"Life is wasted on the living."

The internet is being flakey, but then, so am I, somewhat. Last weekend we went wandering to yard sales and came home with a strange collection of things including a $20 table saw, a gazing globe for the garden, a punch bowl & cup set, and measuring cups in the shape of geese. Then we followed it up with a trip to the hardware store, and spent Sunday building a raised garden bed out in the back in the ex-trash & pseudo compost pile that's been a mess since we got here. Having done archaeology, my automatic thought when faced with nice dirt full of trash and weed roots is to screen it and plant in the backdirt. So I now have my own 2x4 foot screen and grauwulf knocked together a second sawhorse to balance it on. The raised bed is planted with proto-food which has not come up yet, but that's quite all right, as it's supposed to freeze tonight.

Yesterday evening we finally had my parents over for dinner (a thing I have only been saying we were going to get around to for the last eight months or so) and aside from charring the edges of my fudgy brownies by mistake, my first dinner party went well. Perhaps I should have another, although I am constrained in my invite list by only having four dining room chairs, or six if we stretch it and use all the chairs in the house.

I have been keeping up with the violin less well than I might like, but I have been playing. My sight reading, which was never good, is now abysmal, but I broke out the book of fiddle tunes that I got a couple years back and am struggling with a few of them. I also contemplate seeking out a collection of O'Carolan rendered for the violin, since I know a lot of the tunes from decades of listening to celtic harp CDs and once I've sorted out what the written tune sounds like in my head I do a great deal better adapting to the transcriber's set of embellishments. Alternately, I could dig out some music paper and start writing out some of the folk songs I've been picking out by ear so that I can go from one to another without having to stop and think through the lyrics before I can switch tunes. Either way, fiddle style melodies are keeping my interest a bit better than going back through the old suzuki books at the moment.

Aside from this, I've been mostly working on craftster- & craft-related things, ignoring my library books, and contemplating doll things on the horizon. I finished with one of the books I'd borrowed about prayer beads (A String and a Prayer: How to Make and Use Prayer Beads) the other week, and despite it living up to most of the things that irritate me about "new age" mindsets, I'm half-tempted to host a prayer bead party at some point. Admission is a string or two of interesting beads, which get shared out between the attendees, and then you get to string those up with any exciting charms you wish to bring along and have something exciting and pseudo-meaningful to take home with you.