2010 in review

looking back, i am impressed with myself. i thought i only posted once last year, but there's 3 whole posts up! 2010 was similar to 2009 in many ways, which is why we have a huge round up post rather than shorter, more regular posts. so, the last year in review, if not in chronological order:

• in the spring, chuck changed jobs, then got fired, and now drives a school bus. that was a whole mixed bag. he was looking for less work stress, which he now has. he's also been wanting to get out of banking, which he has. the initial job switch let us use part of chuck's retirement to pay off a huge debt (with one tiny click. i savored that moment). we're now down to almost a third of the debt chuck had when we got married. not having that $900 monthly payment and several small miracles helped us through the 3 months of unemployment before the bus job and makes it easier to live on the lower income.

• archy work was very short this year, a measly 3 months. i worked in delta again, with all the fun side effects of living in two places that i noted last year. the work and crew were great though. site monitering is where it's at. you hike out to a known site, relocate surface artifacts, make sure the military hasn't blown a hole in anything, take some pictures and notes, then repeat. i loved it. still wish there was a good option for winter archaeological work up here........

• about the same time chuck started driving buses, i started working part time at a yarn store. work has tapered off, so i ought to look for something else, but it's been tons of fun helping people with their knitting and picking out yarn.

• i played more with homemade stuff. we haven't really bought bread since 09, and i've made my own tortillas and english muffins besides sandwich, french and flat breads. our garden gave us lots of potatoes that we're still eating, along with squash. everything else we ate as it ripened. i wish we could grow enough tomatoes to put up. we gathered blueberries, most of which we froze, and lingon (lowbush cranberries), that were turned into cranberry sauce. i also made spruce tip jelly, which has an interesting spicy sweet flavor. next year i want to try rose petal jelly from all the prickly rose in the yard. Homemade mustard and barbecue sauce are in the fridge, along with homegrown (homelaid?) eggs, some of them blue. chuck raised broiler chickens again, so we haven't bought chicken for 2 years. he also raised a turkey that grew to 25 pounds and barely fit in our tiny oven on thanksgiving, and we have 6 laying hens. they average 4-5 eggs daily, more than we can eat, so we trade them for moose and caribou meat. i even made laundry detergent too! seems we buy less and less at the store. mostly i try stuff out for fun, and because i like knowing how to make my food and what's in it and changing things to suit my taste. none of it took very much time (the jelly was a small batch) and costs very little. i made soft cheese, but for the cost of milk vs the lower cost of cheese and considering the ratio of milk to finished cheese......we will keep buying cheese.

• we bought season tickets for UAF hockey while we had money in the summer, and now the games are like free dates.

• i apparently knit a storm through the year, ending up with more large projects (shawls and sweaters) than before. i also experimented with some new things, knitting with wire and making small toys.
  that doesn't count anything started but not finished of course. i knit more for myself - it makes no sense for me to not have enough socks when i'm the one knitting them. out of 25 finished projects, 11 were for myself, almost half and a definite improvement. mostly i knit from stash, since yarn was not really in our budget this year. sweaters were probably the most satisfying projects while socks were not my friend all. year. long. fitting issues. hopefully to be fixed in 2011.

• the fairbanks knitting group just gets more awesome with time. they're a great mix of people with very different tastes and backgrounds and opinions, yet mostly we manage to encourage each other and have intriguing conversations. if we moved, they would be the people i missed.

• we got lots of yardwork done while we were unemployed together. the raised flower beds i built in 07 have been slowly but steadily eroding and we had started building boxes for them in the spring. we finished those and planted rhubarb, a red currant plant, daffodils, tulips and crocus. ever since living in sweden i've wanted crocus of my own to peep out from the melting snow. we even cleaned out the prickly rose from the raspberry bushes and raked leaves! not all of them, but more than normal. i almost like our yard now.

• my wisdom teeth were pulled dug out in the spring. i was a bit worried, from the horror stories told to my body's high tolerance for medication to getting an IV and being put under for the first time ever. my mouth felt crowded though, and the new teeth were trying to push aside other teeth. so it had to be done, and in the end? not so bad. i almost wouldn't mind doing it again. the IV took a couple tries and hurt more than anything else. the dentist had to give me two hits of anesthesia to knock me out and as i came to, he clearly asked is she waking up already? that didn't make me feel too good, but they were almost done. there was a bit of swelling, and i got a cool ice pack band to wrap around my head. made me feel like i was in an old time war movie.
  i took the (huge) aspirin they gave me and nothing else and was back to work on monday without missing a day since the surgery was on friday, my day off. the pains from crowded teeth were gone and i was happy. although i'd've been happier if i could have kept the teeth for souvenirs..........

