My Apologies

to the island nations of the UK and Ireland. I just spent about three weeks wandering around both islands, and to have enough space in my luggage for whatever I might buy to bring home for my grandchildren and me, I followed the advice of two friends who travel a lot with only carry-on luggage. They do this by saving soon to be discarded clothing (underwear and shirts, whatever, isn't readily visible to the public) and discard them along the way. I did that, and it is a great idea, except that I don't know where island countries put trash. 

So I apologize for the usual things that I discarded in hotel wastebaskets, but I especially apologize for these:

This is, or rather, was, my right Dansko clog, which I alternate wearing with my sneakers when I have a lot of walking to do. My sister and I checked into our hotel, left for dinner, and when we returned, there was black crumbly stuff on the floor.  Hmmph. Some vacuuming job, we thought.

The next night, in a different hotel room, the same thing happened. Hmmmm. Must be one of us picked up something outside...two days in a row???

Not likely, so we checked our shoes and my Dansko had disintegrated. 

Out it went. Off to a landfill I suppose. I read once that we don't really throw things away; we just put them someplace else (like the landfill) and that's true. So I apologize to Ireland.


But my sister and I had a great time and it could have been different. The last time we travelled in a car together was many decades ago and the trips involved: Mom, she's in my space. Mom, she won't stop looking at me. Mom, D (our brother) is bugging us. Good times, y'all, good times. 

But none of that happened on this trip. And as a bonus, my sister is a map genius! Who knew! I am definitely map-impaired and need instructions: turn left at ...., go straight for 11 miles, etc. She was the perfect navigator and I could concentrate on driving a manual shift car, shifting with my LEFT hand, driving from the RIGHT side of the front seat, on the LEFT side of the road. I adjusted by the second day so it was easier than I had anticipated.

Enough!
---time for pictures of a gorgeous country:

 

We met some real Mayo Blackface Sheep:

Came across a wedding party at Bunratty Castle:

1941 Cadillac

Watched a rooster and chicken try to share tea with a visitor at the tea room at Bunratty Castle:

And we climbed way too many tiny stairs to get to the top of Bunratty Castle:

William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, was here, as a baby, in 1646.

All for now! I will put up more pictures when I organize them in my brain...and on my computer. 

Lessons Learned

I hope.

I am currently working on three, no, four projects at once.  And I have messed up two---so far.

I am making my third Umaro, this time with a lavender Cascade Lana Grande, and so far, so good. No mistakes.

And I am working on the Shelby Stole, with a lovely 100% silk yarn. So far so good on that too.

AND I am working on the Purple and Pink Extra Long Cowl

in the same colors shown in the designer's photo. Yum. However, after I finished the first 8 rows of the pattern, it was only an inch wide which meant that the whole thing (24 rows) would only be 4 inches wide. Turns out that is how wide it is supposed to be, but according to Kitterly, I could just go ahead and use all of the yarn in each of the four skeins provided.(There are no knitting police.) So that is what I am doing, and this is it now that I am into my third skein/colorway:

I think it will be about 8 inches wide, and that is fine.  However, and this is a BIG however, the 351 stitches on a circular needle are joined so that I am knitting in the round, and I thought that I had joined the cast on row so that there were no twists in it. But I just needed to count the stitches and in the process I noticed that it is twisted---three times! Yikes. I am not ripping out 351 stitches x 45 rows and starting over, so it will be a mobius, mobius, mobius cowl. Weird possibly, but I am hoping that the fact that it can be wound around my neck a couple of times, and the fact that it is very colorful, will be a distraction from the possible weirdness. It's a "design element" y'all, not a mistake.  

Now the fourth project. I am going on vacation and I want to take a small project with me: hence, socks. I pulled out the socks that I have been ignoring for a month or so because I hate knitting on size 1 needles. I want to put them on my Knit Picks wooden needles rather than keep them on my Signature Needles, which I treasure and adore above all other needles. They are metal and really pointy and I think they could do some damage to someone if that's what I intended to do, which I don't, but the authorities might not believe me on that.

See my beautiful, precious, pointy, potentially dangerous needles!

When I took a look at the sock in progress (Gale's Art Wonder Sock Yarn, graffiti and asphalt colorway), I noticed that because it's been rattling around in the project bag for a month, maybe longer, a lot of stitches had fallen off the needles. If there is anything less fun than retrieving dropped stitches, several rows down, on size one needles, I hope not to find out what it is. 

