You assume I leave the house

So a lot of people have talked about minimalist wardrobes out there.  There's the idea of a capsule wardrobe, when you have 12/22/33/37/some magical number of items that you mix and match whenever you leave the house for 3 months/4 months/forever.  One example of a plan like that can be found here.  They usually end up looking something like this.

The idea behind it is that you can look stylish without having to make too many decisions, you can store it easily in a city closet, and you can spend more on a few simple pieces, thereby buying and wearing quality items you love.

Then there's the personal uniform idea, where you either wear the same simple concept for the day.  

Or the same thing every day.

This idea takes making decisions out of the picture entirely, truly simplifies organization, and practically eliminates the need to shop.

To be honest, I love the idea.

I grew up in school uniforms. 

PE, wood shop, you name it, we did it in our uniforms.  Every day, clean underwear, clean white shirt, the skirt that wasn't at the cleaners, same sweater, same shoes.  You looked reasonably sharp (at least I thought so), they wore like iron, and you didn't have to think.  At the end of the week you rotated your skirt at the cleaners, did your shirts with bleach to eliminate the stains, and made sure to take them out right away so you wouldn't have to iron them.  

Of course the problem with uniforms now is that I love floral prints.  Easter egg pastels make me happy.  I love lace and ruffles and bows.  I adore jumpers.  If I could I would dress like the most conservative Christian on the planet.

Seriously.  I would wear those in a heartbeat.  

And I would look ridiculous.  Seriously.  Size issues aside, because jumpers actually look good on larger women if they don't have the waistband right up under the boobs, I have too much sour and not enough sweet to pull it off.  Also, with my hormone issues, I tend to run really, really warm.  I need to be able to peel off layers.

So, I've come up with a layered uniform.

The base is a simple skirt and tank top combo.  Sleeveless and light for coolness.  Right now it's a light grey on top and a dark grey on bottom because that's what I have. but in the very near future it's going to be black and black.  I wanted to go with white on top, to re-create that crisp school uniform feeling but after an unfortunate incident involving a coffee cup on the way to a doctor's appointment, I've decide to go with black.  Yes, year 'round, I believe it's doable because the materials are so light.  That's my simple, basic, don't think about it layer.

The next layer depends on the time of year, and what I'm doing.  Everything from shorts underneath and a big straw hat in the summer to leggings and long socks with a cozy sweater or flannel shirt in the winter.  Really, you can layer just about anything over black and it will go. 

And for my love of flowers and frills?

Because what housewife doesn't love aprons?  I have several I made some years ago, but they're wearing out.  I plan to make as many as I can, in different styles.  This is another one I particularly like.

And if they get spotted or splotched, you know, they're aprons.  Add in a hair bow and my pearls and I'll be good to go.  Simple, pretty and no need to think.  And probably worn more than any other "accessory" because I really don't go out all that much.

This post brought to you by Laundry Day.

Life (almost) in the country

I've been spending way too much time reading about politics these days.

And with good reason.

It's like following a dystopian/spy thriller serial.  The US government is being taken over by the USSR* and The Powers That Be are trying to do something, anything, to prevent it, or isolate it, or resolve it or something,  I'm not going to get into all the politics, but it's there and it's got that whole thriller/scary vibe going on.

And it's a serial.

se·ri·al
ˈsirēəl/
noun
noun: serial; plural noun: serials
1. a story or play appearing in regular installments on television or radio or in a periodical.
"a new three-part drama serial"

This is the problem.  We have no clue how this story ends.  We won't know until the last chapter drops and chapters are dropping at random.  This story is unfolding at the pace of real life, and we're all living at the pace of 24 hr news cycles.  At least I am, I don't know about you.  I am wasting far too much time sitting here waiting for the next chapter to drop.

The other night I was thinking, what did people do before there was a 24 hour news cycle?  What did they do when they were waiting for the next chapter to drop?

In the cities newspapers would routinely publish extras, sometimes three or four editions a day.  The Wall Street Journal still does.  This picture is a good example.

You might be better off clicking here to follow a link to it.  

