Not My Best Effort

The most positive thing you can say about the Bee Stitch Cloth is that it's finished.  For most of it I wasn't sure that I was doing it right so toward the end there I tried it a different way, and on closer inspection I see that I got my Right Side and Wrong Side confused for one row.  Oh well, it's kind of a swatch, cotton may not have been the best choice of yarns to learn this stitch on--and it's a washcloth.  Pretty soon it'll be doing duty washing dirty faces, armpits, feet, and well, you know, and it'll do just fine for that.  This is the first cloth in my self- and BLKG-challenge (link to July 31 BLKG blog post where I flung down the gauntlet) to pick a stitch once a month, knit a dishcloth with it, and see what happens.  I will say that this one will not be going into the "to be gifted" pile, it'll go right to work to fulfill its intended destiny.  Maybe I should pick a less complicated stitch for October.

Yesterday was a sunny day.  I can't say that I have hope for much sunshine today.  Here's the rain from the wee hours slipping over the eastern horizon just before 7 o'clock, not promising, but weather moves from West to East so maybe there are gaps in the clouds out in Minnesota racing toward us even as we speak.  Probably not, but a girl can hope, can't she?

Last night just before supper Durwood looked out the kitchen window, noticed our neighbor picking his raspberries (which are migrants from our raspberry patch), and said, "Hmm, maybe you should go pick some raspberries."  So, as any good wife would, I kicked off my shoes and socks (the hill's too steep for me to feel comfortable in my "rocky" bottomed shoes), grabbed a bowl, and went out there.  I had a nice visit with LJ while we picked and here's what I brought in.  Good thing I like Durwood and don't like raspberries.  Maybe he'll get them eaten before LC sees them in the fridge and makes them go away.  She's a fan.

On my way to work I'm going to deposit money from my stash and then mail off a check to KS at The Clearing to pay the rest of the fee for my Women's Writing Retreat which I will be going to in 16 more days.  But who's counting?  I've already got my manuscript, pens, and Post-It notes packed.


September 10--Zurmuhlen/Stockline, Graffitti.  Zane loved the tick, click, rattle of the steel balls in the spray paint cans in his backpack as he rode his bike down the gravel road toward the culvert.  He had really scored at Larsen's Hardware that afternoon.  Three cans sat on the "Oops" shelf at the end of the paint aisle--marine blue, a sick aqua green, and canary yellow.  He almost left the aqua behind but for only a buck and a half a can he had to buy it too.  On the ride out he'd thought about his design and realized that using the aqua as a break between the canary and the marine would give his tagging another dimension.  He stashed his bike in the scrubby bushes that poked out of the gravel swale downhill from the culvert and climbed up.  The setting sun was low enough to shine under the tree branches and illuminate the dull gray concrete and shiny metal drainage pipe.  He laid out his paints, shook them hard, and got to work.  He had been painting for about an hour when he bent down to add his signature mark.  That's when he noticed the shoes, the shiny black leather shoes, jutting from the pipe's mouth.  For the rest of his life he wished he hadn't noticed that there were still feet in the shoes.

Ai-yi-yi!  Where does that stuff come from?  That one fairly flew out of the end of my pencil.  I do love it when that happens.  Today I get to work and then go straight to the knitting guild meeting.  I feel like a truant when I don't get home until after 9 o'clock.  Isn't that silly?  Have a great day and stay dry if you can.  I'm gonna try.
--Barbara

Oh, Man, Did It Rain

GB had a record setting 2.5" of rain yesterday and I'm pleased (but a tad damp) to say that I was out during the hardest of it.  There were a couple of time-sensitive errands needing doing and, rain or not, I had to get them done.  I was smart enough to wear my Crocs so my shoes and socks didn't get soaked and disgusting, only my feet.  But this morning the clouds were way on the eastern horizon and blue sky stretched as far to the west as I could see.  A sunny day.  Hooray!

