WiP Wed…Thursday

I swear, I took these pictures yesterday and just didn’t get around to writing the blog post.

There has been a good chunk of knitting on the Swirl. Aside from having one knot in each skein (so far) of Rustic, I’ve been happy with the knit so far. Fortunately, Rustic is a quick and easy spit-splice.


When I took this picture, I was on Welt #10. Now I’m about to start #13. Here’s a slight zoom on Wednesday’s progress.


I’ve also had a good sized sewing project percolating this week. It’s fun, and now I need to sit down and start sewing. Zoom.

(Yes. The fabric is a little bit blurred. Yay Photoshop.)

One final note. Four years ago today, this happened. Hugh is coaching the U.S. Women’s volleyball team this quad. Earlier today, they won their semifinal to advance to the gold medal match. I hope they bring home gold.

Holiday Spirit

I’m freaking out a little bit about the holidays. It’s not the knitting, it’s an in-trade quilting gig. I’ll get it done. I just need to buckle down.

In other news, I’m knitting a pair of gift Knucks.

Pardon the crappy indoor photo. It was a busy day today.

The replacement scarf is finished and in the hands of the USPS with its cohorts.

The tree is decorated and I got a wreath I really liked today (no picture. It went up after dark.) But here’s the tree!


And here’s a picture of one of my favorite ornaments. Way back when we first moved to Pittsburgh, I blogged about our scantily clad Christmas tree (we were low on ornaments. We've been picking up ones we really like slowly, as we find them). A dear friend from my Bruin Softball days took it upon herself to purchase a UCLA tree ornament and send it to us. Makes me smile when I think of all the friends I made during my eight years in Bruin-land.


That’s about it from here. I’ll try to keep the finished scarf blogging going. I have two more to show you!

Rufus

I have a finished project to show you, but I’m just not in the mood to write that post today. Why? I’ll tell you.

As my friend Jenn and her husband, “The MWP,” concluded their vacation last week, they both posted Facebook status updates that their WonderDog, Rufus, wasn’t feeling great.

You can read the rest here. And here. Go ahead. I'll wait.

I started reading Jenn's Weirdy Pants blog before I moved back to Pittsburgh, and Jenn is a fellow Hurricane Knitter – a group of (nearly all of) my closest friends in the ‘Burgh. She’s the friend who joined me for the “big adventure” in Youngstown last May.

Shortly after I started working at Bloomin’ Yarns, Jenn came out to the store (the old one, in the cute house with terrible parking and access), which was nice. What was awesome was that she brought Rufus and I was able to finally meet him! Despite being a very large dog, it was instantly obvious that Rufus understood his size and was cool with anyone who was willing to scratch the brown spot on his butt.

When I woke up on the morning of August 9, 2008, to the news that dear friends had been critically wounded in Beijing, I was scheduled to pick up Jenn to go to SJ’s house for a Hurricane Knitters day.

I was (very, very) late. Jenn understood. And she encouraged being even later than we already were, because she invited me inside so I could get some dog time. Rufus knew something was wrong, and he was happy to sit with me and let me enjoy having a (rented) dog to love for a few minutes.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Rufus is a special dog. Jenn has great stories and pictures about him here on her blog. I am hoping that radiation kicks that tumor’s ass and that Jenn and the MWP get as much quality time with Rufus as they possibly can.

Feel better, Roo! We’re all cheering for you!

Busy Busy Busy!

Hi! I’ve been doing my best not to melt in triple-digit temperatures in Oklahoma City. I really love attending this event, but I wouldn’t recommend spending 7-10 days almost entirely outside in Oklahoma in June. It is HOT!


Roaming Tigger and I have been really busy. We started out on Tuesday night at an event at Frontier City. ‘Burghers, you can think of Kennywood, just about 1/3 the size and with a western theme.


When you lend your camera to a friend, you never know for sure what you’re going to get back


And even when they’re a little bit silly (see above), It’s always good to see friends you haven’t hugged in a while.



I’ve been blogging my little heart out, and had the opportunity to write on Coach Wooden yesterday. Here’s that link.

I’ll try to post a little bit here and there between now and when I get home, but no promises.

