"Lilac Time" and Four O'Clocks

Since my KnitPicks 47-inch circular needles came in the mail, I've been knitting, knitting, knitting. First I knitted the stargate off the 29-inch needles onto the 47-inch ones. Now I can stretch the pattern out a bit so about half of one end shows. (I still can't get a decent picture of these colors, though.)

Then I knitted the string one off a dozen double-pointed needles and onto my 29-inch Susan Bates Silverado circulars. (I can't believe they discontinued these - they are great needles!)

I am three rows into chart C of Marianne Kinzel's "Lilac Time", and you can just start to see the very bottom of the next round of leaves.

The weather was so rainy in October that I never got to dig up my four o'clocks, and they got hit with a frost that made the stems fall off. (They break apart at the joints and at the root.) It was a little harder to find the roots, but today it was sunny and dry and I dug them up. I think I got most of them.They don't look like much, do they? I planted a couple where my rose bush had been, and the hummingbirds loved that. Those three roots really increased in size.

Now I have to go out before it gets too chilly and rub the sand off them so I can put them away for winter. All I do is keep them over the winter is leave them in an open plastic bag, sitting on the cool concrete floor at the far end of the house from the warm woodstove. In the spring when they start to put out shoots (color coded as to flower: pinkish shoots = pink/rose flowers, green shoots = white flowers) I'll plant them out again.

Last Day of Blogtoberfest!

Tonight was Hallowe'en night, and we have been back from taking our son out trick-or-treating for a while.

Yesterday the weather was warm (66 F), windy, and very very rainy, flood advisory rainy.
Today the temperature dropped to 44 F (about 7 C) and it stayed windy. Brrr! That was some cold trick-or-treating. A lot of people left their porch lights off, and it looked like a lot of people stayed home or went to Halloween parties.


Those of us who trooped from house to house agreed that it was cold!

We left our jack o'lantern burning while we were gone.
It was a little different this year. Actually, it's been a little different ever since our son got old enough to voice an opinion on how it should be carved. (One year we had Godzilla and a lobster!)

This year it was the game character from Fancy Pants Adventure by Brad Borne.

Our son looked at the computer and drew a Fancy Pants guy about two inches tall, and I scanned his drawing, scaled it up, and carved it into this year's pumpkin.

I had never done the shading technique before, but it came out well enough - the kid was happy, so I'm happy.

After I took pictures, I emailed them across the room so our son could send them to Brad Borne.

Technology. It's amazing stuff.

Ajax: No More Failed Self-Cloning Attempt

For about the last six years, my dog Ajax has had this growth on his front paw.

It started as a little thing. When I first noticed it, I thought he had a tick on his foot, but when I tried to tweeze it off, he yelped. I took a closer look and saw that it was a little black skin tag.

Over the years, the thing slowly grew. At each vet visit, the vet would take a look at it and give me guidelines for when it should be removed.

Last week it finally met those guidelines: so big it was touching the ground when he walked, and he was finally taking notice of it and licking at it. The top picture was about a week before he started fussing at it.

I took that picture because he had collected all of his chew toys from around the house onto his rug. There was a fourth bone just out of camera range.

The bottom picture is Ajax this morning, with bright orange vet wrap around his foot. Yesterday was surgery day.

Because he is so big and has always been sensitive about having his feet touched, they couldn't remove it by just giving him a local anesthetic. (This was one of the reasons we were watching and waiting.) They had to put him under, and at age eight, I spent the day knitting in order not to concentrate on worrying about him.

But now he is home and doing fine. And I am thinking about drawing a jack o'lantern face on the orange vet wrap!

Yeah. Well.

The thing about not having been deployed over the last eight years is that the deployable pool has gotten shallower over each of those years. By this time, we've been aware that this was going to happen at some point. But the last word was "Probably within the next two years" and "Most likely Afghanistan."

Now it's "Probably within the next six months" and still "Most likely Afghanistan." Which, given the news in the last couple of days, makes me sick to my stomach. Not that it's ever been that safe of a place.

So let's talk about something else, like mushrooms.

