Author: Susan

Last night, after checking with Fenner, Kevin set up a trap to try to catch our disaster crab. I’ve been holding onto a potentially useful small glass jar that originally held dill. Once the main lights went out, he leaned it up against the rock he thought the crab was in, along with a cube of Formula 1 (frozen fish food), and we settled in to watch.

It took the shrimp about one minute to get in the jar.

Once he started eating, a parade of hermit crabs was close behind. We watched for another half hour, with only brief glimpses of the hairy crab legs in the rock, then went to bed. I predicted that we would catch three hermit crabs and no big crab.

This morning, we came down to find a jar full of crabs. Three hermit crabs (as predicted) and one hairy crab. Wow. (I really wasn’t expecting it to work.) You can see him here, sitting in tupperware on top of our fish log (hence the sparkly fish sticker):

Lest you think counting isn’t my forte, we’d removed one of the hermit crabs already, since he was getting beat up by the hairy crab. Neither of us is even remotely sure that this crab is the one we’ve been seeing. He looks littler that expected (Measured against our college-ruled note paper, he looks to be about 1¼” long.), though that may be a result of overactive imaginations and rarely seeing the entire crab at once. Or, given that we’ve already pulled out three of these guys, he may just be a smaller crab and our big one is at large. Kevin will reset the trap tonight, and until we figure out what to do with the crab, he’ll be hanging out in our refugium.

Does anyone know anything about crab reproductive cycles? As long as he can’t breed without another crab physically in the same compartment, I don’t mind if he stays down there indefinitely. But since the refugium water will be shared with the tank water, if there’s any chance that the crab could breed over distance with a still-hidden crab in the main tank, then he’ll have to go. Does anyone have any opinions or facts to share on the matter? He’s incredibly creepy, but my basic instinct is to let him live.

It’s been eons since I posted any knitting pictures. Proving yet again that my knitting will never set any land speed records, I’m just past the fourth dropped row of my clapotis. I really have been trying to post about it for the last two weeks, but I keep taking photos at night with a flash, and the yarn’s gorgeous colors just aren’t coming through. So I mean to take a picture in the morning, and one thing and another, and instead the tang or the plants get top billing that day. We had some serious sun coming in the windows this morning, though, so I finally got a good picture of the colors.

I’m about 75% sold on the colors used. I love the sky blue, medium blue and various greens. There’s a lavender/grey which I find lovely, even though I don’t think it entirely fits with the other colors. And then there’s a purple/brown which is striking, but I think the blend would be much prettier without. The name of the color mix is Green Mountain Madness, and when I keep the name in mind I love the shades because they remind me of New Hampshire, up at the lake. But without the words as a narrative, I’m not as enamored. (I also have a serious peeve. They missed a bunch of spots while they were dying the skein, so there are bright white undyed splotches in the yarn. I’m trying to pretend that they’re the “clouds”, but really, it’s just incompletely dyed. Grr. The yarn was expensive and 99% of it is so vibrant. I wish their attention to detail was a little stronger. You can see one of the bars at the top is that bright white.

It’s very aggravating.)

Dropping the stitches is definitely motivating, and I can see why people are so compelled by this pattern. It takes a long time to work the dropped stitch down, as the wool catches. I wonder if that’s exacerbated by having the purl stitch instead of using stitch markers? In any case, the colors really shine on those dropped stitches, and it breaks up the dark brown/purple color blocks nicely.

Love that silk – so shiny!

The tang is getting a “bonus week” in quarantine while we figure out how to remove our hitchhiker crab from the main tank. You may remember the hairy crab we pulled out a while ago? And how there was another still in the tank? Well, we finally saw the one that’s left out of the rocks last night, and he’s grown a lot. I’m completely creeped out by him, as he’s now a solid three inches wide (that’s bigger than our fish), and very fast. In a slip of the toungue the other day I called him a hijacker (instead of a hitchhiker) – Kevin laughed at me but we both decided the more ominous meaning was actually more accurate. So far he’s shy in daylight and scared of the fish, but he’s big enough to shift the (10 to 15 lb!) rocks as he feeds (I saw him do it when I was watching with a flashlight last night) and there’s no guarantee that his diet doesn’t include corals, so it’s definitely time for him to go. Unfortunately, he may be more difficult to convince, and so far we’re lacking a strategy for how to get rid of him. Until we have a plan, the tang is staying put.

