Author: Susan

After all of the heckling I get every time a fish post makes its way onto the blog, I wasn’t exactly expecting fantasy football to be a winner of a topic. Apparently, though, I am not the first knitter to like football, and the response has been all sorts of positive. So, it looks like I have a topic for Tuesdays. 🙂

I won week one, 58-43, despite the worst efforts of Mr. Alexander… My team, with the assorted points they earned:

QB
	Daunte Culpepper, Mia	3
RUNNING BACKS
	RB Shaun Alexander, Sea	3
	RB/WR Laurence Maroney, NE	8
RECEIVERS
	WR Terrell Owens, Dal	14
	WR Santana Moss, Was	8
	TE L.J. Smith, Phi	5
DEFENSE
	D/ST Seahawks	12
KICKER
	K Jason Elam, Den	5
BENCH
	RB T.J. Duckett, Was	0
	RB Marion Barber, Dal	2
	RB Brian Calhoun, Det	0
	WR Deion Branch, NE	0
	WR Reggie Brown, Phi	8
	WR Keyshawn Johnson, Car	4
	D/ST Patriots	6
	QB Kerry Collins, Ten	4

Clearly Shaun Alexander was the lemon of the weekend. (Here’s hoping that he gets his act together and that Walter Jones stays/gets well, or this may become a frequent lament.) Culpepper wasn’t amazing, especially since he passed off touchdown runs instead of throwing them, but our league rules are difficult for quarterbacks. Maroney did a great job for his opening game. (Yay, rookies. Yay, Patriots.) T.O. did exactly what I hoped he would, though if he’d been showing up to practice and Drew Bledsoe had any idea how fast he could run, his numbers would have been much better. I’m worried that Bledsoe won’t stay healthy and TO’s numbers will drop (and Marion Barber’s would too, which would hurt the bench.) The Seahawks defense was awesome. And Deion Branch got traded to Seattle (woot!) so not only will the local team benefit, but he’s matched with a great quarterback and should start delivering points in a week or two. Sweet.

And, to mollify the knittings who couldn’t care about football, here’s what I spent the games working on:

Coasters to match the new(ish) couch. 🙂 The round ones are from my standard knitting at knoon pattern, and I have a mitered square on the needles. The yarn is Cascade 220, of course. I’ll felt them after I finish a second square.

They’re just so pretty. 🙂

This one had a crazy ring of glowing clouds, and beams of light radiating out from the mountains…

Want to see why I’ve been doing such a crummy job posting for the last two weeks? 🙂

Good friends (who read the blog) are having a baby at the end of September, and so I’ve been (secretly) knitting my first baby sweater! I wasn’t feeling inspired by the patterns I was finding, and the lace in the twist-top tank seemed like it would be adorable, so I decided to wing it. I went and bought a onesie from Gap and used it as a base for the sweater dimensions. (It’s amazing how small baby clothes are compared to 205 yards of DK yarn…)

My yarn was Classic Elite’s Provence (color #2674, sea foam green), a 100% cotton, which I loved working with. It was perfect on size #5 needles. The pattern I mostly made up by placing the tank top lace against the size reference onesie. I did raglan sleeves because I enjoy sewing them, and I used the Yarn Harlot knitty pattern to gauge the sleeve length, since it seemed like she probably would know what she’s talking about and I was having a hard time finding 3 month patterns that I trusted. (If I did this again, I would use her entire Daisy technique of knitting the bottom in the round, and just superimpose my own gauge & lace on top — very clever. My version required seams at all of the edges — luckily baby-sized seams fly.)

Choosing the buttons was tricky to me (I hem and haw on that always, but even more when someone else has to live with the result…), but I really like the ones I finally settled on. And, after being pretty sure and depressed that it was going to be a good six months too big, the finished sweater was the perfect size.

And the back:

Awww. 🙂 This was so fun to work on.

Kevin’s mom’s birthday was last week, and we decided to get her a David Akers jersey. Ordering and shipping took a bit more time than we had allotted, though, so I made her a mini jersey to last until the real one arrived.

I made bias tape to finish the arm and neck holes — it was fidgety but added a lot. Then I embroidered the back. (You may not be able to see in the photo, but the 2 was white with silver and black trim — it was fun to get to use my silver embroidery floss — I’ve been hoarding it since college.)

I also made a little football magnet to hang it out of fimo and gold wire — it was baking when I took the photos. The whole thing was a blast back to fifth grade, when I used to make a lot of doll clothes. Good fun. 🙂

My fantasy draft results are in! (I realize this will be a boring post for most, but everything else that’s been going on is all secret knitting projects, reading about real estate and house inspections, and work — unsatisfying blog fodder. For all the knitters, the upside is that I get a lot of knitting done during football season, so even if this post bores you, it portends interesting things to come…)

Without further ado, my fantasy team (draft pick number in parenthesis):