Anyway, I have rescued the stitches and now I will put them on the wooden needles. TSA or its equivalent in the UK can have my Signature Needles when they pry them from my cold, dead hands. Which they won't be able to do because I am leaving them behind. sniff...

So The Check's in the Mail???

What am I talking about? you ask.

WELL, there is a new movie out titled Florence Foster Jenkins (appropriate title since that was her name. She is deceased.) It stars none other than the wonderful Meryl Streep, along with Howard from the Big Bang Theory and Hugh Grant (really? He is still leading man material after his dalliance with...never mind).

Anyway, I discovered Florence Foster Jenkins, y'all.  Back in December of 2012.  I can only assume that one of my zillions of readers was an agent for the movie studio that has made this film, and without any notice or permission, decided that Florence's story should be told.

Hmmmphhh.

Also, the video link has disappeared from my blog post, so here is one that is just audio. ENJOY! 

So that's that. No big bucks for me apparently. And you are welcome for my unleashing  introducing her to the public.


Now, for something completely different.


Aren't all the good people of the world, at least the church-going ones supposed to actually BE at church on Sunday mornings???

We went out to ride bikes on the greenway this morning, thinking that it would be close to empty but SURPRISE!!! it was packed with cyclists, runners, children, dogs --- heathens all! 

So we bailed on riding there and went back to the middle school parking lot, which was almost empty of cars but definitely empty of other cyclists, runners, children and dogs. I'm surprisingly uneasy about riding so I need target-less locations still.

However, as practice, my husband suggested that I try to ride on the white lines in the bus areas.

Aren't you always supposed to remember how to ride a bike???

I could.not.stay on that line. I could ride to either side of it, back and forth, back and forth, over the line, just not intentionally.  

Practice, practice, practice says my coach.


Now go see a movie!  The reviews of FFJ have been mixed, so don't blame me. I had no input.  

I Heard the Other Day

that if you've searched and searched EVERYWHERE for something, and just can't find it, look for something else and you will find the first lost thing. It's true! It just happened!


When we went to Ireland last year, we used this map:

It was a great map and we used it to get around Northern Ireland and Ireland. Never got lost. We need it again this year, and we haven't been able to find it anywhere! (Mostly my husband searches...he asks me if I have found it and I mumble Haven't seen it. I know, not much help.)

So my husband found this one on the internet and ordered it. It arrived a week or so ago:

It's perfectly good, but we really wanted the lost one.


Part two:

I have been looking all over the house for the creamer pitcher that goes with this sugar bowl:

I remember that the handle had broken off and I had given it to my husband to glue back together. I cannot, cannot find it. Today, in my search for the lost china, I found the missing map! (So really, I did help!)

Great news, right? But I'm still missing the creamer. 

New Project

I am working on this Purple and Pink Extra Long Cowl:

using the Koigu colors in the photo, so it will be exactly like the one in the photo.

Only it's not.

I finished the first color section, which is all of 7 rows, and this is how wide it is, about an inch.  

What the #$%^

I re-read the instructions. The cowl is 30 rows wide??? That means slightly over 4 inches???

(7+8+8+7=30  Right???)

I wrote an e-mail to Kitterly who sold the kit and said "What the #$%^?

They wrote back saying that they hadn't written the pattern and they hadn't taken the photo and it looks to them like the cowl IS only about 4 inches wide.

So there we go. It is an extremely narrow but long cowl. But I, dear readers, am throwing caution to the wind and knitting as many rows of each of the four colors and I choose, and the pattern be damned!

It will be a thing of beauty, but it will not look like the picture.  

There are no knitting police. I'm taking the Yarn Harlot at her word on this.

As the Flying Spaghetti Monster is my Witness

I will NEVER ride an exercise bike or walk on a treadmill (unless it's for physical therapy after I fall and break something while riding a real bike, as I did the last time I rode a real bike) AGAIN.

I realized over the weekend that the reason I avoid going to the gym is that I HATE, HATE, HATE riding exercise bikes and, even MORE RED HOT HATES, walking on treadmills. (Has no one noticed that they don't GO anyplace on these things?) I was vindicated in this hate when I went to the Dublin Gaol last year and discovered that early treadmills were used as punishment in jails and prisons. HAH! I knew it! Treadmills are from h*ll!!!

So this weekend I bought a new bike to replace the bike that tried to kill me. I sold that evil thing.

This is my new bike, bought after many journeys on several models around the bike store parking lot.

