Remember this?

I put it away when I finished it in January so that it would stay nice and not get mucked up before the trip.

I can’t find it :)

Otherwise, everything is packed and, aside from getting dressed, I’m all ready to go.

Thank you all for your good wishes and kind comments.  I’ll be thinking of you and I’ll see you again when I return!

Ack!  I can’t tell you how desperately I am longing to get aboard that damned ship so I can relax!  Poor Myria has been calm and supportive, but I know I’ve been driving her crazy. 

This isn’t going to be a long post - there may be one over the weekend if things sort themselves out in a timely fashion and I have spoken to Myria about doing an interim post.  If she decides she has the time and inclination, it will appear on Wednesday.

Thank you all for your patience with me this last, somewhat haphazard week.  I will miss you; I always do.  Aside of the possible weekend post, I won’t likely be posting again until Monday, May 9th.

Please keep yourselves well - knit/crochet on in peace and joy.

It’s getting down to the wire now and I admit to being a bit tense the last few days.  I’ve got a Mt. Everest of laundry to get done today (not to mention a car inspection) and I can’t say I’m much looking forward to it.  Heheh - tough noogies, eh?  Has to be done :)  Well, it’s possible that shopping will get done today rather than laundry, as the temperatures are supposed to get into the 80s this afternoon and then go down into the 50s tomorrow.  It might be more comfortable to wait until tomorrow to do the clothes :)

Scattered…who, me?

I am also not getting any knitting done.  For me, being tense means having little or no focus.  I spent two nights trying to cast on a sock before realizing that even if I did succeed in casting the sucker on, I’d never get anywhere trying to knit the thing - unless I were intending it to fit a three-legged spider.

So, I thought I’d pass on a couple of things that have been helping me keep from jittering myself off the face of the earth :)

The first is scones (see the recipe on the sidebar).  Both Myria and I have been undergoing a continuous craving for these things so I’ve been making them every three or four days or so.  Probably not the best thing for the waistline but since I don’t have one of those - no worries, right?  And it does seem that the making of them is somewhat therapeutic - at least for me.  There’s the cutting the butter into the dry ingredients which requires getting your hands in there and mushing up the butter chunks until the whole resembles a bowl of soft sand.  Then, after the liquid has been mixed in, there’s the kneading - always a useful outlet for tension :).  Finally there’s the satisfaction of having been able to create something good, something that people like.  Myria asked for them a few evenings ago, which made me feel very good indeed.  Even more surprising though, my dad loves them - and as picky a bastard as he is, I just wouldn’t have thought it possible!

Note - I’ve used milk (whole milk) as substitute for the half-and-half, either in whole or in part and that seems to work reasonably well.  But I wouldn’t substitute margarine for the butter.  I have also made these by leaving out the sugar and the currants, adding a cup of grated cheddar cheese and several crumbled, crisp bacon slices, and substituting 2 tsp of Worchestershire sauce for an equivalent amount of milk/half-and-half.  Wasn’t half bad :)

The other thing that’s been helping me hang on to the ragged edge of sanity is a game called Crack Attack which is modeled on the old Tetris Attack arcade game.  It’s an open GL, freeware game.

The game involves matching various colored cubes in sets of three (or more) in order to eliminate them from the well.  The colored cubes are pushed up from the bottom at an increasing rate of speed while blocks of various sizes fall on top of them from above.  Any set of cubes that touch the blocks will convert the blocks to cubes when they are matched.

The premise isn’t new by any means, but the implementation is slick and the game is colorful, fierce and over in a short time.  This is perfect when focus is a problem.  The game is also silent - there are sound effect add-ons, but I haven’t tried them yet.  Generally I’ve been supplying my own in the form of grunts, groans and phrases like “ARRGGGH!” and “You cheating son-of-a-bitch!”

Happy hump day :)

Remember the beginning of the Landscape shawl from last Friday’s post?  Well, it’s been frogged (sigh)  because, as you all pretty much know by now, your obedient blogstress here periodically (but completely) forgets how to count.  Grrrrr…..  I may try it again later, or try another shawl completely.  The project is not dead - just delayed.  Besides, I love the color of this yarn too much not to do something big and splashy with it :)

Saturday, while dad and I were out pottering around, I found this in one of those little “dollar” type stores that specializes in inexpensive and mass-produced Chinese imports.

