The 0ni

For the last few weeks, my husband has been on his unit’s xmas party planning committee as one of the guys in charge of buying prizes for a prize raffle. He and I scoured Amazon for good deals for a couple of days, and bought about $800 in cool small and mid-range prizes. It was actually a lot of fun, and I got to splurge and spend someone else’s money to buy things for other people. I wish I could make that my job!

We settled on a couple dozen gifts, including a mead gift basket from our local meadery, a custom built bugout bag with items we picked out as the most useful in a survival situation, and a professional-grade dartboard and some darts to go along with it.

Life has been too busy lately. Between a storm of settling household goods and finding ourselves with a new puppy, I have had almost no energy to do anything productive.

I have a room full of WIP’s and no time to work on all of them! But with the end of the year and a couple long vacations coming up, I hope to refocus and get some work done. Enjoy this picture of all of my in-progress projects!

Bonus points if you can count how many there are in this pile!

There is a patchwork baby blanket for my faux-nephew Theo who is now coming up on his first birthday. A couple sets of slippers, some other experimental blankets, cowls, scarves, shawls, etc etc etc. I don’t know how I’ll get back on top of this pile but I guess we’ll see :S

I’m a little late to the Pinterest game, but boy is it ever addictive.

Pinterest is a sort of visual organizer for bookmarks, I think. It’s also a way to browse the things you like and collect them somewhere to come back to later when you can make use of them. They even have a little bookmarklet that lets you pin sites as you are browsing the internet, so every time you think “hmm that’s pretty cool!” you can pin it even if the site doesn’t have its own button.

Last night, during a mad fit of pinning, my power went out. This of course meant that my internet went down and left with 3 hours of battery life and only a mobile handset, I had to take a break from the pinning and managed to draft a couple of blog posts.

I had a few goals I wanted to accomplish over this long weekend, but the best laid plans go often askew. So instead of a glorious catch-up on all I’ve wanted to do, I have to be satisfied that I cleaned my house, fixed my vacuum, re-homed my problem pet, and wrote a bit. Focusing on failures – hair treatment gone awry, sleeping through 2 yoga classes, hours and hours of selfish time on Pinterest – won’t be very good for my sanity.

Anyhow, Pinterest is invite-only at this point so if you browse my boards and you think you might wanna try it out yourself, shoot me an email and I will invite you to start the madness.

Now I’m making all my failures up to myself by going to an evening yoga class to unwind.

And I'll be peaceful like this mossy log from Big Sur.

Last night I watched Dive! – a documentary about people who glean their food from grocery store dumpsters in Los Angeles.

According to the documentary, Americans throw away 96 billion pounds of food every year. That’s hundreds of millions of pounds of food every day that gets tossed in a dumpster, or landfill, or trash can, or down a drain.

I have been lucky enough to never go hungry – even during times when I had very little income, I was lucky enough to have friends to live with who wouldn’t charge me for rent, as long as I bought my own food (though food was mostly bought separately, then eaten together anyway).