Maryland Sheep & Wool

Sorry it has taken me a week to get around to telling you about Maryland. It has honestly taken this long for me to get caught up on my life after two straight weekends away from home! Yes, I got yarn, but I’ll dole that out in chunks as Fridays roll around. I promise I’ll even advance-post YPFs for when I’m in Oklahoma at the start of next month!

Tigger mostly hid in my bag trying to stay cool It wasn’t easy! But he did want to prove he came along, so here’s a picture of RT with some sheep

Baaaaa!!

Meanwhile, I did make a few non-yarn purchases and met some excellent people!

I started off the day running into Trillian42 (Pam) and Turtlegirl76 (Cristi) almost immediately and in almost exactly the same spot where I met up with them in the main barn last year. No, it wasn’t planned, but who am I to argue with fate?

After a few hours of walking around with them, I needed to find the one other contingent that I absolutely needed to find before it was time to leave the fairgrounds for the day to get lunch with my mom and aunt.

I still Plurk just about daily, and two of the crazies I enjoy the most came down from the NYC area for the festival!

HolyKnitballs (Sharon), Sairy (Sarah) and me

Sharon and Sairy were quite hilarious to cruise with while walking around the festival. I’m so glad I made sure to meet then and get to know them a little bit IRL when I had the chance. Maybe next year, Zarzuela will be able to come down with them!

As I’m quite certain you’ve heard from just about everyone who attended the festival, it was quite warm the entire weekend. Around 1 p.m., I checked in with my mom and aunt and we decided we’d scram and find a place to eat lunch in air conditioning. And then visit a few quilt shops. So I took my Plurk Peeps and headed off to find my first set of running buddies from the day.

Turtlegirl76 (Cristi) and me

I was not in “NEED PICTURES NAO” mode when I found Pam and Cristi (and their friend whose name I can NOT remember) in the morning. And if you go over to Cristi’s post about MDSW, you’ll notice that a goodly number of her people pictures are from that top-of-the-hill spot near Brooks Farm. I’d guess they were all taken within 10 minutes of the above picture of me with Cristi.

So yes, I hung out with Pam and her awesome hat (I’ll get back to that). I saw RosiG and met Bezzie (YAY!) but it was hotter than Hades and nobody was really in picture-wrangling mode, so I got the above picture and then left to go cool off, knowing that I’d be back the next day.

Yes, I bought some fabric on the trip. Hell, I bought fabric before we left the state of Pennsylvania, since we stopped by Sew Much Fun in McMurray because they were having a sale! After leaving the fairgrounds on Saturday, we trooped over to Mount Airy, Md., to visit a really good quilt store over there and I got a little batik. But fabric pictures are boring, so you’ll just have to trust me.

Aside from the STR that Celtic Queen picked up for me on Saturday, I actually didn’t buy anything at the show the first day. I figured there was nothing I really needed, so I’d just pick stuff up on Sunday. That plan turned out just fine.

I had been a good girl and applied plenty of sunscreen before heading into the fairgrounds on Saturday, so my winter-pasty-white arms and legs emerged unscathed from my hours on (what felt like) the surface of the sun. My face, however, was not so fortunate. I had been with Cristi and Pam when Pam bought her kick-ass hat (third picture down HERE). Since my aunt Suzie is a hat expert, I took her and my mom up to the Australian Shop tent first thing on Sunday morning and took a cue from Pam:


I love my hat and I wore it all day on Sunday to rave reviews. Until I got home and the Hubster asked me where my knife was and called me Crocodile Dundee. Oh well. He’s just jealous!

After years of listening to KnitNat rave about the honey that she purchases at the festival every year, I checked out the booth for The Bee Folks. Holy customer service! They give you a tiny spoon and let you taste every single honey they had in stock while telling you what that particular honey would be best used for, answered every question anyone could think of and made recommendations when asked. I came away with a jar of Wildflower honey (since that was the one I liked the best) and a bag of their lemon-honey candy. YUM!


