Half-Mad

We had a little meltdown here the other day.

By "we" I mean those of us who are sixteen years old and passionately attached to our iPhones.  And by "meltdown" I mean a crisis of epic proportions.  A emotional event that, left unchecked, could level a city.

It started when PhoneGirl tried to update the operating system on her beloved companion and ended up with an unresponsive black screen instead of than the highly anticipated iOS8.  This was followed by the usual ranting and raving, and panicked plugging in of phones to this computer and that, all to no avail.  In the depths of her despair, PhoneGirl seems to have tried to comfort herself by hearkening back to the halcyon days of her youth ("Enjoy it now," she loves to tell poor Matthew, who is all of 8 years old, "pretty soon you'll be in High School and its all SUFFERING there!").  That is to say, she found this



and this



and went to work.


Observe now, if you will, the shocking evidence of one teenager's descent into iPhone madness:
























Clearly, the suffering was overwhelming.  And, fortunately, fairly short lived.  By the time our damsel in distress was eyeing the activities on page 56, the cherished phone beeped back into consciousness.  It's memory had been wiped, but it had clearly returned from the land of the lost and all was on the way to being well again.

Until the next Teen Drama.

Half-Truths

I'm back, which I suppose is an unnecessarily obvious thing to point out.

I still have nothing to say about where my summer went, but before I put on my audiobook and crank out the rest of the rigid heddle table runner that I still have not freaking finished (and let's not even mention the Socks of Eternal Knitting and the Scarf That Refuses to End), here are a few pictures from this past week that I just can't not share.

First, apples and honey for a sweet new year.



 My kids scarfed them down during dinner the other night, even though I had imagined I was serving them for dessert. That's how much I know, right?

Second, it would appear that Freddy and the Gang are either hot on the trail of the next masked creeper or desperately in need of Scooby Snacks, because this is what Isabel and I found in the Target parking lot Tuesday when we did our last minute shop to make sure she and the boys had something decent to wear to Temple on Thursday.




We were neither the sole nor the boldest photographers on the scene:





And last, we have our Wildlife Update. We've been seeing an awful lot of teeny tiny snakes.


 

This one had the good fortune to still be alive. The others have mostly been lying flattened in the road. Their elders do not seem to have done an effective job of teaching survival skills, such as Not Getting Run Over by Cars.

 That's all, except to wish you all a  Happy Friday!

Lies!

Ahem.

Well, I, uh, was supposed to show up last Monday with marvelously entertaining tales from the summer that just sped by us.  Since it is, as far as I can tell, no longer Monday, perhaps we are gaining a small understanding of why it is that I think a summer vacation that was fully 10 weeks long (well, minus a day, if you want to be strictly accurate) passed in the blink of an eye. That is to say-- as my eldest and most infuriatingly punctual child is regularly tempted to point out-- I occasionally demonstrate a faulty understanding of time.  I prefer to think that I have such an advanced concept of the matter that I have evolved beyond the need for clocks and calendars. Unlike certain persons of limited imagination and understanding that I could mention. So far I have found very few people who see things my way, which often happens to those of us who seek to enlighten the world with such mind-blowing explanations.

To distract us all from this unfortunate topic, here is a picture of some yarn.



"Oh no!"  I hear you groan.  "Not more knitting!"

And you will be relieved to hear that all this fluff is instead destined for the loom.  Not all in the same project, of course.  I may (or may not, depending on enrollment) be teaching an introductory class in rigid heddle weaving.  The yarn is intended for a sample of the first class project, a scarf.  If I am super-speedy, I will make more than one scarf in order to demonstrate different fabrics and color effects etc. etc., and if I am as slow as usual, I will put the extra yarn away in the drawer and pull up some useful project pictures from Ravelry.

And that's all I have to say for today.  I will be back on Monday at some date in the not too distant future and maybe I will have a finished table runner to show (that's the blue thing underneath all my yarn). Or a new door for the chicken coop.  Or some totally unnecessary goodies from the fiber festival I'm going to tomorrow. At this point, I'm making no promises.

Questions

Two months (almost) since my last zucchini-infested post and you might have been wondering where the bleep I've been since then.  That is not, however, the true question.  The true question is where the  bleep my summer has gone, a question that I have no intention of answering right now for the very good reason that today is the last official day of my personal vacation and, in the same way that I refused to stop and blog while summer was available, I refuse to give up the last minutes of my personal time answering questions.

So there.

Here is evidence of what I have been doing for the last week and a half while the kids were at school:





It's not nearly as much as I thought I was going to do, but I suspect now that my original plans, which pretty much amounted to finishing any outstanding project I have ever started, were a teeny little bit optimistic.

My spinning wheel is now empty and my next goals are to:

1. clear off the rigid heddle loom, which looks like this


(ew!  I just realized that I'm not crazy about how this project looks, which is not a lot of incentive to keep working on it.)

2. clear off my floor loom, which looks like this

(boring! no wonder it's been on the loom since December)

3. clear off my in-progress spindles, which look like this


(much cooler picture--maybe I'll work on those next)

4. finish my knitting WIPs, which look like this


(okay--that's just the dumbest picture ever; please ignore it)


and

5. finish all my quilts, which I can't even show you because they've been in deep storage since I stopped quilting 8 years ago. Just imagine a very large pile of blankets and blankets-to-be.

Numbers 4 and 5 might be problems, particularly as they probably amount to 6 months of full time work and I'm headed back to work next week and will, most likely, have to put in a little overtime to make up for the time I just took off.  Then again,  why plan if you're not willing to plan big, right?

In the mean time, enjoy the weekend and I expect to be back here Monday morning, at about the time the first work-avoidance urge hits.  Then we can talk about where the bleep my summer went.