Before

Reminder to Joe: You are banned from the blog this week. Move along buddy. Lots of other sites to look at.

Our house is sort of crappy. When we moved in The house was total crap. It had been empty for some time, partly because it was crap, partly because it was next door to a building that had burned down (or mostly down, it was a danger and an eyesore, inhabited entirely by several large and bold families of skunks and racoons) and partly because the longer it was empty, the crappier it got. When we moved in, there was a hole in the kitchen wall that went clear to the outside. It was big enough for animals to come and go through…which they did. Only one room had been refinished, and the rest of this 120 year old heap was falling down. I did not buy it then because I saw the potential ( though it has turned out to have a little) but because a house with a racoon door in the kitchen, crumbling plaster and lathe and a view of a burned out hulk turned out to be the only house in my price range.

Over the years, much of the house has been fixed up. The wood printed linoleum in the living room was replaced by real wood, the crumbling walls were knocked down and drywalled – we got fancy pants upgrades, like electricity in every room and some insulation. (When we tore down our first wall we were stunned to discover that the only insulation in the walls was old newspapers. Great reading, but a poor force against the cold.) Something (even if it was just a good paint job and a new floor) has been done in every room, and it’s not like now it’s anything out of House Beautiful, but it isn’t awful. I’m not ashamed of the house (much) anymore, and all the rooms are more or less ok. (When I clean them, which is a whole other issue.) Every room except ours. Once the racoon door was fixed, the master bedroom won the prize for the most craptastic room in the house.

I’m not sure when I stopped caring if that room was ok, but it might have been after the first time that I cleaned and organized it really well and realized that it was still crap. That nothing short of a major overhaul was going to fix it. Once I realized that it was a crap room, I started putting our crap there. It was a good match. Nobody saw the room except for Joe and I, so it didn’t matter that it was crap.

Until now. Now, while Joe is gone over the next 5 days…I am going to de-crap our room. Refinish the floor (I have had the good sense to hire someone to do this -if he ever shows up. He’s more than an hour late) repaint (that would be me) put up new drapes and fix things up (still me) so that we have a really nice room and it isn’t the door you rush to close when people show up at your house.

With this goal in mind, I give you: The before pictures. This is the bedroom in it’s natural resting state, except- you know. I cleaned up before I took the pictures. There’s usually some knitting and abandoned coffee cups in there, not to mention the laundry.

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I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Gee Steph, don’t be to hard on the room. It’s not that crappy.” You’re wrong. See the floor?

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It’s the original pine, but it’s been painted (many times, in many different colours, not one of which matches the purple baseboards) and you can’t hardly keep it clean it’s so rough. That’s one of the good spots. Notice that there is no outlet cover on the outlet? We got electricity in this room, but no cover.

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Here’s more of the craptastic floor (accented by the orange-yellow walls and the purple trim ) and demonstrating the extraordinarily gross foam insulation that we used to try and keep the wind from blowing in from the outside through that crack. (Turns out that old newspaper just wasn’t doing its job.) The room was crap, so we never trimmed it. (This is getting embarrassing.)

Here’s a view of how things are now.

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I’ve pulled out all the furniture I can move and cleaned up the floor as best I can. (I have left the mismatched shades in place for now, but they will be on their way out as soon as the floor is done.)

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This is the view from the opposite side, showing the closet (which has no door…it wasn’t there when we moved in and it’s a non-standard door size, so replacing it has always been too expensive) the crappy Ikea bookcase (which I’m going to try and replace with something less crappy, we’ll see how the money holds up) and the purple door with it’s cracked and peeling paint. (Please ignore the large green birth ball in the closet. Those things are hell to store.)

Step one? Floor, although really, absolutely anything I do in this room would be a huge improvement.

Organized

(In which our intrepid knitter is anything but.)

