by Kat | Mar 10, 2025 | General, In This Moment
… anyone else finding the struggle to be all too real as we “sprung ahead” an hour Saturday night?
Yesterday I missed the light on my once again dark o’clock walk with Frankie. And said walk was back to silence… no birdsong to cheer us on our way because it was too dark! This mornings early constitutional was a silent affair as well.
I did find the weatherperson’s logic on “there is more daylight” curious…. I hate to burst his bubble… moving the clock does not give one an extra hour of daylight. It is the almost same amount of daylight as the day before.
I have a most substantial list this week that includes finding a handyperson to install a clothes pole/line in my back yard. Yes, I am circumventing Steve entirely because I actually want the clothes line installed.
I hope that if your Monday includes a list that is manageable and that your struggle with the time change was easy!
See you all back here on Wednesday!
by Kat | Mar 7, 2025 | Finds, General
Like many of you, I am more than a bit overwhelmed by the Tsunami of Chaos and Doom that daily causes alarms to go off in my brain. Overwhelmed seems a bit of an understatement… but I am so overwhelmed (and this is with me avoiding all the news, any “breaking” news updates, and selectively choosing which news to consume…) I cannot even imagine how I would feel if I was ingesting all of the things I am avoiding!
But being overwhelmed is not the only thing… I have this weighty doom that keeps feeling more and more weighty and more doom-y as the days go by.
I realize these are not fun things to open a blog post with… but this is my reality right now. (I remind myself of this as I struggle with bladder issues… there is lots of stress in our lives right now!) Finding calm has been a priority and a challenge.
Log Cabin, on the right, and Log Cabin In The Woods, on the left. (Or it will be after I have added the tree today!)
I am so grateful for the 100 Day Stitch Book right now… It is The Thing that occupies my brain most days and it is the thing that brings the most calm! I am just finishing up page 10 so I have reached the halfway point of my 100 days… 10 more pages to go! My next 2-page “layout” is going to be highlighting crazy quilting… which, btw, I have never done. But I have long been fascinated by the technique and while I don’t have any velvets or silks to add, I am very much looking forward to having two pages that the spotlight will be on the stitches! I plan on learning some new stitches over the next 10 days as well. All good things to keep my mind focused away from the chaos.
And thanks to some random Doom Scrolling I have a couple of things to share with you all today!
The first one, Derrick Downey Jr and his squirrels… the most fun on the Instagrams right now. Really… (And Franklin loves Derrick and his Squirrels as well!)
My other new favorite is from an old favorite.. JM Hirsch (who I have loved for his Freezer Door Cocktails) who I know love even more for the F’d Up Sh*t I Found at the Liquor Store. (And he finds some of the most F’d Up Sh*t! LOL)
That’s it from me for this week as I try and find pockets of calm in a tsunami of stress. Happy Friday everyone… I wish you all a very good weekend!
by Kat | Mar 5, 2025 | General, Unraveled Wednesday
Greetings dear Unraveler’s and Happy Wednesday!
Imagine my surprise when a simple spa soak (with a splash of Eucalan) removed every kink from my reclaimed yarn! That has never happened to me before… I always have to “weight” the yarn (I use a hanger… its weight is enough “weight” without stretching the yarn out) but this yarn came out of the bath relaxed and ready to be reknit! I gave them a quick spin in the washer to remove the extra water and then hung them to dry.
Freshly bathed, kink-free yarn!
So, as you can see above, yesterday afternoon I cast on for the vest that Sarah just knit! I read through and marked the directions Monday night… (and can I just say what a brilliantly knit pattern!!) It does not look like much now, but I have begun!
I also “planned out” some sewing for the month… I’d like to get 2 pairs of Free Range Slacks done and give this pinafore a go! The sewing will be the easy part… it’s the pinning out that I am dreading. Sigh.
However, last week, Jane asked a question:
“When you write “punch out” hexagon pieces what do you mean?”
Jane, forgive me for being a bit vague about my hexie template making. I purchased a hexie punch and have been saving heavier “flyers” we get in the mail to punch out hexies.
Hexie punch for precise hexies!
I purchased a 1/2″ hexie punch (on Amazon) but they are sold in a range of sizes from a variety of sources. It makes use of something that I would normally put in “recycling” and the heavier stock of the paper is perfect for wrapping fabric. It is an inexpensive way of cutting exact paper templates… at least for hexies! If I ever decide to do EPP on a larger scale, I might invest in a die cutting machine.
As you can see above, I have also made some progress on the first panel of the blanket… I am close to starting the second motif and really, this is mindless knitting at its best!
And February stitching is done and I am very happy with how it looks!
February stitching… in all her glory!
