(that's Finished Objects for those not familiar with knitters' jargon) 
I buckled down Saturday evening and finished the Pumpkin Great-Grandbaby hat to send to Aunt B for her impending first great-grandchild. That seems wrong on so many levels. First of all, my Aunt B is nowhere near old enough to be a great-grandma and second, LD's not old enough to be a grandpa. Hell, he's younger than I am... although I will confess that both of my children are in their 30s and haven't made me a grandma yet (no pressure, guys, really) so perhaps my perspective's a little skewed. But the hat is darling. I highly recommend it if you need a quick baby gift. If you devote yourself to it monogamously you can finish it in one long day or two evenings of chat & knit.
All day Thursday at work (and it was a looooong day with only a single customer, paying or non) I made a lot of Green Shrug progress. I'm within 5 rows of putting the sleeve stitches on waste yarn and joining the body stitches at the underarm and keeping on down the body. Remember this is a shrug so it's not longer than the bottom of my ribs anyway and I'm knitting it with hawser-gauge yarn (3 rows = 1") so it shouldn't take me long to get to 15" from the top of the shoulder. A casual measuring just now shows that I've got approximately 9" done already. I may be tempted to add a bit of length to the body and sleeves; I'll see how the yarn holds out because there is no buying more (I got this yarn in Goshen, IN in 2011; hard to match dye lots) and I need to save yarn for the neck band which is added last. I want to have it finished so that I can take it with me to The Clearing in mid-May. I'll so make it by then.
Yesterday afternoon when it began to snow AGAIN I took my iPod and went down into the basement to sew something. Skully shared a pattern for a soup bowl potholder that I've been meaning to make and seeing Durwood carrying his hot bowl across the kitchen yesterday at lunch gave me the impetus I needed to get the job done. I decided as long as I was making one I'd make two, one for him and one for me. I dug through the stash and found a fish print for him and a chicken print for me, and some yellow near-solid for the insides. This is a very straightforward, simple pattern that turns out a very handy item. The only caveat is that you must use cotton fabric and cotton batting so nothing melts in the microzapper. And they're washable for those worried about soup slopping over on the walk from micro to table. And do not put them away because they're "too nice" either. Handmade things don't reach their full destiny if they're not used and loved and sometimes loved to rags. As a knitter/crocheter, lotion crafter, and sewist I expect the things I make and give away to be used and abused. Don't save lotion or lip balm, the stuff I make has no preservatives in it and is only good for about a year. If you wear out, felt from use, tear, lose on the bus, spit up or whizz on (mostly I'm speaking to the babies in my audience here), or sit too close to the fire in anything I have made you, don't be embarrassed, just tell me and I'll either fix it or make a new one. Cross my heart. Makers like to make things so if we get to make more, that's all to the good. Sorry for the rant, it just bugs me when I make things for people and they don't use whatever it is. (can you tell?)
Even though it snowed (yes, again) yesterday afternoon the grass in the backyard evidently is ignoring the snow in favor of Spring. It's turning green. Obvious, irrefutable green. Ya. Hoo! I was so demoralized when Durwood yelled that it had started to snow that I went down into the basement to hide out with my fabric and sewing machines.
A few months back my pal, Skully, shared a pattern for a soup bowl holder that I really wanted to sew up. Durwood eats soup 'most every day for lunch and the bowl gets too hot to carry barehanded from the microwave to the table, so he has to get out potholders and carefully carry the hot, slippery bowl across the room. This holder is bowl-shaped, padded, and all cotton so you set your bowl into the holder, ladle in the soup, pop it into the microwave to heat up, and then carry the whole shebang to the table. I bet it'll keep your soup hot longer too. I grubbed around for a scrap of fish print for the outside and solid-ish the inside for him and then decided that I might as well make one for me too so I found the remains of the chicken fabric I used to made DIL1's egg-gathering apron from for mine, since I eat some variation of chicken soup almost exclusively. I don't have anything against other kinds of soup it's just that Fast Chicken Soup from Pam Anderson's recipe is so quick and easy, and I don't really have to think beyond figuring out what veggies to put in. Simple. Easy.
