Brown Thumb Gardener

I always wondered about that expression, "green thumb". In my experience, a real gardener's thumb is a brown thumb, or a black thumb, from digging in the dirt, viz:
My four o'clock roots had a great summer this year, and grew like crazy. My handspan, stretched out like that, is about 8.5 inches (21.5 cm). Look at the size of that root, and the piece of stem still on it. Wow.

When the soil dries and I clean them off, I'll have to weigh that thing. It's heavy!

In warm climates, I'm told four o'clock (Mirabilis jalapa) roots will overwinter in the ground, but here they freeze and die. They usually produce lots of seeds, so if you're pressed for space, you can save the seeds and grow a new batch next year.

But if you want to lift your four o'clock roots and save them, here is how I have done it for quite a few years now.

After the first frost, I dig up the roots and clean them. Some years I've sprayed them off with the hose, other years I've just let my sandy soil dry and brushed it off.

Then I put the clean dry roots in an open plastic bag (that is, not a ziplock type bag), and I set them aside and forget about them until we're past frost danger again. They literally sit on the floor next to my sewing machine all winter, in the room farthest from our soapstone stove, at around 65 degrees F (about 18 C), all winter.

When I plant them, the buds tell me whether the flowers will be pink (the leaf buds are pinkish red) or either yellow or white (green leaf buds).

When I haven't been turning my thumbs black digging in the dirt, I've been watching my parents' greyhound again:Ajax and Kasper were soaking up some late-November sunshine and a run of unseasonably warm days.

I'm still working on Glöckchen:

And!

I actually finished something and cast it off!

The "Lilac Time" (Marianne Kinzel's "Lilac Time") that I started last fall is finally finished. Whew.And now I apparently need to learn a new skill, starching doilies.

Summer Summary

So what did I do this summer, besides a little knit-a-square knitting and hardly posting at all?I worked the Broad Arrow at a little more appropriate gauge for the size of the thread I was using.

I took pictures of a tree frog in the phlox.

We went to the Binder Park Zoo and enjoyed the giraffe overlook again.The animals have so much space here. It's such a relief compared to some beat-up, tired-looking pens I've seen other places.


We dog-sat my parents' retired greyhound, Kasper, over Labor Day weekend.Kasper really enjoyed running in both sections of our fenced yard.
He liked resting on his bed afterwards, too.

On Labor Day, we got up and did the local Bridge Walk. It's nothing like the 5-mile Mackinac Bridge Walk - ours is a tiny 0.19K, led by the town crier with a brass bell and bagpipers, and with many people accompanied by their dogs.

This year as we walked back across the bridge towards our car, we heard a whistle and saw this coming down the river towards Kalamazoo Lake.We see a lot of different boats, from kayaks up to cabin cruisers and ore carriers, but this is the first steam paddleboat I've seen.


Tomorrow I'll be seeing more steam-powered machinery at the Michigan Flywheelers' Antique Engine & Tractor Show, but I'm still betting none of it will be boats!

Halfway to Spring

Yesterday I didn't get much knitting done: the child and I took down the Christmas tree.

I figured out a long time ago that there were two extremes of putting up and taking down the tree around Christmas time: at one end, you had the people who put the tree up at the earliest possible moment, say Hallowe'en.
(And I'm ignoring, la la la, the stores that put out Christmas decorations in July. La la la.)

At the other end, you have people who put the tree up and decorate it on Christmas Eve, the "Santa brings the tree and all" people.

But the far end of the season has its own extremes: very often, the same people who put their tree up the earliest are the ones whose front door opens on December 26th so they can pitch the tree into the trash, missed tinsel trailing.

And the ones who waited to put it up later generally also wait and take it down later.

I like to have the tree up about a week before Christmas, so I can enjoy it lighted and decorated in the dark of winter. After Christmas, I like to leave it up because it's a festive green thing in a season when Michigan does not show a lot of green. I figure I'm good if it's down by Valentine's Day, although that depends on the tree.

I try to buy a balsam fir if I can find one for sale. Their needles cling on tightly. But if the tree is dropping needles like crazy, I might draw the line at Twelfth night.

This year, I started wanting the light in the living room, so when we changed calendars and the kid said, "When are we going to take the tree down?" I said, "How about tomorrow?" (Which is now yesterday.)

