Domesticity

Time is Marching On

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Flight Gear Vera

"Your helmet bag is comfy, hooman."

Today is a good day for my own personal ways of counting down until Sampson is home with me and a pair of kitties who would really prefer to have his flight gear conveniently strewn about for feline lounging. Not only did I get to flip the calendar page from February to March, but I get to put the trash and the recycling forward tonight. Recycling is every other week, so I am pleased to note the passage of fourteen more days in this deployment. I am two weeks — one fortnight! — closer to being able to hand trash duty back to my husband, a chore I will gladly relinquish into his capable hands the moment his plane touches down on United States soil.

My parents ventured down to visit me over the weekend, so I am coming down off the high of good food, fortifying drink, and excellent company. I hope they enjoyed their little mini-vacation as much as I did. It was so good to spend time with them, and it was refreshing to have a house full of laughter and loved ones again. I sometimes forget how quiet it truly is with just me in the house. Well, I’ll grant you that the cats can be noisy buggers when they’ve a mind, but they’re not big on witty repartee.

My in-laws are coming to visit next week, which is super-sweet of them. With any luck, my house will still be fairly organized from my whirlwind of pre-parental-visit cleaning this past Friday. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except I lost some of the housekeeping time I’d allotted when I discovered the necessity of mounting an all-out assault on the moths that had infiltrated my pantry. Gross, gross, gross. On the plus side, having to get in there with bleach forced me to clear out some items that had been sitting around for a while, like the wedding favor candy from my cousin’s reception a year and a half ago. Whoops.

In non-disgusting food news, I have a loaf of bread about to go into the oven, whereupon it will fill my house with a mouthwatering aroma that will make it difficult for me to resist tearing into the honey-whole-wheat goodness the nanosecond it’s done baking. Strength! I’m gonna need some strength here, people, lest I burn the roof of my mouth on the staff of life.

(It’d be totally worth it, though.)

Cute Paper Motivates Me

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Fellow aviation bride NavyGirl of Marrying the Navy recently held a Reader Recipe Giveaway. I submitted my recipe (Lentils with Spinach and Goat Cheese) largely for the fun of writing up one of our household staple meals, but the random-drawing Force must have been with me: I won! (I only wish my admittedly healthy recipe had been as drool-worthy as the cookies NavyGirl featured after the announcement.)

"What to Eat" meal planning notepad

The turtle wonders what delectable delights will fill the tantalizing blanks.

Sampson and I have never, perhaps, been as good as we could be about planning our meals in advance. When we did, though, it was always a pleasant surprise how much of a stress-reliever it was to have answers to “the eternal question” (as the adorable notepad puts it at the bottom of each page) written down right in front of us. Our grocery runs were smoother, we avoided situations where we needed to dash out at the last minute to get some missing ingredient, and we didn’t wind up eating out when we hadn’t already planned to do so.

And then stuff would come up, and we’d get distracted, and we’d forget to sit down and plan out our meals ahead of time. The same old rut welcomed us back: “What’s for dinner?” “I dunno. What do we have?” “I dunno. Wanna go to Chipotle?”

It’s been even worse since Sampson deployed. I haven’t gone out to eat, which is good, but neither have I been motivated to cook just for myself and wind up with piles of leftovers. I’m kinda lukewarm about leftovers; I get bored with the same dish reheated, and with the household’s King of Leftover Demolition currently halfway around the world, leftovers can hang out in my fridge for a long time. Unless I come up with clever ways to transform those boring remnants of a previously exciting meal into something new and different, they probably won’t get eaten.

That’s where mapping out my culinary week is going to come in really handy: figuring out how I am going to utilize leftovers from one meal in future recipes throughout the week. If I plan out my “transformations” ahead of time, I can space out my leftovers so that roasting a chicken and making rice pilaf for myself doesn’t mean a week-long dinnertime death march until it’s all gone (read: when I can’t stomach another bite of microwaved chicken and rice, it languishes in the fridge until I eventually throw it out). A far better scenario is likely when I know before I roast the chicken that I will use the leftover breast meat for chicken salad one day and soak the remaining dark meat in a soy-sesame marinade to go in fried rice made from the leftover pilaf on another.

