Time sure flies...

...when you have a life. When you don't, it c r a w l s. In other words, I can't believe a month has passed since I last wrote. Still battling various bugs, one of which caused a horrendous bout of bronchitis which, I was dismayed to find last night, is starting to rear its ugly head again. Fie! Be gone! Yes, well, that was far more cathartic than effective. By doing pretty much nothing, I am hoping to stave off a full recurrence.

On a far brighter note, the end of May saw the beginning of an extended stay here of my favorite goddog (okay, only goddog, but, still), Sidney! We haven't had a good long visit in quite a while, something we've both missed, though I have to say that it hasn't bothered Mikey one bit.

Though, truth be told, after a couple of days of getting used to a moose in the house, Mike starts to enjoy it, since Sid is still very nervous around Mike and freezes when Mike approaches if he isn't able to run in the other direction from where Mike is. Mike takes that as Sid's recognition of Mike's Supreme Allbeingness, which goodness knows Mike doesn't get from me. When even the big tortoise contests Mike's right to rule the feeding station, Mike is happy to subjugate anyone who spends any time in this house besides the usual crew of freaks, er, me, the tortoises and the weeny turtle.

Speaking of whom, Tobago was itching to get out of her enclosure the other day, so I took her out while I cleaned up a bit, letting her hang out with Mike:



Needless to say, I kept an eye on them, in case Mike decided to vent his ire against Treppie, with whom he jousts at the feeding station, by dumping it on Tobago, who wouldn't hurt a fly. A snail or mini-crawler, yes; fly, no. Alas.



Sid spends some of his time here outside watching the tortoises carefully, making sure they don't try to escape from their shells. When he's not doing that, he is on watch for the rat that has taken up residence in my yard, which I discovered when the whole ears of corn I put out for the tortoises started disappearing.

For a year or so, there was a cat--feral or just someone's outdoor cat--who spent the nights sleeping on the lounge chair on my patio. I didn't mind her there, and during the cold, wet winter, I put out some food and water for her on days when she didn't leave her roost. She stopped coming after the first time the new neighbor's dogs broke through the fence into my backyard, something they've done repeatedly over the past year since they've lived there. Before then, my backyard was a rest area on the local cat highway, with many cats making their way through my yard, hanging out and sunning themselves, like this one, whom I called Scairdy Cat because s/he always fled when any of the other cats came around:



Anyway, Sidney is a renowned ratter, so I was counting on his ratting skills to nail this sucker. To date, it's Rat 1, Sidney 0. ::sigh::

Sidney watching the tortoises:



Sidney is showing many signs of age, including not demanding to play as often or as long as we used to. Now, our mornings go something like this:

6:30 AM - Sidney lets me know that Mikey is up. When Mike makes it into the hallway, I get up, run his bath, pick him up and go through our morning bath ritual before putting him in the tub. While he soaks, I let Sidney out, clean up Mike's poo, and make Sid's breakfast. Sid and I go back to our respective beds until

9-9:30 AM - As Mike nears the end of his bath time (he usually gets out of the tub about the time his heater's timer goes off), Sid lets me know that it's time for me to get up to take my meds and, more importantly, stuff one of his hollow cow bones with peanut butter.

The rest of the morning is spent with Sid excavating peanut butter from the bone while Mike dawdles over his food and eventually makes his way back to his room. Sid helps me eat my breakfast, and helpfully cleans Mike's leftovers and any other leftovers if the tortoises have been inside that morning.

The rest of the day is spent with Mikey getting periodic visits and cuddles from me in his room, where he can also glare at Sid who comes in to see what's going on (and maybe there' will be food)(or petting). The day is also punctuated with Sid helping eradicate the household population of grapes, and the occasional almond from my trail mix, or a peanut I hold back from the squadron of scrub jays that come around a couple times a day.

Sometimes Sid goes into the backyard alone, sometimes with me. Sometimes he watches the tortoises, sometimes he annoys the dogs next door (which I wouldn't worry about other than for their ability to claw their way through the fence to get into my yard).

