Today has been pretty much all knitting, all the time, for me. I got up early, and went upstairs and knit. Eventually I woke up Richard because I was hungry, and we went out for bagels (please tell me that the little bagel shop will carry the pumpkin spice bagels year round, because they are awesome) and coffee, and then we came back home and I knit some more. We made french bread pizzas for lunch, topped with veggie sausages, and after I ate mine, I went right back to knitting. And even after everyone showed up, and we commenced to spend about six hours gaming, I kept right on knitting. Luckily I can roleplay around the yarn and needles, and it worked pretty well, except for that brief moment when I discovered a dropped stitch that was in danger of unraveling quite a lot of (hard) work, and had to undo about four rows while swearing softly under my breath, and had to pause my character for about ten minutes until the issue was fixed. And then, once the game was done, and everyone left, I tried very hard to knit some more, except that I am very sleepy and knitting lace while sleepy can lead to far worse than just an unraveling stitch. So after I post this I am going straight to bed.

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I am currently on a kick to try to clean out the kitchen. With all the people we’ve had in the house this past week (hosting Christmas, and then Richard’s birthday party), the fridge and the freezer have started to overflow. So I’ve been working very hard on using up all the leftovers, in whatever way we can. This explains the french bread pizzas for today’s lunch (because there was leftover pizza sauce from the English muffin pizzas earlier in the week, I made sure to stock the freezer with shredded cheese, and there was most of a loaf of bread left over from the party last night). This also explains our dinners these past few days. I sort of grossly overestimated the amount of mashed potatoes and peas I needed to feed eleven people for Christmas dinner, and there was not the usual whole-family-leftover-eating-fest the day after, so there were a lot of those left. Wednesday night I made potato and pea croquets (mixed them together, rolled them in bread crumbs, and pan fried them with a spritz of non-stick spray). Thursday night I stirred up a whole pile of potatoes and peas with a little cheese and some extra spices and then tossed that in the oven with a sprinkling of parmesan. We didn’t do much in the way of leftover-eating yesterday, due to the party, although I sliced up one entire loaf of pumpkin bread and that was pretty much all gone by the time the last guest had left, and I managed to make the remaining loaf disappear by putting it on a plate in the middle of a table of hungry gamers.

Still to use up – the rest of the meatloaf, yet more pizza fixings, a massive amount of salad greens, and a large bag of raw veggies, along with yet more mashed potatoes and peas (assuming they’re still any good, which I suspect may be debatable by this point). Those, with some of the rosemary potato bread a friend brought us in exchange for her very nicely taking our fireplace tools off our hands (no need for those, now that we have no fireplace), will hopefully provide us with lunch and dinner tomorrow, and in the meantime, I am declaring this all a success because I am starting to see an end to the clutter in the fridge, and that was my goal all along.

Happy Holidailies!