Baker Street

One of my all time favorite singers has passed away. Gerry Rafferty.... I loved Baker Street.... I still do and as I write this I am listening to it...

It is sad when the old guys die... especially when you hear the canned music of today and then think about the real music of yesteryear... Gerry Rafferty was anything but canned or fake... This world has lost a little of it richness and I am sad that he is gone...

Mwa Ha Ha Ha Ha... It's Dead It's Dead It's Dead!

A Vole.... I knew it wasn't a mouse.... after I got to thinking about it I knew it couldn't be a mouse. It ran funny like it hoppity ran instead of just flat out running. But this morning we got up and the blighter was in one of the traps that we had set last night before we went to bed. We have set the trap again because where there's one usually there's more than one. I wonder how much cat and dog food he's stolen and where he stashed it all... probably somewhere in the walls of this house. Yes this is a log house.... no he couldn't get into the log walls but the house has interior walls that are not log and the walls of the second story are 2 x 6 construction. So a little rodent could get into any of those spaces.  Earlier in the fall we heard something in the roof above Daughter #1's bedroom so I suspect that we will have to finish this renovation before our rodent issues end.

Meanwhile I started the level 4 and after 4 years of spinning for the MSP you would think that I could get a balanced yarn without having to fiddle with it but Oooh noooo... fiddle I must! Thank heavens it only needs a little more S twist. I washed it slightly last night but I will wait till I've put some more S in before I give it a hard washing. If I can get it to work then I will move on to the second question today. I didn't get a chance to work on the level 3. I'm hoping that next week will not be so crazy as this one.

Why is this week so crazy you ask... well, it has to do with Twelfth Night celebrations. Twelfth Night is Thursday evening... and we do celebrate it, so we are preparing for that... shopping is involved but only a little. For us it is the end of the Christmas season... we hang our stockings once again and hope to catch Santa on his way home (thus the shopping).  Friday we will have either another Turkey if we are up for that or a ham dinner.... this year it will be ham... and scalloped potatoes... and then after dinner is over the tree comes down and all the decorations go back into their boxes and while doing so we listen to the last of the Christmas carols.  I have a couple of CD's that have music that is specific to Twelfth Night celebrations. When we go to bed on the 7th we are ready to say good bye to the tree and the season until next year. Actually I think I enjoy Twelfth Night celebrations far better than Christmas... it is a wonderful tradition... full of richness and history.  The animals are supposed to kneel down to the star at midnight... of course I've never seen it and don't expect to in my life but it would be wonderful if something like that happened.

Meanwhile Teapot and the girls are getting ready to go out the door to school and I figure I should get ready to work on that skein of Bison.

Hopefully I will see no more of those pesky creatures.... It's dead, it's dead, it's dead....mwa ha ha ha ha!

Ack!!!

Peaceful quiet reigns supreme
Munching on my crackers and cheese... lunch
Sitting on the sofa looking into the kitchen...
A small black thing runs across my kitchen...
Chewing stops.... heart stops....
Brains kicks in as adrenaline courses through my blood stream,
All animals are acounted for... sleeping peacefully
There is an extra animal in the house... too small to be anything that I really want.

Unwanted small creature running across my kitchen... ack!

Mouse.

Clearly the cats are not doing the job that they should be doing.
Phone Teapot.... "Bring home poison please...."
Will put poison in the crawl space where the only creatures that will eat it are the unwanted ones.

Where there is one there are eight... superstition... but it has always been true whenever I've had dealings with mice...

Da--!! Now I've got to kill a rodent... and all our food.... where are the plastic containers that will seal it from the pesky little creatures...

I wish our cats were not so well fed.

Da--!!

Sigh

They're gone. They just went out the door. (sigh)

Today I have to get back to my spinning for my level 4... This was an early morning and I don't know if my sleep habits have changed as I am getting older but I must say that getting up and staying up this morning is not as easy as it used to be. I always loved to get up in the morning. It was that quiet and peace that I craved... and I always was at my best and most energetic... not so anymore.  Now I get up and all I want to do is go back to bed. The bed is extremely soft warm and cuddly... but I'll never get any work done if I end up back in it so I guess I'm off for a shower... that'll wake me up and get me going and maybe a strong cup of jo to wake me up too.

Either way I'm spinning Bison this morning... hopefully it will be great when I'm finished.

This will be a short post this morning as I figure I've already lost some time to Videomatica... which Teapot joined for Christmas so that we could watch movies whenever we wanted.  The idea is to order movies from an online rental place and when they come watch them and send them back. Then order more... you can set up a list of movies and have them cued so that they come automatically... We are nothing if we're not avid movie watchers. We just finished The Pacific, (very gruesome but worth watching if you're a WWII buff, Ken Follett's Pillars Of The Earth, (I love medieval history), Sense and Sensibility (The Daughters have been getting into Jane Austin), The Thomas Crown Affair, (best con movie of all time), Sliding Doors (interesting take on duel time type movie), and Possession (I have wanted to see it for a couple of years).  That was our movie line up for the Christmas holidays.

