How to Quit Smoking

In today's post, Pioneer Woman discusses her earlier smoking escapades and so, in the interest of public health, I have decided to share my successful method of quitting smoking. It has a 100% success record---me! Minimal (well, none, really) research on my part has not revealed any other uses of this method, so there may well be ZILLIONS of unreported success stories out there.

I smoked for one year, my senior year of college. When I decided that I didn't want to smoke any longer, I came up with my plan:

1. I would not "bum" cigarettes from anyone else; i.e., I would give up smoking all cigarettes, not just my own cigarettes.

2. Each and every time that I wanted a cigarette, I went down to the dorm basement where the cigarette machines were. I would buy one pack, take out one cigarette, and throw the rest of the pack in the chute to the trash. These chutes led directly to a bin in the bowels of the building and there was no way I knew of to retrieve anything from the bin. I would smoke that one cigarette, and that was that. When I wanted another, I would have to buy another pack. Even at cigarette prices in the 60s, this was a very expensive way to smoke and I was a poor college student. My smoking soon came to a screeching halt.

Now, before my daughters tell on me, when we lived in Florida, another neighbor and I helped each other wallpaper rooms. We drank coffee and ate coffee cake in the mornings; we had sandwiches and soda for lunch; and if we were still papering at dinner time, we had one cigarette apiece and switched to drinking beer. A good time was had by all and the wallpaper generally looked pretty good.

To this day, I sometimes really, really crave a cigarette. I am one of those few people who enjoy second-hand smoke. But I have convinced myself that one cigarette will cause me to have a heart attack or some other dire medical emergency, and I have resisted bumming one from any smokers I might be around. On my first trip to Paris, as I was standing in line to get in the Louvre, a very nervous young woman was asking if anyone had a cigarette she could have. I told her there was plenty of smoke in the air (the French do love to smoke) but she said that was not enough.

It is for me!

SCORE!

"Got gas?" you ask.
Why, yes, I do and thank you for asking.

Does this sound like a weird thing to be celebrating? It won't to those of you in some southeast cities, where gas is really, really rare right now. I was down to one-quarter of a tank, and spent the morning using precious gas to find more gas. I decided not to wander too far and stayed within twelve miles of the house. A gas station very near my house was out when I left, but by the time I got back---not finding gas anywhere else---the station had gotten a delivery. The parking lot was lined with roped-off lanes like those for a ride at Disney World, and there were workers directing people to the next pump available. Fortunately I must have arrived just after the gas arrived and so only waited for about two minutes. Lines in the Atlanta area have stretched for miles; there have been fights over people cutting in line; and there was an incident where someone siphoned gas from daycare vans. Bad, bad person!

The cause of this shortage here is supposed to be the hurricane---the one that came nowhere near here. It apparently cut production from one of the refineries in Texas (where there are no shortages) and the southeast is low on gas. Doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's what they tell us. This problem didn't even start at the time the hurricane happened, but started a couple of weeks later. Weird.

Because I left the job that required a seventy-mile roundtrip commute, I can stay fairly close to the house, and so this full tank will probably last two weeks or so.

Whew.... I can go to Knit Night!

Oh, well

Knit Night

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LYS
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Gorgeous Yarn

Result?

More stash. Another project!

(This is Blue Sky Alpaca, Dyed Cotton, colorway 628. It has more green in it than the picture shows. It will be a wrap: stockinette stitch surrounded by seed stitch.)

totally tubular, dude

I don't know what that means. I had thought it had something to do with surfing until I watched a Globe Trekker show last week, and the surfers in southern Mexico talked about surfing in the "pipe." So who knows...

Anyway, I digressed. When I wrote about the circular scarf I was knitting, what I really meant was that I was knitting a tubular scarf. It's knit on circular needles and will form a tube when finished. I don't know where the pattern came from, but all the other kids at my LYS are making it, so I had to as well. It's knit with 86 stitches on size 6 needles, 16" long. It's a perfect no-brain-needed project, unless you're knitting it in stripes and have to count rows. I am just knitting in this green until I run out of it and then changing to magenta and knitting until I run out of that. The finished project is somewhere in the vicinity of six feet long. Yikes! I hadn't thought about that when I started the project; this yarn is really just thread and so I hope I can finish the thing before I, uh, die. Or go crazy, whichever comes first.

Good Intentions

Gone Bad.

I just went to the grocery store to buy something healthful for dinner. I did accomplish that. Then I walked past all the crunchy, salty snack foods I love. I walked past the chocolate. (I really, really love chocolate.) Then I walked past the Krispy Kremes. (I really, really, really love Krispy Kremes.)

But then I spotted the candy corn and candy pumpkins. Resistance was futile. I'm putting them in a dish that has a lid. Think that will help?

As Always

Mrs. G. says it best. Check it out.

Nervacizing

No, that's not a real word, but it should be. It's a word I learned from a friend of mine, and it means, of course, something that makes one nervous. I told my older granddaughter about this word one day when she was up in a tree in her yard---WAY up in a tree. She laughed and now when I visit, up she goes and then yells to me, "Hey, Gran! Is this nervacizing?"

Well, YES! But now it's getting worse. She is on a climbing team and this is her almost-eight-year-old self in the picture. I conveniently forget that I was a climber as a kid. We had several large willow trees, and my sister and I spent many, many hours in them as kids, just hanging out, talking, plotting (against our brother) and dreaming. I loved those trees.

But now that it's my precious granddaughter, I say "Enough! Get down from there!"

Not really. She's been trying to climb anything and everything since she was a baby. A friend of mine remembers when Ella, at only three months old, tried to climb up her when she was holding her. We have pictures of her climbing door jambs, the outside of stairways, and of course, trees.

So Ella, learn to climb well and safely, because I know you're going to always be looking for a way to go UP!

Mistakes Were Made

Many, many mistakes were made. First, there was this:The pattern calls for a garter stitch edge but I had purled a row on the back instead of having knit it. My knit night friends told me not to rip out the whole thing, but to just put pins in each of the stitches that needed to be ripped back and then repair each column row by row. OK. I put in the pins. And blessed FSM that I had been using Knit Picks interchangeable needles. I could just unscrew the needle itself from the cord and put a stopper on the cord.

Then I started ripping out one column (probably not the correct term) at a time. This is knitted in two strands of yarn at once, and one of them is mohair yarn. Very difficult to rip out. I once stopped knitting for about ten years because I was stuck on a black mohair sweater and wouldn't let myself start another project until I finished that one. (Knitters, stop laughing!) I never finished that sweater, but that's another story for another time. I am a knitting coward; I am terrified to frog anything, and I have never done this type of repair before.
But as I said, mistakes---plural---were made. After one hour, I finally got two columns put back together and then noticed that I had skipped one whole row of yarn. So out came the two columns. I re-did the first two columns and slowly finished the third and fourth. Partway through the fourth, I came across a strand of yarn not attached to anything. A cut end! Where this came from I have no idea, but that end sabotaged the rest of the repair. I found the other cut end, knotted the two together, and decided to stop before I did any more damage.
It is repaired to the best of my ability. I know I should consider this a learning experience, but I swear to DOG, what I have learned is: next time this sort of thing happens, I will call it a "design element" and move on.