One foul day, while I was watering my fig sapling that had a couple of ripening figs on it, Sidney ATE MY FIGS!!!!! Bad dog! There were fewer treats that day, and I intend to exact revenge on his mom's fig tree when hers come into season late this year (that is, if Sidney and Ginger have left any within reach - damn dobies can jump and harvest anything within my reach!)

Here's Sid tuckered out after cleaning all the peanut butter ouf of his bone. And not just any peanut butter, mind you, but the organic fresh ground (when she bought it in March, at least) peanut butter from Oliver's.



Sid's age is also showing in his reluctance to lay long on firm surfaces. So, he came not only with three containers of peanut butter and two bones, but also a large dog mattress for the floor, and a "sheepskin" blanket, sheet, and two pillows. I, ahem, also have a "sheepskin" blanket, so that's under there, too.



I had plans to take him to the dog park, and to the pet store so he could pick out a treat, and even cleared all my emergency/disaster response stuff out of my back seat so he'd have something more comfortable to lay on instead of the cargo area. (Spoiled? My goddog?? Nevah!)

Okay, so Mike's letting me know that it's time I talked about him. Hear his chin banging on the window sill as he bobs his head? Oh, wait, he's doing that because he sees Sidney outside.

Anyway, I took these photos last month, but never got around to sharing them. They are something only an iguana lover will appreciate: seminal plugs!



Mike had been cranky for a couple of days. Karen was over and had been petting him, and noticed that his hemipenal bulges felt more bulgy than usual. The next day, he deposited these plugs. Here's a close up of one of them:



Fascinating architecture, eh? And no wonder male igs get a bit testy (ar ar) when these things have built up, solidified, but they haven't yet been able to expel them. For those new to them, check out the article on seminal plugs at my site.

Because I had to suspend the treatment for my Bartonella flare in order to deal with some other health issues, my hand and arm hurts too much when I knit socks for me to be able to work on them. I wanted something rather mindless but useful, but wanted a break from kitchen towels (of which I have made 11 of the planned 30), I decided to make another market tote bag, and try to figure out a better way to finish the top, since I wasn't happy with the way I faked the tops of my first two.

Despite knitting them with two strands of worsted weight cotton held together and using size 10.5 needles, the bags still take 15-20 hours to make (I really need to time it to see for sure), so they aren't something particularly salable, unless someone wants to pay through the nose for a reusable handknit tote bag.

Here is a photo of the two new ones I finished - the green/white one is folded over itself so you can see the blue/yellow/white one beneath:



The bottom of the bag is knit in garter stitch, then stitches are picked up all around the rectangle and knit in the round for 3 inches before changing to the pretty (and expandable) faggot lace stitch. Because it is knit in an endless round rather than back and forth, the 'ribs' of the pattern are diagonal, instead of vertical as they are when knit back-and-forth. Here's a close up of the outside of the bag ('right side' of the st):



And here's what it looks like inside:




I did manage to work a couple of days of role play at the public safety academy. Driving up there the first morning, I noticed some hot air balloons in the early morning sky. After the morning's briefing, we role players and evaluators headed out to our assigned places at the other end of the campus, awaiting the first of the day's recruits to be dispatched to our locations. Since the campus is surrounded on a couple sides by farms and ponds, there's always a lot of birds around, so I always pause to look...and look at what I saw:



One of the balloons was still aloft when the morning winds faded away, and so they had to come down rather abruptly:



They were able to avoid landing in the big body of water that is on the other side of that grassy berm, just visible under the horizontal line in the photo that is the shade cover over the PSA parking lot:



But since the berm is angled on the other side, too, they risked being toppled into the water. They were able to get enough lift to bump their way up the top of the berm and down on our side with the help of a some folks who either scrambled over the fence or jumped out of the basket:



It was hard for me to see who scrambled to help, as I was actually rather far away:



And that concludes our program for the day. Sidney, having supervised me making lunch, is now resting before he goes on leftover/plate cleaning duty after I eat said lunch.

