Goofy Stuff – Page 3 – The Knitting Doctor

Ten On Tuesday, the Cars Edition

I don’t usually do the Ten on Tuesday post, mostly because by the time I get around to it, it’s already Friday and I’ve missed it. I couldn’t resist this one though. Carole wants us to list ten cars that we’ve owned. I won’t get to ten, only because I haven’t had that many!

I’m going to do this in reverse chronologic order. And the current ones are the only ones I have photos of.

10. This is technically John’s car, though my name is on the registration too, so it counts. It’s a 2008 Hyundai Santa Fe. It is dog-approved.

9. My ride.

That last one is the current license plate! This is a 1998 Volkswagen Beetle. Yes, I drive a ’98. It won’t quit, so I keep driving it. As it gets more dinged up, I just get more hippie stickers to cover the bumps and bruises.

8. An ancient Volvo sedan that was mostly John’s car, but I owned half of it. He got it used and drove it until it was almost dead.

7. Early 90’s Subaru Legacy wagon. It replaced–

6. Another Subaru wagon. This was about a 1982 model. I drove it until it dropped dead one day in the parking lot at work. It was towed in, they gave me $150 in trade in, mostly because the tires were still good.

5. Let’s see. Brief co-ownership of a Toyota Celica in the early 80’s. We only had it a couple of years, it was pretty but didn’t handle Montana winters very well.

4. Another VW Beetle, co-owned with my then-spouse. It was a 74 Love Bug, in a color that we lovingly called eagle-shit green. This one got rode hard, and finally totaled in a crash.

That’s it. That’s pretty pitiful. I can’t even get to ten, and most of those technically belonged/belong to spouses. I drove two Subarus into the ground, and I’m working on that VW. I’m thinking my next car might be another Subaru.

Wintergrass, Day 1!

No music yet, but here is the requisite wristband/knitting at the ready photo.

Holy Moley!

Or,

337,666 meters is a lot of yarn!

Those aren’t actually the exact words I used this week, but I figured I’d try to keep the public swearing to a minimum around here.

I mentioned my Just Knit It campaign a few posts back. As part of that, I joined a Ravelry group called Stash Knit Down. I got inspired to update my yarn database, and have spent the past few weeks digging through boxes and reorganizing a bit, deleting yarns I’ve used or given away, adding a few that hadn’t been accounted for.

Then I copied the meterage into a spreadsheet and added it all up.

337,666 meters. That’s 201 miles of yarn, people.That includes about 11,000 meters of handspun, but STILL.

Holy Moley, indeed.

So I’m not only in the Stash Knit Down group, I’m Cold Sheeping, meaning I’m buying no yarn for awhile. I’m at 89 days so far, and counting. Tomorrow I get my 90-day badge.

And I’ve started a few new things to celebrate. (From stash!! Go figure!!)

This is my Alexandra Shawl, a pattern by Dee O’Keefe. The cool thing is that yarn is my handspun, vintage 2009. Please ignore all the dog and cat hair on my carpet.

Here are a few old photos of the yarn in progress and done.

There’s about 550 meters of that, which will definitely help decrease that big number up there.

And I started another sock. No, I haven’t finished the last pair. Sue me.

Mountain Colors Weaver’s Wool Quarters, in Crazy Woman, which I find somewhat fitting.

How about all of you? Anybody else dare to post their yarn meter/yard totals? Anybody else need to go Cold Sheep on buying yarn?

Let’s Catch Up, Shall We?

Oh dear. Not again. I’m apparently hopeless at keeping this thing current. How about I just post a few more photos of our June trip to Montana? Some of them even have to do with knitting.

The car, ready to go. We’re light packers, what can I say? After we got all loaded up it dawned on us that we needed to pick up my sister Diane and her husband at the airport in Kalispell on the last leg of the trip out to our cabin. We hoped they were traveling light.

First stop, Spokane, at the historic Davenport Hotel.

Mr. Davenport interrupted his newspaper reading for a sock knitting lesson.

Our cabin on the river in Montana.

The family!

View across the river to Glacier National Park. It really sucked to have to look at that all week.

Polebridge Mercantile, a hopping place out in the middle of nowhere.

A nice little knitting spot.

Our Red Bus tour of Glacier.

There’s just nothing to say about that. We took about a million photos, and every view was spectacular. It’s just difficult to capture the magnificence of the park in photos.

I did find a few yarn shops along the way.

Some tough competition.

Just a little snow.

More crappy views.

Finished socks, just in time for Father’s Day.

