kmkat and her kneedles

The world's second largest nuclear navy.

An e-mail from my husband:

AK2 Kat,

Reading an old blog (#5, here) [I see that] you mentioned how you came to join the navy. You mentioned how you were in the "world's second largest nuclear navy," but didn't know exactly what that meant.

Allow me to explain...

At the time you were in VP-90, the US had the biggest navy, but because the USSR went on a submarine building boom, they had the most ships with nuclear power plants. Therefore you were a member of the "second largest nuclear navy."

When the cold war ended, we discovered the Russian navy was largely a paper tiger. Their ships were poorly designed and poorly maintained. The also lacked enough qualified crews to put to sea. Since the breakup of the USSR many of their ships, and especially their subs, have been scrapped.

Now the US has the largest navy and the largest nuclear navy. May you sleep better knowing that!

AT2 Smokey

...and may all you sleep better as well.

Here is an example of the plane that VP-90 flew, the P-3 Orion, made by Lockheed:

VP-90 was the squadron we were in. The V stands for fixed-wing aircraft, the P stands for patrol, and the 90 is numerical designation of the squadron. The planes and crews did marine reconnaissance, theoretically looking for submarines, although they also looked at surface vessels. The longish horizontal "stinger" at the back of the plane is the MAD boom, a magnetic anomaly detector. It can detect significant anomalies in the earth's magnetic field such as those caused by a very big hunk of ferrous metal -- like a submarine moving underwater. This is the same type of plane that hurricane hunters use because it can fly low and slow and for a l-o-n-g time.

I knew y'all wanted to know ;-)

Apparently turtle porn does not mandate an X rating.

Who knew? Apparently the phrase "turtle porn" doesn't register on their radar.

Thanks to Stephanie for the link.

Parade!

On Sunday I walked in a parade.

I was a Sherlock Holmes mystery.

Our spot in the Milltown Fisherman's Day parade was right after the ad hoc, anybody-who-wants-to-shows-up high school marching band. That's the official title; I checked with the band director. They played two songs, Tequila and Another One Bites the Dust. Both have a beat and you can dance to them*, so we did.

We had fun.

* Anybody else old enough to recognize this line?

A love story.

Friday started out cloudy and cool but cleared up nicely. After dinner I took my massive basket of Sugar 'n' Cream out on the deck to start my dishcloth and bib knitting.

Bear was there to keep me company. As I knitted and enjoyed the peaceful beauty, I heard an occasional splash near the shore of the lake, just out of sight under the bank. Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I tried to see what it was.

What is that... thing in the center of the ripples? Was it Lucy, who had streaked away while I was maneuvering myself and the laundry basket through the door? Nah, she isn't much of a water dog.

Maybe a beaver or an otter? although I haven't seen either of those in recent years. More likely a muskrat, I thought.

I moved closer.

I  walked quietly down onto the dock.

Hmmm. Those two rocks don't belong there; the lake level is down a bit this year, but the water is still about six feet deep at that distance from shore.

Oooooh, we have splashing!

Let's see that close up...

What in the world?

 

Apparently, it is...

...mating season for snapping turtles.

 

   

It may be hard for you to get a sense of scale from these shots. As a point of reference, the larger turtle's foot/flipper was the size of the back of my hand, about 3" across. (And then there are the claws. Yikes.) These turtles were the size of small- to medium-sized dogs, 16" - 18" long.

Yes, we swim in this lake and shall continue to do so. No, we have never been bitten by a snapper, although some years the tiny sunfish seem to consider themselves Pirahnas of the North.

I think the larger one (in the foreground in the next two pictures) was the female because the other one seemed to be making all the advances. Can you see the "skirt" of algae growing around the rim of her shell? Apparently that part seldom rises above the surface of the water.

Ahhhhhhh...

For all you other nature nuts out there, here is a link to some real turtle porn. It's big file, 7+ meg, and takes 3-4 minutes to download on my DSL. But it's totally worth it, imho. Turn up the sound, too; that occasional gasp or Darth Vaderesque sound you hear is the turtles.

Turtle love.

 

Doo-laan, Doo-laan, Doo-laan!

