An Exhausting, But Less “Interesting” Week!
I don’t know what all was going on last week. All I can think of was my normal yoga one evening and knitting one evening, but I logged less than 12 awake hours at home from Monday - Friday last week. To say that I needed a weekend to recover was an understatement. But, now I need a weekend to recover from my weekend too!
If I thought last week was busy, the weekend was even busier! I left my house at 7:30 am on Saturday to go to Alpacamundo, my friend Kathryn’s alpaca ranch where I shot nearly 8 GB of photos for her to choose from for her web site redesign. I got home at a bit after 6pm that evening, but with my parents in tow!
They were acquiring a new piece of equipment for the farm but the freight costs were crazy so the company met them half way which happened to be Cheyenne. So they picked up the equipment on Saturday morning, parked it at a wonderful farm equipment lot there in Cheyenne for the weekend (in exchange for a box of donuts upon pick up). Then they slowly made their way down to join me at Alpacamundo and check out what an alpaca shearing is like.
DH worked as hard as I did on Saturday, wrapping up the last of the flooring that can be done in the dining room and kitchen without moving appliances. That still involved some heavy moving work and he washed everything that was stored in the hutch so it is ready to use after all that dusty work of ripping out the tile and cement board. The plan was to have homemade pizza, but he kept himself too busy to do the crust so we dined out.
Yesterday we did a tiny bit of shopping and I showed them where I work. Dad was impressed at how “out in the country” it was for being in town :-) Then I roasted another whole chicken and it was phenomenal! The garlic under the skin in combination with simple lemon, salt and pepper is fantastic! I placed it on a bed of sweet potato, rutabega, brussel sprouts, asparagus, carrots, onion, red pepper and some more garlic. Oh yum! Then a little later we had apple rhubarb berry crisp with Greek yogurt.
Scattered into the cooking was fighting with my mom’s ancient laptop (getting proper adaptive equipment set up is a rather large added expense to upgrading as is learning a new OS etc. on top of a screen reader and such so it doesn’t happen often) getting it to deal with downloading books from Audible and putting them into iTunes in a streamlined manner that Dad could stand a chance of remembering how to do. It took hours upon hours. Somewhat our doing, dealing with whose account you were in when you re-installed or uninstalled a program etc. and who had administrative privileges when. Yuck! Eventually one of my mom’s bookpods was filled at 10:30pm, then I had to pack my gym bag and organize stuff for packing my lunch as well as get 4 people through 1 bathroom before bed. I finally got to sleep at 11:30 pm with a 4:30 wake up call… Can I have a nap now?
As tired as I am, I am so glad my parents got to sneak in a visit amongst their work and around mine. That means in less than 6 months they’ve been here twice! When it has been years between visits that is pretty cool. Add on top of that my not having a clue when I might get to Minnesota again and it was even better. As usual it was pretty hard to see them go. But apparently, a tummy full of yummy Creole breakfast makes it easier for me to protect my mascara and keep the tears in check! I am just a big first-born baby.
In knitting news, I had plans to make this dip I’ve wanted to bring to knit night for the last month almost, but there once again was a lack of time and energy to get that accomplished. Thankfully my gals are both understanding and patient :-) I did get about 1/2″ knit on the sweater I started a while back. But I’m really not enjoying the yarn. I’m seriously debating frogging it and getting some easier to work with yarn. What I’ve got now was given to me by Amanda and is a rayon/cotton boucle sport weight yarn from Interlacements that has been discontinued. It has amazing drape, but those loops catch my needles with almost every stitch and it is annoying and has slowed the progress immensely! I have a spreadsheet set up so a slight change in gauge won’t cause much in the way of extra calculations. I wanted to work from stash, but if it is keeping me from knitting that tactic isn’t really working well then, is it?