Our most recent ex-renter rang the doorbell yesterday and asked me to fill out an IRS Rent Certificate since she lived next door for a few months of 2012 and all of 2011. She said she'd be back to pick them up, so I hurried to fill them in. She never came back. She'll probably come today when I'm in the shower or when Durwood's napping, since today is tax day. This is her in a nutshell. Maybe I'll tape them to the door or clip them to the mailbox when I leave for work... I'm going to miss our current renter who is house hunting; she pays her rent and on time too. I know I've said this before but I do not like being a landlord, don't like wondering if the tenant's taking good care of the place, don't like taking a chance on a new tenant who might be a deadbeat or move in a crapton of relatives or trash the place. I'm also tired of mowing and shoveling and home maintenance. I'd lobby for moving into an apartment but don't want to give up my flowers and garden yet, and Durwood wants to keep the duplex for the income anyway, so here I am stuck being the Ethel Mertz to everyone else's Lucy Ricardo.
April 15--Gustave Loiseau, La Place de la Bastille.
Do you know what Paris
smells like?
I hope for baking bread,
wine and perfume.
I suspect it smells like
diesel, stagnant water,
too many people.
Singapore smells like
curry and tigers,
Penang smells like
snakes and the sea,
Manila smells of
gunpowder and honking horns.
Aromas transport me back
to places I've been, unexpected
olfactory mini-vacations
in the middle of my days.
~~~~~
Okay, today's the halfway point in my own personal poetry parade for April the Poetry Month. I'm enjoying it, I hope you are too. Time to leave the serenity of this corner of my life and rev up my day. Monday on!
--Barbara
Yes, it's true. I made soup yesterday afternoon, we had some for supper, and Durwood told me after the first bite that I would have taken over Pappy's position as parish soup chef if there'd been a competition. Now, that's a COMPLIMENT. See, his dad was an excellent soup maker who made the soup for church suppers and Durwood has always raved about Pappy's soup, so last night's unsolicited comment that I'd give him a run for his money with my latest batch of chicken soup was a real ego boost. I started with Fast Chicken Soup Base as usual (I've made it so many times I know it by heart), I got the bones and dark-roasted skin (not the pale, greasy, flabby parts) of the rotisserie chicken I bought simmering after lunch, added three times as many carrots as I usually add with the onions and celery, sliced half a head of cabbage, tossed in the leftover serving of rutabaga from the other night, and stirred in a can of Pace diced tomatoes with mild chilies (which I can't seem to find a link to online, stoopid Campbell's Soup Co. website). I zipped to the grocery to get a loaf of crusty sourdough to have with it and a feast was born. I was a little nervous that Durwood would find it too spicy hot but he went back for seconds so I guess it wasn't. We'll see how he likes it today after a little overnight melding of flavors.
We had a nice afternoon wandering from grocery to grocery store in the sunshine. We started at Sears where we bought a new microwave (they had 30% off yesterday only) to replace the one with the paint peeling off the ceiling of the cooking compartment.) (I put the old one on the curb at around 6 PM and it was gone when I got up this morning, yay! I love junk-pickers.) Then we hit Aldi for fresh pineapple, fresh strawberries, a cabbage for my soup, some cheese for Durwood. Next was Festival for greeting cards (Durwood says theirs are the best) and after that Sam's for all kinds of things plus lots of "tasters" so we really didn't need the Hardee's Jim Beam thickburger that we split for a late lunch. But it was really good; it has bbq sauce and pepper jack cheese and bacon and onion straws, also lettuce and tomato. The only thing missing was the hunk in a tux that's on the commercial. (ooh, baby) (NOT Heidi Klum pretending to be Mrs. Robinson, tsk, the guy who unties his bowtie, slides it off, then eats that big burger one-handed... pardon me, I need a moment) I tried to order the "guy in the tux" combo but the woman behind the cash register said they were out. Drat.
April 14--Gustave Loiseau, La Place de la Bastille.
The exhaust from tour buses,
the heat rising from asphalt,
the cacophony of tourists,
conspire to make the Place
feel like a swirling oven.