I took my purchases out to the car and executed my planned meet-up with Makinika (aka “The Knitting Lady”) and KatieBell, who I had actually met on my very first trip to MDSW! A picture was taken, but not on my camera. You’ll just have to take my word for it. We left the fairgrounds around 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, hot and happy, having enjoyed another festival weekend.

Oh, and Derf wants you to know what his normal headwear is at the moment

Let’s Go Pens!

Three Irish Girls

First of all, if there’s ever a ginormous knitting event with a marketplace that you can’t attend but Cristi is going?

Send her money and tell her to find something she thinks you’ll like. Trust me.

Last week, you saw the Socks that Rock mill end she found for me. But I did get one additional skein of yarn out of the bargain.



If you hadn’t heard of Three Irish Girls before this summer, you may have noticed that the kicked all ass in the Dye for Glory contest, where they won four of the 12 categories. That’s 33% of the winners from just one entity. Impressive.



I was at the Lake during Sock Summit. When I’m up there, I generally leave my phone plugged in upstairs and the signal in the house isn’t always the greatest. On Friday, I think, I grabbed my phone after dinner and noticed I had a “which one” photo from Cristi. It had been quite a while since she sent the photo, but I replied and said “the dark one on the left”



She replied shortly thereafter with something along the lines of “Good! That’s the one I picked!”



Like I said. She has good taste. It’s a beautiful, soft skein of yarn and I’ll have to find something special to knit with it!

Thanks again SuperSherpa. You get an A+ on “stuff” choices and shipping skills. Mwah!

SuperSherpa to the Rescue!

We all know I enjoy knitting socks. And that I want to be Cat Bordhi when I grow up. But in one of the few “boy, that was the right decision!” moments of the Craptastic Summer of Suck™ just a few short days before registration opened, I decided that I was better off staying home this summer rather than trooping to Portland, Ore., for Sock Summit.

Holy crap, was that ever the right decision!

Anyhoo, I “knew” a number of knitters who made the trip to Portland, or were fortunate enough to already live there.

The Sock Summit store was open for orders from anyone, but your goods had to be picked up in person. There was only one person I could possibly ask to Sherpa for me (translation: pick up my SS swag and ship it back to Pittsburgh). A Turtle!

Cristi picked up my swag first thing. I got a text message confirming receipt on arrival day! I’m assuming it was a trouble-free transaction. If it wasn’t, she never let on.



I ordered a hooded sweatshirt, logo buttons in both sizes and a clip-light. Hoodies are my favorite and I have a “thing” for buttons.

I sent Cristi money for postage with a little extra to see if she could find some stuff in the marketplace that I might like. And to get something for herself as a "handling fee." Of course, she found some amazing stuff in the marketplace



We’ll meet that yarn in a future Yarn Pr0n Friday post (this week? Maybe if I write it tonight …) but in the middle there is a nifty Sock Summit notebook. Lined on the top half of the page with graph paper on the bottom.

So YAY for internet friends and YAY for getting a little tiny taste of Sock Summit. Even though I wasn’t able to attend.

And a very big thank-you to Cristi. I'm lucky to have friends who (have great taste and) help to enable my sock yarn habit.

Sheep. Wool. People.

It’s been a week, and I’m just getting together the energy to blog about my trip to the 2009 Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival. Pathetic.

But, the website for my fabulous job was down from noon Friday until noon on Monday last weekend, resulting in about 300 emails coming through all at the same time. All-America nominations for my division closed on Wednesday and my phone was ringing off the hook. It was a completely miserable week of work.

I’ll get back to blogging more regularly very soon. I miss it and I miss all of you guys!

Meanwhile, my mom, my aunt and I drove down to Maryland last Friday and went to the Festival on Saturday. I almost immediately ran into the group of people I most wanted to find. If you read Turtlegirl’s blog, you already know the amazing group of women she hung out with last weekend. Shortly after meeting up with all of them, I met Javajem …

Cristi (Turtlegirl76), Pam (Trillian42), yours truly, Jody (Javajem). Photo borrowed with permission, since I had major Camnesia all day.

And, this year, I made sure I got my picture taken with my favorite Turtle

Again, stolen with permission. Isn't Cristi's sweater awesome?

