Coffee and WiFi
I should be working. But now that I’ve escaped our messy home; I feel inspired to write, for fun. I need to fill out the census form (late), pay some bills, and do taxes. All of which I tried to do at home but kept feeling annoyed and distracted by socks and dishes and things.
Monday is always a total carnage situation of domestic sloppiness at our house. I usually plan cleaning, not paperwork because of the Monday mess. But for some reason I imagined that today I could ignore it and at least work on the taxes.
Not so. I’ve run off to a cafe with wi-fi. I came actually for a croissant. But then arrived and wanted asiago bread. I’ve been known to drive 50 miles for croissants.
I no longer feel sick. But I’m tired. And this does not make for a lot of productive housework. Friday I hung shelves in the laundry room. They’re nice and level, though way too high for anything but storage. Then Saturday I felt exhausted and sat on the couch doing taxes.
I pulled DD out of ballet. She’s annoyed. So am I. She wants to go, and just goof off. I think if she’s going to go and we’re going to pay tuition her teacher should teach, not babysit the toddler they allowed to enroll. Anyway, too late to join a new program this season. And it’s time for swim lessons.
DD has developed a sudden aversion to water. She screams in the bathtub and says she does not want swim lessons – which is exactly why she needs them. I taught swim lessons when I was a teen. So in theory I could teach her. But it has been my experience that things go much more smoothly if the instructor is a stranger. Kids are weird like that.
I am going to continue to ignore the charcoal colored, elastic/cotton hat knitting attempt. I’m now on the lookout for organic cotton for a pattern that may or may not be more simple.
I started a hood/cowl thing in bamboo silk blend for me, mainly because I had the yarn and sort of a pattern. The Silk Fountain Hood pattern confused me. So I’m just knitting a very simple lace pattern, which is working out fine. Though by the time I finish I may have to throw the cowl in with the winter clothes and down into the basement until next year.
DH is impatient for me to become a better knitter. He wants a new hat.
I pruned the cherry tree and have been gathering the sucker branches to make a compost bed. It is far from a work of beautiful manicured gardening. But in my opinion, preparing compost for future caprice salad ingredients is more important.
Off to the census.
I wondered in bed aloud the other night how hard it is to make croissants. Jeff and I decided it’d be better not knowing. We love those things.
Ah, so nice to fill out our young simple tax forms online. It took us about 15 minutes to do ours, minus Indiana requires you to mail some things.
The water thing is strange, but every kid has phases. That ballet situation would have annoyed me too.
Croissants are difficult to make, for me anyway. I tried once, or maybe twice. I’m not sure as it was a long time ago. The kitchen wasn’t cold enough. And I didn’t have a marble slab to roll out the dough. So they tasted fine but didn’t have that perfect flaky crust that makes croissants fantastic. I think DH could do it. He’s more patient with those kinds of things than I am.
Our taxes are time consuming. But to be fair, they are not so difficult that I can’t do them myself. Though when I had my own business, formally, not the freelance type that I do now, I paid to have them done, mainly to avoid an audit situation. Now they mainly take forever because I think that I have everything in order, then realize I’m missing a receipt or something that will cost me money if I don’t find it.
I should help you with the hat, I’m sorry. They really are very simple. Once you figure out how many stitches you need to cast on, I usually go with K2P2 ribbing for at least two inches…basically until you have the size brim you want.
After that, knit (I assume you’re knitting in the round) knit up to the point you start decreasing.
Decreasing is all math, and you’re good at math. You have to make sure that you have an even number of stitches. You want to divide those evenly….when you start, you usually want something divisible from between 9 and 11.
Let’s say you have 80 stitches. You’re going to decrease evenly over those 80 stitches, so you’re going to turn every 10 stitches into 9 stiches. This means that you knit 8 stitches, then knit two together. Do that a total of eight times and you’ll have gone from 80 to 72.
After you complete a decrease row, you knit a row. Then you do another decrease row. This time, every 9 stitches become 8. So you knit seven stitches, then knit two together. Then knit a row. Continue this way until you get to knit 1, knit 2 together. After that row, don’t knit a row. Go directly to knit 2 together (if you don’t do this, you’ll get a point at the top of the hat). You’ll have something like 8 stitches left at the end…just run the yarn through those, pull it tight, and tie it off.
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