We’ve had quite the wind storm in the last two days around here, to the point that driving to and from work was a challenge in keeping the car in my own lane. So it was not a complete surprise when the power started flickering in the house this evening, and it was only inevitable that a few hours later the power went off completely.

It wasn’t so big a deal for me because I was at choir practice at the time, but Richard ended up camping out at Starbucks (the only place open that late) for a few hours to at least be able to work on his homework (a feat which requires light). So after choir I joined him there and played backgammon on my Palm Pilot and sipped a chai tea latte for about an hour until it was time for E.R.. Since the power was still out at home we ended up going over to my parents’ house to watch it there. I think if we’d been home we might not have bothered with that kind of effort, but we were already loitering around town taking advantage of other people’s electricity, so this was just a continuation.

After the show was over we gave up and went home, since normally one does not require electricity to go to sleep, but luckily the power had finally been restored in our neighborhood so we didn’t have to stumble around the house in the dark. This also meant that I could see what I was doing when I checked in on Zucchini, and could see quite clearly the huge nasty pile of hairball and slime he had puked onto the floor. This might normally not be cause for celebration, and before this week I would never have thought I’d be so happy to see something so disgusting. But that hairball means that he does not have to go in for surgery after all, and that maybe, just maybe, he’s all better.

I noticed he wasn’t eating when we fed the cats on Monday night, but that sometimes happens with him and it’s not been a problem before. But Tuesday morning he didn’t come out to eat and he’d been throwing up periodically all night. I gave him some hairball medicine, but by Tuesday night not only was he not remotely interested in food, he was lying in a little ball in one of the cat beds by the fireplace, lethargic and reeking of cat puke and obviously sick.

X-rays Tuesday night showed an obstruction in his stomach which – based on the shape and the shading, looked like it was probably the mother of all hairballs. Most of the time cats can pass this sort of thing on their own, but every once in a while things get so impacted that it can just sit there and mat tighter and tighter, and refuse to exit through any of the usual methods. Wednesday after work I took him in for x-rays again to see if things were progressing, but there was no change. And this afternoon the third set of x-rays showed the same problem. This afternoon we finally decided that he needed surgery to get this thing out. Tomorrow morning I was supposed to drop him off so the vet could cut him open and remove the offending clump of nasty goo.

So when I saw that huge mess on the floor this evening I admit to giving a small cheer. And at least now I know what caused the problem. Someone (I suspect Rosemary, since she’s usually the toy shredder of the house) has been recently disemboweling some of the cat toys, and there’ve been a few times in the past week or three that I’ve found great wads of stuffing draped all over the floor. Apparently at some point Zucchini decided this stuff was edible. Guess what. It’s not.

He’s not out of the woods yet, because there’s still the possibility some of this has lodged itself in his intestines and could be causing blockage there. He’s still going to have to remain confined and under observation for the next few days until we’re certain that everything is moving along like it’s supposed to. But after the force-feeding and the daily visits to the vet and the worry and all the worst-case scenarios that have been running through my head, what a relief to have such physical proof that the worst seems to be over.

There was no riding of bikes today either, but there were much better excuses than hanging out at bookstores or eating tandoori. Today started with choir practice, followed by frantic practicing of the piano (by me) since I was the accompanist for the church service this morning. I’d called my dad earlier in the week to see if he wanted to play recorder with me on the song for the prelude, but it turned out that the song really wasn’t going to work. Of course we didn’t quite finalize that until this morning, so there was a short and frantic scramble to find a substitute song we could play.

After church we all headed home to change and eat lunch (highly nutritious peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches for us) and then Richard and I headed over to pick up my parents before driving down to Concord for a play. We overpadded the time needed for the trip, so arrived with plenty of time to poke around REI and drool over the highly overpriced biking gear. And then it was time to get our seats, so off we trotted to the Willows Playhouse, where we met Richard’s parents and little sister who had driven up from Campbell, and we watched a spectacular performance of Children of Eden.

