Mac the Knife

We're having some unseasonably hot weather right now. Although it's really not that unseasonable because we haven't hit the local record high temperature yet. It's probably going to be 100°F at the peak, although there's a slight breeze picking up, meaning that we may get the marine layer here early.

Updated to add that we did indeed set a new record for the local high for the day, by 4°, at 99°, so far. It may get another degree or two hotter.

Anyway, we put the ductless a/c unit in on Thursday, but it's not working. There's a problem with getting the remote to work and, of course, it only works with the remote. They're coming over on Monday with a new remote and an electrician to sort everything out.

Meanwhile I'm struggling with a constant problem that has kind of gotten out of hand. I do a lot of shopping on the Internet. It's mostly because of the dog; between his epilepsy and the weather, I don't like to go off and leave him for very long at all. Shopping is no fun if you're in a panic to get back home. So UPS and FedEx and USPS keep delivering cartons of shopping to my house. I've been buying a fair amount of clothing because nothing I had would fit and that really added the boxes. The two most recent deliveries were a new HP all-in-one from Amazon and a pair of utility knives from Overstock.

I needed the utility knives because I've used up all the snap-off blades on my U-Haul box cutters. Cutting up cardboard with a dull knife is dangerous and frustrating. All these cartons that keep showing up have to be cut up and put, along with most of the packing material, into the recycle bin. I'd gotten really behind and I had cardboard boxes everywhere. My housekeeper and I made a good start two weeks ago, clearing out the stuff in the guest room. We only stopped because we ran out of space in the recycle bin. So last week I borrowed my neighbor's recycle bin and filled up both bins, but that still didn't take care of all the boxes.

Yesterday afternoon I cut up another half a bin's worth. And the new utility knives really work well. The grip is very comfortable and it's easy to change blades. Plus they each came with fifty spare blades, which should last close to a lifetime. You should have seen me slashing through the carton they came in, with the razor-sharp blade making it effortless. Just call me Mac the Knife.

As soon as it cools off I'm going to go cut up enough to fill the recycle bin so it will go away on Tuesday. Then I'm going to polish off the rest, get it all out of my entry hall and living room, and never let myself get so far behind again. I don't have any real problem keeping up with the household recycling, mostly from the kitchen, just with the inundation of cartons.

Updated to add that I did get all the big cartons and the packing material into the recycle bin, with a little room left over for the kitchen stuff. The worst part was going out into the heat to transfer it from the large carton I'd put it into as I cut it up to the bin. It's not just hot, but more humid than normal. I just couldn't bear to wait until it got cooler. I've gotten a little compulsive about all this cardboard.

UPS bringeth,
USPS bringeth, and
FedEx bringeth,
But none of them taketh away.

It's Spring and my house needs attention and I'm restless. I've got another two 33-gallon bags to donate to the thrift store and I'm starting to be able to hang clothes in my closet without prying apart what already in there. I'm saving the guest room closet for when my cousin comes, in July. She'll help me be ruthless with the dressier work clothes that went in there when I outgrew them. I of course had hopes of losing weight and wearing them again, but I didn't know it wouldn't be until I'd been retired for six years and no longer had anywhere to wear them.

I will get back to knitting, I promise. I'll take photos of all the new yarn I've gotten (I have to put it away, now that it's out of its cartons) in the next couple of days and put some photos up here (and add all of them in Ravelry). I've even got two FOs to photograph and post. Plus two triangular shawls that just need blocking to be finished and a circular shawl ditto. I'm saving the circular shawl for when my cousin is here, since it's for her. After we get it blocked, we may have to shorten it. She's my height and this is supposed to be a circular shawl to keep her shoulders warm in over-cooled restaurants, not a mid-thigh-length cape. It's knit top-down in a modified fan and feather, so shortening it won't be difficult.

It's Gordo's Birthday

Today Gordo the Wonder Puppy is one year old. He has really grown and grown up in this year. There have been days when I thought we should have named him "May Day" but we seem to be past a lot of that.

About a month ago I ran into Gordon Fullerton and we chatted briefly. I told him I'd gotten a new smooth-coated collie puppy and named it after him. I think it kind of took him aback at first but he warmed to the idea.

Speaking of Gordo (the dog), I hadn't realized that a smooth-coated collie would shed as much, or as often, as a rough-coated collie. Nor did I realize that the shorter hair would cling so tenaciously to everything, particularly fabrics. My vacuum just wasn't picking it all up, even though it had worked perfectly for the longer hair from Gordo's rough-coated predecessors. After a lot of shopping around on the internet, I bought a Eureka model designed to pick up animal hair. It looks, and works, a lot like a Dyson, but cost less than half as much (at least, it did on Overstock.com).

I'm still doing a lot of reading on my Kindle (Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives, right now) and haven't been doing much more. I've done a little internet shopping in the last month, mostly very ordinary stuff. The one exception is the two skeins of beautiful cream silk yarn with aurora borealis sequins (Tilly Thomas Disco Lights Natural) that I picked up on eBay for an excellent price. This is an insanely luxurious yarn and I have no idea what I'm going to knit it into. Yarn like this really needs exactly the right pattern and recipient.

