Another thing about the windows: They took out the old ones, and put in the new ones, from the outside: the person working indoors helped orient and level the window, and then put in the insulation around the frame, and then nail-gunned in place the new trim, and caulked them - but the windows themselves never had to be carried through the house (I thought that's how it would work, and had cleared big paths. And prayed that my floors didn't get too scraped up). It was actually less involved than I thought it would be - I thought they would have to remove the trim you see (around the window, and the sill) in order to put it in, but they actually worked from the other side.

The installers also hauled off the old windows as part of the installation cost. If I weren't concerned about the possibility of lead paint as one of the "base" layers of paint on them, I might have asked to keep one - to build a cold frame with. (When I was a kid, my mom had a cold frame for starting plants early in the spring that was made out of a window that the husband of a friend (who was in construction) salvaged for her).

***

I pulled out yet another "stalled" project: a pair of embroidered pillowcases I was working on a while back. The first one is very nearly done, the second one I still have a lot of "outlining" to do on.

I've said before I find this sort of thing soothing. In a way, it's like handquilting: your focus needs to narrow down to doing the next stitch, to making it the right size and going in the right direction. I think for me embroidery and hand quilting are more attention-consuming than most knitting (even lace knitting) is. And sometimes that's a good thing.

I said about a week ago (in the "lumper vs. splitter" post) that I sometimes get overwhelmed by the "bigger picture" of life. If I have too many things to be working on or thinking about I kind of tend to run in circles from thing to thing, not getting anything done and making myself even more frantic. (What I usually have to do, when I have lots of stuff to deal with, as I did on Tuesday, is to prioritize: sit down and figure out the most urgent thing, or, figure out what I can accomplish with the least effort, and do that first). But it does help, at the end of the day, to be able to sit down and work on something where the ONLY focus is on making the next stitch, and making it the same size as the other stitches next to it, and making sure it's the right color in the right place, and making sure that it's covering the printed line on the pillowcase. It's actually kind of a relief: "the only thing I have to concentrate on now is this fairly low-stakes thing, AND it is a thing over which I have control."