On a positive note…

I emailed STR today and told them about the yarn and they are going to remedy it, told me that is not acceptable.  Yay!

I finished a secretive crochet project and am going to mail it out on Friday.  I have been lazy about mailing things lately, but hey it is hot outside.  I will post a picture of it after she receives it.
Speaking of the mail, I sold some cloth diapers on ebay back in May.  The first bidder never paid, so I offered it to the second bidder.  She was an APO address.  I mailed it off and it came back.  Apparantly I wrote her old last name on it and didn’t notice the comment section where she had her new last name.  So, I redid it all and mailed it out.  She never got it.  It was insured, but since my husband mailed it out he can’t find the receipt.  I have the receipt of the first time.  Blah.  I lost $60 over that I ended up just refunding her money.  Sometimes if there is a conflict, it is better to just pay the price and move on.

Thank you for all the well wishes about my cold.  I have a bit of a temperature tonight and periodically try to cough out my lung.  I will survive.  I had to cancel a lot of activities this week but am glad that I am getting this over now then getting sick when I am back at school.

On a positive note and since I think I should start ending my blog posts on more positive notes…I am no longer suffering from chronic severe back pain.  It has been about 3 weeks or maybe longer.  Honestly, I can’t exactly remember when I first noticed it.  I knew something was different, like I was able to stand up straighter, get out of bed easier, etc.  The one night it occured to me as I went to bed I didn’t have to thrash back in forth in pain for 10 minutes, my usual routine before falling asleep.

I am still taking some meds every night before bed.  I want to wait another month or so before I start to wean myself from them, just in case that is what is keeping the pain away.  I finally feel happy I had the surgery I did and finally think I am healed from the surgery and am reaping the benefits.  It was a very bumpy road this last year.  I think in October, 3 months from now if I am still feeling this good I am going to write my doctor a letter to let him know how well I am doing, etc.  Regardless, the last few weeks of no pain have been priceless to me.

STR – Knots

When I went to Stitches West this last spring I got some of the Socks that Rock sock yarn. Tonight I decided to wind it in a ball. The yarn had 7 knots in it and 1 super thin spot. So, my 1 skein of yarn is now 8 balls of yarn. This must be an odd skein of yarn or something. People love this stuff. I decided to email the company and let them know. I will do a bunch of russian joins as I go, so it won’t be too bad.

Having a cold when it is 112 degrees outside is miserable. All I want to do is be by myself with a box of Kleenex. My family doctor was right on the money when he said parents of preschool aged children will get sick 6 times per year. Thank goodness he prescribed me a freak’n gallon of cough syrup at the last one.

I guess that is really all I have to say today.

A sock

Not a big deal, it is for my mom and matches the pair of socks I made for Sierra last winter.  I had promised her a pair for her birthday in March, but well…you know how that goes.  This is a basic sock pattern, 2×2 rib and short row heel.  It is easy and worked up pretty fast.  This is knitpicks sock garden yarn, which apparantly they don’t sell anymore.

I am going to cast on for the second sock of the pair so I don’t get second sock syndrome.

The high again today was 112…when I looked at the temp at around 4pm it said it was 112 feels like 115.  Apparantly down in Woodland Hills, somewhere in Southern California it was 119.

What bothers me most about the heat is we get stuck inside.  If you do go outside you start to get dizzy and sick feeling.  It isn’t good.  The kids immediatly get crabby and cry and fight.  Inside, the air conditioner just barely cranks out the air.  They are so bored being stuck in the house all day.

At night, you can’t open the windows to let the cool air in because apparantly at 2am it is 85 degrees with 50% humidity.  Who wants to let that in?

Well, and to top it off I am now getting Sierra’s bug.  I feel it heavy in my lungs, either that or the air quality is just really bad and my asthma which I thought I outgrew is back.  I don’t know.

