A Little Bit of Spring

We're finally having a little bit of Spring around here.  It brings us flowers



(including true-to-life teenage flowers that like to take selfies:)



and showers



and along with the usual renewal, this year Spring has brought us a notable replacement.  Our faithful old van retired, to be replaced by this marvel of Japanese engineering:

It is sleek and sound and filled with modern gadgets (back up camera? check!  bluetooth integration with everyone's phones/music? check!  voice command calling? Holy smokes-- I can do that too!) and a host of clever little storage places and we already love it.  But you can't just dump a van that's been part of your life longer than half of your children without feeling the pain of separation, and I did not take the parting of the ways well.  A friend of mine captured the experience perfectly: it was like handing your dog over to the shelter and the sense of responsibilities abandoned was icky indeed. I have mostly stopped worrying that the car was lonely, scared, and confused over its fate, but every once in a while I'm zapped by a pang of regret and I wish there were a way to have a decent retirement party for our less animate companions and know that everyone was going happily on to the next phase.  Even if that phase is the scrap yard.

Hissyfit

I am trying my best to make good use of my rigid heddle loom, but this merciless wad of yellow yarn refuses to reveal its free end.



I begin to suspect that this particular skein of yarn was packaged by M.C. Escher and that I will never, ever find its beginning.

I have tried to resolve the problem through liberal application of bad words and phrases, but in the interest of setting a good example (or at least not setting a terrible one) for my children, I had to modify my language and, in so doing, I think I diluted it so much as to render it powerless.

At the peak of my frustration, I vented my feelings by dashing the miserable child of a female dog to the  floor with all my strength.  It sailed lightly through the air and landed at my feet, making no sound whatsoever.

Yarn is a most unsatisfying adversary.

All is not lost, however.  I own scissors and will momentarily return to the field of battle with them.  Thunk, they will go, onto the table, blades open and menacing. One of us will be going to pieces.

Once more into the fray!!!

For the Record . . .

I grow weary of this winter.

More particularly, I'm tired of getting stuck in snowbanks on my own damned driveway.




Really tired.

So tired, that words cannot express my tiredness.

That's a lie.  I know plenty of words designed to express the precise emotion I felt this morning upon getting caught in a snow drift for the fourth time in a week, but they are not very nice words.  Also, I'm pretty sure I used up my daily allotment of them when the car first got stuck, when I realized I was going to have to shovel my way out, when I got my legs tangled in the snowbank for the first, second, third, and fourth times, and then when the dog, who spent most of his time barking helpfully at the shovel, decided to bury the tire I had just shoveled out.





He's a bit of a moron sometimes.

To recover from the morning's excitement, I plan to make a giant pot of coffee, break out the Dove squares (or, to be strictly accurate, I will break out more of the Dove squares), and knit a few more stripes on my stripey socks.



These socks have been knit and worn and then had to be reknit so that they might actually fit my feet without making my toes curl under.  The second sock of version 2.0 is finally nearing completion and as much as this project has felt like a lingering plague on my knitting existence, the do-over came at a time when I was suddenly noticing the imminent failure of several other pairs of socks due to what can only be described as yarn fatigue at the ball of the foot. I'm hoping I have solved the problem (at least for future socks) with the knit-in patch that you can see in the finished stripey sock. Off we go!

Brrr!

We had some cold weather last week.  So cold that on the way down the driveway to drop my poor kid off for the bus the car thermometer looked like this:



On the way back up the driveway, it looked like this:



It was the kind of day when a fresh container of water for the chickens would start to freeze on the 60 foot walk between the house and the coop and when even the frost makes its way inside to warm up a bit:




So we did what any rational people would do with this kind of weather:  we boiled some water, threw it out the door, and watched it snow:



Today we are back to normal:  30F, snowy and blowy, with a treacherous layer of ice on all the walkways where the snow that softened in yesterday's 40F re-froze last night.  I am, of course, thrilled that I have (almost) nowhere to go today.   I will even try not to complain about the fact that my hot coffee and warm blanket time will be spent working rather than goofing around, because it's still nicer than dealing with the great outdoors right now.

Before I get on with the dreaded employment, I will leave you with a small and cheerful WIP to counteract any sympathetic shivers you might feel on my behalf.



It's the bottom half of the first of a pair of Fiddlehead mitten, which I am making to replace these sorely missed mittens, which vanished last year.



