One of the things I like best about Fall? Seeing the bird’s nests that have been hidden all Spring and Summer slowly reveal themselves as the leaves fall.
Four days ago this tree was full of blazing red leaves.
And today, almost all are gone and I noticed the nest for the first time.
I think that one of the things that we always worry when we move from one place to another, even if we haven’t moved all that far, is will our friends from the old neighborhood still be our friends.
The answer, at least in my case, is yes.
I went to a small gathering of my old neighbors this morning. A gathering organized to introduce the new neighbor, now occupying OCK, to the ‘hood. And it was so much fun. And I was reminded, yet again, that distance doesn’t matter in real friendship.
It made a gloomy and now rainy day just that much better to sit with old friends and new and catch up on all the stuff that is going on. And I was again reminded that there was no possible way that I could EVER get out of having the annual ornament exchange. Laura figured that they all would have just showed up, invitation or not. They all know that it is always the first Monday in December.
They have all bought their ornaments already.
I love my friends.
In the wise words of The Knitmore Girls.
I can be smart, or I can be pretty.
Smart being just what it implies. And I am usually that.
But sometimes I am pretty, which in this instance is the opposite of smart.
Today was a pretty day.
I needed to do some banking tomorrow. I need to make a deposit and it happens to be a bit of cash. In order to do that I actually have to fill out a deposit slip. That doesn’t seem all that difficult does it.
Well, it is when I have to do it. You see, several YEARS ago my bank went through an acquisition and name change. That meant that we all got new account numbers. And the implications was that we all needed to purchase new checks to go with those new numbers. Of course we could use up the checks that we had, I was assured. But I had just purchased an entire BOX of checks and I didn’t want to purchase more. The bank already makes money off of me and they don’t need any more thankyouverymuch. I use very few checks, working mostly on a cash or credit card system, mostly cash. And since the whole bank name change and new account number switch over I have had GREAT difficulty remembering the new number. So I wrote it down in a special place where no one would find it…….
Not even me evidently.
It was coded in a special place in the iPhone and somewhere else. And evidently I hid it so well in my office that it is still hiding and ALSO my iPhone ate the place where it was stored there.
So that meant I had to call the bank and talk to not one but TWO very nice and by the sound of their voices very young men who had to walk me through the process of finding my number.
Like I said, pretty not smart day.
And my guess is tonight those young gentlemen are going to go out for an after work beer and have a very good chuckle at the OBVIOUSLY pretty but not smart woman who cannot even remember her own bank account number and hasn’t ordered check and therefore doesn’t have preprinted deposit slips.
I need a beer.
I recently decided to throw my old camera, with Nifty Fifty lens attached, into my purse to go with me wherever I went.
Well, I didn’t actually “throw” it in but you know what I mean.
I always have the iPhone with me to be sure but the urge to take a picture often overtakes me and I want something with a bit more range to it. And my old camera body and extra 50mm lens have just been sitting in my camera bag and not getting any use. The camera body is a 4 year old Canon Rebel Xsi (450D) and isn’t worth all that much on the market anymore but I didn’t want it to just gather dust. I have taken some pretty fabulous pictures with it and it has a lot of life left in it…..So into the bag it went, to be ready when that overpowering urge struck.
Baby Toes
Like this morning.
I am not sure that there are too many things that are more sweet than baby toes.
Here I am, on the second day of NaBloPoMo, and I got nothin’.
Sigh.
TMO and TSiL were here for 48 hours on their way to moving to Washington DC. We went out to dinner. The pizza didn’t sit well with me.
Or perhaps it was the “Beer Sampling” that HHBL and I shared. Loved the Porter, the Stout, the IPA and the Red Ale. Not so much the Pumpkin ale and the Wheat beer. I have never been fond of wheat beer.
It rained all day today.
We went to see “Captain Phillips” which was VERY intense and made me very sad in the end for the Somali pirates who seemed to have no other option but the disastrous one that they picked.
So here is a gratuitous picture of a gorilla butt.
Just because I can.
Here we are, gathered around the last of the Halloween candy, nursing our sugar hangovers. Right? Or is that just me. Nevermind.
Remember your weekly instructions. When you are finished sorting through the blather and keeping the good bits you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of my ingestion of snack size Snickers bars, over to Conversion Diary to see what has been goin’ on.
Blather of an intensely chaotic nature.
1.
The refrigerator is finally fixed.
And the silence is deafening.
Which leads me to think that the refrigerator was dying even before we moved into Chez Knit. I do remember hearing it make a horrendous “clunking” noise when the compressor would cycle off and thinking, “That’s not good”. But it was around the time that we realized that the dishwasher was non-functioning, perhaps three weeks after we moved. And at that time the frig wasn’t making the gosh awful noise that sounded like we were living in the middle of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and it was always race day.
Repairman Bill kindly came and spent two hours doing the repair…and there was nary a refrigerator repairman “crack” in sight. AND we only paid the $75 service fee since the repair was covered under the home warranty.
Once Bill was done, the repair was tested and I had waived him a joyous goodbye I just stood in my kitchen and reveled in the silence.
And then I realized that I could actually hear noises from outside, something that I had been unable to do because of the horrendous racket in the kitchen.
Ah the beauty of silence.
2.
Today is the beginning of NaBloPoMo.
National Blog Posting Month.
And as usually I am going to give it my best to participate. This year I might actually use some of the writing “prompts” that they provide, just in case I get to a day that has me suffering “Blank Brain Syndrome”. It happens.
We will see how I do. I feel like my blogging has slacked off a bit. It has been that kind of year.
Of course, if life continues to give me topics like how not to iron a Stink Bug then I won’t need any prompts.
But I will need another ironing board cover.
3.
I might have picked more apples this week…….
