An Uninvited Guest

An unwelcome guest stop by to visit Eric this week. Considering that he has had 2 different colds in a 2 week time span we were not at all surprised when a secondary infection popped up at the house. Eric is on his second day of medicine for the secondary. We have been working hard to clear his lungs out. I have been doing percussion until my hands feel like cement. This does not bode well with getting a lot of knitting or spinning done. I am lucky to finish one hat in a day. I am back to wearing fingerless mittens to keep my hands warm at night, it helps alleviate some of the stiffness and pain.  With any luck we will be through with this by the time Teri comes for her visit.

My cleaning has come to what I call fine tuning. For the most part this involves areas of less then one square foot. Shelves are emptied and re stacked. Papers gone through. You would be surprised at the amount of unnecessary paper that is leaving  the house. If I keep going like this it will be hard to believe that an artist lives in this house. The picture below is really my craft room and it is hard to believe that it is even neater than in this picture.

I will keep adding items to my etsy shop as time permits and hope that some of the items actually find new and loving homes. Things will get pretty eclectic for a while.

Well the guys are asleep so it is time to either start cleaning or wind down and get some sleep.

Almost Done

You have been hearing about the craft room clean up for months now. Except for about 2 square feet on the book shelves, the room is finally almost done. So you can now see a picture.  Sorry it was probably the wrong time of the day to take the picture. The main question to ask at this point in time is weather I can keep it this neat after Thanksgiving.

The Craft Room

Today I tackled the craft room.  I did a lot of throwing and managed to fill 1/3 of the recycle barrel. The bright side of this is that I will never have touch those things again.  Then I went through half of the craft bags and managed to empty 4 bags and 2 baskets.  

I also made the hard choice to to deconstruct several projects that were going no where.  I think I have a few more to deconstruct tommrow too. 

The top of the craft cabinet was emptied, dusted and reorganized. I know later in the week I will also have to tackle the drawers too. 

Then I finished 1 doll blanket. Followed by reorganizing the yarn into new project baskets,  mostly for hats. 

My only problem seems to be it is 9:30 at night and all I want to do is keep cleaning.  I guess it would not be that bad to stay up and clean because tommrow is Johns day with Eric. 

Catching Up

Spring cleaning is well under way. There might be hope that the house will be ready for Passover.  It is nice sharing the work with John. We work well together.  I also took time to organized fluff. Instead of being scattered around the house it is all in Teri's closet or the garage. My stash is getting realitivty smaller. At least it is not growing.  

I also got caught up on some sleep. Which helps with the arthritis pain.  Last night it got so bad that I got up to clean house on the theory that moving would help loosen things up.  After an hour it was aspirin time.  So I took a 3 hour nap today which helped a lot.  

I also figured out why 2 rows of the shawl is enough for one night. At 398 stitches per row will do that.  It was also easier to work the lace pattern tonight with a stitch marker every 14 stitches.  So as it stands now 4 rows of lace are done and only 16 more rows of lace to go.  I should have it done in a week or so.  Then I will block it.

Tomorrow I conquer the craft room.  Teri's never ending blanket will go on the table that has the beads on it. I will also need to find a pattern for my next sewing project.  So the sewing table will need to be done too. 

I have a busy day tomorrow so I am calling it a night. 

It's Only Tuesday

I know that I should not take it personally, but we lost 2 aides for Eric this week. This leaves me feeling what did I do wrong? How can I make the work environment better? Why over the last 20 years have all the aides I have recruited for Eric gone on to other consumers with in months or days of hire? You would think that after a month or 2 or longer of recruiting someone to take care of Eric they would not jump ship so fast. This has left me a little bummed out. Oh well off to recruit more people. UCP of Southern Arizona is always looking for good people. Here is a link to their employment page.

I spent the rest of the day going from one crisis to another. With the exception of the aides, I can go to bed knowing that I have cleaned up all the messes of the day.  I also got a few more projects done and out of the craft room. I think I will cut this blog short tonight as the house is turning off all the lights and 6 am does come awfully early when I stay up this late.

I know that tomorrow will be a better day.

Cleaner Might Be Better

This might be my other self talking, the neat well organized one that I swear is just a facade.  I spent almost the whole day in the craft room today.  Cleaning, organizing, finishing sewing projects and yes finding more yarn hidden away.  Don't tell John or Teri, but the more organized and neater the room became the easier I found it was to create and get things done.  I even have pictures of 2 of the projects I  completed from start to finish today.  The pattern will be posted once I am not writing on my iPod.  

It seems that it might not be the power supply on the computer after all.  It looks like there are a couple of bad transformers on the mother board.  This I know is a very bad thing.  You will know when things get fixed, yes I will be on the computer more. 

The only other thing that got done today was a very short field trip that Eric and I took.  We made our yearly pilgrimage to Tucson's version of the Mayflower.  It is an event sponsored by our local radio station MIX-FM 94.9 along with Tucson Electric Power who double all the cash donations, the Mayflower Moving and Storage Company who donate the use of a moving van to stack and transport the food to the Tucson Community Food Bank.  It was so nice that they remembered Eric from years past and knew just what to do.  

Well it is time to finish making dinner.  TTFN.  

Busy as a Mommy

It has been a very busy and productive weekend around here. Eric managed to fill the laundry room knee high with laundry 2 days in a row.  I did 9 loads of laundry over 2 days and very little belonged to anyone but Eric.  

Elsewhere around the house I managed to do the following:  Fill the huge roll out recycle bin to with in 2 inches of the top. Finish and get a taker for 4 dog pillows. Repair 1 bib for Eric.  Tried a new spinning ratio on the Louet spinning wheel, I did not think it was possible to get yarn of this weight, yeah. Make a major dent in cleaning the guest room for thanksgiving company.  In case you did not know it, the craft room and guest room are one in the same.  We just pull down the Murphy bed when we have company.  Finished 3 more charity hats.  Last but not least start my to do list for Monday.  If I start now or run all day tomorrow I might finish half of the list.  

I would like to thank all of our Veterans for making this crazy life of mine possible. You are some of the most caring and helpful people around.  

Transformations

Well it is finally done the room that was set up for crafts and exercise on Monday is now a full fledged guest room. As you can see from the picture the Murphy bed is even pulled down and the linens freshly washed. Yes the room was vacuumed also. Although I am not sure that the Swifter duster made a trip in there yet.

With time to spare the spinning area was also straightened out too.  There are no pictures there because in my humble opinion there is not as much progress to show.

This did leave me in a state of total exhaustion with an unscheduled nap taken. I did find some time to knit and listen to a few more chapters of 2030. Yes it is a must read book. Some more work was done on the scarf challenge for tomorrow. I am almost finished. Another just in time project.

A special thanks goes out to Kayla for all her help in this endeavour. If you need someone with extraordinary organizing skills she is your go to gal.

Well it is time to get dinner going an quite possibly think about what I am going to make for tomorrow's party since I have procured help for Eric and plan on being out of the house for a few hours.  Respite is wonderful.