In with the new, and still with the old...

Still muddling through one of the worst years I've had in a while, I've not been doing much in the way of writing, or photo taking, and when I do take photos, I don't seem to get around to editing them. Ah, well, c'est la guerre, as we used to say at home.

Mike is doing fine, despite feeling severely deprived because he is not allowed to sleep in my room or under my desk or the living room couch because the nights are too cold and I can't afford to heat the whole place to tropical temperatures just so he can sleep wherever he wants. In his book, that makes me the baaaaaad mommy.

Every afternoon, somewhere between 4:30 PM and 6 PM, Mike heads out on his afternoon ramble, cruising through the living room, checking the front yard if the front inner door is open, then through the den and into the hallway, his chosen destination being either the bathroom and bathtub for another bath, or my bedroom to hunker down for the night.

On too-cold days when I know I will be gone into or past that time, I now close those doors so he can't get into the bathroom or bedroom. When I don't, and am not home to pick him up and carry him back to his tropical-temperatured room, I will come home to find an igcicle in the bathtub or under my bed. The former is not a problem in terms of picking him up and taking him back to his room, but moving the bed is not easy for me - and of course he positions himself dead center underneath it, and tries to move in the same direction the bed is moving in an attempt to stay under there (and piss me off) as long as possible. So, I close the doors:

(sorry for the blurred image)


If I am not home when he does this, he has taken to letting me know quite clearly how he so does not appreciated being foiled in his attempts to go where he wants to go, his becoming an igcicle apparently bothering me a lot more than it bothers him. This is what he does: he plants himself flush up against the inside of the door leading from the house to garage:



This night, he managed to knock some things down to increase the hazard to me. Keep in mind that the hallway is completely dark when I come home, so unless I remember to look, which thankfully, thus far, I have, I could easily go sprawling face down in the hall. That would garner no sympathy from the boy, of course, who probably would not bestir himself to give me anything more than a sleepy Stink Eye.

. . .
I have been doing some knitting, finishing up or completely ripping out several projects. Tracfone had to send me a newer cell phone due to network changes. Unfortunately, the case I had for the older phone is too big for this one, and the headset doesn't fit the new phone. So, I knit a phone cozy and a little bag for the headset.



I got enough of this yarn (those of you with good memories will remember that I knit a cozy for my ham radio and a bag for its extra battery and car charger) to knit a bag for the ham radio's mag mount antenna, and I'll knit a bag for the various charger cords for the phone, PDA, and my 20 million candle power spotlight (MCPS).

(That sound you hear is my mother yet again rolling around in her crypt, moaning "Where did I go wroooong?!" because we, uhm, diverged on the path of what's important to us individually, and not just because she's dead and I'm not. I am much happier in a hardware store than a department store, among other things, but, I digress.)

Lest you think my 20 MCPS is an affectation, I've actually used it, once to charge my cell phone, and one to find a pill that managed to bounce the length of a teeny slot between two file cabinets, ending up against the black back panel of my desk return. My 21 LED flashlight didn't pick it out, but 10 of my 20 MCP did! ::happy dance::

No, seriously, it hadn't already occurred to you that I am weird? Lizards in Scarves? Eggs in Hats? Lizards period??? Okay, you had me worried there for a minute...

After finding a wonderful website that calculates crown decreases and other increase/decrease knitting things, I finally finished the hat I started for me niece almost 3 years ago:


I knit a couple of Checking On The Colonel hats designed by Kim of Woven~N~Spun, and with the leftover yarn, I did my first neat (as in not puckered and icky) stranded hat. Here, Karen very nicely put it on so I could take a photo of it when I visited her the other day:



The wavy green and white thing behind her is the feather-and-fan cotton throw I knit her a couple of years ago. Now that I have taught her to knit, she has to knit her own from here on out.

