Decisions, Decisions

Please Lord, help me to make a prudent decision. I am weak Lord, I need the strength to stick with the decision you help me make....

Ok so it's not that bad really. Nothing earth shattering certainly. But I have a tendency to want to do everything and participate in every challenge that comes my way and I get overextended and beat myself up for not being able to do it all.

It's Barbara Chlorite-Ventura's fault. She was the one who sent the notification that the new site for the MS4 was up. I signed up this morning.

I already have multiple shawls in my mental queue. I have already committed myself to knitting Ali the Environment Camp layette, I have 1/2 a sweater another pair of socks, a hat and a pair of mittens yet to go and it all needs to be done before the last week in October. Poor Quinnie keeps asking "Quinnie socks?" and I keep telling her that when Ali's stuff is all done then Quinnie will get some socks and a sweater. Granted her socks will take me like an afternoon, and a sweater, maybe a week, but still...

Also, I tried the MS3 last year - I was able to keep up all right, but I never finished it. I didn't like how it went asymmetrical and I don't really like stoles anyway, I prefer big comfy climb inside shawls. And it was in the Summer, not the fall. Fall is traditionally busy.

I signed up for the Growing challenge and how many posts have I made to update that? Alright I did do the challenge stuff, but failed to post regularly about it.

It's lace...with beads! OH! how can I say no? We'll see how it goes. I can always just print out the clues and knit it later, but then it won't be a surprise...Oh I can't decide.

Help!

All in a day's work

So this morning after having a nice look at the latest knit-zine. I went outside to fix the fence. It rained (hard) last night so the digging was easy. I had to move 4 posts. If you are going to dig post holes I highly recommend digging them when the ground is damp. It makes the digging so much easier. I finally finished around 6 (I took a 1/2 hr lunch at 2).

My feet and hands hurt, but the fence looks great.

Bad Melody!

Argh! Melody is a very smart sheep. She's a very BIG sheep. She's a very strong sheep. Melody did this.

My neighbor Martha likes to mow her lawn, and my neighbor Sheryl and Mike's lawn, and part of my lawn. Whatever floats ya Martha...Anyway, she always tosses the clippings over the fence for the sheep. Melody is a big pig. Like Pavlov's dog , the sheep sit at the fence and cry every time someone mows their lawn, whether or not it's Martha. So all day yesterday other neighbors were mowing their lawns - first Gabe accross the street then Peter, next door, on the other side. Neither of these people offered any free food to Miss Piggy Melody, and she got impatient waiting for it so she decided to remove the gate and seek her own goodies.

Guess what I'm doing tonight?

Big Girl Bed

Quinnie got a Big Girl Bed yesterday! We got the bed off Craig's List last November and it's been sitting in "Sam's room" ever since, but yesterday, after the latest in the great crib escape escapades I decided to get Sean to help me move the bed upstairs. Now one of the joys of living in an antique colonial is that they have quirky stair wells. Neither of our 2 stair cases is a straight shot so we went with the wider of the two, which also happened to be in closer proximity to both the bed and Quinn's room. Unfortunately for us, and the bed (and the walls) one of the drawbacks to secondhand furniture is that it comes preassembled and in this case that meant pegged and glued. So when the bed inevitably got stuck in the stairwell, we had a tough time disassembling it in situ. I was in the hall end and able to work at waist height, so my end came apart tidier than Sean's end, which was also the end that was stuck, and one of the things about modern furniture is that it's comprised mostly of particle board, which I admit is very strong and very dense, but when it breaks it's also more difficult to repair. So we had a slightly more difficult time reassembling the bed than we should have. Several hours later, Quinn's bed was all assembled and made, the crib was in the attic, her room set right, and the flared tempers tempered. We had a late dinner and started Quinn's new bedtime routine. Gone of the days of drop and go bed times, now they must be orchestrated carefully to avoid having a stressed out Mommy and a resentful, non-sleeping toddler. So I tucked her in and read her a couple of stories and turned on the music and started to leave, and it took her all of 2 minutes to run screaming and crying come get me in my room. So back I went and sat with her while she adjusted to the new bed situation, and after about 15 minutes she was out cold.