• we signed up for the rosetta stone online through the military. i'm reviewing spanish, and filling in some everyday words missing from my vocabulary, while chuck is learning swedish. i love hearing him learn, it's more exciting for me than him i think. he's improved in every lesson and i can't wait till his vocabulary is large enough to have conversations.

• i read lots too, although i have no idea where i fit it and the knitting in. according to goodreads, i read 45 books this year. that's almost one a week, not too bad. some really good ones were: Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by patricia wrede and caroline stevermer, a lighthearted, funny fantasy with sequels to follow. stieg larsson's girl who.... series was a fascinating mix of mystery, journalism, crime solving, and political corruption set in sweden. they were gripping reads, and had fairly accurate descriptions of swedes. the only downside was the sexual crimes against women, but i suppose that was the point. the latest additions to the vlad taltos series, jhegaala and dzur, by steve brust added more depth to vlad's character. despite being quick reads, they kept me thinking long after reading. in defense of food by michael pollan made an interesting analysis of our current food culture and how traditional food culture has been manipulated for commerce. an extremely well-written and highly creepy fitcher's brides by gregory frost i would recommend for the writing and morals but won't re-read. i'd like to sleep at night, thank you very much. another non-fiction book i really enjoyed was the paradox of choice by barry schwartz. he delves into the unconscious and conscious factors that go into all our choices, big and small. the book was not as dry as i anticipated and points out a need for us to limit our own options to make effective choices. an interesting concept.
  
  annoyingly less good were: water for elephants by sara gruen, which a few of us in the knitting group read. the story just seemed to descend into melodrama and ended in an unlikely series of events. it started well, but i felt cheated at the end. name of the rose by umberto eco has sat on my shelves unread since high school. now it can sit on someone else's shelves. the long involved story of medieval religious heresies and dissidents is mixed with murders at an abbey. when revealed, the motive for the murders seems absurd and superficial. cheated again. wuthering heights by emily bronte confirms that british female romance writers are not for me. a bunch of whiny noble people make bad choices which have bad consequences and i think i'm supposed to feel sorry for them. um, nope. sorry. think i'll avoid the bronte's along with austen from now on.

• the week of thanksgiving it rained. this just doesn't happen in interior alaska. the warm weather made the foot or so of snow on the roof slide off, which normally happens in april. the fall compacted it all and made normal shoveling impossible. when it started coming off the deck in solid square chunks, what could i do but make a wall? crenelations and archer slits possibly to be added later.

• since summer, chuck has been working on painting the kitchen cupboards (the ones he took the doors off the summer before). the kitchen has slowly transformed from a dark green and gunky yellow 70s combo
  
  to a much brighter white (inside), blue, and yellow.
  
  the colors remind me of sweden and make the kitchen a thousand times brighter. i love it. the cupboard doors have been materializing the last couple weeks, and after a year and a half without doors, it feels odd being unable to just reach in and grab what i want.

• we watched more than a few movies in 2010, but not many made it to our favorites list. we really enjoyed blind side, ondine and the A team remake. oddly enough, tv on dvd was much more popular with us (we don't ever watch any tv shows on tv). a random series of events introduced us to the 2005 season of doctor who. september and october were a haze of the 5 recent seasons. it's a crazy, unpredictable, upbeat, funny british sci-fi space/time travel show and if you haven't seen it, do. you never know what will happen and yet only a few times is the story so outlandish that it seems impossible. we're waiting anxiously for next season to start, and have infected the grandkids with the addiction. we finished watching the dollhouse show, joss whedon is my hero for interesting tv. it's a bummer his shows have such short runs.

• we got a couple camping trips in. we took the bratlings camping in denali in the spring and hiked with them all day with no complaints from grownups or kids.
  
  chuck kidnapped me to paxson lake for a relaxing weekend in the summer, complete with canoeing and a beautiful sunset.
  
  we also finally hiked angel rocks together. we've been saying we'd do that for years. the trail starts out on the valley floor and climbs to the ridge top
  
  where granite tors are eroding into cool formations and caves.
  which of course we had to explore a bit, crawling into that hole behind us that opens into some small caves, then out the other side.