Like maybe 20 more pounds of apples. I just couldn’t resist. LaurenLeap sent me a txt msg asking which orchard I had gone to for the last apple extravaganza. I told her and in the course of back and forth txts she told me that Thursday was going to be the last day for picking apples there for the season. Wednesday the weather was beautiful, the sun was out and the temperature was gorgeous.
I just couldn’t resist.
The picking was good for Rome and Golden Delicious. If I had gotten off my big fat bahookie last week I could have also had Winesap, which are some of my favorites. But alas those are all gone.
I do believe that I am not going to need to buy any apples from the store for the rest of the winter, which makes me very happy. I am trying to “locally source” as much as I can.
4.
This is what the weather looked like at about the time trick or treating was supposed to start. And in the end…..
We had not a single trick or treater come to the door. Nary a one. I don’t know whether to attribute that to the absolutely abysmal weather last evening or to the possibility that kids don’t venture into our little development to garner candy.
Either way we have A LOT of snack size Snickers bars now in the freezer.
5.
For those of you who come to the annual Orgy of Theft Ornament Exchange.
I am working on the ornaments and trying to get a jump on them so I am not running around like a crazy woman close to the end of November
They are going to be…..
You didn’t really think I was going to tell you did you?
But they are stinkin’ cute.
6.
I had been sort of, kind of, contemplating buying a “share” in a local, family owned and operated farm.
And by “share” I mean a share in what is produced, not an actual share in the land etc. We drive by a local farm on our way to church and I have long been intrigued by it. I can see that there are chickens free ranging and turkeys and pigs (ummmmmm bacon). And I knew the name of the farm so I got on the internet and found an email and emailed. I was actually just wondering whether they do a CSA but what Trapp Family Farm actually does is has shares in the farm. That means for a certain (rather expensive) price you get as much produce as you can handle on a weekly basis as well as a certain share of meat and poultry and eggs.
The price was $1500 for the year, paid in quarterly installments. Gulp. But when I ran the numbers I could actually see doing it.
And then I read the fine print. And the fine print told me that what was really required was for EACH family member to buy a share. Kids were pro-rated by age but each adult was $1500/year.
That would be $3000 for Chez Knit.
I think I will find another option. I love the concept and I don’t actually quibble about the price. It is just a bit too rich for my blood, and my pocket book, at the moment.
Perhaps I will just start by trying out their farm stand market.
7.
If you not a knitter you can skip this.
Someday my Knit Sibs and I are going to Rhinebeck. We are going to walk amongst our people and revel in all things fiber. But until then I love this video. I love how proud every single person is with what they created.
And I would LOVE the opportunity to do a project like this.
I wasn’t sure what to blog about today. My mind was blank.
Stop laughing.
And then…….
I did the ironing.
Mimi would tell you that when I was younger (read like 10 years old) I would stand in front of the ironing board and iron to my hearts content. Give me a pile of handkerchiefs that could be precision folded and ironed and I was your girl. Saturday afternoon ironing while watching the Sci Fi movie that was invariably on and I was so there. Day Of The Triffids + ironing = perfect Saturday.
Even in college I might have been known to iron my jeans. Yeah, that’s a Baylor thing I think. Heaven forbid if you stepped out of the dorm without full make up, hair done and jeans pressed.
But I digress.
And then I got married. And I married HHBL. And when we were first married and really for a whole bunch of years he wore a suit every day. And a nice, crisp shirt, heavy on the starch please. And I ended my affair with ironing. Ironing a shirt is a pain in my big fat bahookie. Now, thankfully, the cleaners take care of the dress shirts. I just cannot get them starched to within an inch of their lives so I leave that to the experts.
But I do iron all the more casual shirts. And today was ironing day. That means that my kitchen floor needs to be cleaned first and that I then drag all the ironing paraphernalia out from the laundry room and into the kitchen so that I have a bit more area to spread out in. My laundry room is rather small compared to the gigantic one that I had at OCK. But that isn’t really an issue when it is only HHBL and I…..and the dog.
I was ripping along with the ironing, basking in the quiet of the kitchen (more on that tomorrow in Quick Takes). I had finished all but one shirt and a couple of pair of pants.
Left sleeve done…..
Left front, back, right front done.
Right sleeve done…….
WHAT THE HECK IS THAT SMELL?????
Seriously.
All of a sudden, as I lifted the shirt off of the ironing board I was assaulted with a most disgusting, acrid, pervasive, overpowering smell.
Did I tell you it was bad?
I know that the shirt was clean. I washed it yesterday and hung it up on the rolling rack in anticipation of ironing. And I was pretty sure that the smell had to have something to do with this particular shirt because, as I leaned closer to give a bit of a sniff I almost passed out with the disgusting miasma that burned my nose hairs.
And then I looked at my ironing board cover.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
I know my old ironing board cover pretty well after all these years. And that stain is new. Lean down a bit and sniff.
OH MOTHER MARY AND ALL THE SAINTS IN HEAVEN! But where did that stain come from?
So, I looked at the shirt. Nothing untoward there that I could see…..
What a minute. What is that little stain on the bottom edge of the right sleeve right along the seam? Was that there before? That is a weird place for a stain.
Lean down to sniff gingerly.
GAG!!!!
WHAT THE HECK! (I seem to be using a lot of CAPS. Sorry, it’s a CAPS kind of story)
So I turned the sleeve inside out very gently……..
I evidently had been unaware that there was a stink bug who had gleefully crawled into the interior of the sleeve sometime between yesterday afternoon and today. I bet he thought that was going to be the PERFECT place to over winter.
Boy I bet my hot steam iron was a rude, and ultimately guts boiling, shock to him.
And now I need a new ironing board cover because, despite repeated scrubbing with various cleansers……
The smell remains.
