Just Made It

I played a little yarn chicken tonight and finished the Campfire Hat with about a yard and a half of yarn left. Whew. As I was getting toward the crown of the hat I thought how frustrating it would be to run out with only a round or two left to go but the yarn didn't run out. I still have to weave in the tails but the hat is essentially finished. And now I know that I can knit a hat out of one skein of that Landscapes yarn. I have two more balls of the campfire colorway and a couple partial balls of other colors. I foresee more hats in my future. Maybe I'll go back downstairs for some more alpaca yarn, um, once I finish the llama hat, that is.

 

The feeders were popular today as was the mess of seed and cracked corn on the ground under them. At one point there were five squirrels around. One on the suet nuggets, one on the suet cakes, and three on the ground jockeying for position. I watched them for quite a while. One would leap up to a crook dislodging the one on the suet cakes and then the dislodged one would leap to the suet nuggets and take over that place. They went like that for quite a while, each of them taking a turn on the suets. And they didn't bother the Sparrows on the round feeder either.

 

The acrobatic squirrel was back too. It's the only one that nibbles and then stretches down to eat whatever it has in its paws before curling back up to nibble again. For a minute there it lost hold of one of its paws and hung there holding on with only one back foot. Daring!

 

I drew yesterday's gratitude journal page this morning. I had a lot to be grateful for yesterday and managed to squeeze it all on the page. This isn't my best work but I'm glad I got it all on there.

 

After supper but before Friday Night Knitting I drew this whale out of Dr. Seuss's Book of Animals. I like it. I think in the book it has a rabbit on its tail. Or maybe a cat. But I ran out of time so all I have is this whale. And I didn't even have time to color it in. Pretend it's gray, okay?

 

First thing at Friday Night Knitting I worked on the bottom of OJ's owl softie (it's too big to be an amigurumi, I think). Next there are eleven or twelve rounds of straight single crochet that will be much easier for him to manage than doing the counting of stitches in these increase rounds. FYI--the blue yarn is my end-of-round marker.

 

I'm letting the next Seaview Series manuscript marinate for a while but I made it through the manuscript after it this afternoon. Five pages from the end I switched from past to present tense so I spent at least an hour changing "is" to "was" and "says" to "said" and "was" to "were." I'll have to reread that part because I was a lot more irritated at changing all those tenses than paying attention to what was written.

I also posted a rewrite of the Spies Don't Retire blurb on the Ad School Facebook page this evening and got a wonderful comment from one of the Ad School team. I can't believe how she took my pallid words and made them zippy and interesting. I'll be studying what she did and how she did it all weekend to see if I can't learn something.

And this morning I emailed GetCovers to redo my cover. Over the last week I realized that what I thought I wanted just didn't look right and the previous version was much better. So I emailed and asked them to change it back. They'll do it and for no more money. I do like them, they do good work and are very reasonably priced.

--Barbara