QB
	Daunte Culpepper, Mia	(#70)
RUNNING BACKS
	RB Shaun Alexander, Sea	(#3)
	RB/WR Laurence Maroney, NE	(#46)
	RB T.J. Duckett, Was	(#94)
	RB Marion Barber, Dal	(#99)
	RB Chris Perry, Cin	(#166)
	RB Brian Calhoun, Det	(#190)
RECEIVERS
	WR Terrell Owens, Dal	(#22)
	WR Santana Moss, Was	(#27)
	WR Deion Branch, NE	(#51)
	WR Reggie Brown, Phi	(#123)
	WR Keyshawn Johnson, Car	(#142)
	TE L.J. Smith, Phi	(#75)
DEFENSE
	D/ST Seahawks	(#118)
	D/ST Patriots	(#171)
KICKER
	K Jason Elam, Den	(#147)

Obviously, getting Shaun Alexander was very exciting (and at #3! Amazing!). I made a mistake with Chris Perry, who’s injured — I should have picked an additional QB instead, especially where Culpepper’s knee is questionable. Oops. (But if Daunte’s well, he could be a great pick.) I also should have picked more running backs over wide receivers — I didn’t realize there was such a big RB/WR scoring discrepancy. TO is a mess, but I love watching him play, so as long as he keeps his drama and injuries to a minimum, I like him. Maroney I like, but may be injured, and Marion Barber is great — hopefully he and TO will create a good, point-filled environment, though cheering for Dallas won’t come easily. Santana Moss may be injured, and Deion Branch is trying to get traded (a bummer for both), but LJ Smith should be a good pick. It will be interesting to see if TJ Duckett gets playing time and how he clicks after his trade to Washington. And I know that it has almost no impact on fantasy scoring, but I really like my defenses, even if they’re not the Bears. 🙂

A lot of people in the league were out so set it to autopick, and so the whole thing went very quickly. Especially after the fifth round, there was only about a minute between turns. Hard to keep up! I think I did much better in the early rounds than I managed in the later ones.

We’ve been having a string of gorgeous sunsets. I remember last August being the same way — everything gets pink and orange and mountainous every night. The only shame is that every night, the sunset seems to arrive 15 minutes earlier. I get used to the long summer evenings here very quickly, and it’s so sad when that 9:30 daylight disappears — it feels like just a few days until everything will be cloudy and then pitch dark by four.

Two weeks ago, I thought that we’d reached the end of the strawberries after a great run. But, they’re back at the grocery store and I have new flowers on all of my plants!

I wonder if they’re shipping in from somewhere else? In any case, it’s great to see the resurgence.

Our friends Kevin and Jessie (last seen on the blog on the opening night of the knitting Olympics) were just married! It was the first wedding of my generation that I’ve been to, and it was lovely. Now they’re honeymooning in Costa Rica, and we’re in charge of hanging out with their cats and fish. 🙂

The cats are a riot. They all run to the front door at the sound of the key, and are all stacked up and peering around the door as you open it. For an apartment that is essentially cat-proofed, they still find a lot to get into: taking all of the tupperware out of the cupboards, shredding full rolls of paper towels, worming their way behind the fish stand to get to the fish food…

I set my things down while cleaning up one of their misadventures and came back to find Leo and Babar purring away next to my keys.

Very, very cute. However, given that they were responsible for the end of my last keychain (a red lifeguard lanyard, gifted to me by my brother after I lost mine over Spring Weekend in college), I’m sure the purring and cuteness was just a facade. It’s probably good that I came back into the room when I did, or I’m sure that ribbon would have seen the end of its days…

I am trying to get back in the habit of taking the bus.

After starting my new job in February, the convenience of public transportation diminished somewhat. The bus used to drop off a five minute walk from my office, but I’m now in a different part of the campus and so the walk is nearly twenty. At first, Kevin and I were carpooling, but then he switched jobs in March and is on a different campus altogether. Once that ended, the combination of the potential for late afternoon rain showers and the walking time led to lots of time in the car.

I realize that this is pathetic, especially since I frequently follow the bus to work. So, I’m trying this week to be a bus-taker for four of the five days. Day one was less than stellar: I missed the morning bus by about 50 feet (wrong side of a walk light), and the afternoon one by about four minutes… clearly I’m out of practice for interpolating a leaving time from the bus schedule. Both meant an extra half hour of added wait time.

At least I brought my knitting, so there’s an upside. I made it through a solid two inches today of the never-ending tank top, and can now start the interesting detailing on the front! Sweet!

The challenge for the week will be trying to remember to how to enjoy spending time without three consecutive activities at once. My forty minutes of walking that buffers each bus ride currently feels like very wasted time. It’s been an incredibly busy summer, both professionally and personally, and I think I need to relearn downtime. This isn’t a bad week for it — my major deadline for the summer was last week, and all of the visitors and social events are now clear. I’m resisting loading my ipod full of educational materials/news/new music for the week — just walking and knitting. I didn’t even bring reading materials so that I could multitask.

Hopefully my timing is a bit more on the mark tomorrow. How much knitting progress can I really make in two days?

We took the Ferry out to Bainbridge Island, because my grandparents were in town and we went to visit one of my mom’s cousins for the afternoon. It was a gorgeous day and great company, but sadly I only got pictures of the former. I seem to have had a case of the tilts (or perhaps these were the photos that Kevin took, so I can hand off blame), but here’s a clear but off-kilter Seattle:

And Rainier boiling up through the clouds:

(Click through to bigger and better versions.)
True to form, we’d had a work week’s worth of cool & clouds while Sharon was here (she’s still 0 for 3 for seeing the mountains), and it cleared up right after she flew out.