One More Day!

Only one more day to guess the plant featured in this post! At 8pm EST tomorrow, the polls will close and winners shall be chosen. Free yarn, people! What's not to love?

The day after Tuesday I had a visitor. I will present our day in as few photographs as are grandmotherly possible. I took about 150. Thank heavens its all digital. Grandchildren could break the film and processing budget in a heartbeat. First we had crawling practice time.Then we spent some time laughing at Omi in our recliner bouncer thing. This was actually Aidan's, I bought it at the Salvation Army for like $5.00. I love the Salvation Army.
Then we fell asleep in the chair-thing, and napped for a while.
After nap we had roll over practice on the big blanket. She spends a lot of time on the big blanket.
Then back into the recliner bouncer seat thing so Omi could go get her lunch. Handy. Baby cannot be stepped on by dog or roll off of blanket while restrained in this manner. She's found her tootsies. She likes to grab them and hang on, which often results in more smiling. The child smiles and smiles and smiles.
While she was here she requested a new sweater, the cable and lace wrap cardigan from Lois Daykin's Baby Knits book (which I adore, excepting the lack of schematics, but still love!!)The yarn is Valley Yarns Goshen. This is one of my myriad "distraction" projects. Row gauge is a bit off which makes the lack of a schematic that much more distressing, but I am winging it and it's working. I also cast on and started knitting this craziness - beads and wire, mixed and random. This is very much playing around, has no direction or purpose, but is fun and shiny and makes me happy. I've been having some kind of tofu fit lately. I am not sure if this is a result of tofu being on sale, and my buying a bunch, or if I am having some sort of phytoestrogenic perimenopausal soy craving thing. Who knows? But this week's ready-made lunch is:photogenic. Also called Spicy Thai Tofu. Mods? Of course!! Cilantro instead of basil. Kale instead of spinach. Extra garlic and ginger. That's about it. Otherwise I TOTALLY stuck to the recipe. Totally.
So about those stimulus checks. Mr. Wonderful and I pride ourselves on being relatively smart about money. I am kinda cheap, and he's...well...an*l. So when the check was in the mail, we began debating uses. Pay off a bit of our next cruise? Good plan. Be responsible with most? Better plan. Blow some? Sure, why not. One of the things we discussed was our clothes dryer. Now, I hate dryers. I advocated strongly against replacing an existing and functioning appliance on a variety of grounds ranging from the environment to the wallet and back again. I won, and we dismissed "dryer" from the list and replaced it with something cool, like "yarn" or "handheld gps for geo-caching husband who thinks he's taking wife bushwhacking for benchmarks". I prefer a nice trail, myself (I can knit and walk), but I said whatever I needed to in order to avoid buying a new dryer. It is I suppose a love/hate kind of thing with me and the dryer. In the middle of a five day rainy spell, I love the thing. When I am leaving in 20 minutes and have no dry underwear? Love. But generally it is an item I avoid, and not just because I don't do laundry (Hallelujah for the man who loves to wash and dry). It grates against my nerves. I can hear it tumbling and tumbling and sucking energy from the wall, and heating up which then sucks more energy. And it destroys the joy of clean sheets and towels by making them soft and smelling of...dryer. I prefer crisp, crunchy, and smelling of sunshine. We do hang a lot out on drying racks. In the winter things dry pretty fast in front of a pellet or woodstove, and the moisture from the drying clothes soothes my nose.We inherited this thing. It came with the house. We left our old one behind because it was old and decrepit. We know nothing about this one; age, lifespan, nothing. We know that sometimes the buzzer randomly does not work (I appreciate this), and the gasket inside is mostly absent. We know it's an economy model and a bit on the generic side of things. It's a low-end but really big and heavy duty sort of model. No frills, no fuss, no muss; really the kind of thing I would buy since in the world of dryers "Energy Star" is not a phrase one hears. Ever. It is also now a giant doorstop. Space-taker-upper. Big Old Dead Object. How was I supposed to know the stupid thing was actually dying? Yesterday we bought a new one. It's coming tomorrow. It took about five minutes to buy. "Cheap," I said, "and with a moisture sensor. And a fluff cycle." And - I hope - a switch for the stinking buzzer. I briefly toyed with the concept of repair, but dismissed it. New dryer: $400. Repair guy: $60 an hour, plus an additional minimum 1 hour charge for showing up. And we've got no clue what's wrong or what it needs. So we're looking at $120 for the first visit to diagnose, then probably a second visit since it's an obscure brand, which means more hours of labor at $60, AND any needed parts...so you can see where this is going? My desire to consume less is consistently thwarted by the culture's desire to spend and shop and throw away. Grr. Now, this could all be solved if I simply took over laundry duty and hung everything out and we just didn't replace the thing. This is not a sacrifice I am willing to make. The man does laundry. Do I really want to take that away from him??
Still waiting...
for these...
to pop open and reveal infant chickery. The good news? I held an egg or two to my ear. I heard scratching. This means that in 24 - 72 hours we should have hatch. I make no promises. I did not hear chirping, only scratching. But scratching is a darn good sign.