The knitting progresses

Our other projects are progressing as well, but I said I would update the knitting progress on Thursday and it's Thursday (for another 40 minutes, at least). My only knitting project continues to be the blanket for Sports Nut. I may actually finish it by the Baseball All-Star Game on July 13.

As you can see, four of the six pieces have been completed and the fifth is in progress. I spread the pieces out on a king-size bed to give an idea of the size the finished item will be. It looks a little lumpy because one of Sports Nut's cats decided to burrow underneath it. The color discrepancy in the yarn doesn't seem so enormous in the knitted pieces, so I think this will work out all right in the end.

In other news, our new addition is making herself at home.

She's soooo cute.

Right now, however, she has knocked one of the shelves off the bookcase next to my desk and is now curled up on an important piece of paper that she first chewed on. She's still cute, though. Kittens can do little harm in my book.

Yard, Projects, and Whatsits, sort of

We have a couple of big projects going forward this week, plus I have some studying to do, so by the time everything gets done I have been in no mood to blog. Either the stars were in alignment today (Did you know that when I worked for the Army Corps of Engineers during my college summers, they spelled "alignment" as "alinement"?) or I arranged my time a little better. Here it is, barely 10 p.m,. and I have some time to catch up on the week. So far.

Monday was yard and garden day. We still don't have any vegetables in the ground. Other things keep getting in the way. But things are happening. The claret cup cactus we planted last year is blooming:

The apples

and peaches

are growing.

We even have a volunteer flower!

I guess one of last year's annuals went to seed.

There are also problem plants. This plant outside Future Vet's bedroom seems to be taking over:

It certainly makes a lot of noise rubbing against the gutters. For a while, I thought there was some kind of distressed animal in the yard. Also, foxtail grass is everywhere, which is not so good for the dogs. I'll have to get the slave labor out to work on that as soon as they finish their current projects.

What are their current projects (Tuesday's topic), you may ask. One is demolishing the two-story playhouse that we found in the yard when we moved in seven years ago. Our offspring were a little big to use it when we moved, but varous and assorted small children have climbed up and down on it over the years we have lived here.

They started demolition on Monday:

Windows, doors, and the upper walls were removed. Tuesday's big task was to take the roof off:

That's the roof lying on the ground behind the playhouse. They ended up kind of just shoving it off after they had loosened most of the nails.

Today (Wednesday), the plan was to remove the rest of the upper level and all its odds and ends (like the safety railing). And they did!

Sports Nut worked by himself for a while and even started getting the upper level floor off:

They expect to be done tomorrow. And tomorrow, I plan to list the boards, roof, doors, windows, and various other bits and pieces on Freecycle so that other people will haul things away for me.

There's another project going on, but it's a surprise, so I won't share it just yet. Instead, here's a picture of Hershey at his favorite activity:

Nothing Major to Report

As I've mentioned before, it always seems to take me a week or so to get back on track after being out of town. This past week, things were further complicated by our decision to have a tikkun leyl shavuot, an all-night study session at our house.

Despite staying up all night on Tuesday, I did manage to nag Media Guy and Future Vet into washing all the clothes they brought home from college. I  would like to say that I also convinced them to put their stuff away, but I had to settle for getting them to remove their stuff from the public hallways and rooms of the house.

With all that going on, no real decrapification went forward. This week will be different. I have my eye on a few things.....

Home Again with Negative Progress to Report

Y'know, I spend all this time getting crap out and it takes so little time for the crap to find its way back in. Just the other day, for example, I drove to La La Land to pick up two of the offspring from college. They had finished their finals, so I assumed that they would have at least started packing. But take a look at Media Guy's college room:

Future Vet had made a start:

Sort of:

Ah, well. I set them to packing and went off to read a book under a tree. Eventually, in the fullness of time, my car started to fill up:

As did the car that Media Guy and Future Vet are allowed to use while at school:

But wait, as they say, there's more!

Eventually, the back seat of the offspring's car was about as full as it could be:

As was my van, considering that I wanted to be able to see out of the back of the car:

But then, there was a slight complication. There is always a slight complication, and I have to admit that this one was pretty small:

But awfully cute. It seems that one of Future Vet's friends had acquired a kitten but the friend's parents wouldn't let him take the kitten home. How was I supposed to leave that face behind?

So we had to figure out a way to fold a kitten into the car without getting her little self crushed if things shifted while we drove. Fortunately, she found a place to pack herself:

She also apparently figured out who she most needed to suck up to and took the Wizard in hand. First she helped him check his email:

Then she curled up on his shoulder and took a nap:

Awwwww......

