Les Petites Victoires

I've been a little bit scattered since the evacuation for Hurricane Gustav. I haven't wanted to do much of anything other than sit on my butt and knit or play with my kid. So, after almost three weeks, I've decided it is time to get re-centered and get my life back in order.

It has been an eventful past few weeks, of course there was the great evacuation, then my father-in-law ended up in the hospital, and there was that minor incident with my truck and the side of that building. After that we had some evacuees of our own from Houston. It was great having them here, but it still didn't help me get any more organized.

So, I have resolved that over the next week, up until our trip to New York, I will get at least something done around this house every day. Today, I decided to tackle the pool table room and my kitchen. Tomorrow, I'll get the rest of the downstairs clean. I know, really not a whole lot to be proud of, but it's better than I have been doing. Small victories, right?

Stupid names for baby blankets

I must admit, I have never understood why people give inane names to their kids' baby blankets. Woobie is one of the more common ones, but I've heard such a variety of weird and wonderful names. Before I was a mom, I swore to myself that I wouldn't be so cutsie, a pacifier would be a pacifier (oops, it became a binkie), and blanket at its most cutsie would be blankie. Aaah, the naivete of the woman without children! I have since figured out that I get no choice in the matter and once a baby learns to talk, they get the deciding vote on what their comfort items will be called.

So, we now have "Goin", rhymes with groin. While we were in Florida, I finally made the connection between that word and Baby Girl's favorite white blanket (Actually, she has two identical ones). I think maybe it came from the fact that she wants it whenever she is going to bed or going out with me. I'm latching onto that explanation because at least it sounds a bit logical. Also, I'm trying to change it to Gawain, like in Sir Gawain of the Knights of the Round Table.

I can't believe I hit a building....

So, I've been avoiding blogging. After I got back from the evacuation, things have been a little crazy. While we were gone, my Father-in-Law ended up in the hospital, so the evacuation lasted a bit longer than we had anticipated and when I finally got home, I really just wanted to focus on Hubby and Baby Girl and relax. Oh, and there was that good chance that Hurricane Ike was going to pay us a little visit, so I was also doing laundry so I could load it back up in the car...

Anyhow, by Monday I was over my drama and decided that it would be a really good day to go back to the gym and blow off some steam. I loaded Baby Girl into the car and even had a little knitting project to bring with me and knit while riding the stationary bike. People read on those things, so why can't I knit. I was terribly excited about the prospect since I haven't done it before and it gives me further opportunity to play with yarn. Alas, it was not to be!

Our gym is awesome, it has tons of pools, great facilities and best of all, a fantastic day care center and you get up to two hours a day while you work out included in your membership. (If any of you out there feel like joining, please list me as a referral, I get points) So, I pulled up and parked outside the day care. I leaned across the car to get Baby Girl's diaper bag and noticed that the car next to me was backing out. No big deal, right? Well, as soon as my car hit the cement thing that they put at the front of parking spaces to keep you from going too far forward, I realized that the other car was not, in fact, backing out, I was the one moving. Apparently I missed the action of putting the car in park as if I haven't done it everyday, multiple times, since I began driving almost 18 years ago. My car began to go over the block, because it's huge and has an enormous engine and I panicked, I slammed my foot on the brake and at that point everything should have been okay, right? I'm guessing you've figured out by now that everything wasn't as it should be. I didn't hit the brake, my foot found the gas and my car smashed into the side of my little girl's day care.

Okay, it didn't go all the way through, but I did put one hell of a dent in the wall. I backed away from it and put my car into park. For real, this time! I got out of the car and looked at the havoc I had wreaked on my grill and on the building. Oh my! What the hell?! One of the day care workers came running out to investigate what had happened only to find me hysterically bawling. After determining that I had not been injured, he kindly took Baby Girl into the facility so she wouldn't have to see her poor mother in such a state and I began the process of explaining what exactly I had done to various members of the gym management and the security at the business park. They couldn't have been nicer to me, although I really didn't feel like I deserved their kindness. They brought me ice water and a big box of tissues. I gave them my license and insurance information. Fair trade right, after all, I did hit their building. Oh, did I mention that it was the day care. I collapsed into tears again when that realization hit me and they took me inside to prove to me that I had not hurt any of the little kids, or really even scared them too much. I did push in the dry wall inside about four inches, so I'm still pretty upset about the fact that even though I didn't hurt anyone, I could have. That's a really crappy thing to realize.

