Knitting Content!

Finally: some knitting. Remember I told you I was working on a new hat, and that I wasn't sure I liked it? Well, I frogged that back to the ribbing and came up with this instead. I'm actually not sure I like this either, because in typical me fashion I didn't bother to swatch so it's a little on the large side.



The stitch pattern is called Little Curls, and the yarn is Rowan Cocoon, a merino/kid mohair single in the Tarn colorway. Even though I really enjoyed the yarn, I haven't blocked this hat or even woven the ends in yet, so it may still end up as something else! I may try knitting it at a smaller gauge next time and if that looks better I'll post a quick how-to.



In other news, Fiona is now a high school graduate, even though Mary's wearing the mortarboard. Yay!

One Down, Two to Go

Yesterday was Fiona's Senior Presents event for NCL, so we've made it - one daughter through six years of community service and six years of boring meetings she chafed at and griped about. She knitted baby hats for preemies, she served food to the homeless and seniors, she delivered Meals on Wheels, she collected cans, she gave birthday parties for kids in shelters, she built Habitat for Humanity houses, and she performed many many other hours of service I can't even catalog, across many areas, to get to this point. Did I mention I had to be there for most of it? I draw the line at beach cleanups and made sure she had a ride to those, but mostly, we did it together. Anna's still in the thick of it and Mary hasn't even started yet, but they'll do it too.



At the end of the six years, the girls don white dresses and come out, escorted by young Marines and then by their fathers. For us, this was Fiona's graduation celebration. Our whole family was there, two loud tables of us, cheering her on. You can see her laughing with John because I was whooping it up to make them look at my camera!

Can you see I live in the land of the giants? John is 6'5" as a point of reference. I figure by the time Mary's 12 or so, I'll be dwarfed by all and never able to reach whatever gets put away on the top shelves of my kitchen.



The senior girls join their families for dinner and afterwards there's a fashion show for the sophomores and juniors. Anna and my niece Elizabeth got to model high-end boutique fashions and did their best Project Runway strut - very fun.

Speaking of those Marines, how awesome are they? The one who brought Fiona out told her that he had very bad stage fright! They are barely older than the girls - they told her most of their friends were attending college now. But - this is the amazing and heartwrenching part - these boys, the same age as Fiona's friends practically, are all Iraqi war vets. At an age when her friends are still being coddled by their parents. I was proud of them and wanted to cry at the same time...our young people should all be in college, all safe.

Another Noni Moment

Does it seem like the knitting has totally gone by the wayside? Every day has been wrapped up with a work project or a graduation moment. I'm knitting a little bit, but mostly I'm so frazzled that my calm-down activity has mainly consisted of playing hangman on my iphone.

When I do knit, I'm working on a new hat pattern that I'm not sure I love, and occasionally picking up a row or two of my rainbow-sleeve sweater. As soon as we get through the next week I think I'll be able to devote more time to that.

Last night was La Jolla Palooza, the last big show of the year at the girls' school. Fiona was in a dance number and then sang with the Madrigals. Above, you see the two of us crying like idiots at the end...I think I actually cried through the last 20 minutes of the show. She sang a solo, Blackbird, but what really got me was her teacher singing You've Got a Friend to the entire choir. That song is a guaranteed cryfest for me.

Today is Fiona's Senior Presents event, the culmination of six years of National Charity League service. She'll be walking down a big runway in a white dress on John's arm and dancing with him; I'm already getting a little weepy just thinking about it. And see how red I get when I cry? I'm going to need a lot of concealer.

Prom

Does it seem like I forgot I had other children? There's so much going on with Fiona right now and all the end-of-year activities. This weekend was prom, next weekend she makes her NCL Senior Presentation, the week after that she graduates, and there have been and still are a bunch of dinners/showcases/breakfasts/awards and grad night all thrown in there.



I ask you, as an adult, barring that you're, like, Angelina Jolie, when will that much attention ever be focused on you again? What a letdown to grow up!



Anyway, prom was at the zoo this year; I was informed it was "lame" but she had fun anyway.



Speaking of Angelina Jolie, you notice Fiona's dress looks like the one Angelina took her twins to at Cannes? We are just so fashion-forward around here.



We had one of those prom hair disasters, too...we went to a salon for a French twist and ended up with a French poodle. I had to take it down and do it myself; luckily I always think I can do anything so sheer confidence held it together and I covered the questionable bits with fresh orchids.



She was beautiful!

Baby, It's Cold Outside...

In case you were wondering, Fiona has picked Bennington. Finally, all my wool will have a destination.

Where Did April Go?

