kmkat and her kneedles

Saturday: frolicking and fitting, tra la.

ETA: There is a non-workplace-suitable photo at the end of this post. Be warned!

One of my duties as a county supervisor is to be the county representative on the two lake associations located in my district. One is my own lake association. Today was the annual meeting and picnic of the other, above. This lake is quite a bit larger than ours, and the crowd visibly wealthier. That woman in the center front in the denim cutoffs and dark gray shirt is a former Twin City anchorwoman who went on to CNN. Elsewhere in the crowd is a well-known Twin City radio announcer, now retired, who was one-half of a popular morning drive-time show for many years. There were well-to-do businessmen and attorneys, trophy wives and doctors (probably; I did not meet any personally). All nice enough people, but definitely a different crowd than that on my own little lake.

Speaking of my lake, let me show you our Fourth of July boat parade. It is a casual affair.

There were a couple other pontoons, but it is always a small parade. Small lake, small parade.

The last photo made me chuckle in a wicked manner. The guy in the canoe is a freshman at Purdue; the pontoon belongs to his lake-dwelling grandparents and is full of his friends. Unfortunately for them, the DNR had a warden on our little lake that day and every one of those kids got a $200 ticket for not having a flotation device. Oops.

* * * * *

One the knitting front, I bought myself a new toy: an adjustable dress form. I have wanted one for a number of years, and the sweater I am making was the trigger that sent me to eBay last week to buy one.

Here it is, hard at work modeling the Summer Raglan (notice how cleverly I matched the stitch markers to the yarn):

You might wonder why it is wearing a bra. Good question; let me explain the ways of adjustable dress forms.

An adjustable dress form is adjustable in length and girth, but only in an overall way. My own particular body bits are distributed rather differently than is represented by the dummy. (No remarks, please.) For example, when I expanded the bust line to be the same circumference as mine, it was obvious that, um, er, something wasn't right. The majority of my bust line girth is in front, not distributed as evenly around my body as it is on the form. This necessitated some improvisation on my part to make the dummy resemble me more closely. Once again, no remarks, please.

Thus, the bra and its *amplifications*:

Yup. Stuffed with plastic bags. I first thought of using a couple breast prostheses, but a quick check on eBay revealed they cost more than I wanted to pay, like, $50. Not worth it, no matter how realistic they are. Hence, the plastic bag boobs. Yay, me!

* * * * *

As Chris suggested I applied my google fu to yesterday's snapping turtle question and discovered that they mate from April to November and lay eggs from May to October. Those periods of mating and egg-laying are shorter here in the Great Frozen North, but I guess my question is answered. They mate whenever the the spirit moves them and the temperature is warmer than, say, 50 degrees, and then they lay their eggs. There. Now we know.

Turtle love, v. 2008: at it again.

Remember last year? They are doin' it again.

As you can see, our dock and boat still languish on the shore, so this year's turtle pørn photos were taken from the porch. Not as good.

A seemingly odd thing just occurred to me. Three or four weeks ago a female snapper laid her eggs at the head of our driveway. The eggs did not survive more than a day or two before some predator (raccoon? skunk? badger?) dug them up and feasted upon them. So, my  question is, do turtles mate in late June/early July and wait a year to lay their eggs? Or is this mating the second try? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

Eye candy Friday: summertime.

...and the livin' is easy. Have a great Fourth!

Waiting.

Waiting is hard.

Time passes so slowly when one is waiting.

It helps if you have a friend or two to keep you company.

Even then, impatience can cause one to attempt to hurry things along.

So we wait.

And eventually...

something happens.

Mr. Goldfinch has found the new feeder! He helps himself,

and, being the generous and caring bird that he is, tells a friend.

We are still waiting for these two to invite the rest of their friends and relations.

I have had up to eleven goldfinches at one time on my original feeder. But when that one bit the dust -- those hungry little birds pecked the holes so much that after fifteen years the openings were big enough for the thistle seed to fall out -- I got another. It was very pretty, with a copper top and matching bands around the holes to protect them. But it proved to have a very poor design, indeed. It had a seam on each side of the clear plastic tube; in a short time the seams split open just enough for the seed to get wet and nasty. The poor finches would land on it, sniff, then turn around and give me a dirty look through the window. After an embarrassingly long time I got the message.

