A few weeks ago, I opened the envelope that contained our quarterly vacation hours balance at work, and realized that despite having taken three entire weeks of vacation back in May to go to Ireland, and also a few additional days here and there since then, I had way too much unused vacation – enough that it was going to start hitting the ‘use it or lose it’ level in a few months if I didn’t try to do something about right away. So I eyed the calendar and then decided that I would make good use of the next two work holidays, namely Thanksgiving and Christmas, and turn what would otherwise be a long weekend into an entire week off. At the very least, by the end of the year I’ll have managed to trim 6 more days worth of vacation off the accumulated total.

Being sick this weekend was not a good start to my week, but I woke up this morning and felt a lot better than yesterday, so I am crossing my fingers that this means I am done with the winter cold for now. I sat down and scribbled up a rather ambitious list of things i really want to accomplish during the next three days, and made sure to include in the list plenty of time to knit (by listing out the number of socks I intend to have finished before the end of the month).

There has been a lot of temptation today to just ignore the list and curl up in bed with a big mug of coffee and my yarn and the cats and just spend all day either knitting or napping, but the problem is that I keep doing that, and the things on my list keep being left undone. So instead I made myself tackle the very worst job, which was to clear out my side of the computer room. It doesn’t sound so awful until you realize that my side includes all the files of old bill paperwork that have been accumulating in boxes over the past year or two, waiting to be shredded because we cannot just throw them out into the trash, and as the piles got larger and larger I have been dreading this chore more and more.

I spent several hours this morning and this afternoon, doing nothing but sorting and shredding. I threw away piles of paperwork related to credit cards or accounts that have long since been closed. I threw out great piles of junk and filled a huge box with stuff that needs to go to the recycling center. By the time I finally decided to call it quits in the desk organization project for the day, I had filled several large bags completely full of shredded paperwork, and the worst part is that I am not yet done.

I took time here and there to do some knitting on the current pair of socks that I fully intend to have finished before Thanksgiving, and also did a run to the grocery store to stock up on everything we might need for the coming week. When Richard came home I cooked up some vegetarian sausage and spaghetti and sauce and we had that for dinner, and then we purged the fridge, throwing out a whole pile of things that had been lurking in the back, plotting to become their own life forms.

There is still a huge pile of stuff on the floor in front of the shredder to be dealt with, and I have only made a small dent in clearing off my secondary desk, but there is also a huge sense of relief that I have finally worked up the willpower to tackle this project, and I am trying very hard to give myself little lectures about how, once it is done, I cannot ever let it get this bad again.

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I had grand plans this morning of attempting to sleep in late and simply skipping church, since even though the sore throat was (mostly) gone by the time I woke up, I knew I was still going to be exhausted and a little stuffy throughout the day. But then I woke up early because I just couldn’t sleep any longer and I checked my email and one of the other recorder players wanted to know if I’d bring my recorder with me to church because he wanted to give something a try and, well, so much for grand plans.

I’m glad that I did go, though, at least to run through the piece he wanted to try, because now I have some really fun ideas for something to do with the recorder group, and even though this isn’t going to be just the usual transcribing piano parts to recorder but doing some actual *arranging*, I am still excited about the idea. Plus it was nice to poke my head into the Fellowship Hall where all the unsold items from yesterday’s bazaar were arrayed, and see that of all the things I”d brought over, only five jars of the pomegranate glaze were left.

This afternoon was the monthly knitting gathering at the bakery in Vacaville, so Richard and I went early for lunch, and then he left me there amid the other knitters and ran away to Borders to escape all the yarn-related chatter for the few hours we were there, and returning only after all the other knitters were gone. Then it was off to CostCo to stock up on healthy stuff for the kitchen, followed by a massive purging of the refrigerator (because it is amazing, sometimes, what you can find lurking in the back of the shelves when you go digging). Richard did laundry while I loaded the dishwasher, and then we cooked ourselves a rather virtuous dinner and we ate in front of the television while watching Ghostbusters.

There is still that feeling of something in the back of my throat, which I know just means it’s still a little swollen, and I’m still tiring too fast from doing things like going up and down the stairs, but today was a lot better than yesterday so I am hopeful that this means that this little bout of winter ick isn’t going to finally go away.

