kmkat and her kneedles

OMG, it is Wednesday already?

photo credit: Gee, wonder why the unemployment site is overloaded via photopin (license)

I seem to have been incredibly busy for the past few weeks. Every day I fall behind a little bit more -- unread emails pile up, postal mail ditto, the laundry screams, another must-do appears. This is what being useful feels like, right?

Anyway, no time to do a complete post right now. Here's whats been happening:

• I finished two pairs of socks and a hat.
• Tonight I vow to finish a pair of fingerless gloves that have been OTN for a month.
• A pair of summer socks OTN for on-the-go knitting.
• Found I despise knitting with 50/30/20 wool/cotton/nylon yarn, which is what the summer socks are made of.
• Too bad I have enough for two more pairs of socks.
• I got two free (2!) (free!!) knitting machines.
• Plus a crapton of pattern books and accessories and punch cards and who knows what all.
• No time to delve into it.
• Need to donate a rocking chair and matching ottoman to humane society garage sale to clear out some space..
• But they do not want accept anything until mid-May.
• Need to deal with another crapton of stuff we removed from Minneapolis house when we rented out the the last bedroom (the one we used to use) to clear some more space.
• Then I will permit myself to set up the knitting machine(s).
• And explore the world of machine knitting.
• My daffodils are blooming their little hearts out.
• I thank the unseasonably cool weather we had for a couple of weeks. It permitted them to stay in their blooming condition instead of withering.
• Warmer now.
• Haven't finished the book for the last two book groups I went to. 
• Bad Kat.
• But the first one, The Boys in the Boat, has been chosen as next month's book for the second group.
• I was enjoying it whilst reading.
• I get another chance!
• I am involved with starting up a brand-new chapter of the League of Women Voters.
• Hence, some of the busy-ness.
• Just discovered our mortgage, which has been on automatic payment from my checking account for years and years, did not get paid this month.
• New loan servicer.
• New crap-tastic loan servicer.
• Several phone calls, all fixed.
• Sheesh.
• Went to Yarnover last weekend.
• Forgot to bring yarn; had to buy two skeins of fabulous CVM/alpaca/angora worsted.
• Oh, shuckydarns.
• Learned how to do brioche.
• Started a brioche cowl with the new yarn.
• Decided I needed to do it somewhere with no distractions until I get it cemented in my muscle memory.
• Took a cast on/cast off class from Amy Detjen.
  
• Taught her a new cast on.
• I rock (but I didn't invent the cast on; it was one I found several years ago on YouTube when I searched for "stretchy cast on".)

That's enough. Gotta go move the laundry from washer to dryer.

I have a new app on my phone.

This is how far it is from my bed to the bathroom.

Winter may not be quite done with us, and other links.

photo credit: rkramer62 via photopin cc

Twenty years of mergers and acquisitions, from 1993 to 2013.

A surprisingly simple solution to homelessness.

The dog remembers.

A field guide to the American sandwich.

A short summary of the book everyone is reading.

Then and now.

Remember Lindström?

Bill Murray: unpredictably awesome.

Zen thought for the day.

The 3-D printed cast is such an improvement over the conventional ones.

Knit green for spring!

I need to make this sock pattern.

We knitters are all about breaking gender stereotypes.

I am putting this here so I can find it later.

Color wheel!

A knitter's blessing.

I am currently fascinated by bias knitting.

The warmest slippers on the planet.

Another reason to wish for long fingernails.

I find I am inordinately drawn to geometric patterns.

Knitted fence!

 

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Paper links.

photo credit: rainbow via photopin (license)

An amazing story.

Ten on Tuesday, the delightful edition.

Ten Everyday Things That Delight Me.

1. The sound of peepers in the spring. I heard them on Saturday for the first time this year.
2. My morning latte.
3. The feel of yarn in my hands.
4. Rubbing my face in Hannibal The Fluffball Of Doom's fur.
5. When Misha The Formerly Fearful jumps on the bed and comes to have her head scratched.
6. My daffs are blooming! And the Siberian squill!
   
   
   
   
7. Hearing the loons on the lake. There was a pair transiting last Tuesday and making a lot of noise when I got home from the polls.
8. When Smokey says, "Is it time to play Boggle?"
9. Opening the sunroof on my car in summer. Feeling the heated car seat under my butt in winter. 

Yarn and baskets and books, oh my.

photo credit: weenah3 via photopin cc

These are adorable.

I can check 6 7 out of 8.

How to keep your knee socks up.

I never thought I would say that a chair is cute.

Does a cat need a sweater?

Crafters are often privileged. Or not.

Lovely sweater. Unfortunate background.

All online yarn retailers should use these bags.

This knitter is a genius with color.

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Sometimes I knit wicked good and sometimes not. Guess which one this this post is about.