While I was out in the downpour I dashed into Walmart for a pineapple.  I need to have a bowl of fruit with my lunch and pineapple needs to be the star.  I had a few blueberries in the freezer and a couple of peaches that had to be eaten so there you have it, fruit salad for lunches--and topping yogurt or a bowl of cereal or cottage cheese if you're Durwood.

One thing that was amazing was how busy the birds were while it was still raining.  They were all sheltering under the eaves during the hardest rain.  In fact there was a whole line-up of sparrows perched on top of the brick front of the house when I pulled up after my errands, but once the rain had slacked off to a drizzle they were mobbing the feeders.  I even managed to catch a hummingbird enjoying a snack and a shower at the same time.

September 9--Len Rothman, Veronica Donnelly, #PC950712-43.  Hank sat at the kitchen table with a row of amber pill bottles lined up in front of him.  He had a clean paper towel folded in half on the table and he went down the line pouring out one pill from each bottle.  He knew them by color, not name.  Most of them were generics, he for sure didn't recognize those names.  He knew that two were for his prostate, one was a "happy" pill, there was an allergy pill, a few vitamins and supplements, a pill to help him sleep, and one, or maybe two, pills for pain.  It was a lot.  It was hard to keep track of and his daughter thought he had too many docs prescribing too many pills.  What did she know?  Maybe a guy his age didn't care if his cocktail of meds added up to enough to kill him one day.  He was too damn old and too damn ornery to make new friends.  He might as well feel good while he was checking out.

Well, that's cheerful.  Oh well, the sun's shining today and the weather guessers are promising cooler temps with a lot less humidity for the rest of the week, with a few more thunderstorms tomorrow evening.  I'll be glad when "the stickies" move off.  It's not the heat (yes, it is) but the humidity (I'll second that, in spades).  Off to keep the world safe from SCUBA diving.
--Barbara

How Humid Is It?

It's so humid that there's condensation on the outside of the patio doors--and it's double-paned.  According to the "weather station" sensor that sits outside our kitchen window and transmits to the receiver hanging on the wall, the humidity is 94%.  Yikes.  If the storm front that's rolling our way drags the heat and humidity with it when it leaves, I'm all for it.  It seems to be getting darker by the minute and I just heard the first rumbling of thunder.  Better make sure my umbrella's in the front seat of the car.

Yesterday was a cooking day.  First I went to the grocery, using my new app, Ourgroceries, that DD showed me for my list.  No paper for this granny!

Then I came home and got

cooking.  First I whipped up a batch of my old stand-by WW Hummus first pulsing 12 green olives before adding the chickpeas, sesame seeds, garlic, and lemon juice to the food processor.  Of course I had to toast a sandwich thin to have some for lunch along with a handful of fresh cherry tomatoes from the garden.  Yum.  Then I made a cauldron of Greens & Chicken Soup.  A couple years ago I found a recipe for Perfect Green Soup in a Reader's Digest that sounded so good I had to make it, but it didn't have any protein in it and I got pretty hungry between lunch and supper.  So I studied the recipe and decided that I could mesh my favorite Fast Chicken Soup recipe with the  Green Soup recipe.  I keep the chicken out of the pot until all of the greens (1# greens + 1# spinach) are cooked in with the onions, carrots, and tiny bit of rice, whirred with the stick blender until all smooth-ish, then I toss in the chunks of chicken and finish it off with a pinch of cayenne and a tablespoon of lemon juice.  It isn't very photogenic but it sure is tasty, and for $16.50 for ingredients I get six weeks of little, 3-ladle portions to take for work lunches.  It freezes well, too.  As an added bonus, Durwood doesn't like it so I get it all tomyself, kind of like how he gets to eat all the tomato soup.

Durwood and I went to Tony Roma's to cash in my soon-to-expire free birthday coupon, then I stayed up way too late doing the laundry that I meant to do during and around the soup making but didn't.  But I was also knitting so I finished Sudoku Maize #8 and began #9.  So what if I'm a bit dozy today, I can take a little lay down on the couch later.

