Lovelihood

Finished, last night, the second installment to my sashiko stitched alphabet. This U, or is it an N, was worked itself out mostly while catching up on streamed episodes of 30 Rock.

Meeting up at an unfamiliar-to-us park today with some other families soon to be immersed in Kindergarten life, the group decided to explore one of the trails that took us down to a creek. Next to the creek, popping out amongst mulchy pine needles and similary moist underbrush, was a brightly painted manhole which everyone traipsed past as if it were perfectly natural for brightly painted sewer portals to be found creekside.

Of all the crafty fads out there right now, I'm most smitten by the faux bois stuff. You know, fake wood. So when it came to packing up a gift for our attendance at today's Angry Birds-themed birthday party, I thought I'd try my hand at faux-ly bois-ing up a simple cardboard box to house the topical plush toy we'd picked up. Seems a little much for decorating a inevitably tossed-aside box, but, really, it took so little time to make. Simply doodled out some wood-grainesque lines onto an easy-carve block and went to work on it with the tools. Handed it, along with an inkpad and a box of pastels to The Boy, and let him go to town on the box. And now another birthday party is behind us.

When I was a kid there wasn't anything much more satisfying than an a common hard-boiled egg steeped in some briny stew stuffs, mashed up into rice and sprinkled with soy sauce for good measure. It seems that generously salted eggs have a sort of universal appeal. The Mr. has a friend who, living in Sweden the past year, brought back for homecoming souvenirs little tubes of Kalles Kaviar. Spreadable fish roe in a tube. One of those cultural culinary oddities, like the Vegemite of Australia and the deep fried Oreos of carnivals that, I suppose, seem perfectly normal to their native audiences. It'd been sitting in the fridge since The Mr. brought it home, until I decided to break it out for lunch today, and decided it hit more or less the same flavor notes of my childhood stewed eggs.

Even I'm amazed that heading into the middle of August we've only had a handful of days that actually felt summer-like. I'm not complaining, though. Heading out on foot under overcast skies to grab coffee and donuts, and then, later on once the clouds had mostly burned off to reveal a perfectly pleasant 70°ish day, biking down to the playground pretty much sums up the perfect way to kill off the last couple weeks before The Boy heads off into full-time schooldom.

Playing in some corner of our yard where teeny-tiniest of flowers live, The Boy picked up a few hundred specimens.

I've reached that momentous, but ultimately anticlimactic, stage of quilt construction where I'm stitching whole blocks to other whole blocks. It seems like such an end-nearing step, except that once that's through, there's still the business of sandwiching and quilting and binding. I might, for the first time, break out the walking foot and give machine quilting the old college try. Maybe.