Sump pumps suck

The husband says to Ali as he's going off to bed, "can you start the sump pump and turn it off before you go to bed". Ali, 10, is all business, she gets her wellies on, tromps down the stairs and stands the sump pump back up in it's bucket and returns upstairs for an hour of relaxation before bed. I know better than to leave it at that. I know that the sump pump is sideways in the bucket because it's hooked up to a temporary hose running out the front window and that the hose has been frozen beneath not one, but 2 storms since the last time it was moved, and the reason the pump is on the temporary hose to begin with is due to the fact that our regular outlet was frozen solid when we went from 60 and raining to -5 in an 8 hour period a month ago. I know that someone needs to go out to unearth the hose from all that ice, and check to make sure water is actually emerging from the end or else the pressure behind the check valve will cause the hose to burst spraying water all over the panel box. So I reluctantly get my boots on and go outside to check because the possibility of a burst will be far more of a problem than a little cold on my toes when I'm winding down for bed. Outside is pure ice. Quinn (nearly 2) has refused to walk outside (even assisted) since Wednesday and basically bursts into tears if I should so much as put her down out of doors. I perform something similar to Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks by slamming my heel first through the ice to get at the more stable snow underneath and wade my way to the front of the house. Directly in front of the window is even worse and is so icy I can't even break the snow and it's mounded up slightly from the stuff that slid off the steeply pitched roof (the one smart thing the builders of this house did) and I can't get close to the window let alone unearth the hose. I fumble around the yard looking for anything dark (and mind you it's 7:00 so everything is dark outside) in the snow and jam my hand through the ice in a feeble attempt to locate some part of the hose. But two storms ago was long enough ago not to remember exactly what trajectory the hose went and I came up with nothing. Knowing that the other outlet should be open, and that the pump has been running the entire time I've been outside makes me not want to spend forever trying to locate a hose end that is almost definitely frozen so I return to the cellar with electric screwdriver and wellies and disassemble/reassemble the pump outlet and reroute the water out the nonfrozen (I hope) outlet. I plug the sucker back in and dash outside. I can make it as far as the corner of the house, and I can see that water is indeed flowing from the pipe, which is good, but now I wonder where all that water is going becuse the hose is frozen to the ground and coming out of the front window. Can you beleive that the ice on the snow bank is so hard it holds my enire body weight, and I'm no feather let me assure you, and it's so slick because it was slightly above freezing today, that I can't climb up it at all and I have to pull myself up by hanging onto a branch of the yew bush that's in front of the window. The water has softened the snow where it's fallen and I can feel that the door we placed to deflect the water is still in place so I trudge back inside and sit me down in an area where I can hear the pump (at the desk) and babysit it. It goes off by itself (miracle of miracles) after 40 minutes and I go downstairs to see if it'll start back up and how well of a job it did, and though I wouldn't wear sneakers my wellies are a bit of overkill. I don't trust the sump pump to go on and off on it's own beacuse it's proven too fussy on too many occastions to be reliable so I reach over to unplug it whe I notice that all the water it just sent out of the building is coming right back in through the rock wall. Round 2, tomorrow 5:30 am.

New Look

Took a little detour from trying to navigate the Amazon.com customer service page to update Melinda's Growing challenege button (now that I know how to do that) only to discover it's too wide for my settings. Not being incredibly versed in HTML, I did the best I could to make it wider - seemed to work pretty good too until I noticed that the darkening of the page on the scribe setting ended mid page. D'oh! I like green. This is good. Now to get back to figuring out how to get a response from the seller of the book I ordered in January that has NOT come in yet. I have emailed him 3 times for an update on the status and have not heard back yet, and I'm not past my 30 day window for the guarantee. Grumble, grumble.

Clutter or the Environment

I've got some serious issues with clutter. This is the thing, I have serious issues throwing stuff away. I mean I can throw things away, like food packaging and old receipts and junk mail, but about the time when Exeter (NH) started their pay per bag system I started to realize that the world's resources were finite and that we should reuse and reclycle everything possible. That said I started to keep alot more things than I did before, the number of my trash bags went down and I felt OK about what I did throw out. But there are a lot of things you can't recycle, don't really have a use for, and they just kind of acumulate. Add to that a move to a house with ample storage for some kinds of things (a huge barn and a garage) and not sufficient storage for other kinds of things (food, toys, books and cooking tools), plus family and friends effectively dumping their stuff (broken tools, crooked bookshelves, cheap acrylic yarn, games we'll never play) on us I have reached the point where even I can not stand it. It wouldn't be so bad if my toddler would leave the stuff in it's place, but I came home last night to a whole box of books strewn all over the office. I've kept these books because they are my favorites. I have whittled and pared down the collection 'til it only fit in ONE box and I'd like to have them all stored neatly on a bookshelf I have yet to build in the hall. I haven't built the bookcase because the wall is wavy and it'll need a fair amount of recon before I can put square wood against it. We don't have the cash flow to facilitate such a renovation so the books sit in a box waiting for a bookshelf and get strewn when Mommy's not looking. This is just one tiny example oth the thousands of things I have in my house that are cluttering up my life. I know some things I truly want to get rid of, so much so tat I rounded them up to bring them to the swap shop at the local tranfer station only to find out that the selectmen have decided it's no longer a good idea to have such a place and have closed it indefinitely. I suppose there's always freecycle, but that takes so long to unload things - I couldn't even give my perfectly good leather couch away - that it's not even worth posting. A yard sale would be a monumental undertaking at this point. So what options do I have left? I can pitch the stuff as I come to it in my cleaning/clutterbusting endeavours, or I can put it in boxes as I come to it and see if someone could possible come by with a U-Haul and spirit it away, or I can pray for a house fire.

I don't know. It's just too much.