Summer Olympics

July I spent knitting baby hats for Hats For Alex. They are draped over my herb garden planted the same day I cast on the first hat. Both crops are doing well. The Watch Cap in back is nestled in thyme. The two hats in the middle are supported by catnip and sage growing in the same pot. The large hat is smothering the Marjoram. My favorite hat with the ribbing and rolled brim is on the Greek Oregano, the empty spot left by the Golden Oregano clearly shows. It drowned in all the rain we had this summer. Finally the hat in the right corner is supported by rosemary. I could send them in now but I hope to knit a few pink hats. They would look nice with the basil plants.

My first tomato of the summer. I hope it ripens before first frost.


My summer and winter squash are growing fast. Three weeks ago they were mostly dead plants being sold a quarter a six pack. Or I should say a quarter a two pack. That mostly dead thing.

I have been gathering yarn for the Summer Olympics on Ravelry. I'm using stash yarn with the goal of knitting 5 baby sweaters. At first 5 seemed like a hard but completely doable amount. 17 days, 5 sweaters, if I knit a sweater every 3 days then i could take 2 day off. Easy Peasy.

In fact maybe too easy. Maybe I would have all five finished by Monday. What then? So I pulled out all of my stash yarn odds and ends. In that box there is enough to knit at least 10 baby sweaters.
However, on Ravlery all entries have to be filled out in advance. I stuck with five. A sweater every three days with two days off. It better to have a realistic plan. Even if it's large enough to make everyone I've told gasp. It is the Olympics.

2 months 1 week and 3 days...

...is how long there between yarn sales at my LYS and the number of days I can go without buying yarn. However, it seems that I am a sucker for 30% off yarn. Or I should say any % off yarn but 30% and more just makes my day.

Good Books

This was stolen from Needlefingers :
Apparently, the National Endowment for the Arts believes that the average American has read only 6 of the books on the list below
.1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE (mine would be in red)
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Yes, the whole thing front to back. It's very long and very shocking)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (perhaps the worst book ever)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (are you kidding? He wrote 35 plays. I have read 19 and his sonnets and I am so counting it)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (I wrote a most awesome 10 page paper about the color of underpants, and my only A+ ever)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (The funniest book I have ever "read" love books on tape, I'm still counting it)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (I read it in french, the second worst book I had to read for scool. Go look at the top for the first)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So, I have read 39. I think that proves I'm over educated. Many I read for school in The Novel, American Lit, The Short Story, Shakespeare 350, Lit For Adolescence, and Modern Utopian Lit(the best class ever, I mean ever). I graduated before I ever got to Medieval and Renaissance, Great Books, Fable and Fantasy, Women and Science Fiction and missing those classes still makes me sad 8 years later. So why did I take all those classes? Because Art classes are hard. Very very hard. Lit classes are easy and fun. I took one lit class a semester to keep my brain from exploding. You, genteel reader, can tell from my blog that I did not take any writing classes.

But while I no longer get to explore book thoroughly in a class room setting. I read the book strait through the day it was assigned, I read it chapter by chapter with the class for discussion, and then I read it again before the test. Yes, I have to read it 3 times to get it since my LD gets in the way. Yes, reading 5 to 10 books a semester 3 times each is still easer than art classes.

Anyway, while I no longer get to know books that well I still read and I still read a book at least twice to know what happened. But best of all I have discovered books on tape. I can knit and listen. Also while listening I retain it better so I don't need a do over. And I knit. That can't be stressed enough. Knitting. While. Listening. Knitting. mmmmm Knitting and books.

PS. it chaps my hide that Mark Twain isn't on the list.

PPS. After all that talk about reading them for school I went and counted. I read 26 of them for my own pleasure.

A Dirty Bathroom Mirror and Some Sweater Love

Shutter bug

Next time I should clean the mirror...

And crop the photos better...

But my oh my, look at that sweater...

It was a about a year ago I counted up my sweaters and realized I was unhappy with my success rate. That hard look about overlooking things that were just sort of good enough has made a huge difference in my knitting. Since then I have knitted my best sweaters and this is one of them.

Stripes Go Round from IK summer 2004, size small.

Knit in SWTC bamboo, no that yarn won't knit to the pattern gauge but that's ok I did the math.

Size 3 needles for the body and size 2 for the yoke to tighten the row gauge.
Knit the pattern as written but kept going at the yoke for a few more inches and added 2 more decreas rows to raise the neck.

I love everything about the yarn. I love the waxy feeling, the crisp hand, the drape, and how it softens with washing.

I love everything about the sweater. I love the 4 inches of negative ease, the way the stripes curve around my neck, the way the body hangs.

I wash it as soon as I take it off just so I can wear it again.

The trip home

The rest of the trip by popular demand. Cool that anybody is reading this.



So after leaving the Grand Canyon we drove until mid-afternoon and stopped at a volcano. The hike up was all lava.

Our little shutterbug in a lava cave.

The oldest tree in the NM growing out of the lava.

Looking into the crater.

And if the volcano wasn't enough there was also an ice cave. Yes, in this cave it stays cold enough that the pond in the bottom never melts. In fact every year the ice gets deeper. It felt good in there after all the hiking. Like stepping into a freezer. The only photo that turned out doesn't show the ice, only us, but what a handsome group.


Even an hour later, along the side of the road, we could see lava spewed by the volcano and it's brothers.
The next day and last day was all driving. However in the late morning we needed a pit stop and took a chance on a billboard add and stopped at the Dinosaur Museum. What a lucky break for us.

As pretty as the southwest is...

There is no place like home.

So very green. I love it.

