Cattywampus

Gloucester

DH, my mother and I went to Gloucester last weekend for a knitting retreat (not dh of course, he went to visit friends) and we had some beautiful weather while we were there, so I got to practice my newly learned photography skills.  

I'll share a few of them with you here, you can click through if you want to see the whole lot in the album.

I've been assured, and I quite believe, that Gloucester is not supposed to be nearly this nice in mid-April.  

But darn the luck, we just happened to be there when the whole east coast is having an unusually sunny, dry, and warm spring.

We saw gorgeous surf.

Fishing vessels and lobster pots.

We took a tour around the harbor and saw some cormorants.

And we walked through Halibut Point State Park.

All of this and we haven't even gotten to the knitting yet!

We stayed at a quirky little b&b that happened to have a wine tasting one of the nights we were there - with food pairings prepared by a chef from Boston - again, some luck we were having!

I practiced my ability to take photos in twilight (aka the gloaming of the day).

It was just so gorgeous there, I would love to go back sometime and spend a little bit more time exploring the town and harbor.  The town has such a rich history and is still very much a part of the fishing industury, in our rushed tour before we started the knitting retreat we barely touched what was available to see & do, but we really enjoyed it.

Up next:  Knitting!

Finally, an FO

I wasn't very motivated to knit in the spring and early summer, so I haven't had much to show you, I have many things in process, hopefully more FOs will follow soon, but we were on vacation last week and I managed to start and finish a shawl.

Here is a glimpse of our vacation, I won't bore you with oodles of pictures, but of all the beautiful places we saw, this is by far the most beautiful.

We spent a few days in Vancouver and then took a rail/bus combo tour from Vancouver to Calgary stopping in Kamloops, Banff & Lake Louise.  This picture is Lake Louise with the Victoria Glacier in the background.  Everyone should go there once in their lives, it was peaceful and lovely beyond the ability to properly describe it.

Since we were in Canada, DH wanted to buy me Canadian yarn, I wasn't about to turn that down, so I came home with some Quiviuk, it's a silk blend, amazingly soft, I can't wait to make a small shawl out of this!

I intended to knit the Swirl sweater on this trip, but right before we left I decided I needed something else to work on, so I choose the Daybreak Shawl, and here it is!

It looks more like a sunset than a sunrise to me, with all the reddish color in it, now, again, I just have to wait for fall to wear it.  It turns out that flying across the continent, traveling halfway back across it by train & bus and then flying the rest of the way home leaves a lot of time for knitting.  

I haven't had much to show, so I haven't been posting much and I'm thinking about not renewing my blog when that comes up in December of this year.  It seems to take more and more effort as time goes on and take too much time to do it right...has anyone else blogged happily for a while and then just sort of lost the bug?

There a few other things that I think are contributing -  mostly, when I started the blog I was living elsewhere with no family nearby and a very small collection of newly made friends, here we have family and friends close enough to visit regularly not to mention local friends that we hang out with on a regular basis...I also had a job that didn't take any energy outside of work, my job now is practically all consuming for a good part of the year.  If I didn't love it I would find that unacceptable...but I do...so I continue to give it my all and maybe a little bit more energy than I actually have to spare.  

I don't know...

Ah, a puppy update, Duke is doing okay...the cancer has returned, unfortunately sooner than the vet was hoping would happen.  He doesn't know he's sick, so we are doing the best we can, giving him chemo in pill form at home to keep the cancer in check as long as possible.  As long as he is himself and not in any pain we will keep going with that, but there's no way to tell how fast it will progress, so we will give him what we can, while we can and be grateful for the time we have with him.

Weekender

To celebrate my husband's birthday I surprised him with a weekend away at Rehoboth Beach, not the day before we left, but I made the arrangements and told him about it on his birthday, happily, he was as excited as I, and on Friday off we went.

Bags packed ready to, Duke dropped his 'Lamby' (always the name of his current favorite stuffed toy) in between our bags, like he wanted that to be packed too.  Sometimes I think dogs are waaaayyyy smarter than we give them credit for.