Now everyone is happy.

* * * * *

Knitting continues on the Summer Chevron sweater. I worked on it all last weekend and every spare minute since then. You may remember that it is knit top down in the round, starting with a cast-on at the neck and increasing from there. Increasing 8 stitches every other round quickly leads to a lot of stitches. There are upwards of 450 stitches on the needle now, and visible progress is slow. So far it seems to fit, but the real test won't come for another 6-8". Which would make it twice as long as it is right now, so it will be awhile...

Eye candy Friday.

This fine fellow visited my deck one day last week.

Orioles tend to be rather shy -- or scarce -- so it was amazing to me to see this guy. He was awfully obliging to pose for me so willingly.

* * * * *

We are heading out today to go camping on the North Shore (that's the north shore of Lake Superior for those of you not of the MN/WI variety). The weather forecast is cool, rainy, possibly stormy for Friday; slightly better for Saturday; a bit better for Sunday; and totally sunny and warm for Monday. Isn't that always the way? But we will be staying until Monday so we will get to enjoy a little bit of the good weather.

If all our plans had come together properly we would be back in the Little Big Horn mountains near Buffalo, Wyoming right now. It was going to be a 150% family camping trip: Andrew's friend K, whom he met when she came to Chiapas last January for the women's encueñtro and who lives in northern California, was going to meet up with us there; and Maggie, Matthew's girlfriend, was going to come along, too. It would have been 2 weeks of knitting (for me), reading (for me and Andrew and K and Maggie), leisurely walks (for all), and hanging out together (ditto). But various bits of life got in the way and suddenly it was going to be just Smokey and I. Okay, fine, we would still have a good time.

But the long term weather forecast for northern WY did not look good -- chilly, with a side of cold -- so we decided to take our vacation here at home on a lake in northern Wisconsin, a locale that many people drive hours to reach in order that they may vacation here. This weekend camping trip is our last chance to hit the woods with our entire family plus Maggie before Andrew leaves for medical school in New York. I've stocked up on snack food:

Dried fruit, crackers, cheese, granola bars, granola, trail mix, Cheetos, corn chips... and a bottle of Herding Cats wine, product of South Africa :-) Should be a fun time...

Spring, part deux.

The rites of spring include kitties in the window,

   

turtles sunning on a log,

 

and the ritual burning of the Christmas wreath.

I stepped in

To a burning ring of fire.

It went round, round, round,

And the flames went higher.

And it burns, burns, burns

The ring of fire,

The ring of fire.

Well. That was fun.

* * * * *

Dramatis personae included:

• Maggie of the matches.
• Andrew of the daring fire handling.
• Matthew of the warming hands (displaying his new watch).
• Kat of the camera.

Spring comes to the north woods.

May 13, 2008.

May 14, 2008:

May 16, 2008:

May 18, 2008:

May 20, 2008:

...and it's about damned time.

For the non-naturalists among you, those are trillium (T. grandiflorum), trillium, trillium, elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), trillium, and -- you guessed it! -- more trillium, this time with a tiny side of violets (the blurry purple blotches at back right).

The trillium are fading now.

June 1, 2008.

The white flowers turn pinkish-mauve as they fade.

The purple violets are largely done, but now we have yellow flowers.

Yes, dandelions, of course, but what I really meant were the tiny yellow violets at the left.

Tomorrow we examine some other aspects of spring. Class dismissed.

* * * * *

I took all these photos in the narrowish band of woods between our house and our neighbors'. If you look very, very closely at the upper left corner of the fifth photo you can see a tiny bit of our neighbor's green LP tank; at the upper right you can see some of his house, happily painted a low-key shade of light brown. I hate it when someone plants a suburban-looking house in the woods and paints it blue or yellow or pink.

This area of woods is carpeted in trillium every spring, and every year it delights me anew. The woods on the other side of the house are more predominantly coniferous (if I were a really good blogger I would go out there right now and identify those conifers. Sorry, too lazy.) and are not good trillium habitat.  But there are largish swatches of forest that I pass every time I drive into town to pick up a gallon of milk or a book at the library or even to go to crunch some tax forms in The Big City. And I feel so, so lucky to live here every time I do that.

