Six word memoirs..
A friend sent me this link and challenged a group of us to develop our own. I started with prior inspiration and came up with the following, all of which (except the last one for what I hope are obvious reasons) are true, but not necessarily complete:
Passed unnoticed in a crowded room.
Walked barefoot through the alkaline flats.
As a child, fearless and feared.
Left when she needed me most.
Laughed. Loved. Cried. Did it all.
Afraid of heights. Can you catch?
Born crying. Lived loving. Died laughing.
Feel free to leave yours in the comments if you’re so inclined.. it was a fun little thing to do..
Meanwhile, back at the ranch..
Whee! Destruction is fun (or so I’m told.. I missed all of it *pout*)!
First things first.. As I drove up after work last night, I found Jack and my dad (wielding a chainsaw) finishing up this:
(All photos are clickable thumbnails, as usual.)
That used to look something more like this:
.. but without the snow.. Guess I don’t have a picture of that tree/bush/overgrowntreantcreature from spring or summer.. We’ve been meaning to take it out for awhile, but it wasn’t quite on the list for this week, so it was a bit of a surprise.
Also somewhat of a surprise from last night, but not so much in the whether as the what, were these:
Window at the top of the stairs.
Upstairs bathroom window.
Window at the bottom of the stairs.
Those are essentially really big window clings. We’ve talked about getting them for awhile, especially for the bathroom window since there’s not a shade over that one, and the window at the bottom of the stairs because there was a really nasty, ugly curtain thing on a chintzy little curtain rod that would fall off you if walked by it wrong, but since I had to work I didn’t get to help pick out the pattern. When Jack called to tell me what he’d picked out (”bamboo stalk things”), I couldn’t quite picture it and was nervous, but I really like it. It looks very neat and adds some privacy that we didn’t have before in a prettier way than a blind and a less annoying way than a curtain.
We also put in a cabinet organizer bit in one of the really big and utterly pointless kitchen cabinets that we keep pots and pans in, but I didn’t get a picture of that.
Today they moved onto one of the things that was actually on the docket for this week (the other being the fence in the backyard, which doesn’t look like it will actually get done at this point):
Yeah, that’s about what it looks like. They took out the closet wall in our bedroom. You can see in the top left of the photo where the wood door trim was; everything to the left of that was a wall this morning. Said wall made it nearly impossible to actually use most of that really big closet (it goes back almost 4 feet at the bottom). So in order to get more closet space, we decided to take out the wall and put in sliding doors.
And while they’re in there, they’re going to clean up the last of the plumbing nightmare left from the do-it-yourself-er’s that put the shower in the upstairs bathroom:
Uh, yeah.. that would be the chunk of wall that they took out to run the plumbing for the shower; the plumbing we took out last year when we took out the shower. The chunk that they then never bothered to repair, or even to block off, so that this little guy:
Could let his babies into our house. Yeah.. not very happy about that part.. the squirrels chewed through the fascia behind the gutter and have been running around *inside* the roof. This happened last year, but we didn’t know how they were getting in, just that we had a baby squirrel in the house for a few days. We figure out how they were getting in sometime this spring and are having the fascia repaired, but they had to order the board and it’s not in yet, so they’re up there again.. So dad and Jack are going to block up the wall and cover the hole so they at least can’t get in the house again before they fix the fascia.
That’s all for tonight! I need to go clear the dust off my bed so I’m not washing it out of my hair in the morning..
It’s not Wednesday yet, is it?
I have a love/hate relationship with this week. I love that the semester is finally over, that things are actually *slow* (or what counts for it around here), that campus is nearly deserted and very quiet. I hate that I lose just about all motivation to do anything in my office (there’s some twisted logic in there related to finally feeling like I don’t have to be running all the time, so I just want to stop altogether or something), that once I clean up the few things of interest all that’s left are the things that got put off because I needed more than two minutes in a row to figure them out, that I can’t really stop running because I’ll be out again all next week at a conference.
This year I also hate that my dad and Jack are ripping out a wall in our house and I don’t get to help. I mean.. remodeling sucks, really, I get that.. but they’re doing the fun part today and all I’ll get to see is the rubble and the dust once it’s done. (We’re making the (actually rather large) closet in our bedroom more accessible; it’s currently accessed by a standard door, but runs the length of the wall (10 feet?) so we’re ripping out the wall and putting in sliding doors and a shelving system to make it a real, functional closet.)
Even Celtic Stompgrass on Pandora is not helping much today, largely because it seems that they don’t really have all that much that fits that description in their catalogue so I’m to the point where I’ve heard all the songs they’re coming up with several times in the last couple days. Don’t get me wrong, I still like them (most of them anyway), but I want to find more new stuff. (And I’m really trying not to be too upset that I’ll miss the Paperboys by a little over a week..)