• on the winter solstice, we saw the total lunar eclipse. apparently the last time one happened on the solstice was in the 1600s. the moon wasn't totally blacked out but looked shadowed, like seeing it through a black curtain. very cool phenomenon, but we couldn't get a photo that didn't look like a black sky.

• after the very long break i've had in blogging, i have a clearer idea how i want to blog, a way to balance my content. several blogs i read manage to have good, varied content in short posts and i think i have learned from their good example. i suppose this next year will be the test. my iphone was no replacement for the internet and so there are still podcasts and blogs being caught up on.

all in all, 2010 was a good year. i never got tired of being home with my husband. i'm grateful for my friends, talking to family over holidays, and all the little miracles that keep me going every day. i'm thankful i can do so many things that i enjoy and are meaningful to me, which luckily tend not to be very expensive. reading my summing up post on 2009, i must have got something right in the balance department this year. the year was equally disruptive, busy, and i still worked out of town yet i feel as if i did more in most areas of life and feel more peaceful and happy looking back. i have to keep doing that.

in which we learn another disadvantage to having a fake christmas tree

it doesn't die. (i know you thought that was one of the advantages, but hang with me) since it doesn't die, there's no needles piling up on your floor and it doesn't ever turn into a fire hazard. which means there isn't any real urgency to take it down, if say, one were to travel an inordinate amount in december and january, so that one might not actually get the tree down until the day before superbowl sunday.

ahem.

i haven't been on such a traveling rollercoaster since i was a project-hopping archaeologist. you get home, unpack, wash your clothes, catch up on a few bills, maybe talk to a couple people, squeeze in an email (hej lasse!), pack and repeat. ojojoj.

two weeks after getting back from MA we went to anchorage for a long MLK weekend. chuck had bank training mon and tues, so we went down fri and stretched it out. i came to the conclusion that if you're not shopping for something, there's not much to do in anchorage in the winter.

especially when the hotels don't have internet. between traveling for work, and chuck's random training meetings, i'm getting good at sizing up hotels. i've noticed something odd: the expensive hotels have gold framed mirrors and fancier looking sheets but they actually offer the same amenities as cheaper hotels - for a fee. so you're paying more . . . . for less. the midrange hotels tend to have free breakfasts, free internet, microwaves and fridges. and, well, i like those better. i'm paying less for a room, and getting more services with it. the marriot spring hill has my votes.

so, without internet to catch up on blog posts and emails, what's a girl to do?

go to yarn stores and title wave of course.

title wave is a gem among book stores. it beats out barnes and noble any day. they sell new books and used ones in really good shape, plus out of prints and hard to find books. chuck gave me 50 bucks to spend (cuz if i decided the amount who knows what it'd be) and i walked away with 13 books and a dollar to spare. whoo-hoo.

i found some forgotten realms books (used to read them pre-high school and lately have been having urges to revisit some of those stories), a couple of l'engle's austin family series that i missed reading somehow, a cookbook on herb vinegars (so i could use those herbs i dried out this summer), sword singer by jennifer roberson, zel by donna napoli (awesome retelling of rapunzel), dawn by elie wiesel and a wild card never-been-read winter queen by devin cary. i was quite satisfied.

even though chuck promised to go with me to the yarn store (far north yarns, web site out of service), i went ahead by myself to set him up for the kill scope it out. sweater yarn was on the list, but somehow the fiber and the colors refused to match up for me. except for this one yarn, ooooo, it was tempting. sulka from mirasol, merino, alpalca and silk. felt wonderful, and they even had colors i liked. but.....the price was a bit much for our checkbook. and i sure couldn't figure out a 2-3 skein project for myself. darn.

since sock yarn doesn't count, and they had louet gems, one of the few sources for solid colored sock yarn, we grabbed a couple skeins of that. (before my resolution by the way - i think)

blah color for chuck, blue for me. merino wool, machine wash, and solid colors. i've been wanting to try some, and it does seem a crime to walk out of a yarn store empty handed. i sat and knit with the staff for a bit. it was so nice to be in a yarn store and feel comfortable. the one i normally frequent in fairbanks has an odd atmosphere that i haven't ever felt comfortable in, no matter how much i've spent on yarn there.