It was very inexpensive and a find I hadn’t expected to run into.  I have only seen Woolease sport weight in one place in my area and that shop has since gone out of business.  So I was very pleased to see this.  The color selection isn’t superb, but it’s certainly acceptable and this will be wonderful stuff for socks - at least that’s the plan today :)

We seem to be rapidly adding a couple of phrases to our “family language”  The first comes, courtesy of Goldie.  A lovely, mellow animal most of the time, he has one facet that can be absolutely maddening.  All cats bathe.  Goldie bathes for hours at a time.  This isn’t a problem if he’s, say, in another room.  But a while back, fresh from the litter box, he jumped up onto the back of Myria’s recliner (one of his favorite spots) and began his marathon ablutions.  This, of course, resulted in Myria getting nudged and jostled and, of course, the chair vibrated to the rhythm of the cat bath.  Finally, after about twenty minutes, she turned to Goldie: “Can’t you ever settled down?” she said, shooing him off onto the floor.  “And you have toilet feet!”

I just about fell on the floor laughing at that and the phrase has passed into our common vocabulary as a version of “That’s the last straw!”

The second phrase comes from the SpongeBob Squarepants: The Battle for Bikini Bottom”.  SB is not a show we watch, but the game is a pretty fair platformer and we’re fond of that type.  This is a fun game - tweaked on several levels, though I’m certain folks familiar with the TV show will probably be less freaked than I was at the thought of little, square underpants representing the main character’s health level.  SpongeBob starts out with four of these underpants and when he’s hurt, he loses one.  Lose them all, and he dies.  But there are, of course, underpants to be found all over the landscape - up on cliff edges, or in closets or caves.  When SpongeBob manages to retrieve them, he utters one of a variety of phrases such as “Fresh as a spring breeze” or (my personal favorite) “I feel like a new sponge!”  That latter phrase has become common at casa de wolfandturtle at the end of a meal or on emerging from the shower, etc.

Just cracks me up :)

Note - Expression Engine (the blog software) was updated over the weekend.  If you notice anthing funky or have any problems, please let me know?  Thanks!

I’m more pre-occupied with what knitting to take on this trip than I am with what clothes to pack.  And I came to the realization yesterday that for the first time in my life, something has become as significant as books to me - yarn :)  I know some of you out there are nodding and smiling to yourselves but I swear it’s true and I never even saw it coming!  I mean, books have furnished my life - you can follow me through the years on the trail of library cards.  When I was young and poor, I never felt hard put by the lack of a couch (or even a bed) so long as I had books.

I was in Borders book store the other day, equipped with a $50 gift certificate that had been given to my father as payment for filling the 1st clarinet seat in a mini-orchestra for a series of performances when their usual player couldn’t make it.  Since dad doesn’t read fiction (“It’s all just made up stuff”) or buy books (“Why would you buy a book when there’s a perfectly good library you can borrow it from!”) he gave the certificate to me.  And I gleefully went out to do a bit of literary acquisition.  Only as I wandered through the aisles I kept thinking how nice it would be if I could put this certificate (or some of it anyway) towards yarn.  It took another day or so for the implications of that to sink in.

Basically, what it means is that if you put me between a book store and a yarn shop and told me I could have any amount of money to spend in one place or the other -but not both - I would never be able to move off the mark and would eventually starve :)

We are fond of Basmati rice; it’s about all we ever use any more.  Often it comes in these neat little, zippered, burlap bags and we finished a bag a few nights ago.  Myria asked if I could use the bag and it hit me - it would be perfect to put the sock yarn in and, later, to contain the project (I had already wound the hank, with the help of my trusty kitchen scale, into two balls of lovely, soft blueness).  So I grabbed it and made sure all the rice was out of it and voila!

The bag wasn’t put together with an eye towards longevity; the weave is very coarse and the seams aren’t finished in any way at all - it wouldn’t be cost effective, I suppose.  So I don’t expect it to last forever - but it should last the trip without any difficulties and that will be just fine! 

I have also acquired some Caron Simply Soft in an…erm…extremely vibrant color (the company calls it “Rubine Red”) and a bit of a co-ordinating variegate.

