Remember Elusive #15?

 

NO MORE, SISTA!!  Bye bye.

On the subject of garter snakes, the University of Minnesota says, “Remember that garter snakes are harmless to you and your pets and should not be killed.”  Uh-huh…

Okay, enough about death - onto LIFE!

 

Lets take a look at beautiful, living, GROWING things:

  

Not only is my precious peony still coming back from the assumed-dead, but see that little weed-looking thing to the right of it?  Haven’t seen that for 2 years; we assumed it died at the end of the ’06 season.  It escapes me exactly what it is, but you can tell it hadn’t surfaced last spring when we planted the peony or we wouldn’t have planted it so close!

My lace continues to prosper as well.  I’m so amazed by how “old” lace is and how “alive” it still is today; some of the more popular patterns I’ve seen go back hundreds of years!  I for one am very glad this style has survived.

My shawl is about 25% done.  Something finally just clicked for me and I’m clippin’ along much more quickly (though not fast) and with almost no errors - I even managed to do an entire pattern repeat WHILE watching TV last night and only had one little oops that I noticed right away when I’d made it.

 

That said…off to go work on it for a little while before the chillens get home.  Have a great day, everyone!

Where Does The Time Go?

With today being May 3rd, that means 1 month and 3 days until my son graduates high school. There are surprisingly mixed feelings with this - of the “I can’t believe my first-born baby is already graduating high school” to “this day can’t come soon enough!” It must be tough for him being only 17 but knowing EVERYTHING. Regardless of how I’m feeling on any given day about this subject, there is one irrefutible fact that remains constant: I am WAY too young to have a high school graduate.

So needless to say I’ve been quite busy trying to get this ready for the big day.  Understand, however, that he cares not a bit about all of the hoopla - not the ceremony, graduation party (other than he’s excited about gifts of money…sigh), senior pictures, senior day - none of it.  I’ll spare you all the lack of motivation in the “what I’m going to do after I graduate” headache.  But one thing I will point out is senior pictures - they were taken quite a while ago and we went in again yesterday to view the proofs and decide what we wanted.  He doesn’t care about handing out pictures to friends, so between his dad and I we figured 2 8×10s, 8 5×7s, the minimum-purchase of 24 wallets and 8 proofs in a little binder (I’m making the graduation announcements/party invites myself and his God Father is printing them all up).  Working that order a number of different ways (packages vs. ala carte vs. a combination of both), the bare minimum we would spend is $541; that’s with a 10% discount and before tax.  Over my dead body.  If I made $500,000 a year I would not pay that much for those pictures.  They’re good, but they’re not great.  My son, I, his dad and step-dad all decided that we’ll take some pictures ourselves on the digital camera, run them through PhotoShop and have them printed somewhere.  I - who always pays for convenience - am stunned that people actually fork out that kind of dough!  It was $78 for ONE 5×7.  That’s just…rape.  So I now have a couple additional to-do’s in the graduation department, in a very short period of time here.

Today is Prom day.  For four years he has gone to school functions/dances (Homecoming, SnoDaze, Sadies, Prom) with “the gang;” his 4 or 5 closest friends.  We’d all get together the morning of and have the kids hand-make their corsages and boutonnieres, all re-group again to do pictures, sometimes the parents would slam a few after the kids had left wondering how they’re going to make it on their own someday… this time, however, my son is going to Prom with a friend (this will actually be the first time going to a dance without the same girl/girlfriend he’d had for a few years), as just friends, and here it is the morning of and he still doesn’t know what time dinner is at, who’s driving, where or if they’re all getting together for pictures beforehand.  I’m only the mom here, but I’m bummed; I miss the gang doing this together.  He was so adamant about going to Prom his senior year, but even he admits it’s just not the same this time without the whole gang going.  Some don’t have girlfriends anymore, or one’s ex-girlfriend is now another’s girlfriend so of course there’s tension there; still, I hope he gets a little more excited as the day wears on as this is his last Prom.