I spent the rest of the day wandering around, meeting up with mom and Suzie on occasion and basically enjoying the day.

The one and only time I busted out my camera was just before I met up with the aforementioned bloggers. Roaming Tigger takes requests, especially from dyers we really like. So just for Roxanne …


And, in case you can’t figure out what dyer that might be, here’s where you can see her labels a little better below.

Tigger likes pretty yarn!

I hardly bought any yarn, but did buy a decent amount of non-yarn stuff, so here’s a photo of all the loot


One skein of Autumn House Farm sock yarn, two STR-M mill ends, a Blue Moon Fiber Arts Twisted Rare Gem, a lucet, a nostepinne (both rosewood), a pair of mittens made from recycled felted sweater and fleece-lined, the paper bag is soap, there’s a festival tote bag on the right, a set of Signature Needles DPNs (2.5mm, 5”) and it’s all lying on the sheepskin I brought home to keep my feet from becoming blocks of ice next winter.

Our TV room is right above our garage, so my feet get really cold really fast on the floor in this room during the winter. We have at least one more winter in this room before we start moving things around on this floor, so I figured that purchase was worth it.

I also got some Hiya Hiya sock needles, in pairs of 16” circs, but I forgot to put those in the picture and they aren’t very exciting anyway.

I’ll try to come back and blog a little more about some of the non-yarny bits soon. Here’s hoping I can throw up another post tomorrow!

How to Mail a Hug

Every so often, the topic of who is “knit-worthy” or in general terms worthy of a hand-made gift comes up on Ravelry. I had always thought that my best strategy for figuring out who was “worthy” was to give a low-investment gift (meaning something I’m not emotionally invested in making, much like the two Jaywalker Scarfs I gifted a year ago).

You give the zero-baggage gift to a person. If they react positively (as in the case of those scarfs), then they’re worthy of future handmade gifts. If they brush it off, then No Soup For You! And they’re off of the list.

That’s it. Two categories. Nice and clean. Then, in August, I discovered a third category. Something you are compelled to knit for someone. You have a consuming emotional need to DO something.

As many of you remember, on the first day of the Olympic Games, a family that I respect, admire and care for deeply suffered an unspeakable tragedy.

There was nothing I could do from here. I hope desperately that the two interviews I conducted on August 9 were well-received by the family. Telling the world how wonderful Todd and Barb and their family are was quite literally the only thing that I could do.

As the days and weeks went by, it became obvious to me that I needed to do something else for this family.

So I started to knit.

The family’s company color is purple.

I needed something functional that wasn’t size specific. Here’s what I came up with.






I listened to the sage advice of Turtlegirl and weighed the first of my three skeins. Completed the increase section and weighed again. I made note of how much yarn I needed for the increase section (in weight) and when I had that much left on my last skein, it was time to decrease. So I did. And I didn’t have much left

The finished project was mailed to Minnesota just before I left for the Lake for that last stay at the end of September. I haven’t gotten any kind of confirmation that it arrived, but that’s OK. It was made with love and I hope it brings some comfort.

A Hug for Barb

Pattern: Clapotis by Kate Gilbert from Knitty.com, Fall 2004
Yarn: Dream in Color Classy
Color: Visual Purple
Source: Bloomin Yarns
Needles: KnitPicks Options US 10
Started: 23 August 2008
Finished: 10 September 2008
Mods: Knit until I ran out of yarn, with love.

M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I

Yep, that’s where I’ve spent the week.

I flew to Memphis on Tuesday morning and then drove down to Oxford, where I met up with the best friend. I did a few hours of work from his office on Tuesday while he finished his day’s work.

After we headed out and had a bit of dinner, we headed down to his house, where I had an incredibly fun evening just hanging out with Bill and his dogs.

Oh yeah, the dogs! They didn’t do very well at staying still long enough for a photo, but here’s the best one I got of the little stinkers

Jackson on the left, Peggy on the right

They’re both great dogs and Peggy is a trip. She’s a great puppy and is gonna be a great dog when she grows out of the “everything-goes-in-my-mouth’ stage ;-)

After a morning working in Bill’s office on Wednesday, we did lunch in Oxford then I sucked it up and drove southeast to Starkville, where my “home office” is located. Not fun. The leaving, that is. I never get enough time in the same zip code as Bill and it’s always hard to say goodbye, even though I know we’ll be chatting online again in just a few hours.

