Under the Same Sky

Nothing terrible has happened so far this week! Yay! True, the baby has been sick, but even that has not been as dreadful as I had feared her first illness would be. It was a pretty mild cold, and although she was uncomfortable some of the time, she slept through most of it (except that first night.. poor M) and the saline drops helped so much more than I expected them to. I did kind of feel terrible about it last night. Can you imagine being held down by the two people you love the most in the world, who have only ever done NICE things for you, while one of them drops water up your nose and the other uses that HORRIBLE thing to suck it out again? Evelyn normally really likes the suctiony bulb thing used in her mouth, but nose? No. Bad. STOP.

I just transferred a bunch of photos from the camera and really enjoyed looking through them. We have gotten a bit lazy with the transferring of pictures and it has been quite a while since the last time we've done it. In short, we have been like Other People instead of Obsessive Picture Taking People. My mom called me with a sad story yesterday. My dad wanted to have a picture of Evelyn at work, so he went through the stack of photos that they have of the baby and picked out a really cute one from one of our photo shoot sessions. We have turned the sunroom/guest room bed into an occasional staging area for pseudo-studio photos, and occasionally we.. oh, never mind. We're hopeless, I know. We have not yet taken a picture of anything she has produced in her diaper so maybe we are still redeemable? Anyway. They were at lunch, so he set it aside in a napkin, but he forgot to take it with him when they left... and it got thrown away. Poor baby. Her grandparents carelessly allowed her photo to be tossed into the trash at Wendy's. ;) Not that I would give them a hard time about it or anything.

I have spent my free time in the last few days making diapers. I finally found a free pattern that I could follow that is super cute and easy! I made two a while back using mayna's tutorial but my basic template (that I drew myself) was off, so they don't fit her quite right, and I got lazy and so I never got around to fine-tuning the template to try again. The two I made are getting too small anyway, so it would have required a whole new template anyway. I have learned so much about sewing this year! I still have a lot to learn, but I have figured out quite a lot of stuff during this diaper business. I don't really know if I'm doing things the accepted way but it's looking better and better, which is neat. It's a quick pattern, though I have changed enough of it that it's not AS fast as it was. The original pattern expected you to use a pin to close it, and.. no, so I had to add velcro. And elastic to the back because I think it's worth some effort to keep the poo in. But they're really, really cute. No, really. Look.


I am pretty excited because I could actually imagine using these regularly, and making enough of them to actually make a difference in our stash. Diapers are expensive--cheaper than disposables in the long run (for most people) but it's still pretty pricey, especially if you get into it and can only buy new instead of used. I am really enjoying the sewing process--or rather, having sewed things that I actually use. Anyway, the second picture has the diaper I made this afternoon, and I am totally in love with the ruffled edges on the legs--I sewed that differently than the other ones I've made. It's adorable... if I do say so myself.

Random note: do you realize that you save five dollars per year for every bill you pay online instead of mailing in a check with a stamp? Considering that I pay at least six bills online monthly, that's thirty bucks a year! Or, one month of cable service. Free! I have been doing it for convenience but it's pretty neat how occasionally, convenient is cheaper. That's pretty unique.

I have both family drama and a story about being verbally accosted that I could write about, but happily, I can bypass all of that if I just post a lot of pictures. Yay!

First of all, Miss Ducky got her first mail today, from carrieb, big_bubba and Erik.


( Ducky things, and a crafty-type picture. )

As someone whose primary crafting activity is tatting, and then knitting, I am loving this sewing thing. You can like, make things quickly! I know that there are plenty of projects that take up more time than what I've been doing, but compared to the amount of time it takes to tat something, this is nothing short of miraculous. I decided to make an item today, so I drew out a pattern, cut everything and had my proof-of-concept ready a very short time later. It's a simple item, and I'm a little embarrassed to tell you what it is because OH MY GOD WHO AM I these days? Gentlemen, avert your eyes. I have now sewed myself a pair of breast pads. And I know that I have begun sounding strangely crunchy, of late, what with the whole cloth diaper thing, but can't some things stay disposable, right? In my defense, this time it's not really about frugality or environmentalism or anything like that. My skin is just incredibly sensitive, what with the dermatographism thing (I break out in an allergic reaction if something irritates my skin, such as scratching myself.) Putting paper and plastic into my bra is a bad idea, let's just put it that way. I know you can buy non-disposables somewhere, but I haven't seen any, so I just made my own to see how it would work.

