priorities

This is to remind myself about priorities — that a lot of the things I do, I do because I choose to, because I have prioritized something or other. It's something I often forget. I am easily guilted, and now that there is the Spanish Inquisition, there is always something to feel guilty about.

I have a neighbour who has a child about the Spanish Inquisition's age, and she is wondrous. Her house is spectacular; everything is always tidy and clean; she always looks put together. The first time she invited me over, she served me a no-rise, gluten-free loaf of bread ... that she had baked herself that morning ... with sprouts that she had grown. While dealing with an under-one baby, who did not sleep through the night, who was still nursing, who woke up around the (literal) crack of dawn.

I'm pretty sure I just rolled out of bed that day around 9 o'clock. (We were very lucky around that time: the Spanish Inquisition didn't sleep through the night, but she did sleep in.) I may or may not have brushed my hair.

The thing is, though, her house is always clean because it's important to her. I've seen her spot-Pledge the floor after someone accidentally spilled a bit of tea or biscuit on it. Me? I've been known to step around cat puke. (Not for more than a few hours, and not where the Spanish Inquisition is liable to come upon it. But otherwise ... it's been known to happen, is what I'm saying.) So, obviously, a clean house is a little bit more important to her than it is to me. She has beautiful, modern teak furniture and a sparkly kitchen. I have feral dust bunnies rapidly gaining sentience.

This weekend, I gave her child a little handknit cardigan. I gave myself a couple of weeks to do it, and at no point was I terribly worried over it — it had a (very easy) cable pattern and raglan sleeves. Granted, I did end up sewing the buttons on while slightly drunk the night before — but that was only because my silk-camel yarn arrived and I absolutely had to immediately cast on; it wasn't a race to the end. I say all this because everybody else was very amazed by it — how did I find the time to knit? It must have taken so much of my free time. And I felt very abashed, like I'd pulled a fast one on them. The truth is, it hadn't really taken me any time at all.

... Except then it dawned on me (and Pd helped me with this), that it also sort of did. All that time when she was catching up on housework, or making herself presentable, I was ... knitting. Or reading. And I shouldn't feel guilty about that (although, of course, hello!, I do). It's priorities. Having a house that is the perpetual mess of mine would drive her mad. Not having the time to knit or read would make me insane. And so, we choose the things that make us happy. And that doesn't make us any better, or worse, than the other person.

I am really trying very hard to remember this. I bet her kid never tried to stuff a dust bunny in his mouth.*

*This is not true, actually. I just remembered: he has. At my place.

family knitting

Busy, busy week. The Chinese new year is this Sunday, and it's traditional to wear something new for the visiting day. So I've been finishing things up for the family:


Socks for my sweetie. New handknit socks have become a sort of tradition around here, which is really just me shooting myself in the foot — who wants more deadline knitting a month after Christmas? Nonetheless, here they are, self-striping yarn from the turtlepurl (colourway: "Burberry"), purchased at The Purple Purl. The pattern is a simple 3x1 rib to show off the stripes. Which I find fascinating, actually, because usually I knit with hand-dyed variegated yarns, whose pairs never look the same. Sometimes they don't even look related. So this thing about having a pair of socks that are identical? It's kind of blowing my wee mind.

These have progressed significantly since I took this picture — there are only about 10 more rounds before the toe decreases. I should be able to do them in plenty of time.

And for my other sweetie:


A sweet little dress with Noro stripes. (The Purple Purl had a massive markdown on one of my two favourite Noro colourways in Ayatori. How could I not?) I blocked this last night, so it is all ready for the day; luckily my mother knits so hopefully she will appreciate my handiwork.

Alas, I myself do not get new socks this year.  I decided to prioritize Pd, who got ... well, three. (Two for Christmas, one for the new year.) This is fair because I've kind of stiffed him in the sock department for the past couple of years, and he's been very patient about it. (Last year, he got his socks — his cushy, warm, 15% cashmere socks — in July. And he was happy. The man is a saint.)

I did start on a pair, on Monday, but honestly, I wasn't going to be able to start and finish a pair of socks while finishing another pair and weaving in the ends of a toddler dress and doing the button bands and buttons of another toddler cardigan ... inside of a week. (The latter is a birthday gift. You'll see it once it's been gifted.)

Besides which, this arrived in the mail on Monday night, and kind of put all other yarn on hold:


Fyberspates Elegance Lace, which is 65% silk and 35% baby camel, in "plum 3" (nominally a little darker and richer than in that picture). It is gorgeous. It has the sheen of silk but the camel keeps it from catching on the needles the way silk often does. This will be yet another cardigan for me — justified because it's been several months since I knit anything for me, one, and two, because it's been frigidly cold out and I've proven that I do wear my handknits, if winter gives me a chance.

Although, mind you, I wouldn't exactly say no if winter stopped given me any more chances to do so until, say, next December?

hitting rock bottom before you can rebuild

Our new kitchen is almost finished! The only major things left are the ceiling lights. After that I'll have to repair the ceiling, repaint and put up a pot rack, but those are very small, minor things. It's taking us a little while, though, because Pd has been busy with other things (he is the electrician in this family), and honestly, there isn't as much motivation as there used to be — the kitchen is useable, more or less, so we can afford to wait.