At the rate I'm going, they should be done and lined sometime in June. How very useful.


Stay warm!

A World Gone Mad

This was in my inbox this morning and I can only conclude that someone in the advertising profession has lost his or her mind. 

 Did you read it?  Let's summarize the theory here:  Never mind the live action outside, kids; it's time to ignore the great outdoors and  improve your understanding of nature by staying inside and playing with plastic bricks.

Well, there's a grand idea.

Who wouldn't want to trade all the colorful action outside for these utterly life-like models?

Not that the birds aren't cute, in their oddly modular way, but I have to say that I find the beaks a bit sinister.  They look strangely militaristic and I keep expecting them to fire little green laser blips. Which, of course, would please my boys immensely and send them running for the nearest Lego store  so they could add a new threat to their ongoing Lego battle.

Naturally.

Just Some Stuff

Some things just have to be done:



Some things are so much fun, they should be done again:



Baking is, of course, much more fun with my new friends.

Speaking of fun, some of us are back in third grade, the land of the Friday Letter.  In this week's missive, we learned that Matthew has apparently emigrated to Australia:








Can't read third grade-ese? He says:

Dear Mum and Dad,  

G'day and greetings from Australia or "the land down under." Did you know that Australia is both a country and a continent? Since Australia was once owned by Britain, it [is] still their chief of state.  That is why there are so many british expressions. And Mum, I really with Nate would nick off, he's always eating my cheese!  By the way, I will say ta later.  And by the way, can we have a barbie for tea?  Please write back.   

Love, Matt

So we did:

Caught in Her Own Trap

So my daughter is in the other room sorting through the many partial decks of cards we have accumulated.  The following conversation ensues.

Isa:  We're missing the 4 of spades.
Me: You're the 4 of spades.
Isa:  No I'm not.  I'm the Ace of spades, the awesomest card there is.

Silence for a bit while she sorts another deck.

Isa:  We're missing the Ace of spades.
Me:  You're the Ace of spades.
Isa:  No I'm not. (pause)  Well, yes I am.
Me:  Wow, you really are a contrarian today.
Isa:  Am not!

Does anyone else have conversations like this?

So that you won't think my life is made up entirely of oddball conversations with my kids, here is a picture of a snake that I stepped on this morning:



Isn't it cute?  It was sunning itself in the road while I was taking my walk today and I didn't see it until I had just barely set my foot on it.  It became very irate and opened its mouth as wide as it would go and lunged at me and flicked its red tongue,  all of which would have been impressive if the snake hadn't been miniscule. Unable to frighten me away, poor Snake had to avenge his disrupted  nap and near-squashing by refusing to let me catch a picture of it in its "enraged snake" pose.  Silly reptile.

The last picture today is the sample for the project I plan to start this weekend.



We will for now politely ignore the sweater that I absolutely had to start a few weeks ago and the pair of socks that would not be denied a chance at existence the week before that.  They remain very important to me, but this project, which at its full size will be a beaded merino-silk stole, has a deadline because I want it for a fancy dress party we're going to in December. Nothing like a deadline to help you prioritize, although it is very likely that my priorities will shift again when I decide that I'm cold and want a new sweater.

It turns out that it's next to impossible to take a good picture of clear beads with an iPhone, so you'll have to take my word for the fact that I will not be using the purple beads for this project (although I am hoping there will be enough left over yarn for a second project that will use the purple beads). Instead I will be using the invisible beads on the left, while ignoring the slightly visible beads in the middle, which are actually the kind of beads called for in the pattern.  Wish me luck!

Half-Mad

We had a little meltdown here the other day.

By "we" I mean those of us who are sixteen years old and passionately attached to our iPhones.  And by "meltdown" I mean a crisis of epic proportions.  A emotional event that, left unchecked, could level a city.

It started when PhoneGirl tried to update the operating system on her beloved companion and ended up with an unresponsive black screen instead of than the highly anticipated iOS8.  This was followed by the usual ranting and raving, and panicked plugging in of phones to this computer and that, all to no avail.  In the depths of her despair, PhoneGirl seems to have tried to comfort herself by hearkening back to the halcyon days of her youth ("Enjoy it now," she loves to tell poor Matthew, who is all of 8 years old, "pretty soon you'll be in High School and its all SUFFERING there!").  That is to say, she found this



and this



and went to work.


