Another week

Yet another week has run away with me, and I have next to nothing to show for it. Not that it was an entirely uneventful week, just not one filled with accomplishments.

Really the only accomplishment was putting a ton of miles on my car running around. Go north for a meeting, south for another one, stop at the school to get TDQ's schedule and ID card, back north for another meeting and so on and so forth. One of those many meetings was my quarterly review at work. No surprises there, I still do well the things I do well and need to work on the things I need to work on. Maybe now that I have a team in place, not completely trained but picking things up just as quickly as they can, I will actually be able to work on those things I need to work on!

Over the past few weeks we have had some fairly impressive storms, some right over the house. Power out, power on, power out, took its toll on some things. My poor dishwasher, that is way more complicated than I would ever need a dishwasher to be, had a nervous breakdown in one of those power on, power off, power on situations and thought that it was washing, drying and sanitizing our dishes all at the same time! An online search found several tips, none of which worked, so I went to the old standby that we use so often when computers are misbehaving, switch the thing off (in this case at the circuit breaker) let it sit a minute and "reboot". Luckily that worked and we can still have clean dishes at Chez Yarn Diet!

The lawnmower did not fair as well.

I am a bit of a wimp in certain situations, and starting a gas powered mower has been beyond me for years and years and years, well forever really, so along with the enviromental considerations of what type of motor to use, I have an electric mower. That was plugged in and charging when those lovely power off, power on, power off's were happening. The charger unit says the battery is charged, the mower will not start up, the owner's manual offers exactly one solution to "mower won't start"...bad battery.

More online searching....battery is only sold online and costs half what the mower did in the first place!! Thinking that maybe I could at least try disconnecting the battery and reconnecting to see if that would solve the problem I got out the trusty screwdriver and proceeded to nearly break my arm trying to undo the first screw. Many curse words and much time later one screw was out and the second..well maybe if I get the rest out I can pry up the cover and remove the screw I just stripped the head on...no such luck the others will not budge! I am really glad I didn't order the battery now, looks like it will be easier to just buy another lawn mower and leave this one as an opportunity for the monster man to show his prowess with a screwdriver on his next visit. (I don't recall if I explained that name, monster big feet! The biggest I will ever knit for, sorry guys if your feet are bigger than his you are not getting hand knit socks from me!) If he can fix the mower I will have two and can have a child mow one area while I do another. Doesn't that sound like a nice plan?

So between work, household issues and (I know I have hinted at it before) just generally not being quite up to my usual self, not a lot of knitting got done this week, but with about ten minutes to spare I finished Chart 7 of Back to the Garden on my circular shawl. In debating if to stop at the end of Chart 6 or push forward and pray the yarn holds out (I estimate I have 70 grams of yarn left, Chart 7 took about 40..it is going to be really tight!) I was asked "How big is big?" in relation to this giant I am knitting.

Let's see, big enough that I am starting to get worried about where I have a large enough space to block it. I would show you how she looks at the end of Chart 7 but blogger and I are fighting about pictures today. Maybe tomorrow!

Have a great week.

~M