Starting from the top you see the name of the paper, an add for a story about loafers and about debt bubbles and then a thin line with the date written out.  All the way on the right hand side of that line you see stars, two on the one on the left, and four on the one on the right.  That means that the one on the left was the second edition published that day, and the one on the right was the fourth, put out later in the day.  Back before CNN came online in 1980, that was how quickly people could get news unless you subscribed to a ticker service** and that was only in major cities, unless there was a breaking news crisis when the major networks would "break in" to their broadcasts.  If you lived in the country you didn't have that.  You had the paper once a day and the news once a day and maybe the ag report in the morning and that was it.

So what the hell did people do with their time?

They did stuff.  They made stuff, grew stuff, repaired stuff, raised stuff.  They were creative.  They kept things clean.  They cooked.  They read.  They listened to the radio, to entertainment not news.  They would talk to their neighbors and to their family.  They tried to learn things on their own.

I really need to do that.  I really want to do that.

I want to do that because serials suck.  I hate not knowing the end.  I read the end of books first.  I prefer to binge watch a TV show after it's over so I have the end on hand.  I look up the ends of games before I start to play.

Serials suck and I write them!  I should apologize to each and every one of my readers for keeping them hanging for so long!

So as of now I am getting off the serial bandwagon.  I will give myself one hour a day for the news.  The rest of the time I will do other things.  This includes following news sites, news subreddits, and news podcasts.  And I'll try to update more than weekly with how it's going under this headline.

In the meantime I hope this serial ends well.

---

* For anyone about to point out that it's Russia now, Putin is KGB trained and using their playbook.  His government is the USSR in spirit if not in actuality.  

**  My grandfather worked as a groundskeeper for a man named Mr. Johnson, who was deeply into stocks.  I remember going over there once when I was very small and being amazed that Mr. Johnson spent all day watching bands of numbers going by on a screen.  I had no idea what he was doing.  Now I know that he was watching the stock ticker, stock prices updating in real time, and that one of those bands was from Reuters or the AP, keeping up on the news headlines.  You used to see it on channel 1, I believe, until cable became a thing.  But our area ran heavily to the very wealthy, so it may have just been broadcast in a few places nationwide.

It happens

Shit happens, right?

I've learned, from keeping this blog if nothing else, that my life, or at least my health, tend to fall apart in the first half of January.  Fall apart as in mild fever, stuffed head, nasty, phlemmy cough and so on.

You would think I would be prepared for this.

Anyway, now that I have data for multiple years I'm going to do something about that.  Namely put up two weeks worth of whatever were eating next year in the freezer, make sure the house is clean, try to actually get the tree down in a timely manner, and not pledge to start anything until after MLK day.

Yes, my tree is still up.  And now the spousal unit is down with with the annual too, so who knows when it's coming down.  I love trees and even I'm getting tired of the dammed thing.  But hey, we have data, that has to count for something.

Moving on...

So while I was away/sick something happened in our little valley.  Namely this.

This was taken by a local drone operator, whom I will credit if he cares.  

That's our town.  I believe that big complex in the front is the medical center.  If that's the case then that's the Coast Range in the distance and the Cascades are behind the camera.  I know most people would look at it and go "Snow.  Okay, so?  It's winter."  Which is not entirely untrue, we usually get about 4 inches of snow, on average.  But this year we got 12 inches.  In two days.  And it took the rest of the week to warm past freezing.

This never happens here.

As in we shut down the schools for their first week back from winter break, shut down bus service, close the airport, begged Caltrans and ODOT for road salt, and started wondering why our town doesn't own a street sized plow, never happens.  As in the pass shut down for an entire day.  By "the pass" I mean the Siskiyou Pass, the highest elevation on I5, which is the major artery between LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver BC.  On most days it looks like this.

For a good 24 hours it looked like this.

That's in Redding, CA, 125 miles downhill.  I am not kidding.

So why does this matter to me?

Because it got fucking cold is what it did.  We went down into the teens, and never made it past 32° .  And I realized that I own neither a hat nor warm mittens.  I just never needed them before.

So, you know, plans change.

I am now the proud owner of a warm hat.

Made following the Top Down Plain Hat Recipe, with Patons Classic Wool in Natural Marl.  Made top down because I frogged my knee warmer (which never worked anyway) and wanted to use only what I had and no more.  And besides, they discontinued that color, although there's a Cascade 220 variant that's close.