As for reading… I am almost finished with The Secret History for RWU Book Club! What horrendous characters inside such a brilliantly crafted story! I am listening to Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno… a collection of intertwined short stories. And at night I am reading Colum McCann’s soon-to-be-published Twist. I am not far in but loving the writing, so much.
I had one stellar finish recently that I thought I’d encourage you all to seek out this week… it is Ted Kooser’s brief memoir Lights on a Ground of Darkness: An Evocation of a Place and Time. Mr. Kooser is a writer of brilliant poetry but his brief recount of his family history is quite stunning. His writing is so evocative and so incredibly moving. But even better than all those things… what he writes about could be anyones family. It is just brilliant. My library has a copy but I will be adding this little book to my library… it is the perfect thing to read when life feels like it is in the shitter. I have been feeling a bit hopeless recently, and to contemplate Lights on a Ground of Darkness… well, it was exactly what I needed. As I said, the book is very short… I read through it twice and could have read it again and again (thus the reason for needing my own copy!)
And this is a wrap for me today… what are you making and reading this week?
As always, if you wrote a post to share please leave your link below and thank you!
by Kat | Mar 3, 2025 | General, Welcome
How terrible a time is the beginning of March. In a month there will be daffodils and the sudden blossoming of orchards, but you wouldn’t know it now. You have to take spring on blind faith. — Beatriz Williams
March certainly roared in like a lion here in the south hills of Pittsburgh… for a time on Saturday it looked like a snow globe outside with the flurry of flakes that filled the skies and quickly covered the ground! Couple those flakes with 30+ MPH winds and bitterly cold temperatures and I was reminded that it is still winter despite the signs of spring that are “popping up” everywhere!
I spent some time Saturday afternoon, while the winds raged outdoors reclaiming some yarn from a sweater that never worked (and no, it was not the big cabled sweater… I thought I’d start “smaller” and see how the unraveling process worked.) It went surprisingly fast… sigh. All that reclaimed yarn – an incredible CVM 2-ply – is having a bit of a bath this morning. I have two stacks of things from my latest “closet clean out” that I plucked the sweater from (the “repurpose” pile”) The other is a “repair” pile that I’d like to get to this month… things like hem repairs, button reattachments, and seam reinforcements.
From a sweater to “fusilli” and now having a good long soak to work out the kinks!
Outside of unraveling sweaters, I really want to spend the month thinking about my living “spaces.” This means cleaning out a drawer or two, but also contemplating new furniture arrangements! And maybe a new rug for the living room!
Oh… and that refrigerator clean out from last month? Yeah that did not happen… so maybe I will get to it this month!
What about you? What do you hope March holds?
Header photo by Bich Tran
by Kat | Feb 28, 2025 | Aging Gracefully, General
It has been A Week, friends. A Week.
Let’s start with the highs, shall we?
On Monday afternoon, I had my first visit with the delightful Dr. Napoe. She is a urogynocologist and I can’t believe my good fortune in meeting with her. Dr. Napoe is a most excellent listener and the first thing she did was ask my permission to use an AI app to record our conversation so she could be fully focused on me versus having to type notes as we talked. (Yay technology!) She was kind, attentive, and so easy to talk to… she “double clicked” often. It was a profoundly meaningful conversation… I felt very seen and heard.
Now for the lows… (and trust me the lows have won the week…)
My reason for a visit with Dr. Napoe is that I have been having some significant trouble “going” if you get my drift. As in I rarely “feel the need to go” and when I do… trying to get “started” is a Herculean Task. I have always had a “shy bladder” … using a public restroom is really no fun at all for me. Silly? Yes but knowing it is silly does not make much difference.
I figured that I would need a somewhat full bladder for the appointment, and I was right, but little did I know that I almost always have a somewhat full bladder! After a very thorough and, at times, embarrassingly frank conversation, she “scanned” my bladder and then off to the bathroom I went… (only to struggle to “go”) to then be scanned again… with the same volume as the first scan. She also did an exam and discovered, or perhaps confirmed, her suspicions from our conversation – tight, spasming muscles in my pelvic floor. I am not ever emptying my bladder (It is called Post Void Residual) and so we then talked about the “next steps”…
Silly me for thinking there would be some magic solution… alas no. I was prescribed PT (who knew there was PT for peeing…certainly not) but the first available appointment was not until the end of April. So until then, I have reverted to very early childhood… I am on “timed voids” until further notice. Yep… timed voids people. Every 2-3 hours during the day I am “going” whether I need to or not (an unexpected bonus for this activity is an increase in “stair climbing”)
And I am now keeping a Bladder Diary. Sigh.
She also suggested more relaxation… meditation… calming thoughts. I would laugh at this… if I was not so frustrated. Relax and Pee are not words I would ever use together in a sentence… but there you have it!
Getting old is not for the faint of heart, dear friends…
And I wish us all (myself included) a good weekend!
