Oct 9 2010

Car Knitting

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Sometimes I think about all the hundreds of hours I spent sitting in the car going to work, shopping, wherever…everywhere here is far away…all those hours when I could have been knitting. (It makes me almost as sad as thinking about the lost hours of my youth spent watching Little House on the Prairie reruns.) Why did it take me so long (maybe two years?) to make the connection? Riding in car = Perfect time to knit. Since I realized this, I rarely go anywhere without my knitting bag.

Not only does car knitting make the time go by more quickly, it keeps my eyes and mind off Andy’s sometimes crazy driving. He doesn’t think it’s crazy, but, well, he’s crazy. I do often worry we’ll have an accident and I’ll be impaled with a needle. I try in particular to keep the pointy parts from aiming towards my eyes, and I make sure if I rest a dpn in my lap it’s parallel to my body. Is this weird? Do other car knitters fear having an eye-kebab?

Things I’ve learned about car knitting:

  • The commute to/from work is exactly one hat long.
  • ALWAYS finish a row before exiting the car (trust me).
  • Let the yarn balls run free in the floorboard; sure they’ll get a bit dirty but it makes the yarn flow a lot easier.
  • Be 100% sure you have everything you could possibly need in your bag before you hit the road. It really sucks to finish a color and not have brought the next color and have to waste all that knitting time with your eyes closed trying not to scream as the car careens around a curve.
  • Don’t do anything too complicated. Of course it depends on you as to what that means, but for me it means anything where I have to use a stitch counter.
  • NEVER leave your metal needles in the sunlight. (I just learned this one yesterday. Ow.)

Here are two recent products of my car knitting.

Anya’s backpack…

…and a pair of felted slippers that were supposed to be for Anya and will be…in a few years when her feet are a couple inches longer.

Oct 3 2010

A bushel and a peck

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Today we picked a bushel of apples. Okay, it’s really a laundry hamper full of apples. I estimate we cleared out about half of the non-tiny apples from one of our trees.

And here is Anya using her new magnetic chalkboard wall. Only the magnetic part can be used right now – according to the can, we should wait 3 days (THREE DAYS!) before priming with chalk dust and using. I’m not sure Cabol can wait that long.

Sep 28 2010

Pommes, pommes de terre, and oak

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We recently moved our web host, so you’ll notice this space had changed a little bit. It will probably change again as we have time to play around with wordpress. While we were moving, Andy wouldn’t let me post anything new. Big ole meanie.

Anya has been in school now for a few weeks, and she loves it. She’d live there if she could, I think. They’ve already had two field trips, and I was lucky to be able to arrange my schedule so I could go with her on both. The first field trip took the school to a local farm to help harvest potatoes. The kids had planted the potatoes earlier in the year as part of a farm-to-school program to help get local food into the schools. There were two bus loads of fifth graders from the local elementary school there, too, and the big kids followed the potato plow like hungry cats after an open can of tuna. The kids swarmed over the freshly-turned ground and vacuumed up all the potatoes before the little kids could get there. It was okay, though, because the little kids still got to play in lots of dirt.

On the second trip, we went to an apple orchard a few miles from our house. Turns out we’ve met the woman who owns the place when we went to pick up our milk share. When she bought the property, it was overgrown, and she’s been working very hard to get things back into shape. Alas, the little kids mostly were stuck with picking apples off the ground what with them being shorter than most of the tree branches, but they all still had a great time. This was the first time I’d seen Anya eat an apple peel!

After we picked apples, we had a little picnic in the grass and then watched some of the bigger kids use the orchard’s cider press to make fresh cider, which was (of course) fabulous. I came home with a big bag of apples and dreams of fresh apple pie. Later that afternoon, the school had a little festival to celebrate autumn’s arrival. We ate fresh applesauce made by the teachers and watched the kids race carrying apples in spoons and jump over an ever-widening river in what made me think of a horizontal version of limbo.

Inspired by the trip to the orchard, I decided to investigate our own apple trees. We have three on our property, but we’ve mostly neglected them. The apples always seemed to be puny and wormy and not worth the effort. A spring or two ago, though, my dad and I pruned the tree closest to the house, and I think it paid off this year. A few days ago we went to check out that tree and it is loaded with large and tasty yellow apples. We picked a few to add to my bag from the orchard and had plans to pick more, but then it started to rain and hasn’t stopped.

