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Smokey and I were just discussing Lucy The Wonder Dog. We decided she is:
but, much to her everlasting disappointment, not free-range.
Late breaking news!
Matthew is part of the 4-man team Spoke Girl riding in a 24-hour bike race in Milwaukee*. They placed 2nd in their class last year; looks like they might win it in 2011! You can keep track of their place here.
x
* Conditions in Milwaukee at 4:58 pm:
Thank FSM for the low humidity...
As I sat at the computer reading my email this morning I noticed that the sky was getting dark. It kept getting darker. Then the wind started to blow and the black sky started spitting rain. I closed the windows on the windward side of the house and retrieved Lucy The Wonder Dog from her chain outside.
Soon the rain was coming down in bucket and sheets and the wind was blowing at, I estimate, about 300 mph. The oak trees were leaning and tossing and I could not see the lake 75 feet away. Pretty darned impressive. The electricity flickered very slightly a couple of times and I thought I should shut down the computer, but I didn't.
Eventually I went to check that there was no rain coming in on the leeward side -- none, the wide overhanging eaves prevent that -- and noticed that there was a breeze coming in from the 3-season porch. Where there should NOT be a breeze.
You perhaps cannot tell, but there is a window missing there.
This the second time a window has blown out in that porch. I guess combination windows that big are meant to be used with inner sash windows; they are not strong enough by themselves to withstand sustained 50 mph winds. And we thought we were being so clever and economical back in 2001, using just the storms to create a 3-season porch.
Smokey has a lot of Lionel and other model trains neatly stacked on the ping-pong table just visible in the upper left of the second photo. I moved as much as I could out of the reach of the rain, but some of the boxes definitely got damp. Hard to believe, but sometimes the boxes are worth as much to a collector as the train car that came in it. Damn.
This weekend is the county fair. I am glad I am working there tomorrow and not today. I can only imagine how the tents and booths fared in this storm. Same exact thing happened last year, also on the day before I worked. I guess in some strange way I am lucky...
On a more cheerful note, I found this Shopped photo last week, the image manipulation done by #2 Son when he was in high school. (haslp was the screen name he used then, a combination of Half Life, a video game, and Slipknot, a heavy metal group.)
Found in the Personal and Professional Ethics for Minnesota CPAs online course I am taking today.
My Ten Favorite Bumper Stickers.
I have a friend who has this one on her accordian case:
For Matthew:
This one works equally well for everyone, whether you are a gun-toting conservative or a tree-hugging liberal:
I have a coffee mug that says this.
Particularly appropriate for in Wisconsin these days.
This has been the signature line on my personal emails for a number of years. I heard it from the assistant librarian in Oshkosh, WI.
I have this on a t-shirt.
And now, my two favorites.
* * * * *
This is how we learned of #2 Son's engagement. Hurrah for electronic communications! That photo was taken in the parking lot of the [something] Cowboy steak house in Custer, WY.
From City Pages:
I am slowly catching up on blog reading, where catching up = reading the blogs in my Google Reader Must Read folder and hitting Mark as read on all the rest. Or maybe it is the other way around, I'm not sure. The heat and humidity here are playing havoc with my brain.
I need to walk down the stairs, out the front door, into the mini-mini-motorhome and retrieve the bag of dirty clothes so I can do the laundry. Because I am wearing my last clean pair of underwear. (Knew you wanted to know.) But I have been procrastinating on that task for 5 hours so far and there are no indications that it it going to happen soon. Heat and humidity, you know...
In the meantime I am catching up on blog reading. Because that is the most important thing to do right now.
Not laundry.
Not grocery shopping.
Not unpacking the m-m-mh.
Not clearing the wild raspberry bushes that have taken over Lucy The Wonder Dog's poop yard.*
* * * * *
In knitting news, I now understand in a visceral way why people like knitting lace. It.Is.Addicting. As I emailed to BGFE earlier today, once I got into the flow of knitting the lace shawl it became like a good crossword puzzle or a particularly complex tax return: a challenge, but one that I knew I could work through.
I find myself scrutinizing things on Ravelry that involve lace. Scary, I know.
* * * * *
One teeny-tiny bit of news: #2 Son and BGFE are engaged (!)
