ducks like rain...

Onward!

2009-07-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

A bit of an administrative announcement: after almost five years of using Blogger, I’m switching to Wordpress. Update your bookmarks! My new blog is http://slw71881.wordpress.com.

I’ve been delaying this decision for months, hoping that blogger would come out with specific new features, but now it’s only weeks until the baby arrives and it’s time to make the change. I started this blog a month after I moved to Seattle (mostly due to inspiration from other knitters), and it’s turned out to be a great way of keeping in touch with family and friends. I’m always surprised and pleased when I see someone in person and they reference pictures or posts, and I love when people leave comments. For a while at the beginning I’d been trying to increase the number of readers and commenters, but I’ve come to appreciate the fact that I know most of my regular readers in real life. There are a handful of people I don’t know who visit regularly, which I think is neat. It’s a public space, and so I’m still wary of the boundaries – I don’t post about work and rarely post about friends, politics, religion, or any of the deep and emotional subjects. But I love my blog as a record of the day-to-day, all of our projects and trips, and seasonal milestones.

That said, our day-to-day is going to be changing, and while I’m fine with posting the occasional baby or family photo (especially to show off hand knits!), it just doesn’t seem like a great idea to broadcast all of the little details to the whole world. That left me with three choices: keep things the way they are and just don’t post about the baby (sad – we want our family and friends across the country to be able to check in), switch to a private blog where you have to log in to see anything (sad because I love getting the occasional dropins from knitters and quilters), or leave blogger for one of the platforms that allows you to have a public blog with occasional private posts. The third option was the clear winner.

So, I’ve been moving the blog over to the new spot (including all 805 posts of the archives and everyone’s comments). The private posts probably won’t start in earnest until the baby is born – to see them, I’ll have to give you a password which I’ll email out with the birth announcement. After you’ve typed the password in once, you should be able to see all of the private posts – careful though, because if you enter it on a public machine (at the library, say), everyone else will be able to see the private posts, too, which will rather defeat the point.

Let me know if you have questions and see you on the new site!

Owls

2009-07-02T19:39:00.000-07:00

I’d been working fairly steadily on my blue and yellow short rows baby sweater, but my attention keeps drifting elsewhere – to quilting, sewing, and little knit vests. Then a vest pattern caught my eye with little owls cleverly constructed out of cables, and I had the perfect amount of Cotton Ease in my stash. So now I’m officially taking a break and knitting owls instead.

The work has been flying. Many of the finished versions on Ravelry have beads or buttons as eyes – I’ll have to start looking. I’ve been so pleased to have a use for this yarn, and it’s an added bonus that I’m finding the knit result to be so cute. The yarn has been sitting there irking me for over a year (I’d bought a single skein, thinking I needed it for a project and then I didn’t after all), and this is such a great pattern for it.

Encroachment

2009-07-01T21:40:00.000-07:00

I haven’t posted about the fishtank in ages. All the dudes seem to be hanging out and doing well. Over the winter the tang had been acting increasingly neurotic, and was having scale issues, but we moved his food clip a few months ago and it seems to have helped a lot – he’s much more social and is looking and acting like a completely different fish. Kevin’s also been quite disciplined about filtering the water that goes in the tank and about nightly kalkwasser supplementation, and that seems to be having a noticeable impact as well. We’re still talking about a bigger, quieter, automated tank but we’re still probably a ways away from installing it.

I wanted to post, though, about the leather. Since I last posted in February, it’s grown another few inches up and out – truly a monster. I’ve been very worried about the Ricordia below it (the pretty green and blue corals), since it’s increasingly blocking their light. However, apparently the ricordia decided to take matters into their own hands, and have started climbing to a better location. Unfortunately, they chose to move up (instead of over), which means they are now slowly marching up the trunk of the leather!

Here’s a close-up:

This is less than ideal. First, they won’t get any more light because they’ll still be under the lip of the leather. But more importantly, soft corals have limited defences – they move very slowly and don’t have rigid structures to retreat into. Their only real defence mechanism is chemical warfare – trying to sting or annoy away anything that encroaches on their turf. You can see that both the leather and the ricordias look a bit the worse for wear – the ricordias aren’t fully out (they pull their little nubs in at night or when they’re feeling attacked), and the leather is pulling away from the rock and is susceptible to a reddish algae around its base. We’re probably going to have to intervene by both paring back the leather and removing some of the now-embedded ricordias, but I need to gear up a bit more before undertaking that high a level of coral surgery.

Summer colors

2009-06-30T22:42:00.000-07:00

In the “it’s the small things” category, we have a new mat for the back door and it’s beautiful:

It looks nice with our interior green walls in the living room, and each time I go out to water the plants I admire it. Our old one gave five years of steady service, but it was so worn that you couldn't see the pattern anymore. It’s so nice to have the bright, pretty colors on the step. :-)

Fun family visit

2009-06-29T22:58:00.000-07:00

My sister is in California for the summer on an internship between her two years of business school. We were so excited when she suggested flying up for a weekend. Great to see her, and fun to show off our house. This is her fourth Seattle trip so we skipped the touristy things for normal weekend activities (the farmers market, the bread store, a walk around the neighbourhood and Grasslawn park, grilling). It was a treat to see her.

The weather finally cooperated, and she saw both Rainier and the Cascades. (The Olympics were hazed over, but we went down to Lake Washington and the sun on the water was at least pretty.) We have a handful of photos. At the farmers market:

And some of the pretty flowers:

Sharon with the bounty (including the mysterious kohlrabi):

And all of us at dinner, thanks to the tripod and camera timer:

It’s so nice to think that the next time we see her, the baby will be here, instead of just a kicking, hiccuping presence, and Sharon will be an aunt!

Harvest

2009-06-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

The plants on the patio are actually producing! The first bit of a crop, picked while Sharon was here:

The strawberries are doing great in their pot. Last year they didn’t really produce, but there are a lot more berries and flowers in the wings, and I’m feeling very pleased with them.

The beans are a bit confusing to me. I feel like the plants should be spending their energy growing and they can produce later, but I don’t know how to convey this to them. Each plant (I have two) put out a few beans when it was so hot a few weeks ago. The plants are still mid-to-small in size, and now they each have several more baby beans. Any ideas on whether to cut off the baby beans now, or just let them grow?

The pea vines are the most pathetic. They’re each about a foot tall, and they also produced 1-2 peas each during our hot streak. So you have these sad little vines (with half dead leaves from our hot week) with a big plump peapod on the upper end.

They seem happy (green, firm) in a stunted kind of way, but if anyone has thoughts on magical pea growing tricks, I’m all ears.

We'll need some practice

2009-06-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

We are slowly starting to accrue more baby things. I’d made a series of spreadsheets, with links, a few months ago, but aside from placing an order for the crib and myriad knitting and sewing supplies, we’ve just been waiting. My parents offered to buy us a baby carrier though, and our moby wraps have now arrived! We’d gotten to try them out in our baby class, but we’d both managed to forget just how long they are – high amusement value.

They come with a thick booklet of possible wrapping strategies, and we both managed the basic without too much trouble. Can’t wait until there’s a baby to put in them!

Roundabout

2009-06-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

Here’s a late-night photo of the beginning of the quilting.

I love the way the rings are turning out. I had to run out and buy a compass to build my circle templates, and this is as far as I could get with it (it has a max diameter of 13 inches). I’m thinking I should be able to eke out a few more with a longer pencil, and then I’ll start using a string/pen homemade system. Each circle’s radius is an inch greater than the previous one. The sewing went very smoothly, except for the tiniest circle (the size of a quarter) – I just can’t turn the fabrics quickly or smoothly enough to make it circular. I keep ending up with misshapen ovals. I’m going to need to practice until I can manage a better version, I think.

This was my first time using a fabric pen – rather a success. I found a purple one that has disappearing ink. The package said it would disappear within 48 hours, but my experience has been more like 10 min to 2 hours, depending on the weight of the line I drew. It’s hard to consistently trace the stencils hard enough to get a heavy line that lasts. Instead, I started tracing a circle or two at a time and then sewing it before it disappeared. Not entirely efficient, but the end result is great.

A bit more coordinated

2009-06-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

Since I finished my Olympic Mountain comforter a year and a half ago, I’ve been meaning to use the extra fabric left over from the trim to make a matching bed skirt. For a while we had a ruffled white lace thing, but it did not look nice with the dark quilt and wood bed, so we’ve just had a bare box spring. Not the most attractive option.

The sewing for the bed skirt was not hard (straight seams, cotton fabric), but there have been a slew of delays. First I didn’t actually have enough of my patterned fabric (amazingly, three years later Joann’s still had it in stock!), then I was dragging my feet on measuring and cutting the pieces. On the whole, I’m good at designing things to fit a space or an object, but when the measurement is larger than my arm-span, I always seem to get a bit off. Luckily, a bedskirt does not demand the same precision of measurement that trim does (and this one doesn’t even require perfectly parallel lines, since the skirt bottom is going to be tucked behind the base of our bed frame), so once I finally got started last week the project moved pretty quickly. The biggest issue was actually just that I’m getting ponderous enough that doing all of the measuring out, pinning, etc. on the floor was harder than it would have been normally. I made three long panels (one each for the two sides of the boxspring, and one for the base), and four squares to wrap the corners. I still have my bed sheets from college, though the twin extra long isn’t a useful size, so I used one flat sheet for lining the panels and the other for the piece that lies between the box spring and the mattress.

Here’s the empty box spring after we’d removed the mattress and bedding:

And here it is with the new bedskirt in place:

And the made-up bed in the morning:

It looks so much more polished, and it’s a great long-term item to finally have off the list.

Quilt sandwich

2009-06-21T13:36:00.000-07:00

I basted the baby blanket this morning, and I’m so happy with the medium blue/turquoise bali fabric that I found for the back.

The quilt front came out to what seems to be a perfect 36" square, without any trimming. I cut the batting and backing about an inch and a half bigger in case pinning it out revealed some sort of stretch or slant, but now I just have a neat border to trim once I’m done quilting. I was having trouble settling on a quilting pattern that felt right, but I’ve come up with a concentric circles plan that I really like. Can’t wait to see how it works out. I found a fabric pen to mark out the lines (a bigger achievement than it sounds at first glance – there are so many different options), so that’s on the docket for later this afternoon. We’re going to see Up for a Father-to-be Day evening out, so I’m curious to see how much I can get done around that.

New footwear

2009-06-20T22:37:00.000-07:00

On the bright side, pretty new shoes, and they were even on sale!

On the flip side (no pun intended), it’s a good thing that I like them so much because they’re my only option right now. In the last week or so, the foot swelling has graduated from occasional to constant. There are about two months left (this was week 32), so at least they can pass for pretty summer shoes instead of a desperate pregnancy choice. :-)

And NOW it's summer

2009-06-18T09:39:00.000-07:00

Our first CSA bag of the season came today!

Like last year, the first bag is on the small side, but it was still very fun to unpack. They included a bag of lavender – I'm torn whether to try some of the lavender recipes that they included or just dry it and make more of the great hot/cold bags with it. The strawberries and cherries are great, we have tons of apriums (one of the reasons we chose this CSA over others is that they grow a lot of stone fruit and hybrids), and we pretty much finished the lemon basil last night. (Yum.)

A question for you: do you have any recipes/strategies for radishes? They included a pesto recipe for the greens which looks like the plan for tonight, but I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to the radish itself.

Progress!

2009-06-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

The quilt top is done for the Bento Box baby blanket!

I'm wishing that I'd used a little bit more of the medium blue, but I think that once the blue binding is on, that will do the trick. I'm still wavering whether to use the fabric I have for the back or to see if I can find a coordinating Bali print, and I don't have great ideas on how to quilt it, though the size (36" square) will make the quilting so much more manageable than the daybed quilt was.

Here's a close-up on one of the corner squares:

Several of the fabrics are the remnants from my Olympic mountains log cabin quilt (that lives on our bed), and it makes me happy to see them in this context.

Newborn sweater

2009-06-11T08:26:00.000-07:00

Here's the beginnings of a new sweater – the last one I'm planning to make before the kiddo is born. (Two more endless months still left, but at a 7 st/in gauge, the sweater has the potential to take all of it.)

(I'm working sideways, so the button band is down, the neck is to the left, and I'm knitting across the chest towards the left sleeve.) The pattern calls for garter stitch throughout, but after trying that for a few rows, I decided that such tiny stitches deserve at least some stockinette. Now I'm thinking that I'll do this yellow stockinette/blue garter stripe pattern for the front and sleeves, and use garter on the back? It's quickly becoming the indecisive sweater.

Favourite baby sweater

2009-06-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've barely posted about this project at all, which is such a pity because I've loved working on it. I started about a week before we left for PA, then continued working throughout the trip, and finished the hat and bootees once we got home. The pattern is cute, but the part that pleased me the most was how wonderful the yarn is. It's a bamboo blend, machine-washable, and so very soft and drapey. It just feels snuggly.

The back is simple, too – there's something to be said about a pattern like this that just works the way it's written and comes together well.

So now it's off to go live in the cabinet with the pile of other baby things for a few more months.

Flower help?

