Most Emphatically NOT April Fools

I hate April Fools Day. But I have discussed that at length already, here and here and here. So we are just going to pretend it isn't happening this year.

In other positively scintillating news, I am sick with a stupid, stupid cold. It started on Wednesday, and all day I kept thinking, "It's not so bad. I'll drink orange juice. I'll kick this to the curb, no problem." By last night, though? I thought I was going to die.

Incidentally, it takes less than 48 hours for my house to fall apart around me. I can't even imagine what this place will look like when Susie and I return from our 2-week train trip. I picture the other family members wandering aimlessly through a trash-strewn house, foraging for food in a refrigerator filled with moldy leftovers. It will be like the Walking Dead, only messier.

You know what's fun about being a mom? Cleaning the bathroom when you're suffering with the cold from hell, because no one else even notices the dirt and you're too sick to order them around. Gosh, I LOVE being needed.

But, hey, right before I came down with the plague, I did manage to make those project bags out of the napkins I bought at World Market. Here are some really bad pictures I took at Knit Night, because I was giving them away and realized I didn't have a photo of them yet.

It's hard to see, but Susie and I bought fun-colored ribbons to make the drawstring at the top. I am, in a word, dumbfounded that I actually followed through on a project idea. Who knows? Maybe next month I'll finally get around to completing the braided rug that has been languishing on the rug loom I bought at Rhinebeck 1 1/2 years ago. Stranger things have happened.

I think the mustard and the orange soda set off that bag nicely, don't you? They give it a certain je ne sais quoi. Such a shame I never pursued that career in photography....

Photo Finish

Best gummi bears EVER

I forgot to take pictures with my phone yesterday, so I have no idea what I did all day long. And now I'm wondering how we used to keep track of how our days went. Did we write notes to ourselves? Dictate events into tape recorders? Incidentally, if something ever happens to me (car accident, say) and EMT's are paging through the photos on my phone to figure out who I am, well...I don't think pictures of the gummy bear bulk bin at Wegmans are going to help them much.

Modern life is weird.

Our very own Harry Potter bedroom

There's also a picture of the fun thing Larry did in the basement while he was tearing out walls - our very own Pinterest-y under-the-stairs storage space. If you look closely, you can see traces of the way too bright blue-green paint that we tried on the walls before deciding that, no, we didn't need the place to be THAT cheerful. Also, in the back of that cubbyhole there, you can see a bit of the insulation my husband has been intent on installing EVERYWHERE in this house.

Anywhoo, I had grand plans for this area, folks. I mean, just search on "under stairs storage" on Pinterest and you'll see the plethora of ideas people have implemented in this sort of space: wine racks, reading nook, playhouse, kitten cubby (all right, we don't own a cat, forget that one), pull-out storage shelves, etc. But Larry and the handyman won out on this one in the end. Andy wasn't willing to build the fancy shelves on rollers that would enable us to take advantage of the depth, and my husband wanted a place to shove all the camping supplies that we don't keep in the pop-up camper. The upshot being, we're just going to add doors so that Larry can hide Nalgene water bottles, hiking poles, and God-knows-what-else in there.

No one's a visionary here except me.

Shopping - Not The Fun Kind

I was planning to have some finished napkin-project bags to show off here today, but that didn't happen. I spent all of Friday evening buying train tickets; I had to work at the yoga center Saturday morning, attend a fiber festival Saturday afternoon with knitting friends, and then Larry and I actually got our act together enough to GO OUT TO A MOVIE TOGETHER, just like all the other married couples do.

We walked to the movie, which was a nice idea, because it was so warm out that day and exercise and all that. Unfortunately, that meant we had to walk back, in the dark, after seeing a horror flick. Not very good planning, really.

So, yes, Larry and I managed to catch "Get Out" before it left the theaters. Now, I'm NOT a horror movie fan. But this was more old-style horror, psychological and suspense-driven, rather than people jumping out of closets wielding chainsaws or whatever it is they do in these scary films other folks watch. So I could handle it and even (gasp) ENJOY it.

What I couldn't handle, though, were all the R-rated previews that came before the movie. People, they were horrifying. All the characters were so nasty and mean and killings everywhere.

R-rated previews make me feel like this

Why, yes, I do watch "The Sound of Music" once a year. How could you tell?

Where was I? Oh, yeah, I didn't get my bags sewn up. Sunday was similarly stupidly busy, but really I don't have an excuse. And, hey, I had all morning to work on them today (I mean, after my amazingly athletic workout), but instead the handyman made me drive all over town looking for 1x5 boards. As noted here before, I do not belong in the lumber aisle of Home Depot. But, wanting this basement renovation to be done some day in the near future, I found myself once again pushing a weird-looking cart and trying to figure out how to bring home the correct items.  "NOT crooked," Andy had instructed me. "I can't make baseboards out of them if they are going every which way. And not too many knots."

