Chip, Shred, Mulch

Mike & worked like beavers on the garden this weekend. "Like beavers" is here defined as "chewing through an enormous quantity of wood." We had a huge stack of leaves, brushy debris & tree branches that were cleared out of the overgrown flowerbeds, blown down by winter storms, etc. Mike planned to haul it all out to the dome site for burning, but then secured the loan of Cliff's chipper/shredder instead. So we chipped. And shredded. And threw it all in the garden for mulch. Then it rained Sunday night & part of Monday. Now we have a nice layer of nitrogen-enhancing wet organic material that will decompose right in the garden. Go compost! Looking forward to some yummy veggies this summer.

F is for Fool

Strangely, the Fool has come up in exactly the same position in the last three readings I have done... position 4 in the Celtic cross & staff, which is "what is behind you". The Fool is all about leaping off the cliff of your comfortable world and the risky beginnings of rewarding journeys into unknown realms. Gosh, do you think it might apply to me, and the cross-country move to a strange city that we undertook last year?

There are, of course, a bazillion different versions of the Tarot. I use the hoary old Rider-Waite, mostly because the images are so familiar, but I love the images on Boo's Baseball Tarot (the perfect deck for a sports nut, BTW -- baseball clichés blended seamlessly with tarot archetypes.) In that deck, the Fool is renamed the Rookie. A long-haired youth leaps off the bench, grabbing a bat, while the catcher and ump look expectantly towards him. Perfect! "Hey kid, I'm putting you in!" "Me, Coach?" The Fool is getting off the bench and into the game.

Dyeing to Try It

A little while back, I picked up a one-pound cone of undyed sock wool on eBay, home of ridiculous & impulsive bargains for knitters. Then I had to figure out what to do with said yarn. The short term answer was, "Stick it in the stash bin until a project comes along for it."

A few weeks after that, Jen told me about the Six Sox Knitalong, which I promptly joined. I came in too late for the February sock, but I'm looking forward to the April pattern. The shopping list tells us to get something in "a nice spring color", so I figured it was time to try my hand at yarn dyeing.

First I had to skein the yarn in 50-gr. hanks. Hmm, how am I going to do this? I have a ball-winder, but nothing that will make skeins. I asked Mike if he could make something up for me. We started talking about a board-and-two-pegs arrangement, but then I mused, "What I really need is a niddy noddy." Once he got done laughing at the name, he said he had some PVC out in the garage that he could use. He disappeared for half an hour or so & came back with a butt-ugly but perfectly utilitarian niddy, which I put to immediate use. I skeined up the yarn much faster than I could probably have done with the chair-back arrangement I thought I was going to have to use.

Then, because I am married to Mike and Mike is That Guy, he decided he was going to improve the B.U.B.P.U. niddy by installing some kind of counting device on it. (He was probably sick of listening to me chant "Twenty-one, two, three, four, twenty-two, two, three, four, twenty-three..." as I wound the yarn.) He disappeared into the garage again & returned this time with a doohickey that looks like it was scrounged off of an old odometer. He added a bolt that works as a thumb lever, zip-tied it to the B.U.B.P.U.N.'s main shaft, and voilá, I now have a counter to keep track of how much I have wound.

In the meantime, I inventoried the Kool-Aid in the pantry. I have been wanting to try my hand at Kool-Aid dyeing for a while, and the fruity colors seemed like just the thing for a pretty spring sock. I found a few envelopes of Cherry, which the kids don't seem to like much, so... PINK SOCKS it is!

Dyeing with Kool-Aid is actually super-easy, although I did manage to goof up a few things. The nice part is it's all food-safe, so you don't have to use special pans & tools; you just use what's in the kitchen. I nuked the yarn for a few two-minute rounds & got a nice saturated pinky-red color.

Some of the color came out in the wash, but it still kept a nice cherry pink color. I had a few uneven spots, and actually put the first skein back in the dye bath for another round, but it turned out mostly even after that.

A cool-water rinse follows. Mike got another laugh from my squeezing-the-water-out technique: I roll the skein in an old towel & then sit on it for a few moments. Gets it pretty dry, really.

Here they are drying on the rack. If you can't see the uneven spots, I'm not gonna point them out. I think it makes them look fine anyway. If I wanted a perfect dye job, I would have bought commercially-dyed yarn.

Can't wait to see the Six Sox pattern on April 1st!

E is for Emerge

Spring is just around the corner, and we are starting to see those best-loved harbingers, the daffodil & the pussy willow. We have a largish willow just behind the house, and its fuzzy white blooms enchanted me last year as I was house-shopping -- I wouldn't swear that they didn't influence our purchase somewhat.

Our elm seems to be the first one in the neighborhood to bud. You can see that the poor tree was cruelly topped a decade or so back, but it seems to have grown back a nice round crown that will fill in beautifully once the leaves unfold. Of course, E could also here stand for Evil, since I will be sneezing my fool head off in a few weeks because of this monster.

Ragna

In addition to the Mystery Project (mwa-ha-ha!), which is my current at-work project, I started to swatch the luscious Ragna over the weekend. Had to rip once, but it really is a fun pattern. I am knitting it in my favorite wool, Elann's Highland Wool, on size 7's and in a vibrant peacock-green shade called Calypso. (The photo makes it look much darker than it really is. Click for larger image, which shows the detail better.)

The center braid in the pattern is a traditional interlace pattern called a Saxon braid, with a twisted cable on either side. It's not a pattern for someone who hates cables; each right-side row has between 3 and 6 C4's per repeat. Uff da; but the no-needle technique helps a lot.

Eight Below

The kids wanted to see Pink Panther, but I talked them into Eight Below after reading a review saying P.P. was full of the type of crude sex-farce humor to which I'm trying to avoid exposing the kids.

*** WARNING -- MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOWING ***

Eight Below is a pretty straightforward adventure movie, but it's quite graphic in a "red in tooth and claw" way; it's not for very young children. Unfortunately, many parents at the showing we saw didn't seem to realize this & brought their little ones -- as young as threeish. So, we endured some wailing in several scenes... a graphic depiction of frostbite, a section where the abandoned dogs learn to hunt & then consume their kills, and an extremely scary "jump" scene where a predator attacks a dog. Some of the poor kids had problems with the deaths of two of the dogs, which were of course played for maximum pathos.

The human story (the intrepid antartic explorers trying to get back to the dogs) isn't nearly as compelling, for some reason. I think the dogs were better actors.

I admit, I was bawling at some bits; but I always cry unashamedly at movies, even dumb romantic comedies. Ali, on the other hand, was doing her best not to let me see her wiping away tears, but moms see that kind of stuff.

Johari Window

The Johari Window was invented by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingram in the 1950s as a model for mapping personality awareness. By describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up. Click here for my Johari window & tell me what you think of me! (You can remain anonymous if you so desire.)