Catching Up

Hello again!
Before I begin, I want to say I do have an FO post planned for the Chicago Scarves, but I wanted to start with a "catching up" post first. I can't believe I only posted once in all of June. I just found this in a draft post I started the first week of June:

As you can tell, I'm feeling a little swamped right now. What we in my house refer to as feeling "Yaaaaaaaaaaa." We've put offers on houses only to be repeatedly beaten to the punch or turned down because our offer has to be contingent on selling our current house first, so we are still looking for a place to live and hoping we'll be able to move there this month. I've got longer to find an apartment in Tucson, but finding a house in Buffalo is more urgent. In the meantime, we're packing and cleaning and trying to sell our house and having a yard sale and I'm still doing some things for work (research related). Add to that some writing I've been really grooving with lately, and I haven't crocheted or knitted since right before the wedding. After pushing out the scarves, I stopped on the retro top when I realized I'd never get it done in time for the wedding. Now that it's breaching 90 here and I have a wicked sunburn from a day of stupidity+field work, I may not resume it for a while.

I had blocked half of that out in self-defense. Rereading it was a trip. We finally had an offer accepted on a house just a day or two later, but it just fell through yesterday, so we're back to the drawing board. No nibbles on our own house, and no place to live in either Buffalo or Tucson. And I need a place no later than one month from tomorrow. Yikes.

We packed up all of "our" stuff - my husband's stuff and mine/ours that was going to Buffalo with him - and put it in a POD. Now it's in a storage facility somewhere and I'm camping out in my own house for a month. Why? Because Mr. Man had to go to Turkey* for a month, and I didn't want to keep paying for a street permit to keep the POD. (We had it delivered when our offer was accepted, and at $10 per day, it was adding up.)

So, I've spent a couple days running moving-related errands and catching up on sleep lost in the 72 hours before Mr. Man and the POD both left. I haven't been knitting or crocheting much. I did finish the Retro femme top before Packing Mania began, but I need to frog and redo the bottom half for fit purposes. Sad, but true. I've started the Five O'Clock Tank from Crochet Me but I'm just an inch in and realizing I'll need to start over. I'd like to get back into it, and I'm thinking about checking out some audio books from the library if I can find my library card... Hmmm. I don't have anything but my craft supplies, laptop, mattress, clothes, and 13 crates of books. Add to that almost a month to find places to live, and to pack up my own stuff (not much really) and my office (urg, nightmare).

I've been spending most of my time on a writing project I mentioned before that is flowing really well. I've decided to run with it for a day or two and then get back on the moving, pack, cleaning, house-selling bandwagon.

Glad to be back!

* He's fine in Turkey. got there within hours of the embassy incident but emailed to say he wasn't affected. His luggage was MIA though. :(

I miss you!

Oh, blog reading friends. How I miss thee.
I would so much rather be telling you about the scarves I finished - post is half drafted, pictures are still in the camera - or the completed by ill fitting Retro Femme top, or even the swatching I just snuck in clandestinely... but alas. Instead I am packing and freaking out about not having a place to live and various other things.
However, I've decided to make updating my blog one of my rewards, so hopefully you'll be hearing from me 2-3 times in the next couple of weeks. In July, I'll either be settling into a new place or homeless, so you'll either hear from me more, or, well, not. But, in the interim, tonight's reward for packing is a hair dyeing party, so I best go earn my reward!
Hope all is well!

AWOL and Back Again

Well, hello!

Sorry for my disappearance. As you may know, I was working desperately when last I posted to finish two gift scarves and a ton of other things before graduation and two friends' wedding. Well, graduation ended up being much more time consuming than expected, I had some things come up at work at the last minute, and then my husband and I took a no-laptop house-shopping trip to Buffalo this last week. I'm only now getting home and settled, just in time to put our house on the market and struggle semi-valiantly to get it presentable.

I do have some photos of the finished scarves to share, probably by tomorrow night. Things are still a little crazy, though I suppose any house sale and move is like that. I'll try to post more now that we're back in town and keep you up to date, but sadly, Weekend Wonders are on a hiatus until further notice

Quick crafting update: I'm about 55-60% done with the Retro Femme top and planning to finish that before I start anything else. I have a couple design ideas to play with and Jocelyn's not-yet-identified item to make once the house is done. (For those of you new to the blog, Jocelyn won a recent "contest" I had for the best husband-inspiring techniques for getting my husband to do chores. She suggested, among other things, letting the ants build up to get him to do dishes, which was one of my particular issues. Strangely, the ants didn't quite work. They helped, but it was the discovery that a roach has actually been living in our rarely-used dishwasher that seems to have been the key to getting Mr. Man going on the dishes. Having graduation behind us has gotten him more inspired (though not exactly thirlled) about other chores, too.

Now all we have to do is pack, clean, and sell! No big deal, right?

Short and Sweet

I'm afraid I don't have much time to type today, as I'm due to go see IRON MAN in a few minutes. (That's the official household spelling.) But I wanted to thank Jocelyn for her comment on my sort-of-contest and to say.