Last winter, I knit me some mock cable fingerless mitts. This winter, I knit a scarf to go with it. Here Mike models the scarf:



There is a very sweet, crafty young lady named Jessica who gave me a gift at a holiday potluck in December. I knit her a short spiral scarf, one that naturally spirals around, due to the way it is knit. Doesn't Mike look smart in it? ::snort::



I did finish a pair of socks for Socks for Soldiers, and started another pair out of the same yarn, Regia Stretch. Now, while I've always enjoyed knitting with Regia yarns, I really hated working with the Stretch. Last night, having knit past 8 inches on the feet of the second pair - that is, 22.5 inches on TWO socks, I gave up, something I rarely do.

I was so not happy with the uneven tension and how that made them lumpy and uneven, I frogged both socks and wound the yarn into balls. I will be rehoming them with someone who has knit with that yarn before, so they can make a pair of soldier socks with it. I hate giving up on them, after all that work (it takes 2 hours to knit one inch, longer to do the 2.75" heels), but if I wouldn't be happy wearing them for a few hours in my relatively comfy life, I sure as heck wouldn't inflict them on a soldier who may end up wearing them for weeks on end between changes.

The inflammation in my right hand is getting worse, and is exacerbated working with the size 0-2 needles I use to make socks, so I'm going to take a sock break, and finish some projects that are worked on larger needles. Like the tote bag made out of strung-together loops cut out of plastic grocery bags.

May this year be a better one for everyone...


Mike, May 2007

Socks and Hats and Other Goodies for Soldiers

Regardless of one's opinion about the politics and events leading to our servicemen and servicewomen spending long months in Afghanistan and Iraq, these men and women (some barely more than kids) are there, putting themselves on the line every day. Regardless of one's opinion about how well or not the military has equipped and supplied our servicemembers, they're out there the deserts and mountains, freezing winters and blistering hot summers. Here in California we joke about our seasons being flood, mudslide, fire and earthquakes. For most of those in Iraq and Afghanistan, the seasons are sandy, dust, and mud. Many are away from things like showers, clean/dry clothes, and communications with their stateside families for days or weeks at time.

There are many "support our troops" organizations that have arising through the years, each addressing sometimes different, sometimes overlapping, needs. I chose to become a small part of the Socks for Soldiers, a group started by servicemom Kim Opperman in Ohio.

The primary focus of the group is to knit wonderful wool boot socks for servicemembers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since it can be very stressful working on BBS (big black socks) (though not nearly as stressful as it is for the recipients of our socks), we can take the occasional break by knitting leisure socks (colors! patterns!) and washcloths.

Some folks who make hand-made soaps are donating their soaps, which Kim wraps in the washcloths.

Some of us are making wool caps, too, black ones to be worn when in uniform under their helmets, more colorful ones that can be worn during off hours and when sleeping.

Why wool? Because wool is better than cotton and acrylic at wicking away sweat, and doesn't get soggy or stretched out like wet cotton does. Acrylic is not only not was warm as wool and lacks wool's wicking properties, acrylic and other such yarns melt into the skin, severely worsening burns and injuries when hit with fire or red-hot shrapnel.

Those who can donate goodies they pick up locally and ship to SFS--drink mix packets and other snack foods, toiletries, paperback books, music CDs, crafting materials, etc. Kim packs these all up, sending boxes of goodies--all packed with socks, many containing hats and washcloths and soaps--to companies, chaplains, and about-to-deploy national guard units.

Over 2400 pairs of socks have been sent off today - but there is a waiting list of over 1000 names of servicemembers whose names have been sent in by command personnel, families, and fellow servicemembers.

In World War I, the Red Cross had a program called Knit Your Bit, where Red Cross volunteers and others produced a prodigious number of socks, sweaters, hats and more for servicemen. If you're a knitter, please consider joining SFS, reading through the New Members material in the Files section of the email list, and start making your first pair of SFS BBS. If you've never knit a pair of socks before, that's okay - you'll find yourself in the company of other list members who are knitting their very first pair, too.

