General

My house is a disaster. I think I have too much stuff…and I’m not talking yarn stash here, either. I decided to sign up for the FlyLady emails, figuring that any amount of direction is better than none when it comes to decluttering. I’ve only been getting the email for half a day, and it’s sort of funny and sort of annoying – we’ll see if I like it enough to stick with it. I’d really like to reduce the amount of stuff that’s crammed into every nook and cranny in the house, preferably before the holidays. (Just not the yarn!)

To that end, I spent an hour going through three drawers yesterday: my sock drawer, which yielded several pairs of socks that I can’t remember having worn for years; my long-sleeved shirt drawer, which contained turtlenecks I haven’t worn since moving into this house^*; and my…um….unmentionables…drawer, which actually just needed to be straightened up. Now I can put away the socks and shirts I actually wear, instead of keeping them in (folded) piles near my dresser. Yay!

Of course, I still have a laundry basket full of sweaters that won’t fit in my armoire due to the large volume of sweaters already in there. And I do wear most of them…deciding which ones I can part with is going to be a bigger challenge, and I’m saving that for another rainy day.

^*How do I know I haven’t worn those shirts since I moved in? Well, you know how people have different folding styles? Some of them were still folded the way my helpful unpackers did them when we moved in. :) Hopefully they’ll keep someone else warm this winter: they’re going in a box down to the salvation army bin this evening!

See why I love this guy? Yesterday was our tenth anniversary. I know what you’re thinking…”Wait, didn’t she just celebrate an anniversary in May? And wasn’t it her fourth?” Well, yes. But ten years ago yesterday we started dating. So Denis came home from work with ten roses: four white ones for the years were were dating, two red-tipped yellow ones for the years we were engaged, and four red ones for the years we’ve been married.

Then we got all dressed up and went out to dinner at the Spring House (and ate sinfully delicious desserts!), came home, took care of the dogs, and watched baseball and knitted until bedtime. (The last trip out with the dogs revealed…snow?!? Well, flurries, anyway.)

It’s fun being married to your best friend!

I have to say, I truly feel sorry for this guy. I wanted the Cubs to win, and to see the Cubs and the Red Sox in the World Series, because I thought that would be kind of cool, not because I have any particular loyalties to any of the teams involved. But this poor guy – he’s got a police guard outside of his house, and he’s being offered asylum. That’s the sort of thing you expect for people who’ve gotten mixed up in serious crimes…not someone who catches a foul ball.

Now I like my sports teams just fine, and if that had happened to one of my teams, maybe I’d feel differently. But just leave the poor guy alone already! After all, the Cubs lost themselves three other games without any help from the fans. (Sorry to any Cubs fans who read this. That’s just the way it is.)

Incidently, this is why it’s safer to sit at home and knit while the game is on TV. No chance of being accused of fan interference. (Or, more likely, getting hit by a foul ball, since I can’t catch worth crap.)

Lately, I’ve been having some trouble with comment spam – as in, people leaving comments in various older posts with, well, inappropriate links in them.

It’s really very annoying – first I have to get the notification that someone has left a comment. Then I have to go into each comment and manually delete it. Finally I have to rebuild my site. This is a long process, especially since the people in question usually leave several comments within a few seconds. What’s more annoying is that these links are left up there for anyone to see until I check my email and have several minutes to deal with it.

This is not an isolated problem.

The good news is, if you use Movable Type, there is a new solution available: MT-Blacklist. I’m going to install it tonight, and I figured I’d share the love. :)

(Remind me to do a back up first, since I should be doing them regularly anyway!)

It definitely feels like Monday today. That’s the only problem with traveling over the weekend – I feel like I need a weekend to get ready to go back to work. Let’s see…I woke up with a scratchy throat (allergies, I hope), couldn’t find warm enough clothes (it’s cold out there!), couldn’t find my keys, walked half-way to work and realized I forgot my coffee (yes, it’s only next door – the bigger problem was re-navigating the bees crawling all over my driveway…after tree sap maybe?) and then managed to spill half of it because the lid was on crooked.

The trip was good, though. We went for our newest niece’s baptism. I came home with more yarn (surprised?), and several almost-finished little projects. If you ever have 5 feet of i-cord to make, the thruway and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the iPod makes it go quickly!

Molly and Murphy managed to survive without us. Molly stayed with my parents, and we boarded Murphy…he scraped his nose up a little, and seems to have barked himself hoarse. Poor little guy. I wish we had a better solution for leaving the dogs for the weekend – it would be impossible for my parents to take both of them, and he’s just a little too destructive to leave with friends. Thanksgiving ought to be interesting…

OK, I’m done rambling now! Back to work. :)

So, if you were going to steal a tire off of someone’s car, would you be nice enough to replace it with your spare, and leave their hubcap? My brother went to head home for his first long weekend from school, and found that someone had done just that. I guess college parking lots are a bad place to park your car. Fortunately, a local friend of his that was going to ride home with him has a car on campus too, so they drove his friends’ car home.

I’ve never heard of something like that happening – I always thought that we had the special lug nuts on our tires to prevent the hubcaps from being stolen, not the tires themselves!

Of course, it’s kind of funny, in an odd sort of way. At least they tried to be nice by leaving the spare and the hubcap. If he weren’t going to such a small, expensive school, I could see how maybe a poor starving college student, desperate to get home for the long weekend, might consider that the best course of action. But if you can pay the tuition to this place, you can afford a new tire.

The moral of the story is: the world is getting a little crazier every day…

Since I refuse to believe that at 27 I can pass for 35, it must be that liquor stores don’t proof if you pick out an expensive enough bottle of wine? I mean, I know I didn’t have any makeup on, but…really, do I look 35 already?!?

Anyway, more thanks to Peppermint Tina and Jo for their Barktober Fest support!

I just got back from my cousin’s wedding. It’s funny how the ceremonies are different, the receptions are different, but once you’re married, every wedding you ever go to reminds you of your own.

The world will turn and the seasons will change,
and all the leassons we will learn will be beautiful and strange.
We’ll have our fill of tears, our share of sighs.
My only prayer is that you realize
you’ll always be beautiful in my eyes.
— Joshua Kadison, Beautiful In My Eyes