In which I am Enlightened

All has been revealed to me.   The prophecy was not "if you build it, they will come."  It turns out  that our prophecy was "if they come, they will build it, and make liberal use of the porta-potty and sometimes the bushes while they are here."  Go figure.

This morning, before the sun was even fully above the horizon, this truck showed up.  It was carrying a number of construction workers, complete with hard-hats, several of whom got out and made immediate use of the Purple Porta Potty.  

Having established their everlasting dominion over the PPP, they got to work digging holes

and adding poles

and now the Purple Porta Potty Zone looks like this:

Or really like this, because the other picture was taken before lunch.

That guy in the red shirt?  He must have a thing about Purple Porta Potties.  I swear I saw him stalled at the bushes for longer than would normally be required to stop and smell the flowers, and then he needed to adjust his pants and fix his shirt.

I really hope he gets over his issues by tomorrow.

The Halloween issue was solved with a small amount of creativity and a lot of styling gel.  As promised, Matty dressed in his clone costume (yay, Star Wars.  I think.).  Nate cobbled together a marginally army-ish outfit with the loan of a pair of army green pants from his sister and the timely purchase of some junky plastic toy paraphernalia. Happy as I am that his costume worked, I am sorely tempted to collect all the new bits of junk and chuck them in the garbage. I may have issues.  

Isabel decided on the way to her violin lesson that she wanted to be a zombie and that this would require hair gel. Not much of a problem, except that on Mondays she goes from violin to basketball and doesn't get back until after 6:30.  As much as I thought I had secured the Extreme Halloween Procrastination award last year (when we pulled Isa's costume together sometime after 6), last night I outdid myself in stunning fashion.  Isa walked in at 6:40; we all sat down for dinner (a huge improvement over last year, when we thought there would be plenty of time to eat when we got back . . . at 8:45 p.m. HA!) and at 7:15 we started putting costumes on, discovering in the process that really Isabel was dressing up as "an evil scientist zombie dude."  

Can't you tell from her hair?

 So it wasn't until 7:30 that we got into the car to drive to our trick-or-treat spot. The up-side of this is that we didn't have to spend forever collecting candy because half of the people in the neighborhood had already run out by the time we got there.  The down-side: not as much candy.   Except for Emma, the ultimate Halloween scam artist.  She and her friends started off nice and early in a nearby neighborhood, then were driven to the same neighborhood in the village that we went to.  They were well into their village rounds before we even left the house.  She came back with a HeapOCandy.  If any of the other kids did this, I might object.  But Emma likes M&Ms, plain chocolate bars, and Mike & Ikes.  The rest?  She gave it to us.  Although she did ask for some of it back so she could give it to a friend who hadn't gotten quite enough of the candy that she liked. As if!

I absolutely can't write any more right now.  I've joined NaBloPoMo again (dummy!) and I still need 29 more days of material.  Ideas are welcome.

What can it all mean?

It's still there.



Lurking.

Menacing.

Waiting.

It doesn't do anything.  It doesn't lead anywhere.  No one, for example, has stepped out of it from another time or place.  It doesn't appear to lead to another dimension, although one might argue that I am not qualified to make that determination.  And, in glaring defiance of the principle "if you build it, they will come," no one has even stopped by to use it.  Nor does it seem to signify anything.  I thought for a while that the unexpected arrival of a Purple Porta-Potty must be portentous (say that ten times fast), but I have yet to decipher its meaning. Its ways are subtle and devious, too much so for an ordinary thing like me.

It does seem to have brought a few disturbances with it. For starters, Emma suddenly announced the other day that her softball coach was holding pre-season (I'll say; someone should remind her that softball is a spring sport around here) training sessions.  At 6 in the morning. And she wants to go. At 6 in the morning.  It's an absurd hour to be driving anywhere with an 8th grader, especially now when it is dark and cold. But I am the mother:  I drive, therefor I am, and all that.  I just wish I had a spiffier car.  Something with a little zip to it. Or seat warmers.  Either would work for me.

