Blogging has taken a backseat to life
A friend of mine just recently sent me a link to her blog about knitting and gardening. Of course I went to look at it, and this triggered me to check out my own blog. I figured it had been maybe 6 months since I've posted anything... ha! Come to find out it's been almost exactly 1 year since my last post. Time flies, seriously. They (whoever "they" are) say that as you get older time seems to go more quickly, and I buy into that completely! A little too fast sometimes...
I have no excuse for my blogging absence through about mid-summer. That was just plain negligence on my part. But, since the beginning of August, life has been non-stop it seems. Two vacations in August (a week or so in the Outer Banks of NC, followed by a cruise on the Norwegian Dawn!) and then back to some serious work on the house in preparation for putting it on the market. Weekends in September were spent painting, cleaning, etc. and finally toward the end of October we put our house on the market. We had one (long) weekend off for a trip to visit my husband's grandparents in Florida -- we did more traveling in that three month period that I usually get to do in three years!
Selling a house is very very stressful. Even once you're "ready" to put the house on the market, it's a constant job to keep up with the cleaning and preparation for house showing appointments and Open House, etc. House hunting is also extremely stressful, but is fun! We received and accepted an offer on our house in early January, and less than 3 weeks later we made an offer on a house that we both fell in love with. The stressful times did not end there -- we had a few "difficulties" with the chimney and the roof and the furnace on our old house, and almost weren't able to follow-through with the contract on the new house because of this crap. But, in the end, we made it!!
However, before we had our closings, but after the better part of the kinks were worked out, I had some unexpected medical issues of my own that landed me in the hospital for a few days in mid-February. Made it through that, then March is my "hell month" at work, and I ended up having to take three days off in the middle of the month for the big move. We finally closed on our houses on March 14, just about 1 month ago!! The closings themselves went well, but the physical moving of our belongings from the old house to the new house was a nightmare. But, we're in our new house now, and I absolutely love it. The house itself is great, much larger and roomier than the old house. I'm loving the quiet and the fresh air, and passing fields of horses and cows on my commute to work every day. And we have quite a bit of land up here in the country, and like my friend who's blogging about gardening I've started to think about where my garden will go, and what veggies I'll be planting! My grandfather is coming sometime this week to plow out my garden, then we'll see how my "black" thumb fares in the garden.
As for knitting -- now that the house is fairly well set up, I actually picked up my knitting earlier this week for the first time in at least a month and a half!! Prior to the move, there was a project I had been working diligently on. It was a lace project (a rectangular shawl that I'd actually planned on using as a table runner) using lace weight yarn for the first time -- I was motoring along, getting pretty good with the pattern and BOOM: I caught a mistake!! I'd been pretty careful about checking my stitch count at each row and somehow I screwed up, and ended up trying to fix the mistake in multiple ways (for multiple hours) but with the intricacy of the pattern and the delicacy of the yarn, I ended up turning a small mistake into a complete DISASTER and, I won't lie, I sort of lost my knitting steam for quite some time. I was very disappointed and angry and, well, pissed off!! I tried frogging back but with all of the yarn overs and 3 stitch decreases in the pattern I quickly lost the whole thing. Ugh. It makes me nauseous to think about it now, and this occurred back in January! I threw the project back in the knitting bag, and it's still there to this day. I haven't had the heart yet to completely frog it, and I think it'll be quite some time before I have the heart to cast on for that project once more (if I ever do).
I'm currently working on a throw blanket that eventually will get "thrown" over the rocking chair in our new den. Ironically I picked out the yarn and color (it's Bernat Softee Chunky in "Soft Taupe") and gave my husband the details for my "wishlist" at Christmas time, well before we found our new house and bought our new furniture -- turns out, it's a perfect complement to the furniture in the room. Who knew -- knitting ESP! The pattern I'm using is from Knitty.com and is called Totally Autumn. I like this pattern. It's a relatively easy lace knitting pattern that you can pretty much follow while watching TV, and since that seems to be pretty much when I end up knitting! I'll get a picture up here eventually (maybe next year?).
