Random

• We are all feeling better.
• After sleeping for days straight with the flu, then not sleeping two nights ago.  I went to bed last night at 9pm and  woke up at 5am.  So now I am a morning person?
• I bombed my test.  I don’t know the grade, just know it is bad.
• We did blood sugar lab in my school.  Everyone’s was in low or normal range.  Mine was high.  I ate 2 hours before taking the test.  Now I am embarrassed, scared, and worried about it.  I think I am fine.
• My job at Michael’s as a knitting teacher has been terminated.  It wasn’t a personal thing.  All teaching positions (except Wilton’s) is being term’d.  I am going to tell my ladies this Friday.  This makes me sad.  I have grown to love them as my “grandma’s.”  (I was getting use to the money, too.)
• I feel like cleaning the house.
• I had a dream I was on survivor. However, we slept in cabins, with bedding, ate normal food (even with desserts) and I think we even had tv.  We had winter boots and jackets.  It was the “winter version” of survivor, so it seemed prudent we had the amenities we did.  I found the immunity idol, actually…I found four of them.  I didn’t know where to hide them.  I played hackey sack.  I had an ally.  Then, when I was caught moving the immunity idol, I tried to make another ally.  One girl tried to talk about plus-sized people and they all looked at me.  I told them my life story, and they all cried.  I just looked tough.  Then, I had this realization I was being filmed and tried to remember if I picked my nose or if I pulled the underwear out of my butt.  I became self conscious of standing in on place and decided I would look better outside the cabin.  I found it weird that people would drive up to our wooded area in cars, but I just needed to ignore them.  Family members would show up, too.
• Thankfully, I woke up and am not on any type of reality tv show.
• I can’t believe it is 6:30am and I have been enjoying the house while everyone sleeps and am well rested.
• I need coffee.  (I should give it up, but don’t want to.)
• This is just twilight zone like…normal just isn’t my, well…normal.

A little flu in your eye?

Sorry to have left you hanging with the last post.  I was going to come back and post about my wonderful valentine weekend at the beach.  Tony took Thursday, Friday and Monday off work, so we thought we would have a nice time looking for shells, riding our bikes (I got a new one)(thanks to the recommendation of Claudia)(and…yes, I will blog with a picture of it when I am feeling better)  and all of those fun things we love to do when we ge free babysitting.  We were even planning on having a date night at a fancy schmancy restaurant.

Except for one little thing.

Madeleine got the flu.  Then Sierra.  Then me.  Fever, chills, aches pains, cough.

We are all recovering, but we didn’t go anywhere over the weekend and Tony spent his vacation taking care of the family.  The next time he gets sick (the weekend before,) I am sleeping on the couch as I swear he must have coughed in his sleep and I got it.

Also, next year I am getting a flu shot.  I would much rather deal with being slightly sick from the flu vaccine then getting the flu again.   I have read online a lot of people are out with the flu now.  It is a bad year for ye ole influenza bug.

Tony’s boss said to him last week, “Tony, when I look in your eyes, I see the flu bug.”

It is our big joke, since it happened around valentine’s day.  “When I look into your eyes hunny…”  Said all lovingly.  “I see the flu virus.”

Sadly, that has left zero time to study for big, looming test on Wednesday.  Can someone please prepare me for Membrane Potentials, how vision works, and other sensory physiology information.   Sorry again, my knit and fiber blog has nothing related to that…  I am hoping to feel better by this weekend so I can get to Stitches West. 

Pee’d off

I have been meaning to share this gem of a story.  The other day  I heard the neighbor’s dog barking very loudly and some voices near the front door.  I live in a townhouse and my front door is pretty close to the neighbor’s front door.

I innocently opened my door to see what was going on, only to see this man dressed in black, pee’ing behind the neighbor’s garbage can but on their house.  Yes, he was about 6 feet away from me pee’ing on the neighbor’s house (or maybe towards the ground there…I didn’t go and examine.)

Even worse, he saw me see him.

Those who know me personally would think that I would have said something.  I am a pretty direct person.  However, I have to tell you that I was so shocked that I just said “GROSS!” and came back in the house.

Thank goodness the girls weren’t with me when I walked outside.

The next day, I saw the neighbor-lady of the house and I told her what I witnessed and described the man and his car, time of day, etc.  She also said “Gross!”

That whole day I had that image in my head.  I kept wondering why he just didn’t take two steps into their backyard where it is fenced to go.  Or, better yet, why didn’t he just go in there house to use the restroom.

Sadly, this is the second time in about a year that I have witnessed someone pee’ing outside our house.

I told my husband that maybe we should get a little sign.  You know, some people have “Beware of Dog” or “No solicitations.”  Our will say, “No Pee Zone.”

Okay, enough about that.  I have no knitting stuff to share.  I can tell you I finally re-organized my yarn desk.  There was some major yarn creap all over my house as well as my desk threw up yarn onto itself and it became one tangled mess.  It is all fixed now, thanks to Target’s canvas cubes.

In school news, I got a C on my first test.  The class average was a D.  I got an A on my second test.  I am divorcing my lab partners and will get new ones at the next lab.  Basically, they want to speed through the lab and get it done quickly.  I want to take my time and learn.  It is hard for me to compromise this.  One of my lab partners told me “that is how life is, some people are just faster at learning than others.”  So…that is how life is, huh?  I am thankful she tried to teach me that lesson.  I let her know that while she might believe that, I will still be asking for new lab partners.

Don’t you worry about the C grade.  I am not.  I still have the option to drop one test score.

Finally, I wasn’t feeling good a week or so ago with bad back pain, headaches, sore throat, chills…type stuff.  After a few days of sleeping and not knowing what was wrong with me.  I even at one time thought the screws in my back were unscrewing.

It ends up I had the flu, probably a mild version of it.  Tony got it over the weekend and was bad.  He rarely gets sick, but when he does it is absolutely terrible.  He even missed 2 days of work…GASP!!  (He is a workaholic, so that is rare.)

Hummingbird or Woodpecker?

My father took pictures of this outside his kitchen window and asked my mom to send them in an email, with the subject: Large hummingbird disguised as a woodpecker.

Sierra and I had a great laugh. So, here is a Monday laugh for all of you.

Taos Tank Top

Pattern: Child’s Party Tank Top by Dawn Leeseman
Yarn: Trendsetter Yarns Taos
Needles: Size 8

edited to say: I had interpreted the pattern to have some errors, one of those is when you crochet the borders the numbers do not match up. I figured the crocheted border would have the same stitch count as the knit border.

However, Andrea suggested (and the designer agreed) that in this pattern you must crochet 3 stitches and then slip the 4th stitch, and this is to adjust in the gauge difference of knitting and crochet.

The crochet section well…you can tell it was written by a knitter.

Also, I am not particularly fond of how the shoulder straps were knit and finished off. I really like 3 needle bind off for shoulder straps so I think I would do that a bit differently.

edited to add: I forgot to mention that one of the shoulder straps in the front and the back has one extra row of knitting. I ended up modifying the pattern so that when you join the yarn and the neck edge on the purl side that I only purled across 3 stitches and then bound them off, so that way I ended up with the same rows on each shoulder edge. I don’t really know if this is an error, but honestly I pondered if it was meant to have the extra row or not and then decided to do it how I wanted to.

Overall though the pattern was fine and any experienced knitter and crocheter would be able to knit/crochet this in a few days. I was happy with how it turned out and so was the recipient, Madeleine.

The designer of this pattern is going to be having a book published in July, called “Casual Elegant Knits-Classy Designs for Men and Women.” I look forward to seeing what this designer has done.

Finally, I wanted to point out that I sometimes forget how many people randomly come to my blog. I don’t always have very much time to write a blog post and at times just write off the top of my head, without edit. I suppose what I might have considered an error in a pattern, may just be a difference of perception and style. I did not mean for this to be a negative review towards the designer or design.

The top worked up really fast and Madeleine wears it all the time, which is a winner in my book. I am appreciative of the work it takes to design knitwear and am also thankful for the free patterns that are out on the web.

I voted Obama!!

If you are in Cali, get out and vote!