Finishing

I have been knitting like crazy lately. Wait! I always knit like crazy! Perhaps I have been finishing things up like crazy, which has me feeling like I am knitting more than usual.

Here is the round-up of things that I have finished in the past month or so:

1. 3 pairs of mittens for Afghans for Afghans. (Yes, I am aware that there are only two pairs shown here. The other pair is waiting to be felted in the washing machine, before it gets it's photo shoot.)

2. An Owl Sweater for my mom. This is the first attempt at getting the sweater to fit, since I am having to improvise without her being here to try it on. The first attempt met with some success. It fits in the chest, tummy and hips, but the sleeves are too tight, and the neckline is a little too wide for her preference. It is coming back in the mail for a do-over, and hopefully we will get some finished pictures of her wearing it after that. You'll have to deal with photos of it on the couch for right now. I'm a total nerd, but really how cool are those cables that look like owls.

3. I finished up a pair of French Press Slippers

for myself. Mine turned out beautifully, but too narrow for my wide feet. They may get another go in hot water and be given away as a gift to some lucky someone, while I tweek the pattern for my fat feet.

4. A lace scarf to match my bright green wool coat. This was the project that I started when FIL was here, and I made an escape to the yarn store. I am totally enchanted by the color changes in the yarn, and I am amazed that something this beautiful and relaxing cost me only $6.

On the needles now, I have a pair of Monkey Socks, and a Vernal Equinox Shawl, (this photo is not mine, as mine is still in progress, and really looks like a pile of crap, right now) which I hope to have done before the Ravolympics start on February 18th. More to follow about Ravolympics later.

A Few Things I Learned This Weekend

So, my father-in-law came into town from Florida this weekend. The circumstances surrounding his visit were weird, and I had 3 days notice that he was coming. I am not a housekeeper, though I try to keep things clean, they are very cluttered without a lot of effort on my part.

During the process of the visit, I learned a few things.

1. For some reason Ethan's grandpa could not resist making any animal noise that we were trying to get Ethan to say. This is one of our favorite distractions for Ethan when he gets bored in the car, but when we'd try it, there would be grandpa, barking like a dog, neighing like a horse, and bleating like a goat. I've learned that we must select animals that grandpa doesn't know the sound of, or choose those which will entertain us the most when grandpa says them.

2. In the event that I have to escape from the house, I can entertain myself for $12 or less, for a few hours. I left Sunday afternoon out of frustration, and found myself without any knitting, an extremely busy library, and $13 in my wallet. I wound up at The Studio, no knitting needles, no yarn, no pattern. I found some beautiful fingering weight yarn, some needles and worked out a little pattern in my head, and was taking the edge of my frustration in no time flat. Biggest lesson, I should always have at least $12 in my wallet when things are likely to be overwhelming.

3. My mother-in-law is much more like me than I'd previously thought. If you've known me for very long, you know that I can get away with pranks and such because people think I am quiet and innocent. My mother-in-law has this way of appearing very trustworthy by remaining quiet, drawing you into conversation by sharing her secrets and stories, just so that you'll share things with her. I've learned that you must beware. She will throw you under the bus.

4. No matter what I do, I will always have to wash every single bed linen in the guest room after the visit. I've hidden all decorative pillows, leaving only the comforter, the flat and fitted sheet and two pillows on the bed. I even turned down the sheets, and still, he slept between the flat sheet and the comforter. I just need to learn to deal with this.

5. There must be some advantage that I am unaware of to removing dirty dishes from the sink, and placing them on the counter, on top of the dishwasher. Not in the dishwasher, but on it. I see this as a waste of time, but clearly it does something, because the second I place a dirty dish in the sink, it is re-stacked on the counter. Another thing I can't understand, but should just learn to deal with.

I'm sure that I have learned more things I really didn't need to know, but these are the most obvious, and those that I can look at with some humor.

New Year's Resolutions

I'm happy that I didn't choose to include "Do not Procrastinate" as one of my resolutions for the year, since I have been procrastinating on putting the resolutions in print. Something about that makes it real, and almost as if I have to complete it, which, when you see the resolutions, you will understand, just may not be possible.