If you can't knit, or don't have time to knit for SFS, please consider making a donation of money to help pay for shipping everything (SFS pays the going postal rate for shipping all its packages to military bases), and you know how expensive it has gotten to ship parcels) and buy the snack and other comfort items. If you have a large stock of snack or comfort items, SFS is a 501(c)3 nonprofit - just contact Kim (sockforsoldier-owner [at] yahoogroups.com) to find out where to send donations or to find out what's on the Wish List.

Here's a photo of the things I recently finished that will be sent off this week.



I am going to include a little card of support with each item, ones I got from my friend Martha, who is a talented paper and stamp artist:



As for the obligatory Lizard photo, here's the boy, wanting to know why I'm taking photos of stuff instead of spraying him with water and picking off some more shed from his head:

Hey, baby...

Since I made the first vine lace baby hat, I've made a couple more of them,and finished the little preemie blanket/burp cloth I've had on the needles for a while. That got me into making some more baby hats for the guild's Hospital Stash, finishing up the yarn I made the blankets with, and digging into some other rescued yarn from my community knitting stash.




Last night I started a coupl of baby mitts/socks. Apparently, I need a refresher course in gauge, or need to alter the pattern I'm using to make things a bit wider and shorter...




Mike, always the willing model, here shows off one of the baby hats. I first knit a garter stitch strip about 8-9 inches long, then did a sort of 3 needle bind off to graft the cast-on edge so that a smooth seam resulted. I picked up sts around one edge, and knit in the round for an inch or two before decreasing for a couple of rows. I then drew the yarn tail through the remaining stitches, secured the tails, and made and added the pom pom.



What a handsome boy! Okay, so he looks like a total doofus with that hat on, but I ain't gonna tell him that!

When he's not in my bed...

...he's in his own. Usually. Last night I came home from a meeting to find him sound asleep under my dresser. He crept out from under this morning just enough for me to be able to easily pick him up and put him in his nice warm bath. Spoiled? Nah.

Anyway, here's some pics from Monday night...

An ant's eye view:



A (low flying) bird's eye view:



Look at that manly jowl!



With a ruler, for perspective:



Change of Pace....

While I have been knitting squares for the SonomaBlanket Project and preemie blankets for the knitting guild's hospital stash, I've stayed away from other baby stuff. I did knit a little hat to match the last preemie blanket, but that's about it.

A couple of people (well, women) I know are expecting babies in the next several months. I was going to knit my usual hooded bath blanket, but then decided to try something different. Not sure what, but different.

I signed up for the new Knitting Daily e-newsletter from Interweave Press, and came across a pattern for Sandi Wiseheart's Vine Lace Baby Hat. I don't know why it attracted me, but it did, so I did. Here's my first one, being modeled by a naval orange since it wouldn't fit Mike's head:



The increases in the pattern rows, which are balanced by an equal number of decreases, makes a lovely scalloped edge. My brain just doesn't do lace, and while the last 8 even numbered rows are each different and so it requires a bit of concentration as you shape the crown, I find the first three inches to be rather rhythmic and relaxing, as I do the Midwest Moonlight scarf.

So, along with making some of these baby hats for the women I know, thought I'd make some for the hospital stash, too.

If you want to get the pattern, hurry up and sign up for Knitting Daily. The e-newsletter is free, as is this pattern.

Off to cast on #2!

Second dye not so hot...

Emboldened by my first dye attempt, I waited patiently for the ochre dye to get here so I could dye some yarn for my niece, Soma. I'd decided on a sequence of five colors: two tones of sapphire blue, two of gold ochre, and white (undyed stretches of yarn). I applied them as follows: Blue dark, Blue light, Ochre dark, Ocher light, white, Ocher light, Ocher dark, Blue light, Blue dark, each applied for about 5 inches before stating the next color. This would have resulted on several colors appearing on each row, with a sort of mottled or zigzag pattern once knit up, rather than the spiral my first skein is making (where the colors were applied for stretches of 12-14").

