Also known as I “took the day off from work” so I could stay home and work!

• Last minute groceries
• Clean one bathroom
• Laundry
• Get sticky spot out of oven
• Wash windows
• Notice French door and wash those window panes
• Find enough glasses-barn loft to the rescue
• Wash glasses
• Find the coffee pot buried in the barn loft
• Wash the coffee pot
• Wash serving stuff
• Bake squash (which goes in the oven again tomorrow, and gets called “twice baked squash”, fancy, eh?)
• Make pie crust
• Make 3 pies-apple, pumpkin, pecan
• Make cold cranberry stuffing

And that’s not counting things from the previous days… get a table cloth big enough for the table when the leaves are in (it’s red-I figure it’ll do at least double duty, besides red is a good color), cut up and dry bread, get wine, order coffee (I was out! It came today! Do you think 10 pounds is enough???).

Managed to get in a walk with dh and doggies at lunchtime…

Gracie is quivering for the ball. I took video of them running like wild fiends into the water there…

Not much flowering out there now, but still some attractive things to be seen. Granted, you have to be open to what is “attractive”…

One of the “broom-mosses”, I think Dicranum polysetum, and parchment fungus.

I was planning for up to 15 people, but there will only be 10 of us tomorrow. So I have this monstrous bird-20 pounds! It means up early… I was thinking of high heat roasting, but I want to stuff it. So, it’ll be something like Martha does… (but no white wine, it’ll send one of my guests-a friend-into anaphylaxis). Guess I’d also restrain from white if the guest in question was family….

My dad coming makes me want to do things like wash the windows, and more, but I refrained from saddlesoaping the leather chair… I only got to sit down (and drink some of that yummy coffee) about 5 pm. Tomorrow? I’ll probably dip into this by noon, , after all I put some of it on the bird… wet the bird, wet the cook…

Have a great Thanksgiving… or for you Canadians, enjoy the weekend!

A package came to my house this week… a package for me! From Molly Bees!!

The girls were wild about the box… must’ve been they could smell Bentley…

And inside?

a funny bag

Some lovely teal fingering wool from Blackberry Ridge,

(I think this might be destined for something for the potter who made this wine goblet… it is exactly her color!)

and a little goody for me and a little something to amuse me at work,

and do you see something at the edge of that photo??? It’s this,

the Branching Out scarf! At first I guessed silk road aran, or maybe something called katmandhu, but then I remembered these are heavier yarns… and then it came to me, silky wool (and I see it’s in the sweet green color).

WOW! Thanks so much Molly Bee!!!!

spam bots?

Did you see this Washington Post article about some spam bot place with ties to all sorts of unsavory activity that was recently shut down. It says that worldwide spam dropped something like 75% that day.

But I think it was that day that the spam bot comments on this blog started back with a vengeance (they’d been gone for some time…). Anybody else notice an upswing or downswing in spam comments?

huh?

I don’t know. Maybe because the sign was in Whitefield… But I have no idea, NO IDEA what this is about…

Anybody know what skunk cheese is??

I’m finding that I have less blogging time lately… so if I haven’t visited you in a while it’s only because of that…

I have been daydreaming about hanging out at the beach under a shady umbrella being attended to by a rum boy (for drinks!)… so you might think I was thinking of this Montego Bay… but no

It is the Montego Bay Scarf.

(I am drinking that coffee right now… the green sheep amuses me, it’s a second from Robbi because the glaze wasn’t supposed to flash up on on the sheep)

One would think this scarf is a simple thing, and it is… so why did it take me at least five starts? At least one or two was because I hate having a 3 foot long tail. I read about this scarf in Ravelry… folks were saying it gets longer and narrower (which makes sense), so I cast on about 10 extra stitches… Got up an inch or so and realized I couldn’t keep row 2 and 4 straight, ripped, got up about 4 inches and realized it was way too wide, so cast on fewer extra stitches, got up an inch or two and thought still too wide, so then cast on only 2 extra stitches… it is still rather wide (I am a bit of a loose knitter), but I’m going with it. That little bubble at the top of the photo (base of the scarf)? It’s not just because of how it is laying there… Maybe it’ll block out, maybe that’s what the fringe is for…

Interweave Knits

Am I just in a whiney mood or does anybody else out there think that IK is not what it used to be?