we squeeked back into fairbanks in time for knit night, where i discovered i had my first ravelry convert. whoo-hoo! she signed up after the last knit night, and got in that very day. her eyes widened and shined with that ravelry-struck gleam, as she said, "i only looked up felted patterns and there were so many. . . . .ooooooo that place is bad"

things are starting to quiet down as we get settled back into life. between work and catching up, knitting time has been at a premium. as in practically non-existant. i guess those cushy subbing jobs spoiled me with extra knitting time, not to mention slightly shorter work days. still i'm plugging away at everything, without any miraculous advances. and trying to ignore the itch to cast on something new.

my book stack has been neglected lately too. i'm trying to borrow less books from the library at a time, so i can actually read them before i have to return them. elie wiesel's memoirs are going slowly, cuz it's january's choice for a dying book club, and i didn't want to finish it way before we met and forget my thoughts on it. but we still haven't met, so i'm going ahead and finishing it. i made it through trickster's choice and trickster's queen though, both excellent books more on the sneaky spy side of fantasy then the other tamora pierce books. i've got the first book in the protector of the small series, first test, and beka cooper in the stack too now. sometimes i find an author and i want to read everything they've written. i did that with elie wiesel about (ouch) ten years ago, and now i'm in the mood to go back and re-read some of his works and digest them some more.

this weekend we finally bought a proper snow shovel (archaeologists can be picky about things like shovels) so i can start chipping away at the melted hump on the deck. it appeared during a thanksgiving warm spell when the snow slid off the roof onto the deck, where it froze up again before we got back. mildly dangerous, and starting to get on my nerves. now i can do something about it! yay! (i'm one of those rare and odd people that like to shovel, so i actually am glad)

oh, and if you need to do your weekly shopping, and it just happens to be payday weekend and superbowl saturday, um, don't. cuz there might be some lines. across the whole front of the store, down the frozen aisle,
and past the milk cases.and we weren't even the last people in line.

bad habits

lately i've gotten into the bad habit of not having time to write a post and just scribbling down a few notes of what i wanted to post. except then they build up into novel-like posts. so while i'm not joining any of those crazy almost-acronyms i am going to try to post rather than scribble. cuz when all those scribbles add up? it feels like work and i don't want to post anymore.

so .....let's see what i have today. i've been reading a bit on the side, mostly YA novels (this means they're shorter so i whiz through them). heartlight was a pretty good book, very similar to a wrinkle in time, but with less depth. the first few pages made me wary, because they were so so similar to l'engle. a new england farmhouse, malcontented teenage girl with braces, interested in science but not in school, father/grandfather working on faster than light travel & mysteries of the universe. the story line was original though, with some cool ideas. somehow it seemed a little superficial, with a resolution similar to wrinkle. i'd still recommend it though.

apparently the seeker wasn't a great office box hit up here cuz it was in and out before i could see it. not that i was dying to see it in the theater, but it could have been a good date. lately we've been getting lots of movies i never heard of for very short runs. thank goodness for netflix. we finally saw pan's labyrinth. i really liked it, although it was unexpectedly bloody in parts. the fairy tale aspect was fascinating and surreal, and at the end you're not sure if it was real or unreal. a good movie, but with those violent bits (most war related), i wouldn't watch it with kids.

i've been anticipating the golden compass' release next month, but i'm a bit worried about the interpretation. kind of like the seeker. *sigh* hollywood did such a good job with narnia, why can't they show the same respect to other fantasy novels?

for halloween we went to a little party (ok there was tons of kids and people you normally don't see) at church. they always call it a "harvest festival" for some reason, except it's on halloween and exactly like a halloween party. i shake my head at the silliness. kim and austin came , with seth dressed as a lion (no, we're bad, i don't have any pics). we had fun. there was one little girl around a year old in a white bear costume that had the cutest growl. her face lit up if you asked what a bear says and she'd growl a few times for you.

the last two days i had off for parent/teacher conferences. i was heartbroken - not! my math job is done. i think. the teacher is adopting her newborn granddaughter and may need more time off. the kids were still trying to convince me to somehow get their normal teacher fired and become their fulltime teacher. and they said they would miss me - one girl even gave me a hug. awww. made me feel good, even with the math element.

