Apparently, it has been since 2019 that I’ve really and truly blogged. Oops. I don’t need to tell you that a lot has happened since 2019… we’ve all lived with the ‘rona and *waves hand* all of this. I did something super crazy during it all, I’ll admit. Maybe it was just the whole pandemic gave me a fresh perspective on what’s really important in my life, or maybe it was the burnout of working in public health as part of the response team combined with the constant turnover in my department (not to mention feeling completely unappreciated and certainly underpaid)… but I made a leap and opened my own…

This season I am working on slowing down. Simplifying. Buying less, baking less, and just – on the whole – putting far less pressure on myself to create the “perfect” holiday season. Most days I am ok with it. Other days, like today, I find myself jumping in and going overboard again. So far, today, I have baked a gingerbread house for decorating later, baked gingerbread cakelets, made birdseed ornaments for the birds for Solstice, and am currently working on baking through a batch of my great grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. I still have decorating of this gingerbread house to do, and some mint Oreos to dip in chocolate. This…

The semester is FINALLY over, which means I can now go back to a somewhat normal life for the holidays. I’m still awaiting the grade for my final project for the class, but I nailed my final exam with a 98/100 score, so I’m just going to put school out of my mind for a good while and take some time to get caught up on housework, my non-education-related reading, knitting, etc. I am… struggling with the holidays this season. I love the glitter and the lights and the cozy nights with family and friends and the food… and I have found myself outright hating the commercial aspect with gift-giving…

November is the pearl-grey month, the changeling between warm crimson October and cold white December, the month when the leaves fall in slow drifting whirls, and the shapes of the trees are revealed, when the earth imperceptibly wakes, and stretches her bare limbs and displays her stubborn unconquerable strength before she settles uneasily into winter. November is secret and silent. Alison Uttley Daylight savings today, and thus begins the slow decline into seasonal depression on top of my regular anxiety and depression. It’s somewhat hard to believe that November is already here – it feels like October was such a blur and, yet, dragged on. This was, in part, because…

Hey look, I finally finished a thing. It only sat for over a month simply needing the seed stitch on the sleeves. Took hardly any time at all, which I knew but just… kept putting off. Now to search for the perfect black skirt or dress to layer this over. Pattern is My Boy Lollipop, knit in Ritual Dyes Priestess in the Cancer zodiac colorway.

I do not need to start a new project. I certainly didn’t necessarily NEED to buy more yarn. To be fair, I didn’t actually buy a sweater quantity of yarn today – I had purchased that Tartan color back in July when we were in Michigan. And I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT NEED TO START A NEW PROJECT. But when my sweet friend Ellis drove down from Cleveland to visit before she moves clear across the country, I took us on a little field trip to one of my favorite little stores in Columbus, Sew to Speak, and decided I needed a Throwback sweater. And given that I already had enough…

Well, we’re back into school season and I didn’t do pretty much anything on my summer break to do list. I didn’t finish a single book despite my pile of them, nor did I finish any knits other than a sock project I had in the works for too long. I may have been hoping for a relaxed summer, but what we actually had was lots of random stuff going on that didn’t lend itself to much time to just slow down and just… be. I did start a Crumb cardigan earlier in the summer but it turns out I loathe the CoBaSi yarn I bought for it. I have…

Last week I popped into my local bike shop, Rocky’s, with the idea of scoping out a new bike to save up for as I work on commuting by bike more around town. I’ve been trying to bike to work more since it’s only a mile each way, both for the exercise and the eco-friendliness of it – but mostly the exercise because let’s be real: 8 hours a day tied to a desk job isn’t doing me any favors weight and health-wise. My 23 year old mountain bike works but isn’t very comfortable and I knew I’d need an upgrade soon. I’ve had my eye on a few brands,…

The tomatoes are beginning to ripen in the garden, which means I am starting to ever-so-slowly can up this year’s batch of pizza sauce for use later in the winter. I’m using the recipe from Preserving by the Pint, which has been a fabulous book these last few years as I scale back on, well, pretty much everything. Pre-kid, you’d find me with pounds and POUNDS of garden produce that I’d be canning up for use later in the season. But these days… not so much. It’s a combination of reasons, really – not putting out as big of a garden anymore, having a kid sucks up a lot more…

Hi all! I took longer to get this posted than I would have liked, but such is life. We spent a lovely bit of time at the beginning of July in Traverse City, Michigan for our vacation. I unknowingly planned it during the Cherry Festival, and was told by coworkers that I’d hate it because of how busy it was. But we actually had a really good time, festival and all! We went north with very little in the way of plans, more like goals of things in the area we’d like to see. I resisted my need to overplan everything, so there was no daily schedule dictating what we…