Let the wild rumpus begin!

Firstly - I've been unable to contact the person who wanted the Dandy Dreams pattern. PEOPLE. You need to have your profile public if you'd like to be contacted you when you win. Just a small tip. This is the second time in a row I can not find the person who actually wanted the item I was trying to pass on. I'm not sure who you are Barb, even after scanning through all my followers and trying some Google-fu, so please contact me if you do want that pattern. Thanks! :)

Secondly, we got to pick up the kittens this week!

Tuesday, to be exact. :) :) :)

PLAY PLAY FIGHT PLAY FIGHT FIGHT PLAY PLAY PLAY Zzzzzzzzz

Turns out I'm reallllllllllllly horrible at taking pictures of squirmy, always-in-motion beasties though so getting photos has proved....challenging. I have to take like 20 pics to get ONE good one. Heh. Anyhoo. It took a couple days for them to settle in but now they LURVVVVVVVV us and are purry little cuddle monsters - in between trying to bite and kick your ass, of course.(Oh kittens.....I forgot how bitey they are!) They are confined to the office for the moment (I have a screen gate for the doorway so they aren't 'locked away' though) so imagine me trying to type this post out while kittens are climbing up my back, walking across the keyboard going after my fingers, jumping at the pointer on the monitor, etc. It's a little exhausting! It's a good thing they are cute. It is fun too though. :)

 They were the only two babies in their litter so they are really bonded and do EVERYTHING together like twins. No names just yet but I'm working on it. I wish they would stop growing an inch a day. I feel like I should be able to HEAR them growing, they are getting so big so fast. (9 week birthdays coming up this Sunday.)

So. Not a lot of time for projects and stuff this week. I think I knit about an inch on a pair of socks all week and that is it. 

Also this week, was the annual St. James book sale. Oooooooo, I love this and look forward to it every year! It's a MAD HOUSE when they open their doors. (I know I've posted photos before.) A sweaty, elbow rubbing, packed in like sardines mad house. Totally totally crazy. In a good way. (Everyone is very jovial and good natured about it.)

  I didn't get as many as last year but that's ok. I have a lot of books at home at the moment so I didn't want to overdo it. Got a couple for the hubby, grabbed a few JD Robb books to complete my collection and the rest I know nothing about but kinda looked randomly interesting. A $.50- $1 church book doesn't need to be a masterpiece, you know? I just like reading and can't pass up the opportunity to get some good books at a good price. (Libraries don't work for me because I read in spurts so I would forever be bringing things back late.) It's always fun to poke around regardless of what you end up with.

As far as last years church books, I read MOST of them. I still haven't gotten through all of the JD Robbs I got last year because I'm reading those in order and I haven't worked my way far enough in the series to get to them yet. I will eventually though. I just started the series last summer and I think I'm already up to #13 or something. I could make it through them quickly if that's ALL I read but I like reading 2-3 other books in between. It's a bit daunting to think there are now 35 books in that series though. Yeeesh!

Blah, blah, blah, I'm just boring people now with my chatter, I'm sure.

One last pic.........

Just couldn't resist those new notions kits from Victorian Motto Shoppe. Nope. Did you get one too?

Will it be lion or lamb? Hmm..................

 This was the view on my road on March 1st so I'm thinking....................lion, right? Could go either way but I'm definitely leaning towards 'in like a lion'. If only the universe had made it a little easier to choose!  ;^)

(Here's to a lamb-like end-of-March!)

So definitely no walking outside for a bit until the snow melts (which it is doing today, matter of fact) but I had plenty of mail goodies to keep me company inside.

Lovely dishclothy and stitch marker gift goodness from Dee. LOVE IT! And the colors are perfect for me - purple AND lime. THANK YOU SO MUCH!! :)

I really do love a good cotton cloth to use around the house* but hate knitting with cotton (it makes my elbows weep in anger) so I never knit them very often and this makes me sad.

*the more you use them, the better they get until that day when, oops, they completely unravel from the middle or something because you've used it so much. lol

And then there was this.

ARGH! I got sucked into joining QPB.... again! 

