Is it a legacy or just more junk?

What will happen to all my digital photos when I die? Who will care?

When Daddy died we had a mountain of paper photos to go through, and quite a lot of them got dumped. The kinds of photos that got dumped were pictures of places and people that none of us knew, or pictures of my stepmother’s brother-in-law’s family whom we didn’t know either. They had no kids, so there wasn’t someone who would show up later looking for them.

There was a whole album of photos from my Dad’s retirement party (in the early 1980s) that were badly composed point and shoot shots of people being silly with the hired belly dancer. My dad’s former coworkers, none of which we knew.

Saddest of all were the photos of my step brother, the family black sheep. He died of complications of alcoholism at 53, and had no kids. Some of us took one or two of him, but the bulk of them, especially baby pictures, went unclaimed. Ouch.

Now, this is not to say that we didn’t swoop in and enjoy most of the photos of our own childhoods and early adulthoods. I took most of them home to digitize and 5 years later I’m still working on it.
I’m also going to scan and organize all the photos I took prior to going digital. Sometimes I wonder if I’m nuts. Will anyone want them or will they get dumped?

Nina does seem to enjoy the scrapbook pages, even though she didn’t like the idea of making them when I was doing them.  I guess it’s time to get back on that project soon, right?

And another craving hits me hard

I'm the proud (?) new owner of an Express Redi Set Go grill, and it makes the most awesome personal pizza. This picture is from foodline.com, since I ate mine so fast it was gone before I could photograph it.

The bottom crust was crunchy, the top was bubbling and delicious, and well, what more can I say? For a gal on a diet, personal pizza is perfect. And this one is just the right size, too!

 Now I'll have to eat pizza almost every day for the next 11 days, since that is the size of the big ball of dough I made up. That will fix me. And, good thing it's fast and easy, too.

A seasonal craving!

In the last few days I have had cravings for all things peppermint. Of course this is the season where it shows up all over the place, so that's convenient. This coffee, by the way, is yummy, and I'm not usually a big fan of flavored coffees.

The peppermint mocha coffee creamer is going to send my diet out the door if I don't watch out. That stuff is amazing, and addictive.

There's a price to be paid for living on the water.

That price is wildlife that you never want to see. Like rats.

Two years ago when Roehm Air Conditioning put in my new unit, they did not seal up the area around the tube that goes in the house. Apparently rats have been using it as their way in to my attic where they have been nesting in the insulation. (El vomito.)

One thing I don't understand is how I could have heard the scratching in the night and so easily brushed it aside as static noise from my clock radio. The clock radio wasn't even on "radio" at the times I heard the noise. This has been going on for over a year and I have been in denial. I live alone, therefore noises in the night must be explained away harmlessly. It wasn't until I heard scratching coming from the ceiling on the other side of the bedroom that I realized I had a problem.

Another thing I don't understand is how my bug man could go in my attic to treat for ants and never mention to me about the rat droppings. The rat control guy said they were obvious.

So now, the rat control guy will be back every other day to empty and refill traps until they are all caught. Then I'll need to find a cleanup company to remove the poop and wrecked insulation.

I don't' think I'll ever complain about lizards in the garage again. The good news is the lake is really full again!

My kale dilemma.

Ok, three big pieces of kale left. Should I use them in a green smoothie or make (for the first time) some kale chips?

I like having difficult choices like this!

Nuts About Florida is all over the map.

Ok, so I'm trying to work different fruits and vegetables into my diet. Apricots! I never eat them, so why not?

I got these home and put some in my next green smoothie. Yes it was delicious, thank you very much. Buy why do they have to come from Turkey? Don't we make apricots in this country?

You see, I try to remember to select fruits and veggies from not so far away. Except bananas. I read the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and agree with the theory that we shouldn't eat stuff that has to be shipped in from far away, using up energy resources. But if eating greens from Florida means kalalu you can forget about it.

Kalalu in my cart. or don't ask a whimpy blender to do the job.

I got the idea into my head to start doing green smoothies. Green smoothies, for the uninitiated, are blender drinks with greens disguised by fruits, blended in (usually) a really strong blender.

I have an Oster blender that is good for the spinach/banana/melon variety of green smoothie, but once I tried to get out of my comfort zone I had some problems. At the vegetable stand, the greens looked tired and hot, except for these pretty greens marked kalalu. No, I'd never heard of them either, but I did need to do something besides spinach everyday. I knew I wasn't ready for kale or collards. The Romaine lettuce produced 3/4 of the container of fiberous foam. Yeah, like that was pleasant to drink. Thank you Osterizer.

