All signs point to yes

While recognizing there is still work to be done (changing sheets, making bed, and going through that pile of shorts of Josh's that I put on the rocking chair), I am declaring early victory over the clutter.


I even put some flowers in there. See them?
 I think that's probably what I will get done today because
A: You can't make me neener, neener, neener
B: Our neighbor's house caught fire this morning and we were up at 4 am talking to the police about whether we had seen them over there. (incidentally we are pretty sure they are out of town and they didn't find anyone so all children, adults, and even pets are safe)
C: Last time I saved my PTO for enjoying a long vacation I ended up sick as a dog alternating between my in-laws' and grandpa's couches.

We were so glad that their van wasn't there because the fire was so hot that the firemen had to give up their rescue operation. The entire roof is gone. They used so much retardant in their water mix that it looked like there was six inches of snow. The fire fighters didn't find anyone once they could go in.

Anyway, onward to enjoying my day!

Doing my thing

Hello, All!  It seems I can't even manage one post a month but things have been very busy around here.  Blogger also has some new settings that I'll have to get used to so bear with me.

I'm home today for my version of a "mental health day" which just means the house has gotten to a point where I can't bear it anymore.  I have been using PTO days every few months to reset the system and it seems to work ok.  I hate doing it but I love the result and I seem better able to relax and enjoy my weekend when I'm not trying to cram in laundry, dishes, mopping, dusting, straightening, etc.  I finished the bathroom down to scrubbing the tub and mopping the floor-two tasks that are often overlooked.

Note the streak free mirror even!  I've been taking flowers from bouquets and cutting them down when they start to wilt.  I can then put them in one of the little glass bottles like the one on the sink and they will last for weeks longer.  I think their stems just wear out after long enough but the flowers are ok if they have closer access to water.  I love seeing them in the morning too.  It's a nice start to the day.

Next up today: the bedroom.  Wish me luck! Note that it looks worse because items were dragged out of the bathroom.  I'll post an "after" in a bit.


Now to distract you with cuteness! I'm not having all work today. I'm also knitting a sample for my local yarn store, Knitting Temptations. I've just got the collar bind off to do but I tried it on Maegwin a few days ago and it seemed to fit her pretty well. She had just a little scratch on her nose when we went to my cousin's wedding but she scratched it while on the way home and got all the skin off on the upper area of her nose. We've been keeping it ointmented and bandaged as much as possible to discourage further damage and it seems to be healing well. See? There it is way better. I really need to remember not to stand sideways in pictures. It makes me look heavy. :p Nope, haven't gained any weight since last you all saw me though I had to take about six months off from the gym (I went but it would be a few weeks then off two weeks, etc) because of back to back sinus infections. I'm back to going three times a week though and hope to build my arms and general muscle tone back up. Stupid sickness and not being able to breathe.

More later!

Faster Stronger Better

Hello, gentle readers!  I wanted to check in and let you all know that my surgery went fine although I wasn't completely numb on my left side.  Basically when they got back into my sphenoid sinus on that side I could totally feel it.  Having a balloon inflated inside your skull is not something I highly recommend without sufficient numbing.  The worst is when you're hurting and the medical staff thinks taking it slow will be better.  I'm normally like "GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY!!"  But, as with all things that hurt, I just look at it as something that I know will be over in a set amount of time and just power through.  The right side was fine and they even numbed me extra.  Oddly the left is the same side that my epidural didn't work fully on when I was in labor.  Maybe I have screwed up nerves on that side?  Only one other patient has ever done the balloon sinuplasty without valium at their office.  It was a man and he had prior sinus surgery so the doctor said he had a lot more space to work with.  Everyone was amazed at how well I did with it.

I spent the rest of yesterday blowing my nose and getting all the blood out.  Maegwin was quite fascinated by it and kept asking to see.  I love that she isn't afraid.  This morning I can breathe mostly and it feels very odd.  I feel air all the way back up in my face and it stings.  Guess I'm not used to getting that much oxygen!

I'm feeling quite springy and have the urge to finish up all my knitting projects and start some summery sweaters and tees.  I got two projects done yesterday while I was home.  The first is Bunny Bootees by Debbie Bliss which I knit with the last bit I had of some Lorna's Laces in Periwinkle.  This stuff has made four baby and kid projects at this point so I'm pretty happy at how much I got from it.  I used Knitpicks Comfy fingering weight for the ears and the soles are also white though you can't see them in the photo.



