Summer Vacation: Day 4

We have been to the farmer's market.  I'm going to call it FM for short, because it was a very small farmer's market and I can't justify spending so many letters on it. For over a year, I've been kicking myself every Friday morning for missing the FM on Thursday afternoon.  I feel particularly obligated to go to this market because it is sooo close to my house and it seems silly to get all indignant about how far away most of our produce comes from and then fail to seek out the local produce.  So, finally, I put the time on my calendar, got the kids all worked up for our adventure, and off we went. We were all surprised at the intimate scale of the FM, but the advantage was that, even allowing time for chit-chat and encouraging Matty to figure out how much the veggies would cost, we were able to visit both booths without making ourselves late for our next appointment.

After much discussion and negotiation--primarily with my children who wanted to buy everything except the squashes-- we came away with 5 tomatoes ($2), 3 cukes ($1.50, one of which has already been eaten), two very cute little lettuces (50 cents, and where is that cool c-with-a-slash-through-it symbol when I want it???), a fresh garlic bulb complete with stem (50 cents again), and a quart of strawberries (a splurge at $3.75, particularly in light of the number of berries in the garden and fridge right now).  By happy accident, we have red onion, yellow onion, jalapeno, and cilantro in the house, which means that tonight we will be making pico de gallo.  And some strawberry jam.  And I think I will finally be bold enough to pick my spinach and use it with the eggs for omelets.



Our black raspberries are finally coming in, too.  The problem with the raspberries is twofold.  First, they grow wild along the driveway.  We don't make any effort to tame them or even to clear the other foliage away from them and sometimes (like this year) that means that we just stand on the driveway, wide eyed and salivating, and stare at the perfect, plump berries that are just out of our reach.  If we try to get to them, we are simultaneously attacked by thorns and armies of guard mosquitoes. Problem two is that I like to take my assistant pickers with me, but they eat an awful lot more than they add to the bucket, so I only invite them along when I'm feeling very generous.



The kids are still finding creative ways to entertain themselves without leaving home.  Yesterday it was kite flying



and standing on top of the van to have a shout-conversation with El Husbando, who was on the other side of the right-hand window, inside the house.




Today we are dressed in sand toys and making impromptu swimming pools out of wheelbarrows.



One person sits in the wheelbarrow while the other uses the garden hose to fill the wheelbarrow.  Really lucky players get to have the Nemo bucket (which is first filled with water) placed on their heads just before they are dumped out of the wheelbarrow and onto the ground.  Apparently it's endless fun.  They've been doing it all day, although when they first started doing this in the morning they were wearing their pajamas instead of bathing suits. Except for Matty, who was naked.



Knitting is moving along so slowly that I'm surprised all my projects haven't unraveled themselves in protest.  I'm using some leftover DK to make a pair of shorty socks.  These have been the riding in the car/waiting at basketball games project lately.  I'm learning how to knit them without actually looking at them, which is useful when the kids try to claim that I didn't watch them play.  Now I can stare at them the entire time they are on the court and still knit.  Ha.



And, just in case  you were feeling cold, here is a nice, warm, wooly scarf that I started in December.  It is supposed to be for El Husbando.  If it is ever done.  Which I'm sure it will be, sooner or later.  Or, as I heard someone else say today "I should be able to finish by the time this is done."



There are other knitting projects going on, but I'm trying to stick to just these two for now to avoid Project Dilution, which is what happens when I knit little bits on lots of things and then get mad because nothing seems to be getting done.  Instead, I've been knitting little bits on just a few things, and it turns out I'm still mad that nothing is getting done.  Ah, well.  Off to make some dinner and jam from today's FM loot.

Summer Vacation: Day 2

We are awash in strawberries.



We put one little wilty plant in the garden last year and this year, despite my general farming ineptitude, the garden is littered with strawberries. I've been picking them every other day for the last week or two, collecting enough at a time to fill a 16 ounce container, but today things look like they're getting a little out of hand.  We can barely walk in there without being pelted by these things. The berries on the towel are the pretty ones; the container at the top left of the photo is full of the rejects, which my chickens seem to like just fine.  They taste really good. I just wish you could smell them through the picture.