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When I woke up this morning, my throat was sore and there was that nasty feeling that there is something lurking in my throat, something that just would not go away no matter how hard I swallowed. Plus I felt a little achy and I was a bit stuffy, which means that I guess now it’s my turn to get the latest bout of winter ick that everyone else seems to be passing around with abandon.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of just climbing back into bed; I had to be over at the church because the recorder group was scheduled to play at the Open House / Bazaar event. So we went over and we ate breakfast and talked to friends and when all the other players arrived, I rounded them all up and we did a quick run-through of the songs we were going to play, and then, eventually, we played them. There were only four of us, but that was enough to cover all the necessary parts, so I was happy with how we sounded.

That whole thing pretty much wore me out, so after we got home I crashed for a few hours until I realized that I really shouldn’t sleep any more, and I have spent the rest of this afternoon curled up either on the bed or on the sofa downstairs, surrounded by cats who are feeling just as lazy as I am, working on a very cute, and highly involved pattern for a knit pineapple hat.

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None of the jelly set. Not a single jar of it.

Making it, initially, takes an awful lot of time, what with having to shuck the pomegranates and then boil them down for juice and then make the jelly. Add to that the extra four or five hours I have spent trying various methods to reset the unset jars, and it all adds up to a hell of a lot of time spent for nothing.

I dropped all the pumpkin bread and the four jars of set jelly off at the church this morning, and left the rest til the evening, hoping maybe it might change. No luck. I labeled the fourteen unset jars as pomegranate glaze, in the hopes that this will inspire at least a few uses (using it to glaze ham comes to mind right away, and it’d probably be pretty good), and dropped all that off this evening.

I am seriously starting to rethink our tradition of making this stuff every year. We usually manage to get one batch to set, but that never seems quite worth all the effort of having all the rest just sit in its jars and never gel.

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When we made pomegranate jelly last month, only the first batch set. I tried resetting some of the syrup a few weeks ago but didn’t have much luck. However, time is rapidly running out for any further chances, and this morning I had the unpleasant realization that the bazaar is this weekend and if I was going to try to salvage this stuff, tonight was really my only remaining chance.

So after work and coming home to deal with cats and then after choir practice, I came home and tackled the jelly. There were fifteen jars of jelly that did not set, and it took me three batches to treat them all – a laborious process of boiling and adding more pectin and sugar and lemon juice, and then boiling again, for a very exact amount of time (no more and no less) and then doing my best to pour it into freshly washed and sterilized jars without making too much of a mess all over the kitchen counters. I am realizing more and more that I really do need to invest in some additional equipment for canning. It’s one thing when we do it as a group and between all of us we can cobble together all the necessary equipment from either our own kitchens, or by borrowing the stuff from our respective moms, but I am a grown adult now and I really ought to own my own canning funnel. One of these days I will remember that I need to do this *before* I am suddenly facing a pan of boiling jelly and a row of glass jars and trying to figure out how to best pour it in without spilling it all over the place.

The jelly is cooling on the counter now and I am crossing my fingers that this resetting process will work, because while pomegranate jelly is a good seller, it is harder to convince people to invest in a dozen or so jars of pomegranate syrup.

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Today was the official grand opening of the new yarn store in Davis and from all accounts, it sounds as if it was a success. I swung by on the way home from work and there was a small crowd there, either browsing the yarn or gathered around the table, chatting and knitting. I pondered my options – going home to an empty house (since Richard was off at a writers group tonight) or hanging out with friends, and chose the latter. I’ve missed these people – since I can no longer go to the Monday night gatherings (the women’s group rehearsals are on Monday nights), I rarely get to see most of them anymore, so it was nice to be able to relax and catch up. Luckily I had a sock-in-progress in my purse so I got quite a bit of work done on that. There were new yarns to fondle, including some gorgeous plant-dyed wool from a local yarn producer, and new knit samples to check out, and lots of goodies to taste, and best of all, lots of talking and laughing.

I came home late, and tired (because this almost-but-not-quite-a-winter-cold is still occasionally putting in an appearance) but very glad to have gone, and very happy for my friends and their new venture. And it’s nice to know that even if I cannot meet up with the group on our regular nights any more, at least there’s somewhere I can go where there’s a pretty good chance I might run into a few of them, so I can stay in touch.

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This morning was one of those mornings when I felt as if I wasn’t just shuffling around, going through the motions to get ready for work, but instead capable of doing productive things. One of the main things I wanted to do was to felt the new slippers I made for myself, so they would have all day to dry. Ha. I’d forgotten how long these things take to dry, especially since I ended up taking them out of the washing machine before the spin cycle had ended. By this evening they were still quite damp.