i got some other warm fuzzies too. the woven stitch towel and fjörgyn were faved on ravelry. somebody likes what i made! i feel so appreciated this week.

thursday i was a good girl and did some housework. ok, so i still didn't get the cobwebs (they'll just make more anyway) but i did fold the laundry that i don't remember washing, took screens out of windows and took down the curtain rods. they haven't had curtains since last winter i think. i got rid of them as fast as i could convince chuck to let me. windows are for looking out. i hate curtains, shades or anything that gets in the way of my view of outside. we have pretty wood frames to, so they look nice without the curtains. and they look better without the rods! i even did some handwashing (finally) - all while chuck was on ebay. he's like a little kid discovering a candy store in his back yard.

we babysat seth thursday night, which was fun. we don't see him very often, so i don't think he really knows that chuck is his grandpa. we had fun playing with himand feeding him pizza crusts. i took advantage of kim's white rug to take pics of old FOs for ravelry. our rug's so ugly it just detracts from the picture. it's kind of cool seeing things pile up there and realizing how much i've made in the 4 years since i started knitting again. when i go home for christmas i'll be taking more pics of stuff i gave away. since i always forget to take pics. i used to have a good excuse cuz i had a sucky camera (birthday present when i was 12, very low quality - but i actually kept it till i was 27!). now i've got the digital and still forget. . . *sigh* but i think i've got pics now of everything here that i've made.



the broadripples are all done, but will be in a future post since i washed them but want a pic of them on my feet. they went so fast once i picked them up again! the stripes are a bit different, fatter on one sock than the other, but i don't mind. they still look nice. i cast on the 2nd thuja tuesday (i think) but haven't done much on it since i haven't been in school.

despite not knitting much the last few days, the second mossgrid is halfway done. yay! i'm itching to cast on a shawl but told myself i had to finish the towels first. i was planning on knitting the summer shawlette to try out the faroese style shawls, but since i got stahman's shawls and scarves (one of my bits of plunder from the ebay spree) i decided to go with something else more interesting. a feather and fan (i love that stitch), knit neck down so i can still use up the yarn i've got. i have 2 other yarns in my stash that i'm thinking of making shawls with, but i'm not sure if i'd wear them. or what pattern they'd look good in. so those keep rolling around in the back of my head.

while babysitting and not-watching the kingdom of heaven, i started in the hand of the goddess. reading kids' book makes me feel like a fast reader again. i blasted through it and finished it yesterday. i'm liking those books too, even though it was will of the empress all over again - went to read trickster's choice and found out it was sequel-ish to the lioness rampant books. luckily i had just read the first one, otherwise i'd never have known and spoiled the ending for myself. knowing the ending ahead of time sucks.

chuck ran out of lights (we bought them last year, guessing how much we needed and never got them up since it was minus degrees when we moved in), so we bought a strand of blue lights to try out. we've got those icicle lights that dangle, and the pic on the blue box made the snow look like moonlight was on it. and for once, the picture didn't lie! the blue lights are pretties, and now i just have to figure out how to convince chuck we want to buy all blue lights. hmmm . . . . . .

oh, and if anyone knows how to get rid of the little gnat buggies that live in houseplant dirt, PUH-LEASE let me know. they're making me crazy, and i don't want to ditch the plants (which is chuck's idea of a solution).

how to avoid a testosterone party

thursday we hosted a testosterone wood splitting party. our home teacher, chuck's son chris, and son-in-law austin came over to help out.

alas, i had a church meeting for our fun groups, amongst which was the ill-fated knitting group. chuck's daughter kim went with me for that. we had a guest spinner too, which i was very excited and cautious about. i've kept a sort of deliberate distance from spinning, because i think it would be loads of fun, and consume even more of my fun time. if i could make yarn exactly how i wanted, the right thickness, color, ply. oh, the possibilities! and it would take even longer to make a sweater. *sigh*

i got to talk to more people about the knitting group, what their skill levels were and what they wanted to learn. it was loads of fun, and i felt like i got a better idea of how to get the group going. right now the relief society has a project going for a women's shelter. it started with quilts and collecting toys etc, but they realized we could knit or crochet squares too and make something out of that. squares are a good way to learn new techniques or try a stitch pattern cuz they're small and don't take lots of time or yarn. so i'm trying to get people going on that, and that way we can avoid the perils of boring garter stitch scarves.

