Stockings

I don't think I'm going to finish stockings for all of our family members by Christmas. Right now I'm aiming for two--it seems a reasonable goal and takes into account other Christmas crafting I want to accomplish. Maybe three since there are three kiddos!

I hit a wall with Acedia & me and turned instead to A Mother's Rule of Life . I can't seem to muster enough focus for non-narrative books right now. It's been very busy around here--in a good way! We've had many birthdays and tomorrow, of course, is Thanksgiving. The snow arrived just in time ... I love snow on Thanksgiving. :)

I have fond memories of it snowing on Thanksgiving when my cousins were visiting, and we went outside and ran around barefoot in it. Because we liked to live on the wild side, you know. ;) 

Michael and I celebrated with some hot cocoa. 

He had a great chocolate goatee afterwards. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Linking up with Ginny's yarn along.

More Stripes!

My blogging companion this afternoon. Gregory thinks he only needs one nap a day now. Yikes. He's pretty happy in that box as I type this. :)

A couple more stripes and I will finish the first sock up. It's coming along a bit more slowly than before. The past two weeks have been just ... kind of crazy. It seems to be all-cranky-all-the-time around here these days! There has been more than one evening when Keith's come home and I've just sort of given up on making dinner. Dominic was sick AND teething, so hopefully that's past!

Still reading Acedia & Me. Parts are narrative memoir, parts are a more intellectual discussion/exploration of acedia. I fly through the narrative parts because that's how I read; with the other chapters I feel the need to slow down more and let it sink in.

A few weeks ago I bought a yarn cupboard from Target. (My yarn is still in the freezer though.) It's not moth-proof, but it is better than open storage. Right now my knitting books and paraphernalia are in there, along with the box of yarn I'm using for my sock. It hasn't been eaten yet. (I did buy moth traps that arrived just today, and will be setting them out this evening.)

(Sometime in the next few weeks I'm going to move that changing table out of the living room. I moved the bag of poopy diapers out of the frame for this picture. You're welcome. ;) )

I'm thinking eventually I will store yarn in ziplocs in the cupboard. It will still be colorful but a little more safe.

Linking up with Ginny's yarn along.

How many battles make a war?

I know you were all dying to hear an update on the moth situation, right? Or maybe just assuming there was no update because I killed all the buggers?

There is, sadly, an update.

First of all, the downstairs freezer still looks like this.

So it's a really good thing we have an extra freezer downstairs. There are also shawls and sweaters shoved into the freezer upstairs, not to mention all the sweaters that went into my mother's chest freezer.


Last month I laundered EVERYTHING in our closet, took all the coats and suits to the drycleaners, scrubbed the HECK out of our closet with Pinesol, and moved the bookshelf that had my yarn and scrubbed the heck out of that whole area. I vacuumed our rugs every day for a few weeks. And I felt okay, because I'd done everything that I could reasonably do.

And then I found a wool cardigan in the bottom of another closet, complete with holes and moth poop.

Deep breaths. It looked like old damage. No larvae or moths or pupae to be seen. Scrub the closet. Wash all the things. Okay. Deep breaths.

Well, I had the vacuum out, so let's clear the dust bunny out of the twins' closet. Which has no wool. Just some shoes, some bins of baby clothes, some duffel bags on the floor.

Except look ... an old forgotten glove on the floor next to the duffel bags.

Freak out. Throw away the glove. Pull out the duffel bags. Find a LIVING MOTH running away from me! VACUUM IT TO DEATH. Scrub! Wash! PANIC! And while we're at it let's throw ALL THE TOWELS AND SHEETS from the linen closet in the washing machine and dump the rest of the Pinesol in there and banish the baby-towel basket to the deck for two weeks!

Because the last time I talked myself out of overreacting apparently I missed the moths.

That was two weeks ago.

Today, I found this.

A fingerless glove that was waiting for its missing mate in a bucket of odds and ends. The little white sandy stuff is either eggs or poop, and the whitish cylinder is either an old pupae or casing. There was a moth living at the bottom of the bucket.

Blargh.

Whenever enough time passes that I feel safe, perhaps up to tackling the yarn in the freezer, I find another place the moths have landed. The hard part is not knowing whether it's new or was simply there all along.