Startitis Strikes Again!

Yes, it's all about the yarn today, well, at least this evening.  I can't make myself pick up any of my works in progress, so I'm starting a new one.  About two years ago, I collected the yarn to make a second version of the Winter Dreams Crocheted Cowl.  I wanted to make it in colors that would look like arctic ice, and chose a variegated blue and green in Knitpicks Chroma, and a pale pinky rainbow skein of Berroco Boboli.  The Chroma has a flat finish, and the Boboli is shiny and has a lot of texture to it, so the contrast between these two yarns should make for an interesting piece.  It's a fairly easy project and should only take a week or two to make, even just picking it up every now and then.

Friday: I learned foundation single crochet and applied it to this project.  With this yarn, at least, it seems a bit more fiddly than merely doing a chain and a row of single crochet.  It took a good long time to do the initial 176 stitches.

We looked at those two houses the other day, and it was a very interesting experience.  The bungalow with the boatload of charm is also very small -- even though it's advertised as three bedrooms, one of them is actually a former hallway and pantry that has been closed off.  The basement is a veritable rabbit warren of small rooms, and the basement bathroom unpleasantly reminded me of a high school gym shower.

The other house, however, really interested us both.  It's a warm house, and I don't say that because the temperature was turned up when we visited (it was).  It's just a nice, warm home and the owners have obviously kept it up.  They've lived there for fifteen years, so it's not as if they're a fly-by-night operation.  I could see our stuff in that house.  Even the Emperor was enthusiastic about it.

I called a real estate agent who had shown me a house a few years ago, and we'd kept in touch via email ever since.  He sends me links to online listings that he thinks might interest us, but otherwise doesn't bug me at all.  When we visited the houses, he met us with printouts of the descriptions and disclosures, and then just followed us around making small talk while we looked at the rooms.  So one of my "fears" is unfounded -- I won't be getting multiple sales calls asking if we're interested.  I just need to muster up the gumption to go down to the bank and talk to them about a loan.  The only thing stopping me from doing that is that I've made mistakes on my past two years' tax forms, and I'm a little bit embarrassed to show them to anybody, especially financially-savvy accounting types.

I guess we'll have to see.