Nights when I can't for the life of me fall asleep. I got home from knitting just before 9:30, visited with Durwood, did a bit of reading, and went to bed around 11-ish. I wrote my nightly prompt page, turned out the light, and my eyes kept springing open. Durwood got up for his first middle of the night cup of tea and half donut around 1:30 and I was still wide awake. I decided to just get up, dammit, and use the time. So I finished Sudoku Maize #9 and cast on and knit about 6 rows of Sudoku Almond #6. By then it was 3 o'clock and I was still feeling like I could stay up all night so I popped a Benedryl (which always makes me sleepy) and tried again. I guess it still took me close to half an hour to fall asleep.
Naturally today's the day Durwood and I meet his Census 2000 pals for breakfast at 9:30 and I fortunately woke up to whiz at 8:15 so I woke him up, we hurried into our duds and hotfooted it across town to arrive right on time. Whew. I feel like I could sleep but I'm afraid if I lay down now, I won't be able to sleep again tonight and I DO NOT want a repeat.
I gathered up all the Sudoku squares this morning and sorted out the ones that needed their tails woven in and took them to breakfast with me so that after I was done eating I could do that boring task while the talk flew around the table. I got all but four of them done there and finished the last ones when we got home. I laid out all the squares in the order of the upper left block of the puzzle solution and I think it's going to look good. From now on I'll weave in the tails as I knit the squares so I won't have 15 of them to do at once. Anything I can do to make me not push the project aside because I don't want to do the next step is a good thing.
My knitting friend KW just got back from 2 1/2 weeks in Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. In Iceland they have yarn, good wool yarn, Lopi yarn in the grocery store. This is the yarn department IN A GROCERY STORE. Could you die? I might need to go there.
September 12--Tom Collicott, Fruits of Your Labors. It was very nice penmanship, even lines of script marched across the painting. Not Palmer method with its rounded vowels and soft-bellied Bs and Ds, more likely it was copperplate, the spiky script of the days when reading and writing were crafts not everyone pursued, when scribes plied their trade in markets and public houses scraping a living putting other men's words down on paper.
Then I closed my notebook, turned out the light, and didn't fall asleep for about four hours. Arrgh.
--Barbara
But first... it's sunny! I opened the curtains this morning and look! There's a big, yellow white ball in the sky shining its beneficence down upon us poor damp, rained on humans. Ahhh.
Sometimes when you want to "read" a book, you have to put away your iPod and Kindle and just go with the traditional. I had to do that the other day. Lala recommended a book, Fresh Water, which is a compilation of essays by women about living around the Great Lakes. The library only has it a copy of an actual, old-fashioned, paper book. Years ago when my rate of knitting ramped up but before I had any way of playing an audiobook Durwood gave me a book holder for Christmas. It's been a while since I used it but I knew where it was so I dug it out, put it into my knitting bag with the book, and set it up on the desk at work. It worked great, especially since I was knitting something fairly brainless so I could knit a few stitches without looking while reading a few paragraphs. Retro but totally workable.
What I was knitting on that day was the first half of Sudoku Maize #9, and last night at the BLKG meeting I got within one row of starting the decreases. That means I'll have four of the nine colors of blocks done when I bind off this square. The next two colors, Almond & Stone, need four squares knitted each, then it'll be knit eight each of the last three colors, Berry, Snow & Violet. I'm getting there.
I'm also five rounds from the end of the third pattern repeat on the Virgo Hat and then comes the crown decreases. I like the way this hat looks and I'm not minding knitting it with DK yarn, although I did find a big yarn, big needles hat pattern I plan to make as soon as this hat is done. Kind of a palate cleanser after knitting a whole, adult size hat with tiny-ish yarn and small-ish needles. Maybe I'll crank out a pair of mittens with bulky yarn too. In fact I should probably just have a small, quick to knit project as my second one since I want to focus on the Sudoku throw as my main project. I always have to have more than one project, it's my late-onset ADD (self-diagnosed). I can't do only one thing at a time.
After I got up this morning I stirred up some semolina bread dough. It smells good and yeast-y in the kitchen now, and it'll smell even better tomorrow when I bake up a loaf of it. Mmm, homemade bread.
Last night at knitting guild someone said she didn't knit socks because she hated knitting the second one. I asked why she felt she had to knit a second one and the people in the group that know me demanded that I show her and the newbies why I asked the question. So I did.
September 11--George Abe, New Venture. Ethan stood in front of the painting alongside two other men. They weren't together and none of them spoke but they stood in a row and first leaned to the left and then to the right, shrugged, and turned away. It had been like that since the exhibit had been hung. Large canvases with broken rainbows and flat cubes of buildings joined by flat planks of bridges, some with a solitary figure, others without a human seemed more confusing to the viewers than uplifting. Ethan wasn't a real art lover but he'd heard about the exhibit and its controversial art so he came to see for himself. At first he didn't like the paintings, he walked quickly past them, but he stopped when one of the tiny figures in a topcoat and fedora seemed to be looking out of the painting straight at him.
Aw, man, I knew I shouldn't have said anything, now the sun has been buried behind clouds. *sigh* And I can't figure out how to make Win 8.1 play a DVD. Can anybody help or do I need to go out and borrow a neighborhood 'tween? Except they're back in school, aren't they? Drat.
--Barbara
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
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
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
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
Eight full hours of sleep is just wonderful. Restorative.
And I got this much of Sudoku Almond #6 done last night after I finished weaving in about 15 blocks' worth of tails during the day when I was so sleepy I wouldn't have risked knitting anything.
I picked a bunch of tomatoes this morning, and I saw a few feathers in the straw. See, last night when I went to bed I heard an owl a few times and it sounded pretty close by. So maybe an owl swooped down for a rabbit or a chipmunk, both of which make homes in the garden under the straw or in the daisy stalks. I didn't see any fur so it probably didn't succeed but I did hear it. I fell asleep smiling. And the sedum next to the patio doors is blooming.
