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July 31, 2009: Having Breasts Does Not Make Me An Idiot I took the truck down to the Dodge dealer an hour south of here yesterday morning. (We do not take it to the dealer in Kalipell because—as the husband puts it—they cannot fix lunch, let alone a truck.) Normally we try to support Montana businesses. We bought three of our five trucks from the dealer where I had the service work done yesterday. The two most recent purchases were made at a dealer in a neighboring state, four hours away. Why? Because the people at the dealer south of here insist on treating me like an idiot. The people at the dealer in Spokane do not. I had to wait about two-and-a-half hours for the work to be completed, so the husband suggested that I take a look at the 4500 or 5500 Dodge trucks they had for sale. We're looking for a heavier-duty truck for our employees to use (and let me just point out here that my husband obviously thinks I am capable of researching pickup trucks by myself). I found a salesman (who earlier in the morning had made some comments about my "crocheting"), and the conversation went like this:
Those must have been the magic words, because he agreed to take me out to look at one on the lot. We had a quick side conversation about the 2001 Dodge that the husband and I would like to sell before we buy another truck. I can spout off a list of specs for all our trucks, which I've found gives me at least a bit of credibility when dealing with men. We looked at the 5500 and I made some notes. As we were walking away, he handed me his card and I suddenly realized that he was the same salesman who blew me off when I went down there two years ago to look for a MegaCab (the truck I drive now), which was why we finally bought it from the dealer in Spokane. He asked me which truck I had brought down to have serviced, and I told him I had brought mine in. Actually, I think my exact words were, "I brought my one-ton MegaCab—the one I use for hauling groceries." You would think that someone who owns five Dodge trucks would be taken seriously when asking about purchasing a sixth one. The kicker is that he's my age!—I got better treatment from the 75 year-old man who sold us the first three pickup trucks we bought there. I got the sleeve finished. One more to go. Thanks to a thyroid forum I belong to, I ran across this article today. Apparently it was not all in my head that the generic thyroid meds I took in June were weaker than the brand-name I'd been on for eight months. The company which makes the generic is being investigated for lack of quality control. It irritates me to no end that one month on that lousy generic pretty much undid all the progress I'd made since last November. One step forward, six steps back. Sam'sClub.com finally located my bookshelf, which apparently was residing in a Bekins Brothers warehouse somewhere. They will deliver it next Thursday. We have a bumper crop of zucchini, so making a batch of zucchini bread is on the schedule for today. Thank goodness the strawberries finally slowed down their production. The peas haven't.
July 30, 2009: Taking a Class Is Different From Teaching One I had my photography class Tuesday afternoon. It's so rare that I get to take a class instead of teaching one that I was a bit discombobulated at first. The teacher was okay—I felt the pace of the class was a bit slow for me and the teacher was often hunting around for what she wanted to say—but I learned some new ideas. I have been doing a lot of things right with my camera, mostly due to sheer dumb luck. Now I'll be doing things right because I know what to do and how to do it. And it will be fun to experiment with some of the pics for the Fall issue of the newsletter. While I was gone, the kids cleaned the house and the husband got the porch ready to stain (it has to be done every couple of years). He added these to our porch at the kitchen and laundry room doors:
I think they are just fabulous. Hopefully they will help cut down on the amount of dirt and snow that gets tracked in to the house. I've got a pile of stuff on my desk that needs to be attended to. Some of it is construction company and some of it is fire department. I'm finding it more and more difficult to work in my office because the new bookshelf still hasn't arrived. Stuff is piled up all over the place. It's been this way since I placed the order for the bookshelf on June 8. I called Sam'sClub.com yesterday afternoon to see if I could locate the shelf. I had such trouble with their phone system (it wouldn't recognize my membership number, pressing "2" did not take me to the correct submenu, etc) that when the customer service rep finally answered the line, I blurted, "Your phone system sucks!" Sam'sClub.com had sent me a shipping notification with a tracking number, but there was no shipping or freight company given, which makes the tracking number pretty well useless. Even the customer service rep was having trouble tracking it. She said she would make some calls and get back to me. As of this morning, I still don't know where my bookshelf is—and I suspect she doesn't, either. Blah. I am off now to take my truck to the dealer to have it looked at. It should be at least an hour or two of knitting time, which is good because I have a sleeve to finish.
