And now back to our vacation . . .

Having recovered from our attempt to drive without gas, we finally made it to our hotel on Saturday night. The suites here are spiffier than my house is, plus there are nice ladies who come every morning to bring me fresh towels and make the beds.  I feel like I should call them Mom.  Our suite has two bedrooms, a bathroom (no big surprise there), a little kitchen, and a "living room," which also contains a pullout couch.  There are three TVs, all of which have cable so my kids can watch one mindless show after another. Our room was also thoughtfully equipped with a genuine rubber chicken, which we found hiding in the furniture. Please don't ask about this.  We have returned it to its hiding place so that the next family with a curious four year old can experience the same joy that we did upon finding this charming mascot.



Our first day in Florida was a bit damp.  The rain started gently in the morning and we did what any family would do on arrival in Florida after a long and swimming-pool-free winter:  we went swimming in the rain.  Or at least those of us who remembered to have their mothers pack their suits went swimming.  Others, whose mothers are 1500 miles away and not really thinking about bathing suits, may have had to sit huddled under a canopy while everyone else had all the fun.

Later in the day, the rain started to take itself seriously. There was no dinner in the house, so some of us took it upon ourselves to venture forth in the inclement weather and make the trek to the store.  It was felt by all 9 year olds involved in the expedition that cars were for sissies, and the parents of the 9 year old somehow failed to take a stand on this issue.  Instead, the bold adventurers swiped the umbrellas from the sissy-car and waded to the store.  45 minutes later, the rain was coming down even harder and it was time to wade back.  Drenched does not even begin to describe how wet we were. It was tremendous fun, although El Husbando seems to have the sniffles now.  We are not telling Grandma about the expedition in the rain or the sniffles, because she might feel compelled to give us vitamins or lecture us on the Necessary and Proper Use of Foul Weather Gear or the Importance of Preventing Colds and Other Communicable Illnesses.

On Monday, we played games with Grandma.  One of our favorites was checkers.  If the board looks a little lopsided to you, it is only because you do not understand the rules of checkers.  You would not be alone in this deficiency.  The first rule is that Matty gets 17 checkers and Grandma (or any other willing victim) gets 3.  This, it was explained, was to ensure that Matty would win.  The rest of the game involves the players taking turns whacking each other's checkers off the board.  This must be done in the prescribed manner, which is a secret.  The winner is always Matty.  We also play chess, which is pretty much the same except that we get to use all the pieces and sometimes we get to stack the pawns really high before we clobber them.



Today the weather was much better.  We went swimming again and collected large fronds.  They turned out to have bugs on them, so we thought it would be better to put them back.



We also got to eat lunch at the pool.  This involved hot dogs and french fries and hamburgers and french fries and chicken fingers and french fries and grilled cheese and french fries.  Here is El Husbando, who didn't have to pay for all those french fries, hanging out with Matty, who agreed to be his best friend on account of all the french fries.



In knitting news, things are not entirely sunny.  Below is the Must Have Cardi.  20 hours of car travel produced a lot of sweater.  I'm hoping that it grows a lot when I block it, because right now it looks like it's going to be a little snug.  Of the four projects that I just had to pack for the trip, this is the only one that has seen any progress and it is, oddly enough, the one I almost didn't pack.  Go figure.



I have also been working on my Nutkin sock, made from my mixed vegetables colored yarn.  Here are the before



and after



pictures, and no, I did not get the pictures out of order. For the second time, the sock is too small. This time, however, I was not 4 but 7 repeats into the pattern before I tried it on, discovered that it was unbearably tight (although at least this time it fit over my heel), and had to employ a lot of golf language while I tore the little bugger out.  If you look closely at the 'after' picture, you can also see the spot where I pulled one of the needles out by mistake when I took the sock out for picture time, which is pretty much par for the course where this sock is concerned.  I'm willing to try one more time to get this sock right, but if I run into any more trouble I'm going to take the hint and pick a new sock pattern. Or a scarf pattern.  Or anything else that I can work on for an hour or two without making a major mistake.