I think everyone but my dad had seen the play before, although he was very familiar with the music. The plot is a summary of biblical history, starting with Adam and Eve and ending with Noah and the ark, but the premise of the play focuses on the relationship between people and god, and how both sides learn and grow.

It’s also an extremely complicated play to put on. Not only does it require a huge amount of costume changes and characters, but it also requires a huge amount of talent. There are so many parts with solos and harmonies that only a large enough and strong enough cast can pull it off.

There was a bit of excitement at the end. During the big almost-a-finale song where everyone’s singing and dancing one of the younger cast members took a wrong step and fell off the stage. Since he happened to be on risers on the stage at the time, it was a pretty high fall, especially since he was pretty small. There were a few tense moments while he was checked over, but luckily it appeared he was more upset and embarrassed by the shock of falling and not seriously injured. The rest of the cast was obviously upset by the whole thing but rallied together and finished out the play to well-earned applause.

The only downside to the play is that it tends to be a little long, and with the little guy falling off the stage that stretched the time even longer. Luckily Richard had made our dinner reservations with lots of time in between, and even luckier, Benihana’s was just across the parking lot, so we were able to meander over there with time to spare. That gave us about ten or fifteen minutes to lurk in the lobby of the restaurant and chat. It was a good choice for dinner for this crowd, since any gathering of my family and Richard’s family can never, ever, be quiet or boring. They’re all a lively and humorous bunch.

We cheered the chef, who prepared our meal in front of us, and we flung chopstick wrappers at each other and we did not succeed in getting them to believe that any of us were having a birthday, and we all ate far too much. After dinner there were hugs goodbye and plans made for Easter dinner and then a short trip into Trader Joe’s to stock up on blintzes and other goodies that can only be found there, and then, finally, onward we went to home from a long and wonderful day.

I am beginning to realize that making a mileage goal for the year may not have been the best idea. This is because every time we decide to do something besides ride our bikes, especially when the weather is as perfect and wind-free as it was today, I feel guilty. I should not have to feel guilty about taking a break from exercise, darn it. I go to the gym three days a week and heave weights around and spend time on the recumbent bike, for which my thighs may never forgive me. I also go splash around in a cold pool one day a week and do endless eggbeaters, another thing for which my thighs (and my knees) may never forgive me. Okay, so it’s not miles on the bike, but still, it has to count for *something*, right?

But anyway, enough about the guilt. Today was one of those perfectly lovely and lazy days – too nice to feel any guilt over. We slept in a little and then we headed in to Davis for waffles, and then we decided to meander around town for a little while since it was so lovely out. We walked over to the bank, and did a quick brose of the gaming/comics store (for Richard, because he is, after all, the bigger nerd of the pair of us), and wandered around the Farmer’s Market, buying the largest satsumas I have ever seen, and a wedge of some kind of cheese, and a bunch of baby carrots that looked as if they had just been pulled straight from the ground. After that we went home to do vaguely productive things like homework (for Richard) and sewing the sleeve seams together for the sweater I’m knitting (for me). I am actually rather excited by this because the sweater is at the point now where I can start putting all the pieces together and finally finish it. Of course the weather will be too warm for me to wear it when it’s done, but there is always next year.

Then, because Richard was getting antsy to get out of the house and because I was willing to tag along, we returned to Davis. We spent a few hours at Borders sipping coffee and smoothies and eating dry and tasteless scones. While at Borders I started knitting my next project, but it turns out I will need smaller needles so I ended up ripping the whole thing out. Why I did not think to swing by the wool store and buy those smaller needles while we were in town I do not know, but if nothing else, I spent some time sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the shelves flipping through books of knitting patterns. I am very proud of the fact that I only ended up buying one, even though I was so very tempted by about half a dozen more.

We went for Indian food for dinner because it has been far too long since we had salmon tandoori with extra onions and naan. Plus there was the added incentive that our favorite restaurant had finally reopened after what was apparently a very long remodel. We sat in the restaurant and looked around and tried to figure out what had been changed, but finally had to give up and ask (it was a remodel of the kitchen).

The salmon tandoori was just as delicious as we remembered it to be, and the naan just as marvelous. Normally we follow the meal with chai but last night we wanted to get home in time to watch Kingdom Hospital, since it was usurped from its usual time this past week by a stupid basketball game. I am trying very hard to like this show since, after all, it is by Stephen King. But it is moving at slightly less than glacial speed developing any sort of plot, to the point where I am beginning to think that I could probably skip every other episode and not fall a bit behind in what’s going on. I’m a little apprehensive because I remember King’s latest miniseries (Rose Red) with no small amount of sadness for its cheesy badness. However, I am not willing to give up on Kingdom yet, if only because I find the entire premise of a fanged anteater amusing, and also because it is, as I mentioned earlier, by Stephen King and so I must cling to the hope that somewhere along the way it will all turn out okay.

The past month we’ve tried a little experiment. Instead of chasing three cats around the house and trying to lock two of them in one room and the third in another room, all with their own special kind of very expensive prescription food while the remaining four cats scream at us from the floor and mill around our ankles doing their best to trip us so they might get fed too, we decided to hold our breaths and switch everyone to the most popular of the prescription foods, since all the cats had already proven they were more than happy to eat it. I think the fact that it is far more expensive than their other food probably had a lot to do with why they were all so happy to chow down on the new stuff.

Anyway, at first the experiment seemed to have been a success. After all, one of my biggest fears was that Tangerine would get sick again, since cats with irritable bowel syndrome tend to be prone to having nasty reactions to certain grains and proteins used in cat food. Plus my attempts to get actual information about the topic from Hills (the makers of Science Diet) met with miserable failure, due to the fact that the person who answers the customer support emails seemed completely incapable of answering a simple yes or no question, and instead felt that sending me pdf’s of nutritional information I can easily get by reading the damn bag (and which did not answer my question, which was why I tried to contact them in the first place) should be sufficient. Thank you, Hills, for nothing.

But I digress. Despite my worries, Tangerine seems to be perfectly happy and healthy and her recent daily trend of having at least one mad dash up and down the stairs at top speed followed by a race around the downstairs circle while narrowly avoiding crashing into at least two other cats and possibly one human seems unabated. All the other cats have been eating the food and acting healthy, plus there was the very lovely added bonus that if this worked out we could go back to free feeding and not having to plan our lives around getting home to feed the cats.

Alas, as nice as it was while it lasted, the experiment ultimately failed. I took Rebecca (aka crotchety old lady cat) into the vet on Monday afternoon for yet another round of blood tests and discovered that her levels of whatever the heck it is they measure to test for kidney disease have climbed even higher, which requires that she go on a prescription diet. And, of course, this prescription diet is exactly the opposite kind of diet that the other cats need, and now we are right back where we started. Well, not really as bad as all that, actually, since now it’s only one cat we have to chase around the house and since there are two humans, one human can be getting the food for the rest of the horde so the other human can snag the ornery little tortoiseshell without fear of being tripped while climbing the stairs.

Excuse me while I geek out on our garden for a few moments. I am happy to report that, unlike the creepers we planted between the stepping stones around the flower bed this summer, the little perennials we put into the flower bed itself have so far remained alive and actually started to do a teeny bit of growing. Not enough to make them look any less pathetic, mind you, but it’s a start. I give full credit for this amazing occurence to the fact that – unlike the creepers – I am actually remembering to water the new plants. Amazing what a little bit of sprinkling will do to keep your brand new greenery from getting brown and crispy.

Also, what is even more exciting than the fact that they are still alive is that they have actually managed to produce a flower! One of the evening primroses has produced one perfect yellow blossom.

I am impatiently waiting for the rest of the new plants to get busy with the flowering as well. After all, the white peach tree gave quite a show of pink there for a few days, and the climbing roses over the arbor gate just recently burst into bloom. So the rest of the plants need to get with the program. Make with the pretty, darn it!

I’d like to report that we took advantage of all this amazingly lovely weather to get in a nice long bike ride, but that would be lying. Despite having the best of intentions for doing more, we only did 10 miles today, by meandering around the back roads in an attempt to search out the house that a friend is building back there. We eventually found it, and marveled at how big it is. I was tempted to go wandering through since now that it’s been framed we’d be able to get a better sense of what it will look like, but it’s set back too far from the road to get there without getting muddy, or worse yet, exposing the bike tires to the evils that lurk in the fields of the Sacramento valley (puncture thorns, which are *nasty*) so we settled for just admiring from a distance and then pedaled our way back home.

In our defense the reason we couldn’t really do much more than the ten miles was because most of the day was either busy or windy. This morning we headed for Davis, where we indulged in cornmeal waffles with pecan butter and successfully avoided going to the Farmer’s market and buying anything. We had a little bit of time to kill so we meandered around Borders, making up for the not buying of produce by the purchasing of books instead. And then we drove to Woodland because the woman who has been cutting Richard’s hair moved there a few years back and she is good enough that he – and lots of other people – basically keep following her no matter where she goes. I am a recent convert, since before we were married, if I needed my hair trimmed I would usually break down and go to whatever place happened to be close, open, and allowed drop-ins. Plus I have gotten pretty good at trimming and layering my own bangs. However, this time I wanted to get something different. As much as I like having long hair, my hair has other ideas, and once it hits a certain length, about an inch or two below my shoulders, a little switch gets flipped in its DNA and the rest turns into one huge and ratty mess of split ends. So since I was there to get a trim anyway I decided to give it a whirl and asked her for ideas. As I had hoped, she immediately suggested something and since I was in a mood for change I agreed. She got busy with the scissors and the hacking of huge chunks of hair, which fell around my feet and drew all manner of comments about just how much of a hair cut I was actually getting.

So now I have a new hair cut. I’m missing over half a foot of hair and instead of being halfway down my back, now it brushes just over my shoulders when I turn my head. Instead of being all one length there are long layers all over that have magically given my boring, poker-straight hair some actual shape and body and – what is even more amazing about it – all without benefit of styling products or a curling iron. I adore my new cute hairstyle, and not just because I think it might actually make me look younger. All the crunchy split ends are gone and I look in the mirror and actually feel almost pretty. I should obviously have let her have her way with my head sooner.

On the way home from getting all our hair hacked off we were starting to get hungry. So we decided to stop by Plainfield Station, which I have declared to be the very best burger joint in Yolo County. It is this little hole-in-the-wall bar that is pretty much in the middle of nowhere since it’s surrounded by nothing more than farms, but they make the very best burgers ever. We both got cheeseburgers and I was glad I got the small one because I could barely finish. These burgers are divine. They are big and thick and greasy and messy and the cheese oozes out and gets all over the fingers and oh, they are divine. I do not even want to attempt to calculate the number of Points in those cheeseburgers and I do not care. They were more than worth the splurge.

The last few days my life has been all about exercise, and very little else. I am sensing a growing trend here and I’m not exactly sure it’s a good thing. Not, mind you, that exercise is bad. It’s just that I am facing the knowledge that I am going to have to do this kind of thing for the rest of my life and really, where is the fun in that? Sloth is always much more fun than exercise. Sloth with Girl Scout cookies is even better.

After church Sunday I went riding with my dad again, only this time Richard came along as well. We rode over to my parents’ house to pick him up and then meandered all over town discovering parks and streets I hadn’t even realized existed. Once we dropped him off again I was still feeling in the mood to ride and Richard didn’t have any pressing homework assignments that meant he had to get home right away, so we headed down some of the back roads, up over the freeway and off through the orchards and then back home. Overall, it was a 17 mile ride, but unlike Saturday I was not completely exhausted when we got home. Okay, that is not entirely true. Parts of me were very sore and tired and very glad to be done with the biking for the day, because apparently there is just no bike seat in the world squishy enough, nor is there a pair of bike shorts with enough padding to protect my tail bone. Ow, ow, ow.