Less wasted food, more motivation to cook, and I get to indulge my stationery nerdiness by writing it all out on a hip notepad? Thanks so much for a prize imbued with several different kinds of win, NavyGirl! I strongly suspect that many recipes from her other readers will wind up jotted on the notepad in the coming months.

Sock the First!

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I finished my very first sock last night, and it turned out sock-shaped and everything.

Sock the First

Two nights ago, I stayed up until midnight knitting because I got it into my head that I couldn’t possibly go to sleep until I finished the gusset decreases. Despite the late hour I retired, I awoke bright and early yesterday morning determined that I would have a completed sock off the needles and on my foot before going to bed that night.

And I did it!

New skills learned in the course of Sock the First:

  • Working with small-sized, stabbity DPNs (double-pointed needles)
  • Turning a heel
  • Picking up stitches
  • Kitchener stitch (for grafting the toe)

I had better cast on for Sock the Second real soon, lest I get distracted by some shiny new knitting project and wind up having a lonely sock forever pining for its mate (a feeling to which I can relate at the moment, alas).

Besides, my other foot is cold.

New Year, New… Socks?

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Once upon a time, I was not a knitter. (Bet you didn’t know  “once upon a time” meant “last summer,” did you?) With the help of a scrying pool that suspiciously resembled my MacBook, I studied the lore of needles, knits, and purls. With much trial and error was this arcane knowledge won, and with each error I expanded my vocabulary of, ah… magic words of the sort with which Sailors (and *cough* some of their wives, apparently) pepper their speech and mothers attempt to keep from the tongues of their babes.

I have knit long scarves, lace dishcloths, and cabled hats. I have knit woolly fingerless mitts and Navy uniform-spec watch caps. I have knit for myself and for gifts and for no real reason at all. While by no means a master of the craft, I believe I am vanishingly close to being able to claim the title of sorceress Knitter, with a capital ‘K.’

Only one thing stands in my way of my own self-perception of knitting accomplishment: a pair of socks.

For reasons obscure even in my own mind, I will not feel I have truly arrived in the knitting world until I complete my first pair of socks. For me, hand-knit socks carry a cachet that outstrips the apparent humbleness of a couple of modified tubes into which one jams one’s chilly feet. You knit and purl and knit and purl forever. Then, screwing up your courage, you perform the mysterious rite known as “turning the heel,” which to me really does appear to be a magic spell one casts with wands shaped like double-pointed needles. Then you knit some more, conjuring up something called a “gusset,” and before you know it, there sits before you a sock where once was only a ball of yarn.

I’m still in the “knit and purl forever” phase of my first sock.

Sock cuff, with many stabbity needles.

Two-by-two ribbing, on and on and on.

I am a little concerned that I might just keep knitting the cuff forever, for fear that I will thoroughly embarrass myself with a pitiful first attempt at turning the heel. Things might progress a wee bit faster, however, if I had a mite less “help” from the feline contingent.

Cat noms yarn. Yum.

Vera's possession of four paws does little to help her manipulate four DPNs, so she prefers to snack on the raw material instead.

Actually, I feel fairly well prepared (thanks to Silver’s Sock Class) to turn the heel and make a go at finishing Sock the First. It’s Sock the Second that worries me. After the sense of accomplishment that comes from learning the skills necessary to complete the first, will the lack of novelty make the second an exercise in drudgery? Will I be whining, “But I just did this. I don’t want to do it again yet!”

Come to think of it, I have the same questions about deployment. We are in the early days of our first one, and I can’t help but wonder if the fact that I don’t really know what to expect is a blessing. I have yet to experience the kinds of things that can go wrong, so I can focus on the novel aspects of this type of separation. I wonder if it hasn’t quite sunk in yet that I really and truly will not have my husband home with me for several months. I fear that after we get through all the new challenges this deployment will present, after the joyful rush of homecoming and after the comfortable routine of having our family on one continent again, that the inevitable preparations for his second deployment will be all the more difficult. I’ll know what I’m in for, and it won’t even be shiny and new.

All those are worries based on borrowed trouble, of course, and are probably best saved for later. Meanwhile, I need to get a move on if I want to have a completed pair of handmade socks to show off before we get too far into this deployment.