spinster-in-training

FOs!

These are all going on Etsy, because as much as I like how they look, I really don’t need any more hats or scarves.

I also finished my first Baby Soft sock except for weaving in the ends. It’s pretty cute, and feels snuggly enough. But the camera’s batteries are almost dead, so I’ll take pictures tomorrow, after I weave in the ends, too.

Greg just called – they’re still in line for the haunted house, and they’ve been waiting for two hours. I hope that’s an excellent haunted house, because it sure is cold out to wait for two hours outside.

Speaking of which, I really need to bring my tomatoes in.

Tuesday night, we went over to Danny and Michel’s for pumpkin carving, hot cider, pumpkin pie, and roasted pumpkin seeds. It was lots of fun, and I finally got around to taking pictures of our pumpkins. Michel deemed mine “very Martha Stewart” – but whatever, I think it’s cute and it turned out well.

I finished knitting the Crazy Cotton Socks and wove in the ends today. I’ve got to re-cut one of the ends on the toe of one sock, since it’s wiggled its way out a bit more, but I’m pretty sure I left some slack in the end when I was weaving, so I’m not worried about it unraveling if I cut it. I’ve also started some Broadripple socks out of Lion Brand’s Baby Soft – Tiffianna swears by acrylic for socks, and since I really only wear socks in winter, I’m giving it a try.

Dara loaned me Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and I finished that this evening. It’s a great book, and now I’ve got to find the second one. It reminded me of Maus, and that I meant to read Maus II, also.

Today, we went with Sumi and Jesse to Tower Indian Restaurant – they were having a special buffet for Diwali. (Sumi told us Diwali was a holiday, and I just googled it and found this page with info about Diwali.) We met Brian and Jamie there. The food was fucking incredible. There were alot of different, delicious dishes, but I think my very favorites were the rava idly, the appam (I’m a sucker for those sweet-ish pancake-y things), the vegetable cutlets, the pineapple pudding, the mysore pak, and the watermelon halwa (which had an entirely different consistency from any other halwa I’ve had previously). The water at Tower is also incredibly good – I don’t know what they do to it, but it’s seriously so good that you notice it. After lunch, we went a couple stores down to the Carolina Indian Store, where I got some Dabur Vatika hair oil. I love that store, and could have stayed in longer (and probably found more I’d like to get), but Greg had to go to the bathroom all of a sudden, so Sumi and I made our purchases and we went home. A confectionery/bakery was having its grand opening next to Tower, so we could’ve gotten some free sweets if we’d stuck around and gone in – I was too full anyway. Sumi and Jesse stayed over to watch Stewie Griffin: the untold story, and then went home, because all four of us needed naps.

After our naps, Greg went to eat dinner with Danny and Michel before going with them (and whoever else) to the Hollywood Horror Show. Given my experience at the Ripley’s haunted house in Myrtle Beach, I decided I’d be better off staying home and watching cheesy movies on SciFi, and knitting. Right now, Cerberus is on, and, yeah, it’s about what you’d expect from SciFi. But I’m still watching it because I am SciFi’s bitch.

Oh my goddess! I love paper dolls!!

Here are some photos of weird plants growing next to our driveway. I didn’t manage to get photos of them in bloom before they started dying, but they look kinda like small lilies:

And here’s a picture of some Heinz canned spaghetti. I found it in the British foods section of Southern Season. It wasn’t so bad – it wasn’t as excellent as the spotted dick, but it reminded me of Chef Boyardee and childhood. That is, until Greg declared that it looked like worm soup.

I have a thing about worms. I remember as a child, sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen counter and eating a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. I guess I must have been about eight or nine. And for some reason I can’t begin to guess now, I thought of worms, and that grape jelly must be what worms taste like. I know, ridiculous, but to this day I can’t eat grape jelly. So, Greg said the spaghetti looked like worm soup, and all I could think about was eating worms, and I couldn’t get more than two mouthfuls down before I had to throw it out or throw it up. But it wasn’t like excellent or anything, so it’s no big loss.

Okay, so The Front Door Fiasco.

Having successfully changed the locks on the back door, I tackled the front. I managed to remove most of the hardware doodads – the knobs, the pretty lever plate on the outside, stuff like that. That got me to here:

At this point, I noticed three things: 1-I couldn’t really figure out what to do or take off next, 2-the deadbolt was stuck in the locked position, and 3-the whole shebang seemed interconnected.

