Forward Motion

One way to get knitting time.

I got a lot of knitting done today!!  Like 4 straight hours worth of knitting.  The Wollmeise socks now have heels, and pretty eye of partridge heels at that.  I also am thoroughly informed on all items covered by Wolf Blitzer* from the CNN Situation Room. 

Yes, hours of knitting time and CNN.  You can guess where those intersect.  The emergency room.  Not for me this time, for Alex.

Poor kid.  He's had a low fever, cough, and sore throat for a few days now.  This morning, he woke up with no voice.  After lunch, he had a major nosebleed, one of those ones that just doesn't want to stop.  Without being too detailed, he ended up sick to his stomach and well, it was not unlike what was coming out of his nose.  So that was kind of horrifying for both of us and his first question was, "Will I die from blood loss?"

I decided enough of this, we're off to the doctor.  There are no clinic appointments available, so it's back to the ER.  The screening medic, when he noticed Alex couldn't talk, said to me "Oh, you must be happy about that!".  I answered, "No, I want my son to be able to speak.  I like hearing him, you nob."  Only I didn't call him a name out loud, just in my head.  Actually, I called him a worse name in my head.  What a way to imply that I'm a crappy parent who just wishes my kids would lose their voices and that he's a crappy kid that annoys his mom by speaking.  Or perhaps I overreact.  Gah.

Anyhow, he doesn't have strep or epiglottitis or bronchitis or ear infections or several other things.  It's probably a virus.  Also, we were both kind of grateful for the non-lethal earthquake, because the last time he and I were stuck in the ER watching CNN, we had to watch coverage of Britney shaving her head for 3 hours.

So that's trips to the ER this month - 2.  Definitive diagnoses - 0.

He's much better tonight and we are both terrible at charades.  He's going to have to go with a notebook and pen tomorrow because I do not get his sign language.  Let's hope I can be done writing posts about illnesses and hospital visits very soon.

* (side note - I met Wolf Blitzer in 1993 in Tel Aviv and dug through his dirty laundry.  He was very nice.)

Tales from the closet

It rained this weekend.  And I mean rained and rained and rained.  We've gotten so used to the constantly sunny days that we didn't know what to do.  So we flopped on the couch en masse, surrounded ourselves with pillows and blankies and dog and watched TV.  Some of us (me) may have napped during Jumper, which apparently was the best way to experience that film.

I totally snorted today when a native El Pasoan told me it was "so muggy!" this morning.  These people have no idea what muggy is.  It was slightly less parched is all.  If you don't step outside and have your hair go flat and your clothes sticking to you in 3 minutes, that's not muggy.

I did rise from the sofa to finish a project though.  Grace's closet has gone from something like this:

(Disclaimer: this photo is not actually the closet in her room, but the doors are the same.)

to this:

I'm not wild about the clear rings on top, but they were her choice.  It's so much easier for her to access her closet now and hopefully keep it cleaner.  As a bonus, she can pretend it's a stage and fling open the curtains for her grand entrance to a sold out crowd for her world tour.

This has reminded me that I'm really not that fond of sewing.  The end product is nice and fabric is fun to buy, but I like knitting so much better.  With sewing, I have to spend so much time doing things other than sewing.  Measuring, cutting, pinning, pressing, and then finally the sewing.  Plus, you have to be so stinkin' precise with sewing.  All those perfectly straight seams and hems.  Blech.  Also, the sewing needles are way sharper and ouch.

With knitting, even for a project with lots of seaming, you're still knitting for a good 75% or more of the project.  With socks, it's more like 90%.  Sure, you have to wind the yarn and maybe do a little seaming or binding off, but that's odds and ends, not the bulk of the project.

I can't put away the sewing machine quite yet, since I still need to make matching window curtains.  And as long as I'm at it, I want to make a new bag for my swift with a little velcro pocket for the pegs.  And how hard could a cute sock bag be?

In a search for a Hobby Lobby with more of this same material for curtains today, we stumbled across a most wonderous place.  SuperTarget.  All that I love about Target, only bigger, cleaner, and filled with more merchandise.  Plus an optical shop and kind of expensive groceries!  Whoops, there went $82 I accidentally spent.

Swinging

The porch swing we have outside our front door has become my favorite place to sit and knit.  Maybe not so much at 2 p.m. when it's a little bit blazing hot, but in the mornings and evenings, it's the perfect spot.  We've also met several nice people and their dogs as they pass by on their walks.  Tonight it was so pleasant and cool and I stayed out there knitting till I couldn't see the stitches any more.   