Observe now, if you will, the shocking evidence of one teenager's descent into iPhone madness:
























Clearly, the suffering was overwhelming.  And, fortunately, fairly short lived.  By the time our damsel in distress was eyeing the activities on page 56, the cherished phone beeped back into consciousness.  It's memory had been wiped, but it had clearly returned from the land of the lost and all was on the way to being well again.

Until the next Teen Drama.

Half-Truths

I'm back, which I suppose is an unnecessarily obvious thing to point out.

I still have nothing to say about where my summer went, but before I put on my audiobook and crank out the rest of the rigid heddle table runner that I still have not freaking finished (and let's not even mention the Socks of Eternal Knitting and the Scarf That Refuses to End), here are a few pictures from this past week that I just can't not share.

First, apples and honey for a sweet new year.



 My kids scarfed them down during dinner the other night, even though I had imagined I was serving them for dessert. That's how much I know, right?

Second, it would appear that Freddy and the Gang are either hot on the trail of the next masked creeper or desperately in need of Scooby Snacks, because this is what Isabel and I found in the Target parking lot Tuesday when we did our last minute shop to make sure she and the boys had something decent to wear to Temple on Thursday.




We were neither the sole nor the boldest photographers on the scene:





And last, we have our Wildlife Update. We've been seeing an awful lot of teeny tiny snakes.


 

This one had the good fortune to still be alive. The others have mostly been lying flattened in the road. Their elders do not seem to have done an effective job of teaching survival skills, such as Not Getting Run Over by Cars.

 That's all, except to wish you all a  Happy Friday!

Lies!

Ahem.

Well, I, uh, was supposed to show up last Monday with marvelously entertaining tales from the summer that just sped by us.  Since it is, as far as I can tell, no longer Monday, perhaps we are gaining a small understanding of why it is that I think a summer vacation that was fully 10 weeks long (well, minus a day, if you want to be strictly accurate) passed in the blink of an eye. That is to say-- as my eldest and most infuriatingly punctual child is regularly tempted to point out-- I occasionally demonstrate a faulty understanding of time.  I prefer to think that I have such an advanced concept of the matter that I have evolved beyond the need for clocks and calendars. Unlike certain persons of limited imagination and understanding that I could mention. So far I have found very few people who see things my way, which often happens to those of us who seek to enlighten the world with such mind-blowing explanations.

To distract us all from this unfortunate topic, here is a picture of some yarn.



"Oh no!"  I hear you groan.  "Not more knitting!"

And you will be relieved to hear that all this fluff is instead destined for the loom.  Not all in the same project, of course.  I may (or may not, depending on enrollment) be teaching an introductory class in rigid heddle weaving.  The yarn is intended for a sample of the first class project, a scarf.  If I am super-speedy, I will make more than one scarf in order to demonstrate different fabrics and color effects etc. etc., and if I am as slow as usual, I will put the extra yarn away in the drawer and pull up some useful project pictures from Ravelry.

And that's all I have to say for today.  I will be back on Monday at some date in the not too distant future and maybe I will have a finished table runner to show (that's the blue thing underneath all my yarn). Or a new door for the chicken coop.  Or some totally unnecessary goodies from the fiber festival I'm going to tomorrow. At this point, I'm making no promises.

Questions

Two months (almost) since my last zucchini-infested post and you might have been wondering where the bleep I've been since then.  That is not, however, the true question.  The true question is where the  bleep my summer has gone, a question that I have no intention of answering right now for the very good reason that today is the last official day of my personal vacation and, in the same way that I refused to stop and blog while summer was available, I refuse to give up the last minutes of my personal time answering questions.

So there.

Here is evidence of what I have been doing for the last week and a half while the kids were at school:





It's not nearly as much as I thought I was going to do, but I suspect now that my original plans, which pretty much amounted to finishing any outstanding project I have ever started, were a teeny little bit optimistic.

My spinning wheel is now empty and my next goals are to:

1. clear off the rigid heddle loom, which looks like this


(ew!  I just realized that I'm not crazy about how this project looks, which is not a lot of incentive to keep working on it.)

