A Valid Lifestyle Choice

I don't know if it's my age or if it's my family situation - I have kids so am a little less free in some respects - but in the last couple of years I've noticed a weird trend. I'll be chatting with a friend and she'll say something like "Any plans for the weekend?"

I launch into an excited recitation of all the great stuff I've got lined up, and then there's usually a surprised pause, followed by a polite "Oh!"

These conversations always end up with a weird vibe, so I discreetly asked around, and it seems that any of the following doesn't constitute big plans for the weekend:

- "Making pizza on Friday night, then watching Buffy in my jammies."
- "Doing laundry and making cinnamon buns."
- "...stay at home, maybe rent a movie"
- "Sitting - at home - knitting and listening to podcasts"
- "On Saturday, I'm going to bring a cup of coffee back to bed where I plan to play Freecell on my iPod until the battery is completely drained."
- "Grooming the dog"
- "At home, not getting dressed until Monday. If then."
- "I'm definitely taking a shower at some point."

But these particular people really seem to disrespect my plans. Weird, right?

I guess since their weekends are full of things like winter camping, concerts, half-marathons, mechanical-bull-riding, back-country-ski/camp/summit-climbing, remote fishing lodges, and trips to beautiful beachfront whatnots, maybe their bar is set a little higher than mine.

So, what do you guys think constitutes "plans for the weekend"?

Messy Tuesday with a vengeance.

Remember when I used to do Messy Tuesday posts? Well, what you're about to witness is the Messy Tuesday to end all Messy Tuesdays.

A few background notes for this vost:
1) the room in question doesn't usually look quite this bad - I had pulled out all the toy bins for organising;
2) the kids promised me "Mum, if you clean our room, we will DEFINITELY keep it that way until Christmas." [insert hollow laugh]; and
3) this is something I hear all the time: "Mum, we need more socks. All our socks are lost. We can't find any socks. Buy us more socks."

 

A dream is a WIIIISH your heart makes!

Sort, dust, scrub, vacuum, scrub, wipe, shake, scrub...I'm Cinderella these days. My sister-in-law emailed me on Monday and asked me how the Christmas preparations were getting on, and with a guilty start I realised that all I had done was buy a package of dominosteine (my all-time favourite bought Christmas treat) and read "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" to my daughter twice.

So, yesterday I dug out the family room, and today I spent the ENTIRE day on my hands and knees cleaning the kids' room. We made an arrangement - I would get it completely clean, and they would be in charge of maintenance...keep it that way until Christmas.

After two long days, though, I might be at the end of my zeal for housekeeping.

Here's what I need: I need two GOOD friends - not just "friends" - to help me out. What we'd do is, we'd start in one house on, say, Monday, and clean the living tar out of it, get it all ready for Christmas. Then we'd all three move on to the next one on Wednesday, and then the final one on Friday. In one week, all of our houses would be done for Christmas.

Here are the reasons it doesn't work when I do it myself:
a) it's boring;
b) it's too easy to sit down and check Facebook "just for ten minutes"; and
c) because all the junk is mine, I'm too invested in it and get discouraged trying to make decisions about it.

My friends would do all the stuff nobody needs to TELL them how to do, like dusting, vacuuming behind furniture, scrubbing kitchen counters, and I could just get on with putting things where they belong. I'd have somebody to talk to, AND I'd be embarrassed to stop.

Too bad I don't have any good friends.
:-(

Pity party! RSVP.

Playing catch-up

This week I've been working on a few things. I made myself a wool houndstooth skirt (this is an in-progress shot):

...I fed my Christmas ornament collection:

...I made cinnamon buns:



...and I did some slightly secret salvaging, cutting, and punching, all to stock the Etsy shop. I'm hoping to launch it by Christmas.

Seven days in the laundry room makes one weak

I think today I will spend knitting. The rains have begun, so it's a lovely dark, wet day with chilly floors and a sleepy dog, and I am working on Elijah for my sister's son. I think I might do some spinning, too, and maybe a little cross-stitch. I'll just stop by for a half hour and visit with all my projects, see where everybody's at.

