Where I’ve spent the last two days.

Helping IFW organize their Heritage Room. I could bitch, moan, and rail about this. Partly I don’t mind in the least… good to go, good to network with a couple of people, good to help them begin to get things in control. Partly I just want to shake them all.

What is totally entertaining, though, is that they also occupy a former mental hospital. Lots of good history and pictures here. What’s with this? Putting state agencies in old mental hospitals???  They think we are crazy?  Or they make us crazy?

These are for Dianna. Send good thoughts to her about Hero.

barn yesterday in the dreary rain and today in the sun

I thought these might be interesting interpreted as fair isle…

The buildings here are oh so much more interesting than the ones where we are (or is it just because they are new to me?)

the austere one on the end is where ifw is

This tree said, take my picture…

At least we know the darkest days are over… not totally dark at 5 pm anymore!

Sixth grade band.  Not as painful as fifth grade band.

Sid update! He visited the girls today, lots of romping about… he ran around like a dog that’d never been injured. But the girls did wear him out and he was pretty gimpy after about an hour. That’s Sid, Gracie, Zuzu sometime this past spring/summer.

This is mostly for family, no knitting today.  I won’t feel bad if you skip away.

Blogwise, I’m hoping to actually embed this video clip. I’m using instructions found here. Hard to tell… on the preview the embedded clips look empty.  OK…didn’t work, so don’t visit THOSE instructions. Anybody out there on wordpress get this to work? Some kind person sent me some info, but I’ve lost it (sorry!).

Nick plays the saxophone. On the far right are three trombone players in the back row. Next row are the sax’s, a brown headed girl, a long haired blonde boy, and Nick, who looks very short here.

Here is the link, it is a 40 second clip.

That’s the Big Band Bop… a jazzy number. The kids said it was their favorite, even though it was the most difficult. They also played a piece called Anasazi… one would think it would be interesting… it was horrible! Like a very very very slow funeral dirge. Even the kids complained. I forget what the third number was called.

Couple of quick FOs… chemo caps for the daughter of a friend of a friend…

The plushy one is made of Trendsetter Blossom, might be a bit big. The pinkish one from GGH Cotton Velour and Palma (from Stahl?), might be a bit small. I can always make some more.

Four more inches to go on the back of the birthday sweater.

In one of these old magazines (maybe a Knitter’s?) I read an article about fitting men’s sweaters by Lily Chin. She talks about the backs needing to be longer than the fronts… which I found out after I made the first birthday sweater for dh a few years ago. The back of that sweater rides up. A few short rows in last year’s sweater (the one with monkey long arms) helped… but could have used more. Lily Chin talks about broad shoulders, and that they cause a minor hump of sorts in the back, necessitating more length. So my question for those of you who knit sweaters for men, or men who receive hand-knit sweaters… do you have this fit issue? How do you rectify it?

Since I spent most of the weekend on the couch keeping the big bad beast of a cold at bay, I watched a lot of Star Trek yesterday and noticed the shape of the men on the show (I mean, they’re in those tighty pj uniforms, hard to miss what they look like). And indeed, they all had the shoulder bulge.

I did better with short rows above the armhole split, but I kept getting the fleck pattern off-set at the edges. Fixable by dropping the stitches back.

The kiddo is home from school sick today, same bug everybody else here has been fending off. So dh has gone to work to grab a few things. I’ve earned a whopping 14 hours of sick time, he has hundreds of hours, so he’ll be back any minute and it’s off to work with me.

b is for brodpose (pronounced something like brol-poseh), or bread bag, with bread! Ciabatta in this case. It was very yummy. This bag amuses me because it is also my favorite hat shape. Prior to knitting, I made a lot of fleece hats that have this basic shape, and my former warmest hat was a wool hat in this shape.

The wooly one is one made in Pakistan… remember all the Afghan rebels wearing these in the 1980′s? It is a butt-ugly color, and has been put away in favor of a knit hat… but I may overdye it. The fleece is one dh wears, but with the band just doubled as in the pic on the far right… makes him look like a Cossack.

b is also for bush cards, another gift brought from Denmark, as a birthday gift for dh. He says he finds them rather disturbing. I think they are hilarious.

there are bunch of magazine covers

and a bunch of movie clips, famous photos, etc. I especially like the one where Cheney is his little lap dog.