July 28, 2009: Shutterbug I have a photography class today at the community college from 12-5. The class originally was scheduled for August 5, which was a much better date, but it had to be changed because of a teacher conflict. So I am dropping DD#2 off at dance class, my cousin and her daughter off at the airport, and then heading over to the college. It's actually not a class on photography so much as it is a class on using one's fancy-schmancy digital camera with all the bells and whistles. I've read the manual and I do okay, considering, but I'd like to be able to operate my camera with some confidence. Tomorrow morning DD#1 has senior pictures, and Thursday morning I have to take my truck down to the dealer for some recall and warranty work. My truck was in the shop (our garage) over the weekend because the front left wheel was making a horrible squealing noise. Turns out the U-joint had seized up. The husband said he had never seen one that frozen, and certainly not in a truck that's only two years old. It really is a warranty fix (the truck is still under warranty for another 3000 miles), but it was undriveable in that condition so he replaced the U-joint and the ball joint for me. When I take it to the dealer on Thursday I will have them replace both parts on the other side. Thank goodness I have a handy husband and thank goodness we have an excess of trucks so I had something else to drive while he was working on mine. We have had such a good time with our houseguests over the past two weeks. Yesterday I took my cousin and her daughter and my girls up to Glacier Park to do the same hike we did with JC last week. It was another glorious day up there. I tried to get some new and different pics, but my camera battery died (I know, this is an ongoing theme) as we got about halfway to Logan Pass. This was the best of the bunch:
I do need to get back to work, though. I stil have a sweater to finish and my house looks like a tornado hit it. Next week will be just as busy as this week, because I am having a tooth filled, DD#1 is getting her wisdom teeth taken out, and I have a doctor's appointment with my naturopath. I had been doing really well on my thyroid meds until June, when my mail-order pharmacy decided to change my prescription to the generic—without asking me if that was okay. It wasn't, because the generic doesn't work as well and I began gaining weight and losing my hair again. I am back on the brand name again and feeling much better. I'd love to get to a point where it isn't two steps forward and one step back, though.
July 27, 2009: A Monday Morning Favor Do me a favor, would you?—Visit Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's blog, read what she's been going through recently, and leave her a note of support. She doesn't deserve what she's dealing with, and especially not after what she went through with Sock Summit registration. We had quite an evening of excitement here last night. The girls and my cousin and her daughter and I went to an arts and crafts show in town yesterday afternoon. We planned to meet the husband for dinner at Pizza Hut at 6 p.m. Around 4 p.m. the five of us drove up to Whitefish to see the ski resort and do some shopping. As we were heading back to Kalispell, I could see a very large, dark cloud covering the east side of the valley. Then we began to see lightning strikes. Lots of them. When we got to Pizza Hut, I called the husband, who had just left home to come into town. I could hear the hail hitting his truck as we talked—I told him not to bother coming in to town in case we got paged out for some emergency. Two of our firemen were working at the craft show, so we were short-handed to begin with. Sure enough, just as he turned around to head home, our department got paged out for an overturned boat out on one of the lakes. I took my radio with me into Pizza Hut, and could hear the husband in one of the engines as he responded to the call. He got about halfway up our road and was stopped by a downed tree and power line. As he was dealing with the downed power line and the rest of the department was trying to determine if the boaters were still on the lake, we got paged out again—this time for a structure fire. Other departments around the valley were getting paged out for their own emergencies. I paid for the pizza, had them box it up, and called the grocery store to have them get food ready. Our radio system is so old that in a situation like this, we're all having trouble hearing each other and finding out what's going on. All I knew was that we had a structure fire and that meant I should probably get food for the crews. We dropped off some fruit and sandwiches for the guys—who had gotten what little bit of a fire there was under control—then headed for home. The power line had been cleared off the road by then, but there were lots of downed branches and small trees. The damage seems to have been confined to a small area north of us. Our power was still on and we had no hail on the ground. A friend of mine called to ask how we were doing, and I found out that a tree had fallen on their house during the storm. My cousin is married to a firefighter and her daughter is dating a firefighter, so this was a routine evening for them. The husband came home eventually, only to get paged out again to investigate a report of smoke in the trees—it turned out to be just mist from the rain. We have internet access this morning, but it's terribly slow. I suspect that there are still lines down somewhere in the valley. Now we begin the waiting game to see if any of those lightning strikes we saw yesterday will turn into fires. We may not know for weeks yet if they stay down and smolder. Thank goodness we don't get wild evenings like that very often. And thank goodness we are getting a new 911 center soon—if the people who voted against the 911 center last year could see how dangerous it is for emergency responders not to be able to hear each other or dispatch, they might think twice about their unwillingness to pony up for some new equipment. I can't imagine what would happen if we had a wildland fire or an earthquake. Our cell phones would probably be useless in that situation, too.