When it comes to doling out the relaxation, I think I am more owed than owing. See how my laundry room looks?

I put a gallon of paint on the wall. Unfortunately, I need another gallon to deal with the other half of the room, so my photos all resolutely face the one direction.



This room is also my 'school room' and though some people on this earth have lovely school rooms with lots of coordinated colours and tasteful wicker baskets in cubbies, I am stuck in the wretched teal laundry room, with some kind of weird rubber floor and no practical (or beautiful) storage options.

But we work with what we have, so I'm slowly transforming this space to be more hospitable. We need to WANT to be in there.

More updates will come. My next priority (after today's binge of laziness) will be getting a roll-end of carpet for the laundryschoolroom. It'll make a big difference.

When I started homeschooling (FOUR years ago, good grief) I resisted all pretense to formality. I didn't like the preoccupation that other HS mothers had with their schoolrooms. It felt like playing, to me - like they were more interested in lining up pretty glass jars with paintbrushes in, than they were in facilitating their children's natural tendency towards discovery.

It was a 'baby' and 'bathwater' thing.

Now, with Charlotte starting Grade Four, I've noticed a few things. Firstly, the higher the grade, the more organisation you need. The simple fact is, there is more to cover. The time commitment is greater, the content is more demanding, the child is more inquisitive and both deserves and can handle more detailed information. A kindergartner can be given an important lesson just by handing them scissors and coloured paper, and reading them "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish". It doesn't keep a nine year-old nearly as busy.

Secondly, the dark, cold, chaotic laundry room just doesn't have the right vibe. The feng shui of the place practically pushes you out of the door physically. It's like a WalMart - the second you walk in, your hips start to hurt, your feet cramp, the fluorescents make your eyelids twitch and you get an irritable headache. That's not good enough for my kids.

Lastly, we keep thinking of it as the 'laundry room'. That is just plain bad prioritising. It can't be 'the laundry room where school happens', it has to be 'the schoolroom where laundry happens'.

So I'm making a schoolroom. It has a map of the world, it has an art line. It has a dictionary and a thesaurus, and a guinea pig. It will have a globe, soon, and a magnetic calendar. It has a weather chart, a planisphere, several compasses and a protractor.

And it will have math, and spelling tests, and hand cramps from writing, and it will have lying-on-the-carpet (when we get one), and listening-to-audiobooks-while-painting, and playing-with-the-guinea-pig, and lying-around-knitting.

So it won't be a place of constriction, or a monument to the mainstream, and it doesn't make me a martinet, or my children droids.

I think I can handle it.

Springtime Kitchen

I spent the weekend making - embellishing? - a pair of tea towels. It's my first time embroidering (cross stitch doesn't count) so I was not at all sure how they'd turn out, but I think they've ended up quite pretty.

An eggcup, and a Bialetti...slightly esoteric items, and two of the things I like having in my kitchen. Their specificity is very cheering.

One must be able to hang one's tea towels.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tea towelling fabric from Fabricland. 45/55 cotton/linen
Quilting cotton edging: Red Barn.
Motifs: Alicia Paulson, backstitched with DMC 3771 (Black brown).

Reinventing the wheel.

My cousin came to my door the other day with her favourite sweater in hand. "I was at a client's," she said, "and her cat chewed a hole in it."

She was very specific - she wasn't asking me to fix it, she was asking me to show her how to fix it, but...this is a beginning knitter, never darned a stitch in her life, talking to me about a hole in her sweater. Just the thought of explaining exactly how to do it made me tired. I did try, but after a few minutes I said "Y'know what? leave it with me."

I pulled it out this afternoon and examined it, reflecting with a frown that I don't think I have anything remotely like this yarn in the stash...I'm certainly not going to use contrasting yarn...what to do, what to do.

Wait a second - do I have roving in this colour? I'm pretty sure I do.