Tourism isn't for the
faint of heart. It calls
for nerves of steel,
a cast iron stomach,
a bottomless wallet, &
the very best walking shoes.
~~~~~
Today it's overcast--again--so I'm off to the basement to play with fabric. I feel the need to sew. After I fill the birdfeeders, that is.
--Barbara
P.S. I was thrilled to remember that Gustave's last name means "the bird." I usually tell people the only French I remember is "haricot verts" (green beans) so it's always a treat to realize that there's more tucked way back in my brain.
bam
I looked out onto our re-snowed backyard this morning when I opened the curtain... and saw HOPE. The feeders, etc. were casting shadows, not big dark ones but light, pale ones, so light that if I used the "autocorrect" function on the photo fixer program they disappeared, but there were, no, ARE definitely shadows. I know that if it gets half a chance the April sun will destroy the nasty snow that fell pretty much all day yesterday and hadn't totally stopped by the time I came home from knitting at 9 o'clock. (I really like "o'clock" I don't know why, it just pleases the daylights outta me, maybe it's the apostrophe). (it's an hour later; the shadows are strong and dark now, yay!)
This morning I'm going to Aldi for a pineapple and 2 boxes of fresh strawberries so I can have yummy fruit with my lunch this next week and fruit on my granola & Fage (fah-yeh) Greek yogurt breakfasts too. I think fruit might be my favorite food, I could be happy eating fruit... and cheese... and bread... but I like veggies too... and butter on the bread, but just a little, not globs or slabs... salads are good, the leafy kind with just a bit of dressing not the smothered in mayo kind... a little meat's good too... Evidently I am the personification of an omnivore (burp), that explains a lot. I think Durwood wants to come along and I suspect that he has various other stops he'd like to make, he's been housebound most of this week because of the cold, damp wind and freezing rain and snow. I don't know how he manages to stay semi-cheerful being stuck in here; I'd be going mad. Talking about lunch-fruit reminds me that I need to make lunch-soup too. What kind of soup should I make? Chicken most likely but with what veggies? I'll see what Aldi has on sale, onions and celery of course, maybe cabbage and carrots with a can of diced tomatoes, maybe the kind with mild peppers in it for a bit of heat. Sounds good to me.
April 13--Cypriot, Statue of a Young Man.
He looks draped in cloth
wrapped, twisted, folded
prey for the first zephyr
passing by,
but he is stone,
limestone,
the compressed corpses
of ancient reefs.
His springy curls
frame a stone brow,
his boyish beard reveals
tender lips as yet unkissed.
How long did he pose,
one hand outstretched
to offer bread,
or was he the sculptor's
imaginary ideal?
~~~~~
That wasn't where I thought I was headed last night but evidently I'm not the boss of my pencil... or my brain for that matter. What are your plans for the day? Do you get to play outside without snowboots on? Lucky. I put mine away--for one day. Tsk. We'll get there, it can't snow forever. It can't, can it? And 5 weeks from today I get to drive away to The Clearing for a week of walking the trails in the woods and staring at the bay and the sunset and wildflowers and and probably blank notebook pages. 5 WEEKS!!!! I can't wait.
--Barbara
I am convinced that I have late-onset ADD. I can't seem to stay on a path, can't really focus on one project, complete it, and then move on to the next. I had 2 perfectly good WIPs (works in progress) in my knitting bag after we frogged the Fino Bias scarf the other night but did I just focus on them? Of course not. No, I had to gather up 3 (THREE) more from downstairs on Tuesday, haul them up, and cast on 2 of them that very night. I have been laser beam focused on the Green Shrug for the last 24 hours. I left it at home on Wednesday and worked solely on Yogi Sock #1, which is the second of the 3 new projects, at work on Wednesday. That means that I have not crocheted one stitch on the Green Kerchief or added one round to the Pumpkin Great-Grandbaby hat. Now those baby hats take very little time, I could probably have it finished by the end of the weekend, no problem. Will I? Probably not. I am more than three-quarters of the way to finishing the Kerchief. I should bear down and get that baby done, washed, and blocked so that I could wear it (if it ever warms up again). Will I? Probably not. Why?