2009-06-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

10 points to anyone who can tell me the name of this flower:

They're big (a good 8-10 inches across), and the name has been on the tip of my tongue for weeks now. Whatever they are, they're beautiful. The blooms are far too heavy for the stalks, so they tend to drape themselves languorously over the nearby azaleas, and in some cases just rest their heads directly on the driveway.

Sensational, showy things, and such a pretty color.

Quick sewing

2009-06-07T22:24:00.000-07:00

The bento box quilt top is coming together so quickly, which is nice because I seem to be getting so sleepy again in the evenings and haven't had that much time to work on it. I have the right panel finished (shown here on the chair), and am getting closer on the two remaining panels.

I needed to rip and redo some of my seams so that the blocks would all make nice points (it seems that even with my ¼" foot, I still managed to get pretty far off on some of those seam allowances), but it's gratifying to have such a fast, pretty project.

A Work In Progress

2009-06-06T23:23:00.000-07:00

I was only trying to get a photo of all of the new flowers we chose for the patio containers, but the pictures turned out to also be a pretty good before/after comparison of the weeding of the rock wall. In this one, you can see the total chaos that is the rock wall plantings, plus copious forget-me-nots, pansies (with runners), vinca, dandelions, mint, and assorted weeds.

Meanwhile, in this view, you can see the lovely lack of weeds in the rock wall, plus the attractively pruned japanese maple. :-)

The "after" photo constituted a good four hour's worth of work, and unfortunately my back doesn't tolerate a moment more than that these days. The hopeful news is that we are in the middle of June sunlight hours (well past 9 pm!), so I could conceivably divide the remaining wall into chunks and buzz through it after work.

I'm mostly happy with the way the containers turned out. I think they need a little bit more orange and pink – between the creeper (left over from last year, and I can't find the tag) and the snapdragons, it's a little bit too much of that lime yellow. Pretty from the top, though!

Irises

2009-06-04T17:13:00.000-07:00

I have more of Kevin’s macro-lens photos of our yard – the first of the irises bloomed!!

A coworker gave me these when she was thinning hers out three years ago. We had one summer of blooms, and then they sulked all last year. I’d forgotten how beautiful they are.

I love the amazing closeups that are possible with the macro lens – the colors are great.

Two years!

2009-06-03T22:52:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was our second wedding anniversary!

We went out to eat at one of the restaurants on the Kirkland waterfront, with a pretty view of the water and Olympics, and great strawberry basil margaritas (mine was less fun than Kevin’s, but still delicious). We had a table outside right at the edge of the balcony, so our view of all of the boat and swimming activity was perfect, and the sunset was lovely.

I remember thinking this last year, too, but it’s such fun to finally have an anniversary. We met seven years ago (crazy that it’s been that long – a quarter of our lives) while we were both out in Seattle for a summer internship at Microsoft. We didn’t know each other at the beginning of the summer and we were definitively together by the end, but the closest we’d gotten to putting a date on it had been the fortnight between our birthdays in the last two weeks of July, and generally it was more just the summer season. Actually having a day to remember, take stock, appreciate, and celebrate is quite fun. Even better that it holds all of the memories of our wedding, which was such a wonderful, happy day. As nostalgic as the day is, it also feels like we’re standing on the platform about to leap – pregnancy is one thing, but knowing that with next year’s anniversary we’ll be a family instead of a couple, the world feels like it’s about to get so much wider.

Weekend quilting progress

2009-06-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve been looking at lots of bento box quilts trying to decipher what makes some blocks work so well (clear center rings), and some so poorly. (For a reminder of what the pattern looks like, see my old post here.) Each square contains an internal L against a background color, and you assemble four squares (with the Ls rotated appropriately) to make a block with a ring. From what I can tell, there seem to be four rules:

The two background parts should have the same fabric.

The diagonal squares of a block should not have the same backgrounds/Ls.

The diagonal squares of adjacent blocks should not have the same background.

The L and the background need to be different colors or tones.

The tone vs. color issue is interesting. I took a picture of my fabrics and transposed part of it in black and white so that I could see the darker vs. lighter fabrics. Isn’t it kind of surprising that that yellow on the far left is one of the darkest fabrics? And that that second green is so much darker than the two to the right of it?

Since I need 36 squares and I have 12 fabrics, I started by cutting pieces for three backgrounds and three Ls per color. (There was some fudging, since I didn’t have enough for three and three of all of the fabric options.) I love the way the piles of pieces look, waiting to begin sewing.

I cut all of the pieces for the quilt top on Saturday morning, and then sewed the squares together in batches on Sunday.

Next up is figuring out the placement of the squares and seaming the top together. It’s so satisfying to be making progress so quickly – it’s a speedy pattern, and the small size helps, but I also think I’m getting better at organizing my sewing before I start.

Inching closer

2009-05-31T10:32:00.000-07:00

The second most popular baby question I’ve gotten, after "have you thought about names?", is what our nursery theme will be. I feel terrible to have to let people down when they seem so interested, but I wouldn’t say that "themes" have ever been my strong suite. (Luckily, I’m not sure how much the baby will notice.) Theme-incompetence aside, we are making progress on the nursery front. After all of the furniture mayhem three weeks ago, we finally have a plan that we’re both excited about for how to free up one of the bedrooms. We have our great glider, have ordered a crib, and have our eyes on an IKEA bookcase that will complete the furniture. We’re planning to use the second vanity in our bathroom as a changer, and the preexisting closet shelves (with baskets and/or hangers) instead of a dresser. I found a pattern online for crib bedding that looks like extremely quick and easy sewing – I just need to find elastic and fabric. There’s the quilt. And then the only major decision-making left is what to do about the walls and floor.

We picked up paint samples after work on Friday – such a cheery pile of potential.

(The two vivid orange squares aren’t really contenders, they were just too pretty to leave there.) It's been months since we painted anything (last project was the bathroom in January), and while I can't say that I've exactly missed it as an activity, the color is a fun choice to make.

Also, we’ve been planning to replace the carpet in the two front bedrooms (one of the last remaining projects from our initial list), but it wasn’t a high priority item. Since we’re moving all of the furniture anyway, now seems like an ideal time. So we’ll need to find carpet samples, too.

No theme, but I think that both front bedrooms will look extremely pretty by the time we’re done, and it’s not that much work left. :-) Good timing, since last week finally marked the beginning of the third trimester!

On your mark...

2009-05-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

Before we left for our trip, I finally went out and found fabric for the bento box baby quilt I've been mulling. I found two spools of ribbon that seemed like ideal color inspiration: lemon, lime, turquoise and light blue.

I'm delighted with my fabrics for the front.

And I love my back fabrics, too, (shown here with the iron for size reference) but the jury is still out whether they are too saturated. My thought was that I’d make little orange and yellow nine-patch grids scattered across the blue, but it may be too bright. I'm thinking that I'll make up both the front and back and if it's not working in combination then I can sub in a lighter color for the back panel.

The fabric is all ironed and waiting for me to start cutting -- I can't wait to see it come together.

Our welcome home

2009-05-29T09:20:00.000-07:00

We arrived home to find the yard brimming with brilliant flowers.

Our azaleas and rhododendrons are all beautiful, and we managed to catch the tail end of the lilacs (I have a nice big vase of them on our kitchen counter, and they smell wonderful).

Kevin went out with his macro lens, and had fun snapping photos of the bumblebees enjoying the rhododendron blooms.

The bush is right next to our front door, and the pink flowers are spectacular. It's right outside Kevin's office window (soon to be the baby's room) and every time I walk along the path or through the hall, the size and sheer pinkness of the flowers is amazing.

We were quite delighted to see that the grass seed appears to have sprouted as well! It's still early, but the lawn already looks impressively better. Kevin put in lots of time the week before we left raking up the moss (more than a yard waste bin's worth! A herculean task) and then raking in the seed, so it's great to see that a healthy amount of it took even without us here to coddle it. Also, apparently we had cool weather and sufficient rain while we were away so that the container plants didn't bake -- they all look happy and bigger.

Eight buttons shy of finished

2009-05-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

My travel knitting for the trip was the Sirdar Baby Jacket. I managed to leave the patterns for the matching hat and booties at home, but the ribbing took much longer than anticipated and so I didn't end up casting off until midway through the trip home anyway. The yarn (a bamboo blend) is wonderful -- so soft, great stitch definition, and allegedly machine-washable. I wish I'd found it earlier -- it's a great option for baby knits. I still need to get the buttons sewn on, and clearly this needs to be blocked, but here the jacket is in its nearly-complete state:

PA trip, part 2

2009-05-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

The second half of our PA trip was a weekend in the Poconos with my mom's side of the family to celebrate my grandparents 80th and 85th birthdays. The hotel was a stately place surrounded by nature trails and a golf course, and they offered a daily list of activities and good meals. Seeing everyone was wonderful, but it was especially fun to do it in such a pretty setting.

We arrived mid-afternoon and immediately found my mom, grandparents, siblings and cousin in the lobby.

The frequency and ease with which we ran into family members continued to make me happy all weekend. It was such a treat to be in the middle of family – we usually only get to see everyone a few times a year at holidays, and the long weekend visit was wonderful.

The hotel grounds were quite pretty. Here’s one of several hiking groups returning from a hike down to one of the nearby waterfalls with all of the loveliness in the background.

They had dancing on Saturday night – a grand march followed by open dancing with live music. Here’s my sister and grandmother processing by during the march.

The weather was great – sunny and warm most of the days, and then on Sunday our group lawn-bowling event was interrupted by a big thunderstorm, with nice, dark clouds and even a bit of hail. We all took cover under a porch until the storm passed.

(We barely get lightning in Seattle, and a good storm is always a treat to me.) A second storm rolled in a few hours later, but it would have been more fun to watch if it hadn’t disrupted a wedding. They ended up moving it under the roof on the main porch which also seemed pretty, but the bride looked distressed.

PA trip, part 1

2009-05-26T19:43:00.000-07:00

Our east coast trip was wonderful. The first portion was a trip home to see Kevin's family for his sister's graduation. For Nursing, there's a pinning ceremony (which we attended -- a happy, proud celebration for her nursing class) and a college graduation, which Kristina decided to skip. We have plenty of great photos from the pinning. Here's Kristina and my in-laws beforehand:

In between graduation festivities, Kevin and his dad spent the first few days working on re-staining the deck. They did great work, and then Thursday was sunny and gorgeous so we all spent the day outside enjoying it. We've had a handful of beautiful days so far in Seattle, but nothing that compares to east coast summer weather.

We made a few pilgrimages to Dunkin Donuts. No photos, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Lots of time was also devoted to trying to let Kevin's family feel the baby kick. He gets very quiet when I'm talking or moving a lot, and so it was hard to stay settled enough so that he'd really get going when other people were around. Increasingly, I can feel body parts pushing out, but it's hard to decide what they are exactly (a knee? a foot?), and unless he moves other people usually can't feel what I'm talking about. We had lots of failed kicking attempts, like this one:

I was so pleased that on the last evening everyone finally got to feel squirming and kicking.

More speedy sewing

2009-05-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

As a quick project before we left on our trip, I made two more rice- and lavender-filled microwavable heating pads.

I inadvertently filled these ones a bit more than the original, but the slightly less moldable shape works well with the smaller size. They’re a great size for sticking in my suitcase. Since I still use my original heating pad more evenings than not, it’s a relief to know I’ll have a good allternative for the trip.

Container garden progress

2009-05-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

All of the seedlings on the kitchen counter have been merrily growing away. I've been debating what to do about transitioning them to outdoor weather, and when to replant them, but we're heading out of town for a ten-day east coast trip and I procrastinated long enough that the answer ended up being throwing them into containers the day before we left and hoping they'd survive my absence. Benign neglect has worked surprisingly well in the past, so hopefully a similar strategy will work this time as well.

For the first time ever, I not only have everything in appropriately sized pots, but I actually amended potting soil with compost the way you're supposed to.

I'm very pleased with myself, especially after such a half-hearted and late attempt last summer.

I have two containers of peas, two beans, one oregon star tomato, one brandywine tomato, a large bowl planter of leeks, and a strawberry pot. The tomato pots still contain multiple seedlings – I’ll thin them a final time once the plants are bigger. I divided up the lavender, but otherwise left the flowers in their seedling trays until I get back. I'll wait for them to get larger and sturdier and then just transfer them into the ground directly. I bought supplies (aka a lidded bucket and some flexible tubing) to make a drip irrigation system for later in the summer so that I’m not tied to the daily watering, but I didn’t have enough time to get it up and running before we left. Instead, the containers are all in a huddle in the part of the patio that I guessed was most likely to get any rain and sunlight while we were gone.

Grow well, little plants!

Baby's first Red Sox game!

2009-05-16T22:35:00.000-07:00

My parents have good friends who live in Seattle, and they've made a tradition of inviting us out when the Red Sox are in town. The seats are amazing -- right behind the visitors' dugout -- and we always enjoy the game. The Sox are only in town once this season and so we were quite pleased to be invited again.

Sadly, the Red Sox lost, but it was still a great game to watch. The baby seems very into baseball -- lots of kicking, especially when the game is tight. I'm sure I probably just have lots of adrenaline that he's reacting to, but it does feel like he starts rally-kicking when when we need or get a great hit!