July 24, 2009: Lightning Activity Level I have discovered that if there an object or event that is measureable, someone will categorize it and slap a severity scale onto it. This week I learned that we have a "lightning activity level (LAL)" which tells us how severe the lightning activity in our area might be. Who knew? From the National Weather Service website:
Today and tomorrow our LAL is predicted to be at level 6. Right now there are several very dark clouds overhead and the radar shows a big yellow blob over us. I hear thunder (have not looked for lightning), but hardly any rain is falling. That means the atmosphere is so dry that most of the moisture has evaporated before it hits the ground. It's eerily silent and still. I sat and drank my coffee on the porch, where I usually hear lots of birds singing. Not today. This is bad from a wildfire perspective. I remember that in 2003—the year of the fires up in Glacier Park—we watched dry thunderstorms come through and saw strike after strike after strike hit the mountains across the road from us. Sometimes those strikes will erupt into immediate blazes, but sometimes they will smolder for weeks. My cousin and her daughter arrived safely Wednesday night. We toured the Flathead Valley yesterday and went out to Rebecca Farm where there is a big horse event this weekend. My cousin's daughter is an avid horsewoman. We plan to spend tomorrow out at the Farm. Today we were hoping to go to the waterpark in Kalispell, but we may have to go to Plan B if we get more storms.
July 22, 2009: Two Geeks and a Computer JC leaves tonight (darn—but my cousin and her daughter arrive on the late flight), so what do you think we have planned for today? We're going to spend a few hours playing with Adobe Creative Suite 4 and some Excel spreadsheets. JC wants a few pointers on using InDesign, and she's going to help me brush up on Illustrator. I also need her to walk me through using spreadsheets for grading patterns; I can do it, but I am sure she knows some shortcuts. Yeah, we're a couple of party girls, that's for sure. We decided that we must be twins separated at birth. Last night we were reading one of my learning styles books (The Way They Learn by Cynthia Ulrich Tobias). I think we work so well together because JC is an "abstract sequential" while I am a "concrete sequential." We both like systems and organization, but while she's looking at the forest, I am counting the trees. Yesterday morning we left here at 10 a.m.—I drove JC to town so she could get a massage with my massage therapist. DD#2 and I drove back out this way to pick up a friend of hers so I could take both of them to dance class. I dropped them off, went back to town and ran some errands, came back and picked them up, dropped off the friend, picked up DD#1 at the school where she had driven and left her truck, then went back in to town to pick up JC and meet Melanie and Andy for lunch. Everything was scheduled down to the minute and I was a few minutes late dropping them off at dance class only because there was a vehicle accident on the way. That's just how we concrete sequentials roll. We had some swimming and knitting time again last night at Melanie's cabin and the water was definitely warmer than it had been on Sunday. It's been good for the girls, too—DD#1 is a good swimmer, but DD#2 needs to spend time in the water building up her confidence. We got her a really nice personal floatation device, so she was able to come out with me and practice treading water without worrying about going under. Off to dance class again.