So now I can say I've drafted, spindle-spun, and plied a .7 meter long piece of Twist of Fate top in order to fix a cardigan bearing this tag:

(Made in China. By Joe. 70% acrylic, 20% wool, 5% mohair, 5% alpaca. At least they got 30% of it right.)

That's me: needlessly complicating things for over 30 years. A fine tradition of pointless excellence.

Potager

I had a bad day today. But I am making a pot of soup for supper: turkey vegetable noodle, a consolation. Biscuits will happen later, and these two things together are almost certainly going to make the world right again.

I would like to have had some homemade bread with it, but maybe that will be for tomorrow. There’ll be leftover soup, of course, and it’s nice to know lunch is taken care of. I do have to remember to bash up the dough tonight, though.

I was poking through my spice cupboard looking for little glass jars of dried whatnot for the soup, when I realised that back in May, I invested in some 2” pots of various things…

what need have I of dried herbs in July? Forethought provides.

Lovage, winter savoury, English thyme, rosemary, purple sage.

Thanks Mum for planting the bush beans.

___________________________________

I keep forgetting to tell you about an absolutely charming series I discovered: they are by Shire Books. Wonderfully no-nonsense books of information about quite specific subjects, they are replete with history and facts, and amazingly concise. I have “Baking and Bakeries”and “Spinning and Spinning Wheels”, but I long to get “The Woollen Industry”, “Flax and Linen”, “Markets and Marketplaces of Britain”, “Evacuees of the Second World War”……oh, just all of them. I’m trying to scheme how I could get the government to pay for them, seeing as they would be for school.

Spinning and Spinning Wheels, by Eliza Leadbetter: from why wool must be spun, to how to work a spindle, to how to comb flax, to what a niddy-noddy is for.

Baking and Bakeries, by H G Muller: from Pompeii to Pillsbury, a fascinating look at the staff of life. This book is so cool – did you know that, in the 1830s, the main cause of lead poisoning was bread baked in an oven fired with old door and window frames painted with white lead paint? Or that the bread of the early 19th century might contain large amounts of plaster of Paris, white clay, alum, copper sulphate and bone dust?

Anyway, if you get a chance to take a look at this line, do pick it up. I think they’ve just released “Beach Huts and Bathing Machines” and “The Slave Trade”.

Finding out is so fun.

Stitched in Time

Erudite Mondays at Half Soled Boots

Volume 8 Number 1

Stitched in Time

by Alicia Paulson

Alicia Paulson writes the blog Posie Gets Cozy, and if you haven't been there you must visit. (After you finish here, of course.)

Stitched in Time, her first paper and ink offering, is full of sewing and embroidery projects designed to commemorate little moments in our lives. Alicia's philosophy is that something beautiful and whimsical need not also be durable - the finished objects are meant to be pretty, and special, without being required to last for generations. Not that they won't - her birthday banner, for example, would be around for a good long time.

Peppermint-heart Garland

There are quite a few family-picture projects, where you use photo fabric and a printer to transfer people's images to couch pillows, or coasters. The items I like best, though, are the useful little things, such as the cupcake potholder or the recipe apron, that I could see transforming my daily tasks without making a big fuss.

The birthday banner, mentioned above, is one of my favourite projects in the whole book. I already have some fabric scraps assembled and, with the addition of a few fat quarters from the quilting shop, they'll make a beautiful banner for the girls' special days.

My friend Karen once said to me, during a long night-time drive, that her goal for her creative journey was just to make her surroundings beautiful - whether it be in the form of a window box full of geraniums, a hand-knit afghan, or a lace edging on the kitchen curtains. I was struck with the contentment of this image - that she wanted to simply be, in her world, where she had made everything nice.

Since then, I have adopted that goal as my own - to make what I can, to make it unique and as beautiful as possible, and to be conscious of the works of my hands. Stitched in Time is a perfect book for my shelf, with its simplicity, and its cheerful ideas. It is a tribute to the beauty of the daily and the humble and, in this frantic world, there is no more admirable subject.

Family Tree.

