Petunia rambles on and on….

I was off yesterday, and will work on Saturday in it’s stead. Got the fasting blood tests done first thing, and got the last (I hope!!) chest x-ray taken, after January’s debacle with aspiration pneumonia. Then Pop and I spent the day moving stuff from that storage locker back to the house. I would love to have everything out of there by the end of the month, so we don’t have to pay another month’s fee, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Next week we plan on going to see Daughter, the handsom SIL and the GrandTwins. Then I have another dental procedure scheduled where I’ll be out of commission, and will need him to haul my sorry ass home (again). Don’t know how much babysitting I’ll need post-op.

Pop and I are about done with the Annual Discussion over Daylight Saving Time. We still haven’t come to an agreement; I have little hope we ever will. He dislikes it with a passion – I don’t think it’s a big enough deal that anyone should be all that annoyed. He says “they” took his hour and he wants it back. I advised him that he’ll get it back; it will be mailed to him through the US Postal System so it should get here in October or maybe not even until November. I like DST. I like having an extra hour of daylight at a time when I will benefit by it. If it’s ever light out at 5 am, I’m gonna sleep through it.  Over the next 2 weeks, if we can make a few short runs over to storage after work, we might be able to get it cleared out. We’ll have daylight to do that, Pop.  Did you want to get up and do that at 5 in the morning? Huh??

Pop’s been carrying stuff home for weeks. Stuff in boxes and plastic tubs. Lots of stuff, lots of boxes. I bitched at him that he’s doing it all ass-backwards suggested helpfully that if he brought over some of the furniture, desks, tables, umpteen shelving units and such, that I could begin unpacking and putting things away, working towards restoring some order rather than just sitting on my ass watching him build a miniature version of Mount Everest in the back bedroom. Yesterday, he finally brought back 3 tall wooden shelving units and one of my sets of wire rack shelving. Those are commercial grade, made for food service, and STRONG!! Several hours of unpacking and sorting cleared out a lot of those boxes.

Parts of my “past lives” went through my hands. I was/am a quilter, and have a fine stash of fabrics and fat quarters and tools and books to go with it. Before that, I sewed much of my own clothes and also for the children, the house. And I did hand needlework, counted cross-stitch and much embroidery. Did all sorts of that. Hardanger. Drawn- or pulled-thread work. Samplers and recreations of antique samplers. Blackwork. And I found what the kids always called my “giraffe.” I love that device, and when daughter started doing needlework seriously, I made sure she had the complete set-up, too. Her cross-stitch work is awesome! (Never did buy a Hinterberg, though)

But I mainly worked with books, sorted them by subject and tried to place them logically so they could be found again when needed. Quiliting, machine quilting, regular sewing, hand sewing/embroidery, machine embroidery, crochet, knitting. This required a lot of sitting and looking through many of them, and took far more time than it needed to!

I found these – must have been my mother’s. She had the patience and skill to do this sort of work. They’re thin little pamphlets and were mixed in with full-sized books – I probably haven’t seen them in years. I remember Mom having doilies all over the house, dipping them in straight starch and pinning them out to dry. Often! I don’t know if my eyes are up to such fine work anymore.

Check this out – it goes back to 1972!!!  I remember making 4 of that blue pullover sweater, in various colors and sizes, for 4 nieces/nephews who were then ages 8-12. I was a young mother, money was tight, and I made them as Christmas gifts! And back then, we all thought the Bernat Acrylic was the best thing out there. Nothing wrong with these patterns, though – guess that’s why I saved ’em all these years.

or something like that.  She said it over here on her recent post, part of Project Spectrum’s focus on NORTH during March and April.  Go out, find North and take pictures of what you see, what appeals to you, what represents north to you.

My next-door neighbor’s side door and trash bin didn’t appeal to me; not really that photogenic. I assumed that the side of his house would have limited appeal to just about everybody, including the neighbor. I mean, a white door, a black trash can. While black-and-white photography has a beauty all it’s own, I think it would need a more interesting subject. So I grabbed up the camera as I headed out over the weekend to run errands, do some shopping.