Coincidentally, yesterday was Groundhog Day or Imbolc, the cross-quarter day halfway between the winter solstice (dark, dark, dark) and the vernal (spring) equinox. Somehow it felt really appropriate to be taking my midwinter symbol of life in the dark down on that day.
So now it's down, and the light of the longer days can shine in and give me more natural light to knit by.

I can't think of a smooth way to segue to this photo, but I'm sharing it anyway.
Ajax's dog chow comes in three-layer bags, and I tear the outer paper layers off for recycling, and throw the inner plastic layer in the trash.

As I was standing by the trash can doing this, Ajax came up and stuck his head in the bag to see if any kibbles were hiding in the bottom. He spent at least a minute trying to force his head and shoulders down to the bottom of the bag, and I had plenty of time to snatch up the camera and take his picture.

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!

Ajax, the Golden Dog

Look what I found!When I was a kid, my mom bought a set of Collier's encyclopedia that came with a ten-volume set of kids' books, Collier's Junior Classics.

The encyclopedia had great stuff like a dissected frog printed on clear plastic, so you could turn the pages and see the different organs.

Each of the kids' books had a theme - "Ajax, the Golden Dog" is the first story in Volume 4, "Just Around the Corner," with excerpts from books focussed on different countries.

My brothers and I read and re-read the stories in these books, and my mother still has them on her shelves.

When I saw this set in a thrift store the other day, I snapped them up! For ten dollars!

My real-life Ajax, named after my memory of this story, says, "What? Why did you call my name and wake me up?"

I Love Herding Dogs

One of my favorite things to do at the Michigan Fiber Festival is to go and watch the herding dog demos. So naturally I love this.

This video has only been up for a couple of days:



I'm hoping one or the other of my brothers will show it to my mom!


I'm down to the last two rows of Chart C, and should finish Leberblümchen later today or tomorrow.

30 Books (Only Thirty?)

Julie (Samurai Knitter) has started a sort-of meme, "Thirty Books I Dig".

Talk about easy . . . for me the hard part is limiting it to thirty!

Have I told this story yet?

When we were first married, we went to an estate sale, and out on a closed-in porch, we found bookshelves stuffed full of old science fiction paperbacks and magazines. At first we were trying to pick out ones we wanted, but then my husband said, "Let's just offer her $20 for the lot."

The woman running the sale said, "Sure!" she would take our $20, and gave us paper bags and cardboard boxes. Then she said, "Do you want these, too?" and opened up a big walk-in closet completely lined with shelves of books.

Gad.

We stuffed our little Honda Civic hatchback (a red Tardis of a car) with bags and bags and bags and boxes of science fiction until our backs ached.

Every author from Asimov to Van Vogt and Williamson. We have an eight-foot bookshelf double-stacked with science fiction paperback, and more in various places throughout the house.

We sold many of the older magazines (after reading them, of course) on eBay. That paid for two eight-foot bookcases from the furniture company I worked for back then. And I see we still have two computer-paper boxes with the newer (1970's) magazines like Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Barring the Fimbul-winter, it's not physically possible for us to be snowed in long enough to read every book on our shelves in one winter.

So that's about a thousand right there. (Do I joke? I've never really thought about counting them.)

But to get down to cases here, I'll think about some of my more personal shelves:

Travels in West Africa, by Mary Kingsley. I've talked about her before, and no doubt I will again. Quirky, opinionated, and full of wry good humor in the face of everything from mosquitoes to crocodiles.

Anything by Diana Wynne Jones. I started out with Archer's Goon and went from there. Being a dog lover, I'm fond of Dogsbody. (Argh, already I'm cheating and saying, "Just read the lot!"

Anything by Terry Pratchett. Okay. So I cheat. Read the lot!

What else is on these shelves over here?

Women's Work and Prehistoric Textiles by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.

Textiles and Clothing by Elisabeth Crowfoot et al.

Nearly every tatting pattern book ever put out by Dover.

Charles Holdgate's Net Making.

Two different editions of Etiquette, by Emily Post. Amusing and sad and sometimes infuriating. Time travel in hardcover.

Three different editions (one in French) of Thérèse de Dillmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework.

A reproduction of Caulfeild and Saward's Dictionary of Needlework.

Sylvia Groves' The History of Needlework Tools and Accessories.

Old-Time Tools & Toys of Needlework by Gertrude Whiting.

A whole slew of dog books by Brian Kilcommons and Sara Wilson, Carol Lea Benjamin, Stanley Coren, the Monks of New Skete, and Job Michael Evans. (I love training dogs. It's the people that stir me up!)