2. clear off my floor loom, which looks like this

(boring! no wonder it's been on the loom since December)

3. clear off my in-progress spindles, which look like this


(much cooler picture--maybe I'll work on those next)

4. finish my knitting WIPs, which look like this


(okay--that's just the dumbest picture ever; please ignore it)


and

5. finish all my quilts, which I can't even show you because they've been in deep storage since I stopped quilting 8 years ago. Just imagine a very large pile of blankets and blankets-to-be.

Numbers 4 and 5 might be problems, particularly as they probably amount to 6 months of full time work and I'm headed back to work next week and will, most likely, have to put in a little overtime to make up for the time I just took off.  Then again,  why plan if you're not willing to plan big, right?

In the mean time, enjoy the weekend and I expect to be back here Monday morning, at about the time the first work-avoidance urge hits.  Then we can talk about where the bleep my summer went.

Tip of the Day

Today's helpful garden tip:

Never turn your back on the Zucchini plants.




Those buggers are summa cum laude graduates of the Give-em-an-inch-they'll-take-a-mile school.




First class overachievers.




Workaholics with a breath-taking inability to perceive that size isn't everything.

 I think it's time for some good zucchini recipes.

The Hurrier I Go . . .

You know the rest.  Spring is a madhouse in my world and I have, as you may have noticed, begun to neglect certain things.  Which is about all I'm going to say to explain the three month gap in blog posts around here.

Also, tonight is one of the first nights I've had without something on the schedule, and you can bet your buttons that I'm not about to spend it futzing around with a long and newsy blog post. No Sir, not me.  Instead, I will spend it working, which I failed entirely to do during normal work hours, hence the unfortunate schedule.

Before I go, though, I have to let you know that I am now a world famous knitter of hats.

Hat,  really, not hats.

And I suppose that, strictly speaking, I'm not actually world famous.  Or any kind of famous, if you insist on using the word in it's traditional, dictionary-definition sense.

But I did get to knit a hat for a book that is about to take the knitting world by storm, which is just about the same and totally counts as a way cool experience, right?

Here is my hat:

I got the gig two years ago through the lovely people at my local yarn shop, which sponsored a weekend  get-together for members of the Ravelry group associated with its on-line persona, Dizzy Sheep (check out my bumper-crop of links-- I am so tech-savvy!).  Master knitter Anne Berk joined us at the weekend and gave an introductory seminar on her technique for knitting intarsia motifs in the round.  This blew our minds.  Those of us who managed to recover from the shock of what she was teaching us (I almost didn't make it--I'm pretty sure I spent a while unable to do anything other than shake my head and blibber "that is sooooo cool") got to choose a pattern and some yarn and knit a project that would -- get this -- BE INCLUDED IN THE BOOK.  An actual real printed book with pages and everything. This doesn't happen to me very often, so I hopped on the yarnwagon and now my little hat, along with a number of other items knit by real live regular knitters, is going to make an appearance in  Annetarsia Knits (that's the Amazon link; if you really want to have fun, try this one, which goes to Ravelry and lets you take a peek at the different patterns).

Years ago I had an unfortunate experience with intarsia in the form of an afghan featuring little scottie dogs. I thought it had ruined intarsia for me, but it turns out there is a lot to be done with the technique that doesn't involve excessively cute animals and a bajillion bobbins of yarn tangling up your needles.  Such as a multi-color lace hat that does not need to be seamed and involves no gauge-restricting stranding.  In addition to the hat and the instructions for the techniques, the book contains patterns for socks, shawls, and a host of other goodies. Not all the patterns in the book are worked in the round and they range in size from coaster-sized things to --no lie-- an entire skirt/top affair.

And now I had better get back to work.  To tide you over until the next post, I'll leave you with a picture of my almost-but-not-quite finished Color Affection.



When people tell you that the end of this shawl takes forever, you should believe them and possibly choose a different project and save yourself years of garter stitch.  Saturday morning I owed 2.5 repeats (30 rows) and two inches of border on this shawl.  15 hours of knitting later, I still owe 3 rows and a bind-off.  I can only hope to have this finished by the end of the week, in which case I might just celebrate by writing a second blog post for this month.  Wahoo.

fyi:  these are not my pictures.  You can tell from the clarity and beauty of them-- and also from the fact that they are labeled with the book name and feature a person I have never before seen in my life, but who is clearly a real live model--that they were professionally taken for the purpose of the book. The photographer is Bill Berk, and I'm pretty sure that he didn't just pop a hat on one of his kids and fire away with his iPhone, as some of us are wont to do.

