We decided that the two small bedrooms should match, so even though, the front bedroom had no water damage, we tore out the flooring from there also. That was so depressing to have to do. Luckily, I really wanted carpet in the bedrooms in the first place, so I’m pretty happy about having carpet now. I do wish we had put carpet in the master though, too.

Muffin did all of the drywall, taping, and mudding in the back room, and he did an absolutely awesome job. It looks fantastic. Since he had done all of that, the least I could do was paint, so that was my contribution to the back room. We bought the carpet from The Home Depot, and we bought one of the cheapest options available. You really can’t tell, now that it’s installed. It’s soft, it’s nice looking, and it’s great to walk on.

The installation team turned out to be one lone guy, and it only took him a few hours from start to finish. He was really nice, and he did an awesome job. I’m really glad to be done with the bedrooms, and many thousands of dollars later, they look really nice.

I had to wedge myself in the closet, so the picture's not that great.

Since I have two little dogs, I’ve been feeling guilty about going running and not taking them with me. They need the exercise as much as I do, so today I finally took Figgy with me. I should have taken him when I first started so we could build up together. He was dragging a little, so I cut my run short for him. He also had no idea of what was happening, so I cut him some slack. He did a good job being my running buddy, and he should get used to it pretty fast.

I’m also going to try to get Lothar to run with me, but I’m less sure of success with him. He’s more like me, and when someone tries to make me run, I want no part of it. I’m really hoping I can work him up to it. I might have to go on two runs for a while, one real run with Figgy and one short run with Lothar (and maybe Figgy) to build up Lothar’s stamina. That little chubby-pants definitely needs to go running. See, just like me!

Once I started listening to the new episodes, I realized that I could actually go to things like Stitches or retreats. So many of the podcasters that I listen to went to Camp KIP this year, and it sounded like so much fun. I was sad to have missed it, and it made me sad that I wasn’t a knitter for so many years. I half-assed my knitting for a long time, and now it all seems like wasted time. Anyway, after listening to everyone go to Stitches, OFFF, Madrona, and a million others, I decided that this year, I’m signing up for Camp KIP. So I did!

I’m in the 2nd camp session. It’s pretty exciting since I’ll get to meet a lot of the people I listen to on podcasts and read on Ravelry, but it’s also a little nerve-wracking that I’ll be at camp with people who all know each other and who are like celebrities for me. I added a comment on Ravelry for camp, and I was SO excited when Jackie replied to my comment. It was a total fangirl moment! Hopefully, I’ll be able to rein it in once I get to camp!

Because I’m so excited, I’ve already had my first dream about camp. Ha! Camp isn’t until April, so there’s still a long time to wait. I hope I don’t have camp dreams every night until then; I don’t think I would make it all the way until camp in that case. I’ve also decided to go on a yarn diet until camp, so I’m not going to buy anything knitting-related until camp (starting September 1, so I placed my last Knit Picks order last week). Of course, I’m making an exception for our trip to China; I can buy whatever I want within my China-shopping budget. I’ll also have to try to talk all my family into buying me knitting things fro Christmas to tide me over until April, but I think it will all be worth the wait!

On Ravelry, I came across the Stitches for Sisters (SfS) group and thought their project sounded like a great opportunity to use up a ton of yarn and support a good cause. (Although I do think the name is a bit odd.) They were making blankets for women in Ethiopia who suffered from fistulas, which are basically holes in the vaginal canal caused by prolonged labor. Hamlin is an Australian organization that provides surgery to repair the fistulas, and then gives the women a blanket after the surgery for comfort. SfS collected 4″ squares from anyone willing to knit them and is sewing them together into quilts. It was a great thing to be a part of, and I can’t wait to see photos of the finished blankets.