And how did it get to be the middle of May, I ask? I swear I blinked and a month was gone. Anyway, in my last post I promised yarn content, so here it is - the long overdue trip to Shuttles, Spindles & Skeins in Boulder. The day we were there, it snowed! So exciting for two La Jolla girls...a little over an inch by the next morning, beautiful big mountain flakes of snow, which we were able to leave behind by getting on an airplane - the perfect kind of snow.



So, you get to Shuttles, which is in a little strip mall, you open the door, and this is what you see. Spinning wheels! That was a thrill. One of these days, when I have some free time that doesn't get sucked up instantly, I'd like to learn how to spin. The store is large and has another big room for classes that's filled with looms, too. Very cool.



Above you see the magazine racks and bookshelves. I scored several back issues if IK, which I wrapped like babies and jammed into my carryon, creasing clothes without a care. Wrinkles in clothes I can steam out, but wrinkles in my magazines - heavens no.



The other cool thing they had was a lot of roving, which Fiona was very taken by - Mommy, look! They have giant yarn! All in all, it's a very nice shop with friendly staff. Definitely worth a visit if you're in the area.



One last thing - we did see lots of wildlife on our trip. We saw deer and foxes, but also - penguins! We were on the inaugural nonstop flight from Denver to San Diego on Southwest, and we had SeaWorld penguins on our plane! Yes - Penguins on a Plane - loose! There's Pete the Penguin right by my knee!!!!!

Boulder, Part 1

Say "college" once more and I'll fling this laptop at your head.

Well, we're back, and still no closer to making a college decision than before we left. It's between Bennington and Boulder right now, and if Fiona gets off waitlists at Sta. Clara or Scripps I guess we'll have a four-way tie. At least the others have fallen out of consideration.



Boulder has a lot going for it - it's in a great town, the scenery is beautiful, and everyone looks like a cast member of The Hills. Plus, it's La Jolla in the Rockies - Did you know that 25% of the kids are from California? - which has its own pluses and minuses. If UC Santa Cruz and USC met, fell in love, and had a baby, it would be CU Boulder. A little crunchy, a little shiny.

A moment of silence for Harry Potter's glasses, please.

Of course, Boulder also has about 25,000 undergrads. Does anyone else think that seems like a lot of people standing in line in the caf? I'm sure any one of the freshman lectures contains the equivalent of the entire student body of Bennington College...again, pluses and minuses. Oy. Decisions, decisions.



So Fiona and I flew into Denver, stayed with family overnight, and set off for Boulder in the morning in our black rented PT Cruiser, which, as soon as I figured out how to roll down the windows of and read the analog clock (hard to do going 65) turned out to be a lot of fun to drive. In Boulder, we stayed at the St. Julien on Walnut. I highly recommend it - it's beautiful, centrally located, has a spa, and is easily the quietest hotel I've ever been in. Also, the bellboy recommended a great restaurant - The Med - for dinner. Try the carrot cake.

Stay tuned tomorrow for some fibery content!

Scattering

So yeah, I'm still working on the Wool Peddler's Shawl, and the Mystic Light shawl, and a few other things, but you know me. Gotta be starting something. So I had this Noro Kureyon in my stash, three skeins, not enough for a sweater, too much for a scarf.

Now it's sleeves. I cast on willy-nilly, knitted through one ball; cast on another, knitted through the second ball; and now I've joined the third ball and will add caps to both sleeves. I spent a loooong time figuring out whether I could do a seamless join to the sweater body (gray Peruvia, as yet unknit) and reading about intarsia in the round, and finally decided just to suck it up and knit the caps and seam later. I should've started from the top, but like I said, I started willy-nilly.

Anna is finally coming home on Thursday. It feels like she's been gone forever...and I won't be here when she gets back. Fiona and I are leaving this afternoon for Boulder, to look at CU. We're in that period where the yay/nay letters are arriving from the schools she applied to, and while we do have some yays from places she likes (Bennington at the top currently) she also got accepted to the theater program at Boulder and we thought we'd go see what it's like. We've been to Boulder before, but it's been a long time and Fiona was a lot younger - college was on the distant horizon back then. And while Boulder's beautiful, now we'll be looking at it from a different point of view. Boulder admissions people, if you read this, you might like to know the kids on Facebook have adopted the slogan, "Of Coors I'm going to Boulder."

While in Boulder, I plan on visiting Shuttles, Spindles & Skeins, and I hear you can tour the Celestial Seasonings place...I tell you, I'm an exciting vacation partner. I'm not sure Fiona will be able to keep up.

Mystery Cast-on

So after swatching the green Koigu for the Mystic Light mystery KAL I decided I wasn't crazy about that particular yarn for this project. Instead, I ordered some Dream in Color Smooshy in Lipstick Lava (isn't that a great name for a color?) from the Loopy Ewe. If you haven't ordered from LE before, I give it a high recommendation. Shipping was fast and along with some little knitterly extras there was a note in my order thanking me for my business - how cool is that? The internet has give us a vast number of choices, but in many cases it has removed the human touch from our dealings. Great customer service will definitely earn my loyalty.