and hey, it got me away from the testosterone. i came home to loads of split wood, nicely stacked.

until last night anyway.

me and chuck, in the living room, talking to pops and andy online (yay!!), hear a loud rumble. now, september does seem to be blow everything up month for the army, but they're usually not on the range sundays. chuck goes out side to check, and look:
somebody would have failed gail robbins' wood stacking course. i thought it was kind of funny. at least both stacks didn't fall down. yet.

and since we had an abundance of firewood, we started a fire saturday. not that i would call myself a pyro, but i do love a good fire. chuck always has me start them cuz i'm better at it than he is. i sort of thought everyone could start a good fire but i guess not.

once the fire was going we discovered why dwayne didn't use the fireplace much. first of all, the knucklehead put the draft inside the doors, so you have to open the doors to open the draft, and by then there's smoke in the house (ruins the whole point). the doors themselves are on a track of very thin sheet metal stuff that's too weak to keep the doors steady. which means they don't close very easily. and, oh yeah, they're not airtight either, so smoke kinda trickles out. and the baby draft on the bottom outside of the door frame is too small to have any effect. so it'll be good for fun fires, but not so much for warmth so i don't have a huge oil bill by march. bummer. but it was nice to have a fire.

good-bye sulfur sprites

when we looked at our house before buying it, the owners dwayne and daphne assured us the water was very good and tasty. maybe with a little iron but not so you’d notice. they said. well, we noticed pretty quick that drinking that water made us thirsty, and it smelled like the hot springs. not that i mind it at the hot springs, but who wants to take a sulfur shower? and the toilet has a permanent brown stain from the rust. honest. we do clean it, you just can't tell. so we put in a charcoal sediment filter, that we change every month, and it’s done a good job getting rid of the smell. until now. at the fair we ran into the water purifier people – we signed up for a free water test in the winter sometime and never heard from them. so we made an appointment for a test, and i swear the sulfur sprites heard about it because chuck changed out the filter and somehow they snuck through it. we had sulfur smell worse than the hot springs.

so we got 3 water tests within 3 days, and got a water purification system set up by the end of the week. the water actually felt lighter somehow. and my skin’s not so dry. and the sulfur sprites are gone. yay!

the only bummer was that somehow the pressure in the kitchen faucet went from awesome to a trickle. the plumber had no clue why, and chuck cleaned out the faucet and the pipes to no avail. alas. so the domino effect of fixing house is still alive and well. so on top of the filter we had to buy a new faucet. we knew that was coming, but i know the checkbook wasn’t planning on it for a long while.

and while we’re talking about unplanned home improvement, let’s talk about the refrigerator. 30 year old original Kenmore that came with the house. daphne warned us that it had to be manually defrosted. she didn’t warn us that it didn’t freeze anything. took a month to realize that one. luckily we didn't lose any ice cream to it. then i would have been mad. so we don’t use the freezer. then last week we found our milk turning to cheese. so now we have a new fridge. and it’s a nice one. we’d already looked at them ages ago, and picked the one we wanted, so it was fairly simple to go get it. the checkbook complained, but who listens to him anyway? it’s kind of weird having cold drinks again, that mist up on the outside. and ice cubes frozen within hours. we don’t have to walk to the garage anymore to get ice cream (from the chest freezer). i kind of like it. plus we can make ice cubes now, which means we can do homemade ice cream again.........yum!

det helige skriftet

sunday night our home teacher came to visit with his wife. they're really cool. probably about chuck's age, but they just talk to us like we're people. so many people seem to have mental blocks for certain groups, like married, single, married w/kids, old farts etc. chuck and i are between most of those groups, so it's nice to run into people who don't care. but anyway, pam has Norwegian roots which we've talked about since i'm so into sweden. she brought over a family bible, printed 1890. old norwegian is about as fun as old swedish. it was cool just to look at it. there's these random scraps of a norwegian newspaper in minnesota, from the language around 1890 too. it's cool just to read old stuff like that.

and at church a lady introduced herself, a new move-in, and she's an anthropologist. so we had a short conversation before i had to go to outer darkness, i mean primary. hopefully we can talk more sometime, it's fun to have another anthro geek to discuss society with.