(Hopefully I won’t get in any trouble for this picture…) I was reading Alice Starmore’s Fair Isle book, and in the beginning she writes about the history of the islands. There is a large picture of the herring boats at Lerwick harbor. It’s a very interesting picture… all the rigging on the boats, all the fish barrels on the dock, all the people working, women and men working side by side, what the women were wearing, and, wait, what is he looking at?

(portion of a picture from Alice Starmore’s Book of Fair Isle Knitting)
her butt
dh says some things never change.

b is also for bathrooms… ds had a friend over last night. Friend went into the bathroom as we were all going to bed (which though it is our big bathroom, is less than 5×7 and has a sliding door) and I heard a big crash and glass breaking. Leapt outta bed. Kid was fine, luckily he’d stepped into the bathroom before closing the door (sensible, eh?).

A piece of sheetrock about a foot by five fell down, knocking some pictures off the wall (thus the glass breaking). Our house is falling apart around us. The (sometimes leaking) bedroom ceiling is old, solid work that needs replacing. This is more recent (1980′s?) and not so solid work, that also apparently needs replacing.

So if that’s the big bathroom… how small is the small one? 28 inches wide. If you like to read on the seat, you must sit up, you cannot read with your elbows on your legs and close the door.

I posted this picture recently, . The outside of the barn. Hard to tell, but it’s about 8 feet from where you stand on the driveway and where you walk into the house.

The family who lived here before us bought the house in 1955. At that time the driveway went up to the house and barn, and the portion of the house with the deck in front was a carport. (it’s now called ‘the breezeway’). There were 6 kids (the youngest are in their mid-40′s now and live nearby), so they dropped the driveway… something about the kids riding their bikes hell bent for leather into the street. Somebody at some point parked in the barn (based on the oil spot). The barn also in the past held at least a few animals. One of the boys told me that when they dug out the driveway, they found a horse’s skeleton. Imagine… it must have died in the barn, and they just shoved it out into the hole. I suspect the kids played with parts of the skeleton, because I found a horse’s tooth in the front flower beds. Sometimes you can still catch a faint whiff of animal.

The inside barn door,

Notice what looks like a rat hole chewed in the corner next to the door. Oh, and the flourescent paint hand print… remnant of a halloween when we tried to scare all the visitors.

General chaos inside, and the ladder to the loft.

If you stood inside the barn and looked up, you would see boards like these,

And up in the loft, two of the cross pieces (that mostly hold wood now) are like this,

This cracks my dad right up. He said, it got so damned cold one winter that they just started ripping up the barn to burn… and then replaced its parts with packing crates. Some of the floorboards in the attic also have a name and address on them…..

John J Hennessey bought the house in 1907. At some point it transferred to a daughter, who sold it in 1948. No idea who Cogan is, perhaps a business acquaintance. I believe Hennessey was a plumber, there are lots of cubbies along the walls with labels like this,

There are also what look like shopping lists for construction supplies, (more of these on the flicker link)

The family before us left some travel posters

Being biologists, we’ve added our own bent to the barn,

whale rib, cow skull, cow moose skull

The rest of the barn pictures are here.

Forgot, b is also for birthday sweater. Not. Done.

And I know that the bio geeks out there are wanting to know this… A recent discussion on the moss list serve (Bryonet) is about dung mosses and their spore dispersal. The talk is that prior to being totally ready for dispersal, the spore capsules may have a sweet aroma attractive to certain types of flies. And maybe something about some of them looking like berries and having some attraction to birds. And then the capsules give off a different odor, foetid, to attract the flies that will afterwards land on fresh moose dung… allowing the moss to begin its growth cycle, which if you compare a moss to a man, you’d mostly be seeing testes and the tiny dusty part would be the man. Um, that sounds bad, but who wants to hear about haploid and diploid??????