Quite a few books by modular origami genius Tomoko Fuse in both English and Japanese. (I don't read Japanese, but I can follow an origami diagram.)

Music books including Lullabies and Night Songs by Alex Wilder with drawings by Maurice Sendak. (I used to play the ocarina a lot and the pennywhistle somewhat.)

On the self-help shelf, I have authors such as Barbara Sher, Suzette Haden Elgin, Martha Beck, Julia Cameron, and probably a bunch more that I'll slap my forehead for forgetting.

Oh! And over here is my collection of darn near every Ted Sturgeon book ever printed in paperback. And all the Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter books.

I have five dictionaries. I have many knitting books, heavy on the historical. I have at least one cookbook. (The others are my husband's.) And we have many many many kids' books here.

Good heavens, is that the time? I'm sorry, I've kept you up - you really shouldn't get me started on books!

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Doggy School Hallowe'en Party

I particularly love the bull terrier dressed as Goldilocks!

Wake-up Friday. With Errands. And General Rambling.

I worked last night and drove home thinking, "Cool! Tomorrow the child has no school; the husband has already worked his four ten-hour days; so I can sleep in!"

Hah.

At 4:16 am this morning, the black dog, Truffles, woke me up standing on her hind legs with her paws by my pillow. "Mmmmm," I probably said. Sometimes when she does this, if I just put my hand on her, she will sit down, then lay down (don't get on me about lie and lay: I keep looking it up and it keeps not sticking), then fall asleep.

Not this morning. She did curl up on her bed again for about one minute, but after getting the older-dog-with-bad-teeth breath right in the face a couple more times, I got up and let both dogs outside into the fenced yard.

Then I curled up on the couch with my son's hooded cloak over me and dozed off until Ajax scraped on the aluminum screen door to come in, and after that we all three went back to bed.

Until 7:15 am, when our son climbed onto the bed and started saying, "Wake up! Wake up!"

Raaahhhhhhh!

Oh, well, no sleeping in. Instead I had a fried egg chopped up on toast (yum, eggs from down the road with actual orange yolks and flavor) and a little later we bought a cabinet to stand the tiny soapstone gas stove on.

My Honda Fit is indeed a Tardis: the cabinet fit into the back, just like our old 1988 Honda Civic hatchback (also red, also a Tardis of a car).

After lunch, I went up to town to do grocery-shopping and look for shoes. My old white (formerly white) walking shoes have become "ventilated shoes," with the back ripped away from the sole, and so there was no putting off replacing them any more. Disreputable I can live with, but sticks stabbing me in the heel, no.

I hate shopping for shoes. Ever since I went to the Netherlands and saw how easily the Dutch can pick out Americans (that would be: Nikes + jeans + a university sweatshirt over a paunch), I've tried to avoid buying what I think of as dead giveaway American shoes. Some years it's easy, other years hard.

I did come home with a couple of pairs of walking-around shoes that I hope won't annoy me too much.

As a reward for finally doing the shoe-shopping, I bought some of the new Red Heart "Heart and Sole" sock yarn.

I have to say that it feels pretty nice. If I wound it off into a skein, overdyed it, relabelled it, and marked it up, I could probably smuggle it onto the shelf on the yarn store and no one would be curling their lip in that "Red Heart - euwwwww" way. I think they're a little late on the whole self-striping bandwagon, but hey, there's always dye.

Anyways, hi. I'm alive. Despite not getting to sleep in!

Fall Color Tour

We've had a couple of hot days followed by rain last night, so some of our color has fallen to the ground. I thought I'd better get out with the camera before we lost it all.

I took this picture Sunday with blueberry bushes in the foreground. The trees in the background are mostly sassafras and scarlet maple.

The trees on our property mostly turn yellow, and last night's rain brought a lot of the leaves down.

The sumac is still brilliant.
And so are the brambles.

Enjoy it while it lasts!

Friends for Life
Either that, or they could smell what I was eating.

Silly Ajax Story

Yesterday I was out scooping up after the dogs and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ajax in snake-hunting mode:

Whacking in the long grass with his front paw, tail wagging joyfully, darting his muzzle cautiously into the grass and out again.

He was right next to the fence, so I went over to escort the snake to safety just as he tossed his head as if he'd caught something.

Then I saw what it was, and I really did laugh out loud:

A shed snakeskin!

Over the course of the day, he hunted for it and killed it several more times.

