It's a Good Day to Clean

I'm thinking weekly posts are going to be my best hope at this point in time. I'm trying out the "working 15 minutes, taking a 15 minute break" FlyLady idea today. I think that's her suggestion. I figure I can get four hours of housework done if I stay at it all day long. (Hah, that worked for about 1 hour and now I've been here since.)

So I'll be here on and off for the next couple hours or so. Depending on how much I end up fonting about. Pretty cool on the new Blogger feature - auto-saving drafts. NEAT.

My keyboard and mouse arrived. The mouse is awesome, now to learn how to use all the buttons all over it. The keyboard's spacebar isalittle funky... as you can see I am having some spacebar issues. I hope I'll get used to it.

On the baby sweater front... well, it's looking like I might be giving it to someone else's baby. Maybe. I've become a bit annoyed with the previous recipient baby's parent who didn't even know I was knitting a baby sweater, so will never even know what the baby almost had. I was confused about the front and blogged about it here. I think I solved the problem. I'm pretty sure I was backwards on my sides. I will try to remember in the future to use patterns which show the layout of the pieces. This pattern doesn't, so I have no idea how the individual pieces are supposed to look. But this is what I have for now. I think the piece on the left is the right side. The piece on the right side is the first side I did and I had to take out several rows to be redone correctly.

Because this part of the pattern takes so much thinking effort, I decided to start my sock gauge. I hear a lot of grumbling about making the gauge, but then I read a blog somewhere - did I already link to it in a previous post? I see that I haven't. Anyway, I decided to embrace gauge swatch-making and use it as a tool, which is what they say it is anyway. That said, I discovered why I couldn't get my gauge without using needles 3 sizes smaller with this knit baby sweater. It's because I knit freakishly loose. So I decided to tighten up my knitting on the sock gauge. I left this image extra big so you can click on it and maybe see what I'm taking about. The bottom few rows are very loose and stretchy. But as I continued on perfecting my technique my knitting became tighter and more uniform. Later in the day I worked on the baby sweater again and was still able to achieve the loose knitting effect which is important if I ever want to finish the baby sweater.

I like this article about gauging.

Rethinking Thin arrived. I've had a chance to read a bit of it, and frankly am astonished at how long people have been dieting, and learned that like fashion, diets resurface their way through the generations.

Yesterday dh had another side job. It's actually a continuation of side jobs for an elderly woman. We neglected to call to let her know our estimated time of arrival so naturally she was a bit annoyed at us. It was getting late in the day so we had almost decided to wait until next weekend to finish the job, but then we decided we just wanted to get it done. We refinished her back gate, and replaced the door frame (the decorative part) around one of her side doors. We stained the back gate and painted the door frame. It took longer than expected - four hours both of us working steadily. These jobs always do. I told dh yesterday to start doubling the time he's estimating for jobs. If the person doesn't like the cost, then they won't hire us for the job. That's fine.

The lady knows we work four days each week and made a point to comment on how she only has two days each week to get things done and can't sit around waiting for us to arrive. Well, her roommate also drives but doesn't work at all. I say she should do the errands and running around during the week. Whatever. It's not we slept in until 10am and finally decided to get going. I was up by 4:30am, out milking by 5am and we were finally leaving just about 7am. It was a non-stop day. We finally arrived home at 8pm. Ds2 had a wonderful dinner ready for us. Butter fried chicken breast (no batter coating), a lovely tossed salad, eggplant and zucchini and fried rice. It tasted so good. I got overheated while working in the sun and at one point had to sit down and kick off my shoes and socks. I was just too hot. The lady had some friends over, a man and woman and their young daughter, for swimming. They're splashing and yelling (Marco - POLO - Marco - POLO) and we're burning up from the heat.

No one has any time anymore. Today ds2 said the weekend never even started and it's already over.

I was late for milking this morning. The girls were yelling at me. I started milking around 7:10am. Very late indeed. I noticed Ms. Z was still in heat (I questioned whether she was yesterday but wasn't quite sure) and have been toying with the thought of some off season breeding - especially since I'm noticing my girls coming into heat this late in the year. Usually they stop showing signs of cycling by end of March. So I decided to take her over to visit Elvis once I was done milking. I have been worried about his fertility since I stupidly didn't pay attention to the important things when choosing a buck. Things like positioning of the equipment... when humans have fertility issues, men are advised to switch from jockey shorts to boxers for maximum fertility since having the scrotum snuggled near to the body keeps the sperm warm. God designed the sperm to be cooler, thus the hanging design. Elvis' ahem seems to be very near to his body.

Today I moved our other buck, a Nigerian Dwarf -- who is excessively sexy (iow, constantly peeing on his own head) and always ragingly in the mood (and quite frankly he seems more like a dirty old man pervert the way he's always leering and snorting and sticking out his tongue at the girls, lol) -- into the hallway which separates the does from the bucks, while Elvis and Ms. Z had a chance to get to know one another. Ms. Z immediately reared up and popped Elvis one on the head, so I had to hold her to stop her from doing that. One of my goat mentors says there is nothing worse than a young buckling being bashed by a doe to make him less likely to perform his job successfully. Finally he covered her and was done in a fraction of millisecond.

I debated leaving her with him for the day, to make sure she was bred but ended up taking her back home. Next I took out one of our doelings who is 14 months old. She has always been on the wild side and I've been worried about her ability as a milker. I've heard some horror stories of people trying to milk wild does. So I've been catching her once each weekend, removing her from the yard, putting her on the milking stand, locking her in and giving her some grain. She's taming down nicely.

I am working with Elvis each weekend (should work with him more, but just don't have the time) training him to walk with me when I hold him by the collar. I need to be able to take him to visit the does and take him back home. Bucks grow to be very big and it's important that they learn to take commands. Once he weighs 250 pounds, it's too late to teach him to walk calmly. By that time he'll be charging and racing to get where we're going and that would be a disaster. I'd never get him back home. So I took Elvis from his pen to walk him for a while. Last week was the first time I went into his pen. While he didn't run from me too much, he did run. But this week he came right over to me. He knows good things happen when he comes with me. Namely he gets grain. But best of all, he'll learn walking peacefully with me will allow him a visit with one of his wives. I did take him over to visit again with Ms. Z. She stood for him this time, that's a good sign that she's at optimum fertility.

If she produces kids in October, his fertility will become less of a question. I will probably breed a couple other does if they come into heat in the next couple of weeks. We have never bred off season before. Usually we wait until September or thereafter to breed. That is the normal season for breeding Nubians. Also, for people who show, it puts their does at the peak of their lactation so they have these huge udders when being shown at the fair. But since we don't show our goats, that isn't a priority for us.

Sweet dreams, kitty.

Until next time.