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?

Still Here!

Hi! I haven’t fallen into the Lake, I’ve just been busy with good vacation stuff. I go home tomorrow, but only for about 24 hours, then back up here Sun-Wed for my 2009 swan song.

Anyhoo, let me catch you up as succinctly as possible. (I haven't been able to figure out how to keep the photos from getting cut off on the right edge, but if you click, you can see the whole shebang in Flickr)

WiPs:



Socks for my sister in law. Still growing, but have been somewhat neglected.



Vest is growing. I should have been in the round by the time I took this photo, but late on Monday night I realized that I hadn’t read the pattern correctly and I had to rip out both fronts to where they were picked up. I’m in the round now.

There was lots of other knitting that isn’t pictured because it’s (mostly) finished. I’ll catch you up on that before long. I’ll just say that you never saw it as a WiP because I started on Friday night and finished on Monday night. Zoom!

Meanwhile, I’ve been taking long beach walks daily.



Tuesday’s glass. Yes, that’s the entire neck of a brown-glass bottle up next to the battery.




Wednesday’s glass



Close-up of Wednesdays “treasures”



Today’s glass



Close-up of the best from today. That green piece is really unusual. The round piece on the top-right next to the “for scale” battery was the first thing I saw when I got down to the water today. Bonus!

We also had a great sunset tonight. Enjoy!







In case you were curious, Yes, I’m still a little irked with football, but I’m trying hard to enjoy being near a lake and not a river tonight. It’ll be OK.

More of the Same

Today looked like it was going to be overcast and boring. I woke up late, visited with some favorite neighbors and walked home just as the sun started to come out from behind the clouds. Beach day!

First of all, here is Sunday’s beach glass haul



The big piece at the top near the battery (included for scale) is the bottom of a coke bottle or something similar. It was a surprisingly good beach glass day!

It was extremely quiet at the beach today. Until sunset.



I won’t get into the rant that’s itching to come out of my fingers



But the bottom line? Pooper-scoopering is important. GRRRRR!!!

But on a happier note?



Happy sunset picture!

Guess Where I Am?

I’m spending this week at the Lake. It’ll be the last full week I spend up here this year, so I’m hoping I have the weather to enjoy it.

Today (Monday) was overcast from start to finish. These sunset photos are from yesterday (Sunday). I did get a good haul of glass today. I’ll take pictures of that tomorrow.



The lake has been very calm for quite a while from what I hear. The clarity of the water makes me think it’s been at least a week.



I was virtually alone on the beach, despite the fact that it was the middle day of the holiday weekend.



I had my beach chair and was parked down there for the sunset. Which was around 7:40 pm. I am so NOT OK with that. Proof that summer is nearly over, which bums me out a bit.

Then I remember that this has been the Craptastic Summer of Suck™ and that helps to remind me that the end of summer is a good thing.



Have a good short week, everyone!

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!

Smurf Killers

The best thing I can say about these socks is that they are finished.



I had to use a lot of the tools in my arsenal to finish these socks. I’ve previously showed you how my hands looked after knitting on these socks. I got really discouraged at the midway point (one sock done) because the vibrant colors that I had loved in the skein were so muddy in the finished sock



Well, after I finished the Nephew Tulip last Friday, I only had one WiP left on my radar. The Smurf Killer socks (named because Cristi said my blue hands looked like I had choked a smurf). I cast on the toe for the second sock on Friday night and got the garter square finished and got the sock into the round. But my index finger was getting shredded where the yarn is tensioned just before my right needle tip.



So I busted out some band-aids and they took the beating. I managed to finish the second sock in three (long) sittings. By the Monday afternoon session, my middle finger was also getting shredded, so the far-right band-aid was on that

No, I don’t normally save used band-aids, but these were used to protect my skin instead of to cover something icky. I took a picture because I wanted to fully document these socks and tossed them.


See the big “clean” strip on my index finger and a similar less-obvious one on my middle finger? That’s where the band-aids were.



I use a ladder-style row counter to keep track of my two increases every three rows. This one started out white. It got tossed too.


Toe Pic!

Garter toes



New Pathways heel turn following Riverbed increases



About an inch of 2x2 ribbing that I started when I realized I was about to hit the midpoint of the skein. I should have checked the yardage more carefully on this skein. The cuffs are much shorter than my usual because of yardage.

The dyer did contact me on Ravelry about my comments on this yarn. It’s the indigo that was cracking and turning my hands blue. Friction does that. She assured me that a bath for the finished socks would leave me with blue hands but not blue feet. And honestly, I could have dealt with the blue hands, the powder-blue suds when I washed my hands after knitting and the fact that the smurf-choking look made this project NON-portable if the yarn hadn’t shredded my hands while I was knitting with it.

Nothing is for everyone. This yarn obviously was not for me. So I’ll end where I started. The best thing I can say about these socks are that they’re finished.

Smurf Killers

Pattern: Riverbed Master
Source: New Pathways for Sock Knitters by Cat Bordhi
Size: mine (8.5” circumference, 9.5” foot length)
Yarn: Earthly Hues Saplings
Color: Ring Around the Moon
Source: The Loopy Ewe
Needles: 2.75mm needles for foot and heel, 3.0mm for cuff to make it go faster.
Started: 15 July 2009
Finished: 31 August 2009

New and Improved

Now that the odious stuff that I was working on is long gone, I have two brand-new WiP’s to share with you!

I finished the Smurf socks (FO post coming, probably tomorrow) on Monday around 4 o’clock, then hustled off to ship the work computer back to whence it came.

Within half an hour of getting home from that excursion, I was swatching for the Mondo Cable Vest. I cast on later that night!



It’s the store KAL at Bloomin Yarns starting next week. I just jumped in for a little head start! Absolutely loving it so far. I unzipped the provisional cast-on last night and split for the front of the vest. Whee!!!



Last night, the Hubster and I went to a free preview concert for the Pittsburgh Pops (fun!) and I needed something to knit on the trolley into town and while we were waiting for the show to start. So I grabbed a skein of Jitterbug and hit the road.

These socks are for my sister in law. Small feet. Riverbed socks. Perfect!

Oh, and I have these hanging around



I’ll explain later.

Happy Hump Day!