Hello, Goodbye

An era has passed. Etta the Touareg is gone. Sure, since she came to Northern Illinois, she had not left the house much, but then again, neither did I.

Plus, she was a little camera shy. I managed to find this shot of her rear end, hidden in the garage, in the place she called her own.

Is it shallowness on my part? Am I a bad person for leaving her, with almost no warning? Etta was beautiful on the inside and out, and she had everything I needed and many things I never knew I couldn't live without before I met her. She had one fatal flaw, however; she simply had an insatiable appetite. Over time, being with her was becoming too expensive to justify.

Etta was left in capable hands in Gurnee, with folks who will help her transition to a new, possibly more active lifestyle. Maybe this time she can have the family she was meant to have.

So Etta, here's to you. I will miss our gentle rides down 173. I will miss the way you carefully guided me where I needed to go. I will miss our shopping trips. But mostly, I will miss the way you made me feel. You made me feel confident and successful, as if nothing could harm me when we were together.

I wish you a happy future.

With every goodbye, there is a hello.

I have a new friend in my life. He is unassuming, simple and elegant. Where Etta had flash, he simply has function. He is staid and prosaic. Like Kermit, one of his predecessors, he asks for almost nothing and gives me control in return. And like Kermit, he reminds me again of who I am: a simple girl from Ohio who really isn't all that important, no matter how much she wants everyone to think she is.

May I introduce to you, dear readers, Murphy Brown.

He is a pleasure to be with. Already, I feel we have the comfortable bond of an old friendship renewed. It is almost as if Murphy waited in the wings until I was ready to be myself again.

He is from a good family, and I entered this relationship with an eye toward the long term. I left my inability to commit at the door when I met Murphy. I look for our friendship to last a long, long time.

I hope you will join me in welcoming Murphy to our circle. I am glad to have him around.

Just a quickie

Yes I know. All (both) of you are waiting to see pictures of The Desk. I have to do a little bit of camera manipulation to get it done, so maybe tomorrow. I also have to get some homework done, so I can only do a tiny blog (blogarita?) tonight. I got two new knitting pattern books in the mail today.

HOP! HOP!

(That's me jumping up and down, btw). I've been in a bit of a knitting frump - I'm not sure what I want to make, other than I want it to be in the yellow silk I have. I've thought about designing my own piece. The problem is that something I would design would have way too many complicated bits, because I would start with the design first. Then, I would look at it and say...I have no idea how to knit that. So I made a vain attempt to knit a gauge swatch so that I have something to knit in the yellow silk. Then, like a song from heaven, the doorbell rings accompanied by a cacaphony of dog barks and lying on the porch are these two books from Yarn Market:



Both are chock full of neato things for me to knit...for myself! What a great idea! I could make something for me! (Because, in the end, it's all about me. If I wasn't a showboater, I wouldn't have a blog, would I?) :D

I know, I know - I have unfinished stuff. The Bedroom Sweater is sitting patiently, in all its pink, orange and brown goodness, waiting for me to get my gauge on and edge the thing. And Delores has given me garbage bags full of projects. I am so not joking. I have them stuffed in the closet of the sewing room. If I don't watch, doing Delores Projects could become a full-time (unpaid) job. I also have a few unfinished/half started mini projects: The Steeking Incident stands out:

I have successfully steeked, but I have not even touched it since then. I'm sure there is a stuffed animal out there somewhere that needs to look like Spiderman.

(Mom: steeking is this. It's basically, cutting holes in your knitting - on purpose. BTW - I found a very cool jacket in the Classic Arts book that seems to fit the bill. It's loose and pretty - oh, it's the cover, haha. When I see you next, I'll show you my idea.)

So I should get to my homework. Gene told me to take a nap this afternoon (I was a bit...b**chy) and now I am behind :( I may have to not do the extra work. I'm such a freakin' nerd. :P

Ciao for now!

J

Pay No Attention to the Woman Behind the Curtain!

Well, I'm not actually *behind* the curtain - I'm more in front of it and reflected behind it, but this isn't Plato's Cave.

I finished my curtains, obviously.


These pictures actually show the green of the wall, a little, don't you think? I'm actually quite proud of the job I did. You notice they are even. I was a little surprised, myself. :) The corners are nice, if not 100% neat:

They are, in fact, squared off. I sewed that hem by going back to back with a piece of white fabric. I want the front of the house to be consistent, with the same white curtain color in every window from the street. I made lines of stitching every so often, so that the two fabrics didn't "pillow", but rather acted as one single piece of fabric. The bottom of the hem shows this...sorta...

The upshot of the curtains being done is that the front of the house is the south side of the house, meaning lots and lots of sun streams in through my office windows. I love that in the winter - it feels very warm and fuzzy when I am cold and prickly. Unfortunately, in the summer it becomes warm and sticky. Not so awesome. The curtains, being lined, block the heat of the sun during the hottest part of the day. On days like today, when it's cloudy or overcast, I can open the curtains completely to let in the non-hot daylight. Unlike my vampiric husband, I like the light.

