Friday, February 29, 2008

Stash shock

It is a snowy day today, the last weekday of my kid's midwinter break. We're all a little sick of each other--Brian is on a work trip and I've maxed out my "entertaining mom" persona. It takes a lot more energy to come up with interesting things to do with the kids when the weather is lousy, though, all things considered, we've done pretty well this week. My mom and I took the kids to a water park overnight on Monday and I think we all came back a few shades paler from the chlorine. It was fun in a weird indoor mid-western kind of way and did tire the kids out, especially Fiona who pretended to be a seahorse and pulled my mom in an inner tube around the lazy river for about two hours straight. I've let the kids eat fast food this week which resulted in them being pretty nice to me, we visited pretty much every branch of the Ann Arbor District Library and I planned to take the kids to the Detroit Science Center today until the snow storm and sickness hit.

The newly minted 5-year-old is asleep upstairs with a low fever and I'm letting the 7-year-old play as many games of Chain Factor as he wants. So after I shoveled the 5 inches of snow that fell this morning, the house has been pretty peaceful.

It seemed like a good day to start taking responsibility for my yarn stash. I got the invite to join Ravelry a few weeks ago so I set up my account, logged in two of my works-in-progress and then kind of spaced out and forgot about it. Today I had enough time to do a little more exploring and discovered that I can check out other people's experiences with patterns I'm considering and also organize my own notebook area. The scary and humbling part is to take responsibility for my stash.

Right now my stash takes up 4 Sterilite bins that fit under one half of our double bed. And they are kind of, um, full...
Some of the items packed in there I recognize--a whole load of Rowan Big Wool print from a sweater I frogged, the extra ball or two of yarn that were left over from a project where I was worried about running out of the dye lot and overbought a bit, a few gifted balls of yarn that I haven't had the heart to get rid of. But there is also a large quantity of yarn that I completely forgot I had. There's a nice little "Will trade or sell" feature on Ravelry that I plan to make use of to get rid of some of these errant skeins. Maybe I can get myself down to 3 bins?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We went to a nearly identical waterpark in January -- Great Wolf Lodge in the Poconos -- and we all loved it, even though it was a kid madhouse. It had this sort of water rollercoaster that only Lou would go on since it was off limits to small kids and pregnant women. He actually said it was kind of scary; at one point you get dumped into this sort of toilet bowl that whirls you around in the dark and flushes you out the other end. My favorite thing was the huge bucket that dumped out every couple of minutes