Semi-Random Replies to Some Comments

By the time he had his vet visit, Ajax was fine. The vet said she could detect very slight lameness in his right leg by the way his foot was turned, but it was so little she believed it was a strain or sprain and not his hips.

The Niebling swatch was one of those "Let's see how he does this" things. Charts are great, photos are great, but I really have to feel how the pattern grows in my hands. I can't wait to get my hands on the patterns from Lacis. Anything that makes garden string look that good, I want!

Paw paw flowers do look like weird alien lips. And yet another thing I like about columbines is that the hummingbirds come to them.

Once I saw an enormous bumblebee going from columbine flower to columbine flower, but he wasn't wasting any time crawling in them: he was landing on the outside and stabbing right through the end of the nectar spurs to slurp out the good stuff.

I love our all-by-itself house. We have talked seriously about buying the next-door property if the absentee owners ever put it on the market. Just in case that doesn't happen, we've been planting shrubbery along the property border line.

And yeah, having it paid off and really ours is great. We still have to pay the property taxes, insurance, and utilities, but not having a mortgage gives us a certain freedom.

Just this morning I heard the indigo bunting singing, and what I think was a grosbeak (every year I have to relearn his song). There is a lot to be said for living in a place you love.

The hops are mainly my husband's. In the past, he has made such oddities as all-local beer (a member of his brewing club grew, threshed, and malted the barley) and hopped mead, and he usually shares either root cuttings or hops cones with the brewing club that meets at a brewpub.

The kind of hops you get in a homebrew store are called pelletized hops. To me they look like rabbit chow. I'll try to remember to take a picture of the cones when they develop later in the year. There is something compelling and prosperous-looking about hops vines with the cones on them.

A couple of the things I have learned about hops: The cut-down vines burn with an incredible fury when they are dry. Wow. Resinous an' all. If you get hops cones on your car the resin is teh suck to get off. The only beers I ever liked in all my long history of "Yuck" faces made at brewing club meetings were . . . unhopped.

Life as a Celebration of Ephemeral Things

One day you're in snow up to your belly, the next day you're running in the sun.

I had a little scare with Ajax last week. He's never had a problem with his hips, for which I am extremely grateful. He's such a big dog.

But last week, after a happy day of snake-hunting, I patted his rump as I let him in the door, and he yiped and then cried pitifully. Oh, dear!

He was up for a vet visit anyway, only the vet was booked up until this Friday. Fortunately after about a day and a half of occasional yiping and obvious discomfort, I could see he was getting better. I think he probably tangled his feet up in the dead branches out in the fenced yard and hurt himself somehow.

He'll be 8 in November. The painful thing about life with pets is that it ends. Every day, even days when he is very very naughty, I try to remember to enjoy his companionship.

Tempus Fugit

So Friday I took some time to enjoy the hot weather.

Ajax enjoyed it, too, but I don't think the garter snake he was happily hunting in the brush pile enjoyed it! (He's a lucky dog to live in Michigan, which has only one rare species of poisonous snake.)

I used the good light to take a picture of my caught-up Sampler CM (Sampler M, continued). This is pattern 13.

Pattern 14, which came out back in December, was the last one on the group so far, but I didn't enjoy knitting it half as much. But I did knit it, so I'm finally caught up.

This morning I'm glad I took a picture of the shadblow (Amelanchier laevis) in bloom. The flowers are almost gone already.
That's why I really prefer a slow, cool spring to a hot, fast one: I get a chance to enjoy the flowers instead of having them open and burn up in a day.

Weather Update

Snow has disappeared from the forecast. For now.

(So have 80 degree F temperatures.)

Signs of Spring

I finally got out and put a tap in one of the maple trees yesterday. On the left you can see the sap flow inside the blue tubing.

By this morning when I went out to check, I had the full gallon jug of maple sap on the right, with a frozen sap-sicle down the side and ice in the top.

I'm hoping the weather will stay like this (above freezing during the day and below freezing at night) so we get a good sap run.

Every so often someone will ask if drilling the hole for the tap hurts the tree. Well, I don't like to see those trees with six taps in them, even if they are big trees, but if it's a healthy tree and you're not tapping it to death, the holes grow shut within a year or so and look like this:(Don't look at me! I just took the pictures, and that's how they look.)

Then I went looking for spring flowers, and this is what I got: the first winter aconites, sweet violet leaves flat from being under all the snow, and the snowdrops drilling their way upwards through the dead leaves.