Raccoons, Macs, and socks

We were entertained one night this week by this fellow. Smokey spotted him while he (Smokey, not the raccoon) was watching the evening news.

Mr. Raccoon had been bathing himself while nestled in the crotch of the tree, but when I came out onto the deck to photograph him he decided he needed to come down.

How does a raccoon come down from a tree? Very carefully.

* * * * *

Andrew found out that he could increase his loan for med school enough to cover a new computer. His old one, a $795 Averatec laptop from Sam's Club, had barely made it through four years of college. This time he wanted a good one. 250GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, screen the size of a soccer field -- he got what he wanted.

He set it up with the dual boot option so he could also run Windows, which is necessary to play several of his video games. $9.27 to a Guatemalan street vendor scored him this:

which is Windows XP Professional en español. That $9.27 also got him MS Office 97, Windows Vista, and a blank-looking CD that the vendor called el crack and which is supposed to keep Vista working after 30 days. He will only use the XP. Piracy is apparently alive and well.

* * * * *

On a more legitimate note:

I cast on this sock Tuesday evening and knit barely an inch that night. On Wednesday I took it with me to the finance committee meeting and knit most of the leg. I have since turned the heel, knit the foot, and I'm currently decreasing for the toe (which is red; these are fun socks). I'll finish it this afternoon.

Now the kicker: I'm actually knitting these on US #0 needles.

I know, I said that life was too short to knit on zeros. This yarn (Online something or other) is what inspired me. I don't remember exactly where I got it but I'm pretty sure I must have won it because I don't remember buying it. It has been sitting next to my desk since early last winter. (Sitting there because I was too lazy to put it away in the sock yarn box at the bottom of my Tower o' Rubbermaid.) I would look at it and try to figure out how best to knit socks from it fast. My plans were to double-strand it with black. Or turquoise. Or white. Or all three, in stripes.

But last weekend I found myself thinking about knitting it on zeros and adding contrasting heels and toes and cuff. Smokey laughed at me when I said I was excited to try it.

But excitement makes the knitting go faster. I have never knit a  sock this fast, ever. Given the ridiculous weather we are having (40 degrees at the moment), it is possible I may be able to wear them before true spring gets here. 

Eye Candy Friday.

The loons are back! The loons are back!

Yes, that is ice in the background. Hardy buggers, these loons.

There was a small flock of Canada geese swimming around here and resting on the ice on Tuesday and Wednesday, but on Thursday morning these two showed up and the geese were outta here. The loons refuse to share the lake with any other aquatic birds, especially Canada geese.

Loons are one of the oldest animals around; they haven't changed much in the past 60 million years. They are fantastic swimmers and divers, and apparently pretty good long-distance fliers, too, since they winter on the Gulf coast and summer from northern WI to northern Canada. They float very low in the water -- these two must be skinny from the migration because they are floating much higher than I am used to seeing. The loon's body is heavy and its legs are set way back, so far back they cannot walk. If one should mistakenly alight on land, it is pretty much doomed; they can neither take off from land nor walk to the water. Unless they are very close, and it is a clear shot downhill; then they slide down to the water on their breast. They build their nests on floating bogs or on islands and slide down to the water. (Query: how do they get to the nest in the first place if they can't walk; I don't know. Lisa? Anybody?) It is quite a sight to see them take off from water -- it takes fifty to a hundred yards for one to go from the first wing flap to being actually airborne. If a loon lands in a body of water that is too small, it cannot take off again.

Amazing, really, that the species has survived so long.

The Great Frozen North, redux.

My WI deck, 8:30 a.m., Sunday, February 10:

Time to send the slave #2 son out to blow the snow that fell yesterday and last week. Our driveway is 300+ feet long. Happily, he only had to blow away 1-2" of snow. A walk in the park, really.

I thought he was signaling OK, meaning he was all bundled up and ready to attack the driveway. Turns out he was throwing a gang sign, a "b" for Bloods.

A while later he looked like this:

Let's have a close-up of that face.