The kids like to come out and sit on the swing with me.  I tried to get some photos of my socks in progress.

They are just sooo helpful.

There.  I've started the gussets, which is where those large blobs of color are.  I'm concerned that these are going to be a bit snug, so I'm making extra-big gussets.  Even though I know from experience that it won't make the cuffs any easier to fit over my heels when I put them on. 

You can sort of see the pattern I'm using.  Here's a better look.

Really, it's just to break up the boredom of ribbing.

Grace and I are feeling much better.  Thank you for the get well wishes.  Either I've gotten used to the dizziness or it's subsided to a barely annoying level.  I've been drinking so much water I got up twice last night to go to the bathroom.  Then I returned to bed and dreamed I was back on the swim team.  Grace is still very stuffy, but has plenty of giggly energy back and she convinced us to drag her all across El Paso in search of a pair of rollerblades.  (Edited to add - I swear, I hadn't even finished writing this post when Alex wandered out feeling poorly.  He's got a fever of 101.  Sheesh.)

I'm ready to dive headfirst into the Noro Silk Garden and cast on for Klaralund.  But the Soleil tank is sitting in the bag making me feel guilty.  And I really ought to finish a tank top before summer is totally gone.  So I'm trying to make a little more progress, especially since I've only got the shoulder bits and 1/3 of the back to do.  But I keep fondling my Noro swatches and looking impatiently at the skeins.

How about a nice photo together, kids?

Never mind.

Checking in

I know, I know...I haven't posted in days.  (I'm just going to pretend here that anyone noticed.)

Whatever this bug or virus is that Grace and I have, it just will not go away.  And it's annoying, in that we feel pretty good for part of the day, and then suddenly one of us is laying on the sofa with a cool cloth and a ginger ale. 

For me, the dizziness is really getting on my last nerve.  I even went to the ER on Saturday night, because when you lay down to sleep, you should not feel like you are going to faint.  Combined with the nausea and tightness in the chest, well, no way was I going to get any sleep anyway, so I might as well spend from 1:50 a.m. to 7:15 a.m. at the ER.

I hate going to the ER for what is 99% likely a non-emergent issue.  But I also told myself that I would feel really stupid if I stayed home and had a heart attack or a brain bleed.  And this ER was pretty great.  They gave me a chest X-ray, EKG, CT scan, blood work, an IV, and blood pressure tests.  Yay for free health care!  You can thank me when you're paying more taxes this year for all my expensive procedures.  Sorry.

I did feel foolish when the best they could diagnose was dehydration.  I drink a ton of water here, but I had gone to the gym Friday night.  It's like a sweat lodge in that cardio room and the little fan they have pointed at the elliptical machines doesn't do squat.  So maybe I was a tad dry.  But really, I'm still thinking it's this weird sickness that Grace and I are sharing. 

Now that I know that my major systems are all basically okay, I am trying to function through the lightheadedness and generally crappy feeling.  As I can somtimes be labeled an airhead even in good health, you can imagine how competent and productive I am now.

My DH though, he has been very productive.  Check out the middle section of they ne entertainment center that he built.  In one day!

Since his preferred materials are metal, I had no idea he was such a talented carpenter.  It's going to be a 3 piece unit, with tall bookshelf things on either side of this piece.  We have bought no less than 7 colors of stain in the quest for the perfect finish.  6 of them I have declared either too light, too dark, or too orange.  You know how I feel about orange.  I think we might have found the perfect shade tonight, much to DH's relief.

Here's my contribution - picking out swirly handles.

We've covered it with the white sheet for now and it makes a pretty decent photo table.  Look what The Loopy Ewe sent:

Hazel Knits in Chocolatier (deserving of the hype, at least on first glance).  Spindle City Yarns in A Day at the Beach (really, really soft!).  And of course, the embarrassingly expensive Noro Silk Garden.  I've been swatching today and it's just wonderful.

Fascinating!! (Not really.)

Nothing too exciting to report today. 

The kids and I went to the pool this afternoon.

Between getting in the water to cool off and reading a semi-trashy novel, I worked on my latest socks.