Granted, there are always things that I like (such as Sean’s Harvard Square Caps-hey check out that great Komi hat on his blog!) and will make (witness the scarf above), but part of the fun is really looking hard at the patterns, or rather the finished objects.

I also really really really do not like the new layout. When the layout first changed, I wrote the editor to say how much I did not like it. And then I compared side by side Spring 2006 and Spring 2007 and found that there are some things I do like in the new version. I sent this off to the previous editor, and also recently when Eunny became editor… but I haven’t heard back.

Mostly though, I think IK is trying to capitolize on VK’s pictures in the front-patterns in the back set up. This works for VK, because the patterns in the back are just that… just the patterns, squished all together and no ads, like an encyclopedia of patterns.

But for IK, I get to the middle of the magazine, or sometimes through the first third, and then there’s little to hold my interest to read the rest of it. Which, the advertisers should know, means I don’t see their ads. I also find IK’s way of pointing you to the pattern harder to follow than VK’s simple numbering of each pattern, but I guess this makes sense if IK is going to spread the pattern over 2 or 3 pages.

And what’s with all these design features like the dots across the tops of pages 58-61, pale circles in the middle of the photos, and tire tracks down the sides of the pages?

It doesn’t work for me. Especially the little dots, because they obscure the photo of the knitted item.

now to be really snarky

What is with the bobbles on the cover sweater? Honestly, all I could think of was skin tags. “Bobbled nosegay panels” in my mind screamed “booby skintag panels“. I admit to prejudice over these, because in my mind lots of bobbles on a sweater are akin to being breasted like artemis.

To be fair, the bonus photos over at IK’s website are better than the extra photos in the hard copy. And it is basically a decent cardigan.

And we all have our opinions of what we like and what we don’t, and I love that… I might like something you think is absolutely hideous (I have been thinking about something like this pattern, so I am intrigued by the Pfeiffer Falls pattern), and vice-versa… but isn’t that what makes it all so interesting??

Maybe I’ll get a chance to catch up on some blog reading? Because I haven’t been doing much lately… you know, trying to take care of things around here.

I finished the lace project! Look here (ravelry link).

Today is the boyo’s birthday, but he had a small party yesterday. The girls were relatively unfazed.

gracie, zuzu

They actually liked having a small gang of boys around. At one point the boys were all playing the wii, engaging the dogs in things like jumping up, then the dogs started playing with each other, then they got loud like they do, and out of nowhere it was dog fight. One boy ran out the door and slammed it shut, one jumped on top of another on the chair and the two ran upstairs, mine just stood there saying “guys, it’s ok”, and I broke the beasts apart. I think it’s a b1tchy sister competetive thing, and it takes pulling them apart and keeping them from getting back into it to break it off. Then two seconds later they are normal and liking each other. Gave the boys a scare!

Still pulling vegetables out of the ground… I don’t know what kind of carrots we planted… most of them are short, but none so far are as monstrously wide as this one…

Finally got a picture of this beast doing its usual thing,

it is not dead… it also likes to “swim” vertically.

We are looking ahead to the death of the toyota truck and thinking maybe a minivan. Anybody have one they love? Why?

It has been grey and dreary around here. Here’s the view from the front,

This is in the process of being re-sided, seen here a year or two ago. We call it the giant bird bath because it nearly always has water on it… at least until it has ice and then snow.

The only things on the needles right now are two sweaters for dh… I think I’m going to start the Montego Bay scarf. I need something relatively mindless… and having the silk through my fingers is nothing to complain about!

(couple of co-workers…)

We came onto this boardwalk from the other end…

… where there was no signage. So does that mean we have an excuse?

I am glad for a lifeline in lace work here… But I’m finding that on the row just above it I generally screw something up and don’t see it until I get up a couple more rows. Am working on the finishing rows now and hope to block it out this weekend… will post link into ravelry when I do.