7 Quick Takes (Vol 236)

November is upon us. There are only 46 days until Christmas. Yikes!

You know the drill. When you are done blather shopping here you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of  my fast approaching holiday panic, over to Conversion Diary.

Blather that knows no bounds.

1.
It has actually been a relatively quiet week here at Chez Knit. I did have two dates with my boyfriend. We shared a romantic snack of organic Cheerios and milk.

And while he napped I became obsessed with taking photos of the toys.

Don’t judge. You know that is the way I roll.

2.
I produced English Muffins for the first time last night. When I have the procedure a bit more perfected I will blog the whole thing. I can see that you are enormously excited.

I will say that I didn’t use the best dough for the experiment. I knew it wasn’t going to be totally right because I decided to make the muffins at around 4p and so didn’t have enough time to make the right dough. I used the pizza dough that I happened to have in the frig which meant that the muffins were a bit on the heavy side but still worked for making “Mommy McMuffins”.

The actual baking process for English muffins is stinkin’ easy, you can do it in a cast iron skillet on the stove top.

I will keep working on it and report back when perfection is achieved.

3.
Can I just say that it is SOOOOOOOOOOO nice not to have to blow leaves. HHBL has actually enjoyed his Fall for once. He took a bike ride on Sunday and enjoyed himself immensely. If we were still at OCK we would have been outside for hours on end with the leaf blowers and the rakes, moving all of those pesky leaves into the woods.

I was in the old neighborhood on Wednesday and saw all the leaves that have yet to be moved in all the different yards and just wanted to shout with joy.

Cluster home bliss.

4.
I have new photo “toys” to play with. Not something as over the top exciting as a new lens (maybe next year??) but lighting. Lights and backdrop.

I wasn’t really going to buy any lights for a time as the need isn’t always there for a lighting set up. But I have a photography job next week, shooting 70 head shots for a group of young entrepreneurs, and I have to be able to control lighting and background.

Hence all the lights on stands and the backdrop. Well, the backdrop is actually waiting to be ironed but I will be playing with everything later today one would hope.

And now my little, shriveled, post-menopausal brain is just bursting with ideas about how to play and use.

Who knows what I might come up with.

Dang I love photography.

5.
Because it has been a bit of a slower week (despite the babysitting and a luncheon) I have embarked on more organizing in the basement. Or as we call it here at Chez Knit….

The Woman Cave.

My office has slowly been descending into chaos and I cannot function in chaos. So yesterday, as it rained outside, I put things away and wound stray balls of yarn left over from projects, filed knitting needles that were accumulating in the wrong places and cleaned off BOTH of my desks.

And then, because I don’t have ANYTHING else to do (note the sarcasm there) I decided to rearrange things in my Ravelry Library. I have A LOT of knitting patterns and books scattered here and there, many things that reside on my computer but are not reflected in my Ravelry library.

You might be scratching your head and wondering why that even matters.

You must not be a knitter.

Having everything reflected in one place that is easy to access and review just helps me to be more efficient. I couldn’t remember what patterns I had stored on my hard drive and I was tired of switching back and forth trying to figure out if I already had a pattern or needed to buy it. This also applies to yarn stash but I am not even thinking about that yet.

My little post-menopausal OCD brain couldn’t handle all the uncertainty.

But this is a huge project and won’t get done in a day. I have been a Rav member since Beta testing days and have many patterns.

But it will get done!

6.
My other big cleanout project looming on the horizon is the unfinished portion of the basement.

When we first moved into Chez Knit the “unfinished” side of the basement was an unholy mess. At my instruction, the movers yuck patooie put a vast number of misc boxes down there. There was a Mt. Everest of corrugated paper receptacles that mocked me. I managed to bring a small semblance of order to the chaos…..

But not enough.

And so, when Thanksgiving is completed, I will be down there trying to find all the boxes of Christmas decorations. And when I have pulled all those boxes out then I will rearrange everything else into something less like a hoarders house and more like a place where I can find something without having to stand there and scratch my head and think,

I KNOW I saw it SOMEWHERE.

Wish me luck.

7.

I wonder if the neighbors have yet adjusted to seeing me laying down in the middle of my driveway, or the middle of the sidewalk, taking pictures of stray leaves.

I am sure I will be the topic of neighborhood gossip at the Christmas party.