I am certain, if you have been reading this blog for a little while, (or…if you have just dropped by for 35 seconds) that you may have begun to form an opinion that I move fast and may not be the most organized soul on the planet. (I may actually be in competition for “least organized woman alive” but you may have guessed that as well.) Today I’m going to try to pull together some loose ends.

1. The TSF/KWB total remains a work in progress. The total in the sidebar is current only through the 26th of December, as we I await the potential for data recovery on the hard drive that has all the rest of the emails on it. If that data can’t be recovered we I will have to execute a plan I’ve been formulating to fix things up…but for this moment in time, we are waiting. I haven’t forgotten, there is still much work to be done there….but for now we are waiting for the muses that rule technology to smile on me. Cross your needles.

2. I am going to try and go forward with the hats for the homeless part of the Represent tour. (I’m also going to try and do this whole thing in a way that doesn’t explode into complete chaos.) After a great deal of personal reflection, I think the best thing to do is for me to find volunteers in NYC willing to accept the hats, to bring them to the event at FIT and to then drop them at a shelter afterwards. (I tried to figure out how I could handle it myself and it’s just not possible. What was I thinking?) What I need to make that work is a couple of NYC knitters who would be willing to receive them. If you live in NYC, and you have an address that people could mail hats to (I would email your address to interested knitters, not put it on the blog, unless you wanted that…like if you were a yarn store or something…) could you email me or leave a comment to that effect?

(I also need “tour guides” for yarn shop crawls? Any social and welcoming knitters out there willing to take out-of-towner knitters under their wing?)

3. If you are going to be seeing me in your city, don’t mail your hat(s). Save it for your local event, and we’ll find a shelter in each city so that we can spread the love around.

4. I finished the ribwarmer

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and love it to death. (That’s snowflakes on it, not some novelty yarn thing.) It is not the apex of fashion, but neither am I, so I couldn’t be happier that it is simply warm and useful and a very good shade of green.

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(Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Ribwamer, from Knitting Workshop, knit from 1.5 skeins of Fleece Artist “Country Wool” 100% wool – 175m to 100g, knit on 4.5mm needles, in a colour that has no name or number (like a lot of the Fleece Artist stuff) that I liberated from a sale bin in the basement of Romni Wools at a stupid cheap price and knew was destined for greatness.)

5. The Bohus is done to the waist and has one completed sleeve.

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I chose not to knit the ribbing, but instead to knit to the length that I wanted, then purled a round to make a turning ridge, then knit about 3cm on a smaller size needle to make a hem that I’ll turn under and sew down inside. I am pleased.

6. June 7th in Petaluma CA has been added to the list of stops I’ll be making. Jayme-the-wonder-publicist continues to be on her game.

7. Joe is away for 5 days, (Joe, if you are reading this, stop now.) and because I have apparently been watching way too much While You Were Out, I have a plan. Since I do not have a tv crew, a carpenter and a designer to help me with this plan, the outcome should be rather unpredictable.

8. I am pretty upset about Starbuck, let me tell you.

Did I miss anything?

Slushed

Well, it was a storm of decent size. Respectable snow and snow and snow followed by miserable freezing rain (which brought down a chunk of the tree in our backyard, though tree limbs are down all over the city) followed by rain and rain and rain. We didn’t lose our power, though many did. Most of the city (including our neighbourhood) has buried electrical wires, and that helps a lot. This is the worst combination for a pedestrian city. The snow covers the sewers and creates dams, then it warms up a little and it starts to be freezing rain instead of snow, so then the city puts down salt to melt the ice, plus the snow starts to melt (helped by the salt) and then it changes to rain and then…

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Slushflood. Not terrible, horrible flooding, but urban flooding that covers every single sidewalk in the city with inches of an icy slurry of slush and water, making getting around really rough. (If there is anyone in the city who has found a way to keep their feet both warm AND dry in this (insert expletive of your choice here), I would be interested in hearing it. All of my winter boots can’t cope with the water, and all of my spring boots (that can handle the water) aren’t warm enough for the slurry of ice.

