Rachael

The holiday Google graphic that’s been changing has been SO CUTE. I mean, come on, knitting kangaroos? What could be better?

Graphics can be seen HERE. (As I post this, only the first four images have gone up, and it looks like Mama and Baby Roo were doing a little knitting, and then gave a strange-looking sweater to a kangaroo friend. Do you think she’ll be seen wearing it in the next image, with two heads, a big mama one and little baby one, poking out?) (Hey! I think Reader Garnprinzessin is right — that IS a Kangaroo Papa and Baby Roo knitting FOR Mama. Oh, that’s even CUTER. And say hello to Rachael’s gender-stereotyping. Sheesh.)

Okay, I’m home for the holidays in a few hours, so enjoy your family and whatever you’re doing this weekend, hug on someone, knit a little bit, and laugh a lot. Be kind. Knit a sweater for a kangaroo. (And a special hello to Reader Maria who hugged me at Royal Coffee yesterday — you made my day.)

Yay!

Found via Jill, I leave you for the weekend with this. It’s brilliant. A second-violinist joke! Hahahaha! Never not funny! Plus, the end is wickedly funny. Good music-geek stuff.

Why does it feel like Christmas is about ten seconds away?
It’s still only Friday. Oh, I know why. Because with driving time, I have
worked EIGHTY SEVEN hours this week. Today I had eight hours off between
shifts. Excuse me while I yawn eight or nine more times.

So. 

If you were here, you’d see me looking up at the clock,
shifting around in my chair, biting my pen, taking a sip of water. Can you imagine? Have you ever heard of such a thing?

I am BORING. I am trying to think of some way to amuse you,
some trick that I can pull out of a hat for this long drive to Grandma’s house.
You kicking the back of the seat is NOT going to get us there any faster, young
lady (or gent). 

So this: What’s your accidental favorite handmade sweater?
By that I mean this: I have a few favorite sweaters. I love the recent Central Park hoodie, and the cashmere one with the
Venetian buttons. I wear my purple alpaca quite often. I’m proud of them – they
fit and they look good. (Click the Finito sweater on the left to see iffen you want.)

And then there’s the orange one. Remember Orange Alert?

Three years ago, I made it with a panel of five-stitch stockinette running down the
middle, because I was going to make it into a cardigan. But I never did, just
wore it occasionally as a pullover, usually while camping. 

It’s Paton’s Classic Wool, so it pills something fierce, and
it looks all raggedy now, in any light. And for the last two months, I have been
living in it. Ever since the weather changed, it’s my dog-walking sweater. I
pull it on over my tee-shirt on my way to the dog park or the beach, and
unfortunately for those around me, I don’t usually take it off when I get home.
It’s the most comfortable, lightweight, warm-but-not-too-hot sweater I’ve ever
worn. And because I don’t care about it, have never Loved it, I’m not concerned
about the dogs jumping up all muddy or sandy on me. I don’t care about pulling
the sleeves up past my elbows to do dishes. It’s just right.

I keep a hat, and some big clunky mittens (have I shown you
those yet?) and a scarf and a big zipped hoodie in case of rain in the back of
the car, and I pull them on as I load dogs in or out of the car. But the
sweater, it stays on, and now I capital-L Love it.

Walking dogs, in the cool sun.

So, tell me about your favorite sweater, the one you wear the most, even if it’s not the best one, the most elegant one you ever made. Send me a link to a picture. Entertain me. Please?

https://rachaelherron.com/why_does_it_fee/

Last week,
something strange happened to me. Lala noticed it first, I didn’t. She asked, one
evening, “Are your hands blue?

No, of
course they weren’t, I said.

Only, hey, check it out, when I really looked at
them and quit telling her that I had blue undertones to my skin naturally, it
kinda DID kind of look like my hands were blue. I felt fine. A little cold, but
it was cold in the house. My hands didn’t hurt, weren’t tingling. They were
just blue.

I did a
little online research, only a bit, I swear, because I know that madness lives
at the end of that road, and decided it was nothing to worry about if it didn’t
happen again.

But then
Sunday night, Lala noticed it again. “Your hands! Are blue!”

“Are they?”
I wasn’t convinced, but they got rapidly bluer as the night wore on. A friend
came over and told me my hands looked as if they had been dyed. Both Lala
and she were worried, and they started me worrying a bit. My hands were SO blue.
Grey-blue, that moldy-blue look that skin gets when there’s not enough oxygen
going through it. 

And I felt
fine. Completely fine. Again, quite cold, but dude, the house is cold and I’ve
been really tired, which makes my susceptibility to chills that much greater.

So I got in
the tub to warm up.

After a
while in the hot water, I’d warmed up. I put the book down and planned on just
lying there for a while, but I glanced down at my legs poking out of the
bubbles.

My thighs
were blue. I called Lala in and she confirmed: my legs were that ashen
grey-blue all the way down to my sock line, below which my feet were happy and
warm and pink.

What the
hell?

And you
know what? It still took me a few minutes to figure out.