But the holidays are over and we are back to a regular schedule... now where's that coffee and Bison. Hmmm... interesting mix... Bison and coffee. Obviously this is a weird combination... but I'm all for it so I'm off... see you in the morning and I wonder if that one will be any easier....

A Change Of Pace

Tomorrow Teapot and the girls go back to school.... and my work begins again. I will be back and hard at my homework for my Master's Spinning with Olds College. This is the time of the year when I really get down to it and work like a Trojan. (I'm not sure if that is the soldier, the horse, or the condom...) I have been looking at the two spools of Bison that I spun before the Christmas season hit me full in the face and now I'm thinking that a three ply yarn for that would be nice so I will start there with the third single for a 3 ply Bison yarn. That's in the day, by night I will be back at my level 3 homework. And I begin with cotton there. I will put down my knitting needles and take up cards, spinning wheel, charkha, and niddy noddy, and then I will try to get on top of what needs to be done for this June.  If I don't see really good progress I may decide to put off doing level 5. This is the first that this idea has actually crossed my lips, but it has been in the back of my mind. I may wait a year and do level 5 in 2012 instead of 2011. Because I want to enjoy this and not feel so much pressure that I begin to lose my desire to finish at all. I did that with Philosophy... I should have taken another semester to finish and didn't. In the end I was so burnt out that I didn't want to do anything with it again at all period. I know that burning out with me comes easily if I lose sight of my goals. It's not that I don't finish... I've never finished the race yet... but I don't want to finish and then hate it so much that I never want to look at it again. I've been on the Olds Website and there is nothing up yet anyway. Perhaps there will be such a spectacular instructor this year that I will want to do courses with that person and not do my level 5.

In the meantime, I have one last Christmas gift to finish... I am knitting a tote bag for a friend who surprised me and gave me an unexpected gift this year. That needs to be finished today... but since I am almost finished that will not be a problem.

At the end of the week is old Christmas day. It is the beginning of the Epiphany season.It is the day when all the Orthadox religions celebrate the birth of Christ (the Ukranians etc..) It is the day when our celebrations come to an end. We hang our Victorian style stockings and go to bed and wait for the magic to happen one last time. Then the next day we cook a turkey and open stockings (after school) and take down the tree while the last of the carols play... when the last decoration goes in the box and the last box is put away we turn off the music and put the Christmas CDs away for another year.... we sweep and clean and try to get rid of Murphy and his dust bunnies that are still hiding under the china cabinet and that's that.

With a look to the future, we put all thoughts of the old year away and begin thinking about exams and end of semester for the Daughters, report cards for Teapot and I just tick along doing my thing. When the Daughters stopped believing in Santa we decided that there was something bereft about the end of Christmas and so we decided to enjoy the end of the Christmas season with a celebration too. Meanwhile the daylight gets longer and the long haul of winter begins.

Last year, I had the big j.c. to focus on after Christmas... I had my level 3 homework with all the positive possibilities of that... now I'm worried.  Once burned twice shy.  This will be a difficult haul over the next four months... I will have to get down to my work and work hard.... and many long hours.

But for today... the puzzle is finished... and glued so I can take that off the table... knitting to be done.... and life starts to get back to normal.

Are you planning new things for a new year?

Glorious Day Indeed

The weather has decided to turn nice. The Chinook winds blew in yesterday morning in a matter of twenty minutes it changed from -23 to 0 degrees. The wind was blowing the snow off the roof of our house with the wind chimes on "My Deck" twinkling away. All the animals are happy to have the reprieve from the cold temperatures. Dreamer, the horse has been galloping happily around her paddock  with tail held high.... and nose to the wind. The sheep are moving around more freely Honeydew and Mishka (llama and pregnant alpaca) are staying close to the feeding trough. Meanwhile the male alpacas have gotten dreadfully lazy. They only move two feet from their feeding trough.... and they have begun to poop where they eat.... right into the trough.. teapot went out the other day and because he was fed up with the dirty bu--ers he spent a good ten minutes chasing them around so that they would have some trails in the snow where they would be able to move freely and poop away from their feed. So much of their feed is wasted when they poop and pee on it.... quite disgusting actually..... We are going to have to get serious and start looking for hay again. I dear say it will be harder to find some at this time of the year but we are down to our last two bales and we will have to find some fairly quickly.  At the least by the end of the month. This business of hay shortages is enough to make you want to get out of having animals at all!  It will be a hard spring for sure and I'll be glad when the grass starts growing again and we can get these animals out on the grass.

But today the sun is shining and though the sun is low in the sky there is not a cloud to be seen anywhere.