Spring Chickens

It's been quite a week for the chickens.

It started off with a lovely thaw.  The daytime temperatures -- all 40 degrees of them -- were positively beach-like compared to what we've seen since Thanksgiving and the birds took full advantage.
   

Unfortunately, the warm temperatures melted the snow and brought on the mud, which is always worst in the coop with its slower drainage and ground that is constantly being churned up by chicken feet.

Poor Mike here looks like she could use a pair of chicken boots.




And now she and Shirley (or is it LaVerne?  I can't tell them apart) look like they were pretending to be Lucy and Ethel stomping grapes.



Except that it's mud, of course, not grapes.

The birds spent a lot of time standing on top of their play house, like a little chicken convention.



This pair doesn't know from mud.  They and their three confederates continue to be indoor chickens.



That changed, for a grand total of 3.5 minutes, when I freshened up the shavings in their apartment, which, due to their complete failure to step outside and their indiscriminate bathroom habits, were in a disgraceful state.

When I toss clean shavings into the coop, the new birds panic like I'm lobbing grenades at them. Last time, they all backed into the same corner and hopped up and down and trampled each other until I went away.  This time, they headed for the opposite corner, which lets onto the exit ramp.    At this point, I may or may not have pushed the lot of them out the hatch--defenestrated them, as it were-- and followed it up by throwing more shavings at them.

Thus they experienced the glories of nature for a second time.
 


I don't think they cared for it all that much.
 

They flapped and ran for a bit and were completely stupefied to find themselves on the opposite side of the fence. They could see the mini-coop, but they couldn't figure out how to get back to it.

Eventually they found the cutout in the fence and, barely pausing to snatch up a few grains of the cracked corn I had put out to teach them to love the great outdoors, made their way back inside.
 

The next day it snowed. A lot.
 

So much that we got two snow days from school.

My birds don't do snow, but today's temperatures, which were back at a very vernal 42 degrees, were too much to resist.  So they pushed a bunch of shavings out and stood on that.  All of them in one little spot.



I guarantee that they will go no further until the ground is back to its muddy glory.

A Little Encouragement

This was our sunrise some time last week.  As the temperatures plummet (again) and the snow falls fast and furious here today (we're expected to get 12-20 inches and the rumor is that even the nice folks at The Weather Channel have made their way into town to spotlight the anticipated blizzard) and Spring becomes an exercise in memory, it is good to see photographic proof that the sun is still out there.  Somewhere.

My second favorite thing about this picture (that big yellow thing in the middle is my favorite, you know) is the little pink flare that has landed smack in our fire pit and is doing its best to pretend it's an actual bonfire. Nicely done, Nature.

Double, Double Toil and Trouble

Fire burn and cauldron bubble



One mis-colored sweater take, and
 In the cauldron boil and bake

  I was, as you can see, extremely bold yesterday. I used the rest of the original jar of dye and followed the instructions as carefully as ever a person could.

  Isabel supervised and provided literary references and occasional assistance with the stirring while I dealt with laundry and squabbling boys. She thought the entire brew looked suspicious, which is what brought us to Macbeth.

 Nate was hoping it might be soup.

 We encountered a temporary setback in the form of free-range enamel, which peeled off the repaired pot, floated around the dye bath, and had to be fished out.
 

I was sure I would end up with black paint specks gummed to my sweater, but the paint bits (mercifully) turned out to be brittle rather than sticky once they dried. I am still shaking them out of the sweater, but at least they are coming out.

Here is the new and improved sweater.  I promise that the brownish tinge is less obvious in real life.
 


And here's the original, just for comparison you know.



I can see, especially in the glare of the Ott Light (or is it Ott Lite? Marketing language boggles me) that, as much as we have succeeded in removing the sweater from the jaundice category, all color issues have not been resolved. They have, however, been sufficiently masked that I can wear the sweater, possibly even outside the house.

Ah, but by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes!  Have we noticed anything else about the sweater? Let's compare the amount of chair that shows behind the "before" sweater with the amount that doesn't show behind the "after" sweater.

 Uh oh!