So now we are back home, kitten and all. And there are, once again, piles of STUFF all over the place. Like in Future Vet's bedroom:

And Media Guy's room:

And the front hall:

And the dining room:

I'm doing my best to insist that everything be put away before the end of the day. We have company coming on Tuesday and I want it all out of sight, preferably not entirely out of mind.

So the state of the decrapification is that letting the kids come home from college for the summer only adds to the crap in the house.

This time, at least, they also increased the cuteness factor.

We are thinking of calling her Sophie.

What in the World Wednesday and Freecycle Friday -- Together at Last!

The last of this week's two-fers. And very short because there's nothing much to report. No freecycling this week because I'm going to be gone for the rest of the week. And here's the most unusual thing in the house today:

Those are the seats from my van, taken out so that the Wizard and I will have enough room (we hope) to bring home all the crap that Media Guy and Future Vet have had in their dorm rooms this year. The plastic bags hold some clothing and other odds and ends that are going to be picked up by a charitable organization tomorrow.

So while a van-load of crap will be moving back into the house by the end of the week, some stuff is still on its way out.

So long until next week!

Very domestic tonight -- gardening and knitting

Yet another two-fer, to make up for the fact that I won't be able to post something later this week. Or more accurately, I won't feel like posting anything later this week while I am on the road.

Since we still haven't planted any vegetable crops yet and the slave labor is still a few days away from being home, there's not much intentional stuff going on in the yard. The fruit trees are still doing nicely, as are the weeds. In looking around today, however, I did notice that the agave is starting to bloom:

This little gem was the real surprise, however:

That appears to be a mushroom. In the sand in my back yard. In the desert. Go figure.

The other day I realized that by this time last year, our vegetables had been in the ground for about 3 or 4 weeks already. So this year, we are getting a later start. Which brings me to the idea of raised gardening beds.

Sports Nut and I talked about putting in raised beds over the winter, but never got around to building them. Finally we scratched the idea since we hadn't done it already. Then I picked up a copy of the new edition of Square Foot Gardening and decided that maybe we should do the raised beds after all. (I am nothing if not fickle.)

Shortly after the slave labor gets home, and probably before they do their laundry, I have going to have them build me some gardening boxes and mix up some soil. Only after that will I put some vegetables into the ground. Fortunately, there's a long growing season here in Dodge.

And now for today's second topic -- Thursday's Knitting Update.

I am still working on the fourth (of six) piece of Sports Nut's blanket, but I have made progress. So much progress, in fact, that I have almost finished the yarn on the first skein of yarn for this piece. I couldn't find any more of the matching yarn, so I had to go stash diving. (The yarn, as should surprise no one, was hiding at the bottom of the bottom bin in the back pile of yarn bins.)

The yarn I found, however, didn't seem to match the yarn I was actually knitting with:

 

The new yarn seems much brighter and to have more orange in it. I checked dye lots, however, and they all purport to be the same dye lot. So I'm going to take it on faith that this is the right yarn and it's just wound so that a different part of the colorway is showing up. We'll see how it works up very soon -- I only have a bit of the current skein left.

Today a Twofer

Since I will be on the road for the latter part of the week, today I'm going to post both the Sunday decrapification and the Tuesday projects update. The Tuesday update is simple -- nothing to report because my slave labor won't be home until Friday.

On the decrapification front, some progress continues to be made. In addition to all the stuff we freecycled last week, I got rid of three cat litter boxes and a cat tree that are no longer in use. And I have two big black trash bags of clothes and other things ready to be put outside Wednesday morning for a charitable organization to come by and pick up.

Future Vet's room got cleaned up (again):

As did Media Guy's temporary room, which has been cleared out to make room for new bookshelves, which will arrive tomorrow. (Nobody, but nobody, in this family gets along without bookshelves.)

I also finally got to the walk-in closet in my bedroom and reorganized it so that we can throw more crap walk into it again.

Okay,  I lied about this one. I went upstairs meaning to clean it up, but the bed was just sitting there so invitingly. I took a nap instead. Tomorrow. Maybe.

And that's about it. I don't want to start anything big right before going away for three days. My experience shows that, if I were to do so, it would still be sitting here waiting when I returned.

Freecycle Friday is Here at Last

One woman's trash truly is another woman's (or man's) treasure. Yesterday I listed all kinds of things on Freecycle, things I have absolutely no use for and which are, therefore, trash. And people came crawling out of the woodwork -- or the internet -- eager to carry these things away.

