A bit of everything

I have been berated for the lack of updates here. Sometimes it isn’t so convenient to work in the office next to one of your most faithful blog readers. So, without further ado, an update on all the forty-leven things I’ve been working on, or as many as I can cram into my lunchbreak. And also, there’s been a distinct wordiness about this whole thing (but really, would you want photos of my disassembled bathroom plumbing?) so there are pictures.

We had snowflakes earlier, but today it is really snowing, and has been for hours.

No really, there’s snow falling in that picture. See the streaks?

In a new personal record, I harvested the last of the tomatoes this morning. I have never before picked fresh ripe tomatoes in the snow without benefit of greenhouse. That’s the last of it, though. Summer is officially over.

The wintery weather outside (and why am I not wearing handknit wool socks today???) is in part counterbalanced by the tropical greenery in my office.

This was a Thanksgiving gift last year, along with several clone-siblings, and has thrived in my office. I used to have a hard time with African violets, but they seem to adore my office windows. I just killed a jade plant, though. I didn’t know that was possible! I have no idea what went wrong – it had been perfectly happy in that same spot for the past five years, but then just got tired of life. I’ve killed not one but two Haworthias in the past couple of years, clones from a plant older than I am. Apparently I’m not supposed to have easy plants. At least the spider plants are thriving.

I’ve only done a tiny bit of knitting. The current socks in progress accompanied me on some of the hardware trips, and to vote, and around town, but I haven’t gotten too many more rows done. I went up a needle size, so these are going much faster than the interminable jaywalkers (which still don’t have their toes grafted – I’m aiming for Christmas at this point). I have two weaving projects in mind, and some spinning to do. Monday is a Federal holiday, so hopefully there will be time for string!

Plumbing… the bathtub is still non-functional, but Nick spent much time on the phone and managed to track down replacement washers for our very solid original fixtures. Those are in the mail (he ordered extra sets), and we should have working plumbing before the descent of many houseguests for the fiber arts symposium next weekend. Whew!!! Plus, I can take all the expensive parts back to Lowes – we bought entirely new fixtures in case we couldn’t find the washers.

Update: The nice UPS man just dropped off the washers, and they appear to even be the right ones!

I ordered a really, really large box o’string before work this morning – cotton, linen, wool and silk. Oh yum! If all goes well I’ll get it next week. This starting a business thing is very fun – I get to purchase all kinds of goodies, even if I don’t get to keep them. The online store is now up and running at Stringpage Supplies, although I’m not going to make a big announcement until I’ve gotten a few more kinks worked out. PA sales tax is nonfunctional for some reason, and due to an error on my part the “New products” lists really descriptive things like “green” and “purple”. Oops!

In “real” work, within the last twenty minutes I figured out the statistical problem I’ve been working on for the past week, and which will lead to a very useful publication. The details are kind of esoteric, but the very satisfying bit is that right now I know something that not one of the other 6,630,079,512 people in the world know. How cool is that? Of course, now I have to figure out how to write it up so that the very small interested fraction of that 6 billion people will understand it…