Last Spin in St Louis

 

This will be the last spin I will ever do in St Louis, Missouri. It is corriedale, and from two braids (so 8oz total) that I bought off a dyer on Fiber Market Place. I will probably keep it as a single and hopefully use it for both warp and weft on my rigid heddle loom, after we move to New Jersey and get settled. If it wasn't for St Louis (and by extension the more relaxed nature of the Midwest), I don't think I would have nearly learned or picked up as much, or as fast, as I did in the fiber arts world. It is yet another thing that I will miss dearly after yet I leave here, but sometning I'll take with me for the rest of my life.

We have less than a week left in St Louis, and next week at this time we should be in Indianapolis. We are shipping our items in PODs, and will be driving the cars (and kids) together with my Dad, who has been staying with us the last month to help with the move. I am very nervous about the move and settling into NJ, but I know that I am in the best of company for doing so. 

St Louis, I will miss you and its people.

My Days

My time spent every day is basically spent in a few broad categories:

1) Keep kids alive

2) Keep kids stimulated/enriched (that is, not parked in front of a device)

3) Cook

4) Clean

5) Laundry

6) House errands, like grocery shopping, addressing emails and things regarding the house

7) Keeping myself sane

8) Making sure I get adequate rest so I can perform the more critical duties like number 1

And thanks to Madeleine not sleeping by herself any more (she will instead scream/cry for 2h 30min+ without napping - that's the longest I've held out so I'm not sure how long she can actually tolerate), my time for doing all of these things is woefully constrained. 

Last night was the neighbourhood Block Party. While I really enjoyed it, it did push everyone's bed time later, and then E was awake throwing a fit in the middle of the night. I ended up sending her late to school. Meanwhile M is as clingy as ever and not sleeping alone. I know it's only these 2 weeks that I'm flying solo, and while I relish being independent and being able to make my own decisions with zero input as to how to spend the day, I am just tired.

Bye Pin Oak, Bye Silver Maple

When we first moved into our first

 house, it was partly because Jon and I fell in love with the landscaping and all the trees. In particular, I loved the big Pin Oak in our front yard. It provided a lot of nice shade, especially in the summer. As we don't have much space in the back yard, I used to inflate the baby wading pool/sprinkler toy in the front yard, under the shade of the tree, which was fine because we lived on such a quiet street anyway.

However we are are moving in a few months, and both big trees in our front yard, the Pin Oak and the Silver Maple, are sick and dying. Today the tree people finally came to cut them down, and I am feeling very sad. It costs over 5k to get them removed, and their loss will be keenly felt, especially since so many big trees have been dying around our little subdivision of Morwood Hills. Once shaded streets now feel the full blast of the Midwest sun. Maybe we will plant a new tree before we go, maybe we will leave it to the new house owners, but either way the removal of those trees is just yet another stage in our departure from St Louis.

Edit: this is how M has decided to watch the tree chopping 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Last week at Aldi, I bought 2 bags of Gala apples. This is because I noticed E had been eating a lot of apples recently, so I thought 2 bags of apples (3 pounds for each bag?) would be enough for us to last the week-ish until my next Aldi shop. When I opened both bags of apples, they overflowed out of the fruit bowl and into another container. Today after buying a bag of oranges from Sam's Club, I went to put them in the fruit bowls and found a grand total of 2 apples left. 2. Apples. I don't know how on earth she finished them all, because Jon doesn't eat apples (allergy), and M sure as heck doesn't know what to do with one. I eat apples at the rate of about 1 a day, but in order to have finished all the apples, E must have been eating about 4 a day. I am both befuddled and amazed.

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Last Sunday, I attended a beginner's drop spindle class as part of the Midwest Fiber Festival to learn how to spin yarn. I've been trying to practice everyday (10 minutes at least), and it's quite a fun new rabbit hole to get involved in. The class was 4h long, and at the end of it my mind and eyes were swimming from the sheer effort of focusing so long on a single thing - something I haven't done in years. At the same time, I haven't spent so long on just one non-child related thing in years. After that, I browsed the vendors at the Midwest Fiber Festival, and learnt a lot of new spinning/fiber vocabulary from the kind and knowledgeable vendors (combed/carded/top/batts/staple). Then I went to run errands. So I was gone from the house for close to 7 hours, which is definitely the longest Jon has been left alone with the girls. When I got home, Jon said he never knew they fought so much, haha. 