I'm calling them the 224 Socks for now, as I'm using stitch pattern #224 from one of my Japanese books.  Yes, I know you can't really see any stitch pattern.  Maybe when it's on my foot the pattern will show more.  The yarn is Wollmeise in the Sultan colorway and I can tell this is going to be a tricky one to photograph.  The colors are so vivid and intense.  Teal, lime, purple, red, it's like knitting with a string of gems.

As soon as we got home, a huge windstorm kicked up, ruining my plans for making grilled lime teriyaki shrimp kabobs.  I broiled them in the oven to avoid both the shrimp and me getting sandblasted.

Did I mention I bought a new sewing machine a few weeks ago? 

I might possibly have been persuaded to buy this one because it's the "Project Runway Special Edition".  Maybe Tim Gunn will appear.  I don't sew that much, but I hate hand sewing.  That aqua colored fabric in the corner is my project.  Grace's closet has these kind of doors that I hate:

We're removing the doors and I'm making curtains that will go on a tension rod with rings.  Sort of shower curtains for the closet.  The plan is to also make matching window curtains, since her room not only faces the street, but the sunrise.

I practiced making buttonholes in scrap fabric tonight.  The closet curtains are going to be big, hemmed rectangles with buttonholes at the top for the rings. 

This was nifty.  The machine pretty much sewed the whole thing on its own.

I finished a dishcloth a few days ago.  Full disclosure: the ends are not woven in, I just tucked them under for the photo.

I needed a quick project and my kitchen was low on dishcloths.  Boring, but servicable.

Not unlike this blog post.

Only Tuesday

I tell you what.  When I saw the TypePad screen and it said "Begin a new post", I was thinking, but where do I begin?  Grace has been sick, my old neighbors from Georgia showed up in El Paso fairly unannounced, my internet crapped out (insert here long and crazy rant about Time Warner) during a Loopy Ewe Wollmeise day, the dog has been more neurotic than usual and keeping us up at night, and whew.  It's only Tuesday and I need me a weekend.

Today's drama though, I blame Craig.  Craig and his freakin' List.  DH has had all this time off and he is rabidly avidly perusing all the Craigslist postings.  He's sold a bunch of stuff and we did get the awesome new furniture.  And that was great, I was happy with that.  But DH kept seeing this listing for a TV.  A Big TV.  Day after day it would be listed, with the seller dropping the price and sounding more desperate each time.  A 42 inch HDTV, LCD, Sanyo blahblah technobabble.

We'd been saying that someday we'd get a nice big flat screen TV.  Maybe if he got picked up for this next promotion.  Probably after we move next year.  No rush.  First of all, our entertainment center is 12 years old and only has a spot for a 27 in. TV.  Where would we put a bigger TV and I'm not ready to buy a new entertainment center right now.  There's nothing wrong with our current TV either.

You know what happened, right?

Look, you can see I haven't even unpacked and set up all the stuff that goes on the old entertainment center that has now been shoved to the side.  I made a sketch of what I want and Mr. I Love This TV So Much Handyman will be building me an entertainment center starting as soon as we go to Lowe's.  The folding table with the bedsheet is lovely decor and all, but no. 

DH just could not resist the TV and I must admit, it's pretty great.  $575 and it's less than a year old.  Considering that the new ones I looked at were over $1000, I reluctantly have to agree he got a good deal.  He also spent 6 fruitless hours today waiting for the Time Warner technician to bring us an HDTV box.  (Insert here rant about lying technician and more hatred for Time Warner).  Tomorrow, they say.

One nice thing about DH getting the new TV.  He was very supportive when I told him that I was buying 10 skeins of Noro Silk Garden from the Loopy Ewe.  At $11 per skein.  I want to make Klaralund and my latest paycheck was hefty enough to cover it.  It better turn out to be an awesome sweater, because it made me woozy to spend that much on one project.  So there you go.  TV for him, ridiculously expensive yarn for me.  Fair enough.

A little afternoon pick me up. No, not like that.

I almost never watch videos embedded in the blogs I read.  Sorry.  So I wouldn't blame you if you didn't watch this video.  It's okay.  But I bet it will make you smile.

There's no reason really why watching this video should make me get kinda choked up and want to go hug the universe.  It's just a guy doing a doofy dance.  Doing it all over the world.  Sometimes alone.  Sometimes with many others.

Apparently this video has been around, like forever, in internet years.  I haven't seen it though, 'cause of the whole not clicking on videos in blogs thing.