We saw the winter ocean, I LOVE the winter ocean, walked the empty boardwalk, shopped the cute little shops on the main drag (I even got to pick out a fabulous pair of shoes that I won't see again until Christmas), bought some chocolates at a store where everything is made in house, ate too much, drank just enough (went out to the Dogfish Head Brewery, of which I sadly have no pictures), and all in all had a lovely time.  

This sign in a restaurant cracked me up.

Apparently I was having so much fun that I completely failed to take pictures!  

A really nice little break from the everyday at a sweet little b&b half a block from the ocean, glad to have gone, glad to come home, a good weekend all the way around.

If I had a million dollars

So where oh where did I go that made me wish I had all the money in the world???

I"ll give you a hint...

It's sort of hard to give a hint on blog, so there it is.  Webs.  It was fabulous.  The store itself was huge, ginormous, awe inducing, but the warehouse OMG.  I could have spent SO. MUCH. MONEY.  And not only would I need a million dollars to buy the yarn, but I'd also need a house big enough to have a Yarn Room in it.  Ooh, wouldn't that be fabulous?

I only had about 45 minutes there, it was a quick pop in before our Godson's 2nd birthday party, so I didn't have enough time to slowly go through shelf by shelf and look and see what I could find, I did a quick once through grabbing this and that - and boy did I get some good deals!

I stuck pretty much to the sale stuff and got a few really good deals, for the most part (3 out of 4) I know what I want to knit with the yarn, but one of them was a "just because it's a good deal" purchase.  This one

Originally 14.50 a ball, a merino/silk blend, I got it for 5.99 a ball.  I don't know what I'm going to make with it, but it will be LOVELY.  Just lovely.

I think I have my fall knitting all planned out now, all I have to do at this point is actually knit it!!

ANd here's the birthday boy

 

And what a party it was!  He was the center of attention, was more or less angelic about posing for pics all day, and had a blast.  It was wonderful to spend time with DH's family in this relaxed setting, and they are in MA so the weather was wonderful, we were even able to be OUTSIDE.  Can you imagine?  Well maybe you can, because maybe you live somewhere where it's been less than 95 degrees most of the summer, but here outside has become like outside in February - just not anything anyone really does on purpose.  Anyway, it was a great trip, good times with family, and the birthday boy thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing.

We have a new car, and Pixie discovered a new seat for herself on this ride

Seriously, isn't she just the cutest little thing with her paws on the arm rest?  Like it was made for her comfort.

Knitting did happen, quite a bit of it in fact, but nothing to show other than large blobs of stockinette, so I'll wait until they look a little more interesting.

Ghent

Ghent was gorgeous!  I think it was my favorite city, the combination of canals, squares, history and friendly people really made a special combo.  It doesn't hurt that I got antibiotics for my sinus infection there either.

This is the main drag of loveliness, the Graslei.

 

 

Couldn't you just sit there all day with a coffee or a beer and watch the world go by?
 

They were in the middle of quite a bit of construction in preparation for a festival that I have now forgotten.

It sort of ruined a bit of the picturesque effect in places.

But certainly not everywhere.

mmmmmmmmm chocolate.

 

and fabled beer!  This beer you can only get at the abbey cafe, so we trekked out to it and had a lovely afternoon of beer, conversation & cheese.
 
 
 
 
 

 

Antwerp

Well, here we are, back on home soil and it feels good.  In fact it seems odd to look at these pictures and think that we were really there two weeks ago.

This is the train station in Antwerp, it was stunningly magnificent.

This was in the town square, it seemed as if he had lost a bet of some sort, I have no idea what he was doing but it was quite entertaining.

 

Can you tell which one of the statues below is a real dude?

 

The one on the far right, it was pretty impressive!

And below, whatever you do, do NOT sit on the fake cow!

We went to see Rubens' house (we saw many Rubens' paintings in many different churches while we were there).  I love when they have artists' houses set up as a museum, somehow it gives me the best understanding for who they were because you can see how they organized their lives and what they used for inspiration.