I bought a pressure cooker from Overstock.com and have been doing a little fiddling around with that. I'm trying to get back to more cooking "from scratch" instead of nuking something from Stouffer's. The first thing I cooked was potatoes, to slice and fry. I made a tiny mistake and cooked them for about twice as long as I should have. Fortunately I managed to pick out enough big chunks that I could actually slice and fry them, but most of them had disintegrated completely. I had entertained some thoughts of making mashed potatoes, but have decided to just toss them and buy more spuds. You can be sure that I'll cut the cooking time radically this time. I'm a quick learner.

It's finally shorts and tees time here again. I discovered that all of my shorts were at least one size too large. I have bagged them up to go to New to You, the hospital volunteers' thrift store. A lot of my tees were also too big and starting to get a little limp from being washed so many times, so I'm going through those, too. I've gotten new shorts and tees from Land's End, Dillard's, Overstock.com, and Smartbargains.com. It's actually fairly inexpensive to wear shorts and tees. Not that I wear business clothes, but I do notice the prices.

I'm actually back to the size that some of the dressier clothes, currently hanging in the guest room closet, are, but I don't think I'll get much wear out of them. They're too old to be in style but not old enough to be back in style, if you know what I mean. I still have some '70s and '80s clothes in cartons. I can't fit into them yet, but maybe by next year.... I just hope retro stays in style. If I'd had any sense I'd have gotten rid of these long ago. I guess I packed them away at the end of a season and just never went back through the boxes.

Now that I've written this down, I see that I'm actually doing some Spring cleaning. Sorting through clothes, getting on top of the dog hair problem, and so on. I love Spring, even though the season can be very windy here. It's so nice to have open windows and fresh air after having the house closed up all winter. It seems to me that Spring, more than New Year's, is the time to make resolutions and changes. Too hard to be hopeful in the dead of winter, maybe.

Sad Anniversaries

It will be my mother's birthday on the 24th, the second since she died. Somehow this anniversary makes me sadder than the anniversary of her death. In reaction to this, I find myself swamped in creativity or, maybe, in shopping to support creativity. I've been buying lace weight yarn like crazy. I bought three partial cones of Jaggerspun Zephyr and another three colors of cashmere-silk blend on eBay, four different colorways from Black Bunny Yarn, and two colorways of kettle-dyed yarn from Knit Picks. Then today I got a skein of Lorna's Laces Helen's Lace for the 2009 Year of Lace Spring offering.

The funny thing is, I don't know why I'm suddenly accumulating lace weight yarn. It's not in honor of my mother. I never knit a lace shawl for my mother and she wouldn't have worn it if I had. She rarely wore sweaters or jackets or coats and a lace shawl just wasn't her style at all. An afghan would have suited her, but I'm just now starting to think about knitting afghans, mostly for the new house.

There's some miscellaneous news. We're having a heat wave here. It's been in the '90s, which is unusual in April. Today we're having a lot of convective activity and there's an actual thunderstorm just north of us that has really dropped the temperature. I doubt if we'll see any precipitation, though.

Gordo went to the vet last week and he weighs 75 lbs now. He'll be one year old on May Day. He's doing very well, although he has trouble sleeping in the warm evenings. We've started leaving the slider in the bedroom open and he's doing better. His crate is right by the door and the cool air washes over him, making him more comfortable. He also seems to be eating a little better. I think he's not wild about the lamb and rice kibble, so I'm going to look for a different brand next time. Maybe I'll pick up a small bag of Canidae. My previous pair of collies liked it very much, so I can hope Gordo will, too, and that it won't make him itch.

Some time ago I got a new vacuum cleaner, a Eureka, that claims to pick up dog hair. It does and I'm really pleased. I hadn't realized how much hair Gordo had shed in the bedroom (or how much we'd tracked in) until I saw it whirling around in the vacuum cup. His hair is pretty much invisible on the silver plush, which helped conceal the quantity. The vacuum can also be used on hard floors, having a switch to turn the beater brushes off, which is really nice. My halls and bathrooms are tiled and regular vacuums just spread stuff around on them, rather than sucking it up. This vacuum came from Overstock.com and was quite reasonably priced. I looked at Dysans but couldn't find one with the hard-floor option and thought they were kind of expensive. I've had Eurekas before and liked them, so that's what I got.

At the same time I also picked up a Bissell carpet cleaner from Overstock.com. It's refurbished and has a minimal complement of accessories, but I'ver never found that I use the accessories. I probably should, now that I actually think about it, since the chair I regularly sit in is a bit grubby and could stand to have the arms cleaned, at the very least. We have the carpet cleaners come in about once a year and do everything, but with a dog it's nice to be able to tackle spots when they appear, without doing the entire house. All of my dogs have been very good about not making organic messes, being well-trained, but I swear that they would sometimes clench an entire pawful of mud to track onto the carpet on rainy days. Add in my propensity to spill Caffeine-Free Diet Coke and spot-cleaning gets important.

The third thing in my order was a pressure cooker. I've never had one, but my mom loved hers. She was a working woman for as long as I can remember and the pressure cooker let her put dinner on the table in no time. I'm more interested in keeping the kitchen cool during the summer. I'm trying to add some balance and variety to my diet and I know I'm more likely to eat food I've prepared. For example, I despise cooked bell peppers, yet a lot of companies sneak them into frozen meals, where they taint the entire dish. This is particularly true of baked pasta dishes and Mexican foods, like enchiladas. I also think the pressure cooker will let me cook smaller quantities. There's really no reason to make two big pans of cheese enchiladas or lasagna just because you're going to all that work anyway. The cooker is also touted as making excellent rice and, with special pans, steamed desserts. I'll let you know how this works out.