1. There are ants in the dishes. I'm giving it a couple more days. After all, the man graduates from college officially the day after tomorrow. And ant smooshing makes me feel better.
2. We discussed adopting older kids to solve this problem - premade chore-doers - but then I remembered (a) we can't afford it, (b) we're not really mature enough for that, and (c) we're both going back to grad school this year. If this idea works though, I'll owe Jocelyn something handmade again in 10 years.
3. Therapy may also be a viable solution, but see 2(a) and 2(c) above.*

*Can you tell I was a lawyer?

If you still have suggestions, comment away! I do have to say, that I'd rather have quiet lurkers (or no readers, but I'm trying to pretend that's not it) than some of Laurie Perry's crazy fans. (See her May 6, 2008 entry. Dude!)

Have a good rest of the week, and maybe I'll be able to shoot some FOs or WIPs this Saturday.

Weekend Wonder #8

Hello! Weekend Wonder #8 has NOTHING to do with crafts, but I'll include a crafty preamble.

Sadly, I did not finish the scarf on time. I realized yesterday morning that it was not gong to happen, and had a flash of insight I wish I'd had days before. I intended the scarf to be part of a hat and scarf set and wasn't planning to finish the scarf - originally - until I did the hat first, to make sure the yarn would stretch. Well, the scarf is turning out lopsided - I'll explain that in next week's Weekend Wonder - and will require crochet trim. Suddenly I realized I could make the dang hat and give her the scarf when I finish Guy-Chicago's scarf, too! So that's what I did. Made a scarf [edit] hat, graded like a superfast grading demon, forgot to take a picture of it(!), went to a mature-themed bridal shower, where the hat was a hit all around despite not being mature-themed, and came home very late.

I now have too much to do to do anything but whip this out and get back to work... So, this is my weekend wonder to you - a Challenge. This is especially for you married or committed folk out there. My husband is a wonderful man who will NOT do certain chores lately. First commenter to give me a successful idea - other than mature-themed bribery ;) - for getting him to do chores promptly will win a hat, scarf, eye-mask or mitts handmade by me - your choice of project and yarn colors. Before you say, "No problem!", I have a few pieces of key information.

1. I've tried asking, begging, bribing with money, and guilting. No dice. You're welcome to suggest variations - please do! - but I thought you should be warned.
   
2. The man is, as I type, taking a clean bedsheet (the orphan from a ruined set) and wrapping it around three loads of clean, dry laundry, so that when we go to bed tonight, he'll be able to move it off the bed without having to fold it. Yes, he washed it, he just won't FOLD it.
   
3. He also won't do the dishes (we have a dishwasher), but he did take out the trash.

That is your challenge.

P.S. Jen @ PieKnits is having a contest for some beautiful yarn and mystery goodies. Check it out! She does lovely stuff.

Think Sober Thoughts

Hola. I just came from celebrating the end of my husband's semester - and college career! - with margaritas. He took his last final today; he has nothing left to do!

Must be nice.

Sneer. Smile.

I'm a real lightweight when it comes to drinking, so two margaritas - two mason-jar-sized margaritas - was more than I should have had and reasonably expected to go back to grading any time soon. Now, I'm Ravelry-ing (raveling? Jocelyn?) and sobering up.

Speaking of Jocelyn, she had a great post about gratitude today - and for the record, I thought it was great before the margaritas and before I got em-dash crazy, so there. I've been thinking about similar issues as I get ready to take my leave of absence and launch into a new degree program. I'd like to write nice cards, or at the very least nice emails, to thank my colleagues and tell them where I'm headed, but I'm finding it hard. I haven't been worrying about it much, telling myself grading is more pressing - and it is - but it's still something I'm thinking of a couple times a day.

Most of the nicest things people have done for me while I was here were nothing as above-and-beyond as Jocelyn's friend, but the very act of being good colleagues takes on a new meaning when one of you leaves. It's like saying, "You were great, but not great enough." And while I'm technically only leaving for 1-2 years, I think it's unlikely I'll be coming back, and I want to be as honest and grateful in my parting as possible.

Can't make them all scarves though. Hmmm. Best I wait until I'm sober for that one, too, I guess.

Pre-Bed Post, in which I make dumb jokes

My husband - Mr. Man - is studying for his statistics final. I'm his human calculator, so our evening conversation has mainly consisted of long periods of keyboard and calculator typing punctuated occasionally by him asking something like, "12 times 52 is...?" The following exchange just occurred as the blog was loading:
Man: 12 times 12 is 144, right?
Me: Ew, that's groooossssss.

**Pause while I giggle some more.**

Today has, again, mainly consisted of grading. I made some significant progress on the scarf during breaks, but I also had to nap when my brain inexplicably shut down midday. I spent my last break looking at a group I recently joined on Ravelry - Natural Dyeing - and I now have a major jones to crochet. There's something about the rhythm of it that's calling me lately, and the moderately complex colorwork knitting isn't doing it for me (though it needs to be done).

I should be off to bed since I'm actually leaving the house tomorrow morning. Happy May Day and Happy Friday!