I'm going to use the same fabric to make a cover for a round pillow or a neck roll and also as a cover for one of the Ikea cubes we have had for years. They've had covers (bad ones, mind you) on them already, but those covers have passed from this earth. I doubt I'll get to it this weekend since the plan is to build a desk and shelves (and a chaise, but Gene doesn't know about that yet). The weekend after that isn't looking too good, either, since we'll be in Eagle River, but maybe after that? It all depends on my mood and the whims of the creative gods.

This past weekend, Travis, Kat and Taylor came to visit us all the way from Ohio. I don't think they realized just how far we are from downtown...until we picked them up from Midway, ha ha. That first morning, we were able to see just where Taylor gets his crazy hair...

The only picture we have of Kat from this weekend is also from this very same morning, but that's just mean to do to a girl. I don't mind making fun of Travis, though. ;) Taylor is growing a ton - he is really funny! We got Travis a giant cookie cake, since Saturday was his birthday:

And Taylor thought it was pretty interesting and tasty.

I take it back - that last picture has a corner of Kat in it.

But it was great to have them here.

On another, unrelated note, my heartfelt thanks to Kelly for letting me hang out with the cool kids on Tuesday, even though the universe hasn't let me come to her house yet. I will make it, some day!

Ciao, all! I'm off to do homework and then play with power tools!

March Winds, April Showers, Soon Brings, May...

Mold.

WTF is this?

I've asked the gardening guru, my mom. She didn't know what to do. So she went to her go-to guy...Jerry Baker. Whose website is commercial and awful. Whose books are GREAT. Jerry had nothing. So, in the hope that I have friends who know something about molds - the Mulch Mold, up close:

It lifts off, so that's nice, but I am not touching it. Nope. I found this helpful site, but it involves a few things that don't make sense for the area. We also have mushrooms aplenty and I discovered, while outside taking a picture of the mold, a new critter in the garden.

I assume he should not be there. He does look rather nice, though. For the most part, other than the assorted fungi and leaf munching critters, the garden seems to be doing rather well. I think the rain has made everything very happy. The petunias are going bizonkers:

and the jade (at least parts of it) appears to like its new home outside:

The part that used to be the kitchen jade...not so happy.

And to summarize my garden ups and downs, may I present to you, dear reader(s), the following:

This is a finally flowering geranium. I have waited weeks and weeks for this - since the first week Sharon was here, helping us garden, which was the last week in April.

Notice the jade looks a mite happier in that photo. It went through a bit of a shock, but it has lots of new growth on it. We are optimistic that it will pull through. I can't tell you how many Jades and other heirloom plants that have been in Gene's family for 100 years or so I have managed to kill. I come from a gardening family. I should be able to at least keep the stuff alive! *sigh*

Back to the geranium.

So it's finally flowering - but in the back, where no one can see. Turn the pot! you say. I say, that defeats the purpose of having the hanging things in the front. Vinca vines they are called, I think. Hopefully, the rest of the plant will get the idea, and flowers will start popping out everywhere.

No knitting news.

The office is painted. I tried - really I did! - to get a picture of the color, but it's so pale, it looks exactly like the trim. Gene (who did his duty - haha, I said duty - by painting some)

said it looks like a 6 year old girl's room. I think it looks like a slightly fresher version of the wall color one might imagine in a mental hospital in the 1960s. But I like it. :) My Polish Mafia husband, notwithstanding. It's still a work in progress, and when I finish up this blogging thing, I shall make the curtains. The fabric is cut and ironed (*shudder* I hate ironing).

While I was getting the curtains ready, I decided to try to organize my sewing room a little. It has a path, now. But I did manage to clean off enough workspace to make the curtains. That is, until I remembered that I had to make the Thank You basket we decided to make for our next door neighbors. (They watched the dogs for us while we were in Connecticut and New Jersey.)

Gene said it looks Martha Stewart-ish. I think that was a complement, haha, but I just tried to make it cute with what I had on hand. I couldn't find any white tissue paper, so I had to improvise. I used paper bags and some of the leftover white fabric from the curtains I will someday sew. I got cute puppy paw ribbon, and some black ribbon with white dashes, and made it all work somehow. Truely, this is not what I had in mind when I started - but I like the way it turned out. The paws are punches, and my favorite part is the part from our dogs - Pelli, Sasha and Emma - to Cody, the neighbor's dog.

The tag is around a bag of homemade dog cookies. I thought that would be cute, you know? The box said just add water. How hard could that be? Well, the just adding water was sticky and messy, but not horrible. The rolling out of the dough wasn't all that bad. The cutting through the oats and whatever else is in these things was awful! I had dents in my hands, and I eventually had to use the rolling pin to try to cut through the dough. But in the end, they turned out very cute and my dogs, at least, love them.

Well, that's enough for now. I must get ready for Travis, Kat and Taylor to come this weekend. There will be a baby in this house! Eeek!

J