Another anomaly:  my kids are entirely uninterested in Halloween costumes this year.  Matty says he'll plunk one of his existing Star Wars costumes on, Nate is going as an an "army guy" for which El Husbando will be supplying the outfit (how?  we have nothing appropriate here except for one camouflage bandana), and Emma is going as some sort of pirate in a skirt (assuming she can stay awake after her early morning at pre-spring training).  The shocker, though,  is Isabel.  The ultimate costume girl, the girl who spent one year as a blue inchworm (my best one: blue fleece zip-up union suit with accompanying body length stuffed tail, all made  without a pattern) and another masquerading as cauliflower (white sweats and sweatshirt, hat made of white terry cloth stuffed in a very lumpy manner)--the same girl who wore her tiger suit to pre-school for weeks on end and even drew up plans for dressing up as an end table-- the very girl who tested my ability to create these same costumes out of nothing year after year--is out of ideas.  She has no clue what she wants to be this year and cannot even say for sure that she wants to dress up.

Top left:  (1) a paired costume--Emma was the artist, Isabel posed as the art; (2) the tiger suit-- I made it for Emma when she was little and all of the kids wore it (some more than others) and felt terribly brave-- I will never part with it; (3) Isabel as a penguin; (4) elegant in a fabulous cape.  Bottom left: (1) a fabulous chapeau; (2) another fabulous chapeau, because what is a girl without her hat? (3) dragon costume-- she put it on at her sister's birthday party and we had to pry her out of it; (4) wearing bunny ears, just for fun; (5) still another fabulous chapeau, still for no reason we can recall.

Strange times are indeed upon us.

On Second Thought . . .

I'm having a bad reaction to the Purple Porta-Potty.  What kind of world is this where someone--anyone-- can just drive up a person's driveway and deposit a porta-potty on the lawn?  Who does this?  Why didn't they at least ask me what color potty I wanted for my lawn?  Clearly there was a choice.  See?

Purple and green.  And--here's the killer-- it's not even sitting straight.  It's tilty.  So whoever it is who hatches vile plans like randomly porta-pottying people can't even get a good seat for the show. Which only serves them right for hatching such a vicious plan, but all the same, couldn't we have enough pride in our work to do the job right? Jeez.

Intruder Alert

 I am being watched.

This made its way up the driveway this morning:

Your eyes do not deceive you.  It is a Purple Porta-Potty.  It approached with great stealth, but as it rounded the last corner of the driveway, my ever vigilant guard dog caught sight if it and issued Standard Signal Four: 

BARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARK

Translation: Intruder on the Premises, Possibly Dangerous.

Stymied by my top notch security system, the PPP stopped a good distance from the house and has concealed itself in the brush, where it evidently intends to await further instructions.  The camouflage must be working:  my daughter, who walked right past it on her way up the driveway, didn't even comment on its sudden appearance.

I believe it to be some sort of spy.  Here we can clearly see it inspecting the site of our next home improvement project.

I wonder what it wants.

On a sadder note, here is photographic evidence that my newest socks have suffered from Fading.  I took them out of the wash this morning and realized that they were no longer black with streaks of shocking green.  Instead, they are grey and lime.  Good thing I have a second skein. It looks like the next pair will have to be washed specially if I want to keep the colors. Bah!