Anyway, I figure, I will do a few posts about what we've done so far, and perhaps by the time I'm done I'll be able to show you a finished kitchen.

These are the befores:


It's a decent size, as you can see — about 165 square feet — but awkwardly laid out. There are doors, windows or other openings on three walls, and the fourth wall is a lovely brick that we don't want to cover up. (The upside to this is that we actually get lovely light in there at certain times of the day/year.) There was practically no storage — we had more cabinet space in our little galley kitchen in our old apartment, which was maybe half this size. Certainly we had more counterspace. All in all, it was an aggravating space to work in.

And the floor! I can't even tell you. It's linoleum, which is fine, but why this horrid pinky-peach? And the grey patches are random, literally random. I have had two and a half years to stare at this floor and I am telling you: there is no pattern. Which drove me up the wall, because I am not good at random.

When we bought this house, we always knew that we would do something to the kitchen, that it wasn't going to be satisfactory for very long. This time, we debated whether we should just refresh it — maybe put in furniture that would serve as a pantry or an island — but in the end, we decided that we wanted to do this once. And so, complete renovation it was, starting with the demolition:


The cabinets came down so quickly that I didn't have a chance to take any pictures. I went on a walk with the Spanish Inquisition so that they could do the noisiest parts first, and by the time I came back, an hour later, they were done. So we started on the floor, too, and by the end of the day:




Apparently, the reason for the ease of demolition was that the wall cabinets had been secured to the wall by six screws, and the bottom cabinets had been secured to the kitchen by exactly none. This disturbs me less than it probably should, if only for the fact that I only found out after six measly screws were no longer holding up all of my china. Conversely, the single shelf holding up the undercabinet exhaust hood was attached to the wall by seven incredibly long screws, in a pattern I like to call "Is it holding up now? How about now?"

The only other discovery of note was that a tomato plant, which I had thought dead, was still alive and had some green tomatoes on it — which was unfortunate, because we made this discovery only after someone dropped a sink on it.

(We were using our backyard as a dump for the time being. This particular plant had fallen off its stake, very early in the season, and as I couldn't find the vine again I had assumed it had died. Instead, it seems to have grown laterally. But it was already October, so I don't think the tomatoes were going to ripen in any case. Sad to say, but this is my most successful tomato growing to date. I am better with roses — possibly because I don't even like tomatoes. But it would be nice to be able to grow them. As of right now, I would need to get a bumper crop three years running to even approach a 50% success rate.)

hope

I want to show you something.

 This is a hellebore. It lives in my front garden, close to the house.




It was -18 Celsius when I left the house this morning, it's still dark when I get home and in my heart I'm not convinced that I will ever feel warm again.

But now, at least, I have hope.

and then there was Christmas

Okay, Christmas. Which was almost a month ago, but never mind. Actually I think we didn't manage to put up the tree until the weekend before, which would have been exactly a month ago. So I am late, but not (too) outrageously so.

I forgot to take pictures of the tree. It was an Ikea tree. (Last year it was a Loblaws tree.) Pd is adamant that we get a real tree, but other than that we're not terribly picky. I think it was a balsam? (I think they all are?) It wasn't very smelly, I'm afraid — then again, I spent almost the entirely of the holidays with a congested nose, so it's possible that my house smelled like the Black Forest and I was merely oblivious.


The Spanish Inquisition helped me decorate the tree. She loves putting things in and out of boxes, so it was perfect. The actual mechanism of hooking the ornament into the tree was a bit beyond her — particularly as I wasn't about to give her any of the ornament hooks — but she totally understood the idea and tried very hard to follow through.


(Here she is trying to balance a wooden ornament on a branch, next to another ornament — which totally makes sense to me. I think next year we're going to have a very bottom-heavy tree, decor-wise.)

The tree was for the Spanish Inquisition. The mantel was for me.

Behold:

Hogwarts Castle, Borgin & Burkes, and Gringotts. There was also Ollivander's, which you can see in the picture at the top of this post.  I was going to add the Hogwarts Express, too, but it turns out that our mantel is a little narrower than I expected. Also, we finished these at the very last minute — literally, at 11 o'clock on Christmas Eve — and I was so tired I forgot about the minifigs — so it turns out that, on Christmas and in the dead of night, only Dementors, a couple of goblins and a few random Weasleys inhabit Diagon Alley. Which I suppose isn't entirely unexpected.

I am really just an average (as opposed to fanatical) Harry Potter fan, and not a particularly skilled LEGO builder (although I do love it); it's just that I happen to like medieval villages, too, so Harry Potter and LEGO and a Christmas village was just too much good to pass up.


And finally, on Boxing Day, we had a big snowstorm — I mean, really, we were buried; it was wonderful. It turns out that there is a great tobogganing hill literally five minutes' walk away from our house, so we gathered some friends and took the Spanish Inquisition for her first sledding run. 


Okay, so honestly, she didn't seem terribly impressed. But the rest of us liked it.