I knit 88 squares in total. I also had some other knitting projects on-going at the same time, but I managed to spend most of my time on the squares. Each square took me about 45 minutes or an hour to knit, so I was able to do a lot of squares in the less than two months I worked on them. I only managed to knit nine wool squares. I used my dyed Lion Brand Fishermen’s Wool, and it seemed like the fibers would become airborne. Whenever I knit with it, I had a hard time breathing afterward, so I shied away from knitting with it very often. The wool squares came out nicely, even if there are very few of them.

The only problem was that shipping the squares to Australia cost $19! After they sew the squares together, they’re going to have to ship the blankets to Ethiopia. I imagine that if everyone just donated the money spent on shipping to Hamlin, they could do a lot more good for a lot more women.

Obviously, I’m nowhere close to my blog post goal, but I’m going to start it back up. I constantly think about posts I want to write. I just haven’t been able to decide what my first post should be. This is it. Short and sweet, just to get my back on my feet. My wrist is about 85% of what it was on February 12, 2010, and I think that’s about as good as it’s going to get at this point. It will keep loosening up over time, but I’m not sure how much more I can go. I may as well get back to what I was doing before!

A while ago, I had the following conversation that just about blew me away:

Acquaintance (A): I don’t feel good.

ListenMaudy (LM): Maybe you should go home then.

A: No, I mean I really don’t feel good. <eyebrow raising>

LM: Okay, yeah. You can’t go home?

A: Well, my stomach is really upset.

LM: …

A: You know, I don’t feel good at all. I don’t know why; I don’t have the flu or anything.

LM: Maybe you have food poisoning.

A: I can’t have food poisoning. [said like, duh!]

LM: Are you sure?

A: No! I can’t have food poisoning. I’m a vegetarian!

ZOMG. I was a vegetarian for 10 years, and I never knew I was immune to food poisoning! I wasted so much time washing my hands and watching out for e. coli contamination. If only I had known!

Muffin is wonderful, but he doesn’t like to clean any more than I do. No one’s perfect! This makes the Roomba an excellent solution for our (lack of) housekeeping skills.

The other day, while Muffin was out of town actually, I had vacuumed half of the house to clean up all the junk that had fallen out of our vents and fixtures when the roofers were pounding around up there. Then, I ran the Roomba three times to get the rest of the house and all the leaves that have been getting tracked in. I went out to run some errands, and when I got back, the Roomba was stuck underneath a table, directly next to its docking station.

The Roomba is stupid. It can almost never seem to make it back to its home, and we can’t figure out why. This time however, the Roomba didn’t just get stuck, it managed to rip the Uverse cord out of the wall and pull the wires out of the back of the jack. The jack wasn’t really attached to the wall or anything, but the wires had been attached to the jack! That little wire was the only thing that connected our house to the internet, and since we don’t have cable, we watch Netflix pretty much exclusively. I was adrift with no internet and no TV!

Unfortunately, the jack has six pins, but the cable has eight little wires in it. WTF?! Who uses a jack with fewer slots than they have wires to put in them! AT&T apparently. Anyway, since I have an iPhone, I was able to use the internet in order to determine that no one else has ever had this problem. Great.

I decided I didn’t want to mess with it anymore since Muffin was on a plane, on his way home. Next time I talked to him, he said he didn’t care either way whether I tried to fix it. I wasn’t going to mess it up, but it didn’t need to be fixed. I decided I didn’t want to “fix” it, so I popped in a DVD my sister lent us and ignored it.

The next day, I spent a little time at work trying to figure out what the heck to do. All I could find was different configurations for Cat5 and other wires with eight pins; there was nothing about only using six pins. luckily I found a site that explained what each colored wire did in the whole setup. It turns out that two of the wires aren’t used (I can’t find the site that had the diagram of which wire does what, or else I would link to it.), so I figured that maybe I could just pretend those wires didn’t exist and connect the other six in one of the recommended configurations. I wrote down the pin assignment options and went home to try it out.

Muffin had recommended that I use tweezers to push the wires into the pins since they’re all so small, so I got out my super-sharp tweezers and went to work on the first configuration. Two minutes later, my internet was back up and running! I was so excited that I couldn’t wait to rub it in to Muffin when he opened the door a moment later. He was impressed with my mad skillz but wasn’t nearly as excited as I thought was warranted, go figure.