But I found out that kalalu, or callaloo, or calalu; is the Jamaican equivalent of spinach. Maybe, but it was so darn tough that I had flecks of the stuff settling to the bottom of my glass almost immediately. And it tasted like St. Augustine grass smells when mowed.

So I ordered the Vitamix. That was a week ago and I haven't even been notified that it's shipped.

I had a lot of  kalalu, so I cooked the rest like spinach: put wet greens on top of sauted onions and garlic and steam until soft. They were still tough. Like collards.

Me and spinach, we are still real good buddies. He's a softie, what can I say?

Busted kitchen timer. Or not.

I drop my kitchen timer (or it falls off the freezer) at least 3 times a week. When it hits the tile, the back, battery and timer all fly across the floor in 3 different directions. Still, the dang thing is working. I wish it would stay on the freezer better or just frickin break already.

How many times can this thing fall on its head and still be ok?

My newest toy, meet the pressure cooker!

I love my new pressure cooker. It's great for beans and pulled pork, but I think I've taken it a step further with hard cooked eggs.

There is no savings in cooking time, but dang those pressure cooked eggs practically peel themselves! There's your time savings!

Trapped in the dentist's chair

Well, another chapter of the "Blame it on the computer" book.

I had to go in for x-rays and a once-over by the dentist, which there wasn't time for in the previous cleaning visit. My appointment was for 9 AM and I didn't get out of there until 11:15, all due to the new digital x-ray system and "the computer".

If I didn't have to be at work today at noon I could have had the doc start my new crown work. I'm glad I declined, since his waiting room was really full when I left. Schedules are screwed up everywhere.

Trippin' down memory lane - 1978?

I got one of those portable scanners and I said to myself - wow this is going to go so much faster than the flatbed I used to use! Just press a button and slide over the photo! Do 3 or 4 in the time it used to take to scan one!

Hold your horses, Bucko. The scanning does go faster. But each and every photo must be cropped and color corrected and renamed and sorted into logical folders. Where's that speed now, huh?

More about my insanely ambitious scanning projects later.

Anyway, here is a photo of Paula H and me on Halloween in 1977 or 78. Damned if I can remember which one. I'm in my old-fashioned librarian costume. SSSSHHHH!

How does all that stuff get there?

I couldn't put one more thing in my freezer. So when I cleaned it out there was bread from 2009 and a ham bone from 2008. Really, how does such stuff get overlooked so long?

Am I going to have to get one of those whiteboards to keep track? Yuck.

Repurchasing music

I know I had that album somewhere. Where is it? Did I leave it behind when I divorced? Not likely, unless it was a cassette. Ugh oh. Man I hate remembering cassettes as CDs.

The thing is, some of that music sounds so recent to me, could it have been over 5 years since I've heard it? Apparently the answer is yes.

Take in this example: Donald Fagan's The Nightfly. I was walking around the house singing Walk Between the Raindrops, and went to look for it to play. No, it wasn't in iTunes. Odd. No, it wasn't hiding in the Windows Media Player either. No, after a search of the CD shelves (a project all in itsself) came up empty, I resigned myself to purchasing it again. That's what I get for purchasing a cassette in the days of either CD or cassette. Whatever money I saved then I spent today. I could be wrong but I may have had this as an album, too. I know I had Aja in at least 3 formats.

I had forgotten how much I liked this album.

Good news/bad news: Donald Fagen has other albums I haven't heard yet. I may have to purchase them too.

Wow look at all the water!

Frisky geese!

All the rain we've been having has gotten the geese a little frisky.

Rain, sweet rain!

This is the "after" picture. Nice, isn't it?

We are finally getting some rain, thank you God!

This is the "before" lake level. Except for the green floaty stuff skuzzing up the surface, I really like the "after" better. But I won't look that closely at the surface, ok?

Sorry Charlie, you are a liar and I'm breaking up with you!

I've had a long-term relationship with Charlie the Tuna. It started in junior high school when my friend Jean and I ate a can with crackers at her house every day. It's a wonder her mom didn't put a stop to it.

Anyway, in college I sent some Starkist labels and a small amount of money off in the mail and got my first Charlie the Tuna wristwatch. Oh how I loved that watch! It was way cooler than those Mickey Mouse watches my dormmates had. The next year my sister gave me some towels with Charlie on them, because I liked the watch so much. Yay!!