Here goes:

1. I am going to lose weight. Specifically, I'd like to lose 50-75 pounds over the course of the year. Since I don't have a scale, I am actually making my goal in terms of clothing sizes. My stretch goal is a size 8, but I'd be really happy to wear a 12 by the end of the year. I am doing this in small steps, starting one new habit per month. In January, I am going to be working on eating a portion controlled healthy breakfast and morning snack. In February, I will be starting to do cardio exercises for 90 minutes per week. In March, I am going to add lunch and an afternoon snack to my portion controlled meals. The other months are still to be determined, but I plan on controlling all meals, snacks, and working out 5 days per week. After those are accomplished, I will work on toning exercises for the remainder of the year.

2. Yarn diet. I have fairly substantial yarn stash, and I am going to knit with it, before buying new yarn. Once the stash is gone, all bets are off, and I can re-build again, if I so choose.

3. Get us out of credit card debt. We are currently carrying a balance of $13000. It may take more than a year, but we are going to work very hard at getting out of this in one year. That is a little over $800 dollars more per month that we have to find in our already tight budget, but after we are out of it, we should be in a much better position to go forward. We will be controlling spending in all categories, have refinanced the house to lower the payment, planning grocery bills and medical expenses, forgoing a new car, etc. I am not sure we will make it, but we have to try.

4. Figure out a way to not owe the IRS money at tax time ever again! Based on my Bible reading, I try not to complain about paying taxes, however, I do feel that taxes, at least in our current tax law, are a game, and those who figure it out get to keep more of their money, and those who don't get suckered. We will be honest about income and deductions, but I am absolutely going to find every deduction that we are entitled to. Part of the reason we are in credit card debt is paying income tax each year at tax time, in addition to what we have already paid in, and it can't continue, if we are going to meet our goals.

So, this is going to be a challenging year, but I am motivated to accomplish these resolutions. I keep imagining how it will feel when we turn the calendar to 2011, and we are in much better physical and financial shape because of our resolve.

Christmas

This year, things were a little strange with Christmas. We generally have some additional family around for the holidays, but due to a strange turn of events, it was just the three of us.

At first, I think both Day and I felt a little left out and bummed about being on our own on the holidays, but in the end, we decided to make the best of it. We chose our own traditions, and decided how we would handle stockings, gifts, meals, etc.

Day's family never really celebrated Christmas, so he didn't have any specific traditions, but for him, celebrations often center around food. For me, my family celebrated by having a Christmas Eve get together for the extended family, and then basically did Christmas day on our own, with a special dinner, generally steak and all of the trimmings, or prime rib.

Our new traditions, which I think we will stick with, were to get up when Ethan did and check out our stockings.

Ethan actually chose most of the trinkets in his, including an elephant Pez dispenser, a light up shark, a light up bouncy ball, a hot wheels car, and some crayons.

Day really enjoys trying specialty beers, so I wrapped a few for under the tree and a few for in his stocking. He is especially fond of the hard to find, and Belgian beers, and I found Samichlaus, Watou Tripel, Trappiste Rochefort 8, and a few others.

I also chose my own stocking gifts, which included some cute earrings from World Market, and some yarn that I picked up at Tuesday Morning.

Following our stockings, I went and cooked a big breakfast with scrambled eggs, thick cut bacon, and French toast, with Grand Marnier Cream Cheese, and/or Pomegranate syrup. Everything turned out so yummy, and I did a bunch of the prep work early, so it wasn't too big of a deal to have a real breakfast.

After breakfast, we opened our gifts. Since Ethan had a Christmas celebration with Nana earlier in December, he understood what to do with the presents under the tree, and somehow he managed to open all of the toys first, followed by his new clothes, then mom and dad's gifts. I'm not quite sure how he knew, perhaps the size and shape of boxes, but he chose each present from under the tree, and definitely chose toys over clothes, and then his over ours.

Since Ethan had to play with each gift before moving on to the next one, gift opening took nearly 2 hours, which was nice, considering that we were snowed in anyway.