Andy has been busy on yet another home reno project. The latest is putting down hardwood floors in our kitchen/dining room area. We picked up some “rustic” red oak flooring, and Andy has been face nailing it with old-timey looking, square-headed nails. (Rustic = stuff that is all sorts of colors/doesn’t match and has worm holes and knot holes and other small flaws in it. Rustic also = a lot cheaper. Luckily, we like rustic.) Yesterday he finished the floor in the dining room area. We decided not to stain the wood and just put poly on top. It’s definitely a nice change from the purple-painted sub floor we’ve had for the last three years. I can’t wait for the peeling, dirt-colored, stick-on vinyl squares in the kitchen area to vanish, too.

Sep 6 2010

Heads Down

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In elementary school, sometimes our teachers would make us put our heads down on our desks. Sometimes it was punishment…okay it was always punishment even when it wasn’t meant to be because that is just not a natural position to maintain for more than a few minutes. Who thought of this bright idea? Did a teacher one day look out at her students, find them a bit sleepy looking and think, “Hey, if I force them to hunch over and put the bowling-ball-weight of their heads on a nice, hard desktop, my students will really thank me!”

Sep 5 2010

Last Hurrah of the Summer

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We drove up to NY to visit Andy’s family a few weeks ago. The weather was really nice, and we had all sorts of fun things planned. First, we went to the county fair. Compared to our county fair, okay, our county fair is not really a fair. (I think there were more people at the Erie fair than there are living in all of our county.) Anyhow, we watched sea lions and real lions and pet goats and watched dancers and looked at bunnies and chickens and drank lemonade. Anya was just tall enough to go on a bunch of kiddie rides. She didn’t like rollercoastery type things much, but loved the gentler rides. Her aunt and uncle took her on the ferris wheel, and I guess that was okay because there was no shrieking (at least that we could hear).

We also went to Niagra Falls. Neither Anya nor her uncle had been before. Anya, Chris, and Rebecca trekked down into the cave of mist or the misty caves or something with caves and condensation. During the trek, Aunt Rebecca promised Anya a purple lollipop if Anya behaved. After the trek, we hunted all the gift stores for a purple lollipop. Rebecca finally found a rainbow one, and that worked just fine.

The next day, we all went to the town beach. It was pretty awesome. I reprimanded Andy for having never taken me there before and then wondered if he spent all his youthful summers there. It was an awful lot like a real beach and only a few minutes from his house. How did I not know about the place before?!?! While Anya chased seagulls, Kenny dug a really big hole.

On the last full day of our visit, we all went to a family reunion. We hadn’t been to one in several years, and I was surprised I actually recognized people. Anya and Kenny played with their cousins, and I ate a bunch of frito dip. Andy got a soda he thought was a coke but was orange, and he was sad. I got a soda I thought was coke but was orange, and I was happy.

On the drive home, we made our traditional stop at the FiestaWare outlet. This time we scored 8 plates for $2 each and a big, green fruit bowl that Buddy likes to sleep in.

Aug 30 2010

Wanna shake my tree?

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Yesterday I was mowing up by the workshop, when I saw a handful of peaches scattered next to it. I started grumbling about Cabol throwing out old fruit for the animals right where I’d mow over it.

Then I looked up and saw 2 dozen bright red and yellow peaches hanging off a tree that appears to be growing under the large spruce next to the workshop. I blame squirrels, but I can’t understand how I missed a bunch of peaches growing over my head ALL SUMMER LONG. It’s not like it is the first time I’ve mowed there!

Aug 13 2010

BFFs

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Last weekend, Anya and I went to Tennessee to visit our BFFs, Kimmie and Catie. They normally live far, far away over the sea, but every year or so they get to come back to the land of Chuck E. Cheese…where a kid can be a kid.

Can you believe that Kimmie and Catie were born in August?? It is true. I told you, August rocks for birthdays. We were lucky enough to be in TN for Kim’s birthday, and after a day at the mall buying Anya and Catie matching outfits and ransacking the clearance shelves at Gymboree and the Disney Store, we went to the restaurant where the dude in the tall hat waves around sharp knives and cooks things on the table. There were flames that tried to melt Cinderella and wooden clubs being tossed at little girls and a boy that slept through (almost) everything.

