things undone

Last week was a bit of a doozy. It started out fair, if tiring — why I no longer remember — and ended with a small medical emergency in my family and a lot of dashing back and forth. Rest assured, everything (and everyone) is reasonably fine — but it didn't leave a lot of time for getting on with things. In fact, everything that could be dropped, was (and so were some things that probably shouldn't have been, probably).

For instance, I have not really knit. I have my traditional fall sweater:

I'm a few inches farther along now; I've divided the sleeves from the body (it's a raglan), but fundamentally it looks about the same. I am loving the yarn, though: Manos del Uruguay Fino, 70% merino and 30% silk, in "Silhouette." It looks like a lovely green darkening to turquoise in artificial light, and exactly the colour of wellworn denim in the sun.

It is also an adult sweater-tunic knit in light fingering with 3mm needles, though, so I wouldn't expect this to be finished any time soon.


Another example of things undone: garlic. I'd meant to plant garlic this year. I didn't get around to it last year; the year before I had merely plugged some conventional garlic into the ground (it may have been locally grown, but I honestly don't remember), but this year I was Going To Do It. Growing garlic is ridiculously easy: you plug the cloves into a plot of ground in the fall, then summer comes and you harvest. The demands on the soil are light; there aren't really any required amendments, no trimming or deadheading. And the more harvests you make, the better garlic you get.

The devil, of course, is in the details. I'd meant to buy order proper garlic online (likely 'Music,' which seems to grow well in Ontario), but the growers didn't take orders until late summer. Ah, but I was sick throughout August. I checked last week and they had stopped taking orders for 2013.

Okay, I thought. I can probably get some at the Garlic Festival. Which is a great idea and would absolutely have worked if only the Garlic Festival hadn't happened two Sundays ago.

I want to plant tulips this year (that got missed last year, too), but we were too busy this weekend to buy the bulbs, so we'll see. I do remember one year that I actually put them in the ground on my Remembrance Day holiday, so there's time. But there's also the distinct possibility that the universe is trying to tell me that salvaging the fall is pointless; I might as well skip directly to winter — for these came in the mail last week:



... which is a little discombobulating, even for me. (And I am sharing it with you so that you may be as freaked out as I.) I read them, of course — I always do — but it still feels a bit wrong. Like starting to cram for finals in February.