In which I am Totally Famous and Don't Even Know It

Ok. Maybe this is not really 15 minutes of fame.  15 nanoseconds?  Who cares.  As I may have mentioned before, once or twice or twenty times, not that anyone should be counting, my girlfriend Deb and I make an annual pilgrimage to the New York Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck.  This year was no exception, although it does seem to us that the bus arrives just a little bit later and leaves just a little bit earlier every year.  Nonetheless, we went.  And, to boost the fun factor (especially important to me since I felt last year that I had approached the festival with a faulty strategy and mindset and therefor failed to extract the maximum fun possible from my one big day away) we added another Deb and a Jodi and spent the day alternately parting from and meeting up with each other, comparing notes on the different booths we had been too, and texting each other at a rate that would have made our teenage daughters' heads numb.  It worked like a charm.  We still ended up walking through most of the buildings, and we definitely became store-stupid and zombie-like from seeing far too much stuff for sale, but it was refreshing to have accomplished that by accident as opposed to tackling each building in order and making sure that we didn't overlook a single skein of yarn.

The second Deb (who is known locally as Knitting Deb, largely because I took some knitting classes with her, but also to distinguish her from Regular Deb- who was the first of my Deb acquisitions and is my usual Rhinebeck travel companion--and Spinning Deb--who, as you may have deduced, taught me to spin) has an 'in' with my favorite shameless-promoter-of-economic-recovery-through-discounted-yarn-acquisition website, The Dizzy Sheep. Dizzy offers a daily deal on a yarn (punctuated by an occasional holiday-related multi-deal frenzy) and K.D. used the occasion of her trip to Rhinebeck to take the website's eponymous mascot along for some photo-ops.  Now, normally, I would avoid author book signings and the evil, snakey lines that accompany them like the plague.  But Knitting Deb was determined to plunk herself in the line for the Yarn Harlot's book signing and I really really really didn't want to miss this because she was going to get a picture of the mighty Stephanie Pearl-McPhee with our very own Dizzy Sheep.  I thought this would be a memory in the making, and that is what led me to be wandering near the book signings at exactly the moment that would ensure my everlasting international stardom.  To appreciate the scope of my new-found fame, you'll need to pop over here for a minute.  Go ahead.  I'll wait.  Now, scroll down to the picture of the kid with the only kind of monster-butt I would ever want to have.   That's amazingly cute, isn't it?  But that's not what I'm all wee-wee'd up for.  Scroll down to the next picture below the monster-tush.  There is a woman there with her leg on a table, showing SPM her sock.  That's not me.  But, I remember seeing that woman hoist her sock up on the table because I was there.  I can prove it, too.  In the background of the picture, there is a woman in a blue sweater who is actually watching the sock-woman put her foot on the table.  That is still not me.  That is Regular Deb, and if she had known that this was going to be our international debut, she would have smiled for the camera.  But no one told us.  If anyone had bothered to mention that we were about to be famous, then instead of being the pony-tailed girl in the orange vest walking behind Regular Deb and not even looking at the camera, I would have been the pony-tailed girl in the orange vest mugging it up like an idiot for my big debut.  No matter.  I'm still in the picture, and I'll probably go back and look at it a few more times to make sure I haven't been edited out yet.   Excuse me for a second.

I'm back.  There isn't much else to report from Rhinebeck.  Knitting Deb had some good stories, one of which involved her being tracked down by a large man called Thor (yes, the same Thor who sold me free yarn a few Rhinebecks ago; could there really be more than one?), who had reported her --and more particularly the hand-knit shawl she was wearing--to the shawl's designer and wanted to know if the designer had managed to track her down among the thousands of hand-knit clad people in attendance.  But that's not my story.  My only story--and I use that term very loosely--took place on the ride home, where I was so tired that I began sleep knitting and dreamed (hallucinated?  it's a fine line, isn't it?) that someone had thrown a golf tee onto my knitting and just as I was trying to remove the tee from my project, I woke up and realized that I was actually trying to pull my Brittany DPN out of the mitten I was working on. Not much of a story, but that's OK because my picture is on the Yarn Harlot's blog and she's really famous, so now I'm famous too.


In honor of all this photographic excitement, I'll post a few pictures of my own.   The first pictures are Rhinebeck purchases.

