Back It Up

Well, I hauled out my cardi left front at Friday Night Knitting to consult on whether my impulse to rip it out and start over made sense to LB, who just knitted a sweater for her son--without a pattern.  She was able to explain how she figured out the raglan sleeve decreases that made sense to me as it pertained to the angle the front needed to be.  See the band of yarn going in the opposite direction on the ball/cake?  That's all the yarn that used to be the first half of the left front and that piddly few rows OTN are my second run at it.  I'm decreasing every third row instead of every second, that should make the angle gentler.  Fingers crossed.



My red day lily bloomed!  It used to live down by the light pole in the corner of the lot but when the pole fell on Easter Sunday last year I managed to save it from being trampled or tossed out by the linemen (not that I'd blame them if they did, who'd want to deal with a fallen power pole on Easter?) and planted it in front of the house.  It's such a pretty color with its dark rusty red and yellow petals.



The lantana is very happy in its new pot hanging from the crook outside the kitchen window.  I love love love the colors of the flowers.




 
This is about the last of the bleeding heart flowers.  For the rest of the summer they'll be just a big clump of leaves but they're green and the flowers are so pretty while they last that I forgive them for being so fleeting.  Plenty of my other flowers are fleeting-er, I forgive them too.





I noticed these red and black bugs all over against the house on the renter's side the other day when I went over to uproot some thistles and today I saw them on our side.  I just looked them up and the Friday Night Knitters that told me they're Box Elder Bugs were right.  Now I just need to figure out if they're something I need to be worried about or if I can just let them go about their buggy business in peace.


 
I finally managed to get over to DS's house to meet the new grandchickens, they're the darker colored ones.  Two of the previous trio were dispatched by a possum so the flock was down to one lonely chicken, LC Jr.  DIL1 found these on Craigslist and DS went to get them a couple weeks ago.  LC named them this week.  They are Bokkers, Henita, and Cluckers.  I don't know which is which yet but I think she has a gift for naming, don't you?



June 22--Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portrait of Marie Fargues, wife of the artist, in Turkish Costume.  Marie tucked her left leg under her as she sat down on the daybed.  It had been a long morning.  Jean-Etienne had her posed in the most uncomfortable way and then demanded that she hold the pose for over an hour.  He had frowned and mumbled as he painted, throwing down brush after brush, before finally flinging the canvas out the window into the courtyard.  As she sat relaxing he strode back into the room, looked at her and said, "That's it.  Don't move."  Marie sighed but held still.

I know I'm up late again but we don't quit knitting until 9 o'clock and then I went to Walmart for a few things on my way home so I didn't get here to the laptop until after 10 o'clock.  These blog posts don't just fall trippingly from my fingers either.  Some days I really have to work to find things to say.  Okay, not very often because I'm convinced that every word that falls from my fingertips is a pearl.  And with that great egotistical pronouncement, I'll say goodnight.
--Barbara