 This, my doves, is why we wash our swatches. The sweater is now relaxed and much softer, but also several sizes larger than anticipated. It is possible that the change is payback for the insults -and the half hour of boiling in a stinking green witch's brew-- endured by my poor sweater. Or, it could be the natural result of wetting a very sproingy yarn that has been knit into a pattern of well-documented stretchiness. All of which would have been known by me in time to adjust the pattern accordingly had I washed my swatch. Although I suppose that means I would have had to knit a swatch in the first place. But who has time for such fussiness when there are Garments of Unusual Dimensions to be fashioned?

With this winter's extended cold snap, the urge to knit sweaters is still strong and it won't be long before I cave in (again) and cast on (also again, since that's where I thought I was originally going with the handspun used above) for another Central Park Hoodie.

In the mean time, I am working on some mittens for The Games That Shall Not Be Named (also known--heaven help us--as the Ravellenic Games).  The mittens will be a lovely and warm replacement for the pair I lost in December, although they are entirely unsuited to the Olympics since I can't follow the chart and watch the competitions at the same time. But, they are moving right along and I might just pull out the emergency backup knitting to keep me company while we watch the recap at night.
   


And now it's time for me to make good on last week's claim that I would conquer Florida law today.  And time to make coffee, because this Florida thing is not going to happen without a little outside help.

p.s: Anyone know what this might be???  Can we say "swatch"?  Can we say "swatch that has been washed and dried and labeled with purl bumps indicating the needle sizes"?  Maybe-- just maybe-- this is proof that I am not entirely incapable of learning from experience.  I hope my knitting teacher is proud of me!

Um . . . Ew.

Sometimes, the best thing is knowing when to give up, even if temporarily.  I'm very good at that when it comes to work, for example, which is why I'm sitting here tapping away at a blog post rather than trying to make sense of sovereign immunity in the state of Florida.  Basically, my head is just not in that game and I figure my discourse on Florida law will probably go a whole lot faster, and maybe even be a whole lot better, with a fresh start on Monday morning.   Not that I haven't been known to slug it out with a stubborn statute well past quitting time, but Friday afternoon  rarely brings out my work ethic.

With knitting projects, I'm not as good at quitting.

A while ago, I bought a fleece and spun it into yarn.  It was a pleasantly springy yarn, but also one that, in spots, had a yellow tinge reminiscent of bad teeth.  In a fit of wild and unjustified optimism, I decided I could fix the problem by dyeing the yarn, possibly unleashing in the process a hitherto unsuspected genius for color.  The results were certainly unexpected.

 Not wanting to get all judgmental on my new yarn color, I chose to believe--despite what might fairly be labelled abundant evidence to the contrary--that the true beauty of the yarn could only be appreciated in the final piece and so, rather than re-dyeing immediately, I thought I would knit the stuff up and see how things went.  Also, I am somewhat resistant to admitting defeat.

The results are now in:





and I'm truly sorry that you had to see that.  The only color that I like is the gila monster-like striping on the upper left sleeve (which is realistically enhanced by the --ahem-- rustic quality of the yarn), and that's really something I like only in comparison to the rest.



The cat has issued her firm opinion on the matter. I'm truly sorry that you had to see that, too.  Truth --and my cat -- can be a nasty little bugger.

The good news is that I'm almost done knitting.  I just have to bind off the second sleeve and work the i-cord around the v-neck.  After that, it's back to the dye bath.

It can only get better, right?

Right????

The Fat Cat Sat on The Mat

No lie.

See:




This new love of my cat's life is the  doormat we purchased to replace the filthy and disintegrating mat that I pitched when we cleaned out the mudroom.  Unlike its vastly inferior predecessor, this mat is apparently a glorious place for a cat to recline.  I found Tim rolling all over it not long after I installed it.  He rolled this way and stretched that way.  He's so happy he's even letting his udder hang out, though the rest of us are wondering if we should buy him a pair of pants to cover his bald spots.





The chickens, on the other hand, are too cold to have any attitude. Usually, we have one or two days per winter that are so cold that I don't let the birds out.  This year, though, they've spent close to two weeks confined to their quarters.

See?  Doors closed, chickens inside.





The older chickens waited out their imprisonment with reasonable stoicism (stiff upper beak, and all that), although they seem to have acquired a pet mouse, who might even be the same mouse we recently evicted from the mini-coop when we cleaned it out for the new birds. All the same, they get a little wiggy if they are confined for too long, so --regardless of the snow, which they usually don't like to get on their feet-- they plowed their way outside when it was finally warm enough (i.e., 15 or over) to let them out again.