But as I have been finishing up these slippers, and remember how much fun it was to dye the wool, I came up with a really fun idea to do for my niece and nephews for Christmas. This year, because my younger sister’s in-laws are doing their whole family celebration *after* Christmas, she and husband and my niece will be able to come down not just for Thanksgiving, but for Christmas as well. Which means that, unlike any other year, all three little kids will all be in one place at two times.

So today I placed an order for some undyed, feltable wool, this year the kids are going to get to help me make their Christmas presents. I figure they’re all still young enough to have fun playing with Kool-aid to color their yarn, and they’re also still young enough to see the magic in felting big floppy knit booties into slippers that are just the right size for their feet. A little puffy paint decorating party once the slippers are dry (to decorate the soles of the feet, and also to provide traction) and it’ll be something they can wear that they helped make.

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I have, throughout most of my adult life, sung primarily as a tenor. Occasionally I am recruited as a soprano in times of dire emergency in choir (like a distinct lack of any other female singers at the time), but most of the time, I am just one of the men. And that’s really quite okay with me. I like singing tenor, and I’ve gotten pretty good over the years at modulating my voice to blend in so I sound as much as possible like just one of the guys. But every once in a while I think that maybe, just maybe, it might be fun in choir to get to be, well, a woman.

A few months ago, the director called to ask me if I’d be interested in being part of a women’s ensemble that he directs in Sacramento, since they were in need of someone who can sing the low alto parts and as a female tenor, that would be right in my range. Unfortunately, the upcoming concert was the same weekend we were already scheduled to fly up to Seattle, so I had to regretfully decline. And I didn’t think much more about it until a few weeks ago, when he called to see if I was still interested. After I pondered it for a little bit, especially the part where I would actually be able to sing like a woman instead of like a man, I decided to give it a try.

Ever since then, there have been more than a few times when I second-guess my decision to do this. I am not used to singing as high as some of the parts require me to sing, and relearning how to swap between low voice and high voice has been a bit rough at times. I am also one of the least talented singers in the group, since I lack the professional background or vocal training most of the others have, and sometimes I feel as if I am more than a little out of my depth. It is one thing to be part of a church choir, performing in front of people who will love whatever you do, no matter what happens, because they are your extended family. It is another to be part of something like this.

But I am getting there, slowly. The music is coming to me, bit by bit, even the parts that frustrate me the most, and I have surprised myself by being able to somehow make it up to those notes that can be up to two octaves higher than I am used to reaching (although if I am ever required to actually *hold* one of those notes more than a beat or two, panic may ensue). I am slowly figuring out how to modulate between the lows and the highs without straining my voice, and even though the thought of the concert we’ll be performing in far too few weeks still fills me with no small amount of nervousness, I am still glad that I was asked to be a part of this.

Tonight was my third rehearsal with the group, and as usual, we ended late. But we only end late because most of the time no one is paying any attention to a clock, because we are so focused on getting through the music and nailing those notes that continue to elude us. The music is challenging – sometimes extremely so – but it is refreshing to be so challenged. I had almost forgotten how much fun singing can be.

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I realized late last night that I had not done everything I intended to do yesterday; the main forgotten item being arranging the next few songs for the recorder group. So this morning I got up at my usual early time and after feeding the cats (so they would thus leave me alone), spent the next hour or two at my computer, painstakingly entering three songs in three-part harmony, one single note at a time.

The software I use was probably top of the line at one point, but that was at least a version or two of Windows ago. Now, it’s kind of clunky and has an exciting tendency to, occasionally and without warning, freeze up and then shut down. Since the tendency for the program to do this seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of time it has been since I last save whatever it is I happened to be working on at the time, I have learned (the hard way) to save my files often. One of these days, however, I really need to find a new music writing software – something that doesn’t require a separate piano keyboard hook-up and that also does not cost a lot. I’m not a composer – I just need something that will let me transcribe songs, change the key and time signature, and perhaps most useful of all, provide the abilty to enter such items as song title, page number, and those little curvy lines to tie notes together that I currently have to do all by hand.

But I digress. I got the songs set up and printed and the program only shut down on me unexpectedly once during the entire session, which is actually quite good, all things considered, and still had plenty of time to shower and dress and eat breakfast, and then poke around at a website that we are hopefully going to be able to fix for a friend, before I had to gather everything together and zip off to the church for the recorder group practice.

