larry curly and moe

so last friday i get a job at the high school, where i have to be at the ungodly hour of 7 am. the kids are ok, but it's the most boringest job ever, because they just have a chapter review assignment. that means i'm just crowd control, which isn't too hard in high school cuz they know if they don't cross the line i'll leave em alone to do almost whatever they want.

i finished reading the wishsong of shannara, started another book, and knit clessidra for a couple hours. i even visited the library and checked out some books (lucky for me all the school libraries are connected to the city library system - they have more paperbacks). after school, i have to stay for a half hour. once the kids leave, i check my cell phone to find a text from chuck

do you like parakeets?

for some reason, this gives me a bad feeling. especially since he sent it an hour and a half earlier. so i reply with, dunno. why?

while i wait for chuck's answer, i think about it some. birds look pretty, but anytime i've been to someone's house that has birds, they don't ever shut up (the birds, i mean) and they're kinda messy. so i don't think i'd want them for pets.

then chuck answers me: yes.

what the freak is that supposed to mean? why - yes. they don't really go together. he calls me up, and the long and the short of it is, some jamoke walked into the bank saying they had 3 parakeets they had to give away. and chuck took them. they're pretty. they're messy. and they're noisy. but not all the time, and chuck cleans up the mess. so it's ok.
chuck named them after the 3 stooges. cute huh. not quite as good as the last present he gave me. he was afraid that i would either a) kill him or b) kill the birds. i haven't done either yet. lucky for him, eh.
here from left to right you have curly, moe and larry. blame chuck for the blurry pics.

socktoberfest kick off

the afternoon light was good for taking pictures, so here's to the beginning of socktoberfest! first is the half-finished clessidra. it's behaving itself very nicely.
then we have the two socks destined for oblivion in the knitting basket, were it not for the extra motivation of socktoberfest

hedera on the left, and broadripple on the right. take the hederas first. see how much bigger the sock on the left is? gauge problems. got in my head i was sposed to knit loose. go figure. and the sock on the right? that's the one with half the heel rows it should have. otherwise it was beautiful. i like the lace pattern a lot. simple, but pretty. next we have the broadripple. the pattern is well named, i like the waves of color. its actually not behaving too badly, i think the summer just caught up to it too soon.

since the light was so good, and there i was with the camera, i took some other shots. here's the square with the pattern for sara's tie, and a log cabin square i started last night. with the one person that showed up for the ill-fated knitting group. ojojoj. tomorrow morning is the other meeting. we can always hope i suppose. the one person learned to cable. that was fun. cables are cool cuz they look so fancy and complicated, but they're actually easy. watching someone else catch the excitement of cabling was fun.

and last of all is the headless scarecrow almost finished fjörgyn. just waiting for the buttons. maybe this weekend will be dedicated to finishing.

oh the weather outside is frightful, or mom, guess what?

we woke up this morning to this
isn't that great?!!!
i was catching up on blogs and looked out the window to see some tiny flakes bravely struggling down. that's flurries more than snow, but nobody west of the mississippi seems to know that word. saying it's snowing has a much more petrifying effect on people anyway.

whoo-hoo!!!!

insanely early as it is, i love the first snowfall of the year. i have never quite figured out the magic of little white works of art falling from the sky. as a kid, i would lay on bed next to the window and try and see up to where the snow started falling. i'm so going for a walk.

to entertain you while i'm doing that, check this out

not that i have hundreds of people checking my blog who don't comment - i'm not even sure my family looks at it. and they probably have no clue you can comment. but the idea was fun. plus i just like saying mofo.

no candy today

yesterday (on ravelry) i learned that i don't keep very good track of when i start projects. at all. luckily, i've posted about some of them. and was pleasantly surprised to learn i finish projects fairly quickly. my brain moves so much faster than my hands that finished projects never seem to catch up with what i want to do. kind of like the books i want to read. not stopping to appreciate what i've made probably doesn't help. so a new goal: to stop for a few minutes and appreciate a project when i'm done with it before madly rushing on to the next.

tonight the ill-fated knitting group has a meeting. i'm sooo hopeful yet trying to be cynical, so if no one shows up i won't be disappointed. lots of people are learning, so we're making 6"x6" squares for practice and for the women's shelter blanket (i'm not dumb. i might be the only one making them otherwise. 2 birds with one stone man.). and the people who are learning cabling or lace or whatever, why they can make a square too to learn the technique. we have a thursday a.m. meeting planned too, so hopefully that one goes well too.

i've read about socktoberfest in loads of places, and this morning it hit me: duh. i'm working on a pair, have thuja barely started (i rolled the skein into a ball. that counts), and 2 pairs to rescue from the basket and finish. why not be part of the fest? so i'm putting a button up, and taking another not very bold tiptoe into the online knitting world. once you get to know me you'd never believe it, but i am shy. honest. so even though all these secret pals and swaps and knitalongs sound fun, it takes me a while to work up to joining.

my main goal for today is to not be a statistic. i will resist the lure of ravelry, my house will get cleaned, i will put my superdried out herbs away, my cluttered table will be cleared, the laundry will get folded and dinner will get made. and i might take a little, teeny tiny peek over in ravelry. just to see if the brownies changed anything on me while i slept. and maybe take a pic of my clessidra (and my languishing hedera and broadripple socks) to kick off the socktoberfest.

fireballs or reese's or raspberry blowpops or nowandlaters or.....

i'm the kid in the candy store right now. got my ravelry invite today!! whoo-hoo! this morning we checked my number, and i was clocking in at 200-something. chuck was even checking it extra for me (hehehe). since i worked this morning we figured the invite would come while i was gone. i already told chuck he wasn't getting any dinner. and forget about fhe. he said that was ok, since i've been waiting so long - what a nice guy.

coming into ravelry, there's so many choices, so much to look at, so much to put in the database. after drooling at the screen shots, now that i'm inside, i'm not sure what to do first. fireballs are good, but what about the chocolate? oh, the choices. so if i don't post for a week, a month, a couple years, you'll know why. i got sucked into the vortex, or i'm trying to knit my way out and keep getting sucked back in.