It's so pretty. 

And after I showed the salesman this:

the scar from the broken wrist surgery that I needed after my last bike ride on Killer Bike, I made him promise that I was buying the proper size bike for me.

So off I go, but I will not be riding on the Forsyth County Greenway that crosses over swampland. Swamps don't provide the cushioning you might expect. Trust me on this.

Well I Never

will get this book apparently.

2030???!!!

Nice of them to let me know, but sweet baby cheeses, I hope I'm still here when it arrives...

Willpower. I Have None.

My older daughter, who is a knitter, has been visiting and I decided we should go visit Eat, Sleep, Knit in Smyrna. Just to introduce HER to the shop, you understand. I've been there before. I was just the driver.

I used to have an LYS where I went to knit nights, but the owner discontinued them. I can buy yarn anywhere, and I'm not about to drive out of my way to go there to knit when I have no idea when other knitters might stop by during the day; we came from a very widespread area in and around Atlanta. So there are no knit nights where I used to fondle yarns, look at what others were knitting and get enabled inspired. ESK has become my shop of choice when I need to TOUCH yarn I might want to buy. They have more yarn than any shop I've ever been to.

So off we went to ESK. I am really, really certain that there must be a way to get there without going on the interstates. I just don't know where that way is. Both the Garmon and Google maps kept pointing us to I 75 and 285.  

NO! replied Knittergran, who, it must be said, has very little geographical sense. So I kept going hither-and-yon trying to find the way that MUST exist, and ended up, both going and returning, on the aforementioned interstates, strictly out of desperation (and because I was lost).  

RATS. 

So, even though only my daughter was going to buy yarn, I somehow ended up with two skeins of yet more sock yarn. I promised myself that they would not end up as socks, since I already have a lot of socks, and an even larger amount of sock yarn. What they will be I can't yet say. Ravelry searches will occur.

You tell me that you could have resisted these gorgeous colors from Hedgehog Fibres:

Color:  Medusa

Color:  Pod

If you do say you could have resisted, I refuse to believe you, unless you are not a fiber artist, like me. (I was once actually called that! But I demurred. I'm nothing if not humble.)

I Am At The

Visual equivalent of trying to understand someone speaking in a foreign language.

My grandchildren seem to understand it though.



FANDOM. It's not for adults.

(I had thought it was a shop carrying sports-related items.)

Knitting and Swearing

And I swear I don't swear, usually.

But I am knitting this:

 The Shelby Stole, not the chair.  hahaha

 Pretty lace, right?

I am starting to think that I do not LIKE knitting lace. This is the yarn:

Skinny, skinny yarn

Henry's Attic Yarn Barn "Cascade Petite"

And this is my project so far. 

Mistakes may have been made here.  I'm not saying.

After knitting two Umaro throws with super bulky yarn on size 15 needles, I find that it's just so much more difficult and fiddly and annoying to knit on small needles with skinny yarn. And I make way more mistakes because it's just so much more difficult and fiddly and annoying. And who, in their right mind, puts yarn overs on either side of markers, I'd like to know. As a result of the yarn and the needles and the yarn-over placement, I do a lot of tinking.  A LOT of tinking. Not my fault, y'all. It's the project's fault.

So I'm beginning to think that I might not like lace-knitting. I love knitting cables, but lace?

Maybe not so much. Makes me swear. Again, not my fault.  

HELP!!!

WHO, I wonder, decided that all jeans must have spandex or some other stretchy fabric in them? I hate stretchy stuff in jeans, and my favorite jeans have just developed a hole. I LOVE these jeans. They fit; they are 100% cotton---no spandex, no nylon, no plastic, no rubber or whatever the #$%^& is in every pair of jeans I try on the replace them with.

Sad, amirite?

This is the south.  It's hot and stretchy fabrics are HOT to wear.  

As I hunted online for some cotton jeans that aren't ugly, I came across a link to a site titled 24 Things Women over Thirty Should Wear.  Over THIRTY??? What sort of cut-off age is thirty?

Anyway, one of the suggestions, modeled by a woman well over thirty, was this:

Torn jeans!!!

Alrighty, thought I.

Not only are they torn, but they are also white!!!  And my younger daughter said I shouldn't wear white jeans. HAH!

ALSO...I was just at Anthropologie and most of the jeans they were selling had lots of ripped areas in them. 

So I guess my blue jeans are right en vogue, y'all, and so are my newish white ones.  No spandex for me.  