I had been waffling about whether to try another Landscape Shawl.  I really liked the pattern but my first effort last year resulted in something much too small for me to be comfortable with.  So I had been thinking about doing it again (with some modifications) in a larger size.  But then I thought I really didn’t want to do another shawl right after finishing up the Snowdrop.  But then a friend enthused that a shawl in this yarn would feel like being wrapped in a bunny - and that image was so seductive (if a bit alarming, considering what size the bunny would have to be) that I was lost.  I cast on last night…

So, this will definitely come with me, along with the potential socks.  I may bring the Lady Eleanor as well but I’m not entirely sure about that one just yet.  There’s the slight possibility that I’d run out of yarn on that one and I don’t really want to do that on a ship where I can’t easily run out and get more.  Wanting to work on something and not being able to is maddening!

I suppose I should bring a few random skeins and balls in case inspiration strikes in the middle of the Atlantic :)

The spawns of Satan and I wish you all a wonderful weekend :)

First…

Thank you so much all for your kind thoughts and prayers.  I know that if anything in the universe can help, it is the good will of others and if that does the trick, then my friend should be home free :)

On to the knitting part of this program…

I have been wondering when, if ever, I was going to stop feeling like a dilettante.  At what point could I say to myself, I’m not just fooling around any more.  I’m not playing at knitting, I’m knitting.  I mean, I’ve made lots of things (with both knit and purl stitches!), I’ve given away knitted gifts to people who seemed pleased to get them.  I’ve learned to be somewhat comfortable with charts and have done this blog (supposedly in the pursuit of the pleasure of knitting) for a year and a half.

Am I a knitter yet?

Sometimes you come close - I did a few months ago when I finished the Peony Bag.  It’s like that, isn’t it, when you’re really pleased with how something turns out?  Is there anything like the feeling of competence?  But then it fades as you notice the many dozen WIPs and UFOs you’ve got scattered around the place, despite which you can’t come up with a single thing you want to work on.  Even worse, there’s nothing you want to start either.

I’m going through the same thing now with the shawl.  It’s done and complete and even I can unabashedly say that it’s beautiful without also feeling that I need to apologize for something.  But there are these bunches of unfinished projects that don’t seem to be going anywhere and look as I might, nothing trips my trigger, clamoring to be the next big thing.  The horror, the horror.

Maybe this is just the way projects end - kind of a post partum thing?  Geez, that would explain why I have so many unfinished things lying around my living room and in the yarn cabinets!  Why finish anything if it’s going to send you into a tailspin for a week?  And isn’t it supposed to be all about the journey and not the destination, anyway?

UFOs forever!  WIPs rule!

Ahem….

But I’ll tell you something else.  I’ve always wanted to dance.  To me, that is the epitome of grace and elegance.  Of course I’m a lummox with two left feet and no co-ordination what-so-ever.  But lately, when I can separate my consciousness to observe, I notice the way the needles move when I am doing something complex, something with several different techniques or stitch types.  Forward back, under and over, they and the yarn partnering in this continuous series of motions that produces a beautiful piece of fabric.  And who’s choreographing that motion?  Why I am!

So I guess I am a knitter - also a dancer :)

Today was going to be a rant about knitting, snobs and acrylic yarn.  It’ll have to wait. Oh it’s still going to be a rant, but not a knitting-related one.  It’s also why this post is so late today.

I got an e-mail yesterday from a friend, a former co-worker who has been diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma which is resistant to chemotherapy and radiation.  She is young (41) and very fit.  She has a husband and children.  And she has cancer.

I spent a large part of yesterday raging incoherently.  It just seems like such a cheat.  If you’ve ever seen “Independence Day”, I felt just like Judd Hirsch telling Jeff Goldblum (his son in the film) “I haven’t spoken with God since your mother died.”  That sums it up exactly.  I was furious.

So I went up to visit her this morning.  I have always marveled at her slenderness because when we hug, my arms go all the way around her.  Today, instead of endearing, it seemed ominous.  I know, I know - all in my head.

She’s is good spirits, always having been an extremely hard-headed, practical type and, otherwise in good health except for the occasional ache.  She feels that the prognosis is good.  She’s got cat scans and bone scans and MRIs scheduled and she has informed herself (very well, I might add) about what this type of cancer entails, how it is treated, and what she can expect going forward.  She is very tough and more than capable of handling things - but part of me keeps thinking she shouldn’t have to.

She is still telling herself that the doctors may get in there, when the biopsy is done, and find that it’s something else entirely - something benign.  And who knows - maybe that’s just what will happen.  God knows I’m keeping my fingers crossed and telling my darker thoughts to just shut the h-e-double-hockey-sticks up!

We’ll be meeting for lunch a week from Friday and there may be more information by then.

If you have a second to spare, would you cross your fingers?