« September 2013 | Main | November 2013 »
photo credit: Nicola since 1972 via photopin cc
From the blog of a former cancer patient:
Was contemplating Halloween costumes today and thought: "I could just wear housepants and slippers. Slip on one of my old chemo bracelets and carry a bong around all night. Bam: Cancer Patient."
I found it incredibly funny.
But I'm sure people would be really awkward about it. Wet blankets.
* * * * *
The red quadrant es finito completo*. It is about 28"x20" (71cm x 40cm).
We all remember that that ruffly white edge at left and bottom is the provisional cast on, right? And that it it ruffly because it is DK weight rather than fingering? So none of us will be distracted by it? Good.
I plan to take a break from the afghan now. By the 28th square I was getting a little tired of it, plus I have committed to some other knitting -- mittens for Adrienne, another dog sweater for Ser Percy, a bit of Christmas knitting, possibly a hat/scarf/mittens for Elder Son's friend Alí. I plan to return to it by Christmas or soon thereafter.
* * * * *
Everyone's favorite pit bull is here again this weekend. As always, he brought Younger Son with him.
That is Lucy at the right, not Matthew.
The Halloween pedi remains more or less intact on Ser Percy. Such a stylish and seasonal dog!
* * * * *
From this morning's email. Smokey sent it to me because of he loves bears and dogs, but you and I should watch closely for the hand knit (?) sweater the man is wearing.
* * * * *
Yesterday I brought (gluten-free) brownies to a fund raiser for a woman who is thinking of running for governor next year. If you live in Wisconsin, keep an eye out for her -- Kathleen Vinehout. She is smart, passionate, progressive, and utterly delightful.
* Mi español is nowhere near as good as I might like to think. Thank you, Google Translate!
photo credit: The ChainMaille Lady via photopin cc
Halloween is coming. Do you have your scary books ready?
Grrr. (via neil-gaiman.tumblr.com)
Kittehs: the original Mensa. (via redshirtknitting.tumblr.com)
More kitteh: Sygmond, the world's most majestic cat.
Dragon's breath. Gorgeous.
Are you a *me* or a *we* person?
Raspberries and nuclear warheads: what each country leads the world in.
Do you have your scary books picked out?
“God forgot to make my eyelids purple, so I’m just helping him out.”
18 important life lessons from knitting.
Have you donated yet? Go. Do it.
Whilst cleaning my office, I came across this card, sent to me last winter by a knitting friend.
To save you the trouble of googling, I have found a source for the card here. It is available in an assortment of knitting-related humorous cards.
Rambo is one of Lennie The Mechanic's dogs. Rambo is also a female (!) and a sweet, friendly canine, even though she looks fierce and has a ferocious name.
She also like to jump onto cars and look in the window.
We thought this photo was so funny we made a poster of it to give to Lennie to hang in the shop.
On a side note, doesn't Rambo remind you of this dog?
10 Foods You Eat Regularly Now That Were Exotic (or unheard of) When You Were a Kid*
What a great Ten on Tuesday topic -- food, my favorite subject!
My upbringing was solidly boring in the food department. Meat, potatoes, and overcooked vegetables, period. You have to remember two things when reading this list: 1, I was a kid in the 1950s, and b, I was a kid in small-town Minnesota, Home Of The Hot Dish, where the extra-spicy version of something involved the cook adding 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper*.
Contrary to many ToT posts, this time I couldn't stop at just ten.
* Absolutely true. I have a cookbook from that era with that exact instruction.
Percy thinks he is a lap dog.
Ser Percy gets ready for Halloween.
Let's take a closer look at those glam paws, shall we?
* * * * *
Last week was all gold and glorious.
Today, guess what.
It's snowing.
See?
* * * * *
Last night I watched the Ozmandias episode of Breaking Bad, then finished reading The Night Circus. The book is my pick for tomorrow night's book club so I will have to lead the discussion; frankly, I don't know what the hell happened in the book. Between the awful violence of BB and the weirdness of the book, I had one doozy of an insecurity dream after I went to sleep. Took me awhile to figure out where all that insecurity came from (had to snuggle up next to Smokey for awhile), but once I did I felt better.
* * * * *
Smokey baked another of those awesome blueberry pies Friday night. The only reason this one lasted longer than 24 hours was that we knew we should save some for Matthew, who wouldn't be here until Saturday afternoon. Let me tell you, that was a real test of self-discipline.
