Divas Saturday in May

Diva Dorothy was on a boat with her family - cruising up the BC coast to Alaska. This was not a standard "cruise." A family friend had purchased a 32 foot yacht (not a sailboat) and asked her husband if he would sail it from Vancouver to Anchorage, Alaska. Naturally he said yes and of course Dorothy wanted to go (although how she could pass up a Divas Day is beyond me!) - as did her two boys and their respective significant others.

Diva Sue had pressing kitchen renovation issues to take care of.

All that to say, it was down to the remaining Divas to make a day of it on Saturday. We surely did miss the missing Divas, but the show must go on.

Because I didn't get too many sewing pix, let's start off with a pix of one of our resident purple finches. Joe, my DH, took this pix.

Diva Karen did some pinch-hitting for Sue and pulled off an extremely yummy lunch - shrimp and crab on the BBQ. Joan brought salad, Kristie and I contributed some wine, and as you will see below, Rhonwyn, my "girl-in-law", made us a confection quilt.

Joan spent many hours organizing, cutting, preparing the next quilt top beforehand. She brought her machine and did the sewing. With Kristie and Karen's assistance, the next top is ready to be assembled.

Rhonwyn's "spiders" - yummy chocolate/peanut butter treats.

Some cupcakes. They were off-limits to Divas as Rhonwyn wanted them saved for Craig. I'm not sure why he's so special! :)

Here are the "quilt" cupcakes. These are so cute! And they tasted real good, too!

I worked downstairs on Harley and got the purple quilt quilted. Then on Sunday I quilted the black/colour quilt. It felt like I was falling behind on Diva's projects so opted to use my Diva Day that way instead of power sewing, which is what I usually do.

Now - there has been an email floating around that I'm going to put in this post. I don't know if the source is actually as it says, but I totally agree with the "findings" - assuming the study is legit.

We all work at the same company, which has been undergoing a "re-org" - which means many of our friends and colleagues are being "reassigned" to other places, or simply laid off. It has been very stressful for everyone so we felt we HAD to have our Divas' Day just to normalize a bit.

Here is that email:

A thought to share…

I just finished taking an evening class at Stanford. The last lecture was on the mind-body connection--the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends. At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.

Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality "girlfriend time" helps us to create more serotonin--a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being. Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf? Yes. But their feelings?--rarely. Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters, and evidently that is very good for our health. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.

There's a tendency to think that when we are "exercising" we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged--not true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking! So every time you hang out to shmooze with a gal pal, just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing something good for your health! We are indeed very very lucky.

Sooooo let's toast to our friendship with our girlfriends. Evidently it's very good for our health.

...Which is exactly what we did!