The other thing I finished was a Hippo from Itty Bitty Toys. This was knit with some Knitpicks Imagination in the gingerbread house colorway and I used accents from some Craftsmeow Ice Cream Sundae yarn in Cherries Jubilee colorway. I really want to get a whole skein of this stuff but I'm trying really hard to knit from stash for a while until we get through all the medical stuff. :)



He will be part of my swap package that I hope to send out this week. I'm working on a set of handwarmers as well but they are going really slowly. They use the daisy stitch which involves knitting three together, yarn over, and then knit the same three together before dropping off the needle. It makes the stitches very tight and they make my hands hurt quickly but they are so pretty.

Today I'm home with no Maegwin and I intend to knit and read books for a while. I do need to do some laundry, dishes, cleaning, etc. Days off for me tend to not really be days off but I'm going to let myself relax and try to ignore for a few hours at least. Cheers, all!

Cold April

So in true Ohio fashion, winter came in April.  It's been chilly off and on and we even had a few days where it dipped into the 20's at night!  So odd!  I just finished mowing the grass on the riding mower for the first time in 44 degree weather.  I wanted a hot chocolate for my drink holder.  hehe  I felt pretty good about it and I have to say that having a riding mower really makes me enjoy owning property more.  What used to take 4 hours or more to push mow took just an hour and I'm not exhausted and spent for the day at the end of it.  Win win I say.  Of course we couldn't pay for it all in one month but still totally worth it.  Stupid doctor bills!  I honestly don't know how people without insurance do it.  I see those pre-insurance costs and it would ruin us financially.  It really would, and I don't have any particularly life threatening conditions.  I'm really hoping after my surgery tomorrow that things slow down a lot on the medical front.  Plus side is I blew through our deductible in the first two months of the year.  lol

At Easter we went out this year to Buca di Beppo which is an Italian restaurant for those not familiar.  They serve family style so it was perfect.  My mom, stepdad, sister, niece, and Josh, Maegwin, and I all went.  Maegwin enjoyed seeing everyone and posed with Daddy.

She was quite the shutterbug.

She shared my pear italian soda and insisted that we drink it together for the rest of the meal. I think she liked that it was pink.


I've been working on another swap package for my Itty Bitty knitters group. This time the theme is hedgehogs and hippos. The bonus challenge is that all components of the package must be things related to the letter H. I just need to add a face to my hippo but otherwise all is ready to go.

I'm also sewing some ears on little bunny bootees that I knit for a co-worker. I think his baby is due in the next few weeks so I want to give them to him when I'm back at work on Wednesday. Other than that, I have half a Maegwin sock to knit, another fish sock like the one in my last post, and then I plan to start a Spring Garden Tee for Maegwin with the same yarn I used for baby Lily's flower cardigan set. I have three and a half balls left over and really can't think of anything else to use it for than a baby or toddler knit. After all those are done it should be time to shift into summer knitting mode and I have a few sweaters/tees picked out for me that I'd like to do.

Our seedlings are doing well in the basement but we had a mouse come into our house when the weather turned again.  The crazy little thing kept eating our seedlings and managed to get all of our coneflowers and a bit of radish before we caught him.  Nothing seems to be nibbled since then but we've got a few traps up just in case.  We let Cordova out in the garden with it and she just batted at it once then walked away.  The thing actually ran back INTO the trap.  I guess she's too old to be a ratter anymore but it makes me sad.

Thank you to everyone who sent us anniversary cards and wishes!  I've still got some flowers from the bouquets that Josh and Maegwin picked out strewn all over the house.  They were mostly Gerbera daisies which I love and they are great to keep.  I just cut most of the stems off and put them in shorter vases and they perked right up again!

