I'm still in limbo on knitting projects. Very strange. I guess this is the downside of only having one project going at a time. I've
had something going more or less constantly for a year. I've been swatching things and fantasy shopping for yarn and will probably start
a real project soon. I've also unraveled bits of an old Ecudorean sweater that I've been carting around with me since high school and
hardly ever wearing. It almost went to Goodwill, but then I realized that I could rip it out and play with the fiber. The yarn is
barely spun so it breaks a lot in the unravelling process. The flipside is that you can hold the two pieces together and rub them on
your corduroys and stick them together quite easily. Zoe's been dyeing bits and pieces of it with Kool-Aid. And I've just cast on a hat
with it.

Now that it's officially spring, I've been tidying up the yard. I think the fact that I invited people over for Sunday may have more to do with it, but there's nothing like a party to prod you into those long put off chores. Hanging pictures where they should go instead of on the nail that's already there... folding up the guest futon that hasn't seen a guest in weeks... cleaning the windows since it will still be light out... and sprucing up the yard.

I planted a few things in the front. There were a few bare spots in the gazania "lawn", so I replanted those. I also bought a bunch of drought-tolerant wild flower seeds, California poppies, painted daisies... and threw them over the gazania. We'll see what manages to take root, if anything.

My cheap trick for emergency yard spruce up, though, was to shell out $15 for bark chips/mulch/beauty bark. A tad suburban, perhaps, but in a couple of hours of pulling out the worst of the weeds and the dead plant stuff, sweeping and spreading the bark, the courtyard looks fresh and cheerful. Plus, it's supposed to help the soil stay moister and keep weeds down. All good.

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