(sung to the tune of "He's So Fine," with apologies to The Chiffons and to the spirit of Ronnie Mack, who wrote the song)

They're so fine (Doo-laan Doo-laan Doo-laan)
Wish they were mine (Doo-laan Doo-laan Doo-laan)
Those beautiful kids over there (Doo-laan Doo-laan Doo-laan)
The ones with the coal-black hair (Doo-laan Doo-laan Doo-laan)

My last two Dulaan sweaters are done. The random sweater:

and the sherbet one.

I knitted this one during tax season but didn't sew it together until Saturday. Isn't it just the cutest thing you ever saw? (No false modesty around here. No modesty of any kind, really.) The neck is not actually wonky; I just didn't smooth it out before the photo.

Here's what went into the box. Don't those sweaters look jolly in their chorus line pose?

I sent off the box of winter boots last month. I hope. I can't find it in the house, so I guess I already sent it.

Details, if you are interested:

Random sweater.

Yarn: Bernat Lana 100% merino worsted, two strands held together throughout. I had two skeins (198m/217yd; 100g/3.5oz each) of each color -- black, dark brown, camel, and white -- and used a bit over half.

Needles: KnitPicks Options US10.5

Pattern: Child's raglan from A Handy Book of Sweater Patterns by Ann Budd. I used the 34" pattern but it ended up to be 30". No, I didn't swatch. I described the stripe pattern ad nauseum  here.

Mods: I used a different double decrease for the raglans. Slip 2 tog knitwise; knit 1, pass 2 slipped stitches over. It makes a line of slipped stitches up the raglan and no visible decreases. It also camouflaged the color changes that occurred immediately after the slipped stitches. And I realized after 2-3" of yoke that, at my row gauge, the yoke was gonna be w-a-y too tall, so I decreased every round instead of every other. It seemed to work; the sweater looks more or less proportional.

Sherbet sweater.

Yarn: Tahki Yarns Dazzle, 100% wool, self-striping, bought on eBay last summer. I had five balls, each 100m/108yd/50gr, and I have about enough left to make a nice little cat toy.

Needles: Denise Interchangables US9; 4st/in. I DID swatch for this one. The yarn label said US10.5 needles, 3st/in, and I didn't think that looked right. I much prefer the fabric I got on the smaller needles.

Pattern: Child's drop shoulder sweater from A Handy Book of Sweater Patterns by Ann Budd, size 26", which looks to be about a size 4.

Mods: none. I spit-spliced the yarn to maintain the striping pattern, and I matched the stripes on the front and back, plus the sleeves match each other.

* * * * *
Shortly after the photo shoot the deck looked like this.

 

That is a jar of so-called sun tea on the table. Ah, what is so fine as a day in June?

Left = sinistre.

I am a logical person. I do not believe in superstitions. I'm an accountant, for goodness sake; we deal in specifics and quantifiables. Very little that is squishy or new-agey in my outlook. If I am ailing I take full advantage of Western medicine. Chakras, auras, chi -- I know what they are, I have many good friends who are into that stuff, but I don't pay a whole lot of attention.

I am beginning to waver.

Right about the time I had this I realized that every physical complaint I had was localized somewhere on my left side. Shoulder and elbow that periodically refuse to stop aching? Left. The trick knee that has bedeviled me since 1977? Left. Hip that gets sore when I sleep on my side? Left. Fall and scrape a knee? Always left. And so on. The broken blood vessel (all gone now, no remnants, whew) was on my left hand, too. Rational being that I am, I chuckled at the whimsy of chance. "Left side disturbed? Oh, how silly! Now, what did I do with that dpn? and where's my coffee?"

The Bite of Unknown Origin has me rethinking my worldview.

To recap: on the last night of our vacation (Sunday) I noticed that the left side of my left wrist (see? double left!) was sore and slightly swollen. Closer inspection also revealed a tiny dark pinprick in the center that was probably an insect bite of some kind. Oh, well, we've been in the outdoors for two weeks and at least we haven't had any mosquitoes; one unknown bite is really pretty darned good compared to the number of skeeter bites I would have accumulated at home by mid-June.

The next morning (Monday) the wrist was swollen, red, hot, and quite tender. Humph.

The 24-hour drive home was rather less comfortable than it should have been -- big comfy seats in the van, four people to share the driving, a cushy bed in the back, lots of knitting time (luckily, the wrist was not bothered in the least by knitting) -- due to the annoying soreness in the wrist. By that night (Monday), though, most of the redness was gone. It was just a bite that caused a bit of a problem and now it's over. Good.