Short post for now-Maegwin just went down for a nap so I want to take advantage of the time.  Crossing my fingers for surgery tomorrow.  :)

March post

Hello gentle readers! Let me apologize to you all for my long absence and reassure you that I am in fact quite alive. As always seems to happen, I get busy or sick and can't manage more than one post a month. At least I'm consistent! On the bright side, you will all be happy to know that both my doctor and I got sick of the constant sinus infections after the last one and I went for a CT of the sinuses. Turns out I have chronic sinusitis. My doctor looked at my scan and pronounced it "the most jacked up" she had ever seen. She's a cool doctor-I heart her. Every single area of the sinuses that should be all black on the CT is grey with the tiniest sliver of black. Yay me! I saw an ENT doctor this week and he said I'm a good candidate for a balloon sinuplasty so I'm set up for that April 23rd and Josh is looking forward to seeing it all go down. The nice thing is the procedure is with local anesthesia, is done in office, and only takes 30 minutes so my recovery time should be about a day. If it doesn't work, I still have the sinus surgery option as a backup but this is less invasive. I'm hopful that it will give me some relief and make me not have constant sinus infections. The housework I'm sure will be thankful as well.

I find it rather hard to catch up on a month's worth of activity but luckily we are boring people so it can't be that hard, right?

I went to a stamp camp and as my snack I baked a rainbow cake. I found the directions on a lovely blog that I recently discovered called Bird on a Cake. Linky here. It was surprisingly easy and impressed everyone. I think next time I'm going to make the cake from scratch though. I'm not a fan of box mixes. It basically involves separating the mix into six parts and dyeing each a different color. You start pouring progressively less of each color into the center of the first pan and then flip the color order in the other.

Note the nice new cake pans! I found some really nice ones that are made in the USA out of recycled steel. They are fabulous!

We enjoyed the piece that had to be taken out to level the top. It's sitting in our other new acquisition.

I bought a frying pan when Josh and I moved in together that we have had for a long time at this point. It is used almost daily and was showing some serious signs of wear. When I went looking for cake pans I came across this lovely ceramic skillet that has a finish that is non-toxic and it is crazy light. I loved that it was a green solution to our pan dilemma. The bonus is it basically requires no oil to cook things. The white interior also makes it easier to see when food is done.
Anyway-back to the cake. Finished it looked like this:

I've been trying to improve my cake and cupcake baking skills so that I can make good stuff when Maegwin is ready to have parties. I also made some fishy cupcakes for Maegwin's St. Patty's day party at school which were a big hit.

Just FYI though, it is crazy hard to find circus peanuts now. Who knew! I had to search like three stores and I only was able to procure one bag so the fish didn't have as many fins as I wanted. I'm hoping to make some chickie cupcakes for Easter.

Luckily being sick doesn't slow me down on the knitting front! I have been zooming along on quite a few different projects. I've got one Swedish Fish sock done. This is a Spilly Jane pattern and if you are a knitter and haven't checked her stuff out, do it. She makes really fun whimsical colorwork patterns and even I, a novice at best with Fair Isle knitting, am able to do them.

I used two colors of Spud & Chloe Fine sock yarn and I really like working with it. It seems springy and feels like it will hold up well to wear.
I also have completed one sock for Maegwin and was working my way down the foot of the second one before the fancy struck me to blog.

The pattern is King Me from the Petite Purls website. Their stuff is cute and free and I love it. The yarn is Knit Picks Simple Stripes which is discontinued now but I like it. I'll probably still have a half ball when I finish these so I might make a few spares for the inevitable missing baby sock to not slow us down.
The last thing I've finished recently is this cardigan worn by Maegwin in today's egg hunt.

It's Tiny Tea Leaves and I originally made it short sleeved because we had a weird heat wave of 80 degree weather last week and I feared that spring like winter would skip us altogether and she wouldn't even be able to wear the sweater. Of course, today was 41 degrees so we only took her coat off for a few quick shots then put it back on her. sigh.

The egg hunt went well though again no one from Maegwin's class showed up so we still didn't meet any parents of kids her age. I don't understand what the deal is. Oh well. She was definitely more into it this year than last and ran from egg to egg quickly scooping them up.

It was hard to get a clear shot since she was half running around and squealing happily.

She stopped a few times to dump her bag out into another one because it doesn't really have a ton of room. I did this on purpose so we can give her some candy but even full it won't be a ridiculous amount.

She crawled behind and under bushes and let nothing stop her.

Even the cold only made her come and snuggle for a minute. She loosed a mighty battle cry of "EGGIES!!" and continued.

This little girl kept standing in front of an egg but seemed totally disinterested in picking it up. Maegwin hovered in front of her for a while before the girl's dad finally told Maegwin to take the egg. It was funny to watch.

She was thorough and even checked inside the caterpillar.

Then we headed in to empty them out and check the loot.

