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These Are Not Resolutions

Lauren

Just things I’m going to do this year whether it kills me or not. I repeat, these are not resolutions.

1. Apply to grad school (literacy, digital rhet, or ed tech?).
2. Grow my bangs out.
3. Get a fucking job, hippie. Preferably within the next two weeks.
4. Write at least one short story.
5. Plant a better garden.
6. Figure out this gardening crap, even though I can’t keep a plant alive.
7. Finish knitting a sweater.
8. Finish knitting a pair of socks. That means two socks, not quitting after one.
9. Remember to tell E to practice piano close to daily.
10. Continue to cut out all of my negative influences.
11. Call my friends more.
12. Go out more. Quit being a hermit.
13. Get a wine rack and fill it with yummy special occasion reds.
14. Get off of my ass every now and again and do something resembling exercise.
15. Picnics.
16. Get rid of the ugly shrubs in my front yard.
17. Get rid of the grapes in the arbor and put in a perennial flower vine.
18. Do the dishes before I run out of forks.
19. One word: Ukelele.

And this is how I spent my New Year’s Eve:

New Year's Entertainment

New Year's Entertainment

New Year's Entertainment

New Year's Entertainment

New Year's Entertainment

Watching these guys go crazy over their new scratching kitty thingie. Catfight!

23 thoughts on These Are Not Resolutions

  2. Okay fine. I have one plant I have kept alive in the house, a tree I found next to a dumpster. Apparently it’s previous owner couldn’t kill it either.

    As for the garden: weeding, harvesting, fertilizing, tilling, hoe! I can’t keep up. Plus, the twenty tomato plants thing. That was a biiiiiiiiig mistake.

  3. Mulch. Mulchmulchmulchmulchmulch.

    Dunno how your town works, but my local council picks up green waste with the rest of the garbage, turns it into mulch, and what they don’t use on the parks the ratepayers can come and pick up to use on their garden. All you need is big bags/tubs in the back of the car to collect it with.

    Start with a small flower bed of hardy cottage classics or tough lilies where you will most enjoy seeing it, and add some herbs to the tomato bed. Don’t go mad and get too ambitious too soon. Plant stuff that smells nice when it gets summer sun. Enjoy.

  4. I just realised the photos jam linked to were of your garden, Lauren, not hers. Now I feel like an idiot moreso than usual. You’re obviously doing pretty fine already. Although I still stand by my mulch.

    So what plants have you killed? Is there a pattern emerging?

  7. Remember: You can play the ukelele backing for “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” using an overlapping of the 034 Pick Bass and 026 Jazz Guitar sounds on the Casio CTK-611 keyboard. Main D-A-G-A. Break Bm-F#m-Bm-F#m-Bm-F#m-A.

  12. Lauren, whenever I see our cats sitting in a position like your first photo, I turn to The Count and say, “Can you do that?” He laughs his ass off.

    If you need help getting started writing your short story, e-mail me. I have lots of great tips, especially when you feel like you’re apathetic or you have writer’s block.

    I don’t make resolutions, either. I’m pretty happy with the way things are. Here are my Not-Really-Resolutions for 2006:

    1. Move to Hawaii
    2. Stop panicking about moving to Hawaii
    3. Get The Royal Spawn to write his essay for his college application
    4. Get The Royal Spawn squared away in college.
    5. Finish my novel, and send it to Harlequin SPICE
    6. Find more erotic magazines so I can write more stories and articles. I’m already safely in Scarlet and can practically write anything I like for them. I want to expand.
    7. Clean the house (This won’t happen. I hate cleaning.)
    8. Find local businesses to sell my soaps. I expect to start doing this in the Spring, since I live in a seasonal/tourist town.
    9. Get the kitties updated on their shots and get a few of them spayed.

  13. Lauren, I can also help you with the gardening crap. I plant lots of drought-resistant plants, and plants that I can divide up in the fall to make more plants. You save lots of money that way.

    Buy oregano, many varieties of mint and lemon balm, and lamium (dead nettle). The leaves look cool, they have pretty blooms, and they can take over your garden. You’ll have lots of plants to divide up and move around your garden. Saves money and time.

    Also, don’t throw out the ends of scallions if you cook with them. Plant them. They’ll take off. Mix them with chives and ornamental onions. I sometimes plant onions I buy from the grocery store. They have cool white dandelion-fluff-like blooms.

    You want some cool-looking plants? Look for fresh ginger in the supermarket that has shoots coming out of it. Plant it in a pot at home. When the plant takes off, it’ll look a bit like bamboo. Really cool looking and easy to take care of.

  14. Countess, do cats eat the ginger sprouts? We don’t have much luck with indoor plants due to the critters, except for my pepper plant that’s been going for a good five years or more despite serious neglect.

  15. My cats don’t touch the ginger sprouts, Leda. They usually leave my plants alone. They’re weird because cat nip doesn’t affect them, but if I try to grow catmint or cat nip indoors, they’ll eat the live plants, right down to the dirt. When Oreo was an outdoor kitty she ate all my catmint, but cat nip in a bag doesn’t affect her. Weird.

  17. Grad school is fun. You get to hang out with a bunch of nerds who are all obsessed with the same nerdy stuff you are. It doesn’t get any better. You really should apply.

  18. We used to have an enormous catmint plant next to the driveway. Nearly every time we drove up a cat would shoot out of it. It’s dead now. Too much affection.

  19. Once you finish a pair of socks that you love, you will never again have “second sock syndrome”. You will realize how wonderful hand-knitted socks are, and desire whole pairs.

    Consider making the second sock different but still, by some stretch of the imagination, matching. Add a different colored toe and heel, or try stripes.

    If heels annoy you, try a peasant heel. It is ridiculously easy: no flap, no turning, no gusset. It’s also one of the best heels for stripey yarn.

  20. Is the peasant heel the same as the hourglass heel? I can never remember. I’m thinking of trying the two-at-once-on-double-points method with my next ball of multicolor yarn, just as soon as I finish my son’s Dobby socks and my other son’s gloves.

  21. 6. Figure out this gardening crap, even though I can’t keep a plant alive.

    I can actually help here. Take the advice of King George III, who was a famous gardner: Find something that grows and plant a lot of it.

    As for finding something that grows, hosta is a gardners best friend. (if you’ve got shade). I have hosta all over the place and people tell me all the time how beautiful my gardens are and I’m not a gardner at all.

    Good luck!

  22. Re: the socks…well, you could just make more one-legged friends, but that’s probably in bad taste (and I should talk — I’ve lost track of how many incomplete crochet projects are hanging around here…)

  23. Ledasmom, they’re different but both awesome. The hourglass heel (also one of my favorites) has you work short rows as you go over the heel area. The peasant heel is even simpler: you don’t knit a heel at all, you just put in a scrap of yarn as a placeholder. Later, after the rest of the sock is done, you take out the scrap of yarn, put the resulting open stitches on your needles, and make a toe. You will discover, to your amazement, that the second toe is actually a heel!

    This page has an excellent description of the process:
    http://www.keyboardbiologist.net/knitblog/archives/000336.html

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