On the culinary downside, I seem to have injured my coffee maker.  I failed to install the lid/carafe assembly correctly yesterday (yes, that means that I forgot to put the lid on), which caused the coffee filter to overflow and dump heaps of ground beans and hot water back into the water chamber. I love that leaving the lid off actually keeps the coffee from making its way into the pot.  Despite lots of rinsing and draining, the poor little thing no longer seems to be able to suck the fresh water out of the water chamber and pump it into the filter basket.  Instead, it makes sad little gasping noises and hisses and issues a lot of steam.  Half of the water seems to come through as coffee (not very good coffee, though), but the other half refuses to leave the water chamber.  So there is no coffee.  Also, I stopped buying chocolate recently and at this point, I feel that I really am entitled to an explanation for why my weight has not plummeted.

We have survived the first day of summer vacation.  I don't count the two days at the end of last week, largely because they were dreadful.  My kids acted like inmates just released from prison which, regardless of my personal regard for our local schools, they kind of were. They had no clue what to do with themselves and their time. They fought and fussed and begged for TV (no!) and Wii (no!!) and quit in a funk half way through board games that they were begging to play five minutes earlier. They didn't want to go anywhere and they didn't want to do anything, but they were BOREDBOREDBORED because there was nothing to do and there was nothing good to eat and, shockingly, no one wanted to play with them.

This week we're off to a fresh start.  Everyone seems clear now that there will be no TV, Wii, computer, or any other such thing until after 3 p.m. and that they can expect lunch to take place around 12, not 10:30.   Also, they need to make a good faith effort to do stuff before they can earn an hour as couch potatoes.  It seems to be working.  Emma has agreed to play mother's helper, or au pair, or whatever else you want to call it; for three measly hours in the morning, she is Matty's playmate and I am free to work with many fewer distractions.  Admittedly, she was a lot more prompt for and patient about her work yesterday than she was this morning, but today is payday and hopefully the fist-full of green will help adjust her work habits.

The other two got hold of the Dangerous Book for Boys (well, I checked it out of the library for them), and have decided for their first project to make bows and arrows.  It requires me to let them use the swiss army knife, but in return they go out into the woods and fields and spend the morning looking for sticks and trying to follow the construction diagrams in the book.  So far, everyone still has 10 fingers, plus an assortment of bug bites, and they seem happy.

When morning adventures lose their shine, there is always the new rope swing.  El Husbando got it in his head that we were pathetic losers because we had no rope swing.  So he set one up and we have recovered our social status.

Here are my children flying out over the drop-off at the edge of the yard, except for Matty, who takes a less aggressive approach to swinging.



The weaving project seems to have recovered from my rookie methods. Here are the first few repeats on the Mystery Project, Mark II. I took advantage of my warp mishap to fix a pair of crossed strings and modify the design a little bit and I'm hoping that the rest of the project will go smoothly.





Back to work for me; it would be a shame to waste my few hours of morning peace.

Fresh Starts

Summer is here, both seasonally and by the school calendar.  We (hahahahaha--that would be the royal 'we,' since the majority of the collective we just stayed out of my way while I was indulging this recent compulsion) kicked off this splendid season by cleaning out the mudroom.  This, it turns out, was long overdue; I found school papers under the carpet from two years ago and was forced to admit that my "Annual Mudroom Cleaning Extravaganza" was misnamed.

We started off looking like this:

Shoes, boots, winter coats, gloves, scarves, and school gack were everywhere.

One corner, which I had been unable to see since last November, was filled with last season's hockey jerseys, which were patiently waiting for me to repair them (how did this get to be my job?),

and an assortment of truck parts that had so far failed to pack themselves up and leave my house.





The first  challenge was to figure out what these things were so I could fill out the return form.  I thought about writing  "big black tubey things" and "short silver cups with no bottoms," but that seemed kind of girly.  Instead, I spent a solid half hour poking through the catalog and trying to find pictures of these things so that I could match the numbers on the forms with the actual auto parts and hopefully not look like a complete lemonhead.

Part two of the "Survivor--Mudroom" challenge was fitting the two big black tubey things back into their box.

I remember doing these kinds of puzzles in school so they could assess our 'spatial relations' aptitude.  I thought I had done pretty well on those tests, but it must have been a fluke because these little buggers had me stumped. I flipped them and turned them, arranged and rearranged.  Finally, after I had the pair of them interlocked in the box with only a teeny bulge poking through the top of the cardboard, I decided to apply an extra measure of packing tape and hope for the best.

Presumably they will not escape on their return journey to the auto parts place, but there's no need to worry about that yet because El Husbando still has not taken them out of the garage to ship them back.  The jerseys are waiting there too, so they'll have some familiar company while they wait.

