Chickenminnie’s Weblog

No, it’s not Christmas….it’s spring, and gardeners everywhere are rejoicing. Finally free from the ice and cold of winter we can look forward to at least six months of grubbing, weeding and dead heading. I went out last weekend and surveyed the ravages winter left behind and am pleased to report that fatalities have so far been minimal.

I lost a couple of roses this winter, but rather than feel badly I mentally cross those varieties off my list. Roses are my favorite, but I have little use for fussy types preferring instead the robust roses of the rugosa and David Austin variety which bloom repeatedly and don’t need constant spraying. There are no fancy foam rose covers in my garden; it’s tough love all the way.

After the rose inspection I check on all the first year plants. These are things that were new to the garden last year and sometimes results are mixed. A Japanese maple purchased at the end of the season at half price did very well as did a “Black Lace” elderberry which was definitely not half price. A couple of the evergreens I planted last year got pretty badly chewed up by the deer, but the parts that remain look healthy. Apparently they will have to get little burlap coats next winter like the rhododendrons do.

It will be a few weeks before the status of the “stay abeds” will be known. Those are the plants that wait until they are sure winter is past before announcing themselves, such as the hibiscus, the butterfly bush and caryopteris. Until then I must exercise some restraint and resist the urge to pronounce them prematurely dead.

This is an actual snippet of an email received from my daughter. I swear.

Yes, I may go home and paint the linen closet. I really need to stop reading Design*Sponge.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) she has inherited my compulsive urge to fix things, make things and generally repurpose everything around her, usually on the cheap. If you ever see her with a can of spray paint in her hand do not stand still for very long because you will be turned into a lamp. She is constantly devouring ideas from the web, magazines and HGTV, and her impeccably neat apartment looks like something out of a magazine.

I don’t expect her to outgrow this mania; at 47 I’m still remodeling, rebuilding and replanting everything in sight. These things happen in bursts, but happen they do. My latest project, a slipcover for my couch, will be posted soon. My parents are to blame for this do-it-yourself obsession; I’m sure I was the only kid in grade school who had a radial arm saw in her dining room. Remodeling was a fact of life for me, and it still gives me a curious sense of satisfaction to create something. I’m glad the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.

Actually, Sean would make a great lamp if you could find the right shade.

The Professor has flown to San Antonio, Texas for a few days of R & R with his sister and I have been having a good time playing bachelorette. Since I have always really enjoyed living alone it’s like a nice little mini vacation for me, and I don’t even have to leave home. I get to spread my reading materials all over the couch and hog the remote so I can od on Home & Garden Television and the Food Network. Bachelorette week invariably means great shopping, eating cereal over the sink and spending quality time with my chick. Funny note: I just looked up bachelorette in my thesaurus and one of the substitutions was spinster. Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead.

Anyway, Ken views my little vacations from him with a mixture of amusement  and consternation because he knows I don’t bother to cook for myself. Before he left this time he made some chili and put it in individual containers for me. After showing me where they were located in the refrigerator he looked at me and said, “You’re going to eat cereal over the sink, aren’t you?” He knows me well; which is one of the great things about living with him and why it’s always okay when the mini-vacation is over.

Sal’s Boutique as my friend Maryann affectionately calls the Salvation Army Store, is a blessing for thrifty clothing lovers like myself (my daughter prefers the term cheapass). As a regular customer I have managed to amass a huge cashmere collection, some fabulous sweaters and a few big name jackets, not to mention a fair amount of art pottery. Sure, you have to put up with some fairly colorful people, and it usually doesn’t smell too great in there, but that’s part of the adventure. And where else can you get an Armani jacket for seven dollars? Sal’s satisfies the “champagne taste” textile junkie in me while catering to my beer pocketbook.

Years of working in the sewing business gave me an appreciation for good clothing and fabrics, so even if I don’t buy an item there is still a chance I can experience the thrill of happening upon a couture Chanel jacket, a vintage silk cheongsam or a retro Harris Tweed suit. Sal’s is also a good place to find the occasional EBay resale item; I once paid five bucks for a silk Japanese Hapi coat which sold on EBay for seventy two dollars.

The conservationist in me appreciates the recycling aspect of my Sal’s habit.  When I get tired of a piece of clothing it goes back to the donation bin (or one of my sisters) and I get to buy more.  If I itemized on my tax return I could even write off the donations…how great is that?