I don't know.  It's just the awesome sort of thing my afternoon needed after standing in line at Walmart and then realizing in the parking lot that I forgot to buy ice cream.

A combo plate of yarn.

After fussing around a bit with the photo tent tonight, here are a few pictures of new yarn.

Wollmeise in colorway Campari Orange.  Did you know I don't like orange?  I really don't.  But if I was ever going to knit with orange, this would be the only orange yarn I'd consider.  It kind of reminds me of citrus fruit.  So why did I buy it if I dislike orange?  I was feeling sorry for myself because I'd missed an update with a bunch of the colors I'd been wanting by only an hour or so.  All the shop had left was Campari Orange, so I bought it for trading purposes.  I'm hoping I can get Raku-Regenbogen or one of the others colors I'm jonesing for.

Lorna's Laces in the Franklin's Panopticon colorway.  I love Franklin's blog and I like the way these colors look together.

Spirit Trail Fiberworks in the colorway Wheatear.  The color name does nothing for me, but the yarn is soft and gorgeous.

Sheepaints SilkBamboo in colorway Lava Stone.  I don't have the colors quite right in this photo.  The reddish part is more burgundy.  This is one of those skeins that if I'm not careful, I'll become hypnotized by the beauty and end up casting on without even realizing what I'm doing.

We've decided that each Sunday we'll try eating at a new Mexican place.  Last weekend's choice was El Serape de Somethinga (not the exact name).  Grace, for all her adventurousness in other areas, always orders just a plate of rice & beans.  Alex has been breaking out of his quesadilla comfort zone and trying some new dishes.  I usually order some sort of combo plate so I can try a few new things at once.  This is usually the only meal I eat all day, by necessity. 

For DH, Sundays are the day he relives his childhood food memories.  You know in the movie Ratatouille, when the snooty French restaurant critic tries a taste of the ratatouille and is instantly swept back to a memory of his mother serving him ratatouille in their humble kitchen?  Yeah, that's DH each Sunday as he eats menudo and barbacoa and tamales.  Every Sunday his dad would go down to the little corner store and bring home containers of menudo and barbacoa and sliced avocado and limes.  He realizes now that this was a hangover remedy for his dad & uncles, but it's still fond memory.

We went to see the movie Get Smart a few weeks back and heeehee!  I've never watched The Office, so I only know Steve Carrell from his movies, but that guy is awesome.  We did that thing where you're laughing really hard, but you're trying to control it so that you can hear the next part of the movie, and then more funny stuff happens and you're laughing worse while trying not to miss anything until you feel like you're compromising your internal organs. 

I'm going to try and avoid Carmike Cinemas now, though.  We sat through 8-10 commercials.  Commercials!  Not even previews.  I haaate that.  This didn't happen at the other theatre we went to for Kung Fu Panda.  Sitting there with the kids watching a stupid Gardasil commercial before Get Smart irritates me.  Previews I accept and often enjoy (should I be ashamed to admit that I want to see Hellboy 2?), but commercials for cars and cell phones and HPV vaccines, NO. 

This is what the weather's been for the past few days:

Even the thunderstorms are pretty here, but I've had enough rain for now.  I can't go for my evening walk/jog and I've had to venture over to the gym.  I have not been on an elliptical machine in many, many years and wow.  They have not gotten any easier.  But if I'm going to keep eating Mexican combo plates, that's the price I pay.

Hey, I just realized.  New sofa.  I should knit an afghan for it.  Oooh, the possibilities.  I'm thinking maybe mosaic squares. 

I hope Roy & Mark would approve.

In February, I started a pair of socks for Alex.  After knitting him the Opal Tree Frog socks on size 0s that took for-stinkin-ever (and probably don't fit him now, but I don't want to think about that), I thought it would make more sense to knit him socks out of DK weight yarn.  After all, he doesn't really wear them with shoes.  He wears them to sleep in and around the house on cold days.

I bought 2 skeins of Knit Picks Swish Superwash DK in olive green.  I knit two socks at a time and when I finished the heels, I noticed there was only a small amount of yarn left.  Like a tiny wad of yarn.  The skeins were 50 grams and I just figured that would be enough for a pair of socks.  I was incorrect.