We spent a lot of time in the hotel pool. Catie worked on her jumping.

Kimmie worked on trying to keep the camera away…and failed.

I didn’t have a suit, so I hopped in with my clothes on. Anya sat on the edge and splashed with her feet. Every now and then, I’d race over, grab her, and carry her around in the pool. We played “keep away” with an invisible ball, learned how well crocs float, and ran away when the sun burned up all the shady spots in the water.

What trip to TN with K & C would be complete without a trip to Cracker Barrel? The last time I’d been was with Kimmie and Catie, and Catie was in a high chair. Anya ate two eggs, two pieces of bacon, and a bowl of grits, and the clouds parted and angels sang.

The last event of the weekend was to visit the Children’s Museum in the place where they made The Bomb. Alas, my camera batteries ran out part of the way through. I shoved Kimmie out of the way and stole her camera, but she said I can’t have any of the pictures until I remove the picture of her in the pool from the blog. I did manage to get a photo of Anya in some of the dress up clothes the museum had. They were mostly too big for her, and we picked a great mix of things….boy’s shirt…girl’s underskirt thingy….straw hat partially eaten by a goat.

It was a fabulous weekend, and when we got home we crashed and didn’t wake up for three days (no, I had work the next day). Too bad Kc wasn’t there. Next time!

Aug 13 2010

Birthdays

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August is a big birthday month around Loafkeeper Farm. (Can we still call it a “farm” when there are only two chickens and not much of anything planty growing besides weeds?) I think August is the best month for birthdays. Anya sure messed up.

For my birthday, I requested Andy make me a rainbow cake. Andy has never liked making birthday cakes, and every year I have to do lots of whining to convince him the horror of cake making is less than that of my whining. So, I’d sent him the link to the rainbow cake, and he’d purchased the pack of fancy-schmancy food coloring, and he decided to get started one hot August day when Anya and I were taking a nap. He was doing okay, when out in the kitchen I heard such a clatter that I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter. Well, no, I really didn’t because I knew what the matter was: Andy was making a birthday cake. There was banging and cursing and the sound of things being tossed about. It was really quite impressive.

After nap time, Anya and I emerged and I went to go find my cake. Poor little cake. It was so sad and mangled looking. The top layer was held together by frosting and a prayer, and there was no frosting on the outside of the cake…just between the layers. Andy later told me he’d run out of frosting. I wanted to take a photo of it, but Andy wouldn’t let me. He did, however, allow a slice of cake to be photographed. I think the colors are fabulous…and it tasted fantastic. (Even better after it’d been frozen.)

Kenny’s birthday is also in August. I made him a card, and I liked it so much I wanted to keep it and play with it, but I couldn’t find a charger for it.

Andy’s birthday is next (at least in the family), but he doesn’t like cake or small, hand-held video game devices. Whatever will I do?

Jul 20 2010

What I did on my summer vacation

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Anya and I went to visit my family the first week of July. Andy was a big poopie head and wouldn’t come with us. That’s fine. I left him a long list of things to do. (He even did a few of them!)

We had a great time playing in the backyard full of evil mosquitoes and going to our favorite restaurants and shopping at the Goodwill Emporium and getting our hairs cut by Ms. Pat and eating sheep and worm and mouse pancakes and chasing ChewyDog and NonnieCat and BobCat and seeing peaches packed and making cowstumes and squirt-gun-fighting with Grampa and Bubba and having a big ole birthday party with chocolate-cherry cake and candles to blow out! PHEW!

We also played in the pool,

and made tree kites,

and Anya dressed up in her hootchie-mama-Goodwill top (which some lady tried to steal out of my cart – the nerve!),

and jumped up and down at Monkey Joe’s (but not in the hootiche-mama-Goodwill top).

Although part of the journey and not the actual visit, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Anya went poopoo on the side of the road (not once, but twice!) on the way to Georgia. Ethical dilemma: do you leave the poo on the side of the road (non-populated area) or clean it up? I mean, surely all sorts of things are out there pooing all the time. But then…what if someone gets stranded and steps in the poo? What if a mower mows the poo? What if a bunch of kids stop there to do a Chinese fire drill and slide in the poo and all is ruined?!?!?!?