It's hard to believe that a whole year has passed. I remember exactly one year ago, just before midnight on the 30th April, I had my cloth ready in my lap, needle was threaded and hand poised ready to strike! And at the stroke of midnight, BAM! Okay, well I'm sure it didn't quite sound like a BAM, but more like the, well, the non-noise of stitching.

Here's a slideshow of my progress pictures for the last year, for every single fortnight:

It's been quite a good week for me and I had the chance to take yesterday and tonight off. However, I better get back to it tomorrow! Here's my latest project picture:

From The 5 Year Cash Race

What has happened in this past year? Well, in terms of cross stitching, I have definitely gotten faster, neater and more systematic. I've gone from stitching in disciplined blocks, to ad-hoc stitches all over the page, and then back to more orderly blocks. Reading back through my posts for the last year, I've spent a lot of time watching TV! That's probably not going to change any time soon though. :)

Though there are many times when I look at my cloth and think "What the hell was I thinking??" I think this competition so far has been quite fun. Daily back and forth taunting between Sae and myself on MSN, Chen-Po trying to stop me from stitching just to annoy me, little goals set and accomplished, these are all the little joys that have seen me through the year.

Yesterday, I was having a bad day at work. I was feeling quite sick and there were many things going on at work that was annoying me. At lunch time, I put all that away and worked with Sae on getting the blog template ready and I remember feeling happy and content. It was just really nice remembering that there are other things in life to focus on if one part of your life is feeling pretty sucky.

So I think that in the past year I learnt, or rather reinforced within myself that its good to have interests, activities or projects that are outside of work. This has definitely helped keep me quite sane.

And of course an unexpected but very nice joy of this competition is getting to read all the supportive and encouraging comments from visitors. Thanks for visiting, everyone! Hope you'll continue to visit and share in the story of our long HAED journey!