Oooooh....

Everyone at my LYS has been working on circular scarves. They are knitted on a 16" length, size 6 circular needle. Most of the knitters have been picking out about 10 colors and knitting the scarves in stripes. But last night, one of the knitters was working on hers---all in one brilliant yellow color. So I thought, hmm.. why not just two colors and not in stripes. I found these gorgeous colors (Rowan kidsilk haze: 70% super kid mohair, 30% silk) and fell in love. PLUS, I had a coupon for ten percent off any one purchase during September. So I HAD to buy it, right?

I started this afternoon knitting with the green, and will continue with that until I run out (3 skeins) and then switch to the magenta. I think it will be gorgeous! However, my joy in the project was briefly derailed when I started casting on; the yarn is the thinnest stuff I have ever used. Really, it's just fuzzy thread, and I am not exaggerating. After a few rounds, the stitches became a little easier to work with. I have learned that Addi turbo needles do not have very pointy points. I imagine it would be impossible to knit lace with them, but I don't intend to try lace any time soon.

To add to the thrill of this new project, my husband left a window open (no screen) in his basement office. Two chipmunks have come by to visit me. Indoors. I screamed, then dh caught the first one. The second is somewhere still, but I've let the cat in and maybe he can hunt it down. I think chipmunks are cute, but good grief! They belong outdoors!

My Preciou.s.s.s.s.s.s

My preciou.s.s.s.s is in the hospital. Sniff, sniff. The wireless connection wouldn't connect any more and I have no clue what is wrong. The staff at Frys said that if the card for the wireless is dead, it can be replaced in house and that will take seven days. If the motherboard is fried, the computer has to go back to HP and that will take six or seven weeks. WEEKS! Yikes. This loaner is probably perfectly nice, but it doesn't have any of my stuff in it, all my important documents, my pictures, my....everything!!! It is all backed up on a server in the house, but I don't want to put it on a temporary computer, and so, it's not easily accessible.

The weird thing about electronics is how cheap things get, and how quickly. My computer, which is still under warranty (phew), cost just over $700.00. The loaner, which is comparable and is supposed to do everything mine does, costs $389.00. Wow. If I hadn't had the warranty, I would just have bought this one, I guess.

New Stash

Well, this will teach me to brag about how little stash I have. I went to last Thursday's Knit Night at my local LYS and this Colinette Jitterbug (color: Lapis) just jumped right out at me! Really, it did. So I had no choice and this beautiful yarn is soon to join my sock stash---just as soon as I stop petting and admiring it. I am working on another project at the moment and haven't had the "knit socks now" bug hit yet.

Also, I just found TWO grammatical errors in my last blog. GASP! I am an English teacher, and I proofread and proofread and proofread. Geeze...

And another also: I drove to Clemmons, NC this past weekend to a friend's house. It is 307 miles driveway to driveway. On Saturday we drove from her house to Blowing Rock and back . I don't know how far that is because part of the drive is on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is gorgeous, and I look out the windows, paying no attention to anything but the view. Anyhoo, on the whole drive, I saw only five bumper stickers: three for Obama, one for McCain, and one for Ron Paul. This surprised me, but maybe it's just too early to have many bumper stickers around. I only have two stickers; one says SSK, which allows knitters to find each other in public parking lots (this hasn't happened to me yet, but it could, theoretically) and one which says FSM, the logo for the Flying Spaghetti Monster (described as an internet parody of religion). I have nothing against religion except for the followers who are nutjobs, and I see way too many bumper stickers in Bible Belt Land that say things like "Atlanta Belongs to Jesus" and "Everyone Knows that God is a Republican." So my FSM is my silent and very ineffective response to those people. Some rebel I am.

Why I Will Never Knit Fair Isle

I am currently working on a Christmas stocking for new baby, and I have made so many of these that you would think I would know what I am doing by now---but NOPE. I don't know how to do fair isle, intarsia, or stranding or whatever the skills are that this project requires. I just sort of do whatever and hope for the best. So Santa looks OK from the front, right? Except for the missing eyes which I will duplicate stitch in when the whole thing is finished, along with the baby's name and the year 2008. Do I know how to duplicate stitch??? Well, not exactly. The knitting guru at the LYS showed me how many, many months ago when I started this project, but now I'm a little unclear. I'll work it out, or ask for help---again.

The reason I say that I will never do any beautiful fair isle knitting is in the picture below:
Knitting fair isle designs requires working with more than one color at a time. I hate working with more than one color at a time because doing so means that I will have this mess on the back while I am trying to knit. I end up with the strands all wound up around each other and have to keep unwinding them as I go along. The only thing that made this stocking easier than all the hundreds (I swear) that I have knit in the past is that our guru told me to just work with 24" or so of the yarns (except using the whole ball for the background color) so at least I didn't have to wrestle with three balls of yarn while I was knitting. Now that Santa is finished, I can go on to finish the foot, sew the whole thing up, stitch in the eyes, name and year, and it will be finished. Thank goodness!!!


What is shown in this picture is what has allowed me to get back to knitting without so much pain. It reeks---it's made of whatever wet suits are made of and it REEKS and always will, according to the therapist who gave it to me. But it allows me to knit. (My sincerest apologies to anyone who gets stuck sitting near me.)
While I have been catching up on my knitting, I have been catching up on shows I had not watched before. Law and Order, of course, and also House. What an odd show:

Each episode is as follows: A patient with weird symptoms shows up at the hospital. Dr. House, loveable but scruffy and crabby, and his team mis-diagnose the patient a whole bunch of times. Since the patient is mis-diagnosed, he is also treated incorrectly for his mysterious condition. Those treatments cause more symptoms. Sometimes members of the team go to the patient's house to snoop (look for clues to his illness); sometimes they don't. Then in the last ten minutes or so of the show, something suddenly occurs to Dr. House, he has his team treat the patient appropriately, and everyone lives happily after.

The End.

Well, the end except for this question: House is forever popping pain pills without benefit of a drink to swallow them down with. How does he do this? I can't do this. Just wondering.

Yay! Another FO!

After taking two months to finish one pair of socks, I've now finished three projects in about two weeks. This is a sweater for my grandson, who will be two next Wednesday. I found the receipt for this yarn when I pulled the yarn out of the bag to begin knitting. I bought the yarn on September 17, 2007---grandson's first birthday. Although it sounds as if it took a year to knit the sweater, it didn't really; it was only on the needles for about the last two weeks. However, it was supposed to have been done in time for Christmas last year. Ooops...

