Wrong

(Before I begin, I have to point out that for the first time in ages, I'm actually able to post a blog on the date for which I intended it to be posted. I'm quite chuffed about that.)

I am in house hunting hell.

Well, okay, maybe not hell. I do have a tendency toward the dramatic, I'll admit.

House hunting purgatory, then. (We'll ignore for the moment that I'm Lutheran and when Luther got in a snit with the Catholics he chucked out things like Purgatory. Think the Catholics have now too, for that matter.)

The thing about moving back to small towns is that they're, well, small. There aren't as many housing opportunities.

There are lots in the small city where I'll be working, but the Things' requests (and my own wants, too, quite honestly) are for some space and especially, for my "Learning Disabled" Things, a school small enough where they won't get lost in the crowd. After years of living with LD and of working with them, I can categorically state that all LD means is someone with an unusually high IQ who tends to think outside the box and who is totally unimpressed by conventional sit on your butt and do it this way learning. Makes me wonder why the word disabled is even part of the label.

(Anyway, little me digression there, sorry. I get like that when not in full tell-a-story mode.)

So, we've spent lots of time trucking around visiting school districts and trying to find housing in them.

The general result in School District #1 has been that houses are either 1) more than I would want to pay for a mortgage, let alone rent, especially with a heating oil winter coming on, 2) actually below what I expected to pay and therefore tiny and already rented anyway, or 3) perfectly within my range and available, but not rentable to me because the landlords generally rent to childless couples only and I am not childless. I'm not even a couple. And when you have 3 homes in category 1 and a single home each in categories 2 and 3, your options ratchet down rather quickly.

School District #2 has a house. A lovely house on 8 acres. A lovely house on 8 acres in my price range with enough square footage for all our furniture and for furniture I don't even own (like a couch) and a terrific propane fireplace (which I would soooo use) and a prospective landlady who really wants us to have the place because, as she said in an email, she thinks we would take good care of her home, and that means everything to her.

It's a lovely house that is not available until the end of October. This would mean driving the Things from the town we are in to some sort of before school drop off each morning, driving into work, driving back up to get them from some sort of after school, then driving clear back to where we currently are. If you are at all familiar with Maine's "you can't get here from there" road system, you would, as I did, quickly realize that what should be about 20 minutes of driving on straight shot road between the three towns (if said straight roads actually existed) is more apt to take an hour. One way. Besides, although my hosts would say stay, I don't want to impose that long. And it's not like there's a handy extended stay hotel to live in for a few weeks either. Small town, small city. Sigh.

So, the perspective landlady who really wants us is racking her brains trying to figure out how to get out of her home earlier so we can get into it, I've emailed a friend who has a mother with a large home in a great school district father south down the road (but at least it's interstate driving; interstates are pretty straight shots, even in Maine) who was seriously considering looking for someone to move in to help pay for oil (she and I are very sympathetic on views on politics, religion and kid raising and she adores my Things so we get on like a house afire) and we go today to look at a place 20 minutes north up the interstate, which has a dean from work in the same area with whom I cold commute, and also has a fireplace and at least an acre of land, but which is more along the modular home build which will mean not lots of insulation.

(And yes, I realize that that last sentence-which-is-its-own-paragraph is the sentence from hell, but I believe it is punctuated properly enough to not technically be a run-on AND it perfectly illustrates just how quickly my brain is slamming together options so you're stuck with it. Mea culpa.)

The last house is at least the perfect excuse for lots of sock knitting. Really warm, thick socks, like the Frankensocks.

Not that the socks I am currently knitting are warm or thick. (Yes, I'm actually going to talk about knitting on a knit/crochet blog. I know that seems odd given the last few posts, but please bear with me.)

I'm knitting Shetland Lace Rib Socks from Stitches of Violet with the purple Trekking sock yarn that knocked the Frankensocks out of the running awhile back (we won't discuss just how long awhile back that was, okay?). The socks are my first go at lace, and I am loving the idea that regular mistakes (i.e. holes! Holes in the knitting!) could create something so beautiful.

Well, for real beauty, go click on the link. My stitching isn't that perfectly even yet, even allowing for the blobby lace look the Yarn Harlot talks about and the fact that I have a tiny point and shoot digital camera. (I so want a rig like Deanne has. Nice camera. Nice price too, I am sure. Sigh.)