* * * * *
Elder Son called yesterday from the Michigan-Indiana football game, which he was attending with friends. He said he had decided that, although football is his favorite game to watch, he prefers to watch it on TV. More comfortable, and cheaper food and drink close by. $6.50 for a hot dog at the game appalled him, poor guy. He was sounding quite rowdy, which is extremely unusual for him. Probably had done a bit of pre-game celebrating...
* * * * *
I am currently on square 28 out of 35 in the red quadrant of the sock yarn afghan. I think I will take a break once I finish #35 because I have committed to several other smallish project before winter -- another dog sweater for Ser Percival The Energetic, mittens for martinimade.com's mitten project, a possible hat and/or scarf and/or mittens for Ali, Andrew's friend.
* * * * *
Edited to add: I didn't think the snow was gonna stick.
Guess again.*
* That is spearmint, a hardy perennial, being weighed down by snow. I plan to winter it over somewhere cold so I am not too worried about it getting snowed on. :: fingers crossed::
photo credit: The ChainMaille Lady via photopin cc
Bananas just the way you like them. (Click through to #5.)
Things are not always what they seem.
Remember Tetris when you do your Christmas shopping..
This one is for the vegetable gardeners, particularly those with stony soil.
Maybe you need a keytag for your cavern key? getaway car? panic room?
Knitting: it's a religion. (via martinimade.com)
These are kinda really weird.
I got 9 out of 11, but I am a really lucky guesser.
Links from Chris.
Last night (Tuesday) I saw an acquaintance at a meeting. He had had a hip replacement the previous Wednesday and was out and about, no walker, just walking with 2 canes. Sheesh! I did not even venture out of the house for at least a couple weeks. After the meeting I offered to help him with his briefcase and iPad and he declined, saying he was fine. And he was. The guy is over 60 and a Vietnam vet who was subjected to Agent Orange, has had 24 (24!) surgeries so far. And had one knee replaced four times.
On the plus side, he said that I was his inspiration to have his hip done because he saw how happy I was afterward*. So there is that.
* * * * *
photo credit: Louis Abate via photopin cc
Today, the day after I finished and mailed our tax returns, I am cleaning up my desk and organizing the flurry of papers that I was tossing around yesterday. The file drawer with our tax returns was getting too full, so I went through and pulled out stuff that didn't need to be saved, like all the medical receipts. We always save them and I add them up at tax time, but the total is never enough to deduct.
In the interest of privacy, I shredded everything with our name on it... and overheated the shredder multiple times. I am a shredding fool!
* * * * *
Misha The Rescue Dog had forgotten the rules about relieving herself in the house, so she has been back on the leash 24/7 for a couple weeks. It is working, although she didn't pee for four days at the beginning and didn't poop for another couple of days. The way I finally got her to understand that she is supposed to *go* in the new dog run was by putting a small rug out there. It was the one she had favored as her toilet in the house, and even though Smokey had put it through the washer twice, it still smelled. If I could smell it, so could she. It worked. I am so proud to be (somewhat) smarter than the dog.
To get her pooper working, I consulted the internetz to see if we could give her a laxative. Consensus was no, but alternatives were offered: milk gives dogs diarrhea and exercise is always stimulating. Misha got a small dish of milk twice a day and I took her for a walk shortly afterward. Eventually that worked, too.
Dog ownership is sooo glamorous, isn't it?
* He is the second person to comment that I seem much happier and smilier since the hip replacement. I didn't realize how much it showed.
Ten Things I Did Over The Weekend.
Ser Percival The Energetic watched the process with great interest.
Younger Son used my car (with all-wheel drive) to pull the pontoons -- all that was left of the old, sunken pontoon boat -- from the lake edge to the trailer up by the pole barn, from whence they will go to be recycled. I photographed him from the decks, first on the lake side, then on the driveway side.
I haven't figured out how to make it play any other way than on the site where I made it, so you will have to go here to watch it.
Mutterings.
* * * * *
Ser Percival The Energetic is ready for Halloween.
Dah dah, dah dah, dah dah!
* * * * *
We all know that good tools can make any job go more smoothly. Tools can also be toys. Let me show you a couple of Smokey's toy--, er, tools.
This mahogony case (mahogony! for a set of screwdrivers!) lives in a cabinet next to his chair in the living room. Although I probably laughed myself silly when he got this, I cannot tell you how handy it is to always have the right size screwdriver to hand*.
