I am late to the show. Again. It’s been busy here, but more on that later. Right now I want to say that I love Osnaburg fabric. Really, I do. And I’ve enjoyed working with some of the light-weight types. But OH. MY. GOD. I’m gonna flip my lid here and just say that medium weight is my nightmare. I love it. I love the course, slubby texture. I love the dark flecks peppering the fabric. I love the unbleached charm of it. BUT…the shrinkage is going to kill me because it takes a nicely textured fabric and turns it into a scrunched up mess after laundering. Then, when some anal retentive person (I will not name myself here) spends half a lifetime ironing it, it’s still overly textured.

On the left of the photo we have the unpressed swatch, on the right, the swatch that has been ironed so much it should be like crispy bacon right about now.

The Osnaburg from Hell

I know there’s definitely an improvement, but it’s still so crinkly I may go mad looking at it. Maybe I’ll just toss it back in the wash and iron it while it’s damp. Any pointers?

Now, on to other things. It’s been crazy busy here. It’s always crazy busy here, but lately, I’ve been crazy and busy. Why have I been crazy…err…crazier than usual? Because there is so much clutter in my house that I feel like I’m having a mental avalanche every time I walk through the damn house. Seriously. I’ve been ready to snap for weeks because every time I get one area of the house looking nice, one or all of my freaks walks through leaving death and destruction in their wake. Okay. Not death. But destruction, for sure.

I cannot keep up. And adding insult to injury are the hordes of neighborhood kids who keep crawling out of the woodwork. I do like kids…I even love my own, but I am drowning here. There are, on any given day, up to a dozen kids other than my own banging on my door, pulling my screens out of the windows, stealing bikes, raiding my garage refrigerator (not to EAT the food…No…they destroy it all over the floor of the garage), trampling my herbs, pulling the leaves and blooms off my blueberry plants, climbing on the roof of the garage, falling out of our trees, breaking the fence, or building “forts” in our yard out of anything and everything they find in the piles of household items left on the curb for the garbage collector. And of course, said building materials are things like dresser mirrors which end up shattered and scattered through my yard.  And then there is the oh, so sweet little girl who whipped her pants down and flaunted her vagina at the my prudish boy child. Not a week later, she punched Kearsey in the nose and gave her a gusher of a nosebleed that took over half an hour to stop. Neither last nor least, we had Ari get bit by a neighbor’s dog. It has been a pleasant month so far. Wouldn’t you agree?

The thing that burns me up the most about all this ridiculous nonsense is that there is never a single parent in sight. We deal with all these kids (at least four of them are under five), give them snacks, sometimes help them with homework, fix up their boo-boos, deal with the behavioral issues, pull them apart when they’re beating the shit out of each other, etc. Only once has a guardian/parent even been out to check on them and that was after the vagina incident when the girl was outraged because I sent her home and told her not to come back over unless she faithfully took her meds every day. (You can surely imagine how much of heel it makes you feel like to have to say that to a seven year old–but it couldn’t be helped since she wails on everyone or behaves appallingly every day because she refuses to take her medication for her issues and her grandmother won’t make her. Me…I’d pry her mouth open and throw the fucking pill down her throat.)

Do you deal with this madness in your neighborhoods?

So, aside from all the kid drama, purging the house, and dealing with a week of uncertainty with the command wanting to send Eddie on a ten month deployment (set to leave less than a month from when they started talking about it, no less), it’s been mostly normal around here. With all that stuff, though, it’s not been even a teensy bit normal. I haven’t knit a single stitch since the second day of the month. I have only touched the sewing machine once this month and that was a five minute job putting a patch on Eddie’s uniform. Fun stuff.

I’m really in need of some calm, boring days where the house isn’t a cluster of kid stuff thrown everywhere with no one willing to pick up, days where school goes smoothly and quickly, days where I have fifteen minutes to mix up a batch of cookies, a day where I can manage to get my teeth brushed and hair brushed before noon, a day where I can sit on the porch with my loverly hubby, sip some coffee, and knit while we enjoy a quite evening.

In short: I need a miracle.