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Today: Art!

(Am experimenting with photoblog options. All photos embiggenable; click on it, then click on it again.)

I’m trying some different ways of making my daily photoblogging easier. Y’know, so I’ll actually do it.

Who can identify this tree for me?

(Am experimenting with photoblog options. All photos embiggenable; click on it, then click on it again.)

Pictures I took walking from one end of Grand Old Day to the other. Since I live at one end, it only seemed right to walk all the way to the other. And now I never have to again.

(Am experimenting with photoblog options. All photos embiggenable; click on it, then click on it again.)

I have seen many people (possibly even you) refer to themselves as the King or Queen of Procrastination. In truth, however, I am the true occupant of the throne. Not simply because procrastination is a way of life, but because it is my faithful servant. Rare in my life have been the times when I have come to regret procrastinating, but the list of benefits is near endless. (Okay, there was that one time, but I refuse to build a life strategy around the seventh grade science fair.)

Beyond the simple satisfaction of doing what I want when I want, putting things off works to my advantage time and time again. I have a whole semester to work on a paper but leave it until the last week, only to find that the perfect source material for my subject just became available the day before. If I’d ordered those stand-up tickets when I was supposed to, we wouldn’t have gotten the seats next to our friends. Good thing I watched tv instead of putting those seedlings in the ground, because surprise hailstorm!

My dedication to this lifestyle does not, however, extend to the mundane and everyday. When it comes to cleaning the litterbox, putting away the laundry, grocery shopping, I have spent the last few months trying to keep Future Me in mind. I am using my own neuroses in my favor with two important points:

• I hate having people unhappy with me. I have an extra lobe in my brain for worrying about who might be angry with me at any given moment.
• I’m always irritated at Past Me for reading the internet when she should have been unloading the dishwasher.

So the trick is to count Future Me as a person. There’s nothing I like better than approval, and when it comes to my own approval, well, I know from the inside how sweet that is.

~~~

All right, here is your photographic reward for plowing through that terrible metaphor. And by “reward” I mean some grainy photos from today’s lunch trip with Mary to the American Swedish Institute.

 This mansion/castle/museum is like an Alice Starmore sweater – no surface goes undecorated.

Walking around in there made me want to wear a dress shaped like this squared-off flowers.

I guess this wouldn’t technically be called “stained glass,” since it’s a painting on glass rather than leaded segments. It was stunning either way.

Mary and I always have fun afternoons. We’ve resolved to go back later this year and just sit in the solarium with books. Reading in a castle built in 1908. Like princesses. Because we can.

The time has come. The time to make Michael a sweater. 

I think most knitters dream of clothing their significant others, but the Sweater Curse is a thing for a reason. My husband is not a little dude. At 6’5″ and with a 53″ chest, I’ve always known that a sweater for him would be a major undertaking. But making him something that I wanted to knit and then being annoyed when he didn’t wear it never seemed like a good strategy for marital bliss.  So (OMG has it been that long??) eight years ago, when the thought first crossed my mind, I promised myself that I wouldn’t knit him a sweater until he asked for one. He’s very hot-natured and we lived in Missouri, so I mostly put it out of my mind.

I did buy the yarn a couple of years ago, though. Hope springs eternal. Between a buy-in and some hoarded LYS work-hours credit, I managed to get three hundred dollars worth of Araucania Toconao for about seventy bucks. When it was delivered more apricot than orange, I traded Rain some knitting for her dyeing services, and obtained a lovely bittersweet.

More time passed, and the seventeen skeins-in-waiting hung out in their bin, waiting for the confluence of events that would allow them their heyday. They became hopeful when we packed up and moved to Minnesota, but our first winter here was quite mild, and they continued to bide their time. When this past winter provided us with seven months of sub-sixty degree weather, they knew their time had come.  Michael said he wanted a sweater.

We sat down together last month and had a deep dig through Ravelry. I did a pattern search (“Pullover – Worsted/Aran – Knitting – Has Photo – Male”) and we started scrolling through the thumbnails. I had 82 tabs open by the time we finished with page sixteen. I’ll be honest, I tried to steer him toward something simple like Big Thaw or Cobblestone, but my husband knows what he likes.  We finally narrowed it down to two patterns, but his clear favorite was St. Enda.

Alice. Fucking. Starmore. People, what Michael lacks in subtlety he makes up for in complexity. Dude knows a good pattern when he sees one.

I timed some rows and did some math, and figure that if I knit for half an hour uninterrupted every day, I’ll be done with the sweater by October. I love him, and he’s worth it, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to whine. Wish me (and my wrists) luck!

I talked to my mom after I posted last time, and changes were abruptly set in motion. Turns out that in spite of manyseveral emails and conversations over the previous few weeks, mom’s surgery was not on the tenth, but the second. So instead of hanging out with Michelle for the weekend and having some calm prep time for the trip, we were suddenly scrambling. We both had to change our times off work, Michelle had to get hospital documentation for the airline to cancel her plane tickets, and instead of a leisurely drive down on a Thursday afternoon, we had a 10-hour slog through the last (last, dammit!) snowstorm of the season.  Luckily, both workplaces were amazingly kind about the reschedule and we made it down in time to nap for an hour before taking mom to check in at the hospital.

Surgery took longer than expected (scar tissue = a torn hole in the bladder, apparently) but well, though they won’t know if the tumor is going to require chemo or radiation until pathology comes back in a couple of weeks. Speaking of which, just before we left town, we found out that Katy has a tumor on her face that is going to require surgery. Up to $1500 worth, which I don’t even know how or if we can manage, but I decided not to think about that until we get back to Minnesota.

We brought mom home to her apartment this afternoon, and she was tired enough that she just wanted to sleep. We were thus able to spend some time hanging out with friends.  Which I’ll sum up with this:

It’s the existential questions that really get to the heart of friendship.