Good morning! I’m still sick, but I slept well, and I’m on Tylenol, so I’m not too miserable at the moment.

Before I get started, I had the most yummy breakfast shake this morning, and I wanted to tell you about it. I used 1 cup of soy milk, a couple spoonfuls of frozen orange juice concentrate, about half of a very large, frozen banana, and a small handful of walnuts. Plus the Whey Protien Powder and vitamins. Very, very good. I added the walnuts after the rest was blended and only blended them for a few seconds, so there were still chunks left to crunch.

Ok, so this week I’ve been sick and I haven’t done much to be healthy or lose weight. I think I might have done some weights early on in the week, but I’m not sure. And I ate way too much of Veronica’s birthday cake. I weighed 220.5 this morning, which is the lowest I get when I fluctuate, so my goal is to drop below 220 by next Saturday.

Can she do it? YES SHE CAN!

Well, I honestly don’t know, but Bob the Builder jumped into my head at that moment, and I decided to run with it.

In order for this to happen, I need to do what I keep TRYING to do, which is to get my big butt on the treadmill a few times next week.

So that’s my goal. How’s your week going?

Wednesday night, around 10 pm I started to feel a little sick. Sinus pressure and sore throat. At 1 am I woke up completely miserable, and ended up having to miss out on Olivia’s field trip to the tide pools at Mukilteo Beach yesterday. I had a fever of 102, and I wanted to die most of the day. I seem to be better today. No fever, but my sinuses are still sore and congestion is moving into my chest. Bummer. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen in JUNE! Of course, it doesn’t really look like June.

But making lemonade from lemons, I have dinner in the crockpot already, figuring I’d take advantage of the little bit of energy I have this morning, and the cool day to make some Hamburger Barley soup.

So far, Clark is healthy. I pray he stays that way and doesn’t catch this, because if he gets it, we’re ALL going to be miserable.

Thanks for the tips on sock knitting. I don’t know which method I’ll try, but I’ve been thinking about testing one or both on Christmas stockings. I want new stockings this year and the larger yarn might help me out in the beginning while I get used to using circulars. As I said yesterday, I like doing two socks at the same time, but I prefer doing each part of the sock one at a time. I do one cuff, then the other, one leg, then the other, one heel flap….. So I need two sets of whatever I choose to use. But if I start out with Christmas stockings, I can use the larger circulars that I already have, and see which way I want to do it. Make sense?

The trouble is designing the stockings. In our new house, the style we’ve been going for is Modernism, except that we’ve broken one of the “rules”, which is a limited color palette. We have lots and lots of color in our house, but I’d still define our style as somewhat Modern. As I’ve been thinking about stitch patterns and colors that might fit in our living room, I’m not coming up with much. So I went to this website, looking for inspiration for graphing out some intarsia insanity to make a retro looking fabric. Like this, or this.

I can’t decide if it’ll be really cool, or really stupid.

And there’s also the choice of fiber. It needs to be the right fiber, and I don’t know what that is yet.

Yesterday, Veronica turned 5.

We had a fun day. It started off at the doctor’s office, where both she and Clark got their shots. (Not so fun). Then we went to Sur La Table where we bought some mini bundt pans to bake Veronica’s cake. She loves to bake and decorate her own birthday cake, and when she found out later that you can’t frost and sprinkle a bundt, that was scrapped and we ended up making a 9×13 sheet cake so she could have her fun.

After Sur La Table, and before the cake baking, Veronica enjoyed her first “spa” experience with a pedicure and manicure.

It was cute, cute cute! I was originally just going to have her fingernails painted, but they up-sold me into doing both the manicure and pedicure for her, and a pedicure for me. They cut the price for Veronica because she’s so little and wouldn’t need exfoliating. (Or because they wanted more money out of me). I wasn’t planning on having a pedicure myself, and I hadn’t shaved in quite awhile. However, I decided that it would be a bit vain and silly of me to pass up a pedicure in a massage chair with a swirling foot bath, just because I was hairy.

Clark was a dear and slept in the sling the whole time.

