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I seem to be having one of those months.  The rainy weather really really really isn’t helping.  I’m thinking that I should just go crawl into a nice hot bath and soak away the world for a while…such a girly thing to do.

I’d show everyone what’s on the sticks at the moment, because it’s really a very cheery looking piece of knitting, but I won’t…because Mum looks at this blog once in a while, and that would spoil the surprise.  Pictures will likely be posted either by the end of this week or the beginning of next.

Instead, I’ll share with you an (old) parody of the classic Canadian film/video icon, “Hinterland Who’s Who“.  Believe it or not, I actually forced my parents to sit down and learn about the Crack Spider’s Bitch a couple of weeks ago…

Sometimes you have to do a reality check, and remember the bits of awesome all around you.  Folks may have noticed that I haven’t blogged recently (not sure if anyone other than family reads this, but it’s true*).  Mostly that’s because life has been crazy lately, particularly with trips to various doctors for various things.  Nothing serious…one doctor who doesn’t believe my blood pressure is perfectly fine had me do a 24-hour heart monitor that, in the end, proved that (for once) I was right.  Yay!  Other trips to doctors were for girlie things that I’m sure the public doesn’t need to know about.  The last visit (yesterday) left me feeling so flattened that I had to take the day off work today to recover — headaches, what felt like a mild fever, and tummy upsets.  Yuck.  Should be all better for tomorrow, though.  A hot bath and a long lie-in will help that.

But instead of wallowing in feeling ugh-ey (yeah, that word?  It’s MINE), I decided to actually write a little & share some bits of awesome.  It’s been a grey, rainy day, so why not a little cheer?

Tulips!  After my chiropractor visits, I have to take a little walk afterwards to loosen everything up.  On one of those trips, I took this picture of one of the gardens along my route.  There are a couple of spectactular gardens to be seen, let me say.

Yep.  These are the kind of folks I work with.  While I may not be approving of the pretentious inner-city gas-guzzling sport pickup truck (I mean…really), I think the bumper sticker is 100% pure awesome.

No, don’t adjust your monitor.  Those cookies are green.  GREEN.  They were even greener in person, and really really tasty.  Last week, when I was doing that heart-monitor thinger, I had some fun in the kitchen.  I took my Mum’s tried & true chocolate chip cookie recipe & altered it to have less sugar and gluten.  Not that I’m gluten sensitive, but every bit counts.  I substituted the sugars with Splenda & Splenda blend, and the white flour with Pea Flour & Whole Wheat.  Awesomely tasty!

That?  That would be BPAL.  Sniffies of various scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs.  Took forever to get here, but well worth the wait…AND they threw in some extra imps (that’s what the wee samplers are called).  Most of the scents in my order were intended for the Husbeast’s use, and most of the extras seem to have been along that vein.  Yay!  And now I have more of my favourite scent, “Gluttony”.  YUM.  These have been camped out in my living room for a couple of weeks, since either we’re too lazy to take them upstairs, or we’re enjoying trying the scents in the much larger environment downstairs (less shower & hair style product smells to interfere).

Just off the needles, a Baby Surprise Jacket!  And yes, even though it’s acrylic, it’s awesome.  What’s also awesome is the fact that I have figured out how to knit using straight needles.  The set shown are a pair of aluminum needles by Boye, which seem to do the trick quite well.   Folks who remember how long it took to make the last two BSJs will be glad to note that this one took maybe 2 weeks.

This is a sock in progress out of Online Supersocke yarn in a pattern by Wendy Johnson of Wendyknits.  They’re turning out rather pretty, and I’m enjoying playing with my circular needles again after spending some quality time with straight needles.  No, this isn’t Wendy’s latest book…I haven’t yet picked that one up.  Expect a review of the older one soonish (really, the books came out rather close together, and while I love a prolific author, I haven’t finished with the first book yet!)

I’ve saved this bit of awesome for last.  Mainly because I have no idea how to be eloquent about it.  My brother and his family brought this little girl back home with them from the US, and my Mum & Dad made sure we brought her home to our place.  I’m hoping that the picture can show just what it is we see in her when we look at her.  It’s a kind of awesome malevolence.  Don’t think we don’t appreciate her…we’re far too scared of her to do otherwise.  Yes, she’s still in the packaging.  Generally, she’s in the glass cabinet in our living room.  Why?  Because if she’s in the sealed package, behind glass, she can’t get out. (And no, we wouldn’t display her if we didn’t think she was cool.  Otherwise, we’d stick her at the back of a closet, probably in a salted circle, wrapped in charmed ribbons.  Yes, seriously.)