Driving, watching where I’m going. Looking North, too.

Did pull off to the shoulder of the road to safely take this picture! If you look really closely, you can see “Miles the Monster,” a large sort-of statue on the right (east) side of the track. Dover is referred to as the “Monster Mile” by the NASCAR folks. The statue looks like it’s made out of concrete, is patently ugly, and my wee grandsons always said, each time we drove past, “Grandma, that man needs to put some clothes on!” The track complex is HUGE, attracts tens of thousands of folks for 2 big races annually.

Because I don’t fly (haven’t in 26 years now!) and generally don’t do UP of any sort very well, my concept of North is reduced to what’s within a reasonable driving distance of home.  Therefore Lappland is out! So is Alaska. Being a “flatlander” I like someplace with some hills, and love going up into the Pocono Mountains, central Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Valley, or into central New York. It seems like another world up there, so different from what I’ve become accustomed to here on the coast. I’ve been posting pictures of the Poconos here and on Flickr for years – and finally have something to post regarding Project Spectrum.

And the PS color is Green, not one I work with often. Doing February Lady Sweater in KnitPicks WOTA in Forest Heather.  Starts at the neckline, raglan increases, separate the sleeves out, work down the body. I’m about down to waistline or so, and due to age and, ummm, girth, I don’t think stopping right at the waistline is a good idea – some can wear it and look lovely. Some clearly shouldn’t try. I’m in the latter group, so I’ll knit on for awhile!

Well, yesterday, while I had daylight streaming in the back window, I sat to tink back the knitting – to those who don’t know Jack about knitting, “tink” means to uh, un-knit or to knit backwards (knit – tink) or to correct flagrant stupidity, which was clearly the case here.

I’ve been knitting for 50+ years, and still, I did this, and with all these years of wisdom/experience, I can’t figure out how I could be this stupid (Children, all 3 of you, keep your damn comments to yourself on this particular subject) (Please do not list here other examples of flagrant stupidity, to demonstrate that this was clearly expected and normal behavior for me!) The first thing I did was to thoroughly inspect what I had, and put wee markers in at every place the error occurred, just to be sure that I tinked back far enough. Nothing worse than taking 3 long rows out, thinking you’ve got it all corrected, re-knitting the damn 3 rows AND THEN finding one more stinking mistake way back there.

So I’m comfortably sitting in the sunbeam coming in the window, with the iPod playing a Sticks and String podcast, and reversing last night’s accomplishments. Wait a minute! The yarn’s not going to the stitch on the right-hand needle! Huh?? So I transferred one stitch from left to right, wondering. Did I make a boo-boo and attempt to fix it and screw something up here? Turn the work around and lets look at it from the other side. WTF???? The yarn isn’t coming from the right direction.

I’m still amazed at what I did, and can’t figure how I accomplished it, and why it took me so long to figure out what I’d done!

I was working on it in the office. At the end of the day, I scooped it up and dropped it into my knitting bag and came home, did some chores, dinner, laundry, whatever. Finally, later in the evening, I sat down and picked up my knitting again. I do remember that I was in the middle of the row – I remember thinking, “Mom would hollar at me for this!” She was pretty strict about always finishing the row – (this worked back in the day when everything was done flat) I know I counted the stitches between the markers, making sure I had all 7, that no stitches had been dropped – and I went on…..

THE WRONG DAMNED WAY!!!

I picked it up backwards and that’s the way I went!

For the record, my maiden name was not Corrigan.*

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I finally bought another document shredder. The original was a cheap model, and worked well for quite a while, but then it started to jam often. Pop would spend lots of time with tweezers pulling wee bits of paper out of it. He was spending more time picking confetti out than I was at shredding. The blades in it were too dull to do the job anymore. This new one reportedly will shred credit cards and staples. I’m not sure why anyone would need to shred a staple, or what potential risk there might be to my name or my credit from an intact staple. Actually, I’m going to work at NOT putting any staples into it, ever.

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*For those of you who are too young to get the reference, read here.

I will henceforth be known as Wrong-Way Petunia.