Greenery

This is the time of year when I'd buy all of the plants in the stores and all of the seed

packets (it's the pictures that get me).  I fell into the plant trap the other day when I was in ALDI.  They had a rack of foliage plants--Philodendron, English Ivy, Swedish Ivy, and Wandering Jew.  One of the Wandering Jews jumped into my cart and wouldn't get out.  There I was in the aisle between the random crap (what they call "special buys") and the frozen foods arguing with a plant.  See, the sign said they'd been $7.99 and were marked down to $2.99 so my resistance was already crumbling before the plant grabbed me.  I lost the battle and this came home with me.

A couple weeks ago I dug out a bigger clay pot and some potting soil from the garage and re-potted the avocado we sprouted last spring.  I gave it a nice big drink of water and pinched off the terminal bud, hoping that it'd open up a branch or two.  No such luck.  It merely sent out a new terminal bud from the side of the top.  *sigh*  I was supposed to snip off the top when it got to about 6" tall but I forgot and now it's evidently too late.  I should probably blame the potting soil, it was the kind with built-in fertilizer.  Anyway, see?  Sprouts!



I meant to sit down and start knitting the thumbs of the Tweedy Log Cabin Mitts today but found myself hooking my way through a Tunisian Short Row Dishcloth.  I feel like I made a tactical error in the first wedge.  See how much more elongated it is than the others?  That's going to require some creative seaming together but it's just  a dish/washcloth.  I'm not even sure that the yarn is cotton or has cotton in it.  It feels like cotton but it burned like acrylic, making an acrid smell and a bead of melted plastic on the end.  Maybe it'll act like cotton once it gets wet...  I like the colors, though.

As I started writing this blog post I was trying to think what I'd done with most of my day.  Then it dawned on me.  I decided to get a jump on the April Knitting Guild newsletter and migrate the "every month" parts over to a new document so I won't have to race to finish it by my self-imposed deadline of 2 weeks before the next meeting.  I was pleased as punch to discover that I can cut and paste items from the old version of Print Shop (where I've been making the newsletter the last 2 months) to the new version I bought and hadn't taken the time to explore yet.  This afternoon I moved all the things that don't really change over into a new document, some rearranging will have to happen but this is a huge advance on last month.

March 13--Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Learns of the Sword Excalibur.  The hand rose above the surface of the ice like someone clawing their way out of the underworld.  Calla stood shivering on the shore trying to blink away the image.  She tried hard to convince herself that it was an oddly shaped branch from a tree that fell into the river upstream but she knew no tree branch wore a gold ring or painted its nails red.  She held tight to Kipper's leash, keeping the curious Lab off the ice.  Sheriff Maxwell had come himself in answer to her call and had asked her to stay there while he went out on the ice to investigate.  "Stay here, will you?" he said.  "If that ice is thin I don't want to be without someone to call it in."  When she nodded he had patted her shoulder, said "thanks, Cal," and side-stepped down the bank and out onto the ice.

I went to a meeting this evening and mentioned that our renters are moving on Thursday.  One of the women there asked where the duplex is.  When I told her, she said that her sister lived nearby and she'd hoped to move closer to her sister.  She asked what the rent it and when I told her she said, "Right in my price range."  She's coming to look at it next week.  The only hitch, besides having to live next door to me, is that she's in her apartment until the end of April so we'll be without tenants and therefore rent for 6 weeks but I think she might be just what we're looking for.  And I contemplated skipping the meeting.  Glad I went.
--Barbara