Puttering: the Reveal

This is all that remained of the hazelnut brownies I took to Firstborn’s ward activity. Five brownies, one of which I ate shortly after snapping this picture. There were two more when I left the cultural hall [i.e., the gym], but I was waylaid.



And here we have the first triangles for the entrelac portion of the February Mystery Socks. If you click to embiggen, you will see my jottings for a possible future post. I hear the darnedest things when I’m on the train. [If you’re not in the mood to embiggen, it reads “He has to have his teeth out and be in bed by 9:00”.]



While these, if you turn your head sideways like Rory and Lorelai in the opening credits of Gilmore Girls, bear a striking resemblance to Beaker on The Muppet Show.



Or those aliens on Sesame Street that go yupppp yup yup yup yup ... nooope nope nope nope nope... Or maybe some of those critters on Easter Island.

This is what else I did yesterday. A poster hung above the computer desk.



Another one tilted fetchingly against the wall, not-so-coincidentally covering up the electrical cord for the lamp and the plug for the window unit.



More pictures on the wall in the hall, just outside the bathroom. That’s my dad, holding a trout; the picture was a rare color shot taken by FirstHubby’s dad, who was an amateur photographer of no small repute in the Pacific Northwest. The plaque with the car is a souvenir of Galveston, from a quilt shop that I suspect no longer exists, after that last hurricane. The girls are Willow and Lark, approximately eight years ago if I carbon-date it by the absence of Lark’s two upper incisors.

The red-matted picture is calligraphy that I picked up at Scarborough Faire, the local renfest; it reads “There have been no dragons in my life, only small spiders and stepped in gum. I could have coped with dragons.” There is a small spider dangling from the final S in dragons, and in gum appears to be lifting off a wad of gum. I have another piece by the same calligrapher, bought the following year, which reads “Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.” He embellished that with three copper pennies.



[Note the hammer and the snack bag full of nails which I am oh-so-frugally reusing.]

Near the front door, the bucket containing the short variegated ficus is now down on the floor, instead of up on the square table that I sometimes use as a lightbox. That brown paper bag is full of LittleBit’s stuff that somehow managed to end up here instead of there. The white bag is filled with more plastic bags to give the good brother at church so he may finish crocheting his rendition of the shield on a CTR [choose the right] ring. The sheep are plotting their escape from that basket; the red bag is the one that goes to work with me every day, and the white chicken wire basket is for just-because.



I also found somebody’s TI-83 calculator which LittleBit had borrowed; that and the brown paper bag should exit the building [like Elvis] if LittleBit and Middlest come over on Wednesday. Middlest is having difficulty getting hold of her. The plastic bags will go to church with me today, to be productively recycled, as will the original Relief Society manual I got in my old ward [it’s a two-year manual, with 47 lessons in it; we have an average of 2 lessons a month from it, lessons from General Conference addresses once a month, and something else on odd Sundays], which has been AWOL since we packed up and left the apartment. For roughly a year I have been faking my way through those lessons without studying; I finally succumbed to bringing home a new manual a couple of weeks ago. The first one is unmarked, so I can donate it to the ward library or the RS closet and feel like a slightly better steward.

Out in the kitchen there are still four small boxes to empty, one of which contains photo albums that belonged to my folks and some of my textbooks on deafness. And I need to find a permanent place for the rolling cooler which contains my 72-hour emergency kit. Then I can reorganize two of my kitchen cupboards for greater efficiency, and maybe I will be officially done in there.

At least until the next time that the Good Housekeeping Fairy smacks me upside the head, and not counting the eternal succession of dirty spoons which testifies that Heaven has blessed me with enough to eat, and to share.

I am hopeful that before next Friday, I will be able to close the door to what I laughingly call my studio, my bedroom walls will be magically repainted, my bed will be set en pointe in the corner, with the 7-foot ficus fetchingly arrayed behind it and the headboard attached and the redwork sham that I plan to make “someday” leaning up against it. If I remember correctly, the pattern reads [in the finest Germanic calligraphic font] “I love you more today than yesterday. Yesterday you really ticked me off.”

In the meantime, there is visible-to-me progress chez Ravelled. Remind me to ask LadyZen on the train tomorrow if she was more successful at evading the Good Housekeeping Fairy than I have been.

I now return me to my regularly scheduled knitting.