So, I did some googling, and learned that the front door had what is known as an interconnected lock, or mortise lock (because it has to be mortised into the door) – and that these are fucking awesome, heavy-duty, secure locks, that generally run about $300-700 before installation. In other words, that we totally didn’t want to change that lock. The only problem was I couldn’t get the deadbolt to unlock, and the door was open, so I couldn’t shut it (because the deadbolt was sticking out). So, we called a professional. He was very nice, and it was pretty cool watching him work. It turned out that in trying to remove the lock I had done something you shouldn’t be able to do as easily as I did: break the whole thing, and in such a way that it couldn’t be fixed. And I’d done it just by trying to unscrew a wee little screw – but that wee little screw broke a casing around it. Sigh. Here’s what a broken $300 lock looks like – but at least we hadn’t bought that lock in the first place. I mean, there’s a slight difference in breaking an expensive lock you bought, and breaking an expensive lock someone else bought and you just “inherited”. So I felt a little less dumb.

Anyway, so the locksmith was nice enough to cover the hole for the mortise lock with a metal cover, and install the new deadbolt and keyed entry locks. He also checked the back door to make sure I’d installed those locks properly, and I had. (So I’m still the bomb as far as that door’s concerned.) And he charged us less than $100 – which I’m convinced is pretty amazing. He did quite a bit of drilling and installing, and I was expecting to pay quite a bit more, since 1-it was a professional and 2-it was a Saturday afternoon/evening. Here’s the finished, lockable front door:

I asked Greg if he felt like he was living with Lucille Ball, considering all the foibles and fiascos I get into – and he said, “No, more like Tim Allen.”

I finished the first sock out of Crazy Cotton (well, except for weaving in the ends), and am pretty close to finishing the second one. I’m pretty psyched.

And last night I cooked a “pizza bake” that was pretty awesome.

Earlier tonight, Greg introduced Skeeter to the wonders of margarine.

Skeeter looooooooves margarine. I wouldn’t let Greg give him too much – I don’t want to have to deal with cat diarrhea. But Skeeter cried in the kitchen for more margarine for a while.

Now we’re watching last night’s TNA payperview. It’s pretty fucking awesome. But Jeff Hardy is kinda nuts. And by “kinda” I mean “totally.” And that dayglo bodypaint has got to go. And why doesn’t Raven have a match? And Hardy just did the craziest high-risk shit I think I’ve ever seen. Nuts, I tell you, completely nuts. Greg said, “How is he walking after that?” And I said, “He’s totally crazy, and probably hopped up on drugs.” Actually, it looks like that dive didn’t hurt him much after all – but I’m still standing by my “crazy” assessment.

A big project after we moved into our home was changing the locks. I’m pretty handy, if I do say so myself, and I was led to believe that changing the locks would be pretty damn easy. So we bought a set of two keyed entry knobs and two deadbolts, all keyed to the same key, and I set about installing them the second weekend of our homeowner-ship.

The back door (that opens from the kitchen onto the back porch) was a pain in my ass. The original deadbolt had what I suspect are some funky contractor-installed things that looked like nails hammered into longass screws. I have no idea what these fuckers are called, but I know for a fact that they are a pain in the ass to remove, and I suspect they are installed so that the hapless homeowner will have to call a professional to change the locks. And really, once I realized what was going on (ie-that some previous professional was trying to get me to spend money when I shouldn’t have to), I was bound and determined to get that fucker out by myself. But I couldn’t unscrew the fasteners – so I, uh, took a screwdriver and forcibly wedged it (using a hammer) under the edge of the deadbolt. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a smart move, but I didn’t get hurt, so I guess it doesn’t matter now. And it dented the door a wee bit around where the original deadbolt sat – but luckily the new deadbolt was a little larger, and covered the dents. So, I wedged the screwdriver under the deadbolt and wiggled it around – basically trying to pry the deadbolt off the door – in a couple places. The deadbolt didn’t come off the door, but I did pry the one side of the deadbolt further away from the other side, including those damn screw-nails. So then, I took the hammer and hammered the deadbolt – carefully avoiding hammering the screw-nails – back towards the door. SUCCESS! The screw-nails stuck out a bit from the deadbolt’s surface. Then I took a pair of needle-nose pliers and grabbed the screw-nails and unscrewed them, then removed and replaced the deadbolt. I am the motherfucking bomb. Here are some pictures:

Part II : The Front Door Fiasco tomorrow.