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My neighbour is seen here going up and down the street trying hard (as are many Torontonians) to find the street sewer under the snow and ice and open it so the water can drain before it freezes.

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We tried for a good long time. We failed. I shovelled water for long enough to figure out that it was a losing game unless my neighbour could open the sewer, and he couldn’t even find the sewer. All the neighbours out on their porches giving advice, some walking up and down, all with different techniques. Some were listening, some had long sticks for testing the road at intervals and some were convinced that they could remember where it was. (They were wrong.) Someone in this neighbourhood has got to put a damned flag on it in July or something. This happens every winter. I’d call the city and ask them, but in the wake of a storm like that they have bigger fish to fry than our wet sidewalk. Thwarted, I knit on the Bohus instead.

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It was considerably uplifting. Sort of like my own little sunshine farm. I think I’m almost done the first sleeve. ( I thought I was before, but when I tried it on I was totally deluded. By a lot. Hope is an incredible thing. )

The kids are home today, two of them had a scheduled day off and Sam stayed put because, well….she’s a pedestrian. We’re supposed to get more snow later this afternoon and evening as the temperature drops….and that should be even less entertaining for all parties who failed to find their sewer as that 8 cm /3 inches of water freezes into a spectacular city wide skating rink. (Sam admits that she thinks this will be very, very fun. I have a terrible sense of balance and am less sure.)

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In the interest of producing cheerfulness in the face of the two outside things I hate the most (cold and wet) I am going to bake cookies and eat as much of the batch as it takes to replace lunch and possibly dinner and consider how very, very happy I am that the basement is not currently leaking. Optimism is everything.

(How much longer ’til spring?)

Added later: Apologies for if your comment from earlier is missing. The server (which I loathe with the white hot fury of a thousand suns) is having some sort of seizure – again.

We hates it.

Be prepared

They say (the “they” in this case being the weather forecasters) that a big storm is headed my way. (Indeed, while I was writing this the snow has started, and it’s a pretty respectable display. Thundersnow too.) They are always predicting this horrific weather, which I suppose is fair, what with this being March in Toronto, but the whole “get prepared, go buy milk, rush around being worried” thing is lost on me. It’s a snowstorm, not a tidal wave or a massive hurricane. I imagine that when my laissez faire attitude bites me on the arse by leaving me with no milk for cereal when the big one finally hits I will be properly repentant, but that’s not today. So far, about twelve people (one of whom was carrying enough toilet paper to service a bunker for the duration of the apocalypse) have asked me if I am ready for the storm.

I’m not sure what “ready” means. Emotionally ready? Physically ready? I live in the city. Though I would undoubtedly prepare differently if I lived further out, here there are three grocery stores, five corner stores, a beer store, a liquor store, a police station, a fire station, two hospitals and about ten thousand of my fellow humans (eleven of whom I am related to) within walking distance (no matter how poor the weather) of my house. Frankly, any weather that would mean my family was in danger that I couldn’t solve with those considerable resources is not going to be fixed with 4L of fresh milk. (The queue at the grocery store would indicate that most of my neighbours somehow believe that they are either about to be struck by a storm that will shut down Canada’s largest city for six weeks, or that they do not live in Canada’s largest city.) Thusly, beyond the few things that every household should have in the event of an emergency (like candles, canned goods and water) I have prepared more personally. My personal storm emergency kit includes the following.

Freshly washed wool socks for every member of the family.

A decent bottle of red wine.

Six beers.

Two rented movies.

Chocolate.

My wits.

A pot of coffee

A pot of soup

Cheese and crackers

A small bottle of Glenlivet (if things were very bad)

An extensive stash of wool (both for insulation and entertainment)

My children (both for insulation and entertainment)

Frankly, any weather (or personal) emergency that cannot be handled with one of the above is too horrible to even contemplate.

Let it snow.