July 21, 2009: Hidden Lake I took JC and my girls up to Glacier Park yesterday afternoon. Even though we live here, we rarely get to the park during the summer (too many people) and the last time I tried driving the Going to the Sun Road, there was so much traffic that it would have taken us about four hours to get to the top. Glacier Park has a new shuttle bus system, though, and I was eager to try it out. We parked at Apgar village at the entrace to the park, hopped on a bus, and were whisked to the Logan Pass visitor center in about an hour and a half. There is a lot of construction happening on that road and I was extremely grateful that I wasn't driving it in my big truck. Behind the Logan Pass visitor center is a boardwalk and a trail that leads back to Hidden Lake. We hiked to the Hidden Lake overlook, which is about 3 miles round trip—not a long hike, but the elevation gain is fairly significant. This was the view as we started our journey:
Along the way we saw lots of wildlife. Here is a marmot hoping to score some trail mix:
The rock formations in Glacier Park are really cool, and I am not even a geologist:
Approaching the Hidden Lake overlook:
A mountain goat was waiting for us there:
The scenery blew me away, and I live here (actually, I live down in one of those valleys way in the background). Pictures do not do it justice:
JC and me:
On the way back we saw more wildlife. Here are some bighorn sheep:
And Mr. Mountain Goat was hot so he decided to take a nap:
We were tempted to bring some mountain goat wool home to spin. It would have taken us a long time to collect enough, though:
We stopped for ice cream on the way home and introduced JC to the flavor of huckleberries. All in all it was fabulous way to spend the afternoon.
July 19, 2009: Another Post on Why I Love Deadlines This project I am working on is due August 1. I started it June 20. That's roughly seven weeks in which to get a sweater done. As these kinds of projects go, that's actually a long time—many magazines only allow three weeks for designs to be knit up. But it's still a shorter timeframe for completing a project than I am used to, and I've been sweating a few bullets here and there trying to get it done. I've now got the back and both fronts completed, and what's even better—they all match. Nothing like completing the pieces of a sweater and realizing that the left front has one (or more) fewer repeats on it than the right front. I've got eleven days in which to complete the sleeves, sew the sweater together, and knit the collar. Considering that I knocked the left front out in just under two days (I think that's a personal best), eleven days seems like a luxury of time. I've also reached the point in the project where I would like to move on to something else. I've got a wealth of submissions for upcoming issues of the newsletter, which gives me some breathing space. I want to do a couple of sweaters just for me. Having a firm deadline means I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. JC's classes went well this weekend. I am pretty sure she'll be back to teach more. Melanie is really the first LYS owner in the western half of the state to bring in non-local teachers. The Big Sky Fiber Fest and the Montana Association of Weavers and Spinners often bring in nationally-known teachers for their events, but I don't think any stores ever have. I love it that Melanie is willing to host these kinds of workshop weekends. Next month we will have Chrissy Gardiner here teaching a class on toe-up socks, a topic on which she just self-published a book. Knitters in the Flathead get to take wonderful classes and I get to spend time with my designer friends. I cooked solo last night and made more Thai curry, this time with chicken and zucchini (some of which came from my garden). Tonight I think we will do Indian again. But today we're going up to Glacier Park to hike the boardwalk behind the Logan Pass visitor's center. What's really nice is that the park is now running a shuttle bus service, so I can park the truck in Apgar, hop on the shuttle bus and take it to Logan Pass, and not have to deal with the ridiculous traffic on the Going to the Sun Road.
July 18, 2009: Tubular We know how to treat our guest knitting instructors here in Montana. We make them go tubing after class:
That's JC on zooming around the little oxbow lake with Captain Andy (Melanie's husband) at the helm of the boat. I also went tubing (before JC) but fortunately no one thought to get the camera out when I was on the water. It was a tad chilly when we first got in; however, it's been hot here so the water felt very refreshing. I am hoping to take another dip after class is over tomorrow. Last night JC made the most amazing Thai curry with eggplant and fresh halibut. After dinner the husband and I took JC on a short hike across the road from our house. There was a muddy spot on the trail that had a lot of tracks in it, so we stopped to see what we could identify. We saw a couple of deer tracks, some dog prints—and some mountain lion prints. The husband said it was a "small" cat—as if that was supposed to be comforting. We'll see what fun pics I get tomorrow.