I grew up with a shelf of field guides and a mom who knew how to use them. Her interest was mainly trees and wildflowers, so by the third grade I knew trees by sight the way most kids learn the words for chair and table.

When I went to college, I considered getting an English degree. But then I had a flash of myself standing in a school trying to teach English, and the instant I got to college, I changed my major to horticulture.

By the end of my degree studies, I could rattle off the scientific names of a couple of hundred cultivated plants, everything from Asparagus esculentus to Zinnia elegans.

When I got married, I married a guy with a family tradition of foraging for edible mushrooms. Not just the easy obvious morels, which you have to work very hard and delude yourself greatly to get wrong, but the tasty stumpers or honey fungus, Armillaria mellea.

We joined a not-so-local mycological society, with a lot of knowledgeable mushroom experts, and learned more of the edible and yes, deadly species that grew in our often damp and rainy state.

For a while we were on the local hospital's list of people they could call if someone brought in a case of suspected mushroom poisoning.

It was a great group, and we enjoyed their forays (and their potlucks!) greatly. Sad to say, the group disbanded about four years ago.

So it's always interesting to come across a species that we don't immediately recognize.

And oh, yeah, knitting.Almost to the end of chart B. Which is boring. (I can say that now that I am almost done with it.)

And I'm up to a dozen needles in this one. I'm using pieces of wide rubber band on the ends, a tip I learned from knitting designer Diane Willett at our last lace group meeting.

I have longer circ.s on order from Knit Picks. Until they get here, I'll just add needles until I run out.

Back on the Maybe-Deployment Treadmill

I took the child up for the fourth and last section of the MEAP (science), stopped for gas, and headed home.

And I promptly got a call from my husband saying that once again there's a good chance his unit will get deployed.

*sigh*

We've faced this possibility so many times in the last several years that I think my panic mode is burned out.

Pictures on Overcast Days

A short progress post.
I've knitted my way out to the last two lines of chart B, and I have 26.4 grams of the 50 gram ball left.

I keep reading in the ads that the full-spectrum bulbs like my Ott Lite are supposed to more closely match natural daylight, but to my eye they make everything look bluish.

What A Week!

Monday I borrowed my dad to try and help me fix a problem we are having with our well. We have water, but the water pressure in the house is low. Dad says, having gotten an unexpected cold shower, that the pressure in the well pit is great. We still have some more adventures coming with that one.

To brighten the day up, I found that April at The Weaving Inn had drawn my name! Thanks, April!

Tuesday while our homeschooled son was taking the math section of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP), the elementary school secretary was counting up absences. She said they had 22% out absent Monday, and if they hit 25% they would have to close the school.

Sure enough, that evening I read on a news website that the school district was closing until Monday the 26th. The public library was also closed, and is supposed to re-open today.

Wednesday my new glasses (my first bifocals) came in. I am getting used to the lenses pretty fast, but I need to get the new frames adjusted, ow ow ow!

Thursday I was woken in the night by Truffles, having one of her periodic spells of midnight anxiety, panting bad dog breath in my face for no reason I could figure out. I ended up dozing on the couch with her until daylight. Later in the day I fixed the kitchen faucet that had been dripping for a while.

Friday we drove up to Grand Rapids in the rain after dropping my husband's car off for maintenance. (I drove, since his car was in the shop.) We did some fun fancy grocery shopping, had brunch, and saw my 14-month-old niece and my parents' recently-adopted grayhound.

On the way home, we picked up the car, and my husband and son went home. I went bookstore-browsing, and after looking through a shelf of mushroom guides, I think our earthstar is most likely Scleroderma polyrhizum, formerly known as Scleroderma geaster. (Better picture here.)

None of the Geastrum spp earthstars are big enough, and I was amused to find this thing in a genus with the poison pigskin puffball, Scleroderma citrinum.

Then I was further amused, after noticing that Scleroderma was in the order Boletales, to read the first part of Michael Kuo's article, The Evolution of a Great-Big Headache: "Understanding" Mushroom Taxonomy and Phylogeny.

