for a messy person, I handle clutter remarkably poorly

One of the concessions I made about the pregnancy and renovations was that I wouldn't take part in anything that was too dusty. The problem, of course, is that, until this week, it's been too rainy to do any of the cutting (of drywall, subfloor, or floor) outside — not to mention that they've been measuring and cutting as they go, rather than all at once — so, while the boys have been renovating, I've been elsewhere.

Mostly the kitchen.

No, really. It smacks a little bit too much of traditional gender roles, but, I mean — these people are in my house, literally rebuilding a room for me. The least I can do is feed them. That's one reason. Another is that, honestly, I really can't eat pizza that often — not even in undergrad. Which means that somebody has to cook, and that somebody might as well be the one person who isn't laying floor. That's another reason.

And finally, I think I have been a little bit obsessed with keeping the kitchen tidy because it's literally the only place where I can do that right now. The second floor is a write-off, including the bedroom. And the living room is slowly devolving, because I've been either buying or scrounging around for books and magazines, and after I've finished them there's no place to put them away (yet). So they're sitting in piles. Ditto my spring and summer jackets, and shoes — I've needed them (for obvious reasons), but they're such a pain to get in and out of the second bedroom right now that I just leave them out. (When I don't have to dodge around bookshelves and office chairs, it's much easier to put them away.) So the foyer, which leads off the living room — also a mess.

Meanwhile, the dining room has turned into the de facto office, as the actual desk is in the bedroom (but partially blocked off), and the filing is in the second bedroom (almost entirely blocked off). So the dining table now has all the stuff that we need to keep track off, like the contact for the window quote guy and bills that we've paid but need to keep. And that pretty much covers the entirety of the house, except for the bathroom (which is too small to store anything other than bathroom necessities, thank God), and the hallways ... which have paint cans lining their walls. Both floors.

(There is the basement, which I am also not supposed to spend too much time in because of the whole toxoplasmosis cat litter thing.)

So, you see: I am going mad. Cooking is good, because it distracts me and makes me go mad slightly more slowly. And the payoff is usually eatable, which is a plus.

The whole point of writing all this was to preamble a great spaghetti sauce I wanted to share with you, but this post is far too long and wordy as it is, so it will have to wait until tomorrow. Here's a renovation update, instead:


Last weekend was a painting weekend — they had finished the drywall and initial mudding on the long weekend, and Pd finished the rest of the mudding through the week. I'm going to hold back on the reveal until the whole thing is done, but you can see the aftermath (and some of the colours) in the picture above. They put the flooring in last night so, if we manage to do a second coat of the paint in the erstwhile den tonight, we might be able to move furniture back into the two rooms by this weekend.

After that we'll have another room to paint — we need to stagger them as we've moving our bedroom from one room to another, and while we're using low-VOC paint, they still need to air out for a few days before we can sleep in them — and then more furniture moving, and then unpacking/decorating. Everything needs to be done by the end of the July long weekend. It doesn't sound like a lot, but we've plotted it out, and we might squeak in just under the wire — essentially, we are saying that we need to set up half the house, from scratch, in a month. While working full-time and subtracting two weekends lost from prior work and social commitments. I'm not saying it's not do-able, I'm just saying that it's ... well. Ambitious.

epic knitting

Last week, during the long weekend, I finished all of the squares for the patchwork blanket.


I seamed them all together — I had decided to knit individual large squares, rather than knit every little square on, so that I could get a specific grain on the pattern, which in retrospect was extraordinarily prissy and stupid and I don't want to talk about it any more — remember how I said the ends would be epic?


I wasn't kidding.

I finished off one or two of the large squares — which is something — but then I got extraordinarily bored and needed pre-bedtime knitting, so I decided to pick up the stitches for the edging instead and knit on that.


It's going a little slowly. Each side has around 145 stitches in it — I wasn't terribly fussy about how many I picked up — so it's not fast knitting by means. Also, the longest circular needle I had was 80cm, so the blanket is all bunched up and I can't spread it out to show you what it looks like. Nor is it commute-friendly knitting because, while it is sufficiently brainless, I generally don't want to haul 144 teeny mitred squares on the streetcar with me. So it's at-home knitting, exclusively, which is slowing it down even more.

And by the time I finish, I will still need to weave in the ends.