Now while I realize I am complaining, I need to throw it out that we are lucky to have running air conditioning.  Life could be a lot more miserable and is in many places.  I will just be a bit happier when it is cool enough to go outside and work in the yard and watch the kids swim in the pool and at night be able to open the windows in the house and let a nice cool breeze wash through.

I was going to get out the spinning wheel this weekend, but it was too hot.  I have a lot of baby gifts to crank out, but feel unmotivated.  See where this is going?  I don’t even feel like doing housework, just feel drained.
Tony and I have pretty much gone vegetarian.   It all came about because my doctor said I can’t have red meat, flour, sugar, potatoes, and white rice.  I found a lot of vegetarian meals that I have been able to cook that incorporate more foods that I can have and less or none of what I can’t have.  We are eating more vegetables then we ever have and a variety of different foods.

Tony only likes about half of what we eat.  The funny thing is when he says he doesn’t really care for something, I ask him if it was better than fastfood and he always says it is.  Any homecooked meal, even if it isn’t his favorite is better than fast food and that makes cooking a happy thing for me.

Tonight I made eggplant mozerella.  However, since I can’t have flour, I dipped the eggplant in dry buckwheat pancake mix, which isn’t a white flour and is better.  He said it had a weird flavor, but Sierra and Madeleine ate all of it and I liked it.  He has lost about 15 pounds…typical man.  Me, I have lost 5.  It has only been a few weeks, though.
Though my goal should be to lose weight, right now it isn’t.  My sole focus is to eat healthier and learn to cook better, more nutritious meals with the foods I can eat.  If the weightloss comes, then awesome.  Well, I think I rambled on enough…until next time.

HOT

Today it was 112 degrees outside.  Currently it is 3:30am is 85 degrees with 60% humidity.  Where am I?  California is known to get hot this time of year, but dry heat.  This humid hot ick is ridiculous.  I was outside for a few minutes talking to my cousin and I started to get dizzy.  Nothing good can come from being this hot outside.

I have one sock almost finished.  It is just a standard 2×2 ribbed cuffed sock with a short row heel.  I like how it is turning out.

Jaywalkers finished

Pattern: Jaywalker, largest size
Needles: size 2

Yarn: Claudia’s Handpainted yarn, color purple haze (which does not photography well.)

The color of these socks are an electric purple and a reddish/orange. There is black in there too and really these socks remind me of lava. I absolutely love this yarn and will be buying more of it one day in the future when I have money again.

I have organized my crafting space and am very happy about it. I put my ball winder to good use and I wound up lots of remnant balls of yarn. I am amazed on how much yarn I have that isn’t a full ball of yarn. These are all from projects that I have finished which didn’t require the whole ball of yarn. I need to think of creative ways to use up this yarn. Maybe I need to try intarsia or something that incorporates various colors of yarn. Also, I have been winding up projects that I started that I won’t finish. Some of these are knitting projects that when I started them I was inexperienced or lacked the right tools so just tried something that I thought would work but didn’t. It is a learning process and I am comfortable with reclaiming the yarn and using it for a project that I am happy with. Also it makes my WIP’s much smaller.
I am not done with my crafting area as I really could use a couple of shelves, but it is a start. My goal right now for this blog and for my knitting/crocheting is to have one finished project per week.

I know some people have more but I think this is something I can manage.

Current WIP:

Clapotis w/ sari silk yarn. (I looked at this and I wound the sari silk into balls and man it is dirty. I am not ready to start working on this. This could be something I don’t look at until after the first of the year, I don’t know.)

Socks – basic ribbed sock pattern

Sweat Pea Shawl – crochet project, near complete but am blah about the yarn choice. It isn’t yarn for me, but maybe someone else will like it.

Angelica Tunic – I have one sleeve to complete and then I need to pull out the bind off of the body and add a few more inches as I think it is too short and needs a longer body for my body type. I have kind of stalled on this as I realized that varigated yarn does not look good on a big body. I should have chosen a color that was a solid color. I plan on finishing this within the next few weeks, whether I like it or not.

