Utah

is where I flew to, to help out my Mom for a few weeks.  Despite my unhappiness with my current job,  on the plus side they are super wonderfully OK with me working remotely. Mom is getting ankle surgery, and won't be able to drive for some time. She'll be having a hard enough time hobbling.

(What are those weird black and white squares in the middle of the Nevada/Utah desert? Alien invasion? Secret government plant? I have no idea.)

So I'm not really all that happy to be back in Utah, because it's always sort of a culture shock, and there's also a long history I'd rather not go into. Also March in Utah is more or less Brown, with a side of weather inversion smog if you're near the city. With the occasional White when it dumps snow. On say, Easter.

But that's beside the point. It's just late right now, and I'm missing my Love Monkey. Mom and I will have a good time.  She is a huge doily knitter, and has promised to show me the nifty cast-on start for tiny centers of doilies, as I have become just a teency bit obsessed with some Herbert Niebling patterns lately.

Other obsessions: indigo dyed silk organzine, linen, and lace bamboo from Habu. Laos naturally dyed handspun silk and cotton gima (look at that navy!)  Yes, the current color obsessions is all blues. I have to keep reminding myself, I am trying to divest my yarn, not acquire more yardage.

I leave you with a picture of one of the ads from The Workbasket, a magazine to which my grandmother subscribed. (Grandma was a huge doily knitter too, back when it wasn't so easy to get knitted doily patterns. This is from her Big Binder o' Doilies). August 1963.

Cookie, you do the eye boggle so much better than me.

March.

I seem to have skipped the bulk of February. No, really, I don't even much remember what happened. Work during the week, knit, post yarn for sale on Rav, send packages, sleep. Weekends we try to get out and explore, at least a little.

Seagulls down at the pier by Fisherman's Wharf.

And looking forward to this:

I just got back from a week in Hawaii. We took my Mom this time. She'd never been before.

(I have a lot of these. I seem to have a weakness for sunsets).

The condo we stayed in looked right out over the (relatively shallow) water between Maui and 2 other islands, and there were SO many whales. It was hard to look out the window and NOT see whales. One memorable sunset, right as the sun went down, a calf and a full size humpback took turns breeching right outside. I think the adult was teaching the little one.

It looked like this in the mornings.

Hawaii wasn't quite the shock to the system it's been before (a good shock), since SF's winter weather isn't dark, rainy, and cold like Portland. It was still wonderful. I spent the week mostly unplugged. We went snorkeling, and hiking, and also just swimming and paddling about in the water, in between breaks to knit and read for hours. Lovely.

Black sand beach. A little harder on the toes and foots than regular sand, but interesting.

Now, back to reality. You'd think it'd be easier to do things you don't want to do, after a week off, but no, it's the opposite.

Well, the vitamins seem to be working

Or, at least I seem to have more energy this week.

I also seem to not be able to stop myself from starting new socks to knit. I liked the red yarn that I used for the toes of the other, and it was sitting out, just asking to be used. So I started some cabled socks. Except the yarn is thin and the feet are big, and 64 stitches is no way going to be enough, so I added do repeats and now we're at 96 stitches. And these socks are EATING YARN. I'm at 70 g and I haven't even started the heel.

So it's now they are in temporary limbo while I figure out what to do (I'm not sure even heels & toes in another yarn will be enough). Meanwhile I cast on another pair of socks, because I've got to have some knitting for the bus, right?

Really I'm doing project-avoidance, so everything looks so much more interesting than the thing I really ought to be working on: a pair of gloves or mittens or something that I'm trying to make up from a couple different patterns, sort of winging it. I'm fairly sure they're going to be too small and I've gone too far past where the thumb would be anyway. I've noticed that when I reach a point in a project where it appears the finished object might suck, but I'm not entirely sure, I start avoiding it. Instead of fixing it or just ripping it out, or completing it to evaluate possible suckage, I just stop. I need to learn a new behavior, because while it's great for other productivity (socks!) it means the important thing doesn't get done and I have a pile of UFOs.