Luckily, he seems pretty happy where he is. The quarantine tank has recently bloomed in florescent green algae, and there’s a good bit of bright red and purple coralline algae in front of the pumps.

(The color in this photo isn’t distorted. It’s amazing.) We can’t tell if the tang is nibbling on any of it, but he’s clearly well fed and fat with Nori. He’s grown a lot already, and is pretty rambunctious. We need to get that crab out so that we can let him in with the gramma and the clowns! I think he’d be a lot happier with the interaction.

Since it continues to delight me, here’s another post on my office garden. I replanted all of the starter peat things in the pots, and the plants have been taking off. One of my co-workers unraveled a mystery to me. The first two leaves in the balm lemon, mint, and basil looked nearly identical, and none of them looked like the grown plants. It turns out the first two leaves are the seed leaves, or cotyledons, which provide energy until the real leaves grow in enough to start photosynthesizing on their own, at which point they wither away.

You can see them, along with the more-formed real leaves, on the dill and the basil:

and on the balm lemon:

and if the mint was not so miniscule, you’d be able to see them on that as well:

The mint is amazingly tiny, even though it’s been growing as long as the rest. I have to assume, having tried to remove it from pots before, that these pipsqueaks of plants are already accompanied by a huge and growing root structure. I’ve been tempted to go digging to try to find out, but so far I’m being good and letting them live rather than satisfying my curiosity.

No cotyledons on the chives, but they’re going strong, and when I planted a few more seeds they sprang up very quickly:

The first lavender seeds never took, but I planted a few after the first pictures, and those came up within the week. It then took a good five days for me to realize that I must have grabbed the wrong packet because this “lavender” actually looks suspiciously like chives. I kept waiting for it to just grow leaves.

It’s sort of odd — every new sprout has the seed held aloft. I have to assume that the roots are growing underneath the soil and the seed shell got shed and pushed above ground. It’s sort of tempting to pull them out and replant them the other way. (You can see the seedpod silhouetted against the style guide that I printed out and put under contact paper so that I would have it at hand instead of opening the website thirty times a day. I’m finally learning it, and there’s something about it and the contact paper that satisfies the Type A part of my brain.)

The Olympics were amazing on the drive home on Friday, to the point that even though I had ice cream and milk in the trunk, I had to take a detour up to the nearest hill and stop for pictures (Which of course didn’t do the scene justice, but I tried.). It’s rare that you can see so much depth in the mountains. It didn’t completely come out in the picture, but there were about seven visible layers of hills in front. It looked like a watercolor, with a thick purple line at the top of the mountain, which bled down into a hazy violet that the next closest mountain contrasted against.

Between the purple mountains and the gold sky above them (the colors, incidentally, that I’m trying for in my quilt), it was worth a bit of melting.

I’ve been bringing my iPod to work, and have been worried that with the moments on my purse it was just asking for scratches. Never one to pay $35 for something that I could make, or one to turn down a crafting opportunity, I headed over to the craft store and picked up some felt. Two hours later, I had the following:

Once again, my camera fails completely to pick up the periwinkle, so you’ll have to make that blue a bit purpler in your mind. I included a hole in the bottom of the iPod cozy for the sync cable and the FM car transmitter, and added a snap to the top between layers of felt to hold it closed.

I was originally thinking I’d have to go back to the store to look for ribbon to wrap it closed, when I realized that it would be much easier to make use of what was already there:

In the sad news department, though, this means I now only have two snaps left:

I’ve been whittling away at these since the late eighties for doll clothes and other usefulness. I have to wonder how old they even are. Anything bought in Stamford, CT was definitely Mom’s from way back. (I’m hoping I was gifted these and didn’t appropriate them.)

Taking the snaps into account, the grand total cost comes to 42 cents (20 cents for each of the pieces of felt, and 1.875 cents for the snap). I am feeling smug.

