I’ll be away-from-the-blog for a few days taking care of some family stuff. Blogging, if any, will be sporadic and short.

I have some new finished objects to show when I get back. I’m quite pleased with how they turned out. And I know I need to get Sensational Shirttail up in the gallery. It will be there next week some time.

In the meantime, I’ve finished mommymonster.com’s move to the new servers. Check it out!

#1 Son moved home yesterday. I could tell because all of his worldly possessions were piled in his room when I got home last night. (Readers will remember that he moved out “only for the summer, Mom.”)

Moo Cow was curled up on top of #1 Son’s clothes, purring. She’s happy he’s back. Captain Kidd was whacked out because something in his tiny little universe changed and he wasn’t consulted. He got over it by bedtime. Phoebe could care less.

After three months of silence, last night it became obvious that I will have to again get used to going to sleep with the TV in the family room and the lights in the kitchen on. But I’m so glad to have him back, that I can adjust pretty darn quickly. Although I don’t begrudge him the opportunity — it was good experience for him — I missed him a lot. He’s good company.

This morning there was a body-shaped lump in his bed. We’re back to business as usual.

Well… not quite usual. This week is the first time in 12 years that I haven’t taken the first day of school off from work in order to make sure that buses were met, someone was at school on time with the right supplies, etc. This year there was no last-minute frantic search for just the right notebook. (One year I went to three different stores to find 4 tear-out graph-paper notebooks. There were several of us moms looking, and when some were finally located we were ready to fight over them.) This year I didn’t have to fight the traffic trying to get in and out of the school drop-off.

This year school is fading back into the background noise of something that other people’s kids do.

I now have a young man ready to start college at the end of the month. It still brings a lump to my throat.

I have not been idle, this long weekend, and here’s the proof!

Sensational Shirttail is finally finished. I’m quite pleased with it, as it does have the same slouchy goodness that the picture in the book shows. I should have knit the arms a bit shorter, but they’re OK if I roll the cuffs up. I might take them out. But probably not.

I used a tiny, tiny part of one of the two extra skeins I bought last weekend in a panic, sure that I didn’t have enough. So my panic was justified. In a small amount.

I’m trying to decide what my next “big” project will be. I’d like to do Tilt, but I might have to wait until payday to afford all that Noro Silk Garden.

I had some of the Noro Kochoran left over from the Sensational Shirttail. The resulting in-store credit caused these little goodies to jump into my bag and beg to be taken home.

And what do you think these will become?

I have some ideas… 😀

And if any of my ideas pan out, you’ll be the first to know!

I’m seeing reports on the local news that gas companies and/or local service stations are asking people not to top off their tank, but to wait until the tank is almost drained before filling up. This is supposed to prevent runs on gas station.

Why? This makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

Let’s say I drive 500 miles per week and use an average of 10 gallons of gas to do so (hey… I drive a Prius). That means that every 50 miles takes about 1 gallon of gas. If I decide to buy 1 gallon of gas every 50 miles rather than 10 gallons of gas after 500, I’ve still used 10 gallons of gas in roughly the same amount of time. The difference over the span of a week to the local gas station is zero. They’ll get to see my smiling face more often, but they won’t be selling me any more gas.

If the price of gas is going up, then I’ll come out ahead because some of the earlier gallons of gas will have been purchased at a lower price than the last gallons. If I wait until the end of the week, the gas station (or probably the oil company that supplies them) will come out ahead because I bought all of those same 10 gallons at the highest price.

So who benefits if I wait? The oil companies.

When the Teton dam broke in 1976, I was already living full-time in Portland. My brother was home for the summer in Idaho Falls and helped to sandbag the Broadway bridge. The flood never came anywhere near mama’s house.

I came home for a visit a month or so later and drove with mama to look at some of the damage. The town of Rexburg was about 80% destroyed. Sugar City, a tiny little town that boasted a cheese factory we had visited when I was small (I remember so well the man at the factory offering me a sample of curds, using a snow shovel for a scoop) was gone. Not damaged. Gone. Farmhouses and barns, those that were still recognizable, had been moved off their foundations and deposited in the midst of ruined fields surrounded by downed trees and mounds miscellaneous, unidentifiable “stuff.” Nothing was as I remembered it. The landscape I’d grown up in and knew like the back of my hand had been transformed into something unfamiliar, and I couldn’t get my bearings in it. I drove through this alienscape with tears running down my face. Even though much of it was rebuilt (although not, I think, the Sugar City cheese factory), it never seemed quite “right” to me afterward.

Eleven people died when the Teton dam collapsed. The monetary loss was said to be around $1 billion.

I cannot begin to comprehend the loss and damaged caused by Katrina’s little hissy fit in the Gulf. Nor can I begin to comprehend what the inhabitants of that area must be going through, what they will continue to go through for many months. My heart goes out to them.

This is about the 20th time I have tried to write about Katrina. Other, better writers have covered all aspects of the subject far more eloquently than I ever could. I find myself speechless.