Monkey Tale

A few weeks ago a small goodie arrived in the mail from Granny and Daddy Dave. Inside was the most enormous pair of red-heeled socks I've ever seen. Seriously! I have no idea how they managed to sweet talk Paul Bunyan out of his knitwear, but there they were.

Of course, J and I knew exactly what to do with them...




Meet "Bluey". J chose the hideous blue buttons for they eyes, and he adores them. Bluey is now his best buddy, and they are nearly inseperable. He even took a trip to the dentist with us today and got to take a ride in the cool chair. He's developing quite a personality, too. He tells J things like "You don't want to eat that broccoli," and "Bedtimes are for babies." But he also tells him that he'll protect him from nightmares, which is an awful sweet thing for a pair cut up socks to do. We are quite grateful to the evil little monkey.

A day or two after Bluey's creation, J turned to me and said, "Mama, Bluey's naked. He needs a shirt. A red yarn shirt."

And so, while no one else will probably ever be gifted with their very own handknit sweater, the mighty monkey wears his proudly. I didn't really use a pattern for it, and it's perhaps a bit large, but it makes it easier for J to help him in and out of as the weather dictates.


In other news, our little garden is coming along nicely. The tomato plants are starting to show their first little fruits, and the beans are climbing higher and higher every day. Last night we harvested our first tiny crop-- two radishes. J was brave and tasted one before deeming them "too ficy" and passing them along to Steven, who ate them right up. I hope the kid has a big appetite for them, because he's the only one in this house that will even come near them, I think.


Tomorrow we're off to Tennessee for my baby sister's graduation, and to visit with family. I'm looking forward to the destination, but the traveling and the prep that goes into it has just about wiped me out. Thank goodness we were able to get the kittens off to their new homes before we left. Could you imagine the nightmare it would have been to find someone to take care of them?!

Almost no knitting

It seems like forever since I've managed to update any sort of knitting content. I've been working on the ballet cami that I was supposed to be knitting, oh, about 6 months ago. I'm done with the waist decreases, and starting in on the increases. I'd share a picture, but I haven't got one. Besides, it's an uninteresting to look at purple blob right now. I do have my concerns about this pattern, though. I prefer my clothes to not be clingy. You know, hide the middle parts, etc. Even knit using a larger size than necessary, it appears pretty small and clingy. Yes, I do realize that's sort of the intention of the pattern. If nothing else, it'll look great as a shell underneath something, I suppose. Or I'll find it a proper home if I really won't wear it.

The reason there's been so very little knitting is quite simple. Time. Some days I feel like I haven't got time to even sit down. I'm on the go from the minute I roll out of bed at some ungodly hour (and I'm not a morning person), until my head hits the pillow at another ungodly hour.

Throw in a lot of gardening that needed to be accomplished before the plants died, and an impromptu plumbing job, and that's about all the excuse I need.

Yes, lets talk about plumbing jobs.

Hubby is not the most industrious person in the world. It's not that he's lazy, he's just difficult to motivate at times. He's slow and meticulous, and it takes him darn near forever to accomplish something that I could do in about 15 minutes. So, when he said he wanted to work on the flower beds, the skeptic in me rolled her eyes. But how do you discourage someone from doing something like that?

So Sunday, when he went out to finish the last of the straggling flower beds without prompting, I was quite amazed, and decided to stay inside and out of his way. Yes, I'm a hover-er.

All of a sudden, from the other side of the kitchen window, I hear a string of bilingual foul words, followed by a loss of water at the kitchen sink. Who knew that the main water line from the well ran directly through that flowerbed? Further, who knew it was only about 2 inches underground?


The hubby has bad karma. He cracked it with a hoe breaking up roots.

So it was a quick run to the hardware store to repair it, lest we be without water indefinitely. Ummm... not an option.

Neither of us have ever repaired plumbing before, but it seemed simple enough... Cut out the broken piece,

(notice hubby doesn't seem very amused)
fit in a new one, some of that blue goo to hold it, and viola! Fixed pipe.



Of course, I covertly made a quick call to Dad while hubby was at the hardware store just to make sure we were on the right track. Thanks Dad! and shhhh... don't tell Wil!

I wanted to show you pictures of the finished flower beds and the veggie garden. They're looking quite lovely! But once again, my morning time has run out. *sigh* maybe tonight, if I get home at a decent enough hour.

Handspun, Homemade, and other stuff.

I finally finished spinning up the 2 ounces of merino I've been working on. Yeah, I know! It took me THAT long to do 2 ounces! But to be fair, I only get a chance to spin when the planets align just right and the moon is in it's proper phase, etc. In other words, only when the munchkin isn't around. And usually when that happens, I have about a million other things that HAVE to be done first. So, anyway, I finished spinning my 2 ounces of merino. The color was "forest multi" and it was quite lovely in the bag, burgundy with flecks of pink and green and all sorts of reddish-brown tones.

It's more muddy spun than I expected it to be, but I still think it's quite pretty, even if it's not so bright.

I plied two singles together to get the final product. Jonas decided he needed to help me with this process, but fortunately, he grew bored with it pretty quickly.