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I also finished the Aeolian shawl, which Ravelry tells me I've been working on since July 12, 2010. Granted, it was never meant to be a fast knit; I had wanted a challenge and Estonian lace shawls don't tend to be transit knitting (although I made an exception last week), but still. It's a well-travelled shawl, too: I brought it to Las Vegas and Iceland (where I did not knit on it once. I may have knit a row on the plane — but really, only one).


It wasn't just the knitting that was epic, though. I finished it on Saturday — in the end, it took me over an hour to cast off. We were at a friend's house, and the only thing big enough and flat enough for blocking in my house right now is the bed, so I decided to block it on Sunday morning.

However, I slept in a little, and by the time I had soaked the shawl and had had breakfast, a friend had come over to help with the renovations. I didn't want to leave him to work while I fiddled with a shawl, so I left it soaking in the Eucalan and went to paint, planning to block it later. But then Pd pointed out that it wasn't going to have a chance to dry properly before bed if I did it after work, so I woke up early this morning, and:


It took me an hour. I was kind of late for work. It's not like I could just stop. I even ran out of T-pins, and had to dig into my sewing kit for the dressmakers' pins. Each point had five pin points:


... which I didn't even stretch out properly; some of them overlap each other. You see how the nice rounded bays between the main points are bunched up instead of laying flat, as they're supposed to. I couldn't stretch it out any more, though; the thing has taken over the whole bed.


The yarn is Fleece Artist Saldanha, a limited edition yarn I got at the Frolic and, as always with Fleece Artist, I have no clue what the colourway is. Whatever it is, I don't think they make it any more; none of their 2011 colourways have this much pink in them. I have no idea how big it is, exactly; just that it's gigantic (obviously). I think I love it. Everything hinges on the blocking at this point.

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And now, I have no knitting. This is so weird. I underestimated how long it would take me to finish all the squares for the blanket — or maybe I just didn't think it through. But I am supposed to be knitting from stash, exclusively, and it's been put away because of the renovations. Also, I don't have a pattern lined up, and the needles are underneath a drop sheet right now. I had been knitting on a laceweight Whispy Cardigan (Rav link) until recently, but that's been finished, too. Actually, I'm wearing it right now — I finally got around to blocking it last night, but it didn't dry completely, so for the first part of the day I've been walking around smelling like eucalyptus-scented wet wool. Nice.

gardening for food, take two

Argh. It turns out that I am either sensitive or mildly allergic to something in the garden; we don't know what. I did a lot of work in the garden this weekend — not just the flowers, but the herbs as well, and more to the point, there was a lot of weeding and pruning — so it could conceivably be anything. (Except tulips. Or, actually, herbs, because I touch those on a regular basis.) I noticed that I had been spouting random little red bits on my arms since Sunday, which I dismissed because I'd been pricked by several rose thorns, so I thought they were just scratches, like small cat scratches. But no. We realised last night that it had escalated to a minor rash. It's mostly on my right arm, so it is probably from something that I brushed against while pruning — I had been wearing gloves, but no sleeves — which means it could be the roses. Or the forsythia. Or the spirea. Or the weird unnamed shrub thing under the roses. Or the rhubarb leaves. Or even the lavender.

Seriously. There was a lot of gardening there.


More herbs! I picked up a bunch of seedlings for the herb pot and garden before the weekend. Front row: Greek oregano from the big box store, "Dark Opal" basil and chocolate mint from Urban Harvest — the mint was an impulse buy; I don't usually use mint but it smells exactly like my favourite kind of fundraising chocolate, so how could I not? Second row: rosemary and lemon thyme, again from a box store, and Genovese basil, again from Urban Harvest. And the strawberry pot, of course, with its giant garden sage.

There should also be a small-leaf basil hiding in there somewhere.


The chocolate mint and some of the small-leaf basil went into the herb pot, which will remain outdoors for the summer. Hopefully it will last. I learned recently that basil is an annual in pretty much all of Canada, so I feel less bad about its ignominious demise, but I'd still like to make an effort. I don't think the thyme is coming back, though. Ever.

The rest of the herbs went into the garden. I'm hoping that the lemon thyme and oregano will establish themselves as ground cover (enough, maybe, that I'll be able to steal some and propagate them back into the herb pot for winter). The weather has obliged by dumping a lot of rain on us since Saturday, so at least I know the roots are nice and wet.


I also transplanted the two tomato seedlings that sprouted. They don't look nearly as good as this right now. The cooler weather and lack of sun this week is probably not doing them any favours.