As it turned out I had enough to make 2/3 of a pair of mittens, and enough of their natural mix and dark grey mix to finish them, so I'm making mittens.  I have one done, I'll post pictures when I'm done with them.  I also have enough scraps in shades of red to make a second pair, and will be frogging the Grandmother Shawl (which I dislike for multiple reasons) to make a scarf.  Eventually I will buy enough Patons in natural marl to make a scarf and some KnitPicks Wool of the Andies in Barn Door tweed to make a hat and I'll have two roughly matching sets of warm things in case global warming means we have colder winters with more snow.

Not that I am complaining about that.

You'll notice that none of that involves the Rainbow Wings I'm supposed to be working on this month.  I know, hush.  I'll pick those up after I finish this mitten, and then revamp the schedule slightly.  It'll all work out.  At least things are being made.

Plus side of it all?  We already have a full snow pack, and it's not even the end of January.  This is how you water an old growth forest well into the warm season and help prevent forest fires.  Go Mother Nature!

Where am I on the rest of it?  I haven't been sewing because the light has been grey and dismal for weeks, but that's okay.  I haven't been crocheting because I want to get this knitting done.  I haven't made my Sassy bag because I've been too sick to sit at a sewing machine and the Money Fairy hasn't brought me money for the material yet.  And I haven't been checking my blood glucose because both being sick and the meds that go with being sick make it artificially high.  Although I plan to start that back next week, or perhaps the week after, depending.

But I have been diligently stretching and as a result my left leg is working again.  By that I mean I still limp if I try to walk without one crutch, but with that one support I can get anywhere pain free.  I plan to start on a full chores schedule next week and full workouts the week after.  And I have been reading and am getting writing going again, now that I can sit at a computer without a massive headache.  Really, I spent a week on the couch knitting and watching the snow fall with wool in my head.

And I'm going to start a new feature around here.  I'll have that up in a bit.

This happens every winter

That is all.

January 2017

So, to choose from the list below...

• Book:  Shall We Wake The President by Tevi Troy
• Embroidery:  Stitchers Studio Stocking, but not in any rush because lighting is still an issue.
• Quilting & Sewing:  A black Sassy Bag as soon as I can get to the machine
• Crochet:  A Kitty Cat cushion for the couch.  Or at least the first half of one.
• Knitting:  A Rainbow Wingspan
• TV:  Westworld and The Expanse
• Writing:  Finish Least Expected
• Personal stuff:  Focus on checking BG 3x daily & resume full range of motion in my left leg
• The House:  Set up the sewing table in the Room of Many Hobbies

Now when I set up my daily to-do lists I'll include enough of each one to get it done by a little short of the end of the month.

Projects for 2017

I've come to accept that this is a preliminary list.  Things always change.  But you have to start somewhere.

So here we go.

---

Books:

I'm starting with 12 books, because I need to work on my ability to focus.  Much has been said about the internet cutting down the ability of people to focus on reading, and in my case I believe this is true.  I'd like to read for about an hour a day, but I need to work on that one.  That being the case I'm starting with the hope of getting at least 12 books read this year, and if I can get up to 24 I'll be thrilled.

1. Shall We Wake The President by Tevi Troy
2. Grit by Angela Duckworth
3. Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Cory
4. Caliban's War by James S. A. Cory
5. The Wrinkle In Time Trilogy by Madeline L'Engle
6. The Quilter's Apprentice by Jennifer Chiaverini
7. Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara
8. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
9. The Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara
10. Pontoon by Garrison Keilor
11. The Art of War by Sun Tsu
12. The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine

I don't know if it's the most well-rounded list ever but it has the benefit of currently occupying my coffee table.  So that is where I'm starting.

---

Embroidery:

I have six embroidery projects listed, but given that the last one is kind of big and in truth it's hard to fit embroidery in from November to February I'm only listing five.  The problem being that I don't have pictures for some of them, they're so old they're out of print.  But we do what we can.

1. Stitchers Studio Stocking
2. Kitty Cat Stocking
3. Cat on Steps picture
4. Cat on Fence picture
5. Mary Englebrit Christmas Ornaments

---

Quilting and Sewing:

I have myself down for one big quilt this year but I don't think that's going to happen. We need to replace the one on our bed, but there's one we'd really like to buy.  Instead I'm going to shoot for two pillows to continue with girling up our bed.  I'm saying four because I need to buy the patterns and material, which will take a bit, and at the moment I'm not physically up to sitting at the machine, so I'm going to lose the first four months.  And I have other, priority projects anyway, namely a new bag that's both easy to wear with my crutches and shows off my butons and some new aprons.