And I've come to an interesting bit in the pattern. I'm getting ready to do the heel. Heels have never bothered me. I learned short row heels while knitting Christmas stockings and have had fun turning them ever since. But my old sock pattern (the first and only pair I'd made up until now) had me consider the stitch marker/first stitch as the center of my heel. This made sense to me, because it's where everything began. (If that's completely illogical, don't tell me. Dyslexic brains move in their own logic sphere.) To do the short row heel then, I simply slipped an equal number of stitches off of each side of my first needle and onto the other two dpns, then knit happily away.

If I use the same process here, though, I will mess up the lace patterning when I return to knitting lace; each repeat is a set of ten and I need to keep that set together or I will have an off-kilter foot. I'm off kilter enough as it is, I don't need twisted feet.

One bit of my brain says, "The sock is a tube. Therefore, you should be able to split the stitches as needed and the tube can't do a thing about it. It can't even run home to its mommy crying because it hasn't got one. Just do it." The other bit says, "Yes, but it's a tube knit in the round, which means you're knitting a spiral. A spiral might care where you say the middle is."

The rest of my brain has told both bits to shut up. Some days, there is nothing more fun than being a house-hunting, dyslexic, beginner knitter with not another knitter in sight. I wonder if Maranacook Yarns is open right now? After all, it's fine to be out driving; all Tropical Storm Kyle is doing is dropping rain that sounds comfortingly heavy as it hits (that's due to a frontal boundary and upper-level trough that's pulling Kyle this way; I should mention I'm a bit of a weather geek too). It's only in fall that rain sounds that way, have you noticed?

Oh, and Arthur? Does this blog answer your question?

So Maybe The Blog (Okay, The Blog's Writer) Was A Tad Optimistic

I never realized how long ten minutes could be, until the computer I was using froze on one screen for that long. Repeatedly.

It all began when Things 1-4 began their summer bacchanal of fast food and parade candy,



endless days at the pool



and nights way later than thought possible in winter.



Throw in some cool designer clothes at sale prices their mother can never find and fried retinas from so many movies and video games,



and their little lives are more or less complete.

Yes, that's right. They'd gone to the grandparents.



The mother, left on her own and about to begin looking for houses, was feeling a bit odd. How does one cook for just one person? A friend of hers from work suggested, that, as her Things were gone, and the friend's teen Thing was also gone, the lone mommy should come and hang out. Then there would be two for which to cook (there hasn't been really; we were optimistic there) and lone mommy could explore the northern and western burbs as well.

Sounded good. Actually, it's been great. Lone mommy has been having a blast. (Note to children: never leave your parents unattended.)

However, the internet connection left a little to be desired. It froze so much lone mommy started checking the weather to see if a strange front was moving through. And that was just on email. Forget opening files or posting pictures.

No problem, lone mommy thought. She'd use the weekend time to keep up with the blog.

Ha. Like that worked. Enter lone mommy trying to catch up with 183 unanswered emails, field calls from Things who oddly enough thought her still in charge even when hours away and being unable to find excuses to stay home when her friends said, "It must be lonely without the kids. Why don't we______?" all while making time to get lost in unfamiliar burbs because she was trying to sneak peaks at what's for sale in areas she fancied?

Notice the blog didn't even make it into that last sentence, let alone any of the weekend time lone mommy tried to give it. Nap time at work was out as well, because 1) work was fuzzy about how many jpgs can be downloaded on their computers and 2) one tiny guy is not real into napping. So nap time has devolved into one shining moment of respite while he briefly snoozes, followed by an hour and a half of playing let's-find-ways-to-keep-Cash-on-his-cot-and-quiet-so-everyone-else-can-sleep. A most thrilling game. Really. (The staff strongly suspects this child's inherent adorableness is a survival trait given to him by the angels in order to offset his amazing capacity for mischievousness, but that's another story...).

But now lone mommy has narrowed down the housing options and has things like appointments with a (gasp) realtor. (He has GPS. That is good.) So here she is with weekend time AND a happy internet connection (it pays to offer to water the plants of people who are gone). She has picture permission from one yarn website, public domain clip art, and a blog-in-waiting in the Drafts folder. She's even finding time to knit and crochet again (amazing what an I-must-get-this-stuff-done-before-we-go-to-visit deadline will do for one).

Exit optimism. Enter posts.

(Well, she hopes anyway. Especially since this little blog is a master of bugging her when ignored.)