Bonus! The website 24 Things Women over Thirty Should Wear concludes that they should wear, and I quote, "Whatever the f*ck they want."

YESSSS.....

It Might Be A Slippery Slope

And if it is, I am sliding down it.

Not mine.  (Not yet.)

The first time I saw a Fairy Garden at a plant nursery, I thought: Oh c'mon.  Just how old do they think we are?  

And the next few times I came across them I thought the same.

But suddenly Oh c'mon turned into That's so cuuuute.

And yesterday I hit the bottom of the slope.

Grandchildren are visiting in July, and I thought that the youngest girl, 7, might want to "help me" put together a fairy garden, so while I was at Lakewood 400 yesterday, I bought these:

Two fairies reading a book 

A hedgehog on a leaf (the leaf is not to scale but who cares?)

A birdbath with a bird on it 

A bicycle. Fairies can FLY so I don't know why they would need a bicycle, but who cares---it's so cuuuuute.  

Part of me wants to go back up to Lakewood 400 today and get MOAR STUFF. 

It's nice here at the bottom.    

I Cheated!

I decided to make a bacon/onion quiche for dinner tonight, but it's HOT out and who needs to spend a lot of time in the kitchen? says I.

So I bought the ingredients:

Cheaters pie crust (the ONLY kind I use), cheese already shredded, and for the first time ever, pre-cooked bacon.

YAY me! Who really likes cooking bacon anyway? It's messy and then you have to clean up the mess. This bacon is a bit limp though, and I wouldn't put it on a BLT without a little more cooking, but for this? Perfect. I chopped it up, added chopped onion and celery (and I did all that chopping that MYSELF y'all; I guess I could have bought pre-chopped celery and onion. I don't really know. hmm...) and put all of it in the pan for a few minutes of sautéing.

I added the rest of the ingredients, and an hour later, voilà.  

It was just as good as if I'd really made it all myself.

Cheating.  As my buddy Martha would say, "It's a good thing."

Sez Who?

So it's the day after Memorial Day and now we can wear white. 

Just who said we couldn't until Memorial Day??? Who makes these rules???  Who made them boss of us?

My sister-in-law once told me that women over the age of thirty-five could not wear their hair long. Again, SEZ WHO!!!


I don't know who comes up with this stuff, but I don't listen anyway. I'm a free-thinker, y'all! I dance to the beat of my own drum, and all that stuff. But jokingly I asked my LA daughter about a month ago, after I had bought the first pair of white jeans I have bought since my college days, if I had to wait until Memorial Day to wear them.

Her answer:  Why would you wear white jeans?

Well, so I don't wander around in just my underwear. And because white goes with, oh, everything.

And even Prince William wears white, and BEFORE Memorial Day (although I realize this rule is only for Americans).

What is he doing?  I have no idea.

And if it's ok for the Prince, future KING of England, it's ok for me.

SEZ I.

Oh Deer

In my mind, my garden is beautiful. In my mind, the rose bushes are four feet tall and covered with roses; the butterfly bushes are six feet tall and covered with blooms. All the perennials are healthy and flowering.

In reality, the rose bushes are one foot high and obviously nibbled, the butterfly bushes are two feet high, the perennials, most of them, are chewed to the ground. I would swear that, based on the damage, I am planting things FOR the deer.


So I am fighting back with everything I can find. When I went to the garden center, I asked for netting to put over the plants and the saleslady suggested that I also go to the dollar store and buy helium balloons; she has heard they might frighten deer away. 

Then I went to the most gorgeous nursery I have ever seen, Scottsdale Farms, and in addition to beautiful plants, I bought a deer deterrent product.


Now my garden looks like this:

Netting over the puny rose bush

My arsenal: netting, deterrent, helium balloon. There are THREE rose bushes in the photo. THREE! You just can't see them because they are so PUNY!!! Thanks deer.

My new garden boots!  Aren't they purty?

Elmo says "Hi!"

In my online research into discouraging deer, I read that they don't like the odor of garlic and that sprinkling garlic powder around in a garden might keep deer away.

That's my next weapon. 

Oh deer my %^Y&UI(OP.

Hudson Bay Blanket Socks

I don't remember when I started these---a couple of months ago maybe, but I've been obsessed with blanket knitting. I finished these yesterday.

I'm quite happy with these, made from Jan Stephen's basic pattern, using Fishknits Strong Heart yarn in Canadiana colorway.