Life’s been.. interesting lately, but most of it is not really suitable for here, so you’ll have to take my word for it. *shrug*
Random Thursday
As an Institutional Researcher, this is about 90% of what I do daily. Because Institutional Research is one of those more or less obscure careers - most people have no idea what it is, even a fair number of the rank and file in academia - there’s no predominant path people take to get here. In the three and half or so years I’ve been in this profession, I think that my background as a social worker has been far more useful than my background as a researcher or a statistician. Social workers are trained to see person-in-environment - to explicitly see the context of a particular set of circumstances. More than anything else I do, being able to set the context around any particular piece or set of data is by far the most valuable (and also most often overlooked by users of data). (If you want an example, ask me about the IPEDS Graduation Rate Survey sometime.. *smile*)
I apparently smell like jelly beans today. *shrug*
The Peterson’s Graduate Survey has become officially known as “The Evil Survey(tm)” by my student survey monkey. This amusing me for several reasons, not the least of which being that it is truly an evil survey.
I promised pictures of Ornette; here are a couple from when I hit the 3 inch mark a few days ago (row 36 or the 40 row cable pattern):
As usual, all pictures are clickable thumbnails.
I’m knitting the large size of the pattern and started with the right sock. I’m using Cherry Tree Hill Supersock Merino yarn on US1 needles. I thought I had a set of Harmony US1s, but I can’t find them so I’m using Clover bamboo needles, which are just not quite pointy enough for the cabling and causing the yarn to be splittier than I think it should be. Despite the heavily cabled appearance, the sock is fairly elastic - relaxed, it measures about 6.5 inches, but it stretches enough not to be tight or luck stretched out around my 10.5 inch lower calf. (I’d show you a picture, but it’s rather difficult to take a picture of your own calf, particularly when the interesting part of the pattern is on the outside!)
At Cookie’s request, I washed and blocked it this morning (I’m now through row 40, one full repeat of the cable chart), but apparently can’t take a non-blurry picture today; it also appears darker because it’s still damp.
The yarn did bloom a little in washing, but I didn’t lose as much stitch definition as it appears from the pictures. I might go outside at lunch and try to get some better pictures.
A caveat: I’m test knitting the pattern along with a couple dozen other folks, so it’s possible that the pattern I knit will be different from the final released pattern. There have been one or two minor revisions already, but for cosmetic purposes; the pattern is well written and easy to follow if you understand how to read charts. I’ve been doing the cabling without a cable needle, which is a bit of a new trick with the small gauge (and is another reason I’d really like some pointier needles).
How does your garden grow..?
This will be a photo-intensive post, just as a warning for those who may be on dial-up and/or using an RSS feed reader that doesn’t pull the photos through.
I took advantage of some sunshine and nice weather over the weekend and on Monday to get some photos of the early blossomings in the garden. In no particular order (and, as usual, all photos are clickable thumbnails)..
The apple tree in the side yard:
We removed a large and dying tree from the front boulevard last year and replanted a new baby (maple) tree; around the time we were replanting the new tree, our mail carrier left us some daffodil bulbs, so I decided to plant them around the base of the tree. I’m very happy with that decision!
When we removed the large and unsightly bushes from the front porch, we were worried about losing the shade from the afternoon sun on the front porch. The solution we tried last year was to put some garden boxes on the front edge of the porch and plant morning glories but as we weren’t sure it would work, we didn’t want to invest in new garden boxes. It worked well, though, so dad built us some nice new cedar boxes that we installed just below the front edge of the porch:
They’ve been filled with potting soil and I planted morning glory seeds Tuesday morning; I’ll put up some mesh for the vines to climb on in a few weeks once the plants start coming up.
The front garden is still coming in, so I decided last year it needed a little color while things grew. I really liked the Gerber daisies, so got some more for this year:
I hated our mailbox - it was a metal mailbox that had been painted with the same paint they’d used on the house and jerry-rigged to the porch and just altogether ugly. But I also balked at spending upwards of $50 on a new mailbox. Dad came to my rescue and made this one for me for Christmas:
It’s not secured to the porch yet - still need to screw it down - but I’m trying to decide if we want to wait until we re-paint the porch first.
Every year, there’s a lonely little tulip that pops up in the side garden to provide some early color before the rest of the flowers come in. I keep meaning to get it some company…
Again, we needed some color in the front garden, and I wanted to put one of the bird feeders out there for the songbirds that like to nest in the bush by our front door. Last year, I put a basket of Johnny-Jump-Ups out there, but this year I couldn’t resist these deep purple violas:
We have clover all over in our yard, and I love when it blooms before we cut the grass for the first time, so I snapped a couple pictures before Jack mowed Tuesday:
I’m sure as the spring and summer progresses, there will be more pictures from the gardens, but that’s the first batch!
Campus is also a-bloom and I really loved these two, which are right outside the door to the building my office is in, so snapped a couple quick pictures so I could remember them (and if anyone knows by what name I might find either of these, please chime in (yes, I know the flowers are tulips, but I like the multi-colored petals)!):
Up next (like either later today or tomorrow), I’ll prove that I am still (sometimes) knitting! Watch this space for a sneak preview of Cookie A’s new pattern, Ornette!
