Well I’ve finally blocked the Soleil tank I was working on (and finished last week but I had pressing matters to attend to – aka other knitting).

Here’s the whole deal and here’s a close up of the lace.  Unblocked it looked good on me so blocking should make it better (it helps the stitches form their memory).

I also am blocking the top part of the latest hat I’m making.  It’s the official one (the last one was a “practice” hat) that I’m taking to FL.  I have the wires to work in and the flowers to attach and hopefully that can be done in the next few days.

Next I should be working on a few pair of socks but I’ve also designed my own hat pattern and my mind keeps wandering to it and trying to perfect the design.  We’ll see if anything gets done when I’m thus distracted.

Ethan and I sat and watched it while Victor made as much background noise as he could.  I pointed out the important people and tried to impress upon him the importance of the moment.  What a good man Pres. Obama is and how he’s going to take care of the country “the way Mommy and Daddy take care of you two”.

I don’t know if he’ll remember any of it, but I hope he can start to understand the world outside this house and school and how much bigger and, today, better it is.

Someone really loves me.  I should specify, though, that someones loved me enough to buy me several delightful gift certificates to my favourite yarn source.  I have MANY plans for all this yarn.  Wanna see? (I know, ME TOO!)

This is going to become this (horrible picture, I know).  Offwhite for the hat, light and dark pink and light and dark green for the flowers and leaves, respectively.  More on this later…

This is going to become this (though because of availability his will be dark/med/light blue and red/orange/gold instead of brown/red/beige).

This is going to become this.

These will be socks for Ken and myself (think toe/heel/cuff of one colour for him and the reverse for me – he’ll likely take the blue).

This (not the best colour pic – it’s a bluey-lavender, not grey) is already started on this and hope to be done by the time we head to FL in, um, 10 days. (heheomgIntk! – that’s oh my god I need to knit!  I made it up just now, aren’t I witty!?)

This will become a toque for Ken’s co-worker who gifted us an extraordinarily large certificate to a local restaurant and said “it comes with free babysitting”.  Bless her!

That’s all of it, I think.  I’m going to be a very happy and very busy knitter for a while.  Gardening BE DAMNED!

Oh, and this weekend I made myself this for our FL trip (as a practice run on the hat above – not the same but same designer).  I hadn’t the proper yarn but needed to knit.something.now.  It turned out really nice and even Ken, my litmus test, said it looks “neat” and “nice” and he’d be seen in public with me wearing it.  Such praise can’t be bought!  It’ll be the perfect travel hat since it’s cotton and folds almost completely flat without wrinkling at all.  The flowers stick out a bit but they’re an acrylic yarn and will bounce back admirably.

I went out again, today, armed with my little P&S camera and a better idea of what I wanted to capture (glitter! I’m a girl, afterall).  I did better.  I’ll link them, instead of making this such a pic-heavy post, but I’ll show you my favourites (in order of least to most favourite by coincidence alone).

There’s also these…#3, #5, #7, #9, #11, #12, #14, #15, #16, and #18.

Not too shabby, eh?

The aftermath of our ice storm from this week, since it’s stayed cold since then, is this…

I recommend you “View Image” as they’re best in their “full size”.

They aren’t as pretty as the real thing, but camera’s can only capture so much (when in my hands).  It’s been really sunny today, so the whole forest is a glitter.  Last night, while I waited to see if Ken would make it up the driveway (on foot) without slipping and cracking open his head (he did – make it, that is), it was dark and watching the cars drive by was really neat since their headlights would light up *everything* and their tail lights made everything all red and glow-y and festive.

Well, after his “vacation” from work, Ken was due back this week.  He went in Monday and mostly had nothing to do.  Tuesday he took off sick because we’re the family of perpetual sickness it seems.  Today he may have gone in but was still feeling sick and not inclined to work.

There was also this…

(right-click, view image if you want bigger).  That there’s 1/2 to 3/4 inches of ice.Now, had we a typical driveway it’d be a damned challenging problem.  But we have this (17mb – I know it’s big but I tried to shrink it and, um, no) (the sound is the ice sliding down the driveway… alllll the way down… it even took the curve and kept.on.going).