So, after the paperwork was done and most everyone had gone back inside, I sat outside, waiting for Hubby to arrive (my knight in shining armor) and collecting myself. I must've had no less that four people tell me that "these things just happen, you read about it in the paper all the time." Yeah, you do read about such things all the time, but it's usually about some poor, senile octogenarian or followed up by the phrase, "with a blood-alcohol content of _______." So, for all their good intentions, it really didn't make me feel too much better. One of the staff even told me that if I still wanted to work out, they would keep Baby Girl for a little longer than usual so I could. Nope, I wasn't ready for that, so Hubby took us for sushi instead and then I got my car off to the collision center and picked up my rental. I was beating myself up pretty hard until my wonderful neighbor called later that night and brought me homemade cookies and told me when I am ready to go back to the gym, she will ride with me and prove that she thinks I'm still a safe driver. What a sweetie! I still haven't gone back though, it's still a little too fresh.

I can't believe they didn't revoke my membership....

I will try and post some pictures tomorrow, Hubby has them on his camera and I am tired tonight and want to go to bed.

Take care, all!

Binge Stitching...

So, I'm a refugee. I have escaped Southeast Louisiana and I'm now at my parents' house in Northwest Florida. Unfortunately, Hubby is not with me. We have a family-owned business and he needs to be there to keep everything under control during the storm and to get things up and running as quickly as he can after the weather passes.

What am I doing now? Worrying, waiting, obsessively watching the news and Weather channel, and knitting. I call it therapy knitting, but I've found myself becoming a bit fixated on it. I actually packed my supplies in my evacuation kit! So far I've been working on baby burp cloths (thanks Mason Dixon Knitting), but I've also got a sweater that is a work in progress that I will try and finish in the next day or so. Of course, when given the opportunity, I made a bee-line to the local yarn shop and enough yarn for several more projects. Oh my! Some people turn to alcohol, others comfort eat; I hoard yarn.

There is something completely soothing for me working with yarn in times of stress. The repetitive motions and need to focus on maintaining a pattern help distract me from whatever is on my mind causing me worry. After I lost my grandmother to liver cancer, I completed a king sized afghan based on one of her patterns in about a week and a half! After Katrina, I turned to cross stitching and completed a portrait of Mickey Mouse in front of the American flag almost entirely before the power even came back on. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of it, it's a pretty impressive piece of work if I do say so myself! So, we'll see how much I get accomplished this week while watching my home take a beating again. Please say some prayers for New Orleans, whether you're a religious person or not, we need all the help we can get tonight.

The beginnings of a fiber addiction....

Okay, so here's my dilemma, there are only so many hours in a day, and the majority of them are dedicated to one very small, yet demanding little girl. The hours that are left, must be divided between Hubby, knitting and whatever else I feel like doing (blogging, reading, etc.). So, tonight I will forgo knitting my sweater for a little while and look back to where it all began for me. A yarn stash born, an addiction begun....



My grandmother, Nanny, was a crafter through and through. She quilted and crocheted beautifully, but she was also one of those ladies who could look at something and figure out how to make one herself. She was brilliant, but never thought so herself. When I was five, we moved to Charlottesville, VA which was not terribly far from Nanny and PaPa's house in Norfolk, only a couple of hours. So we went down to see them often.



I was a very loud and active child (big shocker, I know), so my grandmother was often trying to find ways to hold my interest. When I was around six, she put a crochet hook in my hand for the first time along with a ball of pink variegated yarn. Thinking back, it was hideous yarn, but I love the stuff to this day for the memories it evokes. I had some in my yarn drawer for years and when Nanny died, I found some of it still in her stash. She taught me to make a chain and it kept me busy for hours! I would chain the whole ball, then re-wind the ball and start again. I could wrap that chain around the entire house. On subsequent trips she taught me different stitches and how to turn rows. I made blankets galore for my stuffed animals!


