WHY????

Okay - so we are planning a great 3 day weekend - go to cabin tonight, have fun with kids & dog before school starts ... great fun. Bonfire, fishing, knitting! water gun fights, playing fetch all day, swimming.

But the dog stank -- she didn't stink -- she stank! So told oldest daughter to wash the dog -- its okay, she is 16 and can handle the dog. well she got the soap on and left the 12 yr old in charge of rinsing the dog off ... not too bad really, he has enough common sense to keep the dog listening to him.

So next thing I know the 8 yr old is coming in the house crying - somehow she managed to get pulled into the concrete house and put a lovely chip in one of the lenses of her glasses. didn't break the frame by the look of it -- just chipped it right where she looks thru.

So how did she get slammed into the wall you might ask? Why the 12 yr old thought it was okay to put the 60lb kid in charge of the 90lb dog, of course. this is why 12 yr olds should not be allowed to baby sit.

she is okay, the glasses to the brunt of it all ... but damn it! well wouldn't you know it, her prescrip is 5 weeks too old for them to make her a new lens -- all she needed was the one.
It takes 2 weeks to get into her regular eye dr. school starts next week too -- crap.

Luckily the eye dr attached to the eye glass place is able to squeeze her in around the other patients -- no guarentee as to just when she will get seen, just sometime tonight before they close for the day. so we could be seen right away, or we could be sitting there for an hour or more waiting for our turn.

Actually it was really nice of them to squeeze her in -- she has never been seen there before so this is a really nice thing they are doing for her ... of course my wimpering on the phone may have helped some.

Then to top it all off -- she fell in the shower so now she has TWO hurt elbows (she scraped up the other one earlier playing football with the 12 yr old) .... boy I hope there aren't anymore 'surprises' today.

I need some tea and some knitting time .... but I've got to pack ... I've been putting it off, and now hubby has to come home early! damn. Not that I don't like hubby coming home (its a bright spot) but I haven't started packing yet and now he will know. damn.

Irony

I just checked the posts on the hss4 site and my partners site -- how ironic ... she just got back from vacation too.
(Maran, if you're reading this ~~ I happen to love the smell of campfire)
I am busy trying to find a pattern that will look great with Gryffindor scarlet & gold .... its actually quite tough.

I don't want to do just stripes .... that just seems so dull ... but I don't do duplicate stitch very well ... and I haven't tried artesia-in-the-round yet so its a bit daunting. Then there's the question of "does it have to be knitted socks?" I have been wanting to try crocheted socks and I'm a whizz with the crochet hook ... but my partner is working on knitted socks I'm sure.

I love knitting socks -- there's a great feeling of accomplishment everytime you clear one of the dpns and move to the next one ... it feels like you are going warp speed. I have tried socks on 2 circs, but without the constant clearing of the needle it just doesn't feel like I'm getting anywhere.

Forgive me Cat Bohndi, but 2 circs just don't do it for me .... but the patterns in the book are nice - I will have to 'translate' them back to conventional terms/ways though.

Speaking of Cat - I never did post about my order from KnitPicks that came before vacation.... {place Hufflepuff screech here - even though I'm Slytherin}

Banging my Head against the Wall now

UUUUUGGGGHHHH!!!!!! I'm so frustrated....can you tell?

I didn't get a chance to go to the coffee shop with the other Scout Mom's this weekend as I had hoped because it was cancelled due to lack of interest. If hubby hadn't answered the phone I would have pretended that everything was honky doory and talked the oldest daughter, gimpy and all, to come with me and we could have spent the entire time knitting and talking and sipping coffee and tea--she says they have tea, it would have only been my second time there and the first time I got away without ordering anything---but no, hubby answered and I didn't think fast enough on my toes.....so I didn't get any knitting done yesterday.

Instead I spent the afternoon cleaning the kitchen....especially the stovetop. This is the first summer that my oldest has been on his own while we went out of town--his favorite thing to do was use the deep fryer (and leave me the mess)....because I hate the dripping of the oil I have it on a sheet pan that's lined with foil for easy cleanup.

