Back to basics

The decluttering continues here at Hugs, which isn't making me happy in the moment, but is cultivating very good feelings about the potential for ease and charm in the near future:

I've never not been busy, but pre-house renovation, my life was pretty simple. You'd think having an entire extra floor would have given me more room to simplify even further. Apparently not. Mostly it's given me more places to let things pile up. No more of that nonsense! I've been at this a week now, and the transformation is officially noticeable. 

For one thing, our living room bookshelves are tidy, shed of unwanted items, and dust-free. Now I can get at my craft books a lot more easily.

 

The dining room table, which is used for dining on Christmas Day only and the rest of the year is my worktable, is now clear of everything but my favourite cloth, ready for me to sort papers or cut fabric. 

Our coffee table is clear too, except for a book Pete is reading - totally appropriate use of space - and the shelf underneath has new, very large, baskets wrangling my sock darning pile. Also the skeins I have yet to cake for future socks. 

The surface of the desk in the living room features only the plants and antique books and lamp that are supposed to live there.

The piles of things I'd been accumulating with a view to donation are making their way to boxes, some of which have been whisked away to a vehicle, no less.

And in the basement, digging out boxes from under the stairs, I discovered a collection of fingerless mitt forms I cut from felted wool sweaters, one of which was all ready to gift. 

I was not sorry to see a few with work left to do on them. I loved making those things, feeling the felted wool sleeves and deciding which ones were soft enough to really enjoy, then blanket-stitching the edges, maybe embroidering something extra. These ones didn't need that, with all the pattern on them. Just as well because even now I my fancy needle skills are strictly entry-level.

Feeling tired just reading all that? I am, thinking of how much I still have to sort and shed. But when I'm done with the dreck I get to sit here, in my freshly reorganized front hall, now 100% free of a misguided attempt at growing basil and rosemary on the sill.

I could knit. Or read. Or both together. Or just enjoy the fruits of my labours.

If you ask me, spring cleaning's for the birds. By the time the weather's nice you just want to be out in it. But in these weeks leading to the fall, wowza. I'm so jazzed to know that when the cooler cosier weather hits, I will have plenty of room for pulling out my spinning wheel, or my loom, or a quiet collection of felted wool, scrap yarn, and my embroidery needles. 

Or, you know, writing. That's the one thing that's guaranteed to happen.

 

Hope your weekend's fantastic and that your home is already tidy and ready for anything! Thanks for dropping by again. I'll look forward to seeing you next Saturday.

Eye candy

We need to start today with some eye candy, aka The Carrot:

Considering the glacial pace of my knitting lately it was a shock to discover

I'm almost out of caked sock yarn! 

Two pairs of socks left and then I have to get out my ball winder and set up with some more. Also I think I might finally be running out of Vesper Sock Yarn, which has been my go-to for fifteen years, give or take. Not sure when it will ever ship to Canada again. Not panicking... but I also heard this week that Kleenex will no longer be sold in Canada starting soon, so, stability breached. 

Anyway I gotta cake that sock yarn, but I've been writing so hard the last few months all our horizontal surfaces kind of piled up. You know how you put stuff onto a table so your hands are free and you can put it all away where it's supposed to go? It's a lot like that here, except more like when it's three weeks before you have time to do the putting away part. Or in my case.... h'mmm. I've lost count of how many weeks. 

So this weekend, I am CLEANING. Or at least, tidying. Yep, all weekend. 

Gulp. We need more eye candy.

Also I might have had another Paris Breakfast today to cope with the whole concept. As usual on such a day, it's sunny and gorgeous out. There are so many things I'd rather do, but I figure if I don't try to write or play or read or knit for two tiny days, the house can run on autopilot again for ages. And I can cake sock yarn while watching a movie on TCM, always a favourite pastime.

 

Traditionally, Labour Day Weekend is when we do projects around here, so I could have saved this job for that. I don't know why we're not always off barbecuing with friends like other people on such weekends, except that Pete and I are both pretty driven with this sort of thing and any long weekend automatically pings as three days to get through something big, rather than three days to sleep in (though, let's face it, in my case the sleeping in usually happens too.)

To that end, I have set out my must-do-on-Labour-Day project gear out in a decorative way, hoping to recapture the magic of my sock darning pile. And when I say 'recapture' I'm talking about the moment when I thought, if I just put it all out there in plain view, I will actually pick up a sock and darn it randomly through the day, and before I know it, all these socks will be completely free of holes and weak spots. 

Do I know how to make paint stripper and sanding paper
look glam or what? I should totally get a hardware store stylist job.

 

The reality of my darning design was several bowls of dusty socks, because I didn't factor in how busy I was going to be with writing (slammed, in fact) or messy the living room was getting as a result, and how not thrilling it was to curl up there with a darning needle and an audiobook. I'm hoping once I finally start stripping the paint off our mini nightstand from the cottage, the way I expected to do back in July, I'll be excited to finish and ready to paint it up in some fun way. 

Meanwhile, here's something I'm already excited about. A big wooly dust mop! It is true. And it is something I never, ever expected to say. But check this out:

And now for the closeup:

the STRIPES!! and also, the colours!
Seriously, they match our decor. It was meant to be.