And yeah.  You DO see a Douglas Adams book and 3 different varieties of Munchkin.  Because that is exactly how we roll around here.

* I figure that I can never become a hit knit-blogger because I’m just not alternative enough.  I haven’t eschewed all modern conveniences, adopted the latest gizmos, and become vegan.  I live in what passes around here as the burbs, have a mortgage, and like to eat meat too much to give it all up for coolness.  I also don’t have a way-cool alternative-type job that lets me be creative-as-fuck all day.  Otherwise, I’m sure there would be more finished projects.  Sad, eh?
And yes, that was all said tongue-in-cheek

Yeah.  I was less than impressed that this is how my Cthulhuclava turned out.  There’s been a lot of knitting and re-knitting on this particular pattern, and I have to admit…the instructions could probably have been a little clearer.  Maybe some better close-up pictures to show how some of the bits (like the socket/brow area(s)) fit together.  I may come back to it.  I still have this vision in my head of the Husbeast wearing it on his bike while passing slow cars in traffic…

Yeah.  I totally went there.  Happy Sunday.

Woke up this morning & stumbled on down the stairs to make a cup of tea, and what should I find waving at me through the garden windows?  Bright, cheery, unashamedly perky flowers!

It seems that the gentlemen who previously owned our house left us a few pleasant surprises in the garden for springtime…now I just need to find time to get up before the bees to pull some weeds and do some pruning of the old stuff!

We have pink and yellow tulips, and when I went to take a picture from a better angle, I spotted this lonely little girl standing off in a corner by one of the garden lights…

Absolutely gorgeous.  Made my morning, as I woke up with my back screaming at me and all sorts of other unpleasant girly things that I won’t go into.  My back has been giving me problems for a couple of months now, and only just finally got around to making a visit to the chiropractor’s office.  Since it’s been years since I last visited, they did a full assessment, and I’ll find out the results today.  I got a pretty good idea from Dr. J, who made some pretty telling comments about my hip being so out of alignment that my left leg is slightly twisted & consequently shorter than the other by about an inch or two.  Yeah, that will cause some problems.

So while I was waiting for all this to happen, I whipped out the Robinsock and did a few rows.  Apparently they see quite a few knitters, and have to tell them to stop hunching over their work.  I guess I shouldn’t be telling them that I’ve been spinning too…

Yes, that’s their website address.  If you need a chiropractor, I highly recommend them.

Finally…since it’s the weekend, I leave you with the following example of “Ur Doing It Wrong”.

I was getting ready to leave work the other day, when I noticed that the silver car ahead of me was parked rather oddly over the lines.  Notice that there is plenty of space to park on either side of it.  Little black car comes whipping into the lot, pulls up *proportionately* next to the silver car, and this girl gets out and hurries into the building (license plates have been deliberately blurred to protect privacy).  You notice that she didn’t even stop to consider that maybe…just maybe….she was doing it wrong?

Maybe it’s just my sense of symmetry that’s affronted, but c’mon…

Happy weekend!

I know it looks like a sudden rush of productivity, but I’ve been meaning to do this for while now.  The blocking of my Wisp shawl.  Yes, a Wisp.  And just like a bunch of folks in Calgary, it seems, I knit mine from Zauberball.  I got the idea from the Sherrimonster, who apparently picked up the idea from the ladies at The Knitting Room.  And when one person gets a wacky idea, of course there’s going to be a domino effect.

It took me longer than I thought to get this piece finished, but it’s been off the needles for about a month or so (and waiting to  be blocked).  As you can see, the reason I went to art college was to learn how to draw a rectangle properly.  Apparently the lesson didn’t stick.  Maybe that’s why I dropped out?