We continued driving through Monday night, and by the next morning (Tuesday) the wrist was really swollen and really red and really tender and really hot. I resolved to call my doctor as soon as I got home. We pulled into our yard mid-afternoon on Tuesday and by 3:30 I had an appointment the following morning. By the time of the appointment I was getting shooting pains in the wrist. Yikes.

The nurse practioner I saw agreed that it was indeed a Bite of Unknown Origin, probably from a spider (which I had already surmised), and that it looked rather nasty. (Yup.) She did reassure me that it wasn't the bite of a brown recluse (again, something I had already surmised) because the skin at the bite site was still intact. I've seen pictures on the web of the progress of a brown recluse spider bite, and they were some of the more horrifying images I had ever seen. Think necrotic area that spreads. If you want to be informed and grossed out, google it; I prefer not to see them again.

She prescribed a week of Benadryl for the histamin reaction, three days of Prednisone for the inflammation, and ten days of sulfa for any possibly infection. I'd never taked Prednisone before, and I seem to remember that long-term usage has some fairly dire consequences, but I figured three days was nothing to worry about. (If I am wrong, please enlighten me. It is too late to do anything about it, but still I like to have all the facts. I should have queried the NP but I didn't think of it at the time.) The Prednisone really relieved the soreness -- less than an hour after the first dose the wrist felt much better. I could still feel the problem, but it no longer screamed for my immediate attention.

It's now Saturday and the sulfa seems to have the infection in check, although progress is slow. I'm cautiously optimistic about the whole thing, something I was definitely not on Tuesday.

But this whole left side thing has me pondering. Is my body trying to tell me something and I've not been listening? Should I seek out the help of a holistic practitioner of some kind? What kind? Or should I just shrug and get on with life? What do you think?

ETA: I started thinking about selective perception and that maybe I'm only remembering half the ailments because I have already decided that left is The Side. After a fair amount of navel-gazing, I have remembered a couple right-side ailments, one in 1966 and the other in 1987. I chipped a bone in my foot in about 1992 but for the life of me I can't remember which foot. In the retrospective process I also remembered a couple more left side problems, so I guess that overall the left preponderance hasn't changed.

Jury duty.

No knitting content here. I have some great knittage and yarnage to talk about, but today is the Dulaan mailing deadline, and I have some serious finishing, blocking, and packing to do. So you get this post that I drafted about a month ago and was keeping in reserve.

No, I haven't been called for jury duty, but I was last year. One of the Rainey sisters mentioned awhile back about being on jury duty and it reminded me of my experience last year. It was kind of interesting so I thought I'd share it.

In this rural county people are on call for jury duty for a month at a time. I had gotten some kind of notification early in the year so I was expecting to be called, and May turned out to be my month. I was excited about the whole thing. A jury trial is something I had only seen on TV, albeit probably hundreds of times, and I was eager to see the real thing. I have never understood people who try to get out of jury duty; I think I am just naturally snoopy.

The second and third trials for which I was empaneled never made it to the jury. In one, the prosecution's main witness, who had to make the four-plus hour drive from Madison, didn't show up. In the other, the district attorney's office had screwed up the charge. The accused was completely guilty of what he had been arrested for -- illegally hunting deer -- but not of what he was eventually charged with -- something similar but not exactly the same. District attorney = not the brightest bulb on the tree, apparently. She is also no longer holds that office.

The first trial, however, was a good one. It lasted only one day: wham, bam, thankyouma'm. First of all, though, let me explain what was really, really different about being on an actual jury vs. seeing one on TV.

On TV you have a pretty good overall idea about what has happened and why this particular person is on trial for these particular charges. In a real jury, you know nothing when it starts and have to piece it all together from the testimony. In addition, the judge told us we could not take notes; he said that in his experience, note-takers got too involved in the note-taking and tended to miss things that were happening in real time. So we were all concentrating as hard as we could and trying to understand and remember everything, since we didn't yet know what was important and what wasn't.

The first witness was a man who had been at a certain bar when a  [something] happened, we didn't yet know what. Next up was a sheriff's deputy who filled in many of the blanks. Then another bar patron testified about what he had seen and done and not done ("Did you ever hit or touch [him] in any way?" "No, sir, I never touched him." Yeah, right.) A nurse from the local emergency room testified about a person who had been brought in for treatment. The defendant's mother and girlfriend also testified, giving us some background on him.

