Trying to fit it all in + tap dancing

I really enjoy Annie Modesitt’s blog. She put this link in her blog post, and I followed it to its natural conclusion. Gene Kelly could have parked his tap shoes under my kitchen table any time.

Amazing knitting progress yesterday! I am done with the cankle decreases and am galloping away toward the heel flap. Eleanora is a much easier sock than she looks, especially once you’ve figured out how to get gauge or how to tweak the pattern to suit your own unique proportions.



I inadvertently got on the early train last night, but one of the charming women who sometimes sits with me in the morning was across the aisle with her knitting, and we chatted briefly. Mostly we just tended to our knitting.

So, no Trainman last night, but so much fun with sticks and string that I barely noticed his absence once I got over my initial dismay at being on the “wrong” train. I got home in time to nuke a nice assortment of leftovers and then update my online genealogical records with information in my book of remembrance.

My cousin’s second wife’s children are working on some of my lines. My brother-in-law, who is not LDS, was bitten severely by the genealogy bug twenty or more years ago. I have four floppies that he sent me in 2002, with 2700 names on them that I cannot access because he uses a different software than I do [I suspect that if I take them to the Family History Center, there is a program that will convert them into something I can use.]

I function best if I have a routine that I can follow, with wiggle room for serendipitous moments. [Here is where I fly off on one of those tangents that so bumfuzzle my girls.] When I was a little girl, I used to read the Sears, Roebuck catalogue and daydream about the pretty clothes and all the neat toys. One of the things I liked best, which I never had, were the day-of-the-week undies, neatly embroidered with Sunday through Saturday. They came in little-girl sizes, and also in grownup sizes; Saturday night for grownups was frequently black with red embroidery, and there was no way that Mom could explain that logic adequately to my seven-year-old mind.

I don’t know if the days of the week were to help little girls get their calendars straight or to make sure that they actually changed their undies every day. But I thought they were cool, back when I was knee high to a grasshopper, and I wonder if they still make them. BittyBit is sounding out words [at not-quite-four] and might be highly amused to have a set. And possibly OCD enough to spazz if she were wearing Tuesday on a Friday, so maybe it would not be a kind thing to do.

Another seeming tangent. When I was a girl, we dried our dishes with tea towels that Mom or Gram had embroidered. When I was five, Gram taught me how to do a buttonhole stitch and make a fine, even outline stitch. Some of our tea towels had “Wash on Monday”, “Iron on Tuesday”, or “Bake on Thursday” embroidered on them. I don’t remember which days were for which chores, but you get the idea. It was a way to break the never-ending tasks of homemaking down into manageable chunks and keep the work going in an orderly progression.

I am still trying to find the new shape of my days and weeks, now that I have an empty nest and a long commute. Sunday, of course, is for worship and for family. Tuesday, except for the nights when we have a Relief Society meeting, is Knit Night. Wednesdays are no longer gobbled up by Young Women activities.

My visiting teaching companion and I are learning each other’s schedules. And it looks like Thursdays and Sundays will be best for us to make our visits. I have two and possibly all three scheduled for this Thursday night.

I really enjoyed doing family history work last night, so that could kill two birds with one stone: an automatic Family Home Evening activity [spent helping dead relatives, so it counts as family] and an assurance that I will be obedient about gathering and organizing family names and thus not waste the time that I spent in the family history class this summer.

So maybe something like this?

Sunday - church and family and a nap; feeding the missionaries once a month
Monday - family history research
Tuesday - Knit Night or Relief Society HFPE meetings
Wednesday - me night; window shopping, browsing bookstores, personal maintenance
Thursday - visiting teaching or otherwise serving people
Friday - temple service
Saturday - errands, miscellaneous service or projects, having dinner guests

I’m going to try this for awhile and see how it goes. It would be really cool if I could eventually get one of my ancestral lines traced back to Moses [Supposes].