Nanny (and my mom as well) also taught me how to sew on plastic canvas, cross stitch and various other crafts; I will confess a love for making just about any kind of handicraft, but crochet is what stuck with me throughout my life. This is my "I was country, when country wasn't cool" moment. I crocheted long before knitting and crochet began to get popular. I was closeted for certain, not even my closest friends knew, but I did it nonetheless. I didn't come out until college, during a bad breakup, I stayed in my suite at the dorm and made an entire afghan in one week as my own weird form of therapy. My suite-mates looked at me rather strangely, but darned if they didn't all want blankets of their own!



After college, I was still crocheting and terrified of the prospect of two needles. I just couldn't grasp the concept of how it was done and the risk of dropping stitches. Crochet is an instant gratification kind of a hobby, things work up fairly quickly and if you mess up, well, you jut rip it out and start over. Knitting is a whole different beast. But after I discovered my best friend from high school was also a yarn girl and knitting, I was intrigued. Plus she had made a really cool sweater that I wanted, so, I had to learn. That was about six years ago. I still crochet from time to time, but I am obsessed with knitting and all the pretty patterns you can create. Plus, it uses less yarn that crochet, so I can afford to use much higher quality stuff. I have become addicted to expensive yarn. It's kind of crazy, if I went into a store and saw a sweater for the price that I've paid for some of my yarn, I would think it was way over-priced, yet I spend it and then have to do the work to assemble it too. Hmmm....



Hubby teases me about yarn being my heroin, how sad and true that statement is. I get the shakes walking out of a yarn store with empty hands. I crave new yarn like and alcoholic craves his next drink. I justify my addiction by telling myself that I am creating things for other people and really that's a fairly generous thing to do, but in reality, I am a yarn-oholic and I just NEED it!

Bow-Fishing Adventure

Okay, so I guess today is as good a day as any to begin my blogging experience. Despite my blog's title, today's entry has nothing to do with knitting or crafts whatsoever. Sorry for false-advertising.

Last night was definitely a new experience for me. Generally, I tend to be an indoor type, especially when heat and insects are involved, but when Hubby and I were invited to go bow-fishing with Hubby's attorney, how could I turn down such an intriguing new adventure? Here's the basic premise, you get on an air-boat at night and head out into the marshes to literally hunt for fish. No wimpy waiting for fish to come to you and bite a hook for us, no sir! So, ignoring the fact that I haven't shot an arrow since camp in junior high (and I pretty much stunk at it back then, too), off we went down to the little town in Southest Louisiana called Jean Lafitte. Yes, it's named after the pirate because it's where his hide-out used to be and supposedly his treasure and ghost still reside there today.

We headed down to Lafitte after Hubby got off work on Friday. I thought we were heading for a camp down there, but we were, in fact, staying at the marina where our air-boat would be leaving from. Here's a picture of our bunk-house. It really wasn't that bad inside, but when I saw the outside, the spoiled little girl in me whined, "We're staying there?" The marina was filled with small, run-down boats, shrimp boats, trailers and equipment. And one very interesting , and out of place addition. Nicholas Cage's yacht was moored down there. He and his family have been down there for about two weeks! All the amazing places they could choose to go for vacation and they were down in Jean Lafitte, LA. Interesting choice, guess they truly wanted to get away from it all. The marina owner even told us they had taken the 130' yacht into the bayous earlier in the week to catch catfish from. I found that really amusing, fishing from that huge boat in a tiny bayou.

Attorney had dinner waiting for us when we arrived. Steak and mashed potatoes with plenty of cabernet. Yummy! I am a girl who loves her red meat (and wine)! Afterwords, we made our way over to the dock to wait for our guide and his boat. And wait, and wait... The guide was about an hour late, not really his fault, there was a wreck on the one road leading to Lafitte, but still...I'm waiting an hour at a dock with MANY flying insects and beetles. Let's focus here, people, it's all about me! Okay, not really, but the fact that he was late gave Attorney plenty of time to regale me with a story of not one, but two incidents on prior bow-fishing trips. In one, the boat sank with them out in the middle of the marsh, in the second, he ended up stranded on a bit of land out in the marsh surrounded by alligators. I don't know about you, but this is definitely not a story I really wanted to hear prior to embarking on my great adventure. Still, I didn't let it get to me too much and psyched myself up for a good time, shooting fish and being in nature.

