Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The comforts of home

I have had cause to think quite a bit about house and home and comfort. I recently went on a bit of a binge with the online shopping. I couldn't figure out why I suddenly felt compelled to buy all that stuff. When I really thought about it, it was a comfort thing. My house is still all topsy-turvy trying to recover from "the incident". Not a single room in the house was really usable for a couple of weeks. In short, my home was not providing me with the comfort I needed. Naturally I turned to my knitting for the comfort I was lacking. No such luck. I was sick of socks. I didn't have the concentration required to knit lace. I had swatched for the sweater I was really excited about, but until I washed the swatch to make sure the gauge was in fact good, I couldn't work the sweater. Unfortunately we don't have working laundry at the house right now and I kept forgetting to take the stupid swatch to the laundromat. Without home and knitting comfort, I turned to shopping. I finally ordered some Rockin' sock yarn. I ordered three books from Knit Picks. And I subscribed to IK at long last. Several times I was able to back down from the ledge and finally asked myself, "what are you doing?" The answer was looking for comfort. Once I realized what the issue was I was able to take other steps to make things better. I moved a bunch of stuff that had been stacked up in our bedroom up to the spare bedroom that won't require any construction. My personal sanctuary was restored to some semblance of order and the compulsion to comfort shop has relaxed. Whew!

Last Saturday I ventured down to Tacoma to check out the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival. It was lovely and next year I may actually attend classes. I got my book signed by Stephanie! Then I went to the market. It was lovely wandering around the booths looking at all the wonderful fibery goodness and being wrapped in the loving comfort and wool fumes. Several things happened at the market. I was fondling some fiber when a woman behind me started explaining the properties of some yarn. I knew that voice, I just couldn't remember from where. I moved around so I could see her face and she was really familiar, but I still couldn't put my finger on it. She looked at me and said, "welcome back!" That startled me because I hadn't been there before. Eventually the epiphany hit. This was the woman who taught my mom and me to spin! What a wonderful small world. Next I met Teyani, and had a nice conversation about spinning.

It was a really great day that ended up like this... I joined Knitters Anonymous. I bought a new spindle and some fiber. I have been spinning a little bit each evening when I get home, and I am in love! Hopefully this dose of comfort shopping will hold me over until my house is back in order. If not I have set my sights on a spinning wheel asap, so perhaps that motivation will keep me from getting out of control in the internet...

We'll see!

Monday, January 15, 2007

Let's recap...

So 2007 hasn't started out the way I had envisioned. Our year end trip to California was great. We spent 5 action packed days at Disneyland and California Adventure. Then a couple days in the Pasadena area including the Rose Parade. The down side is that with the long hours and lack of sleep, the dry climate and the air quality, we all came home with a cough and sniffle. We got home late Monday night to find one of the trees in our yard laying over into our neighbor's driveway. Luckily nothing was damaged when it fell. We had 2 evenings to do our laundry and clean up the disaster we left when we rushed out of town before my parents arrived to stay for a week. It was great to see them and my mom very generously shared her cold with me. So back in bed I went over the weekend feeling like total snot-headed crap. I even missed the rescheduled Christmas gathering with the in-laws due to my yuckiness.

Monday things got really interesting. A load of laundry was started before everyone left the house for the day (not an unusual occurance). Upon arriving home we discovered that the washer had malfunctioned and pumped large quantities of water into my entire house. The laundry room is upstairs in our house and directly over the garage. The hallway was soaked and the water was making it's way into the other three rooms up there. It was practically raining in the garage and the furnace was completely filled with water. Water made it's way down the stairs to the hardwood in the diningroom and through the walls/floor/ceiling to the family room below and rained onto the leather sofa below (missing a large stash of sock yarn by inches!) What a mess!

We have spent the last week in a hotel while our house was full of drying equipment. I just got word that the new furnace is in and the blowers and dehumidifiers have been removed. The carpets are getting cleaned tomorrow and the insurance adjuster is coming Thurday. I'm sure it will be a long process of putting everything back together, but I'm so excited to sleep in my own bed tonight!

What about the knitting, you ask? I worked on hubby's socks on the plane to and from California, but since I've not felt well and the light in the hotel room sucked, I've done very little. I did buy a sweater kit and did a little swatching for that, but I'm not jumping in on that quite yet. In my cold medicated state while my mom was here I managed to somehow end up with the wrong number of heel stitches on the other pair of gift socks I was madly trying to finish, so that didn't happen. I will finish them and they will get to the intended recipient, but I just didn't have it in me last week. I am very ready to get back to the normal routines of our life. We haven't really had that since before Thanksgiving.

Think happy thoughts for us, and I hope 2007 gets better very soon!