Currently … (February, 2017)

Currently, I need a new blogging link-up to inspire me to write and actually finish a blog post. Fortunately, Lisa over at The Golden Spoons had provided me with just the thing! She has a new link-up for “Currently…” posts, updating readers on what we’ve been up to. I’ve been up to a lot. The first couple months of the new year started hectically and just kept going strong. This post is going to make me seem way too energetic, but as busy as I sound, I actually have plenty of time to mess around and avoid cleaning off my dining room table by watching way too many YouTube videos on how to knit.

And that’s one of the things I’m currently doing. I joined a knitting and fellowship group at my church and we’ve met three times now. You’d think that I’d get a lot of knitting done and finish the dishcloth I showed you earlier, but I have not. The dishcloth is getting bigger, but it’s not finished. I keep messing up the pattern, and I have about 3 inches to go before it looks like a square. However, it’s just a dishcloth, so I’m not too concerned about how it looks. I did visit a local yarn shop with a member of the group today, and I bought circular needles! And woolen yarn! And I have a pattern for a hat! I’m very excited to start knitting in the round. Please don’t make me finish my dishcloth before I start the hat!

I’ve also started a fellowship group at our church. (Our Family Ministry board is working to start a few new groups to bring church members together, doing things that we already enjoy.) I’m organizing a Family Hiking and Biking group. We had our first outing last Sunday, with 4 families joining us! We had unusually warm weather last weekend for February, and it was perfect for a hike up the Des Plaines River Trail.

My father-in-law died last fall, and I’ve been trying to organize and purge our things along with his things. It’s a daunting task, but I think we’re almost there. I’ve also been discovering some of my mom’s things in the basement that I really should get rid of. It’s hard to part with things that were part of the lives of people you love.

In with my mother’s things were my old Dragonriders of Pern books, by Anne McCaffrey. So of course I had to read ALL THREE of them. It’s a good thing I don’t own any more, or I’d still be reading! By the way, my husband thinks it’s ridiculous that when he types “goo” in the URL bar, my computer goes to “Goodreads” and not “Google!”

I’ve also been doing a lot of planning; planning our summer vacations (two of them and a weekend of camping!) and planning our garden. More on these things later!

And yes, I also had a birthday and still haven’t had my birthday dinner out! Lily had a show choir rehearsal that night and we went down to Danville that weekend for a show choir competition. She is practicing the viola right now and has a mini-concert tonight in preparation for a viola contest on Saturday. I know for a fact, though, that I will get a nice dinner at the end of March when I use my birthday present. Ed bought me tickets to see Carmen at the Lyric Opera! So that is something to look forward to.

What are you currently doing?

signature

Dirty Laundry

Have you seen this “life lesson” floating around on Facebook? A young wife keeps commenting about her neighbor’s dirty laundry–literally. The neighbor is constantly hanging up dingy sheets on the clothesline to dry. The wife wonders why the neighbor can’t seem to learn how to get her laundry clean, until her husband washes the window and voila! The neighbor’s sheets become white and clean. All along it was the windows that were filthy dirty. See what happened there? The wife was being so judgmental about the neighbor’s laundry when she should have been cleaning up her own house.

Every time I read that story (a lot of my Facebook friends apparently think it’s a good lesson) I think about my dirty windows–literally. On sunny days in November, I kept thinking I should wash my windows, especially the bay windows in front of the house along with my kitchen windows. These are the windows we look out of most frequently, and they are very dingy! November was such a beautiful month this year; warm and sunny. It was a very unusual November for Chicago, and it would have been the perfect time to wash my windows.

covered-bridge

And yet, between Lily’s birthday and Thanksgiving, November flew by. It’s December already. The first couple days of December were cold, but still fall-like. Yesterday, however, the view out my windows changed drastically.

snow

And I thought to myself, a bit belatedly, CRAP. I guess I won’t be washing these windows this week. There’s really no lesson here, unless it’s about my own laziness. I should have been “making hay while the sun shines” or something like that. The best I can hope for now is that we have a mild, sunny day in December. Who knows? It might happen. Otherwise my dingy windows will have to wait ’til Spring.

Just don’t judge me by my dirty windows, and I won’t judge you by the way you wash your sheets!

signature