some unwanted visitors and knitting on the side

the morning we left for chitina, we saw the mama moose and her calf in the yard. they were browsing on tree leaves. this was fine, and a little cool. moose look so awkward, and yet when they move they're surprisingly graceful. chuck snuck out with the camera, and we got some shots without scaring them away. this was still fine. they had moved to the end of the yard when we got bored and went inside. sometime after that, they snuck back towards our garden. not fine. chuck scared them off.

well, they came back again while we were gone fishing. the jerks. they didn't actually get in the garden though. they got on the deck instead (well, the calf did anyway).

it took us a minute or two to figure out, cuz we have neighborhood cats that jump into our flowerbed too. these prints were a bit too big, and not the irght shape. the big tipoff was the barely visible dirt prints on the deck in the shape of moose hooves. i've been amazed all summer at the things the moose think worth going after. there's flowers and human-edible herbs all around the deck. they don't touch those. what did it go up on the deck for?
chuck's hanging basket. if you remember earlier pics (over at the boogeyman's hideout), there used to be long hanging green viney things. the moose ate em. they also chomped the tops of my new raspberry bushes, our strawberry plants, and my poor lilacs. to get to the lilacs they had to stomp through the pretty beds we just barely got in. the jerks. am i saying that too much? plus they stripped leaves off several branches of the crabapple (?) tree.

at least they leave something behind i guess.

in other, unrelated news, the knitting has been going very slowly lately. there's just so much to do in summertime, while it's light and warm. it seems a crime to be inside. i have knit outside a few times, but still. it seems a waste to sit and do stuff when you know that's what you'll do all winter too. i think the fact fact that most knitted items are best worn in winter makes them seem a little les urgent in summer too. but anyway.

i've got the silk cami on its last legs. the plain stockinette body was a little too mindless at times, and i couldn't force myself to work on it as much as i should have. but the back's bound off, and i'm decreasing the fronts so it's very close now. and then i can go buy yarn for my christmas surprises. yay! (i will of course have to sneak it by the checkbook)

chuck's irish moss sweater is coming along pretty well. i spent about 2 hours making readable graphs for the cables. some charts are not very readable, the lines all merge together when you glance at it. and then others give a clear enough view of what's happening that chuck knows where the cable's going. that's the kind i like, where i can take it all in at a glance. but some people don't use that style, so i make my own. *sigh* if only i could find an excel program with the symbols, then i could do it on the computer.......although i don't know if that would necessarily be faster. all i know is it doesn't look like chuck'll get his sweater in time for fall.

and off and on between the boredom of other projects, i'm working on the mystery gift. the graphics are the most time consuming. brilliant of me to combine my first colorwork project with designing my first colorwork project too. i'll still need to knit swatches to make sure they look proper and combine well, but the swatches will be almost the size of the finished product (hint: it's a scarf). *another sigh* since i'm so excited about my ideas, i want them to be oh so perfect, and don't want to chance messing it up by not doing swatches, but.....do i want to waste the knitting time? decisions, decisions. i'll likely go with the swatches first since i don't trust my color planning abilities yet. but wouldn't it be nice to skip that?