This is actually pretty mild. Smokey, who seldom wears a face mask, used to get some really, really impressive icicles in his beard and mustache back in the day when he was Head Snow Blower. Remember Dr. Zhivago? Yeah, those kind of beard and mustache icicles. But Smokey is in Minneapolis right now, and besides, what good is having a teenage boy around if you can't send him to do the cold nasty work you don't want to do yourself?

I didn't really say that, did I?

So.

Anyway.

The photos above show how #2 minimized the amount of exposed skin that would be subject to potential frostbite while he blew the snow for about hour.

This is how he accomplished same when he was loading stuff into his van in preparation for driving to Minneapolis to clean up the sewer backup in the basement of that house. (see "benefit of having teenage boy," above; we do pay him for this stuff, though, we aren't completely heartless)

After that photo he obligingly showed threw me the full gang sign.

Yes, that spells "blood." Why an upstanding boy from rural Wisconsin should know that is something I prefer not to explore.

This, however, is a gang sign we all should know. And use.

* * * * *

As I was readying this post for publication I realized that I need to knit a hat with attached face mask, maybe from some nice mid-weight STR -- soft, washable, super warm, fun to knit. Really, if it is cold enough to need a face mask, how can one send acrylic to do wool's job?

Eye candy Friday.

The island in our lake, taken on 12/30/07, the day we started the aerator.

What I did on my summer vacation Sunday.

Hmmmm. Where does this trail lead?

It leads to this little shed at the edge of the lake, between our house and the neighbor's.

What's going on? Poles and a shovel?

Ice augers?

People on the ice?

It is...

(ta da!) the Annual Turning On Of The Aerator.

I already knew what was going on. Got an e-mail a few days ago asking if I would help. "Aerator party at 12 noon on Sunday." Got another, somewhat panicked, email the next day. "Aerator party rescheduled for 10 am Sunday. PACKER GAME AT NOON! CANNOT HAVE CONFLICT! PRIORITIES, PEOPLE!"

The aeration system in our lake is to prevent freeze-out. For those of you who do not live in The Great Frozen North, let me 'splain.

Actually, before we get too far, let me explain what freeze-out is, for anybody who hasn’t experienced it. It doesn’t mean the ice freezes all the way from top to bottom: it means the lake gets low in oxygen during heavy snow years. When snow cover is sufficient to limit sunlight penetration, you don’t have photosynthesis occurring. Everything dies under the ice. Weeds die and consume oxygen, and without sunlight, oxygen isn’t replenished in the system. Eventually, fish die off, too, because there isn’t enough oxygen to sustain them.

This is not a problem in deep lakes, but our lake is only 20 feet deep at its deepest point and about ten to twelve feet deep in the rest. It is deep enough for boating and swimming and floating and sunbathing and sitting-on-the-deck-admiring-the-view, but susceptible to freeze-out in years of deep snow pack, like this year.

The solution was to install an aeration system, which was done in the late 1980s after the last freeze-out. That little shed houses air pumps, and there are five or six good-sized (~6" diameter) pipes running out about a hundred feet or so on the bottom of the lake. When the pumps are turned on, air is pumped out through the pipes, bubbling up through the water and keeping the surface free of ice. The large area of open water is a danger to snowmobilers, though, so we must also put up poles and ropes to mark off the area, plus a warning sign at the public access. The aeration system was funded by the state Department of Natural Resource, and its ongoing operation and maintenance are the responsibility of the lake association.

But the poles and ropes must go up before there is open water. Where exactly to put them?

Although Mike and Marcia, who have been in charge of this whole effort for the past several years, last September mapped approximately where the pipes end, it is difficult to judge precise distances and angles and where the heck exactly are those pipes anyway? So the first step today, after turning on the pumps, was to drill some pilot holes. Any holes that had air bubbles coming up were winners; they were located over -- or very close to over -- the air outlets.

(No, we don't drill the pilot holes at the bank. I got a late start taking photos, so the holes were all drilled and the poles and rope up before I thought to get my camera. What you get is a re-creation, sort of.)

Success! See the bubbling water?

No? How about now?

Thar she blows!

The pilot holes were four inches in diameter.  After an hour or two the successful ones were a foot or two across; by 3 pm they were ten feet across. Within a day or two there will be an area of open water 50 to 100 feet in diameter. The bubblers really work.