Sierra is sick, cough, sore throat, 101 fever. It sucks and has kind of messed up my day today. I know that is selfish but in the past year I have had to cancel more stuff because of her or Madeleine getting sick. It is frusterating. Building better immune systems, right? I think I need to make her wash her hands more often.

Rewind me into a ball of yarn.

As I was looking for a past blog link I realized my blog has a problem, UGH!  As I was deleting my old blog I didn’t realize that I was deleting pictures, too and so now all of my archived posts show no pictures.  There are a few ways I can go about fixing this and unfortunately will not be able to go back and undelete those blog posts.  This is going to take me hours to fix just really upsets me.

I received an awesome gift awhile ago from Cordelia and I am still in awe of it all.  She made me a crocheted copper stone bracelet, it is gorgeous.  I wore the bracelet this weekend when I went to visit my sister who is leaving for Texas.  She also sent me materials to make a similar bracelet (as well as a ball of cool crochet yarn, some tea, and a candy corn candle that smells awesome) so I am going to make one and mail it out to my sister.  I have never crocheted jewelry before and so am excited about it.

I am sad that my sister is leaving for Texas.  I am happy for her, too though.  Man I am going to miss her.  She gave me a plant that was in her yard.  It is huge.  It lived in the shade.  It is now in my yard, full on sun, 108 degrees.  Yesterday it was 10% dead.  Today it is 50% dead.  I don’t have any shade in my yard so I don’t see how I can save it.  It is sad.  The other two plants she gave me are doing okay (aloe and spider plant.)

By the way, we are getting some HOT and weird weather.  The hot is expected.  Triple digits is not uncommon for August in the valley in California.  However, it rained tonight.  That is just downright strange.  It is also 50% humidity right now.   We usually have a dry heat here, not humid, so it is weird.
I finished another pair of socks.  This is really a finished UFO/WIP.  It was the second of a jaywalker sock I finished several months ago.   I had thought the sock was too big, because it sagged in the arch.  Inexperience told me that.  Well, in reality, the sock was too small.  So as my toes stretched the sock lenghtwise the sock sagged in the middle.  I am in awe of people who knit these perfect fitting socks.  Mine always seem to have something about them.

The green pair of jaywalkers I knitted awhile back, the cuff was too tight but the sock part too small. Today I said, “screw it!” and I wound the socks back up into a ball.  I have realized that most of my unfinished projects are because I had a problem and so I stopped and picked up something that was problemless.

I had always hoped I would go back to it and fix the problem and finish.  Some things, yes I will.  However, no sense trying to make something work when I can spend less effort and have more fun just winding it all back into a ball and making them into something else.  Apparantly those were not suppose to be green jaywalkers.  I think they were suppose to be happy knitted socks and so they shall…in my own time.

Like my husband said, “atleast with yarn you can just wind it back into a ball and make something else you just can’t do that with painting.”  I wish you could do that with a lot of things.

For instance, say you wake up in the morning and are just having a bad day.  Nothing is going right, kids crabby, smash your hand in the door, lock your keys in the car while the ice cream is melting on the seat, just a bad day (nobody likes wasted ice cream.)  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just wind that day right back into a new ball and start it over again, but different?  That my friends is the joy of yarn.

So what about the jaywalker that was too small?  I pulled out the weaved in end and added about an inch more stitches.  I have washed them and blocked them and tomorrow I will try them on and take a picture.

I did start a new project, a scarf in the alpaca that was given to me in a swap last winter.  It is a 2×2 twisted rib.  However, I have a question.  I casted on 28 stitches, so I start with knit and end with purl.  Would it have been better for me to cast on 30 so that I start with k2 and end with k2?  So it is more symetrical looking?  Or is k2 ending with p2 okay for a scarf?  Give me your opinion.