We were a very small group today – only three of us out of the usual five, and alas, none of the three of us present plays an alto – but we managed to muddle through half a dozen songs and pick out four that we swore to practice in time to play at the Open House next weekend. I am crossing my fingers that at least one of our alto players can be there next weekend, if only because I do not relish trying to learn how to play a new instrument in one week. Not, mind you, that I have not already determined I probably need to just break down and learn the alto anyway, because the hallmark of a good group leader is the abilty to be flexible, and thus to be able to cover all the parts. Now if I can just track down an alto recorder to actually learn on, I’ll be all set.

There was choir practice and then there was church, and in between I gulped down my only coffee of the day in order to wash down what has recently become my daily decongestant. The winter cold seems to have mercifully gone away without doing much damage at all, but my sinuses still hate me. And after all, there is something to be said about having to rely on medication that, according to a fairly new law, requires proof of identification and signature before it can be purchased (apparently pseudoephedrine can be used to make meth. Or something. Go figure). We met my parents for lunch and talked about local politics, because the side effect of living in a somewhat small town where the prime industry wears wool is that there is always something interesting (and usually stupid) going on. And then we came back home, where I snagged thisIrish Diamond Shawl I made during the Knitting Olympics this past winter, and headed off to the new yarn store in Davis to pick up the thing I have been trying to pick up for the past few days.

I left the shawl there, because the other one on display was actually being used by its creator and since I never wear mine (I love knitting lace but I most assuredly do not love wearing it) I figured it could be put to better use selling yarn. There was a small group of knitters at the store, amid a clutter of boxes and we all had fun taking my new knitting design equipment (ha) out of its box and trying to figure out the name of all its parts. I should note that it actually was never meant to have anything to do with knitting, and I suspect that its designers would be quite dumbfounded to learn what I intend to use it for (a use that I cannot mention until after Christmas, because the recipeint of the item I intend to make reads this). They also helped me pick out a few balls of feltable wool in just the right colors so I can start poking at designing a pattern, and then one of them mentioned that they needed someone to do another sample hat for the store, and so I came home with pattern and yarn, and the intent to make a very adorable pineapple hat by the time the store has its grand opening on Wednesday.

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Today was one of those rare days where not only did I have the time to sleep in, I also had the ability. Too many weekend mornings I am wide awake by 6:30 and can only make myself lie in bed another half hour at most before I finally give up and crawl out of bed to do something productive. This morning, however, fate, and the cats, were very kind to me and I was able to sleep in until almost 8am. And eventually I did get up and go about doing productive things, but it was still a fairly laid back and sometimes lazy day.

Richard went out and picked up breakfast at Starbucks while I puttered around putting things in the kitchen away. We picked up my car from the dealer, where it got its 45,000 mile tune-up and a new hood-opening latch (to the tune of $-ouch). I baked another batch of pumpkin bread and stashed it with the other three loaves in the freezer, and also determined that unless we do some serious clearing out of the freezer, I’m not going to have room to store any more bread between now and next Saturday, when the bread will all be sent off to be sold. I ran a few loads of dishes through the dishwasher, and threw some laundry into the washer, and then made a pumpkin spice bundt cake, which I later covered with cream cheese frosting, mainly to hide the fact that I have never in my life been able to make a bundt cake that came cleanly out of the pan. I also stirred together some homemade fruit and granola breakfast bars because now that I have finally found a dried fruit mix that I actually *like*, I feel the need to use it in as many ways as I can. And in between all of this, we watched Over the Hedge, a movie that had us both practically rolling with laughter by the end.

We did a quick flurry of house cleaning and Richard zipped off to the grocery store to pick up cider for mulling and sodas, and then a small group of local Nanowrimo particpants came over for a party to celebrate the fact that they have (almost) hit the halfway point. It was a fun gathering. We all crowded around the breakfast nook table and ate soup and chips with homemade guacomole, and followed that with pumpkin spice cake, and we talked about a whole list of things that had nothing whatsoever to do with Nanowrimo or writing at all. I found it highly amusing that the two women in the group had brought their knitting with them, and so occasionally the three of us would sideline into a conversation about yarn or patterns or needles and all the non-knitters in the group would get the same look on their faces that half my family gets when all us computer nerds start talking about hardware or operating systems or some other nerd thing. Sebastian, Tangerine, and Rosemary did their best to charm everyone,. And even Azzie came downstairs because there is only so long a not-very-bright cat can maintain the illusion of being shy before he cannot stand it anymore and come out to be seen.

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