I don’t really need to do a Finished Project post, do I? Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock yarn, color name A River Runs Through It. For John, same old pattern. I did a bit of modification around the ankle, doing the gusset decreases every third row for awhile so he can get them over his instep. I usually do my socks on 72 stitches, I did these on 76 stitches and they fit him perfectly.

Flute playing in a roadside campground! I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I started taking flute lessons back in March. I used to play a million years ago, then it sort of fell by the wayside over the years. I bought a new flute in February, then found the Community Music Program at the University of Puget Sound here in Tacoma. I take a private lesson once a week, and yes, I did practice on the trip. I had to be a bit creative on the road trip back since playing in a hotel room probably would annoy people. We stopped at this campground which was totally deserted, and I practiced until the mosquitoes threatened to cart me off.

Enough for now. I’ll leave you with a photo of Lewey.

He wishes he could have gone along.

Black Hole

Well this has been one of those days. I had a few hanks of yarn that have somehow appeared around here in the past few months, and they needed to be put into storage.

I have told you about my fabulous overly obsessive-compulsive yarn database, haven’t I? I’m sure I have. Here’s what it looks like on my iPad.

Glorious, eh? I have a billions skeins of yarn categorized in a sortable database so I can search by yarn name, fiber type, number of yards, and most importantly, know exactly which numbered box it is in.

So anyway, after I got my little new skeins all happily stored away, I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the whole thing, adding a few new database fields, deleting some yarns that have been used or given away, etc.

Every time I put new yarn into the storage warehouse, I’m reminded of the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. You know the one.

That’s all for today. After all that sorting, I need a martini.

One Sock

So I did finish the first sock of the pair. After all that measuring of the foot, I got to the last row of the toe decreases and had John try it on before I grafted it closed. I knit on the edge, but I’m not a complete idiot. Of course it was too short. I was tempted to just knit some more rows onto it but realized how totally dumb that would look, and ripped it back to the beginning of the toe increases and added a few more rows. Now it’s Really Done.

Click to embiggen!

The second one is started:

In other news, even though I’m only a Mother to four-legged creatures, I got a swell Mother’s Day gift from them. I didn’t even know that Lewey HAD a credit card! Anyway, they picked out a very nice Tamron macro lens for my Canon 60D. I’ve been taking photos of everything around here, as has John.

Really, do click on those to get a better look. Even if you don’t care a hoot about one pitiful sock, you should care about pretty flowers and martinis!

Right.

I sort of disappeared again. It’s been a bit of a busy week or so, and I just forgot about the blog. I didn’t forget about the contest though! Karen from Nova Scotia won, with this:

There once was a Doctor who knit.
For acrylic she cared not a whit.
It was Cashmere she wanted.
So the yarn shops she haunted.
And she bought up every last little bit.

That was chosen by the random generator, but if I’d have picked the joke that made me laugh the loudest, she still would have one. She chose the Mama Llama sock yarn, which is on its way to her house. Here’s a photo of it…

The really funny thing is that John and I have been planning our big fall trip, which involves trains, planes, and automobiles, and includes a trip to Halifax, NS where Karen is from. So I’m hoping it works out that we can meet up, and she can give me the lowdown on all the local fiber opportunities.

I’m still knitting the same old stuff. I’m working on the Big Green sweater, and am nearly done with the back half. It’s knit in the round, which I’ve decided I really don’t enjoy. It’s gotten too huge to stuff in a knitting bag, so I can only work on it at home. I rather enjoy doing seams, and I think they give a sweater some structure, but the real advantage is that it makes for a more portable project right up to the end.

I now have three lace things on the needles, that Pretty Thing cowl, which is in a time out, and two shawls, which aren’t really in a time out but I only have so many hours in a day. I’d like to petition Congress to do something useful like add another 8 hours to each day, but I doubt they could ever agree on the details, so I suppose I’m stuck with the usual 24. And then there is John’s one lonely sock, which I’m nearly done with, then I ~~have to~~ get to make its mate.

I’m off to knit. My husband is at a Tacoma Rainier’s baseball game with a buddy*, so I have the afternoon all to myself at home, which is a rarity. Maybe next time I’ll have some progress photos to post!

*I was offered first shot at sitting next to John at the game, but it might hit a high of 50 today if we’re lucky, and it’s been spitting rain off and on all day. No thanks. I’m a fair weather baseball fan.

The Church of Bluegrass

Yes, it’s that time of year again. We’ve had tickets (and hotel reservations) for this years Wintergrass festival since about two days after last years event was over. We debated for a bit about whether to go or not, since neither of us is in much of a mood, and decided that this would be better than sitting home staring at an empty dog bowl and the empty spot on the end of the couch where Riley always hung out. So here we are.

