Lighter

I just took 145 pounds of usable clothing to Goodwill (and I probably threw out another 10-15 lbs.) Yippee!! I'm still not done purging, but it's a very, very good start.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I'm the official Irish member of the family, being at least a full quarter Irish and being born Sherry Ann Brannen. But the St. Patrick's Day spirit is running more strongly in my kids this year. The picture of above is James in his St. Patty's Day finery, complete with welding goggles (yes, welding goggles, he's mighty proud of those welding goggles, not that he welds, he just has the goggles.) I'm in the middle of a huge excavation of my bedroom, pulling out years' worth of outgrown or otherwise unappreciated clothing from a family of four that have been cluttering up the joint. It's been a daunting task, but one that is long overdue, and my husband is out of town going to a medical conference, so I dug in. Being preoccupied with this I didn't do my duty as family leprechaun this year.

About 10 years ago James had a preschool teacher who celebrated St. Pat's by having a mischievous (but unseen) leprechaun visit the classroom. The leprechaun would pull pranks like dying the milk for snack and the water in the toilet green, put green paint in all the paint pots, move things into unusual places. I thought it was a marvellous idea, and the leprechaun started visiting our house. I snuck around in the wee sma's and put green food coloring in the toilet (and the tank, too, so it would flush green,) I put bags of green M&Ms in the kids shoes (when they had cute little-kid feet, not when they had stinky big-kid feet,) I put bricks or rolls of toilet paper in their backpacks, I replaced their white shoelaces with funky ones with clover on them, and once I filled the mail slot with peanuts, so when it was opened they flooded into the living room. It was all fun, and the kids looked forward to "Leprechaun Day" so much that I caught all kinds of grief last year when we were out of town for the big day. Sigh.

Unfortunately, with a pre-teen daughter it really doesn't take much for me to catch a whole lot of grief, and this year I'm in big trouble. I didn't do anything. I mean, there were no rooms filled with green balloons, no shamrocks drawn on yards of the toilet paper-----none of it. Audrey got up at 3:00 AM and put green crepe paper streamers around the house, and did a few things like wrapping the computer monitor in aluminum foil and writing "Happy St. Patrick's Day!" on it in green Sharpie. She painted her nails green, and sprayed her hair to match (discovering later that it rubbed off on her sheets and pillows---but I wasn't up at 3:00 AM to tell her this.) I got up to the streamers and messages and thought "Hmmm. How nice that Audrey is carrying on the tradition." Then Audrey got up and said "Where is all YOUR leprechaun stuff?? Apparently once a mother starts a tradition, she's not allowed to mess with it, or heaven-forbid, do away with it, EVER. So let that be a lesson to me.

Did I mention I spent 10 days with a quilter, doing fabric-y things? Crafty things are contagious, and I am definitely susceptible to infection. However, since I am a great starter, a great accumulator and maybe not so great a project-finisher, I am starting small. Think potholder size. There is a cupcake themed swap over at Swap-Bot, and I picked up a fantastic cupcake print fat-quarter at Bayside Quilting. Hmmm. Now where did I put that yard of Insulbright?

Spring is Springing!

Primroses are the first sign of Spring around here. The ones I put out in the pot-rings on my back fence have had time to get established.

These little tete a tete daffodils come right after the crocuses. I love them, they are so little and perfect and early, and I really need to remember to plant a whole lot more.

It isn't until the forsythia bursts out in bloom that I know Spring is really here. We actually turned off the heat yesterday!

March is Slipping Away. . .

. . . like the tide.

John's dad and step-mom were up visiting us for the last week and a half. They are my favorite set of parents in the family, and it was terrific having them up. They live in Texas Hill Country, and it was a definite change of scenery for them. This picture is from our trip to Cannon Beach, Oregon. Unfortunately low tide wasn't at a convenient time for us, so we weren't able to see much of the tide pools, but it was still worthwhile, definitely worthwhile.

Time gets away from me even when I'm in my most efficient and productive mode (which isn't very,) and while we've had guests we've tried to live in "vacation-time" as much as possible. So here it is, with one third of March gone, and no blog entries. Wow.

March is National Craft Month. I don't know who declares these things, but it is. Connie and Audrey and I started the month appropriately with a trip to the big Sewing and Stitchery Expo at the Washington State Fairgrounds in Puyallup. We didn't attend any workshops, but there was a mind-boggling array of booths to look at. And as usual, there is no shortage of crafting in the family.

Connie is a quilter (current president of her quilt guild!) and she brought a paper pieced "Grandmother's Flower Garden" project to work on. We also hit a few quilt and fabric stores while she was here, including the 1.25 acres of material at Fabric Depot in Portland and the highly rated Bridgeport Quilting in Olympia, although Connie gave good marks to our local Longview Sewing and Vacuum.

James got out his chain maile to show to the grandparents. He's making a coif out of 3/8" polished aluminum rings from a kit puchased on eBay.

I not been crafting as much as usual, because there has been an extraordinary amount of housecleaning and laundry going on around here, but I did take my knitting to the Portland Roadster Show:

This is some of that hand-dyed alpaca/merino from England I got in January, but I'm having some size issues with the hat, and am still trying to figure out if ripping it back and decreasing earlier is enough, or if I need to frog the whole thing. Audrey wasn't modelling it so much as she was using it to block out some light for a nap on the steps of the Convention Center (Grandpa Jim, who visits us every year during this event, looks at the hot rods much more thoroughly than the rest of us. ) After leaving here at 3:30 this morning to catch their 6:15 flight out of Portland, I'm sure that they are both ready for a nap, too.