1. Black Sassy Bag
2. Three 1940's style aprons using this pattern
3. Three smock type aprons using this pattern
4. Spring Symphony pillow
5. Ruched Blossoms pillow

Really, if I get all that done this year I'll be very happy.

---

Crochet:

Which is distinct from knitting in that I can only manage a small amount of it during the day because it bothers my wrist so.

1. A Kitty Cat cushion for the couch
2. A Ripple pillow for the couch
3. A Ripple pillow for the bed

And I will count it good

---

Knitting:

This is where the rubber meets the road, isn't it?

1. A Rainbow Wingspan
2. A Rainbow scarf
3. A pair of Rainbow Gloves to match the above scarf
4. A Copper Boom scarf in a rich, soft blue
5. A Hoek in rich, forest colors
6. A Leftie in black and cool jewel tones (inspired here)
7. A Simple Sideways in silly pastels
8. Finish the Country scarf
9. Finish the Nine-Patch pillow
10. Finish the Wild West scarf
11. Make a Bobble Sheep pillow
12. Make a Riverbed Scarf, at last

Yes, this is a project a month.  Yes, this is GOING to happen this year.  I am a productive knitter and I will produce.  And I might just throw in some more decorative stuff or tea cozies besides.  But I am going to pick one and FINISH it per month before I start anything else.

You'll notice a lot of scarves and aprons.  That's because I finally settled on a "school" uniform of black tank tops and either charcoal, black or denim skirts.  Relatively stain proof and good everywhere, but they need to be dressed up somehow.  Scarves to the rescue.

---

TV & News:

Because I feel the need to catch up to my Liberal brethren.  Also because I have a lot of handiwork to do up there.

1. BBC news every day
2. NPR news every day
3. CBC news every day
4. Westworld
5. Game of Thrones
6. The Expanse
7. Breaking Bad
8. American Horror Story
9. Supernatural
10. Gilmore Girls

That ought to get me started.

---

Writing:  

I have stories to finish.  I truly do.

1. Finish Least Expected
2. Finish Understanding
3. Finish First Run
4. Finish Percival's Dominatrix (This will take two months)
5. Finish the new Sci-fi one
6. Finish the Lost Girl cross-over
7. Finish the one with the White Plague
8. Maybe something original

---

Personal stuff:

Of course these are the really important goals

1.  A1c under 6.0
2. Healthy LDL
3. Walk a mile
4. Ride five miles
5. Get back to lifting 5x/week
6. Get to a 2200 kcal/day diet

At the moment I'd be happy to be back on one crutch.  Baby steps here.

---

The House:

Which is dead last because I can't do any of it right now.  If I can empty and re-load my dishwasher I'm thrilled.  Hell, at the moment if I can shower I'm thrilled.  But hopefully, eventually I'll get to this.

1. Clean out the pantry
2. Clean out the cupboards
3. Set up the Room of Many Hobbies
4. Clean out the walk-in closet
5. Clean out the craft closet
6. Set the craft closet up as camping/emergency storage
7. Set up the library

So those are my goals for the year.  I'll be drawing from this list to make my monthly goals. so watch this space.

And the Winter Curse continues

This year we managed to lock down our financials, and were trying to have an idyllic holiday.  The holiday was pretty darn good, until my knee locked up so badly on Christmas Eve night that I couldn't walk on it.  I ended up in Urgent Care yesterday for a cortisol shot, which will still take another day or so to truly take hold.  That should kick in just in time for me to head back to physical therapy to hopefully start regaining my mobility.  Needless to say that issue is informing my plans for the month.

Thankfully my ear drained.

My marvelous in-laws send me an ice cream maker, which we've wanted forever, and an adjustable kettlebell, in the hopes that I can actually start lifting again.  If all goes well I'll shoot for that in February.  For January I'd be happy with getting back down to one crutch.

On the plus side being stuck on my ass for the rest of this week will give me a chance to both plan ahead, write, and knit.  Always useful things.

Speaking of, planning posts will be dropping shortly.