The mudroom purge yielded a few forgotten treasures.  This is some rusty antique-y thing that El Husbando picked up at an auction back in the days before his purchases were properly supervised.  We don't really know what it is, but it migrates around the house and every once in a while one of the kids picks it up and cranks it until we all yell at him to stop. We think it is meant to scare the crows away from the crops, although I have some doubts about that because it has to be hand cranked, and once someone is outside cranking it, wouldn't that person's presence be enough to scare the birds away without bothering with this headache inducing crank thing?

Here is a large quantity of duct tape, useful for fixing vacuum hoses that have suffered dog bites and also, according to an old colleague of mine, for securing prisoners of war, although we have not yet had occasion to test this theory.

Hiding behind the boxes of jerseys and auto parts were Mr. Potato Head's right arm, some Guatemalan worry dolls, a wandering snack container and, inexplicably, the letter C.

These boots remain a sore spot for me.  They are completely worn through at the sole, making them both a bad purchase and useless for out door wear, but the uppers are in excellent shape and I keep thinking I should be able to make something clever out of them.  Until that time, they are retained as doorstops to keep the French doors from slamming shut.

And now the mudroom looks like this:

 It's so clean and neat that I'm tempted to hold a party in there,  although that kind of thinking probably goes a long way to explaining why I don't entertain much.

The new weaving gig proceeds with mixed results.  The colors of this scarf are pretty, but it was a nightmare to weave because the yarn began to shred part way through, which you can see in the upper right corner of the photo.  Life is too short to have to deal with that kind of stuff, so I ended the scarf early and stuck the extra yarn in a jar to be used for knitting.

I'm much happier with this next project.  Isabel and I stuck it on the big loom so we could start weaving right away. It was easy to set up and the pattern was easy to follow and the weaving was entirely trouble free and the scarf turned out way cool, if a little wide for my taste.

Plus, after I ran out of the blue yarn for the scarf, there was enough warp left over for me to make this little bonus hoozit from some other scrap yarn.  It's the same pattern as the scarf, but I love the way the yarns interact.

And now we come to the Project that Must Not be Named.  This is the yarn that showed up on the box mentioned in the last post.  I measured the warp and got it all sorted out on the loom.




Or so I thought.




 A few repeats after this picture was taken, I advanced the warp and watched in horror as the middle strings sagged a half inch below the rest of the warp.  This is what is known in the weaving universe as A Bad Thing.  I kept weaving for a while longer (one-fifth of the way through the project, to be precise), and the problem got worse.  So then I got the bonehead rookie weaver idea of winding the warp forward and tightening everything up from the back.  Only when you do that, the cloth you've already woven gets all wiggly and icky and instead of solving any problems, you create about one hundred more.  And so I unwove the entire project and retied the warp from the front, which pretty much erased all the warm and happy feelings I was having about how quickly this project was going.

Now the loom looks like this:



Want a close-up?



There's no weaving there yet; the white stuff is just some T.P., which is very useful for getting your strings all lined up and ready for the actual weaving.

I thought I would really hate undoing my project and then having to weave it again, but It turns out I'm enjoying the sight of the warp waiting for me to get back to work on it.  Weaving, it would seem,  lends itself well to do-overs.  The biggest parts of the project are planning and setting up the warp, and as long as you don't have to trash your warp, it's not a debilitating hardship to have to do more of the fun stuff.  At least that's how I feel now.  I might not be so relaxed if  it happens again.

Below is our nature shot of the week.  El Husbando came tearing into the house the other day and demanded that we all run outside to see this turtle (tortoise?  I feel obligated to call the ones I see on land tortoises, but that doesn't explain the snapping turtles we find on the roads).



Here's the picture of the whole turtle, including the dinosaur-like spikes on his tail.



And, just so you can have a true sense of his size, here he is with my foot for reference.  I wear a size 8 shoe.

And that's about all for now. July promises to be a month of self-imposed knitting, spinning, and weaving deadlines, hopefully with pictures to go along, and maybe even some summer adventures with the kids.

Meant to Be?

This showed up on my doorstep today.  It was not much of a surprise.  I ordered it and have been tracking its progress, via the fine operation at UPS, on my computer. I have been very keen to see how my chosen shades of burgundy and bordeau (essentially a dark shade of rose and lighter--and possibly purple-ish-- rose) would look together because I was a little unsure from the picture in the yarn catalog whether they would be a successful color combination.