I enjoy art even if I often find it inaccessible, seeing the way the artist lived somehow makes it more more immediately accessible to me.

 

I loved the gardens best, I just love sculpted gardens like this.

One of the MANY rainy days we had while we were there.

We saw many, many very old cathedrals and they were all gorgeous.  How can one country have so many cathedrals that after 4 or 5 days you start thinking "really?  ANOTHER 13th century cathedral?  I bet this one will look EXACTLY like the last one..."

We took a bus ride (very brave of us, we thought) out to the country side to visit a monastery cafe where we could sample a beer straight from the source (Westmalle) and got stuck there briefly because we didn't understand the bus signs.  We stood 20 feet down the road where the glass area with seating was instead of at the little yellow temporary sign - the bus literally drove by us and the driver waved his hands at us - sometimes it's a pain to be in a place where you don't understand the rules.  But we passed the time by talking to the cows, and as cows are curious creatures they amused us by wandering over and watching us for another 45 minutes until the NEXT bus went by and we were in fact standing in the proper pick up spot.

 

It's hard to summarize such a long trip with a handful of pictures and a few anecdotes (antidotes anyone?), but there is antwerp in a nutshell.  We were there for 2.5 days and we saw MOST of what we wanted to see,  and before we knew it we were packing our bags for Ghent and walking back to the train station!

Spring cleaning commences

What is it about spring that makes us want to go through and air out everything, to dig in the backs of closets to discover what's lurking inside?

I don't know either, but I figure I should take advantage of it while I can.

Last weekend we went to Ikea and while they were out of stock of one storage unit we wanted to get, we were able to get one and replace an old thing that didn't work so well.  We also got some zippered containers to house my yarn.  The white tower to the left of dh's desk is the unit we bought, it replaced a small chest of drawers.

 

This is in our den, where it seems like all the stuff that didn't fit anywhere else ended up, so it was time to rectify that. 

The stash, which is quite substantial, is in 8 of those bins.  There is one for lace, one (overfull) for sock weight, and the rest are everything else.  I am amazed at how much less space yarn takes up when you smush it into something and can zipper it closed!

For reference, it looked something like this before:

 

That pic is 2 years old, so the yarn was almost all different then, but it still looked about the same, with an additional giant basket in the living room full of yarn.  I guess I finally decided that as nice as it is to look at, it's getting dusty and it doesn't look very neat, and it would be better enclosed.  The only problem is that now, with the exception of the lace and sock yarn, I don't know where anything is! 

I tried to organize it, but I definitely didn't do it the right way, I may go back  and organize it by color, at least that would prevent me from having to open ALL the containers to find what I'm looking for.  Thank goodness for Ravelry, at least I know what I have!!

I also pulled everything out of the closet to make sure I didn't have anything hiding in there that needed to go, of course I did, this is what it looks like after.  (It didn't occur to me to take before pics)

 

You'll just have to trust me, it is better!

Here is my poor sewing table, holding all the stuff that needs a home now, hopefully next weekend Ikea will have the unit we wanted back in stock. 

 

The little dresser is empty already and prepared to be jettisoned as soon as we have the new unit.  I'd do it now but the printer needs to live somewhere.  The magazines are going to be gone through and the projects I want to keep are going to be ripped out and scanned in so I don't have to store all that anymore, and most of the stuff under the table, a bunch of cross stitch and beading supplies, is going on ebay (eventually).  I decided I wanted it all OUT in the room, so I couldn't hide in the corners and forget it was there.  Whatever doesn't fit in the new unit is going to be sorted through until it does fit!

We are doing our best to live on the surface of things in this house.  We have one more bastion of stuff in our storage space outside in the basement of the building, that is mostly stuff leftover from when we sifted through dh's mother's house, and that will stay there until he is ready to go through it. 

The combination of being responsible for going through and disposing of her things and moving out of our house in NC with a garage, an attic, and room under the house to store things, let alone closet space galore into this house with comparably little closet space and no storage at all to speak of (though for a city dwelling we actually have a decent amount of closet space), really made me leery of collecting too much stuff. 

