Here I am, popping up like a little groundhog to give an update and reassure everyone that the house hasn't killed me yet. I've been doing a crapload of cleaning and cleaning and yardwork and taking down seriously icky A/C window units (those things are freakin' heavy!), and yardwork and lots more yardwork. My bedroom looks so much better.

OK, well, you can't really tell from the picture, but believe me, it does.
And um, here should be a picture of the enormous pile of brush and lawn debris that my parents and I made, but I guess I was too busy trying not to pass out and die to actually get a picture. Crap. Just visualize.
My parents have come out the past two Saturdays and helped me bushwhack the yard. They are amazing. Aparently I have a pretty sizeable side yard, but you could never tell because it was horribly overgrown and covered in English ivy.
My next big task is picking out paint colors.

I have actually been accomplishing quite a bit on the knitting front.

Mom's socks have two toes and two heels, and lack only cuffs to make them complete.

The Branching Ferns shrug is almost three-quarters finished. I have one more lace repeat before I join for the sleeve.

The Best Roommate Ever's socks are coming along. I finished one toe, which I did not take a picture of, because I am full of picture-taking fail today.

And finally, I have a few gifts for guy-type people that I promised to make, so I snapped up some Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Superchunky at Knitch. Soft, machine-washable, and on sale! If only guys weren't so boring about colors.

I CAN has house!

Look! I has a house!

And, uh, yeah, expect posting to be sporadic for a while, because I have a lot of work to do. All you lovely ladies who volunteered to help, expect me to be calling in those favors soon.

tomorrow

I can haz howse?

the theme for this week: creation!

I woke up Wednesday morning (the first day of my "weekend") with a wicked pancake craving, so, armed only with my wits, a vegan cookbook and a spatula, I made these little beauties.

Mmmmm, vegan pancakes. Topped with vanilla soy yogurt and berries (frozen, hence the vivid purple color) and accompanied by fake bacon, since I wanted some salt to go with my sugar. Intense amounts of numminess, and a rather odd and alarming continuation of a recent trend. All recent evidence to the contrary, I am severely cooking-skills-deprived. It was only recently that I figured out if I don't make food, no food will appear. Don't ask me how I survived until now. I think it was sheer dumb luck.


Crusoe socks, finished! I didn't even need to be sat on.

The larval beginnings of a pair of socks for the Best Roommate Ever.

My mom's socks have two toes and a heel! Yay for progress and speedy mindless stockinette!

I finished one sleeve of the Branching Fern shrug. (I made the pattern up out of my head, with a little help from Barbara Walker, and for the time being, it's going well.) Modeled with a recent purchase, one of my very favorite shirts, which I then tried to take a picture of in the bathroom mirror . . .

forgetting that if you take a picture of words in a mirror, they will be backwards. D'oh! Attempt #2:

Much better. And so very true. Need one of your own? Here. (I especially like the bumper sticker.)

So close! And yet . . .

I am SO CLOSE to finishing the Crusoe socks it's not even funny.


I've been almost finished with them for about a week now, and every night I say, "Tonight I'm going to finish those socks!" So far, not so much. Last night I was distracted from sock knitting by the need to make little wee tiny lemony minicupcakes


and ice them while watching Brick for like the eighth time. This level of domestic goddess-ery is weird, unprecedented and unsettling. But the cupcakes are quite tasty.


(My excuse for not watching the Olympics is as follows: all they were showing was boxing, and in the words of Lymon Zerga, "Hand-to-hand combat does not interest me", and the marathon, which is spectacularly boring to watch. "Yep. They're still running.")
Fortunately, I am having dinner with some knitting friends tomorrow, and they will sit on me and force me to finish the socks. You ladies know who you are. I'm counting on you and your evil ways.

Warning: too much lolcats can be detrimental to your spelling

Toze!


I has dem.

sometimes it's hard to get anything done around here

I was cleaning the other day, and tossed the rug from our wee tiny entryway area into the living room in order to mop. The Best Roommate Ever came by a few minutes later when the floor was dry to put the rug back, and saw this.

Don't see it? How about now?

And here's a view of what was peeking out the other end.

It's awfully hard to get things done around here sometimes.