This is what I found inside:




When I saw the purple-y shade on the left, I panicked because I knew that it was disastrously purple and would be hideous in combination with the rose (I know this because I once had personalized stationery in exactly that ghastly combination).  But then I remembered that I had already panicked over the color combination and had, at the last minute, changed the  color scheme to the safe and ever-reliable combination of periwinkle and silver/grey specifically so that I wouldn't have to worry.

But what is all this for, you ask.

Well, I can't tell you that.  But it has to do with this:






This is my new loom.   It isn't really a new loom, it's new only to me.  I haven't forgotten that my last official position on floor looms, as expressed here, was that I couldn't justify a new loom because they are really expensive and, as I may have mentioned 10 or 12 times, I don't really weave all that much.  And I was able to stick very strongly to this position for at least 7 or 8 months.  Then, around the time of my birthday, I realized that I probably could find a way to justify a used loom and I started scanning Craigslist periodically. Second hand looms show up now and then at pretty reasonable prices, although you have to act immediately if you're going to score one.  I watched a few looms come and go without doing much about it.  A few weeks ago, someone advertised a 36" four shaft loom for $300.  The loom was not my first choice brand, but it was the right size, it was offered at an outstanding price, and the listing was only a few hours old.  I contacted the owner, who said the loom was still available, but somewhere during our exchange of emails to set up a viewing date, she sold the loom to someone else.  I was extremely disappointed, and may have harbored some uncharitable thoughts about the seller's failure to let me know she had another interested buyer.  I may also have fumed and scowled in a childish manner, but I don't want to talk about that.

Eventually, I decided to get over it and just keep looking, and right about then another ad popped up. This one was advertising the exact loom that I was hoping for.  The price was fair, and the fact that it was more than the price of the loom-that-wasn't was more than made up for by the fact that it was advertised along with 4 different sized reeds, which would cost at least $60 each to buy new.  The loom was located not too far from us, the seller, Ed, wrote pleasant and gracious emails, and --most importantly-- he did not sell the loom to someone else while we were emailing.

So two weeks ago, El Husbando --who is ever indulgent of my hobby habits-- and I made the trek way out into the Bristol Hills to find my loom.  Ed was waiting in the driveway for us, (probably because he saw us miss the house on the first pass) and he was warm and friendly and began to tell us that the loom had belonged to his mother-in-law, Janet, who had been weaving as long as he had known her, right up until her death five years ago. She had two looms, and she kept one of them in the family room, where she would weave while her husband watched the TV.  She assembled and updated the loom herself and she particularly liked to weave small coverlets.

As Ed and his wife told us more about Janet and her weaving, the significance of this sale grew for  me.  I wasn't just picking up a new toy, I was taking on a piece of someone else's history. I know that a lot of stuff just stuff, but some things are so tied to our memories that it's painful to let them go.  The loom must have been one of those things to Ed's wife, who had lost her mother and was now giving up this remnant of her mother's identity. We talked for a little bit about how much her mother had loved weaving and how I liked the feeling of picking up where someone else left off.  I promised to take good care of her mother's loom, and then she gave me a hug.

I'm glad that my loom has a history and that they were willing to share a little of that history with me, and I really really hope that some of Janet's weaving mojo has come along with the loom.  The project I have planned for it, the one with the panic-inducing cones of yarn, is an ambitious undertaking.  It is big, it has emotional significance, and it's on a deadline; I'm going to need all the help I can get.  And I refuse to be any clearer until it is done.

In the mean time, the loom looks great in my office.  I'm not the only one pleased with it:





Apparently it makes a great battlefield.




Probably not what Janet intended, but it's always good to see the next generation appreciating fine tools.

Today I am . . .

 . . . working very hard at not working.  And getting quite good at it.

. . .  entertained by this growing collection of real life weird things customers have asked this bookseller.

. . .  missing the scorching warm temps we had at the beginning of the week.

. . . wondering what this turtle--last seen while riding my bike yesterday morning*--is doing now.

*nice try, grammar police:  I was riding, the turtle was squelching in the mud.

. . . thinking how silly it is that I have 30 stitches left to bind off on my I Knit Like a Twit socks, but they're still sitting in the knitting basket waiting for my attention.



. . . wondering why my five year old thinks it is so funny when I shout things to him.

. . . waiting for the world to slow down so I can  get back to this--



or this --



or this --



Really, a few minutes on any one of them would be fine.

. . . thinking how nice it is to look outside and see flowers  where last year there was only mud,







although I can't figure out whether this ugly duckling



is an authorized and bona fide garden plant or an invasive weed.  And how long do I wait before deciding?

. . .wishing it wasn't time for me to get back to work. Sigh.