It seems that a certain 30-something pony-tailed white guy (we will call him Boyfriend) had attended a wake for his stepfather that Saturday afternoon. iirc, the wake had taken place at the same bar at which the [whatever] happened. In the late afternoon as he was sitting at the bar his girlfriend tried to persuade him to leave. He didn't want to go, and she left to walk around outside. At some point she had a bloody nose, which apparently led certain patrons, who had previously noticed them arguing and who may have had some history with Boyfriend, to infer that Boyfriend had hit her. When she came back inside a couple women took her into the bathroom to help her clean up, and [probably; no one actually testified to this] ask if she needed a ride, did she feel safe leaving with clearly-intoxicated Boyfriend, etc.

Boyfriend had had a few hostile exchanges with various other patrons over the course of the afternoon; apparently he was known there and not well-liked. He got pissed off when Girlfriend didn't come back from the bathroom quickly -- she had been trying to get him to leave, right? -- so he went out to his truck in the parking lot to sulk. He testified that he knew he was too drunk to drive, so he didn't leave; he called his mother to come get him. While he waited for her he burned off his anger by driving back and forth and round and round in the parking lot. In the course of this little tantrum he ran into at least one other pickup truck.

Bar patrons saw the truck zooming around, noted the damage it had done, and got mad. The owner of the damaged truck and his buddies pulled Boyfriend from his truck, beat him up, and even rammed his head into the side of the truck. (Yikes.) Other patrons came out to the parking lot, separated the combatants, and called the sheriff's office.  Boyfriend sat in his truck until Deputy arrived. Truck Owner stomped around a bit and went back into the bar.

Now, given these facts, who do YOU think was charged and with what?

Assault? Nope.

Some kind of automobile collision charge? Nope.

Terminal stupidity? Well, yes, but that's not a crime in Wisconsin.

Boyfriend was charged with DWI. There was no charge of assault, apparently, because Boyfriend was so drunk he couldn't identify those who had beat him up. And even though he didn't attempt to drive on a public road, a parking lot is considered to be a public place and therefore subject to the same drunk driving law as a highway. Really, the whole thing was just a bar fight gone bad.

Let this be a lesson to you:

• Don't drink and drive. Anywhere.
  
• And don't get mad at your girlfriend in public if she is prone to nosebleeds.

TTFN. and have a great weekend!

P.S. All of the above, except my parenthetical comments, is a matter of public record.

This is where I work.

Not. But I totally could. Not.

Shamelessly stolen lifted borrowed from blackbird. (You really should read her blog. She doesn't knit but is creative and thoughtful and ironic and funny. Plus, she and her husband ("tall gorgeous 6'3"") are writing a cookbook.

* * * * *

We are home. Slept in my own bed last night with big black fluffy kitty whilst stupid fluffy brown tabby kitty wandered around outside like a dope. Gonna take a shower in my own knobs-are-backwards shower right now. Then gonna go to the doctor to have her fix the Bite Of Unknown Origin on my left wrist that has said wrist swollen, hot, red, and very tender. Gonna stow the mountain of camping gear now residing in the middle of the living room. Yay, vacation! Yay, home!

Vacation, part four (will it never end?)

Downtown Buffalo, Wyoming, by City Hall.

 

A park bench, one of many on Main Street,

this one in the shade of an unidentified flowering tree.

I love this little town.

* * * * *
Remember all that Sugar ‘n’ Cream in the variety store? On Saturday I stocked up.

None, absolutely NONE of these colors are available in any Wal*Mart, Michael’s, or Joanne’s store that I have checked in our area of Wisconsin or in the Twin Cities. (Now all you TC knitbloggers are going to chime in and tell me about the great selection of SnC at some store I missed. Go ahead, you know you want to :-) ) I may go back for a few more solids colors before we leave tomorrow. Oink… (Edited to add: I did buy a *few* more solid colors. Eighteen is a few, right? Double oink.)

I also picked up a couple skeins of Paton’s Soy Wool on the recommendation of Octopus Knits.