You don't have to read the whole thing (although he has some fascinating comments about our old buddies Linnaeus and Fries). I'll quote the best part here:

I understand so little of DNA science that I have no choice but to accept unconditionally what the experts hand down. Last month, I thought that DNA sequencing for mushrooms involved injecting rabbits with something from the mushroom and then sending something else that comes out of the rabbits to a big laboratory somewhere. I told all my friends. This month, reading different articles, the rabbits are gone. ...

I mention this rabbit-thing to emphasize my infantile understanding of molecular biology, but I promise I didn't make it up; see for example Jung et al. (1993), an experiment reaching important conclusions about morel taxonomy, in which methods included the following: "Rabbits were bled from their marginal ear vein [sic] to obtain preimmune sera"; and my personal favorite, "100µl of goat-antirabbit immunoglobulin antiserum coupled to horseradish peroxidase . . . were added to each well and incubated"

That has to be my personal favorite, too.

Today (Saturday) the public library was open, so the child and I went up and got the books we had on hold, and then I finally got my painful frames adjusted.

Then we came home and my copy of Susanna Lewis's Knitting Lace, reprinted by Schoolhouse Press, was in the mailbox!

Oh, yeah. And I finally joined Twitter. Because I must follow CryForByzantium.

It's still raining, so we had gray watery light all day. I'm almost to the end of chart B. Tomorrow I will weigh my ball of yarn and take pictures even if it's still overcast out.

Have a good weekend!

Mostly Pictorial Except When I Can't Shut Up

Path through the little maples.

Part of the loop through the gone-to-seed goldenrod, blurry where I stitched it.
One of the Chinese chestnut trees we grew from nuts from a tree on the farm next door. I'm not old enough to remember the chestnut blight, but I'm old enough to have grown a tree from a nut!
And now those trees are old enough to be producing spiky chestnut burrs of their own.

Last, a fungus, some kind of earthstar, growing just outside the dripline of a youngish red oak. I'm going to invoke the power of the internet here and ask, "Which the heck earthstar is this?" This one was about 6 inches across, and one of the others was about 8 inches across. They came up in a rough crescent around the oak tree, a couple of dozen of them.

My husband is into mycology, so we have quite a few mushroom field guides, and I haven't found any that really seem to match these.


So if you know any mycology professors who are into earthstars, point them at this one!

Chimney Tales

The Stargate is still in Chart B, the lace ground bit, where every fourth row is a whole round of YO and a double decrease, quite fiddly in the fine yarn. It's slow knitting and it doesn't look much different from photo to photo.

So I was blanking yet again on any kind of a post topic.

And then! I finally got around to catching up on the blogs I read, and Antonia did a post about chimney sweeps (look at her gorgeous fireplace: I am so jealous), and I started to type a novel in her comments and realized, "Hey! I have a post topic!"

We heat our house with wood and now with the little gas log. When you burn wood, you need to keep the chimney clean.

The first time we started to think about this, we called the only chimney sweep around, and he came in and looked at our short, straight length of chimney.

Then he draped everything lovingly in tarpaulins, took the vent cap off the top on the roof, and swept it from the top down, and came indoors and carefully vacuumed the whole stove as clean as a dinner plate.

Amazing.

And then he said, "Not to shoot myself in the foot or anything, but you could easily clean a nice straight chimney like this yourself." Sweeps really are like Antonia's, even in the wilds of America.

(It is, too, wild here: I saw an owl fly across my driveway this afternoon when we walked down to get the mail.)

Of course, our chimney is just boring black metal, and our chimney pots are soot-blackened shiny galvanized metal, not very photogenic.

The stove itself is pretty, light bluish soapstone with fancy castings. Also in need of a wire-brushing and spray of new high-temperature stovepaint on the cast iron parts.

But!

Last winter the child learned that when the fire had burned down to a nice bed of coals, I would open the stove door and allow the toasting of marshmallows.

Mmmm, marshmallows.

Happy Thought

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

When I was a little girl, my mom would read to me from a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses. Many of the illustrations were tiny detailed pictures of plants, flowers, leaves, and seedpods.

I still have a head full of those poems, that come to me at odd moments.

The Cow

The friendly cow all red and white
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
And eats the meadow flowers.

Mmmm, apple tart.

Google Books has an 1895 edition with illustrations by Charles Robinson.