By the way, I kind of suck at the sewing thing, but I am seeing a gigantic leap in my skills already. I can sew mostly straight lines! I can keep my seams a relatively even distance from the edge of the material! I don't ask for much. ;) I started at basically zero on the sewing thing so I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself. I had M teach me to sew, by the way. I have sewed a few things in the past, but badly and rarely. There are plenty of uglies, but I've avoided doing several things that I was doing wrong at the very beginning, so I am definitely learning from my mistakes. I love this phase of learning something new. You know just enough to get by with what you want to do and have not yet grasped the enormity of all the things that you don't know. I don't know how long I'll stick with it but it's fun for now, and I have several more little projects in mind before I can call it quits anyway.

I had a pretty relaxed day at home--I'm usually pretty busy on my days off, but I decided that rest would be a better idea today. I did get some stuff done, though, and I made some spontaneous money (long story) AND rubbed salt in the wounds of Mr-We-Shut-Off-Your-Domain-Without-Warning hosting company to boot. That was satisfying. And it's Crock Pot Monday (a new feature in this household) and we tried a new chili recipe and it turned out to be yummy after I added cumin to it. How can you have chili without cumin? It was just wrong. And M came home with a crib (!!!) and we moved our bed to the new room. There's a lot of furniture to be shuffled around before we can get the crib into the right room and assemble it. Still, it's exciting. Maybe we'll also get a mattress for the crib sometime soon. ;)

I am a good wife because I let my husband hang mandolins on the wall, btw. See, M is just as easy to please with a spouse as I am. We are well matched that way. I told him tonight that I had bad news about his TV girlfriend, Giada--she mentioned her husband on the air so she is married. He just looked at me without blinking, and said, "It's not like I'm wanted to MARRY her. It's more like a one-night .... dish, with us." You know, I have a feeling most people think we're absolutely nuts. Or, nutters, if you're Kirsty. ;) He is having a good karma day (according to him) so he's in a pretty good mood. I think the crib helped. He is generally happy when I let him spend a lot of money.

In addition to coming all the way to our house (ninety miles) last night to help us fix my car, my parents brought us pumpkins, since we couldn't buy them here.



And, in keeping with our Halloween tradition, we made homemade ice cream. I'm not so sure why we do that but it's fun. Strawberry, this time.

Trick or treaters: 0. We bought a little bit of candy but we were pretty sure, based on our location, that we wouldn't have any. I turned the light out half an hour early because I was dying to change back into comfortable clothes, but it's not like anyone would have suddenly showed up. We're kind of on a back road, with no easy access for kids except by car. The good news is that we bought candy accordingly, and are now well-stocked on chocolate we actually like.

The pumpkin seeds are roasting in the oven right now. How Martha Stewart of us!

And, Nanomaybeo starts tomorrow. I must be out of my frickin' mind to even think about doing it again with such a half-assed plan. I can't even decide for sure if I'm going to try it! But I do have half of a plan, which is more than I had on Sunday. The problem with Nanowrimo is that it sounds like So Much Fun... until you actually start writing in November. Then it pretty much sucks. Decisions, decisions...

I always get this image in my head of school kids running out of a school on the last day before summer break, goofy grins on their faces and arms waving wildly in the air... I love Fridays with a fierceness that shatters my very soul. It doesn't affect my flair for melodrama, though, no worries there. I never understood why you would run with your hands waving in the air but it certainly looks fun and carefree in my mind.