 

In the comments she correctly identified it on the shelf above the SnC and told  me that it is nice stuff, with long color changes like Noro. Last winter I made myself a Calorimetry from Noro Silk Garden but lost it right after the coldest weather had passed. The colors in the skein on the left are almost exactly the same as were in the Noro, so it will make a perfect replacement. The skein on the right has just enough red in it to go with my winter coat. Two Calorimetries for me this winter – woot!

* * * * *

Meanwhile, #1 spent his day in his usual way, hiking to a comfy spot with a panoramic view in which to read for a couple hours. To get to his perch, #1 continues walking on the little dirt road that winds through the campground until he passes this cabin. Then he heads up the hill behind and to the left of the camera.

See that highest crag off in the distance? That’s where he sits. Yes, my heart flip-flopped when he showed me where he has been going every day.

See the notch between the highest crag and the one on the right?

That’s where the Stalingrad sniper sits ;-) I'm not sure what it says about how I raised my children that #1 son and #2 son and I all immediately thought "sniper roost" when we saw that little cleft.

From his perch, #1 sees this when he looks up from his book.

 

He says there is a rounded cleft in the rock that fits him like a chair. The boy knows how to pick a reading spot, no?

* * * * *

Lucy’s favorite way to ride in the van:

“If I could just wiggle a little farther and turn my rib cage sideways, I know I could get out. And that chipmunk/squirrel/turkey/deer would be toast!”

* * * * *

Anyone else see Clapoutis in that rock?

Vacation, part three: camping with a camera.

I mentioned all the electronics gear we brought along. Here are some other things that make camping more pleasant.

The beer cooler.

 

The bed warmer.

 

The cooking crew.

 

I recommend them all highly.

Wildlife sightings are fun. This guy joins us at the campsite for a few minutes every day.

 

There are lots of red squirrels.

 

Lots of deer and antelope, too, although the latter tend to be sighted at great distance.

   

Yesterday #2 went for a long bike ride and was rewarded by a view of the majestic moose. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the camera along.

Scenery.

  

 

   

 

   

Of course, there are a few things [it would be nice] to avoid:

flies,

 

and certain types of weather.

   

   

The tent at left, above, was #2's. The snow was so wet and heavy it collapsed the struts. He was already sleeping in the van, though.

The temperature inside the camper and outside in the snow at 10:30 this morning:

   

I was toasty in my bed, though -- two sweatshirts, two pairs of sweatpants, two pairs of wool socks, two sleeping bags, and (remember above?) a canine bed-warmer. The way Smokey can tell if I'm warm enough over in my end of the camper is whether I have my hoodie over my head or not. No hoodie this morning. I haven't needed one since Lucy remembered that she likes to sleep with me when we go camping.

 

Vacation, part two: We go to Town.

Who knew that the little grocery/dry goods store in Buffalo, Wyoming

 

would have the world’s best selection of Sugar ‘n’ Cream?

 

That is seven -- seven! -- shelves of SnC, carefully displayed by colorway (the top shelf is Paton's wool). I took several photos to study back at the campsite to help me decide what colors to buy. This display has roughly six or eight times the number of colors found in the typical Wal*Mart back home. I see warshcloths and baby bibs in my future, both for gifts and to sell at the library federation’s booth at the fair. Yee-haw!

This variety store is where last year I pondered the limited selection of Lion Brand® wool when I ran out of knitting. The selection of natural fibers is definitely improved this year. There are a number of lovely wools and blends, Paton's and other brands, plus (of course) far more acrylic and novelty yarn than anyone in their right mind would want.

And there is this – I got myself some souvenir yarn.

 

 

 

(The yarn was completely clean. The bits of vegetable matter you see were picked up in the van and the camper after purchase.) The label calls this a 2-ply sport weight, but I’d consider it DK, almost worsted weight. It was also available in an unplied bulky weight. The photos don’t really convey the soft fuzzy texture, which reminds me of a chenille bathrobe. I’ve never touched wool so cottony soft. It probably wouldn’t be good for socks –- my first thought of what to make with it –- because I think it is too soft to wear well. I liked the yarn but not enough to spend $$$ to buy enough for a sweater. I’m also thinking of felted slippers  with leather soles to overcome the wear problem. It’s certainly soft enough for a scarf, but I made one for myself last winter and don’t really need another. For the immediate future this yarn will marinate in the stash until it tells me what it wants to be.

