Do you multitask?

Last night I was doing perhaps the most concurrent projects that I have ever tackled.  I often do two things at once but last night I was listening to a webinar on goat raising and goat health while the cricut was cutting out gift tags and I was threshing my asparagus seeds.  When I would stop to program the cricut for the next set of cuts I would wash a few dishes or fold the towels before getting back to my threshing.

I saved one of my asparagus plants that had gone to seed.  We have been adding to our asparagus plantings every year since we started growing asparagus and each year I would buy new seed for plants.  Our first planting is old enough now that we were able to harvest it and the when the harvest was done the plants were allowed to form the tall fronds.  As I understand it, we have both male and female plants so some of our fronds grew small beads which turned red and then eventually started to dry.  When the asparagus was cut down as part of the fall cleanup I rescued one plant and it has been drying on my table ever since.  I was unsure where to put it, I didn't want the seeds to fall and get lost so it was a good, if unusual, choice of location.  It has been sitting there for the better part of two weeks but it was time to work on it to get it done before the weekend when my kids will be at the farm and we just might need that table for meals.

I started by pulling the pea sized 'beads' off of the branches.  There were some that were still red and not yet dry so I consolidated those branches into a smaller group after removing the dry ones.  After I got the dry ones into a small bowl it was time to separate the seeds from the dry husks that contained them.  The seeds are a hard, black, and irregularly shaped.  Rubbing the beads between my fingers allowed the seeds to drop into a low bowl a few at a time and I could then pick them out and put them in a different container.  It was a pretty laborious process but made  more enjoyable because of the other tasks that I was doing simultaneously.    I was able to get all of the dry seeds separated from their husks.  I will have a second go round when the remainder of the beads have dried.

The cricut project that I am working on is a group of two color gift tags.  They involve cutting each color separately and then gluing them together.  Another kind of putzy project.  I had already created the file on the computer so what was left was to adhere each different color paper for the project onto the cutting mat, instruct the machine to cut it and then remove all the tiny pieces from the mat. This process was repeated eight or nine times Once the cutting was done the two layers were glued together.  Not done yet but still needing to be done is to attach a string to each tag.  A fun project but it was nice to fill the downtime while the machine was cutting with other tasks.  Dishes and laundry--not as much fun.