As it turned out 18 yr olds have no sense of oil life---I thought he had changed the oil at least once over the summer--he hadn't. Oil in a fryer, I'm told, needs to be changed at least every 3 months depending what you've cook in it...if you've done any sort of meat it needs to be changed sooner. Anyways, I never really thought much of the stove--I don't usually use it....I either use the oven (they are seperate units) or the microwave, the stove is mostly used when I want popcorn or fried eggs.....mostly its just the place I put the cookie sheets or roaster when they come out of the oven.

So I had been keeping the top of the burner cleaned up okay....but when I pulled out the burner trays to clean---OMGs---he must have spilled the fryer or something and wiped it up without thinking of cleaning under the spill-pan. I had sticky "dried" oil all underneath the dials, under the dial plate and the rubber gasket that holds the plate in place. He had switched the burner grate with the one from the other side knowing that I tend to put the big tea kettle & the Splatter Blue camper coffee pot there so you can't see it.....gaaaawwwwwkkkkkk. And only one single--just one--S.O.S. pad left to do it.....it died after I finished both drip pans, the dials, the dial plate, the gasket, the stove top, one grate....but it didn't make it thru the really ucky one.

I could have killed him, but you know he's a kid (at least to me) so I turned on the football game in the kitchen and started cleaning it up---everytime our team made a TD he'd say "did you see that?" or "Look at that, that's amazing" and I'd answer with "I didn't see anything, I'm too busy cleaning someone else's mess" or "no I was busy scrubbing this ____".....I think he got the point though because one time when our team made a TD he used it as an excuse to give me a great big hug....he NEVER hugs--"I love you" gets answered with "yup" or "huh?".

So I will have to wait until the next time I can talk hubby into taking me to the regular store to get some more and really pound it....MIL says she used to put them in a black plastic bag with a bottles worth of amonia, tie it shut and then put the whole thing out on the front lawn in the bright sun and it would just eat off the grease. It might be worth the try--except I have a hard enough time not getting sick from the smell of Moth balls, I can't imagine what the smell of amonia would do to me.

Anyhow, back to my knitting.

As it turns out not knitting yesterday would probably have been a good thing---because I got done with the first part of the second socks ribbing and found that --shit!--the guage is off again! I measured really carefully too--but the sock was WAY too big....I hadn't noticed it while knitting because I tend to keep the stitches bunched so quick work, but damn!

So now I've had to frog and now its back to the drawing board....so I like the simplicity of the pattern but the colorworks is driving me nuts....it is not working out the way I thought it would. One row one color, one row the next....no pooling!

{sigh} well I've got to get back to the needles---I have to get these to my partner by Halloween and hubby is taking three days off this week so I don't think there will be much knitthing going on then. He seems to get jealous of it....what he doesn't realize is that there are days that my crafting is the only thing that keeps me from-=-=-=-sending him back to work!!!

Another Season Over

{sigh}well another summer season at the lake is over....the boats are pulled and the docks too.

Actually not a bad weekend for closing up...yeah it rained the majority of the time, and we pulled docks in the lightening but it had to get done. I know we are crazy for being in the water during a thunderstorm but my FIL wouldn't take no for an answer.

But it wasn't bitterly cold like it has been in the past...no hail storms, no straight line winds, no strong winds...other than the rain that came down so hard you couldn't see it wasn't too bad. We started at about 8am and had it all done by 10am....actually it was one of the shortest pullings we've ever had, and we actually had less of a crew.

Normally for Opening and Closing weekends we have a full crew--everyone in the family (with the exception of my BIL) are expected to be there, and for all the financial help the folks are giving the other parts of the family they better well had better be there--but this year for some reason, the whole of my SILs family decided to take a powder! A total, absolute, see you maybe if I need money, powder.

So we put in the docks by ourselves and had to pull them out by ourselves...and it went BETTER~!~ I couldn't believe it, but then when you have only a few doing it, and these people are determined to get it done instead of bullshitting or fucking around, you'd be surprised at how fast it goes!!

