About Me

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Eleven years into widowhood, after one year of incredible happiness and nearly 14 years of single blessedness. Retired, and mostly enjoying it. Still knitting. [Zen]tangling.again after a brief hiatus.

Friday, September 12, 2008

More cats, more dogs, more little fishes

I drove home on Wednesday night through a downpour so enthusiastic that it could only be termed a frog-strangler. Visibility was maybe twenty feet at 4:30pm. It was so nice to pull into the driveway and see this on the porch.



Which now looks like this.



The steps and the apron of the front porch, plus the side porches, will all be stained and sealed. And the Floor Dude came and replaced the water-damaged laminate in my bedroom.

But I bet you came here to see what I came up with for commuter knitting. Well, I emptied a couple of boxes last night, where I found the mismatched Anastasia socks, a missing Addi 0 circ, my Addi Lace 00 circ, and the Addi 000 circ that I thought was missing. I also solved the mystery regarding the mismatched socks. I had knit one on a 00 needle and the other on the 000 needle. So I frogged them both back to nothing and will start from scratch. And I think I will try Wendy’s trick of using a smaller needle for the sole of the sock and a larger one for the instep, and knit two socks on two circs and see if I like that any better.

The light here in the duplex is naturally brighter than that in the interim apartment. I think that is why I couldn’t see that I was working with two needle sizes. That, and I haven’t sprung for the Addi needle gauge. I may rectify that omission tomorrow.

I found several patterns in one of those boxes: some for finished objects, others for projects that are sitting in timeout as the Anastasia socks have been for about five months. And maybe something to knit for one of the six birthdays that will smite my checkbook sanity reserves available knitting time between now and the first week of November.

That’s just the patterns I already had on hand; the new Knitty is up. My Ravelry queue is now four projects longer. I had better hope that I live to be 100. Is this me, or what?

In family news, when I turned on the phone yesterday morning there was a text message from Firstborn, time-stamped 1:34am, telling me that they had just gotten their father admitted into the VA Hospital and were heading home. She had to go back later to fill out more paperwork, but he is now safe and supervised, and the girls can all gear down from emergency mode to we-love-our-Dad mode. I hope the improved unity continues, now that the crisis appears to be past.

His sister flies back to her convent this morning. It was so good to see her again; I only wish it had been under better circumstances. She has grown into the spitting image of my dear late mother-in-law.

Middlest called me shortly after I got home, inviting me over for red beans and rice. Sometime in the last three years, she has learned to cook! And I suspect that her culinary skills will continue to blossom, now that she is surrounded by love and people who have fewer dietary quirks than her STBX.

I took a raincheck on dinner, as work was particularly intense yesterday. My backup had been unable to do any of my duties because she had had to help deal with an insane amount of mail on Wednesday. And yesterday afternoon I finally got to go into the back office and resume training with one of the legal secretaries. By the time I got home, I was channeling Greta Garbo and only vont[ed] to be let alone. It has been a harrowing week for the tribe, moreso for the others than for me but still grueling, and my weekend is scheduled to the hilt.

I was twelve hours off when I reset the time on my alarm clock last night. [My room got severely shuffled in order to replace those floorboards.] Thankfully, I woke up about half an hour after the alarm was set to go off. But now I have to scurry if I want to make the train.

I leave you with this.



Marital advice from the local transit company.

2 comments:

Jenni said...

I assume they mean sleep with your spouse as opposed to the oft tried sleep with random men from the bar. It made me laugh though, and that was needed.

Anonymous said...

Oh my goodness! Try explaining that one to a first-grader just learning to read, right?