Wild.

So we got out the iron rake and digging shovel and chopped and yanked and cleared the ice off down to the tree 2/3rds of the way down (on the right side of the drive).  The ground under the ice was slightly warmer than the ice, so it wasn’t as hard as it could have been (though the ruts on the drive were frozen solid).  I spread some salt on the exposed driveway and Ken slid the car down the rest of the way and parked it at the bottom.  If we’re lucky he’ll be able to make it out tomorrow.  I hope, but don’t expect, it’ll melt by Friday so I don’t have to haul the groceries up, bag by bag, from the bottom of the hill.

Ken and I are foodies, at least in willingness to try new and exciting foods.  We’ve been trying various Japanese dishes to great enjoyment and I’ve been interested in curries recently (Indian, Japanese, and Chinese) as well.  I’ve also started looking around for good Indian and Thai books to try out.

Ken, for Christmas, bought me a rice cooker (bless a man who knows your heart!) and some cook books to help along with it.  Two big tomes on rice, one on thai food, and the one that we tried tonight.  5 Spices, 50 Dishes by Ruta Kahate.  It’s a very pretty book, outside and in, with nice little tales about her childhood and stories about each dish.  Each dish is cross-referenced within the book to help you make whole meals easily (eg “this dish goes well with X on page x or Y on page y” and then X will say something similar but with entirely different references, not just back to the original).  Along those lines I made Spicy Eggplant with Tomatoes which the comment “To create a complete North Indian vegetarian meal, serve with Chapati (page 109), Creamed Farmer Greens (page 35), and Punjabi Red Beans (page 43).” encouraged me to do just that (minus the Chapati because I don’t have a gas stove or open flame but it would have been much better with that, than the rice we had).  The food.was.amazing!  It wasn’t very hard, though the recipes can be challenging to read because of how they’re laid out on the page, and didn’t take too much time to make.  I’ve never had a “new meal” with so many new items that every one of them was a resounding success.  Only slight addendums to the recipes (eggplant teeeny bit too spicy, beans teeeny bit too salty, greens pureed too much – my fault).

I always measure success when a dish makes it into the recipe cards (when I copy it out onto a card and it goes into the file and into rotation).  Typically it takes 2 tries of a recipe before that happens, but when something’s really stellar it goes in right away.  These three are going in right.away.  I’m highly recommending this book if you have any desire to try cooking your own indian food.

The house is beautifully, breathably, quiet. (*cue Victor’s early wake up from nap in five…four…*)

There’s no body making noise but me and my typey-type fingers.  It’s.so.strange.  The past few weeks have been, as the Grinch said, “noise, Noise, NoisE, NOISE!”  Now that the holiday’s are over, though (and they were wonderful!), I’m being driven by instincts that are screaming at me to ACT.NOW.QUICKLY!  Like in August with my weird KNIT.NOW.OMG! urges, I’m being ordered to prepare to plant the garden!!!  I’ve been pouring over seed catalogues and books and trying to figure out what the plan of action will be.  I have loads more planning to do and WAY more work than you’d believe.  Ken got a chainsaw (and gear) for Christmas so we can now cut down trees.  We also found out that renting a backhoe/excavator won’t cost as much as we thought it would so this spring, as soon as the ground is less-frozen, we’re digging out the side hill.  I don’t know how much room I’ll need for the garden, but we also need to dig out space for the root cellar Ken’ll be building me (for the gads of veggies I’ll be storing up for next winter in my hugely successful garden). (What? It could happen!)

I’m also ordering a whole bunch of stuff from my favourite online yarn source because people LOVES ME and gifted me with certificates of joy (in large amounts, yay!).  I’ve got at least 2 projects to make in the next 4wks because in exactly 31 days from today we’re leaving the boys to their Grammy and flying south.  Not out of the country, but still travelling without boys.  It’s gonna be great!

I just hope we don’t get sick right before we leave.  We’ve been sick for the past forever and I’m getting a little tired of it, to be honest.