yay!!

my waiting number at ravelry has finally passed the halfway mark, as in there's more people behind me than in front of me. whoo-hoo! of course, the number in front of me is in the 9000s, but it's ok. the numbers are still going down.

our lovely fall weather has it raining yellow birch leaves today instead of rain (we got that the last 2-3 days). and last tuesday there was a sudden downpour in the evening, with some nice high winds. then chuck looked out the window and saw this:

it was a live one too!

on chuck's day off last week we went to the yarn store. got some knee sock yarn for me. i was really wanting some dark grey/charcoal yarn, and it was REALLY hard to find. go figure. i mean, it's hard to find solid colors anyway in sock yarn cuz everyone likes the multicolored and striping yarns. i don't mind them, but not with lots of patterning. most patterns disappear in the color changes. but anyway, i found my grey at the yarn store, and bought some yarn for the summer shawlette pattern. the idea of shoulder shaping so the shawl stays put fascinates me. i might even wear a shawl if it stays put. the idea of always having to readjust irritated me just thinking about it, so it'll be fun to try the faroese style. specially when it only uses 2 skeins of yarn. cheap experimenting.

i haven't fixed the silk cami yet either. it's too depressing. so chuck's sweater is seeing a lot of action and i might finish it before thanksgiving. the twisted stitches seem to take a bit more time, and i'm working the cables without a cable needle. they're a bit faster that way, but i need to watch my knitting a lot more. it looks good though! somehow i don't seem to be finishing anything lately so i'm trying to organize myself and focus on fewer items. with less math to mess up and have to fix later.

and a sad bit of news: Madeleine L'Engle died last thursday, along with the secret hope i always had that she would write some more awesome books. she wrote some of the best fantasy ever (kid fantasy harry potter can't even touch), soul-searching and fantastic. her book a live coal in the sea is the best handling of god's mercy i've ever read outside scripture. i loved her books. she's like christopher fry: the way words dance for them makes me wish i could write. they make me think about life and god and love and why am i doing what i am.

check it out - overheard

as i finished my last post, i saw this blog under blogs of note. lines taken out of context, how much better can it get? i'm gonna be keeping my ears open for anything to send them.

butterfly day

this morning when i got up it was 33 degrees out. fahrenheit. (celsius would have been fine if oddly hot.) so today was a winter chore day. chuck did cut up some trees saturday, so i went and tried my hand at splitting for an hour. it wasn't much to be proud of. i did 2 logs without much problem (not much aim either - but it did get a little better), and then the third killed me. it just don't want to split. being new to the sport, i endured but finally gave up. it seemed awful wet too, so i don't know if it was newer wood. chuck tried to split it at lunch too without any luck, so i felt a bit better. i've got gouges in it, and it just refuses to split. oh well. i'll be back out there tomorrow for my new favorite way to exercise.

we still have a pile of leftover dirt so i've been filling in dwayne holes in the yard. he drove machinery everywhere so there's ruts in weird places. not to mention the crappy job he did scraping the topsoil anyway.

the silly cherry tomatoes still have tons of blooms on them. can't they tell by the chill in the air they'll be dead soon? i can, but i'll take the tomatoes while they last. my lilacs seem very happy in their new dirt. despite being chewed on by the moose, they've got some new shoots going. i just hope they last the winter.

i'm getting ready to bring some of my herbs in, and noting what did well where. and i'm an awful archaeology dork, i actually made a map. it was a struggle to not do it to scale. good habits die hard i guess. chuck laughed at me for that too. i did bring in my minirose plant already, but it had some illegal aliens hiding out on it. it's got aphid (? i think? maybe?) larvae making little cobwebby cocoons. yuck. i didn't see any on it when it was outside, and i was checking for them. they're the same bugs that got all over our english cucumber plant and killed it, so i'll wait to spray them to death till after chuck gets home (he didn't get to see them). they're bad, they suck all the juice out of leaves and they turn yellow and die. luckily most buggies can be gotten rid of with a simple dishsoap and water spray. i don't get much fancier than that. i just hope they don't affect the other 2 rosebuds.

and i was so proud of myself this morning - i finished the silk cami! well, the main part, it still needs the ends woven in and an edging put on it. the pattern said to try it on and make sure the straps were ok etc. so i did. and was immediately horribly disappointed in myself. it's way too big. i told chuck at lunch but didn't show him yet. most patterns don't include how tight or loose fitting they are (called ease, so if i say that instead you better know what it is), but this one didn't look tight. so i went for my actual bust measurement. maybe i was too worried baout it being tight. it sure ain't. i'll have to rip out a bit (i don't know how much yet) and do some decreases so it doesn't look like a sack. the bottom bit fit good but i guess the no-shaping was a bad idea. after i figured out how off it was, and roughly what i need to do to fix it, i put it down. i'd be happy to not see it again for a month. and there's no way i'm waiting till i tweak it to start another project. i've been such a good girl working on that boring stockinette, barely working on chuck's sweater, and i'm so buying yarn for other projects.

