January was…

• Cinnamon rolls on New Year’s Day
• A rekindled addiction to polymer-covered pens
• Cookies when Mom & Dad came to visit
• A new set of crochet hooks for me
• A flower-petal crown for my cabled hat
• Clayathon 2012
• A finished sweater for a nearly 12-year-old son
• The younger’s new cardboard friend
• The Stirling Hotel’s beautiful outdoor Christmas tree
• My Father-in-Law’s birthday
• A warm day to play
• 3rd Grade International Day

…and a full moon in the background.

Ok, who wants to help me be a little less winter-fashion-inept?

I am reasonably comfortable dressing myself in the warmer months, or pulling together an outfit around a pair of jeans, but in the winter, anything not jeans-based throws me for a loop.  I always end up feeling like I’ve chosen the wrong footwear and “frumpified” the whole outfit.

So here’s the challenge: Neil bought me the most comfortable pants ever for Christmas.  And when I say comfortable, I mean that I wore them for several days until Neil made me wash them. That comfortable.  I ordered a second (ok, and a third) pair last week so now in addition to my original charcoal gray pair, I have two black ones.  Here’s what they look like:

These are great flip-flop-wearing pants in my opinion, but that kind of weather is still several months off.  What do I do right now? It’s too cold to be without socks.  What kind of shoes work best here?

I could see dressing them up with some nice heels, a cotton blouse, a fine-gauge sweater, and a linen scarf for a night on the town, but that’s not what I’m after at the moment.  I want to wear them with a t-shirt, a nice hoodie, and… what? sneakers and tube socks? mary janes and argyle socks? black flats and gray socks?

The goal here is to be comfortable and casual without looking too dressed-up, too dressed-down, or 20 years older than I am.  Especially that last one.

Please educate me

We’re not really one of those families who has the tree up the day after Thanksgiving. In fact, we’re often lucky to have our act together in that department by Christmas Eve. True to form, this year I’ve been slow to get the house cleaned up, preferring to focus instead on closing up the shops for the season, and on gift-making + gift-buying.

This week Neil has had the week off, and he cleaned up the spot downstairs where the tree goes. He also put up the lights, and sometime soon the kids will put on the ornaments. They’ve asked to put the ornaments up themselves, but their leisure time has been mainly focused on beating the latest Legend of Zelda adventure. They’re nearly there, so I suspect our tree will be well-adorned very soon.

In the meantime, I’m working on secret projects and trying to capture a little taste of this week’s inherent magic through my lens. So far, this magic exists only in little carefully-cropped pockets of space – pockets that have been cleared of the clutter that plagues the rest of this house.

Oh, I have so much work to do to get this space cleaned-up and pretty! But I do so want to. I want to string twinkling lights in the kitchen, and burn candles in the living room. I want to exist these next several days in cozy, happy spaces, alive with joyful preparations, warm scents, and familiar music.

Essentially, my goal for this week is to make some family memories that don’t involve me freaking out in the middle of a huge mess.

As I write, the Wii has been turned off for the night, and the tree decorating has begun.  I think I’ll join them.

Be Merry!
-Lisa

Oh, thank you ladies, for all of the hook love this past weekend! I am loving your feedback, thoughts, and constructive criticisms, and you can bet I am taking all of it into account while I plan my next move.

Which is?

Well, cleaning the kitchen and catching up on business email have to come first, but after that, I am all over the hook thing!  I’ve decided they’ll be made-to-order, which will give you the chance to tell me what size, what brand, and what clay design you’d like.  Stay tuned for those details this week.  I’ve still got some prep work to do before it’s all ready for prime time.

Oh, how I wish I could sit down and work on this stuff righthisveryminute!  But let me tell you, friends, my kitchen spent the weekend in one heck of a state (while those of us who live here spent the weekend in Cherry Hill, away from the growing intelligence in the sink).  I’ve spent about an hour in there today, giving it a good and proper cleaning, but it’s not quite done yet.

No claying until there is room in the kitchen for baking! I’ve got an apple pie, pumpkin bread, and cranberry bread on my mind for this week…

And no claying until my Polka Dot Creations inbox is empty!

I’m such a slave driver.  Today, anyway.  Other days, not so much (which, I suppose, is how I got backlogged here in the first place…).

Be back soon to share the lowdown on those hooks.  Please feel free to continue posting your thoughts about what makes a perfect clay-covered crochet hook, while I’m gone!

It’s no secret that my van has seen it’s share of wrong-place-wrong-time accidents: one for every year since 2008, in fact.

I guess we were due for a little 2011 mishap, but when the tree (our vehicles’ most imminent threat) came down on Thursday, I allowed myself to feel a twinge of optimism that we’d avoided such a thing this year.