And finally, this is why I've been trying to be diligent about harvesting the rhubarb: its giant leaves were stealing sunlight from these:


Strawberries! With blossoms! A lot of them, even! Well, it seems like a lot to us, anyway — last year we didn't even get one. (We got maybe half. It wasn't really fully formed.) They were planted right in front of the rhubarb patch — it's the sunniest place in the whole back yard — and now some of the bigger rhubarb leaves have started to shade the plants (you can sort of see it in the picture), so I've been picking them off. I'm not fond of rhubarb, but I do like strawberries. I know my priorities.

Pd and I aren't counting our berries before they're berries, though. We have some rapacious squirrels in the neighbourhood, and it's conceivable that they might beat us to them. One of them chewed through our window screen in two places this weekend, trying to get in to the kitchen. (We think it was lured by the scent of the banana loaf I was baking.) Walking into the kitchen to find a rat-with-a-bushy-tail hanging upside down on your window screen, with bared teeth and crazed eyes, is kind of terrifying, let me tell you. And the cats were useless; completely uninterested. Which is probably a good thing, in hindsight — they probably would have gotten beaten up.

flower garden update

Even though it's sunny today (at least, it is right now; that might change), it's still much too cold, so here: have another tulip picture:


These are definitely the last, but also, I think, the best. They're called "Carnival de Rio," and are my favourite so far — of course, I've said that about each and every cultivar this spring. What can I say; I'm fickle. But these are lovely. (And I particularly love the tiny, dwarf tulips that sometimes appear, like a conjoined twin. So cute!) They're even taller than the Banja Luka tulips, and have less of a that garish, plastic sheen. And they keep closed a bit better; their shape is more tulip-y.


Sadly, the (brief) heavy rainstorms that came through on Monday pretty much destroyed their petals, so even though they're still around in my garden, there will be no more pictures. I don't expect them to last more than another week.

But! This means that all of the bulbs I planted last October bloomed (!), and bodes very well for next year, when I shall be able to execute my plan for a tulip-filled strip on the side of the yard. It makes next year's plan reasonably easy — essentially, we just need to do more of the same.
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I don't talk much about the flowers in the garden because I'm not always sure of what's there — for example, there are some odd spikey things that Pd and I think are lilies, but could also be weeds. (When we went for a walk, we kept looking at other people's gardens for similar plants, and then trying to evaluate whether or not they were placed deliberately — does this particular gardener look like he knew what he was doing? Or is that a random weed growing there? It turned out to be about 50/50, which honestly was less than helpful. But we think the odds are tipping towards proper lilies.) Anyway, though, I can report that the trillium are growing again, which makes me very happy:


They were a little later this year, because of the cooler weather, but it's always such a lovely surprise when I find them — an unexpected gift. (Although really, I don't know what could happen to them, in the interim — they are so wedged in the fence that they are pretty much protected from me, wild animals, elements — everything.)

The calla lily, too, is doing amazingly well:


Here is what it looked like two weeks ago, when I transplanted it outside (it was started indoors). There's a rough size comparison if you look at the wooden ID stake at the back.


(It was bent that way because I was negligent about constantly turning it while starting it inside, and it tilted, naturally, towards the sun. It straightened up fairly quickly, though.)

It is occupying the spot by the door that formerly housed one of the peonies — did I mention that I lost one? The other is doing reasonably well, I think, even though it's very small so I'm not sure if there will be any flowers this year. The other, though, never got much further than the bud stage, which was disappointing as it had been the first of the two to bud. It became reasonably clear that it wasn't viable when the other started leafing and this one just ... lay there, so I pulled it out for the calla lily. (it was in a nice, sunny spot — prime real estate. You can see that the lily loves it.) It looks like the root may have rotted. I don't know what I could have done to prevent that — I didn't water it any more than Mother Nature did — but, considering how late I left it and how little I know of what I'm doing, one out of two isn't bad.

There are also two other calla lilies — another started indoors, which was transplanted out at the same time, and a bulb planted three or four weeks ago. The bulb has not broken ground yet, which is not entirely surprising considering the weather, but I'm keeping an eye out. The other transplant is also doing well, if not gangbusters like this one; it's in a slightly shadier and wetter spot.

I really do feel like this year I have a better grasp of what I'm doing — but it's still early days yet. Plenty of time to flail.

photoblog: victoria day weekend

Our long weekend: rebuilding a room; stopping to play with flowers; knitting for the future; long walks on the beach; and relaxing with my love.










How was yours?