---

Today was cold (for here, stop sniggering), windy, and very brightly sunny. We decided to go wander around Golden Gate Park.

Beethoven is watching you!

Yes, there are palm trees.
The big tower in the background is Sutro Tower, a radio/tv antenna tower visible from much of the city.

We went to the Japanese garden. Doesn't look very windy here, does it?  LIES!
This pond was down in a protected little hollow.
I don't think traditional Japanese gardens use palm trees much, but you work with what you got.

I thought this fountain of a snake and a... cat-thing with fangs was cool.

OK, I'm going to go take some ibuprofen for the headache the sunshine and wind gave me, then maybe  work on the books. I'm a huge Saturday night partier, you can see. WOOWOOO!

Januaries are hard

I don't know why. I've always thought it was SAD (and when I lived in the PNW it probably was, because: hello, increased carbohydrate intake and withdrawal from social activities? That would be me) but winter here in San Francisco has been mostly one bright sunny day after another. Not entirely, (thanks a lot, Christmas storm) but fairly frequent. I probably need to take more vitamin D.

I got reminded this morning of a blog post I saw years and years ago, which essentially said: you people with your perfect blogs and your perfect lives and your mess-free children (or cute messes): I do not believe you and you can go jump in a lake.  This morning I was wandering around famous sewing/crafting blogs and well, this. I should have remembered that this happened last time I did this, and which is why I made it a kind of personal policy not to read Perfection blogs regularly. While I occasionally find inspiration, mostly they inspire feelings of inadequacy. You want to know what my front room looks like this morning?

Which is not bad, except for the dirty cereal bowl and the pile of crap on the front table. I just finished a pair of socks. Go me. What you cannot see in this picture is me sitting on the futon in an ancient sweatshirt and old yoga pants with holes in them. Let's turn left and right, shall we?

The pile of yarn that I am slowly listing on Ravelry in my Massive Destasherino, slow because my camera really, REALLY hates purple, and it's not so hot about dark blue either. I wish I could just throw it all up there (pun intended), unedited, but I don't want to mislead anyone on colors.

It would have been smart to do this BEFORE I moved, but I thought I had some kind of bending space-n-time superpower and could work full time, paint and clean and pack and do all the other house crap that needed to be done, AND have time to take pictures, color correct them, list the yarn, and pack it up and send it off.

Ha ha. NO.

And this is the lovely view to my right, the boxes of books we will put into the bookshelves (or get rid of.) This is a far cry from those houses full of white, spare rooms with perfectly blowing blue curtains. Logically I know they are editing heavily and arranging and making perfect stage sets. But emotionally that doesn't seem to quite register with me.

We're working towards order, but we also both work full time, and often extra hours, and frankly, I prefer to de-stress by sewing or knitting or reading in the evenings instead of trying to figure out where to put the damn bookcases. It will come. Just that January doesn't seem to leave me a lot of energy to do even the important things.

I'm not fishing for sympathy, just giving you a rundown on why it might take me two weeks to never to answer email. It's not you, it's me.

Meanwhile the cat has parked herself on my lap and dozed off and I am apparently going nowhere for awhile. That's ok. There are worse fates.

HO HO NO

Isn't she pretty? I haven't seen a dawn for a long time. I'm not a morning person. But I got up early to go to the DMV to get a new driver's license.

Unfortunately, this was Thursday. And Friday, the day of our flight to visit my family in Utah for Christmas, was wet, windy, and bad enough weather that SFO cancelled a hundred flights, ours included. Seeing as it was the 21st, there wasn't anything unbooked for a 250 mile radius (ok, 1 seat on a flight out of Fresno... a 3 hour drive away).

I did a quick check into driving, but the same storm causing problems was also dumping heavy snows in the Sierras. Love Monkey says they've since closed that freeway. I've learned my lesson, don't fly in or out of SFO for anything time-dependent.

So. Christmas at home. Which I usually vastly prefer (mmm, not a fan of airports, especially during busy seasons) but there is that still-moving-in-feel here. We're still coping with reducing Box Mountain.

That's my living room. It's gotten slightly better since then.