Just tootsie rolls and Hershey Kisses but it was a good time.


She fell asleep on me after we ran a ton of errands. I wrapped her up in her new quilt and it reminded me of Dune. Worm sign, we have worm sign!


Other than that, the other two big pieces of news are that I changed jobs and that we bought a riding mower. The job thing is just a lateral move within my company so really not that big of a piece of news. The hours are better though-well they will be once they back fill me...We are psyched about the mower though! So nice to not have to push mow our crazy big yard and now we can help our neighbors out who helped us mow. It should be delivered tomorrow so we're going to fire that up as soon as we get it.

Where is winter?

It seems we are trapped in a perpetual autumn here.  My yard is as Miracle Max says in the Princess Bride "mostly dead" or "slightly alive".  Unfortunately, unlike Cary Elwes in that awesome movie, it is a very unattractive sight.  It has also been extremely muddy so it makes going outside a very messy prospect.  Our driveway is a mud pit since we didn't quite have the funds to get gravel trucked in before winter started.  We weren't planning on not having nice frozen ground to work with.  There is no feeling quite like going out to start the car (it's still cold enough for them to need warming up in the morning) and feeling your nice work shoes sinking in heel first.

My weekends have been filled, as always, with my desperate attempts to keep the wreckage of my house at bay.  These largely fail and I'm trying my best this year to not let it get to me.  I do, after all, have a two year old.  Still I somehow feel that if I can't keep my house clean I'm somehow failing.  I acknowledge this is absolutely ridiculous but there it is.  On Saturdays we go to toddler yoga which gets Maegwin some well needed exercise and also gives her a chance to see her friend, Emma.  It's during her normal nap time though so we've been trying to adjust to that.  Some weeks this means her nap is totally shot and she sacks out at 4 pm, completely exhausted, then sleeps until 6 and is unable to go to bed at a normal hour.

Since I last blogged, I've had a birthday.  We didn't really do anything except enjoy some lavish cupcakes from Whole Foods.

Maegwin had it all figured out that she would eat the turtle, I would eat the monkey, and Daddy would eat the elephant. When asked who would eat the hedgehog, she got quite serious and said "No one," with authority.

She did wish me happy birthday though which I happened to catch on film.


I've managed to get a bit of knitting done as well. I participated in a "What's at the bottom of your garden" swap which had some very small knitting requirements. I made a frog:

and a snail:

The snail was quite bellicose and faced off against the Wheely Bug. I'm not sure who would have won that matchup because Maegwin intervened.

I also finished a cowl in some very soft grey yarn that has been in my stash for several years.

She got into helping me take pictures.

I'm currently knitting an Autumn Vines Beret in some alpaca that was the second yarn I ever bought. At the time I had no idea what one did with sport weight yarn, I just knew I loved the color-a mix of blue, pink, green, and purple. More pictures to come soon. I have about 15 rows left to go.

We missed getting our winter cover crops in but honestly with how warm it has been we're going to try today to get them down. I think that they will germinate nicely. I can't believe it's almost time to order seeds again. Without snow I've lost track of what time of year we are in.

Yesterday during nap time I made some play dough for Maegwin using this recipe. It turned out pretty well but I think my food coloring may have been a bit old. It was really settled and I ended up with very blah colors. The recipe was easy though and she's been having a great time with it. I see more dough making in our future!

We're going through a Mommy phase right now and it's a bit exasperating, but I'm sure we'll make it. I just wish she would let Daddy help sometimes. Time to get some breakfast before I am summoned again. Cheers, All!

A selection of favorites

Maegwin has been getting into watching Journey on Youtube.  Yep, you read that right...Journey.  She especially likes this video and will ask me to "turn on Steve Perry" which is something I assure her is most likely not in my power.  hehe  She also enjoys all of the Iso videos which is an oddly adorable dachsund doing very mundane things to great music.  My favorites are Iso takes a bath and Iso on the couch (which also reminded me why I love Ben Folds Five).

I've been getting some knitting projects done.  I finished up those fingerless mitts that I talked about for Mom and will give them to her when I see her next.  I also finished a hat for Maegwin's friend Emma which turned out really cute and I hope to make one for Maegwin soon.

Things were pretty whacky at work this week and while I am a patient person I found myself being really ill-tempered. Hopefully this weekend will give me some time to unwind. Enjoy!