this old house- coming along

yarn along- a hat for unity

Well after I made a hat for Chris and one for me, Unity wanted one too. Thankfully I had some great yarn for her in my stash- pink and purple.

I'm still inspired by our weekend at Quarterly Meeting, so I've been reading lots of Quaker books. Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk Through the Quaker Tradition by Catherine Whitmire 

and Holy Silence: The Gift of Quaker Spirituality by John Brent Bill

They are both great books to savor and reflect upon.

Linking with Ginny at Small Things.

Just so you know

I takin da baby and I goin ta work.

Unexpected harvest

I went out to the garden to check on our pumpkins, to see how they were coming along. and I found, these two unexpected tomatoes. Understand, this one single tomato plant is a volunteer, an offspring from last summer's one single tomato plant. I noticed it growing and let it be. I didn't even stake the poor thing. I saw a few hard green lumps had developed but I didn't expect them to do much. I walked past them on my way to the pumpkins. And then, today, there they were, red and round and ready. Somehow they did the growing they needed to do, alone and with little encouragement.

And now they're in my kitchen, and I'm the only one who will eat them. What shall I do with two volunteer tomatoes?

Quarterly

This weekend we attended the Northwest Quarterly Meeting  for the first time. A Quarterly is a regional gathering of Friends (Quakers.) We spent the weekend talking, singing, eating, reading, exploring, playing and worshiping with folks both familiar and new, in a beautiful retreat center in eastern Washington. It was a very powerful, moving, and relaxing experience and I'm still pondering many of the things I heard and discussed there.

This moment

Linking with Soule Mama and enjoying this busy busy toddler.

This old house- an update

Dan and Philippe are magical! Every time they come to work, so many things get done and the space gets transformed again. We now have walls, and the start of a roof. Soon we'll be able to open that door and I can do laundry without carrying it out the front door and around the side of the house.

Yarn along- a hat

I was so inspired by the easy calm hat I made Chris that I had to make one for myself. Now Unity wants one too! I have just been playing with all that new yarn, and trying to figure out what to do with it. (I bought a woman's whole stash off her hands for a deal.)

This week I finished The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels by Ree Drummond.  I know a lot of people really love her blog and I was interested to hear her story but I didn't really get into it.  I was not a big fan of her writing style, which spent a lot of time describing her brand name outfits and kept using the same adjectives to describe her sweetheart.

Then I started Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel. It's a memoir by a young man of Indian Muslim heritage. He first tries ignoring his heritage, then strongly embraces it. But when he realized the radical clerics were recruiting people like him, Patel realized he wanted to work for interfaith pluralism.  He started an organization in Chicago to work with young people on interfaith communication.

And hey, speaking of, it's International Day of Peace.

Eight Years

Chris and I celebrate two anniversaries; our first date and our wedding. September 20th is the anniversary of our first date. If you had told me when I was younger that I would find a partner that I met at a bookstore and our first date would be at the library booksale, I would have said "Duh."

So in honor of eight years of togetherness, here are some old shots of a couple of youngins.

Autumn Weekend

Don't get me wrong, summer is great. I love summer. But my heart thrills at these early autumn days. I love walking with my hoodie on and the cool air with a tingle in it and the mist on my face and crunching through the leaves. I love pulling out the long sleeved shirts and the boots and the knit hats. I love making soup and steaming up the kitchen windows. I love that shiny new notebook feeling of possiblity and change and reflection. We had a great autumn weekend.

Brixton helped Chris fix a build break. (Yes, he was working on the weekend but only for 20 minutes or so.)

We hosted our rotating date night. Cooper's parents went out while Sophie and her parents stayed and hung out with us.

The kids helped me set up chairs for Meeting for Worship.

I met up with some former coworkers to watch a dedication of a very moving art project. There is a project called Homeless Remembrance Project, where artists create bronze leaves with the names of homeless people who have died. This particular leaf was in honor of Robert Hansen, the charming Real Change vendor who died suddenly last year two days after being released from the hospital with orders for bed rest. He was sleeping in his truck at the time, which is where he died. The dedication was a great remembrance of Robert and his cheesy jokes and boundless optimism.

Chris tried to get a nap. Largely unsuccessful.

A woman was selling off her whole yarn stash for a bargin. How could I resist?!

Whew. What a lovely autumn weekend.

Linking with Weekending.

Am I ready for the big time papa?

a sweet tea party

This old house

Our house is over a hundred years old. We have noticed a couple of odds and ends around the house that we wanted to fix and while Unity and I were gone this weekend, our friend Dan the amazing carpenter started working on them. It was just a couple of rotten boards in the back deck, and then there was a place in the basement at the end of the stairs that looked like there might be water in the walls. Well. As you know, with an old house, it's never that easy. The boards on the deck got replaced sure enough, and then Dan and his friend Philipe went to work on the basement wall. They pulled off some of the siding and then made that face. That face that says "Oh. This is going to be a lot more work then we planned." That face that makes your wallet shrink right then and there. It turns out that the former owner of our house who built the deck took some shortcuts, or maybe just didn't really know what he was doing, and all of the deck's weight was being supported by one beam, which had water damage. The weight was also being carried by our basement stairs, which were not connected to anything, and were slowly buckling under the weight. So, on the plus side at least we discovered all this before something collapsed. On the unexpected side, we are now rebuilding the basement stairs. Which will be good in the long run since those stairs were incredibly steep and narrow, but we weren't really planning on it at this stage in the game. ah well. That's what you get with old houses, right?

Yarn along

Since we were traveling, I wanted something I could easily knit on the plane. So I didn't bring my darling socks and their charming gussets since I would have probably thrown them out a window. No, I made a simple ribbed hat for Chris with some yarn from my stash and it was the perfect thing to work on. My reading was along the same level, I wanted something enjoyable but straightforward and Philippa Gregory fits the bill for that nicely. This one is a fictionalized account of the War of the Roses and I don't know enough about that period to notice if she fudges the details a bit, so it all turned out fine.

Linking with Ginny at Small Things.