We saw a few interesting sights around town. Around the IGA:

   

   

Parked downtown:

 

Now, I'm not making fun of the folks in Buffalo. FSM knows that you guys could find lots to point fingers at in my life. These are just things that reminded me, once again, that I'm not in Wisconsin any more. And who would have expected to find a pickup truck-driving Tool/Nine Inch Nails fan?

The funniest thing, though, was just now. Here I am in the espresso bar I mentioned in the last post. It's a charming place, funky and friendly and comfortable, although it gets a tad noisy after 3:30 when school gets out. #2 was here, too, with Smokey's computer, IMing with his friends back home. He was sitting at another table, but when I looked for him I couldn't see him. I figured he had taken the van to go explore the town and didn't think too much about it. About an hour later he suddenly called to me from across the room. Turns out he had made some new friends.

 

The boy takes after his father.

* * * * *

And now, the knitting: The Lure of Random.

Stripes are easy. Stripes are fun. A knitter can devise a stripe pattern to accommodate any amounts of yarn. If you have 300 yards of color A, 100 yards of color B, 500 yards of color C, and 50 yards of color D, you can, with the judicious application of a little math, make a 900-yard sweater in a stripe pattern that will use pretty much all the yarn without running out of any colors. In that situation I would use color D for a narrow edge or stripe in the ribbing at bottom, cuffs, and neck. I’d probably make the rest of the ribbing from color C, and the body and sleeves in a stripe pattern that was 3/8 color A, 1/8 color B, and 4/8 color C. (300 A + 100 B + 400 C (the amount I’m estimating would be left after all the ribbing) = 800).

I brought along a bit less than eight 200-yard skeins of worsted weight Bernat Lana merino, bought on sale from Smileysyarn.com last fall: 2 skeins each of black, dark brown, light camel, and ivory. I had used some of the camel and black for a Dulaan hat and some of the ivory in the Lopi Lite sweater I just finished, so the only color of which I had the full two skeins was the brown.

My original plan was to make a sweater modeled after one by Elizabeth Zimmerman that Meg Swanson showed us in the Yarnover class. It was a child’s sweater done in four wide bands of color, black at the bottom, dark gray above that, then a lighter gray, then white at the top. It was all stockinette and had eight vertical lines of faux seam stitches evenly spaced around the sweater (one line at center front, one line at center back, one on each side, and the other four evenly spaced between them; I think there was one more on top of each sleeve to take over after the side ones ended at the underarms) that turned into lines of double decreases in the yoke.

The problem was that I was afraid that a, I might run out of one color of yarn, and 2, I might run out of brain trying to figure out the eight-way decrease. (Thinking about it now, I realize that the yoke of a typical raglan has four lines of double decreases every other row, so a sweater with eight lines of double decreases would need them every fourth row. I’ll keep that in mind for a future Dulaan sweater.)

Anyway, back to stripes. After I discarded the EZ idea I decided to make the sweater striped. But my on-vacation brain didn’t want to concentrate long enough to figure out an appropriate stripe pattern. Call me lazy, call me slothful, call me whatever, I just didn’t want to do it. So I hit on the idea of a random stripe pattern. Given the weight of yarn (worsted weight doubled) and the size of the sweater (large child) I decided that the widest stripe should be 6 rows, which would be perfect for using dice. I would roll the die and knit the number of rows that came up. The only problem was we didn’t happen to bring along any dice. How to figure out a random pattern?

Remember all the electronics we brought along? I used the RAND function in Excel. In the first cell I typed “=RAND()*(6-0)”, which will generate a random number between 0 and 6, and copied and pasted it down the first column for a hundred or so rows. The problem was that the numbers generated were ones like 1.47653 and 4.59385. (There is probably a way to tell Excel that I only wanted integers, but I was too lazy to look for it.) It’s hard to knit .47653 of a row. So, in the second column I typed “=ROUND(A1,0)” and copied and pasted it down the column. Perfect. If I had access to a printer I would have printed it out, but I didn’t so I couldn’t.

 

Here you see the four columns of random numbers. At the bottom of each is the cumulative number of rows so far. I’ve written abbreviations for the colors in the first column to help keep it straight. The sequence is black, camel, brown, white; rinse and repeat.

I set up my knitting bag to minimize yarn tangles.

 

Here’s how it looks.