July 16, 2009: I Love People Today I begin with a simple request:
I could say more, but I won't, because I might not be able to stop. I did get some knitting done during my meetings last night, but I did a fair bit of ripping, too, while trying to shape a neckline and keep the cable pattern from going wonky while I did it. One of my fellow meeting-goers is also a knitter, and I think she was a bit horrified when I yanked out the needle and began frogging. I'm off to the train station in a few minutes to pick up JC. The schedule is a bit fluid, because DD#2 is going camping with her Girl Scout troop and I am not quite sure when they plan to leave. JC may want to take a nap, too—sleeping on the train is a tricky proposition. And we may just hang out and knit, too, before going to Camas Creek this afternoon. JC is a pretty low-maintenance person. I don't expect she'll be demanding chocolate-covered strawberries and drinks by the pool. (Thank goodness, because we don't have a pool.) I got an e-mail from Craft Cruises yesterday about the extra tours associated with our Alaskan cruise in September. One of the offerings is a trip to Shipwreck Beads. Oh—be still, my heart! I can hardly wait. I love bead stores almost as much as I love yarn stores. In fact, I was thinking yesterday that I'd like to reward myself when I finish this deadline project by spending a week doing nothing but playing with beads. I can't do it now because I would feel too guilty. I tell people that I took up beading to cope with the stress of my knitting job. Oh, the irony. If you're going to be in Kalispell tonight, make sure you stop by Camas Creek and say hello.
July 15, 2009: Knitting to Deadlines I'm one of those people who actually does pretty well working under deadlines. Knowing that I have a finite amount of time to accomplish something allows me to slice what otherwise might be paralyzing panic into manageable daily amounts of motivating panic. As I roll out of bed at 5 am, I'm mentally ticking off the things I need to accomplish that day. The husband is the same way (except for the "rolling out of bed at 5 am" part). I think it's why we get along so well. We're so very task-oriented here at Chez Schuster and Szabo. Mess with our to-do lists at your peril. I'm working on a design for someone's book. Due to some problems beyond the author's control, the yarn was a bit late in getting to me, so I don't have quite as much time to work on it as I'd like. It's due August 1. The back is done, and last night I finished one front up to the armhole opening. I have a couple of church meetings tonight and am hoping to get this front done and the second front started. Every so often I look at my calendar and mentally calculate how much knitting I need to do every day to get this project done in time. I certainly don't want to be pulling all-nighters the last week of July in an attempt to finish it. JC arrives tomorrow morning on the train. Tomorrow night she and I will be sitting on the sidewalk in front of Camas Creek Yarns knitting for Thursday!Fest. This is a new weekly event designed to get people to come to downtown Kalispell. I'm looking at it as two more hours in which to work on this sweater. And now it's time to attack today's to-do list.
July 14, 2009: Palak Paneer I promise this won't turn into a foodie blog, but I do need to talk about my successful foray into the world of cooking Indian cuisine. When JC gets here we will jump in the deep end of the pool; for now, I am just dipping in my big toe. Thanks to the wonderful Manjula and her Manjula's Kitchen website, I made a delicious batch of palak paneer (spinach and cheese) yesterday. I consider it a success because it tastes very much like what I had in Columbus. And it was super easy.
The only substitution I had to make was the cheese—Indian paneer is not available locally (big surprise), so I used cotija cheese instead. The consistency is similar; however, the cotija is quite salty. Thank goodness I don't usually add salt to a dish until I've tasted it. Manjula has a recipe and video on making homemade paneer, so I might try that for the next batch. I like the spicyness level of Manjula's recipe, too. I like a bit of heat, but not an overwhelming amount and this was perfect. It was even better this morning after the flavors had a chance to blend. I've decided it's time to cut out the red meat again. For a long time I only ate red meat occasionally—and I mean really occasionally. My preferred protein sources have always been chicken, fish, and tofu. Because of my thyroid, I am supposed to have tofu only once or twice a week (given the opportunity, I would eat it every day). And I got lazy. The husband will eat chicken or fish but he really really really likes red meat. Some days I didn't feel like making myself a non-red meat dinner in addition to what I cooked for everyone else, so I just ate what everyone else did. However, I noticed that my hormones started to get out of whack again. I'm sure there are "experts" who will tell me that I am nuts, but I think commercially-grown red meat has so much estrogen in it that I was messing with my hormone levels by eating so much.