We also re-arranged the storage sheds and pole-barn that holds the boats, and this year a neighbor's car...boy did we ever have to re-arrange it--we may have to do it again too, depending on whether they can figure out a way of getting the backhoe in.

Picked up some more wood, but it was too wet last night to stack...and I'm kind of hoping it will start raining here soon so it will be too wet to do it tonight too--I don't mind stacking the wood, its just that most of it is pretty funky because its so old...yuk@!

New Video of Addy

After much begging from my oldest daughter I have uploaded a new video of our puppy...she is 7 months old in this video and we were on "vacation" at the cabin getting ready....rather taking a break from getting ready....for my MILs family reunion.




Enjoy! What the video doesn't show you *because the battery died* was her practically pulling me off the pontoon when we docked! LAND!!

Home Sweet Home

I am so glad to be home. I enjoy going on vacation but it is always nice to get home to my full stash, um, I mean, my own bed.

We had 10 days of pure work work work. We got up on a Friday and the work didn't stop until Monday after the reunion, my mother-in-laws family reunion. I doubt there will ever be a reunion on my FIL side or even on my own parents side....which I think is really sad, but that's the fact of life.

I will try to write more personal stuff over on my yahoo blog because I have some major gossiping to do and this isn't the place to do it, the private blog is.

I did get some stitching accomplished:

I finally finished the first sock for my daughter, now the second sock will have to wait for me to finish my HSS partners socks...I am kind of disappointed with the way they turned out actually. I messed up the pick up stitches on my gusset and now I have some pretty big ventilation holes there...oh well...it is also the first time I've done a tailored sock so I was having some problems with double increases/decreases...I also got interupted so often that I had made one section too long and the other section too short.

So after I take a break from them and work on my partners socks (using a pattern type I'm used to) I will be comtemplating whether I will let the sock stand as it is now or make a new sock ripping out the stitches from the old sock as I go.

But I will wait....I may even wait until after I finish my daughters brownie socks, even though I was planning on them using the same pattern. I did find however that each sock takes one ball of Bernat Sox yarn...or about 1.75 ounces...50 grams....203 yards....186 meters.

so I was right in buying two skeins of yarn in each color. I found some hair binders at walmart while on vacation that will match them wonderfully!

I even had time to knit up something special for my partner using pearle cotton and size 0 needles...I will probably make another for her using even smaller needles but not until the kids start school so I will be nearly uninterupted, and I can put on three pairs of magnifying glasses w/o worry of being picked on.

I feel kind of bad because I came back from vacation and found that there have been some trivia questions going on the HSS2 blog that I've missed and let my house down on...time to pull out those books and keep them close to the computer I see.

Actually it reminds me alot of the trivia contests we used to have on the WB HPbbs...one person would ask a question and then whoever answered it would ask the next one, the moderator would decide the difficulty of each question and award points...only this time only McGonagall will ask the questions. Either way I've found it is helpful to keep the books handy...along with the URL for the HP lexicon!

Well football is coming on in about...ewww, NOW! Got to go.

Go Vikes!! I bleed purple.

Getting Squared Away

Well things are getting set up for vacation...I finally got the database set up on my craft exchange group on yahoo so partners will be waiting for me to match them when I get back (interested? You just need to do three things...1 be a crafter, 2 be tolerant of other peoples religions-we are mostly pagan, and 3 be willing to send a JIC package....if you can do this go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/All_Craft_Exchange we are now doing sign ups for old members for Mabon/Fall Equinox, and newbies still have time to complete obligations to get in on the Halloween exchange).

So what does a gargoyle pack when going on vacation you might ask? Here is a shot of my crafting suitcase (clothes are a whole other bag!)

I will print the list of what it all is when I get back....I have to count it all first! I just went, "hmmm" and started chucking in stuff I thought for sure I would need...LOL.

You can guess if you'd like....but I offer no prizes for the correct answer....just for fun.