One skein of STR mill ends for a pair of fingerless gloves for me to wear when my office gets too cold for typing. One purse strap, because I really am determined to knit that kit purse that I bought last year. One bag of dyed bluefaced leicester top.  The display at this booth was photo-worthy -- all sorts of colorful top and and skeins neatly displayed against a black background.  I had the most miserable time choosing because everything was beautiful.

One yarn bowl from Brier Street Pottery.  Isn't it pretty? The color is  teal blue, with a lot of blue-grey in it.  I also bought a little rose colored crock, but it is busy holding some of my spindles right now.

More roving from Hope Spinnery, which is a co-op that produces fiber and yarn  using wind power, and local purchasing, and natural dyes, and all sorts of socially responsible things.  I think I would feel wrong not buying something from this booth.

Next up are some things I actually finished.  First, my Night Fury socks.  I have a second skein of this stuff, which is good because I am not done enjoying either the yarn or the color way, which is named after Toothless the dragon in How to Train Your Dragon.  There is also a possibility that I'm going to take a dyeing workshop with the person who dyed this yarn, which would be too much fun for me.

Here is my Swallowtail Shawl.  Finally.  Finished.  Not sure what to do with it now.

Here are a pair of hats I made for a woman in the knitting guild who is collecting preemie hats for donation.  These were started and finished on the eternal bus ride to and from Rhinebeck, which isn't saying much because they are so quick to knit, but I also finished my Night Fury socks and knit most of a mitten on the same bus rides.  Just saying.

Emma, who had asked me a while ago to make her some hats for her pet gourds, was annoyed that they didn't fit her gourds properly,

although I think this guy looks fabulous.

That's enough for tonight.  The natives want dinner.  Again.  And I think I'm going to go make sure I'm still famous.  Again.

A Whole New Outlook

We had a little excitement here last week.  Sometime in the middle of the summer we were seized by the notion that we absolutely had to install a bay window in our family room.  We knew that terrible things would happen if we did not, so we contacted the appropriate authorities, offered up a pile of cash, and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  The lead time on this project was about two months,  and by the time the Great Day of Installation rolled around, I was pretty sure everyone else in the house had lost track of the exact installation date and that I would be able to surprise them all. For days I giggled to myself at the thought of snapping pictures of the expressions on their faces when they got home from school/work and found the  new window in the family room.   I managed to keep my mouth shut about the installation date even when I was burning to talk about it, just so I could enjoy the surprise.

That didn't work out.  They had all forgotten, but one of our friends had remembered and she called and left a phone message and spilled the beans by asking if Thursday was the day.  If you've ever left me a message, you may have guessed by now that I don't get messages.  It's not that there is any thing wrong with our voice mail system, it's just that I can't possibly be bothered to check for messages, so they all just sit there waiting for someone to show a little initiative. El Husbando is the responsible party who usually retrieves the messages and, not surprisingly, he got this one too.  He then shouted around the house asking me if Thursday was the day, this kids overheard, and the gig was up.

Failed surprises notwithstanding, the installers showed up Thursday morning to install a window.   We started with this:

Normally we keep some furniture in there, but I moved it to avoid the construction dust.  The installers had thought about dust on my furniture too, and they came prepared with a nifty plastic zip wall, which is why the next pictures look like they were taken through a piece of Saran Wrap.

They slapped down a bunch of drop cloths and started making dust.  The first part was pretty quick.  The missing drywall shows where the new window will go.

Then they took out the window and started sawing in earnest.  They sawed and sawed and sawed and the entire house vibrated and rumbled until I thought my head might explode.  I began to have serious doubts about the wisdom of letting these cranks put holes in my walls, which I consider to be an important part of the house, particularly when it is pouring rain outside as it was for a great deal of the sawing.  I decided that it might be best to chase these hooligans away, but when I went out to see what they were up to, it looked like this:

That is to say, exactly the same.  Nothing had changed.  I was terribly confused, but unwilling to reveal the depths of my ignorance, so I went away and endured more sawing and, as a therapeutic measure, began to issue anguished tweets about trying to work while people were busy taking my house apart.  When I went out to check again, it still looked the same.  Eventually it occurred to me that they were very carefully (and very loudly) sawing through each 2x6, top and bottom, so that they could very neatly cut the bit of the wall out.  So the sound that was driving me crazy was, in fact, the noise of people doing their job with intelligence, forethought and care.  It really freaked me out.

