Who knew knitting in public was such a big deal? On Worldwide Knit In Public Day, everyone is encouraged to go out into the world and knit. Knit openly and freely. Scoff at the granny-callers, threaten the obnoxious with your needles, tell them that no you won’t knit a sweater for them but you might make them a scarf of some mittens sometime if they ask nicely.

The Albuquerque branch is being cohosted by Scout and Erin and will be taking place at the Flying Star on Rio Grande (the usual meeting place for the SNB) this Saturday from 9 to 11 am. I’m hoping to catch a ride to it since Mr. Man has to work Saturday night.

Whether or not I get to go I made a few buttons for the event. Yes I made that image myself as the founder requested. Feel free to take them.

I will also be walking with Ramona, Laurie, and Carole in the Susan G Komen event this Sunday. I’m hoping I can make the whole walk but I’m not kidding myself. Let’s hope we won’t be hitting 101 degrees like we did yesterday!

Only one day left in Cody’s vacation but we’re doing a lot of organizing and stuff. We’ve lived in this house since October 1998 and both tend to be slobby pack rats. So you can imagine how things build up. I’m also hell bent on fixing up the back bedroom into a proper studio craft room. I’m getting a lot of inspiration from this Flickr Group. But for right now we’re working on our closets and fixing up our shared bathroom a little. I have two big garbage bags of clothes for The Arc and will probably have at least one more by the time they come to pick up stuff next week.

I haven’t posted in a while and usually that’s a bad sign but I’m actually feeling better physically and mentally this week than I have in a long time. I think we may have found the perfect medicinal cocktail now. I’m very excited about this. The shorter hair seems to help as well. Easier to care for, less tangles, less heat on my neck.

And I actually have several surprise projects in the works. And, get this, none of these particular projects are knit or spun (by me anyway). A few involve crafts in general, one involves yarn specifically, one involves photography and crafting of a sort, and another one involves..well, no real way to describe that one so I’ll let you wonder about it for a while. They’ll all be revealed in time.

In other non-surprise project news we went and did serious grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s now that Cody wasn’t afraid of the potential hippiecrit prices (to be honest I don’t blame him our bills in a normal grocery store can be pretty outrageous) but we did well! Several new things to try, several re-purchases of things we liked from last time. And while we still have to go to the regular grocery store for a *few* things the bill at TJ’s was WELL under our usual grocery bill. So we’re both pretty happy about that.

And the cats seemed to like the non fish flavored cat food tins. I don’t recommend the tuna for cats it doesn’t have a pop lid and that annoyed me I don’t open the cat food in the kitchen I open it in the kitty bathroom dammit I don’t have any can openers in there. So we’re going to try a small bag of the dry cat food and see how they like it. They’re very picky about their dry food. In this case picky means they only eat crap Science Diet that I put out as a last resort. But the dog, who will eat any dry food I put out, and loves eating the cats’ poop when she sneaks into the laundry room, likes the dry dog food. Which wasn’t really a surprise. The question was whether or not I’d approve of the food for her. And I do! No corn, first ingredient is not a meat meal or bi-product so I approve.

Ok, it’s been a fairly long day. Before Trader Joe’s I did some work on a really cool project (my Albuquerque knitter friends will LOVE this) and we had a visit to Scout’s house since she lives near TJ’s. So I got to meet Supergirl, Superboy, Superhusband, AND Superdog! Her house was unbelievably clean and organized (would you expect any less) and the kids were so sweet. Let me say, those Superkids are WAY cuter in person. My friend has a great little family there and I can’t wait to visit again sometime. I’d invite them here but..I’m afraid the house would scare the children.

t’s been warm which is nice but the angle of the sun is brutal on the house this time of year until we get the energy to go on the roof to get the swamp cooler working. So even with the windows open and the fans on the house doesn’t cool down until late at night.

Not a lot of knitting going on. Still working on the same old projects. Still need to ply that pretty green yarn.

Oh! And you have about fifteen minutes to go wish Cari a Happy Birthday before she turns into a birthday pumpkin. I don’t remember how old she is today but this girl totally kicks ass. She knits and snowboards. Not at the same time of course. And likes Upstairs Downstairs! Paisana!

