Waiting, With Caterpillars and Cake

Patience is power.
Patience is not an absence of action;
rather it is "timing"
it waits on the right time to act,
for the right principles
and in the right way.
― Fulton J. Sheen

It's been unseasonably cool around here. I'm actually ok with it. If you've been reading my blog for any amount of time, you'll know that I usually find the summer really overwhelming. The cool weather means good things for me, namely:

• The ability to get a good night's sleep.
• The ability to bake cakes.

This is excellent news, as I am able to both bake a cake and eat it without being grumpy. This is the best result for all people who need to deal with me on a daily basis. It also supports my goal to work through the stuff in the cupboards before we move. Behold: Orange Semolina Cake with Bay Leaf and Lemon Balm Syrup. This is much better than the idea I had to try to work through the chickpeas and tuna in there. I'll save that for next week:

Life pre-move and pre-current house sale is kinda tedious at times. We were banished for part of the morning today for the landlord's realtor to show the house. Luckily, the rain forecast for today did not materialize, so we wandered down to the wander to drink coffee and eat apples in the sunshine:

                                 

Seymour got busy lazing in the grass:

I became fascinated by a caterpillar in the grass, which I eventually "rescued" and put into a tree:

I'm really looking forward to getting out of this limbo and getting on with moving into our new place. We haven't even started packing yet because we don't have a confirmed moving date yet. If someone could get busy and make me some kind of teleporter that would just move all our stuff with a flick of a switch, that'd be great. I'll even bake you a cake. I won't even put tuna in it.

I signed up for a Creative Lettering class this Friday. It feels like a long time since I attended any workshops, so I was pretty happy to find out about this one. What I didn't realize was that it would come with some pre-class homework. So far, I'm supposed to notice lettering that I like around me, and I'm also supposed to play around with strokes and squiggles. I wish all my homework in my life was like this:

I've also spent some time thinking about my next yarn project. I was all geared up to make another home decor piece... maybe a wall-hanging or a cushion or a throw. The pending move has me all excited to decorate.

And then, I decided I'd make myself a top. Heh... I'm a terrible project manager.

I dug around in the stash and came across these skeins of mercerized cotton which I'd forgotten about. I sat and wound one skein into a ball by hand one evening. I don't do that very often, and I found it quite tedious. I pulled out my ball-winder the next day and said, "Right, this should only take a few minutes," and then spent an hour fighting with one of the skeins tangling up on itself. The offending ball is in the back of the photo. I'm hoping this is not a bad omen:

The pattern I'm using has a lace motif, but it's all written out with no charts. I'm usually pretty adaptable and can knit from either, but I was really not in the mood for trying to fight my way through the written instructions this time. I decided to convert the written instructions using Stitch Fiddle, which is the same online app I used to make the chart for a top I made a couple of years ago. It took me the better part of an hour, but it's been so worth it. I've been zinging through this repeat and, dare I say, I think I might be halfway through it next week:

Oooo, I better shut up now. I'm totally jinxing it. I think I better get dinner in order before the whole thing implodes. Have a great week!