The yarn is Jelli Beanz and I do like knitting with it. There are lots of choices of primary colors for the background color, with even more primary colors worked into the yarn. It is 75% wool and 25% nylon. The pattern is from Ann Norling and I love using it for children's sweaters. It's knitted top down, and there are instructions for four different yarn weights, cardigan or pullover versions, and three different necklines.

And The Winner Is...

The first occasional Knitter Gran Funnybone Award goes to:

(Imagine drum roll here)

Mad, Mad. Check out her blog “I really, really need a job,” and then--- come back!!! There’s more!!!

Her story about what her daughter said when asked to tell us/the class/the school/the whole world about her parents is hysterical and she does a great job telling it. I laughed out loud, a lot. But it did make me wonder, what if.....

I am happy that, to my knowledge, my two daughters were never asked to talk about their parents. When we lived in Florida, I lived, ate, breathed, slept, dreamed tennis; I was even a USTA tennis official for awhile, working as a line judge and chair umpire at professional tournaments. When I wasn’t doing that, I was playing tennis---lots and lots of tennis. I LOVED tennis.

One day when I was driving home from the club, younger daughter, who had been at the club’s pool, said that another girl there had asked her where her mother was. She answered that I was playing tennis. The friend asked if I was any good. Younger daughter’s answer? “No, she’s never been on tv.” Well, yes I had as matter of fact, but as a line judge, not as a player. But still…

Anyway, I imagine that if my daughter were in the same situation that Mad Mad’s was and had been asked to "tell us/the class/the school/the world" about her parents, she would have said:

She’s not any good at tennis.


(And a big thank you! to hokgardner for suggesting that I check out Mad Mad's blog)

Stash Hoarder? Not Me.

I do not have very much stash. (See below) For those non-knitters out there, "stash" is yarn you have in storage for projects you may not even have come up with yet. This is an embarrassing amount of stash, not because there is so much, but because there is so little. Most self-respecting knitters have lots and lots of stash, so much stash that they hide it throughout their homes---under beds, in closets, in basements and attics, and other places they think their significant others will never see it.
Mine all fits in ONE container:
One 13" by 21" by 7" container. My knitter friends would laugh at the idea that I even consider such a small amount of yarn to be stash.

My sock stash:

My sock stash will eventually make nine pairs of socks. Again, my knitter friends would laugh.

There are people who are hoarders. I am not one of them. When I see "professional organizers" on HGTV, I hear them say that anything you haven't used in one/two years, get rid of. Some members of my family claim that my philosophy is that if I haven't used it in a day or two, I want to get rid of it. NOT TRUE... After older daughter was married, my s-i-l told her that he thought I was trying to get rid of everything in my house, box by box, by shipping it to their house. Again, NOT TRUE. Isn't there some sort of statute of limitations on how long adult children can store stuff at their parents' home?

Older granddaughter is now reading Nancy Drew books and I found a lot of them this weekend in my basement. They belong to my younger daughter, who lives in LA, and I left her a phone message asking if I could ship them off to older granddaughter. Before she could even call back, I had the books all boxed up and labeled to be mailed. When she did call back, she warned me that the Nancy Drew books she had were for middle-school or high-school readers, not for almost-eight-year olds. Too late! They will go to the Post Office today, and then my older daughter can figure out what to do with them.

Box by box by box by box.....

Can You Say "Paradise"?

That’s what our neighborhood pool felt like today. For some reason, once the end of summer vacation comes and the kids are all back in school, no one comes to the pool, and so I have it to myself. It was lovely this morning: the bluest, cloudless skies; no noise except for the birds and whatever the noisy insects in the trees are; perfect temperature and humidity; and the occasional, silvery corporate jet gliding noiselessly overhead, very high in the cloudless blue sky. I have said for decades that the only thing I would trade my soul for is my very own swimming pool. Natas, are you listening?

When I lived in Florida, I was a regular long-term substitute teacher in a school for the gifted. It was a separate facility, on its own campus, and the students had to meet IQ and other ability requirements to qualify for the school. The kids were amazingly bright, smarter than most of the teachers probably, and teaching there required that the teacher’s ego could stand knowing that if a student questioned something, it was OK to say, “I don’t know, but let’s find out.” We couldn’t fool these kids. Since it was a separate school, the kids weren’t bullied by the types of people who would call them “geeks” or “nerds.” They may have called each other that at times, but all in teasing fun. They tended to spark off each other so classes were never dull and it was a blast to teach there.

One student has stayed in my memory. His name was Joe, but when I took over the class for the remainder of the year at the start of second semester, I couldn’t figure out who he was; he signed his papers “Natas.” I asked Natas to let me know what his real name was so that I could record his grades correctly in the grade book. Turns out, he was signing "Natas" because that is "Satan" spelled backwards. It was meant to shock, I’m sure, but I just said “OK.” Let’s just say that Joe was dancing to his own music. He was sort of Goth before Goth was even in existence and occasionally got in trouble for his behavior and his appearance, but all in all, he seemed like a nice kid. His poor father was called in once for a conference after Joe had done something wrong, and he certainly was rattled by his son’s behavior. He said to me, “Do you know he signs ‘Natas’ on his papers?”

Well, yes I did, and I told him it didn’t worry me, that it was just meant to shock and it wasn’t working. He finally bought his son a computer (before the days when every home had one, let alone multiple, computers), hoping that using it would inspire better work. Oddly enough, Joe started signing his papers “Joe *anonymous*, 3rd.” I guess he liked how his actual name looked in print.

We teachers wondered what would happen to Joe. Would he end up a bored office worker? A conservative, right-wing Republican, very strict with his own children? I hope not. I hope he’s found a creative and fun way to make a living, and is able to use his sort of odd outlook on life in a way that he and those around him can appreciate. It’s just one of those things I will probably never know….


Knittergran?

What? Who’s there?

It's me, Natas.

Huh? Wha…?

Quitcher bitchin.

What?

Didn’t you just go on and on about how no one is at the pool and the weather is perfect and blah, blah, blah?

Well, yes.

So you already have your own pool. Stop bugging me. I don’t want your soul. Geeze, you’re practically circling the drain aren't you?

Uh, well, I hope not, but...

Well, you're old. So there's not much soul there for me to work with, right?

Well, Ohh...kay . I see your point.

Good.

Yikes!

Cooking Post

I never thought I would write a cooking post, because, well, I'm not much of a cook. Take out is my favorite meal. And after my chicken-on-the-grill adventure (not enough coals, coals on one side of the chicken no longer burning so I had to keep opening the grill---losing heat---to turn the chicken around), I was sure I'd never write about cooking. But today, I had a success, largely by chance of course, and I just wanted to share.

