Productivity

Just so the five of you who read this blog know, I'm now in super busy work season, so it's harder for me to blog, particularly when I'm not sitting in my dank basement cube but instead am training a room full of people about the program I run and having to be on for 8 hours at a time. My schedule for the next month runs such that I'm going to be away from the office and/or home more frequently than I'll be in the office/home. Fall is always both my favorite time for my job (I love the training aspect and getting out of the office, traveling around the state, and interacting with people face-to-face) and a really tough time because I'm gone so much. By next week, when I pull out my suitcase or duffel bag, Petra will stop speaking to me and Loki will take it upon himself to sit in it and prevent me from packing. They know what's up.

So anyway, last week was super stressful because I had to finish putting together my training materials after I came back from Indy and then I did 2 days of training and then I had a big meeting. By Friday afternoon I was absolutely exhausted, having not gotten enough sleep/rest in nearly 2 weeks (since before I left for Indy). I knew that once the weekend was here I would want to just do a lot of sleeping and relaxing and ass-sitting. But since we hadn't had a weekend home in a while to clean and stuff, there was a lot to be done around here.

Hulk is currently working on two major projects for his art classes, one of which he has been working on at home (the other is a computer-based project and he can only do it on campus). The at-home project is a wire sculpture primarily composed of baling wire. Hulk asked me if it would be possible to get some much thinner wire to knit into a wire fabric for part of the sculpture, and I took it upon myself to knit the pieces he needed myself because a) I'm a much more accomplished knitter, though he does know how to knit, and b) he's still working on the rest of the project.

So when I had the state car for work this week we made a stop at a Michaels and got some thin wire and when we got home I pulled out some aluminum needles and started working on the first piece. It took me a few minutes just to get a row or two done, get used to working with such an unfamiliar material. Though it was quite thin and relatively easy to work with (bendage-wise), knitting with wire is certainly not easy by any stretch of the imagination. After an hour or so, I had a few inches done and sore fingers. But I have to admit, it looked pretty cool. Over the next few days, I worked for an hour or two in the evenings and yesterday while we vegged and watched Lost from Netflix, I completed the second of two larger pieces. After working with the wire for a while, my fingers were scratched, poked, and sore, and the paint on the needles had been scratched off. My fingers started turning black from aluminum residue. Tonight, I finally finished the last (long, thin) piece of wire knitting. My fingers haven't hurt this much since I cleaned our oven in our old apartment without gloves on. But knitting with wire was a definite challenge, and I'm proud of myself for having taken on that challenge and completing those pieces.

Today, Hulk made and canned salsa and pasta sauce from the overabundance of tomatoes and herbs and other produce from our garden (I did a lot of chopping) and I made homemade chicken tortilla soup tonight for dinner while Hulk watched football. Yesterday I baked a sugar pumpkin, pureed it, put it though cheesecloth, and today I made pumpkin pie. We also got some cleaning and laundry done and I'm working on a scarf for me and a scarf for Hulk to replace some of the ones we lost in the Great Leaking Storage Debacle of 2006.

When there's so much to be done, it's hard to be lazy. But we accomplished a lot this weekend, and I'm ready to start another week of copying, training, and attending a pointless two-day meeting in Keystone. At least being in the mountains should be fun. And in a couple of months we'll pull out a jar of sauce or salsa and taste our garden when it's below freezing outside.