It's been interesting to see the quiz results; they are pretty much as I expected. Thanks to all who participated!

(If you want to see them, please click on the Quibblo logo below and you will be taken the results page. I couldn't figure out how to post the results here easily, and I am too brain dead to type them up for you. Sorry.)

So I forged ahead and began the project with the Sublime Organic Cotton. I really really like it. I like the yarn, I like the stitch pattern, I like the overall design idea. It's an idea that has been percolating since last summer (when I bought the yarn) based on one of the top-down styles in Barbara Walker's Knitting From the Top. It's a style that hasn't been used often as the basis of a design (I could only find one example of this style in the whole Ravelry database), so I am interested to see how my interpretation of it turns out. Stay tuned.

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Today I tackled a task I could put off no longer—the taxes. It's my business that is the big holdup. I do all of the husband's banking and bill-paying in QuickBooks and it works really well. I reconcile the account at the end of every month, and at the end of the year I press a few buttons and poof—out prints a nicely detailed profit and loss statement. If that were all I had to do, I'd be golden.

I keep the records for Big Sky Knitting Designs in QuickBooks, too, but my business has a checking account, a savings account, a line of credit, a PayPal account, a merchant account, and a credit card I use when traveling. I send out three times as many invoices in a month as the husband. If I were more disciplined than I am (and that's pretty disciplined), I would reconcile my bank statement at the end of each month, just as I do for his business. Alas (my mother will be horrified), I do not. I usually wait until the end of the year (or well into the following year), then spend an entire day or two entering all the info from my bank statements into QuickBooks.

Yes, I know, it's possible to download all the bank statements directly into QuickBooks. Unfortunately, my bank uses a generic debit and credit account for each transaction. After downloading, I still have to go in and manually change each entry so that it reflects the correct income or expense account. That takes almost as much time as entering them manually.

I got through the first six months of 2010 today, and I'll do the rest tomorrow. I could have done all of it today, but I had to spend some time this morning on transcription homework. I'd like to get this done and off to the accountant soon. February is already half over.

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We had a fun family outing yesterday. My FIL is sending a vintage lever-action .22 rifle to DD#2. We're waiting for it to arrive from the east coast. She was excited about learning how to shoot—and yesterday was a gorgeous, sunny, warm day—so we took her down to the gun club. The husband started her off with the single-shot bolt-action .22 that he learned to shoot with. After she got comfortable with it, he moved her over to my Ruger 10/22, which has a scope. They practiced for an hour or so (I went to a different part of the range to practice with a different gun), and when I came back, the husband proposed that we have a competition. He put up a target at 25 yards, and we each took turns putting 10 rounds on a target. This was the result:

So I started with the circle at the top left, then the husband took the one just to the right of it, then DD#2 took the one to the right of that, and so on. I finished up with the one at the bottom right. DD#2 put in a very respectable showing, considering it was her first time shooting anything. The husband and I were simply trying to outdo each other. When I got to that last bullseye, I put about half of the 10 rounds into it and he said, "You do know that you're shooting out the center of the target, don't you?" and I said, "Yes, of course I do."

I got such a kick out of DD#2's Facebook status after we came home. She wrote, "I accomplished something big today." She certainly did. I told her that next year she could get her own deer instead of waiting for her father to get one. She and her sister have a great fondness for deer jerky and pepper sticks.

Time for some knitting.