Obsession du Jour

Still here

So have you ever noticed how the first week back at work after a vacation can totally kick your ass?  Yeah, me too.  I didn't mean to leave this hanging for so long, but.....TA DAAAAAA!

Just take a gander at that fabulous floor!!!  Gorgeous, ain't it?  You'll want to ignore the white window trim, though, that all got painted this past weekend (hence the distinct lack of posting here) and as soon as I can find the camera again, there will be a new round of pics.  For now, just imagine that it's the same brown that you see on the COMPLETELY PAINTED BASEBOARDS.  Uh huh.  Woooohooooo!  And here's the other side of the room:

Please note the swank new cream leather sofa. There is a matching chair somewhere in customs in either Italy or NYC with our name on it, but we've been told not to expect it until sometime in February. ( Please also do the brown substitution for the window trim and mantle in this shot.)  Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like it's somehow wrong for our furniture to be better-travelled than us?

Anyhooooo, these pics, you should know, were taken at about 3:30am NYE, AFTER the party, but before we went to bed.  Why after the party, you ask?  Well, because when the first guest showed up last Saturday, the floor was not even yet completed, and we were unpacking, building (new table and chairs also, BTW), and arranging furniture on the completed side of the room while Rick was laying the last row of boards on the other.  Seriously.  The other room right next door? The den?  Looked like this:

Just to give you a complete picture, know that what you can't see from this angle is:

• Coffee table sitting ON the futon there.
• Christmas tree just to the right of this doorway.
• Piano to the right of this door, blocking the entire hallway.
• Eleventy-million bags of groceries - dinner and breakfast for eight. (Not that we are all that crazy these days, but it pays to be prepared to host some sleepover guests on NYE, dontcha know?) - just sitting on the floor in the very, very trashed kitchen which still contained all of our dirty dishes from this week of all-renovation-all-the-time. 

Oh my God.  I hope none of the women in my family ever read this.  I can already feel generations of fine, upstanding Southern Women in my family doing cartwheels in their graves.  No seriously, my Grandmother would have put a torch to the place before she would have allowed anyone to see her home in this condition.  I used to think I was more laid back about that sort of thing, I really did, but I'll confess to you (and really, I'm sure Melanie and Debbie would be happy to back me up on this) that I did not handle this situation with the grace and aplomb that I would have liked.  Nope, I went just the tiniest bit off the deep end.  In my defense, I had just returned from spending the entire day running  - not joking - EIGHT major errands, including the pick up of that fancy new table you saw up there, capped off by the single worst shopping experience in my life (Whole Foods + the Liquor Store - Cambridge, MA - one hour before closing - NYE).  Man, and you think they DRIVE rudely here in Mass....holy cow. 

However, luckily my girls are real troopers, and the three of us took turns organizing furniture, washing dishes, and cutting up bread and veggies to dip into the cheesy fondue goodness that was our dinner plan.  By the time the last guest arrived, the living room and den looked like they had been finished HOURS before, and with the exeption of the late start on dinner and the really very trashed kitchen,  like we mostly had our shit together.  I can't thank these ladies enough for helping and entertining and basically keeping me from throwing some sort of hissy-fit.  In the end, we had a great time and got to bring in the New Year with a bunch of people we love.  Does it really get any better than that?  I don't think so.

Here we are after midnight, starting our New Year with (what else) chocolate - and after all, what year that starts with melty, chocolatey godness can ever possibly be anything but a great one?

Happy New Year!!!

Progress?

Midnight last night:

What do you think?  Can we get the entire floor down, the baseboards painted, and this:

....turned into drapes for the big bay window (along with cleaning the entire house, shopping and preparing cheese and chocolate fondues for 8 and we will not even begin to discuss the pile of dishes already in the sink) by 6pm tomorrow?

C'mon, let's hear your votes.

Let's make a deal

I'm sorry ladies, but Carlos and Joao? I traded them in.  For this:

Isn't she beautiful?!?!

