Rachael

   I is snoozin.

First, THANK YOU for your lovely, wonderful comments about Digit. A lot of them made me laugh, and some of them made me cry. The image of the limping coyote will always be with me (I saw one this morning on my way to work, just around the corner from the house, and I checked his legs for limps — he was fine, so he wasn’t The One). Your comments meant the world to me, thank you.

But you want more pictures, right? That’s why you’re really here. That’s why I would be.

Because I’m working a lot this week, and possibly all this weekend, and the kittens couldn’t come home with me until the night before I started back to work, I wanted a safe, secure place for them to be when we weren’t home. I wasn’t about to leave the two kittens with either: 1- our three curious dogs (although I’m sure Clara would have them reading Tolstoy by the afternoon), or 2- my yarn room.

So I bought a big ole crate in which to make this little nest, where they’ll stay for the next week or so while we’re not home and they get JUST a bit bigger and more confident:

Yes, people, that is a cashmere sweater inside the carrier. A cashmere sweater that Clara ate the sleeve from, but cashmere, nonetheless. A wool sweater that suffered the same fate is next to it, then a bit of carpet, and their litter box (they’re very well trained) and their food and water.

But the part I like it best is the hanging scratcher you can’t really see that I hung in the back, so they can climb, and that weird hammock looking thing hanging from the top. It was an impulse buy — I found it in the hamster section of the pet-product store — and it’s awesome. This is what they do A LOT:

There are two kittens in that picture. One is just sleeping and smushed.

 

This is Willie Joe. Willie for Shakespeare (rescued on WS’s birth and death day), and Joe for the Race That Knows Joseph (an Anne of Green Gables-ism for kindred spirits). He’s a little more timid, and will always have bed-head, I think. He’s not officially long-haired — he just has SOME long-hairs.

This is _______________ . Lala, being the best wife ever, let me bring home TWO kittens on a day we hadn’t even planned on getting one, so she gets to name this one. You can give her ideas, but please, for the love of god, let them be good ones. I didn’t know I would be a control freak about the name, but apparently I have strong opinions about it.

Willie, chillin’

    Earrings?

See how fluffy Willie is? And No-Name (Lala? Noname? Like the sushi?) is just a big spaz — confident and a little purrbox. I have yet to get Willie to purr. It’s my goal. I love them.

In other news, last night it is reported that I said in my sleep, "They were just spiteful Canadians, anyway." THAT IS SO FUNNY TO ME. I love sleep-talkers, and I love the fact that I am one, sometimes, and HELLO! There ARE no spiteful Canadians, so I’m proud of my sleep creativity!

Well, hello!

I am at work, and it’s 7:30am, and it’s Saturday, and the scary thing is that I’ve already been up for three hours. And I’m awake. Very awake. That hyper-awake thing you get when you’re tired, right before you get sleepy. Yawn.

Last night I had one of those very unsatisfactory falling-to-sleep experiences where you’re lying there, knowing you can’t sleep, having lots of busy thoughts, knowing that you only have six hours to sleep. Now you only have five. Now you only have four and a half, and you’d like to grump to your wife about it who’s only just now coming to bed because she has a normal schedule, and she has lots of good suggestions, and tries to turn the clock around so you can’t stare at it, but you grump at her no matter what she says or how she tries to help.

Then at 4:30am, when the alarm goes off, oh, yes, I am asleep. Very asleep.

So now I’m awake but spacey. What was I going to tell you?

Oh, yes. I started a pair of socks from the TOP DOWN. I am firmly in the toe-up camp, having done a couple of pair top-down years ago and then realizing that toe-up, short-row heeled socks rock and are just plain easier. I always have three or four in progress.

But then I saw Stephanie on Knitty Gritty this week, and she made top-down socks look like fun. So I’m whipping into one now, and I’ll let you know how it goes. I have this idea that after watching her that once I’ll just try to remember her instructions, her recipe, as she called it, without looking it up, and see what comes out. I believe, because of this fact, I might be bored with toe-up. If I think winging top down socks is a hoot — that might be a sign. But you understand.

But really, that show, while fun, was weird in that during the 23 minutes Stephanie was in front of the camera, she never fell over laughing, not once. I’ve never seen her go that long — I believe it might be impossible, in fact. She told me that they edited those parts out, which made me feel better, because otherwise I’d have been worried about knit-body-snatching. (There’d be money in that.)

