Random weekend thoughts.
It’s starting to feel like spring. I’m starting to get out of the house.
It’s light enough now that I can sit on the deck for a little after work. I have to wear a coat, but it’s worth it. Seriously: I’m nature-powered.
(And it was light enough before they stole my hour. Insert semiannual rant here.)
Saturday I pulled my bike out of the garage and make sure it’s working. It’ll be time to start biking to work soon. I wanted to go for a ride, but of course it started raining at exactly the wrong time. Sunday I biked to the library, and it waited to rain until I was on the way back, half a block from home. Nice thing about biking is I notice more: white snowdrops, bright yellow crocuses, red cardinal on bare branches.
At the time I’m writing this, biking to the pool Monday morning is still up in the air.
I also finally spread compost on the front vegetable bed. Last fall, I covered part of the bed with a huge pile of compost, but since the chard was still growing, that half of the garden had to wait. Finally got around to it this weekend. And while digging up the old rotting chard roots, I discovered that two of the stems have tiny green leaves on them. So I left them. Maybe they’ll grow.
Pretty soon it’ll be time to plant new things. I need to review my seed supply and see what I need to buy. Chard, for sure.
In non-outdoors related news: I bought a sewing machine. It does a bunch of stitches that I don’t know why I would ever use them, and it has a needle threader that thoroughly confused me when I was trying to read the threading diagram until I realized I could ignore it and thread the needle myself. And a cool thread cutter on the side that means I don’t have to keep hunting for scissors. Also, a huge button for reversing (the button on the bottom right in the photo). I will never forget how to backstitch with this thing.
Yesterday I played around with the stitch length and width and thread tension dials to see what would happen, and tried out half the stitches. Also speed: it goes scary fast and makes the whole table shake.
Next weekend I can start a new tote bag, since I also got fabric for three projects: two more tote bags and another pair of pajama pants (which we’re making in class now). Next week I have to go back to the fabric store for t-shirt fabric for the second part of this class.
This also required lots of moving boxes around in the basement so I’d have space to set up the ironing board (no, I don’t iron) and Jeremy’s old card table.
Saturday, dinner was Red Wine Pinto Beans with Smoky (Maple) Bacon, which was really good. Next time I’d use less red wine. And preferably, not maple bacon, but that was what we had. I also made whole wheat biscuits to go with it, which I haven’t made in a long time. I love bread and bread-like things, and I don’t eat them much, so these biscuits were awesome.
Also, the usual writing stuff. Revised a couple flash stories, submitted stuff, wrote more on a longer story, wrote more on the current novel, did some exercises. Etc., etc.