We were notified by an email from #2 Son last Friday. I saw the subject line -- "I'm engaged" -- and burst out with something dignified like, Holy sh!t! Matthew's engaged! Smokey and I couldn't be happier for the two of them. They are so obviously delighted together and good with each other. They say they won't be tieing the knot for a couple of years, though, until she is through school.
The happy family group, pre-engagement, in Hill City, SD:
.
* Lucy cannot even get into it at present. Smokey has had to take her down the stairs and out the front door to the other side of the house, and that is not easy when one has rheumatoid arthritis and incipient heat stroke.
My husband loves our summer camping vacation in the mountains. He starts talking about the next one about a week after we get home from the last. He studies the calendar, calculates his work schedule, pesters me about what dates I absolutely positively have to attend to county or accounting business, and hops on the internet the instant one can book a campsite at our favorite national forest campground. Thus, this vacation has been planned since last July and the dates have been set since December.
Imagine my dismay when I got an email in early May that I had qualified for [another] Jeopardy audition -- to be held in New York City on June 28, smack in the middle of our vacation. I had taken the online test back in early March; when I hadn't heard anything from them after a month I figured I had not done well enough to qualify.
[Background] This is the fourth time I have qualified to do the audition. 1999, 2005, 2008, 2011. I blogged about the last one with lots of photos. This one was very similar. [/background]
Consternation quickly gave way to plotting and studying airline schedules. I could fly from Cheyenne, WY through Denver to La Guardia for 30,000 air miles (I had accumulated over 40,000 on my Visa card) and #1 Son said that I could stay with him for the two nights I would be there. A quick, cheap trip; a visit with Andrew; and a good story FTW!
The flight from Cheyenne to Denver was in a 19-passenger puddle-jumper.
There was one bit of the 20-minute flight that was so bumpy that a ball of yarn jumped out of my knitting bag and rolled all the way to the other end of the plane. Happily, I am not a nervous flyer so I just sighed and had the flight attendent/copilot -- small crew! -- retrieve it for me when we landed.
The flight from Denver to New York was on Griz's plane.
We had to get up at 4:45 a.m. to start the drive from the Big Horns, in north central WY, to Cheyenne, in southeastern WY. I got to La Guardia at about 10 p.m. -- the time change accounts for two of those hours.
Next came a bus ride to Grand Central Station in Manhattan and a subway ride to the Upper East Side and a three-block walk to #1's dorm, but my back protested strongly after about half a block of that short walk. I called and asked him to come carry my [very small] suitcase and tote bag for me. I was waiting for him, sitting in the median in the middle of Park Avenue at 96th Street. For him, no problem at age 26; for me, no way at age 60+.
The audition was at a Sheraton hotel in mid-town the next afternoon. The group was small, only 23 of us.
The auditioners arrived. We waited.
Killing time while waiting is always such a problem for me.
The audition crew never tells the auditioners how we did on the 50-question test or if our interview and mock-game-playing skills were impressive enough to land us a spot on the show. There were 100,000 people who took the online test back in March; 2,000 were invited to audition; there will be roughly 400 spots available on the show over the 18-month period in which we are all eligible.
Time to wait for that phone call/email/letter. Keep your fingers crossed for me, m'kay?
* * * * *
That evening #1 and I went out for dinner at DBGB, a restaurant that was recommended to him by a friend in training to be a chef. If you go to the linked site, watch the slide show. We were seated just past the pillar in the center of the restaurant, and my view was of the wall with lots of cubbies and an assortment of copper cooking implements.
#1 studies the menu.
We had steak tartare with quail's egg (raw), grilled chibatta, cornichons, and some bitter greens to start. Andrew had never had steak tartare so wanted to try it; I am a big fan of extremely rare beef so it was a go. My entree was the chop salad with lobster, his was a burger with barbecue pulled pork and jalapeño mayonnaise. We drank beers we had never heard of before and I had an excellent glass of pinot gris.
No photos of the food; I felt enough like a country mouse without pulling out my camera to photograph a raw quail's egg atop a neatly shaped patty of raw beefsteak.
The only fly in the ointment was that I had lost my wallet the first night we had left Wisconsin; I was able to locate it by phone at an Applebee's in Forest Lake, MN and they mailed it to me in Buffalo, WY -- complete with all the cash and credit cards!* -- but I had already cancelled my Visa card before I thought to call the Applebee's. So there I was in NYC, without a credit card and relying only on the cash that Smokey had given me.