Didn't write last night, I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.  Stay dry today!  I won't, it's raining like crazy right now.
--Barbara

Midwest Farm Report

Okay, I admit, that heading up there is a little grandiose.  It should probably say "Midwest Garden Report" or "Midwest Yard Report" but I'm feeling a bit grandiose today so I'm leaving it.

When we got home on Saturday it was too dark to check the garden to see if anything survived the week of neglect and probably no rain so Sunday morning I went out and was happy to see round red things on nearly every tomato plant.  I'll admit that a few of the cherry tomatoes and at least one regular tomato were past their "eat by" date but the rest are just waiting to be picked or finish ripening.  The gourd-let has grown into full gourd-hood.  Look how perfectly it's shaped.  There's another one growing behind the fence that isn't quite as big, so I'll get at least one birdhouse sized one.  Yay!  The spaghetti squash is doing well too.  The big one is, well, bigger and there are two smaller ones growing too.  The stem of one of them has a twist to it that I think is particularly nice to look at.  I like those curly tendrils and twisty stems, so much more interesting than straight things.











 
I was surprised to see that no squirrel had found the corn feeder where I'd moved it before we left so if they tore down the fence while we were gone (they didn't) they wouldn't tear down all my feeders too.  But just as I sat down to blog Durwood called out that a squirrel had found the corn so I scurried out there and snapped photographic proof.





Just a couple more trip notes:  I got to help DD & SIL1 shop for wedding centerpiece ideas one evening after supper.  We hit Dollar Tree, Goodwill, and Michaels, and came away with clear glass vases and candleholders, votive & floating candles, black rocks, black sand, clear glass pebbles, blue glass marbles, dried moss, silver scrapbook paper, and a bag of plastic dinosaurs.  Then we adjourned to their kitchen table where we brainstormed ideas, took pictures, and SIL1 emailed them to the bride.  She didn't like the black rocks or sand but liked everything else including the plastic dinosaurs that SIL1 planned to spray paint silver and put in the water between glass pebbles and floating candles.  The wedding was yesterday; I can't wait to hear how they looked.

It's probably a good thing that my mother-in-law has long gone to Heaven.  See, before our honeymoon (almost 39 years ago [that long??? good god]) she handed me a travel diary and told me to write in it every day so we'd have a record of our travels, and I faithfully have--until last week.  I took it along, even had it on the nightstand right by my bed, but I didn't write one word.  I felt so guilty when I pulled it out of the suitcase yesterday morning that I sat down in the evening and wrote the whole week's worth using the blog as crib notes.  Thank god for the blog or I'd have been sunk.  I will never do that again, MIL, cross my heart.

September 7--Brainworks, Athletics.  Kendall stepped on a tennis ball and nearly fell.  "Dammit, Jasper," she said as she limped to a chair.  She should have turned on a light but she didn't want Wally next door asking why she was up in the middle of the night.  Wally didn't miss a thing, day or night.  Her red-brown Lab-ish mutt, Jasper shambled into the kitchen, his tags jingling, and laid his head on her thigh.  She went from rubbing her ankle to rubbing his ears.  "Good boy," she said, "but you need to learn to put your toys away.  I almost broke an ankle stepping on your..."  She caught herself just in time.  Saying the b-word would make the silly dog think it was time to play when it really was time to worry about her job.  What if Apex Plastics folded the way Plastron had?  Apex had hired a few Plastron people and she knew that the Project Manager they'd hired to work along with her had years more experience, and she wasn't at all sure that there were enough projects needing managing to keep both of them on and busy.  If only Owen Masters weren't so nice and so handsome...

