I'm a lousy blogger. I blame Christmas knitting.

Time flies...

I'm finally recovering from my Christmas knitting. I successfully knitted a pair of socks for nearly every living member of my extended family. Money was tight, and it kept me from smoking, so everyone got socks from our family this year. I hope they wear them. I hope they have a year's worth (at least) of warm toes. I suppose if anyone asks for another pair next Christmas, I'll know who enjoyed them.

Now I can FINALLY knit something for myself. YAY! I also got a digital camera for Christmas, so I can actually post some of my knitting project pictures to my Ravelry profile. My picture-less project page on my profile makes me look like the knitter who never knits. Unfortunately, my old camera won't even turn on, so all of the Christmas sock knitting projects didn't get photographed. Perhaps I can talk the recipients into taking photos of their feet wearing aforementioned socks. Hmmm, that's a thought. I think I'll have to make that request. Ok, that's enough blogging for today. I'm off to knit some socks for myself now. :)

Tagged!

ktb38 tagged me a while back, and now I'm going to pass it on. Yes, I've been a slacker.

Ok, so here are the rules:

Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs. Let them know they are tagged by leaving comments on their blogs.

So I'll start with 7 weird/random facts:

1) I do not like my food to touch. I'd be a happier person if every restaurant served their food on plates with separators. Yes, I do take the time to separate each grain of rice from my green beans. I don't care if this means I have OCD either.

2)I hate shoes, and I avoid wearing them whenever possible. If I have to wear shoes, you will generally find me in slip-on clogs, or flip-flops. Only on special occasions do I wear anything else. And I do mean SPECIAL.

3)There is not a room in my house that does not contain a chicken (not a live one if anyone wondered)... Even my yard has them, because they keep the gnomes company. :D

4)I spend way too much time on www.Merriam-Webster.com. I'm a word geek, what can I say?

5) My 2 favorite scents are coconut and cucumber. If Bath and Body works ever combines the Freshwater Cucumber scent with the Coconut-Lime Verbena scent into one bottle, I will gladly do the happy dance in the middle of the store for the world to see.

6) I shave my toes. Hairy toes? Eww....

7)I've never traveled west of the Mississippi river. With the cost of gas lately, that may never change unless I win the lottery.

So um, who is gonna be tagged as "IT" next? Hmmm.... lets see....

I am gonna tag :

Colyn

dlalomia

sewtart

VAPurl

Marvie

Zelda Zunk

zuzusunshine


So, I passed on the "IT" cootie. Ya'll are "IT" now!!!

I'm one year older...

So, my birthday was Sunday... and this year, it was a good one. I'm officially 33 with more grey hair than most of my 40+ friends. How does that happen?

"It's just nature's way of softening the aging process", or so my 80 year old grandmother says. She turns 80 tomorrow, and well, she just rocks. Her birthday is 4 days after mine, and my mother's birthday is exactly a week before mine. We're a gaggle of spring May chicks, we three are.

Anyway, I didn't mind this birthday too much. It was much better this year. I got some really awesome chicken stuff, which I may remember to eventually post pictures of. Don't count on it though, as I'm a lazy ass. I am trying to learn not to say I'll do something unless I REALLY mean it, because I have ADD and this leads to NUMEROUS unfinished WIP Projects cluttering up my house. They will soon start collecting dust in a remote corner if they're not kept in check. This applies to anything DIY or crafty, including knitting projects. If I make a commitment to finishing any project, and set a deadline, or promise the finished result or product to anyone, the project soon resembles work, which makes it aaaabsolutely ZERO fun to finish.

Last year, I had a bit of a miserable depressed birthday. I think 32 was a bit of a milestone year. I really felt like the tar baby, stuck on that log, unable to move and going nowhere fast. None of my goals were met, or even on the way to being met at that time.

Not this year!! For now (because I know at any time, it could change), it feels like my life is in forward motion. This is a good thing. I don't know what exactly changed between now and then, but the train is moving forward instead of being stuck huffing and puffing in the station. I'm in "I think I can" mode on my way to Hogwarts. Non-muggles will understand what I mean.