[digression] One year it was a day or so after the aeration system was turned on before anyone was able to drill the pilot holes and put up the ropes. The air was trapped under the ice and came through wherever it could. One such place happened to be about ten feet off the shore in front of our house. I watched from my window as Lucy inspected the resulting hole. She would sniff around it suspiciously, then leap! back! when a mega-cluster of accumulated air bubbles caused the water to spout several feet into the air. It took about 30 seconds to a minute for enough air to gather and cause a spout, so she had plenty of time to sniff and investigate and wonder about the whole thing. This happened over and over. And over. Until I brought her in. [/digression]

After we had three successful holes that told us approximately where the open water would be, Mike walked off a perimeter around it. Jan and her daughter (Jan's husband John is pictured above with the ice auger) and I followed with a drill equipped with a 12-inch-long, 3/4-inch-diameter bit and with several bundles of seven-foot-tall plastic poles. Jan -- and later, daughter -- drilled holes into the snow and ice, and I stuck a pole into each one.  Marcia followed with a bucket of water scooped from the lake. She poured a dipper of water into each hole, where it would freeze and make the pole solid.

Our equipment:

What's that written on the sticks?

The last step was tying colorful warning tape along the length of the rope to make it more visible to snowmobilers.

There were some hazards, namely water and slush on top of the ice but hidden by the snow. When there is so much snow on the ice, the weight causes the ice to sag, and water seeps up through cracks in the ice. The insulating layer of snow prevents it from freezing unless the temperature drops really, really low. Which it hasn't for a couple weeks.

Walking Slogging through this:

leads to this:

 

When I got home I had to thaw my laces with a hair dryer in order to get my boots off.

It might look as though most of the work was done by the female portion of the crew, while the men stood around and watched.

This was most assuredly not true. What it demonstrates is the bias of the photographer and the timing of her photographs. Like I said, the rope was already up by the time I got my camera; that heavy job, plus others requiring impressive feats of upper body strength, were strategically allocated to the males.

We leave the poles and ropes in place until long after the ice has melted in the spring. They all float, and generally wash ashore right in front of our house. In May Matthew gathered up last year's efforts and tucked them into the shed until we needed them again.

And today, when the job was done?

 

 

Mmmm, chili and beer.

And football. If you weren't watching The Game, the final score was 31-31, Packers. Or some such; unlike the rest of the crew, I am not a football fan (I finished one preemie cap and started another).

In addition to The Game, we had other entertainment.

 

Marcia and Mike have four dogs, friendly tail-waggers and ball-chasers every one. This sweetie is Maurice, a collie-shepherd mix named for the former astronaut on Northern Exposure.

In addition to the indoor entertainment, this guy kept stopping by to whammer on the trees just outside the living room.

That's a pileated woodpecker. It's about the size of a crow. One impressive bird, yessireebob.

All in all, a very good day. Perfect weather, lots of help, and a little party afterward. Good times!

The good, the bad, and all the rest.

The good:

 

If you aren't exactly sure why all that is good, check this out:

Yeah, teenagers are good for the heavy lifting snow blowing.

The bad:

My old Palm Zire 22 suffered a cracked screen. eBay to the rescue. $79 from me to a seller with 5,000+ sales and a satisfaction rating of 99.9%. Yay!

Oops.

 

Grrrr. Matthew and I have futzed with this on and off for several days, both with and without the instructions to hand. I guess it's time to fire off an email to the vendor. Time wasted.

The rest:

Actually, the rest is pretty darned good. A package came in the mail. Addressed to Matthew. But he had warned me not to open anything that came from this place. (We are delaying Christmas until later in January when Andrew is home for 2 weeks.)

The package is about 24"x24"x4", is fairly light, and rattles slightly. Not yarn. Whatever could it be? No guesses in the comments, please, I'm keen to be surprised.

More of the rest:

When I went to bed last night I swear there were three preemie hats on this little table next to my chair. This morning, one. The other two seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Golly gosh, whoever could be responsible?

 

Hannibal: Who, me? I've been sleeping on this comforter since October.

En Esch: Who, me? What preemie hats? Erm... quick, look over there! A badger with a gun hat!

Home again.

