whole lot of stitching going on

I'm almost finished with the little Golden Girls cross stitch project that I'm doing for Shelley's birthday. Looks like I'll be done almost a week ahead of time - that's unheard of for me! The pattern doesn't call for outlining the finished pattern, but I'm doing that. Otherwise, a couple of the ladies get lost, their colors are so pastel.

I've got the house to myself tomorrow night. Brad will be in Duluth on an overnight ski trip, and teen is spending the night at Grandma's. Hooray! All nighter of video games and dozing in the big chair....

soooo not in the mood

I want to be, but I'm not. I had such a terrible week at work last week, and I'm afraid it's going to spill into this week and poison it, too. It took me the entire holiday weekend to get over it (and let me say, I think it was the brunch at Cafe Twenty Eight that finally made me smile again), and I'm trying very, very hard today, but I feel like I'm slipping a little. I think I'll finish this (small! and only!) glass of wine, head upstairs with a book, and wait in bed for my husband to come home from darts. With any luck, I'll still be awake when he gets home...

spring, and a girl's thoughts turn to....

.... vegetables. All it took was two days of February thaw, and suddenly, I've got CSAs on my mind. I left off last season with a promise of a half share from Loon, but I'm a greedy, greedy girl, and I told them that really what I wanted was a full share. They never replied, and I saw today that Driftless is taking orders, so I emailed Loon to find out if there's a full or half reserved for me. If it's just a half, then I have to decide if I want to also do a Driftless half and just hope that the two farms wind up doing their half shares on alternate weeks or if I want to say thanks but no thanks to Loon and go with Driftless this year.

sapping the life out of me

Yep, that's what my job's doing these days. I've been bored there for months and months and months, but this last week or so is just putting me over the top. It's been seriously painful. I can't even describe how tedious. But how old is this getting? How often will you have to read that I hate my job? How many more days/weeks/months/years will I simply settle? How many bottles of wine will I have to consume to try to forget?

girls' night

Brad had a user-group meeting tonight, so teen and I were on our own for dinner. After MUCH debate, I remembered the Chatterbox Pub, and seeing how teen was in the mood for chicken tenders (CHICKEN TENDERS. STILL. AT SIXTEEN. I have failed as a parent...), it seemed like the perfect spot. And it was fun. We actually pulled out a card game to play, which I'm sure surprised the hell out of her, since I seldom want to play games. They weren't at all busy, so we weren't there for long, but we had a nice time. And now she's found another place where she and her friends should be able to hang out.

sunday night already?

Another weekend where I didn't get done nearly as much as I wanted to. I can't complain about the amount of knitting I got done, though. I finished up two more pieces of the sweater - I just have one sleeve left, and then I'll be ready to make it up. Today I remembered that I want to do a cross stitch project for Shelley's birthday, and now htat's just around the corner - March 6th. I have time to do it, but I really want to finish the sweater first. We'll see.

Today was a beautiful day, with full-on February thaw, but I couldn't get Brad to even go for a walk.  He and Lauren went to run some errands (for Valentine's Day tomorrow, I believe), and he came home in kind of a crappy mood. He should've stuck to our agreement - cards at the most, out to dinner later. But it's sweet that he wanted to do something else. The first few years that we were together, we did terribly romantic things for Valentine's Day. And I loved it. But honestly, it's a lot of pressure to keep trying to top yourself, and I don't need him to do that. He shows me every day that he loves me - I don't need any surprise on Valentine's Day to tell me.

three down, two to go.

Pieces of the teen's sweater, that is.

gah.

That just about sums up how I'm feeling tonight. I have days where I can almost hear myself aging, and I just want to turn back the clock and start over. There's so much I still want to do, and I'm just wasting away my days at another job I don't love, coming home too mentally depleted to do anything except surf the web and half-heartedly watch tv. I guess that I should consider it a small win that I've been doing this almost every day since the start of the new year, but I haven't made it public, I haven't quite figured out my voice yet, I haven't even decided the direction I want to take it.

What do I want to do this weekend? Food shopping, eating out, knitting, Italian, reading, writing, adding to the blog, perhaps some time with jewelry... we'll see what I actually get to.

notorious

Teen wound up staying home from school today. By the time I got home from work, she was heavily wallowing in the misery of a terrible, terrible cold. Sometimes she's the world's biggest drama queen, and I had to talk her down a little. She doesn't get sick very often, and it's like the end of the world when she does. Worse. Than. A. Man. She told us at 6:30 she was going up to bed, but Brad wouldn't let her. He was afraid that she'd wake up again at 9 and not be able to fall asleep again. To keep her up, I put on another one of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" movies - Notorious. Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman. A classic. I think it's in my top 10 all-time favorite movies. I was about teen's age when I started getting into old movies, and it seemed like she really liked this one.