Not crooked...not crooked...

I've mentioned I'm short, right? I had to climb up onto the shelf just to wrestle the 8-foot boards out from under the wires that held them in place. After that, I had to maneuver them over to the cart without bonking my own head (or that of an innocent passerby) in the process. Then, and only then, could I try to assess whether or not the boards met my handyman's criteria.

"Do you think these are straight enough for baseboards?" I asked a contractor-looking stranger in desperation.

"No, ma'am," he said. "Look how that one bows out. And that one, too."

Sigh.

Long story short (too late, I know), with the help of strangers, I managed to load 14 acceptable boards onto my (weird) cart, pay for them, and cram them into my Toyota Sienna. And if anyone managed to get a video of me attempting to slam the back gate down on my minivan before all those pieces of wood came sliding back out (NOT successful) ....well, let's just say odds are good you'll see me on YouTube soon.

Where, incidentally, I'll be wearing my new sneakers for my 15 minutes of fame, so there's that...



[Get Out image: Universal Pictures]

Undaunted Courage, Plus Yarn

I finally managed to buy our rail passes and make the reservations for every leg of the cross-country train trip Susie and I are planning to take. People, this was hard - I was trying to coordinate 7 train schedules with people I want to see and with available Airbnb places that looked clean and axe-murderer-less. I've had six thousand tabs open on my browser for a week, trying to figure it all out. Plus there was the hassle of not being able to make any of the train reservations online - when you buy one of the rail passes, you have to call the Amtrak reservation line, figure out the magic words to get past the automated reservation clerk, and then stay on hold for half an hour just to get to talk to someone who can make the reservations for you.

More complicated than it looks....

A daunting task for someone ultra-distractable like myself, but it is done! Well, except for the fact that all the Airbnb's in Seattle hiked their prices by hundreds of dollars over the Easter weekend, so we are still trying to figure that one out. It looks as though some of the hostels are family-friendly; maybe we'll try that.

Probably not Lewis and Clark's colors

I guess I should pack. But first, there's the dreaded Mulch Delivery Weekend, where I am still somehow obligated to help out with the food tent, despite my belief to the contrary. And there's our Metro Yarn Crawl, the same weekend as Mulch, which unfortunate confluence of events is engendering a very immature amount of resentment in me. AND I need to figure out what knitting to bring on the train trip. Socks, probably - socks all the way across the country and back. They're portable.

I bet Lewis and Clark brought socks to knit, also. AND complained about expensive Airbnbs. They probably left reviews like "That tepee was way overpriced, and no indoor plumbing...Will not portage my canoe here again."

Or, maybe not.

I Bought Napkins, But Not Really

Remember my finger, the one I injured by reliving my youth? It's doing fine, hardly any bruising, no obvious swelling, so I'm pretty sure I didn't break it, just jammed the knuckle. Luckily, the injury hasn't affected my doing yoga, or typing, or knitting. But it does hurt when I am scrubbing sinks or bathtubs, putting a fitted sheet on the bed, washing dishes...

I mention this for the purpose of pointing out that I may have inadvertently discovered the PERFECT injury.

Also, because my life wasn't complicated and expensive enough with all these renovations, etc., going on, we had to purchase new toilet plungers recently. Apparently the high-efficiency toilets we've installed have a differently shaped hole than the 45-year-old American Standard ones that we are used to.

I'm not sure how much more change I can handle here, actually.

Larry picked out the new toilet plungers, because I'm not THAT much of a control freak and also he hadn't even been to Home Depot that day. He bought the ones with MaxPerformance Technology. I'm so proud.

You know, it seems to me that "high-efficiency" toilets shouldn't ever need a plunger, actually. I feel ripped off.

Let's talk about World Market for a minute, okay? There's one a few towns away from me, but I've never managed to actually visit it. At least every other month, one of my friends will share/show off some interesting or tasty or unusual thing, and I'll say, "Where did you get that?" And they'll say, "World Market." And I'll say, "Gee, I really need to go there some time." And then I never do.

But last Friday, at a knitting get-together, I noticed a drawstring project bag one of my knitting friends was carrying. Constructed out of an attractive cotton fabric, with just a ribbon threaded through a top casing for a closure, it was the perfect size to carry an incipient pair of socks, say, or the beginnings of a crescent shawl. "Oh, where did you get that?" I asked. "It's pretty!"

"This thing? I just made it out of a napkin that was on sale at World Market," she said, way too modestly.

(Let's note here that I have really creative friends, okay?)

So that's how I finally found myself inside a World Market today, asking some helpful sales clerk where the napkins were. He helped me find them.

I restrained myself and only bought six. Project bags for everyone, coming right up! Or that's the plan, anyway...