I just finished cutting out a new wool dress for this weekend (it's supposed to be a high of 56 degrees F on Saturday) and these are the only bits leftover from the fabric.
Hooray patterns made of rectangles and triangles! Now just to piece it together before the week gets away from me.
Some of our neighbors have already put up Christmas lights, one house on November 1st. I'll be lucky if I'm not still shopping on the 24th of December, but it's in our nature to wait until the last minute. One thing I've come to rely on is our Christmas Excel spreadsheet. We have all our friends and family listed and what items we have gifted them with along with an approximate price. I think I have spreadsheets for the last three years. It reminds me a bit of a scene from the Sopranos where Carmella is writing the amount of their wedding gift in a special book so that when their daughter Meadow gets married they'll know if she was shorted. Our list isn't designed for tracking what the rest of the world is doing but just reminding us of what we've been doing. We have a lot of friends and it can be hard to keep track of it all just in our heads.
Perhaps this year, we'll give everyone sheep and goats and llamas care of Heifer International. I keep threatening to, but always opt for gifts that can be easily put in boxes with paper and ribbon. Last year, though, the catalog came in the mail and nearly broke my heart. There was a quote from a man saying, "If I die my family will grieve my passing. If our water buffalo dies, my family will starve." Holy crap, someone get this family a water buffalo immediately!
So don't be surprised if this year at least a portion of your gift goes to some foreign country in the form of livestock. And maybe one day I can get organized enough to coordinate a Gift Ark.
We had a .05 second power outage this afternoon and it seems to have killed the two most expensive UPSes in our house. Rich's super cheap UPS is working fine, while the UPSes attached to my computer and sound equipment as well as all the entertainment equipment in the living room are toast. I've tried resetting the breakers, resetting the UPSes, crawling around unplugging and plugging things behind large pieces of furniture and rolling around on the carpet all but throwing a tantrum at the unfairness of it all but nothing has brought them back from the grave. I've locked both UPSes in the upstairs bathroom to wait for their batteries to drain (and think about what they've done) so I don't have to listen to their annoying beeping every 30 seconds. I hate buying UPSes because they're expensive and no fun. But what I hate even more is replacing them less than six months after I've bought them. Sure, they may be under warranty, but I might like to use my computer or the TV before they get around to shipping us new ones via UPS ground. I'm trying to remind myself that even if the UPSes are a lost cause, they were a lot cheaper than anything hooked up to them. But it doesn't make it any more fun.
I'm off to cook dinner and knit, since they're two things that shouldn't require a backup power supply.
Edit (10:05pm): I successfully made a roast pork tenderloin for dinner and have started the first three rows of my very first knitted sock ever. But most importantly, I went upstairs to check on the UPSes and they were happily glowing green lights again! They are all hooked back up now and humming long nicely. It's like found money to not have to replace them.