The watch bit the dust and as a young adult in my 20's I found and bought another one.

But I have a big bone to pick with you, Starkist, and watches and other cool stuff won't fix this.

I bought a 12 oz. can of chunk light tuna in water, and it seemed, sloshy, even before I opened the can. So I read the label. It said each serving was 2 oz drained, and there are about 5 servings per can. There is no way there is 10 oz of drained tuna in there, and when I drained it and weighed it, there was 6.75. That's quite a big difference from the "about 10" the label is claiming. Unless you really eat your tuna dripping wet.

Sorry Charlie, after all these years I'm breaking up with you. I am going to see that cute mermaid, her chunks have actual identifiable chunks!

OMG, I can read on the treadmill!

I walk on a treadmill at the gym, 3 or 4 times a week, for about an hour each time. Back in March and April there was usually something on TV (among the 5 channels available on the machine) that was suitably distracting. Now with summer programming we are at boredom central on the old 'mill. I do not want another reason to skip a workout.

I have seen women reading magazines on the ellipticals and on the treadmills, so I thought what the heck, give it a try.

I started with a large print book, which was great, except it was a tiny bit too thick to fit the lipped tray, at least at the beginning of the book. I held it open with a lightweight rubber band, which I had to fiddle with at each page turn. Once I got nearer to the middle of the book, I could just slide the pages under the lip of the tray. Yay for books!

But the coolest thing is the Kindle on the treadmill. Except the fact that I felt the need to go wash my hands after the weight machines and before the 'mill, it was ideal. It didn't shift around and the page turns didn't always require two hands.

Next I will experiment with the Sony 300 reader, since it is smaller. The page turns require a little more focus since the "target" is a spot on the right side of a ring, but all in the name of reducing exercise boredom, right?

What a way to kill a Sunday

So, instead of working on the actual pants pattern I'd downloaded from the Internet and traced, I spent several hours doing a new croquis. I didn't remember how long it had been since I did my last one, or what I weighed at the time.

Here's the overall plan:

Take pictures of myself in dark, tight fitting clothes, front and side, and reduce the photos to outlines. Then, in theory, I can draw the outlines of sewing patterns on top of "me" and see how I really look in them. That is often enough to cure me of wanting that pattern altogether.

Oh, and since I couldn't find my old croquis, I hooked up my old computer and spent a great deal of time copying selected directories to the external hard drive, then comparing directories to the new computer. Mission accomplished, day/time killed without actually working on my pants pattern. More measurements were taken.

The last croquis was 13 months ago and 13 pounds heavier. I am smoother in this one, but it may be due to the choice of dark and tight this time around. Is it obsessive that I am considering buying a leotard and tights specifically for future croquis?

This croquis came out much better since I used Nina's old room for a background (less cluttered, better background angle to the wall, and better contrast), and fully extended my little tripod. Also I was standing more straight to the camera. Not perfectly straight, but better.

My conclusion after studying the two croquis side by side? I used to describe my body as a tube atop a beach ball, but that comparison only works from the front view. The side view shows a belly that denies the tube and extends the beach ball idea. With tiny bumps for boobs. Really now, was that necessary?

Sigh. Time to start doing some of those "core" exercises I have been avoiding at the gym. Damn I hate getting on the floor at the gym. I'm not too keen on doing it on the floor at home either. The treadmill is so much more sanitary.

No, I'm not going to post MY croquis here. The sample above is a professional model croquis. Mine would be TMI.

It's grilling time again!

Ok, so it's not like it's never grilling time here in south Florida, but when the popular media starts getting into it, so do I. I'm shallow that way.

So the above bunch of food is good for about 4 meals for me. Well, 4 meals of meat and 2 of veggies, but it's a start!

The above ribeye steak was brushed with a mustard/olive oil/red wine vinegar marinade and the veggies were brushed with Italian dressing. Pretty simple and OH SO Good. The most exciting part was when the wire grill brush fell apart in action. Yowza! The second most exciting part was not realizing I'd run out of fuel and wondering why it wasn't cooking faster. I really should be more observant. Ya think?

Walking around the neighborhood

So, walking around my neighborhood, I counted, well I tried to count the squirrels but there are so many of them! And they are loud and fuss at me when I walk under "their" trees. It was a good year for acorns last fall and now the critters are big and numerous. I suspect some of the neighbors are feeding them.
My next door neighbor puts out veggies for the bunnies, but I've never seen the squirrels stealing from that supply like they go after seeds in the bird feeders.

