1. Some beat up door frames
got a fresh coat of paint.
2. I shelled out for a new hacksaw,
which made easy work of cutting the downspouts in preparation for my new rain barrels.
I seem to be having a Murphy's law kind of relationship with these barrels. Before we ordered them, it was painfully dry around here. No big deal, since I didn't have any barrels with which to "harvest" any rain. Then we got them, and it rained gallons and gallons, but of course they were in the garage waiting to be installed so they still didn't do us any good. Now they are installed, and it stands to reason that it will never rain again. Just as well; I still have one more coat of paint to put on the doors.
3. On the inside of the house, I attended to some long neglected projects. The highest-impact project was the re-installation of the TP holder in the downstairs bathrooom. Despite all my instructions to the builder to make sure that all towel bars and TP holders were firmly anchored to studs, this one got installed just in the drywall and it has been out of service for more than half of our 6 years here. Last year I decided I would fix it and got as far as making half a dozen or so exploratory holes in the walls
before I stripped the screws and got the holder stuck in a piece of accessory wood that was meant to serve as a plaque on which to mount the TP holder. Because I had stripped the screws, I couldn't get the TP holder out of the 'plaque' without a saw, which I couldn't find. I got annoyed and decided to set the project aside until it stopped making me mad.
Yesterday I decided that I was mighty and dreadful and I set my TP holder free again by stomping on the plaque until it broke into a thousand pieces. I bought some washers and screws and was on the verge of fussing about the absence of a replacement plaque when I realized that the TP holder screws could be set in a vertical line (I was originally waylaid by a pair of very misleading holes set horizontally in the TP holder --a total red herring) and that the whole plaque escapade had been an unnecessary diversion. To top it all off, it turned out that two of the holes I made last year were perfectly spaced and reasonably well located for the TP holder. And here it is! Holes have been filled and I even searched the house and found the wall paint for finishing the job. I can't imagine it will match after all this time, but it will be much better than looking at all the white dots on the wall.
4. While I had the spackle out to fill the holes in the bathroom walls, I also filled the holes made when the dog freaked out about the chickens and tore the curtains [story here] (which have since been cleverly used to make secret hideouts on the bunk beds, where the extra ventilation in the curtains is actually a good thing).
5. Catching up on some knitting and spinning stuff, here is a picture of my final Tour de Fleece project, which was 4 ounces of Spinner's Hill fiber that I got from Dizzy Sheep. After all that worsted weight long draw spinning, I was in the mood for some very fine and smooth spinning and this ended up being over 590 yards of a light fingering weight. The colors mixed beautifully and I'm hoping it will be just as pretty when I knit it, though I have no clue what I'll make with it yet.
I did not meet my goal of spinning all 4 pounds of fiber, but I did finish all of my merino fleece, I filled two bobbins of the autumn bat (although I still have 5 bobbins/10 ounces total) left to spin, and I had a lot of fun.
While I was busy spinning, Dizzy put some Dream in Color yarn up for sale and I bought two skeins of purple to make this sweet little sweater for a new cousin of ours. I'm trying to knit really fast because I'm worried that the sweater might be closer to a 12 month size than the 18 month size that I think is really what a March baby might wear for this winter. Then again, my babies were kind of hefty, and maybe this new cousin will be petite and I won't have to worry.
All this sweater knitting for baby Delilah led my baby to ask when I was going to knit him a sweater. To prove how earnest and desperate he was to wear a hand knit sweater, he made moony eyes at me and tried to stuff himself into a tiny little sweater that I had pulled out of storage to use as a guide for the size of Delilah's sweater. I was powerless to resist that much cuteness and I ordered a few skeins of this yarn to make him a little sweater from the Green Mountain Spinnery Knitting Book. What a sucker!
6. The busy-ness will continue today, if I ever get off my blogging duff and get to work. This nice little pile of materials was delivered yesterday (as was my new anti-fatigue floor mat from the nice people at Williams-Sonoma; I told you it was busy around here) and is waiting to be made into a mini-coop for this year's babies. They are getting a little stinky in the garage, and I think it's high time they were turned out into more natural surroundings. I'm pretty sure they agree; every time I pull back the netting over their box, at least one of them tries to make a break for it.
Off to work!!
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