Crochet Me Crazy

Meet our new dog, Man. Alison and Phoebe named him. He is a real sweetheart and he has just moved right in and acts like he owns the place. He's like a really big lap dog and has a huge personality. He has some bad habits like he's knocked over the trash and he's a food bandit. (Good thing he's so short) Even when he's in trouble or you tell him NO, he never stops wagging his tail...he'll just roll over and wags his tail like he's so cute. Well, he is cute. Maybe he's still a puppy....I don't know. He's solid muscle and weighs a ton for a smallish dog.



Well, today is the day that we will be moving Gracie!

We got all of our "stuff" moved in but we still have to move Gracie, the RV and the piano and I have some cleaning up to do at the old house. The new place is coming together but I still have a lot of stuff to do here too. It's still a little bit of a mess with boxes and stuff sitting around. Saturday, Jeff spent a better part of the day putting up a fence at the new house for Gracie.

Jeff bribed one of his technicians with pizza to come and put our internet in early. We wouldn've normally had to wait 2 weeks. Our internet was up at 11 pm last night but Jeff is really mad about it. We ordered Hughes Net and they sold him 5 mb per second speeds but he did a speed test and we aren't even getting 1 mbps. It's completely unacceptable so I don't even know if we're going to keep this internet or not.

Well, my sleep problems have virtually disappeared since we started sleeping here. It's so quiet and isolated here...and we didn't have TV or internet so all of my normal time cues are gone. It feels like I'm on vacation or something! I've tended to stay up later and I used to wake before 7 every morning automatically. Now, I'm not waking up until after 8 am. My room is darker and there isn't all the noise at the ranch we were at before and the highway noises outside my window.

Anyway, I woke up to a cold morning this morning and I'm trying to figure out what is going on with our Texas weather!! Enough already!

I'll post some pictures later!

Alison and I moved a few boxes over to the new house today. It's so big and very nice once it's cleaned up! It's pretty dirty still and I have a lot of cleaning to do. But it's not nasty dirty...it's just the non-use type of dirty. Dead bugs and dusty and stuff. They had left a bunch of cleaning supplies so we started on the cleaning a little bit. Alison got her and my bathrooms cleaned and I worked on the kitchen. It was so fun to clean something and have it actually look like you did something when you were done. I am so excited...I actually have a dishwasher and an ice maker -- and a big bathtub with WATER to put in it! We have trash pick-up too! I figured we'd be burning...which we probably still will but not everything burns. The little luxuries I forgot about! Once we get it all cleaned up...it's really going to be nice. It's so peaceful and quiet out there and we have a gorgeous view. We are really fortunate to be able to get this place as cheap as we're getting it.

Alison took some pictures with her Ipod while we were there.


Me in the kitchen cleaning the refrigerator

The living room

This is the view from Alison's bedroom

This is the view from the side porch

My bath tub and WATER!!

Once the owner's get all there stuff out, I will even have a spare bedroom for guests! They won't be moving all the stuff out of the spare room and the cabin for about 3 weeks. We're waiting for them to get their storage building built.

I've been piddling around and packing up stuff. I came across this afghan pattern. I will ABSOLUTELY make this afghan some day. It's one of those patterns that every time I see it, I just love it. It comes from a Oct-Nov 1999 issue Hooked on Crochet Magazine.



We have 5 cats pregnant here at the stables! 3 of the cats I feed has had their babies but we hadn't found the litters yet. I found one of them this weekend.



I'm looking for Bobbie Sue's kittens. She's one of my favorite cats here. I might get take a kitten with me when we move and maybe even Bobbie Sue, too.

We got the keys to the house last night and we can start moving in any time. It's going to be hard to really get moving with Jeff working this week but I guess I'll start bringing over what I can get over myself. I have to clean the house too. The lady renting it to us works and has had a hard time trying to get the house cleared out and cleaned by herself. The house belongs to her 84 year old mother. They have the stuffed packed but had to put a lot of it in the spare room and the cabin until they can get the storage building up on their property to move the stuff to. That might be another 3 weeks.

Well I thought I'd go ahead and show you a picture of the baby lamb we have here at the stables. The lamb is completely rotton (spoiled rotten, that is) It walks on a leash and loves people.


Here is Mrs. Stable's baby fawn, Hope. She is growing fast. She's blind.

Just sitting down after a long day. We had a fairly busy day doing rides today...not crazy but busy -- just busy enough -- 30 riders. We were starving afterwards so we went into town to eat dinner. We just got home.

I feel bad that Gracie is missing out on Spring with all the fresh, juicy leaves popping up everwhere so we pulled over on the side of the road on the way home
and got her a large tree branch of Spanish Oak! (It's actually a small tree) Jeff said..yeah, poor deer -- the other deer are roaming and scrounging around for food while Gracie has nice bowls of Corn (we call it her "candy") -- sweet feed, Alfalfa hay, grass hay, apples and carrots! Yeah, but her crazy owner also brings her small trees to munch on! She's enjoying it...