I need croutons for dinner, and there were only the boxed varieties (yuck, unless you like chemical flavors) at the grocery store. So I took some soon-to-be stale bread, cut it into cubes, and put the cubes on a baking sheet sprayed with PAM. Then I poured a liberal amount of olive oil over them, topped them off with garlic salt, and popped them in a 300 degree oven. While I was reading other blogs, I occasionally remembered to check and turn the croutons, and after about 20 minutes or so, they were done! They are cooling on a paper towel because I apparently added way too much olive oil, and next time I would add more spices, perhaps. But all in all, I'm quite happy with them and they were easy.

I have a feeling that most other people know how to make croutons, but for me it was a new adventure, and I thought I should share. :-)

Finished Objects

Yay! Two projects finished---finally! After spending two months knitting a pair of socks, I was able to get busy on two other projects-one, the dreaded beaded scarf, and the other, a scarf I had bought the yarn for about four months ago. It was nice to knit on something other than size two needles for a change.

I like the beaded scarf, and knitting it was much easier than the beading process was. Sixteen-hundred beads on yarn a bit too thick for the holes in the beads---not fun at all! I used the kitchener stitch to graft the two ends together, and it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. The seam is quite visible and since the scarf could conceivably be worn with either side out, the seam detracts from one side a bit. I know (now) that the kitchener wasn't designed to work with a combination of knitted and purled stitches.

The second project is a scarf (Horndal Scarf from Noro Revisited by Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton) and it's an easy project. The garter stitch sections are knitted in Noro Kureyon and the ribbed sections are knitted in Noro Blossom yarn. As always, Noro colors are gorgeous, but I don't like the sudden surprise of knots, especially knots that cause a sudden shift in color. When I use Noro in the future, I will re-wind it into balls so that I can look for knots and color shifts before I knit.

Next project? I am starting on a sweater for grandson, who will be two this months. I bought that yarn last fall to make him a sweater for Christmas. Ooops......

Why So Few People Read My Blog

(And I sincerely thank those of you who do read it.)

It's because I am not clever---check out this blog, and add her to your "favorites" list. She is clever and funny, and by the way, how do you add pictures with your own text to blogs???

To Older Daughter:

I take back the Ravelry access information I sent you. Delete it from your memory and your computer's memory.
Why?
Dad told me that you have picked out names for New Baby and you won't tell the grandparents what they are.
Mean, I say. Just plain mean.

Georgia On My Mind

I've lived in Georgia for nineteen years. I didn't move here by choice, but because of my husband's job. After all these years, I still don't much like it, but I have friends and activities here, know where the stores are, and have a hairdresser and doctors I like. The reason this area has grown so fast and so large is because companies move here, and the unfortunate employees must follow. After all these years, I still wouldn't choose to live here if I had the choice, and I can't think of any reason anyone would move here if they didn't have to.

Two items in this week's news reinforce my opinion of the area: Clayton County, south of Atlanta, is the first school district in the nation since 1969 to have its accreditation stripped from it; AND there is a road sign on the Georgia side of the Georgia/Alabama border that says that our speed limit laws will be "strickly enforced." Oh, good.

I feel sorry for the parents in Clayton County. Unless they are wealthy enough and can find decent private schools within commuting distance from their homes, they are stuck with schools that are poorly run and poorly performing. If they are homeowners, they can try and sell and move someplace with better schools, but people aren't moving to the area because of the schools.

I don't know the solution to any of this, but I do know that there is a connection between education in Georgia and the sign just inside the state line...

Are the inmates running the asylum

over at the McCain campaign?

I'm guessing that the governor of Alaska is a nice enough woman. But a heartbeat away from the Presidency??? She has been governor for two years and before that she was the mayor of a small (pop. 7,000) town and before that she was a PTA president.

John McCain is 72 years old today, and if elected, will be the oldest president at the time of his election in our history. He has had a couple of bouts of melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer. So to worry that he might not make it through four years is not wildly beyond imagination.

And then Sarah Palin takes over? She must give hope to PTA presidents everywhere...

Does anyone know

if you can get e-coli or whatever from slicing your finger open while trying to put a skewer in raw chicken?

What I was trying to do was roast a chicken on my charcoal grill. I have no business doing this but my husband is on the road coming home from south Georgia and I felt like trying something new. My friend in West Virginia did this while I was visiting and the chicken was delicious. I thought I was paying enough attention, but possibly-NOT.

First of all, I was distracted by all of the different brands of charcoal at the grocery store and decided to try something called Greenwise 100% Wood Charcoal. Doesn't "100% natural" sound like a good thing? However, it doesn't look like charcoal; it looks like black pieces of lumber. When I was in college, my friends stopped asking me to get them their cigarettes from the machines in the basement if I was going there to do laundry. (Yes, there were cigarette vending machines in dorms back then. It was a long time ago.) I would get distracted by all of the labels and end up buying something other than what they had requested. "Give these a try," I would say. I learned then that smokers are very faithful to their brand, and I have just learned that I should have stuck with the normal charcoal briquettes.

I don't know if I put enough charcoal in or if the fire is hot enough to even roast marshmallows, let alone cook a chicken. It sure doesn't feel like it. And as I dumped the hot coals out of the chimney we use to start the charcoal, the pieces fell apart. I don't know if I'm supposed to leave the vents opened or closed, or if it's ok to open the lid to check and make sure everything is still cooking along. So basically, I don't know anything except that my finger hurts.

Tonight we are going to a restaurant where the local democrats have rented two rooms with televisions so that we can watch Barack Obama's speech. I honestly thought that there were only ten or twelve of us out here, so this is a nice surprise. And if this chicken doesn't roast, well, there's my fallback plan---dinner out.

One Downsmanship?

Is there such a thing?

When I fly, I always notice if and what the person sitting next to me is reading, and so I assume that others do the same. I'm just back from DC and West Virginia, and on the plane back I had a book (The Other Boleyn Girl) given to me by a friend. When she handed it to me, she said "It's kind of trashy," and it kind of is. I was in my favorite seat---the bulkhead window---and a well-dressed businessman sat down next to me. I assumed he was probably no dummy and thought: What kind of dummy will he think I am when he sees what I'm reading? So I sort of hid the book as I read it during the flight, but when my fellow traveller pulled out his book, I saw that it was one of the Anne Rice vampire stories. Ick.

I don't know why on earth I care what a total stranger thinks about my reading material, but I guess I do care; maybe it's because a million years ago I was an English major. The question is: Which one of us had the poorer taste in literature?


Unrelated Rambling:

I am not surprised when grocery store/elevator music includes the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Simon and/or Garfunkel. They have been around a long time and their music has sort of become mainstream. But the music playing over the sound system on my Delta flight yesterday while we were boarding and waiting to take off included "Back to Black" by Amy Winehouse. Is she already mainstream? Is background music on a plane in the same category as grocery store music? I think she is an amazing talent; I just hope she stays around for a long time so we can enjoy more of her.