One thing that really surprised me was the big mango tree overhanging the fence on Gateway Blvd. I must not have ever walked there when there was fruit on the tree. It sticks way out, making that fruit available for anyone who can pick it. Too bad I don't care for mangos, with as many as grow around here. Here's a picture of the tree, which is near Gateway and Lawrence, if anyone wants to come a-pickin!

I can't tell you if they are ripe or not, though.

Bland chips, but chips nonetheless.

They are toasted tortilla wedges with a hint of cheese. Just a hint now, because "we" are watching how much cheese and other delicious stuff "we" eat. I love chips, I could make a whole meal out of them and dips/spreads most nights. Love love love the crunch.

But chips and crackers come with a high calorie price. I'm trying to come up with a suitable substitute that doesn't have me pretending crisp vegetables are really chips. Come on people, veggies are good but they are not crackers.

These chips are bland. Really bland, but they are crunchy so I'll make them again. Plus I still have a lot of tortillas left.

Wildlife in the 'hood.

It's a good year for wildlife in my neighborhood. And domestic animals gone wild, too.

We have a bunch of these bunnies out chomping on the grass, at dawn and dusk. And lately they have been joined by domestic rabbits that have either been released or escaped. Last week in a small rainstorm I saw one of each near each other looking all cute and everything.

I'll save my comments on the squirrels for later, but rest assured, they are out there in full force too. Can the foxes be far behind?

*I am not able to get a photo of the bunnies, so I'll give credit to the poster at Wikipedia who shared the one above: I_Am_Ninjor.

I just love my new carpet cleaner!

It's a Bissell lightweight that I got at the big box discount store. You know, the one with the funny looking customers. Except for me of course.

I did my daughter's former bedroom with it and boy did the room need it. First of all, I gotta say, that detergent for carpet cleaners is expensive! But the good news is it only took a couple of tablespoons for the whole little tank, and that tank did the whole little bedroom.

It didn't take out the dents however. And no matter how much I clean it, there is that tramped down area around the edge of the former bed. The photo makes it look even worse!

Now let me tell you the sad tale of the little Hoover that didn't suck. I bought a rug cleaner at the other big box discount store, you know, the one that is much more pleasant to shop in. I had that cleaner in my garage in the box for a couple of months before I opened it up and assembled it. Then I discovered it wasn't sucking up the dirty water. In fact on the tiles it just blew it around. It too was very inexpensive, but I hadn't saved the reciept, so now I can't return it to the store.

I'm offering it up on the local Freecycle to see if anyone wants to try to fix it or if anyone can convince a store to take it back. Good luck to them.

In the meantime I may have to go in there and do the walls with a magic eraser. All the walls up to 3 feet off the floor are covered with marks and stuff. My gawd those two "kids" were hard on the house.

If this is all I have to be bugged about...

Don't you just hate it when that woven strip in the towel shrinks up the 2nd time it's washed? It makes it harder to fold them, and it just looks bad. The towels in this group all did this except the one that was being used that day. This happened 5 years ago and I'm still pissed about it. Damn dryer in my rental apartment, anyway.

If this is the biggest complaint I can come up with then I'll take it.

Our annual drought.

The lake behind my house is freakishly dry. We are not supposed to have a beach on it AT ALL. Although it is fun to see the birds on it sometimes. The same birds are not so visible when they have to be on the grass.

They don't talk about our usual drought on the news these days because the DCF screw-ups, the economy, and the tsunami in Japan with the atomic disaster are out-shadowing our little water issue.

Dress shopping, an exercise not enjoyable yet.

Bealle's only had one dress in my size appropriate for an afternoon wedding. ONE. So I moved on to the mall.

Penney's was remodeling and the women's department was not well labeled. They had rack after rack of dresses. OMGZ they were so cute! So many in my colors, too! Wait, where are my size? I wandered around for 15 minutes before finding the one rack with 5 different dresses in my size range. Only 3 of them were in my colors, so off to the dressing room with them. Yeah, I know I need to lose the socks, but my last shopping trip in dress shoes ended with a blister, so I wasn't going there!

There were only 3 fitting rooms, so I got to wait in line for a booth. Once in I decided I kind of liked all three dresses, but one was somewhat better fitting than the others and wasn't so revealing of underwear etc. so it was the winner. DING DING DING!