The tab in at DBGB took almost all the cash I had, but I eventually made it back to Cheyenne with five dollars in my [new] wallet.
And that is how I made a side trip to NYC whilst camping in the mountains.
* I was so impressed with the honesty of the young man whom I dealt with that I sent him part of that cash as a reward. Sometimes I get lucky, even when I don't really deserve it.
To me, vacations are a time to knit and read. How can I stand the excitement, you ask? Don’t try this at home, folks – I’m a professional.
Reading.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
Feed by M.T. Andrewson
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
A Dark Matter by Peter Straub
The Compassionate Carnivore by Catherine Friend
Vanished by Joseph Finder
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman*
CO2 Rising: The World's Greatest Environmental Challenge by Tyler Volk
Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen
Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy by Alfred W. Crosby
Earth, The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn
Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pipeline to the Pump by Lisa Margonelli
Heh. Can you guess what I was obsessed with when I chose my vacation books?
So far I have read Vanished (suspense novel, supremely mediocre) and Night of the Grizzlies (nonfiction account of two 1967 fatal grizzly attacks in Glacier National Park; recommended by soxanne; glad I didn’t read it before we went to Glacier last year) (headline in Thursday's local paper: Man Killed in Grizzly Attack in Yellowstone National Park. Eeep.). The top three paperbacks are all sci-fi, the other is probably horror; all excellent, non-demanding amusement. I started The Compassionate Carnivore – by the same author as Hit by a Farm – before we left home. It is a nice blend of humor, introspection, and ethics; I might be able to handle it. The others, mostly nonfiction, may be too much for my vacationing brain.
On the audiobook front, so far I have listened to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larssen. I had read or listened to all of them before but wanted to do it again in one continuous string; #2 and #3 are really one story. Then I listened to A Study in Emerald read by the author, Neil Gaiman. That was a short one, less than one hour.
I just finished Grave Peril, #3 in the Harry Dresden series. I heartily recommend listening to the audios of this series. The read has the sexiest voice on the planet, plus he reads them as though he were telling the story over a beer the day after it happened. Much more enjoyable (again, imho) than reading them.
* Last night I couldn't fall asleep so I grabbed a book from my stash -- in the dark -- and a headlamp to read until I got sleepy. This was the one. Friedman is such a wretched writer and egoist that I made it to page 32, skimming large parts, before my eyelids drooped. Success!
Knitting.
I brought along enough knitting projects to sink a battleship.
The Lace Shawl of Doom Delight for BGFE.
This is coming along swimmingly. I have finished the first chart and am ready to start on the border. That simple statement belies what lies ahead, though; the pattern warns that most of the knitting is in the border, plus chart 2 is altogether different and appears far more complicated than chart 1. Stay tuned.
Fast Forward, for the Red Scarf Project.
This is currently about two-thirds done but was put on hold when I took up the Lace Shawl of Doom again. Nice pattern, nice yarn – I’m using Louet superwash merino worsted left over from my kimono sweater.
Palindrome, also for the RSP.
Notice how well-defined the cables are? Not. The yarn is Drops Alpaca Sport, luscious stuff but not at all suitable for good stitch definition. I have since frogged that effort and am instead doing a mistake rib pattern that works much better with the yarn. It is also nice mindless knitting :-)
Actual color is somewhere between the two photos, orangey-red like the second but darker like the first.
Sock for me.
This was to be my fall-back project, the one I would carry into restaurants, etc. Instead the mistake rib scarf has become the take-along. That’s okay; I’m not dying to have the socks done. Yarn is some OnLine Supersocke 100 Circle Color that was on sale at Webs last year.
These last two projects got packed to come along when I was apparently on drugs and in a fantasy daze, thinking how awful it would be if I ran out of knitting projects. The chances of either of them even getting cast on during this tripe is roughly... zero.
Yarn for a narrow Montego Bay scarf for me.
Worsted weight silk from Alchemy.
Yarn for Braided Glory for me.
I was thrilled to match this yarn with a pattern. The yarn is 1600+ yards of Brooks Farm Acero, a sport/DK blend of superwash wool, viscose, and silk. It is not enough to make a sweater for me and has been yearning for a pattern for several years. I think it will be perfect for this shawl, although the pattern will use only about half of it. I am not wild about wearing shawls, but this one seems like it will stay in place without fussing.
