Life of a Single Married Lady

With a mixture of elated "we no longer have to deal with this house" and very sad "I'll miss its charm and tall ceilings and so many cabinets" feelings, I announce that our house is for sale. Wil and I spent a lot of time clearing out things we don't need, packing some stuff we won't need immediately, and deep cleaning to prepare for realtor pictures today. The listing should be up tomorrow and we have open houses this weekend. I really hope it all goes well. We did a couple things in the past week specifically. Bella Rae Painting came to cover up the patched holes from the insulation installation, and everything looks fantastic  now. I also caulked my first tub, and I think I did a pretty good job! If you've somehow missed my previous rants about our house, just know that it was a flip and the flippers did work that was adequate at best. As I was scraping away all the old caulk that started to mold almost immediately after we moved in, I noticed a...

Happy February! It's always a good February when you get a whole extra day. Wil and I are spending our extra-long month preparing the house for sale in the hopes that it will go quickly and we can move to Madison with little fuss. More on that later. But first - crafts! My favorite indie dyer, Expression Fiber Arts , announced a year-long tea-inspired yarn collection! Once a month she comes up with a new color, and all the colors for the year will coordinate in some way. I'm selling a lot of the yarn that I'm not sure I'll ever use in order to justify buying many of this year's tea yarns. I know the picture is nice, but it doesn't do the real thing justice. My dream is to make a big sweater and a big shawl out of these beauties. This is a close-up of Keri's wedding shawl ( Lyrata ). It's coming along; I'm nearing the end. I can't wait to see what it looks like all blocked out. For a while now I've wanted to make a sweater ...

What's new today? Wil's family (Lynn and Theo) were in town for the long weekend, which was just lovely. Since Christmas for us was in Michigan this year, we held a post-Christmas celebration. It was a ton of fun to do everything late: we got the second-to-last 6.5' pre-lit tree from Home Depot for $25, we went on a family shopping trip to Duluth and Eddie Bauer and hit up some impressive winter sales, and we just had a great time. Kaiser "helped" with tree decorating. I made a cute little cross stitch for the MO Tus-house coffee nook! New Duluth winter coat, 50% off! My Arc'teryx is still going strong, but it's starting to fray in a couple places. I will keep it for when the worst cold hits, but my new one should be able to handle most WI winter days. What have I finished lately? I pulled this lobster out of deep hibernation, redid the claws, made some legs, was corrected by Wil about the number of legs, and finally  finished it. Victory! ...

I don't like the idea of New Year's Resolutions. They're great in theory but nearly impossible in practice. Instead I set goals that I think are reasonable and work toward implementing them throughout the year. So far, I've started tracking my intermittent fasting, making sure to cook at home, and failing to go to the gym (2 out of 3 ain't bad - there's room for improvement). Podcasts caught my attention about 6 months ago, and I'm currently listening to the Yarniacs podcast from the very beginning. It inspired me to attempt more regular blogging! So today I'm going to talk about what I've made recently, what I'm working on, and what my future plans entail. I think it will help me stay on track and not stray from the projects I know I want to do. What have I finished lately? Honestly, I'm really proud of these enchiladas. If there's one thing Wil and I can do very, very well, it's enchiladas. Wil cooked up a beautiful pulled por...

Happy 2020, everyone! I hope your new year is off to a good start. Wil and I are both looking forward to changes this year, and we just have to wait and see where they take us. So what has happened lately? On Halloween it snowed a lot, and it hasn't done much else since. For Thanksgiving we drove all over Iowa visiting family and friends. While exhausting, it was a lot of fun and great to see everyone again. After that Wil decided to be festive and I decided to bake more cookies than I've ever made at one time. It was a Christmas cookie year, and it was spectacular. On the top are my ginger molasses cookies. The white ones are pecan balls. The plastic containers have caramel pretzel sandwiches dipped in chocolate and a chocolate/vanilla shortbread swirl. I think I quite outdid myself! Since we were in Michigan for Christmas, of course we did the annual Cabela's trip. John and Anna couldn't join us, so we made sure to remind them of how much we missed them....

Long time no see, and this time I have actual travel updates for you instead of just yarn! Over Memorial Day weekend Wil and I visited Philadelphia for the wedding of a grad school friend (congrats, Mary!!). My insane desire to read every sign was thwarted by the limited amount of time we had in Philly, but it was still pretty awesome. We arrived on Friday and wandered around the neighborhood until we found a local who pointed us to a Yemeni restaurant...it was an amazing choice. The food was incredible, and we got enough bread to make breakfast all weekend (along with a little meat, cheese, and jam from the grocery)! Our apartment was in this neighborhood, which is super old and super adorable. The building we stayed in was built in the 1850s. Counterclockwise from top: shakshuka, some kind of lamb stew served "volcano style", and so.much.bread. On Saturday my phone clocked us at about 10 miles of walking, though I'd say it's more - we did a lot of slo...