Enough of my ramblings, back to business....

My Goals for this new year are coming up in short order for anyone who gives a damn:

1. Sell hubby's car and drop back to one vehicle

2. Purchase Super cool (!!!!) Adult Tricycle (as seen here:)


http://belizebike.com/english/trike_20.html">


3. Start losing this quit smoking weight since I have to walk or bike anywhere I go

4. Learn to ride public transport to get the places that are too far to bike (Pathetically enough, I've never ridden local public transport. I've been a spoiled brat all these years.)

5. Save a crapload of money that used to be wasted on a car (payment, interest, taxes, insurance, gas, maintenance) and start putting it toward buying LAND FOR MY VERY OWN SHEEP FARM (My future Happy place!!! YAY!!!)

So it begins....

HoneyDo list for this weekend for hubs:

1. Wash car so we can sell it

WifeyDo list for me:

1. Vacuum and clean the inside of the car, (including: getting the kid crumbs off the back seat) so someone might want to purchase it

After having 2 vehicles for so long, the idea of cutting down to one seems almost scary. At the same time, it feels rather liberating. Watch out world, I'm going green. Thank goodness I'm churning out hand knitted socks instead of smoking, I'll need 'em with all the walking and pedal pushing I'll be doing. :D

knitting the bad weather blahs away....

Its cold outside, (a high of 55 degrees F) and misting rain at the moment. I reluctantly opened my eyes this morning and ever since, it has been a grey, ugly, sleepy, do nothing kind of day. I should be painting my living room, or probably even dusting. I should be planning which furniture to move into the front room (or perhaps even attempting to move said furniture myself) so we can tile the floor in the back room. I could and should be doing at least one or all of those things.

Instead, I found myself sitting here knitting this sock. While working the gusset, I began thinking of picking up an old unfinished knitting project and actually FINISHING it. It is an almost-sweater that I put down when my grandfather died last year. At the time, it required too much concentration and effort to complete, so I left it on the needles and walked away. Funeral planning, and grieving took precedence. To make a long story short, here I am now feeling once again ready to take it up and finish it.

Ironically, the sweater is for my grandmother. It is my first ever sweater, and I'm a perfectionist. I'd rather take as long as I need to than hand her an ugly monstrosity. That sort of gift was lovely and cute when I was 7, but I just can not bring myself to give her a hand made gift like that now. I really would prefer to give her something she would actually use, and not just wear because her granddaughter knitted her something.

I chose her to be the first-sweater-ever recipient because she was the one who needed the most spiritual support when I decided to knit it. My knitting is my equivalent of attending church. It is my version of spiritual meditation/contemplation. If I knit for you, I feel that I'm sending my spiritual energy toward you in the form of a knitted gift. I don't care who thinks it is silly, it is my belief.

I refuse to knit items for kids when I'm in a bad mood. Call me crazy, but I feel doing so would contaminate the item with bad energy. I put down a prayer shawl for the same reason. I hated the pattern, so I left it on the needles. I couldn't knit a prayer shawl with "I-hate-this-pattern-I-wish-I-was-done-with-this stupid project!!" energy. That ain't so good for a prayer shawl, kind of counter productive. That energy seems better suited for knitting the vitriolic-shawl-of-utter-contempt. I'll have to create a pattern for that. Gawd, wouldn't that be ugly?

A prayer shawl is meant to be knitted with positive healing energy right? When the knitting of the prayer shawl turns into F*** YOU!! energy, it is time to walk away. Obviously, the shawl in question is still sitting, on the needles, in my great bag of unfinished projects.

I really want to finish that sweater for my grandmother. As soon as these socks are done, I'm going to conquer that unfinished project. My unfinished project bag, aka The Bag O' Black Hole knitting projects is going to be a little bit lighter. Maybe when it's done I'll actually have enough motivation to post a picture or two.

Energy without direction...

