Feeling hormonal

Thanks to the wonders of birth control pill dispensers with little numbers on the slots, I've noticed that my instances of "Oh, I want to do that project, and this project, and refinish this piece of furniture, and plan a trip, and bake cookies, and crochet 14 different things, ALL TODAY" tend to occur right around day 14. Coincidence? I think not.

Since most of the time I end up moving agitatedly (is that a word?) from one project to the other, not much actually gets finished, and I end up with a house full of UFOs it takes at least a month to clean up. Today, for example, I've made another set of flashcards for my daughter, worked on the sweater I'm crocheting for myself, added a handful of clothes to my store on eBay, made a sample block for a challenge quilt I'm working on for this spring, done some correspondence for an etsy collaboration I'm trying to organize, made all the paper foundations for the challenge quilt, and found a ridiculously perfect hotel room for a vacation we're working on in February. Yesterday, I made flashcards, worked on the sweater for two hours, finished a pair of pants for my daughter, started editing the ridiculously cute video of my daughter, stared longingly at the challenge quilt fabrics, and stayed up way too late trying out a knitting technique I had read about online (despite the fact that, given my current list of projects to work on, I won't have a chance to make anything with that new technique until, oh, 2009 or so). Oh, and did I mention the three or four new project ideas I've come up with and jotted down on random scraps of paper I'll probably lose before Sunday?

All these projects and plans and things I've done and things I'm planning to do and schedules and whatnot are what prompted me to start blogging in the firstplace, a little less than a year ago. Sometimes it helps to dump it all down on paper (or into cyberspace); sometimes it just makes it worse. So here goes ...

In no particular order, here's a list of what I have to, want to, and need to do this weekend:

1. Get a replacement toilet seat for our powder room, to replace the one I sort of broke when I was trying to install the toddler seat adaptor. Stupid old houses with their stupid rusty toilet seat screws that snap when you try to unscrew them. Eh, the old one had a chip in the lid, anyway, and it weighed about 14 pounds, so Liza was bound to break a finger in the thing eventually. Right?
2. Take down and store the Christmas decorations, which are cluttering up my dining room table so I can't invite any of Liza's friends over to visit, lest they choke to death on one of my father's carvings.
3. Fit and glue the veneer I'm using to repair the gaping termite damage holes in a chest of drawers I'm refinishing (sound familiar, Joy? You ought to see it now that I've got the paint off ... I'll send photos when it's done, just to make you jealous).
4. Stain the chest of drawers.
5. Start varnishing the chest of drawers.
6. Clean my kitchen floor and vacuum the living room carpet. Liza has started wanting to have a granola bar in her hand 24/7, just in case she should, for example, want to sit there for 10 minutes pulling all the granola out of the way so she can get to the chocolate chips. There's granola on the floor, on the couch, up the stairs, and in my bed from where it got stuck to my feet in the hallway when I got up to comfort Liza for the THIRD TIME LAST NIGHT and didn't wipe my feet off before I got back in bed.
7. Start making the squares for my challenge quilt; probably order more of one of the six challenge fabrics, since I'm almost positive I won't have enough to do one part of what I want to do. I won't bore you with details here - that's what the Lazy Mama blog is for - but suffice it to say that it's going to be unique, and it will totally kick ass.
8. Make an entire quilt for a friend who's having a baby shower in a few weeks (hi, Saho!). I've got the fabric, and sort of an idea, but we'll see if I can pull if off in time. If not, I guess I need to go to Toys R Us.
9. Crochet the living heck out of that sweater so I can wear it whenever it decides to go below 60 degrees this month. Sixty freakin' degrees. My kid is outside in shirtsleeves, playing in puddles, in January. Stupid Kentucky weather. All I can say is, it had better get cold before we go on vacation, or San Diego isn't going to be such a nice change of pace.
10. Start crocheting one of the projects I came up with last night as I was trying the new knitting technique (I know, I know, keep my mind on the craft at hand). This would involve frogging out all of the stuff I knitted while Sybil was here (hi, Sybil!), which looks suspiciously like it won't end up working the way I wanted it to for that knitting project, anyway. It would look much nicer as a felted neckroll pillow cover. Not that I have a pattern for such a thing, which means that it will end up two sizes to small, require more yarn than I have, and take three times as long as I expect.
11. I've got one of the elf stitchettes from wee wonderfuls finished, but I've yet to start the second. I'd really rather avoid doing redwork elves in August, so I'd better get cracking.
12. Supposed to be warm again this weekend, so it would be nice to transplant the boxwood bushes in our backyard to make room for a vegetable garden this spring.
13. And then I need to actually make the vegetable garden, which will involve liberal amounts of soil amending. I'd like to actually do this right and do the double row method, where you end up digging down two layers, amending the first and sticking it back in the hole, then amending the second layer and putting it on the top. That'll show the weeds who's boss. Stupid nutgrass.
14. Vacuum cheerios (and sludgy sippy cups) out of my van. And get the oil changed. And change the windshield wipers. And swap the CDs out for new ones.
15. Finish editing the instructions for my next project to sell on etsy (which involves taking pictures of the finished project, once I dig it out from the bottom layer of my desk). Post on etsy. Reformat to be able to sell it in stores. Make a list of stores to call to see if they'd like to sell it.
16. Start writing the instructions for the quilt I finished like a month and a half ago, and have been stalling on ever since, so now it's covered in cat hair from sitting next to my desk.
17. Invite the neighbors over to play the new game we got for Christmas (Settlers of Catan, in case you were wondering).
18. Finish making the vacation plans (call Enterprise to find out why they're half the price of the other car rental companies in San Diego, make final flight arrangements, start pricing sanity-saving portable DVD players for the flight, start making a list of things we need to bring with us on the trip, start obsessing about how we're going to fit two weeks' worth of stuff into one week where we only get to use half of the days because Liza needs her naps, etc.). That is, of course, provided that we hear back from Jason's sister (hi, Jen!), who is the whole reason we're going to California in the first place.
19. Write thank you notes for Christmas presents, including some very expensive things, and some very thoughtful things, so I can't just phone it in and do the generic "thank you very much for the gift. I'm sure we'll get a lot of good out of it. Hope you had a good holiday!" I'll have to write more about the extremely thoughtful gift, as my mind just boggles that one of my mother's friends (hi, Grace!) would spend so much time putting a gift together for us. Maybe I need to crochet something for her cats ...
20. Finish sorting out Liza's unused toys for the consignment sale, which isn't until the first week of March, but it's never too early to start obsessing. I've got most of the clothes on hangers already, or at least as many as will fit on the proper hangers I have in stock (need to buy more metal hangers). But Liza has way too many toys, and I haven't even scratched the surface of what needs to go to make room for the birthday onslaught that will hit a few weeks after the consignment sale. Gahh

There's more, but I need to get to bed if I'm going to get anything at all done tomorrow. Hope you all have slightly less manic weekends planned!