Then it clicked. I started
scrubbing my legs and hands. I HAD washed my hands before this, of course, but
now I scrubbed them with all my might. The
bubbles turned blue. My skin went pink.

Dude.

New jeans,
from Gap. That I’d worn twice without washing first, the first time a week ago
and then again on Sunday night, when our friend had been over. I’d been
standing in the kitchen talking with her, my hands shoved into my back pocket,
my hands getting bluer and bluer as the night and the dye wore on.

Best diagnosis ever.

 

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Those boxes on the right are all Christmas things, so they won’t stay there. The dogs are usually cluttered like that, nothing I can do about them. Oh, this felt good to do. I worked for HOURS in my room and still didn’t get everything done. It isn’t even that evident in these pictures, but my room had gotten out of control. I maintain a pretty tight rein on the rest of the house (Lala, of course, has her room to mess up just like I do mine), and it’s usually pretty neat and clean, but my room was filling up with clothing and yarn piled up on the floor, papers piled in leaning stacks….. 

You can see in the top photo above the printer my horizontal filing system. I have a method that works for me — I stack all completed paperwork and get around to filing it maybe once or twice a year. In the meantime, the pile leans and pushes against the sock yarn basket, making skeins jump behind that bookcase, which I hate, because it’s always the skein I need next.

Instead of simply filing that pile and starting over, I went to Ikea and bought pretty paper boxes to maintain my system. Isn’t that kind of sick?

I didn’t touch the yarn, though. I was recovering from being sick. I’m not crazy. That’s a big commitment, one I’m not sure I’m yet ready for.

Other exciting news: In addition to having gained two pounds since her spaying, Miss Idaho, now eight little plump pounds of spazzy love, can almost not fit in my yarn bag. It amused me to make Lala hold it on the sidewalk:

OOOH! I forgot — I also got the organizing bug for the front sunporch. It’s been a completely unutilized room in our house — a dumping zone for boxes and things we didn’t know what to do with, a broken toilet tank lid (now that I think about it, why the hell didn’t I just throw that out?), a rope swing still in the box, a tent, boxes of papers and books to recycle, boxes that need to be kept but had no other home. It was ugly and I hadn’t ever gotten to the point where I could completely go blind to it, and it was visible from the living room through the inside window (which I love), making it that much worse. So I took a bunch of junk out, covered the stuff I can’t move yet with pretty fabric and set up a writing spot.

The chair will eventually be replaced with a comfy armchair from the thrift store or Craigslist, but I haven’t reached that point yet. Soon.

This room now makes me happy. That’s so cool. I love home.

https://rachaelherron.com/before_after_th/

The Whoreshoes played the Bottom of the Hill the other night, and they were awesome, as usual. The place was packed, and apart from an unfortunately offensive performance artist who acted out the part of a "hillbilly," it was a fine, fine time. Lala’s friend from the old days, Ron, was there (hi, Ron!) and he was aDORable. I’d never met him before, and he came up to me in the club and said, "You’re even more glamorous in person." I looked over my shoulder, sure that he thought I was someone else. A sweetie-pie, and he’s a great knitter — check out his first hat:

I didn’t get many shots of the show, because I only had my cell camera with me for most of it, but I like this one:

Lala uses a walker to hold her lap-steel guitar, and that’s just so punk it kills me. And do you KNOW how hard it is to find a used walker? Those are in demand, people. There must be lots and lots of lap-steel players out there, because those walkers don’t hit Craigslist that often…..

And our marathon-running gorgeous-sweater-designing Emily was there. This is a great picture of her:

Me, I look a little drunk, which I decidedly was not. I was the driver, and I was also the babysitter. Yay babysitting in a bar! Prior written consent granted, and of course, there’s no smoking in bars in California, so it’s almost as healthy an environment as a coffee shop. We just had to make sure 9 month old Dylan didn’t knock back too many tequila shooters. He didn’t. But he does play a mean game of pool.

Oh, my GOD, how cute is that? That picture is the screensaver on my phone, and it makes me happy every time I look at it. Ask Lala. I keep going, "Look! I turned my phone on! Look at him, just LOOK at him!"

All right. I’m at work, and I’m going to finish up a little Xmas knitting for that little boy up there tonight, if it stays quiet. Also, I’m going to try to not walk much. I went on a three-mile run yesterday, which was sadly longer than my recent runs, and also, the run included hills. My thighs, they don’t like the hills so much. They’re yelling at me today. Remember when I could run seventeen? Twenty? Twenty-six twice? Not so much anymore. Three felt like fifteen yesterday. But surprisingly, I haven’t lost any speed (because I really didn’t have much to lose, but I’m still at the same pace I was last year).

I found this amazing run RIGHT near our house, just drive up the hill (no, really, it’s an incredibly steep hill), park at the dog park, run a mile and half through pretty hilly Oakland neighborhoods with Clara running at my side, then run back and let Clara run off leash a bit at the park while staring at the silvery bay below. Excellent.

Enjoy your weekend, y’all. Mwah.