 

I'm going to match the stripes on the sleeves to those on the body for continuity -- the human eye always tries to discern a pattern, even when there is none -- then continue the Excel-determined random sequence on the yoke. I did a couple short rows in the back at the level of the underarm and will do a couple more near the top of the yoke, all to raise the back of the neck. Another cozy warm sweater for Dulaan.

Vacation, part one.

We camped in the Black Hills for the first couple nights. These two boxes, one packed by each son for himself, demonstrate some of the differences between my boys. The upper box is #2's -- lots of clothes.

The lower box is #1's -- 75 pounds of books. His [few] clothes are packed in a small backpack somewhere.

You already saw what I packed for amusement; besides the yarn I've also got six or eight books. Smokey brought a portable DVD player and a 3-disc set of 20 John Wayne movies. #2 brought his bike and Quake and Home World to play on one of the computers.*

* * * * *

Guess what?! We have knitting!

#2 modeled it for me.

The sweater is sized for a 10 - 12 year-old child. #2 is 18. The sweater is a tad small on him.

But it should keep some 10-year-old Mongolian child mighty toasty next winter.

Yarn: 1 strand Reynolds Lopi Light held together throughout with 1 strand worsted weight wool: teal Lopi with KnitPicks Wool of the Andes "Artic Pool Heather", creamy white Lopi with the same color of Bernat Lana merino, Oxford gray Lopi with camel-y brown Ella Rae (I couldn't locate a KP WotA the right shade of gray).

Needles: KP Options, US10.

Pattern: seamless yoke raglan from Ann Budd's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, size 34". (My gauge is a bit tight; the sweater doesn't look that big to me. Must measure before I send it.) I didn't use that pattern's yoke decreasing, though. It has you do four decreasing rounds spaced evenly up the yoke. That wouldn't work very well with my planned yoke color work, so instead I used Elizabeth Zimmerman's system of decreasing, which I got from the handout at a class I took from Meg Swanson for EZ's percentage system updated. In that you do three decreasing rounds, at halfway, three-quarters of the way, and at the top of the yoke; that way I could put the decreasing rounds in the two-round strip of solid blue between the color work rounds. (In the photo it looks like those blue strips and decreasing rounds are lower in the yoke; it's because the crew neck makes the top of the yoke look taller.) I made up the fair isle pattern as I went. :-) Simple as it is, I am inordinately proud of it.

Here is a close look at the fair isle (please click to embiggen and truly appreciate the fuzzy wooliness).

Now, y'all have seen fair isle done by really good knitters, where the pattern lies smoothly even before it is blocked and the floats are perfectly even. My knitting is not like that. These are the kind of floats done by a rank beginner. Here is the first set:

And here is the back of the yoke. I can see improvement there, even if you can't see it in the photo.

As I said, I am inordinately proud of the this sweater. Color work no longer scares me. I can slip stitch and I can fair isle. As they say here in the west, yahoo!

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After the Black Hills we moved on to our main camping venue in the Big Horn mountains near Buffalo, Wyoming. Friday night we went to a rodeo in nearby Kaycee. There were cowboys

 

and cowgirls.

There was bronc riding, both with and without a saddle.

There was calf roping.

 

There were bull riding and other kinds of roping and trying out some new bucking horses without riders. It was especially interesting to watch the pick-up riders take the bronc rider off the bucking bronco once the whistle had blown.

We are definitely in The West.

* Although we are camping in a National Forest campground with outhouses, no electric hook-ups, and only a hand pump for water, we are not exactly roughing it. We have with us a small generator** with which to power and recharge our two computers, three iPods, DVD player, two cell phones, camera, hair dryer, and waffle iron :)

** If you have ever been camping next to someone with a generator, you are probably shaking your head right now. Let me reassure you that ours is a small and fairly quiet generator, plus we have 120' of extension cord so we set it up f-a-r from the nearest campsite.

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ETA: The first hot spot we found here in Buffalo was the McDonald's by the interstate, $2.95 for two hours. The price was very reasonable, but the place was a little lacking in ambience. Today we found that the (sadly website-less) Deerfield Boutique & Espresso Bar, est.1994, on Main Street has excellent cappucinos and scones and comfy couches and little tables and free high-speed internet. Woot! It is a totally charming splace, very spacious and full of plants and works by local artists and a bookcase of paperbacks and games and chess boards and a fenced-off play area full of toys for the littlies. This shows about a third of the space.