I got home about 11:30 Monday night after my weekend travels to visit old friends. The dogs came with me. They are good travelers.

Here they are in the back of the Aveo. Mostly they slept, but sometimes Lucy watched over my shoulder so she could navigate. And whenever I got out of the car, when I came back she was in the driver's seat. Every single time.

Since this is purportedly a knitting blog, I shall tell you about the souvenir yarn that came home with me. My friend Connie tried to take me to a yarn shop but apparently it had gone out of business. No LYS in Grand Forks, North Dakota, folks, only Michael's and JoAnne Fabrics. Not to worry, though, I still managed to pick up some of that fuzzy string:

Light blue, pale lime green, and terra cotta -- this Cotton Ease will make dandy unisex striped preemie hats for Jeanne's annual January preemie hat extravaganza.

I was working on socks and mittens for the Soaring Eagles Project* while on my travels, and I picked up some red, green, and cream Wool-Ease to go with the variegated Plymouth Encore Colorspun I had along. No photos of that, too boring. I'll take pictures of the finished items before I mail them off.

In Park Rapids to see my old friend Kathy (she IS my oldest friend -- I've known her since we were 14, and she is one day older than I am) I hit the jackpot. Turns out there is an excellent yarn shop in town, Monika's Quilt Shop. Kathy frequents the store because she is a quilter, so she gave me a tour of the vast selection of quilt fabrics.  Then we walked into the yarn section.

Heaven! Cascade, Noro, Misty Alpaca, Malabrigo, and lots, lots more. Lovely colors, lots of knitted swatches, nicely arranged, a wide range of prices and qualities and brands -- truly everything a knitter might want. The Cascade 220 was $6.60/skein, which struck me as a very good price. It was amazing to me to find such a well-stocked yarn store with decent prices in my old home town. I kept telling Kathy I wanted to move it to my current stomping grounds.

I got some washable worsted weight wool for Soaring Eagles Project mittens in lively kid colors:

And some sock yarn, destined to be double-stranded with some slightly mottled pale beige Trekking for a pair of gift socks next year:

Yes, I'm going to double-strand Trekking. Life is too short to knit on US#0s. Or even US#1s.

* Thanks to all of you who have stepped up to the challenge! I bet we will help Rachel reach her goal in time.

* * * * *
It is winter here today.

Lucy has the right idea:

Wrap your tail 'round your nose and take a nap.

Today is a twofer.

Two posts today. I am rockin' the NaBloPoMo!

After seeing Norma's photo of wintry mix this morning, I checked my thermometer. Yikes! It's cold out there!

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I decided about six months ago that this thermometer reads a full 10º F. colder than actual. Be that as it may, it is still darned cold.

But the sun is shining, and really, it IS a beautiful day.

There was ice against the far shore on a couple mornings last week. The lake froze over completely on Friday, I think. On Sunday there was still no snow on the ice, and there was a fault line that ran diagonally all the way across the lake. Today there is no sign of it.

I was particularly taken with that curved pattern of snow on the ice.

No idea why the snow does what it does.

While I was outside taking these photos (and shivering; I had to use the tripod to avoid camera shake) I heard the strangest sound. If you turn up your speakers you can hear it, too. I think it must have been the ice groaning. It sounds like the wind in the video, but in real life the day was still so I know that wasn't it.

Perhaps it was the Abominable Snow Ice Man.

* * * * *

This is the first video I have ever uploaded to YouTube. Zounds! it was easy. The raw .avi file from my camera was 11.2 meg, way too big to expect anyone to download just to hear the ice groan. I tried to edit it in iMovie to compress it or maybe just to strip out the sound into a separate audio file, but three minutes of dinking around produced no results. Enough of that. I am all about the instant accomplishment.

Then I had a thought: Typepad automatically reduces the file size of photos (My originals are generally 900k-1mb in size; after I upload them they are more like 200k.) -- maybe YouTube automatically compresses video, too?

Yes, they do. I don't know what size my 11meg .avi file is now, but it downloads pretty quickly on my not-blazingly-fast DSL.

New squirrel.

A couple weeks ago I heard the pitter-pat of tiny feet in the storage closets above my laundry/craft room. Autumn is here; time for the outdoor rodentia to move to their winter quarters.

