It’s Still Wednesday …

Since the cottage was going to be empty for more than a few days between my departure today and when the next human arrives, I had lots of little stuff to take care of today and ran out of time to blog. But I have authentic “as I started this Wednesday” footage of my knitting, so here you go.

My Manos möbius is excruciatingly close to finished. I’d say 60-65% of the attached I-cord bind-off is finished. But take a look at the bottom edge of the möbius in this picture:


Yeah. I’m out of yarn. Thankfully, the generous and talented CelticQueen has some of this very same yarn and is going to let me mooch what I need. Thanks, birthday girl! (her b-day is Thursday)

In other news, the Musique socks are getting some knitting time


Sock #2 is nearly to the point where I’ll begin arch increases. Yay!

I did manage to wedge a 90-minute walk into my day, and once again the pickings were pretty darn good. As cruddy as the weather was this week, it’s tempting to stay because there was so much good glass to find on the beach. Even with the Lake pretty high today, I still got some really good stuff


Some of the cooler pieces, quarter for scale

Yes, that's a badly-focused neck of a bottle. Probably a Coke bottle. Cool!

So that’s it for 2010 at Van Buren Point. Here’s hoping I get more time up there next year.

Miscellaneous

Several of you have asked what I do with all of that beach glass. Well, I don’t have a particularly good answer for you. I find a shockingly small number of pieces that I’d like to have drilled (or wire-wrapped) for necklaces, but for the most part? No plans.

Honestly, the big lure is twofold: It’s neat/unique to the Lake, and it makes a 2-1/2 hour, six-mile walk go by in the blink of an eye.

Meanwhile, here’s my solution for now. I found a bunch of these large mason-type jars at Ikea last year. I have two that are full and three empty ones. Next time I’m in that neighborhood, I may see if I can pick up a few more. Cheap and highly functional.


Ooh, I didn’t put anything in that picture fore perspective. Oops. The jars are 8.5” high and have a 16” circumference, so they hold a pretty good quantity of glass.

In other news the Hubster gets a gigantic gold star for wearing his thinking cap while we were on vacation. At the end of our tour of the Darwin Martin house, they finish in the gift shop (much like every single ride at Disney). We both poked around for a bit before the Hubster called me over to take a look at something he’d found. A new floor mat!

We had talked about getting a new front door mat once all the stonework was finished. Neither one of us was a big fan of the one we had inherited (sorry, Mom!), plus it was beginning to fall apart and was molting all over our entryway.

On top of that, indoor/outdoor mats are obscenely expensive! At least the ones I had looked at and liked were more than I was willing to pay. But this one? That’s styled after Frank Lloyd Wright’s art glass? Very reasonably priced. I love it.


Gotta be efficient on Wednesday. I’ll try to WiP Wednesday you straight out of the gate, then I need to work efficiently in the morning. I have Barenaked Ladies tickets for Wednesday night in Cleveland, and I’m going with a friend I haven’t seen in about a dozen years. Can. Not. Wait.

Back in the ‘Burgh

We’re home from vacation. Things got a little busy the last few days, so I’ll get you all caught up from the end of our vacation.

The Lake was pretty high on Thursday, so the walk was shorter and there wasn’t a whole lot of beach glass. But that’s OK! Because it means that there WILL be lots of glass the following day!


Friday proved that theory true. Walked to the State Park again and got a ton of glass!


And a close-up of some of the cooler pieces from that day’s walk, including a chunk of Coke bottle and most of the bottom of a bottle.


That night, we had the first good sunset of the entire trip. Hooray! Here’s a mosaic of some of the ridiculous number of photos I took that night. Click through to Flickr to embiggen!

1. 0806sunsetA.jpg, 2. 0806sunsetB.jpg, 3. 0806sunsetC.jpg, 4. 0806sunsetD.jpg, 5. 0806sunsetE.jpg, 6. 0806sunsetF.jpg, 7. 0806sunsetG.jpg, 8. 0806sunsetH.jpg, 9. 0806sunsetI.jpg

The Lake was actually pretty high again during Friday’s sunset, so there was another bonanza on the beach on Saturday morning. Yay!


The big party was Saturday night and I was busy chatting when it was time for sunset, but I grabbed my camera in time for a couple shots as the sun peeked through the clouds one last time.


This won't be my last trip this summer, but I don't know when I'm going back up. We shall see!

Many Photos, Few Words

It’s late and I have a packed day tomorrow, so I’ll make this as quick as I can so I can go hit the hay.

Woke up this morning and took a walk. Same distance covered in half an hour less than normal. I only picked up the “really good” pieces of glass today, one in particular kind of blew me away. Whole haul:



As (I hope) you can see, there’s one gigantic piece of glass there next to the battery. But you can’t really tell what’s going on with that piece until you see it up close a little better



That blue piece is larger than normal and I got a few more good ones, but yeah. Let’s talk about that monster just above the battery.



It just dwarfs the battery



Bigger in every way. I was just shocked when I saw that piece on the beach.

I snapped a few WiP Wednesday photos



I cranked on the sister in law socks on Saturday. Almost done with Sock #1!

And I’m still Mondo-ing along



I’m on my fourth ball of yarn and it’s a pretty simple knit at this point.

Snapped a few final photos of the Lake and I was out of there.





So that’s it. I have a gazillion things on my to-do list for Thursday, so I’d best hit the sack.