I was so proud of myself I had to spend the rest of the night asking Muffin if he could believe I fixed it and how totally great I was. He could believe it.

Here’s the final configuration that worked for our AT&T Uverse connection:

Six-Pin Assignment for AT&T Uverse

(Part of the reason I’m posting this is that I hope someone in the future who might have the same problem will find this page and get an easy answer. If so, and that’s you, good luck!)

House goals:

1. Finish the back bedroom
2. Make all the bathroom tiles (Also a Personal Goal)
3. Remodel the master bathroom
4. Install the backsplash and finish the minor stuff left in the kitchen
5. Finish the backyard (Put down grass and get rid of our ugly tree bushes)
6. Have a garage sale on Memorial Day weekend (May 30)

Money Goals:

1. Pay off the roof (Did I mention we have no roof today? We don’t. We do have 12 months to pay for our hypothetical new roof though.)
2. Add $5,000 to our emergency fund
3. Open a Roth IRA

Personal Goals:

1. Knit at least 24 things (A pair of socks counts as two things. Smaller items, like baby booties may count as one thing, but I haven’t decided yet. It will depend on how I feel. I’m planning on knitting some mittens, so I’ll have to make a decision on that soon.)
2. Average at least one blog post per week, or write at least 52 posts this year
3. Sell at least  two ceramic wreaths
4. Repair my scooter and be able to ride it
5. Send out Christmas cards!

Some of these goals need a little explanation, so I’ll probably post about them later, as I work through them maybe. I had a hard time keeping my list of resolutions from turning into a to-do list. I need to get new car and house insurance, and I almost added that to my resolutions. Sending out Christmas cards and repairing my scooter are questionable on this list, at best, but I’ve been working on them each for years at this point. Here’s to hoping that making them into resolutions gets them done!

We had gotten my dad a ton of fancy meats and cheeses that were supposed to be part of our hors d’oeuvres that evening. Since we opened presents so late and so close to dinner, we didn’t get to eat any of them. Sadly, Muffin and I will be out of town next weekend, but my dad sweetly said the cheeses would all keep until the next weekend we were back in town.

I got to give everyone else the presents I had made. I forgot to take pictures of the three cowls that I made for my mom and the beer cozy I made for my sister. They were all big hits; although my mom preferred the cowls made of the cheap acrylic yarn over the fancy (and expensive) wool that I bought at the last minute. I was at a yarn shop and just loved the yarn; I thought she would love it too, but she didn’t seem too thrilled with it. I guess I should stick to the letter of the request for handmade items!

My niece got a dress, but it was too big for her. I’m not sure how much too big since she refused to try it on Christmas night. I’ve only heard the report that it is indeed too big.

My older nephew got a little bear similar to my mascot. His is a little bigger and has blue eyes. Very cute. He gave it a big hug when he opened it, but there were so many presents and so many new things, that I couldn’t expect a little stuffed bear to hold his attention for very long.

(He got the one in the back)

My youngest nephew got a crocheted carrot rattle. He seemed to like it pretty well, which was great.

I know that I like kettle corn, but I haven’t had it in years. Muffin doesn’t like it and absolutely hates the smell, so I never get it when we’re at a fair or anywhere that sells it. When my mom gave me some, I was super excited, but then I got in the care and opened the bag of kettle corn. O.M.G. It was so freaking delicious. I had no idea how good kettle corn was, even though I knew that I liked it overall.

On the drive home, I ate more than half of the bag. I only stopped because I didn’t want not to have any the next day. Also, Muffin had seen how big the bag was, so I figured I didn’t want to hear about having eaten it all. I swear there must be MSG in there, or maybe crack, or maybe morphine, like in cheese! Whatever’s in there, it’s absolutely delicious.

If only I had more kettle corn!