Not too long after these revelations struck me, the wall looked like this:

And then like this:

I really began having second thoughts here (which I guess were third and fourth thoughts by now) because I hated the way the window looked without any detailing and I was afraid that I had made a dreadful decorating mistake and that it would look this way forever.

I was wrong.  They just hadn't put the side windows in yet.  And now we have this, which I love.

It's got a nice, deep window seat.  Perfect for this:

And this:

We even have a reading chair, which is mine.  ALL MINE.

Mine.  Don't even think of sitting here.

That's all I have to say about that. 

The garden has been less of a failure than in years past.  Sort of.  I did keep it weeded, and the asparagus patch we planted in the spring looks very green and vital.  My cukes, however, were an abysmal failure, as were my squashes.  Cabbages, which are there only to provide volleyballs to entertain the chickens in the winter (no lie-- we hang them in the middle of the run and they peck them; keeps them busy for hours), still look distinctly un-cabbagelike.  More a collection of leaves than a head of cabbage.  Peppers are coming in with a vengeance, but the raw ones make me barfy so I roasted the first batch and we'll see how things go from there.  We got some gourds and it looks like my eggplant plant (that feels like a stutter, doesn't it?) is hosting a revival; now I just have to figure out what to do with some late season white eggplants. Tomatoes are taking over, which always bothers me because I feel obligated to cook them, but I never get around to it and I just end up weighed down by the additional guilt.

Here's a big success, though.  In addition to my regular bed of smaller sunflowers, which spent the summer beautifying my garden and are now serving as a bird buffet, we had two rogue sunflowers.  This one was the biggest and it clearly earned the name 'mammoth.'  That's my shoe--not Matty's-- sitting next to it. About half the seeds were already gone by the time I cut the head off the plant, but there should still be plenty of seeds.  Probably I'll keep them around for a while and then put the head out for the chickens.  Or maybe, just maybe, this will be the year that I actually save them for us to eat.  You never know.  Well, really I do know that I won't do any such thing, but I like to pretend that anything is possible.

The knitting mania of the last post has faded.  I've decided to ignore everything except the Swallowtail shawl and I stayed up late Saturday night finishing up the budding lace section (while re-watching most of the newer Star Trek movie on my iPad; I might still have a thing for Karl Urban) and starting the edging.  I have been stymied by the unexpected failure of one of my nupps, which has now been compounded by an amateur repair job.  I'll know after another row or two whether I can tolerate it as is or whether I'll have to retreat to the last life line and start the edging over.  I'm hoping to finish this next week. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

And last, so that no one should claim that I'm neglecting my other craft-stuff, here is a picture of a visitor that I had while I was spinning the other day.  I'm not sure whether I should consider her a good luck charm or a quality control agent, but there she was, one of the founding members of the spinners' guild, come to see how I was getting along.

She's moved on now, after hanging out for an hour or so on my wheel, but I would like to let the powers that be know that I like her company much, much better than that of the snake we found slithering around the garage today.  Just so you know.

Off now to make dinner.  They really do demand feeding with astonishing regularity.

In which I Lose My Mind and Start a Ridiculous Number of Projects

I'm having one of those months when everything seems like a good idea to me.

Mostly the problem has involved excess knitting, which would explain why my project list is overrun with things like this

Swallowtail shawl in the making.
Some other people started knitting this, so I did too.
They are all done now.  Me, not so much.

and this

Some sort of Estonian Shawl thingy. The entire shawl
will look like this, which is why some of the more v
aried projects have bumped it out of its place in my must-knit list.

and this:

Bridgewater.  Starts with a very large garter stitch square, worked from
point to point.  When you finish that, you still have to
add the edging, which is also pretty large.