My beautiful girl...




I took a picture of the progress on my afghan...pictures just don't do it justice though. See how different the color looks depending on whether I have the flash on the camera on or not.

Picture with the flash shows a more accurate view of the color of the yarn...


Picture without the flash shows the actual stitches better...



Looky lumpy because of the picture being taken on the un-made bed! (Oh, and the blue yarn is just my stitch markers!)

Sigh...is there no relief?? So today I find out that my son got fired from his job. Okay...not completely his fault but surely his smart mnouth didn't help matters any. I'm very stressed because he was going to pay us rent to rent the cabin on the property where we are moving. He needs to find another job-- and soon!!

Next, I met the girlfriends little 2 year old son today. Oh, I don't think I ever mentioned that I met the girlfriend last week. She's actually seems like a very nice person. A very happy sort of person. Anyway....tonight I get home from taking Alison to dance and my son is babysitting! My son. Babysitting. A 2 year old. The little kid is attached to Michael like glue. We're all sitting there watching American Idol and I smell something. I look at Michael and I say..."Michael, is he potty trained?" He says NO. I said I think he has a poopy...you're going to have to change a poopy! Michael tells me..."You're going to have to show me how...I don't know how to change a diaper." So I had to show my 19 year old son how to change a diaper!!! This is not happening to me.

Jeff talked to the owner's of the house...they aren't quite finished moving stuff out of the house. They said maybe by the 15th. I got to go inside the house though. I hadn't even seen the inside of the house except for looking through the windows because it was always locked. It's really big! It's a 3 bedroom and it's bigger than my old house in Houston. We're not goin to know what to do with so much space! Gracie is going to have a nice big area too.

So the plan was to take a picture of my afghan tonight but that's not happening. Sorry sister...try to do that tomorrow!

and the good news came today! We can start moving on Tuesday!! We are so excited!! Now, we're just praying and waiting on what will hopefully be more good news about the job Jeff is hoping to get!

The worst part of this is moving Gracie...I dread having to do it. It's going to be a lot harder this time. We're going to use a horse trailer this time and I'm going to ride with her so she won't freak too bad. She's a big girl now!!

'

The good thing about living here for her has been she's gotten pretty used to people because of all the tourist that come through here. She's quite an attraction!

It hit me suddenly yesterday afternoon....we were doing rides yesterday afternoon when I just started feeling like crap all of a sudden. Alison had her friend over and there was a shin-dig in town last night with free food and a dance. I didn't want to go nor did I feel good so Jeff took the girls to that. They brought me home a plate of Bar-B-Q. I took some Nyquil and went to bed at about 8:30. I had a terrible night. We still went to church this morning because Alison had her friend spend the night so she could come to church with her today. We went and I came home and have been trying to sleep the rest of today. I finally fell asleep for a little while after I found some nose spray! It's hard to sleep because my nose is stopped up and I can't breathe.

Okay---- I've finally got it figured out and now I'm cooking! I had to just clear my brain. It's a cable stitch and you are having to crochet into the 2nd row below your working row so it is difficult to find your stitches. I decided to start completely over and use pieces of yarn to mark my chain stitches that I need to find a couple of rows up. This will ensure that I am definately getting it in the right place....well, that WORKED! Now, it's working out just fine and it's straight like it's supposed to be. Last night I finished up my second ball of yarn on the project. It's looking nice now.



Okay, I'm really trying to hold it together here waiting to move and hear back from the company about Jeff's possible job. I'm getting frustrated because every day Alison keeps having to do horse rides and she is very overwhelmed and it is interfering with her getting her school work done. I told them that she couldn't do rides every day because she has to have 5 hours a day between ballet and her other activities to do school. They still are giving her rides. When they told us we had 12 rides coming yesterday, I almost came unglued. I need for Alison to be able to have time to do her school work during the day and at this rate, she is not going to accomplish what I had for her this year. I went over and told Mrs. Grain that I am not going to let Alison do rides this summer because she's going to have to continue her school work through the summer to finish. She wants her to work part time or half days or a few days a week at least. Letting go of Alison seems to be hard to do!

So I undid what I had done with my afghan and marked stitches to be POSITIVE I was doing it right...well, I'm pretty sure this pattern has errors because if you do what it says, it doesn't work out right. It's taking me awhile but I've at least got it to where it's not crooked. I looked online to see if there were any pattern corrections published anywhere and I didn't find any. I just sent out a message to my online crochet friends to see if I can get any feedback from them. If that doesn't work, I may give Annie's Attic a call. Patterns with errors are extremely annoying to me.