On kids, and dogs, and domestic tales…

I haven’t abandoned you dear readers.

It’s just that sometimes, there are priorities that get in the way, and that can be a really good thing.

My whole family was reunited for a brief holiday weekend (yeah, that one last week, Thanksgiving…)

My exuberant daughter was back from college with all her drama and laundry.

My son surfaced briefly from the hell well of black Friday retail blues (He works at Target, enough said…)

My husband came in from Saudi Arabia, and immediately set out to repair, fix, or replace much of what went wrong in his absence, before he leaves again to go back to Saudi on Sunday.

Three of us, (except my son who was chained to a fork-lift at Target for the long shopping extravaganza of a weekend) all set out for the Catskills, where my wonderful sister and her husband have a cabin.  Can I tell you how grateful I am that she and her husband are willing to share this lovely retreat, especially for holiday weekends?  This time last year my daughter was recovering from Wisdom Teeth Removal surgery, and my husband was recovering from a cat bite that caused brief hospitalization.  Nothing so dramatic this year.

Except the dog.  Animals have a way of showing their displeasure at being abandoned, and it is very clear that we all travel entirely too much.  We probably shouldn’t have a dog, and I swore when the last one died that we wouldn’t replace her, but you know how it goes, especially with a daughter who worked at a kennel for a number of years.  I’m surprised we don’t have more.

So when my husband and I went out shopping the day before Thanksgiving, the dog trotted up to my studio and lifted his leg on a pile of white yarn, sitting in the corner, waiting to be skeined.  Ewwww…

Thankfully I discovered it before we left for the cabin on Thanksgiving day.  I threw the yarn in the garage.  Most of Thanksgiving weekend I spent skeining the yarn so I could scour it with soda ash and Synthrapol.  I’m down to the last cone.  It would have all been skeined and washed anyway, but I wasn’t planning to spend my Thanksgiving salvaging yarn.

Note to self:  Keep studio door latched at all times…

Sunday my daughter returned to college.  🙁

Wednesday morning I woke to a series of texts, she was really really sick and her laptop broke.  After many phone calls and texts, and a trip to the walk in clinic on campus, it was determined that she had “acute pharyngitis, acute sinusitis, and an upper respiratory infection. They sent her home with a bag of soup broth, tea, honey, and salt along with antibiotics.”  And last night, she, and a couple of engineer geeks on her floor, performed surgery on her laptop, to remove all the accumulated pet hair that had clogged the fan causing the processor to overheat.  I heard on Facebook that the surgery was successful.

And my illustrious son, whom I adore, and has given me such grief over the years, decided to actually take my recommendation and start writing a blog of his own.  The point of this blog, was to practice writing.  It is his weakest skill.  I think he would love to one day return to college but he has to be able to pass English Comp 101.  So far that hasn’t happened.  There is no better way to get better at writing than to just write. (And reading a lot really helps as well…)  So he started a blog, called the Illustrious Illiterate.  And now he spends his time with a stream of consciousness and a keyboard, and we have all discovered that not only can he write, he is pretty good, and pretty funny, and he is learning how to make spell check his friend, and I’m learning way too many things I would rather not have known about my illustrious son.

So my husband and I went to Target yesterday, because on top of everything else, the toaster oven broke.  While we were there, we decided to replace the living room rugs that were, lets just say they were due…

We got home and rolled up the old ones, cleaned up the wood floors underneath and spread out the new ones, beautiful hand knotted wool, who knew, on sale, and four hours later the dog threw up on the brand new rugs.  Sigh…

I’ve spent most of this week cleaning.  Partly because the house needed it, (I’m talking deep cleaning her, like moving furniture) and partly because my wonderful dearest oldest friend Candiss Cole and her husband Rodger are due in this afternoon, to stay for the weekend while they do a craft fair in Morristown.  I don’t usually have the space to put them up, but with my daughter gone to college, I was able to rid her room of all the dog hair and debris and turn it into a serviceable guest room for two.  I can’t wait…

And my lovely shearling jacket.  My challenging lovely shearling jacket.  My rip your hair out challenging lovely shearling jacket.  I have to say, I’ve met my match.  And I’m not sure why that is.  Partly because I’m reinventing the wheel so to speak, and partly because the assembly directions in this pattern aren’t quite set up for what I’m doing here, and partly because I have all these wonderful distractions that are keeping me from actually focusing on the task at hand.  So I failed to think ahead and realize that I needed to engineer a hem and I had already chopped seam allowances off on the denim, and I had to redo much of what I had already done.  There are so many seams in this jacket.  After letting out the pattern, I had to reshape and rework many of the seams to get it to fit the way I really wanted, something I couldn’t have simulated in the muslin.  I had basted all the seams, but ripped out most of them to adjust the fit.  And the zipper.  I shortened the zipper forgetting I had lengthened the torso of the jacket.  Sigh…  I ripped that out four times as well…

It is turning out lovely and every time I try the bloody thing on, I decide I want to be buried in it, it is so warm and comfortable.  But my progress is slow and I feel like I’m going to spend all of December on this and I have so many other things I want/need to accomplish.  So I just take each day as it comes, and right now, I want to focus on my friend and her husband and my own husband who is rewiring the ethernet lines in the house, as I write…  He will leave on Sunday and I won’t see him again until right before Christmas…

Sigh…