Because look, here's the Green Shrug after yesterday's quiet day at the dive shop. It's yarn the thickness of the hawser used to tie up a tugboat knitted on needles as thick as a horse's leg. I get a lot of progress with each row and that's like those electromagnets that pull the Bullet Trains along to me. When things are going quickly I knit faster and longer because I just love watching that knitted fabric pile up, form itself into something that I can wear or use. For me that's knitting crack.
I don't know what it was about Yogi Sock #1 the other day but it was THE project I had to take to work and HAD to work on exclusively.I will say that I have NOT cast on the third project (another boot sock) that I brought upstairs. Yet.
Last night at the Bay Lakes Knitting Guild meeting Founding Knitter, TS, taught us how to put bling in our knitting by putting beads in it. It was more of a challenge than I'd anticipated but it was fun and most of us went home with postage stamp samples of beaded knitting.
There was a guest at knitting last night who is a member of Evergreen Quilters, which shares a president with the Knitting Guild, who brought a garbage bag full of twin-size wool quilt batts she had gotten from a co-worked who had inherited the fleeces. She had them carded and cleaned, and was selling them for $10 each. Ten bucks! I just looked them up online and most are available for between $20 and $30. I bought two of them, one for the quilt I'm working on and one to have. Hey, when else am I going to find a 90x50 wool quilt batt for ten bucks? Even if I don't make another quilt I can use the wool batting for a lot of other projects.
Look! Look what we got overnight. Wintry mix is what they're telling us we're getting today. (that's rain, freezing rain, and snow for you Southerners out there) Ugh. Right now it's merrily snowing like it's Christmas Eve. Eee. Nough. Someone who might know (as if anyone does) said that we're supposed to approach "normal" sometime next week. My little warm-corner hyacinth looks a bit forlorn with snowflakes on it. Skully and I decided yesterday afternoon that we weren't going out to walk along the river today. We're going to count on the Kress trail being clear next Tuesday and try again to rack up more than one walk per week.
I had one entire customer yesterday at work. One. I wasn't surprised; it was cold and rainy and WINDY, so windy that at one point the wind sucked the store door open all the way and held it open until I went and hauled it back closed, I had to put some muscle into it too. I was afraid that the temperature would drop, turn the rain to ice, and they'd cancel the knitting guild meeting. See, the program last night was about adding beads to your knitting and I really wanted to learn how to do that. Well, the temps didn't drop, they held the meeting and I learned a few ways to add beads. It was fun and a bit more challenging than I thought it'd be. We learned, though, battling through confusion and have little postage stamp-sized samples to show for our work. Thanks, TS!
April 12--American, Compact.
Begin dialing with the letters
of the exchange
(ours was G-Y
for Gypsy)
followed by the numbers...
To dial a number,
place your pointer finger
into the correct hole
of the dial,
Push the dial clockwise
to the stop,
remove your finger,
allow the dial to rotate back.
Mom shed a tear
when they changed G-Y
to 4-9.
Numbers aren't as romantic
than Gypsies, she said.
Now everything is
pulses and beeps,
the phone Gypsies
are no more.
~~~~~
Remember rotary phones? Remember compacts? I loved opening the compact in Mom's purse, loved the aroma, the little pink puff, and the tiny mirror, its edges fogged with powder. Now kids play with their mom's SmartPhone, staring blankly at the screen, eyes glazed, faces slack. Is there anybody home in those little people? I think I'll hide from the snow until time to go to Friday Night Knitting. I'll either go downstairs and sew something or I'll sit on the couch and knit on my shrug just in case it ever warms up enough to wear it. Stay warm!
--Barbara
I'm listening to Pete the weather guy saying on the teevee that we're supposed to have sleet and freezing rain today and then up to 4 inches of snow by morning, plus more snow throughout the day on Friday. No, really? Wasn't it warm and sunny last Sunday? Don't we get to keep that now? Aren't we done with winter? I feel done. I also feel like I'll be calling Skully to cancel tomorrow's walk along the river. Good grief.