If I'm not going to use it, I don't want it!

In knitting news, I've been making little hats for a coworker who is expecting.  It is hard to take pictures of infant hats without an infant to put them on, but here goes:

And for some reason typepad refuses to right this picture no matter how many times I try.  I can't be the only one who constantly gets into fights with typepad.

This one is in the newborn size (it's a girl, just in case that was in question).

Next, the pumpkin head!

 

On the candy jar, so it's a bit misshapen there.  Two more left, one the birthday cake hat - I thought the white base for this was boring, so this particular birthday cake is teal.

 

I have one left to finish, the snowman, he still needs his eyes, nose & scarf, so I will update with pictures of that when I finish it. 

And one more thing, we are finishing up the reservations for our trip to Belgium (but it's still 2.5 months away, sigh).  We are trying to travel relatively light, with one suitcase and each of us will have a backpack, so we went to LLBean yesterday and I got this one.

 

I am excited!  This is first tangible thing I have for the trip, we've talked about lots of things, thought about buying lots of things, power converters & such things, but this is the first thing I can play with - so now I want to jam it full of stuff just to see how much I can get in there...but I'm not going anywhere. 

That's okay, my mother and I are going on a quilting retreat in two weeks (have I mentioned that before?  it's very exciting!) and I can use it then.  

I am off to enjoy my rainy Sunday, I have a Pi Shawl that needs a few more repeats!

ETA - Pi Shawl, what pi shawl?  Can I interest you in a snowman hat instead?

 

This was the fiddliest by far, but it is also my favorite, seriously, can you stand the cuteness???

Vegas is weird.

No offense intended if you're from there, I was just on the strip, and it's weird there.

Before I get into that, on the trip I knitted a shetland triangle in worsted weight, Dream in Color Classy in the Embrace the Lace colorway:  Justice.  I don't know if you can see the subtleties here, but it is grey with little hints of purple in it, very pretty.

 

I did 11 pattern repeats and ended up binding off the last 8 stitches on the row below, completely and totally out of yarn.  When this yarn came last week I was in the midst of pondering a shawl for a friend who has an extremely cold office and this is the perfect fix for her.  It is heavy and pretty and it will match everything.

 

 Back to Vegas...have I ever mentioned that I'm claustrophobic?  Not in the extreme, I can generally manage it, but I avoid certain situations - especially when there are crowds involved.  I don't do the mall at Christmas, I don't like amusement parks, I prefer to stay away from anyplace where there is a crowd - I also don't like confined spaces, close places I am unfamiliar with or don't know my way out.  

 

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.  Vegas is crowded, low-ceilinged, loud, smokey, the casinos are maze-like, they intentionally make it hard to find exits, and heaven forbid you be able to see the outside while you are in any of the casinos.  Vegas made me very, very nervous.  On the surface I wonder how long it would take everyone to die from smoke inhalation if there were a fire, underneath that I just felt incredibly unsettled the whole time we were in the buildings.  Sounds fun, no?  Yeah.  I probably won't be going back.

We did see some shows, the Cirque de Soliel Beatles Love show and The Blue Man Group.  We enjoyed both of them quite a bit, so that part was fun.

And I did take a day trip to the Hoover Dam, which was pretty incredible for more than one reason.

There are building a bridge so traffic doesn't go across the top of the dam anymore.  It's HUGE.

 

I took that to prove I was there and these weren't somebody else's pictures.  (DH was at his conference for this part)

The dam is crazy high.

 

And I went to Arizona!

 
Lawyers have been here.

The scale of it is hard to capture in photographs.  We also stopped to see Lake Mead, the lake made by the dam.

It's beautiful, isn't it?  The white line around the edges is approximately 125 ft high, that is how low the water level is.  To stand in Vegas and see fountain show after fountain show...in the dessert...and then to come here and see this, so far below the normal water level...well, it really makes a person wonder.  There is this insane city in the middle of the dessert, built for nothing but entertainment, using heaven only knows how much water a day, and here sits the Colorado River, wasting away, little by little.  It makes me think back to those greek tragedies and the hubris of man.  And it worries me.  A lot.