Got a couple of sock designs in mind, but as this is “buy nothing month” (at least, in our household), I can’t exactly rush out and order the yarn ASAP.  Thinking I might stop by Michaels’ & see how many balls of Kroy I can pick up at a reasonable price instead.  In the meantime, I have a Robinsock to finish off, as well as a couple of other pending projects.  I’m really trying to finish stuff off so I can get them off my plate.  The Cthulhuclava is going to have to get ripped back a bit because the whole “slipping the first stitch” to keep the rows even?  Yeah.  It turned some of my counts wonky.  The coninual setbacks make for slow progress and a few headdesk moments.

There’s a ton of wildlife in Calgary, and it has a tendency to just pop up wherever.  We went for breakfast down at the Blackfoot Diner with Chelsea…and what should be parked on top of Chels’s building?  A Canada Goose, full of attitude, honking away on the roof.

We walked down to the Diner, and Chels showed off her new toes.  Well…she’s always had ‘em, but now she’s got ‘em on display.  Apparently she had to get the more audacious colour, too.  Bright, bright pink.  Now…both Robin and I had heard of these things, and had been very curious about them, but had no idea where to get them.  Apparently MEC carries them for a very reasonable price.  We stopped in after breakfast and picked me up a pair of Vibram 5-Fingers Sprints.  What most folks probably don’t know is that I have horrid posture & my back has been killing me like crazy for a good part of the last month.  Barefooting is supposed to help that.  We’ll see how that turns out.

After getting home, and putting on those bad-boys, we went for a walk over to Dale & Morgan’s place & then walked back, taking a stop off at the Safeway for a brief coffee with friends… and saw a wee froggie on our walkway (he posed for a photo-op.  The bunny that wandered past our garage the day before didn’t stop long enough for that).  We ended the day with some meat on the grill, the remains of a bottle of chardonnay, and a bit of knitting in the last few sunbeams of the day.

Hope everyone else had an equally good weekend!

Well, this isn’t the sum total of what I did on my vacation, but it took up a good part of last weekend.  I had a couple of sweaters-worth of yarn hanging around in my basement.  One lot was from Robin’s Grandfolks.  They had bought it on a trip to Ireland, and nobody had ever made use of it.  There was an attempt at the start of a sweater, but the aran pattern was definitely lost in the richness of the colour.  It looked like a muddy steel colour, but in the sunlight it showed hints of all kinds of blues.  The other yarn was from my mother — it had survived a basement flood in our old home in Yellowknife, where Mum had been storing it in a cardboard box (since then, any yarn stash in our family exists in Rubbermaid.  Just sayin’).  It looked to be a nice yellowish off-white.

Both yarns were in dire need of washing.  I picked up a bottle of SOAK at one of the local yarn stores ($16 at Pudding Yarn downtown) and got to it.

First things first, some skeining had to be done.  As can be seen in the picture above, most of the yarn (at least from Mum) came in factory-wound balls.  You’ll notice that the ball-bands are home-made, and just have the number “23″ on them.  I am not sure of the significance of the number (neither does Mum…I asked her when she first gave me the yarn), but the original ball-bands were lost in the aforementioned basement flood.  Far as we know, the light-coloured yarn is wool.  That’s about *all* we know.  Domo-kun is wearing a home-made skein as a stylish hat.  This is easily done by wrapping the yarn around a couple of chair backs.

Once the yarn has met the Domo-kun seal of approval, into the wash it goes!  The instructions on the bottle of SOAK indicate that a capful of SOAK should be enough for about a gallon of water.  Doing things the usual Maire-way translates to “squirt soapy stuff into sink & fill with cold water.  If you’re lucky, you get bubbles.   Bubbles, yay!”

Here we have the Yellowknife yarn, and what was left over after the Yk yarn came out of the bath.  GROSS!  Yes, this is why the yarn was kinda yellowish.  And a little stinky.  And more than a little rough on the hands.  Ewwwww!  I didn’t get a chance to get a picture of the water after the Irish yarn had finished soaking & had been wrung out, but that’s because there was very little water left in the sink. I have a dual-basin sink, so I had actually wrung out the Irish yarn in the empty basin.  Mainly because the skeins were so very heavy.  The Yk yarn?  Not so much.  Smaller skeins mean greater ease in wringing.