Although I had an astonishingly bad hair day yesterday, I managed to get a few things done anyway, namely, my scarf. No, there was no real reason for pointing out what my hair looked like, except that it was really bad and it bugged me all day long, and also, I wrote something funny about it yesterday but I sent it in an email that I don't have access to anymore. I really really don't feel like transferring pictures but I guess I will because otherwise, what good would a paragraph about my first scarf be? (One could ask what good it would be even with a picture, but then one would be MEAN, and also, get schmacked with a noodle, so I wouldn't recommend it.) My undeniably handsome husband modeled it for me. Have you ever seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? (preferably the one with Clive Anderson and not Drew Carey because who are you fooling anyway, you unfunny man, you're not nearly as good as the original, but then again, I just can't stand Drew Carey.) Anyway, they play this game called Props, where they're given an absurd object and have to come up with alternate uses for them, and we played an impromptu version last night with the camera and the scarf, which masqueraded as a sling, a blindfold, a bank-robber mask, a belt, a Miss America sash and oddly enough, a piece of winter clothing worn about the neck for warmth and comfort. (see photo for example.)

Speaking of winter, I really don't want to talk about that again.

Darnit, I am sleepy even though I can stay up as late as I want. I really hate it when that happens.

I don't even remember when I started this, but I've finally finished the hanky edging I've been carrying around with me for months! I did the last bit of tatting last night and washed and starched and ironed it tonight. M laughed at me because I started ironing it well before it was dry. I just couldn't wait any longer. I don't think I'd been working on it all that long when Blatt came to visit, but that was in April and this is July. I've done most of the work in the last few weeks, though--lots of driving time lately. Anyway. I'm very excited to have this done! The best part is coming up now.. deciding what to tat next. :)



Oooh, that's hot and nerdy. I just noticed that Semagic uses div/text-align tags to center. Please ignore the dork in the front row.

I'm trying to talk myself into going to bed early. I haven't slept very well, or nearly enough, this week, and I'm considering getting up early tomorrow. I'm working 45 minutes longer than normal every day this week. You can come in early if you want, but I have a really hard time getting out of bed in the morning. Rather pathetically, I've made it to work five minutes early twice this week, and ten minutes once. I'm just thinking that it would be terrific if I could get out of there at the normal time and start my weekend on schedule. I'm just not good at making decisions that negatively impact my sleeping time.

I'm pleased that so many of you enjoyed the nipple story. And just so you know, today's entry has a 99.9% probability of being completely unfunny. You may drink as normal.

I'm in a pretty good mood today. I've had a ridiculously small amount of food (I ate my lunch for lunch, snack and dinner--enough said) and I've also had incredible amounts of energy. I've been running around the house doing all of those little things that you never quite get around to doing. I glued one of my marble magnets back together, fixed a knob on and cleaned out my tatting drawer, done several loads of laundry, etc. I almost started cleaning out the refrigerator at midnight, but I wasn't quite silly enough to get into that. Yet. The day isn't done, though..

I also updated my tatting blog for the first time since September. I broke it when I switched hosting companies, and then I started Nanowrimo, then Mosaic Minds, and I wasn't tatting much anyway, so I never got around to fixing it. So, I did that today, and scanned the snowflake/star I finished this week. Tatting Blog. I might have quietly axed it, or more properly, just integrated it at Bitchy Pookums, but a couple of other tatters link to it. Linkrot is a horrible problem in the tatting community, so I don't want to add to it if I can help it.

The Daily Show makes me so happy.

I'm done! I'm done! I'm so happy! I've been working on this doily for months now. I haven't been tatting all that often in the last bit, what with the carpet and the novel and all that, but I almost finished it in the car this weekend. This afternoon, I finished it up, sewed the ends in, washed and soaked it (white string gets dirty when you carry it around with you for weeks and weeks) and then blocked it, which is a pain in the rear. (Blocking is pinning it all down so that it dries correctly.) Then there was the ironing and starching and scanning, and I'm bouncing all over the place with happiness over this. It's the largest project to date at a little over seven inches across (or eighteen centimeters.) Anne Orr refers to it as a small doily. Hmmph.