In Which We Have No Gas

We are, as everyone who has ever met us knows, a wild and crazy family.  Or maybe not so much.  But when it comes to road travel, we have invented a number of ways to keep ourselves and those around us entertained.  Emma likes to plug in to her ipod.  Sometimes she sings really loud and off-key while she's got the earplugs in and we all think that's really funny and then we tell her to stop it. Isa and Nate like to punch each other and have pillow fights in the back seat and sometimes throw things at Emma. This is also marvelously funny to the rest of us, and then we tell them to stop it.  Matty, a small and generally powerless individual, has found that he has the power to bring the entire vehicle to a halt by yelling "I need to go POTTTYYYYYYY."  The true humor of this gag is not apparent until we have left the road and found the nearest bathroom, only to discover that he didn't have to go at all, he was just a little bored. This is especially funny after he has done it two or three times in an hour, and boy do we get a good laugh out of that one.

The wildest traveler of all is El Husbando, who decided that we should see just how far the van can go on no gas before it stops moving. Just for the record, the rest of us chickened out when the car said that we had just 5 miles (or pieces of gas, as Nate likes to think of it) left before empty.  We left the road at a place where we could see there were houses, because people who live in houses must have gas nearby, right?  Or not. But they would know where we could find some gas, right?  Or not.  Around the time that we had 4 pieces of gas left, we happened upon a yard full of people who must all have been from a totally different place, because no one was too sure where we could get gas nearby.  Eventually, they agreed that our best bet was to get back on the highway and drive to the next exit where there certainly was gas.  This, it was agreed, was no more than 5 miles away.  Which was great, except that we had only 4 pieces of gas left, and Florida is entirely flat (except for the highway ramps) so there was no possibility of coasting downhill to save some gas. 



We got back on the highway and watched the car display work its way down as we drove.  Here is the picture from before we got to the exit with the gas.  As you can see from this very fine photo, the car is clearly telling us that the DTE (distance to empty, it is too late to get gas) is now ZERO.  As in, there is no more gas in the car and it is now running, as my father used to say, on its reputation.

As it turns out, the car is a big fat liar.  We drove for a good mile on no gas and the car did not stop until we got to the gas station.  I think we'll try it again on the way home, because now we all want to know how far the car will really go on no gas.

Too Much Tired!!!

Crazy does not even begin to describe the last week and a half around here. First, there was my birthday, which was such a huge event that it deserves its own post. For now, I'll just say that my fiber whims were fully indulged, and there was cake (and some other goodies) too.  As soon as my birthday was over, I put my work schedule in high gear so I could earn a work-free trip to Florida.  And then I had to start planning the work-free trip to Florida. Air fare was prohibitive this year, so we are driving. Laundry, maps, hotel reservations, strategic food shopping and 40 hours worth of activities to keep us all from killing each other in the car . . . the to-do list was eternal.  And I was still working on it at 3:45 on Thursday, which is actually when we were supposed to be leaving.  An hour later, we got on the road and we didn't get off for 300 miles, by which time we were in Washington, PA.  A lovely place, I'm sure, but all we did was sleep and eat breakfast there.  The kids, however, loved the Hampton Inn and its delightful breakfast.  They are ready to plan a whole new trip just so we can go back to the hotel and eat breakfast again.

Today we chalked up another 600 miles and, after too many potty breaks and way too much road construction, we have made it to Walterboro, SC.  For some reason, I thought our hotel had one of those fancy indoor-outdoor pools, and I talked about it a lot on the drive.  This, as it transpired, was a bad idea because, in point of fact, the hotel has no pool. What it does have is a convenient 'sharing' agreement with the hotel across the highway, but the hotel across the highway seems to have a sharing agreement of its own with the local mosquito population and we found the atmosphere less than inviting.  My poor children got a two-minute swim and then we fled to the safety of our deluxe hotel room so we could order pizza (not enough of it), eat more road snacks (probably too much of that), and do a lot of this . . .


and this . . .



and this . . .



because,  really, we didn't sit on our butts enough today.