Today the laundry gets it and I have to make lunch food.  SIL1 is on an olive kick, I love olives too so I'm going to make some green olive hummus.  Olives are really too salty but if I only put in 8 or 10 of them and don't add any more salt, it isn't too bad.  Besides, I ration it out so I'm not glomming all of the salt at once.  Then I'm going to make a cauldron of my Chicken Soup with Greens.  Having that puck of greens on my Shrimp & Grits last week made me hungry for the soup because it has a pound of greens and a pound of spinach whirred in the broth.  This is the soup I make in mid-winter when I feel like the sun will never shine again and it perks me up.  Coming back to reality, housework, and work work makes me feel like I need a bit of perking up.  Got my list--on my phone (I'm so tech savvy.  Thanks, DD!).  Now all I need to do is get dressed and hit the store.  I think I'll use the reusable bags I have from Lexington grocery stores so I can pretend I'm still on vacation for one more hour.  Sayonara.
--Barbara

Home!

Rural Indiana, corn & soybeans

Bridge at Louisville, glad we're northbound

Yesterday was a long day.  A really long day.  An extra long day, since we decided to ignore the giant "Alternate route for Chicago-bound on I-65, take I-74 to I-54" signs alongside and over I-65 and trust our GPS to get us around the road closure.  Yeah, that didn't work.  Robert did route us through, around, and about rural central Indiana, but he just took us right back to I-65 in the middle of the closed part so we had to backtrack a few miles and join the throng of detour-ers.  That added an hour to our trip although it did allow us to have a Subway lunch in Thorntown, IN which is about the size of our house from end to end.  The detour and backtracking was an experience that I feel helped me grow as a person because I only spent a couple miles berating myself (like I usually would for the rest of the day) and sighing deeply before Durwood convinced me that we really weren't in a hurry and could stop for the night if we got tired so we should just enjoy the pastoral scenery and drive.  So I did.

I drove my first two hour turn which got us through Louisville and into Indiana, where Durwood took over until we got to Thorntown for lunch.  Then I drove to Crowne Point, IN (just before the excitement that is driving on I-80 through Gary and onto the Illinois Tollway) where we stopped for gas, he took us through Chicago and Milwaukee (I got to do those on the way down, we kind of squabble over who gets to drive those), then I drove us on from Grafton, stopped in Sheboygan at the Charcoal Inn (just in time) for a brat for supper, then I drove home.  We don't adhere religiously to the "two hours on-two hours off" thing but we are religious about breaks from being at the wheel which makes us both get out of the van, stand up to let the blood flow in our legs and butts, walk around the van (at the very least) before hopping in and driving off again.  We probably added 2 1/2 hours to the trip with all the potty stops, doodling around in rural parts, and stopping for food, but the traffic was light, big cities were a snap, and now we're home having had a wonderful, relaxing time in Lexington with DD and SIL1, and on our own too.

Old photo, same old woman

Better yet, I discovered this morning that I lost 6# on the trip.  I need to remember how and what I ate--and do it again and again.  I didn't feel deprived (except I only had ice cream once, on the last night I dodged into Wendy's for a Frostee--no wait, I had a little on my birthday cake on Sunday--see? not deprived), ate what I wanted, didn't really exercise, and still lost weight.  Maybe it was so hot I melted?  Yeah, probably not.  Whatever, seeing that big minus when I stepped on the scale this morning motivated me to do 10 minutes of step aerobics on the Wii.  I plan on a bit of yoga this afternoon.  I need to keep whatever this is going.

Remember I said that I thought I didn't have enough of the Berry colored yarn to finish my Sudoku afghan?  I do now.  I found someone on Ravelry with a bit of it in her stash that she was willing to part with for just the cost of shipping.  How's that for nice?  It came while we were gone and I think it matches just fine.  See?

I had increased navigational duties yesterday so only got this much of Sudoku Maize #8 knitted (two more increase rows and then I start decreasing back to four stitches--downhill, yeah!)  I imagined that I'd sit beavering away at Sudoku squares all last week, never casting on the Virgo (Audrey) Hat, never starting the Bee Stitch Cloth but I didn't and I did.  It was my vacation, I'm not too fussed.  Those squares are terrific work and group knitting projects, very little thinking or counting involved.  Now that the Berry yarn reinforcements have arrived my enthusiasm for knitting those little squares is renewed.

