My pep talk to the garden (small exerpt: Grow dammit, or I will stomp a mudhole in you and walk it dry. I know, I should TOTALLY be a motivational speaker) has apparently worked because on Tuesday? I ate the first radish from the garden. Granted, it was a little bit smaller (still overall good-sized though) and therefore a bit more zesty than I care for, but still, I WAS ABLE TO EAT SOMETHING OUT OF THE GARDEN THAT I GREW WITH MY OWN TWO HANDS. Note to self: Get out of the house more often, STAT.

I am also working on overcoming my fear of talking myself up to total strangers in the interest of growing my portfolio so I can make my ever closer escape from workplace a reality. Believe it or not, this is actually resulting in a more positive outcome than I would have initially guessed. On a totally unrelated and non-biased tangent, you don’t happen to have a website or blog that you need designed and want to pay someone oodles of paper with dollar signs all over them, do you? Why am I asking? Oh, no reason at all. (www.trenabdesigns.com /shameless self-promotion).

Thing the third: Who will win Top Chef next week? Who do I want to win. Now that they’ve weeded out all the psychos, it’s kind of hard to pick who is the most lame. Although, I have to say I am so glad that Dale had to pack his knives last week, because he seriously made me have anger issues and I found myself shouting things at the TV against him because he made me so angry for all the other chefs who had to compete against him. Don’t watch Top Chef? Don’t worry, I’m totally not a complete loon–I just feel a mite strongly about my cooking competition shows. Yet one more endearing personality quirk. No, it isn’t a personality ‘flaw’…quirk just sounds so much more…not most likely to go crazy and end up on the news, don’t you think?.

Owen has managed to catch his first cold, conveniently at the same time that my husband has been sick as well, so I’ve been busy taking care of my two babies. Three shiny gold stickers to whomever can guess who the bigger baby has been (hint–it isn’t the one who still wears diapers). It seems like the worst is over and everyone is on the mend.

What I would like to know is why it has to be such a terrible thing to have your nose picked. Owen acts like I’m asking for a kidney every time I pick a huge booger out of his nose. Little newsflash pal, it isn’t like I look forward to the privilege of picking your nose and I do believe I’m doing you a favor by making it easier to breathe.

On a completely different tangent, I have discovered the coolest thing: Pandora It is entirely possible that this has been around for a while and I am just now finding it as I tend to be on the tail end of cool new things. It’s a free (and legal) music search/play thing that I won’t be able to do justice trying to explain–so you just need to go and visit the link and see for yourself.

Now I’m off to the craft store to buy yarn (glorious yarn–my secret weapon in my bid to take over the world) and a new pattern. I’ve wanted to knit a blanket for Owen for a while and thought I had found an easy and cool looking pattern. After my third attempt to make it past row 28 and my third result of having to rip everything out yet again I’m done with the stupid pattern and looking for something different that won’t cause me more stress. Knitting is supposed to be relaxing, right?

I’ve always been a crafty person. I’m sly, but I’m also into the making things kind of crafts as well. My grandmother taught me how to do needlepoint when I was 6 because I tended to be excessively somewhat hyper when I was small and she noticed that reading and doing needlepoint were about the only two times while I was awake that I would stay still for longer than 5 minutes at a time.

In high school, my best friend taught me how to crochet and also to cross-stitch. Crocheting was really frustrating in the beginning and I made many Christmas Tree type potholders (they would start out as a square, I’d miss a stitch here and there at the ends and before you knew it, my potholder would come to a point. Which is great if I’d wanted to make a Christmas tree potholder. But I didn’t, at least not every potholder) before I finally practiced enough to move from inexperienced beginner to seasoned expert.

I had always wanted to learn how to knit, but it seemed impossible–I am left handed and all my friends who knew how to knit and were willing to share the secrets were right handed and I just would end up getting lost and frustrated and forced to make comments about how superior crocheting was and why would I want to learn how to knit anyway.

That is, until we moved to Virginia and I knew absolutely no one where we lived. Being brave and trying to find my way around our new town, I happened upon the one decent yarn shop. Lo and behold, they had a sign-up sheet for knitting lessons on the counter. The grandmotherly woman who taught my class made it seem so easy–once I had the basics down, I wondered why it had been so hard to learn and why I had been so obstinate about learning before.

Even though I have been knitting for a little over two years and would consider myself to be somewhat of a novice, there are some things I don’t enjoy working on–namely large projects (i.e. adult sweaters, blankets). Lately I have discovered the best sock pattern (I own three that I paid $5 apiece for and my favorite? I found for free online) for baby and toddler socks and the most fun yarn to make it in.

I may not be the brightest bulb in the drawer as far as examples for Owen go, but at least his feet won’t be cold or boring this winter.

Elann-really great online store for really nice but inexpensive yarn.

Knitpicks-another great place for reasonably priced nice yarn–they also have some beautiful patterns (some free, some inexpensive). Their catalogue is good tub reading material.

Knit Baby Sock Pattern–out of all the patterns I’ve made from, this is pretty easy and the socks turn out really cute with self-striping yarn.