March is the most wretched month. It’s long, devoid of three day weekends, and seems to sport the worst weather of any other month in the calendar. People are always crabby in March because they are sick of the cold, tired of being cooped up in the house and in desperate need of some sunlight.

Like everyone else I’m officially sick of winter, and the fact that garden catalogs have been arriving in my mailbox in great numbers since the day after Christmas is not helpful. Those of us in Zone 5 have a long way to go before planting time and even though I am a planner, the garden catalog people should not send me anything until mid March. It’s just a big fat tease and kind of mean.

About the only good thing that happens in March is my birthday. I’m going to be forty seven and realized that the old term “pushing fifty” pretty much applies now, though I will admit it’s kind of fun to say it. I have never been particularly hung up on how old I am, and I have a hard time understanding people who actually lie about it. Somehow having to remember a fake age seems like too much of a waste of energy.

The silk market bag is coming along, but I need to purchase a set of double pointed needles in order to do the decreases on the bottom; a circular needle is just not going to work. I am also working on a baby sweater which is almost instant gratification and a good thing to do between big projects.

The gigantic orange sweater is done and a picture is posted here. The only thing I hate is the zipper which is not really orange. It is not possible to find an orange separating zipper in the entire city of Albany which is rather distressing, but we don’t have a Whole Foods Market here either, so I suppose I should not be surprised (the Whole Foods Market thing is a rant for another day).

I have already started the market bag out of recycled sari silk and it’s coming out pretty well. I scammed the pattern from Lion Brand – thanks guys – and I think the only drawback to it is that you can’t put anything in it that will fall through the holes, like your favorite pen.

I have been incredibly bad about keeping up with my blog.

Classes have started at Sage and it’s nice to be in a classroom again. I’m taking Linux Administration this semester with a lady who seems pretty savvy; many of the students have taken her Java class already and seem to like her. The evening class students at Sage seem to be generally a lot younger than the ESC students which surprised me a little; I think of evening students as falling into a much older demographic.  One of the great things about the class is that half of it is a lab, so if I finish early I can leave. Homework is minimal too, although there is a sizable paper for the final project. Since I have already used Linux in a production environment I can usually get through the labs in good time and part of me is wishing I had taken a second course.

Of course, now that I am not doing hours of homework on Saturday morning I have more time to knit. My current project is a big orange cardigan to keep me warm in my freezing cold office. The yarn was purchased at a garage sale for twenty dollars; a garbage bag full of undyed skeins which I grabbed because I have always wanted to try my hand at dyeing wool. I found a nice fiber reactive dye online and chose burnt orange because I wanted to do something different. The wool dyed up pretty well and has a kind of a light and dark thing going on which looks great knitted up. The cardigan is nearly done and I’ll post a picture when it’s finished.

I can’t wait to finish the cardigan because I have a new project waiting in the wings and have forbidden myself from starting any more knitting projects. I found some great Bartlett wool online in a yummy moss green which is going to be a cabled pullover some day. Restraining myself from starting new projects is a monumental effort; I have attention deficit disorder when it comes to knitting, so starting a new project always gives me a happy little buzz. I also rationalize that I need to have different kinds of projects on the go, such as a pair of angora fingerless gloves (again for a frigid office), a baby sweater for a pregnant niece, a pair of mittens for my sister and a plain black pullover because I always need to have a “mindless” project. This restraint from starting projects does not keep me from planning projects however, and I have had to devise all kinds of creative ways to store my stash in a house as tiny as mine.

I love three day weekends; there’s something blissful about the gift of an extra day at home and I appreciate each and every one of them. There is a little accompanying paralysis however, because I feel as if I must do something important and not fritter the day away, so this weekend was spent doing a little personal organizing. That means I tackle one of my mini disaster areas and make some attempt to deal with whatever it includes. The disaster area of the weekend is my dining room table.

We rarely eat at the dining room table preferring instead the living room (yes, I know) or the island in the kitchen. This means that the dining room table becomes a repository for things that are in transition…the sewing machine on its way to the repairman, a lampshade my daughter wants re-covered, a defunct paperwhite which needs to go to the compost pile, a package that needs to be mailed and a pile of next semester’s textbooks.

This should not be a big deal, but the stuff ended up on the table because I didn’t want to have to deal with it at the time, so dealing with it now requires some sort of monumental psychic force. I can hear my daughter’s mantra now…don’t put it down, put it away. This is the same person whose only discernible disaster area is the trunk of her car. She’s getting the damned lampshade back.