Of course, all this washing and wringing reminded me of my Grandmother Smith’s old soaker washer with wringer.  While I love my clothes-washer & dryer, and wouldn’t give them up for the world, there are times (usually when I’m washing hand-knits) that I would love a wringer-washer.  I wonder if they still make them, and if so, whether they have any smaller, portable, pack-away-able sized wringers?  It would get rid of about 95% more water, and not felt the fabric.  This *is* a concern

Toss the now-clean skeins into a laundry basket, truck ‘em on out to the patio & hang ‘em on your handy-dandy portable clothes-dryer.  If you’re like me and you live in the suburbs, chances are pretty good that there’s a bylaw that states you can’t have a clothesline.  Far as I know, there’s no law against using a portable dryer.  As long as you’re not flying the flag of Fruit of the Loom, I don’t think your neighbours are going to mind too much.
When you’re done, you’ll probably have a nice, big, pile of dry yarn.  You’ll notice in the picture on the far right just how fluffy and…downright HAPPY…that yarn looks.  It took about 2 days to dry properly.  We were lucky to have a very sunny, very warm weekend when I pulled off this little stunt (as a comparison, I woke up to snow on the patio this morning).  You’ll notice, also, that the dark-coloured yarn in that middle photo is most decidedly BLUE.  A very lovely deep blue.  As I look at the wound balls in my little office this morning, they look more neutral-grey.  It all depends on the light.  Whenever possible, look at your clean yarn in honest daylight.  It will tell you more about the yarn than you thought.  While the colour looks kinda blah to me right now, I know that the Husbeast will have one kick-arse blue sweater when I’m done.

Here’s my gauge swatch.  Looks like we have a winner!  After I finished knitting this, I washed it again, stuck it on the porch railing to dry, and measured it again.  We have gauge.  Robin will hopefully have a sweater sometime in the next decade.  Huzzah!

(special thanks to Chelsea, who provided run-on commentary and hand-holding where necessary)

Thursday evening we got word that there was going to be a snowstorm on Friday.  We didn’t think too much about it…after all, it wasn’t snowing at that point.  We kept an eye on the weather, though.  Our plans were to head down to m1 in the morning to take a look at the saxony wheel again.

Well…that didn’t happen.  We were going to give Bess some time to get opened up before we went, and by the time we stirred our stumps, the snow was falling.  Realizing that it was coming down like crazy, plans immediately reverted to “snowed in” status.  Hit the Safeway down the street for food for the next couple of days, and hunkered down.

For those not in the know, Fridays and Saturday are our days off around here, so that left us with the pleasant knowledge of not having to go outside again after we got home from the store.  We played a little Katamari Damacy (mad fun), then stuck in a movie or two or three.  I managed to finish the knitting portion of the Creamsicle BSJ, and the socks I’m working on are also not far from completion.  I had given myself a deadline of this weekend for them, so we’re doing better than I thought.  I have my next project queued up and the pattern printed, so hopefully that will be on the needles shortly, with another pair of socks to replace the current ones in the wings.

I’m looking forward to yet another day of cuddles, hot drinks, some knitting, and maybe capping the day with a little snuggling by the fire.  Not just the one on Channel 2, thank you Shaw – though we did tune in to hear a little crackling & popping last night.  We have a gas fireplace with a prepped pilot light.

btw…the yarn in the picture above is destined to be something nifty like a koolhaas or gretel.  I got a kick out of the fact that Tanis writes a little something on the inside of each ball band.  Cute!

Yes, I’m linking to Flickr searches instead of Ravelry for those patterns.  Why?  Because not everyone subscribes to Ravelry, even though they should

Leaving you with a picture taken by Robin during his shovelling of the walk.  Just a little background here…the two houses at the end of the cul-de-sac are assumed by us (and anyone who visits us) to be multi-family dwellings.  The sheer volume of cars seems to bear this out.  Often the overage will spill out in front of our place, usually at precisely the wrong time (ie: we are entertaining and need parking space ourselves).  One of the neighbours is a cabbie.  He couldn’t QUITE make it into his driveway this morning.  In fact…he’s parked in the middle of the cul-de-sac.  Not much better than one of our other neighbours, who missed his driveway entirely last night and parked in the space between  the two driveways (we were woken up by him rocking and digging himself out this AM).

Here’s the cab for your edification.  Whee!