On the upside, when I was packing up my knitting for the drive I was seized with the irrational fear that I would run out of knitting in the middle of the trip (doesn't sound like much of an upside, does it?  Wait for it, though, we'll get there). Plus, I was feeling guilty about leaving my long neglected Must Have Cardi at home when I would have so much knitting time available. So, in addition to the February Lady sweater and the two sock projects (yes, two, because even though I haven't finished a single sock in the last three months, I'm suddenly going to tear through two pair in a week)  that were already packed, I tossed in a few balls of my pink yarn and my Cardi and I have worked on nothing but my neglected Cardi for the entire trip. I even whipped out a spiffy new book light when the sun went down last night, and earned several choice comments from El Husbando in the process. I now have about 10.5 inches of the body done and in another 2 inches (or so) I can divide for the sleeves. I plan to get there tomorrow, but I have no plans to start the sleeves while I'm on this trip.  I still believe I'm going to work on socks during the week, but even I'm not fool enough to believe that I'll be making 2 pair of socks during the 4 days that I'm spending in Florida. But, if I'm a good girl and I finish the body of the Cardi soon, I'll get to start my February Lady on the trip home, for which I'll use some very beautiful birthday yarn that my parents don't know they bought for me. Pictures soon, but not tonight because I left all the yarn in the car.  I hope there are no roving yarn thieves in Walterboro.

p.s. We're ready to go swimming now.

Note to Self:

You can stop buying toothpaste for a while.



Sent from my iPhone

In Which We Get all the Wrong Things Done

It was a wild and crazy weekend at my house.  There was almost nothing on the schedule.  No place to be, nothing that really had to get done.  Once again, the weather was outrageously beautiful and there's only one thing you can do with weather like that:  sit on your duff outside and knit.  So Saturday morning I took the knitting basket outside and plonked it down next to my favorite cheap red plastic Adirondack-style chair.  I headed back into the house to fortify myself with a few pieces of chocolate and my iPhone (because I really wanted the full relaxation experience) and that's when I saw It:  the giant pile of dust and dirt dragged into the garage during the winter.  "Oh," I said to myself,  "just a quick sweep and then I'll sit down and knit."

HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!

7 hours later, El Husbando and I collapsed in exhaustion, having cleaned out the entire garage.  Not just a sweep.  Not just a quick shuffle of mis-shelved items.  We emptied out the entire thing, cleaned off shelves, washed everything that would sit still, then carefully replaced our authorized garage items in their designated places. Outside we had three giant piles:  donations, trash, and recycling.  The kids even helped, kind of.  At least, they stuck around for the first three hours so they could shift stuff around and spray everything (and everyone) with the hose. The garage itself is now almost clean enough to have a party in, not that we would think of doing such a thing.  One giant job crossed right off the checklist, and we didn't even mean to do it.  An accidental garage cleaning, if you can believe in such a thing.

The catch: one beautiful 86 degree day down the tubes and at the end of it I was too tired to knit. Figures.  A few hours later, a cold front rolled in, bringing the kind of wild wind that comes when the temperature suddenly drops 40 degrees.  We scrambled outside to collect all the donations, trash, and recycling that were being blown all over the yard.  Our perfectly clean garage is now filled (again) with three giant--but well organized-- piles:  donations, trash, and recycling.

