Thunder Alarm Clock

There are still several inches of grainy, slushy snow on the ground, but this morning before my alarm clock went off, I was awakened by thunder and lightning and rain. After the storm passed over, I checked my email, because I subscribed to school-closing emails from a local TV station, and read an email that said there was a two-hour delay. So I let our son sleep in.

Later I checked the TV station's website, only to find that the delay wasn't listed, and no schools in my entire county were listed as closed or delayed. Huh? So I hustled the child into clothes and through breakfast, and drove off to the school. Which was open. Apparently the TV station had broadcast a correction, but so far they still haven't sent out an email correction!

Although it is raining, it is bright enough out that I can finally take a picture of ribbing that shows ribbing. The other day the sun was shining, and our son looked at this yarn and said, "This yarn isn't blue! It's got purple and yellow and green in it!"

The yarn is Wool-Ease "Blue Mist," and although I have no way to take a digital picture that shows the colors, he is right. It is spun of different colors, with the blue predominating, but up close and in good natural light, it does indeed have purple and green and yellow in it. It's so pretty up close, it's a pleasure to knit with it.

The ragg wool is a little scratchier to knit with. I switched to ribbing and have knitted just over an inch so far. It looks like I will need to unravel the second legwarmer of the too-tight pair in order to finish this pair, but it will be so nice to finally have a pair that fits instead of feeling like compression hose.

I did most of this knitting on Tuesday. Yesterday I got busy and cleaned the electrostatic cell of our air cleaner. It sits right near the soapstone woodstove and filters out soot and dust, so every so often I have to unplug it, lift out the cleaning cell, spray it with degreaser, and soak it out in hot water. The instruction manual says to clean it in your dishwasher -- but come on, I eat off those dishes!

And we exchanged the water in the betta fish's tank, and I stripped the beds and flipped the mattresses, which was quite a job up on my son's loft bed. I have to say, the loft bed is extremely stable. It doesn't rock or wiggle or rock, even while I am mattress-wrestling in a confined space!

We bought the plans and the bolt kit from OP Loftbed. While I don't think my husband and I could have built it without my dad and my brother's help, I am very pleased with the bed now that it has been up for several months.

So today -- I have a whole heap of bedsheets to wash.

Zip, it's November

As soon as our son was born, time sped up for me. By the end of his first week, he had grown visibly, and I was already nostalgic for him as a newborn. While time goes slowly for kids -- remember how long first grade seemed to last? or the long stretches between holidays? -- it seems to speed up proportionately for the grown-ups around them.

Last night, while trick-or-treating, we saw our dogs' vet and her son, who is about seven months younger than our son. We only had the chance to say, "Oh, hi!" to each other, but wow, how these boys have grown!

It was chilly, in the 40's, but mercifully, there was very little wind. Some of the people had gone all-out, decorating their porches with black lights and fog machines. One lady was passing out candy by the big handful, out of a big orange three-gallon bucket. We coached our son to say, "Trick or treat!" and "Thank you!" and I heard that rarest of all lost arts, the response "You're welcome!"

Our son's costume was his own invention: he had a pair of fairy wings, and he wanted to wear his blue clothes and be an Ice Fairy. We bought a packet of glow-in-the-dark stars at the dollar store, and with these and a bamboo skewer and some tape, I made him a wand. To me, it looked like one of those made-up-at-the-last-minute desperation costumes, but it was all his idea, and he was proud of it. Luckily at age seven a boy can declare "I'm a fairy" and not be instantly teased to death.

This morning he generously gave me a Reese's peanut butter pumpkin. What a nice kid!

The phone guy came yesterday and fixed our connection. He said it looked like mice had been chewing in the cable access box! Plenty of mice at the edge of the soybean field where the access box stands.

I finished the headboard shelf yesterday. Today I want to sand the edges and prime it. When it is finally painted and mounted, the bed will be completely done. It is absolutely rock-steady, and doesn't wiggle or move at all even when my husband climbs on it. I think our total expenditure for 2x4's, 2x6's, plywood, the bolt kit, and paint, is still under $200. Pretty good for a bed that can eventually go to college with him someday.

I haven't mentioned knitting -- because I haven't done any. That's okay: I'm allowed to take breaks even from things I love.

Weekend Over, Time to Rest?