More furniture moving

2009-05-14T21:52:00.000-07:00

This week was the week of furniture turmoil. Once we sat down to think about it, and especially after we started moving furniture, we quickly compiled a surprisingly long list of preferences and requirements. The red couch looks best in a room with green walls, the glass coffee table does not work with the other fish room or family room furniture, blue fabric and oak furniture looks best in the fish room, the dining room table and cabinet should stay as-is, we like the butterfly chairs in the corner arrangement in the family room, etc, etc. We had opinions about the traffic patterns of rooms. Kevin considered forgoing a desktop (and a desk) altogether. We considered five places in three rooms for my desk. We considered buying a new couch, or new chairs, for a living room grouping.

We were pretty pleased with ourselves for considering options, moving things around to see if they worked, and stopping for breaks before we got too frustrated or discouraged. The house plan and to-scale furniture helped a lot.

And now we have a tentative plan for a shared office that we’re sitting on for a few days to be sure that we’re both happy with it. :-) It feels like a very successful week.

Farmers Market Flowers

2009-05-12T19:51:00.000-07:00

The farmers market opened two weekends ago. I’ve been going to prenatal yoga on Saturday mornings (a wonderful thing) and now I can pop over to the market afterwards. They don’t have very much produce yet, but the flowers, as usual, are spectacular.

Portrait of a Sunday Night

2009-05-11T21:52:00.000-07:00

In the foreground: Mothers-to-be Day tulips from Kevin! :-)

In the background: Total disarray. The furniture/rooms question was starting to weigh on us, so I measured all of our furniture and printed out a floor plan of our house and to-scale furniture so that we could start considering our options. We have a three bedroom house, and currently we each use one bedroom as an office. My office also has a twin/trundle bed in it for when guests visit. Once the baby comes, we’ll turn Kevin’s office into the baby room. But the third bedroom isn’t big enough for both desks and the guest bed, so some creativity is required.

We were doing a good job with the paper cutouts for a little bit, but before too long we thought we had a good option and just rolled up the rug and started moving furniture. Several couch, coffee table, and bookcase configurations later, we abandoned the effort in favour of dinner. I took the photo while Kevin cooked.

With a bit of a break, we thought of new possibilities to try which actually turned out pretty well. We’re still not quite there, but definitely getting closer, and we got the room put back together once we’d eaten.

They'll let us leave the hospital

2009-05-10T23:34:00.000-07:00

In a big step closer to baby-preparedness, we have a carseat! (A gift from Kevin’s parents!!)

For those who are interested in such things, it’s a Britax Diplomat. We decided to skip the infant seat in favour of a convertible, and then I found a great sale price with free shipping.

We had a good time trying it out in the car (with my 26-week shape quite evident). Rear-facing for the first year:

And then forward-facing up to forty pounds:

It’s now packed back into the box in the garage. We’re saving all of the LATCH and installation fun for July, which still feels very far away. People keep telling me that time is going to start to fly, but I’ve been feeling acutely aware of the fact that it isn’t and I’m struggling not to feel impatient.

Debbie Bliss Ribbed Jacket

2009-05-08T20:04:00.000-07:00

Continuing the theme of baby knits on the rock wall in the back yard, here’s the finished Debbie Bliss Ribbed Jacket with some pretty white mystery flowers.

This sweater, knit in aran weight yarn, was a lightning-fast knit. I used Cascade 220 superwash, and I’m wondering if I should have gone down a needle size as it grew substantially when I blocked it. The fabric feels nice, with good stitch definition, and while the under-arm seams aren’t smooth, I think they’ll look fine when the sweater is actually being worn. (Ignore the raggedy hemline, here. The sky was starting to open again as I took the photo, and I didn’t take the extra second to straighten it. In real life, it’s even.)

I suspect that the buttons may not be in the best taste, but I’m leaving them anyway.

I bought them on Queen Anne in the first month or two after we moved to Seattle, and I’m quite pleased that they finally have a home.

Baby Surprise Jacket

2009-05-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

After a long interlude without buttons, the baby surprise jacket is done!

I finished it early in the week but the rain and dark clouds were a constant this week and this yarn is had to photograph without real light. After so many days of downpour, the garden is vibrant, though, so it was clearly for a good cause. Here’s the finished jacket with the blooming violets, forget-me-nots and periwinkle (not to mention the ever-present moss and a few ivy starts that I missed while weeding. You can also see a stand of mint in the upper-left. The mint was simply delighted with all of the rain this week and has been flourishing. We’ll have to do mojitos or something similar soon to subdue it a bit).

A less leafy view of the front, but hard to see the purple and green accents in the yarn:

And here’s the back:

I probably won’t use this yarn again – it feels wonderful and was so pleasant to knit with, but the color variation looked prettier in the ball than knit up, I think. Nonetheless, I’m pleased with the sweater and it’s so nice to finally have the buttons sewn on and be able to cross it off the list.

Sunrise Circle Jacket

2009-05-06T22:23:00.000-07:00

After four nights of work, including during a particularly unfortunate 0-13 Red Sox loss, I finally finished seaming the Sunrise Circle Jacket, and got the buttons all sewed on!

I’m reasonably pleased with the fit. The arms are a bit long (an inch or two shorter would probably be better), and the entire sweater is roomy, especially under the arms. The back fits very well, though, and the length is great. I’m still not wild about the color (probably the sweater’s biggest fault), but it’s cozy and I think I’ll wear it, especially in the evenings at home. I think the style should work for breastfeeding, and it’s machine-washable so that’s certainly a plus.

The button placement works well for my current body shape, but I’ll probably redo the bottom button or two at some point next fall. I love the way the button line looks with the overlapping hems and pretty curving rows of stitches.

The buttons were a find. I’ve been looking for quite a while without much luck (that purple is tough to work with), and then found these. I think the color and size are great, and I love the carved circles on the surface – they reinforce the lines of the sweater well, I think.

All in all, a long project, but a satisfying result.

Friday grilling

2009-05-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

The weather on Thursday and Friday was gorgeous, and the forecast for the rest of the weekend looked discouraging, so we had Larry, Kelly, Shawn, Sanna and their dog William over for grilling on Friday after work. William treed his first raccoon (I wish they’d stop hanging out in our neighbourhood, but maybe we’ll just need to invite William over more often?), to everyone else’s bemusement. After we were done eating and the sun had set, we retired to the kitchen for brownies and chatter.

Kevin’s parents found a toddler backpack and sent it out to us a few months ago. We knew that Larry, especially, would be delighted.

He’s an avid hiker, and has already been scheming about introducing the baby to the great outdoors. (Lending new meaning to the phrase "baby hike"?) On the counter, you can see the gorgeous tulips he brought – wine for everyone else, and flowers for me! :-)

While Larry played with the backpack, everyone else took a turn with the stroller (a gift from Kevin’s friend Sunil!). It’s quite the mean machine, with shocks, bright colors, and a great stroller/lifestyle instruction booklet. Here it is with the top down, facing backwards, with the back fully reclined:

William wasn’t too sure about it (his nerves were probably still on edge after the raccoon encounter), but luckily the humans in the room were much more appreciative -- we’re quite enamoured of it and it was fun to show it off. :-)

Speedy little knit

2009-04-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

After those last long rows of the Sunrise Circle Jacket, I needed something quick and gratifying to knit. One of the things in my Ravelry queue was a 3-6 mos Debbie Bliss baby sweater in worsted weight yarn, and I’d picked up yarn for it just recently. Perfect. I’d been expecting fast, but it really just flew. Here’s one evening’s worth of leisurely knitting (a little over halfway done):

I love those tulips, by the way. Generally, I’m much more of a vibrant tulip person, but the subtle pink and white is lovely, and I love the two layers of petals. Rather blowsy and completely the right mood for the week.

I meant to post this and then finish knitting the body, but it was too quick, and so here’s the body blocking:

Tonight, I have a bunch of seaming to do – buttons for the Baby Surprise Jacket, all of the seams and buttons for the Sunrise Circle Jacket, and then the hems , sleeves and sides of this little jacket. Then I can pick up stitches along the edges of the front and sides and knit the ribbed collar. We’ll see if I manage to get it all done?

Green and Growing

2009-04-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

We had unusual weather on Sunday – dark clouds to the east and west, and steady sunshine overhead. Kevin took advantage of the light to take some photos.

Our pink tree is still blooming, even though more leaves grow in by the day. I love the angle of this photo, since the yard looks so green (you can’t see the spots where the buttercups and moss are dying, which I need to reseed) and you somehow can’t see the thick layer of pollen coating the table. To the right, just above the rock line, you can see all of my irises. They look so much happier this year – I’m hoping this means they might bloom. One of my coworkers said that they’re petulant flowers, and usually sulk for a good year after being transplanted. I only got one lone flower from about 15 plants last year, so fingers crossed that they’ve worked whatever pique out of their systems and will be extravagant once again this summer.

In the side yard, outside our kitchen window, the azalea’s buds are getting fuller by the day.

The next project

2009-04-27T23:28:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I particularly appreciate about my job is having the flexibility to work at home. This afternoon was unusually pleasant, what with tulips, bright sunshine, and warm enough weather to have the windows open!

Now that we’re getting back to the warm season, I’ve recommenced mulling what to do with that big kitchen window. As you can see, it gets great afternoon sun but the downside is that the room heats up substantially, which is unfortunate because that makes it tricky to control the fishtank temperature. Last summer we spent a lot of energy doing extra water changes, making huge ice cubes, and running fans to promote evaporation (all of which cool the water). But I’m thinking that lined (and possibly insulated) curtains would probably do the trick for all but the few hottest summer days.

We spent a little while looking at fabrics last Fall, but the ones we liked on their own merits all looked pretty iffy with the kitchen counters (a pretty blue-grey corian) and backsplash tile (two very similar shades of translucent aqua) once we brought them home. Not expecting to have much luck, I did a quick pass through Joann’s yesterday and found a new fabric that I think is very pretty. It’s grey-green, has a nice sheen to it without being too loud, and has thin vertical lines of neutral speckles. I picked up two 1½”x3” samples to bring home, and while it’s certainly not a match for the kitchen, it also doesn’t clash.

We may have our curtain fabric?

Next up will be settling on a style and deciding if I can wing it or if I’ll need a pattern. I’m thinking a Roman shade will work well, but I’m also trying to figure out if there’s some clever way of pulling up the corners on the two lower edges so that if we leave the side windows open we can get a breeze. I can think of all sorts of button, loop, and drawstring methods for engineering that, but so far none of them look very attractive in my mind’s eye. I’m also trying to decide whether some sort of cornice at the top would be a good addition or not worth the extra work/fabric...

Blank slate

2009-04-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

My knitting friend Diana is due in October, and she decided to have a sewing get-together on Sunday to make maternity pants. I’m actually in good shape for pants, but it wasn’t hard to come up with a list of other baby-related sewing projects. I ended up bringing over this fun:

A few years ago, I bought onesies to use as a size-gauge when I was knitting baby sweaters as gifts. The packs of 4 plain white onesies were cheaper than the singles, decorated ones, so now I have a small stockpile of baby clothes that could use a bit of color. I figured I’d try an appliqué-meets-embroidery mix. I don’t have any after photos yet, since the hand-sewing wasn’t terribly speedy, but it was a fun afternoon and the colors made me happy.

Slow, slow progress

2009-04-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

The Sunrise Circle Jacket is coming together ever so slowly. I blocked the back and the left sleeve and front as a sanity check to make sure they'll fit together when it comes time to seam. I'll have to do a good job lining things up ahead of time, but it looks like it should work out nicely.

(The photo makes the yarn look black. It's really purple. No idea what setting the camera was on to produce that effect, but I was running to work and didn't have time to troubleshoot. At least you can see that lovely silhouette!)

On the way home yesterday, I found buttons that I'm really pleased with. So now, the greatest obstacle is finishing the right front. I'm on Row 53 of 104, and increasing 1 to 4 stitches every other row so it's a bit of an uphill climb. Luckily, the Red Sox play the Yankees three times this weekend, so I'll have good knitting time. We'll see if it's enough to finish off the front and switch over to seaming?

Baby updates

2009-04-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

We had a great treat this weekend – a package arrived from California with a hand knit baby sweater from my friend Amanda! It’s so well done, and I love the offset cable and the seed stitch detailing at the edges.

As much as I love the color and pattern, my favourite part is the way it feels. I wish that you could blog texture – the yarn is a gorgeous merino/microfiber/cashmere blend and it is so wonderfully soft. It’s such a treat to have a hand knit that I didn’t make myself, and such a beautiful one at that!

All seems to be going well with the baby. He’s been kicking away with increasing intensity. Kevin felt him kick for the first time almost two weeks ago (so exciting!!), and when he was describing it to a friend later he mentioned that he could see the kick as well. I thought he was exaggerating but he turned out to be sincere – it hadn’t occurred to me to try to watch. When the baby really gets going, as he seems to in the evenings, it’s kind of like watching a lightning storm pass overhead – you’re not entirely sure where to watch for the next one, and never sure whether the previous kick was the final one of the series. Most of them you just see out of the corner of your vision, but every now and then there’s a kick that’s so obvious and exactly where your gaze fell. It’s a bizarre sight, but captivating.

For the last week or two, we’ve been sorting our way through all of the tons of baby gear out there to figure out what we think we’ll need. We’ve arrived at decisions for many of the big things (a crib, cloth diapers, breastfeeding details for when I go back to work, daycare, assorted must-haves), and are making good progress on others (a pediatrician, car seats, sorting out the zillion options available for pack n plays…). We certainly are not wanting for options. We still probably won’t start buying things in earnest for a few months, but it’s nice to have brands and rough price points figured out, and an increasingly complete list. (We both seem to be magnets for advice right now, and I’m appreciating a larger context to fit all of it into, instead of trying to keep track of all of the individual comments and data points as they’re given.)

Flowers for the counter

2009-04-20T23:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the string of plant posts (usually I try to spice things up a bit more) but the plants keep being interesting whereas the sweater I’m knitting is just endless. Each row is at about 170 stitches right now, which takes me a good fraction of an hour. I have five rows left, finally, and then I can bind off, block it, and get a picture. (And then, of course, repeat the process for the second front.) Until then, though, the parade of plants continues. I cut a few sprigs from the flowering fruit tree by the back patio, and though I don’t think they’ll last for many days, the blooms are amazing in the sunlight.

Kevin was playing with his macro lens and I think the resulting photos are beautiful.

Fleeting but lovely.

Kitchen Garden

2009-04-18T23:49:00.000-07:00

We have a deep counter in our kitchen under a large garden window, and it’s a perfect place for growing seedlings. I have one tray of edibles (strawberries, tomatoes, peas, beans, leeks, and stretching the definition a tad, lavender) and one of flowers (dahlias, zinnias, black-eyed susans, foxglove, columbine, and delphinium). I set up a lamp on a timer (with a compact fluorescent bulb) to help supplement the natural light, since that spot doesn’t get constant light and our days are still more cloudy than not. It seems to be doing the trick, as the trays are full of seedlings growing away.

The winners by far are the beans and peas, which are growing exuberantly. Each day they seem to add another half inch or large set of leaves.

We’re still debating where they will get planted – I’m torn between two competing spots for a raised garden (not sure which will get the most sun), and still haven’t entirely ruled out just setting them up in containers again.

More flowers

2009-04-17T23:47:00.000-07:00

Our tree by the patio in the backyard is amazing this year.

Last year, we’d pruned it back hard (with Kevin’s parents’ help) in December. I’d been feeling guilty all winter this year for not getting out and re-pruning, but my guilt disappeared completely after the flowers started to appear. My new plan is to prune after it flowers, and then let it spend all year working toward the next crop of blooms – Spring is definitely its magnificent season.

For the last few weekends, I’ve been making a habit of going around the yard and poaching a few blooms from whatever’s going strong this week. This week, there were two more daffodils (perfect for the tall vase from our wedding day, placed by the sink). Also, the first of the camellias appeared! But they were on the lowest branches and the weight of the blooms bent the flowers face down into the lawn, so I decided we’d enjoy them more on our dining room table.

Lighting!

2009-04-14T17:53:00.000-07:00

When we ordered a new light for the bathroom, we also found sconces to replace the ones in our living room. The old ones were small and yellow. I disliked the color of the glass shades during the day…

But they were worse when we turned them on at night, since the shades were opaque enough to block most of the light, and what got through was a dark yellow-orange that made skin look ghoulish and most colors look garish.

Lamps are such a matter of personal taste, but we found white art glass sconces that we both liked a lot. They’re bigger, so I think they look more proportionate on the wall, and the light is a much more natural color. We’ve had them up for almost two weeks, so you’d think that I’d be getting accustomed to them, but I’m still so happy every time I turn them on or walk by.

It’s hard to take a closeup of a lamp when it’s on, but I wanted to try to get some of the pattern of the glass. It’s a mixture of more and less opaque chunks, and I think it’s quite lovely, both on and off.

Yay for lighting improvements!

Getting smarter

2009-04-13T08:58:00.000-07:00

I’m having fun working the first front of the Sunrise Circle Jacket. You knit the sleeve up from the wrist, and then in addition to decreasing as usual for the shoulder, you start increasing to form a steadily growing semi-circle for the front.

It’s an interesting design, but it takes a fair amount of attention to knit. The designer made the increases appear at random (a very pretty effect, so you don’t see spokes radiating out across the chest), which means that the increases are in a different spot on each row of the chart. I’d been counting as I went, but that was going poorly since I tend to knit while reading and I kept flying past the increases. Finally, I got smart at row 47 and started marking the increases with white stitch markers in advance before I knit the row. Now it’s going much faster, since I only have to stop and count once at the beginning, instead of several iterations of counting and ripping back. Here’s a closeup of the semi-circle forming, with randomly-spaced increases, and my white stitch markers waiting for the next row.

I’d love if I could ever finish the sweater this week. I’m in great shape on maternity clothes except for long-sleeved shirts. All of the maternity sites I know only seem to sell short sleeves and ¾ sleeves, made of surprisingly thin fabric. Since it’s still in the forties most days, that just isn’t sufficient. I’ve been just wearing a few loose pre-maternity sweaters, but all but two are suddenly too short and I’m in dire need of new options.

Bonus Yarn

2009-04-11T16:34:00.000-07:00

I bought three skeins each for the Peapod set and the Baby Surprise Jacket (which I’ll get completed photos of as soon as I find buttons), and then only ended up using one and a half skeins for each project. The Acorn Street Shop, where I bought the yarn initially, has a sixty day return policy, and I realized on Wednesday that I still had four days to trade in the yarn for a new projects’ worth. I headed over Friday after work, and was quite pleased to be able to buy yarn for not one but two projects with the store credit:

That’s Stork in yellow and light blue, for a newborn sweater and hat (a going home outfit?), and two skeins of Cascade 220 Superwash in light blue for the Debbie Bliss ribbed baby jacket in the 3-6 month size. I’m trying to finish my Sunrise Circle Jacket before I go cast on, since I’m having a hard time finding long-sleeved maternity shirts and I’m down to two sweaters that fit for work. But it’s a tempting little bag of fun projects.

The Name Game

2009-04-08T23:16:00.000-07:00

By far the leading question so far about the pregnancy, even beating out gender, is about what our leading contenders are for names. It's a hard question to answer, especially since everyone has strong opinions. Quite the loaded topic! This week at the Brown dinner, our friend Stacy showed us the best baby name website.

It has the cleverest way of graphing name popularity over time. You can search for specific names, and it updates the page as you type (for the screenshot above, I’d typed an S so that we could see that nice peak in Susans in the 1950s, but as you keep going it shows all names and variants that made the top 1000 since the late 1800s). You can narrow down to boy or girl names, and if you mouse over the graph it shows you the name’s rank by decade. You can click on names for more information. It’s an incredibly fun thing to play with.

For a flat list of popular names, the best (no-nonsense, ad-free) option is the SSA site. This one lists popular names and the various spellings (though I can't decide if that's helpful or annoying).

And, no, we don't have a name yet, or even a list of favourites. We gave ourselves a reprieve on even considering names until we had the 20 week ultrasound. Now that we know it's a boy, we don’t have any strong opinions yet but it’s definitely a topic of conversation. :-)

Sunny

2009-04-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

We woke up a bit after eight today to the third morning in a row of sunlight streaming into our bedroom. This is such a novel, wonderful experience. Since moving into the house, we’ve had only a handful of days that any direct sunlight made it into the room, but between taking the trees down, the clouds disappearing for a few days, and the angle of the sun at this time of year, the light is amazing and lasts for about two hours. What a great way to wake up! (So much better than this!)

This photo was taken from our closet, partly to show the sunlight, and partly to show our “new” mirror:

The wall of our closet has been so empty since we moved the shoe closet over a year ago. The craigslist cabinet helped, but when we deconstructed the old bathroom, I kept the mirror and painted the frame black. I was afraid that glossy black would be too much of a contrast with all of the pale, blond shelving, so I found paint that matched the wood and used the mouths of old jars to stamp circles. I’m very pleased with how in came out. Here was the mirror in its prior incarnation:

I love its new look and spot!

Exciting Fish News

2009-04-05T22:43:00.000-07:00

We had a huge tank event tonight! The clownfish spawned!! Kevin was starting a water change and saw the eggs!!

We’ve had the clowns for more than four years, and kept hoping they’d mate. Clownfish are hermaphrodites: they start out male, pair off, and then one fish becomes dominant, quite a bit larger, and female. Clack has been the bigger fish for years, and they’ve displayed lots of the typical clownfish pairing behaviour, but no spawning until now!

I need to read up on more about exactly what happens (since clownfish are one of the most successfully captive-bred fish, there’s a lot of information out there), but Click (male) and Clack (female) did alternating passes of circling around the eggs. They bind them to the rock (I think that’s Click’s job?), lay eggs (Clack) and fertilize them (Click). They chose a spot right behind the leather, which makes sense as usually Clowns lay eggs on rock near the base of their anemone.

There are many steps, special food, and extra tanks involved in raising fish fry into baby clowns, so we’ll probably let things take their course (ie, either the eggs or fry will be eaten by other creatures in the tank), but Kevin was having fun brainstorming baby clownfish names: Clickety, Clackety, Yakkity, and Yak were leading contenders. :-)

I got a few videos of them as they spawned. We were so captivated and delighted. The first has reflections from the kitchen light (oops! sorry!) but you can see well how first one circles, then the other. They repeated this for ages (We watched for well over a half hour, and only saw a portion.)

At first I was disappointed by the second video because Click stopped mid-circle and seemed to lunge at Clack. I wasn’t paying enough attention to the other creatures in the tank though, since the shrimp had decided to come check things out. I might not have noticed him, but the Clowns definitely did and they chased him off.

Suburban wildlife

2009-04-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

This morning was wonderful. The light woke me up early (not something I usually can say!), and I had breakfast and noodled around on the internet before heading to prenatal yoga for the first time. The class was great, especially after a somewhat uncomfortable week, and I stopped at the bread store and the library on the way home. The afternoon was sunny and low key until Kevin called me into the kitchen around five because he’d spotted this enormous guy in our neighbour’s backyard.

Cleaning himself like a cat, and quite the grooming and scratching session, but he was enormous. Despite the tail, I was still somewhat disbelieving that such a big creature could be a raccoon until he left his spot in the sun for a stroll across the yard.

Definitely a raccoon. :-/ He wasn’t acting disoriented or odd, but I really didn’t think that they were sunshine sort of creatures? Maybe the Seattle variety gets confused when the days start really lengthening? Or he was as delighted to see the sun as the rest of us? In any case, I was decidedly less than pleased when he hopped over our fence (only five feet, no big deal) and started hunting in our rock wall. I don’t know quite what he was eating (those beetle larvae? Worms?), but his technique was very efficient: dig away, and then wipe the creatures off on the lawn before consuming.

I was mostly just fascinated as he dug up whatever they were in front of the wall, since we try to keep that area weed/plant-free. When he started moving around in the beds, though, we decided that was plenty of a good thing and when to go throw things at him. He was very skittish, and scared easily, but unfortunately chose to scale one of our pine trees instead of just hopping the fence. The sound of his claws on the bark was the creepiest thing. You can see him way, way up (there’s an orange arrow, and you can see his tail hanging down off of the branch).

He finally came down and then Kevin succeeded in frightening him over the fence. I’m hoping his usual haunts are many miles away and he was in an exploring (but not settling) kind of mood.

Ready for the weekend

2009-04-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

Counteracting Friday with some sunny pictures of tulips:

And a bright close-up:

It's been one of those antsy weeks where home is so much more interesting than work, and it's all that I can do to stay at my desk instead of running home and starting the next project.

The first baby purchase!

2009-04-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

Two weekends ago, we stopped by a baby store on a whim in between other errands. It was surprisingly fun, and since then we've both been steadily reading about cribs and other baby things. A few days later, our ultrasound revealed that we're having a boy, and the game of envisioning the baby's room stepped up a notch. At the crib store, we'd tried out several rockers and gliders and thought they were quite lovely but exceedingly unrealistic (the price tags of the "cheap" options were over $800 – right). In any case, I started stalking craigslist for the brand of rocker, and after dismissing many posts (ugly wood color, ugly chair model, very ugly fabric, etc), I found one on Sunday that looked just about perfect. We drove to one of those gorgeous Wallingford craftsman houses and brought home an allegedly eight year old chair that's in perfect condition.

It's incredibly comfortable. It will live in the family room for the time being, in the sunny corner by the windows. I keep smiling to see it there.

Singing the praises of the sewing machine

2009-04-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

Probably the most persistent pregnancy symptom that I've noticed is near-constant hip and lower back soreness. I've been stiffer than normal for months now, and sitting in most chairs is difficult after about fifteen minutes. On the whole I've adjusted, but after the afternoon of gardening on Sunday I was too sore to find a good spot.

I thought of the microwavable heating pads I've seen online. This turned out to be one of the highest payoff craft projects ever. The entire thing took seven minutes to make, and that included scrounging in the kitchen for a good filler (we didn't have enough lentils, so I used white rice), choosing pretty fabric and thread, and both ironing and pinning the fabric before sewing. I used a fat quarter (folded in half, it wraps around the base of my back perfectly) about a pound of white rice, and a lavender sachet (I bought mosaic mirrors from Etsy as a bridesmaid gift, and the woman who made them included a few sachets of the lavender she grows. I love Etsy.) I double-rolled the edges before seaming to make them sturdier. It gets nice and warm after about 3 minutes in our ancient microwave, and the heat lasts for a good half hour. Blissful. :-)

Clover vs. buttercups

2009-03-31T08:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve been kind of assuming that weed that’s been steadily marching across our yard was clover, even though it had a different leaf edge (frilly vs. smooth), root structure (dense with runners vs. fibrous) and flower (yellow petals vs white/pink/red balls). A very short search on the web turned up this website, which made it clear that we are dealing not with clover, but with buttercups. Hmmm.

A little bit more searching, and I’m increasingly impressed at the scale of the problem. Apparently buttercups, with their runners and thick roots that can grow up to 25 cm deep are a nearly unstoppable force. They thrive in damp and acidic soil. (Check and check.) They crowd out all other life forms. And, to top it off, they’re poisonous and you can get bad rashes if you come in contact with them or breathe the leaves’ oil. Super.

It sounds like we have two options:

The first is to give up on the grass and go for a buttercup yard. The advantages: at this rate of growth, the yard will be all buttercup by the end of the summer, the leaves are genuinely attractive and tolerate mowing well, and buttercups appear to be the only thing that can out-compete the moss. Disadvantages: we’d miss the grass, and some sort of containment is needed to keep the buttercups from marching straight into the garden beds (which they’re also taking over).

The second option is to just start spraying immediately with highly potent broadleaf killers, and to repeat frequently until the last of the stuff is dead. (And then to stay on guard because that root structure is dense, deep, and long-lived.) Advantages: cheap, relatively easy, not too time-intensive, more-or-less effective over time. Plus, Kevin gets to use the chemical sprayer, which makes him cheerful. Disadvantages: toxic chemicals.

The third option is to try to dig it out manually, but we’d have to dig a foot down and replace all of the topsoil to be guaranteed success, and the time investment, difficulty, and expense effectively renders this a non-option.

Sounds like we have weed poison in our future?

Sun-day

2009-03-30T09:04:00.000-07:00

We were finishing breakfast yesterday when the sun came out! Brilliant warm light! We basked for about 30 seconds, and then wonderful Kevin hopped up and headed out into the 42-degree sunshine to clean all of our windows.

It makes such a huge difference. He followed it up with weedwhacking the suddenly 10" tall mess on the top shelf of the yard, blowing all of the sodden, caked-on sawdust off of the patio, and redistributing all of the mulch from when we had the tree stumps ground into the beds along the side of the house.

It looks awesome. He’s a good person. :-) Then he headed out with the macro lens to get photos of the dew on the flowers. (As usual, click for big. The detail he gets with the macro lens is beautiful.)

We have lots of buds on the daffodils:

I keep expecting to wake up to find a riot of flowers, but they’ve been keeping tightly curled. We still have just a few partial blooms, and those are all toppled, like the weight of all the rain and the grey made them just want to lie down. Poor despairing flowers.

It appears that something has been snacking on our primroses.

I love the orange-yellow bleed of color on these white primroses.

And the minidaffodils are still looking dainty and bright. I definitely want to plant more of these for next spring.

I went out to admire his handiwork around noon, and discovered that the sun was actually warming things up! It got up to the mid-fifties, and was so pleasant outside in a sweatshirt. We did a quick hardware store run for gardening supplies (weed and moss killers for the lawn -- post on this tomorrow -- plus new grass seed. We got back and spent the entire rest of the afternoon (until twilight, so after 7) moving from one project to the next. Kevin mowed the lawn (the first time this season!) and then sprayed down the entire yard (front and back, including the top shelf and most of the beds) with broadleaf killer. I put primroses and pansies in the planter by the front walk, and then finally planted the entire 90-bulb bag of sprouting tulips. One of these years I'll do that in October, when you're supposed to. I used the handsnips to deadhead and even out a few of the bushes, including the hydrangea by the kitchen window, and then continued on to remove all of the dead plants, branches and runners from the rock wall. I picked up a full yardwaste bin's worth of downed birch and evergreen branches. Whew. Kevin did a round of moss killing on the driveway, and I potted cilantro for the kitchen window. The yard looks amazing from every window. It's going to be a treat to come home and see it all week!!

Orange is so cheery

2009-03-29T12:24:00.000-07:00

I seem to be on a green and orange kick this week.

The tulips are tomato colored, with irridescent orange edges. :-) I'm an enormous fan, and they counteract the crummy weather beautifully. Thank goodness for March tulips!

The sweater is my finished Pea Pod. I made the six month size sweater, and the 14½" hat. I love the orange shell buttons (Kevin does too!), and I expect that they’ll make me as happy next February as they do now. :-) I thought the hat as written kept looking way too short on babies’ heads, so I started the decreases at row 9 of the chart instead of row 3. I have no idea if the hat and sweater will fit at the same time – if not, at least it will be easy and quick to whip up a second hat.

And here’s the back:

This was such a great pattern, and I have fun memories of working on it – the Whistler trip, the Costa Rica trip, and sewing on the buttons right after we found out the baby’s gender: we’re having a boy! Any suggestions for boy baby knitting projects? I have a few rows left on the Baby Surprise Jacket, and then my queue is blank!

Getting closer

2009-03-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

I've been steadily plugging away on the Baby Surprise Jacket, and I'm finally seeing some real progress. For a few days, my pattern seemed to be that I had to rip and reknit two rows out of every four, because I kept sailing by one of the pairs of increases. When I miss a single increase, I can make it up even a few rows later by crocheting down, but double increases make the tension far too ugly. At least I kept catching the problems quickly (I'm using the row-by-row chart, crossing off rows as I work, and counting regularly), but it's made this project feel like more of a slog than fun. Because of the increases, each row is longer than the last, so that probably doesn't help my sense of progress.

I took photos of the construction so far, but the light here has been horrible and they're all yellow and flashy. Sorry. I tried retaking them, but the March clouds are just too persistent. (We are so ready for summer!)

Here's the unfolded blob on the needles:

I'm at the point where you put the two fronts on holders and just work on the back and bottoms of the front for a while. The cast on edge is the trapezoid at the top – the top edge plus the two sloping edges at the sides. You can see diagonal lines coming in from the top corners – the decreases for the sleeves, and then slanting back out the other way – the increases for the body. Because of the increases and decreases, it's impossible to lie this flat, so there are folds of fabric on the right and left sides.

Now, if you fold the sleeves in half (the cuffs are the sloping cast on edges) so that the seam will run across the top of the arms and shoulders, you get a jacket. Huh.

Here's the back:

It's a cleverly designed pattern and shape. I'm not sure if I'll really knit this again, once might be plenty, but it certainly was a puzzle to work on until my eyes adjusted to the construction.

Project-happy

2009-03-25T14:59:00.000-07:00

After a decent stretch of keeping things relatively low-key, I seem to be accumulating quite the project backlog all of a sudden. At the top of the list are planting veggie and flower seedlings, whipping up a bed skirt, recovering the two butterfly chairs in the family room, finishing two knitting projects (the baby surprise jacket, and my long-abandonned Sunrise Circle Jacket) and sewing buttons on two sweaters, and reseeding the front and back lawns.

Now, since I clearly have free time to burn, I keep thinking about baby quilts. :-) The leading contender is the Bento Box pattern -- the piecing is quite simple, but some of the fabric combinations are spectacular. I don't have a color scheme in mind yet, and I'm not sure whether the baby pastels or some combination of brighter/starker fabrics would be better. Just starting to ponder the possibilities.

Stealing photos from other people's flickr sites, some notes/thoughts:

These color combinations are great. The muted blues/greens/browns are definitely what I associate most highly with this pattern, but some of the other combos are equally appealing.

I like the 3 level squares (inner, middle ring, outer) best. The four square ones are still neat but I think you lose some of the power/simplicity.

There seem to be three main ways of assembling squares:
Opposites – two colors per set of four blocks, diagonally self-mirroring:

Random – you see the L’s but somehow they don’t really come together into rings:

Rings – the Ls come together to form a ring that really stands out and provides structure:

Each are pretty in their own way, but the rings are the ones that impress me the most. Most quilts seem to end up a mix of the random and the rings – it’s hard to find examples that are purely one or the other. Some blocks just seem to come together more successfully than others. I've been trying to figure out what differentiates the Ring blocks from the Random blocks -- tone of the center fabric compared to the exterior/interior? Using the same fabric for at least two touching center stretches? Color? Pattern texture/density? I haven't figured out the trick yet, but it's definitely something to decode before deciding on fabric.

Finally, the quilting on this one is amazing:

Baby Surprise Jacket

2009-03-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

There are some patterns that it feels like everyone must knit (this feeling has only been magnified now that people can track their projects on Ravelry, and you can see the thousands of versions of the same sweater or scarf). Elizabeth Zimmerman's Baby Surprise Jacket is one of those patterns. It's unusual in that it was published in the late 60's (most of the bandwagon projects have been published online in the last few years).

In theory it's a simple knit, because it's all garter stitch. The odd part is the construction – the cardigan-style sweater is knit in one piece – you cast on along the line that runs from the cuffs of the sleeves, along the top of the arms, and across the back of the neck. You strategically decrease for a while, switch to strategically increasing, and then bind off along the line that extends down the middle on one side of the front, around the bottom of the back, and then up the other side of the front. The directions are easy to follow, but trying to envision the finished pattern as you work is truly mind-bending.

Here's my progress at the end of the decreases:

The right and left sides are the completed sleeves. Ultimately, I'll fold the bottom edges of the sleeves up to the top and seam them to make the shoulders and the top of the sleeves. I think I finally understand what I'm doing, but it's very convoluted. Based on other people's gauges and results, I think this will turn out to be a 6-9 month size – perfect for early next spring. I wasn't entirely sure about the purple (I think I'll probably omit it in the next two balls), but otherwise I love the yarn – a very soft washable cotton with interesting and pretty color variation.

Hope

2009-03-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

Our yard is still more wintery and ugly than not, but there are starting to be pockets of Spring. The crocuses are blooming in front of the house.

We have a bunch over on the side as well, where they managed to grow through about 6" of wood chips from the stump grinding in October. I was so discouraged after they were mangled last year that I didn't bother to plant more bulbs, but seeing them persevere this year I'm thinking I'll have to get more in the ground. They're such cheerful things. The hydrangeas are all budding with leaves – it's a treat to see the green nubs on those woody, dead-looking branches. Quite Secret Garden. The daffodils are starting to bud as well – I'm guessing there will be flowers by next weekend?

I was mystified when I saw flashes of yellow at the top of the rock wall yesterday. When I went up to investigate, I found my mini daffodils!

I'd been wondering why so few had come up in my planters – usually I have about a dozen and this year there are only six sprouts. I assumed that the squirrels must have dug up the bulbs (when in doubt, always blame the squirrels). I must have replanted some of them when I was transplanting irises? I really don't remember, but it was a lovely surprise. The mini rhododendron behind them has buds that look like they're about to burst, and when I looked out this morning, the forsythia under the pine trees had bloomed!

Between daylight savings and the natural progression, it's suddenly light past seven in the evenings. Now we just need the weather to break out of the forties and stop raining, and I can start cleaning things up in the yard after work. The big project for the next few weeks is going to be figuring out what to do with the lawn. The winter seems to have encouraged the clover, moss and weeds. We definitely need to reseed the grass. I'm all opposed to spraying the weeds, but haven't yet figured out a better solution than nuking all of the undesirables with chemicals, since the clover (if that is in fact what it is) has a huge network of underground runners and is impossible to pull out. Any ideas?

Buttons!

2009-03-20T21:03:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to make a trip to Joann's for months, and finally went last night. I found fabric for several projects (a skirt for the box spring, fleece to wrap up all of our new crèche figurines for the season, properly rigid stuff for baby shoes, etc) but the real success was finding buttons for some of the outstanding baby sweaters!

I spent ages in the button aisle, and came away feeling like I'd found the perfect options. Yay! :-)

Wildlife

2009-03-19T20:59:00.000-07:00

Most mornings, we woke up at dawn to the loud groaning/roaring of a howler monkey right above our roof. He was gone by the time we emerged from our room, but I was so delighted to get to see him in the tree above the B&B entrance one of the afternoons.

Our shower was another interesting viewing spot for creatures. It was open to the sky, and one wall held a planter with all sorts of leafy plants.

I was very leery of seeing enormous spiders (we didn't see one all trip – yay), but we saw all sorts of other interesting insect eaters. The first night, there was a gecko chirping away. The second night, I turned on the foot hose to wash off the deet and sand on my legs before bed, and a bright yellow frog used my knee and arm as a launch pad before clinging to the wall. Luckily I saw him before the shock of the motion had fully registered. When I was a teenager, I'd papered the walls of my room with photos from National Geographic, including many tropical frogs. This guy looked exactly the part – bright golden yellow, and he stuck around long enough to be admired before crawling up the wall into a leafy hiding spot.

Our welcome packet warned that crabs find their way into the rooms, especially the showers, but we weren't entirely disappointed that the only ones we saw were on the beach.

Happy

2009-03-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

Me (18½ weeks) and Kevin at the wedding:

We were saved from feeling like this trip was the last pre-baby hurrah by the sheer number of months still left – plenty of time for interesting weekend trips and travel. I enjoyed my first maternity clothes on the trip. We joked that we could practically see the baby growing, since it felt like every time I looked down I'd gotten bigger. We're both amazed by the changes. I've been feeling a lot of movement, especially a few minutes after sitting down and any time I got in the pool (it's the oddest feeling). And it was fun for both of us that our friends were so enthusiastic and interested.

Beach knitting

2009-03-17T20:56:00.000-07:00

Most of my knitting time was in the airports (I try to sleep on planes) and in the evenings before bed, but I still made a lot of progress on the Peapod Sweater (just need to find buttons! Something in the brown/orange/red spectrum?) and the beginnings of the matching hat!

This picture makes me want to squint it's so bright, and yet it was taken at 9:30 in the morning when the sun was just starting to climb. We both managed to avoid burning (yay, 45 SPF) and came back with tan lines, so it felt like a successful vacation. :-)

Costa Rica

2009-03-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

Our trip was wonderful. Our bed and breakfast was right on the beach. There were eight rooms arrayed around a courtyard, a covered but open dining area and kitchen next to the pool, a line of trees and plants that provided some very welcome shade, and then the ocean.

The rooms had screened windows and ceiling fans (which kept the temps exceptionally pleasant for the brief moments we spent there), but at sunset we'd close the shutters and turn on the AC to keep the mosquitoes at bay. The first morning I woke up early (7:00) to many bird calls and a horrible groaning sound above our heads – turns out that there's a howler monkey that frequents that shoreline! I decided to get up – not my normal time of day but the morning was crisp and beautiful. The hot shower felt wonderful, since the air was still cold enough for goosebumps, then I went down to the beach with knitting and a book.

I was all excited to finally find a book on baby brain development before we left, and even happier that our delay meant that I could bring it with me on the trip. Unfortunately(?), the beach was too interesting and pretty for much reading. There were crabs everywhere (from half an inch in size all the way up to about 10"). The tide was going out and they dug holes in the wet sand, and then would venture out (to hunt? to sun?). I tried to get photos but couldn't get close enough – they were way more scared of me than I was of them which seemed ideal since they were lightning fast. Out on the water, there were many pelicans fishing. They have the funniest technique of diving straight down into the ocean, and just when you're convinced they must have broken their necks from the impact you realize the bird is now just sitting on the water looking blasé. There was also a steady stream of people and dogs walking by before it got too hot. Here's the view looking north up the beach:

By 8:30 I was too hungry so I went back, woke up Kevin, and we went to breakfast. Each day there were two to three courses. Always a fruit course, sometimes a freshly baked fruit or spice bread, and then a main course. I had trouble finishing. We saw several great butterflies as we ate, birds, and enjoyed watching the hotel cat stalk leaves in the garden.

Each day after breakfast, we'd head back to the room, get all of our things for the day (sunscreen, books, water, towels or sarongs) and head out to meet up with the rest of the crowd.

(You can see the courtyard off to the right. I loved the flowers outside each of the doors. They changed daily.)

The wedding was 106 people, and a full quarter of the crowd was Kevin's fraternity brothers and assorted wives and girlfriends. Most of them were staying in two huge, fancy houses about 30 yards down the beach from us. Marrakech had a particularly lovely infinity pool, so we'd head there to find people.

(You can see the tables being set up for the wedding reception in the background. The reception was held on the beach along the shoreline, with lanterns strung up everywhere and dramatic lighting on the trees once the sun set over the water. It was exquisitely beautiful.) The pool is uncharacteristically empty in this photo – generally there was a crowd enjoying the cool water (the days got hot – pushing 90), reading on the edges, racing the floats, and sunbathing.

We tended to have an afternoon or evening group activity – sailing along the coast on a catamaran, heading to a beach 25 minutes away to surf or body surf, manicures and pedicures, a welcome reception, the rehearsal dinner, or the wedding itself. The surfing beach we went to was impressive. Big waves (a little bit too big to bodysurf, in my opinion, though I got thoroughly tumbled by them a few times and had a good time floating out past the break point), a stretch of sand too long to walk in the heat, and a beach bar with lots of shady tables.

When we could, Kevin and I would go to the beach chairs out in front of our B&B to watch the sun set over the high tide surf.

We made the mistake of not putting on bug spray early enough the first night and learned quickly. We'd sprayed our clothes with DEET before we left and were pretty religious about getting the DEET lotion on by 5 PM or so. It was such a nice feeling to rinse it off before bed when we were finally home in the evening. Dinners were late (usually between 8 and 11 by the time we ate), and Kevin would walk pregnant me home after them before rejoining the gang for a bit more fun. I'd been worried before we left that the group vacation would be hard, but it was wonderful – great company and fun activities, but plenty of companionable relaxing/reading time and where everything was so close, I didn't feel like I had to stay out once I got tired. Such a wonderful getaway.

Enough of Winter

2009-03-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

The crocus spikes have budded in the last few days, and I've been enjoying the tightly curled petals every time I walk to the car or mailbox.

All of our crocuses were eaten as they appeared last year, by some marauding cat or squirrel, and so each time that they're still there when I walk by seems like something of a gift. I'm guessing that they'll open while we're away, which increases the urge to enjoy them now while I can.

We were supposed to leave on Saturday night for Costa Rica. College friends are getting married on the beach, and there will be a week of hanging out with East Coast friends before the Saturday ceremony. Originally, we'd been thinking of taking a few days at the beginning of the trip to go see volcanoes and tree frogs, but the combination of logistics and pregnancy convinced us to just enjoy our beach time instead. We've been looking forward to the friends and sun. Packing beach clothes was delightful. So when we got to the airport and were refused boarding passes, we were disbelieving, then incredibly depressed. Apparently Costa Rica requires 30 days of validity on your passport, and Kevin only had 28. We took a sad cab ride home.

Luckily, there are a handful of passport offices in the country that do same-day passports and Seattle has one of them, so Kevin made an appointment for first thing Monday morning. We weren't sure until he got there that he would be able to actually renew his passport in time for the rest of the trip to be worth it, and so it was so exciting and such a relief to have the passport in hand by 3 pm. The airlines changed our flights for free and the expedited passport service only cost an additional $35, so in the grand scheme, not too much harm was done.

We spent most of Sunday with the suitcases parked next to the front door, trying to will the passport thing to work out. The weather was dismal, and then on Monday it started to snow.

It should have been a beautiful sight, but we were too much in the mood for hot beaches and so the wintry scene was more frustrating than enjoyable.

We drove into Seattle together to pick up the passport and as we headed back home across the 520 bridge, the weather turned from grey to snow and the headlong rush of frantic commuters outrunning the "storm" appeared. Luckily, they were all going the other direction, and we were grimly amused to see traffic completely stop within minutes. When the first flakes appeared, we were having visions of cancelled flights and airport shutdowns. But seeing the lines of cars all gridlocked on the on-ramps, we started to feel like the traffic jam karma would actually outweigh the trip bad luck. Sure enough, everything had melted and the roads were clear when the airport shuttle arrived at 7:30.

What a weekend of not-skiing will do

2009-03-05T21:47:00.000-08:00

I finished the body on the Pea Pod sweater last night. As you can see, the back and fronts are knit in one piece, with sleeves and the collar added later. The front is asymmetrical, with the leaf lace panel roughly centered and the closure to the side of it.

I’m thinking buttons somewhere in the brown to orange spectrum will look great. I started the first sleeve, and aside from some mixups in the lace, it’s been flying. (I should know better than to knit the first few rows of lace patterns while reading, it always goes awry.)

I’m debating what to knit next after this. We have friends getting married in Costa Rica, and we’re going to have a beach vacation. (Can’t tell you how much we’re looking forward to the sun!) I’m guessing I’ll run out of things to knit on this within a day or so of arriving, so I need more vacation knitting. My top candidate has been the Baby Surprise Jacket, but I didn’t realize you couldn’t buy the pattern directly from Ravelry. :-( We’ll be going on vacation before the mail-order version could arrive, and I’m opposed to buying any more Elizabeth Zimmermann books. (I keep giving in and buying them based on one pattern that I like, but the two that include the BSJ are quite a bit more expensive and I’m just not that big a fan of the rest of the patterns.) I put a hold on it at the library, but the next book’s due date is the same day our flight leaves, so that seems really unlikely to pan out well. Barring some library miracle, I think I’ll probably give up on the BSJ for now, and instead use the Yarn Harlot’s Daisy sweater as a base and incorporate some sort of fun “interest” out of Knitting on the Edge? And use cotton out of stash, since wool won’t be as nice to knit on the beach? Decisions…

Layette, part one

2009-03-04T23:44:00.000-08:00

These photos are already two weeks old, but I finally finished and blocked the first baby sweater. Ready? Awww:

I found the pattern on Ravelry, and made some adjustments (changed gauge from Worsted to DK, added the stripes). The construction was completely confusing to me at first (I was having trouble figuring out from the photos how the side slits and ties worked), but I really like the end result.

It took a few tries to get my tension right on the diagonal lace – it wasn't very stretchy, I was knitting in cotton (which is non-elastic), and the color changes complicated the issue – but I finally got the hang of it and it looks great after blocking.
Here's the back:

This set of photos is finally accurate on the color. The vinegar washes appear to have done the trick to prevent bleeding (knock on wood).

The pattern called this a 6 month size but it looks so small. We'll see? Now it can just be tucked away to wait for next fall.

Whistler Weekend

2009-03-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

Friends that ski frequently were heading up to British Columbia for a three day ski weekend, so we jumped at the chance to join them. It ended up being quite a crowd (11 of us in the condo – I was very grateful that pregnancy apparently guarantees a bed instead of floor space) and enormous fun. I decided ahead of time that I'd skip the downhill on this trip (fortuitous, since my ski pants have ceased to button), but Kevin and I both brought our cross country skis.

We skipped out of work a little bit early on Friday to beat traffic, and even with a fair amount of rush hour made great time. We'd both had a long week on not enough sleep and were a bit punchy, but the sunset was gorgeous, lighting up the clouds over the Cascades, and all of Vancouvers lights were beautiful as we passed in the dark. On Saturday, the rest of the crowd went skiing, and I found a spot in the village with great french toast and a view of the skiers coming down the mountain. The surrounding mountains were all completely clear, and the prettiest texture of blue-gray with all of the snow on the trees. Gorgeous.

There was already lots of activity in preparation for next year's Olympics. Right in front on the flags in this photo was a bobsled painted with Olympic rings, and there was a steady stream of people climbing in for photos. Also, you might be able to make out the new Peak-to-Peak gondola between Whistler and Blackcomb (click for big, and look right above the flags):

I thought it looked terrifying – so high up.

Sunday night was lots of fun, as one couple made dinner in the condo and we all hung out, relaxed, and enjoy some apres ski time. It snowed overnight, which made everyone happy. Kevin took the day off downhill and we went cross country skiing around Lost Lake. Skiing on groomed and tracked trails was a novel experience for me (I'm a huge fan), and the views of the lakes, woods and mountains were gorgeous. I was exhausted and starving by the time we got back, but it was a great few hours. We found a creperie (yum) for a late lunch, then I deeply enjoyed a nap. Our room was barely bigger than the bed, but the window had a great view of all of the trees (lacy with the new snow) and the snow cascading off of the roof across the way. Pretty.

We woke up to deep clouds and lots of rain on Monday morning, and the skiing crowd all opted for a leisurely breakfast and ride home over chancing new snow higher up the mountain. We went back to the creperie with Graham, Andi and Adeeb – just as good the second time round.

I was pretty pleased with myself early on for remembering to bring up all of my Canadian change ($25 worth, plus a $20 bill) from ski trips in 2003 and 2005. After carefully spending it all weekend, including one final stop at Tim Hortons for apple fritters right before the border, I was left with a $5 bill, 3 twonies, two nickels and two pennies. Good work, me. :-)

The drive back along the Sea to Sky highway north of Vancouver was spectacular. Amazing mountains, roadside waterfalls, and views into deep valleys.

The colors were spectacular greens and blues – I love that Pacific Northwest palette.

As we got further south the road curved along the mountains that rise out of Howe Sound, so we had gorgeous water and island views as well as the Vancouver Island and Olympic mountains in the distance. I'm so glad that we made the drive in the daylight.

Unanticipated

2009-02-26T22:40:00.000-08:00

Last night, Kevin looked out the window around midnight and realized that it was snowing. Not only coming down steadily, but actually accruing. We’ve had some real snow this winter, but the pattern has held with three days of rumour and anxiety first, THEN snow. The sort of snow that starts gently falling in the middle of the night without fuss caught me off guard. This morning, we had a few inches. The roads were pretty much clear (though that didn’t keep the garbage from not getting picked up, half of my team from not making it in to work, and the buses from chaining their tires. Nothing like driving to work behind a sparking bus.).

I grabbed the camera before leaving the house, because all of the crocus spikes in our yard were so visible against the white. (I’m guessing that their days are numbered, and whatever nibbled them to the ground last year will do it again, but for the moment they’ve been giving me happiness every time I walk by.)

I should have kept the camera with me for the drive to work – the trees were all lacy and magical, especially as the sun started to come out through the clouds. By the end of the day, the snow was pretty much gone, which suited me. If it was going to be unexpected, then fleeting seemed like the right thing.

A new villain

2009-02-26T00:46:00.000-08:00

So the squirrels won the Great Birdfeeder War of 2008. We’d had it in the tree by our patio, and the squirrels would just climb up, hang upside down, and eat all of the birdseed. They were impervious to thrown rocks and pinecones, not to mention all of the horse radish, hot sauce, etc we slathered on the tree and the feeder.

So we gave up and took down the feeder for a few months. In December, we rehung our two feeders from two corners of the house on hooks that were already there. Our birds are back, fun views from the house, no squirrels in sight, and it’s been continuing to seem like a great plan. However, last weekend we woke up to find the feeder lying chipped on the patio, seed spilled everywhere. We had our suspicions, which were confirmed when Kevin caught this guy on film:

On the ground, picking through the seed debris? Slightly suspicious, but totally acceptable. However, climbing the gutters? Less so.

Not a bird:

Kevin still really likes the BB gun option, though I’ve maintained my veto. Our Plan B is to rig some sort of funnel-shaped attachment for the gutter so that the squirrels can’t climb up. I figure our long-term odds of success are quite low, but it’s worth a shot.

Tulips

2009-02-22T22:48:00.000-08:00

Down to five but still pretty.

We had great sun for most of the weekend, and the temperature actually made it into the fifties! Kevin took advantage of the weather and blew off the roof (third time since the summer, and once again the roof color is barely recognizable without the carpet of pine needles) and pulled/dug the rest of the ivy from the side bed.

Magic

2009-02-21T21:33:00.000-08:00

We’ve been doing lots of evening walks in the dark after work recently. Work has been especially interesting and hectic recently, and it’s nice to have time to rehash. We’ve been picking a different route through the neighbourhoods each time, which works well because it’s easy to add loops or cut back. We’re getting better at ending up where we expect to instead of facing dead ends and cul de sacs.

Last Sunday, we went for a walk in the daylight, with the express purpose of taking photos of some of the places we’ve found on earlier loops.

There’s a huge park down the street, and while it was already great and constantly in use before, the town has been doing a series of improvement projects for the last year or so. They started by resurfacing some of the playing fields and fixing the utility buildings, then they overhauled one playground and built a second from scratch, and now they’re redoing more playing fields and fixing drainage on the walking trails where it used to get swampy. This photo of the redone playground was taken late afternoon after it started to drizzle, but there were still lots of families out. (Sorry for the tree-filled photo – it’s hard to get far enough away to see the size of it without having trees in the way of the view.)

They have bunch of towers, slides, bridges, climbing nets, and balance beams. I don’t know who designed it, but they seem wonderfully free of the "playgrounds are dangerous" mentality – there are lots of moving parts, things to hang from, and high heights. It swarms with kids. There’s a separate area with a little structure for toddlers (a basic structure with a slide), a set of big swings, and a set of baby swings. The new playground is on the other side of the playing fields, and has tire swings, more climbing webs, a merry go round (one of the ones where kids run to make it spin and then jump on), a water park, and some huge (10’ tall) climbing boulders, plus new basketball courts. I love that the park is used by all ages – young families are well represented, but you also see a LOT of teenagers, adults of all ages, dogs, etc.

If you cut through the park on a diagonal, there’s a new street (used to be one house and lots of empty forest, now it’s been chunked into teeny lots with packed-in houses that list at $800K). The construction is relatively pretty, and the location is great, but it all just seems so new, fake, and somewhat pretentious. Pretty much as sanitized and unmagical as things get. At the end of the street, there’s a cul de sac next to some fenced off “wilderness”. And if you look over the fence, this is what you see:

Pure magic. Pictures aren’t going to do this justice. Someone build a three story tree house (and raised it up a good 12 feet off the ground) out of scrap wood and metal . They surrounded it with a moat, built a tire swing, and built windows and skylights. It looks like something out of a fairy tale (the non-Disney version, where the evil magic is probably more powerful than the good), or out of an imagination-tinged dream/memory from your childhood, and we keep going back to check on it and make sure it’s still there. There’s a gorgeous, huge house tucked behind it, and a guest house with amazing wood and stone detailing. I would love to know what sort of eccentric, wonderful people built it.

If you take the trail back through the woods and cut the fourth corner of the park, you come out in another neighbourhood, right across from this treasure (pun intended).

I can’t imagine what possessed them, but it looks like they were aiming for the look of a tourist trap seafood place. They were VERY thorough: white sandy beaches (plural) in the yard, fishing netting and thick ropes draped artistically over the fake piers, plastic parrots, a marooned rowboat, a stuffed guy snoozing off his daiquiris in the hammock by the front door, fake flamingos strutting under fake palm trees, and tiki fringe everywhere.

Can you even imagine what the neighbours think?

Big news

2009-02-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

I’m starting to feel like if I don’t speak up soon on the blog, the plethora of baby knitting projects will soon give it away: I’m pregnant. :-) I’m just shy of four months, and due mid-August. January was a long month (while Kevin was busy renovating rooms and keeping the fish going, I ate cheerios and snoozed on the couch, waking up just long enough to take a photo of whatever he was up to), but I seem to be improving on the energy front and the knitting has commenced in earnest. :-) We won’t know gender for another month or so, but I have several patterns that would work quite well either way, so those are at the top of the list in the meantime.

I finished the kimono baby sweater last week, but I haven’t blocked it yet. I thought to test the yarn for color-fastness only after I’d made quite a bit of progress, so of course the darker one bleeds. Oops. Not ideal for a striped sweater. I’ve been soaking it in cold water and vinegar baths which seems to be helping. I’m going to try it in hot water tomorrow, so fingers crossed. I’ll get photos as soon as it’s blocked.

In the meantime, I’ve started knitting Kate Gilberts’ Pea Pod sweater, shown here with the tulips in the morning sunshine:

I love the yarn (Provence – a really nice DK cotton). The body is knit in one piece, starting with a leaf rib, and then it switches to mostly stockinette with a lace panel. It feels like I keep only making it through a row or two at a time, but the progress is starting to feel noticeable. Here’s a closeup of about 6" of the leaf ribbing.

Curtains!

2009-02-17T20:54:00.000-08:00

Kevin got all motivated after work and got the curtains back up! We were both very impressed that we’d managed to keep track of all of the hardware over the course of that many months!

There were a few difficult moments. Since two of the old windows were just surrounded by that faux-paneling and didn’t have trim, the windows are now narrower. One of the curtains still fit, but the metal bars at the top and bottom of the other were about ¼" too big. Hmm. Kevin did something to them with power tools in the garage (I was very happy not to have to spend time stressing over the problem/solution), and now they still look lovely and actually fit in the window. Yay!

At some point, I need to go around and fix the lengths on all of the cords, but they look so much better than they did on the dining room floor – a great milestone. Now all that’s left is figuring out a way to recover the blue butterfly chairs and the room can be declared completely done!

Busy Saturday

2009-02-15T20:53:00.000-08:00

Kevin went skiing at Crystal yesterday, and I decided to take the day for fun errands. There are two thrift stores in Redmond that I keep meaning to peek into, so that started the day (I was more interested in getting the lay of the land than actually buying anything). Then I headed up to Woodinville to visit Molbaks. I’ve been meaning to go since we moved here four and a half years ago, and this was my first trip. I get the local paper’s weekly gardening email, and they’d mentioned that vegetable seeds were in, so a trip seemed in order. The store itself is amazing (read: enormous, comprehensive, and fairly overwhelming). There were aisles of seed packets, which I spent a good 45 minutes browsing through. I ended up with these guys:

The veggies from Territorial Seed Co were the main reason I went. I just didn’t get in gear last year on the vegetable gardening (two late tomato plants notwithstanding), and I’m all excited about the beans and peas this year, not to mention heirloom tomatoes. The leeks are an experiment, but I’m optimistic. I'm not sure where I'm going to plant the veggies yet. The over-the-top plan would be to build a raised bed or two on the side of our house by the bedroom window. We have all sorts of space and sun there now that the trees are down. And with an actual bed, we’d be able to grow lots of peas and beans, instead of just a token plant or two. Downsides include all of the effort of building the raised bed and figuring out drip systems and other irrigation (there isn’t a good source of water on that side of the house, so rather than a million trips with a watering can, I think I’d have to figure out some sort of system with a rain barrel that I fill every week or two. The cop-out alternative would be buying more containers and just gardening on the patio again, but then we’re basically limited to one container/plant of each kind. I have a few months to decide. Opinions?

The rest of the seeds are more straightforward. :-) The dahlias and zinnias are for the beds around the house (front and back) and for the rockwork. I had a few of each that I bought piecemeal and planted mid-July last year, and this will hopefully be a *much* cheaper expansion of that – they thrived and the color was spectacular. The Black-eyed Susans and lavender are for the now-empty space outside our bedroom window. I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much, but both of those are such great summer flowers. We’re both all excited about the Foxglove – we loved seeing these on our Oregon road trip last summer, and they’re supposed to prefer shade (which we have plenty of!). They don’t flower until the second year, I’ll just get them established this year.

After Molbaks, I drove around the top of the lake to Seattle – interesting driving. Quick clothes shopping at University Place, delicious lunch and a croissant at the bakery/sandwich place, and then I went to Acorn Street Shop to use a gift certificate from my brother and sister that I’ve been hoarding. :-) I had two small projects in mind, and found perfect yarn for each of them (a pretty green shade of Provence cotton, and some gorgeous blue variegated cotton that’s wonderfully soft and lovely colors.

On the way home, I knocked some less-interesting things off the list: cashed checks, bought a power strip at the hardware store, and stopped for groceries. That last errand was a treat, because the tulips are finally back! Bunches were 2/$7, so I picked out a medium and dark pink in honour of Valentine’s Day. I am so glad that we’re back to tulip season – it makes February and March so much more enjoyable out here.

Real Progress

2009-02-11T22:27:00.000-08:00

We are so very close to being done with the family room! I'd spent several weekends in the fall caulking, recaulking, and repainting trim. We had a few touchups left by the end of November, and so I finally went around and put all of the faceplates back on the outlets, only to find that the holes for two of the outlets were too big by about an inch in each dimension. It meant a tricky patch job, then re-priming, texturing, and painting, and we just couldn't face it. We decided to invite friends over for the Superbowl, though, and that was just enough incentive for Kevin to remotivate on the horrid outlets. So while he was working late and redoing the bathroom, he was also repairing those two tiny, wretched bits of wall. The end result (completed shortly before everyone arrived for the game) was perfectly done:

So now, for the first time since October 2007, we have neither the 10' stepladder nor painting tarps in the family room – it looks so classy without them! (Also the photo above is a great one for seeing the wall vs. trim vs. carpet color combination – I still keep admiring how nice they look together.)

There are two remaining steps. The first is to relocate all of the hardware so that we can rehang the blinds, which have been hanging out in front of the windows in our dining room for the better part of the last 15 months.

Again, it will look so empty and neat without them on the floor. The second goal was to head back down into the crawl space and rewire the TV cabling and internet for the XBox under the floor and up through the wall. Our interim solution has had the coax cable running across the room one direction (from our hall closet) and the ethernet cable cutting a diagonal from the opposite corner.

This Sunday before the Brown dinner, Kevin got all suited up and headed down into the crawl space, and I fed him cables down through the wall (I'm always so thankful that I get to be the above-ground person), and we ended up with this:

A combined outlet with speaker wiring on the bottom, a CAT-5 ethernet jack and a coax connection. Yay! The cables run directly to the hall closet and hook into all of Kevin's other networking there.

So now it's just the curtains. :-)

Cute knitting

2009-02-10T23:26:00.000-08:00

I finished the back and one front of the kimono-style baby sweater I've been working on. The yarn continues to be impossible to photograph – this color is closer, but a bit too yellow. Unblocked, it's curling madly (to be expected, but it's making it look even smaller than it is. I'm always surprised how tiny 6-month clothes are. Here's the back:

And the front:

The diagonal edging was a bit of a headache, since it isn't particularly stretchy. Combine that with cotton yarn (ie. no elasticity) and the typical colorwork tension issues, and I had to rip back several times. The second front is going much faster, though. I did a preliminary block and the pucker you can see in this photo disappeared. Yay!

Spring!

2009-02-09T23:24:00.000-08:00

Kevin's war against the moss progressed a step this weekend – he spent quite a while with a wire brush scrubbing away at the patio, and areas that he cleaned are now spotless.

Unfortunately, the wire brush disintegrated as he worked, and was forced to quit after only a portion of the patio because the brush had been worn down to stubs. Hmm.

While I was out photographing the progress, a delightful sight caught my eyes!

Mini daffodils bulbs coming up in one of my planters!! Once I saw that, I had to go see what else was sprouting, and was completely amazed to find these:

Remember my poor daffodils that actually bloomed through the mesh bag last year? Well, I went and planted them and the tulips in May, but then the stupid squirrels dug all of them up. And then we had a huge tree removed and the stump I'd planted them around was ground up. Yet somehow, it looks like at least twenty made it and are sprouting through the woodchips. I'm so enamoured with their verve for life, especially in the face of such trying circumstances.

Of course, it's not really Spring quite yet (just to prove it, it snowed again last night).

But what plucky little flowers. :-)

Satisfying

2009-02-08T16:23:00.000-08:00

We were both a little bit stir crazy and bored last night, but still too drained from our weeks to do anything big. So after dinner, we headed over to Ballard for cupcakes and espresso.

Yum. Perfect.

A bit behind the ball

2009-02-07T23:23:00.000-08:00

It's nearly Valentine's day, and we still have our Christmas wreath up.

It's proven impossible to take down as it still has all of its needles and somehow it still smells like evergreen when we walk by. (It's such a great smell.)

It's also been a really good reminder that we need something on that wall, preferably exactly that size and shape – the wreath just suits the spot.

Happy Tank

2009-02-06T23:14:00.000-08:00

We keep watching in amazement as the leather just keeps growing. Really the only change has been the clownfish's behaviour, so it's quite incredible to watch it continue to expand.

Meanwhile, the yellow montipora has also recently taken off, and is really starting to grow in the classic shape.

You can compare the leather and the monti (just a tiny corner is visible) in this photo from Oct 26th:

The difference is rather shocking.

5:13 PM

2009-02-05T21:44:00.000-08:00

There were neat clouds outside Kevin's office window just before sunset yesterday, so he sent me a picture.

It was fun to see it pop up in email, but way more exciting that the photo was taken at quarter past five -- we'll be driving home in the light before we know it!

Closing an ugly chapter

2009-02-02T23:18:00.000-08:00

I still pay all of my bills via mail, which seems to strike friends and coworkers as quaint. I like sitting down to write checks and making sure that all of the accounts are balanced. Every few months, I find an error in the billing and call to resolve it. And then when I'm done, there's a neat stack of stamped envelopes waiting to go out – it's a nice mark of keeping things in order. It's such a little thing but it makes me feel successful.

Well over a year ago, Kevin went to the post office, I asked him for stamps, and due to a miscommunication on my part he came home with books of dreadful "celebrate" stamps. I tried to bring them back and trade them for something prettier, but it wasn't allowed. So I've been slowly working through them for the last 14 months. The postage rate went up, so I could at least use the pretty Tiffany 1¢ stamps, too, but I'm so happy that I only have two left.

I bought two books of pretty new stamps (hearts and sunflowers) last week – they will bring such happiness to my bill-paying.

Saturday Bathroom Progress

2009-02-01T23:20:00.000-08:00

Kevin finished painting the bathroom last week, and I'd been mentally debating the color. It looked so much darker and just *yellower* than I'd been envisioning.

Above the tub (which we'll be having refinished – white instead of that flat blue):

We took down the towel bars and face plates:

See? Isn't that yellow? Qualms aside, since it didn't seem worth repainting in a paler shade, I pulled down the blue tape, moved our heavy duty floor lights, and was amazed at the difference. We have our lovely yellow back. The blue tape must have just struck some sort of chord that made the yellow look supersaturated. I was also really pleased to see that the yellow coexists with our existing vinyl flooring without making it look dingy. Replacing the vinyl (and therefore moving the toilet) wasn't ever on the docket, but I was concerned about that color combo.

We mounted the medicine cabinet – so pretty, and such a challenge as its interior is the exact width of the drill.

We had one of the best craigslist experiences ever. The old vanity had been sitting in our hallway for many weeks, so I decided to list it, the matching wall cabinet, and the matching medicine cabinet in the Craigslist free section. Within an hour I'd gotten an email from people hoping to take it away that night, and two hours later, it was gone. We were giddy when they drove away. The couple was cute – they're getting married this spring and hoping to sell both of their 1BD places to move somewhere bigger. Since the market's soft, they're doing as many DIY cosmetic improvements as possible and they were delighted with the new bathroom set. I'm glad it's going to such a good cause – I hope they find buyers.

Once the old vanity was gone, Kevin did a ton of work with the sawzall to cut holes in the back of the new vanity cabinet and cut a piece of plywood for the counter to rest on. He glued it all together, we got the vanity in position and screwed into the wall, and he started working on the plumbing and the backsplash as the clock ticked past midnight. Here was the progress right before I headed for bed:

We still need a light fixture, but otherwise we are so close to being done. :-) And after many months of having a vanity in the middle of the fishroom, we can't believe how spacious that room seems without it. The walk from the bedroom to the kitchen used to require dodging two vanities, and now the path is so clean and empty. :-)

Swatching

2009-01-31T23:19:00.000-08:00

Within moments of blocking Kevin's hat, I was already swatching for my next project. I've had this yarn sitting in my stash for ages, and finally came up with a perfect idea for it. The ball band called for #6 needles, so I cast on and away I went, then realized the resulting fabric was far too loose. Oops. I went down to #5 needles, then #4, and finally #3 before everything seemed like the proper fit.

The good news is that the gauge is now a perfect DK, which will make the math nice and easy. (I'm loosely following a pattern, but it was written for worsted yarn.)

I'm planning to switch off in 2 row stripes, which I think will look great. My only concern is that the darker color seems prone to bleeding, and I want this to be machine-washable. The ball band says something about doing the first wash in vinegar – will that set the color? Prevent bleeding?

The colors above are quite a bit off. This photo is closer, but both yarns are a little bit more teal and less blue, and less saturated than they appear in this photo.

Blocking in the sunlight

2009-01-30T23:17:00.000-08:00

For some reason the last few inches of the hat took days this time around. I finally managed to bind off, sew in the few last ends, and get it blocked. Since this was a Christmas present, I'm feeling relieved that it's finished before the end of January. Entering a new month with it still on the needles would have been too guilt-inducing.

(Note that the garlic is thriving!)

Kevin vs. the Moss, rounds 1 & 2

2009-01-27T23:17:00.000-08:00

After months of growing increasingly irritated at the moss, Kevin began the war to eradicate it. First he tried spraying zinc sulphate, and when that wasn't lethal enough he switched to an ammoniated soaps and fatty acids solution.

I'm pretty ambivalent about this phase of the project (the moss is so green, and I'm not really a spraying chemicals person), but I'm considering it a trial for our roof which desperately needs moss relief. The chemical-free solution (scrubbing with a wire brush) isn't really an option for the shingles.

Several days later, the moss is distinctly dead in some patches and distinctly flourishing in others.

The colors in this photo are particularly true – the moss is thicker and greener than the lawn at this point.

You have to be impressed at its tenacity.

Complete!

2009-01-24T13:14:00.000-08:00

It took me ages to weave in the last few ends, and then even longer until we had enough daylight for a photo, but the striped Noro scarf is finally done!

And really, just in time. It has been so cold here, and I’m in heavy scarf rotation. I’ve been getting lots of compliments on it (and from randoms like people in the cafeteria at work and the cashier at Ann Taylor, not just friends who suspect I made it myself), so that’s an extra bit of gratification.

I'm still thinking I might use wool wash on it, since that's supposed to make it that much softer (according to the Yarn Harlot). That will be a new thing for me, though -- does anyone have a favourite wool wash? Where do you find it?

Just as fun the second time around

2009-01-21T23:36:00.000-08:00

I finally measured Kevin’s head and ripped the hat back to the proper number of stitches (I was off by 20 stitches, or just over 2 inches, so it’s a substantial difference). Here’s a status photo 7 rows into the reconstruction.

All of the mini balls of yarn are the remnants of the ripping. I felt clever for labeling them as I went so that it would be easy to keep the order straight. Since this photo, I’ve finished the dark stripe, and am halfway through the next white stripe. The yarn is gorgeous to work with. I’m not managing to knit as fast as I did in December, but Kevin’s been talking about biking to work again so I’m trying to rush.

Inaugural

2009-01-20T23:35:00.000-08:00

This is such a proud, happy, hopeful day. Call it youthful idealism, but it seems like we’re at a moment that’s defined by its potential. So much is off-kilter in our country now, from the economy to our wars, the environment and the investment in infrastructure, and our basic ability to view ourselves as a strong, capable nation. For so long, the trend lines on all of those scary long term problems (health care, social security, global warming, energy, education, etc) have been heading in increasingly dire directions. And there is so much uncertainty and fear right now that it seems odd to have confidence that those problems can be addressed. However, I’ve been listening to Obama speak for years now, and I think he not only has the intelligence and ability to tackle these big problems, but the more rare ability to inspire people to make hard decisions and progress past the nadir. The fact that so many millions of people listened to him and then voted him (and all of his complex opinions) into office is an amazing, wonderful first step.

Time will tell but I’m so optimistic.

I didn’t want to post without a picture. This one is completely appropriated (it’s a quilt from the “President Obama: A Celebration in Art Quilts” show that’s coming up at the Cafritz Art Center in Maryland – wish the show was closer, it looks amazing). There have been some really neat stories, I think, about the grassroots-level outpouring of folk art that the Obama campaign and now presidency are inspiring. Everything from photos and paintings, to street art, murals, mosaics, large scale carvings and sculpture... You certainly see evidence of it on the craft blogs, and there’s a neat general blog about the art here. I completely understand the emotion that drives all of this creativity, and so many of the results are just beautiful.

Growing

2009-01-19T23:33:00.000-08:00

Yet again, the garlic sat on the counter for too long, lost patience, and sprouted. And yet again, I planted it.

It’s beginning to take off, in that twisty way it grows. We actually had three days of sunshine in a row (!!!) and it looked so cheerful there on the counter. Perhaps the reprieve from the January gloom and the light have gone to my head, but I’m already scheming about starting lavender and veggie seeds there too. Realistically, it's still way too early but I'm ready for spring!

Wall art

2009-01-18T23:32:00.000-08:00

A fun mail day: the first package I’ve ever received from Mexico.

We were mystified at first, and then realized it was the bird prints from Etsy that our sisters gave us for Christmas!! They’re so lovely. Here they are gracing our coffee table, where they’ll stay until the bathroom wall is ready for them.

It shouldn’t be too much longer. Kevin has been spending impressive amounts of time priming, texturing, and repriming the bathroom walls. (He’s even getting up early to work on it before work, so that he can keep the schedule tight. Dedication.) A mid-conversation photo of him and the gleaming white textured walls.

This weekend, we finally chose a paint color, and we can’t wait to see how it looks up on the walls.

So the birds shouldn’t have to wait too long!

January

2009-01-17T18:12:00.000-08:00

We woke up yesterday morning to thick, ghostly fog. The view from my pillow:

And from the end of the bed:

Normally, given the house's position relative to the hill, we can just see pine trees and the tops of neighbours' houses from our room, but there's something about only being able to see half of the normal field of depth that is wonderful and eerie. I kept snoozing, and the fog kept being there when I woke up. It finally burned off around 10, leaving just the normal thick clouds and deep grey. But this morning, we had a repeat performance followed by winter sunlight and blue skies – a wonderful day.

In an attempt to steel ourselves against the second half of January, we looked up the sunset times the other day. On January 25th, we'll finally have all the way until 5:00 before the sun sets. By March 5th, the sunset will be after 6, and (in a daylight savings cheat) three days later it will be after 7! On March 17th, we'll finally be back to having more than half a day of light (even if it's the Seattle, clouded-over kind). We're looking forward to that.

And levity ensued

2009-01-14T23:30:00.000-08:00

Kevin's been making major progress on the bathroom – the holes are fixed, the wires for the bathroom light have been relocated, and he's gone through many coats of spackle. We need to choose a paint color soon – it's on the verge of becoming a blocking issue!

Funny story from last week:
Kevin bought an industrial-looking work light so that he could actually see what he was working on. We thought it would be useful to also hook up one of our table lamps so that the bathroom would still be available for non-spackling use. We agreed that it made sense to be able to switch it on and off (it's too hard to see the outlet to plug the lamp in). I wandered off, back to my book, thinking we were in agreement. A chapter or so later, Kevin asked me to come in and see his work:

He'd found an extra outlet, hooked it up to the overhead light wires (which are in turn connected to the wall switch), added an extension cord, and voila: the light turns on and off. I laughed and laughed. We have a bunch of those plug extenders that you can toggle right at the outlet, and I was envisioning just grabbing one of those. I should have been more clear. :-) Kevin, next to his handiwork, holding the switch:

Secret December Knitting

2009-01-11T23:28:00.000-08:00

This was an insanely difficult secret to keep, but I knit a biking hat for Kevin for Christmas. :-) The goal is something that would fit snugly under his helmet, and keep his ears and the back of his neck warm during his commute in the cold months. I decided to splurge on Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino. The colors match his paniers (carrying bags that attach to his bike so that he doesn't have to wear a backpack).

The yarn made the secret that much harder to keep – it feels heavenly, and it was so hard not to find him and share. :-) The pattern is based on Thorpe, but I revised it for DK yarn. I had to guess at his head size based on some surreptitious baseball hat measuring, and I ended up knitting it about an inch too big.

So now the project for the next week or so is to rip back and resize it – at least it won't be secret this time!!