Yesterday we got up early and headed off to the gym, where I was able to do the whole workout the trainer had come up for me without wimping out and dropping to lower weights. And by the way I suppose I should mention that I’ve left Curves and joined a gym with Richard. I really liked Curves and it worked so nicely into my schedule to go work out at lunchtime, but in January I started noticing that all the machines were getting too easy. Since they’re all resistance machines it’s not like I could increase the weight to make it more challenging. Plus the new gym has treadmills and elliptical walkers and ski machines and all manner of other complicated equipment that makes me feel clueless, so after almost a year at Curves, what better reason to switch.

I’ve been going to the new gym now for…hmmm…exactly one week, and so far it’s okay. I cannot say that I really enjoy it because the truth is that, since it is exercise, and stinky sweaty exercise at that, the best I will ever manage is a resigned tolerance. I am never going to be one of those people who actively looks forward to going to the gym, especially since I sweat buckets the minute I start moving around, so I end up looking and feeling like the monster from the swamp by the end of the hour or so I spend in there. Luckily everyone else there is our age or older (at least the regulars who get there at 6am like we do – wince) and they have a tendency to spend their time there looking pretty tired and sweaty too so I figure I fit right in.

If heaving weights around for an hour in the morning wasn’t enough fun for one day, last night was the first practice for the season for the Master’s Synchronized Swimming team in Sacramento. I’ve been doing my best to talk myself into going to the practice, and only the guilt over the fact that they actually moved the practice from Wednesday to Monday nights just to accommodate my schedule made me go last night.

It was nice to swim though, even if my calves did spend all last night not speaking to me in as loudly painful a way as possible due to all the eggbeaters I was doing. I need to buy goggles and I need to buy a swim cap and I need to resign myself to reeking of chlorine for the next 24 hours after each practice, but it was fun and I didn’t hurt myself and the best part is that in the pool it doesn’t matter if I’m sweating, which is, sadly, one of the main reasons I have always preferred swimming to any other type of exercise. It was so fun that I am ignoring the fact that I spent last night with my right ear clogged entirely by pool water and am already looking forward to next Monday when I can clog it back up again. Yay!

This morning was more biking, but this time it served a dual purpose. Richard and I have been trying to find ways to be more environmentally sustainable (hence the order for the Prius, which may arrive sometime in my lifetime, or so the theory goes). We’d pondered alternate ways of getting to work, but the bus is extremely inconvenient, plus more expensive than driving. Carpooling seemed out of the question because we work on opposite ends of Sacramento and there usually tends to be lots of traffic in between. However, my boss cleverly pointed out that Richard could drop me off with my bike at Raley Field, and I could pedal through Old Sacramento and then down into Discovery Park and make it to my office in only a few miles, without putting him too much out of his way. So today we gave it a try, and it actually worked out quite well. I figure we can do this two days a week, which saves us two round trips to Sacramento with the cars, and plus it has the added bonus of giving me about 15 miles per week to add to the slowly growing total for the year.

Twice now in the past week I have found myself out in the backyard, either meandering through the bark-covered edges or climbing around in the flowerbed. The reason for these backyard activities? Weeding. I have been weeding.

Someone please smack me upside the head and make this go away, okay? I am not going to become one of those people who are obsessed with their yard. The sole reason we pay a wonderful gardener to come out and mow and trim and yes, weed, is because both of us truly hate gardening. And yet now that the backyard is starting to look more like a yard and less like a big prickly wasteland, I have found myself out there more often, pulling weeds.

I am trying to rationalize the need to weed the flowerbed with the fact that the little flowers we put in are so small and pathetic that I need to make sure the weeds do not overwhelm them. But what rationalization can I offer for crunching around in the bark while I was on the phone this morning with my parents, bending over far too many times to count to yank up weeds? The only one I can come up with is that they just look so…icky. I want our backyard to be beautiful and pristine, full of flowers and trees and things that were planted there on purpose instead of creeping in and setting up roots without an invitation.

Weeding. Shudder. How the mighty do fall. Or something.

In other news, spring has arrived in the Sacramento valley with a vengeance. Everything’s in bloom, temperatures are rising, and by all that is holy, if it is in the low 80’s this early in the year, just how hellishly hot is it going to be this summer?