We've doing this dance for yearsssssssss. Literally. Over a decade now! (For real.) They go 'Psst. I'll let you have all these books for $1 each  if you just promise to love me enough to buy one more over the next year' and I get ALL TWITCHY AND DO IT. And I buy the one extra book, immediately cancel the membership, they woo me for a couple more years and keep adding stuff to the deals to catch my attention (this also came with a Star Trek-y book light and an overnight bag) until, one day, OMG I'M DOING IT AGAIN. Repeat until one of is dead. Honestly, I don't know why they keep wooing me because I'm not good for any other purchases - surely this is not a good business model? It is what it is at this point, I guess. Plus, as much as I love my Kindle(s), I do still love an 'old fashioned' paper book. Books in general make me happy. 

I was particularly pleased to get the Grimm's one. I had one of those when I was kid and it was quite fascinating and...........odd. Almost creepy and very un-Disney-like. I watch that show Once Upon a Time and it renewed my interest in them, to the point where I just wish listed one on Amazon recently. I'm not sure it's good 'reading' material to just sit and read all in a go but I know I'll enjoy going through it here and there. I don't remember them verbatim from childhood but I remember snippets, like, someone stomping their foot through a floor and that being his downfall? (Rumpelstiltskin?) I should probably finish one (or all) of the 4-5 books I've already started though first, eh? lol

Well here's something that hasn't happened to me in a while! Mr. Man and his 'make the leg longer, longerrrrrrrrrrrrrr, longerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr' made me run out of yarn on these when doing the toe*. BAH! (I swear he'd be happy if I made a pair of socks long enough to pull right up to his flipping EARS! lol)

Oh well. A quick dive into my leftover bits came up with this heathered gray that blends in so well you probably wouldn't have noticed I had run out of yarn if I hadn't said anything!

*The yarn was generous enough for a normal sized pair of socks so the fault is all mine - on that count. I have to say though, this Paton's Kroy line is a total bust and I won't be using it again. It knits up nice and thick, cushy and wears well. Good price on it. etc. So what's the problem? ABSOLUTELY NO RESPECT FOR THE CONCEPT OF DYE LOT. This is the second time I've used it for socks, using matching dye lots for the two skeins, and both pairs of socks ended up wildly different. One clearly has more vibrant colors than the other and they match only in that 'kinda sorta if you blink' way. Last year with a pair for my mother and now these - same thing. Not cool. Dye lots are there FOR A REASON and the coloring is off WAY too much for a commercial yarn to be anywhere NEAR acceptable. Grrr!

Anyhoo. I think next I might tackle one of the Cookie A patterns that just came in with my red sock club yarn. I'm kinda askeered of them though. *gulp*

They come with five charts to work through. For ONE pair of socks. 0_o

I blurred this a little so you can't really read them but you don't need to read them to see the page after page after page of charts for the design. Wish me luck! Heheheh.

Off to catch up on blog reading! Have a great weekend, y'all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, crap.

How did I manage to go two weeks without updating.................and not even notice? lol

I guess I just haven't been very chatty lately. Or I've been busy. 

Honestly, I haven't even been working on projects much either, though I did manage to finish this super simple and sweet Lizzie Kate freebie:

 I used whatever colors hit my hand as I was flipping through my hand-dye box and added another red stripe on the bottom because I like red and thought it was underrepresented in the original. It will make a nice addition to my little stash of Americana pillows I did last year: 

Besides that it's just been reading, reading, reading. I've gotten the bug again so it's go-go-go READ! I read two books this weekend at a furious pace: The Help and Mrs. Peregine's Home for Peculiar Children. That last one? 

CA...REEP.....EEEEEE. But in a good way.

It's tagged as 'young adult' so it's not overly gross or anything but, like the Harry Potter books at the end of it's run or The Hunger Games, we're not talking about an easy, breezy kid's read either. The author uses creepy-deepy real vintage photos to illustrate the story which is a new twist I've never seen someone do before. Very neat! (I added a Good Reads widget to the sidebar if you want to 'hook up' over there. :))

And now I'm going to go try and catch up with all of y'alls blog posts but I have to admit I'm waving a tiny white flag in that regards because I've become a bit of a.........................skimmer........over the last couple weeks. I know - BAD ME. SKIMMER?? Quelle horreur! I do love reading blogs and leaving comments but sometimes it gets to be too much and then I take off a few days and come back to a Google Reader with 300-400 entries waiting for me and........*GULP* But I'm digging in this afternoon and catching up a bit because I totally adore what you guys have to post about. :)

How is everybody's summer going?

