A Sure Sign of Spring...

In Other News
I've been working on some Top Secret spinning (it's a gift for someone) which I'll show you in a week or so. It's coming out very nicely.

My Lair is such a disaster area that I go down there and I'm overwhelmed with possibilities. I read an article a while back on various working styles. Some of us (frequently the ones accused of being messy) need the visual reminders of what needs doing, what we're working on, what's possible. So we leave our stuff out because if it's all put away, we don't see it and we forget that we're supposed to be doing anything. But I've been dragging so much stuff out lately that I've overwhelmed my brain with possibilities. Too much yarn. Too much fiber. Too much fabric. Alas, I think I need to spend a few weeks making things worse before they can get better. That is, I need to open up all the various boxes, purge, resort, relabel, and then put away. But that's such a daunting task that I just sit at my desk and make little swatches. If I start to seriously start organizing, usually Owen appears and demands attention when I'm about 15 minutes in, so I have learned helplessness about the whole thing. But maybe this week I can at least put away about half the distractions so I can focus on getting a few things done.

Knitting
I've also been working on some socks that go in and out of dormancy, depending on what else gets bumped to Priority One. One of these is the Charade Socks I started a few months back. I finished the first, cast on for the second, got about 2 inches in and stopped. Last night I got a couple more inches done, so maybe that'll get done before barefeet season is really and truly here. Also, I'm hoping to finish some socks that I'll send to my dad for his birthday later this month. The first one is done and the second over half done, so just the home stretch there.

Rant
I have a little rant about the time change to get out of my system, too. I always thought the time change was a minor inconvenience until I had kids. But ever since I became a parent, I've come to despise the time change. When I'm in charge of the universe, we will just have one time all year round. We'll split the difference between so-called Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time. I know there are nice, easy, flexible children out there somewhere. Children who fall asleep when put to bed, and wake up cheerful when it's time to get up, but not before it's time to get up. Well, those are not my kids. I am not exaggerating when I say that it takes my kids at least a week to really make the time change. The Little Emperor has been awake until 11 p.m. several times in the past week and we wake him about 7:30 on weekday mornings. Yeah, this is not a good sleep pattern. Honest-to-Maude, we start him moving toward bed at 7:30. This is a kid who had night and day reversed his first 4 months of life, so no real surprise that he's still bent that way.

So until someone appoints me Time Czar, I have a plan that could be put into place quickly and effectively and would improve school behavior and learning in every community that adopts it. Schedule Spring Break for the week following the time change! Is that just too darn logical for any modern bureaucracy? The kids would have a week to adjust. They would not have this week of rampant tardiness and tired, fidgety kids. The teachers might even enjoy it, too.

So, there you go, a rant and a solution! How often does that happen?

Enjoy the approach of spring.

Updates

More of the same


The Blue Faced Leicester from Sandy's Palette continues. I'm really really really loving the results I'm getting. Two 70 gram skeins so far, the first has about 205 yards; the second, about 220. This makes a nice sport weight kind of yarn. I'm a bit over half way through the batch.

More of the same, again


The basic garter stitch scarf from early handspun. It's about 45 inches long at this point. I think I'll be able to make a smallish hat out of the same yarn when the scarf is a good length. Either that, or keep on with the scarf until ridiculous proportions, a là Tom Baker/Dr. Who. Well, not quite. Getting a 20 ft scarf out of 7 ounces of fingering weight yarn would be a feat worthy of the TARDIS, which I don't possess.

A Problem

I'm cruising along last night, thinking I'm making such great progress. And I count stitches on one half of the front, to see how many more neckline decreases until the shoulder.

Hmm, seems a bit off.

Count the other side.

Uh Oh! I have a couple extra repeats of the design on one side than the other. Which means I've placed one of the steeks for the armholes in the wrong place.

Having pondered the Fix-It options, I know I have to frog.

I think I'll just let that project be for a few days. The weather is nice. The weeds are over-taking all the flowerbeds. The lawn is getting long. More baby buckthorns are springing up under shrubs. (I do like the thrill of pulling the small ones. It's nice knowing that's one less pain-in-the-butt weed tree in the world.)

And my family needs me to go to the supermarket today.

Here are two recent pictures of my cats enjoying the spring!

Spring Has Sprung

Today we had the kind of spring day that people all across the northern parts of the country wait all winter to experience. The birds are singing, the early flowers are blooming, the air was warm and the sky bright and clear. I hung out laundry on the line, turned a little dirt for a new flower bed, and sat on the porch and enjoyed the weather. I made the first iced tea of the season.

Here are a couple of flowers from the yard:




We're starting to plan the next big phase of the brick walk. This gets more challenging, because we have a giant silver maple in our front yard and it has put an extensive network of gnarly roots near the surface of our lawn. I need to ask some of my friends who know about this stuff if there's a tool that makes cutting through big roots any easier. Anyhow, in this photo, I've outlined the next phase of the path, which will bring it around to the existing front walk, such as it is.

After the walk is in, we can put a big planting between the walk and the porch.

The existing concrete walk is cracked and buckled and we'll eventually find someone with a mini-hoe to come and pull it up so we can replace that section with bricks, too. Our front steps are cracked and pulling away from the house a bit, too, which is another phase of the plan we'll need to consider. Have I mentioned before that this house was a great deal because of about 30 years of deferred maintenance? Even though we've been here 10 years and have done a lot, there's still a big list of things I would do before I'd call it done. All in good time.

And finally, the progress on the Baby James sweater.

I need to go and machine stitch the steeks next. Then cut. Then pick up stitches for the hood and finish off the front. If I didn't have kids, I could have been done by now. Alas.

New Neighbor!

Our favorite next-door neighbors have just had a little boy, so of course, I have to make a sweater for him. The challenge is to make the superwash wools I already own work together. I like this kind of challenge.

I have several balls of the Emu superwash, probably enough to make a plain blue sweater. But that would boring. I've got two different yellows of Dale Falk and the navy blue of some other superwash DK to use for Fair Isle or stripe accents. The brighter, darker yellow is a bit too vivid against the medium blue for my taste. It reminds me of school colors. The pale yellow is really too washed out to pair with the medium blue. So, I decided the solution was to use them both, and the navy.

I guess I'm going with the tried and true little fair isle diamonds. They're easy, really jazz up a baby sweater, and tend to make any colors look right together. Within reason.

In other news, we're having Spring. Again. Maybe it'll stick around this time? One can always hope.