The End

Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others?

OK, so this doesn't work when there are only two things, but do you see a problem here??? Well, I do. But I didn't until I was one row away from starting the toe decreases on sock two.

Take a good look at the heels (oops, one sock is upside down):















Yup. For some reason, I switched back to the striping yarn before I turned the heel on sock #2. But I didn't notice until way, way too late, unless I wanted to frog the whole foot, which I didn't. These socks have been a series of mistakes from the very beginning of sock #1.
Mistake #1: I don't remember what it was, but I had to start over fairly soon after beginning.
Mistake #2: I picked up the OTN sock and enthusiastically started knitting. Many rows later I noticed something odd. There was a hole, and the brown striping zigged when it should have zagged. Ooops, a short row. I didn't realize I had knitted in the wrong direction. Ribbit, ribbit...
Mistake #3: The yarn is called Paca-Ped HT. The HT, of course, means "heel" and "toe." So I just used the solid brown yarn as reinforcing yarn for the heel flap. At the time, I did wonder why the reinforcement yarn was a solid color, and why it was as thick as the sock yarn. Well, I tell you, it made for one thick, sturdy heel. Duh. It was for contrasting heels and toes, just like the picture on the yarn label!!!!! Frogged it.

So on sock #2, I was destined to do something wrong. Today after I discovered my mistake, I took the pair, with #2 still OTN, to my LYS. My knitter friends there said that since the socks were not a gift, I should just leave them as is. They reminded me that The Yarn Harlot says that there are no knitting police. If there were, I think that they might take away my needles. However, in my defense, I started these months ago, just before I damaged my knee and needed surgery. Also, my thumb has been in a brace forEVER and that doesn't help any.

Some people say that the yarn tells you what to do, and I believe this yarn was telling me to just, for Dog's sake, finish and go on to something else. So I am...

Silliness

This is the state of the suburban neighborhood-at least the state of MY suburban neighborhood. Our list serve sent out a warning yesterday about a "predatory owl." This owl has so far taken out one dog and two cats. This must be a very large owl! A huge owl!! A very hungry owl!!! Who knew such a thing was possible?

The powers-that-be in the neighborhood are trying to find a professional "owl catcher" to humanely trap the owl and relocate him. Who knew such a "professional" existed? But then, who knew such an owl existed?

For whatever reason, the neighbors choose to believe that an owl, not the coyotes that inhabit this area, has killed off their pets. Friends who live about three miles away found their mangled cat, and knew that one of the two coyotes seen regularly in their neighborhood had gotten it. The evening following the discovery of their cat's remains, they saw one of the coyotes standing next to the mailbox at the end of their driveway. They assumed he was asking, "What's for afters?"

The wildlife was here before we were, and I kind of enjoy seeing different creatures outside; we've had raccoons and opossums on our deck. Deer are all around, although unfortunately, we more often see them dead along the roads.

I would love to be listening to the phone call asking for someone to come and remove the owl. "You want what???" But the thought that crosses my mind is that these same people who think that the owl is carrying off pets are the same people who get to vote. ..

Beaded Knitting, continued

Remember the beading I whined about over a month ago? Well, I have finally gotten back to it, after knee surgery and dealing with a problem thumb. I threaded 1400 of the 1600 beads on the yarn (Aslan Trends, Natural Luxury Yarns, "Class"), and that process shredded the yarn a bit. I don't recommend it for beaded knitting. The beads are from Czechoslovakia (via this shop) and are very sparkly, but that sparkle doesn't show up well in the photo.

I met a friend for a "working" lunch on Saturday. She has made several of these scarves, and they are beautiful; there is an endless variety to make depending on the yarns and beads chosen. She was kind and offered to guide me through the getting-started stage. It turns out that I should only have put about half the beads, or even one-quarter of them, on the yarn. Every bead on there has to be pushed along as I knit, and once past the first eleven set-up rows, I only need five beads every other row---so I'm pushing way too many beads along, even though we cut off about half of the 1400. (Arggh--I'll have to re-string them when I start the second half of the scarf.) Once I got the hang of pushing the beads into place as I knit, the project became fun. I've also found out about a new bead store in the area, but I'm refraining from checking it out, going crazy over the beads and buying even MORE beads to thread onto yarn. If I still enjoy this process after finishing the first scarf, then I'll go there and fall in love with some new beads.

Anyhoo.....

As I was going to add in my previous blog, but Blogger wouldn't let me, there is art, no matter how strange, everywhere. This huge spider is on the grounds outside of the Louvre. I have no idea why it's there, but I think it's neat and fun and all, especially when you change where the picture is taken from, and discover, voila! The Eiffel Tower in the background...

April in Paris

This spring I went to Paris with a college friend. It was her seventh visit and my third, so we skipped a lot of the more usual tourist attractions and enjoyed things that are more off the beaten path, except for Monet's garden, which neither of us had seen. We both love, love, love Paris, and my friend has a savings account which will allow her to live there for several months. She says she will move there and stay until the money runs out. Her husband isn't fond of this idea because he worries that she may not return. (Two cute grandchildren will bring her back...I think.) Within three weeks of our return, we both decided that we "needed" to go back. That's the lure of Paris for us and for many expats who now live there part or all of each year.

It was April, the weather was cool, and on two evenings, it snowed! It was magical. Snow at home? Not so magical, but it was really pretty to see Paris by night with the snow falling. We stayed on the Left Bank in a neighborhood called Rue Cler. We had windows overlooking Motte-Piquet and it was so amazing to open the windows and look out to see this in the distance:

Paris is a wonderful city for children. There are small parks tucked in all over the city, and in the summer, lots of carousels. We came across a hand-operated carousel, and learned the derivation of the term "catching the brass ring." The children had sticks and as they circled past a post with brass rings hanging from it, they used the sticks to try and catch one. It was more difficult than it sounds, and I don't know if the children who were successful won a prize or not, but they were having a great time. The man in the center of the carousel is cranking the wheel to make the whole thing turn.

What is also fun about Paris is all of the art. Yes, there are more museums than you can imagine, but also, there is art in the streets, in the parks---everywhere!

THIS is an entrance to a Metro station:

A friend of mine and her husband recently returned from their first visit to Paris, and they did agree that it is a beautiful city, but they didn't (in their own words) "get" Paris. They saw sidewalk cafes everywhere, full of people drinking wine or coffee no matter the time of day. They wondered if the French work. Of course they do; they didn't see the same people at each cafe all day every day. But the French take time to sit and relax, and so do the tourists. It's a treat to just sit, drink rich, strong coffee or great wine, and watch the world go by. And because everyone from everywhere goes to Paris, you really do see the world go by.

So, if anyone is looking for a travel companion, my passport is ready...and so am I!