I did ask the tour guide about the fountains and he told me the hotels recycle their water and acted like I might be a touch crazy for questioning that, but in the dessert in the summer I have a hard time believing they don't lose an awful lot of water to evaporation.  

I'm not an expert in these things and don't play one on tv, but logic tells me that if we turn off the water in Philly in our paltry fountains during a drought, shouldn't the ones in Vegas be off all the time - what with it ALWAYS being a drought there - b/c it's a dessert?     

Worrying about these things makes me feel old.  Also, all those people wandering around and no recycling bins.  None.  Just trash cans.

 

On the way back we saw some big horned rams grazing in a park, I guess they go where the eating is easy!
 

Playing Catch-up

hello!  I guess it's been two weeks since I posted last, it seems I have lots to share so maybe I'll split this up into two separate posts, I'll see if it gets unwieldy.

First, I met Jocelyn Friday morning to chat, knit, and have lunch, alas I did not document any of it outside of the fact that we had the exact same Zauerball (sp?) colorway, what are the chances of that?

 

With or without documentation it was fabulous fun to get together in real life and have time to talk!

Then later that same day, to celebrate dh's #decade birthday we went to Cooperstown, not for the baseball hall of fame as you might first think, but to a Bed & Brew weekend that the Inn at Cooperstown holds with Ommegang Brewery.  It was SO.  MUCH.  FUN.  

 

We found this giant bottle of beer (a jereboam sp?) in our room with two Hennepin glasses to match it.  This picture cracks me up b/c it looks like maybe I am just really small and the beer is normal sized.  An alice in wonderland effect, if you will.

Then Friday night the Innkeeper hosts a beer sharing event, they ask everyone to bring their favorites and it's just a free for all of sampling different regional craft beers and getting to know the other people who are there for the weekend as well.  

Needless to say, we didn't start saturday morning too early, so we pretty much hung out in our room doing crossword puzzles and watching it snow.

 

Pretty!  It was a really pleasant way to spend the afternoon.  In the late afternoon a trolley came to pick us up and take us to the brewery where we were given a guided tour.

 

I hadn't ever been on a brewery tour, so it was pretty interesting.  It's amazing how small this operation really is, all the bottles are hand fed and hand boxed, that made me stop and think.  It also made me realize that buying local beer made by small breweries is actually supporting the local economy in a way I hadn't thought about before, so I feel good about that too. 

Then we went into the gift shop for a beer tasting with some fancy cheeses.

 

As part of the package DH got an Ommegang Hoodie, of which I have no picture but you can see the sweatshirts & shirts behind the dudes.

After that there was a 5 course meal, each course was paired with one of their beers.  No pictures of this, but it was OUTSTANDING.  Then after all that beer they let us loose in the gift shop - they're no fools!

So that was LAST weekend.  And since my finished Tang is in the picture above I will show you the rest of the FO pics for that.

 

LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE IT.

 

warm and cozy and the brooks farm fourplay is an amazing yarn 50/50 wool silk it is soft and drapey and gorgeous.  I am now out of fourplay and am very sad about that.  I already have plans to go to MDSW this year to stock up.  

 

Sorry for the grainy quality of the photos, I'm not sure what happened, it's all rainy and yucky today, I'm sure that played into it.

Okay, so that's about half of what I have to say, I'll stop here and do another post cuz this is getting crazy long.  Sorry for the lack of linkage, I am feeling behind in the world and am afraid if I stop to link I'll lose my momentum.

La Jolla

Friday we drove down from LA to San Diego and stopped for lunch in La Jolla.  It's a beautiful place.

This seal was sunning him(her?)self and rolling around like  a dog rolling in the grass.  He was completely enjoying himself until those kids got too close then he swam away, to everyone's disappointment.

A very lovely day indeed.