The Giving Flower

It’s been a very long two weeks. It’s also been a very short two weeks. You know how it is when you’re on vacation. You have tons to do and not much time to do it, but at the same time everything has happened during the short time of a week and you can’t believe how long it was. Does that make sense? Oh well, I’m not making much sense these days. Anyway, Martin has had vacation for two weeks now and we’ve tried to get some necessary things done around here. We had originally planned on heading off to the Baltic Sea for a few days, but as you will find out we stayed home because of some harryhairy(sorry I’ve been reading Harry Potter) things happening which were out of our control. We also underestimated how long it would take to do things with two little monsters running around under our feet.
First there was the dishwasher repair man that came and took some (a big part) of our vacation money with him.
Then we decided to do some long-needed building. These are the best IKEA shelves of all times. We took out the changing table and toy chest in the kids’ room and replaced it with these monster high shelves, so that the kids could play in their room instead of everywhere else in this tiny apartment. Now, because of the shelves, you can see floor in the back part of the room and you can find toys without having to dig. Oh joy!

I had Alida in the picture so you could see just how high these monstrosities really are. It took a whopping two and a half days to get these built and filled, with a lot of time swearing left and right while building them. I’m going to make curtains for the front so it doesn’t look this messy all the time. Ching ching- another big chunk out of our vacation money.
Then we woke up to a dead washing machine yesterday until Martin decided to open her up and see just where she was hurt. Well, he’s got her running now, but I want a new dependable one. This is the third time she’s been acting up. No more fooling around. That new machine will take the rest of our vacation money and more. So you see, we didn’t go anywhere for our two-week vacation.
We did manage to go swimming as a family 3 times. Alida is a fish! We also took Alexander to see his first movie-Wallace and Gromit and he loved it. We spent the entire day on Saturday looking at washing machines and talking to intelligent salesmen who tried to tell us which machine was the right one for us. Who says that’s not quality family time?

Onto a little bit more positive knitting news. Fortunately, I did get short spurts of knitting time in and have some fingerless gloves to show for it. Here they are.

I love how they turned out. To my chagrin, I worked on them when my eyes were falling shut-about 9:00 at night- so I did quite a bit of ripping to get them exactly the same. One lesson learned-when you write up a pattern as you knit make sure you understand it before moving on! It took me forever to figure out what I had done. It’s a good thing I had an identical twin glove to check the directions before giving it out as a pattern. The pattern is not as perfect as I’d like right now, so it might take a minute or two to get it posted.

Saturday, as I said, was crammed full of dishwashers, salesman and two squirmy kids vacuuming the floor at Media Markt. Needless to say, I was allowed one hour to meet some bloggers at WollKontor one of my favorite yarn stores here in the area. I was so excited (please ignore those black rings under my eyes) to see some blog faces. I met some knitters from Hamburg and Leipzig, but I really wanted to meet one of my favorite bloggers Sabine from Stricky, however she was not to be seen. While I was there the owner, a really nice knitter and mother about my age, received a call that they were not going to show, instead they were headed to a nearby cafe. I went home very disappointed not to have met anyone, but otherwise happy to have spent a full hour kidless surrounded by yarn. Remember, the washing machine tour had to continue after I returned home. Did you think I could come home yarnless? No way. How could I not?

Do you see this Gryffindor sock yarn??? I’ve seen some fabulous socks being knit with these colors at the blue blog but after getting no response to my many questions on how to get some of this great stuff, I decided I would have to be Gryffindorless, until I found these two balls waiting to be unpacked-they had just come in! These will be my next socks and I’m going to try knitting from the toe up. Wish me luck.
Too bad you can’t feel that purple yarn in the back. It is soooo soft. I normally wouldn’t succumb to such unnatural fiber, but the last time I was in the shop with Alida she would not put this stuff down. She kept saying purple and would not touch any other color. As you can imagine she was so excited when she saw me come home with this. She keeps showing me her neck so I know to make a scarf for her with it. I guess I will. I’m a sucker for a cute smile.