One plus has been that the sun is coming up earlier, which means that when we go biking at 5:30 in the morning we can actually see where we are going. Tuesday morning it was light enough that we could see the rabbits fleeing through the empty field as we passed them – three of them bounding along in random patterns in what was probably some pathetic attempt to confuse us by making us unable to figure out just where they were going. Not, mind you, that we were really all that much of a threat, seeing as how we were on bikes and no where near enough to even consider trying to do anything to them. But we are talking about rabbits, after all – an animal that has never been known for having any sort of brainpower whatsoever.

We didn’t go biking on Thursday because I had to get to the office extra early to make far too many phone calls to a whole plethora of architects in New York. But today Richard was off at a library commissioner’s conference of some kind or another down in San Jose, so I decided I’d better take advantage of having an entire day with nothing to do, and I went out and did ten miles. I had originally had great plans for doing up to twenty today but there was a rather strong and steady wind roaring in from the north that I decided I just wasn’t in the mood to fight with. In my defense, an email from the Davis Bike Club later in the afternoon detailing alternate routes for a ride, due to the wind, suggested I wasn’t the only one feeling particularly wimpy.

The rest of the day I have been blissfully lazy. I sat and read several chapters of a book about knitting that was written in the 60’s – an era when they still referred to shop girls and when people were apparently willing to wear entire outfits made from yarn and not just sweaters or vests. I also did a lot of sleeping because all this getting up early and going to bed late has finally caught up with me.

And now we are off to a play – Guys and Dolls, I believe – and there will be pie afterwards and tomorrow there will be singing and playing of the recorder that may, quite possibly, involve the opening sequence to Stairway to Heaven, and possibly more biking. But whatever else it holds, tomorrow will definitely not involve weeding. I will be strong. Oh yes. I *will* persevere.

I may have already noted at some point in this journal that I am hopelessly clueless when it comes to anything artistic that has to do with color and texture and planning and figure out where things should go. However. If some kind and wonderful person provides any kind of blueprint at all for me to start with, suddenly I am filled with confidence and even a very little knowledge of how to figure out arty sort of things, and I will happily muck about with the blueprint until it might not exactly look like what it was supposed to look like in the first place, but it will be something that I am much happier with.

The latest example of this mucking with perfectly-fine-as-they-were plans has been mainly in the realm of our slowly evolving backyard. Granted, we are sticking fairly closely to the general theme of the plans our friend’s mom very generously drew up for us (in colored pencil and with sheets of details, no less!), but as we put in each section, the temptation to make changes to the rest just gets stronger and stronger. And right now, I think we’re about ninety percent convinced we are not going to expand the porch as planned. Instead, we are going to take out the existing steps (which were always rather temporary anyway) and replace them with much wider and longer steps to provide more sitting area for family Fourth of July fireworks-watching parties, and instead of filling up half the (now non-expanded) porch with a hot tub, we are going to enclose the far end with a few sheets of lattice board and then plant some kind of climbing thing in the ground in front of the lattice so it can do its best to grow strong and tall and try – much like the poppies in front of the house – to take over the yard.

To that end I have been suddenly struck with the need to figure out exactly *what* the climbing/creeping thing should be. Star jasmine grows exceedingly well in this area, but star jasmine is everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. So while I like star jasmine (and in fact we already have some star jasmine which is very slowly taking over the side of the front yard in as messy a way as it can), I would really prefer to add some variety.

Currently the front-runner is Some Kind of Rose. After all, we already have the old fashioned climbing roses that cover the arbor gate (and serve as a perfect hiding place for the little sparrow nest – which, by the way, I am watching anxiously in hopes that the sparrow mom will return and lay more eggs so we can peer at her little fuzzy-headed babies and squeal in glee again this summer, just like last summer). But I am not actually a huge fan of roses as a whole, since they seem to be such a terribly fussy sort of plant. Whenever the subject of roses comes up the conversation inevitably veers into a discussion of pruning, and I am so not all about the high maintenance plants. However, I have been finding different types of roses – old fashioned varieties that look less like fussy multi-petaled roses and more like flattened flowers in all shades of lovely pinks, that might work quite well in the role of the Thing that Climbs. Also, some of these roses-that-don’t-look-like-roses produce big fat rose hips that, according to all the sites I’ve visited, can be made into jelly. Yes! More jelly! And it is this jelly possibility that is making me think maybe I can handle just one more fussy, high maintenance plant in our back yard.