Here we have the latest toy: a butane-powered soldering iron**. See the flame glowing at the left end? This is the camping soldering iron, for times when there is no electrical hookup. (He often putzes on the car when we are on vacation while I spend my time knitting.)
* Kinda makes my three (3!) sets of interchangeable needles look reasonable, doesn't it?
** Those of you with Significant Others who are similarly inclined to DIY, do tell them about this little wonder. I predict they will be intrigued.
Edited to add: speaking of toys, check out this 2008 photo of ipods.
Some dead, some in use.
photo credit: dongga BS via photopin cc
Funny and nerdy. (via Younger Son)
The park bench of irrelevence and the bumblebee of hope.
A fellow blogger's 20-ish son was in the hospital with a mysterious gastrointestinal Thing. Many, many, many questions from the the docs trying to figure out where he got the Thing. BloggerMom and son amused themselves with making up answers.
From the same site: To the last I grapple with thee / From hell's heart I hug at thee.
Best quote of the week: "...a scrap of fabric so incredibly dense it could have run for Congress on the Tea Party ticket."
Remember this?
Newest time-waster.
Miley Cyrus? Best comment ever.
I knew there was a reason I prefer to get my history from literary fiction.
Let's get this image into main stream media.
And this. (via RedShirtKnitting on Tumblr)
Vatican needs spelling lessons.
Linkity from Chris.
I did not sew the buttons on my Tappan Zee so no modeling today. No button sewing because SOCK YARN AFGHAN. I am obsessed.
Here's a little somthing to tide you over.
Even the chart wasn't enough. Now I can finish the red quadrant.
All cheerfully lifted from George Takei's Facebook album.
Many thanks to Betsy and Donna for sharing their sock yarn leftovers with me.
That is one heck of a lot of sock yarn, yo.
The packages were waiting for me when we got back from vacation. I opened them and marveled, then spent an entire Saturday evening and most of Sunday rewinding things into tidy center-pull balls.
I adore winding yarn on my ball winder, although it did get a little tedious after the
first dozen balls. So I moved the entire operation to the living room, where I could watch TV.
Please note the clever use of Edward Said's Orientalism, which I read on vacation.
My first pass at categorizing the yarns by color family.
As you can see, I am a bit light in the greens. If any of you have leftover sock yarn of the green persuasion, I'd be happy to take it off your hands.
Some of these -- previously mine and donated -- didn't make the cut, althrough no fault of their own. They just didn't quite fit into the plan.
Somewhere in the knitting of the first dozen or so squares, the overall plan of the afghan morphed into a different overall plan, one that I liked much better. It also had the advantage of being doable, as opposed the original vague plan which was not achievable without some significant warping of the space-time (and -color) continuum.
I happily knat away with the new plan in my head but soon realized that having a definite plan in my head did not necessarily translate to good yarn/color selections every time I started a new square.
So I did a real plan for the current quadrant...
...which looked like this before the infusion of all that new yarn.
Aside: Elizabeth asked how much yarn each square takes. I weighed the afghan-in-progress and divided by the number of completed squares: each square is ~5g. There are 4 rows of black at the beginning of each square so the colored part is slightly less than 5g, but I need to allow for the ends to weave in. Let's say 5g of colored yarn for each square.
Ten Ways I Am Embracing Autumn.
photo credit: FalkoMD via photopin cc
I never upgrade to a new version of anything right away because I want to read/hear some feedback about it first. I like to know the initial kinks are worked out, given that many software companies -- I'm looking at you, Microsoft -- release beta versions as upgrades.
So I had not updated the OS on my iPad until Sunday when Younger Son The Tech Guru was here.
While I am not fond of the new faded color scheme, the upgrade did accomplish one thing.
I have often emailed interesting Twitter links to myself for use in the Saturday links posts. Precisely when Gmail did their upgrade to tabbed inboxes last June (?), that feature of Twitter stopped working. My emails went somewhere into the ether, never to be seen again.
Until Sunday night, when the 50+ lost emails appeared in my inbox.
So there is that.
Mutterings.
* * * * *
I was singing Sunday, Sunday as I began this post.
What a disappointment to remember the correct song title.
* * * * *
We did some tree trimming and forest maintenence last weekend.
Kiera The Teenaged Helper womaned the weed wrench and uprooted unwanted saplings.
Younger Son handled the electric chain saw and did the actual pruning.
Percy took care of the sticks.
Sorry, no video of Percy and a branch. You will have to be satisfied with this still.