Sayonara

My last full day at the Lake in 2009 is complete. Well, it’s a little past complete. I’m up past my (self-imposed) bedtime and have a very full day that will start early (for me) Wednesday morning.

So how did I spend my final day in paradise?

Woke up at a semi-reasonable hour. Took a two-hour walk on the beach. Located a pretty impressive quantity of glass:



It has been the easiest thing in the world to walk out the door for a two-hour walk when I know I can pick up beach glass over those 5,000+ steps (I wore my pedometer today). Here’s hoping I can keep up a somewhat similar quantity of exercise when I get back to Pittsburgh. Working out daily is going to be my job. Right? Right!

After returning from my walk, I scrounged a bit of lunch, started some laundry and went to the beach for nearly two hours to read trashy novels and listen to the waves. We had a cold-and-dark snap this afternoon, then I took a mini-walk on the beach at sunset.



Wasn’t much of a sunset …



That first shot (above) is about 20-25 minutes before the sun actually set, but was the closest thing to a sunset that we had this evening.



And I was reminded that I never made it out on the kayaks this summer. Then again, I wasn’t here all that much.



Once it started getting too dark to be on the beach, I ambled on down the beach to visit my dear friends the Blackburns for the final time this summer. I spent about an hour with them before heading home to putter around and mentally prepare to scram tomorrow following my morning beach walk.

I hope I haven’t bored all of you to tears with my pictures of glass and sunsets. We’ll get back to the regular blog fodder shortly.

Love and Hate

I have a day and a half left at the Lake for 2009. I was in Pittsburgh on Saturday and came back up here that night.

Sunday was a perfect beach glass day.



Notice I’ve switched my “for scale” object in the photos. That’s because of the one piece of glass just to the right of my phone. It is the largest piece of beach glass I’ve ever seen, by far. Let’s have a closer look…



Yeah, the other pieces closest to my phone aren’t too shabby either. The one directly above is probably close to an inch thick. Oh! And I also found my first-ever marble that same day. See?



Today was another good day. Here’s my haul from my “primary” walk, around lunchtime today:



Not too shabby, I’d say! The half-round just to the left of my phone is a really nice piece I found at the tail end of my walk



So that covers the “love.” What’s the hate?



Bugs. Well, Ladybugs. I don’t know anything about the life cycle of this insect, but the beach has just been infested this week. There are long stretches where it’s impossible to walk without stepping on the damn things. And when they land on you they stick. Yuck. Yeah, I know there are all sorts of cute Ladybug stories and there’s something about letting the bugs stay on you and make a wish or some crap like that? I’m over it. They’re gross.

We had a decent sunset tonight






And on my way back up to the house, I ran into a couple I’ve been noticing all summer. Why have they stood out so clearly? Because of this guy:



Meet Sam. He’s a very large very old dog whose hind end doesn’t work so well anymore. So this is how he goes on his walks.

Cute, huh?

Cue the Elevator Music

Just a quick update here at the World’s Most Boring Blog ™. Six days of employment left on the books. Still job hunting. Ugh.

Roof guy is coming Monday morning at 7 am (yikes!) to fix the gutters. I’m quite psyched about that. Aside from the early wake-up call, of course.

I was going to take yarn pictures and Ravelry sweater-stashes pictures today, but it was rainy and overcast all day, which makes for crappy pictures. So I turfed that to later in the week. School starts here tomorrow for all the neighborhood kidlets. Nothing else exciting to report.

For those of you who asked what I was going to do with my beach glass from this summer:



WeirdyPants suggested I take a look at Ikea for a glass container. Perfect suggestion! This one is full, but I have a second empty one. May have to sneak back over there to get a couple more for future beach glass.

In other news, we had a family of deer wander into our yard and (primarily) the neighbor’s yard earlier this week



Sydney was not outside, or those deer wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the neighbor’s yard. We have "wilderness" immediately behind our house, so deer are pretty common 'round these parts.

Still trying to psych myself up to cast on the second SmurfKiller sock. Nothing else to report here. Less sewing that I’d like. Perhaps the sewing time will increase drastically once I’m unemployed? One can only hope.

Vacation Wrap-Up

Well, I have another full week of vacation that I’m enjoying … although I’m working a full day at the LYS tomorrow (Wednesday) … but we came home from the Lake on Sunday so the Hubster could go back to work yesterday.

Had a great beach glass day on Thursday morning

Good variety of glass, and a large quantity. But the kicker on Thursday was this:


That blue thing, to the left of the “for-scale” battery, is the largest piece of cobalt glass I have ever found in 30 years. I’m still a little bit in awe.

That night, we had a rather boring sunset

But I was easily distracted thanks to Georgia

She’s a lab-mix rescue who was on the beach with her humans. She’s named Georgia since that’s where she came from!

On Friday, I took a brief speed-walk on the beach and came up with this:


What’s not pictured are the two largest pieces of red glass that I’ve ever seen. My sister in law mentioned red glass at dinner that night, and when I went out for my walk, there were TWO big pieces of red. I hadn’t found a piece of red bigger than the nail on your pinky toe all summer. And in one walk? To find two the size of your thumb? Day-um.

Saturday and Sunday had lousy weather. Rainy and cooler. But I didn’t care. I parked here



In that front blue chair, and read books. All day. It was awesome.

There were other adventures, but those pictures are on my other camera. So I’ll blog them on another day.