So my projects are making progress in various ways. I’ve made progress on my knitting, the garden (luckily!) is making progress with little intervention and I’ve gotten to try some new cooking adventures out too.
Ta Da! Actual knitting progress! Knitting (while not very fast) has been very useful with my new sleep schedule. It’s a lot harder to space out and start to fall asleep if your hands are busy. And since I’m into the cable pattern now, it’s really obvious if I’m not focused enough! I want to start my Beatnik sweater too, but I think I’m going to stick to finishing my hat first. For one, this gives me the chance to get used to knitting again after a few months off; and for another I want my hat back! I don’t really need a fuzzy hat in July, but if I don’t stick with it, I won’t have one when it starts to get cold again so there are good reasons for sticking with it. Speaking of hats, maybe I should make a hat as a Christmas present for my brother-in-law this year. He likes to critique the hat I made him a few years ago…which in my defense was an early knitting project…giving him a newer fancier one would require him to up his game in terms of critiques, which would be fun. We’ll see though since I don’t think I’ll be doing any projects quickly this year. If not this year, maybe next year.
Things are actually looking pretty good in the garden. There’s plenty of lettuce and radishes out there and there’s a bunch of beans that should get picked. Also, the mystery squash hasn’t been killed off yet by squash vine borers! It even looks like we’re going to get tomatoes this year and the peppers have recovered pretty well from the insanely cold/wet May we had. I haven’t checked the cucumbers recently, but they were alive and trying to make cucumbers last time I looked, so I consider that doing well. The potatoes look a little sad, but that’s because they’d like to be watered more, and well, there’s a lot to do right now. Still, all things considered I think it’s doing petty well. And since the goal was “whatever we get, if anything, is awesome” I consider things a success so far!
The new cooking adventure is our shiny new crock pot. Our old crock pot which was an older one from family no longer maintains high enough temperatures (which is a problem!) so it was time to get a new one. After a lot of research we picked this one since it’s bigger (6 qts!) it’s oval (yay meat cooking!) and it’s programmable (not burning the house down!). As for why we’re interested, the hope is that with the crock pot we can prepare a meal early in the day when we have a little more time and then there’s no rushing around in the evening when we’re tired and trying to get things done so we can get as much sleep as possible. The other idea is making a nice big meal that produces lots of useful leftovers and doesn’t generate a lot of dirty dishes to deal with. And since the lid and stoneware insert go in the dishwasher… there are some definite benefits.
So last night was it’s maiden voyage/cooking attempt. I think it did well, everything fit in there, it cooked it well, the timer worked, it was easy to clean, etc. Our first attempt was a nice simple pot roast (I was tempted to do the fancy recipe, but since this was our first try with this crock pot and since things are busy I went with the straightforward one). I think next week I’ll try the beef and dumplings recipe I have.
So, all in all, that’s a nice bit of progress on my projects I think!
