Not Another Knitwit

I feel so refreshed by summer. Living in Michigan (aka the Great White North) can be a bit depressing at times. But with summer here and the 4th of July under my belt, I am feeling light and refreshed. I've been having a great time cleaning things out and taking pleasure in my surroundings instead of having them make me want to go curl up on the sidewalk because it's all so overwhelming. DW and I consolidated down to one storage unit, we mostly have everything out of his grandmother's house, and the amount of junk that I will never use has been greatly reduced. I've been using a very simple method of determining if an item is something I need to keep or not: If it has been in storage for more than six months and I haven't at some point in that time thought, "wow, I wish I had my ------", then it is either going to charity or the dumpster. I think that I've shed almost a household's worth of junk that was just sitting around in storage, waiting for me to do something with it. There are points when I have had to sit back and say, "wow.... I really own all of this, No Way!". After having a series of jobs from hell (and no time outside of them), I am finally at a point where I can begin to deal with all the accumulated stuff that I have collected.

In addition to all of the physical stuff that I have been getting out of my life, I've made a lot of changes to my eating habits too. Part of that is having access to the farmer's markets and fresh produce that comes with summer. But part of it too is how I'm thinking about food and the role that it plays in my life. I've been making it a big priority to make sure that I am planning out at least two meals a week so that if nothing else I have those two meals and leftovers for most of the week. I've also been making big batches of things like pasta salad and chili that store well in the fridge so that when I don't have a lot of time or am just hungry for a little something I don't feel the need to go get junk food on my way to places or things like that.

Ok... I have definatly rambled on here, but there are things that just need to be said, like the things that get left at the wayside.

I might have just bought myself a birthday present. Two weeks early. That supports my already prodigious fibre addiction...

oops

by not delivering my ring!!! Luckily it is all tracked and insured so it is on its way back to the goldsmith that we got it from. And even more lucky is that the guy we got it from is a pretty small company so we were able to talk to a real person and they got back to us really quickly. So when it gets back to the smith he is going to resend it to a different address (i.e. one that will have a human at it during business hours) so it will totally be here in time for the wedding but just not quite yet.

Part of my birthday present that made me go squee is the set of drop spindles that I got here. I found them on eBay but you can also get stuff directly from their site. The spindles are gorgeous and I kind of haven't put them down except to go to work and sleep. I have some fiber from an arts & crafts show from 2 years ago that I kind of picked up on a whim for cheap that I've started with. It's really nice (might be merino, there was not label and even if there was I would have lost it ages ago) and soft and is spinning up really nicely. After the obligatory "yarn barf" stage I'm actually spinning pretty consistent yarn that is working up to be roughly worsted weight. Super excited about the whole thing though...

wheeeeeeeeeee!

For Art Fair is over in Ann Arbor. It's not that I don't love art... or have much against Ann Arbor... Just the two put together drive me up a wall. But the week is over and I have fun things like a wedding shower and a birthday this week so I have a bit to recover... But right now I'm off to have another drink, because it makes me forget the pain of my brian leaking out of my ear from the silly people.