That would, if you are inclined to count, be three shawls.  That might seem like a lot for a person who wears no shawls.  But they seemed kind of cool, so I thought I would make them. Or at least start them, because I don't seem to get too far before something else seems like an even better idea.

Like this sweater. Or hem, really, because I haven't gotten beyond the bottom edge, even if it is my  newest love.

Sullivan, designed by a woman in my knitting guild.  How cool is that?

It's miles ahead of this, which is the very, very beginning of a sleeve for a sweater that I couldn't wait to start in the spring.

Serape Jacket.  By the third color change, with all of its
attendant dangling ends, I realized I was doomed.  

And here is another hem, or a lace edging, really.  This bit of cottony fun was almost pitched overboard after the 50th time that I goofed it up, but in the end I was able to complete the edging.  The rest of the sweater will have to wait.

A sweater?  Oh, please!  I'm just a tank top.
Could somebody please finish me already?

Since three shawls and three sweaters cannot possibly be enough to keep a knitter going, I also have some socks in the works.  The first are knit in a yarn called Night Fury.  I love the grey-black color and its little green stripes so much, I thought it would be a good idea to buy  a second skein to use for something totally different.  You know, in case I ever run out of knitting.

Wanida socks in Night Fury colorway

This little sock cuff is so abandoned that I think it's time to repurpose the yarn.  The idea was to alternate two skeins of yarn with long color repeats and see how they interacted.  The little I can see of it has been pretty cool, but I don't seem to be getting very far.

This mini-scarf exists just because it seemed like a bad idea to toss out some reasonably salvageable yarn that got cut off of my loom after the bajillionth time that it broke.  Impressive progress, no?

I'm not even going to talk about this yarn, which was intended for a shawl.

The picture doesn't do it the proper injustice.  The darker browns and reds are ok, but the bulk of the skein is made up of a thoroughly objectionable puce-y-tan color.  I can't possibly wear it and if I gave the finished shawl to someone else, they might take it personally.  Someone has cleverly suggested that the colors might be best used in a home decorating capacity, and I think this is a good idea.  They suggested pillows, which did not appeal to me, so I'm thinking an afghan might do the trick.   I would only need about 7 more skeins, and what could be better than 10 skeins of barf colored yarn?

I'll tell you what would be better:  7 skeins of hard-to-knit cotton chenille in an eye-burning shade of royal blue.  I got this at the knitting guild's yarn auction last spring, because I have made two little washcloths from this kind of yarn (though not, heaven help me, from this particular color) and apparently, in all the excitement of the auction, I thought it would be a great idea to knit about 20 more.

Lest you find me exceedingly dull, I want to assure you that my good ideas are not limited to knitting.  Sometimes I have cleaning ideas too. Here we see a locking cabinet that contains a bunch of china stuff that I never use.

The reason that I never use it is that it is extremely dusty.  And the reason that it is extremely dusty is that all of the china is securely locked behind these marvelously porous and ugly metal grilles and I can't find the key.

Eventually, they became so dusty that I thought it would be a good idea to find a way to clean them, and so I tried to pick the lock.  That turned out to be a useless idea, as did the idea of bending the grilles so as to pull them out of the doors.  Not that I tried very hard, since I had my doubts about the wisdom of that idea in the first place.  You will be relieved, I am sure, to learn that I found the key, or at least a key that fit the lock exactly.  The problem, it turned out, is that I was looking near the cabinet for a small black key, whereas the key that opened the door was a larger silver key, which was inexplicably located in an entirely different section of the house.  I still suspect it is an imposter.

And last, in a fit of culinary inspiration brought on by the impossible number of pastries we ate on vacation, I bought a donut pan.  I thought this was a really great idea, although the donuts have yet to become a staple of our diet.  They taste great, but they are a little  . . . nontraditional looking, let'say.

