Matthew and I visited the Mallow Run Winery today after work (I managed to escape around 3PM somehow) - we sampled around 8 different wines and came home with two bottles of their holiday wines - Winter White and Reindeer Red. I like the white best for it's crisp sweetness and Matt liked the red so we got both and will be donating them both to our different holiday gatherings. It will be nice to share something that we enjoy with our families AND to ease the tension ;). I love Mallow Run Winery - it is so close to our house, is nicely set back into the country outskirts of Bargersville - the people who work there are always so nice and they have the best setting for wine tasting - a restored barn complete with fireplace and a marble high top bar to taste their many wines - I also love the crackers and chocolate morsels to go with the wine. In the summer they have the best Friday line-up - pizza from Bazbeaux's, wine, a farmers market with bread, meat, fruit and cheeses, music and plenty of outdoor seating. Marvelous!
Since taking up knitting around Thanksgiving - my husband has been very supportive of my new hobby. He has even picked up one of my projects while it was sitting around the house - of course he turns down every offer I give about showing him how. Knitting has a stigma about it - you hear the work knit and you see little old lady knitting socks or something - which is not true at all - lots of people of all ages knit - INCLUDING MEN. I happened to stumble upon the subject of men and knitting in Lion Brand's YarnCraft Blog Post - Men Who Knit & Crochet - I will have to show this to my husband now - maybe he will take a second look at my knitting - hey, it is great stress relief! I even found an online community devoted to men who knit!
I am at least catching up a little on my scarf "orders." Never EVER mention that you can knit in public - people will all of a sudden start mentioning how they need a scarf or something and you say yes to one and then you are sucked in! No, but really, I enjoy doing it so of course I am not going to say no. Here is a scarf I knitted up for a coworker. I love how thick it is and how the white yarn looks with the stitch I used - knit two purl two!
As a little new parent gift, my husband and I bought our friends with the new baby the "Wee Blocker." A little soft foam sports cup of sorts to shield off a baby boy's squirt as you change his diaper. Now my friends are new to the baby thing and we are too - not having any ourselves - so we thought this would be a great gift for newbie parents. Upon further review - however - some people seem to think it is a ridiculous product and that parents should be able to figure out some sort of double diaper method and be quick handed at the process to ward off any incoming stream. But you know what? My friends are new to this - I highly doubt they are going to be quick handed right off the bat - as I know I nor my husband would be either with our first little one(who is still a few years off in the future for us) so I still think it was a good gift - at least for new parents - maybe not for old pros.
Each year my husband and I accumulate a plethora of plants that we adorn our yard or porch with (now we actually have a yard - and no longer have a porch or balcony like we did when we lived in apartments for 4 years). These plants come from a various amount of sources - the garage bins (I hate seeing a perfectly good plant thrown away) and this is how we now own a spider plant and a little tropical palm, we also find lonely plants in the bargain bins at our local Home Depot and Lowes - that is how we have become the proud owners of a rubber plant that had outgrown its pot and was sold 75% off. We also get plants from family. My brother-in-law gave us a starter off of his spider plant which has since grown into a monstrous plant that we have to physically chop back to keep a check on its growth. My grandmother has a nursery and so we have received many green leafed housewarming plants - in fact she loads our car up to brim every time we come to visit. Now granted, only about 75% of those plants actually live due to my neglect or ill placement in our yard. Well the point I was getting to was that, each year we collect this crazy amount of plants to create a backyard oasis but then winter comes to Indiana and there comes the need to bring almost all the plants back in so they can survive which makes our house into some sort of greenhouse. Right now we have 14 potted plants in our dining room, two in our living room and two in our bedroom. In years past, bringing the plants in has always been an issue. We have cats and cats are downright ridiculous about plants in the house. Well, at least mine are. They eat the poisonous leaves and end up hacking up the remains somewhere on my floor or they try to use the pots as extra litter boxes. The very worst is when they actually knock one over in the attempt to do any of the things I just listed. A knock-over usually happens after I have water the plant - so that whatever mess is made is 50 times worse because not only is there dirt on the floor but it is WET dirt. This year we have a house instead of an apartment. We have double the square footage to place our potted plants and one top of that we have a great little dining nook that is equipped with linoleum floors and plenty of light from our sliding glass door and a window. This is where the 14 of my 18 plants will be spending the winter. And the cats have been leaving them alone - not sure why but they are.
I cannot believe it, but we have only 20 days till Christmas. Here I thought I was getting ahead of the game by getting my Christmas cards out of the box I stored them a few days after Thanksgiving - now I realize I am behind on getting them done at all! Arg! (I figured I would work on them sooner if I had them out in plain sight ealier - especially since we had them bought since last year - yay for after Christmas clearance cards!) And I just now put out my little bit of Christmas decor out on my desk - 5 days late!(pictured to the left). Usually my husband and I manage to get all our shopping done early - but this year has been a little crazy with the new house and other more pressing issues filling our minds. We are probably a little over halfway done with everyone on our list - but this time last year we had everything bought and wrapped!
Lazy weekends seems far and few anymore. My husband and I always seem to have some family function to attend to, or some friendly get-together to attend so it is really nice to be able to laze around the house for once with utterly nothing to do - except clean, laundry, go through my hundreds of subscriptions on my Googler Reader and knitting of course! Not to mention the weather outside, the day is practically screaming for us to stay inside. It is a lovely dreary, drizzly day out there - my little weather icon on my Firefox browser says it is supposed to be a high of 54 today - but it seems cold - my tootsies are about numb right now. So I guess I will go back to surfing the web for more things to add to my boxedup.com account (gotta keep the family updated on our Christmas List....yes...I am 23 and have a Christmas List) and hopefully finish up my second scarf (pictured to the right).
So I recently taught myself to knit! Wohoo! I was browsing through the library one day and this book caught me eye - it was called Stitch N Bitch and it sounded humorous and it is was an instruction manual to teach someone how to stitch - anyways I thought I would try it and now I am hooked!
Being a homeowner has its ups and downs. Downs including waiting until 2009 until our homestead tax reduction kicks in since we could not apply for them until we moved in which was April and we did, but they won't take effect until good old 2009 - so that is an extra $200 a month tacked on to our escrow. Anyways, one of the more recent "ups" came around Halloween. For once we will finally have Trick-or-Treaters! For the past 4 years we have lived in apartment complexes my husband and I have always dressed up and stocked up on candy for potential Trick-or-Treaters and each year we are sadly disappointed. One year we almost had a visitor come up to the third floor of our building but they quickly turned away after hearing the crazed barking of our harmless but mean-sounding mutts. Well, this year we have a house in a neighborhood filled with families with two or three kids each - all in the trick-or-treat age-range! So we stocked up, two or three large bags of chocolate and assorted candies - bought some outdoor decor, carved our pumpkins, and switched on our front door light. This year we got what we wanted - trick-or-treaters out the ying-yang. They started showing up promptly at 6PM and we ran out candy before 8PM - had to start limiting how much we handed out (picture little tots with sad eyes as we only hand out one piece - one little girl even asked for more!) and when the last piece was gone we had to turn off the light to discourage more visitors. It was crazy! And everyone had great things to say about our creatively carved pumpkins. No one could believe they were real - but real they are!