So I am going to try an experiment and not eat any red meat for a couple of months and see what happens. I have yet to meet a vegetable I don't like, and I love beans and rice. I think I could do quite well on a sort-of-vegetarian diet. The husband can't—his daily calorie requirements are huge. But he doesn't mind vegetables along with the red meat. It's been raining steadily—and sometimes hard—for almost 24 hours now. The weatherman said this is an unusual pattern; these kinds of storms come in the spring, not in July. But the garden will be glad of the extra watering. And we'll be back up into the 90's with no rain for the rest of July.
July 12, 2009: Godzilla and Megadon Lay Waste to Tokyo I made the mistake of letting the dogs into the herb garden with me yesterday morning. It was like watching a bad Japanese horror flick. Rusty hunted up a garter snake under the hyssop bush and had it for breakfast. Chester plowed over half a dozen plants because he doesn't believe in using the paths. I finally put them back in the laundry room, where they howled until the husband woke up. He told them they were in danger of losing their junior gardener badges if they didn't shape up. DD#2 and I went to town yesterday afternoon and stopped at the nursery to see what interesting things they had. I needed lettuce seed for the second go-round of lettuce planting. I also picked up some borage, two basil plants (I've never had real good luck with basil, but I'll try again), a woolly thyme, and—score!—a rock soapwort plant. I used to have rock soapwort in my garden but it died out one year and I never could find it locally to replace it. So I'll replant it now and see if I can keep it going. Yay. I actually did use it once to wash some delicate textiles. In other news: Pop over to NeverNotKnitting and check out Alana's podcasts. The June 2 episode has a recap of her adventures at TKGA in May. She was in my Design Your Own Cables class and talks about her experiences there. I see great things in Alana's future. She's got the energy and drive to take her knitting to new places. The office reorganization is proceeding apace. I added a large table to my office so that I have an area to collate, staple, and stuff patterns into page protectors. I've been doing it at the kitchen table, which is nice because it's a "gathering table" at a height of 36", but which is problematic for other reasons (ketchup being one of them). And I needed a place to put the swift and ball winder. So it's getting there. I'm working on filling a pretty sizeable pattern order right now, and gradually getting a better handle on how much paper and how many page protectors I need to have on hand so I don't run out. We stopped at Costco after going to the nursery and laid in a supply of page protectors. I print my patterns on my color laser printer on glossy laser paper, which I've been buying at Staples. It's rather pricey there, and they don't give a quantity discount like they do on some other papers. Fortunately, I found another supplier of the same paper. The price from this other supplier is 40% less than what Staples charges, and shipping is included. It pays to shop around. I am eagerly awaiting JC Briar's visit this week. JC is my tech editor and is teaching a series of classes at Camas Creek next weekend. I very selfishly asked JC to stay at my house instead of the hotel in town so that we could cook together. She has put together a list of Thai and Indian dishes for us to try. Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong country. I would happily eat Thai, Indian, Ethiopian, and/or Lebanese food all the time. When we were in Columbus a few weeks ago for Mennonite General Assembly, I bought lunch at the Indian food stand at the North Market every day rather than eating in the dining hall with everyone else. Lunch included a wonderful palak paneer (spinach with cheese) that I want to try and replicate. The problem is that it's hard to find ethnic food ingredients here in all-caucasian Kalispell. It will be interesting to see how these ethnic dishes will be received by my family. The husband was born in the United States and that's where he likes to eat. (He insists he's not a picky eater, but that's only true as long as I make the foods he prefers—he doesn't eat lentils or tofu, two of my favorite foods.). He will probably try the stuff JC and I cook up, but I expect I'll have to grill a steak or two for him. The girls?—I have no idea. They have fairly adventuresome palates, but this might be pushing the envelope. I'm going to go walk around my garden now—without the dogs.