So, I've kicked the nicotine habit. Yay me. I still want one now and again, but on the whole I'm feeling quite over the whole smoking thing. I really don't want another one ever again. I have a new found bundle of energy that I wasted for a long time on cigarettes. I have so much new found energy, I cannot seem to find enough outlets for it all. This is dangerous energy, it leads to unfinished projects. I think I may look into learning Tai Chi. I wanted to learn it anyway. If only classes were not so expensive. *sigh*

I purchased a couple of cool books. Prescription for Nutritional Healing & Prescription for Herbal Healing. Both by Phyllis A. Balch, CNC

They appear (so far) to be packed full of good info. I plan to devour them slowly, with my handy-dandy highlighter and post-it notes. Such tools are required for good reference books. I'd like to eat my way to good health now that I've conquered the smoking beast. I am a huge fan of BBC America's "You are what you eat". Gillian McKeith is my idol.

I will be spending my weekend painting my living room if I can remember to pick up a paint roller. If anyone actually reads this, Have a Happy Healthy Day. :)

I have a case of the Mondays.

I, much like Garfield, hate Mondays. I have hated Mondays for as long as I can remember. I'm assuming that I learned to hate them when I was forced to board that school bus every Monday morning and go off to that miserable place I hated. I'm so glad that my kids won't hate Mondays when they're adults. I wish my mom had homeschooled me. Of course, in hindsight, I think she would have killed me and I wouldn't be here typing about this if she had. So, then again, maybe not.

Anyhow, my oldest child (the 11yo full of pre-teen angst) is upstairs working on an Essay and is none too happy about it. She hates, or should I say LOATHES handwriting. She'll have to get over it. Just because you can type does not mean you should never learn how to properly wield a pen for it is by far mightier than the sword. She is also angry that I (mommy dearest) am making her look up the definitions of words in her dictionary rather than search them at the Merriam-Webster website. I (evil mommy dearest that I am) want to know that when my child is without internet access, she can look up the definition of any word she does not know without the help of google. I believe this is a skill that should be required for graduation. She does not.

This is a source of constant contention in our household. Google has made us all look-it-up-in-a-real-book-brain-lazy. I'm guilty of it myself. I still know how to use a dictionary when necessary, and spent many an hour reading it for pure enjoyment. I was probably one of the only kids in my entire 7th grade class back in 1987 who could spell and define the words flaccid and fedayeen, and use them in a sentence. The dictionary provided quite a bit of enlightening entertainment for me in those "tween" years. It was also a great source of words that could be turned into veiled insults, because most people did not know what they meant and I was not old enough to get away with a cuss word. It was like learning a coded colorful language of potential snarky insults. I love snark. If only my child could find that joy.... I can only hope.

My youngest child just finished her school work for the day, and is now catching butterflies at mylittlepony.com. She enjoys that site almost as much as I enjoy Merriam-Webster's site, except her favorite site plays annoying music. I'm currently trying to drown out her music with my Pandora Radio station (you can listen too, the link is on the left! Its good music, I swear!). My music is quite nice, and much less annoying than mylittlepony.com's theme music.

I have managed to do 2 loads of laundry so far, and now I am off to re-organize my pantry and fridge. The fridge needs a good thorough cleaning, and I'm just the woman for the job. I'm kind of scared to find what sort of exotic new species of fungus I'm growing in the dark corners of the fridge, but I will soon find out. If I find anything particularly exotic, expect pictures to be posted here. I may run with scissors, but I also share cool educational stuff.

Ok, Now i'm signing off to get to work so I can hurry back to my knitting when I'm done. Hello world, my week begins.

Smoke Free!

I am officially a 4 day old Non-Smoker. Yay me! I decided to have my last cigarette on the 9th, and I've made it all the way through to the 14th. The first 3 days were really sucky, to say the least. I definitely don't want to feel that withdrawal ever again. Now that I'm past it though, it's actually not too bad. I want one to smoke one every now and again, especially after meals or with my morning coffee, but the urge is certainly lessening. I'm really proud of myself. I haven't been able to say that and truly mean it in a long time. Go Me.