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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…

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)

Today’s post is courtesy of Chelsea, who started making up stories when Robin switched to another Rockband character (not his usual Lance  Pyston) in order to make her some monies to buy clothes to make the backing band look cool.

Lance Pyston’s meteoric rock career looked like it was due for a stall when the renowned guitarist reported a repetitive stress injury to his right wrist (eff you, he got it playing guitar) and a strict six months off the axe in the midst of an 81 date international tour.  But rather than cut a tour short, Pyston hired a series of stand in guitarists and took on the role of lead vocals for the tour, introducing the rock world to unsung stars.

Frankly, Rolling Stone doesn’t know what to make of it, as all Pyston’s choices for chops have been chicks.

But the big surprise of the international tour has been an online run of Lance Pyston-endorsed wrist braces, styled with studded and tooled leather depicting nautical tattoo motifs. Braces have been flying out of the warehouse and command sums in the thousands on e-bay. In six months, Lance Pyston has generated more income from medical devices as he has in the last two years of the extensive, gruelling tour schedule he’s maintained since superstardom.

Last night Lance appeared on stage long enough to tune a guitar and strum a few chords. Fans went mad, and the 17 second YouTube video has netted a half-million views.

Obligatory sock shot!

This is that yummy Koigu that I mentioned in my last post.  I couldn’t help casting on.  They’re going to make a wonderful pair of Yule Socks, methinks.  I’m just turning the heel now (toe-up), so we’ll see whether I got the measurements right soonish.

New feature on ye olde blog: a link to a new page labelled “lifestream”.  For those who aren’t aware of what a lifestream is, it’s the feed of information generated when you use microblog (Web 2.0) applications like Facebook or Twitter or Flickr or whatever.  It may seem somewhat egotistical, but I include it as a stream-of-consciousness page for folks who would like to see what I’m prattling on about when I’m not blogging.  Since it takes comparatively less time to twitter or upload a photo to flickr, this includes the generated content in a relatively easy to follow format that keeps it all in one place for thems who are interested.  Those who aren’t can just overlook it and keep on going.  No harm, no foul.

I checked out a few Firefox addons today, as I realized that there was a potential to get rid of some of my various windows and/or extraneous applications.  Well…to make a long story short, out of a bunch of applications, I pared it down to a feed reader called “Feedly” that presents the sites I want to read in an attractive, easy-to-follow format.  Much better than Google Reader or bloglines (ah, how I disliked bloglines).

So yeah.  Slowly, but surely, the windows are coming under control.