Of course, the biggest sign of spring, besides that fact that I can't sit still and knit for more than two minutes at a time, is the deep gluey mud out where my new car is parked, but I didn't feel like laying on my stomach in it to get a good photo!

Instead I went out and kicked the frozen basketball for Truffles.

She is a ball chaser extraordinaire, and she really misses our ball-chasing sessions when her toys are buried or frozen in the snow.

She was overjoyed to find her ball unthawed so she could gallop after it and herd it around the yard again!

Mysterious Brilliant Object in Sky

It is so bright outside, my troglodyte eyes water just taking pictures out the window.

I know if I scrape the roof today, the sun is going to melt a lot of the ice right down to the shingles. And then it's supposed to rain, yes, rain, in the night, despite having been a whole 5 degrees F. (-15 C) when I woke up.

The snow is not really that deep on the roof: the danger is ice backing up under the shingles and messing up the roof, getting into the attic and melting in the ceiling drywall.

The geodesic dome part of our house turns out to be mostly self-clearing. All day in the sun, accumulated ice and snow falls off it and goes sliding past the windows. The rest of the house has a mildly-pitched roof, so melting snow runs off, but freezes on the eaves.

If I was building a brand-new house here, I'd either go for a big dome with little domes budding off it like yeast cells, or I'd have a really steeply-pitched roof that would mostly self-clear. But since we've got what we've got, it's aluminum roof-rake for me.

And when I come indoors, I'll have burned off so much rhodopsin that everything will look green. (That's when I completely understand the greeny-purple color of octarine!)

I wanted to show a little sock progress, but it's so bright it either washed out the Fizzy or made the Jardin yarn look black. This is the compromise picture.

By the time I had tinkered with the camera settings enough to get to this one, Ajax had discovered I was not moving and come to be near me and get his big nose in the picture.

This is how big of a dog he is:

Oops. Missed Silent Poetry Reading.

Which is weird, because I have a lunar phase poster from Celestial Products on my refrigerator, and I keep track of solstices and equinoxes and cross-quarter days.

When your daylength varies from fifteen hours and eighteen minutes in high summer to nine hours and four minutes in the dark of the year, in the winter you count every day as you climb the hill to spring again.

Knowing that you're halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox is a useful benchmark.

Here's another interesting datum: from the winter solstice to Groundhog Day, forty-odd days, we gain about an hour of daylight. From Groundhog Day to the spring equinox, we gain another two hours. Same number of days, twice as much light.

Friday has become an odd day now that my husband is working four-tens. He's at home, but our son usually has school. (Miss Fluffy Truffles says, "I don't care what day it is. Wake me when it's supper time.")

(No school Friday, another snow day. Let's see, two days of school last week. Tell me again why I'm not home-schooling him?)

Then I get a weekend like this weekend, where my husband has a Guard drill, and Friday becomes a kind of mini-weekend.

I guess it's not so weird over the last two weeks that I'm confused about what day it is, what with people home from work or school or both. If I didn't have a watch that shows the date, I'd have no idea what day of the week it was.

Sock-finishing day, that's what day it was. I used the whole skein, right to the center, measuring out the last yard and a half for the bind off. Two more finished objects for 2008, still socks. I think I'll have to wear the Chocolate Cherry socks for Valentine's Day.

Maybe the Valdani bag will get on my list today, after I bind off the other sock.

No School Today

Yet another snow day partly due to lake effect snow, but primarily due to blowing and drifting. I returned some library books last night, and I mainly drive north about fifteen miles to the library. Those north-south roads were already drifting at 7pm.

So my "Get the kid off to school, feed the dogs and the fish, and write a blog post" routine turned into a "Let the kid sleep in, help the kid feed the dogs, shovel the bottom of the driveway that the big slant plow filled in, and rake the roof edges" routine. Wahoo.

My back and shoulders are protesting. "Hey, we didn't know you were going to make us work! Sheesh!"

So what you get is a couple of pictures of Ajax, the golden dog. I sat down to pull my legwarmers, the ragg wool ones I re-knitted last winter, over my jean legs. I got one on, then this happened:

When he was a tiny barely-weaned 10-pound puppy, he used to curl up on my feet when I stood at the sink and washed dishes. Awwww.

Unfortunately (at least from his point of view) now that he weighs over 100 pounds, my feet are no longer big enough to curl up on. So he has to take what he can get.

Seconds after I took this shot, he shifted position.

"You're going outside, aren't you? Can I come?"

Hit Me Where I Live

Okay, I hardly ever push charities, but this one hits me where I live.