Sunrise

We were to leave the Grand Canyon right after breakfast and while I had hiked the rim the day before I still hadn't walked more than a few feet down. So when I woke up I slid out of bed, grabbed my camera and took off. I would like to say I made it down a mile but I'm sure it was only half a mile or a little less but I had the place to myself. The only people on the trail were almost at the bottom, they must have started hiking in the dark. I stayed out there taking photos of the sunrise and only turned back after I was passed by the 3rd group of people. It was starting to get crouded, time to get back and load the van.

Photos of the sunrise.

Don't hit the deer.

It's been a year...

since I started the food stamp challenge. It's 2 days short of the year and I have 2 weeks of food in the kitchen but I'm ready to go back to the store so last night I pulled up all my receipts for the year and added it up. $1309.74 or $25.47 a week. I didn't make it. Although, I was really close and I could have made it with more work. More on that later.

I did just fine until thanksgiving. I even hosted a few fancy meals for friends and had a people stay over a few times and fed them all just on my food money. But at Thanksgiving I had a set back when the urge to cook the whole thanksgiving diner for myself took over. Buying the 3 turkeys and all the fixings cost almost $300. At that point I thought I had blown it for 3 days of fun times and extra tasty food. However, that food lasted me well into March and it turned out I was ahead in the game.

But this was a hard semester with long hours and the last 3 months of it I pretty much lived off of granola bars, string cheese, and dark chocolate peanut m&ms. That diet completely wreaked my monetary goal and my eating healthy goal too. The last 3 months ruined the whole year.

Now that school is over and I’m eating again it’s harder to meet my goal this spring with the price increases we have seen. It’s also really stretching it now that I have cut wheat 100% from my diet. No more ramen for me, so special food needs makes it more difficult too. Although I was still able to do a little specialty shopping at Whole Foods the coolest grocery store with the highest prices around so it’s not impossible. And now that I know Hy Vee caters to the wheat free cook I think I can get the same ingredients for less.

So is $21 still doable? Yes, but only if I really watch it and have time to cook, and only if I eat real food and not junk, and only if the real food is frozen not fresh. It’s easer if I do fewer and larger shopping trips once a month or once every other month and then just do with out a favorite food, or even a perceived necessary food until the calendar says it’s time to go back. So while it’s doable, $30 a week is more realistic for me.

Hmmm

I haven't forgotten but I'm still having problems. Is my photo account full? Is Blogger having a few down days? Did they just rearrange stuff on me? I don't know and I can't tell. I'm getting a head aches so I am backing slowly away from the computer.

Photos, Photos, Who's Got the Photos?

Blog won't upload photos today.

At The Canyon

Day 3 we woke up at the canyon and we spent a quiet day. The morning was driving around the lower part of the rim stopping and looking. The place is just huge.

playing with my zoom lense

After a lunch at the Laundromat we all went our separate ways. Some took a nap at the cabin, some a bus trip to look at more sites. I walked the rim. The day was cool and sunny, the walk a easy hike, and the view stunning. The people along the way happy and friendly and surprisingly mostly foreign. I had no idea that it was such a destination for people from France, Germany, Japan, Norway, Australia, and those were the just accents I recognize or people I talked to. There were many more I couldn't place. The best part was at the end of the hike. I hopped the free bus to ride back to the cabins. Hikes are the most fun walking only one way.

That night we played cards in the cafeteria and went to a talk on the history of the road we had traveled earlier in the day.

There is so much of the trip that I don't have photos of that are important too. Seeing the mule train and the chipmunk with Brandon as the sun was rising. Watching the condor glide below us. The crisp thin air, the dust, the smell of the trees, and being so dry that my skin hurt. Running in the dark to the late night lecture about condors that wasn't about condors at all. And just hanging out in one of the most breath taking places on earth.

Day 2

The next day was less driving and more doing so no knitting on day 2 of the trip but lots of photos.

The Painted Desert is stunningly beautiful.

Newspaper Rock

Bad Lands



Petrified Forest

The day ended pulling into the Grand Canyon

Summer Vacation

While I'm back now, I'm going to post one day at a time to keep the photos in check. This was a great vacations for photos and I did a little knitting too. The first day was all driving. We got up at 4am and drove until a late bed time.

There was a stop 5 hours in for some Kansas history

The rest of the day was spent counting trains.

and water towers, grain elevators, and windmills, but I don't have photos of them. I wish I had thought of getting a snap of the wind farms we past.

I knit a One Skein Wonder for the trip. I knit the first 3/4 over 2 days a week before leaving thinking I could finish the last 1/4 over the next 5 days and have it done in time to pack. Nope, I still had the last 1/6 to knit in the car. I finished it at the Grand Canyon and wore it, but sadly it looks stupid in those photos. This is a knit that only looks cute posing in the mirror. It looks so cute posing in the mirror that I will wear it again even thought I have proof that it doesn't look cute out and about. In fact, it looks down right weird in the photos.

The yarn is a cotton/rayon blend I bought for weaving years and years ago. I used a size 2 needle, cast on the smallest size and knit until it was big enough. The swatch skewed so the back is in seed stitch to stabilize the yarn. I have hopes that the skewing on the arms won't matter. After half a day wearing it stretched out of shape and I'm going to wash and dry it to shrink it up a bit.

I'm digging the bells sleeves. I made it by not decreasing the arms and adding 2 stitches after the elbow. I had no idea that 2 stitches would be all I needed at such a fine gauge. I also made the sleeves 3/4 in length because I hate how bell sleeves drag in food at the table. They are the best part of the shrug.

What a trip