I think that pretty much covers it. There was some other knitting since last year (up through about January when the knitting disaster struck), but nothing major that I can think of! I hope that now that we're settled I can start back into my knitting once again!
I have no excuse for my blogging absence through about mid-summer. That was just plain negligence on my part. But, since the beginning of August, life has been non-stop it seems. Two vacations in August (a week or so in the Outer Banks of NC, followed by a cruise on the Norwegian Dawn!) and then back to some serious work on the house in preparation for putting it on the market. Weekends in September were spent painting, cleaning, etc. and finally toward the end of October we put our house on the market. We had one (long) weekend off for a trip to visit my husband's grandparents in Florida -- we did more traveling in that three month period that I usually get to do in three years!
Selling a house is very very stressful. Even once you're "ready" to put the house on the market, it's a constant job to keep up with the cleaning and preparation for house showing appointments and Open House, etc. House hunting is also extremely stressful, but is fun! We received and accepted an offer on our house in early January, and less than 3 weeks later we made an offer on a house that we both fell in love with. The stressful times did not end there -- we had a few "difficulties" with the chimney and the roof and the furnace on our old house, and almost weren't able to follow-through with the contract on the new house because of this crap. But, in the end, we made it!!
However, before we had our closings, but after the better part of the kinks were worked out, I had some unexpected medical issues of my own that landed me in the hospital for a few days in mid-February. Made it through that, then March is my "hell month" at work, and I ended up having to take three days off in the middle of the month for the big move. We finally closed on our houses on March 14, just about 1 month ago!! The closings themselves went well, but the physical moving of our belongings from the old house to the new house was a nightmare. But, we're in our new house now, and I absolutely love it. The house itself is great, much larger and roomier than the old house. I'm loving the quiet and the fresh air, and passing fields of horses and cows on my commute to work every day. And we have quite a bit of land up here in the country, and like my friend who's blogging about gardening I've started to think about where my garden will go, and what veggies I'll be planting! My grandfather is coming sometime this week to plow out my garden, then we'll see how my "black" thumb fares in the garden.
As for knitting -- now that the house is fairly well set up, I actually picked up my knitting earlier this week for the first time in at least a month and a half!! Prior to the move, there was a project I had been working diligently on. It was a lace project (a rectangular shawl that I'd actually planned on using as a table runner) using lace weight yarn for the first time -- I was motoring along, getting pretty good with the pattern and BOOM: I caught a mistake!! I'd been pretty careful about checking my stitch count at each row and somehow I screwed up, and ended up trying to fix the mistake in multiple ways (for multiple hours) but with the intricacy of the pattern and the delicacy of the yarn, I ended up turning a small mistake into a complete DISASTER and, I won't lie, I sort of lost my knitting steam for quite some time. I was very disappointed and angry and, well, pissed off!! I tried frogging back but with all of the yarn overs and 3 stitch decreases in the pattern I quickly lost the whole thing. Ugh. It makes me nauseous to think about it now, and this occurred back in January! I threw the project back in the knitting bag, and it's still there to this day. I haven't had the heart yet to completely frog it, and I think it'll be quite some time before I have the heart to cast on for that project once more (if I ever do).
I'm currently working on a throw blanket that eventually will get "thrown" over the rocking chair in our new den. Ironically I picked out the yarn and color (it's Bernat Softee Chunky in "Soft Taupe") and gave my husband the details for my "wishlist" at Christmas time, well before we found our new house and bought our new furniture -- turns out, it's a perfect complement to the furniture in the room. Who knew -- knitting ESP! The pattern I'm using is from Knitty.com and is called Totally Autumn. I like this pattern. It's a relatively easy lace knitting pattern that you can pretty much follow while watching TV, and since that seems to be pretty much when I end up knitting! I'll get a picture up here eventually (maybe next year?).
I think that pretty much covers it. There was some other knitting since last year (up through about January when the knitting disaster struck), but nothing major that I can think of! I hope that now that we're settled I can start back into my knitting once again!
posted by Erica | 9:03 PM
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