The encouraging or discouraging thing is that I am only one size away from being able to shop from the hundreds of dresses instead of the five. Not that i wear that many dresses, but the ones in my closet have been there since I was married, that's how old they are. Sometimes you gotta update your stock, ya know?

I didn't get the memo.

But then, sometimes I am not that sensitive. Sheeesh.

I had a health scare a couple of weeks ago and after it was all over I went out and joined a gym. Yay me, finally doing something about this out-of-shape body instead of eating cookies.

I have been to the gym about 10 times total so far, and I have only once seen people wearing colors. That was on Friday night. Seriously, there's black, navy, gray, white and khaki. There were probably 60 people in there on Friday evening around 6:30, and 7 or 8 women and about that many men had on colored tops. No one had on colored bottoms at all.

I had purchased workout clothes in navy and coral, so when I wore the coral I REALLY stuck out. By the way, my gym is really big like the one above. But that girl in pink in the picture I snagged from the 'net must be on her Friday night date, ugh I mean workout.

Notice how I'm carefully not mentioning my workouts? Let's just say getting out of chairs has been a challenge for me since Wednesday. So I must really need it.

Just when you thought it was exciting enough...

After writing the piece about my embroidery machine and coordinating software I started exploring on the "box's" website and discovered there is an upgrade, and the upgrade supports sub-directories. Yay!

I downloaded the upgrade and attempted to install it according to directions. Well, sometimes no good deed goes unpunished, and in this case it did not upgrade according to the printed instructions. Not to be discouraged, I uninstalled it and did it again. And again.

You know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Just call me certifiable by this point. Now it doesn't connect at all. I am officially stuck with the 6 designs I put on there Saturday until I can get this straightened out.

Somehow I suspect this won't come free.

Machine embroidery, starting over, again

I had forgotten how much I had learned before and it had to be relearned. I got my embroidery machine in 2002 and had a great time with it, but didn't use it from 2005 to 2009. My friend Sam wanted a special embroidery job on his new lab coat, and I was glad to help. But Murphy assisted in the design of this one. He wanted the snake on a stick portion of the paramedics' symbol, but all the designs I found had the star of life with it. He picked a good one and I was able to edit out the star, then put his lettering around the stick. As it turned out, he liked the star but the lettering wasn't what he envisioned. We worked up a sample piece with brief lettering and I decided we needed to use my computer to adjust the lettering, rather than rely on the built-in letters on the machine. You can never tell on the machine how the kerning is going to work without actually stitching it out first.

I only had one font on my software, so I went to the website that sells them, thinking it would be a simple operation to add a couple of fonts. HA! Not so fast sister. The version of software I had was the 2004 version and I needed to upgrade before anything else could happen. So I did, and $235 and an hour of fussing with the installation later we were designing the lettering. Sam did most of the adjusting because he knew exactly what he wanted. How fast he picked up how to run Embird was amazing.

The embroidery machine uses a memory card that is similar in size to a Compact Flash card, but wider and flatter. The card can only hold 6 designs at a time, even though each one averages about 50 kb each. That's KB, not MB. Wow. That's how designs get from my computer to my machine.

The card reader/writer has a usb connection but I can't just use Windows to copy the files over because Windows does not recognize this device as a drive. So it requires proprietary software to do the actual transfer. But, the software does not recognize sub-directories (how primitive is that?) so designs have to go in a top level of c: or in the top level of a jump drive before I can even put them on the machine's card.

This is one of the main parts I forget each and every time. Oh, and the card reader with the card in it has to be plugged into the computer BEFORE the computer is booted up, or it chokes on a com connection which it doesn't even have. So after 9 YEARS I got smart and wrote these things on top of the Amazing Box. That's it's name, really!


We worked over 6 hours on this, and it looks great! But friends and family, know this, I will NEVER do this for money. It's so slow for me I could never make a profit! Plus, as everyone might guess, once you have to do it, it's no longer fun. This was fun, thanks for a great afternoon, Sam!

Teaching myself to fidget

So, in addition to doing some actual, real exercise, I'm trying to teach myself to fidget. I've heard fidgeters burn a tiny bit more calories and raise their metabolism (a tiny bit). I don't know what the science of this is, but I like TV and reading, so I am trying to add leg wiggling and toe tapping to my habits.

So, if you are sitting next to me and I'm jiggling your chair, know that I meant to. Tell me to stop, otherwise I won't.

I really miss tuna fish. The one of my youth, that is.

A few months ago I picked up this book, Four Fish, by Paul Greenberg. I don't eat much fish so it was just an idle curiosity about fish, fishing and the fish "industry". Plus, I had heard all these cautions about farmed fish.