But why did the show do that? I have to say, even though these last few weeks have been chock-full of friends and cool people being the Hosted Designer, I can still barely watch that show. How do you suck the SOUL right out of knitting like that? (You darling Hosted Designers didn’t do it, don’t worry. You all were lovely and perfect. It’s the set and the set-uppers, I’m thinking.)

But it’s like the L Word (Showtime’s lesbian soap opera), in a way. I have to watch, because it is the Representation of My People. I used to have to watch Knitty Gritty because I’d never seen anything about knitting on TV.  Now I have to watch because cool people show up and do some cool things. Hello, moebius! Hello, nice socks! Hello, dying sock yarn right on TV! Then, of course, they show some things that we won’t talk about because of that whole if you can’t say something nice rule.

How’s that for a half-assed rant? It’s too early in the morning for a real rant, I think. How ’bout a cute girls picture? Okay? Okay.

Oh, and go say hello to the decidedly blogless no-blog-Rachel. Who now has a blog. Heh. Another one bites the dust. 

Just to show you that Lala and I have traded hair colors.

Yesterday was nice. It was a day off for both of us, and we had nothing we HAD to do. We wanted to meet up with our dogwalkers, Woofwalks, who hold a monthly group walk at Pt. Isabel with their clients. We went, and Clara ran her ass off, trying to avoid an intact male Retriever who had the hots for her. Good exercise, I say.

Then we shopped at Costco, the making or the breaking of a relationship, and we marvelled at the consumer culture we live in. People roll cheese and LazyBoy chairs out in their carts. That’s wild and scary to me, but they have really, really good cheap toilet paper, so what are you going to do?

We bought some cushions while we were there, too. The couch throw cushions are so dog-smelly that I had recently taken to hiding them when company came over, so we got rid of them yesterday and bought two red ones, and two furry ones. I forgot that Clara’s favorite toys are her plush furry animals (oh my god, especially the duck. She loves her stuffed duck). So I put the new pillows on our couch, the big couch. Clara sits on the little sofa, and eats her frozen kongs there. I keep it covered with a sheet over its slipcover, so it stay clean, but she certainly doesn’t get to have pillows on her couch.

This is what we found ten minutes after I had put out the pillows. She had moved them to her couch, and more than that, she had ARRANGED them. These are not callously thrown, they are not being lain upon and chewed up, they are just thoughtfully and artfully placed.

Last night, we barbequed to the sounds of our neighbor’s party. They had a boomin’ stereo playing mariachi and it sounded like they’d set up an amp and a mike, so we heard impromptu karaoke that got progressively wilder, louder, and drunker as the night went on. The funniest part was at 10:59 pm — we were lying in bed, just about to finally get annoyed that it STILL sounded as if it were in the room with us — when the music was shut off. It was like Mom said, "It’s eleven, no more. You’re done." The men then went into the driveway and sang along with the car stereo, but it was totally ear-plug manageable by then, and it was pretty damn cute.

Also cute, and I have to tell you this — we caught the fish on fire last night. We have these cedar bbq planks (from Costco) that have been sitting in the rain, so they are already wet. The instructions say to soak one in water for at least 20 minutes, so we do. Then we cook the lovely salmon steak on top of it in the grill. We go inside for a minute, and come back out to flames coming out from under the grill lid. I run inside to get something to put the fire, and Lala lifts the lid, and uses the spatula to hold up the flaming plank, topped by our flaming fish. She’s yelling something, and I finally hear that she’s yelling, "Get a plate! Get a PLATE!"

I think, wow, she must have one interesting way to put out flames — she’s going to SMOTHER the fire with the plate! I never would have thought of that. So I bring her the plate, and she puts the flaming board back down on the grill and rescues our fish onto the plate. Then she just looks at me. She’s done her part. So I run back in, grab the baking soda, and douse the fire.

I totally love that she saved the fish. I saw flames, I thought of extinguishing the same (might be a byproduct of my job). She saw flames, she thought, oh shit, dinner! And the fish was wonderful, by the way. Just a little charred on the outside edges, perfectly done inside. Yep.

That is all, I think. For now.

