M is for Making: Messes and Muffins

First, let me say that the boys are camping this weekend. The troop is on a canoe campout where they have their stuff in "pickle" buckets in the canoes. They canoed several miles this morning to get to their campsite. Then they break camp in the morning and continue their canoe trip, presumably arriving at the mini-van convoy for their trip home. From what I hear 4 boys(2 canoes) from the monkey's patrol capsized today in two independant incidents. Three of the kids' stuff got soaked for one reason or another. One of those kids with soaked stuff is the monkey. Poor kid. He really didn't want to go on the camping trip in the first place.

Second, let me say that I have an ear infection (I'm surprised it wasn't strep. My throat hurt like the dickens when I went in, not my ear.) And we've been having some bizarre medical situations with our parents - DH's mom (who has early-onset Alzheimer's) is being "evaluated" at the psychiatric ward of the hosptial - she wasn't playing nice with her friends at the ALF, and it got to a point where it was affecting the other residents and it was too much for the staff to handle, and blah, blah, blah. Every night this week at dinner, DH has had a story about either (a)bureaucratic run-arounds with legal stuff (guardianship, medical proxies, etc.), (b)his mother hallucinating, (c)plans for the future (does she go back to her old ALF? Is it time for skilled nursing?) And in other news my dad recently discovered that he has prostate cancer. The good news is that they caught it early and it doesn't seem to be anyplace else, the bad news is that it's cancer. That's been kind of a lot to digest.

Well, what I'm getting to is, it's been a few weeks since I been doing the "nightly living room sweep" before bed. And I'm pretty selective about what chores I do when it's just me and La for the weekend. It'll probably take an hour, hour and a half to get the place picked up to a reasonable level, and that will probably happen Sunday. I'm very nearly to the point where I can't stand it. This is what the living room looks like today. The aisleway by the dining room table is also difficult to navigate.



La and I made blueberry muffins today. Well, La, Betty Crocker and I did. She poured everything in and did most of the mixing and put the muffin papers in the tin. Not bad for age 3. AND! She could tell me how many eggs to put in. Either by reading the label under the picture of eggs or by counting the eggs in the picture.



Here's what else I made today [pros and cons of a 4 hour nap - lots of time in the afternoon to do stuff. But the kid can't fall asleep until 10pm.] I began quilting my nephew's quilt! It's a little over halfway done.



Here it is with the new, improved backing fabric:


Not much in the way of knitting to report. I've been having trouble with garter stitch lately. I found my Wrap Style book. It was in my laptop case. I did bring it to work to photocopy, and brought it home again. (duh.) I lost the batting that I bought for the above quilt. (Maybe if I put things away?) I used the batting I bought yesterday for the impromptu yellow and green quilt, figuring that the other one would show up in time for me to use it for the yellow and green. I bought material for the yellow and green quilt. Turns out it wants to be a girl quilt. Solid pale pink for the border. Pink with frogs for the back (Robert Kaufman, scroll down to the bottom). Oh, and I picked up some Paton's yarn. SWS and merino to try out.

I finally frogged this scarf and am reworking it. Still garter stitch, but horizontal. I like it a lot better this way.