Smoke and Mirrors

I spent way too long today, in the million-degree heat, walking across more acres of asphalt parking lots, in order to pick up my new glasses. "HAH!" said DOG.

First of all, last week I ordered the new lenses for my glasses at a place I shall call by its initials: PV. When I was in the exam room with the doctor who owns a bunch of PVs in the Atlanta area, I mentioned how horrid my current glasses had been; I was on the third pair because the little magnet that holds the clip-on sunglasses on kept falling out. I finally found a glue at Lowes that worked, but then the sunglasses went all wonky and wouldn't stay on the glasses. They have been a pain in the a** for a whole year. I wasn't being unpleasant and I didn't even think to ask for any sort of refund, but he agreed that he didn't like the glasses either, told me he would give me free frames to make up for the inconvenience and didn't charge for the exam. Sweet!

However, I wanted to keep the old frames, because I like the look of them, but wanted separate sunglasses. No problem! The sunglass frames would be free. Again, sweet!

If you've ever been to PV, you know that the pricing is based on magic, smoke and mirrors, and the click of the mouse. You never see the screen; you just listen to the clicks as the salesperson mumbles all sorts of things that you can never quite hear. As I looked at the receipt, I realized two things: I have no idea if I REALLY got free frames for the sunglasses and I have no idea if I've paid anywhere near a decent price for what I've bought. Six-hundred dollars for one complete pair and the lenses for another pair? I have no idea.

When I went in today, there was, as always, a line. So I waited and waited and waited... There is no one whose job it is to ask, "May I help you?" Everyone is at tables helping people pick out glasses, so until one of them is free, we wait. And wait. An indecisive teenage-age girl was picking out frames. Her equally indecisive younger sister was trying to help. Finally, the salesperson voiced her opinion and the teenager took her advice. Phew... Last week when I picked out my sunglasses, I asked the salesperson, hoping that she did not have an ugly or perverse sense of humor, to just tell me what to buy. She did and I did and that was that.

Well, when I finally made it to the head of the line, I got my sunglasses and they were fine. But I had to leave my regular glasses for two hours to have the lenses changed out. No problem. I went to my nearby LYS and knitted with friends who were there---a nice break.

But two hours later, back at PV, there was a problem: blurry spots right in my line of vision. So next week, I get to go back and stand in line again to get my correctly-made lenses (I hope).

Really, this is it. PV is always very good about repairing glasses and fixing problems. But it would be great if there weren't always problems, and it would be even greater if I knew if I was getting a good deal.

In My Not-So-Humble Opinion

I was just at the local mall, and it must be about a million degrees outside. And acres of asphalt don't make it any cooler.

So, I think that all parking lots should be made of something that allows water to seep into the ground. I think that this would allow rain to seep through, and the parking lot wouldn't be so hot.

A. I have no idea if this is true or not, but in any case, letting water into the ground can't be a bad thing.

B. It doesn't rain here, or at least not at any here where I am, so I may never find out if it's true.

On the other hand, I did find a lamp I like to replace one I didn't like, so all is not lost.

My New Grandson, Abraham Lincoln Gardner

I’ve been reading The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, written by Daniel Mark Epstein, as part of my lifelong fascination with Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. I don’t know why I and others are so interested in them, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that they are the first accessible President and First Lady. I don’t recall ever seeing photographs of previous presidents, but thanks to the development of photography and the work of Matthew Brady and his staff, we have many, many pictures of the Lincolns and notables of their age as well as of the Civil War. I have heard that there is even a recording, scratchy and poor, of Lincoln speaking; I don't know if this is true. I think that part of the fascination may also be because Lincoln would seem to be such an unlikely man (very poor, unschooled, and born to a mother who was apparently an illegitimate child) to have become president. (Although, perhaps in his era, he was not as unlikely a possibility as someone like him would be now.)

I have even gone so far as to bid through an online auction site on a hair purportedly from Mary Todd Lincoln. I didn’t really want it, but I bid early in the auction so that I could send links to both daughters telling them that one of them would be receiving it for Christmas--and no fighting, you two! I figured that there were people a lot more obsessed than I and that surely I would be outbid. The joke was almost on me as time went on and on and there were NO competing bids. What on earth would I do with it? Ick. But at the last minute, several bids came in and I lost. Whew….

Anyway, the book is very interesting, well researched and has a lot of letters and documented statements from both of the Lincolns and from people who knew them. History comes alive, but without the soap-opera aspect of the book I read before this one, which was so bad that I can’t remember the name of it.

This book was a novel about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, and boy, did the author take liberties with what little research she apparently did. Part of the plot? Mary Todd Lincoln seduced Abraham Lincoln (on the sofa at a friend’s house, no less-while the friend and her husband stayed out of the way in the kitchen) in order to get pregnant so that he would marry her. The author seems to have “channeled” MTL in order to be able to write her thoughts as she plots to trap Abe into marriage. I realize that Mary is long dead, but it still seems wrong to me to take such liberties with the life of a real person.

I have always thought that it would be interesting to be the descendent of someone so famous (NOT infamous) that the whole world knows about him. I wonder what that would be like. The only lead I have on finding out is the sister-in-law who claims to be descended from President Polk. He seems mainly notable for starting an unnecessary war for reasons that were, at best, exaggerations of fact (sound familiar?)and my sister-in-law seems only interested in feeling somewhat superior because of her ancestor. But the last descendant of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, a great-grandson, died in 1985 and so there are no descendents to protest what history does to their story.

I suggested to older daughter, who is having a baby and seems to be having a problem coming up with names, that she should name it, if it is a boy, Abraham Lincoln Gardner. She says no, but I think it would be a lovely tribute to someone as significant as our sixteenth president.

Abe Gardner, anyone?

Converging Thoughts

1. Blogger Amanda says (quoting her mother): Raising children is like being pecked to death by chickens.

2. I heard on the news this morning that as men get older, they get happier; as women get older, they become less happy.

Hmmm.....could there be a connection here? As women get older, there may be one chicken left that tries to finish off the job. (Check out Mad Mad's post today for a clue.)

Gardens in a Time of Drought

(with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez )

I live in a suburb outside of Atlanta, Georgia. We have been in a drought for several years, but last year and this have been the worst of it so far. Last summer we weren't allowed to water outside at ALL, except with water saved from the showers indoors---water that runs while we wait for hot water. There was even controversy over that because some people thought that using that water in the yard kept it from going back into the water supply via the sewer system. But that's all the water we had for outside use.

This summer, even though the drought has not eased, we are allowed to water three times a week, for twenty-five minutes each time, using a hand-held, automatic shut-off nozzle attached to a hose. Woo hoo! We can do this until ten in the morning.

