As proof that I can still finish things that I start knitting, I give you the last two pairs of socks I have finished.  And both are mine.

 

Both are made from Roxanne's Art Walk Sock Yarn but both are different.  The one on the left with the leaf design (still one of my favorite patterns to wear and to knit) is what she calls "smooshy" yarn.  And it is smooshy.  The cakes are bigger than the non-smooshy ones of the same yardage.  It's a bit more orange/brown than the photo and I love it.

 

The blue one is a simple lace pattern made with a cashmere/merino blend.  It feels so soft and nice to work with.  I really love it and despite the fact that I seem to have a lot of blue clothes, I don't make blue socks very often.  These are not very tall socks so the picot cuff works.  I like the way it looks and don't know why I don't think of using it more often.

 

I forgot.  I finished another pair!  I made Pk another pair of what he calls Fire Socks (since they are mostly red and yellow and orange).  He wore out his other pair and I gladly replaced them.

 

There is something so satisfying about kitchenering that last few stitches of a sock or binding off that last few stitches of a cuff.  They are a huge number of stitches but still relatively small and portable.  I have three other pairs in the works that will all be mine.

 

Does that sound selfish?  Maybe.  I didn't do any knitting for the holiday this year.  I didn't think to start early enough and I am not into the stressful deadline knitting thing that so many people seem to thrive on.  They must thrive on it since they never seem to learn and do it year after year.

 

Me?  Not so much.  I knit for pleasure and when I knit a gift, I don't want to be rushed.  The few times I have tried to meet a deadline I didn't enjoy it.  I'm thinking of Sock Wars and even the Tour de France.  The first one I took part in, I wanted to make a small shawl and ended up making an unsatisfactory piece because I rushed to finish it and didn't stop to fix mistakes. 

 

This morning I downloaded some new audio books and my spinning wheel is feeling a bit neglected so I think we'll spend some time together, if I can stay awake.

 

We are a House o' Plague.  Pk brought home a nasty, congested, wet cold with him from work.  I am managing to fight it off for now (but I've been rather sinusy as we undergo a change in atmospheric pressure).  He did well yesterday with hot tea, chicken soup and rest.  Today, however, he's feeling a bit of cabin fever and is headed out to work on the garden bed.  We've had a bit of frost and he wants to get the bulbs in and finish preparing the rose bed. This is the color of the roses I want to put in the bed.  I spoke to the people at the local garden center and they said the plants come into the center in April so we'll go and get them in the spring. 

And what else is going on around here?  There will be pie baking on Wednesday (or Thursday morning) and fruit relish will be made today in preparation for the holiday on Thursday.

 

We are going to Em and Jim's house for dinner for Thanksgiving and so I can bake the pies in the morning because she will be cooking the turkey.  The fruit relish is better if it's made a few days ahead of time so I'll make that today. 

 

Sunday we'll have what Pk calls Second Thanksgiving.  I'll cook our turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and more pies so we can have sandwiches for lunch.  I'll also package up leftover turkey, stuffing and gravy into a dish that can be frozen and put in the oven for one night in December when we are busy preparing for the other holiday that is fast approaching.

 

It's very windy today and the fall leaf show is over.  Only the oak trees (which seem to hold onto their crisp brown leaves all winter long) are not naked this morning.  I'm going to make some ricotta donuts and omlettes for brunch and then some onion soup and focaccia sandwiches for dinner. 

"Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think."

~Gautama Buddha

 

Sound familiar?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here we are at Tuesday morning already.  Our weather has been bouncing back and forth between cold and balmy.  When we leave for work in the morning, it can be cold enough for mittens but coming home, it's warm enough for just shirt sleeves.  It's a weird time of year.

Sunsets are short but intense.  This is out the back window of my house just about dinner time (around 5 pm).  The days are getting shorter so quickly.  In another few weeks by 5 it will be full on dark.

I ripped out an almost finished (all but the last half of the foot) sock because it finally dawned on me to try it on and it was a bit too small.  Since the sock was for me, it had to be ripped.  It has been restarted and the larger needles are making just enough difference.

I have been using some Noro that Kate gave me for my birthday for another pair of socks for me (if someone gives me some yarn, I almost feel honor bound to make something for myself with it).  This pair was too large and I had to rip it out to the cast on (which is something like 189 stitches) and use smaller needles.  As you can see, it has the famed Noro color combinations and unevenness.  It's Silk Garden and so is a silk/wool blend.  It's not soft but I have another pair of socks made out of this and they have lasted quite a long time.  I enjoy wearing brightly colored socks that can peek out of my more conservative colored pants. 

Pk and I were shopping last weekend and we came to the canned meats aisle.  Now, we are not canned meats type of people.  I think the only thing we've bought in that category is tuna and maybe once in a while, chicken for him to take backpacking. 

I stepped back and was surprised to see an entire shelf section of Spam.  When I was a kid, my mother (who didn't like to cook and was an uninspired cook on a good day), would take a chunk of span and cut slices almost completely through the meat.  She would place pieces of cheddar cheese in these cuts and bake the whole thing.  Yes, it is as awful as it sounds but she was proud of it.

But, look at all the flavors of spam!  Honey BBQ, plain BBQ, Lite Spam and regular old Spam.  And if you're so inclined, you can get clothing with the Spam logo on it. 

We live in an odd world.