Aesthetically challenged donuts.

My novice frosting skills might not be helping much.

They have really great personalities, I promise.

I guess I can see why I like to focus on the knitting.

The small wonder started kindergarten this week.  Here he is on the first day, with his giant backpack on.

Here is the side view, so you can see how monstrously out of proportion it is, compared to his tiny little body.

You might ask how it could possibly be necessary to burden such a small child with a bag that could easily hold him and a few of his friends.  Go ahead.  El Husbando already asked and he wasn't nearly as polite about it as you probably would be.  The answer is, of course, winter.  He doesn't need this much room now (although it was handy for sending in the towel, tissues, and baggies that he had to bring on Tuesday).  But when the snow flies and he has to go school with his big old coat and his big old boots and a change of shoes and his lunch and (here's the clincher) his snow pants, then he'll need the big old bag too.  Since my kids take snow pants to school pretty much from December straight through March, the mega-bag seems like a pretty good idea to me.  Plus, these bags last forever, and I'm pretty sure he'll grow into it.

Here is Nathan doing his big brother thing.

This is the same child who has, on occasion, voluntarily (I kid you not:  he actually noticed that these things needed doing and then did them)  changed dirty diapers and taken care of the dog's morning walk so we could sleep in.  So it should not have surprised me that he spent the first few school days finding Matty a seat on the bus and that he wrote himself a note (aptly entitled "Note to self") reminding himself to remind Matty of the signal the teacher gives when it's time for the kindergarteners to move to the transfer bus.  On the back of the note was this, which was meant for Matty:

It just makes my heart go all gooey.  Lest anyone panic that we've developed some sort of freak super-child, I would like to reassure everyone that Nate ate too much for snack, left the uneaten snack food  all over the table, and spent the rest of the afternoon fighting with Matty over the Monopoly rules.  And he leaves his dirty clothes on the floor and he might not brush his teeth quite as often as he claims to.

After all the to-do with sending the last child off to school, the natural question seems to be "what's it like?"  To which I can only reply that it is Quiet.  After 13 years of small children spending their days with me, this is an entirely foreign state of affairs.   I think I like it.  A lot.  Right now it seems peaceful rather than lonely, and the witching hour at the end the day is easier to handle now that it doesn't follow hard on the heels of an entire day of dealing with little gremlins.  Plus, I feel more like cooking dinner than I used to, although I'm sure that will wear off soon enough.

The biggest anticipated downside so far is this:

We came back from vacation to find it parked at the proposed site of our soon-to-be-built-if-we-can-get-over-the-zoning-issues barn.  Right now it is doing a whole lot of nothing.  But, should construction ever start, it and a few of its friends will be very busy doing all sorts of weird stuff.  And that's when I'm going to miss my sidekick.  One of my favorite things about little kids is how they think new stuff is so cool.  For a very long time now, I've been saying "Hey [Emma/Isa/Nate/Matty], look at that!"  Predictably, the child in question answers "cool!"  Now something pretty cool is going to happen here, and all of my little external validators will be off at school and it makes me sad that I won't have someone to share the coolness with right then and there.   The dog, being naturally inclined to people-pleasing, will try his best, but his reaction will probably take the form of loud and enthusiastic barking, which just isn't the same.  The cats, who are already as cool as an animal can be, really couldn't care less.

In the knitting world, I joined a knit-along at the beginning of August.   Below is the final product.  As with my Undulating Scarf, it was great to work with my handspun, although I am undecided on the merits of the finished shawl.  I like the border best, and I guess using my precious yarn on a scarf that isn't really my taste is still better than letting it languish in a drawer.  Plus, I can now more easily justify buying more of the fiber when I go to Rhinebeck this year.

That's all, folks.  I'm off to make good use of my new-found interest in home-cooked meals.