Housekeeping

It occurs to me that I need to do some catching up.

First order of business -- What I've learned about this blog and myself as a blogger. I've been merrily blogging away for months now, typing and musing, not as often as I'd want or intend, but I'm working on it. Sometimes I go for weeks without an entry, sometimes there are several within a week. Sometimes people comment, sometimes not. I figure if it's read by anyone other than its author, who is infatuated with her own writing and will read every entry over and over, it's doing alright.

I'm amused by the very earliest entries, because they seem so stilted. I think I was so worried about making what I wrote worth reading, the theory being that the writing had better be worth the effort if someone took the time to click through a link, that I sort of lost my narrative voice. Until recently, I didn't tell any of my friends or Accountant Boy about the blog, because I didn't feel all that good about it. The Knitty blogstalk post about dinner prep turned that around for me. I had such a good time doing it, and still have such a good time looking at the series of pictures, that I wanted to share. The narrative voice is coming back to me now. What I write is becoming more me, less generic, inoffensive lady from the Knitty boards.

The blog's changing as well. I guess this happens to all of us eventually, the 'knitting' blog turning into the 'me' blog. Let's face it, folks. I love knitting, but I'm not all that zippy about it. If I wait until I have a finished object, or what the hell, have made enough appreciable progress on a project that it warrants photographing, it's going to be a helluva long gap between entries. I'd have to go back and check, but how long ago did I start Bristow? And how long ago did I decide that I was going to work on it exclusively until it was done, meaning that I wasn't producing anything else? That doesn't give us a lot of knitting content, does it? No, it doesn't. But if this isn't just a knitting blog, if there's more to it than that, then the door is opened for this sort of thing.

But that's a story for another day.

My final thought on the blog for today is about comments. Kimberly121 from the Knittyboards asked the question on her blog recently, "How do you respond to comments?" Now that I'm getting more of them, I had the same question. I don't have an answer. Comment in the comments? E-mail the sender? Respond in a future entry? I'm going with option 3 for the moment, because there were a few really nice comments recently that I wanted to acknowledge.

For everyone who loves/envies my kitchen, thank you! I love it, too. I should post a couple of pre-remodel pictures, so you can appreciate the horror that it was. We're especially proud of it because, while the designer did the structural design work and talked us into/out of some of our less-informed ideas, we came up with the look and style all on our own. We wanted sort of a "St. Helena wine bar" feel, and I think we got it without the look skewing too rustic.

I'd also like to point out that the kitchen/front room is the only remodeled room in our tiny, postwar-era house. You should see our bedroom. We painted last December, didn't get the second coat of paint done, propped the loose trim up behind the door, and haven't done anything since. We only put the doorknob on a couple of months ago, because we needed to be able to close Buddy in up there for his safety during a party. We hastily rehung the IKEA curtains so that we could have some privacy, not realizing that we'd hung them backwards, and still haven't rehung them. The tag's been staring me in the face when I wake up for nine months. Yeah, there's a reason we never leave that front room.

Batty, I asked my gnarled feet if they wanted a pedicure this week, and they said, swear to God, that they'd rather I spend the money on heavy work boots so that they can safely pound a spade into the clay out in the yard. (You can't do that kind of work in sneakers. We're just saying... -- Suzannes gnarled feet)

That picture at the top is Lucy's reveal of the mystery macro shot. She actually has two of these ropes at the moment -- this one, and another that is in considerably worse shape. She's pulling it apart, one thread at a time. Look at that face. Look at those ears. She looks like those demon dogs in 'Ghostbusters'. To me, she's adorable.

Her other favorite toy is this bone. She likes to play fetch with it. It weighs about three pounds, and I'm always worried that it's going to bonk her on the head when it lands, but she won't accept any other toy in its place. If we throw a tennis ball to her, she'll run past it to find the bone and bring it back to us, abandoning the tennis ball under the rose bushes. So we gave up and now we just throw the bone to her and hope it keeps taking lucky bounces. Whatever it takes. The girl needs exercise.

The vet said I look like a chunky, burnt baked potato, and that's O.K. because I like potatoes, and I think that means I'm a pretty girl. -- Lucy the Dog

Moo moo, Flossy. Moo moo. -- Buddy the Cat.