And another month flies by!

I don't know how this keeps happening! Another month has flown by... a very gray, rainy, dreary month! About the last time I wrote we found signs of a mouse in the house. It never got into our food, or garbage or anything, but we found little signs. Like holes eaten in my sweaters!!! I thought that it was some sort of moth problem with the fleeces or something, so I was carefully sorting through everything. No moths, but I did find mouse poop. The horror! We have lived in this 120 year old house for 7 years and have never had mice before... it makes me crazy. What made me extra crazy was when searching and cleaning ( and not finding more than a dozen little turds) we opened the furnace vents and found the main pathway. Mouse crap in the forced air furnace. We turned off the heat completely until the landlords agree to clean the vents. Thank goodness it has been a mild winter so far. So I was completely neurotically panicked... we have been under the weather for most of the winter, and the boys are asthmatic. So after the cleaning, bleaching, plugging every teeny crack with steel wool, and neurotic waking up to every little sound I heard( i am embarrassed to admit the part where i sprinkled baby powder over every single surface to see if i could see where it was coming from.... that was fun to clean up!).... I came down with the most awful flu. Like freaky fever, chills like i have never experienced, toilet hugging passed out on the bathroom floor for three days, heart racing and sweating, barely conscious for a week kind of weird flu. ( of course the family should be banned from google , because they were convinced I had hantavirus! I think the doctors were even a little freaked out about it) It never progressed to the lung collapse and total system failure part though!... it took a couple of weeks to get better. Good news though. the mouse is gone. I think that it may have only been one. None of the traps ever got any, and there has been no sign of it at all. We bent back one little metal piece on one of the vent grates and I think that it was just out of place enough before that it could JUST squeeze through.

Got a little bit of knitting in. A friend had a brand new baby, so I pulled out that skein of my first ever hand spun. The one I did on the spindle... the cause of this slippery slope obsession with all things fiber! I used the free pattern for the manly Pebble Vest on Ravelry, but thought it was girly enough. I knew that i wouldn't have quite enough for the entire vest from the original skein, so I spun some of that nice cheviot mushroomy brown fleece. It is really nice and soft spun up. I had bought it from a farmer who washed it already. She wasn't a spinner though , so it isn't washed quite as thoroughly as the stuff that I do myself. I still have 3/4 of the fleece left, so I may rewash it all when the weather gets nicer. So here is the finished vest. I don't think the pics quite do it justice... it needs a nice squishy new baby inside of it!



Been busy for the past couple of weeks trying to " get out there" a bit more. I am trying to expand the kids comfort zone a bit. They don't do crowds or outings too well, but we can't just be hermits all of the time! Eldest son is really doing so well these days out of the home, finally making friends and just happier around others and not so overwhelmed. Youngest son is improving. We tried to go to a show featuring an African children's choir. We got there too late and sadly we are too passive to handle people shoving through while we waited first in line to see if they could squeeze us in with some rearranging. Then we tried to go and watch the Olympic opening on the big screen. I was grumpy, and am not an Olympics fan at all, but thought it would be an OK way to have the kids experience community in that way. It was going all right until a woman and her teenage son sat down directly behind us and she proceeded to comment on EVERY SINGLE thing that was going on. Describing what they were wearing, what she thought about everything, reading what it said on the screen out loud. It was just so bizarre that I got the giggles until tears were streaming down my face. We left halfway through and watched it in the quiet comfort of home instead! We went to a busy ( and awesome) travelling Science World show yesterday and it was just too much for the youngest... his coping skill is to punch himself in the face and hide under tables, and generally growl at anyone who looks in his general direction. After many breaks and snacks and walks around the building to recoup, he came around a bit. Enough to get a sweet fossil of an octopus leg from the paleontology exhibit! Eldest son even volunteered to go up to take part in an experiment during the show. Something that never ever would have happened a year ago! I got to hit the thrift store in the next city over, and could hardly contain myself when I found the final desirable cast iron piece that i have been lusting over... a wicked muffin tin. For cheap cheap cheap! And to top it off, a copy of the encyclopedia of Country Living, which is pretty cool and I usually am about 40th on the wait list when I want to re read something from it! It was a good day!