Friday night I went to my drum circle, and found out that the hosts are very likely moving to Vermont! Boo hoo. It was threatening to rain, so we drummed indoors. It was a good drumming, and every so often the rain joined in. But it's always bittersweet when something like that breaks up.

Saturday I thought my dad was coming down to drop off the rest of the pieces of the loft bed. Instead he showed up with the pieces, tools, and my brother D., and Dad and D. assembled the whole thing!

Do I owe these guys or what?!

It's a heavy-duty bed and a small room, so it was not easy to get a picture. Yes, the walls really are that orange, and my husband and son have mostly-primed the bed white.

I had to lie on my back on the floor to take the picture, and then found my camera batteries were too low to take another picture. So until the "charged" light goes on, I can't add a picture of my almost-finished socks knitted from the Filatura Lanarota "Country Sock" yarn I bought at the Michigan Fiber Festival. I have been trying to Google this yarn with no luck, except finding my own and a couple of other blog posts.

Although the black-purple-red-orange Color 16 is not exactly to my taste, and the yarn has a faint smell of cedar, I do like how it is knitting up, and I can hardly wait to finish and wash the socks and find out how they feel on the foot. Kerry took a very good picture of Color 16 here.

Carla of the Sampler M group was on Dutch television over the weekend, and didn't get to put pattern 13 up so far. I finished pattern 12, which has embossed leaf shapes. Pictures of those will have to wait, also. It's nice to feel I'm ahead on this again, instead of trying to knit two patterns to catch up!

Ajax the Golden Dog had a little excitement yesterday, when all six of the wild turkeys came about ten feet outside of the fenced dog yard. I tried to get a picture, but someone tried to be helpful and let the dog in, and the moving door and running dog spooked them.

It's fall. We've already had our first fire in the soapstone stove, and I seriously need to wire-brush and get some stove black on it. It was chilly out this morning, and it's possible we had a bit of frost. I refilled the bird feeders and the chickadees have been in and out of them. And I took in the hummingbird feeder last Thursday, only to have the hummingbird hover outside the window Friday morning, looking in accusingly as we ate breakfast and she didn't find hers!

Take a Walk with Me

Our property is an old, grown-over farm, a 10-acre parcel a quarter of a mile deep. This is the two-track that leads to the south end of it, all grown over by seedling maples from the five big maples along the western property line.

A lot of the grass is little bluestem grass, sometimes called "poverty oats" because it will grow in our sand-dune-y soil. The goldenrod will grow anywhere.

On either side of this trail are thin little maple trees that all grew up competing with each other for the sunlight. They are great for making a quick trellis for growing morning glories or beans on. And the dead ones are good winter kindling, too. Because they are standing up, they don't get so wet, and can be broken off and carried back to the house in the winter.

The sandy ground is thick with moss and next year's hawkweed plants. When the frost comes this moss will be even more beautiful. Under a thick snowfall, the moss will grow happily. It always looks amazing to me when the snow melts away, this under-snow greenhouse of low-growing plants.

I got back to my socks yesterday, and I worked a little on the Sampler M pattern. It is an interesting one, embossed leaf-like shapes on a purl background. I want to finish that one before the weekend.

The loft bed progress is slower than I expected. We took home over half the cut parts, and the plan was that my husband would paint them during the week. Well, I finally hauled them out of the van this morning! My dad is coming down tomorrow to bring the rest of the parts. And the assembly directions!

Going to the Fair

I finished Sampler M pattern 10 last night, and knitted about two rows of pattern 11. No new photo of that until you can see what pattern 11 looks like.

We are going to the county fair today, and I am looking right at the camera. If I actually remember it, check this space tomorrow for pictures of draft horses, oxen, bunnies, and so on. Maybe ribbons, if I have won any!

Monday my husband bought the 2x4's and 2x6's for our son's loft bed. It looks like Saturday my dad (the man with all the tools) will help us cut pieces and drill straight holes in them. If I'm lucky, I'll get to clean Shetland fleeces with my mom. Then the following week I'll be assembling the bed.

I'm sure I've mentioned that in our family, I'm the one who fixes stuff like dishwashers, mows the grass, and other mechanically-minded things. My husband is the cook and homebrewer.