The new chickens are another story.  When we moved them from their early home in the garage, we tried to learn from our last experience moving chickens to a coop.  That time, we opened the ramp immediately and the chickens eventually discovered the great outdoors and tried to convince us that they had no further use for indoor living.  We put a stop to their camping expedition after one of the chickens disappeared (pretty much immediately, poor thing) and this year we followed a recommendation to confine the birds to their new quarters for a few days so they would understand it was home.

HA!

It turns out that these chickens are even stupider than the last bunch.  We confined them for a few days and then held the grand opening.  They looked outside and then went back in.  We tempted them with some grain sprinkled on the ramp.  Two of them made their way out, fell off the ramp, and were totally unable to figure out where they were, where they came from, how they could get back, or whether they should even try.  I had to squeeze my way across the snow and into the little run and put them back in the coop by hand.

Since that time, they have steadfastly ignored the world outside.  Even on the nicest days, they pretend it is not there.  We have tried luring them out again, but all we get is a prolonged attempt to eat the grain off the ramp without actually stepping out the coop . . .

       

followed by a show of tail feathers as they return to the real world.




They are entirely citified and I think my only hope is to let the old chickens into the little run in case they can teach these bimbos a thing or two.

There has also been some knitting and some blocking, if you will pardon the lackluster photography.

First up:  an Oscilloscope Shawl.  I loved this when I first saw it published in Interweave Knits, but I tried to knit it with fingering weight yarn and, after getting mixed results anyway following the charts (my fault), I realized I wasn't going to have enough yarn to make more than a glorified handkerchief and set it aside.  This time, the project flew by with no problems and now it just needs a little blocking before I can enjoy all that graphic straight line-iness.






Next, I finally blocked my Bridgewater.



And, I finished and blocked Triinu, which is very soft and alpaca-y.



And last, the reject-o-hat.  The yarn was not springy and I should have sized the needles up, because this is the smallest hat ever.  No one can get it to stay on his or her head.  You put it on, pull it down to try and make it cover your ears, and seconds later, you feel it working its way upwards as it contracts to its original shape.  Ah well. Some day I will meet a very small person in need of a blue hat.



And now, if you will excuse me, I must go.  I was supposed to spend this morning working, but I didn't.  And that's all I have to say about that.

In Which . . .

. . . well, nothing really.

There just isn't that much worth talking about that is going on here. Thanksgiving was late, Chanukah was impossibly early, and  the relevant birthdays showed up exactly when the calendar said they would but managed to surprise me anyway.  I caught a whopper of a cold, which was an insult to my belief that good sleep, eating, and exercise habits will keep illness at bay. The cold lasted two weeks and led to the consumption of several boxes of tissues and tea and the declaration of a mandatory jammy day in which no one was permitted to get dressed and everyone was required to lounge around  watching movies all day.  It (the jammy day) was most efficacious, which sounds like a dirty swear word but isn't.

I also bought some metal lunch boxes.  During one of my more recent tidy-up-the-yarn/fiber-stuff rampages, I decided that it was vital that I find entertaining, practical, and portable storage for  some of my pointier projects--the kind that would do no end of damage to my fabric project bags.





First I swiped  Matty's Yoda lunchbox.   He used to use it to carry his Playmobil knights, but he was surprisingly willing to give it up and I suspect he objected to the genre-confusion inherent in transporting knights and horses in a space-themed container.  I, on the other hand, thought it would be perfect for my Zoom Loom, which was advertised as coming in a handy carrying case that turned out to be nothing more than a paperboard box with a handle. As if.




Doesn't that look perfect? I'm a little freaked out by the ghostly imprint of Yoda on the inside cover, though; I feel like he'll lop off my hand with his light saber if I get too close to the loom.

Belligerent Jedi notwithstanding, I was so pleased with my lunch-box-as-craft-storage discovery that I decided to add to the collection.  The hardest part was choosing exactly the right theme: whimsical? nerdy? retro-cool?  Evidently not much has changed since elementary school when your choice in lunch boxes could make or break your social standing.

The first choice was easy: who wouldn't want a sock monkey lunch box?  And how much cooler would it be if I actually stored a sock project in it? Nerdvana, right?  I wish I could claim that I was really that clever, but because I am pathetically slow in the uptake, I didn't even recognize the full potential of a sock monkey lunch box until after I had stuffed my sock project inside.  Poor me.  Then again, maybe I am super-clever, just on a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub conscious level.  That must be it, right?



