I don’t make time for blogging and then when I sit down to do it, there seems to be too much to say, or do, or show.
House – sale closes the 24th. It is being purchased by a Contractor who will rehab the house, use it as a promotional vehicle, and then sell it.
Mom is finally back in her apartment, after 10 weeks of rehab for her broken leg and wrist. She is using a walker, and can’t drive yet, but is otherwise mostly independent. She gets herself down to the Dining Room for meals and is doing well. Her spirits are good – she was SO READY to leave the rehab/SNF unit.
OKC – I’m back to working on the Dogs Paw Lace, but it is embarassingly slow going. I gave up on the smoky brown color; I couldn’t get the hang of it and I knew I would not want to be staring at this color for weeks on end. It doesn’t have to be the color of my friend’s dog to be a tribute to him. So, I’ve restarted with a vivid, dark pink Lorna’s Laces sock yarn. I still probably frog 10-15% of what I do, just because I’m not paying attention and occasionally a dropped yarnover that can’t be recovered. I keep a lifeline at the end of each repeat and I have two in at any given time. I actually needed to frog past the first lifeline once, but thankfully only a row or two back. I am FINALLY getting the hang of the pattern. I’d like to get two repeats done a day (24 rows of 49 stitches). It doesn’t sound like much but I’ve been working on it as I can for several weeks and I’m doing very well if I can get one repeat in and not have to frog most of it. There are 29 repeats, plus a small border on each end. I have one border and 8 repeats so far. I need a really good pix from digital camera but cellphone cam is all I can manage so far. There are battery issues with the “main” camera.
It can be hard to keep up, when you have your own Penelope, undoing your work.
Later, the culprit is caught red-handed. 
He’s lost a couple of his nine lives this way. He needs to be especially careful if I lose all sense of decency and start doing REAL lace knitting.
I’m trying to be serially monogamous because I’ve started so many things lately. I might switch off to the Lillehammer Hat for a while, but as right now that involves an afternoon of serious frogging and much gnashing of teeth, I simply can’t touch it at the moment. Also, I’m trying to contain myself from fits of *ess*eee*ecks by only working from stash. Since I’ve probably spent $200 in the last couple of months on yarn (still cheaper than compulsive shoe or purse shopping), I should be able to restrain myself.
Finally, DH was mildly interested in this house, just down the street from us. He thought the curbfront garage would be a great place for his home business/office. There was a moving van in front of the house a month ago, but you could still see a table lamp in one of the front windows. I got fairly panicky, figuring we’d just spent months cleaning out Mom’s house and knowing that there would be more of the same before we could get out of this one. Plus it appears that all the Living space is on the second floor, (admittedly I think you can get to it from the back without stairs). DH is 66 with arthritis. I’m 51 with a bad ankle and fat to boot. I did not enjoy the prospect of schlepping everything we own up those stairs, plus go through all that to move to a house that’s probably 300 yards south of us. Yards as in “3 feet to a”, not “house with a”. DH rightly told me to chill out. We don’t even know if the house is remaining vacant. Last week, there was a dumpster and the garage doors were open. The dumpster appeared to be full of landscaping material. Well. Now, it IS for sale. For $341K.
I really can’t see us doing this. The RMLS listing photos show a huge Living Room with MILES of panelling. Miles of it. There IS a fireplace, though. The Kitchen appears to be tiny with those Marshall Dillon saloon doors. And, in 8 photos, there is not ONE photo of a bedroom in a 3 BR, 2 BA house. How weird is that? Since we’ve just been dealing with Mom’s house, admittedly a fixer-upper, I know that the rooms needing the most work were not posted on the Net. Duh. However, since it is like a 2-minute walk from here, if they do an Open House, we will go look at it. If the stars were in alignment, we sold this one, bought that one, we’d have about $100,000 mortgage. I don’t know how anxious I am to sign my life away for another 15-30 years. We paid off this house, then and now a fixer, in 11 instead of 15 years. For that kind of money, we could move out of this one for a couple months, rehab this one, and move back in. There is a vacant lot next to us that prospective homeowners are fairly salivating over. This is an older neighborhood and there isn’t much land available. There was a nice, normal-sized lot down the street with a tiny (less than 1000 feet) bungalow set way back from the street. A builder bought that, tore down the little house and put a McMansion in with virtually no yard. It’s a monstrosity, 2o feet higher than anything else in the neighborhood. Now he wants to sell it (he didn’t have a buyer in hand first?) and it’s been on the market for a couple of months. There are also some of those very narrow infill houss going up. The kind where you can nearly touch the windows of each side of the house with outstretched arms. It’s like living in a corridor.
We saw Shrek III yesterday. Now, I love Shrek. I love the idea of “beautiful at any size”. I was prepared to love the movie. It was, eh. And it was short, maybe 90 minutes? Not even any “outtakes” to speak of during the closing credits. My grade would be an unenthusiastic B- or C+.
OK, enough ranting for today. I need to get to chores and perhaps a nice quiet movie to knit by this afternoon.
