7 Quick Takes (Vol 227)

Here we are again. Another day older and in need of a re-infusion of blather.

You know what to do. When you are done cataloging and archiving the blather herein you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of Miley Cyrus’s quickly disappearing moral compass, over to Conversion Diary to see what is happening.

Embrace the blather! You know you want to.

1.
I had great intentions of having my 7 Quick Takes out MUCH earlier than I am going to. But….

I went into the garage this morning to get something or put something out there and I stood there for a moment and then…..

I JUST COULDN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE!!!!

I had to rearrange and clean out a bit.

It might come as a surprise to you but neither HHBL or I can really function all that well in chaos. Oh we can get our work done if we have to but it isn’t a happy time. His office is on the way to being organized, he has a desk now, but there is still stuff he has to put away or get rid of.

My work space is fairly organized and I am liking my “woman cave” in the basement. But there is still stuff to move around and work on.

And let’s not even TALK about the unfinished side of the basement. Mother Mary and All the Saints in Heaven it is crazytown in there.

The thing is, I have to go in and out of the garage multiple times a day and I just couldn’t stand it anymore. The movers spit patooie! had just plunked the garage shelving units down on the side wall and let it go at that. I was otherwise occupied or I would have told them that I wanted the shelves on a different wall. But it was quickly too late. And I have striven to not look at that wall for three weeks but I just couldn’t take it any more. So since HHBL’s car wasn’t in the garage at the moment I decided that I was just going to move the shelves to where I wanted them. But that entailed moving the bikes out and moving the shop vac out and unpacking the last two garage boxes that were in the way and going through those boxes and getting rid of some more things and removing all the things that had already found their way onto the shelves and finally moving the shelves and then putting stuff on the shelves and then unkinking and rewinding the extension cords and hanging up the extension cords and then sorting the boxes that need to go to HHBL’s office (they are moving) and then wrapping up the boxes that go into recycling and moving the “special” garbage can that holds the dog biological matter and then putting the shop vac back in a place and putting the bikes back and sweeping out the garage.

But I feel better.

But 7 Quick Takes is a bit late.

2.
Canning tomatoes is a messing job any way you look at it.

And canning tomatoes in a kitchen that has white cabinets AND white tile floors……

Well for most of yesterday afternoon it just looked like a crime scene. A very messy crime scene. At least it is easy to see what needs to be cleaned.

And the last of the tomatoes are canned for the moment.

I hope.

But last night I met a young man who runs the Urban Vision Aquaponics program and Micah has me convinced that I need to buy some tomatoes and cilantro from him so that I can make more salsa. Even though we have enough salsa at the moment.

3.
Some of you might know that I write a daily “Ode to Coffee” poem. I got on the coffee poem train in 2010 and I cannot seem to get off of it. And really, it sort of jump starts my brain in the morning because I don’t “pre-write” them. I write them the morning they are published.

And I have all the poems in a database…..

Well, I knew I was a bit behind in getting them put in the database. I couldn’t remember the exact date that I had to work forward from but I figured it was some time in April………

I might have been off by 5 months or so.

I pulled up the database this morning and realized that I didn’t have anything in there from the end of November of 2012!!!

Guess I will be working on that today after I get my house cleaned and laundry done.

4.
The repair person (I am assuming a man but you never know) is going to be here soon to fix my dishwasher.

I never knew how much I would miss that thing until I realized that it wasn’t working.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind doing dishes. I actually find it rather soothing and satisfying.

What?

I’m strange? I’m odd?

How long have you been hanging around here?

But I digress.

So, hopefully the dishwasher will be fixed pronto because I am getting tired of doing dishes. I think it is just because canning season brings so many extra dishes to be washed.

Or maybe it is just that, deep down, I am as lazy as they come.

5.
HHBL and I like to sleep with the window open. We dislike air conditioning although we are not idiots about using it if the temps are high enough.

But we have discovered a slight problem with having the window open in the bedroom at Chez Knit. There is a street light that is situated just past our house. And for some reason the neighborhood has a light in there that is about a million candlewatt.

And it is never a good thing if you are trying to go to sleep with a beam of light shining on your face.

But if we have the shade drawn down to block out the light then it also blocks any airflow into the room. Both HHBL and I like to have as little light as possible at night. We just sleep better. We have eliminated bedside clocks that glow. We close the door so that the light shining in from the living room windows (which are even closer to the street light) doesn’t leak into the room. But having the shade down was just a problem.

Until last night.

I have been contemplating this problem daily. Wondering what to do. And as I lay in bed last night, wishing that I could raise the shade, it occurred to me that if I just cut a piece of cardboard and positioned it just right that light would be blocked. So I hoped out of bed, grabbed my trusty box cutter that is always in my pocket these days and went to cut up a box, of which we still have MANY.

VOILA!!

Problem solved at least temporarily.

I feel so McGyverish.

6.
One of the things that is most unsettling about moving is establishing new routines in your new place.

You knew how you did certain things in a certain way and you didn’t need to think about it.

Case in point, the laundry.

In one sense it is actually easier here at Chez Knit on the days when I do laundry. The master bedroom is on the first floor and so all I have to do is sort the laundry and then roll the baskets into the laundry room and do the laundry.

But my laundry room here is significantly smaller and I feel like I am moving things around too much just to get laundry done. It is against my principles to move things back and forth all the time. I like to have things arranged so that you don’t have to do rearranging every time you want to do something in the laundry room.

I may have to pull everything out of there and re-evaluate the situation.

But not today. I already did the garage.

And will tackle some things in the basement before LL and The Tech Guy show up this evening.

Dang performance/house must look good anxiety.

7.
A consequence of my crazy summer…..

I am WAY behind on blog reading and podcast listening.

Almost overwhelmingly behind.

But I refuse to just mark them all as read or listened to and start afresh. I might miss something vital. So I am barely maintaining and hoping for things to slow down a bit so I can at least listen to and clear out the podcasts. I am thinking about casting on a sweater so knitting time does generally mean podcast time.

Of course, the logical thing to do would be just to cut down on the number of blogs that I read and podcasts that I listen to.

But who wants to be logical?