In about five years, when I am drowning in a sea of pomegranates and peaches and apples and possibly rose hips, I give you all permission to remind me, in great detail, of how much I was looking forward to spending hours each summer canning fruit and making jelly. Now, however, I can maintain my blissful optimism and get all excited about adding one more thing to our yard that can be boiled and mixed with sugar and put into jars with pretty labels and shiny tops.

Maybe. After all there is still the pesky little issue that things with flowers = things swarming with bees and we are already up to our eyeballs in paper wasps and big fat flack bumblebees each summer as it is so I am not entirely sure if I want to bring buzzy little things with sharp and allergen-laden rear ends that much closer to yet another entrance to our house. But….jelly! Does jelly outweigh the threat of bees? Oh, this landscaping thing keeps getting far more complicated then it should!

Winding yarn is, I am discovering, an extremely tedious task; especially when the yarn comes in a huge skein and manages to get more than a little bit tangled between when it was purchased and when it comes time to convert it into a nice, neat ball. Friday night I zipped off to craft night with my tote bag stuffed with all the completed pieces of my sweater so far, fully intending to work on sewing those pieces together, and maybe even doing a little work on the sleeves. Instead I sat at the table and wound yarn; or rather, I sat at the table and spent short bursts of time winding yarn in between longer periods of time spent untangling it.

My knitting-enabling friend very nicely let me take her winding contraption home with me. It’s really nothing more than a little thing which clips to the edge of a table and has four extendable arms around which you can drape the skein, but it’s much more convenient than either making someone sit there with their arms outstretched holding the skein for an hour or two on end, or else trying to do it from an untidy heap on your lap. So since I had it with me, I was stupid and ended up staying awake until nearly 2am yesterday morning finishing up the first skein and getting hopelessly entabled in the second.

She also let me borrow a few more books, including one that is chock full of patterns for Aran-style knitting, which is the type where the pattern is in the texture and is not done with more than one color. In between snarling at the tangled mess that is my newly acquired stash of pretty, pretty yarn, I flipped through the pages and oohed and aahed and ignored that little voice in my head that insisted that I really do not want to dive into another project requiring complicated cabling, really I don’t. I am sure I will most likely regret it when I start the next sweater and am faced with far more complicated instructions than ‘knit 2, purl 4, knit 2’ and so on, but hey, at least it will be pretty. Assuming, of course, that I can untangle all my yarn enough to actually *knit* with it.

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It has been a truly lovely weekend, even with the frustration of winding yarn that refuses to untangle. The weather decided to finally stop with the grey and gloomy and sprung a bit of early spring on us, to the point that yesterday and today it was warm enough to open the windows and let in the sun, and this afternoon we even broke down and put on shorts. The cats have been quite happy to have open windows again, taking no time at all to crowd onto the sills, noses pressed to the screens and whiskers twitching wildly with the excitement of all the new smells. Plus, with all the new plants in the backyard there are new things to watch and smell – including all the birds who have been delighted at the fact that our small spate of gardening Thursday night uncovered all manner of bugs and worms to eat.

I’d fully intended to try to get a bike ride in yesterday afternoon but instead ended up coming home from getting our taxes done (we’re getting a refund – phew!) and curled up in bed with an ice pack and large quantities of ibuprofin until my head decided that it would give up and make the migraine go away. So this afternoon, since Richard had a meeting after church and wasn’t going to be available anyway, I poked at my dad until he agreed to go riding with me (it didn’t take much poking). After lunch we each headed to our respective houses to change and then I rode over to meet him and we meandered around town for about five miles, with only one brief detour to check out the newest housing development being constructed on the other side of town. With those five miles plus the ride to and from my parents house, I managed to rack up another ten miles toward the 1000 mile goal – not as much as I might have liked to accomplish this weekend, but better than no miles at all.