Christmas in July

At least for me it has been Christmas in July. I have sewn a good part of the day and the result is the beginning of the Christmas ornaments that I will make for gifts this year. I have been gathering needed materials (threads, felt, stabilizers, machine embroidery designs)for a while. A stack had been growing on the end of my sewing cutting table. Today I started using said materials. I have one ornament stitched which is going to be two-sided so had to stitch the design twice. It was a design that "should have" stitched out fairly quickly...BUT...I decided to stitch it with metallic thread and that can be uncooperative at times...and, today it was. I used all the tricks of the trade, but still had problems. The end result doesn't show the problems so that is important. I will still have to make this into an ornament, but at least the "difficult" part is done. I also worked on printing out templates that I need for patterns for several other ornaments. A little while ago I started cutting out the felt pieces using these patterns. I have been working on choosing the thread colors that I will use. While the machine was stitching I did a little dusting in the sewing room. Woody has been working on getting our driveway free of debris...all the trees dropping leaves, branches, twigs, etc. can get pretty messy. He hasn't been able to work on keeping it clear for a while. He has been working on it for several days and today he made it to the end of the driveway...at least for a couple of days...or till the next storm...there will be no crunching when backing out of the driveway...nor will we turn our ankles on acorns, etc. Last night he finished taking his 28 days of coated aspirin that he has been taking since he came home from the hospital for prevention of blood clots...one more thing marked off of post-op "to-do's." A little after supper Woody headed out the door and is doing another first since his leg broke...walking to and from the church prayer room. He hasn't returned yet. He waited till after supper to try to avoid the extreme heat of the day. I went out a little while ago to put something in the garbage can and it is still quite hot and humid out there. It got into the 90's here today.