But, as I was reading along, I had a sudden ah-ha moment. The reason I don't like to eat tuna in a can anymore is that light chunk tuna is no longer "chunk". The cans are smaller, and what passes for chunk these days is what was labeled as "flake" back when. Professional homemakers used to say that flake tuna was alright for tuna salad since you were going to break it up when you stirred in the mayonnaise anyway. But my mom and grandmother, in fact none of the women I knew would ever buy flake tuna. It was always chunk light for us! I am talking the 1970s and prior. Maybe into the 80s, but honestly I don't remember when tuna became either flake tuna or solid white. Solid white is flavorless, IMO, and with a texture of fish that's overcooked. I eat it but I b*tch about it.

The problem is of course, people. We have fished for tuna so much that the actual fish are harder to find, and they are smaller, too. So the cans are smaller and the cans have a higher portion of liquid to tuna. I remember squeezing out the oil with the lid and having more than half a can of meat left. No more.

I really miss tuna, but I do understand that with as many people who also love it, we have got to let the tuna reproduce and grow some or we won't have any.

House painting

All the houses in my neighborhood are getting painted. They are getting painted with exactly the same colors they have been, since the beginning, 1996. Apparently some of the residents were ok with a color change but the most vocal were not ok with it.

I wish I had seen the samples; I would have blogged about them, with photos. But, the samples were on #1, which I don't usually drive by. Oh well, drama opportunity missed. I like the old colors or I wouldn't have been so charmed by this place, but when the next painting time comes around I will be on the lookout for the new opportunities.

Since it's raining today, the painters are not in the neighborhood. They come in a crowd with suprisingly few vehicles. There must be some kind of drop off, but my vision of the street through the kitchen window is quite limited and I haven't seen it. This picture was taken Thursday morning, on the building across the street from me. As near as I can tell they work on 3 buildings at a time.

I must say, if you had asked me I wouldn't have said my house needs painting yet, but the ones that have been done really do look better and brighter. This must come from years of reduced expectations in the paint department of my brain. But, new paint is good, even with the old colors.

Uh oh, looks like it's time for me to pressure wash the driveway again.

Worst food product EVER

In my attempt to eat healthier snacks, I picked up some packages of freeze-dried fruits at Target. The strawberries were tart and kind of tasty, but these freeze-dried bananas tasted like they had been dipped in gasoline. What the what?

I keep a small but potent list of "do not buy again EVER" products and this is going to the top of my list. Yuck, double yuck.

New spices, same old chicken? We'll see.

Wanda gave me these 3 new rubs and I think it may help to cure chicken boredom. If I make 3 different kinds of chicken tenderloin strips on the same pan, then the leftovers for all week long won't seem so repetitive, right?

I am tired of chicken but maybe this will work? A girl can dream, right?

Valentines are so yesterday...

OK, here it is January 28th, and already the valentine decorations are on clearance to make way for the shamrocks. This is way to fast for those of us who plan at the last minute. Even those of us who prefer green to red and pink.

Avoiding the dry cleaner

I've managed to avoid the dry cleaner for over 4 years. Mostly I wear casual clothes, and I have started to hand wash some things that were previously marked dry cleaning recommended.

But, I have a confession to make. My jacket, pictured above, has not been cleaned in over 6 years because I needed to mend the lining in the sleeve first. We wear jackets infrequently in Florida, and I would remember the lining each time I would put this on, but promptly forget until the next time. And the tear in the lining wasn't getting any better by itself.

I believe I have mentioned in the past how much I don't look forward to mending by hand. Never mind I have enough hand sewing needles to last 4 more lifetimes, I just don't like to do it. But I did it anyway, and finally took the thing in for a cleaning. Ten bucks, why am I not surprised? Anyway, it's good to get that one little nagging job off my list.

What's next?

Knitting progress

Well, it's up to 31" and I don't think I've dropped any stitches, at least none I couldn't pick back up more or less. While it is getting more comfortable, I'm still not ready to start up with patterns or anything else that requires counting as I go. Baby steps.

Lucky for me, my neck is often cold.

Knitting again

I just couldn't resist that big ole' ball of yarn in just my shades of green. I'm a pretty bad knitter, but a scarf in all the same stitch can't be too bad, can it?

The question is, can I finish it before it gets too hot to hold it in my lap. That was the end of the similar scarf I started in 2008. Seriously.