After I finished the first sock, I unwound the yarn so that I could re-wind it from the other end and have the stripes in the opposite color order in the second sock. Apparently Fishknits anticipated craziness in knitters and meant for the knitter to knit from both ends; the colors are in the same order in both socks.

Oh well....

Love them anyway.

Exteriors

Disney, LA

The Petersen Automotive Museum, LA

I love wandering around LA and looking at the buildings.  These are two of my favorites.

The Future Might Be Here

from The New Yorker

Yesterday, Sunday, my husband ordered a new router for our computers from Amazon: same day delivery, free. Last night as we were getting in the car to leave for dinner, a long, shiny black limousine pulled up in front of our house.

The driver got out, I walked to the street to meet him, curious about his being in front of our house at all.

He was delivering the router. No joke. Amazon's delivery vehicle was a limo with a limo driver. He told me that his car is, in fact, a limo, and that he is, in fact, a limo driver. But when demand for limo service is slow, he delivers packages for Amazon.  

Well I never.....



The cartoon is a joke, i.e., not serious, i.e. not real.

I wonder how long, though, before it IS reality.

Back from LA

We just returned from a visit with younger daughter, who celebrated her one-year anniversary of brain surgery! Yay S! The surgery was successful, with only a minor hearing loss as a result of removing an acoustic neuroma on her left acoustic nerve.

Before we left Atlanta, I had tasked asked her to find this house:

It is Harry Bosch's house in the series Bosch on Netflix. The series is based on really good police dramas written by Michael Connelly. And yes, I do know that it is fiction, and that no one named Harry Bosch lives in this great house, but SOMEONE does; it exists and I want to see it.

Apparently younger daughter was not very motivated to find it because she DIDN'T.

She also has not watched (or read) the series because if she had, she would move out of LA.  It's dangerous there, y'all!!!


Anyway, we had a nice visit, even though her plans to keep us busy while she was at work didn't quite work out. She had suggested that we go to the Rain Room at LACMA, but when we looked for the hours it was open on Monday, we learned that it was closed for a couple of weeks, no explanation given.

OK, we'll go see the newly-opened Frank Lloyd Wright house on Monday. On Monday we looked up the hours....not open on Monday or Tuesday, the only days we had left to go there.

Our next stop, the Broad, a new museum of contemporary art, was a no-go as well. Because it's relatively new, tickets were sold out for a month or so in advance. Standby tickets only....

We did go to the Rose Bowl Flea Market and that was entertaining, more for the people there than for the stuff for sale, but the best thing was this:

A friend who saw the photo of this funnel cake topped with powdered sugar and chocolate sauce asked me if the apple dessert was good. Hah! It was Mother's Day.  Who eats good-for-you stuff on Mother's Day? No apples here.

We did also make it to see the amazing cars at the Petersen Automotive Museum. What I loved was the stairway that was designed specifically for the museum:

Sort of looks like a weirdly-shaped hubcap, doesn't it?

We also made it to the BEACH!!! Saltwater, waves, sand, my favorite place to be. But the weather was not ideal...isn't it always sunny in Los Angeles?  (Nope, just in Philadelphia.) We experienced what the locals call "May Gray." The temperature was in the 60's so that was nice, but we only saw sun the last two days we were there, and not until after about 4:30. But that's ok; it was still the beach.

Santa Monica Pier

Now, back to TV (Remember? I mentioned the Bosch series?). There is a new version of Burn Notice on television, but it isn't about a spy and it doesn't take place in Miami and it has a different cast. It's about...hard to say. It is The Catch on ABC.

The plot is convoluted and totally unrealistic, just like the plot of Burn Notice, and it's a pretty show set, not in Miami, but in LA, where it IS always sunny in TV land. The people are pretty; the settings are pretty; the clothes and jewels and cars are pretty. But there is one thing that distracts me:

Mereille Enos's eyelashes.  

Holy Smokes! No one's eyelashes are that long. And we know they are fake because she doesn't have them on when she is in her AMAZING home. 

So, I watched this show and then started noticing all the really, really long eyelashes on other actresses. Real people don't wear false lashes this long, right?

Wrong. In LA they do and I saw some in the wild, so to speak, on a saleslady in a store we went to. It's like seeing a new bird species! I can add them to my life list.


And I can add this:

  
We were stopped at a red light when we saw this man on the opposite side of the light. He rides this, in LA traffic.

Brave man?  Or crazy man? I report, you decide.