So Lala got a jones to square foot garden. It’s a phrase I’ve heard all my life — my father being one of the first on the bandwagon back in the DAY. So we read the website and got the book (get the new one, not the old one) and talked about it. She had a very good point. We have a nice-sized front yard and a better than nice-sized backyard, and to the right of the back deck, we have a HELL of a lot of concrete. Someday we’d like to take that all out. That day, however, is not today, and we don’t know when it will be, so why not garden on top of the concrete?

Of course, she came up with this solution in the fall, so we waited, and then I woke up yesterday with the need to DO IT ALL RIGHT NOW as I am wont to do.

And I gotta tell you, it was easy. Three and a half hours, from beginning to end, and that includes an hour and half of shopping at the hardware store and the Big Longs (o, how I love thee, biggest Longs in America). At home I finished the construction, soil mixing, and planting in two hours.

Read his site for answers (I certainly don’t have them) but here’s basically what I did:

Had the lumber store cut 2 eight foot 1X6s in half, so I had four four-foot pieces. I also bought deck nails, framing nails, and wooden lathes (six four-foot lengths) for the grid (essential in the Square Foot Bible – do NOT leave off the grid).

I used my drill (and I remembered to buy a bit for the deck nails, hooray!) to assemble the lumber (I am so butch).

    Lovely concrete, before

    Butch!

    A square! (Kinda.)

    I put weed cloth down so those cracks don’t bother us.

The mixing of the perfect soil is the hard part. The website and book explain it, but basically, you’re making an even mixture of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. That last is hard to find in the right quantities (I bought eight bags of it) and it is IMPOSSIBLE to remember its name. I kept thinking vermicelli. Verisimilitude. Vermiculite would NOT stick in my head.

So you dump eight cubic feet, total, onto a huge tarp (and you should really wear the mask — I didn’t think that would be so necessary, but that stuff is dusty and stinky) and then you drag the short end of the tarp to the other short end, rolling that heavy, heavy mass back and forth inside the tarp until it’s all mixed up. Above, you can see it’s almost mixed. That was hard work.

Then you add it to the box! That’s hard, but fun. I dragged the tarp over, tucked the end over into the box, and rolled all the soil in. I had just the right amount, a little bit left over.

I was happy about that.

Then you add the grid, which just took nailing (and my sheep measuring tape), and was very fun to do.

Then I got out my seeds and decided what I wanted to go where. The goal is to have no adjoining boxes have the same plant. I think I put thirteen different things in the sixteen boxes, and I drew myself a map (thank god, because I would have forgotten by now). I know I put in spinach, edamame, several kinds of bush beans, bush cucumber, some habanero, basil, two kinds of beets, ummmm. I can’t remember the rest. But I know at least some will come up. I hope.

Isn’t that the coolest?

This is now what it looks like from the deck:

And today I’m home sick from work, so I can sit out there and look at it. It rained this morning, and that can only help, too.

I’m fighting a migraine that knocked me out last night and part of this morning — any good remedies? I’m desperate. Right now I feel a little better, but it’s as if there’s a big gorilla next to me, and he has a vice-grip on the base of my neck, and if I get out of line, he’ll hit me again. The migraines are hormonal, but I can’t go on the pill, and I react really badly to even plant-based progesterone products. I’ve been doing acupuncture, which helped, but not totally. I’ve given up coffee completely. Fi0ricet works on the pain, but I’m pretty useless when on it. The Relpax/Imitrex/Maxalt triptan family of drugs don’t do a thing. Anything else you can recommend? Thanks, man.

New Class at Knit-One-One!

You all probably know how much I love the Fabulous Bonne-Marie’s pattern, Chickami. Welp, now I’m teaching a class on it. Dress it up or down as much as you life: we’ll work through designing your own. Add a lace panel? Why not? How ’bout some cables? Learn to cable without a needle? Okay! Bring 500-1000 yards of your favorite DK-to-worsted weight yarn (cotton is good for summer, Rowan Calmer is dreamy), a 24inch circular needle that allows you to get 5st/inch in YOUR GAUGE, and you’re good to go.

I had to whip up this sample version this week, since the old pictures of me workin’ this tank show me with some crazy old haircuts. (Back to dark — I like this new haircolor (Loreal Feria 51) much better.)

And oh, my god, I’m in love (again) with Rowan Calmer. This stuff is all right for lace, but PERFECT for cables.

See?

I think you should totally take the class with me. But if you don’t live here, then you should go buy the pattern, if you haven’t already, and then throw in your own touches. And then tell me about what you did with it!