Anyway. The first Mystic Light clue arrived on Wednesday, so I wound my Smooshy and then a bunch more yarn that was still living in LYS bags in my office. Can you tell I like red and blue? The off-white was kind of a fluke...it's Ultra Alpaca Light and some very soft Blue Sky Organic Cotton. I put the various other yarn cakes away and left the red, white & blue out so that I can say I'm ahead of the holiday game for the first time this year. As opposed to saying I'm still cleaning up remnants of 2007 and my stash is so out of control I'm pretending it's decor. Hey - at least it's not dirt.



Re: My knitting. I cast on with the red Smooshy and knitted through the set-up rows and about a third of the first clue-chart, and like it much better than the Koigu. Still love my Koigu, but now I love Smooshy too. Plus it's fun to say.

Deep Red Cravat

Here's one of those in-between projects I always have to have when my main projects get to that awkward teenage stage (hard to take anywhere, always asking difficult questions, sulking, what-have-you):



It's the Leaf Cravat by Teva Durham, which I found in an old issue of Interweave Knits (Winter 2002/2003 - before I started knitting!) The yarn is Knit Picks Merino Style in the Hollyberry colorway and it was knitted up on my brand-new Knit Picks Harmony Options, which I love love love.

The Easter Bunny!

Could it be? Those ears are awfully big!



Oh, it's just Snoopy, taking his four-hour midmorning nap.



I think he's determined to sleep with one eye open, just in case that rabbit comes back. Maybe next time he'll leave some biscuits instead of all that chocolate.

Clouds

Every now and then I look out my kitchen window and see something like this:


We don't get a lot of dramatic weather here in Windanseaville...sunny days, foggy days, and not much in between. This storm blew through overnight on Saturday and by Sunday we had Mary at the beach. She swam while John and I huddled in sweatshirts, chilled by the 65° afternoon.


This morning we heard from Anna, who's in Shanghai right now. She left on Saturday for a three-week exchange in China with her school and is spending this week attending classes at a high school there. She writes:

Hey daddy! It's me anna, I'm here in china and can already say i've reasonably beaten the time change. I feel like I've spent three days on a plane, really i have. We missed our flight in beijing and had to get a later flight, but we're finally at the school. It's cold. Like really cold. Like 5 degrees centigrade cold. Really cold. I mean, where's all this global warming I was promised?

Meh, walked around shanghai all day, I'm exhausted. I spent the morning in my partner's classes, music (which was nice, we sang, and there was an electric bass sitting in the corner), then math class (i couldn't figure out which kind, but we were doing sine, cosine, and tangent), politics and chinese of all things.

After, we went to the museum (I don't know which kind) but it was full of chinese art and money and artifacts and stuff. I started sketching a small statue (totally forgetting I had a camera) and after a while people started to watch over my shoulder. A lot of people crowded around to watch me sketch and to study the statue, to see what had caught my interest. I only noticed when I was done that I had drawn the attention of a lot of people (and several guards!). I suppose they wanted to make sure the crowd wasn't a commotion.

I got a lot of pictures along the way too. I felt kinda dumb because I walked into some people (the crowds are crazy) and tried apologizing, conveniently forgetting any chinese I had ever learned at that moment, not only did the people have no time for "sorry"s and "excuse me"s but of course the alerting sound of a foreign language and defensive "excuse me" hand gestures I think scared a lot of people. All of it was pretty exciting, and with sore feet and tired mind soon I will go to bed (it's about 8 o'clock here). I'm well and safe in China, not injured or sick, happily awaiting tomorow's adventures. I love you a lot.

To my entire family my love,
Anna

P.S. tell snoopy and patty and all the rest that I'm ice cold at night without them and I really am coming back, love them lots.

You'll notice I'm not mentioned by name like Patty & Snoopy, but I can tell she's thinking about me because of the "injured or sick" part. I'm pretty sure that was for my benefit. I had to go look up how cold 5°C is, and it's 41°F...Here's hoping she doesn't decide to go to school in New England. And PS, I told her to pack layers.

It's weird to think of my kid walking around on the other side of the world across the date line where it's tomorrow, a world apart and yet happy with sore feet.

Swatching a Mystery

Swatch? Me? Well, yes, this time, because the swatch was more interesting than a 4" stockinette square of unrelenting boredom. I swatched this beautiful green Koigu up for a mystery shawl KAL I joined: You sign up, and then you get part of the Mystic Light pattern each week...the project unfolds without you really knowing how it will turn out until it's all done. Click here if you want to join in.