Matthew set the live trap for us and baited it with a nice fresh mushroom. Now we have a second flying squirrel in the cage.

Click on the photo to see a very short video* of how a couple of flying squirrels get acquainted.

There was a fair amount of squawking and squabbling for the first few hours. Smokey had put a second nesting box in the cage so they could stay separated if they chose, but by the time the house cooled down in the evening they were snuggled up in one box. Cold weather makes good bedfellows.

For more background on our flying squirrel menagerie, see this post.

* Okay, the video may only be a few seconds long but somehow QuickTime insists that it has to be >1 meg. At least that is a considerably shorter download than the unedited, uncompressed 68 meg video clip I started with.

Eye candy Friday.

Let's play *Spot the Woodpecker*, shall we?

My favorite knitting spots, by kmkat.

Yarnhog is having a contest. Tell her, or even better, show her your favorite knitting spot(s) and you might win some Regia sock yarn.

My own knitting spots vary with the season. The first one is summer only.

This is my favorite spot to knit, although I don't get to sit there as much as I'd like. (As much as I'd like =  24/7; unrealistic, I know.) You may recognize this photo; I took it the evening in June when I discovered the turtles. It is 40˚ and windy today, too cold to go onto the front deck if I don't have to.

The glider overlooks the lake and [what we laughingly refer to as] the front lawn. I take my knitting, a beverage, my iPod, and the phone with me and sit there on summer evenings and late afternoons, usually until it is too dark to see. Sheer heaven.

The second spot is good spring through fall and is the only other place I go with the specific purpose of knitting: the front porch.

Of course, when I am knitting, I will have moved the boxes. They are on the table now because they have been removed from the treadmill at the right. That's a good thing, right, that the treadmill is being used?

The other places I knit are wherever I happen to be. Riding in Smokey's van,  middle row or shotgun:

Riding in Matthew's van, ditto:

Riding shotgun in my car:

I'll spare you the back seat shot.

I knit pretty much everywhere I go except at work -- meetings, restaurants, on a plane, etc. You'll just have to imagine those.

But the very, very, very best place to knit is in my recliner:

Yes, our living room/dining room/kitchen is a 1976 time capsule. That's when this house was built; it had been used mostly as a weekend getaway when we bought it in 1991, so it seemed spendthrift-y to redecorate then. When we finish the remodel it will look more timeless (we hope).

That recliner, however, is excellent. Good light (will someone please invent a 3-way compact fluorescent so I don't have to feel guilty?), an infinite number of comfy positions, cozy afghan for the winter, ample surface to hold the obligatory beverage and knitting supplies. But the best part, aside from the fact that it more or less faces the fireplace, the TV, and the lake, is that corded control nestled in the corner. It is a powered recliner. Slowly leans back, slowly comes back up -- it goes high enough to take the sitter almost to a standing position. Don't need that yet, but I'm planning ahead.

Eye candy Friday.

A green heron on our dock, 8/31/07. I was photographing stash for Ravelry when Matthew said, "Mom, there's a bird on the end our dock." I love living here.

Summer.

I think I have mentioned that our a/c is on the fritz. What I may not have leaked is that without it I am enjoying real summer, the kind that starts out clean and fresh in the morning and creeps over the house during the day and perhaps forces me into the lake for relief and comes through the bedroom window at night. The scent of some unseen flowers borne on the nighttime breeze. Fragrance of mown grass that blows in and out of the open windows of the car.*

Although all those things are there every summer,  I am unaware of them if the house is closed up to keep its ambiance at 72˚ and 50% relative humidity. All I feel is the unpleasant shock of walking out the door into the real world and the overwhelming desire to keep myself wrapped in that artificial cocoon of a/c.

I'll admit, there have been a couple days when it was so hot and airless and humid that I found myself flopping onto the bed in the late afternoon simply because it was too hot to move. All my energy had been sapped by the heat. But a nap is hardly a punishment, even at 90˚. It is more a rite of summer leisure and something to celebrate. I thank my fate that I am able to relax in this way without having to struggle to work every day as I did the past two summers.

My Mediterranean herbs are loving the heat.

 

The fuschias, not so much...