In theory--on the kitchen counter--it looked good:




As you can see from the drying and hanked photo, not so good in execution, as the ochre capillaried across the white, and merged unevenly with the blue on its other side, leaving a yucky mess:



Ewwww. At least to me for whom oranges and golds are not in my preferred palate (my first skein most definitely is), and even though I love the deep sapphire blue, I didn't the greens.

Ah, well, live and learn - and dye again! This time, rather than scrap the 465 yards of sock yarn or send it off anyway, I ordered a gift certificate from Amazon for Soma (a book fiend like me, I know that it will be welcomed, even if not as personal as yarn dyed just for her), and overdyed the yarn. I pulled out the leftover blue solutions (one made with 1/2 teaspoon of the sapphire blue Jacquard powder, the other made with 1/4 teaspoon), poured it into the dye vat along with more water, vinegar and dye powder, and submerged the yarn.

I was so busy grumbling to myself about how the yarn turned out originally that I neglected to soak it once again in vinegar water before putting it into the vat. I don't know if that would have changed the uptake of the dye.



I brought the water up to under a boil, and let it steep until the water was clear. The result, once dried and wound into a cake, is sapphire blue and mostly two shades of green, depending on whether the blue soaked into the light or dark ocher. Here's the photo I took of the cake indoors under my fluorescent desk lamp:



Karen, who has been knitting for just a year now, and is still working on her first sock, decided to get in on the dyeing action, too. So, while my yarn was cooking in the microwave, she mixed up her dyes (Jacquard's Vermilion and Jet Black) and laid out her yarn.

A couple of days before, I unraveled a row of of sock in the Jaywalk pattern I'm hooked on (and that Karen is also making) and measured it, finding that it takes 41.5-42 inches to work one pattern row (*K1, M1, k8, double decrease (sl1, sl1, k1, pass slipped sts over), k8, K1, M1; rep from * to end three more times). Karen wanted one color a row, alternating black and vermilion, with a little white thrown in now and then to brighten it up a bit.

Rather than sequence dyeing like I did in both my skeins, she did hers this way:


I realized as she started applying the color that she could have vat dyed the yarn, using two vats at the same time, with the yarn in between them being the undyed 'white' yarn. Ah, well, next time.

We took care in wrapping it to keep the white yarn separate from the adjacent colors:


Even so, there was some capillary action, with the black and vermilion bleeding into the white.


(Sorry about the blur...) What is odd (and not easily seen in this photo) is that where the black bled into or otherwise came into contact with the intentionally undyed yarn, it didn't show up as black or gray. Instead, some of its component parts were present or absent, such as some milk chocolate brown smears that appeared in one area. Karen was so impatient to start applying the dyes to the yarn that she didn't do a great job of really getting the black powder mixed into solution, but still, the colors of some of the bleeds and contact areas were unexpected.

When I get around to actually knitting with my blue/green yarn, I'll post a picture here of what it looks like worked up. I rather like it in its current incarnation, but 'twill depend on what shades of green turn out to be most visible as it gets worked up into a sock.

Operation Gratitude

Operation Gratitude has been active in shipping care packages and other things to our service members stationed around the world. (See Crazy Aunt Purl's blog about her visit to an OpGratitude collection & packing site in June 2006.)

New to their Wish List is an invitation for people to knit scarves for our service people. Not just ones to wear on duty (like Operation Home Front's Helmet Liners) but scarves for fun and comfort when wearing civvies. (For other off duty comfort, see Operation Toasty Toes.)

Anyway, here are the three scarves I'll be shipping off this week to OpGrat. I made the goldish moss stitch and wild black and orange scarf; Juliette made the green basketweave scarf. She gave me the black-and-orange yarn, whereas I gave her the green yarn; the green and gold (actually, two strands fo slightly different colors) were made from donated yarn.

All of which you could probably care less about, and just want me to get to the lizard part: