No good deed goes unpunished

We had an unusually productive weekend (read boring if you are a small person). Since it was cooler than it has been, we got motivated and cleaned out our rental storage unit. When we move last September, a lot of boxes that had been in our garage at the old apartment (and unopened since we left Iowa) we just shoved willy-nilly into the storage unit. If we needed something, it was almost impossible to find anything and pretty much every time we tried, something fell over. So on Saturday, we took everything out and organized like crazy. Some stuff, like my journals and work files were put way in back, since I'm not likely to need them soon. Other stuff, like the Christmas decorations that never actually surfaced last December were put together and left more accessible toward the front. We found all the crib parts, so we can get them out before too long and sidecar it to our bed. The kids got bored, even though we brought the trike and wagon for them to play with, but we got done anyway.

On Sunday, we did our usual house cleaning and then cut Kitty Daddy's and Bug's hair out on the back patio, since we desperately needed to clean up the patio. Our unit got new windows on Friday, but the replacement process left a heck of a mess, especially on the back patio. The windows are a grand improvement and will hopefully make a difference in heating costs next winter! As an aside, the widows each had a label that said, "This fenestration unit complies [with some gobble-de-gook]." Seriously? "Fenestration Unit"???? I still snort and roll my eyes when I walk by one of the said fenestration units. Can you see it? "Dear, it's getting warm in here...could you go open the fenestration unit?" Anyhoo...it did give me the opportunity to recall one of my favorite words: defenestration, which is the act of throwing someone or something out a window.

In spite of the fact that it was cooler than average, it appears that Kitty Daddy overdid things and didn't stay hydrated, as he wound up in the ER this morning with a kidney stone. Not fun, but last I heard, he was getting good drugs. That did put the kibosh on my day's plan, which was to get both cranky, overtired kids down for a nap, come hell or high water, because you know the minute one or both FINALLY falls asleep, we will need to go pick Daddy up! Just for the record, I'm not trying to compare the magnitude of my personal nap tragedy with the unpleasantness of a kidney stone. I wouldn't trade with him for the world. Of course, if I had been the one to overexert this weekend, it would have probably involved a NICU instead of a kidney stone, so I am extra appreciative!

The Curse of the Crappy Concrete Patio

Apparently it's genetic! When I was growing up in South Dakota, we live in two different houses with lovely, big decks. Plenty of room to picnic, to lounge, or whatever kind of outdoor enjoyment. The problem: it was always too hot, too cold, too windy, or too buggy to really enjoy the deck more than a couple of times a year. Then, in 1987, my parents moved to Oregon and bought a house with no deck, just a concrete slab patio in back. Lo and behold, gorgeous weather, lovely evenings, lots of opportunities to sit outside and read, or picnic, enjoy a cup of coffee or a refreshing adult beverage. Since then, much work has been done around the slab and my parents actually have a beautiful outdoor living space that gets used frequently.

So, when Kitty Daddy and I lived in Iowa, we lived in two different houses that had lovely decks (fwiw, my dad was responsible in full or part for all four decks...and they were nice!!), but (guess what), it was always too hot, too cold, too windy, or too buggy to really enjoy the deck more than a couple of times a year (sound familiar). So we move to Wisconsin and have an apartment with a slab concrete patio in back that we are out on almost daily, except for the hottest weather. The kids run around in the back yard and I can sit and knit. It would be glorious to have dinner out there, but there really isn't room for a table. *sigh* Maybe someday...

This gripe was motivated by the break we have gotten after last weekend's hot weather. Those of you in the toasty Pacific NW might want to skip the rest of the paragraph...just sayin'. Today is the second day in the mid-70's and the kids and I were out back from after supper until pajama time. My toes were *almost* chilly by the time we came in! We spent a couple of hours at the zoo yesterday morning. Except for the fact that we were clearly not the only ones who thought it would be a good zoo day, we had a wonderful time. We saw youngish prairie dogs (not babies, but clearly not full grown either) and we spent a lot of time at the herpetarium/discovery center looking at the exhibits. We also caught the bats actually moving! Usually they just hang there the whole time, but yesterday several were flying around! There was even one that would hang on a lower point so that Bug could get a closer look. We also discovered a bat skeleton that has always been there, but we hadn't been to the discovery center since starting the bat craze. This morning, we took the sand toys to the volleyball court at "Keys Park" and played for a while.

Apparently, my freak magnet is still in good working order. While we were playing in the sand this morning, two girls came over and, naturally, Bug invited them to play. A couple of minutes late, their mom came over, picked up their shoes and snack (or something in a ziploc) where they had left them and walked away. She finally came back about 20 minutes later and still really didn't say anything except to ask if some nearby buildings were condos (I didn't know). Then she told the girls they could play a few more minutes and walked away again. What the heck?? There have been a few times when we have been playing with our sand toys that a mom and a couple of kids have wandered over, but the mom always asks if it is okay for her kids to join and then keeps an eye on them. This was just weird.

While at the park, I started on a new sock. I am trying the toe-up recipe from the Summer Interweave issue. Since these are destined to be gifted, there won't be any pictures until all is said and done. Just in case the recipient is reading or one of my readers blabs to him/her...kwim?? The Black Gloss yarn is going back in the stash to think about its misbehavior. We'll try the Rosa socks again after this pair is done.

Hello from the land of fried hard-drives

Dude, I just get caught up on blogging and reading blogs after our vacation and what do you suppose happens? Well, my nearly four-year-old laptop has developed a few, shall we say, "personality quirks" over the last several months, but if you could put up with a few minor annoyances, it was still doing fine. That is, until one evening last week when it informed me of an "unbootable system drive." I am not a computer expert by any means, but I was pretty sure this was a bad thing, so we took it in to the Geek Squad for a look-see. They say it is a "fixable" problem, but the price to fix it is almost as much as a new low-end laptop, so the laptop will be going to the big computer lab in the sky. We will probably take it in to see if they can retrieve the data first though, we just haven't gotten back to doing it yet. So for now, we move the big desktop (firmly pre-flat-screen-monitor vintage) down into the living room as an interim solution. It isn't even close to as nice as the laptop, but it works. We will probably be shopping cheap laptops in the not-too-distant future...

While the laptop was gradually dying, I discovered that I had been named a "Rockin' Girl Blogger" by KnottyKitty!

And then, when I started trying to catch up with blog reading, I found out that I had also been selected by KnittyMama. Wow, for a chick that does most of her rockin' either in a LazyBoy or to toddler tunes and who gave up on ever being one of the "cool kids" decades ago, I am extremely touched and honored! So now I am supposed nominate five more rockin' girl bloggers. There are certainly a lot of rockin' girl bloggers out there (and I read the blogs of a bunch of them), but since I am a fairly wimpy commenter, I will pick my top five that I read and comment on...which means that two of my top five are the two lovely gals that nominated me! So without further ado, my nominations for Rockin' Girl Bloggers are:

1. KnottyKitty Knits - Knitter, crazy cat lady, gainfully re-employed, what's not to love??
2. KnittyMama - A knitter, a Midwesterner, and a mama who's crunchy in all the right places
   
3. The Life and Times of Florence Knitingale - a very funny lady who knits and occasionally provides gratuitous kitty beefcake and cheesecake
   
4. Marianne's Knotminding - Lovely knitting, gorgeous flowers (my black thumb would be green with envy if it could manage it!), and an all-around nice gal!
   
5. The Toddler Whisperer - another former Hawkeye, Bug's first (and only regular) baby-sitter, and children's librarian. I don't think she knits, but we'll cut her some slack anyway ;o)
   

The littles still (and constantly) keep me entertained. Bug's new thing is telling jokes. In general, they usually include several nonsense words and the punch line is invariably either "A Cadillac and a beaver" or "A poodle in a dog house." The jokes never make any sense at all, but Bug amuses himself so much that you can't help laughing. Even though they don't make sense, the punch lines aren't as mystical as they sound. The first is misquoted from the movie "Cars," where McQueen says he "floats like a Cadillac, stings like a Beemer" and the second comes from the book "The Twelve Dogs of Christmas" where a poodle in a doghouse plays the role of a partridge in a pear tree.

Bean's vocabulary is blossoming and she is becoming quite the little conversationalist. I'm still about the only one who can understand most of what she is saying, but she is suddenly putting pretty complex ideas and concepts together in her discussions. She also our fearless, swimmy little fishy at the swimming pool. Our apartment complex has a pool and we spent time there both Saturday and Sunday when it was in the 90's. She loves to jump off the side of the pool and we basically just fish her out after she goes under. She could do this non-stop forever! Who says two-year-olds have short attention spans?? Bug loves going swimming too, but he is a little more tentative than his little sister.

In knitting news, the lace shawl continues on, though I haven't been keeping track since my über-geeky spreadsheet is residing on the dead hard-drive. I am on the fourth repeat of chart two (of eight, I think...to lazy to go look right now!) so things are cruising along and the rows are getting longer and longer! My Roza sock has been frogged. After knitting six inches of leg, turning the heel, shaping the gusset, and doing an inch or two of the foot, I got the bright idea earlier in the week to try it on. Ummmm...wouldn't go over my heel. Drat (what I actually said was a bit more colorful, but you get the idea). I am trying to decide whether to start over now or let the yarn sit in the stash and think about its sins for a while and start a different sock in the meantime. I need to decide, because I need to have a purse project! I also got my entrelac purse felted. Apparently, Cascade 220 and entrelac just love felting! As if entrelac weren't magical enough...add some felting! Whoa!

Confessions of a Spreadsheet Junkie

Okay, confession time...I admit that I am a total and complete spreadsheet junkie. I think if everything in life were tidy enough to fit in an Excel spreadsheet, I would be in total bliss. I have been working away on my great big shawl and didn't get very far before I started wondering how much I had done and how much I had to go. Enter my spreadsheet addiction. Since the shawl is designed as a big square made up of four identical triangle, the number of stitches total and stitches knit so far can be estimated. So I wound up with a loverly little spreadsheet that estimates how many stitches I have knit so far (almost 39,000) and what fraction of the total I have knit (nearly 29% of a total of about 134,000 stitches). I update the spreadsheet daily as I knit and it delights me way more that it should.

Anyway, if any of you are math-phobic and the thought of lace-knitting spreadsheets makes you woozy, here are some pictures:

This is the shawl, which turns out to be particularly well-suited for sitting in the grass while the kids play in the sand at the park, sitting on a chair on the patio while the kids run around the back yard, and so forth, so I have been getting a lot done on it! I have finished the first chart and am on the third repeat (of seven) of the second chart. Needless to say, the rows keep taking longer as the thing gets better. Fortunately, I have stitch markers at the ends of each quarter, as well as setting off each of the repeated sections of chart two (one repeat on the first time through, two repeats on the second time, etc.), so I have very frequent milestones!

I have finished the knitting on my entrelac purse, but will now need to felt it a bit, block it, line it, and put a handle on. This is the backside (flap up):

and the front (flap down):

I have all the ends woven in, but I am waiting to trim the ends off until it has gone through one wash cycle. I am happy with how it turned out, but in retrospect, I kind of wish I had swapped the colors of the first two rows of full squares. That would have made the edge triangle navy blue, the first row of block magenta, the second row of blocks light blue, and the third row pink. I love the way the colors look like woven strips on the rest and doing the first edge the other way would have had the navy be a continuation of the light blue stripes and the magenta be a continuation of the pink stripes. It clearly doesn't bother me enough to undo or redo, but...

My current TV knitting is the M-D baby kimono:

We finished all the Battlestar Galactica episodes that are out on DVD and season 3 won't be out until August or September, so we are currently waiting to do a nostalgia fest and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, starting with season one and going in order. Kitty Daddy and I have both seen every episode multiple times, but it will be kind of fun, unwind-in-the-evening entertainment when we are between other things. Yeah, yeah, I know, "must get a life" and so on, but what else is new???

The only other thing that is making slow progress is the current sock. I was too lazy to dig it out of my purse for a picture, but I have turned the heel, shaped the gusset and am working on the foot now.

Once I get the baby kimono done, I am going to try and go back and pick up and finish the things that have kind of gone into a permanent holding pattern to get my progress bars jungle cleared up! Most of them qualify nicely for TV knitting and would finish up very quickly if I would (in the famous words of Nike) just do it!

Going Batty

Since Bug had such a fabulous time watching the bats at the Oregon zoo during our vacation, we got a bunch of bat books from the library after we got home. I am so impressed with how many cute bat books we found, so I am sharing some of our favorites today.

Stellaluna by Janell Cannon is a cute fiction book about a baby bat that gets separated from her mama and gets raised by a mama bird. The illustrations are just adorable!



Bats at the Beach by Brian Lies is definitely our favorite. It is about all the bats meeting at the beach on a perfect moonlit night and what they do (bug-mallow roast is one thing). We have read this one just about every night since we checked it out!



Little Lost Bat by Sandra Markle and Alan Marks is about a little Mexican free-tailed bat that loses its mother and a mama bat that loses her baby. The mama bat adopts the little orphan. Although this book is fiction, the notes at the end of the book suggest that it may be an explanation of a significant number of Mexican free-tailed bat mama-baby pairs found by researchers that don't share common DNA.



Bats by Tony Hutson is a longer, non-fiction book all about bats. We have started a habit of having a non-fiction "chapter book" that we read a chapter before bed. The more memorable ones include a biography of Jackie Robinson, a book about weather, a book about animal classification. Since we finished Bats, we have been working on Built to Last, a book about big, cool engineering projects in the U.S.



Shadows of Night: The Hidden World of the Little Brown Bat by Barbara Bash. This book is also non-fiction, but reads more like a story, going through a year in the life of the Little Brown Bat.



Other than going crazy at the library, we have been making regular trips to close park, "Keys" park, the coffee shop, the grocery store, and all our other favorite haunts.

I haven't been blogging very regularly and have gotten behind in my blog reading again...my laptop has been acting flaky at times, which with the time we spend outside, can really cut down on computer time! I'll work on getting caught up again...

Coffee, Caribou, Clean Carpets, and Plain Ol' Dumb Luck*

Today was "Cooler Fest" at Caribou Coffee. They were giving away their cooler drinks, and since their Caramel Cooler is my drug of choice for summer, there is no way we could pass that up! It was a 12 oz cup (which is smaller than the regular "small" at 16 oz.), but, hey folks, free coffee is free coffee. We won't mention that we might have accidentally dropped by the Monona Caribou before going to our "regular" Caribou that is a couple of blocks from our apartment.

At our Caribou, they had a poor soul dressed up as a caribou (though all the other customers in the store insisted on calling him a moose) that was standing on the corner with a sign advertising the event. We happened to drop in during his (or hers...I didn't think it would have been polite to lift up his/her tail and check, so we will just call it a "him") break, so he was just walking into the shop when we pulled up. He disappeared into the back just as we were coming in, so we thought we had missed him, but after we got our coffees, he came back out. Both kids shook his paw and then played peek-a-boo with him while he was standing in the entrance. They were both completely taken by the 'bou. Bug got all silly and giggly and Bean just stood and stared with big eyes the whole time he was in the store. We left shortly after he headed back out to the corner, so we drove around the block so the kids could wave good-bye to him.

Since I am finally getting caught up around the house and back to normal after coming home from vacation, I took advantage of a couple of warm, sunny, relatively low humidity days to start shampooing the carpets. We have a shampooer, so at least we don't need to rent on and do the whole house in one day, which is good, because with one not-completely housebroken dog and little ones that have a tendency to run around with no diaper on and/or to spill all manner of thing anywhere, anytime, we need to shampoo more often than the average Joe. Anyway, yesterday I did the rug that is under the table on the dining room carpet (does anyone else think the whole concept of "dining room carpet" is just plain fundamentally flawed to begin with??? Even without kids, stuff winds up on the floor, or is that just me?) and laid it out over the clothes drying rack and storage bin on the back porch. After that I did the dining room carpet. Not a huge accomplishment, but not bad for the third trimester!

The plain ol' dumb luck came after leaving the rug out on the porch overnight. Usually I do these things and the procrastinate putting them back inside until they get rained on and have to stay outside to dry and get rained on again, etc. However, this morning, I was looking out the back window and decided to be a big girl and bring the rug in. With lots of kid help (that makes any job just that much harder ;o) ), we got it in and rolled it out and got the table and chairs put back where they belong. Not five minutes later, I looked outside and it had started raining! Now, I am one of those people that ALWAYS gets the bright idea to move the rug five minutes after it starts, so I was more pleased that I should have been! The other thing that could be filed under "dumb luck" (but would be more appropriate under "every cloud has a silver lining") is that today's rain wasn't the good rain associated with a cold front that brings cooler, dryer weather, but a garden variety Midwestern rainstorm that just leaves everything kind of muggy and icky, so the forecast is for more humidity over the next few days, so I may be off the hook with the next section of carpet cleaning for a little while.

* you wouldn't believe how long I wracked my brain to come up with a clever synonym for plain ol' dumb luck that started with a C. *sigh*

Father's Day Weekend

On Saturday, we went to Eugster's Farm for the annual Boy Scout Pancake Breakfast. For $5 for adults, $3 for kids three and over, and little ones free, we got all the scrambled eggs with ham, pancakes, frozen custard with strawberries, juice, coffee, and milk we could eat! We all had a wonderful meal, but Bean, who is still two, definitely got her money's worth. I think my parents can attest to just how many pancakes our little girl can eat (when Dad made pancakes while we were in Oregon, she ate more either KittyDaddy or me!). After eating, we had a ball playing in the Petting Farm area! The definite favorite was the huge sandbox:

Bug, the social butterfly, found all sorts of friends to play with!

They also spent quite a while playing on the swingsets. Both kids took a try on the monkey bars. I couldn't get an action shot of Bug, but here's Bean:

KittyDaddy was pretty worried that she would fall and get hurt. He didn't realize that she is part monkey and could have hung there for the whole afternoon. We also got to pet kittens and goats and chase chickens and check out all sorts of other animals. The deer were especially fun, since the little guys were getting "nummies"

I personally liked this guy, but I want to know what happened to the "a":

On Sunday, we took KittyDaddy out to dinner for Father's Day. We went to the Prime Quarter Steakhouse. It's a grill-your-own joint and we had a good time, though the kids got a little bored by the time we were done. The steaks were very good (and I'm not a big beef person, so that is high praise coming from me), too. They also had a salad bar, baked potatoes, and Texas toast. We got dressed up for dinner (well, relatively speaking, dressed up for us...I actually wore makeup). I didn't get pictures of the four of us, but later that evening, Bug put together his "Joe Cool Number One" ensemble, so I got a picture of him:

Of course, Miss Bean could never miss out on a photo op, so she posed, too:

All in all, a loverly weekend, although the temps were generally hanging out in the hot and humid region. Fortunately, it is supposed to cool down again by tomorrow!

A Bug's Eye View

Rumor has it (actually, an email from my mom) that the pics my dad took of our vacation exploits is in the mail and on the way, so there will hopefully be a bit of vacation recap occurring soonishly. Meanwhile, I thought I would give you a quick Bug's eye recap of the highlights of our trip:

• "I need to tell Caffy" - we left our other car with one of Kitty Daddy's co-workers so it wouldn't have to sit in the apartment parking lot unattended for two weeks. For the first five days of our trip, Bug found at least one thing a day that he absolutely had to tell "Caffy" when we got back from our trip.
• "Is it a flush potty or a porta-potty?" - Bug got his first taste of Porta-potties outside of a fruit stand on the way to the visit the coast (Mmmmmmm...unbelievable strawberries...the first real strawberries I have had in ages...at least since Bug has been born!). So everytime we stopped in a public restroom since, this was the question. If the potty in question was, in fact, a flush potty, the next question was, inevitably, "Is it a magic potty or a regular potty?" We also had our first experience with automatically flushing toilets. He was also completely taken by "Magic Sinks" and "Magic Paper Towels," but the toilets were the definite winner.
• Electric Trains and Electric Blankets - while driving around Portland, we saw the MAX lightrail train and, as Bug is a big fan of trains in general, it was love at first sight. Bug and Namma had a discussion about how MAX was an electric train, rather than powered by typical diesel or steam engines. In the course of the discussion, other things powered by electricity came up, including the electric blanket, which Bug had never heard of. He got to see Grandma's electric blanket and has been taken by the concept ever since. He would have been delighted to drag everyone he met upstairs to see Grandma's electric blanket, but Bean was the only taker.
  

Actual Knitting Content???

Is it true? Can it be?

Why yes, since one of the side benefits of a road trip vacation is knitting in the car time! My entrelac purse-ish things was almost done (I started binding off the night before we left), so I decided to leave it in Wisconsin, since I didn't think my folks needed to provide their washing machine for felting. Besides, I plan to line it, so I wouldn't have been able to finish it on the road anyway! Because of seatbelt laws, car knitting is one of the rare times I can knit without having small people climbing all over me, so I decided to go the involved, fiddly route and start my big lace shawl. After three cast-on attempts, more interruptions than I can count (I need a drink...I dropped my toy...how many miles to the next town...and so on), the discovery of just how much coordination it takes to deal with eight stitches on four sticks (way more than I actually possess), frequent and creative swearing, and nearly 800 miles, this was the result:

After two more days of knitting (that went much more smoothly...especially after I got out my nail file and sharped my Brittany DPNs) and about a half of a round done in Oregon, this is what I came home with:

It definitely looks much more like lace now. After taking this picture this morning, I finished the round I was on (36 stitches per needle, up from two!) and then switched to KnitPicks circulars and now this baby is going to sail! While I adore my wood DPNs, I readily admit that they might not be the best for picky lace knitting...especially if you want to do something completely silly like slide the stitches along the needle! But dang, my size six wood DPNs sure are sharp now!!

On the way home I decided I was too tired to deal with the intellectual side of lace, and I was about ready to change to circulars and the only circs I had were my Denise Interchangeables, which probably would have been even more aggravating than the wood DPNs, so I went with completely mindless stockinette and started a Mason-Dixon baby kimono for Little Brother using the Blue Sky Organic Cotton I got last summer with my birthday gift certificate. Right now, I am thinking about doing matching cap and booties using this and a coordinating soaker (not cotton, definitely wool!!) to take LB home from the hospital.

My last, not-so-grand update is my current sock. At the park yesterday, I finished the last two rounds before starting the heel and got a couple of rows into the heel in the car when we ran to the Home Depot last night!

So now, I will need to update my progress bars again and do something about the WIP ADD that is becoming apparent from that list! Hopefully, I can get some FOs out of that list and I am seriously considering frogging Bean's sweater and starting it over when fall gets closer. It has been sitting there for so long, I can't decide what I want to do for stripes, I'm just not feeling the love right now, and I just swiped the needles for my lace shawl.

Oh yeah...

We also got to see Uncle Chopped Liver and Aunt Chopped Tofu for a day while on vacation, as well as Cousin Rigby-Dog and Cousin Bast-Cat. Cousin Chino-Cat wouldn't come out of hiding.