Friday afternoon - I teach but one class on Friday and consider that recompense for doing three labs during the week - I took this one off and cleaned my house (well, except for my office, which still needs it) by way of psyching myself up to clean the blood off the back door.
I did it. I feel better now. Oh, I still jump a little when I hear loud sounds and have periodically got up to be SURE I locked the front door, but I'm less-inclined now to try approaching the local Catholic priest to see if he'd to a house blessing (I have it on good authority that at least some priests will do so for non-Catholics). Or to get my own pastor out to do whatever the Protestant version is.
Still, the door will need to be repainted. Probably a summer job, and the difficulty level is that that paint MAY be old enough to contain lead. (I can get a test kit to be sure). I joked about getting the door painted "haint blue" (a very pale turquoise some deep-South porch ceilings are painted; the folklore is that it drives away evil spirits. The more-scientific explanation is that the color makes biting insects less likely to want to rest on the ceiling - presumably they take it as open sky, or some such). But haint blue won't match my house trim, so I will probably either go with white again, or a green that is similar to, but several shades lighter than, the shutters.
Saturday I mostly faffed around but I did work on this:
Another pair of the Weasley Homestead socks in a dark spruce green. (It's hard to see the stitch pattern there but it's essentially a broken rib stitch).
Also, it was a very good mail day. My friend Purlewe had proposed we do a "winter doldrums" swap and we set a price level....and her box arrived on Saturday. It was an excellent haul; I am only photographing three of the things (there were many, many things in there, many of them Pony-themed):
Yes, I like pink :)
There's a pair of fingerless mitts she knitted for me (you can never have too many pairs of fingerless mitts, I think). And PONY BOOKMARKS. These are those magnetic clip-type so they won't fall out. Three of them: Book Horse (of course) and Book Horse, Jr. (Rainbow Dash, whom you will remember is a big fan of the Daring Do books) and then Pinkie.
And yarn! Sock yarn called Pinkie Pie with a smaller sparkly skein for heels and toes. I'm thinking either a knit-purl pattern of some sort, or a slipped-stitch pattern for this.
Also, she sent me a new bottle of nail polish - Essie's "S'il vous play" (All of Essie's names are pun-ny and have little to actually do with the color in the bottle). It's a metallic color somewhere between pink and lavender:
I had cleared the old "Supposed to be Twilight Sparkle but looks more like Rainbow Dash" off my toes with a vague plan of using the Party Cannon glittered one again, but when this came I decided I wanted New!polish on there.
And today, I sewed some on the "birb" quilt:
I'm getting close to done with all the boring bits (the flying-geese units - the triangles - that form the points of the stars). The nice thing about this is once I get all of those done, making up the blocks will be fairly fast, and also, I won't have any agony of having to find a large enough floor to lay it out on to see what arrangement looks good* - it's all one print so I can just start sewing blocks together following the schematic.
(*I have blocks for two bed-sized tops I have never set together because of needing a space to do it in. I keep planning to go down to the Fellowship Hall some Saturday when no other group is using it but I never get to it).
And one bonus photo of a finished item from over break:
This is Fireball. He's supposed to be a cat even if he looks maybe a little like a fox. He was one of those free kits that came with one of the British knitting magazines. (And I'm reminded why I don't like knitting with fur yarn).
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