Fever Pitch.

Someone is still trying to beat that holiday deadline :-)

Fun Guy

This morning as I was out taking a walk with our dog Farkle (she is nearly 14) I saw this really cool tree fungus that I just had to include in the 'ol blog. It was about a foot in diameter and the brightest yellow. In my neck 'o the woods you definitely don't see cool stuff like this every day.

"Cool tree fungi"

Beaming with pride...and a little envious to boot.

I just had to add this to the 'ol blog. Carlin finished her Dad's Christmas sweater. Yippee!

(Luckily, he doesn't really read this blog or i'd be in trouble!)

It practically blogs itself.

Please, may I have one minute and twenty nine seconds of your time.

"hilarity ensues"

"World's ugliest dog dies"

R.I.P. Sam

They are out of their Vulcan minds....

I swear when I saw this in the adult beverage section of the grocery store it had to be a mistake. I also thought it looked like something I might find in the bubble bath section at Target. You must take a look and tell me your thoughts. Oh, and by the way...the stuff is not cheap, around $12.00 each.

There is a large little hat that shall remain pictureless. Some of you saw me working on it at the last Sunday SnB. Let's just say making that thing turned into the worst idea on the planet. Here are the reasons, bear with me, list's are big these days and I am a bandwagon jumper...

1. "FUGLY"...."thanks Clare and Tevana and Carlin for NOT saying anything," Danielle said, in a very sarcastic way.
2. Scratchier then "Scotts Brand" toiletpaper on a baby's bottom
3. HUGE. It fit me with room and it was supposed to be for a 4 year old.

I ended up making this hat instead: (I used "Ricochet" by Moda Dea. I'm happy with the results. I took a cockeyed picture, it really is shaped much better then this and it WILL fit a four year old)

I took a little trip to Echo Park's very own "third world yarn store/magazine stand" the other day and I bought a few balls of my favorite Mexican yarn...

Currently, i'm using the red for a scarf for me to wear on Thanksgiving...i'm making it using the "Arabesque stitch" the camera user (me) couldn't quite capture the stitch pattern very well but here it is anyway:

and the chocolate brown will be used for a scarf/holiday present made using this pattern.

I almost forgot....

You know what I did today?
(and NO that's not me, though I am feeling 90 years old at the moment)

Today I feel like a...

彈劾布希!

Thanks for the Bush clock, Clare! Okay, now everyone say "Bush Clock" ten times fast....outloud!

:-)

Off kilter

Dixie wrote a blog entry over at Blog Coven that I found extremely provocative. In fact, it answered a lot of "whys" for me . The other day I thought to myself that Mercury had to be in retrograde because of all the weirdness happening to me lately...I think that I prefer to go with her Mars theory instead. Things are so out of sorts I even did a Rune reading for the first time in years. It was right on. Here's what it looked like:

I'm getting nervous about the holiday projects so I'm trying to do things that take no time. The people that they are for do not crochet or knit so they have absolutely no concept of how long or short of a time they take. I feel like I'm duping the commoners. Oh well. The sham will continue.

My Grandmother commented about a week or so ago, using her best Jewish guilt, about how she would love to have another scarf for the cooler weather. Here's the part that got me...I think she feels like why would people, grandchildren included, want to do things for her out of the goodness of their hearts? She offered to pay me for it! I feel so cheap. Like a Crochet Whore...I told her to leave the money on the nightstand.

Grandmother's scarf:

Happy "All Saints Day "

Hope everyone had a safe and happy Halloween... Carlin ended up having a very popular costume. So much so that she was receiving full size candy bars :-)

It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life. ~Rita Rudner

I'd like to give a "shout out" to this man for putting up with me for the last 15 years. Today is our 14th wedding anniversary. Love you honey. Here's to many more.

Sweater, fini!