Good evening, Renée. Are you in any pain?

I started Christmas cleaning today, and the whole tragic farce reminded me of the rigorous grooming we girls undertake before the first swim every summer: there's a lot of catching up to do. I go through vacuum bags in December at approximately the same rate as I go through waxing strips in July.

I made a chai latte yesterday, and Em wanted some, so we went to the buffet to choose a demitasse cup for her. AND FOUND THIS.




Care for a close-up?


No sign of any other disturbance, and no one has opened this cabinet in like a month. It's a complete mystery to me, though I suspect that my friend, who deeply covets this cabinet, has put a hex on it so it spontaneously smashes my china at random intervals. She's trying to get me to give it to her and tells me that the hutch will not be happy until it finds its rightful home. I'm thinking of knitting one of these with curly black hair - see how she likes it when I run a few red-hot needles into her little woolly gullet.

Piper is nine months old now. Mr HSBoots happened to read the contract we signed when we bought him, and apparently we promised to neuter him by 7 months of age. But with Christmas coming up and the trip we just took but haven't yet paid for, I'm eyeing up that rubber mallet and Xacto knife. Or I suppose I could just tie 'em off with one of these ouchless elastics that keep clogging up my beater bar.

It's not like I solved world hunger or anything.

I spent last weekend visiting a friend I haven't seen since we were teenagers. It was great to catch up with her, and to get to know her children a bit. She's just learning how to knit, and we spent a lot of time talking yarn and needles as she worked on a pair of striped legwarmers for her little girl.

Her house is nice. It's an old, kind of rambling place with lots of crown mouldings and built-ins, and it's almost spookily tidy. The kitchen - you should see it. Every time she does anything in there, like makes a cup of tea or gets crackers for her kids, she's wiping down the counters and Vimming the stovetop. It was awe-inspiring.

On one evening, while we were discussing her husband's thinly veiled contempt for her new pastime (but he used the word "obsession") she made a remark like this: "It's not like I sit down and knit during the day, or anything - I'd never do that."

And it all became suddenly clear to me. All I'd need to do, to have a clean house like her, is NOT KNIT during the day!!! Breakthrough!!

When I got home, it was as I feared. My place looked like a tornado hit it, per usual, and even more so when compared with my friend's house, haven of peace and rest that it was. That very evening, I started cleaning.

Yesterday was my first full day at home with no obligations, since coming back from the weekend. I spent the entire day standing up, doing stuff. It was nice for a bit - the countertops were, for once, available for use, and the girls' room looked great. Bunkbeds made, and everything.

I felt pretty good about it all, until I got to the end of the day. I was totally exhausted and irritable, with dishpan hands, and I looked around me and realised that the whole thing was WASTED! WASTED! One whole day and not a THING to show for it. I mean sure, the dishes were done, but I could JUST AS EASILY have done those next morning. And really, a clean house, though an immediately measurable outcome, isn't a lasting one. Three other people live here, none of whom pick up after themselves, which means as soon as I'm finished cleaning something, they mess it up. If I had been crafting, though, no one would have noticed the lack of Clean everywhere, and I'd have something to hold in my hands that would be a mark of time well spent.

So I won't make that mistake again. Lesson learned.

And now I'm sitting here amid the disarray (didn't get to the living room, yesterday) with the kettle on and knitting in my lap. And it feels freaking great.

Imperfect, Inimitable

Erudite Mondays at HalfSoled Boots

Volume 6 Number 3

Quilts of Provence - the Art and Craft of French Quiltmaking

by Kathryn Berenson

I've been meaning to tell you about this book for a long time. I got it a year or two ago and I've been reading it off and on ever since, trying to work up the courage to try this beautiful incarnation of the textile arts.

Broderie de Marseilles is a method of quiltmaking in which two layers of fabric are densely quilted, by hand, with no batt in between. There are often several parallel rows of stitching on the edges of the piece, with the centres featuring designs of flowers, suns, and plants. There are extant pieces featuring more abstract designs, too - usually in a very romantic style. Lots of swirls and curlicues.