For the last year, whenever we have wanted to get clean we've had two options, three inches of bath-temp water in the bottom of a giant cast iron tub (that's really not very much, FYI), or a 5 minute (if we're really, really lucky) shower because our hot water heater was on the fritz.  Not broken, exactly, just fussy and unreliable.  Also?  Very.Small.  Not anymore, baby!  50 gallons of high quality, energy-sucking, water-heating fabulousness!!!!

I took a 20 minute shower last night.  Not joking.  Life?  She is good. 

p.s. the baseboards?  kicking my ass.

Creep show

There are no pictures in this post.  There is not even any real knitting content, though there is some coincidental talk of fibers and spinning.  I mention this only so that all of you who care nothing for the status of our battle with moths can just skip on by, and we’ll see you later in the week when the fun stuff comes back.  For those of you who are gluttons for punishment, hiya!  Welcome to hell.

I wish I could say that it seems like only yesterday, but two very, very, very long weeks ago, demons descended upon our home.  Mothdemons.  Foul denizens of a fiberholic’s hell. We hate the mothdemons.  They suck.  The cats, however, thought this was a great idea.  They loved the mothdemons, and as their particular version of love involves claws and teeth, we encouraged them to continue loving the mothdemons. We even paid them to…in tuna. That’s right, kill a moth, get some tuna.  It’s fabulous. If only that were enough to make our home safe from them, it would be grand. But it wasn’t.  We also discovered that we had not one, but TWO infestations.  That’s right folks, clothes moths AND pantry moths.  At.the.same.time. I don’t know which gods we offended, or how, but it must have been bad.  I’d also like to mention, just in case they’re listening here, that we’re really, really, really sorry, and we PROMISE we won’t do it again. 

So for the last two weeks, in addition to much, much tear-inducing work, house renovations, and family visits, there has been a T.O.N. of inspecting/cleaning/tossing/freezing/inspecting/cleaning/refreezing going on at Chez Obsession.  The upside is that the pantry has been well and thoroughly cleaned out. The down side is that we lost fair bit of food (mostly to my own paranoia, but you know...moth larvae, ick), and there is now a fairly complicated yarn/bean/rice/flour/fiber freezing and re-freezing schedule on our fridge.  All rugs have been taken outside and beaten until we cried and then cleaned thoroughly.  All furniture has been vacuumed, pillows have been sun-baked and beaten, and the cats are giving us a wide berth for fear that they will be next.  During these massive cleaning/inspection sessions, I believe that we found “ground-zero” for both sets of moths.  In the pantry: a bag of masoor daal (red lentils) from a local indian grocery, and in the fiber stack: a large bag of a mostly angora/finewool blend. Large being one full pound. 

One pound. Angora. Finewools.

Kind of makes you go all cold and clammy, doesn’t it? As Julia has noted is their habit, they couldn’t have come in on my embarrassingly large stash of cheapass Peruvian Highland Wool from Elann could they?  No siree, they came straight out of the single most expensive item in my fiber stash.  There may have been some foul language, and there was definitely some tequila.  I have to be honest, that fiber is still in my freezer because I simply can’t make myself throw it away.  I know logically that I should bring it out, let it sit for a week or two, refreeze it for a while to kill any new larvae (thanks again for that tip Julia), and then spin it up.  It should be completely safe by then, but I feel like every time I sit down to spin it I’ll get the creepy-crawly-heebie-jeebies because of the dead moth eggs/larvae/bodies in it.  Also? Even if it gets all cleaned, I’m afraid (and I know this is stupid, I do) that I’ll never trust it not to sprout more mothdemons to take over the stash room, or worse, the closet full of hand knits.   Eventually I will have to ask Rick to throw it away for me because I don’t think there’s enough tequila or chocolate or wine in all the world to make me voluntarily do it myself.  For now it’s resting peacefully in the freezer, blissfully unaware of it’s fate, and I am quietly ignoring it as I go about the rest of the damage control activities.  That is, however, the only fiber I’ve actually “lost” so far, so it’s hard not to feel pretty grateful that we caught things early.  

