12 Days

Old items, just cause I want to feel caught up, although i won't really be because I can't post pictures at the moment. Maybe I will make time for such things when I get home tonight from meeting Vivian (yeah!).

2) Our new curtains
They look lovely inside and out and just make the house feel more "grown up", if that makes any sense. It makes me excited about doing some more painting, but I still haven't removed the wallpaper in the dressing room. We have curtains for all four bedrooms on the second floor and in a few months we will get the three sets for the first floor. I also need to consider what to put in the 2nd floor bath, what to put on the third floor and if we should put something over the glass panels in the front and back doors.

7) House master plan and furniture rearranging
There will be a lot to do in our house for a long time, just like any other house, although certainly the fact that our house is 100 years old adds to the issues. I have been mentally working on a master plan for the house (how to use each room, what to change, etc.) and mentally rearranging furniture. I find that I want a change in the living room and at some point I want to think about buying a few new things instead of just using what we've always had. Considering that we have *plenty* of space, I see us using some of our apartment stuff on the third floor to make space for more fitting stuff on the first floor. A good example of this is the IKEA two-seater couch in the living room. It's there so that we have plenty of seating, but it just doesn't go at all. R and I both know this and have always known it, but until we save the money to buy a couple of chairs to take its place, it has been needed in the living room. It will work great on the third floor for all of the room uses we're considering up there.

* Broken dishes
Again, a photo is needed here, and I'll save the description of broken dish #1 for the photo posting. Broken dish #2 was a glass knocked off the kitchen counter by Nora, which leads us to the next item...

* Aluminum Foil on the counters
The foil actually does prevent the cats from jumping onto the counters, but now we have to figure out how to get rid of the foil without having cats return to the kitchen counters...

* Fetch
As I think I've posted before, Stewart likes to play fetch. And we've discovered that it isn't just something he likes to do while we're in bed. He's up for it anytime. He will chase just about anything you throw, but the only thing he will regularly bring back are the plastic rings from milk jugs. Although I'm not proclaiming that he does it 100% of the time, but certainly more often than any other cat I've known. It's pretty cute and it's the easiest way for me to play with him while knitting or working on the computer. That is, as long as he brings the ring back. Sometimes he just looks at you with that "do it again" expression, even though the ring is still sitting in the room where you threw it.

* Seeing the floors again (rooms feel bigger)
My room (office, studio, whatever you want to call it) is as straight as it has been for a long time, and it's clean. I don't remember the last time I cleaned the floor and rug in there (scary but true), and I did so two weekends ago. I also moved the piles to the far edges of the room, so that when you look in from the hallway it looks deceptively clean. Being able to see so much of the floor at a glance makes the room seem twice as big. It's a nice change.

Knitting update - I did a lot of knitting over the weekend. In celebration of the fact that I didn't have to work, I did very little other than knit and watch TV all weekend. I finished my first pair of two-at-once, toe-up socks. Saturday I turned both heels and started the cuff and on Sunday I worked the cuff (mostly during the Steelers game). Saturday night I also finished my Broad Street Mittens - finishing the second mitten top and weaving in all of the ends. I still need to find good buttons for them, but I wore them for the first time today. *And* I started a cardigan for a friend who is due in April. I finished the second sleeve on the bus this morning, so it is going pretty quickly. Baby Ull is lovely to work with, although a little splitty when fixing mistakes.

While knitting, I watched the first two Harry Potter movies and all of the extras that aren't aimed at kids. The second movie definitely had better stuff than the first, but the "magical knitting" in the second movie was worse than I remembered. The needles make the correct motion, but no stitches get moved from one needle to another.

Sorry for the super long post. I'll try to get in the habit of posting more often to avoid such length...