in fact, i already have my stash built up at knitpicks. there's some cotten/linen yarn for some handtowels for chuck's mom (christmas present), and some sock yarn for somebody else (i'm starting to think i knit too many surprises for people). i'm itching to make myself a pair of knee socks. the pattern's all picked out, clessidra, but i haven't found the color i'm looking for yet and haven't decided if i want to compromise. i'm wanting a dark grey, charcoaly color, and knitpicks doesn't have it. the knee socks are for church, so they should be able to match lots of stuff, but i'm wanting to make 3-4 pair of them. so the color shouldn't be that critical. but...i want the grey.

i was looking at this pattern i want to do, with this yarn i have stashed, but the yarn i have is way smaller. augh. that means math. once i contemplated changing the pattern for the yarn, i took a good look at it and realized i didn't know if i liked the lace pattern on it anyway. what i'm really after is the general garment design, so i may just chart that out and then find a pattern i like to plug in there. i'll have to keep thinking about it. (the idea was that i could start that right now without having to wait for yarn to come in - guess that won't work)

oh, and i finished the last 2 circle opens books sometime over the weekend i think. i forget. but that brings me to the book i wanted to read in the first place. yay! except i have a sneaking suspicion that there aren't any published after that. since there's 4 main characters, each with their own book, i'd think tamora pierce would keep on that way. which means i'll have to wait for books. *sigh*

sometimes i think i could start every paragraph with oh, and.... but speaking of chuck's family we just got tickets to go visit them at thanksgiving. that should be interesting to meet them all. but the very very best part is we're not telling them about it. hehehe. i love stuff like that. and they don't go online, otherwise i wouldn't say a word. chuck and me were talking about how to spring it on them. we fly into little rock 3 hours away, so we figure we can call about 10 min from the house and as we pull in say well, i'm tired of talking on the phone, want to let me in? wouldn't that be funny?

i'm off to take a shower and figure out exactly what plants are coming in and what size pot they need. and maybe knit. a little. but not on that silk camisole. it's not my friend anymore.

the last blooms of summer

as if those few traitor leaves weren't enough, they've been joined by more. all the green is slowly dulling to brown. there's a hint of cold in the air, though the sun's still warm. fall in alaska. it should be over in a couple weeks. i miss the maple leaves, with their brilliant reds and oranges. fall is the only time i like those colors. and only on the trees ;)

the coming chill has me thinking about sock knitting again. and those two pairs i totally jacked up and have to start over. *sigh* my dream is to have enough handknitted socks for a whole week, plus one to wear on wash day. 8 pair. doesn't sound too hard..........if i only knit one project at a time maybe. plus i'm wanting a few pair of knee socks to wear to church, since i never disgrace myself by wearing the abominable nylons. the only thing keeping me from my sock dreams is that silk cami. i promised myself to finish that before i start anything else. why do i do that to myself? oh yeah, so i won't have 5 projects going at the same time.

i just finished cold fire, and am going to be a good wifey and balance the checkbook, pay bills, start laundry and do dishes before heading outside to pick a couple zucchini. yay!! although now we run into the problem of what to do with loads of zucchini if chuck won't eat them. hmmm.......maybe send him out for burgers while i have stirfry! that might make both of us happy.

i might wander through our woods a bit too. night temps have been in the low 40s, and once the frost hits i can go gather rosehips. there's loads of them in the woods but i thought i'd scout out the best spots. it's a good excuse anyway. and once chuck gets home we might actually cut firewood. we want to use our fireplace this winter (it's getting cleaned in a couple weeks) but that'll be hard to do without firewood. another thing i have to do before we get an actual frost is transplant some of my herbys into pots. night before last was cold in our bedroom (all freaking night) so last night we put the winter blanket on. i love my IKEA blanket! it was bloody cold when i got up, and when i checked our thermostat the temp was at the very bottom where the numbers don't even go. so i turned it up to 60. made a huge difference.

but anyway. talking about winter preps doesn't exactly go with my title does it? well, i have some pretty pics of our morning glorys that finally bloomed and my lovely minirose chuck bought me last summer. it has the prettiest mixed colors on its blossoms. since it comes inside for winter, it blooms rather erratically, and it always makes me happy to see it blossoming.

wasn't that a lucky shot with the bee? enjoy!

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?