Today, I did have an agenda.  In October, the gas meter reader backed into our basketball hoop.  He must have been driving with his eyes closed, because those things are pretty hard to overlook.  But he was very responsible about his irresponsibility (perhaps not his first infraction?) and knocked on the door to tell me that it was his bad and he called it in to his company and they were all over it before the end of the day.  They told us to buy a new hoop and they would reimburse us.  So we did, and they did, and that giant unassembled bugger has been sitting in my garage since November.  One of the reasons I was so keen to sweep my side of the garage yesterday (HAHAHAHAHA) was that I wanted to finally put the hoop together and I wanted a reasonably clean workspace where I would not be rained on or get sun stroke or have all my instructions blown away.  I celebrated my clean (if re-cluttered) garage by opening up the hoop box, counting all the parts, and beginning the assembly.  I got about four pages into the 30 page instruction booklet and found that I am missing the single most important tool for finishing the job.  One tiny little drill part which will allow me to install the self-tapping screws through the solid metal pole that supports the hoop and keeps the whole affair from toppling onto some unsuspecting ball player.  There is no hand tool substitute that I can find, and after trying to put the screw in by hand for 45 minutes (please feel free to laugh at me here, I deserve it), I was forced to admit defeat.  So now, in addition to my three giant piles, my garage contains this:




One long overdue job, still un-done.

We still managed to end the day in grand style.  El Husbando,  known the word over as the Rock Whisperer, was up to his old tricks again.  He got out the tractor, the pull cart, and his two trusty helpers and they captured and relocated two more rocks.  They are intended to be the base of a bench, but the slab of salt and pepper granite that we plan to top the bench with is still in service as our front step.  It is poorly suited for this job, as the slab is a mere 8 inches tall, but the front door is over 20 inches off the ground.  But it's all we have, and it needs to stay put until the nice Patio People come later this month (or early next month, not really sure which) and put in a patio and walkways and proper steps.  It is too big to move anyway,  even for the Rock Whisperer, and we'll need the help of the nice Patio People and their earth moving equipment.

After he put the two new rocks in place, he made the inaugural fire in the Fire Pit.  The timing coincided perfectly--although unintentionally-- with dinner, and here we are dining al fresco by the fire. This is unheard of behavior for early April, when we are more likely to see freak snow storms and heaps of mud, but I suppose we'll have to call this the unexpected upside of  global warming.





You can see in this picture how badly we need some patio stuff at the back of our house as well.  It has looked like that for 5 years, and I'm a little tired of it.



Also, although only bits and pieces of the dog are showing up in these pictures, I assure you that we do own one complete, but camera shy, canine.

Continuing with the theme of jobs that were supposed to get done, but did not (cough progress on must have cardi cough) and things that I wasn't really supposed to do, but did anyway with shameless disregard for the consequences, here is the completed Tweed Beret.  It was a very quick and easy knit, and considering its origin as a throw-away kind of project (not in the sense that I'm going to throw the hat away, just that I was really only looking for a way to use up some left over yarn), I'm very pleased with the outcome.  I have used a stunt-double for the first picture because (1) she has much more style than I do, (2) she is very cute, (3) the hat looks good on her, and (4) she keeps asking if she can keep it.  Also included for your viewing pleasure are artistically arranged shots of the hat, from varying angles, in an appealing natural setting.  This should provide ample explanation for why I went into law instead of art as a profession.





Here is another hat. I finished it a few weeks ago.  It is very cute and was a lot of fun to knit, but it doesn't fit the person I knitted it for.  I hope I learned something while knitting it, because otherwise I can't account for its existence.



Because I wouldn't want anyone to think that I'm only about the knitting, here are some things that I was supposed to finish a few years ago.  They were my quilting works in progress at the very time that the knitting upgraded itself from a pleasant hobby to something bordering on obsession.

First is a Halloween quilt.  I bought the fabric when my local quilt shop was closing and was never entirely satisfied with the way the different fabrics went together.  That didn't stop me from making the quilt though.  I dug it out a few weeks ago and machine quilted it with a spider web design.  Here is the whole quilt with the binding on, but not yet tacked down on the back side. 



Here is a close-up of one of the blocks:



And here is the goofy little spider that I added to the last web I made on the quilt.  It's right at the point of the blue triangle.



Here is the backing.  I like the way you can see the quilting best from the back, but I will admit that I used this quilt as practice so that my freehand machine quilting will be improved by the time I get around to working on some of the nicer unfinished tops still in my collection.