Our next new tradition was to have one of Day's favorites for dinner. It was idli, sambar and vada, which is a typical breakfast in southern India. It is one of his favorite meals, and I had never been able to accomplish making the vada before, but I was able to make them on Christmas. Even Ethan liked them.

I'm sure that we'll add more traditions as Ethan grows up, but this was a great start, and we had a wonderful time together as a family.

Good Things

I think that today is a good day for a little list of good things going on in my world.

1. Mom (Nana's) birthday.

2. Dining room lights are up and working beautifully. I love them!

3. I made white chocolate macadamia nut cookie dough to freeze today, so that Day can have fresh cookies whenever he wants.

4. Ethan colored by himself for the first time today. I am so hopeful that he'll be interested in coloring a couple of times per week, so I can do a few things around the house, without having to worry about what he is up to.

5. I have 16 rows to go on Day's Christmas scarf. I am hoping to finish up tonight and get it blocked tomorrow. the box is already wrapped, so I just have to slip it in an put it under the tree.

Home Improvement Saturday

Every once in a while, I get the urge to do some DIY home improvement project. This happens every couple of months, and I hope in the end, my home looks better for the effort I've put in.

For our early Christmas, my mom gave us a Lowe's gift card. She intended for us to spend it on a new dishwasher, but we decided to wait until it died to replace it, so that left us with $100 to spend on something else.

Well, the lighting in our dining room has always bugged me, and the ceiling had some stains on it, so last weekend we went out and bought a couple of pendant lights to replace the canned lighting. The biggest problem with this is that we have 10 foot ceilings and the lights are recessed another 6 inches or so, so the room

was always really dimly lit. I was also fairly sure that the water damage had been caused by a shower malfunction a couple of years ago, and that there were no plumbing problems causing the staining, so fixing that up would be a good thing to check off of our to-do list.

Unfortunately, the day didn't go quite as planned. First, the breaker controls all lighting on the first floor, as well as the tv. This is a huge problem because Day has been anticipating the KU Jayhawks game all week. He even reminded me that it was on at 11 today on Wednesday, before we went to bed.

Not to be deterred, I thought, well, take out the recessed lights, at least to the point of electricity,

work on the ceiling repairs, and then I can finish up after the game.

So, we get Ethan put down for a nap, and I get going. The light fixtures have been plastered into the ceiling, so they have to be pried and yanked out, which takes nearly an hour. At the point

where I get them out, I realize that the hole is 6.5 inches, and not the 5.5 inches that our new fixture is, and that there is no electrical box to attach them to.

Ethan then wakes up two hours ahead of schedule, and we decide to go back to Lowe's to get the missing hardware, some sort of medallion to cover the 6.5 inches hole, and some sort of conversion kit to allow us to hang these.

Fast forward a few hours, and $43 dollars later, we are back home and I get back to work, with Day trying to keep Ethan out of the way.

I'd love to say that it was smooth sailing from there, but the

conversion kit was impossible to install, the wiring had to be cut super short to remove canned light, and then was hard to attach to the new fixture. In the end, we stopped for the day, and we'll try again tomorrow.

I turned on the breaker, and checked the light, and it does work. Now if only I could get it attached.

Just Getting Started

Ahh, I just love nap time on a day off. No "other baby" and plenty of quiet time for knitting, blogging, facebooking.
So, on my day off, what do I find to do. This morning, I took Day into work, stopping to get a yummy coffee, on the way, went to the Yarn Shop and More. I was on a search for some yarn for my mom's Owls Sweater. I didn't find anything, for that anyway. I did buy some Glacier Del Cielo, colors 74 and 3578, for some sweater's for Ethan for next year.
Next we stopped in at a boutique in Prairie Village, looking for a birthday gift for a sweet baby girl's first birthday. They had a great selection, but unfortunately priced out of my range. (Says the girl qho spent $70 on yarn to make 2 baby sweaters).
After a stop at the local big box retailer, we came home, had lunch, and settled in for nap time.
This evening: a birthday party and BBQ, and then home for some more relaxing.