Finally, I received a ball of Opal yarn from April.  She doesn’t like the colors brown and blue and apparantly had sock yarn in those colors.  My favorite colors are brown and blue.  I actually love the color brown and wish I had more brown in my wardrobe, that is actually a hard color to find.  I cannot wait to use this yarn, but they will be for me and I owe my mom socks first.

Pomatomus

Pattern:  Knitty Pomatomus 
Yarn:  Knitpicks dyed by me (food coloring and KA)

3AM Thoughts

I finished a project, but don’t have pictures as it is 3am and I should be in bed.  I will take pictures tomorrow and share the details.

Tony and I have been considering life changing plans.  One of those ideas is to move out of California so that we can afford to own a house.  I am no stranger to moving and change, so I can make it work.  Tony isn’t too keen on change but he just really wants to see his hard work paying off in a house.  California hasn’t left us with many options.

How long do I live in this state just to be closer to family and sacrifice being able to buy a house?  I have rented for over 12 years of my life, 8 of those years with Tony…don’t you think it is time to buy?

These are just random late night thoughts…I will let you all know if anything ever pans out.

4th of July Weekend

We went to Mendocino to see my folks. It was fun and we are all tired from the drive.

Here is a picture tour of our weekend. First, the girls and my husband saw deer out the kitchen window. I was in town with my mom at the local yarn store. My mom could not believe how much yarn there was. She agreed the owner is super friendly and you almost feel guilty if you don’t buy anything because she is so nice and wonderful to be around. Of course, we can’t have guilt, so I picked up some sock yarn to be auctioned off as knitted socks to support Beth in her 3 Day Cancer Walk.

The next day we go to the beach and look at the tidepools. Tony finds a star fish, a purple and white one. I didn’t have the digital so you will have to wait for my film photos to come back. Tony did get a picture of two people having lunch with a turkey. I am not kidding. There are all of these people sitting around having lunch with their kids and dogs. Then there are these two with a wild turkey sitting on their towel.

I decided to give Sierra the camera while we were sitting in the car. She took a lot of pictures, mostly of kites in the sky. I would share them, but well you can imagine what a kite looks like with a digital camera pointed by a 5 year old. She did get a nice shot of her sister sleeping.

While Madeleine slept in the car and Tony read his book (grumpy,) Sierra and I explored. We looked at tide pools, hiked along the headlands, talked to the kite man, and more important than anything else, we picked flowers (sh…you aren’t suppose to pick wild flowers…but you know, tell that to a 5 year old.)

I cannot wait for the day that I get a digital SLR, but until then you have to put up with our 5 year old digital point and shoot.

Before we left we went to the 4th of July parade in Mendo, where for the first time we did not see a marijuana plant. There is usually some type of legalize pot float in every parade, but not this year. We did see a lot of Peace floats, which I loved, Old Broads for Peace is just a hoot.

Also, did you ever wonder what it would look like if you went to grandma’s house and grabbed every knick knack off of her shelves and glued it to your car? Well apparantly this guy did. Tony couldn’t get the camera out fast enough so we only could get a picture of the tail end of it.

When we got home we were able to catch the local fireworks show and the kids did some fireworks also. Love the helmet?

Last but definately not least and probably the most surprising…

On the way home from Mendo we stopped through the redwood forest and I picked up some branches from a fallen tree. My plan was to mail them to Jimbo for one of his next projects. However, being the curious creature that I am I went up stairs and got out my spyderco, not your ideal carving knife, but it worked and started carving. I also used some sand paper and then oiled it up and here is my very first carved redwood crochet hook. It isn’t perfect by any means but I am so proud of myself I can barely stand it. I know Jimbo would be proud of me too.

I did finish one sock this weekend and am to the heel of the second sock. I hope to have it finished by Monday. Still working on changing my diet, no sugar, flour, potatoes, corn syrup, juice, or red meat. I corn chips and salsa today, not necessarily good but not super bad, either. Atleast it isn’t on my list of dont’s.