So what was there?

A cat cube left behind by the Drama Queen's cat, a laundry basket that might have been my Grandmother's, some ends of candles, some freebies received by a friend while he was in cancer treatment, cheap-o odds and ends, some not-good-enough-to-keep videos.

But wait! There's more!

More souvenir items, more not-great videos, a day-by-day cookie calendar that I got fed up with back in February, and clock/radio that also plays CDs. And the pick of the litter:

A Nintendo game cube with 2 controllers and 3 games. Everybody and their brother wanted this one. It is, however, going to a residential treatment program where getting to play with it will be used as a reward for good behavior. I do understand why this game system was in such high demand, but nobody uses it here. They are far more into their PS2s and their Wii and their requests for a PS3. (That's what jobs are for, guys.)

Here it all (well, mostly) is outside waiting for people to come and give them new homes.

It's sort of like finding homes for a litter of puppies.

Knit Happens

For the first time in a long time, I only have one current knitting project. I promised Sports Nut that I would finish his blanket after I got done with all the Wallabys and, so far, I have stuck to that instead of starting something new. Like all of the blankets I have made for the offspring, I started off not really knowing where I was going. I wanted to try knitting on the diagonal, which was fun. However, I made a small but telling error on the first piece and ended up with a diamond shape instead of a square.

Okay, what could I do with that? I came up with this idea, of putting the diamonds together to make a star-shaped afghan/blanket:

Having finished one diamond, I had 5 more to knit. As of today, I have finished 3 of the diamonds and am plugging away on the fourth. Once they are assembled, Sports Nut and I will decide whether I should fill in the areas between the points of the star.

You can't see the full scope of the finished pieces in this picture because the diamonds are over 4 feet long from top to bottom. This is going to be a fairly large blanket when it's done.

My primary knitting time is during Red Sox games on television (Fenway Park being too far away from Dodge), so I thought I would set a baseball-related goal for the completion of this blanket. Here it is: I am going to finish this blanket before the MLB All Star Game on July 13. That gives me a little over two months.

Although I am being monogamous with my knitting project right now, I have some sock yarn on order.

Oddly enough, nothing odd happened this week

I've been getting all my ducks in a row to take off for Los Angeles next week, so I haven't really gone through boxes or shelves. I've emptied boxes and dealt with their contents, but they were boxes of mostly receipts. Nothing too interesting.

You know it's a blah week when this is the only thing to strike you as odd:

Why, do you suppose, did this bag have a dotted line that says "tear here" nearly half an inch above the perforation?And since I tore along the perforation instead of the dotted line, do you suppose the Perforation Police are going to come and take me away? Curious minds want to know.

This is not a one-off, by the way. This morning, I opened two more bags that were marked in the same manner.

Maybe next week's Wednesday post will be more interest. Maybe not.

Tuesday (weird name for a day) Project Update

Project, project, who's got a project?

Problem is, there are a number of projects that need to be done, but nothing is going to happen on most of them for another week or three. Summer vacation = project time.

Two years ago, we redid the kitchen over the summer. Last year, we had work done in all three bathrooms. This year.... it's time to wrap things up. Besides the outside projects, which I mentioned yesterday, there are things to be done indoors.

Something obviously must be done about this kitchen ceiling. We have a call in to the electrician to put up a new light fixture, one that includes a fan. Once that is done, there's some work to do on the ceiling and walls. After that, we can paint pretty much all of the public areas downstairs.

The master bedroom and bath, along with the Wizard's office will need to be painted upstairs. And we should probably also deal with the halls in the stairwell.  And I've already mentioned ripping up and replacing carpets.

 This demonstrates part of the carpet problem. The previous owners apparently cut out various corners and put carpet scraps in. This happens all over the house. Just one more thing to fix for the next people who live here.

Beyond household projects, there are always and forever the boxes in the garage.

As much as I would like to forget them, I really can't. It's just not in my nature.

The First Monday Yard and Garden Update

This is somewhat timely, I suppose, given that it is just getting warm enough to spend time outdoors working in the yard. We have done a few odds and ends, like planting some new pear trees, but that's about it. I probably won't put in vegetables for another couple of weeks because I'll be out of town for 3 days next week. Rather than trust fledgling plants to the offspring left behind, I think I'll just wait until we get back to start planting.

But things are happening. The apple blossoms have disappeared, but that's okay. Look what we have instead:

Those are nascent apples! And there are lots and lots of them on both apple trees. I have high hopes for an apple harvest this fall.