<Ooooooh - my wonderful husband just handed me one of his to-die-for bloody mary’s…he must be sensing some of my sadness.  Love!!> 

In between all of that and job interviewing, I’ve managed to get a few things done in the fiber department:

    

The two above are back and front shots of a washcloth done in Tunisian Crochet.  If you’re not familiar with it, think of Tunisian Crochet as a combination of knitting and crocheting:  each row is actually a series of two steps, where stitches are picked up and held on the needle across from right to left, and then crocheted off on the way back from left to right.  This particular pattern was done using a double ended crochet hook and two colors.  The washcloth was a refresher project for me before I start on a baby blanket.

 

Then I finally finished my Saucy Spring Socks for the swap I’m in; love the way they turned out and can’t wait to make another pair!  This pair was done in Dream In Color Smooshy.

 

 

 

 

After refreshing my memory on Tunisian Crochet, I hopped over to doing Tunisian Entrelac; I hadn’t done this technique before so used this bag as my starter project - something entrelac and done in the round.  This is all leading up to the project I eventually will dive into here in the next couple of weeks. 

 

 

Lastly, and most exciting for me right now anyway, I started my lace class at Double Ewe.  I was prepared for a learning curve; I was prepared for patience; I was prepared to learn how to read charts.  I’ve done lace before, but what I really wasn’t prepared for was using lace-weight yarn.  That really takes getting used to.  I find myself going very very slowly knitting this up, and move my life line often!!  I’ve already ripped back a couple times because I couldn’t find where my mistake happened (which I can only assume was a dropped YO when I was on a purl row).   The other thing that has me intrigued is how it looks now vs. how it will look once it is blocked; quite a difference.  When I really stretch this out I can start to see the pattern it’s supposed to look like when it’s finished.  I can see myself getting hooked on this!  But being a newbie at this point, it’s definitely something I can’t do while I’m trying to watch TV or carry on a conversation; I need quiet so I can concentrate.  Needless to say I barely have the opportunity to work on it in this house! Wait…wait… husband appears to be gearing up to go power-wash the deck; that should give me at least a couple hours of relative quiet. So I’m off!!

13, 14, 15: A Quick Math Lesson

     +          = 

 

 

This is just soooooo WRONG!  Let’s be clear - they’re not IN the house, but they’re pretty much all over the outside on the south side of the house where it’s warmest right now.

You can see all the icky blood and guts on #13 to the left…it wouldn’t die!  My neighbor finally came over and took pity on me, informing me that you need to chop it at the head before it’ll die.

 

 

I somehow managed to kill #14 to the right here while it was peeking out at me from this little crevice in front of the garage.  It’s still there, which is good because that means it really did die right away.

 

 

#15, who had been peeking out and witnessed the demise of its other family members, just as I was sucking in a big breath for yet another scream, beat a hasty retreat in another crevice before I could get to him.  But his days are numbered. 

I should mention that the number of snakes this spring is a combination of those at my house and those next door at the neighbors.  Now she’s a real trooper - when she’s around she comes over and kills mine because I really have a tough time being anywhere near them.  And said neighbor actually had one get IN her house a couple years ago, so we are diligent about trying to control this from the onset.  I actually felt bad about killing the other ones; it’s not their fault they were born snakes.  I know they’re not poisonous and they don’t hurt anything or anyone, but GROOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSS!  So I may feel bad but not bad enough to let them live.  Sorry to any animal rights activists reading this; they may not cause physical harm but they definitely cause mental anguish.

In between my snake escapades I did manage to get one of my sock swap socks done; the other is on the needles right now.  Still love this pattern! 

I also start my lace class on Monday, and need to get a baby blanket done for my MN-Knice charity group on Ravelry (though I’m still waiting for my Mo-EZ crochet hooks so I can get started on the baby blanket; probably a good thing they haven’t arrived so I can get the other sock done).

