Wednesday Bits and Pieces

First, a little bit of responding to comments.

Becky said, "So *that* is what those kinds of spiders are! We quite frequently have them trying to live in our mailbox."

They get in my mailbox, too! My husband emphatically does NOT like spiders (this t-shirt is just made for him), and when these come in the house in the mail, I'm the one who escorts them back out again.

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Cathy-Cate said, "My Asiatic lilies have never looked the same since a friend of ours (who is a landscaper) thinned them three years ago....he said they would bounce back better than ever in a couple years."

I have my suspicions about what he did! The way to thin lilies is to dig up all the bulbs after the stem starts to die and space them out, so each bulb has more growing room. But this takes a lot of time and a lot of labor.

The cheating way is to pull off the stems of some of the lilies in each clump, hoping to starve those bulbs out and let the ones left with their stems take over. This method is obviously a lot faster and easier than all that digging.

But the problem with this method is that if the lily variety is tough, instead of the stemless bulb dying, it just throws up a new stem the following year.

This new stem will be smaller and weaker and less likely to bloom, since it didn't get to store up as much energy when its stem was pulled off.

If this was what happened, I'd either leave them in place (the small stems will probably recover), or else dig them up and space them out in the fall.

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Catsmum said, "I don't want to know what the stitch count will be by the final row."

Well, that's the thing about Nieblings, they don't always increase in a strict geometric way. In this particular doily, the stitch count got to 76 stitches per round in Round 139, leaped up to 101 per round in 140 (that make-a-triple-yarnover-into-13 bit), and has been decreasing by two stitches per pattern round ever since.

I just counted out the last chart round, and it has 91 stitches per repeat, so I'll be ending at 1,092 stitches in the final round.

I also stretched it out a little against a ruler, and it's at least two feet in diameter, even knitted in size 30 thread on a 2.0 mm needle.

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In other news, we found some more beanie babies for Beanie Baby Wars.

An octopus mounted on an ice dragon.

A turkey mounted on a unicorn.

They're jousting.

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Ah! And I finally got a picture of one of the hummingbirds at the feeder this year. I waited so long with the camera all set up that the power saver kept turning it off again.

My camera's preview screen has a speed of 30 frames per second, and when I watch the hummingbird on it, I can see the wings moving! But they were still too fast for the camera and showed up as blurs in the photos.

Boy, is my Face Red

Otherwise known as "birdwatcher fail".

In 2008, we had a couple of pairs of phoebes try to build mud nests over our door, and later, over the window of our bedroom.

I fended them off by stapling paper over the 1-inch ledges, but I also found some plans and built a phoebe nesting platform, which I mounted on the north side of the house.

The way these things seem to work is that if I build it, they go away and never come back. I saw and heard phoebes last year, but nary a one tried to build a nest on the platform.

This year, overnight it seemed, a robin's nest appeared on the platform. Well, robins are quieter than phoebes, at least. But I never saw a bird on or near the nest.

Day after day I watched: no bird, nothing on or in or near the nest.

Finally, after almost a week, I decided to clear the platform. I thought maybe a cat or a hawk or something had gotten the robin that built it, and if the platform was bare another bird might use it.

Um.

This morning I looked out there automatically and there was a robin. Yes! Poor robin, sitting on the bare platform, fluffed up like a broody hen.

I cannot tell you how bad I felt. Bad, bad birdwatcher!

Could I repair my error?

I found the nest. I stood up on a bucket and felt three warm robin eggs in the bare wooden nesting platform. Okay, eggs in nest, nest on platform.

Then I waited.

The Blue Cow's Tale

Everyone seems to like the blue cow, so I thought I'd tell what I know of her story.

She started out as one of those fiberglass art project cows. She might have been one of the Cows on Parade in Chicago back in 1999. The owner of Sherman's Dairy Bar bought her after the show was over, and for years she stood inside the brown garage door next to the entrance to the dairy bar. I remember her as white with flowers and leaves painted on her.

A couple years ago she showed up on the roof, painted blue-moon-ice-cream-blue, with a cowbell around her neck (and chains and a padlock to keep the wind or vandals from carrying her away).

They tell the kids "That's where Blue Moon ice cream comes from!"

She stands up there all year round, and in the winter I've often thought I should get a picture so I could say it was so cold even the cows turned blue.

I just found out that Sherman's has a Facebook page.

Since we're local, we usually go to Sherman's on rainy stormy days. The lines are shorter then, and that's when you'll find old farmers and their wives in there, enjoying a waffle cone and the flowers on the table.

Random Story From My Colorful Past

Once upon a time (as all the best stories begin), my husband, an avid roleplaying gamer, and I made friends with a blacksmith.

The blacksmith and some of his friends were also roleplaying gamers, and so every month or so we'd go up to the blacksmith's house and game until I fell asleep on the floor.

(In those days I could and did fall asleep anywhere, including hard floors with dubious carpets. Ah, youth!)