Example of "sometimes not".

Oh, sure, that looks like one completed sock and one done nearly to the heel. But it is not.

It is one completed sock and another in the process of being frogged back to its roots. 

The sad part is that the second one was done a couple inches past the heel turn, to exactly the spot marked with a stitch marker on the first sock. (I knit socks toe up.)

This is what happens when Your Knitter grabs a US#1.5 needle to cast on instead of the US#2.5 that she always uses for double-stranded socks. That sucker was w-a-y too small.

Never fear, however. I frogged, rewound the ball of yarn, cast on with the proper needle, and am almost to the heel turn again. The sock is going much more quickly on the US#2.5 needle :-)

* * * * *

This was a Gradient in progress.

On Monday night I got ready for my 13+ hour stint at the polls: wind four skeins of Shibui Silk Cloud into cakes, divide those cakes into twelve equal smaller cakes, put each one into its own little plastic bag so they wouldn't tangle, do a provisional cast on, and knit the first inch or two of this gorgeous thing:

 

By the time I left the polls on Tuesday it was about 14" (35cm) long. But the next day I discovered that I had an error in the seed stitch about an inch back, so I began to tink. You can imagine how much fun it was to tink that mohair/silk yarn.

See the cut in the yarn at the top of the photo? That happened when I was about halfway to the first error and I had begun to cut -- very carefully, I thought -- the sticky fibers that were making it so hard to tink. 

Crap. Gonna have to tink back an extra few rows.

I was working on this in the car on the way to Rice Lake, about an hour away and where Smokey had an appointment at the VA clinic. We were giving another person a ride; when we dropped off Smokey at the clinic, I got out of the back seat and walked around to the driver's seat.

Unbeknownst to me, my yarn was hooked around my foot.

What I found when I picked up my knitting again.

I am not sure what I am going to do. Right now the project is sitting in time out to consider its sinful ways. Unwinding three strands of heavily twisted mohair might just be more than I want to tackle. Maybe this will be a short cowl that does not loop twice around the neck. Stay tuned.

* * * * *

Let's end this on a humorous note, m'kay?

Observed in Rice Lake.

 

Decaying links.

photo credit: Grant MacDonald via photopin cc

Stuffed ravioli with dead souls. 

Sales of organic food have more than tripled in the decade ending 2013. Now there is a supply problem.

I would go to this dentist.

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Images of spring.

 

The wood ducks were passing through last weekend.

 

It was difficult to count them because they kept doing this and disappearing under the water.

 

I spotted this today. For a second I thought it was a maze in the woods.

 

Then I figured it out. Those are piped maple trees, and that little wooden
building might be the cook shack. Maple syrup season is probably over this week,
according to the chatter I heard on Tuesday.

Speaking of (the first) Tuesday (in April), spring brings certain local elections --
village and town boards, school referenda, a supreme court justice.
These were three of my fellow election judges.

 

The fifth election judge monitored the single voting machine.
I'm pretty sure that voter is one of the volunteer fireman that pulled Smokey and I 
out of the lake a couple weeks ago. Small towns: you see the same people over and over.

 

She and I occupied ourselves in the same manner during the down times.

 

(no photo)
When I got home that night I heard the loons crying. It made me very happy.

 

 
Today brought the traditional April snowfall.
::sob::

The snow is gone, so if you drop your white knitting you can find it again.

 

Picnic season approaches!

This one sent me scurrying to Ravelry and thence to Amazon to buy the book.

She's gonna be ready.

Nice stash!

I need this on a t-shirt.

Knitting saves hearts.

Knitting is often about letting go.

Sorry, but these astrological signs make no sense to me.

These could be fun.

I adored this show when my kids were young.

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Note: I have a confession. I have decided not to attempt Fox Paws. Reasons: would take an awfully long time, and I already have plenty of scarves. The yarn will just have to become something else.

 

 

Sundays are for posting.

I have become rather obsessed with mahjong on my computer and my iPad. 

I used to have it on my Windows box back in the day, but that was a downloaded program; this is online. Who knows what nasty stuff might be infesting my hard drive...

As I played I found I had an emotional reaction to the different pieces, usually based on how easy or difficult it was to recognize and match them. To help myself I have made up names for many of the tiles. Across the top row we have Nine Stick, Flat Top, another Nine Stick, Legs, Nine Plate, and Tee. The bottom row is Box, Three-Stroke, Box, Nine Stick, and Little Man. Weird, but it helps this non-Chinese reader. Those are all pretty straightforward. Then there is Little Bad Guy, Grace, Pointy Top, Round Bottom, and Strikethrough. And Chairlift and Birdhouse.

Enough of that. I am amusing only myself. 