 

It’s another pretty nice day here (mid-60’s) so of course the windows are open and a nice breeze is coming through in the office along with beautiful spring music:  

 

 

“I just want to say hi - I promise!” 

 

Good thing there’s a screen there.

 

Just Because I Could…It’s About Damn Time

 

 

 

 Sitting on the deck soaking up the SUN

 

 

 

 

 

 

…appropriately working on the Saucy Spring Socks!!

 

 

 

 

Just because I FINALLY CAN!

Raised From The Dead

I’ve mentioned before that my husband is a phenominal cook…well he also has a beautifully green thumb and can do wonders with landscaping!  Though it hasn’t been my strong suit in the past, I have learned a great deal from him over the years on what goes well together (colors, height, bloom times, etc.) and how to take care of things.  Actually, my unwritten job IS to take care of the annuals and perennials and do a pretty good job of it.  But there’s always the exception:

We make a trip once a year down to a nursery in the Twin Cities called Gerten’s; biggest nursery/landscaping place I personally have ever seen.  You name it, they have it.  LOVE this place.  So last year we make our trip and are loading up our carts with mostly perennials since husband also likes to move things around 2-3 times each summer (front yard to back yard, back yard to up front, left side of trees to right side of trees, you get the picture) which always creates some open spaces.  My job is to say “I like that” and then he reads about it and determines whether or not it will work.  We get done, pay, and are both scratching our heads walking back to the car with our purchases wondering how in the world our bill got to be so high.  We’re going over the receipt line by line when we notice that one particular little tiny bush was 75 freaking dollars!!  It was no bigger than a large grapefruit! 

 It’s a Fern Leaf Peony - isn’t it cool??!!  This is what it is supposed to look like eventually.  The one we purchased had about 3 bulbs on it that we thought looked quite eager to bloom for us.  After about a month of wondering why they didn’t look like they were progressing at all, I started reading up on care of them and the first thing it said was that you need to be careful not to saturate them with too much water.  Well guess where we planted it?  In one (of two) spots between us and our neighbors that get double the watering of anywhere else because we water and so does the neighbor, and the areas between our houses get double the watering.  There’s not a lot we can do about it because this also happens to be a spot where the GRASS desperately needs the water to keep it green, so…another month goes by and we finally determined that we KILLED IT!  It’s looking all icky and slimy and…dead.  Really bummed, but we tend to learn from our mistakes.

So imagine our absolute shock - and joy - to discover this yesterday while starting to do some of our spring landscape cleaning: 

IT’S COMING BACK!!  And look how many of them there are (we counted 10).  IT’S A MIRACLE!  I do realize that sometimes it takes a year or even two for some plants to really take to their environment (i.e., we have a few dwarf lilac bushes that didn’t really take off until their 2nd full year here) and I thank GOD that maybe this is one of them!!  I feel like I’ve been given a second chance to raise this little guy, and hopefully better than the first attempt.  So I have about 4 sites bookmarked that all deal with Fern Leaf Peonies and am ready to shower it with TLC!

It’s also nice to see the Day Lilies coming up, too.  I leave a lot of the early-season chores to husband because as the weather gets warmer now, and the bulbs start to come out of hiding for the season, we also have some UNinvited guests doing the same thing:  snakes!  So if I’m forced to have to go anywhere near the yard (like to take these pictures) for the next probably 4-6 weeks, I carry this big sharp spade-looking thingy with me everywhere I go so I can defend myself.  And yes I HAVE had to ginsu a few in the past; I tried the catch and release thing, but that only worked for about 3 seconds in my head - my arms were faster and smarter.

Here’s another example of TLC…it’s all in the eyes!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And TLC that’s addicting… I am seriously in love with these socks!  These are the “Saucy Socks” for our Saucy Spring Sock Swap that officially kicked off (partners assigned) on Saturday.  The pattern is very easy and knits up quite quickly, which is great because I can get a few pairs done in a short period of time - one for my partner and a couple for me!