Anyhoo, the hotel in Starkville is perfectly nice. Nothing flashy, but that’s fine. It does have one rather unique feature that I have completely fallen in love with

RT likes it too!

It has a window seat! Yeah, it’s designed to camouflage the air conditioning unit, but let me tell you, that thing is comfortable!!! I spent a few hours sitting there last night and am typing to you from that exact spot right this minute. The view isn’t the best, but you can’t have it all, I guess.

Today was pretty much an entire day of sitting at a conference table with all of my co-workers. I feel slightly hopeful about the next few months of ye olde jobbity job, so keep those fingers crossed.

A full morning of meetings is coming down the pipe tomorrow (Friday), then it’s a 3-hour drive to Memphis and a pair of flights back to the ‘Burgh, landing around midnight. I look forward to getting home, I just wish someone would figure out that teleportation thing. Someday …

Beach Day

After a fairly crappy Saturday, today was a nearly perfect day here at the Lake.

I was up early to see my parent off on their vacation to Nova Scotia. I sat on the front porch and read my favorite brain candy for two hours, reading a book start to finish.

Then I wandered down the street to visit six of my favorite humans. I know I’ve mentioned the Blackburns before several times. They’re truly wonderful people. Without even trying, I received and accepted a dinner invitation. A far superior choice to running into town to get dinner to eat alone, which was my original plan.

After coming home and having leftover ribs …

Oh yeah. We had the VBP RibFest last night. Winning the ribs contest is like playing hot potato. It means you have to host next year and nobody wants to do that. Here’s the passing of the crown …


Tony, on the right, is the two-year champion. We didn’t have a RibFest last year since his mother was extremely ill. Dan, on the left, is our new champion. He has won previously.

And we had a cool sunset

Saturday’s Sunset

… So back to today. After having rib leftovers for lunch, I went down to the beach. Today was an almost perfect beach day. It was too hot to just sit on the beach, so I went swimmin’ Twice! There were a ton of people in the water, since the lake was dead calm and a perfect temperature for a hot day.

After I was properly sunned, I came back up to the house and got quite near the end of my second book of “brain candy” for the day. Then I had a really great bike ride, finished my book, showered and went down for dinner.

We got a little silly after dinner when we all started taking pictures of each other taking pictures :)

Ann

Bill (L) and Chuck

Joann and Bill

Then Ann and I took a goodly number of sunset photos




I went inside for a bit then said my goodbyes. Ann, Chuck, Doug and Andrea (last two were not pictured. They hid inside. Doug is a good friend who is 10 years younger than your friendly local DPUTiger. Ann is Bill & Joann’s daughter. Doug is Ann & Chuck’s son. Confused yet?) leave to go back to Indianapolis tomorrow. I’ll leave to go home and then spend the week in Mississippi. I hope to have another week up here before the end of the summer, but today has been great.

Oh, and we had fireworks in Barcelona tonight! Nearly no booms, pretty show from a distance. Actually, five local communities had fireworks displays tonight. We could see flashes from two of them in addition to the Barcelona show. Much fun!

Bachman Bars

Bachman Bars
Recipe by: Barb and Wiz Bachman

Grease 9x13 pan
Bring 1 cup sugar and 1 cup White Karo Corn Syrup to a boil and remove

Stir in 1½ cups creamy peanut butter and 6 cups Special K cereal

Spread in greased 9x13 inch pan

Melt in a double boiler
6 ounces butterscotch chips
12 ounces milk chocolate chips
Spread over bottom layer.

I woke up on Saturday morning to the news that Wiz and her parents, Todd and Barb, had been touring the Drum Tower in Beijing when a 47 year old nutcase attacked the group, killing Todd (her father) and inflicting critical, life-threatening injuries on Barb (her mother) and the female Chinese tour guide.

