It’s the end of January 2014, and I’m already late with my posts. Not exactly how I had planned to start the new year. But I do have a reason. I got a new job! Yea! I am now working at Ideal Printers in St. Paul. I actually started working part-time awhile ago and was hired on full-time in December.

It’s been really great so far! The employees are all really nice, and there’s lots to do. So much to do, in fact, that I am getting a lot of overtime. Which is great for the money, but leaves me with less time at home to work on my own creative endeavors. (Hence the lack of posts.)

One really fun thing about this job is that I started right before some big changes were happening in my department. We got some new equipment, relocated to the second floor of our building, and had a whole new room and office built for us! The construction was tough at times because it was so noisy and dusty, but the final product is really nice. Here’s a picture of what my office looks like when you walk in and when you are by my desk. Fun!

This past weekend, I finished knitting a sweater that I’ve been working on for awhile. I was so excited to get it done so I could wear it! Unfortunately, I will not be wearing it out in public. In fact, it looks so horrible on, that I couldn’t even bring myself to take a picture in it. Boo!

I think I need a little more practice with gauge. Or I should just ignore gauge all together. When I started this sweater, I knitted a swatch for gauge and adjusted my needle size accordingly. (For those of you who don’t know what gauge is, it’s when you knit a sample swatch that contains a certain amount of stitches and then measure it. If your gauge is correct, it should match the measurements in your pattern. If not, you need to adjust until it does by either using larger or smaller needles.) And now the sweater is WAY too big for me!

On the good side, with it being too big, I can take it all apart, and I should be to remake it using the yarn that I previously used. But that is for the future. I’m not really excited at this point in time to start all over. Maybe next weekend.

Our naughty cat Johnny has struck again! This is his third victim, Emily. Ok. So I don’t know for sure that Johnny did bite Emily, but it seems pretty likely. It’s hard to believe that Emily suddenly became neurotic and bit herself on her tail and back badly enough to scab over. And being that Johnny has two known previous victims… I’m just saying…

So things have been a little out-of-routine at our house lately. Emily has a really hard time with the standard, plastic “Cone of Shame,” so we had to try this soft cone for her. Since she seemed to still be able to lick her tail, we tried another cone that looks like an airplane pillow, and a few different topical items that were supposed to taste so bad that they would deter her. (Nick made sure to taste test each item we put on her, and he affirmed that they were indeed, not delicious.) After all of our trial and errors, we ended up sticking with a bitter apple spray and this soft cone. I think she’s getting used to the spray, so we still need to watch her. But the healing process is well under way. Hopefully this poor girl will be back to her crazy daredevil ways in no time without a cone to slow her down!

Things have gotten busy this week, and I haven’t had as much time to create as I would have liked. So instead of creating, I am destroying.

Our new house was owned previously by a lover of wallpaper (or the previous previous owner was the lover, and the last owner didn’t mind it). I’m not kidding. One bathroom even has wallpaper on the ceiling. If that’s not a love of wallpaper, I don’t want to see what is!

So I have begun the task of removing said wallpaper. Since this is my first encounter with it, I started with the borders in one of the bathrooms. It was really easy to remove and only took 45 minutes to complete the entire project. Excited and hoping that everything else would go as smoothly, I moved on to the dining room. Only to find out why people hate removing wallpaper so much! It took me around 2 hours, and I only have this small chunk completed. It’s not really that it’s a difficult task, it’s just time consuming. And it seems to work best if done in layers. First I remove the top vinyl-like layer, and then I can remove the paper and glue part below. And I now have a lot of spackling to do, because I ruined the wall below it. Oops!

But when it’s all done, it will be worth it. I can’t wait!