Now I get to do the fun part--decide what to do next. :) *bounce*

I'm waiting for M to get home from Ken's and I'm not entirely sure what to do in the meantime, so I naturally thought I'd post. We're heading to Lexington this afternoon.. we're going to Jenny and Andy's house and then off to dinner with them or something like that. Jenny is a Swedish graduate student at UK.. she's been living here for a few years now and recently got married, so it seems she might be in it for the long haul herself. As I said to her, I have such a partiality for Swedish-American couples, for some reason. :) We met her at the midsummer picnic that the Scandinavian Heritage Association held back in June.. it was the first visit for both us and her, and the three of us were at least twenty years younger than most anyone else there. I think they were quite pleased to see young people there all of a sudden. In any case, we've talked on the phone a couple of times and sent a few emails since then, but now we're going to meet up with her and her new husband, which sounds like fun. You know we don't go out much. *grin*

I suspect M will be more than a little excitable when he gets home, as when he gets here, he should have a fully complete mandolin. He asked Ken (who builds Silver Angel mandolins and happens to live twenty minutes or so from here) if he would do the last bits for him.. something about grooves in a nut and adjusting the bridge to the shape of the mando. He's been gone a couple of hours now, though, so I suspect they've started talking. M was hopping up and down earlier, thinking about the completion of his mandolin. I must say that I'm intensely impressed with him and quite proud of his accomplishment on this mandolin. It looks even better in real life than in the pictures, and he's worked so hard and has done such a good job.. particularly if you consider that he's taught himself completely and didn't even have a terribly strong background in woodwork. I think he certainly does now, though. :)

Dad called to see if we would go pick up his truck from the repair shop earlier (this place actually happened to be on the way to Ken's.) M had just headed out of the driveway, so he came back and we met at the store to get the keys (and so I'd be able to get home after I brought the truck back.) We were there for five minutes or so, and I could tell that my parents had done a LOT of cleaning in the store to get rid of whatever the problem was, including mopping and all that. I couldn't feel the smell of what caused me such distress yesterday.. but two minutes after I left, I could feel my throat tightening and a sort of metallic taste in my mouth. I didn't notice a strange taste yesterday, but I was reading stuff online last night and that was mentioned. I don't know if I'm suggestible or if I just didn't notice it or if it didn't happen at all yesterday. Anyway, I had to go in for another five minutes or so when I got back to give the key and the bill and all that, and I ended up coughing and my eyes were "looking funny" and my throat was doing its thing, so I really don't know what I'm going to do about the whole store thing. Obviously I can't be there, but I never expected to stop working in produce because of it. Eh. As good of a reason as any, I guess. *laugh* It seems to be related to the Amish stuff they brought back, but for all I know, I've suddenly developed an allergy to.. pears, or whatever. Hmm.. I guess I could test that by running down to the other produce market and browsing for a while. I might do that tomorrow. Right now, my throat still feels like it has a lump in it.. not that it feels hard to breathe, it just aches. I had that all day yesterday. Sleeping for twelve hours seemed to help, though. :)

I'm quite sure you're all going to get tired of hearing about this allergy thing. It was really scary, though, and it's obviously still a bit of a problem for me. I figure you'll get over it. And M--shush, don't say it. *whop* Funny how you don't even have to hear it to know what the spouse is going to say to any given thing, isn't it?

I made my parents an anniversary card last night and dropped it off earlier.. they seemed quite pleased. Oh, hold on, I'll show you. It was pretty simple, but I thought it turned out pretty well. Created in Photoshop completely from scratch, no template. The film strip I borrowed and edited, but I don't remember from where.