I actually finished another piece of the sweater and got a smidge done on the third. I should be able to finish that tomorrow night, and then I just have to knit the short sleeves and assemble it (including knitting the neckband). Don't think I'll be able to finish it this weekend, but I'm getting there. She may still be able to wear it while it's cold! Then I can move onto the next project, which will either be Bella's Christmas sweater for next year or one of the purses that Jess showed me.

valentines

We don't really celebrate Valentine's Day, but I do love doing a little something for the kids. And the teen likes (with a little prodding) doing something for her grandparents. So tonight, we busted out the craft materials and made cards. Teen's were all lovely, with lots of glitter and loving sentiments. I did the ones for the kids and had fun with it. I'll mail them - I can still remember how much fun it is when you're little to actually get something in the mail, and an envelope with some candy and a big heart valentine should be a big hit.

I'm tempted to one for the teen, too. We'll see how she reacts to the ones for the kids - I made them after she went to bed. She went up early again tonight - she's definitely fighting some kind of cold. She was better for a couple of days, but today, her sore throat is back, and she was coughing before bed. Hopefully, another good night's sleep will help.

quiet evening

Brad is out at darts, and I spent the evening watching "Gaslight" (Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman - I loooove her) and working on Lauren's sweater. I got a lot done, but I had to put it down when the pattern started requiring too much counting. Too sleepy and engrossed in movie to keep count. So instead, I finished the vanilla bean/bourbon/candied pecan ice cream. And it was fabulous. I'm absolutely making it again when my dad comes to visit next. He's going to love it.

babe

Do I ever love me some Children's Theatre. Last night, I took Bella to see Babe. It was fantastic. Dean Holt was the lead, and I've been loving him since we started taking Lauren, probably ten years ago. His face is so expressive, and he's a master of physical comedy - the kids always laugh uproariously at his antics. Bella loved this one, probably because she vaguely knew the story. She's definitely fascinated with the sets and how they do things. Last night, she was wondering about how they make the same set look like day/night, so I tried to explain lighting to her a little. She also loved that there was audience participation in this play - the first thing she said when it was over was, "I liked how we got to do stuff, too."

Not much crafting going on these last few days. Some knitting here and there, but not very much. Tonight, after we got home from dinner/bowling with Jack/Jena, I paged through the knitting book I have from the library. It's due back on Monday, and I wanted to see what, if anything, I wanted to glean from it before I return it. There's a chapter on cables that interests me, so I might try to take notes on that. I'd like to make the purse that Jess was showing me, and it's got cables, which I haven't tried yet. The purse seems like a fairly easy project and a good way to jump into cables.

Coming up in this next week, though, my creative goal is to start taking more photos and begin uploading them to the blog...

teenaged girls suck

Teen is going through a bit of drama at school. She made a social mistake, and she's paying for it. There's a major Mean Girl mentality these days, more I think than when I was in school. I'm not blind - I'm fairly certain that the teen is sometimes a mean girl herself, and now she's on the receiving end. I'd love to be able to step in and somehow make things better for her, but I can't. And she's already fairly fragile - I hate seeing her ostracized like this. I know it will blow over, and probably pretty quickly, but it's still painful to watch her struggle through it. What I'd really like to do is bitch slap one of the girls and have a serious, honest talk with two others, but again, I can't. It's going to be a rough weekend here, I think.

might be time to shit or get off the pot

Today at work, my boss told me that our upcoming web services project is going to need 24/7 support for the client and that I'm on the support team. Granted, when I looked at the list, my name isn't at the top, and I could only be called for one scenario (unlike a couple of my coworkers who are at the top of the lists for each of the scenarios), but it just gives me a bad feeling. And sure, it's unlikely that anyone would answer, "Why, yes, I'd LOVE to do that!" but it would've been nice to have been asked. When I signed on for this job there was no hint that I'd be working outside of normal hours, let alone dealing with the possibility of getting a support call every Sunday at 3:30 am.

So, I'm thinking that there's a fairly good chance that I'm not long for this job. And I'm not excited at the prospect of going after another IT job that's unfulfilling. I'm getting too old for this shit. It might finally be time to figure out what I want to do with my life and GO FOR IT. What the fuck am I waiting for at this point? That needs to become my short-term goal. I want it to be something creative, but can I make money at that? Gah - it's so exasperating! I have to at least try, though, so that's what I'm going to do over the next couple of months. Wish me luck...

back to where i was

I made up all of the rows I had to pull out last night, and in fact, I might be a little bit ahead. Tomorrow night, I should be able to start shaping the armhole - with any luck, I'm thinking tonight that I might actually be able to finish by Valentine's Day. Of course, making any sweater up always winds up taking much, much more time than I think it will. But I'm feeling much more optimistic about it tonight than I was last night at this time.

Had some of the birthday ice creams for dessert tonight and had to go back for a second scoop of the vanilla/bourbon/candied pecan. Holy crap, is that stuff good. I'll definitely have to make it for my dad the next time that they come to visit. He'll love it.