Although we just unearthed a box of the Love Monkey's old Star Wars toys.

The Rancor says that in this season of sugared goodies, please remember the importance of oral hygiene.

The Rancor also knows how to party.

Holiday season, an excellent time to devour fruity drinks and tootsie rolls.

The other M

I'm not so good at keeping track of days lately. Witness that I should be doing last minute Christmas shopping that I'm not doing. I'm just having trouble summoning up the enthusiasm to care much. I like giving gifts to people, but I am so done with deadlines for this year.

The house is sold! We are moved. We are all urban 'n' crap now, and I still have a mountain of boxes of stuff to get rid of. It's putting a damper on the whole moving-into-a-new-place thing.

It has been nice weather until just last week, and we've had a couple weekends in all the craziness to play tourist a little. I tell everyone I think I have climate jet lag, because it really, REALLY doesn't feel like December. Then again, there's a reason there's palm trees growing here.

This is the Car, all loaded up before I drove down the last time. On the trip I took to calling it Toronado, as I was listening to Zorro by Isabelle Allende on CD most of the way down.

No, that wasn't everything left. I seem to think I can bend the laws of space and time when I move. Not so much. I could have fit more in here (just take everything out of boxes and you get rid of all that pesky empty space. The whole car rattled) but I was already running very late and needed to get on the road. Here it is at the Vallejo rest stop, right before the descent into Bay Area Rush Hour Traffic Hell.

Frances is acclimating better than I am, but she doesn't have to order any Christmas presents for any nieces and nephews. Hmph. She's instead hanging out on the balcony, enjoying some sunshine.

M is definitely for MUM

I am really a poor planner. Or maybe an unfortunate optimist. I always think I'll have 3 or 4 times the amount of time to do things that I actually do. Or maybe I think I'm superwomen and can complete everything faster than everyone else!

Yeah, not so much. But some of my ridiculousness at least had a pretty payoff.
Remember these?:

They look like this now:

Lava

River City

Zinfandel

St Tropez

Some of them went from tight buds to HOLY COW in about a week. The big shaggy purple ones are as big as softballs.

October, and pretty much all of this month has been one big blur. We put the house up for sale, after spackling, painting, refinishing, scraping, sweeping, washing, and so many other -ings. I had no idea it'd be much work, and I didn't even do most of it, thank the contractors for that.

The house is old: 1925, so almost 90. They built it well, but there's so many things that deteriorate over time. Not to mention the weird/unfortunate/bizarre choices of later owners.  I stayed up most of the night before the indoor painters came, pulling screws out of the walls, taking down the old crappy mirror in the bedroom and the horrible old shades from the windows, and washing all the walls and woodwork. Again with the WHY DID I NEVER DO THIS BEFORE. I shouldn't be so surprised that the windows look a million times better without the old yellowing cheap venetian blinds.

And then the waiting. The angsting. Honestly I was so exhausted from all the work and stress that I didn't much care for the first week after. It was a relief to just go to regular work and have a desk job. Then we drove the cat down to California (oh was THAT a fun time. Don't worry, we all survived and she seems to be settling in nicely), and I couldn't do anything from 800 miles away for a week.

Road to California

(it doesn't look anything like the quilt block. Different road.)

But maybe there's an end in sight now. And I am right terrified of the home inspection, which is Tomorrow. Terrified for no good reason, of course. My anxious brain is trying to raise my blood pressure by about 40 points, never mind that logically, there is crap all that I can do about it.

I am back in Portland, which is doing its full-on soggy Fall impression, to get rid of the last of the Stuff. Oh so much stuff. And the new place is full of stuff, too. Argggh. I never thought about having to cope with things like getting rid of the hedge pruners and the brooms and about a billion pots full of potting soil. My friends have been wonderful, helping us out so much. But still with the stuff.

When was the last time you emptied out your fridge?

Anyway, I need to go do yoga to calm down that BP and get dressed and then ditch more stuff. Just wanted to check in. I'm still alive, we're almost done, and I am very, very lucky. Also, I have too much stuff.