I keep joking that I made it rain yesterday by the sheer force of my will. We woke up to what looked like storm clouds brewing, but often summer storms dissipate right before they hit our city. And, when it’s mid 90s already, we call them summer storms. Thankfully they did not dissipate. The rain we got wasn’t hard rain, but it did do a good job watering our plants for us, and went a long way toward filling our rain barrel. This meant that Mr. Ink and I got an evening “off.” Because at this point our gardens are so large that watering them properly really can eat up an evening.

Despite the fact that the rain made everything super humid, I decided to go out and weed the rose of sharon garden bed. Now, yesterday Bagheeracr at Experiencing Local made the comment that maybe I could set the timer for 2 minutes and then get on with it. I figured I’d do myself 3 minutes better and set the timer for 5 minutes. And, I figured if I do that every evening I can, I am likely to feel less overwhelmed. So, I set my timer for 5 minutes, weeded for 10 or 15 minutes, and made decent progress without feeling overwhelmed or miserable. In fact, even in the humidity, that amount of time wasn’t enough for me to break a sweat.

So, I am going to try that trick again. But next time with a bucket rather than throwing the weeds on the lawn, which always annoys Mr. Ink even though he comes by and picks them up anyhow. (The patience of that man is quite amazing, so we try not to take advantage of it too often.)

If I was really smart, I’d go out and weed first thing in the morning before work! In fact, I wandered out this morning to look at the garden very briefly, to see my huge lily beginning to bloom!

Isn’t that wild? I thought “I should really plant some more of those” and then I realized that those are ones which I propagated, so I’d better not. With any luck, I’ll have more in a few years, and they’ll get overwhelming quickly.

This garden bed is a constant work in progress. You can see that we’ve still got lots of area to fill in. And I’ve got to get my mums pinched back again. Mr. Ink just bought a plant for that garden, but has planted it so far back it’s hard to see. I think he’s going to be moving it forward so it doesn’t just smoosh in with everything else. There’s some stuff in there I am allowing to stay for now, but will be removed in the future. But, it’s a pretty vast improvement on last year. 

This. This is what that garden bed looked like last year. (And what you don’t see are the huge volunteer tree roots that we kept cutting back but really needed digging up. We still find them sometimes.)

I was pretty motivated to work on the list from yesterday, getting my work bag cleaned out and more than half a repeat done on the tibetan clouds stole, in addition to regular keep the house running chores. I always get irritable at the thought of having to put away dishes while Miss Butterfly is away, it’s her job. But then I realize that Mr. Ink and I use fewer dishes overall, and I really only have to run the dishwasher twice when she’s gone for a week.

After those things were done, Mr. Ink and I finished our listen to A Man Called Ove while he made dinner and I worked on this new project:

The pattern is the One Row Handspun Scarf, and the yarn is some of Miss Marja’s handspun. I’d tried to make it into another scarf awhile back, but could tell I’d run out of yarn. Let’s see if I can find a photo:

There we go. The ruching ate up way too much yarn, so I had to rip it back out. I still want to make the above pattern at some point, but I’ll save it for something with more yarn. I the meantime, I really love how the one row handspun scarf pattern is showing off the yarn. I started with 7 balls of yarn, and I am currently knitting on my 3rd ball of yarn. I bet she made this yarn on spindles, because all the balls are about the same size. Which means at the rate of one ball of yarn per day, I’ll have a completed scarf by the end of the weekend.

A week or so ago I think I expressed that I really wanted to work on something out of handspun, rather than working on all my projects out of commercial yarn. Now I’ve got two handspun scarves on the needles, which really helps scratch that itch! I am enjoying my month of knitting. Earlier this year I was able to get my yarn stash down to JUST ONE cabinet. Since my spinning picked up again, I was struggling again. But, with this latest month of knitting I’ve got everything put away in that one cabinet again, much to my relief. I never want to expand beyond it! In fact, I’d like to get it down to such a reasonable level that I can easily move yarn about in the storage cubes, making each skein easier to see. Right now they are sort of stuffed in there pretty tightly.

I guess that’s it for around here! I am pretty pleased with my progress yesterday evening. So much so I’ve made myself an additional list of other stuff I need to get done, like purchasing plane tickets for vacation and stuff. Let’s see if I can be equally good at getting that one done!