July 10, 2009: Nesting For some odd reason I am having a fit of nesting and no, I'm not pregnant. I got home from the trip and looked at the house and the checkbook and decided it was time to do some things I'd been thinking about for a while. When we made our grocery run the other day, we stopped at a big furniture store in town that's going out of business (the rate of Kalispell businesses going under is accelerating at an alarming rate—a post for another day). I found a great end table and a CD cabinet on sale. The end table replaces a 30 year-old hand-me-down from my parents' house. The CD cabinet holds our collection much better than the wire racks I was using. The girls cleaned out all the old videos and CDs to give to our neighborhood library. My office is a mess and I can no longer work efficiently in this space, especially now that I am printing and shipping patterns. DD#2 and I have been kicking around some ideas for a while—before we left on the trip, she asked if we could move my drafting table down to the basement and make a place there for her to keep all her drawing supplies. That frees up space in my office for another bookshelf to match the one I've got. I ordered it Wednesday and it shipped yesterday, so hopefully it will arrive soon. Then I can get books out of cartons and off the floor, and make some other changes to streamline the workflow. I told DD#2 that she needed to clean up the spot in the basement where she wanted to put the drafting table. She was fairly motivated and got that done yesterday afternoon. The husband moved the drafting table down there last night, along with a shelving unit that also had been in my office. Now all of her drawing and painting supplies will be in once place. Currently, they reside in a cabinet in the kitchen and in various other locations throughout the house. I'll get my kitchen cabinet back and can finally get my soup pots off the stove and into storage. We need some industrial shelving units for the mechanical room in the basement so we can store household stuff like paint and furnace filters there. And I ordered two of these:
They will go in the room in the basement where the—ahem—24 bins of yarn reside. Right now the bins are all stacked up and it's a major pain when I have to get yarn out of one on the bottom. That room is also something of a dumping ground for stuff we don't know what else to do with. It needs a good cleaning out. Eventually I'd like to move the boxes of back issues of the newsletter out of the spare bedroom and down there. The spare bedroom is tiny enough as it is. What's left? We're researching new carpeting for the upstairs. The existing carpeting has not survived two children and a husband and a succession of dogs very well. And if we're going to replace the carpeting, we might as well paint the spare bedroom and possibly the hallway, too, because everything in a house is connected to everything else in a house. In between all of this redecorating, I've been catching up on paperwork. I think I'm close to being done—I can see the top of my desk again. Yay. But right now I am going to go out and see if there are any ripe strawberries to be had.
July 7, 2009: Good to Be Home And here we are, back in Montana. It was a quick and painless trip back. I went immediately to my garden (after kissing the husband hello) and picked strawberries and did some weeding. I couldn't help myself. I needed to play in the dirt. The husband has been very good about keeping the berries picked, but even so, this is what I took out of the garden today:
I am so pleased with whatever variety of strawberries these are that I put in last year. They are hardy plants and heavy producers—nice, big berries that are really sweet. We'll have shortcake for dessert tonight. I've sorted the mail in preparation for paying construction company bills tomorrow. I need to sync up the laptop with the desktop and get some website stuff caught up. But I do plan to go out early tomorrow morning and weed a bit more.
July 4, 2009: The "Vacation" Is Almost Over The word vacation is in quotes because this trip has been everything BUT restful. It's not terribly restful to sleep in a different location every other night or have to be creative with clothing because the weather is cooler than you expected it to be in Ohio in July (it'll be 75 here today and 90+ back in Montana—go figure). I put over 3000 miles on the rental car. I miss the husband and the dogs. On the plus side, I've met lots of new people and spent time with old friends and relatives. I had so much knitting time in meetings this week that I got the back of a sweater finished and one of the fronts started. I taught two new classes that went really well. I have lots of new ideas, but I need to go home in order to start working on them. DD#1 and I visited Kenyon College on Tuesday, on our way down to Columbus. It's a pretty campus and an excellent school, but it's also in small town in the middle of nowhere and that's not really what she's looking for. She's got a few months yet to decide where she wants to apply. This is an important process for her and I don't think she should rush through it. DD#1 and I attended the biennial Mennonite General Assembly gathering in Columbus this week. I stayed with my friend Doreen (she was my physics teacher my senior year of high school and owns the yarn store where I taught), and DD#1 met up with three other girls and the adult sponsor of our youth group and stayed at the hotel with them. I think there were about 8000 people in attendance at this conference, and two-thirds of them were high school kids. Wow. It was amazing. I even impressed DD#1 with my texting skills—texting has definite advantages at an event like that. I probably won't update again until I am back home in Montana. See you there!
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