If we want to install a pool, we may fill the pool. If we have a pool, we may top it off throughout the summer. If we have landscaping professionally installed, we may water it for a month. This allows pool and landscaping businesses to survive. But if we have---and I do---nearly 20 year-old landscaping---tough. I understand this, I really do. I've been to Lake Lanier and seen how terribly low it is. It is just so frustrating to watch plants wither and die. Last year nothing died, but this year things are on their way out. My azaleas didn't bloom this year and are now wilted. Daylilies, which are tough plants and survive neglected along roadsides, did not bloom. My roses are just hanging in, but not flowering. Very large leyland cypresses that give us complete privacy in the back yard are now diseased and will probably fall over in the next ice storm. I think the drought has stressed them beyond the point where they could have remained healthy longer. Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, there are floods! We watch the news and cringe to see floods ruining homes and destroying crops.

Last summer we learned that Atlanta is the only major city in the country to have only one source of water: Lake Lanier. Other cities have multiple sources and thus, have resources to allow them to deal with droughts. Not here. And our always-unhelpful governor, Sonny Perdue, can only think to hold prayer sessions on the steps of the capitol.

Gotta love the "Bible Belt"!

Chat Bizarre

My summer has gotten way off track. I quit my teaching job (YAY) and planned on doing lots of gardening and other DIY projects. I also planned to join my friend Kathy and go to Art in the Park in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. It's held one weekend a month during the spring and summer and many great artists and craftsmen participate. Also, Blowing Rock is a great little town in the mountains, and there are lots of interesting shops there. My favorite is de Provence et d'ailleurs, a French shop run by a very patient French woman who is quite nice about allowing me to practice my French with her.

Because of other trips and my knee surgery, I haven't been able to get there yet this year. Two of my friends did, however, and they sent me a sign that reads: ATTENTION! CHAT BIZARRE
I put the sign on the door to the laundry room (my cat's "office"), where we keep his food and bowls.

This is Lewis, THE cat:

And he must be able to read French because he is turning crazy. Last night he opened the Rubbermaid bin we keep his dry food in. Maybe we hadn't left any food for him to eat during the night; I don't know. He has never done this before and without opposable thumbs, how he managed it is a mystery. But he apparently ate himself into a stupor and didn't wake us earlier than we'd like this morning.

Just now (noonish) I heard a racket in the laundry room and went in to see what was going on. He was trying, again, to open the food bin, even though he has plenty of food in his bowl. So it's just for fun, I guess. He is crazy...

Too Lazy Today

I apparently am too lazy today to write, so instead I'm sharing this video from The Country Doctor's Wife. It's for English majors, English teachers and the grammar/spelling obsessed everywhere (or at least for the one or two who read this blog).

Oops...

This past weekend, I went to Austin to visit my wonderful, perfect, gorgeous and funny grandchildren (and their parents). I had a great time just watching and listening to them. Yesterday we stuffed them in the hot car (it was HOT in Austin-over 100 every day, and one day, even 105!!!) to take them to lunch, and then to a new yarn shop in town. It's called Gauge and it's great! Lots of gorgeous yarns to pet and drool over. The woman there was very nice, and didn't even seem to mind 22-month old grandson "admiring" the yarn. I told older daughter that she was to stop me from buying any more yarn, but she must not have been listening, because, oops, I ended up with this:
It's Lorna's Laces hand-dyed Shepherd Sock Yarn (80% superwash wool, 20% nylon) and it is really, really soft and the colors are ...well, you can see the colors. My daughter and I each bought the same colorway, and will make socks out of it. Great minds think alike.

However, I REALLY had not intended to buy yarn, but resistance was futile. One of the best reasons to knit socks is that no matter where you are, if you see a sock yarn you love, you know how much you need. The same is not true of sweaters and other items, so you end up either buying a new pattern in order to buy the yarn, or you leave the yarn in the shop for another knitter. But you can ALWAYS buy sock yarn!

And if you live in Austin, and love this particular colorway in Lorna's Laces, too late---we beat you to it and bought it all. Sorry...

The Dumbest Idea I Have EVER Had

I don't know what possessed me. Last week at Knit-Nite at the LYS, I saw a beautiful scarf. It had beads knitted into it, and I loved it. "What a great gift idea," I thought. And it is. I'm sure people I would knit them for would love them.

However, each scarf requires 1500 beads. FIFTEEN-HUNDRED!!!!! And how do these beads get in the scarf? Each of these FIFTEEN-HUNDRED beads is threaded onto the yarn, bead by bead, by hand. I've been at it for twenty minutes, I have about thirty beads on the yarn, and I've broken one needle already.

I am visiting older daughter in Austin this weekend, and I offered to watch her three children, to let her have absolute, complete peace and quiet so that she could string all these beads. She said "No," very emphatically.

So now I have NO idea how I am going to accomplish making this scarf. The only thing I can think of is to leave the beads, yarn, needles, and foam pad out on the dining room table, and then to work on it little by little, bead by bead.....for a very long time.

The Middle Child

My older daughter and her husband are expecting their fourth child in November. They hope that child #2 and new baby will be buddies, no matter the sex of #4. Child #1 (almost 8) and child #3 (almost 2) are great buddies, and that is helped by the fact that #1 is old enough to understand personal space, and knows that she can’t force #3 to like her. Instead, she plays with him in an appropriate manner, reads to him, and generally lets him be him. #2, however, tries to make #3 love her, and is way too enthusiastically and physically affectionate. (You don’t want to play with me when I love you so much? See how much I love you? Momma, he’s running away and I want to HUG him!)

My sister is the middle child and she has always been opposed to anyone’s having a middle child. She told her husband that if he wanted four children, fine, they would have four. But they wouldn’t have three. He pointed out to her that they couldn’t have four without first having three and she explained that three guaranteed four. They have two children.

When I see how #2 and #3 interact, I realize what my sister meant all these years. I think back to how my brother (#3) and I (#1) treated her. There were five years in age between my brother and me, and we got along well. My poor sister was often the odd man out. My brother was (in my memory, at least) the worst of the two of us when it came to tormenting her. There was a period of time in his youth when he was obsessed with robots; they didn’t exist yet in any form but there was plenty written about their development and my brother was fascinated by the idea of them. When my sister was angry with him and told him off, he would repeat in a monotone voice, “That does not compute. That does not compute,” until she gave up and went away.

A lot of what we did to her was the result of her having her birthday on April 1st. It wasn’t her fault that she was born on April Fool’s Day, but my brother and I made the most of it. One year we sent her on a scavenger hunt. She followed clue after clue, only to find a gift-wrapped apple core at the end. I really, really hope that we had the generosity (and the budget) to give her a decent gift after all of that, but I don’t remember. We often told her that she had won the Fussbudget of the Year Award (after Lucy in the Peanuts cartoon), but no wonder!!! We tormented her and she, understandably, fought back.

So, for #2’s sake: I hope new baby just loves, loves, loves his or her big sister!

Oh, and---sorry, Linda!!!

