Not Yet On The Sidelines

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Your child’s actual inquisition and grit
May only seem rhythmical at the end of the process
However, if the uptake angle is too salutary and likewise advantageous…
Our approbation for parents is to try to get at least one hour a day of strain

— #spamadvice aggregated from last week.

One more dishcloth down! I’ll post pictures at some point: maybe after the advertising showcase/Maroon 5 concert that’s happening in February.

(If you were under a rock on Sunday and haven’t watched the news today, the Chiefs and the Saints both lost.)

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Two Dishcloths Later…

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Je crois que mon titre serait “deux torchons plus tard” en français.  I think.  I restarted my Duolingo French refresher as one of my not-really-a-resolution-that-just-so-happened-to-start-around-the-New-Year-nothing-to-see-here-Universe things.  Not that I had a practical reason to restart my Duolingo French refresher, beyond seeing it as a bit of psychic clutter that might finally go away if I finish it, and it’d probably be healthier to finish it than, oh, say, for a completely random example, the Dragonborn expansion of Skyrim.1

Probably.

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Aasymptotic

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Once I finish the remaining sleeve, I will have crocheted my first sweater.
– Me, March 27, 2017, “Throw”

I haven’t yet finished the sweater. 
– Me, April 17, 2017, “Eighty Percent Chance of Getting Stuff Done”

I still haven’t finished the sweater. To be honest, I haven’t worked on it at all.
– Me, May 14, 2017, “Ninety Percent Thresholds”

I still haven’t finished the sweater.
– Me, June 23, 2017, “One Hundred Percent Standard Deviations”

Who knows, I might even finish that sweater this year.
– Me, September 2, 2017, “=NVL(Number,24)”

The sweater I’ve been working on is still in the bag piled beside the entertainment center, waiting for me to finish that sleeve.
– Me, December 14, 2017, “Escapades in Escapism”

The new season of The Orville started on the 30th.  Finding myself without a craft project to work on in front of the television for the first time since football season started, and feeling pretty good about myself for finishing all of the ones I’d planned to get done by Christmas, I convinced myself to fish that sleeve out of the bag piled beside the entertainment center and finish it.

I finished the sleeve, dug out the rest of the pieces, seamed the shoulders together, and…

Uhm.

sweater

The aggressively asymmetrical sweater.

This is supposed to be a “Cozy Shell” that falls at the waist. If I seamed the sides, it would fit me like a caftan, and as you can see here, the absolute shortest the hem gets is mid-thigh.

I can’t remember what I was thinking while I was making this. I’m not convinced I was thinking while I was making this.

I considered blocking the sweater to see if I could straighten it out, but I concluded the only thing that would help is wrapping it around a concrete block and throwing them into a deep dark hole.

Perhaps it will be happier as dishcloths, or a couple of blankets for the hypothetically eventual dog to shed all over and shred into yarn confetti.

On the bright side, now that I know the limit of how badly I can screw up crocheting a sweater, shouldn’t my next attempt be better?

Aasymptotic is my trying to describe being in the opposite state as asymptotic — that is, becoming less precise as a variable approaches a limit, instead of more so.

Interstitial Sorting

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Hey there, you have done a great job.
-Random Spammer #1

(Evidence is lacking of poor traits or conflicts
So the comparison of benefits and harms cannot be determined.)
-Random Spammer #2

I like how this sounds. Have you considered changing?
-Random Spammer #3

Hi. Wow, yeah, it has been a while. Remember when I used to post multiple times a week, or once a week, or once a month? Yeah, me neither.

There’s been … you know, stuff going on. I’m still doing work and school and gym wise what I was doing back in September — and back in June, if we’re counting from my last “real” blog post.  There have been good weeks and bad weeks and gritted teeth days, but none of them have involved sacrifice of anything other than the occasional gym visit or good night’s sleep or entire weekend or part of a vacation.

I am feeling better, but it’s best not to ask how I spent my summer vacation.

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Hey There

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Dear Fellow COMM 390 Students,

If you have found me here, congratulations!  You managed to get to this blog despite my leaving the link out of my introductory post to the class.

Please say hello if you like, or just run away screaming. I’m not one to judge!

