Today, Yesterday, and the Day Before

In a way it would have been nice to spend today, my last open weekday before returning to employment, lazing around, accomplishing nothing. But since yesterday and the day before were fun days for me (see below), I present instead Things I Have Done Today, aka Why I Will Sleep Like A Rock Tonight:

• Slept in. It was grand.
• Washed and pinned out the love shawl. (Had to clear everything off the kitchen table to do it, too.) Looking good!

• Cleaned the toilet bowl. Hey, I never said this was a completely glamorous list!
• Went to get the car inspected (about 11 hours after my sticker expired, oops).
• Cast on the second sock, since I finished the first one yesterday. In eleven days!

• Picked up the dvd of Doctor Who season 2 from the library. I re-watched the first season over the last week or two. Love the Doctor!
• Talked to the HR woman from the new job, who just wanted to repeat everything about Monday that she told me by e-mail. Wait, she did give me the office hours, and let me know that another person was starting in the office Monday, as well as five in NY. Otherwise, it was repeat info sharing.
• Laundry. Not fun or exciting, but essential. Load one was interrupted and further loads postponed by the repairman who said that the pump for the sink between the washers will need replacing. One load is better than none?
• Washed the still-hand-washing-color-bleeding socks, which still turn the water faintly blue. From November! Can you believe it? When will it stop?
• Potted the little basil plant I picked up, and put it out on the stoop. Cute and fragrant!

•  Hand-washed a dainty unmentionable in need of personal attention. Not time-consuming, but took me a while to get around to it, so it makes the list. (I have a tremendous ability to walk around and past things that need doing about the house; not much of a super-power, that.)
• Wrote a note and posted it by the mailboxes, to nudge the residents who threw boxes down by the trash area to deal with them properly or they'll never get picked up (garbage truck won't pick up cardboard, but recycling truck won't pick it up if it's not flattened, separated, etc). It's getting messy, and looks bad on the whole building. I hate having to bug people, but honestly, grow up!
• Went out to run the errands that I had planned to do after laundry. Lunch first (a couple of slices from Pizzeria Regina, yum), and struck out on an idea at Michael's, then onward.
• Found a pair of sneakers in my size at Famous Footwear. New Balance for $45, not bad!

 

• Babies R Us, not one of my usual stops! But my friend, for her son's first birthday, suggested giving diapers for a local charity in lieu of gifts for him, which is such a nice thing for her to do. For my one item, the receipt-with-coupons measures 39.5 inches. Seriously ridiculous.
• Petsmart for food and litter, aka the In and the Out of cats.
• Now in danger of overheating (a windy but warm day, plus rushing about) and thus suffering a severe dip in good mood, I paused at Panera for a frozen caramel drink and a few minutes of knitting. Perfect! Though at one point, the three people sitting near me were all on their phones. I kind of miss the old days sometimes. (I remember the days before cell phones ... before voice mail ... before caller ID ... before cordless phones ... before answering machines. I am old.) (My mother just read that and winced.) (Her mother doesn't read blogs, but imagine what she'd say!)
• Target, where they didn't have two of the four items I went in for. Oh, Target, are your best days behind you? You used to be better than this. On the other hand, they did have this, which a friend told me about, and which is just as wonderful as you think it would be.

 

• Home again, and shortly after my return, the repair guy left, so my laundry resumed. Oh. Joy.
• The mail brought me something I ordered last week, when I spent an hour of waiting-for-the-job-offer time on Etsy (a wonderful, dangerous place to spend time). (If you love this enough to check out her shop, let me know, as she sent a coupon code for 15% off next purchase, and encouraged me to share it with friends.) I'm going to bumper sticker my car!

• Unpinned the love shawl. Nice!
• Put things back on the kitchen table (that spent the day spread all over the kitchen), and did some much-needed tidying about the kitchen.
• Finished loading the dishwasher and ran it. Any recommendations for types of cleaner? I'm using one of the types of little pod, but I don't love it; I notice a slight powdery residue left behind.
• Changed the sheets on the bed.
• Cut my nails.
• Isn't that enough FTLOG?

There! No wonder I'm tired. Now, the last two days were busy but less accomplishy and more fun-having. On Tuesday, a friend posted on Facebook that she had a gift card to Webs burning a hole in her pocket, and who wanted to go? My reply ("When?") led to our trip on Wednesday. I met her at her house, where I saw a vivid example* of why the weather website always has pollen warnings these days.
*As if I needed more than my car, previously dark blue, these days yellow-ish-green.

Yuck. But off we went, westwards to Northampton, stopping for lunch at perennial favorite Northampton Brewery before landing at the mother ship, Webs. It was wonderful, as it always is, though I was disappointed that they only had a few colors of Socks That Rock Lightweight, and none I wanted. Still, we press on, and I fell for a nice skein of Madeline Tosh, a brand of which I have heard many good things.

Mmm. It's soft, too.

Other than that, I got a few little things from the tools section, but was remarkably restrained. My trip to Coveted Yarn just last week probably helped in that respect. I never showed you that yarn, did I?

You can see how that would take the edge off. But even with only buying a few things, I had the usual heady Webs experience. What a store.

Thursday, meanwhile, was already planned as a day trip to visit a friend in Central Mass--in fact, the same friend I've gone to Webs with, earlier this year and last year. When I realized this would be my last week of free time, I checked with her to see if it was a good time to invite myself for a visit, and it was! (You know it's a good friend when you can do that.) The visit didn't start off that well, as unfortunately her dog had gone into the woods just before I arrived (though I don't think there was a connection; I mean, it's not that she was avoiding me) for a call of nature, but decided not to come back for a couple of hours. My poor friend was very upset, of course, but eventually the dog appeared at the edge of the woods with a sheepish expression on her face, and the day got better from there (not so much for the dog, who had to get hosed down for some major mud removal, but for the humans).

It was a nice day weather-wise, and we had a pretty laid-back afternoon. Out to lunch at a cute local place, first, and time to visit an antique store after. I picked up a couple of bottles for my collection; have I mentioned that I have random bottles across the top of my kitchen cabinets? There's a lot of space there, it cried out for something, and this is what I did:

Not my best photography, but did I mention I was a little busy today? It conveys the idea.

I already had a couple of Coke bottles up there: one from Canada, one of the Mexican, and my prize, one I brought back from Israel, which has the logo in Hebrew. So at the antique store, I knew I wanted a Coke one, and then how could I resist a bottle of Cheer Up? I had to get it, really.

"For hospital, home and general use" indeed. Just what I want in a soda, don't you?

Some of the things I did not buy:

Though if I was going to buy a dust mop, I would want the radiant kind, wouldn't you?

"The kind with the strong back-bone"? And when were cloves and nutmeg equally popular as pepper?

Back at the house, we sat out in the yard, knitting (in my case) and crocheting (in hers), and chatting about shoes and ships and sealing-wax. And that's when I finished the sock, of course. All in all, a lovely afternoon.

Now, given that we can add "Wrote mammoth blog entry" to the list above, I will stop here! Happy weekend to all.