Purchased lunch box #2 was a much tougher choice.  It was easy to rule out Power Puff Girls and Hello Kitty, but the final choice--Scooby Doo vs. Doctor Who--was agonizing.  Much as I love Scooby Doo and the Gang, in the end the Doctor Who box was bigger (inside and out) and blue-er enough to overcome the yucky fan-girl feeling that comes from actually purchasing it.





And so I stored my fairly recently acquired Hipstrings spindle in it, and because the blue box is so big, I could fit the wool and (you can barely see it peeking out from under all that wool) my Emile Henry spindle bowl in too.



Isn't it amazing how the blue of the spindle matches the blue of the lunch box?  There's a reason, although--true to form-- I failed to realize it until  after I had stuffed all of these goodies in: this is a Time Traveller spindle.  Get it?? A Time Traveller spindle in a Doctor Who lunch box!!! And now we have convincing proof that I am a geek and a fangirl and either I am a sub-sub-sub conscious container-to-project-theme matching genius or the Force was with me when I was hunting around Amazon.  I am not a little embarrassed by all of this, and you can read that any way you think is appropriate.

As if my lunch box adventures were not enough, I also went on a little bag making binge.  I found outstanding tutorials for making drawstring bags and those insanely cute little zipped boxes (although I forgot to take a picture of the one I made).



I'm not quite done yet; below are the next four fabric combinations.  I bought them (along with the coordinating zippers) for making the fabric boxes, but I suppose one of them might find itself becoming another drawstring bag instead.



And finally (of course), there was a little knitting that got done during all this nothing time.

First up is the finished (but not blocked) Triinu shawl that I started last year.  It doesn't look too promising right now, but I promise I will block it soon and then (hopefully) it will be magnificent.

And done, which was really the only thing I cared about in the last half of the project.



Another major project to cross off the list:  the ugly duckling afghan. As suspected, it is very brown. It is also 4 inches wider at the beginning than at the end, which has something to do with the 2 year duration of this beastie, a circular needle shortage, and somebody's failure to note even the most rudimentary details in her  project notes.



Again, however, it is done and, as you can plainly see, cat approved.



It is currently doing its appointed duty in the family room and it showed up not a moment too soon when you consider the old school nature of the winter we've been having.  And I like to think of its trapezoidal shape as a brilliant design innovation, similar to the mummy sleeping bag shape.  After all, aren't most of us wider at the top than the bottom? How clever of me to tailor my blanket to that.

Let There Be Chickens

My how they've grown!

Here they are in their new digs, which were cobbled together in a hurry when their deluxe indoor accommodations started to stink beyond what I could tolerate.  Now they live in the garage inside an old dog crate that has been wrapped in cardboard (including their old box, so they shouldn't feel too uprooted) and tootsed up with some perches that we made from scrap lumber and an old cucumber trellis.




You can see from the picture that we are, unfortunately, down to five chicks.  When last we discussed chickens, we were concerned that one of our chicks did not seem to be growing at all. Poor Tiny peeped and squirmed for most of that first weekend while we tried to get her to drink and eat, but in the end there was nothing we could do.


In the mean time, the remaining chickens are suitably ridiculous, which is why we love them.





They are on their way to becoming handsome birds, but for now they look a bit like vultures since their necks and heads have not yet feathered out.




See what I mean?

Lest you fear that I will let you escape without your dose of knitting, here is a little lovey that I made to send out with last month's baby cardigan.  This is not for the baby, however; it is for the new big sister so that she doesn't have to feel entirely left out of all the gift-showering that tends to accompany new babies.

And last, for your viewing pleasure, some natural works of art.





The first one is how, after an extremely stormy night, we started the first morning in November.  We were actually treated to three rainbows, all in the same morning, but I was driving when we spotted the other two and picture taking seemed contraindicated.

This last picture falls into the category of unintended art:

Does anyone else see the face of Bambi-- or maybe Brother Fox-- in this paint-by-numbers-ish chunk of bark? I came across it on my walk last week.  Tempted as I was to bring it home and hang it by the coop to see if it would freak out the chickens, I thought it might be better to leave it for others to enjoy, which I hope they did.