 

 If you can stand one more photo of fall foliage, this is the tree outside our bedroom window.  I woke up Saturday morning and the bedroom was suffused with an orange glow.  The sun had just made it over the top of the house and hit this tree.  It reflected all that orange out into the air.  It was glorious.  We have been really blessed this year in terms of fall color.  It seems like everywhere we go, there is a tree that is showing off.

After two major storms in two years (although nothing to rival what went on in the Philipines last week.  Those poor folks are devastated), this is our first real Fall in a while.

When we went to Rhinebeck we bought some souvenirs since it was our first time.  I bought a t shirt with this year's logo on it.  I followed the washing instructions and this is what it looks like today.  You can just see the word Festival in yellow.  The rest is supposed to be a Jacob Sheep but you'd be hard pressed to know that.

The thing that bothers me is that this was not a cheap shirt.  It should have lasted beyone 2 washings.  I'm trying to decide whether to email them with a photo and express my disappointment. 

This is one of the things I was working on this weekend.  I bought this colorful yarn at Rhinebeck and needed a pattern to show it off but not overwhelm the colors.  I chose Monkey Socks.  For some reason, the more colorful the yarn, the better this pattern looks.  I am in love with all the cheerfulness.

And there was bread.  PK left a container of dried fruit on the counter and it made my fingers itch to be in some dough so I experimented and came up with Orange Cinnamon Fruit bread.  I just added some grated orange peel and dried fruits to a basic rich bread dough.  It was delicious.  I love it when an experiment works out. 

And last but not least, this was actually finished last weekend.  It's one skein of Gotland that I got for Christmas last year.  It has a nice halo but is not too hairy.  It's the wool they made the Elven cloaks out of in the LOTR series.  I have another skein I'm working on and then some Icelandic and some alpaca in complimentary grey colors.  I want to turn them into a shawl in shades of grey.  I might look for one darker color to add to the mix just for contrast.

Otherwise, things have been quiet around here.  I didn't leave the house all weekend.  Pk had some plans but they fell through which was just as well since he got to watch his soccer games.

And lest we forget, today is Veteran's Day here.  We don't honor the men and women who were members of our armed forces nearly enough. 

Today we try to make up for that. And in their honor, I leave you with this:

In Flanders Field

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.


John McCrae

 



It's been a while.......

And I have no idea why.  We are deep into Fall now and the weather has been glorious.  Life is blissfully dull (and I mean that sincerely).  We have been eating popcorn which I made on the stove in the heavy aluminum pot.  I always put too much in the pot and the lid always pops up. 

This batch was consumed while watching Star Trek: Into the Darkness which has become one of our favorite movies. (even if Mr Cumberbatch has a tendency to open his mouth very wide and enunciate in a big way).

No major storms have come through so we have had some beautiful leaf displays.  The last two seasons both Irene and Sandy have cut short the fall display but this year, as if to make up for that, the leaves have been hanging around longer and turning such beautiful colors.

 Hallowe'en came and went.  I wore my t shirt with the bats and houses on it and my ghost headband to work.  I've had the headband for years but since I only wear it one day a year, it has lasted quite well.  Pk and I were passing a low grade virus back and forth so we stayed home and met the trick or treaters at the door instead of going to my brother's house. 

I'm not very good with the self portraits.  I never know where to look.  This was in the library of our building right before a meeting of the Super User group for our computer program.

There have also been some spectacular clouds.  For some reason, I have been taking lots of photos of sunsets/sunrises and clouds just blowing through.  That's my neighbor's house and the clouds moving overhead looked so ominous.  They were grey and slightly pink and also some yellow in there.  Pk always say they remind him of the clouds in Independence Day (aliens, lightning, death soon to follow). 

 This one is in a mall parking lot just around sundown.  We just stood in the middle of all the cars watching the sky turn colors.  The air turned orange and it felt like magic.

And then we had this one coming home yesterday on the train.  That's looking south along the Delaware River.  You can see the edge of the front that rushed through the area.  The day ahead of it was balmy and humid and afterward?  Back to the cool, rather damp Fall we were getting used to.

Pk wanted to give me roses for our anniversary in October but he said "they always die".  So, this year, he and Elanor dug out the bed under the front window to prepare it to plant some rosebushes.  This way I will have "roses for months at a time".  I have wanted rose bushes for a while but didn't think we would be able to grow them in our clay filled soil. 

I am thinking of floribunda roses in this kind of colors (photo from Jackson and Perkins catalog website).  These will bloom and make lovely bushes of color for most of the spring/summer and early fall.  Don't they look like little handfuls of sunshine?

In other news, I have now entered my late 50's.  The girls came for dinner last Sunday and we had cake (of course) and Chinese food.  There was laughter and soccer games and football games and everyone seemed to have a good time.

Other than that, like I said, things have been quiet.  We are slowly returning to working on the house. Pk is going to replace the siding on the side of the house and we'll put some plain wood siding on the back until we can tear it all off and have it done.

I bought the fan for the dining room and as soon as the sheet rock goes up, so will the fan so we can have air circulating through our space.  Now that we've lived with it for close to a year, I am having some thoughts about how to use it so it's comfortable and attractive.  It may involve neon colors in the kitchen area but that's still under discussion.

As we begin the long slide to the end of the year, I hope you are all filled with peace.