A guy in Maine was walking his dog after dark and a snowmobiler hit both him and his dog. And sped off, leaving his victim with two broken legs, a broken arm and other injuries. The dog's got a broken pelvis, at least.

Dr. Mel is treating Phoebe.

I heard about this via Rabbitch and the Panopticon.

If you are so moved, Dr. Mel has a Paypal donation button at the post above. Any excess funds beyond those used to treat Phoebe's injuries will go into the clinic fund to help some other family in need.

"Bad Dog!" Story and Mitten Progress

This is Ajax. You might remember him as the dog who chewed up the soup can.

If you regulate your Vermont soapstone woodstove by dog thermometer, the reading is, "Too cold, human, put some more wood in that thing!"

Friday my husband took the day off work to get a tire fixed. When I dropped him off at the car place, I went inside for a few minutes, because they had an enormous Rotweiler there who I wanted to meet.

Like most Rotties I've met, she was a sweetie and a leaner, and in about a minute she was leaning hard against me and being petted.

I knew that when I got home, I would be thoroughly sniffed at the door. And of course, I was.

What I did not expect was that the breath of one of the sniffing dogs would smell strongly of . . . mint!

I knew in a flash what he had gotten into: the bag of York peppermint patties our son and my husband bought for me on Tuesday! My present!

That dog found and ate up my present!

After I had explained to him in indignant tones that his name was not on that bag, and he was not to go opening doors, ferreting about on bookshelves, and getting into things that were not, either! his, I stuffed the plastic candy bag through his collar as a Bag of Shame.

Then I alternately sulked and growled at him, because he ate the whole bag, foil wrappings and all, and didn't leave me a single one.

Saturday afternoon, at 3:22 pm, it started to snow, and in an hour it looked like the photo on the left. Our son joyfully suited up in the winter coat that's really too big for him and went outside to make slush balls from the snow on the cars and pelt his dad with them.

I stayed inside and finally got to work double-knitting the thumbs on my snowflake mittens.

I didn't do it on purpose, but I happened to pick up the hardest one first, the mitten where I had had the hardest time picking up the upper stitches of the thumb hole.

I put the thumb openings in a spot where there was color patterning. In double knitting, naturally the colors cross inside, in between the layers. But my big stumbling block was the fact that the top edge of the opening had loops that were half white and half green, with the other half crossing into the inside layer.

On the mitten for my right hand, I got confused about which side to pick up for which layer. It was a mess, and no doubt that was why I let them sit while I tried to get my courage up to tackle them.

At first I thought I'd just knit green-outside, white-inside thumbs, with a little contrast patterning to lock the layers together. But after a couple rows, I realized I could easily ladder down on both sides in pattern and exchange colors from layer to layer, the way I do to fix a mistake.

So then I was good! After I fixed the colors of the stitches at the base of the thumb, I could knit the rest in pattern to match the mittens.

Just in time for:
TODAY
Windy. Cloudy with a 40 percent chance of light snow showers. Highs in the lower 30s. Northwest winds 15 to 25 mph.

Outa Books

Which is to say, I've read my way through the stack I bought last weekend, and am starting to sit up and look around at the world again.

I knitted a couple of rows on a pair of socks this week, but it was literally a row on each sock.

I tried printing out Jane Gaugain's 1847 The Lady's Assistant for Executing Useful and Fancy Designs in Knitting, Netting, and Crochet Work, only to discover the file was missing big chunks (like pages 80-250+).

Our son had Friday off from school following parent-teacher conferences, and my husband took a half-day Friday preceding his National Guard drill this weekend. So I had one or both of them home all day.

Yesterday (Saturday) I had to make the drive up to Grand Rapids to buy Truffles' dog chow. (She can't eat Ajax's, because it gives her hot spots. He can't eat her food, because it gives him diarrhea.)

And then I had to turn around and race home in time to take the child to the Pumpkin Patch event down the road -- the kids got to run around in a corn maze and pick out a numbered pumpkin, and after all the numbered ones were picked, the numbers were drawn for Halloween-y prizes.

So we came home with a respectable-sized pumpkin and a black Halloween cup of candy, spider ring, little plastic pumpkin, and other gew-gaws.

The weather was beautiful, in the 60's F., sunny and breezy.

And when I finally got the mail, my copy of Rutt's History of Hand-Knitting was in the box. Thank goodness for reprints -- they have made the price on the original, with the color plates, come down to a reasonable level.