I'm glad it's the weekend.

- The abstract I submitted a month back to a conference I usually attend was accepted. So I'll be giving a talk this summer, which goes a little way to quell my "OH NOES NO SCHOLARLY PRODUCTIVITY MAKES FULL PROFESSOR UN-POSSIBLE!" fears.

- It's been absolutely unbelievably lovely weather here. The kind of weather I imagine they must have in Heaven - sunny, just warm enough that you don't need a jacket but still cool enough to be comfortable working outdoors, not humid, with a lovely light cool breeze. I've been working in the garden a lot.

- A lot of the herb plants didn't make it through the wet summer/cold winter (or my inattention to weeding because of the wet summer) so I'm restocking the garden. I've got Mexican oregano now, and some more lavender, and a couple of new thyme plants. And more pineapple sage, which is my all time favorite garden plant - it grows well and is pretty in the foliage stage and has nice red tube-shaped flowers and the leaves smell fantastic. There is a tiny garden center in my town that boasts "25 varieties of herbs" and by golly, they were right. They didn't have more than two or three of each variety, but they had a lot of different kinds. I even have tansy now, which I know spreads like crazy, but I bought just one plant. (I didn't buy any mint, though. I might sometime but only put it in a planter...mint is something that will take over an entire garden if it's not confined.)

- I am probably going to have to cover the tomatoes tonight; we might get a frost.

- Except for the fact that the yarn is too thin and the pattern would probably come out too tight, I should have done the Noro sock yarn in the "Lichen ribbed sock" pattern, because all of the colors that have come up so far remind me of the various species of lichens. There's a couple of gray-greens, and a gray, and a grayish pink, and an orangey color and a yellow green. (It's prettier than I'm describing it; if I get up to the heel flap this weekend (and I might), I'll take a picture).

- I am once again in love with hand piecing. A big part of it is that I can work on it wherever I want to; I'm not tied to the sewing machine. But another part of it is that you can see the slow progress - every patch sewn on, every "flower" completed, feels like a tiny little Finished Object. I'm estimating that it will take 9 x 7 or 63 of the flowers, with single rows of plain (probably white) patches between them to make a quilt to fit my bed. If I finish a patch and a half a week, I'll have all the flowers in less than a year.

- I always forget how relaxing hand sewing is. Our society's need for speed kind of squeezes out a lot of the things that take more time to do the "old way" when they can be done the "fast way" instead.

- I'm also back hand-quilting again; I can almost see the point at which I will be done. (I think that Provence-inspired quilt I posted a picture of about a year ago will be the next one to go in the frame; not sure how I'm going to quilt it yet. Not in the ditch; I like my quilting to show. And not on a gridwork - I did that once and probably would never do it again).

- My parents told me the piano's measurements the last time we talked and I will be able to fit it (with some moving of furniture and moving some of the bookcases into my guest room) into my living room. So they're proceeding with the plans for the repair/refurbishing. I'm getting excited for this; every time I hear someone playing the piano now I pay a little more attention and wonder if I'd ever be accomplished enough to play the piece I'm hearing. (And yes, I know, this will take time from the knitting and quilting but I keep telling myself that if I just watch less tv, I can make the time for the necessary daily practice.)