Here is a picture of a table runner I made out of the same fabric that I used for my brother's wedding quilt.  I used the same pattern to make a runner for my mother, also using the left over fabric from the wedding quilt.  I am about half way through tacking the binding down, which explains both the hair clips on the right side of the picture and the difference in the size of the maroon edging. I plan to finish both quilts soon, but I haven't actually worked on them recently, so "soon" should be understood to mean sometime in the next 10 years or so.



Moving on from my Xtreme Crafting habits, tomorrow is my birthday.  By my children's reckoning, I will be turning thirty-twelve.  El Husbando has spent weeks working us all into a frenzy over this day, which I think might be the single biggest gift giving occasion in our year.  Last year he asked me for a list of "suggestions" for what I might like and I was fool enough to give him one.  I thought that he would pick a few items off the list, but instead he bought everything on the list. I felt pretty greedy when he kept bringing me present after present, and I have spent the year working very hard to use everything he got me.   This year I asked for just one thing, but I suspect-- mostly because El Husbando keeps calling me to tell me every time he either buys something or even thinks of another gift--that there might be a few more things coming.  I can't complain too much; it certainly makes getting older more fun, but it forces me to accept the idea that this is one area where I cannot possibly compete with him.  He is just too good. 

47 minutes left until the big day.  Better get my beauty rest.  Good night!

Too Much Fun!

We've been having some fun here, which is why there have been no blog posts for the last three weeks.

For starters, we've had a slight improvement in the weather.  We do not, for example, look like this:




We do not even look like this:



(certainly we do not look like the marauding  deer who were trying to munch on my lawn when this picture was taken)

No, indeed.  We look like this:



(a note to those of you inclined to be painfully literal:  I do not claim that we look like chickens and you should check right now to make sure that you are keeping your snarky comments to yourselves. Please pay attention instead to the blue skies, the emerald green grass, and the total absence of snow.  The very fact that the chickens were out of the coop proves that the day was so beautiful that we knew we would be outside all afternoon and would not have to worry as much about the fox making off with the birds)

And we looked like this:


spiraling clockwise from bottom left:  happy kids on swing set [note the total absence of leaves on trees, it was late March]; happy kid on swing; happy kids near swing; free range bath tub, complete with interior flora; gratuitous chicken butts; shoes that have been abandoned to allow happy kids to play barefoot; happy kid on slide; free range bath tub hiding from predators; free range chickens not hiding from predators; free range chickens hunting bugs; the "Climbing Tree," which was willing to pose for this one spectacular photo.

See how much fun we are having?  The kids played outside, I sat on my duff and did some knitting while surrounded by chickens, and El Husbando cut down many innocent sticker bushes, which is his default activity when the weather picks up.

But wait, that's not all!!  I joined a really fun yarn swap.  It's a lot like a secret Santa thing, only with yarn and without the trees and tinsel.  Everyone answered a few important questions and off we went.  My Swapee said that she liked deep rich colors, a variety of candies, bath stuff, and fabric.  The original thought behind the swap was that people could paw through their stashes, find some suitable yarn, and mail it off to someone else.  This did not work well for me.  I have a bunch of yarn, but it turns out that I am emotionally attached to the good stuff, and the not so good stuff isn't really good enough to dump on someone else.  So (and please do NOT tell El Husbando about this) I bought some really nice brand new yarn.  For a woman I have never met and probably couldn't pick out of a crowd.

I bought her a few other things, too:



I actually bought two bags of these new-fangles Skittles Crazy Cores.  My kids are total Skittles hounds and I thought they might like to try them too.  They didn't last 24 hours in my house.  I totally recommend them to you, unless you are my dentist, in which case we didn't really eat that many of them and we made sure to brush really well as soon as we were done.

The fabric was easier to collect than the yarn; I still have a pretty good collection of totally random bits of quilting fabric and I no longer remember what I was thinking when I bought them, so it was a little easier to send them on their way.  Two of them stuck around long enough to become this  bag



which I filled with the goodies and mailed out to Seattle.

It was HUGE fun putting together my swap package, so much fun that I almost forgot about part two:  the incredibly fun package for me!!!

