I am obsessed. 

I know, that’s nothing like me and it’s totally shocking to find that I’m here again, but once I got the hang of these little spirals, and especially once I had the first row done and was picking up half of each motif from the sides of it’s birth parents… it started to be like potato chips.  I’d knit one, then another, then think "perhaps just one more" and the next thing you know it’s the wee hours and there’s nobody in the house who wants to hear or see anything more about it.

Each one is like a little project.  Each time you finish one I  have the total satisfaction of a complete little perfect knitted thing, and it makes me feel like I am really getting things done.  Really, really getting things done.  Really accomplishing just so much, and that’s a good feeling, since the rest of the house is chaos.  Total, unmitigated, unrestrained, absolutely unfettered Chaos. 

Joe had hoped, I know, to have most of the work done before I got back, but the contractors didn’t really work out the way he had hoped they would, and so while the drywalling and trim around the new ducts did get built, there was collateral damage.  For instance, for very, very complex reasons that I haven’t quite worked out yet, my office was unpacked into the kitchen, and the building materials moved into my office (feel free to imagine what either of those looks like), and oddly, since we weren’t doing any electrical,  one of two outlets in the living room is no longer  there.  There’s a hole where the outlet used to be, but no outlet, and I don’t even understand where or why it has left us. I’m afraid to ask, considering that dude got us in pretty deep in a whole lot of other ways… and I mean that in a literal sense. 

That is exactly what it looks like, which is my charming and affable husband standing in a seven foot deep hole at the side of our house. (By the way? There is absolutely nothing sexier than a man doing some brutish manual labour to save money.)   I’m sending anti-rain vibes into the world until the basement is no longer open to the outside world.  The foundation should be fixed this week (for the record, the problem with it turned out to be that at least in that one place IT DID NOT EXIST ANYMORE – which is a really horrible thought when you consider that it’s right under the bathtub – and it’s really incredible to me that it’s fixable, but it totally is, with the right contractor and for the right price)  and then there won’t be a big hole (I think) but until then, rain would stand in the way of progress – or mudslides, or a hundred other poor outcomes.  Joe keeps saying not to worry, that while the hole is bigger, the opening to the basement is smaller, and  I keep telling him that he is suffering from a failure of imagination if he thinks that a  hole in the house- running from the basement to the outside is not absolutely going to end with one of the most bloggable stories of our lives.** 

In the face of that,  I can’t tell you how comforting it is to be able to connect to a sense of finishing things while that’s going on.  Or at least that’s what I told myself while I am knitting that scarf – or pulling buckets of dirt out of a hole.  Things are getting finished, things are getting finished, things are getting finished.

(**Really, I think this story begins with a skunk falling into the seven foot deep hole, finding no way out except into the house- and then ends with  Joe standing on our bed screaming like a girl, us having to throw out all our possessions, me purchasing  twenty seven cans of tomato juice and us accruing a bill for therapy for our teenaged girls that makes a new foundation look cheap.  Mark my words.)