The festival started last night, and I made it through about two acts before somebody played a sappy sad song and I was just done. Hopefully tonight will be better. My favorite last night was Sarah Jarosz, who is a superb musician.

So far today we’ve been to a workshop with David Grisman and Kenny Smith playing an impromptu “concert” set on vintage mandolins and guitars, most from the early 1900’s. It was just fabulous, they played a bunch of old sweet tunes, many from Grisman’s Tone Poems days.

I’ll report back with more as the weekend goes on. Of course there will be knitting and spinning, I brought one of my drop spindles, which is a good portable activity for those down times between musical acts.

Speaking of knitting, one of the projects I brought is that Seraphim shawl. I spliced in the second ball of yarn yesterday using a Russian join. This morning I noticed this, which really irritates me to no end.

So I guess I’ll get more practice doing Russian joins. I hope this is the only knot I find, or there may be some inventive swear words flying around. What really annoys me is that this is on the very outside of the ball, so I should have seen it when I bought it. Oh well.

Thank you all for the sweet condolences on my last post. I’m working my way through answering all of your comments, but each and every one of them makes me cry, so I have to take it in small doses or I might run out of hankies.

On to more bluegrass!

Almost There

OK, did anybody else think of Andy Williams or the Lettermen when they read the title of this post? Terrific, now I’m not going to get that sappy song out of my head.

Anyway, this post is not about Andy Williams or the Lettermen. It’s about being Almost There with a finished project.

Yes, I have been knitting this blasted thing for eons. It’s Almost Done, though. The knitting is All Done, and it’s currently in the tub getting a soak. Then it’s the buttons, and the little button loops, which I have no idea how to do, but I suppose I’ll just wing it, like I do most things. And a tassel. I’m pretty sure the hood needs a tassel. Then it will be Really Done.

Buttons! I keep forgetting about the buttons, which is pretty much why I made this sweater. Here they are, again.

True Blood Faery Buttons!

We’re Almost Ready for Christmas around here. We’re having our big annual Solstice Dinner on Saturday, so I’ve got a lot of cooking to do. Of course there will be photos, so stay tuned.

Here are a couple of photos from our tree decorating this year.

Why yes, we do open a bottle of champagne for the tree decorating!

And now, just for your listening pleasure:

Oh Dear

I sort of missed most of the past month, didn’t I. Oh well. I’ve been sick, then busy, then more busy. And I haven’t even knit all that much. That crazy bug that I picked up on our cruise has really hung in there, and more or less knocked me on my butt. It turned out to not be whooping cough, according to the test; didn’t get much better with a round of antibiotics, and has turned me into a total slug for the past few weeks. I’m still coughing though it’s finally getting better. All that whining is my latest excuse for not blogging.

I did start doing NaNoWriMo in a fit of insanity. I got to about 7000 words before I decided I really wasn’t having any fun, and wrote another 2000 or so words before I REALLY decided that, no, in fact I am not having fun with it this year, and abandoned ship.

Enough of the pity party. Here’s some fun stuff. My latest socks.

Click on that to get a better photo of the wild and crazy that is Lewey.

Getting that model to cooperate was no easy task. He was not one bit interested in helping me blog, he just wanted to eat the yarn. I didn’t take the time to shoot any more photos since the mutt smelled a little funky when I got close enough to tell. He just had a bath too, so I’m sure he thought it was necessary to roll in something at the dog park. Lovely.

I’ll forgive you if you’ve forgotten what yarn that is. It’s Frolicking Feet, from Done Roving (I got mine here), color is Pot o’ Gold. Do me a favor and go buy her out so I’m not tempted to buy more of this.

Here’s more fun. I needed some new shoes, and found these.

Closer…

Click on that one, too.

Knitted shoes! How cool! They have these on Amazon, here they are. Danskos are not cheap, but they are seriously some of the most comfortable shoes you can buy if you are on your feet all day. Take a clue from hospital nurses, Dansko clogs are what many of them wear. You will note that I’m wearing mine with hand knit socks, too.

I’m off to knit. I get to work the weekend, so I want to stockpile some stitches today.

Summer Of Lace

Now that summer is almost here, I really want to knit lace! Fortunately I have a couple of lace projects on the needles. I just wish the weather would feel more like summer. It hit a high in the mid-50’s today, and rained much of the week. Oh well, I can hope, can’t I?

Here’s the big lace thing in progress.

That is my Evenstar shawl, started over two years ago. I think it’s high time it’s finished, don’t you?

Here’s where I am. This is a round shawl, with endless rows then a knitted on border. I have 56 rows to go, then the border, which is a 20 row repeat done 28 times. There are 560 stitches on the needles. This may take me a while.

