Monday Musings--29 October 2012

Right now...it is still quite dark, but on the back side of the house a very bright, full moon is setting.  No one is up yet.  I told Una, who has a bad cold, to sleep in this morning and not set her 5:20 alarm.

This weekend...was pretty darned busy!  The weather changed drastically between Thursday and Friday.  On Thursday the high was about 80 degrees, and the kids stayed out until after dark playing in the back.  On Friday the high was something like 58 degrees.  The kids, who had the slightest indications of colds, suddenly had full-blown ones.  Gemma was up several times at night, and I think I may have gotten about 4 1/2 or 5 hours of sleep.

We managed to get some school work done, though not all, as I spent the day in mainly in the kitchen.  Made baked oatmeal for breakfast, did three loads of laundry, made a call to Teaching Textbooks to obtain a replacement disc for one that was not working in Una's laptop, put the makings of a bone broth into the slow cooker, made a batch of garlic salve to put on the feet of my sickies, baked a pan of corn bread to go with the pintos for lunch, made a batch of cookie dough (Una, who was not yet down for the count, baked the cookies), and finished knitting Gemma's sweater.  I was pretty beat by day's end, and sat watching a couple of episodes of Fawlty Towers from Netflix (John Cleese is such a riot!) and figuring out what to cast onto my knitting needles next.

Saturday I got up and folded the three loads of laundry, put up pintos to soak, washed and blocked Gemma's sweater, strained the bone broth which had simmered all night, showered, spent a bit of time at Mountain Rose Herbs filling a cart with the makings of this winter's cold and cough remedies, spent a lot of time putting garlic salve on little feet and administering high doses of vitamin C and tea all day.  I finally sat down in the mid afternoon and tackled what was becoming a highly daunting mountain of mending.  I mended numerous pairs of socks, a sweater, a sweatshirt, a stuffed animal, the falling hem of a skirt and more.  My pile is GONE, and it feels so good.  I decided to cast on some fingerless mitts for Una next, and did, but the start of projects with thin yarn on 4 needles is rather tricky, so I also cast on a cowl on big needles so that I would have something to knit in the van the next morning.  Before bed I put the pintos in the crock pot with a quartered onion and a smoked ham hock to cook overnight.

Yesterday we went to Mass at the Chapel of Divine Mercy.  It was cold out!  Mass was lovely, and we stayed for a while after so that Una could spend 30 minutes with a most kind gentleman who is giving her some assistance with her algebra.  He is a mathematician and chemist, and he thinks Una will conquer higher mathematics in spite of my doubts and hers.  He tells her she mustn't be satisfied with B's in math...whereas I am happy if she manages to keep a B average...I barely kept a B myself in algebra.

There was shopping to do after Mass.  I still feel badly about running errands on the Lord's day--and my "free" day--but with a huge van and gas prices being what they are, we combine trips as much as we can.  So, we did the grocery shopping and got home, where I spent what was left of the afternoon putting away groceries and freezing a few containers of the cooked pintos.  I put up a listing in the Etsy shop for a new wooden sword and wrote an email letter to a friend, and that was pretty much the rest of Sunday.

Some plans for this week: most of the kids are on the mend from the colds, but Una has it pretty badly.  I have noticed that her fibromyalgia symptoms, which we usually have under control, flare up at the onset of a cold, so that she gets all sorts of pain when fighting illness, and is usually the one who suffers most from a simple cold.  So today I want her to take it easy and drink lots of ginger-lemon tea with honey, take lots of vitamin C and zinc and rest.  We need to get better, as we want to go to Blue and Gray Days in Franklin on Saturday, weather permitting.  It will be hard doing without Una today, as she is my second pair of hands around here, and Gemma's ersatz Mama.  I have an Etsy shop order to send out today, and I need to order those herbs I have in a cart. I want to harvest what's left of my parsley and freeze it, even though the late parsley is never as tasty as the early spring parsley.  I have butter to make, too.

If I find some time for myself, I would like to...write a letter, work on my knitting and maybe try to get some covers made for some watercolor sketchbooks to put in the shop.

I am grateful for...the intercession of St. Joseph.  I prayed to him for a means of getting through November and December without draining our savings account, and Bret now has several weeks worth of work to to at his old cabinet shop; what's more, a nice, big order came into the Etsy shop on Saturday.

Some prayer intentions for this week:  for everyone to be healthy by this weekend; for friends who are trying to close on a house; for Aiden to be able to go home soon (the little guy is nearly 5 lbs now, so his release is imminent!); for those on the east coast facing a bad storm today.

Something that makes me smile:  Well, I accidentally deleted my most recent photos from my camera yesterday, so I don't have a photo to share this morning.  But here's a video of a group of fantastic young bluegrass musicians, Cats and the Fiddler.  They're a few years older now, but still playing great music!
Happy Monday!