September 6--Dennis Galante, Calendar Page.  The first thing Julie did when she got to the kitchen each morning was tear off the previous day's calendar page.  She used the back of the pages to make grocery lists and notes to herself.  Sometimes she would jot down interesting words or phrases she read in books or heard on TV.  She remembered being a kid and complaining when her mom wrote notes to her teacher on the back of a sheet of junk mail or an envelope.  She thought the teacher or, worse yet, the other kids would think she was too poor to use fresh, clean paper.  Those were the days before everyone was into reusing and recycling.  Nowadays you got chastised for throwing away "perfectly good paper" with a blank side.  When had she turned into her mom?

For some reason my phone won't talk to my computer so I can't post any of the cool pictures Durwood and I took on our drive yesterday.  We didn't get the coolest one.  At the very end of the detour the road took us through that long swath of windmills that I always admire near Lafayette, IN but this time we could look down the row of them all lined up one after the other and see the blades turning.  They weren't in sync so it looked, for just a split second, like one tower with 25 or 30 blades going around.  Very cool, but not worth getting rear-ended to stop for a photo.  Lots of laundry today and perhaps a trip to the AT&T phone store to see what's wrong with Ethel.  If running Spybot and Ad-Aware on the laptop help, I'll update the post with a couple pictures.  I'm sure you're dying to see them.  **3:45 PM--Ethel finally got her pixels or bytes or whatever buzzes in cellphones' brains together and let me download the pictures.  Whew, saved me from having to call Tech Support.
--Barbara

Yarn Again & What Sounds Like Dracula's Alma Mater

I couldn't stand it.  Durwood gave me yarn money for my birthday so I hightailed it back to Magpie Yarns to see if she had any of that baby llama yarn left in her sale baskets.  She did.  Someone came and bought all the remaining Lava Red in the intervening day but there were six skeins of the Khaki left and one of Amber Orange.  Then there was this one black silk and wool one in another basket.  Don't look at me that way.  He made me go buy more yarn.  He did.

Then I took a spin around Transylvania University.  Really, it's a place with a library, bookstore, and students, even famous alums like Jefferson Davis, Ned Beatty, and Sam Houston.  It's a pretty little campus with just over 1000 students smack dab in the middle of downtown Lexington, but I think it has an unfortunate name.

One of the places DD took us to eat was a local diner called Ramsey's.  The big thing on their menu is their "meat & three," a meat with three sides, few of them veggies but all of them tasty.  I had a salad the first time (disappointing and no three) and BBQ chicken breast with mac & cheese, fried okra, and honey ginger carrots (all delicious) the second time and Durwood had chicken-fried pork chops with fried okra, Parmesan deep-fried corn on the cob (interesting), and mashed potatoes and gravy.  All for $13.95.  Needless to say, there was no room for dessert.  In fact, his second pork chop and my second BBQ chicken breast made really great sandwiches for yesterday's lunch.

I did a little preliminary packing yesterday afternoon in between bouts of knitting.  I finished the second repeat of the Virgo Hat (it's already packed) and worked more on the Bee Stitch cloth.  I've learned that it's a pistol to tink because of the pattern stitch because you knit in the stitch below and drop the one above.  I'm absolutely certain I'm not doing it right and have multiple boo-boos but I like the way it's looking and who else but a nit-picker will find the mistakes.