No sooner had I finished packing my Swapee's stuff into its box, which I super-sealed with plenty of tape, than the local postal employee brought me a shoebox FULL of stuff.  Heaps of yarn.  So much stuff that I dug through my stash to find some more stuff to jam into the swap package for my Swapee so I wouldn't feel like the cheapest swapper that ever lived.  The top prize in my shoebox was some yummy pink malabrigo.  I have heard people making a big fat fuss over this stuff and I really wanted to try some, but I'm too damn cheap to buy it for myself.  And now here it is. 




In addition to my fabulous new yarn, there were heaps of goodies and a sheep card.





Sophie was very suspicious.  She supervised the unpacking of the boxes and can be seen in this picture keeping an eye on the ceramic sheep.

There was one last surprise in the box:  chocolate for me to eat! bubble wrap for Matty to shred all over my office!



I was so inspired by the new yarn that I immediately knit it up into these nifty fingerless mitts (fascinating point of trivia:  these are the very mitts that I was knitting while sitting on my duff on the aforementioned beautiful sunny day).  As a bonus, they used less than half the skein, so I can knit another pair any time I feel like it. It turns out that the yarn is every bit as soft as people say and I love it. 



As if sunny days and yarny gifts were not enough, there is still more fun to be had here.  In other knitting news (and really  it all ends up being knitting related news, doesn't it?), I finished the Alhambra scarf.  The only problem is that I haven't bothered to block it yet, so it is still very crumpled looking, instead of all airy and beautiful. 





That leaves me with the three actual current knitting projects.  It was supposed to be two (sweater and socks), but I am a little fickle and was suddenly struck by the overwhelming desire to cast on for a beret.  This is a truly laughable project for me.  Like a lace shawl, which I will almost certainly knit  and almost as certainly never have the courage to wear, a beret is a hat for someone with fashion.  I have no fashion and therefore no need for a beret.  But I had exactly the right yarn for the Tweed Beret and so I am knitting it.  Here it is in its infancy: 



I promise it will get better looking.

For socks, I recently ordered this yarn from the kind folks and Dizzy Sheep:



It is an Opal hand painted sock yarn.  The colorway is called (and I apologize in advance for this) Blatterwald.  The manufacturer claims that the color was inspired by an autumn forest, but when I wound the yarn into a spiffy little yarn cake, it became clear that the yarn painter got hungry on her trip through the autumn forest and had begun to think instead of a big bag of frozen mixed vegetables.



The resemblance wears off only slightly in the knitting.  Also, there seems to be a curse on the socks and I had to take them apart--after 4 inches of knitting-- upon discovering that the sock would not fit over my heel. Bad sock!  I'm beginning to have reservations about this whole project, which might explain why I was so keen to start knitting fingerless mitts and unnecessary berets.



And finally, as if there has not been enough knitting talk, here is the first picture of my Must Have Cardigan.  Now that we are getting to spring, this is not a cardigan that I Must Have soon, which is is just as well because it is S-L-O-W going.  Instead of knitting the fronts and back separately, I have linked them together and am knitting them all at once.  So far I have knit about 5 inches.  This is in addition to the 4 inches that I knit on the back but had to unravel because I put the project down for so long that I forgot what I was doing and the other four inches that I knit on the back the first time I started the project which I also had to unravel because it was so far off gauge that I could have given the sweater to El Husbando, except for its undeniable pink-ness.  I think things are going better this time.  If not, I'll be forced to conclude that this is not a cardi that I must have after all.


Just so you don't think that it is all fun and games around here, I'll close with a picture of this week's monster laundry pile.  I have run out of socks and can no longer put this off.



Here, just for the sake of artistry, is a larger picture of the Climbing Tree.  I love this picture, so I had to put it in twice.

 

And now (this is really the end of the post, I promise) is a little reminder of why small children cannot be trusted with cameras.  They inevitably try to take pictures up their noses.

Kind of looks like some bizarre cross between a human and a owl, doesn't it?