So it’s finally time we had the dead trees in our yard taken away. We’ve been putting it off for over a year but now it must get done - our insurance company says so. It’s four 40-foot-ish dead cottonwoods so it’s probably going to cost a bagillion dollars. Honestly, I have no concept of what the proper cost of having a tree removed is. So we’re auditioning tree removal services tomorrow to see what their suggestions are and get a chance to brace ourselves for the cost. Tons of fun.

taking advantage of boredom and a wireless network

I’ve been trying to organize our living room this weekend. It’s full of book stacks because of the great office overhaul. We moved the bookshelves to the foyer because we didn’t have anywhere else to put them really and they actually look kind of cool there. So I decided to just shelve the books so at least it would look neat until I decided what to do next.

There is a gigantic box of unsorted office crap in the middle of the already cluttered room. It’s filled with stuff from the rats nest that was next to Cody’s desk including the usual fifty notebooks and pads with notes on only the first ten pages and stacks of printouts on arbitrary subjects such as preservation of genes in space that seem to trail behind my cute husband with the short attention span. There are also our old two desks in addition to the usual ugly sleeper sofa, matching chair and ottoman, dining table, sideboard, and china cabinet. Yeah. It’s a bit crowded.

We’ve been ignoring it for months but yesterday I was up early and just didn’t want to play games or watch tv. So I unpacked his laptop in the living room, logged it in to the wireless network, downloaded a few books on tape from itunes, and went through the box from hell. It was dusty with nicotene dust, pet hair, and the usual New Mexico extreme dust that permeates the pores. Bleh.

eventually

When I’m done with the living room I’m going to tackle the scary room!

We’ve also started talking in a serious tone about flooring. I think we’ve decided on a recycled PET carpet of some kind in most of the house with bamboo flooring in the foyer (and maybe the living room), and possibly linoleum tiles in the kitchen and bathrooms but maybe saltillo tile.

I also want to finish putting up new switchplates.

And put track lighting in the office.

And organize all my power tools and junk in the garage.

I’m thinking about putting my easel to the back porch and making it my studio for the summer.

No idea what to do with that back room. It’s always been vaguely ‘future baby room’ in my mind. It has the most pleasant view in the whole house of the back corner of the garden and is shaded by a big (still healthy) tree. But I’m getting very tired of not actually using it for anything other than storage of crap.

And hopefully someday I can decide on paint colors for the walls.

cluttery to philanthropy

I’m thinking about taking advantage of this freecycle thing to get rid of the desks and ugly sofa and chair. Or more likely I’ll give it to a domestic violence charity there are an unbelievable number of abused women in this state.

I also plan to go through all the health and beauty drawers and donate them to a women’s shelter and maybe go through my clothes and donate to that ACLU clothes drive for women to wear in court again if they’re still doing that Jocelyn?

I can’t decide if we should sell the boxes of books we don’t want anymore to a used bookstore or donate them. There’s also the decision if I should sell some things on ebay - like the Monty Python and the Holy Grail knights action figures set (still in their boxes!).

dream on

I have a vague vision of a “Woody Allen’s New York” style living room with a dining room, dark wooden shelves of books everywhere, and a little reading area with two comfortable chairs.

Otherwise all I usually want is something sturdy and comfortable that’s easy to clean, doesn’t show pet fur too much, and looks good.

Trying to incorporate all the cool mid-century stuff we have isn’t easy to do in a 70s suburban house but I’m trying.

cocksure

For the most part I don’t want to worry about a specific style and just include things that I like - someone demonstrated to me once that if you choose several things you like and put them together they evoke a certain kind of asthetic style that is personal and far more creative than the cut and dried style rules. And this may sound egotistocal but I *do* have a degree in visual arts so I usually know what looks good. Or at least I’m confident enough about decorating (when I actually do it) to ignore most criticisms about it. Heh.

Ok back to the living room for me now.

After many reminders from my friend I’ve started keeping track of our library on mediachest. Neat little service there. The books, cds, and games are going to take quite a while but the dvds were pretty eady to add since I had most of them listed at imdb already.