We’re leaving town on September 24th for a big adventure that I’ll tell you about later. I want to take this with me, finished and blocked. That gives me 108 days to finish. If I do “only” a row a day, I’ll still have 49 days to do the border.**

59 rows + 28 border repeats; 108 days. Let’s keep track, shall we? I put it in the sidebar over there on the right. And please, don’t calculate how many stitches that is. I might have to break out the bourbon.

In other news, our fabulous peonies finally bloomed. Peonies might be my favorite flower, and we planted several the summer before last. They didn’t do anything exciting last year except grow leaves, but they are going to town with flowers this summer.

This is where being able to add fragrance to a blog post would be helpful.

Last but not least, next week is the 125th anniversary of the founding of my home town. There is a big celebration planned that coincides with the annual alumni banquet (that absolutely every alumnus that lives in the vicinity attends every year!) I can’t make this one, though it’s scary to recall that I was at the centennial celebration 25 years ago. I think I even still have the t-shirt! In solidarity with all of my fellow alumni, I rummaged around in my jewelry drawer and found my class ring.

That ring was designed in 1930, and hasn’t changed since. Of course the Edgeley tribe mostly doesn’t need the ring to identify each other, since the town is so small. If we run into each other somewhere, it’s a good chance we’ll be recognized.

So who is with me on the lace bandwagon? If you are, let me know in the comments and tell me what you are knitting/finishing!

**Updated with the right numbers. Apparently I can’t add or subtract, not a good sign.

Dang!

John and I don’t buy lottery tickets. Except of course when the prize gets to over $500 million, at which point every other human in this country is buying them too, and our chances go from “nil” to “same as getting hit by lightning a bazillion times at once”. But we did have plans on how we would spend it. Inspired by Lee Ann’s post, here are mine. Were, not are, I guess. Oh yeah, somebody else won.

1. Buy all the yarn I want. Right. I already do that.

2. Pay off the house, remodel the bathroom.

3. Travel. Oh, right. I already do that, too.

4. Change the locks on the house. There are too many people out there that have keys and codes to the garage door.

5. Get an unlisted phone number.

6. Get my 1998 VW Beetle to the body shop and have the dings repainted. What can I say, I like driving an ancient car.

7. Like Lee Ann, say “I quit”. I’ve always joked that the first thing I would buy if I won enough money would be a fax machine so I could fax in my resignation.

8. Figure out which of our relatives would get to retire, too. 😉

I guess we’ll survive without the lottery winnings. We have a terrific house, even if the bathroom makes me want to take an axe to it. I have a great job to dream about retiring from, as do most of my not-already retired family members. And my beater car is paid for, dents and all. And I have more yarn and fiber supplies than I will ever use up in any imaginable lifetime.

Your turn! What would you have done with it? Let me know in the comments or on your own blog!

Corgis!

Ok, ok. I sort of forgot about the blog. Here’s the quick update, in list format.

Work’s been a bit busy. I could just stop there, and hit “publish” and be done with it.

We did finally get the huge downed maple out of the back yard. It’s now in pieces in the front yard, awaiting a log splitter to turn it into firewood.

I haven’t been doing much knitting on old projects. I have a bazillion of them, and I am just bored to death with them.

So I started a new project. If any one of you honestly says that you wouldn’t do the same, I still won’t believe you.

Here it is:

And another shot.

Don’t ask, I have no idea what it’s going to be. It’s the first clue of a mystery project. I’m suspecting a hat of some type, but we’ll see. John thinks it’s half of a bikini top.

I had a little dust-up with the circular cast on, and finally searched out a you tube video on the Emily Ocker cast on, and figured out how to use the magic loop technique to get the thing started. The yarn is from Abstract Fibers, and the designer is Mary Scott Huff. Here’s the Ravelry link. I forgot how much fun color work is!

Then there are Corgis. When you don’t know what else to blog about, there are always dogs. There’s one of them up there in that photo. You can tell he’s not very energetic today. We’re also dog sitting for friends today.

Riley really thinks that three Corgis are an unnecessary number of Corgis. She really wishes she were still an only dog.

Last but not least, I am making roasted garlic pasta sauce for supper tonight. The garlic is roasting in the oven, and the house smells divine!

I’m off to knit!

Mid-November Update

Now there’s a catchy title for you! Let’s see, what’s going on at the Knitting Doctor Palace?

Hardly any knitting. I started a pair of mittens a couple weeks ago. Here’s where I am now.

Yes, I know my desk is a mess. But those are damned pretty mittens. And since it’s gotten cold here, I need them.