Fortunately, I had some Swish DK in a brownish color.  Alex is not a stripey sock wearing kid, so I wanted to do something with the brown yarn that would give me a cuff, but not be stripey or boring.  He's a creative kid and so funny.  He's been working all year on a comic called "The Ninja Adventures of Roy & Mark".  Drawn on a large sketch pad using mostly stick figures, it's clever, detailed, and cute and we all look forward to the next issue.  Thus, this cuff seemed suitable:

Do not look too closely.  Just notice that they are stranded stick figures and then look away.  Because this photo shows the 4th time that I knit these suckers.  First time, my stranded knitting looked lovely and even and that sock did not fit over Bigfoot's my son's heel.  I went up a needle size and added a few stitches to the motif.  Still did not fit.  I went up two more needle sizes and added a whack more stitches and finally we got them on his foot.  And I was thoroughly sick of knitting little stick dudes.  By that point, neat stranding was abandoned in favor of just finishing a sock that would fit.

These were supposed to be a quick and simple project, one to take with me and knit on the go.  Ha and ha.  I did kind of create more of a fit problem by doing a slip stitch heel.  I thought it looked neat, but it did take away some stretch that we could have used.  I believe he's wearing a size 11 1/2 shoe now.  At age 12.

Note the rather floppy cuffs.  That's from increasing and increasing and increasing because by cracky, these socks will fit over those feet!  I'm not proud of these cuffs.  They are not my finest knitting.  I may run a bit of elastic thread through them later if they fall down too much.

Although this pair was a total headache, Alex likes them and is happy to have more warm socks that his mom knit for him.  Even though it's July in El Paso.  He is such a great kid.

Have a seat.

This weekend was supposed to be kind of a lay around, catch up on a few things, relaxing kind of weekend.  It's DH's last weekend on leave, although it's not like he really has to do any work or school for a few more weeks.  But he'll have to sign in and put on his uniform and stuff like that.  So we really wanted to just chill out this weekend. 

Then I went and checked Craiglist yesterday afternoon, like I've been doing several times a day ever since the movers unloaded our living room furniture off that truck.  They put it in our new living room and I thought, "Gah, I hate that furniture so much!"  I didn't realize how much I disliked it until I saw it in a new room.

The old sectional, (prettied up for selling on Craiglist):

Let me give you a brief history of our living room furniture.

First there was the dusty rose sofa set that DH had from his first marriage.  Dusty rose and ex-wife juju? That had to go and quick.

So I found the blue flowered sofa and loveseat that a co-worker of mine was selling.  She lived in the barracks and was getting out of the army.  She'd bought it from one of our other co-workers, so I have no idea how old it really was.

The loveseat went to the kids rooms when they were babies so I could snooze while they nursed at night.  My mom gave us a futon for the living room that had been my grandparents.  That was comfy to sleep on, but not so much to sit on.

We replaced the futon with a used sofa bed bought for $100.  It was quite firm.  Like something the Flintstones would have sat on.

For some reason, we traded that sofa bed for a different one that some guy DH knew had in his garage.  It was as attractive and well maintained as you would expect a garage sofa to be.  Every time we had someone over I felt like apologizing.  I used a variety of blankets as slipcovers, but at least we didn't worry about the kids eating on them.

We had the blue flowered love seat and the garage sofa for about 6 years until my mom gave us the sectional sofa that is pictured above.  They bought the neighbor's house after he died and it still had a lot of furniture in it and we are well known for our "accept all free furniture" policy.

The dead neighbor sectional wasn't so bad.  At least the pieces matched and it didn't look like it belonged in a garage.  But it was very green.  And the pieces would slide apart and holy crap I hated fixing those stupid pillows!  11 of them and they were always scattered all over. 

So I've been looking for new furniture.  But not new-new.  'Cause brand new furniture is stupidly expensive and then I'd be too afraid to actually sit on it.  For the last month, all people have been posting on the local Craigslist is super ugly or overpriced furniture.  Until yesterday.

Here's our new-but-not-new sectional:

DH is embarrassed that I took a photo of him napping, but I think it shows perfectly how comfortable the new sofa is.  That's the Soleil tank in progress in the bag on the ottoman.  (That's also the sum of the knitting content for this post.) 

I just love this furniture.  It looks grown-up, like furniture that real adults own.  But since it wasn't bought new for a small fortune, I won't freak out too greatly over normal use.  See, my son is eating ice cream on the sofa.  I better not catch any of them wiping their greasy popcorn fingers on it, though.