I got some spinning done! I finished plying my mom’s cough January shipment of her Christmas Handspun Club this morning, 4oz of Shetland in a colorway I called “Cloisonné”. It’s taking a bath right now and I hope will be dry by tomorrow. My mom is lucky that I love her, because if this was for anyone else, I might have “lost” it somewhere. My only regret was that I’ll probably never be able to duplicate the colorway. I was experimenting with greens, browns and yellows to get the bronze-y color, and the pink/magenta was leftovers I mixed together.

The fiber before spinning:

The handspun, hopefully around a worsted weight (I blame any unevenness on the fact that some of this was spun while watching the Superbowl):

The house is really in presentable shape now, with mostly just some craft room and office unpacking left to do. I was thrilled to be able to display my wooden wacky farm animal collection in the breakfast nook. I ended up banging some picture hooks into the backs of some of the pieces that weren’t originally intended to be hung up, and it’s worked out great.

I haven’t blogged much about food in the past few months because all the to-ing and fro-ing between me and Jag’s houses was not really conducive to making involved meals or even being able to eat many leftovers before they went bad. However, now that I’m settled in one place with my sweetie, I can start cooking again.

Yesterday morning I threw a whole 4-lb chicken (cleaned and giblets removed, salted and peppered) into the crockpot with some sliced garlic cloves and rosemary in the cavity and under the breast skin. Following the advice of various recipes, I didn’t add any liquid, just drizzled some oil on top and closed the lid. It cooked on Low for about 10 hours, and when I pulled it out of the pot, we got this wonderful falling-apart tender chicken and a whole lot of concentrated chicken juice.

After skimming most of the fat off the liquid, I ended up with almost exactly 2 cups of broth to make gravy with. That and some mashed potatoes and green beans made a really yummy meal. I’m really looking forward to being able to cook more now!

We opened the door of the Kitty Containment Area this morning after breakfast. Tentative forays around the upstairs and then downstairs occurred over the next few hours, and by noon all four cats had made the trip to the first floor at least once. Shastes has so far limited her response to the invasion to occasional hissing and watchful surveillance from her favored hidey-holes. We knew the adjustment was going well when Perl showed up promptly at dinnertime to sit next to the table and beg for anything vaguely resembling a dairy product. Someone with a softer heart than mine fed her some freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

The unpacking is going well. We completely rearranged the kitchen and pretty much everything in all the cupboards and pantry, and got the office into a semi-usable state. The craft room will just have to wait a while, since it’s currently my four cats’ home base for litter, food and and safe non-Shastes-inhabited napping areas. But we’re pretty pleased with the progress we’re making. Just very tired.

We’ve all seen those rather cheesy family stickers on the rear windows of minivans and SUVs, with the mommy and daddy and 6 kids and family pets parading in a row across the glass. Since I drive a giant station wagon with lots of display space in the back window, I thought it would be funny to get a sticker that represented the new Heathbar and Jag household.

We’re torn between the laptop family (representing our jobs):

And the hiking family (representing what we like to do when we’re not working).

Thoughts on which one we should pick? The big kitty is Thumper (they didn’t have a cow-cat option).

The move went about as perfectly as me and Jag could have hoped for. TROSA arrived on time with a crew of 4, packed the truck quickly and professionally, and moved everything into the house with the same speed and attention to detail. They came in around $200 under the non-binding estimate, too. Hands down the best move I’ve ever had. Would recommend them in a heartbeat.

There are boxes everywhere.

In the bedroom (blocking in Jag’s kitty who was locked in the bathroom down that hall, until we were able to unpack enough boxes to get the door open).

And in the kitchen.

And in the living room, blocking the TV.

And in the office, where access to just about everything but the computer desk is blocked.

I think my stuff was reproducing in the truck. One of the movers remarked, “You all sure read a lot!” as he hauled in yet another load of book boxes from the pile of approximately 23 bazillion. I think their arms all must have grown 3 inches from the weight.

