It’s Wednesday—this week has been …hectic and all over the place…I started to write yesterday—and then my son shooed me away from the computer and lost everything I wrote for me, because he is always so kind and closes every application I have open after he’s finished…I am in mermaid on land phase today (which means it feels as if I am walking on daggers—which means this cave dweller is refusing to leave the house until I have things cleaned up enough around the house to actually feel human…)…so I am making the time to get everything I have put off done today…
Let us begin:
This week-end was awesome for me. Ok, only on some levels. R had to spend the week-end elsewhere, helping out family…so on that level, it was a lonely week-end—except that he still had his phone w him and we were able to bother the snot out of one another often enough that it wasn’t too bad.
I closed the old work blog for good, after transferring all the pages and posts to both Alyce and to my current work blog…I completely opened up Alyce again…I won’t rehash every detail here, but will let you read the reasons why here. I haven’t made the time to go through each and every page there, since Alyce is actually the one blog where I have combined all the other writers blogs I have written that as I closed them I simply imported them into Alyce…so there are several about pages there on various subjects, not just on me…I still have some house cleaning to do there, but it is open again. There are no new posts as yet…I have quite a few that need to be typed and edited…I cannot guarantee when I will start posting the new stuff…just be assured that it is coming.
I did a great deal of writing this week-end…which had been hit or miss the previous week. So I was feeling really good…
We were all more than ready for R to return from his …visit… to his father’s this week-end…he and his brother-in-law dug up and replaced about 80 feet of sewer pipe. The poor man came back with wasp stings and blisters, but overall, not in too bad a shape. I find it amazing how both kids react when R isn’t here. N actually gets worried about him and can’t wait for him to come back. I think N is the one who tracks exactly where R is when he’s on the road, because N will start insisting we go home –and within five minutes of us getting home R arrives (we went to dinner w friends Sunday…so that’s where that comes in to play). We all sleep better once he’s home…he may not think he is as loved as he is by these two small snotheads…but he is…
Monday. Talk about a busy day. N is here with us all week… so between work and trying to get the house together, working on washing laundry after the week-end and so on, plus trying to get a box together for the Vietnam Veterans charity that came yesterday…I didn’t get much writing done. By noon, we decided it was time to run our errands…get groceries, dining room table chairs, a few other things. We actually had a very good afternoon…even if it was hot and not as leisurely as we wanted…and we only got half our projected errands out of the way…the rest of which we will take care of this week-end…
We got home in enough time to unload the truck, put a few of the colder things away, and then R came home. We were supposed to be helping a friend out at the produce co-op, since that was her first time in charge of everything, so we were supposed to be ready to go the second R got home. (Way to go, Lori—you did a GREAT job…btw), but we were already running late as it was, since R had to change clothes…and there was traffic, and we of course got lost, although it turned out to be a good thing in the end, once we figured out where we were. We weren’t early, as we should have been, but we weren’t all that late either…so no harm, no foul there.
We have enough fresh produce to choke a horse at the moment. I am very glad we have two refrigerators up and running. We have both of them stuffed at the moment, between what the kids and I bought and what we got through the co-op. All in all, very cool. I am rather interested to find out what sort of things we’ll be getting through the winter with this co-op. I already have a desire to experiment more with squashes. I found some amazing recipes for pumpkin recently where we are not using mashed pumpkin or pureed pumpkin, but cubed pumpkin, which is something I have wanted to do for awhile now…even though the kids LOVE our pumpkin soup.
Tonight we are grilling tomatillos and potatoes and fresh corn and onions…and I have no clue what we are planning for dinner…but we know there is a salsa in our future…if nothing else. I need to remember to pull some of the garlic cloves out of the freezer so we can grill those too…just for the smoky flavor.
We got home so late and so exhausted last night, after everything, we darn near went straight to bed. The kids were exhausted. They got to play on the playground while we were helping with the co-op stuff—and it wasn’t too long before they’d both had enough of the heat…poor little things. We really wore them out.
Tuesday. Well, I started to type Monday’s stuff up…until N overtook the computer…which is not as bad as it sounds…because that meant I could turn Dog City off…we borrowed this movie from the library…we’ve watched it hundreds of times now. N absolutely loves this movie…I still don’t get it and I still don’t want to get it. I got to watch a bit of Primeval and eat chips and salsa for a few minutes undisturbed, while trying to flip through the latest edition of Hobby Farms that had arrived sometime last week…I have not been overjoyed by many of the magazines that have arrived on our door lately…I am actually sorry I have subscribed to the ones I did…but now I know…when it comes times to re-up our subscriptions, out of the five we subscribe to right now, only one is going to get renewed (Poets & Writers)…when I have time, I will be researching different literary journals to which to subscribe…I knew better than to subscribe to Writer’s Digest…but I did it anyway…it’s a good magazine (I guess) for its niche—it’s just not a good magazine/fit for me…I wish I could subscribe to the knitting magazines I like…but none of them are American…not even Vogue Knitting International is right for me…
Speaking of knitting, I am currently in a flurry of trying to learn the best way to design…I have all these shawls and scarves and yada yada sitting here waiting to be test knit—or reknit so I have something to photograph—and the patterns written up clearly enough for anyone to follow (rather than my normal more like EZ style….)…but ever since deciding to knit my own seamless yoke sweater, I have been bombarded by the whole…there are not many patterns available, either online or in books, that I actually like enough to knit…I have been knitting the same ribby tank top all summer, trying to find that right balance of changes to the original pattern so that I really like it and will wear it all the time…I sort of have the same issue with my seamless yoke sweater…EZ on the video says that puckering occurs around the yoke with the rapid decreases…so instead of two decrease rows, there can be three…and that steaming will work out the puckering anyway (at least this is how I remember it)…but then I borrowed Ann Budd’s The Knitter’s Handy Book Of Sweater Patternsn from the library…and in the pattern for that yoke sweater there are four rows of decreases in the yoke…so I had to finally order that book—that book has been on my have to have one day list since at least 2006, when I bought her other companion book, The Knitter’s Handy Book Of Patterns…although that book is currently in storage at the moment, so I have no way to check any information in it to see where things lie. So, I am waiting for my own copy of Sweater Patterns to arrive so I don’t mess up my sweater. I love EZ, but I never said her directions did not often bring me to tears. I want to start making sweaters, at least a couple, before I even think of branching out into sweater design. I have no worries about my shawls or scarves or anything of that nature…but a full sweater? Yeah…I want to make sure I know what I am doing and what I am saying before I start putting things out there for other people to buy…
I do have a lovely shrug in the midst of planning at the moment…I simply have not decided which yarn to use…which is the only stall on a test knit…I have the whole pattern written out…once I decide on the yarn, I’ll work up a swatch (gasp—I know, right!) and write it up properly … what I have at the moment is the basic guide for the design I want to follow…not line by line this is how we do it…
And now, off to work…I have plenty of house work, plenty of writing work, and plenty of children to nag and nag some more…so …here we go…
