As Well As Ornamental...

Making myself useful, that is. I try to do it as a matter of principle. It keeps me out of the pool halls, for one thing. It also keeps me from chewing off a paw. Kinda hard to knit with only one paw.

I spent yesterday looking for stuff to do. I paid invoices for a couple of the legal secretaries. I did a little drop-filing. I recorded a few expenses in our expense-tracking system. I drank about half of a non-Cherry Coke in an effort to remain vertical and somewhat coherent. [No snickering from the peanut gallery, if you please.]

I ate way too much pepper-Jack cheese. And nowhere near enough chocolate.

I did a few piddly things for the office manager, who was working remotely. I helped scan the incoming mail. I twitched a lot. And I was the one whose “may I please go home early?” email hit the office manager’s inbox first. So I negotiated with the switchboard operator, who was equally at loose ends. And I left the office at 3:15 after covering the front desk for her break. [I love getting three personal days a year, and the option of converting up to five vacation days into PT.]

I plugged my phone into the car charger and called NailDude. Could he see me around 4:00? He could. So I got the popped-off nail replaced and the others tidied up, went from there to LittleBit’s work to see if she was there [she wasn’t] and on to the bookstore for Knit Night. I stayed while my friends came in, one and two at a time, visited a little, showed Monica how to cable without a cable needle, said goodnight, and headed for home just as things were getting exciting.

It was a good, restful evening filled with people I like and a reasonable amount of solitude. I put a few more rows on my friend Jenifer’s scarf: something like three or four inches total for the day. My eyeball tells me that I am more than halfway through this ball of yarn; I am not particularly interested in walking over to the coffee table and firing up my digital scale to confirm it. I have another partial ball, leftover from Secondborn’s birthday scarf last year, which should be sufficient to make this scarf the perfect length. I think I am just over one-third done. And suddenly, I am enjoying working on it again.

Once it is finished, I will pick up Firstborn’s birthday socks. If I time it right, they will be done about the time my doll arrives from Korea.

I am hoping to have Autumn Asters assembled and its collar embroidered in time for Knit Night next week. I might even have found buttons for it by then, but if not, there is a JoAnn’s not far from the bookstore, or Fourthborn and I can make a field trip to the one by Secondborn’s house, not-coincidentally also near the bead store. I would love to reproduce some of the necklaces in the Sundance catalog in doll scale.

Or there is Benno’s in Dallas [oh please, oh please, don’t make me go to the button store].

This is probably enough nonsense for one post.