I have been working on a 100 piece puzzle throughout the last week which my sister gave our family for Christmas. It is quite a lovely scene of a log house by the edge of a lake with loons floating along in the water. The Daughters have been helping with it. Teapot hates puzzles and so he ignores it totally. But the girls and I have been having a relaxing time working on our challenge. We are almost finished. There's something nice about working on it since we can only work on it during daylight hours. We sit here in the newly paneled sun room and the sun is shining brightly... it is a lovely room. I'm happy in it. Sun streams through the window calling to me...

Today is a great day... a day for doing things outside... and that is where I'm headed... outdoor for a breath of fresh air. 

I hope the sun is shining on you too....

New Year

Ok so I have come to the conclusion that I have no more stories left in me at this time... so I will say it straight out instead of sitting here staring at a blank screen for an hour tapping out inane sentences before finally giving up in desperation and eating chocolate in an effort to overcome any mental block I might have. Somewhere I have read that you should start your year as you mean to go on. 2 seconds after the new year Daughter #2 placed on our relatively new coffee table a still burning sparkler and left a nice big burn in the wood. How do you deal with that when you mean to go on as you start the new year.

This last few days of the old year has been a very large disappointment. We are just 6 hours into the new year and there is a very strong Chinook blowing in this morning. But at 12:01 a.m. my house was in order.... except for the burn. The dishes were washed. The bills were paid. Pretty much everything in the house was clean if not neat. But then there was the burn... not an auspicious beginning to the New Year.

I have to wonder what 2011 will be like... especially after such a lousy ending to the old year.

Let me tell you why the old year ended so badly. Actually it wasn't the end of the world and we certainly have much, for which to be thankful.... still we have had our share of disappointments and bad patches this last year. The most recent downturn began on Christmas Eve when we discovered that my main gift which Teapot had ordered from Sears would not get here at all.... really it was nothing... I wasn't disappointed there were still lots of lovely Christmas gifts under the tree. The other disappointment was that Daughter #1's main gift came the day before Christmas and was too big... and so it had to go back... right away. Now I'll be honest, though they are disappointments... for the givers... neither of the receivers were terribly upset. That's because we do not have, in this house, a big desire for material things. But for the givers there was much disappointment. These things could be dealt with later on and so we put it out of our minds and had a lovely Christmas anyway. Then we looked forward to an anniversary party on the 28th... we had invited many of our friends and we looked forward to celebrating our 19th year together. Two couples came! That was a greater disappointment.  We had scrubbed and cooked and gotten ready for a party that just never happened. The electrician and his wife came, (they happen to be an older couple and have done much for us like our electricity renos for no pay), they are a lovely couple and we were happy to have them come and be with us for our nineteenth. Then another couple who are from back home came by in the evening with their two children (who are the same age as our kids) and are like family. They are always reliable for a party. That was it. Not another friend. Zip. None. Nada. We were heartily let down in many we call friends. And so our 19th anniversary passed into ignominy. Still we were not going to let that get us down and we looked forward to New Years Eve when we had invited a couple of friends by for fondue and to help us ring in the new year. After telling us they would love to come, they emailed yesterday to say that they were going shopping and that if they made it at all they would be late?! Like what's that all about? We ended up ringing in the new year on our own... and that's when the table burn happened.

2010 was a strange year... full of unwanted things... like an unwanted jacket commission, (remember that) a break with our church, the moving of one good friend and the death of another, a disappointment in my level 3 marks, unreliable friends, a horrible flair up with my back, and the most worrisome of all, a steady and visible decline in my parents health. If I didn't have a stronger resolution then I guess it would be enough to get me down.

Recently, I have found myself looking at real estate in Spain. It is an out you know. I never ever indulge in fantasies but recently somehow it has helped to keep my outlook on life positive. Running away makes me think that perhaps something good will come of it all, maybe a little adventure and some new acquaintances.... but here I sit with a burn in my relatively new table and a Daughter who is upset and a Teapot who is also upset at me for my reaction. And in the end who cares about the table... tomorrow I might saw the blasted thing in half and make a headboard out of it. (I thought of that at one point when I stubbed my toe on it a while back!) I lay in bed this morning thinking worrisome thoughts, I thought about my parents... but there's not much I can do there other than continue to help them the best way I can. I thought about the table and while it bother me to look at the burn I can apologize to Daughter #2 for my reaction and help her to understand that the table is not important and that I might just saw it in half.... that will appease Teapot. Then I thought about my bank account this morning, while lying in my sleepless bed, and figured that I might as well deal with the budgeting for January... so up I got, and down I came, and I checked the bank account, and low and behold... money... a little that quite honestly I wasn't expecting till later in the month. It's nice to get a little unexpected bonus. And so begins 2011. One bad thing and one good thing.

Start the year as you would wish to go on. Is my house in order.... is it ever? But I suppose... in the end... life is like that... full of ups and downs... and facing it... well, you just have to.

Have you got your house in order...?

Here's to 2011... may it be better than the year before. Salut!