On one of those gaming occasions, we walked down the street to the little grocery store and picked up snacks to sustain us, and as we were all walking back, another friend drove into town and slowed down when she recognized us.

Some of our party decided walking up the little hill and around the corner was too far, so they . . . sat on the hood of her car. And laughing and driving slowly, she drove as far as the railroad crossing.

Where apparently the bumpiness of the crossing and the weight on her hood made some metal bit touch her battery, because there was a flash and a zap and one person leaped off her car, rubbing his rear end.

The car stopped. The people who had been riding all jumped off and started pushing the dead car up the hill and around the corner to the blacksmith's yard.

Someone opened the hood and took out a melted connector. The blacksmith gave it that hmmmm that people who fix stuff recognize. He went in the back yard and fired up the propane forge and waited for it to heat up.

When he put this piece in the coals - it evaporated. More hmmming, a different bit of connective metal, some magic pounding with hammers. A new part.

And the car ran again.

(I get to blame Julie for bringing this one to mind.)

In Which the DH Learns About Mice

Once upon a time, there was a smoked turkey.

The smoked turkey was eaten up, and its carcass put into my big canning pressure cooker and made into soup stock.

But the cook (my dear husband) ran out of time to make soup. The canning pressure cooker was too big to fit into the refrigerator.

So the cook had a bright idea: he would put the kettle of stock outdoors, where it was 14 F (-10 C) and thaw it and make the soup later.

Monday there was a snowstorm, and after driving home from work in the snow, he cleared the driveway with the snowblower and came in too tired to make soup.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday went by.

Thursday I glanced at the top of the canner when I came home from work at night (in another snowstorm) and wondered what those black specks on the top of it were.

Friday morning in daylight I took a good look: a nasty little mouse had climbed on the top and tried to get in by gnawing off tiny bits of the rubber safety seal.

Argh.

Fortunately it didn't get in . . . but I don't guess the canner will get left out in the snow again any time soon.

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!

We Had SUN Today!

Sunshine! And blue sky!

And I got to knit in actual daylight.

But, uh, now that it's dark again, I just realized I forgot to take any pictures except this one:


Another introvert shirt. Collect them all!

Busy, Back Soon. With Visual and Sound Effects.

This is a busy week:

We are finally getting the rest of our roof re-shingled (thumping, footsteps, and banging from overhead, dogs flinching and shivering);

We found a carpenter with the mental agility to frame in the windows and archway in our geodesic dome addition (skilsaw and pneumatic nailgun with airborne sawdust and drywall dust);

We have someone scheduled to hook up the gas to our mini soapstone stove (dust filtering down from the new chimney hole in the ceiling, shop-vacuuming and yarn smothering in protective plastic bags).

The computers are in the geodesic dome room. Before and after pictures when all is done and dusted!

'Tis the Season

The season of tempting garden catalogs flooding into the mailbox.

I've been a gardener long enough to realize that 90% of my extravagant winter garden plans don't come off.

Spring comes, and the soil is still frozen, or too wet, or it rains for eleven days, or the mosquitoes come out early and there is a limit to the number of times I can swat myself in the head before giving up and going indoors.

But in the winter, all things seem possible in the garden. Once again it seems possible that I will start all my seeds on time and plant all my transplants without being frustrated by cutworms, chipmunks, or groundhogs. Once again I can curl up and dream with pictures of heirloom tomatoes and zinnias the size of my head.

Winter is also knitting season.

With the garden put to bed and the lawnmower snowed into the storage shed, I have an excuse to sit indoors in the warm and knit.

Here are some of the diagrams I drew of the funky corner pieces that a knitted circle needs to become a knitted square.

(If you need an excellent compass for drawing circles, I blogged about my mmArc in this post a couple of years ago. And now I can point you to the joy of Google Patents and tell you that this is US Patent #5,615,485. Safe-T Products was acquired by a company called Learning Resources in 2006, and Learning Resources sells both the mmArc in millimeters and the orange Safe-T compass in fractions of an inch.)

And here is how the math geekery works out in the actual knitting.

(Did I ever mention that this is not a blog where you will find math hate or weather hate?)

And now for something completely different - as long as I'm talking about geekery and thinking about weirdness, I just noticed that Monty Python has a YouTube channel.

Singing

I heard a weird noise just now, and walking around to suss it out, found that the cast-iron steam kettle on top of the soapstone woodstove was singing.

The kettle was singing.

How often have I read that? And now I've heard it.

Christmas music on the CD player: Butch Thompson's Yulestride, one of my all-time Christmas favorites, alternating with things like Bethlehem after Dark, Anonymous 4's On Yoolis Night, Ethan James' Ancient Music of Christmas (primarily hurdy-gurdy and definitely not for everyone), Christmas with Sonos Handbell Ensemble, or The Jethro Tull Christmas Album.

What? You didn't know there was a Jethro Tull Christmas album?

It's an education, blogreading, innit?


Now [says to self, firmly] must go get ready for Christmas!