today i've been in the yard a bit harvesting some herbs and deadheading flowers. it really does help them to bloom longer! who knew. the chamomile was so top heavy it was trying to lie on the ground, but now it's standing up again. and i have flowers for tea! i'm not very fond of chamomile tea alone, but it should make a good add in. there's only the one plant but if it keeps blooming like it is, i should have plenty to last until next summer. of course i'm hedging my bets with most of the herb plants and bringing at least one of them in for the winter, but it would be nice if some of them survived. about half of our flowers should come back next year, and i'm planning on stealing some iris next spring from the roadside for our beds.

i've got an overdue library book to read this afternoon, and some plant ones. i want to be able to save seed from the plants we have for next year. why buy them if i can keep them? the borage has so many blooms (which tasted ok in salad btw) that we should have lots of them coming up next year. self seeding is the preferred method for us lazy gardeners.

my bike needs a check up too. i've had it over a year but the last 2 times i rode it, the pedal has been coming off. somehow it started binding against the nut holding it to the frame, cuz it loosens as i ride, to the point of falling off. so i'm going to take it apart and clean it and see if that helps; if not, it's going back to the bike shop for their expertise - it's free since we bought it there.

last night we took out the busted dishwasher. yay! now we have undercounter storage space for juice, potatoes etc. i'm glad we can do small things like that without it costing lots of money. now if only we can put in those last 2 closet door handles we have.....

the only one more bored than the students

i'm a computer lab teacher today, hence the post. yay for jobs that let you do what you want (sometimes). i finally got over my cold, which was more of a cough. and, typically, yesterday chuck got a sore throat and started coughing today. so i guess he's going to be coughing for a week now like i was. :( bummer for him.

dance class was fun yesterday. we started east coast swing, and learned a turn in the foxtrot. i don't think we did anything with the waltz. we did get a practice CD with music for all 3 dances, so we can practice at home. hoo-ra. practice would help. we don't do too bad, surprisingly. those folk dance classes must have helped my coordination and gracefulness more than i thought because it's been easy to pick up steps. i almost feel like a good dancer. but most of all it's fun. we're lucky to have a big deck we can dance on, otherwise we wouldn't have enough space inside to dance.

i finished the mystery yarn socks. . . well except for grafting the toes. what can i say, it's not the funnest thing in the world, and i don't have to do it yet. i'm starting the foot on the second hedera sock. in the process of doing the heel, i realized why the heel on the first sock looked so short. because it was. i did half the number of heel rows i should have. duh. but of course the sock is done now, so the internal dilemma is whether or not to take out the whole beautifully finished foot (including grafted toes) to lengthen the heel, or to just leave it becuase, hey who's going to see the heel but me? the perfectionist side might win out, but then again the lazy side might. we'll have to see.

the sides and back for the fjörgyn sweater are all done, so i just have to bind off the shoulders together and i'll be ready for the hood. i'm so almost done with that sweater that it's killing me. if only it were smaller, i'd take it to school and be done with it already.

the snow is finally all gone from our backyard. it did leave a small, mosquito breeding pool in its place though. the first mosquitos are so big, it's like i forget from year to year how big they are. luckily they're also very slow, which means i can kill more of them. the smaller ones are faster. but back to the yard, obviously dwayne never raked leaves. we've got our rakes and we're working on plans for gardens and flowers and things. we bought crocus bulbs, a wonderful mass of them, that i had hoped to plant before spring so i could see them peeping out of the snow. that's one of my favorite memories from sweden, crocuses in spring. but alas, not only did dwayne never rake, he never put real grass or topsoil in. he scraped off the moss to (sort of) level out the yard but there's just loess open for weeds and rosehips, the nastiest spiny thorny plant around. i like the rosehips and the flowers, but not so much the spikes. i still have some in my work clothes from last year. so we're going to have to do a real make over before we get to our garden or flowers or herbs. *sigh* i found this fascinating book in anchorage last week called, lasagna gardening, where you layer natural materials and end up with good topsoil. sounds way better than the traditional way, and more like nature's way. i'm thinking of trying it, but besides waiting for the mosquito swamp to dry out, dwayne still has a huge truck he has to drive out through the back yard. it just wouldn't do to go through all the effort of fixing a garden spot to have it run over by dwayne later. so we're still waiting on that.

tonight the most important improvement to our house is finally being made. we're putting in our new hot water tank. YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i can finally wash my hair in hot water and maybe have enough warm water to shave my legs! i'm excited. nothing can be better than a hot shower.