By the way, when I’m Queen Of The World, I’m going to make it a rule that every electronic device that needs a cable to hook to your computer has to use exactly the same cable. I’ve got a cable for the phone, a different cable for the Kindle, and yet another cable for the camera. They are all white, the end that hooks to the computer is identical, and they lack any other identifying markings, so I spend at least twenty minutes trying to find the right one every time I try to download photos or charge the Kindle. I should come up with a system for keeping track of them.

Back to the update.

I’ve written 28,327 words so far for NaNoWriMo. To stay on schedule, I should be at 28,333 by the end of today, so I’m in good shape. Of course the damned thing makes no sense, but that’s not the point.

I have to work every day next week including the whole weekend, except I have Thursday off. I have a dozen people that will be around my Thanksgiving table expecting to be fed, not expecting me to brag about how many words I’ve written, so I probably won’t get much writing done. I suppose I should spend the next few days banking some extra words. Blog posts don’t count in the Nano world. Neither does a swell turkey dinner with all the trimmings. And we’re having three kinds of dressing, since I’m an overachiever. Most of the family like bread dressing, but some are gluten intolerant*, so there will be wild rice dressing too. And there is a contingent of Southerners that insist on cornbread dressing, though I think that’s heresy. I suppose that makes me a Yankee. I farmed out the making of the cornbread dressing to one of those Southerners.

Last but not least, you’ve all met Sweetpea, or at least you have if you’ve been here awhile following me around in my travels. She joined our family back in about 1994, I think, and has been on every world travel trip we’ve taken since then. She’s gotten dragged around on buses, trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Oh, and boats. And river rafts, on a camping trip. She also went camping on a two week horse pack trip way back when in Montana. She traveled by pack mule on that trip. She has gotten dragged around the bedroom by a dog once, pawed by the cats, and I sleep with her. Every single night.

Up until today, she has never had a bath. There was that close call on the Mediterranean Cruise in 2006, here’s what I wrote then:

I promised a bear tale a few posts ago. Sweetpea is a rather unadventurous bear, at least up until now. Generally, she’s been satisfied to hang out in hotel rooms and ship cabins. Occasionally we get a room/cabin attendant with a sense of humor, and we find her perched in different places in our room when we get “home” at the end of the day. But that’s about as much fun as she usually has.

Until now. One day on the cruise we came back to our cabin after being out and around the ship, and found our room all cleaned up, as usual. Don’t ask me how, but the cabin attendants unerringly know when you’ve left the room, and whiz right in to tidy up and make the bed. This particular day I was rummaging around to find my knitting, and noticed that Sweetpea was gone. She was nowhere to be found. I rather frantically called the number listed on the card that our attendant had left. I found that she was on a break, and I had reached room service. They listened quite patiently to my rather lunatic-sounding story of the missing teddy bear, and I could almost hear the eye-rolling and snickering in the background, though the man on the phone was well-trained enough to not laugh out loud. He said he would look into it.

Not five minutes later there was a knock on the door. A young woman had rescued Sweetpea from the laundry, where she had apparently arrived wrapped up in our sheets. She was very happy to be home, and did not even think about having any more adventures for the entire rest of the trip.

She’s been looking more and more bedraggled looking as time went on, so I decided to give her a bath this morning. She’s drying out now, but John snapped a photo before she came out of the washer.

I can see why children are terrorized by their parents tossing their favorite companion in the wash. I paced nervously the whole time she was in the machine of death, but she did fine, and smells a whole lot better.

Enough stalling, I need to go make up some more words.

*Does anybody know if there is a way to make gluten free gravy? I’m pretty much a gravy making traditionalist, make the turkey stock from the inside parts, then do the flour thing in the turkey drippings and it all takes about a zillion hours to make, but boy I never get any complaints. Except it would be nice to have something without flour for the ones who can’t eat it. Any ideas?

Today In History

1975 Kate Winslett born

1983 Lech Walesa wins the Nobel Peace Prize

1970 PBS becomes a network

1969 Monty Python’s Flying Circus begins

1962 Beatles release their first record “Love Me Do”

1962 Sean Connery starts in the first James Bond film

1951 Bob Geldof born

1951 Karen Allen (another knitter!) was born

1947 Harry Truman delivered the first televised White House address

1892 the Dalton Gang was nearly wiped out while robbing a bank in Kansas

1956 Lorette, AKA “The Knitting Doctor” was born

I have to work today, but there could be worse things to have to do on your birthday. Hopefully there will be a little knitting later, some champagne perhaps, and a nice dinner with my sweetie!