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Dear Ellen,

Sunday afternoon or evening is often when I carve out the time to post about activities in general and activities in knitting.  The act of slowing myself down enough to capture some thoughts for public consumption is calming even when I feel there are more urgent items on my to-do list.  More and more I feel like it is my chance to take a deep cleansing breath before I dive into the insanity to come.  And then the act of knitting (which I do try to squeeze in daily, even if only for 10 minutes) is my lifeline that will pull me back to the surface in time to get another breath.  I’m so glad we started this blog!  And believe it or not, our two year anniversary is in just over a month!  I’m going to try to read some of our old posts to get some perspective on from whence we’ve come….and maybe thoughts on to where we might decide to head next.

This last week really was one of insanity.  The new boss is finally on board and he seems to have the notion that he’s in charge.  I’ll have to disabuse him of that quickly.  I’ll talk to his wife.  He’s a pretty good guy, but the “new boss” period is always stressful.  It was also stressful to frog all of what I had accomplished on the right front of my Einstein jacket (A Stitch Away from Genius).  I have screwed around with the pattern due to the gauge yielded by the bulky alpaca I’m using and I decided I got it wrong after about 3 inches.  Here you see a new scant inch where I modified…and added mini box pleats to account for the fact that I’m severely pear shaped.  Now I think I want to frog this and do it once again adding a few more pleats or to change them to distributed decreases.  I don’t know I’ll leave it aside for a few days.

Saturday we drove to Quarryville (where our property is) and bought some stuff from an Amish guy named John.  He and his brother do custom furniture and sheds and we bought both.  We had decided that for our anniversary we would get furniture for the deck here…a bistro set since a full patio set would be too large.  Looking at John’s stuff I got the notion that we might just enjoy the beautiful spruce glider chairs better…most excellent lumbar support.  Dale fairly quickly agreed and we ordered two and an end table.  We had gone in to order a shed for the property.  We did get that too…a very nice one with room for storing the tools we’ll be using to clear paths and landscaping and to keep camping gear between visits.  I’m looking forward to our first night on the property…but not till we acquire some suitable gear!  We did some work too…cleared the 12X12 foot area (of course cleared more than that) at the edge of the woods on which the shed will sit.  And we cleared debris and brush from where the entrance had become overgrown and obstructed over time.  I felt we had very much earned our stop at Maplehof’s Dairy where we had sinfully delicious ice cream cones.  On the way up I studied.  On the way back I got the second of the Desert Skies Socks started.

Today I woke early, managed to find a means to fall back to sleep and then wasn’t out of bed till 11:30AM.  Even so, I am ready to go to bed now.  I did do some more work in my office — arranging, unpacking and doing homework.  It was a very good weekend and with this deep breath, I feel like I can face the coming week.

Love, Jan