I also discovered that I own well over 3 cubic feet of underwear. I brought along a generous supply of unmentionables with me pre-move, but then I opened up a U-Haul “Medium Box” to discover that it was packed to the brim with skivvies. Where did they all come from???

Perl says, “Good lord woman, can I come out of this room yet?”

I was extremely excited about the possibility of last night’s snowfall for some reason, and when I got up at 3:30am to look out the windows (yes, I was THAT excited), I was pretty disappointed, because there wasn’t much snow there. At 6:15am, there was a bit more, but not nearly as much as I was expecting. However, when I checked my work email around 6:45, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my employer had closed the office due to the weather. Turns out areas east of Durham got a lot more snow than we did. Yippie!

After doing some work from home while watching the Inauguration (YAY!), me and Jag took a walk after lunch to see how the roads were doing. The snow was starting to melt by this point.

The deck was snow-covered, but only by an inch or so.

Jag’s metal boar sculpture seemed to be enjoying the weather.

Some of the roads were still pretty wet due to tree cover; this will probably refreeze overnight, unfortunately. Luckily there’s a 10am start tomorrow, and I won’t need to leave the house til 9 or so.

In spite of all the moving and packing mess, I have gotten a little spinning done. I’ve spun up 4oz of Three Waters Farm merino-tencel blend over the past 3 weeks or so in small sessions before work or as a reward for packing. I’m planning to leave it as singles and knit something lacy with it. I have another 4oz of black alpaca waiting to be spun up as an accompaniment, and I’m thinking that the feather and fan striped stole from Folk Shawls would be a good project for the yarn.

Spinning this fiber was a totally different but even more enjoyable experience. It’s Shetland top that I hand-dyed in teal, magenta and bronze, and it’s going to be the next installment for my mom’s handspun club as a 2-ply worsted weight. It’s very wooly wool, drafts like a dream, and is simply wonderful to spin. I need to order more of this stuff. This is fiber I can definitely see myself spinning sweater amounts of.

All in all, a happy snow day.

34 As a 1930s wife, I am Poor Take the test!

I think I got marked down for drinking, telling risque or vulgar stories, and failing to wash the top of the milk bottle before opening it. Also, still working on that whole “pleasant disposition in the morning” thing.

Four cats were corralled into cages, transported 30 miles, and released into a new environment without anyone being scratched, peed on, or bitten. Perl is sitting in a corner growling at everyone and Thumper has taken up residence in an unused litterbox cover, but Ada and Miranda are hopping up on furniture to peer out the window, trying to pry the bedroom door open, and seem generally unfazed by the experience.

I’m getting pretty good at this chasing-cats-around-and-forcing-them-to-eat thing, but experience with this isn’t something that I ever wanted to have. At least I convinced Miranda to eat enough last night and this morning that I can let her out of confinement for the day without worrying that I’ll get home from work and she won’t have eaten anything at all, again. She got 2 doses of antibiotics, too, which I hope will help with the mouth stuff and perk up her appetite. She’s not hiding any more, which is a good sign.

No thrilling stories of cat disappearance or misplaced dairy products for you today, but I do have something amusing to relate. (A bit of useful background here: my upstairs hallway has a railing open to the living room on one side, and is basically a catwalk over the dining room/entryway, with railings on both sides.)

The movers came out last Friday morning to do a walk-through of my house so they could write up an estimate. The previous night I had straightened up and vacuumed and generally made the house presentable, since they’d be traipsing all through it; no piling a bunch of crap in the bedroom and closing the door! The movers were nice, the walk-through went very quickly, and everything was dandy.

Jag came over that evening to help me start the Big Weekend of Packing. As we stood in the living room, he frowned and looked at the unplugged black torchiere pole lamp standing behind the couch. “Um, did you know that you have a pair of panties sitting on this lamp?”

Yes, a pair of my skivvies had apparently plunged through the railing from the second floor, probably while I was clearing out a pile of laundry in the hall, and had been coquettishly draped over a lamp the whole time the movers were here.