Me, I can tell the gas prices have gone down because I've been inundated with bead orders this past week, letmetellyouwhat. (It really is a GREAT barometer for the nation's mood re: gas prices. Makes sense though, right?) So things have been a bit 'boring' lately because I've been spending so much time on that. I even had to work Saturday last week and I NEVER do that. Sundays I almost always work and I'm cool with that. Saturdays? I like Saturday for lazing around. (I'm not really complaining about it so you can put your tiny violin away. lol)

I started another Cookie A sock but lace socks aren't terribly exciting to look at while being worked on. See:

*yawn*

I even added a flower there for 'production value' but, nope, still boring to look at. Lace knitting is like that. It likes to scrunch all together like a used tissue. It's only once it's done and you can wash and block it does it really look like something worth your time.

Despite being really busy lately we did take some time to go see our first summer flick.

I liked it. It's like a 'feel good' alien movie and how often do you come across one of those? It's kind of nice to see a summer flick where the United States isn't completely destroyed and ruined at the end of it. lol

Now I'm  just counting the days until Harry Potter comes out. *grin*

(Though I think I'd like to maybe see the X-Men one next week. Worth it y/n?)

Mostly though I've been doing some reading. I finally managed to get around to the Hunger Games trilogy. Hello, finished all three in less than 48 hours. For real. Sleeping is for BABIES. I can sleep when I'm dead! It's been a long while since I read a book(s) that seduced me into staying up until dawn to finish it. You should definitely try them if you like to read fiction!

Now I'm slogging through this sloggy, soggy 4th book in the Songs of Fire and Ice series. It starts off slow, slower, SLOWER STILL (!!!) but I'm determined to finish ASAP so I can get to the 'prize' of the 5th book that comes out in a couple weeks. (If that sounds odd - to be excited by the next book when this one is boring - it's because of the structure of these books. All of the 'good' characters are lumped into that 5th book, while this 4th one is comprised of all new characters or people that, up until this point in the series, haven't been very exciting.)

What else should I be reading this summer???? I'm always open to suggestions. :)

I'm sure I'll get to the new Sookie Stackhouse at some point and I still have two books from LAST summer that I never got to. (The Help and The Imperfectionists. I KNOW - I'm the last person on earth to read The Help. Believe me, I KNOW. lol I *WILL* get to it this summer. *WILL* It's sitting on the shelf MOCKING ME and looking at me cross-eyed when I walk by at this point.)

Feh. Time Change.

It's like I'm moving through quicksand today. Oh time-forward-change, my nemesis. *shakes fist*

I should be feeling 'right' again by...................July or so. lol

LOOKEE LOOKEE LOOKEE. I actually finished ANOTHER small stitchy! Never underestimate my ability to ignore what I should be doing (*ahem* sweater *ahem*) in order to dazzle myself with a small pretty. Distracted by teh shiny. I haz it bad. 

(look at me breaking out those buttons again!!!! )

This is a freebie chart that was posted last week by Vinniey on Sometimes I Stitch. Super cute! I changed the colors to be more appropriate to the room I want to use it in but I think it looks great in any colors really. How about red birds and green for the lettering for a Xmas theme? Or all pink or all baby blue for a new baby theme?

I wanted to do a wire hanger for this, you know - just poke it through the corners, curly-q the ends, etc. But I couldn't find any black wire in my craft supplies. I KNOW IT'S IN THERE SOMEWHERE but it's probably easier to just buy some more at Michaels vs. tearing up a big huge closet full of crafty odds-n-ends. So for now it's just a small pillow but I WILL make it into a hanger at some point. (Thankfully, unlike the Joann's that is 45 minutes away, there is a Michaels in town that I can swing by next time I go to the supermarket or whatever.)

Is anybody else planning on watching the new Game of Thrones show on HBO next month?

I have to watch it because I pay dearly for my HBO subscription and figure I have to watch everything in order to get my money's worth. lolol (Thankfully I like most of their programming.)

I know nothing at all about the mythology behind this show though so I broke down and got the first book in the series to try it out. I read the first few chapters last night (hence why I didn't get to bed until 4am *sigh*) and it seems..............dense. (And much like something else I've read but can't quite put my finger on at the moment. Pillars of the Earth? The Mists of Avalon? I just started it though so I could be very very wrong.) So far I would say it's interesting but it's not 'wowing' me. I could just be a jaded SOB though. lolol  (As much as I love sci-fi TV, I'm pretty picky about sci-fi books.) And I do all this with the full knowledge that reading the book first might totally ruin the show for me, like it did with the Sookie Stackhouse series. (Love those books, am just 'meh' on the show. The trashy lowbrow fun of the books just translates into ridiculous and over-the-top to me on screen. Clearly I'm in the minority though because the show is a hit. /shrug)

Getting back to normal this week.