There’s been lots more stuff going on around here, but this is quite long enough already, so stay tuned for actual knitting content,  quite possibly even tomorrow, including a River-along update.  I'll warn you now, it's not pretty.

Y'all might want to sit down.

Let's suppose for just a moment that you went to visit a fiber-holic friend one evening, and in fixing yourselves a nice, frosty beverage you noticed two things:  the first being that she looked a little haunted around the eyes (maybe even a little haggard from lack of sleep), and the second thing being this:

...her knitting and spinning WIP baskets in the freezer.

Would you:

A) Ask her why in hell she'd be freezing perfectly good wool 

B)  Give her a big hug and offer to help her fumigate all four floors of her house (including the basement)

C) Go on with your visit as if there was nothing wrong, meanwhile making sure to sit only on furniture that does not have any fabric upholstery, trying desperately to remember if she'd given you anything recently that you might need to burn quarantine in your own stash, and trying to make up excuses about why you're not pulling out your knitting to work on while you chat

D) Run screaming away from this obviously demon-infested hell hole while stripping off all clothing on your way to your car, reasoning that driving home naked is a small price to pay for the safety of your own stash and vowing to never ever return

Warning: The following is not for the faint of heart.

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Bastards.

Send wine.  No, wait -- send Tequila.

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Updated to add:  I'm pretty sure this is going to have a happy ending because I'm pretty sure we caught this early enough to keep it from reaching the actual STASH, a consequence of a driving paranoia regarding pantry moths born from having lived through a year-long pantry infestation once that made me want to kill myself before we were finally able to eradicate the disgusting little bastards.  I suspect that clothing moths deserve an equal amount of fervor.  Plus, I have FAR more cash invested in my stash than I ever will in my pantry.  How many moths have I seen flitting near my fiber and avoiding the pantry-moth traps?  Um. Three.  You think this is extreme action for three measly moths?  I say NUH UH.  And if you disagree, go here.

So here's what's happened so far.  This stuff all lives in the living room (which is two floors below the office where the stash lives and there's been no traffic UP the staris in well over a month due to a bad case of start-itis recently), and I'm now 95% sure that the evil demons came in on these new baskets purchased a couple of weeks ago in a fit of organizational frenzy.  Last night, all fiber (and baskets) went into the freezers, all rugs & pillows went out onto the deck for some solar radiation today prior to tonight's vigorous cleaning, and what little upholstery was left inside got a thorough vacuuming.  They'll get another before the stuff comes back in tonight, the curtains will go in the wash, and the floors will get a thorough scrubbing.  How long should this stuff stay in the freezer?  Is there anything else I can do - short of toxic chemicals - to help keep this infestation from spreading? 

p.s. Don't get me wrong, there is a freezer rotation in the future of every scrap of fiber in the stash, because one can't be too careful, but what else can I do?

Still?

Yup -- still too much work and not enough knitting around here. I do have one very exciting thing to show you, though.

Fabulous, isn't it?

And this is where they willl soon be reclining.....

It doesn't look like much at the moment, but one day it will the bestest, most luxuriousest bathroom in all the land. (Right, honey? ) I've even promised not to store yarn in here. Can you believe it?

See that tall white pipe back there? That, my friends, is the future home of our lovely gazillion-year-old cast iron tub. It is a great testament to my love of this thing that after 6 months of it being my only option for bathing (in the winter, with a fritzy hot water heater), I'm still VERY excited about it. Let me clarify this for you folks, there's not a shower head anywhere within the boundries of our house and as far as I can tell there never has been. Astounding, isn't it? I'll spare you the stories of having to boil water on the stove downstairs to take a bath, lest you think I'm making it all up.