Our taxes are in progress (hence the obsession with a computer game). I have a first draft of the federal return, still need to print it out and review it as though I were still at work. Then the WI and MN returns, yuk. For the past several years Smokey has had to be a MN resident (MN tax law) even though he lives in WI, and I am a WI resident. Even the fancy-schmancy professional grade tax software we had at work could not quite manage that situation, requiring me to override things in the return. Overriding was strongly discouraged because it usually meant an error. 

Because I am retired now and my time is more leisurely, I was able to take a different approach on the return: one day I did the W-2s and 1099s. The next day I did the cap gains. The next couple days were spent on the rental property. Then I took a break for a few days. Back at it to do the contributions. Next day the rest of the itemized deductions. Although this approach meant I always had the return nagging at me, it was also low stress.

On Saturday Elder Son called to ask for help on his return. He and I had gone through his situation back in early February and I had counseled him on which forms he needed, but he didn't go ahead and do the return. He did, however, manage to forget everything I had told him. His return's only quirk was an tuition credit; at work the software took care of the mechanics of that, but he and I had to wade through the form line-by-line on the phone, each of us on the IRS website looking at forms and instructions. He kept saying, Jeez, they're telling you every step without ever telling you the goal of what you are doing. Yup, the IRS is not in the business of making this process easy or self-explanatory. He wanted to know how people who are not good at math do their returns. I explained about H&R Block.

Speaking of H&R, I am using their tax software package this year and am not happy with it. I originally purchased and downloaded TurboTax, but found that it wouldn't run on my 2008-vintage computer. (Refund for it takes weeks :-( ) The Block software runs and was cheaper, but damn, there is a reason it cost so much less. I am not looking forward to reviewing the return; if what I saw going on on the screen comes through on the return, I am gonna be doing some overriding.

On the knitting front, I have another pair of double-stranded socks OTN, plus the second of another pair of fingerless gloves. 

 

I was able to tweak the color of the socks to be accurate; the fingerless gloves are actually camel-colored. The good news is that my new camera seems to be able to focus on yarn and knitwear, something my previous camera had a lot of trouble with.

There are so many things in my Ravelry (and mental) queue that I am feeling like I will never accomplish them all. And I probably won't, especially if I keep adding things. But that's part of the fun of knitting, right? Seeing all the possibilities? That is probably a part of any creative endeavor, I guess. Choices.

Colorful links.

photo credit: Strung up 32/365 2013 via photopin (license)

Garage sale.

Sure, a degree in broadcast journalism and Spanish literature qualifies her to be a science writer.

Caution: extreme adorableness ahead.

Good advice. She explains a bit.

Links from Chaos & Mayhem.

Broken mirrors can be beautiful.

You should read this if you haven't already.

WTF.

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I wonder what would happen if I...

One day a couple weeks ago Smokey was taking a nap and I was doing crosswords on my iPad while keeping him company. As I figured out the three-letter word for a particular lyricist ("IRA"), my mind wandered to a yarny problem. What could I do with the remaining pink/orange/purple sock yarn now that I had used about half of it in fingerless gloves? The obvious answer, to me at least, was to overdye it. But with what color? Red? I had plenty of red yarns. Blue? Ditto purple yarn. Hmmm...

Well, if green and red make brown (and they do), I wonder if green and pink would make tan? (Hover over photos for additional comments.)

 
Lemon-lime Kool-Aid, here I come.
(And let us rejoice that my Kool-Aid stash included lemon-lime.)

 

 
Pre-dye soaking.                                                       Kool-Aid is dissolved.     

              

Dyebath is ready.

 

 
The dyeing begins. 

     

Stopwatch shows 5:16. Dyebath not quite exhausted yet.

 

 
I took a photo of my kitchen counter as the iPhone lay there. As one does.

 

   
Dyebath exhausted.                  Dyed yarn in clear rinse.

Wet.

 

Dry.

 

Emo.

 

 We went to see Emo Phillips in concert at the St Croix Casino. Free show!

We got there early. Great seats!

Emo is Smokey's favorite comedian on the planet, so there was no way we would miss this show. The fact that it was free was an added bonus. 

First joke of the show: "Speech. It is what separates us from the animals. Amplified speech: it is what separates us from the Amish."

He played with members of the audience a bit. Since we were in front, we got picked.

Emo: Are you a couple?

Me: Yes. 

Emo: Do you have a pet name for your partner?

Me: Yes, Smokey.

Emo: How long have you been married?

Me: 41 years.

Emo: Then you have probably worked out all the details of your relationship, unless Smokey is hiding a mistress under that beard.

He came out in front after the show for photos with the audience. He is extremely tall, 6'3" at least, and seemed to be a very nice person.

He was every bit as funny  as in these clips, but not quite as contorted any more.