Once the entire piece has been quilted, the finished item is corded and stuffed - that is, each individual channel between quilted rows, or each quilted pocket, is stuffed with cotton. To do this, the quilter uses a needle to carefully open a space between the threads of the fabric until it is wide enough to admit a darning needle. She threads a piece of cotton cording into the eye and runs the needle through the channel until the entire channel is corded. She cuts the cord, manipulates the end in through the hole in the fabric, then wiggles that hole closed with her needle. If it is a pocket that needs stuffing, she opens a hole as before, then uses a needle to curl the cording tightly into the pocket, bit by painstaking bit. The holes are all closed up afterwards, and the entire piece is washed.



It takes an unbelievable amount of time, and careful work. When I first saw the book, I was drawn to the gorgeous finished pieces and declared to all, "I am going to learn this technique and make a bed-cover!" Then I read on a little bit and decided, "I'd better make a table runner instead." Then I got to the part with the templates and the instructions for cording and stuffing, and thought to myself "I could really use a coaster."



This book is a sumptuously presented, intelligently arranged blend of history, instruction, and eye candy. Stunning photographs depict gorgeous, brilliantly-coloured textiles, dated from as early as the 18th century. There are closets full of antique quilts, sofas covered in folded florals, and dress forms garbed in authentic Provençal regional costume. There are instructions and templates for 11 projects ranging in difficulty from an easy placemat (in imitation broderie de Marseilles) to an advanced single-piece, corded and stuffed wedding quilt in ivory silk.



What impresses me most about this beautiful book is not the inspiration to try the technique - although I am dying to, one of these days - or the respect I feel for these women who clothed their families in this incredible art. What I think about most is the concept of regional dress: the idea that at one time, any given People expressed their identity, their history, their place in the world, and their sense of community through clothing and textiles.



I thought of this book when I was at the Fleece and Fibre Fair, walking around the venue and taking in the knitters, crocheters, felters, and spinners all around me. There isn't one unified dress sense, at all, but there is a unified pride in our accomplishments. Some people are visibly....well I must say tickled pink to be wearing their first botchy, lopsided hat, while buying more yarn to make coordinating chunky mittens. Others are standing watching the spinners, their backs straight and their heads carried with quiet pride above dreamily soft, perfectly-executed lace shawls in baby alpaca.

It was, really, the incarnation of what people refer to as "the fibre arts community". We aren't neighbours, we share neither a place nor a history. We are united not by a common tradition, but by our love for the craft. Maybe there isn't a region, strictly speaking, but there is a regional dress: there was so much Handmade in that hall, it was exhilirating just to breathe such a creatively-charged atmosphere.

I don't imagine the Marseilles needlewomen felt quite the same way about their handwork as we do. In the days before widespread mechanisation, it was nothing extraordinary to clothe one's family entirely in garments made by one's own hands. The extraordinary thing, in fact, would have been to spend the family's money purchasing clothing and linens when you could make them yourself.



Then, as now, the beauty of these items is in their uniqueness: no two pieces are exactly alike. It's a little depressing to look around me, sometimes, and realise just how many things in my house are mass-produced, and therefore also in the homes of hundreds and thousands of other people. I like to think of myself as an individual, a non-conformist, but the reality is I buy the same Rubbermaid bins and Levis jeans as everyone else does.



Times have changed. Making your own clothes isn't unheard of, but wearing them is much less usual. I like to see people taking pride in the works of their hands. I like the feeling of wearing something I've made, and I don't mind when people ask me, "Did you knit that yourself?" As some never tire of pointing out, you can buy a sweater for $40 at the Bay. But nobody can buy MY sweater. I made it myself, and there'll never be another like it.

One of these busy, full days, I'll try some broderie de Marseilles. I have some fabric that I bought specially to try it, and I have even sketched out a template for a stylised sun, very much in the Provençal style. It's a little intimidating, but I think if I'm patient and careful I can do it. I'd like to have something that no one else has - even if it's just a coaster.