As I typed that, the vision of a short- or three-quarter-length sleeved lace cardigan came into mind. Lace takes less yarn than stockinette, right? And I am now lace-qualified, right? I may need to investigate that. I have some other, not-enough-for-a-sweater yarn in my stash that would work for the Braided Glory, actually better than the Acero. Stay tuned.
The lace shawl continues s-l-o-w-l-y. Back around row 45 I figured out how to read my knitting and felt very proud. I continued with great confidence – and care – but around row 55 or 60 I found that I had screwed up something royally. Perhaps I could have fixed it, perhaps not. I did not even try, just threw up my hands and frogged back to the lifeline.
Imagine my horror a few rows later when I discovered that my mistakes had begun BEFORE the lifeline. That column of stitches that is the stem of the openwork leaf? It should continue and become the stem in the next leaf above it. That was not happening in part of the shawl.
I put down the knitting and walked away. Over the next few weeks I would pick it up, look at it, try to figure it out, and put it down again.
Eventually I put in about a gazillion markers, counted the stitches, put in some more markers, figured out where the yarnovers and k2tog/ssks should be, recounted the stitches, wrapped waste yarn around certain stitches, and after much concentration located the errors in the row on the needle. The pattern is such that each half of the shawl is exactly like the other; I have made almost no mistakes in the right-hand half and multiple mistakes in the left-hand half. The mistakes were not apparent when looking at the lace unless the viewer knew exactly how the motifs were supposed to line up above each other; then one could see that I was one column of stitches off in a couple places on the left side.
With great care I knit the next row, making whatever adjustments were necessary to get the knitting right again. A few rows later I caught a new error and adjusted for it. One too many stitches between the markers? Do an extra K2tog. Forgot a yarnover in the previous row? Pick up the strand between the stitches and create the yarnover while purling back. None of these are news to anyone who has ever knit lace, but I was pleased to have come far enough that I could *fix* my errors.
I am nearly back up to row 60 and feeling a tiny bit cocky. That is a sure sign that I should be extra careful.
Here are the things that have helped immensely in this lace saga.
Stitch markers. A commenter recommended putting markers between the repeats. Hallelujah! What a great idea! I had not actually realized before that this was a 10-stitch repeat (duh). Now I would know immediately whether I had the correct number of stitches.*
Anal soul that I am, I used different colors for each half and other colors to mark off the center stitch.
Lifeline. No explanation needed. (Color is way off in this photo. Auto-correct scores again... not.)
Row counter. I have no explanation as to why it took me so friggin’ long to begin using a row counter.
Before I started using the row counter, every time I picked up the knitting it took me many anxious minutes to determine which row I was on. During the long pauses in the shawl knitting I started a couple scarves for the Red Scarf Project: Fast Forward and a modified version of Palindrome. Fast Forward has a 68-row chart for the pattern at each end, and I threw a row counter onto my needle as soon as I got to the chart. I knew from knitting Palindrome several years ago that I needed a row counter to cable at the right row. When I finally went back to the lace shawl I immediately awoke to the need for a row counter. Lesson learned.
Highlighter tape. Best $2.89 I ever spent.
I started out using 3x5 Post-Its but they lost their stickiness pretty quickly, plus I had to use at least 3 to mark the entire chart row. The highlighter tape works soooo much better, plus it allows me to see the row below.
The areas highlighted in pink and yellow were that way on the original pattern;
I printed this on a b&w printer so had to improvise.
There are a few bummers, however.
This pattern is long. Here is where I am.
…and here is how much yarn I have used. See the big hole in the center where I have been pulling out the yarn?
I didn’t think so. (To be fair, that was a 600-yard skein and the shawl will require 480 yards, so I won't use all of it. But still...)
I may need to rethink my goal of finishing this while on vacation. We have 11 10 days left.
* Using stitch markers also created a lot of angst... until I realized that the 10-stitch repeat moves one stitch to the right every right-side row, which necessitates moving each stitch marker one stitch to the right as well. Is this characteristic common to triangular shawls that increase 1 stitch at each edge? I sure wish the pattern writer had mentioned it. Would have spared me any number of gray hairs.
Yes, we are in Wyoming on vacation. Bullet post seems appropriate.