Once the guides arrived they got the boat loaded into the water fairly quickly, and we set off! The boat was the standard air-boat like you see in any movie set in Louisiana with the addition of a platform attached to the front for us to shoot from. The platform had lights attached underneath so we could see the fish in the water. I will say that it was pretty cool riding through the intercoastal waterway and marshes at high speed with only the lights under the platform and one hand-held spotlight to guide us. It was kind of like that swamp chase scene from that James Bond movie....okay, so not really that cool, but still a lot of fun! Oh, except for the fact that if you smiled, you ran the risk of getting bugs in your teeth. I was amazed at the guide's ability to know where we were going without the usual visual references the rest of us would rely on.

When we got to our first "fishing" spot, the guides showed us how to use the bows and we got started looking for and shooting fish. The mass of bugs surrounding us was amazing! I'm really shocked that I didn't get absolutely skeezed out because I am truly one who HATES the insect world. The marshes are teeming with life, not just bugs, but little fish were jumping out of the water everywhere you looked, there were stingrays, shrimp and alligators (which I was quickly instructed that I was NOT to shoot!). We were looking primarily for redfish, but also for sheepshead and drums. They are not as easy to spot as one might hope. The guides kept pointing for us and I would look where they were pointing and see NOTHING! I think they quickly decided that I would be hopeless and concentrated their spotting efforts primarily to Attorney and Hubby. I did figure it out after a while though and started to see the fish that we were after. I shot and shot and shot and hit nothing. Darn that refraction. Well, I say I hit nothing, I actually hit a couple of fish, but I was so bad at drawing the bowstring that the arrow kinda bounced off the fish. Hubby and Attorney got several and I think Hubby was starting to feel like Robin Hood! I was so proud of him! After many tries I did manage to hit one small redfish. I was SO excited. This was by far more success than I was expecting and made the trip worth it for me. Of course, that didn't mean we could head back so we proceeded to hunt for fish for HOURS. After a bit, I pretty much determined that my one hit was a fluke and I retired to the captain's seat high above the water and became an observer. It turned into a beautiful night with a cool breeze and stars everywhere. Hubby came back and joined me after a while. We were definitely becoming bored with the fishing, but enjoyed the evening. Until about 1:30am, then we just wanted to go back to the dock! We finally got back to the marina around 2:30am. Boy, did I ever have to pee! All-in-all, though, a very fun experience. I'm really glad we went and even happier we didn't run into any spectral pirates!

Now, we're waiting on our turn at Tropical Storm Fay, so I'm going to sign off and bring in some plants before the winds pick up!

About me...

Hmmm....this leads to a very interesting question. Who am I? And to top that off, what can I say here that will hook people and get them reading and caring about my blog. Okay, so I'm not really so worried about that, but c'mon, we all care what other people think just a little bit, whether we admit it or not.


To start off with, I'm a yarn addict. I have a problem, but I've accepted that and I'm trying to find a way to deal with my addiction and incorporate it into my life and still be able to function normally. Okay, so maybe not "normally", but in a way so that I can still get the other things in my life that need doing, done. I have some serious responsibility. Namely, I'm trying to raise a good human being. I think of all the jobs we do in life, that's the most important. For the most part, no one really remembers what you did for a job when your gone (unless you're famous, and I'm not), the only lasting legacy that you leave is your children. So, I want mine to be really good. So far I only have one, but I want her to have all the options in the world, but I also want her do be a good person who looks out for others and is kind.

I'm also a wife. I love that job. I like having Hubby come home and tell me that Baby Girl and I are the highlight of his day. So, right now, that's me: wife, mommy, crafting fiend. The description probably will change as I grow up (I know, technically an adult, but never fully grown), so I'll keep this updated as need be.