Our tang has been with us three weeks, and is looking great.

He spends his days munching Nori and zooming round the tank. It’s very hard to get a picture of him. After about fifteen pictures like the one above, where I caught him mid-direction-change, I had a brainstorm of using our scraper to lure him to the glass. I don’t know why (does it look like a tang? Like something good to eat? A little tang demigod?), but he dearly loves the scraper, and swims tight circles around it whenever we put it in the tank. This is something of a godsend, since he still panics a bit when we put our hands in the tank, and doesn’t like when we stand next to it, even to put food in. But the second he sees the scraper, even if it’s in motion, he comes zooming over, and will follow it around the tank until it gets pulled out again. I would love to know what’s going on in his little mind.

And one more for good measure:

One more week without issues and he can go into the big tank!

I always think that Seattle has the oddest reputation for weather. After the long, dark winter we’ve had, I will no longer protest against the cloudy stereotype, but the “rainy” one still seems wrong to me. There seems to be two types of weather in Seattle: grey and blue. The first consists of low, deep clouds, maybe the occasional raindrops, and has everyone reaching for the coffee. The second means the lakes are gorgeous and the mountains are out. But both kinds of weather are subdued, and kind of prozac-ed. You’ll see seven weeks in a row of the exact same thing. You don’t get scorchers, or thunderstorms, or hail or snow. When TV shows (Grey’s Anatomy is guilty) show Seattle as a dark city plagued by driving rain and lightning storms, you know that the computer effects people were working overtime — there’s no cathartic hard rain, and I’ve counted four bolts in over a year and a half.

Which is why, driving home on Monday, I was amazed to see an enormous bank of dark clouds descending on Seattle. It wasn’t a tall thundercloud, but looked like someone had taken a brush and textured them up a few thousand feet. If you saw a photograph, it wouldn’t look real. (I was gushing about them to Kevin later, who didn’t seem so impressed until he saw a shot of them on TV, at which point I think he got it. They looked like something out of one of those climate-change end-of-the-world movies.) I got home, made tea, and took this picture out the upstairs window:

As with the fish, it doesn’t do the scene justice because you can’t see the motion: the clouds were boiling by, and the two tall trees were waving back and forth wildly. True to form, we only got a few drops of rain and no lightning, but I appreciated the drama of it.

This weekend was wildly productive. (Not the phrase that typically comes to mind when describing my weekends.) I cleaned, recycled cardboard boxes (my natural inclination is to hold onto them, in case they might come in useful, but my apartment only holds so many.), cleaned out my closet and donated three big bags of clothes to the Goodwill along with Kevin’s old skis and boots that were sitting in the hallway, cleaned out my files, recycled two big trashbasket’s worth of paper, vacuumed, finished the yoga bag, and made this pillow:

After I made the first two, which I still love, I decided to make a third as a sleeping pillow. The other two are for the most part slippery, fancy fabric, so they aren’t comfy to use for naps. I had enough to make another from the extra fabric I used for the round pillows and the backs of the square pillows, and I decided to line it with fleece, so that it would be soft to lie on and wouldn’t slide around on the pillow insert. And then I added the ribbon, which I bought last year on a lark because it was so pretty. It works really well with the futon and other colors, and though you can see a bit of bunching with the flash on that shiny fabric, the fabric is so dark that it really isn’t visible sans camera.

Sunday morning marked the very last of the i-cord, and now the yoga bag is done:

I hardly even know what to do with my hands now. 🙂 The final specs were:

Yoga Mat Bag (pdf) from Stitch n Bitch Nation
Yarn: 1 ball and about ten yards of Lion Kitchen Cotton, color #108 (Morning Glory)
Needles: #7 for the lace body, #5 for the i-cord straps.

I initially went down two sizes for the needles because I didn’t have dpn’s in a 7, but it ended up making a stiffer and less stretchy strap, so it was actually ideal. I looped the icord through the lace at the top of the bag to make a drawstring, then attached both ends to the bottom. Functional, easy, and I like the double strap.

And, so that you can see how close the color is, here’s the bag scrunched down a bit:

The mat’s a bit shiny, but otherwise they’re nearly dead on.