Or should I say back to the new normal...or would that be the start of the new normal because if it's new then how can you go back to it? OMG MY HEAD HURTS ALREADY. lol

Thank you everyone for your kind messages and emails. My husband reads my web site too so he too read them over and sends his thanks.  It was a difficult week. Not as difficult in some ways as I thought it might be but downright awful in other ways. Nothing insurmountable with a little time and patience though. :)

To that end it was back to work yesterday so I should have some new beads posted for sale at some point this week. We made a bit of a change to my working area which is causing me some headaches (not literal headaches, just major aggravation) and made me a little less than productive yesterday so that was UGH. He probably won't be able to try to fix things until tomorrow so I'll just have to grin and bear it for another day. I had the bright idea to switch out the falling-apart chair mat with a piece of plywood to save money because I end up replacing those damn mats *all* the time and the size I need to protect my work area is not very small so the mats are expensive. Yes, I get to write them off on my taxes, which is a good thing, but sometimes I just don't want to spend all that cash on the same item, again and again and again. (And I have to have something because I do drop things here and there and dropping hot glass on a floor, as one might imagine, results in ugly burn marks. Who knew right?) So I thought maybe a piece of wood would be better because, theoretically, it should last forever. And it would be fine if my chair didn't fall off the back like KLUNK every time I got up to put a bead in the kiln, and my elbows weren't at different heights because it raised up one of my tables but not the other and I could actually SEE the psi gauge on my oxygen concentrator (which also got raised up and now I can't see it) because it does fluctuate a bit as I'm working and I need to adjust that and MAYBE I JUST DON'T LIKE CHANGE VERY MUCH, OK? lol I've had things a certain way since 2004 and OMG I MIGHT DIE NOW BECAUSE IT'S ALL DIFFERENT.

*ahem* Or not. There is a plan to make things better so it will work out soon. Just feel free to ignore me in the meantime. :)

Ok, who else has finished The Passage because I need to pick your brain a tiny bit about something that happened at the end. I read it one way, thought about it some, reread it, and now I'm not sure what I think. Ultimately it doesn't matter because it will/won't work itself out in next books, which will give me a definitive answer.......at some point. /shrug

How is everybody's week going?

No complaints here. (Other than the unrelenting heat that rolled on in about two days ago. Ugh. It seems like that in the last few years around here there are exactly 3.5 days of 'optimal' weather where you could sit on the deck without dying of heat/humidity between Memorial Day-Labor Day. Why do I have deck furniture again? It's lonely about 98% of the time! lol)

Good things for the week:

*The next (and final) book in the Millennium series was released in the US.

Been waiting for this!!!! I haven't dug into it yet because I know when I do it will throw me into an 8-hour echo chamber where all food/drink/chores/conversation will be IGNORED until I get to the last page. (I'm thinking tomorrow might a good day to settle in with it.)

*I don't have cancer. So that's really good. (Had a weird mole-thing that suddenly popped up on my chin over the last few months removed a few weeks ago and had to wait for the test results to come back on it to be sure it wasn't cancer. I guess it's a 50/50 deal with that type of fast-growing growth but I ended up on the right side of that '50'.) Though the whole episode is probably a precursor of things to come as I get older so I'll have to stay vigilant about getting bumps checked on....no biggie there. I can live with that. Who knew about sun disease in the 70's when I was growing up? I remember having one peeling sunburn after another as a kid and nobody thought anything about it. It just was what it was. Oh well. Not much you can do about it now, right? I haven't had a tan in at least the last 18 years so hopefully this is the last of the scary skin issues. *crosses fingers*

*Awesome LOST finale. I just noticed the other day that Netflix has seasons 1-5 available for "instant play" so I think I'm going to spend the summer rewatching the series while nothing else is on tv anyway. I can get Netflix instant play streamed to my TiVo in high-def which is OMFG@!@#$@# awesome and it will be interesting to go back and watch everything knowing all the stuff you know NOW about the Island's goings on.

What else good is going on??