 

This is the Big Wooly from Sladust, who I really wish was paying me in kind (the dry dust mop kind) for this product endorsement. Actually I can't speak to whether it works. But it's washable, biodegradeable, and much prettier to look at than popular landfill-clogging alternatives so I want both the mop and duster. Maybe more than one of each even. Maybe for Christmas? 

(that was not scarcasm, btw. I may hate cleaning, but I love wool. And I'm pretty sure I could come to love shaking out a dusty mop from the back deck, if I got to look at stripy wooly bits flapping in the breeze.)

 

Okay I had better get moving. Fingers crossed that next week I am sharing all sorts of elegant photographs of dust-free shelves, attractively staged with yarny treats. For now let's just hope you're having a funner weekend than me!

 

 

My new dog is a robot vacuum

While we were gone, all our neighbours got new puppies.  So maybe I have dogs on the brain now but when I unpacked the robotic vacuum cleaner I bought after lugging our usual one up and down the stairs four too many times, I couldn't help but see the similarities.

I mean look at that.  Flat top, round body - you can totally see it, right?

Yeah, okay.  It's not so much a physical resemblance.

The first thing I did with the robot was to panic.  I couldn't figure out how to get the charging dock into a good location for both me and it, and to make an adjustment I had to pick up the robot for a minute, and it FREAKED OUT.  Its wheels were turning like mad and it was making all kinds of whirring, whimpery noises like a new puppy that is just desperate to hit the ground and start running.

I'm not used to appliances that have a mind of their own, so all this was a little alarming and I found myself talking to it to calm it down again.  I got it onto the dock and backed away slowly wondering whether
a/ I had made a terrible mistake and
b/ it was too late to take it back to the store for a refund.

After it was fully charged and ready to go, I had to carry it to the room I wanted it to deal with.  I set it down carefully to do its business, and pressed the button to indicate it could get going already, and off it obediently went, snuffling along the floor, its whiskers spinning around and around, drawing stuff into its path for a closer inspection.

How can you not immediately start calling a thing that does all that, Rex?

Since that first day, Rex has become part of the family.  And to prove it, he eats everything we put down in front of him.  I mean other dogs may be willing to lick a plate clean but they have nothing on Rex and our floors.  Some of his litter mates balk at a black floor, apparently, but Rex has no problem with our charcoal grey tiled hallways.  Sometimes I stay to watch him explore, and sometimes I go off for a while to do some other job and come back later to make sure he's still okay, only to be reassured by his single-minded hunt along a track that only he can see.

On the landings, Rex is amazing.  He gets very close to the tops of the stairs and then stops himself, correcting his path and carrying on like the ground always just drops away into nothingness and is nothing to worry about.

Upstairs though, Rex gets a little silly and sometimes hides under the bed when he finishes what he was doing.  The game is, I have to find him, then go under and lift him out because I still can't figure out how to get his remote control working.  He loves this but doesn't do it every time - I guess he doesn't want it to get Old before he does.

He can't do the actual stairs but those are still plain wood, and a Swiffer duster makes short work of them, so it's not really a hardship.  And he is so tiny!  Carrying him from floor to floor is nothing, and I can just let him roam free or close him into a room while I go off to do other things.

Probably Rex was not the best investment I ever made.  He was VERY expensive and he is not perfect.  For example:

He takes a long time to get through a room and his priorities are to cover all of it, not just the various parts that I can see have the most problems.  If I carry him over to a particularly bad mess and press a particular button on his back he is all over it, but generally he is more about process than product.  Rex is not the dog you want cleaning your floors when you find out guests are dropping by in ten minutes.  Basically, you have to be a proactive cleaner to be Rex's human, so I am having a big learning curve on that point.

He is bagless, which means that periodically I have to pull out part of his undercarriage and dump what's in it.  Probably I am doing this wrong but his leavings don't just fall into the garbage - I have to pull stuff out and that is both gross and messy.  (this is actually a good place to pretend I'm not using a dog analogy for this entire post... sorry about that.  ahem.)

He will only get into nooks and crannies that are larger than his body.  We've had to buy a little more new furniture for the house, and my choices are dictated by what will make Rex happy first, and what will look nice in the house second.

He doesn't do upholstery or the car.

On the other hand... we can always fill in the gaps with our  original vacuum. We would have wanted open-bottom furniture anyway, because of the infloor heat.

And you know what, the other options for lightweight vacuums - you know, the ones you can take up the stairs without having a heart attack from the strain? - they weren't so great for me either.  They may be as perfect for stairs as they are for upholstery but from the research I was doing before I bought him, it looks like the most working time you can get out of a cordless stick vacuum is 20 minutes - and even then, not on high power.  Sometimes it's as little as five minutes.  What can you clean in five minutes?  Then you have to find a place to charge it, which takes hours.  I don't know about you but even in this small house, it takes a lot longer than 20 minutes to vacuum everything, and if you only vacuum one room you will be tracking stuff into it from the others all day long.

So: we sort of live with a dog now.  He may never wake me up and save my life in a fire, but he'll keep me from drowning in dust, and that's pretty good in my book.