Anyway, this is how much yarn I've spun for the past week. As much as I enjoy the process so far, and all the new knowledge it brings, I'm still not sure what to do with the yarn I've spun. I'm not the best crocheter, and I don't really know how to knit. Still, there's something in the act of spinning that feels meditative, and makes me feel connected to history, like the huge nerd I am.

Muse

Last night, Jon and I attended a Muse concert at the Chaifetz Arena. It was a nice size, big yet cosy at the same time, and the surrounding infrastructure much less messy than the Enterprise Center. I have been listening to Muse a lot on and off since I was about 16, and seeing them live was one of my big wishes. This concert was by far, the best live act I have ever seen. 

Evanescence was the second act playing last night (we missed the opening act because of the kids), and we managed to catch the show in the nick of time. Then Muse came on at 9pm and played for a solid 2 hours, and it was amazing with the changing sets, pyrotechnics and assorted exploding confetti. As usual, they had a solid setlist that told a narrative, and yet incorporated a lot of older hits from almost all of their albums. I'm thankful that I finally got to see them live.

Reddit Comment

The best Reddit comment for Feb 2023 goes to the user who commented:

"Goodnight room,
Goodnight moon,
Goodnight Chinese high altitude surveillance balloon."

Cookie Baking and Breaking

 

Today out of the blue, Jon texted about how the nurses at the place he was rotating at were asking about cookies. Since I was planning the stay in today anyway, because it was a snow day (a failed winter storm that just became winter weather, boo), I decided to oblige and bake cookies. This time, I decided I'd break up the mixing of the dough into two batches, hoping it would result in a more even chocolate chip distribution in the dough. I felt very clever and thought this would prevent frustration on my end. In the end that strategy worked, but somehow during the process I managed to break two things. First, I somehow broke the plastic tupperware holding the sugar when I tried to use it as a scoop to get the sugar out of the sack - too much force? The second was when I was trying to use a plastic Chinese soup spoon to scoop portions of dough out of the mixing bowl. The handle snapped off, startling me. I continued to use it, but the broken end did feel a little sharp. When I was done, I tossed both broken items.

Anyway, at least the cookies turned out perfect. It's always hard figuring the timing out, because my oven seems to be less warm than the purported temperature, and I prefer cookies on the crunchier side. This time, with about 15 mins at 375 Fahrenheit, the cookies turned out crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. Hooray!

Happy Things

Things that have made me happy/inordinately excited recently (besides the usual happiness from Family and Seasonal Events):

1. Top freezers being installed in my local Aldi - twice the freezer space for more things for sale! 

2. Yarn Com - a yarn store/crafting space opening up in Creve Coeur, checking it out yesterday on it's opening day, and learning that they're planning to have a floor loom installed inside. Maybe they'll have Spinning and Table/Floor loom lessons too?

3. Finding a 2nd hand 10" Schacht Cricket Rigid Heddle Loom for sale on FB marketplace nearby, learning how to use it and weaving my first piece. Then learning about weaving on Rigid Heddle Looms in general

4. Then finding someone in Springfield IL selling a 2nd hand 32" Ashford Rigid Heddle Loom on FB Marketplace, and her driving all the way to St Louis to sell it to me, and then learning how to use it and weave my first piece on it

5. Learning how to make good Cantonese-style soup - learned it from my Mum. As I type this, I'm boiling Pork Ribs and Lotus Soup. I've also learned to not be afraid of adding dates and goji berries to soup.

6. Reading and finishing the Shadow and Bone trilogy by Leigh Bardugo - I first read the Six of Crows duology in 2019 when I was student teaching, and loved it, I purchased Shadow and Bone on my Kindle sometime later, but never started it. I managed to borrow the other two books of the trilogy from the STL County Library, and immensely enjoyed the series. I then also finished the first season of Shadow and Bone on Netflix, and am also awaiting the second season. 

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As an aside, on Monday I picked up a stroller wagon from someone off FB marketplace. She lived off Carman Road in Ballwin. When I was driving in the area to her place, I noticed how incredibly hilly that area was, and also noticed to my immense satisfaction that the road names were geographically accurate; roads with Heights and Ridge in their name were on ridges, and Valley was really a valley. This made the Geography nerd in me very pleased, especially since it's more common that not that these terms are applied willy-nilly to developments and roads because they 'sound nice'.