Let me 'splain

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
We are having damp, gray, overcast and foggy weather. Last year we had lows around 15 F (-9 C) and highs in the 70s (about 21 C). This year November we've stayed a little closer to the average than last year.

Some plants are still in bloom (about six months out of season).

When I was folding a lot of origami, I never tried to fold a goldfinch.

But today I saw a goldfinch fold itself!

Sometimes I am just too slow to catch the birds on the feeder.

I have reached row 71, finally, on both projects.

This has been a month of going to the vet. First we had that growth removed from Ajax's foot.

Then at Truffles' regular visit, some of her teeth had gotten very bad, so we decided to have them cleaned. I took her in on Tuesday. She came home very groggy and minus three of her worst teeth. She felt well enough tonight to eat up all her food again.

Tonight I'm grateful that she'll be well and have shiny teeth for Thanksgiving tomorrow!

Trying to Take Pictures of Drawings When It's Dark

Oh, No I Don't!

I was reading an article the other day, and later when I went to work I was still thinking about it.

It doesn't matter what it was about, because basically what it was about was fear. What it boiled down to was the article said, "Here is another thing to be afraid of, here is why it is scary, booga booga booga booga booooooo!"

And why I was still thinking about it is that I don't need any help being afraid. I have one of those five-alarm adrenal systems that goes off with lights and sirens and big red fire engines for any teeny change in my life.

When I was a kid, my heart rate would go up if I had to wait at a different bus stop. I do not need anything new to worry about.

I can already take the stuff that I know about farming and pesticides and herbicides and the water table and soil micro-organisms and fungi and extrapolate, and keep myself up nights.

I read a lot. So with about five minutes' head start, my little rabbity mind can be running zigzags in the brambles about pretty much any subject you can think of, "Oh no oh no oh no oh no!"

A person can go crazy living like that.

Fortunately I discovered walking and meditation and drawing and poetry at an early age.

More on that tomorrow!

True Colors

I took this photo on my cutting board and realized that if you saw the stargate in person, after only ever seeing it on my blog, you would probably be surprised when you saw the real color.

The first thing I noticed was that my cutting board is much more yellow than it was showing up.

So I sat down with camera and its manual and played around with the settings until I got a little closer to what I was seeing.This picture of the purl side is really close.


If you click for the bigger photo, you'll see some of the barber pole colors that I'm enjoying while I knit. (No) thanks to optical blending that blurs these into duller colors, but at least the knitting never becomes boring while I'm doing it.

The center of the ball has more changes and surprises waiting for me.

"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.