Roughly 24 hours later, I was rear-ended at a highway off-ramp.

If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is.

It was actually a slow-speed smashup, and the cosmetic damage to my bumper is minimal (the other guy wasn’t so lucky, with green ooze escaping from his front grill).  Once my pounding heart had stopped trying to jump out of my chest and I’d made sure the boys were alright, I just had to shake my head and laugh.

This van. I love it to pieces, but at this rate it just may be in actual pieces by the time we’re ready to replace it.  The Carfax report will be a mile long by then…

I think I’m going to miss this lovely old oak.  The way it filled up the sky with green.  Or, at this time of year, fiery red.

But it had been prone to throwing its branches at our vehicles from time to time, and recently it dropped the limb that broke the camel’s back.  Right on the roof of our garage.  So it was decided that the tree should go, and Thursday afternoon that is just what happened:

*sigh*

It was a beautiful tree, but it made me nervous every time the wind blew.  I’d like to plant something in its place, perhaps one of those pretty pink trees I lust after each April.

For now, though, until the tree guys can come back with some better log-cutting equipment, we are squeezing just a bit more enjoyment out of our mighty oak:

And I’m getting used to having so much sky overhead.

It was quiet and it was pretty.  But then this happened and made me a little nervous…

A branch on this tree (you know, the three that routinely tosses big sticks at our vehicles?) cracked under the weight of the leaves and snow and came to rest on the garage roof.  Neil moved the cars up the driveway just in case.

All afternoon, the sound of cracking branches echoed throughout the neighborhood.

And then this happened…

That garage-topping branch snapped in half and is now dangling between the house and garage.

The snow is almost over, but heavy wind is expected overnight.  Several areas of town are without power.  Sounds like a perfect night for a family room slumber party, to me.  And tomorrow? I think we have to make a plan for removing that homicidal tree from our yard once and for all…

So, wow, October? Really?

I hope any of you who are dealing with the early snowfall are staying warm, cozy, and safe!

It’s a yearly tradition for me to go on and on about how much I love the fall, yet here we are in mid-October and I have yet to fill my quota of autumnal gushing.  Clearly this must be rectified at once.  One look out the window (or several errands out in the car) this morning will tell you that this is Autumn in New Jersey, and it is Good.  It puts me in the mood for some Reasons to be Cheerful.

• 55 degrees and drizzly on a day when I’ve got nothing pressing to do.  I took care of the most important tasks on my list yesterday. I may just spend the next few hours knitting and watching movies…
• A breakfast experiment gone right: heaping spoonful of canned pumpkin stirred into my vanilla yogurt and topped with Vanilla Almond Agave Granola.  Quite good.
• The mums my mother-in-law brought over a few weeks ago are really starting to bloom nicely.
• Homemade pumpkin lattes.  I still haven’t gotten the mix quite right for my own taste, but there’s fun in the experimentation.  Bonus: Eamonn absolutely loves the pumpkin milk.
• The Pandora station I started five+ years ago and am still enjoying listening to and tweaking.  It’s good Fall listening, if you’re interested.
• Daydreaming about future projects. I’m thinking: Ripple Blanket, crocheted for Eamonn. After I finish knitting Aidan’s sweater, that is.
• Mini pumpkins.
• And lastly, I am quite cheerful to report that the results of the biopsy are in, and the growth I had removed from my throat a few weeks ago is of the completely harmless variety. Thanks for keeping me in your thoughts and prayers. I appreciated it!

Want to play along?  Use the inlinkz button below to link to your own Reasons to be Cheerful post!

You’re not really a nerd, are you?

Ok, I can accept that.  Let’s talk about something else, then.  I’m kind of in the mood to revel in Autumn right now.  How about you?

I have been resisting turning on the heat, just so that I could wear my new sweater, sit under my favorite lap quilt, and sip a warm beverage.  I feel like too much heat in the house would rob me of some of early Fall’s simple pleasures.

My evenings this week have been spent knitting Aidan’s sweater.  I’m probably still less than a quarter of the way through it, but it’s a nice easy knit and good busy-work in front of the tv.

I am also feeling the urge to finish the quilts I started for the boys several months ago.  The nights are getting chilly…

There’s something about October.  It brings with it this urge to seek out the warmth of handmade objects, and to wrap our loved ones in that same warmth.  Do you feel it, too?

School starts this morning.  6th grade for one (middle school!) and 3rd grade for the other.  In some ways I feel like summer never really got off the ground around here.  But in many other ways, it certainly did. Fun was had, memories were made… and now we look forward to another season.  I love summer, and I love having the kids home all of the time, but fall is good, too.

Hello, fall!