Then we went to Claim Jumper (her choice) for lunch before heading home to bake the cake before family arrived to celebrate and sing.

I’ve been knitting on the socks a little bit. Both gussets are done, and I’ve started the trek down the foot towards the toes. I’m tired of being poked in the palm by the double points, and have thought about trying my hand at socks on circulars, either two circs or the one long circ which I think is the “magic loop” method, unless I’m mistaken. The problem is that I like to do both socks at the same time which is the only way I think I’ll ever finish a pair, as opposed to just the one, and the only way I’m at ease about them both ending up the same size when I’m done. To accommodate that, I’ve bought two sets of double points in the small sock sizes. If I move to two circulars, thats FOUR circular needles per size I’d need to buy. If I choose the magic loop (which is what I’m more interested in) I’d need to buy two circulars in each size.

I don’t want to.

Which is why, thus far, I continue to get poked in the palm when ever I knit socks. But it’s getting old.

Yesterday I was able to knit some. I was desperate, so I knit over poor Clark’s head while he was nursing, or under his bum when he was sleeping on my shoulder. (He’s been really fussy, so I haven’t been able to put him down much. Fortunately, he mostly stops fussing when I hold or feed him).

I’m still knitting on the green socks, and am half way through the second gusset.

Yesterday, I noticed one of my size 1 bamboo needles was looking quite bent, so I tried to straighten it and SNAP! Dangit.

So I knit yesterday, in between painting. Our formal dining room is being trimmed out in cedar this week, and we needed to finish up with the red paint. The last owners of the house had painted the top half of the walls a really dark purple, framed by white plastic chair rail on the bottom and white plastic crown molding on the top which sat right against the rough cedar ceiling.

Picture that for a minute. Bright white, shiny plastic crown molding next to rough cedar planked ceiling. Um, yeah. Not pretty.

We really dig the cedar ceiling, and are going to make the most of it by putting more cedar in the room, but we didn’t realize the crown molding NEEDED to come down until after we painted the walls red. When our friend Dave pulled it off last week, we were left with more painting to do. And that’s what I did almost all day yesterday. And for most of it, I had Clark in the sling on the front of me. He was helpful and slept a lot, which was nice.

Slings rock. I could never have done all that with the Baby Bjorn. It’s just different.

How was your week?

I’ve been eating well and writing down everything I eat. It helps curb mindless snacking because my snacking tends to be a bite of this, and a bite of that, which would result in a lot of writing and a very long list. And this week, I asked Nate to start reviewing my eating log which further curbs the mindless snacking.

On Thursday, I did physical therapy and weights. I wanted to walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes yesterday, but that didn’t happen. Today, I’ve done weights, and hope to sneak in the physical therapy again. There’s so much going on, and Clark is fussy, so there isn’t much time.

Clark will be blessed in church tomorrow, and afterwards, we’re having a get-together and luncheon for family. I have a lot of cleaning to do, and Nate is on a publication deadline, so I’m on my own with the housework AND the kids.

I moved my big goldfish from their tank into the pond on Tuesday.

The goldfish that I’ve had for 4 years now. The goldfish that nibble on my fingers when I feed them or clean their tank. Those goldfish.

Well, immediately upon entering the pond, they went completely feral. The idiots. They freak out when I feed them, they don’t come up to me, and I can only assume that they’re eating, ’cause the sure as heck aren’t doing it when I can see them.

The ingratitude is too much, and I’m really annoyed. All I can say is they’d better shape up.

Nate brought home Big Girl Knits on Tuesday. It’s a neat book, and has me excited about knitting myself a sweater. I love what it says about shaping, measuring, etc. I haven’t read it all yet, but so far, it’s good.

I found the Sensational Sock book in a box yesterday and re-copied the page I need to finish up the socks. I’d like to say I knit on them, but I didn’t. I spent the day grocery shopping to restock the fridge and pantry. It had been awhile.

Finally, I got an email that the new MagKnits is up, and I luuuuurve Rufflette. A lot.