-Shai

Blurring Toward Clarity

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Resemble cheerful
Respect expression
Compliment temper
Neglect sentiment
Distrust praise

– today’s #spamadvice

I was supposed to have my cataract lasered out last week, which went remarkably well (considering I dread any procedure that involves my eyes) right up to the point where the laser broke down during my surgery prep.

Supposedly that had never happened before.

Everyone was amazed that I took the breakdown in stride and seemed gosh, cheerful, about having to reschedule.  I should clarify that by ‘everyone,’ I mean my ophthalmologist and the folks at the surgical center, not @bhoneydew.  He’s had a front-row seat for decades to how I break things just by being around them, especially when I’m a shade anxious.  It could be fair to say that I’m relieved once they do break because the next steps suddenly become obvious.

It could be fair to say that, but I’m not.

The rescheduled operation went well, minus a minor glitch during the imaging process (which did point out that my eyeball wasn’t numb enough, so we were able to correct that before the surgery). I’m recovering both faster than I probably should and slower than I definitely want, which is to say, yes, I suck at resting, but at least I’m acknowledging that I need to be nice to myself.

 

 

 

Acedia Domesticus

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We must believe
The hours of this situation
Present education
In cultivating celebration
Through graceful service
Of fortunate appetite
And felicitous occasion

-5.25.2018, the latest #spampoetry

It’s almost the middle of the year, and we’re coming up on six years in Northern Virginia, which is now tied with California for the longest @bhoneydew and I have ever lived anywhere together. It has been the longest we’ve ever been at the same address:  we moved twice when we were in California, three times if you count the month we spent in San Diego before we moved north.

Does this house finally seem like home?  No.  Most days, it feels like we haven’t finished unpacking. Even though we got rid of moving boxes right away (having the basement flooded by Sandy did help with that), we still have pictures and artwork stashed in a closet wrapped in the same bubble wrap I taped around it when we left New Jersey.  Yes, that was two moves ago.  Yes, the stuff hasn’t left that closet since we rescued it from flood waters then returned it right back to the basement after it was torn up, dried, scrubbed, repaired and I spent three months yelling at our escrow company so they would just give us the freaking money our insurance company had already said we could have to pay our contractors.

The argument has been that we’ll put the stuff on the walls when the painting’s done. Is the painting done?  No.  Some of it is done, though, and has been for a while, but eh, busy, no time to fool with it, there’s work and school and stuff and even scrubbing toilets is more entertaining than going through the trouble of moving everything and doing the rest of the painting ourselves and being vaguely unhappy with the results and then having a real estate agent’s eventually telling us we do have to get it all redone by professionals because we aren’t experts at it not even close … or even giving up and hiring professionals because that means we’ll still have to move everything and have to live around having people in our house doing the stuff and it might take months, just look at the patio that was supposed to take three weeks and took a year and we still need to get the last sign offs on it!

Et cetera.

But, I did get the tile floor fixed in the Monster’s bathroom.  That took two days, or six years, depending on how you look at it.1 I got the roof dealt with immediately after the late winter storms took shingles off it.  That took a day. This year, I found someone to mow the yard right away, instead of waiting until the local wildlife showed up on the front porch and suggested we seek help, or at least try to get named a nature preserve.2  I also picked up a new couch and chair for the living room, instead of just circling around “I don’t want to do that, because it’ll get damaged in the next move:  let’s just keep the beat up stuff we already have”. That took a week, and I felt really good about myself afterwards.

Not as good as I felt after wrapping up my spring semester of classes, sure, but pretty good, yep!

So I guess there’s hope, if you can call it that.

Or we’ll just convince ourselves that this house really is cursed and move even though we don’t have a sane reason to do so, and we genuinely do have too much going on right now to want to invite that flavor of chaos back into our lives.

1This house was a new construction spec, which the builder decided to interpret as “hey, you bought it after it was built, so we’re going to ignore your punch list, and forget all about doing those three and six month inspections we promised, and decide that you waived your right to a year one inspection because you brought in outside contractors to tear out your basement finishing and do mold remediation after it flooded even though we didn’t intend to offer you or any other resident of this subdivision help in dealing with that.”
2Am I even trying to do any gardening this year?  The sack of bulbs that have been parked by the door for a month suggest I’m still thinking about it, but we’ll see.