Black Friday This-n-That

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I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving. I was still feeling sick with my head cold, so we stayed home. Please don't feel sorry for us. We had a beautiful dinner, including a delicious persimmon-frangiapani tart, made with persimmons from our tree.

Now as for Black Friday? Long-time blog readers know that Robb and I would rather poke hot needles in our eyes than venture into any shop on the day after Thanksgiving. Neither of us possess the Recreational Shopping Gene, and we both have a deep suspicion of religiously-mandated consumerism. We stayed home, and worked on small but gratifying projects.

I'll spare you my annual rant on this subject, and only note that the shooting in the Walmart parking lot was one town over from us. I'll also spare you my thoughts about the woman who pepper-sprayed her fellow shoppers at a Wal-Mart in Los Angeles.

Is this how good Christians observe the birth of Christ? What's wrong with people?




As I said, we stayed home.

Our little 1925 cottage has many of its original lighting fixtures. Not surprisingly, they're all in delicate condition. The glass shade for our dining room lamp, for example, is held together with glue and string. Glue and string that probably qualify as antiques, in their own right. We've been looking for an unbroken antique shade, but these things cost Real Money. Both Robb and I have been terrified by the thought that the string might finally give way, so today we wrapped some brass wire around the lamp, to augment the vintage string.




It's not a complete fix, but it will do for the time being. Now, at least, I won't spend dinner staring at the lamp and fretting.




Because we are tender hearted idiots, and because we plan to eventually replace the door to the laundry room, Robb cut a doorway for the outside kitties. They've spent the last two winters hunkered down under our house, and that's just too pathetic. We've made a little bed for them in the laundry room. (I'd invite them inside, but they're not housebroken, and anyway being closed inside with the humans is terrifying.)

We thought they'd be totally suspicious of the whole arrangement, but they took turns jumping in and out of their door, and generally checking out the view. When last we looked, they were snuggled up together, next to the washing machine. Adorable.

Robb and I also unclogged our clawfoot tub, using a cut-up bicycle inner tube, a bike pump, and an empty bottle of tylenol. I'll leave this to your imaginations.




I'm -- finally -- feeling well enough to knit. The cold still has hold of much of my brain, but I've been able to do some simple work. You can judge where I am on the path to recovery by the this fact: I'm still making plenty of mistakes, but the mistakes don't make me want to cry. It is a good thing that I like knitting, though. By the time I finish finding my errors and ripping them out, I'll have knit this project four times.