Here is the red raspberry mead (raspberry melomel) he started at Havoc in Hastings. I know that when some people hear "homebrewer", they think "big beefy guy who drinks a lot", but truthfully D. hardly drinks any of what he brews. He does give away a lot.

And me, I'm your basic non-drinker mead authority!

You can see the thick frothy raspberry layer on the top of this batch. That's the danger of fruit meads -- the fruit likes to float and clog up the bubbler, then the bubbler blows off and fruity, sticky proto-mead spews all over. (Strawberries are even worse than this!) The tan layer on the bottom is mostly raspberry seeds that the yeast has eaten all the pulp off of.

This batch is sitting on top of the dishwasher with a plastic bag protecting it from fruit flies until it gets past the dangerous stage. Then he will siphon it ("rack" it) into another carboy, put a bubbler on it, and lug it into the basement to do its long-term fermentation thing.

How do you make really good mead? Set it up and forget about it (after that "spewing out the top" stage is over). Okay, cleanliness is important, too, like not starting with dead moths or anything in the bottom of the carboy. But D. is pretty strict about bleaching carboys and storing them sealed so nothing can crawl in.

The other batch, the "black mead", made with black patent malt, passed the dangerous stage quicker, since it didn't have any frothy fruit layer, and is already in the basement.

What is mead? People always ask that. Is it like wine, or beer . . . ?

Really mead is only like mead. When making beer, the yeast consumes fermentable sugars from a sprouted, roasted (that's "malting") grain. In wine making, the yeast consumes the fermentable sugars from the grape juice. In mead making, the fermentable sugar is the honey. You don't see it in US stores very often because mostly the alcohol regulations (and tax laws) were written to cover beer, wine, and spirits. (If you do find something labelled "mead" in the US, often it is either made out of the country, or else it is white wine flavored with honey. Or else you are at an SCA -- Society for Creative Anachronism -- event.)

From your basic mead (honey, water, yeast), there are a bunch of varieties. Add pears and it's perry. Apples (or cider), and it's cyser. Grape juice, and it's pyment. Any other fruit, and it's called melomel. Add a fermentable grain and it's braggot. If you add herbs, it's metheglin. Obviously at one point it was popular enough to bother to name all these subcategories!

And speaking of subcategories, suddenly I have a blank in my Blogger dashboard to add labels to posts. Cool!

I apologize if you have tried to comment and run into the "Blogger & beta Blogger aren't speaking" problem. I only switched to beta Blogger because otherwise I couldn't log in at all, not to shut anyone out!

Now off to knit pattern 11, just in case I forget to take the camera to the county fair after all.

September

It's fall. If the cool nights didn't tell me that, the morning I spent yesterday at our son's school, cleaning up after the construction, probably would have.

His school was originally a one-room school house. By the time he started, it was two rooms and a kitchen. Over the summer, a third room was built on. I was happy to see that it was made to match the original room: wooden floors, brick walls, matching wainscoting.

But being that it's such a small school, our "janitor" is one woman. The construction left the inside of the school covered with drywall dust (I'm sure Tatt3r, with her new windows, can relate!), snippets of electrical wire, and odd chunks of plaster. So Wednesday night I got a call, asking if I could come and help clean up and get the rooms in shape for the start of school next Tuesday.

I spent half of yesterday sweeping the floor, dusting computers, and checking out the new addition. Even the windows were made to match the old (1854) building.

We went home at lunchtime, and then spent the second half of the day looking for a bed for our son's new room. That was possibly more exhausting than cleaning his school! We drove all over, looking in every store that had furniture, trying to find a loft bed like his friend P. has. And we found that not only loft beds, but twin beds in general, are pretty thin on the ground in September.

We saw a couple of possibilities, but they were not cheap. And I am! Thrifty, frugal, penny-pinching, whatever you want to call it, I am rarely willing to spend hundreds of dollars on something that doesn't look worth it. I don't mind spending hundreds, or even thousands, on something that is going to last. But I get very itchy when the quality doesn't match the price.

So, after many hours walking through stores and saying, "Mm" about what I saw, our son got -- a haircut! And then we went home. I got online and found loft bed plans for $10. I'm pretty sure that between me, my brother, and my dad, we can get a bed made that will be worth every cent we spend on it.

Now I have to go eat some breakfast and go back to the school!