I spent the day crying off and on. I did two interviews talking about Todd and Barb, one with Yahoo! Sports that is posted here. The other was with a good friend who is writing for her Tuesday column in the Orange County Register. I’ll post that link when it goes live.

Todd and Barb are amazing, wonderful people. Please indulge me while I make a pathetic attempt to tell you a little bit about about them.

Their youngest of three daughters played volleyball at UCLA. I worked with her during my first two and her last two years with the Bruins. She was the first student-athlete that I met when I started at UCLA. That recipe I put at the top of this post? Bachman Bars (OK, so the recipe card Wiz gave me at her senior banquet says “Special K Bars” but screw that. They’re Bachman Bars!) were present and consumed at every single banquet during those first two years I was at UCLA and the three years Wiz played prior to my arrival. After every Friday night match (roughly 5x/year) there was a social for family and boosters and most of the parents brought a dessert to go with the athletic department-provided food. At her senior banquet, Wiz handed out recipe cards for the bars.

I woke up yesterday morning and Chris (the Hubster) had heard that “relatives of the U.S. men’s volleyball head coach” had been attacked. Wiz is married to the men’s volleyball head coach, who is from New Zealand, so when that news was paired with “Americans were injured” Chris put the pieces together rather quickly. I couldn’t compute it until he said what I couldn’t accept out loud: It’s Todd and Barb.

After a series of frantic emails to people I know with the U.S. delegation in Beijing, emails to my former co-workers at UCLA in case they couldn’t connect the dots, and the confirmation that Todd was dead and Barb was in surgery, Chris and I talked and decided that we should keep our plans for Saturday. There was no sense in sitting at home and being sad. There wasn’t a damn thing we could do from Pittsburgh. For me, Saturday’s plans included a Hurricane Knitters gathering at PAKnitWit’s house.

When I was completing preparations to leave the house, I threw some tin foil over the peppermint brownies I was bringing to the gathering. I looked at Chris and said “Why do I want to stop everything right now and make Bachman Bars?”

Instead, I picked up WeirdyPants and got a Rufus fix at her house, then we made it over to PAKnitWit’s, where I was only physically present. I was in and out of the house all day, emailing and texting with former co-workers. Talking to the reporter from Yahoo! Sports for half an hour. And crying off and on.

I feel badly that I was a drippy wet blanket on what should have been a fun knitting day, but all the Hurricane Knitters seemed to understand. (thanks, guys!)

Todd and Barb attended all of Wiz’s college volleybal matches. All of them. That’s no mean feat when you live in Minneapolis and your kid’s home games are in Los Angeles. Once she started playing internationally with the U.S. National team, they frequently traveled abroad to watch their daughter play. This is why I truly believe that this was a completely random act of violence. Sure, they were probably identifiable as tourists, but so are 75% of the humans in Beijing this week and next. They were seasoned enough travelers that I'm certain they weren't wearing anything that would scream "Americans!!" to random homicidal/suicidal crazy people.

Todd and Barb were responsible for the end-of-year team video for pretty much all the years they were involved with the program. Wiz, as well as Todd and Barb, were invited to my wedding (they were in Italy with the U.S. Women’s national team and could not attend). I was invited to Wiz and Hugh’s wedding in December, 2006, but could not attend because I was in Hawaii with the Bruins women’s volleyball team.

They were parents to the whole team at UCLA. And to me, when my own parents were 2,500 miles away. Again, they were parents and "volleyball nomads," cheering on Team USA at as many matches as they could attend, all around the world. Their two older daughters live on the same street as they do in Minnesota, while Wiz and Hugh are in Southern California because of volleyball.

There is no distinction between "son" and "son in law" for Todd and Barb. Wiz and Hugh were going to be in Beijing because Hugh's team was playing? Great! Let's go! A quote in one of the articles I've read said that Wiz was really excited for the Olympics because her parents were coming to Beijing and she'd have a good chunk of time to spend with them in China. That's indicative of the relationship Todd and Barb had with their kids, and it's a very familiar feeling to me, having spent eight years living thousands of miles away from my own parents and sibling.