One Pair Down---Many, Many To Go

I finally finished the Noro socks. They aren't identical because there was a knot in the yarn at the bottom of the leg of the second sock-rats! But I love the colors anyway. Noro has GREAT colors!

I am just finished with the heel flap on the Paca-Ped Socks, and boy-howdee, do I love this yarn. It is alpaca and it is just SO soft! And instead of forming horizontal stripes, it stripes in a spiral. It's fun to watch it stripe up, and now I can't wait to see how the spiral works on the foot.

For Non-Knitters

A friend just spent a long weekend in Vermont, and came across these socks. Because she is not a knitter (in spite of my best efforts), she LOVED this place and bought two pairs of socks. I look at them and think that even though I love the colors and the fact that they are not identical, I would miss the knitting of them! So I will look at them for inspiration, but for all you non-knitting sock-lovers out there, this may be the site for you.

Why I Hate Having Surgery

Yes, I know, no one likes having surgery. But today's activities made me remember more reasons why I don't like it. It took four hours to go through all the pre-op routines at two different places. The surgery will take about a half an hour. There is no logic to this.

And I had to sign a whole bunch of forms saying it's ok if they somehow maim, paralyze or kill me. I had to say that it is ok for them to do whatever they want with any body parts, including limbs, that they take during surgery. I hope they don't need any organs or limbs for transplant that day. Maybe that's not what they had in mind...

All of this for what is supposed to be quick, minor routine surgery to fix two tears in the mensicus in my right knee. At least I have lots of knitting projects for the recovery period. :-)

@#$%^& Noro Sock Yarn

Well, that's it!!! I am working on my second pair of Noro socks, and just as with the first pair, I've come across a knot. Grrrr. In the first pair, the knot was at the bottom of the leg of the first sock and that meant no chance for identical socks. But I love the colors that Noro uses in their yarns and I grabbed a new skein that caught my eye at my LYS.

I love, love, love the colors, but not the unexpected knot, this time in the gusset of the second sock. I had even unwound the skein so that both socks started with the same color and I really thought I was on my way to almost-identical socks. Nope.

No more Noro sock yarn for me.

On Scrapbooking and Good Intentions Abandoned

When I told my daughters that I was going to make scrapbooks for the grandchildren, they laughed---with good reason. Both girls have albums with odds and ends of pictures and various awards taped to crispy, yellowing pages. Of course these scrapbooks were put together before the scrapbooking craze, and I didn't know anything about using acid-free paper and non-yellowing tape, cutting and pasting all sorts of designs on the pages, and stamping. When older daughter was little, even getting photographs was tough. We used film cameras, the film had to be sent off to a processing center someplace far away, and we just crossed our fingers and hoped that the film or pictures would not be lost in the mail. By the time I made second daughter's scrapbook, I had lost some enthusiasm for the project, and a few years ago she pointed out to me that I had labeled some of her school pictures with the wrong grade and age. I told her to scratch out the incorrect information and write in whatever was correct. She was moved...

After my first two grandchildren were born, my neighbor started working as a scrapbooking pusher representative. My older daughter's neighbor was a stamping pusher representative. The perfect storm!!! I bought all sorts of supplies, and put together a beautiful, complicated and elaborate scrapbook for grandchild #1. Then I made a somewhat less beautiful, complicated and elaborate scrapbook for grandchild # 2. Grandchild #3 is a little over eighteen months old. I am two years behind in scrapbooking, so imagine grandchild #3's scrapbook: Oh look! There's his birth announcement and a photo! Grandchild #4 is expected in November. That poor child will be lucky if I don't lose the birth announcement before I remember to buy the scrapbook!

Half a Project Completed, But New Yarn Beckoning

I have half of a pair of socks finished, i.e., one sock. But when I went in to the LYS yesterday, new sock yarn shouted out to me, "Take me home!" And I did. And I want to start knitting with it, but I have NEVER started a second pair of socks before I have finished the pair OTN. The problem with starting the second sock is that I will have to unwind the ball to find the proper color to start with in order to have even remotely identical socks. But I'm lazy, so maybe I will just make fraternal-ish socks. Decisions, decisions.....

The new yarn is Paca-Ped H-T, color: Carribean Chocolate---YUM! It is a superwash Alpaca sock yarn (100g hand-dyed) with 25g. of co-ordinating heel & toe yarn for reinforcement. The yarn itself is from Peru, but it is dyed in the US. It is so soft that it is now my new favorite sock yarn---until the next new yarn at the LYS shouts out to me.

Huh?

I do not understand the people interviewed on television who say that they supported Clinton, but since Obama, not Clinton, is the nominee, they will vote for McCain. If my choice isn't running, nyah, nyah, nyah, I sure won't vote for another Democrat???

There are issues: war or peace; universal healthcare or no universal healthcare; good energy policy or crummy (or no) energy policy; and so on and so on.

Politicians have positions on these issues.

If they are elected, politicians can turn their positions into policies and these policies can affect us all.

This isn't American Idol. Good grief...

Noro Colors

I love Noro colors. The sunlight was bright when I took this, so just how deep and rich the colors are isn't as apparent as I would have liked. I think these will be my favorite socks so far. This is Noro Kureyon sock yarn, 70% wool, 30% nylon, and it is color S40. There are 100 grams and 420 meters in the single skein, so there is enough for a standard pair of socks.

The Sounds of Silence

Most of us live in a noisy world; traffic, cell phones, Ipods, television, radio, and so on fill our days with sound. Some of us apparently don’t remember “quiet” and are uncomfortable with time filled with silence.

I was at my orthopedist’s office yesterday. His waiting room is a quiet one, overlooking woods and large planters filled with flowers. There is no television blaring drug infomercials or showing talking heads warning us about diseases we might have and not even know about. I had about a half an hour wait, and was quite happily enjoying the quiet while I knitted.

Suddenly the woman across from me picked up her cell phone and called her parent’s number. “Hi Dad. Is Mom there? No? Oh. Well, I wanted the recipe for the cookies we had the other night…….” and on and on she talked. This gave the woman behind her the idea to call someone, and then the woman behind me called someone. So suddenly the silence was gone, and the rest of us had to listen to three halves of conversations. Why people are willing to have personal conversations in front of complete strangers is a mystery to me, and why anyone on a cell phone has to shout is as well.

There is a sign in the waiting room asking people to please take cell phone conversations outside into the hallway, and the daughter of the woman behind me noticed it and whispered to her mother that she shouldn’t be on her phone. The woman took her call outside, and the other two people quickly ended their conversations.

Silence!

Finished Socks!

I have just finished the socks that gave me such a hard time and they are almost identical. I don't really get too fussy about identical normally, but after the not-even-fraternal Noro socks (because of a knot in the yarn, resulting in a sudden color change), it's fun to have something come so close to working. These are made from Online Supersocke 100 Holiday-Color.

Now I'm on to another skein of Noro. :-)