Making the Best of It

The other day I mentioned that I had found a couple of small holes in my quilt after I repaired the edge. I sat down in the sunshine today with a couple of needles and a helpful book, and spent a half hour or so doing some fancy darning...my first try at this sort of work. Here's a pictorial record.



The Hole, roughly mended to keep the raw edges from unravelling during repair.


The Book. Full of useful knowledge and pretty ideas. I must keep an eye out for this one, for my own library.


The Patch. Stitched in DMC 223, 224 and 3347. Made up as I went along, trying to follow the instructions for "Spiderweb Stitch" and failing miserably, but still coming up with a pretty flower, so all's well that ends well.

And here's a progress shot of Charlotte's stocking.


Have a good weekend - I'm off to Fun Knits tomorrow with my knitting posse. We'll be stuffing ourselves with incredible food at the Lovin' Oven and spending the grocery money on laceweight. Fun!

Saving Nine

The year we got married, my mum and dad made us a quilt. Isn't that nice? They did one for each of us kids around the time we all got coupley: and the weddings went as follows.

Eldest - 1995
Youngest - 1996
Middle - 1997

So it was a hectic few years. My dad was off work due to an injury (broken neck, believe me or believe me not) during much of that time, and spent a lot of his recovery quilting. I love that.

Anyway, I am not one of those people who redecorates their house every year or two and has multiple sheet sets for each bed. I can't justify the money and the waste. But, I hadn't realised just how well-worn this quilt was until I was inspecting the fall linens in preparation for the cold weather, and saw the edge of it up close.



Ten meters of 5/8" double-fold bias tape, a little bit of pretty stitch work from the Pfaff:

and Presto! the quilt is ready for another ten years of duty.


When I was folding it up after rebinding it, I noticed two small holes in the patchwork top. I'll repair those and show them to you next week.

But in the meantime, I'd like to reflect on the concept of stewardship. I think it's one of those things that became unfashionable around the same time as marriage did - during the decades following the Second World War, when people were tired of making do and women were tired of staying home. I recall a magazine article I read in about 1982, entitled "Are You a Supermarket Miser?" It had a little quiz where you could find out if you were committing the sin of trying to save money.....sorry, I mean "pinch pennies". One of the questions was "Do you use plastic grocery bags for the trash instead of buying proper garbage bags?" The whole article was smugly tittering...you certainly got the impression that "Yes" was the wrong box to tick.

The article was written at a time when consumption was the height of fashion, when manufacturers were scrambling to make everything disposable. But you wouldn't have caught a pioneer family, or a Depression family, or a wartime family, throwing away a quilt that could be repaired for less than a half-hour's wage, or a towel that could be cut down into facecloths, or a facecloth that could be turned into a diaper, that could be turned into a rag.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this in the last while, especially since my bike was stolen and we realised we can't actually afford to replace it. Living on one income is difficult with gas at $1.34 a liter (and we're grateful it's that low), and flour costing me $15 per 10 kilo bag. As expensive as the essentials are, though, they're not what puts us into the overdraft.

Being part of a privileged class in a privileged nation brings with it a certain carelessness when it comes to small luxuries. I remarked to my sister the other day that it would be interesting to save all our receipts for a month, then go through and highlight everything we bought that was nonessential. Every bag of chips, every tall nonfat extra-hot latte, every video rental. I think it would be a little shocking to see the total.

I have a lot of skills. I can patch jeans. I can make bulletin boards, and clothes, and muffins. I can even darn socks, though whole-wheat breadmaking remains a challenge. I may not be making a wage, but I can at least avoid spending a wage we don't have.

As I spend year after year raising my children rather than editing government audit reports, living costs climb relentlessly. Like the Elliotts, we must retrench. Part of that is fixing my quilt, sure, and part of it is buying too-short thrift-store jeans and letting them down, but most of it is attitude. There's a......yes, I would say almost a shame that comes with being careful with money, even when it's by necessity rather than by choice. I had to search, there, for a phrase that wasn't demeaning: the first things that came to mind were "cheap", "skinflint", and "miserly". It's interesting: I'm obviously a product of my generation, latchkey kids raised by two working parents who bought cookies and threw away worn linens.