Please ignore the absolute disaster that is my office area. It seems that everything in the house finds a way to land in this little corner at some point or another. I'm really not that slobbish. :)

The result is still drying as we speak. I'm not sure on my exact WPI, but it's quite thin. Somewhere between lace and fingering weight, with the occasional slightly chunkier spot. My only problem with plying them is that I do not have a tensioned Lazy Kate, and my singles, on several occasions, decided to snarl up on each other. Perhaps an indication of overspinning? But my plied yarn was balanced, so I guess all's well that ends well, right?

I know this isn't a good picture, but here's the end result wound onto the niddy noddy.



If I'm doing my math right, by counting the number of wraps on the niddy noddy, I've got right around 125 yards here. Not enough for any big project, but enough to play around with, I suppose. No idea what it'll become. Probably a lacy headband or something. What else do you do with 125 yards? Suggestions?

I guess that as I continued spinning I became much better at keeping my single an even thickness because my second bobbin, despite having the same 1 ounce of fiber spun, ended up having quite a bit leftover after plying. I took that leftover single and practiced Navajo plying. The technique isn't all that hard to understand, but it kicked my butt in a big way. I think with some more practice I could learn to really love it, though.



The rest of my day was pretty busy, too. J and I worked on getting the rest of the vegetable garden planted. I hauled hundreds and hundreds of pounds of dirt, and my back knows it, too. But,with the exception of a couple of pepper plants and a few herbs, the garden is done. Hopefully it will do better than previous years. We intended to get it planted earlier this year, but time has been an issue all around, it seems. Oh well. We still have a few months to get these babies established before the blazing summer heat destroys them completely.

Aside from that, we baked some fresh bread,
and J and dad took a loaf to Abuela while I sat down and did some transcription. I have GOT to finish this before it kills me! I don't know why I'm procrastinating so much.

And one last picture, just because.

In cleaning out their attic, my parents came across a ton of my old stuffed animals and whatnot, and sent them home for me to sort through. Now, it was fun to go through the bags and remember all of them, etc. But honestly! I don't need another 50 pounds of plush in this house! I let J go through them to see if there was anything he wanted before I gave them away, and he promptly picked this!

Wait, it gets better! When you squeeze him, he farts. Of course, Stimpy was in there too, and now also resides in my son's room. Oh well, there are worse things he could fall in love with, right?

Anything BUT transcription

So today was J's second day of school. Thankfully, he still loves it, and still hates me for returning to pick him up. I guess he thinks that if I forget to come get him he can just stay there forever.

I have very few complaints so far about the school. Only two tiny red flags have been raised for me, and believe me, they're really tiny. Today when I dropped him off, he headed straight for the "house" center with the baby dolls and the dress up costumes and the play kitchen. Then he turned to me, pointing to the purses and dolls and told me "I can't play with these. This is stuff for girls only." I don't know if one of the other kids told him that (most likely) or if one of the teachers told him that. I don't believe in gender biasing. As a matter of fact, J probably has more dolls and teddy bears than any little girl in his class. It balances out the side of him that turns everything else into a gun, sword, or laser shooter.

I simply reassured him that he could play with anything he wanted to. There were no such thing as girl or boy only toys, and left it at that. He proceeded to head to the train table, and I made my exit.

Second tiny flag: Today, in a completely random conversation he revealed to me that big boys should never cry. I had to sit and explain the difference between crying because you're really sad or hurt and whining simply because things aren't going your way. I don't think I like the idea of anyone telling my son that he has to be stoic, but have to admit that he is a bit of a whinebag at times.

Like I said, small things and neither of them are things that would prompt me to really worry at all. Everything else about school is going great, and I think he's already learned quite a bit in his two short days.

Today he brought me home Orange Ovals, a cute octopus made of a painted paper plate and streamers, another octopus decorated with cereal, and an owl. Yes, the letter of the week IS 'O'.

The idea behind him being in school twice a week, besides his socialization and freedom from me, is to give me time to do my school work. This was supposed to be a fast sort of thing for me to breeze through. When I quit working when he was 18 months old, I fully expected to be finished by his 2nd birthday, and working from home. Ummm... yeah, we are approaching birthday 4. Thanks for reminding me. I've never been a bad student. And whether it seems like it or not, I DO like doing the transcription a lot. I just keep coming up with other things that I either MUST do first, or want to accomplish with the small amount of free time I have. To say that I'm discouraged about ever finishing would be a huge understatement.

So, in the two days he's been at school, have I worked like mad to push through this last unit before my final? Ummm... negative. I've scrubbed bathrooms down to the corners behind the toilets. I've done umpteen loads of laundry, I've swept, mopped, dusted, cleaned litter boxes. And today takes the cake: I steam cleaned all of the living room furniture. Then I spun about 1/2 oz of some merino I'm anxious to finish. Then, since I only had about 30 minutes before it was time to pick him up, I sat down and knit on the heel flap of a sock.

I keep telling myself that next week will be more productive school-wise. It has to be, or I'm in trouble, and will be left justifying myself to the hubby who has been gracious enough to put off going back to school himself so that I can finish first.

On the upside, J and I did finish digging out (by hand!) the entire garden bed. All 15x10 feet of it. Oh my blistered hands! Now to start our seeds and finish off the flower beds. Sooner or later our house is going to look a little less trashy, I swear.