I've never participated in a mystery KAL before (although some of my knitting becomes myterious - check out the little circled portion of my swatch below where I mysteriously switched the order of the YO & K2tog...smooth, huh? At least it's only a swatch.) but it seems like it'll be fun.

Back to the Knitting

Thank you, thank you, all of you who commented and contacted me about my dad's passing. You don't know how your kind words helped me - I appreciate knowing you are all out there! And you lurkers - I lurk on lots of blogs myself, so I know it's hard to come out of hiding sometimes - thank you so much. We are all trying to keep on with our normal lives again and just get on with everything. On this blog, I'm now getting back to my regularly scheduled knitting as evidenced above. That's a cotton kimono jacket you see there, a result of the bedside sitting I did last week. Amazing how just holding the needles calms me down.




The pattern is here, and it's very quick to knit but awfully cute when it's done. I was in Walmart (I know, it's evil, I normally boycott but I couldn't find something electronic I was looking for anywhere else in town. Pile that on top of my SUV guilt.) and wandered through the yarn aisle and saw Peaches & Creme yarn, which I had never seen in person before. Wow, it's $1.27! Sure, it felt like steel while knitting, but how can you pass up $1.27? Plus I had read that it would soften up after washing, sort of like the 501s I used to wear in the 80s.



Anyway, I bought a bunch in the three colorways you see here, knitted up that kimono, seamed it, and started a matching hat. I will admit that the hat, which should've taken a couple of hours, took three days because I screwed the pattern up five or six times and had to rip it back. Good thing I wasn't working on the Wool Peddler's Shawl...I just wasn't able to concentrate with everything going on.



The hat is the Center Square hat from Knitty, of course, and I will be finishing it off with some kind of little pompom or braided tassel in the multicolored yarn to tie it all in. I'll try to post a photo when everything's truly done.



Last night we went to watch Fiona and Anna in Midsummer Night's Dream and took my mom with us, and for a couple of hours we just concentrated on the play and laughed. Fiona played Helena and was a riot, and Anna played a fairy and got to sing in her soulful voice. They set the piece in Mardi Gras theme and overall the kids were great and it was very fun.

Jose Gonzalez, 1921 - 2008

My dear friends, today my darling father passed away after being ill for a very long time. He was dearly loved and will be deeply missed.

Waiting Room Knitting

This weekend started out so nicely...Friday morning Mary's school had a "Solarbration" to flip the ceremonial switch on its new solar power system. The mayor was there, the kids all sang "You Are My Sunshine," and our faith in humankind's ability to reverse global warming was restored as long as we turned a blind eye to all the parents' SUVs (my own included, mea culpa) parked out in front.

Friday afternoon the weekend took a bad left turn (Squeamish people or those wishing to avoid TMI should stop reading here and just look at the knitting.). My mom called to say my dad had an infection on his foot that didn't look too good, and that the doctor told her to head to the ER. My dad is 86, with so many chronic health issues that we're not exactly sure what keeps him going. I think it must be the Gallego genes...his own parents lived into their 90s.

Anyway, I met them at the ER, where we spent all of Friday until midnight talking to a series of doctors about things like amputation, advance directives, and everything else you never want to think about in conjunction with anyone you love, or really, with anyone at all. At 1:00 am they admitted him, at 2:00 am they took him in for a stat CT scan because his blood pressure was crazy high - turned out to be temporary so that was good; they medicated him and then he just sort of calmed down - and simultaneously they started him on two broad-spectrum antibiotics.




Today he is, I think, much better. His spirits were higher, his feet looked better, and he ate half an English muffin for breakfast. The first thing he asked me early this morning was how the Deportivo finished yesterday, and he was delighted to hear they won over Sevilla 2-1. Just goes to show you what people can have on their minds in times of crisis.

The doctors think he'll have to be on IV antibiotics for 4-6 weeks (!) so he's going to need a PICC line inserted...we know all about those now thanks to my niece's lymphoma last year...but all of the drastic measures are now only distant possibilities, thank God.



I knitted until I was sick of knitting, and I listened to Duma Key and watched Damages on my iPod. I managed to finish the garter stitch middle of my Wool Peddler's shawl and then started on a cotton baby sweater since the lacy border on that shawl is a task best undertaken with fewer distractions. In a few repetitions I'll hopefully have the pattern down and be able to take the border on the road again, but until then it'll have to be simple stuff.

Not Quite Half of a Wool Peddler's Shawl

I'm still here...still knitting, too. I've been working away on the many many garter stitches of the Wool Peddler's Shawl from Folk Knits. I have 88 stitches on each half of the body right now, and I have to keep at it until there are 110. So let's see...2 sts increased for each half on each right side row...that makes 22 more rows to go before I can commence the lace section. I think I'm averaging about 5-6 rows a day at the moment...ugh. I might have to cast on an instant gratification knit!