September 5--A. Higbee/Imagewright, Candles.  "Happy birthday, tooooooo youuuuuuu!"  The group elongated the last two words of the song making Jen think of owls and loons.  She hated being the center of attention, but the whole birthday cake with candles, singing, and wish-making was unavoidable at T. Waldman's.  She'd like to take whoever started this tradition back behind the shed and teach them a thing or two about workplace decorum.  "Did you make your wish?" Sarah asked, clapping her hands like an excited eight-year-old.  Jen nodded.  "Then blow before the candles melt."  Jen looked at the slowly spreading pools of orange wax on the white grocery store frosting and blew out the flames.  One of the candles relit, shooting a tiny spark.  She licked her thumb and forefinger and then pinched it out.  "Very funny, Larry," she said to the balding guy with gravy on his tie.  "How'd you know I... I mean, uh, what makes you think I did that?"  She just shook her head and cut the cake.

We're pedaling homeward today.  We're banking on it being the Saturday of Labor Day weekend to make the traffic a bit lighter in the big construction pinch points (Louisville and Indy) and the hope that any holiday travelers will be going the opposite way until we get to Chicago which will be late enough in the day for them to be where they're going, except for the procrastinators, that is, and we can deal with them.  We think we're just going to take the main roads, no fancy juking around, and take our chances, and if we get too tired we'll get a room for the night and go on Sunday morning.  It's that simple.  Luckily Durwood's not one of those "gotta make time" kind of driving guys, not usually anyway.  Goodbye Lexington, hello Green Bay.  In about 10 1/2 hours and 650 miles. Gonna be a long day.
--Barbara

Tourist-ing & More Yarn

Yesterday we slept late--until 10 o'clock for me and I never do that--so we didn't leave on our driving tour until just before noon.  We drove into Keeneland, the thoroughbred racecourse, even though there's no racing there just now.  We've been there a few times for the racing but I never noticed how pretty the stables where the horses for that day's races wait their turn are, and on the backside of the course we could see the grandstands in the distance.  The tour (watch for the signs with the blue horse logo) took us past absolutely beautiful horse farms with miles of white or black fences, manicured paddocks, and curious baby horses.  (foals? colts? yearlings?)  We passed a field of tobacco waiting to be harvested and a castle some developer built for a home but is now an exclusive hotel.  I think my favorite feature of driving around Lexington is the stone fences.  I read that they were brought by Irish & Scottish stonemasons in the 18th and 19th centuries and after emancipation the art was taken up by black stonemasons.  Whoever made them, they are beautiful.



After supper DD picked me up for knit night at Rebelle, her LYS (local yarn shop).  It, too, is in an old house and features small rooms jam-packed with yarn for every taste and need.  There is a lot of handspun, a slew of pattern books, and the friendliest of friendly staff.  As always I shopped the clearance shelves and made away with a few skeins to knit a cardi for LC for next winter (the yarn has sparkles in it) and a couple skeins of Silky Wool because I'm so enjoying knitting the Virgo Hat out of it.






Speaking of the Virgo Hat, I got most of another repeat knitted at knit night.  After our tour but before supper I added a few repeats onto the Bee Stitch Cloth.  (it sure is hard to photograph white knitting)  Today I confess I'm going back to Magpie to see if she's still got that baby llama yarn in her sale baskets.  Durwood gave me a little birthday money for it.  Eeee!

September 4--Peter B. Kaplan, Commuters in Rain.  The rain beat on Carla's umbrella making it sound like she was inside a drum.  She was glad she had on her old leather sneakers because the water on the sidewalk was at least half an inch deep.  She knew her feet would get wet, actually they were already wet and her socks stuck to her toes but at least it wasn't a good pair of shoes getting ruined.  It was hard to hurry when everyone's personal space expanded by the three-foot diameter of an umbrella.  Street corners were a tangle of umbrella rib tips at various heights that snagged sleeves and each other and nearly tugged her umbrella out of her hand when the light changed.  She wasn't paying attention, she was too interested in seeing if the umbrellas matched their owners.

Not my best effort.  It was one of those nights that started with an idea that melted away almost as soon as pencil hit paper.  Ah well, such is writing.  I'm off.  Later, dudes and dudettes.
--Barbara