I really don’t know what else to say. How to convey what special, genuine, wonderful people they are. I wish that there was something, anything, that I could do to ease Wiz’s burden right now. I simply can’t comprehend watching my father murdered and mother critically injured while I stood and watched, unhurt. I’m not a praying person, but I pray to whoever will listen for Barb’s recovery. The only thing that could make this whole awful thing even more awful would be if Barb doesn’t fully recover.

As long as I have known Wiz, she has always taken a camera everywhere she went. When Chris and I met her at Downtown Disney just before we moved east, we were on the road (and running late) when I realized that I had forgotten my camera. No worries, Wiz would have hers! In a funny twist of fate, Wiz had forgotten her camera that day as well, so we didn't get a picture of the two of us that day. So I share with you a photo of Barb, Wiz and Todd from Opening Ceremonies for the Athens Olympics. This was Todd and Barb’s 2004 Christmas Card, but I think my copy didn’t survive the most recent purge of stuff. Bachman’s, Inc., the family’s horticultural business in Minnesota, posted it on their website.

Barb, Wiz and Todd

The Bachmans are loved and respected. By me. By many people. I am heartbroken by this news and eagerly await each morsel of news and word from my friend if there is anything at all I can do to ease her unbearable burden.

Meet Peggy

I’m still chugging along on my first Summer of Socks sock. Updates later. Meanwhile, it’s time for all of you to meet Peggy!


Remember my friend Bill? Well, he decided he was ready to take on another puppy and Peggy came home with him two weeks ago!


She’s been playing with Jackson (he’s the big blur with the blue collar in that photo above) and otherwise being a pup.


I think some of the casualties have involved a flip-flop and a pair of headphones. And here Bill was with Jackson who just stopped chewing stuff fairly recently. :)


Oh, and she likes to wake up EARLY. Like in the 5 o’clock hour early. But they're working on that too.


But so far, so good. Oh, and in case you want to see her in motion, we’ll see if this Blogger video thing really works



Just so you know? If I ever get a dog of my own (doubtful), you’ll wind up with pictures of him/her just about every day. I’m just sayin’. I’m a sucker for the furry cute.

Four Pin Heads

That’s what you can find in the very bottom of your container of basting pins when you empty the whole thing out. This happens when you first pin a queen size quilt for your mother, then pin a long-but-narrow “couch quilt” of your own.*

Yep. The reservoir of pins is empty, the basting tables are broken down and the space is now free for the Hubster to use. I'll probably get to that tomorrow :) Of course, I do have one more container of 100 pins that’s fresh from the store (I stalked these things and bought when 50% off for several months about two years ago. They’re bent and I like them)

*I didn't take a new picture of the quilt, since it looks the same as it did in my very first post ever, just with pins in it. Backing is the backdrop on the pin photo above.

In other news, Bill called me this morning and he sounded So. Much. Better. He sounded like himself for the first time in a few days. I want to thank everyone everyone who commented on yesterday’s post. It meant a lot to me and hopefully Bill will appreciate it too when he’s ready to take a look. If I didn’t send you a personal thank-you, it’s most likely because Blogger didn’t provide your email address and I didn’t already have it.

Since yesterdays’ WiP Wednesday was pre-empted by that much more important post, I’ll give you a peek at where things were this afternoon.


This is my Bruin scarf. Same as the Steelers scarves you’ve seen Derf modeling in my Ravelry avatar, but in Bruin blue and gold. The very end started to curl when I started knitting it, and since my one pet peeve with this scarf is trying to un-twist this thing as it goes along, I decided to encourage it to curl. It's working :)

I’d guess I’m about 40% through each of the in-use cakes of yarn, but I’m not unraveling the damn thing to measure it. Sorry!

In other news, I’m thisclose to being finished with the no-purl Monkeys that will be a Christmas present (late) for my sister in law. I’m ready for the toe decreases. These will most likely be off the needles by bedtime. Yay!


They are too small for me, but seem to fit my sister in law just fine (she tried on the finished sock on Christmas). Yay! Gotta say I'm not loving this Yarn Love that I'm using, but I have plenty more sock yarn in my stash just waiting to become socks for me!

Not much else going on here. Lots of busywork. Here's hoping for a productive tomorrow!