The blueberry class was very inspiring and made the possibility of saving my blueberries by replanting them in pots with soilless media and then sinking them into the ground seem totally doable. I want to do it NOW. I want to go outside this weekend with my shovel and some 5 gallon pots, a bag of pine bark nuggets (don't you just love the word "nuggets"? it's so cozy.), one of peat, a bit of Perlite, and DIG. (1 part nuggets, 1 part peat, 1 part Perlite [optional]--that's the recipe) Vijai, the UW Extension horticulturist, has enthusiasm enough for all of us and isn't too proud to say when he doesn't know things. He's also excellent at sidestepping questions about which cultivar is the best and where to buy things. I knew he was nice and very helpful, what I didn't know is that he says "actually" nearly every other word. It's one whale of a verbal tic and he must have said it fifty-hundred times in that hour and a half. After a while I didn't hear it quite as much but then it caught me again and it was all I could hear. Marginally annoying but I can deal for all the great gardening info he shares. You should find the University Extension office near you if you're a gardener or want to be; they have bales of free pamphlets, they do soil tests for not too much moolah, help identify pests and weeds and tell you what to do about them, have test and demo gardens, and are all-around helpful, at least ours is here. My tax dollars at work. And I found out that I can use the pine needles that my friend, BD offered as mulch. Score!
April 11--Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave at Kanagawa.
Claws of foam loom
over tiny boats
Mt. Fuji broods
Wind-shredded water
roaring, heaving
air and sea at war
Fanatic oarsmen
paddle fragile crafts
up oceanic mountains
~~~~~
Okay, not haiku but haiku-ish. I never got the whole "seasonal symbol" part of writing a haiku but I do like trying to paint a picture with just a few words. Like I said, I'm enjoying the challenge to poem this month. I'm going to brood today upon the crap-tastic weather. There may be pouting involved, also foot stomping and Bonaire-dreaming. I'm outta here.
--Barbara
I buckled down Saturday evening and finished the Pumpkin Great-Grandbaby hat to send to Aunt B for her impending first great-grandchild. That seems wrong on so many levels. First of all, my Aunt B is nowhere near old enough to be a great-grandma and second, LD's not old enough to be a grandpa. Hell, he's younger than I am... although I will confess that both of my children are in their 30s and haven't made me a grandma yet (no pressure, guys, really) so perhaps my perspective's a little skewed. But the hat is darling. I highly recommend it if you need a quick baby gift. If you devote yourself to it monogamously you can finish it in one long day or two evenings of chat & knit.
All day Thursday at work (and it was a looooong day with only a single customer, paying or non) I made a lot of Green Shrug progress. I'm within 5 rows of putting the sleeve stitches on waste yarn and joining the body stitches at the underarm and keeping on down the body. Remember this is a shrug so it's not longer than the bottom of my ribs anyway and I'm knitting it with hawser-gauge yarn (3 rows = 1") so it shouldn't take me long to get to 15" from the top of the shoulder. A casual measuring just now shows that I've got approximately 9" done already. I may be tempted to add a bit of length to the body and sleeves; I'll see how the yarn holds out because there is no buying more (I got this yarn in Goshen, IN in 2011; hard to match dye lots) and I need to save yarn for the neck band which is added last. I want to have it finished so that I can take it with me to The Clearing in mid-May. I'll so make it by then.
Yesterday afternoon when it began to snow AGAIN I took my iPod and went down into the basement to sew something. Skully shared a pattern for a soup bowl potholder that I've been meaning to make and seeing Durwood carrying his hot bowl across the kitchen yesterday at lunch gave me the impetus I needed to get the job done. I decided as long as I was making one I'd make two, one for him and one for me. I dug through the stash and found a fish print for him and a chicken print for me, and some yellow near-solid for the insides. This is a very straightforward, simple pattern that turns out a very handy item. The only caveat is that you must use cotton fabric and cotton batting so nothing melts in the microzapper. And they're washable for those worried about soup slopping over on the walk from micro to table. 