Is it okay now, at the beginning of a new, expensive century, to value skills like patching and darning? Can I be proud of myself for having saved that $90 for a new quilt?

I think so. I think the world might be ready for a person who spent five years in university, then four years wearing heels to a government office and getting $60 haircuts every six weeks, to stay at home every day educating the children and patching quilts. I might not be Rosie Riveter, but I'm still doing my bit for the war.

Specifically speaking....

The days, they do go by. Here it is Messy Tuesday again, and I almost forgot to chronicle my slatternly ways.

I realised, when reading over last week's post, that you could probably put together a documentary just using the material from my Messy Tuesday posts. What I mean by that is, I am giving way too much detail.

I present to you the new, streamlined Messy Tuesday post.

Here's the mess:

it's my coffee table. This has been here for at least six weeks. It's an old mess - a comfortable mess. The kind of mess that thumps its tail on the hearthrug when you get home. I'm rather fond of it.

And here's what I did instead of cleaning it up:

which got me these,

which were delicious.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

Mel over at Pipe Dreams and Purling Plans brought this to my attention last week - it's a new thing called "Messy Tuesday" where we all come clean (but only in the figurative sense) about our 'unideal' homes. She posted her first Messy Tuesday today, and luckily I will never have trouble coming up with something to post on at least ONE day a week.




Just inside the front door. Note the bits of leaf and dirt, bag of thrift store donation, bike helmet, recyclable grocery bags, assorted shoes, and scuffed-up flyer.



The stereo cabinet. The perplexing thing about this mess is that it is so obviously a quick and easy clean. And yet, there it sits. (Let's conjugate that verb: It sits, it has sat, it will sit.)



The top of the cedar chest in my bedroom. Clean, folded towels (they are on about day 8 on the chest), a coin belt (day 7), crumpled discarded clothes (various vintages). At bottom left-centre you can also spot the end of another laundry basket which is full of odds and ends from a crisis clean a few weeks ago. You know the kind of thing - grab a laundry basket and run through the living room, sweeping everything off surfaces and into the basket, deposit the basket in a bedroom and shut the door, with the vague intention of sorting it all out later.

Mel says I should do something that's NOT cleaning and tell you about it, so I will go have a cookie and read some more of Time Will Darken It while the kids are watching Max and Ruby.

Man I have a great life.

Thanks Mel.

Edit: Are you guys serious? You don't think that's messy?! Okay, then what about THIS:

Floor in the corner of the bathroom. NOTE THE DIRT.

Or THIS:

Laundry room.

Is that better?

I've got one awful picture I'm holding in abeyance, but please don't make me show you a flash photograph of the floor behind my toilet. Please.

A Cautionary Tale

Four things I've learned from being a crap housekeeper.

1. Boil the potatoes long enough, you barely have to mash them at all. Straining can be a problem though.



2. Before you attempt to open and scrape out that forgotten Tupperware whose lid is bulging from the noxious gasses within, freeze it until garbage day.



3. If people come over and you want to make them think you have been cleaning, turn the dryer on. It sounds very productive.



4. If people DO come over, your oven will hold A LOT of dirty dishes. Just don't forget they're in there.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go find out what that smell in the fridge is.

Yum, Yum, and Yum Again.

It hasn't been All Potter, All The Time around here - I've actually done some other things.

Comforted myself after the initial read by making chocolate waffles with vanilla whipped cream and fresh, hot, strawberry sauce.



And this - this is my desert-island cake:

Lemon loaf with double syrup. Come to MOMMA.

Lastly, I took the first sockapalooza sock and turned it into this:

which really reminds me of my desert-island ice cream, blue bubblegum.


Hmmmm....I do believe this post counts toward my ongoing meme: desert-island items are always good.