So yesterday at the SnB I started to sweat the fact that I may not have enough yarn to finish the baby sweater I was working on. I was worried for a couple of reasons. The first being that this is a sweater for a baby and when crocheted in mass quantities Simply Soft becomes like one of those lead aprons you wear while having an Xray. The second reason is because i'm trying to do stash busting things. Granted, I started this with the yarn I had left from "TDB" and I had to go and buy another skein, but I really did not want to have to buy more and then have the majority left over after. That would have put me in the same position I was in when I started. I did end up with enough and this is what I have left over, yay!








and here is the sweater:

What I need.

Ok Clare, you got me. I wanna play"What I need" (remember kids,this is where you go to Google and type in "[your name] needs"...first 10 things, blah, blah, blah.)

1. Danielle needs to be attuned to how she is feeling
2. Danielle needs to let the Social Security Administration know ( what do they need to know? See #8 of this list)
3. Danielle needs to make announcement at October meeting for volunteers to make phone calls (Phone calls people! Make phone calls!)
4. Danielle needs some advice about IUI pregnancy please! (ummm no, I don't)
5. Danielle needs to stop making stuff up. :-)
6. Danielle needs to be abused (in a good way)
7. Danielle needs four wheel drive
8. Danielle needs to retire (comfortably, with lots of money)
9. Danielle needs to raise £1000 to cover flights, food and Team UK uniform (what the hell is Team UK? Dixie? Anyone?)
10. Danielle needs another bath

I think a couple of posts back I mentioned that I was knitting a sweater on size 4 needles for my nephew. Let's just say it's not going to happen. I was completely overzealous in my choice of needle size and yarn in relation to my lack of knitting skill. However, as a side note, I am still going to attempt knitting socks in the very near future. After much trepidation, I have frogged the 8,000,000,000 rows of that sweater and have found a crocheted sweater pattern I like a lot better and it's fun and satisfying!
Here is my progress so far....










The funny thing about certain crochet patterns, usually the stuff that is free, is that you have to look past the obvious dorkiness of it's appearance in the photo . This sweater was no exception. I hope that my visualization skills have not let me down and the end result will be what I have envisioned. Time will tell.

Happy Birthday to our cat Cyddy. She's 15 today! The cat butt you see is Baby Olive, she's only 10.

Yipee Cayee !

"TDB" = DONE!

and the shawl that I made for my mom...

Incommunicado

I'm still here. I have been a flake in ALL aspects of my life as of late. Not just in the blogging department. I've been super non-committal about everything. Sometimes I think it's just easier that way.
I've been working on some projects. In case you haven't heard...the frigging holidays are coming. Which means... holiday projects. Yay.

Hats...


















Little girls hat, for the niece...
















Oh, and i've become semi-suicidal with my latest urge to knit. I'm making a baby sweater for one of my nephews with size 4 needles. Oy vey. At least it's a smallish piece. That ought to satiate my urge to knit for awhile. After it's completed I plan on trying socks. Hopefully, Dixie
the Guru of socks, will come through with that beginning pattern we talked about at last Sunday's SnB.

"Very hot and still the air was, Very smooth the gliding river, Motionless the sleeping shadows" Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's been awhile since my last entry. it was too hot to write anything coherent (see my last post.)The level of heat this summer had really begun to get to me. We don't have air conditioning. Our house is over 100 years old and I guess no one ever bothered to have it installed. Usually, the temps over the summer near Downtown L.A., which is only about a mile and a half from me, do not warrant having air conditioning. Believe it or not 15 miles inland we still get the ocean breezes, what with no hills or mountains to get in the way. I actually semi-seriously pondered the idea of getting air conditioning for a few weeks this summer. But alas, the weather yesterday and for a few days more at least, have been overcast and in the upper 60's and low 70's, enough to make my air conditioning needs almost a distant memory.

I also found myself over the last couple of weeks to be very affected emotionally by the situation on the Gulf Coast. Just when I thought I was incapable of having those types of feelings toward humankind I have an emotional breakdown that seems to just go on and on.

The cooler weather means that I will again have to pick up TDB (the damn blanket). The occasion for which I need to present that present is fast approaching. However, i'm sure it will have to be late. My mother's birthday was last Tuesday and i'm near completion on her obligatory gift, a shawl. The blanket has re-entered the queue right after that. Photos are forthcoming.