The peach tree is also showing promise:

The apple and peach trees are making me so happy that I can (almost) ignore the vegetable garden plots. Like this one:

This picture was taken after I pulled up and removed three wheelbarrows-full of weeds. This is the plot where we have planted corn and squash the last couple of years. This year, Sports Nut and I decided to forego the corn. Corn takes up a lot of space and water and we just haven't gotten that much return on the investment. Beyond yellow squash and zucchini, we haven't decided what else to plant here this year. Maybe cucumbers, since this plot gets the most sun.

We had tried planting cucumbers in the small plot next to the house last year, but they didn't do very well. The tomatoes we planted here did nicely, however.

And they left their cages behind. I think we'll use them again. I also found some interesting new plants when I was checking out the area yesterday.

There's a good chance that this and its little friends are romaine lettuce. We let a couple of romaine plants go to seed in this area last year. I'm inclined to leave them and see what develops.

The plot that had our strawberry and blueberry plants last year is a total loss.

None of the plants survived. Possibly because the dogs dismantled the fence and took to sitting in the dirt over here, but who knows? Two years ago, we had a very successful pumpkin vine over here. Maybe we'll do that again.

And somewhere, I want to plant some sunflowers this year. The birds have planted a few over the years, but this year I really want to plant some intentionally.

The rest of the yard needs a lot of work. Fortunately, the slave labor will be home by the end of next week. Of all the perennials we planted last year, only these seem to be thriving this year:

And I can't remember what they are called. I'm going to put in perennials in this area along the back fence again, but I think I'll stock up on these, whatever they are, just in case everything else dies again.

What we do have in the yard right now is an abundance of weeds.

These particular weeds are on my get-rid-of list, along with the puncture vine that I complain about every year, because in the fall these produce a nice crop of nettles. The nettles are very good are working their way through the fabric of your clothing and socks, and into the coats of dogs. And they have very sharp pointy ends.

We bought this house because it had a lot of land. Less land than we had in our last place, but an enormous amount of land for houses here in Dodge. Turns out that the extra land is a problem. We don't get much water here, but that doesn't mean that nothing grows. Instead, unless you are rigorous about maintaining whatever ground cover you have chosen, opportunistic and very hard-to-kill plants take advantage of you.

For example, this area is meant for parking an RV (a big plus when trying to sell houses here in Dodge). The ground cover left behind by the previous owners was a layer of sand. We have consistently cleared out this area every year, and still, every spring this is what we have:

Weeds. Chamisa (the kind of fluffy stuff over toward the wall). And various debris.

On the side of the house, in the area that leads up to the RV access gate seen above, there are rocks.

And weeds. And the Drama Queen's car. And debris, though that was carted off this morning by the trash guys, so ignore it.

In the little parking space in front of the house, there are also rocks. And weeds.

I think that during the coming year, before we put the house on the market, we are going to have to have both of those areas re-rocked. Add it to the list.

And all that brings us to the front yard, which -- thanks to the relatively copious amounts of precipitation we have enjoyed this winter and spring -- is actually kind of green.

And overgrown. I'm waiting for the slave labor to return and start whacking the grass back to a manageable height.

Of the four rosemary plants I put in last year, only one seems to be thriving.

Hmmm.... that light purple really doesn't show up well, does it? It's actually a very nice-looking plant right now. I think I may replant rosemary in this area. In addition to looking nice, they also smell nice. And, if you are so inclined, you can probably trim them for herbal uses.

I realized that the picture of the front yard above doesn't include a view of the Evil Walkway, so I took a picture from another angle:

There it is. The path that did its best to kill me last summer. I came away from my encounter with it broken, but determined to prevail. That walkway is not going to win! Last year, I had intended to put some annuals in that barren area, but after my bout with the walkway, I kind of backed off. This year, I will plant something there -- maybe some bulb flowers. Or maybe....

Vinca! These plants are the only thing in the front yard that actually looks gorgeous right now. It stays green all year and has these pretty purple flowers in the spring. I never water the stuff, so it lives off whatever falls from the skies. I am definitely going to look into putting more out in front of the house.

So I guess that's the plan. In the back yard -- yellow and zucchini squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, maybe some romaine. A pumpkin vine. Sunflowers. More perennials along the back wall. And whatever else looks good when we go buy plant starts.

In the front yard, some rosemary. And vinca. Along with our fruit trees, I think I have the beginning of a pretty good garden this year.