Category: Uncategorized

In yet another illustration of why I wasn’t a math major in college, I’ve redesigned my Branching Out redesign for the second time in three weeks. Here it was before I ripped:

This scarf has been giving me problems. My original problems were just memory- and skill-related: I kept forgetting yarn-overs, and I didn’t realize that “sl 2, k1, psso” meant that the first two stiches should be slipped together (so the middle one is “on top”) instead of sl1, sl1. My middle line was very knobby, and it wasn’t until I was four inches in that I discovered the error. (See left, below.) I tried to take command of my knitting and rip back selectively with a crochet hook a la Elizabeth Zimmerman, but gave up after three rows – yarn overs are too complicated, I couldn’t keep track. Cowed, I left the jig in and decided to think it was quaint, but then I realized that my third set of leaves wasn’t quite looking right. I didn’t have yarn-overs all the way around the leaf, the bottom had two points instead of one, and it was higher than the diagonal formed by the others so I lost my pretty diagonal line. (See below right, from the yellow diagonal and down.) I’d been so busy trying to follow my pattern that I hadn’t stopped to consider whether it was correct. So, on the trip home to Sharon’s graduation, I packed graph paper for my carry-on and worked away at a fix. I arrived at something different, but after a few rows clearly still not right. (see above the yellow diagonal.)

Sooo, down I sat again, and I’m delighted to say that my brain is apparently finally catching on to lace! I started over completely this time, and it’s looking quite pretty. I wish that I could say I had an ETA, since I’m not ripping back every row anymore (and consequently have gotten faster), but with only two inches done, no guarantee. 🙂 Hurray for progress and sticktoitiveness, nonetheless!

Life is pretty exciting when you get a bucket organization system:

The left container is for fresh water, the right is for salt water, and we’ve finally found a place to put all of our airline tubing and nets and little boxes of spare parts. The only downside is that instead of lifting the buckets straight up and down (which somehow still resulted in near-constant spills whenever I was involved), now we have the extra step of sliding them out off their shelf first. It doesn’t bode well.

Despite this, I’m psyched. A great find by Kevin, and we even got Larry’s approval when he was over the other night. Perhaps now he’ll stop telling everyone about the marvels of our downstairs bathroom. 😛

While I was back to the east coast, I got to spend a few days in New Hampshire at my parent’s house on Winnepesaukee. The house is a lot more full now, since most of the things that didn’t make it to Florida with my parents ended up there instead. I felt like I’d done a decent job paring down my room in Weston and moving stuff out to Washington last summer, but my room had 12 boxes of stuff when I arrived. Luckily most of it was standard packing excess (a hair elastic and single earring on my dresser warranted 2 sheets of packing paper), and I spent a day unpacking, enjoying, and throwing out the contents of the boxes. Going through my room has always approached archaelogical dig status — I’ve definitely inherited my share of pack rat. Once I was in the mode of not keeping things because I recognized them, I was left with this in my NH Closet:

The rug and painting on the right are my parents’, and other than that we have two boxes of books, one plastic tub of art projects, one white basket of the surviving stuffed animals, two envelopes full of all of the clippings and cartoons and pictures that I had stick-takked to my walls in high school, two boxes of dollhouse furniture, computer games (challenge of the ancient empire, operation neptune, sim city, oregon trail, etc, all on floppies), and a few bits of extra clothes that I always keep up there. (Not pictured is the large dollhouse my grandfather made me and my sister when we were little — that’s in a corner of the room.) This seems like a manageable amount of things — it’s nice to leave it all in a guilt-free state.

Since February was for fixing, and it’s now late-May, it seemed like it was time to finish off a project. I’d reworked the neck and steeked the front of this sweater months ago, but the zipper that I’d bought for it didn’t quite work out. I had it almost all sewed in when I realized that you need a separating zipper for cardigans. Ouch. So, a-seam-ripping I went. I ordered a new zipper online and got it all sewed in this morning. I’m proud of my handiwork, except at the top. I either need tape to hide it, or I need to shorten the zipper an inch or two (I think I’ll go with the second). I can’t entirely cross this project off the list yet, but getting closer!!

Before:

And after:

While I’m talking about knitting, I might as well do the whole roundup. I’ve mostly been working away on Branching Out. I modified the pattern so that instead of two columns of leaves on each side, there are now three. I’m really happy with the effect, even though it took a fair amount of graph paper and ripping to get the math right. I’m still such a lace novice.

I’m gradually getting quicker at working on this, but I still keep forgetting yarn overs then having to rip back. Thank goodness at least for crochet hooks or I’d spend more time ripping that knitting. I’m flying back to the east coast this week for my sister’s graduation, and I’m thinking that this may just make a perfect airport project. 🙂

P.S. also this:

🙂

As has become our wont, we headed over to the fish store this weekend, and came home with new zoos! They’re bright orange, Kevin’s choice, and they grow on me more by the day for their brilliant colors.

I saw an inch long crab in our main tank that must have come in on one of the tiny pieces of rock holding either the yellow zoos or the mushrooms, and since then we’ve decided to be more careful about quarantining our corals. I’ve been diligently hunting for the crab since, without any luck. We have about 70 lbs of live rock in the tank, and I’m guessing he’s found a protected crevice with a decent food supply, and we may never see him again. Hopefully he won’t decide to munch on any of the corals or fish, and we’ll catch anyone else who hitchhikes in. My great fear is that we could get something like an eel, or one of the enormous poisonous worms, and not realize it was there until the clowns disappeared one day. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Fenner.

Angela had the opening sale for her new yarn store yesterday. For now, she’s running an online site out of her apartment, so I headed over to Redmond, and walked away with this fun:

The two balls are Cascade 200, in colors 9450 and 9407. They’re both somewhat speckled, and I just can’t wait to see how they felt up — speckled cascade has amazed me with its brilliance in the past, so keep those fingers crossed. Nice summery tones, too, and a steal for the sale price. 🙂 The *lovely* All Season’s cotton from Madil is just waiting for #3 needles to be turned into Branching Out.

P.S. Want to see something bizarre? There’s a HUGE tree behind my apartment that has these foot long pods of dandelion-type seeds. They’ve been blowing densely all over the neighborhood, getting caught in all the plants and accumulating on the ground. It looks for all the world like it’s just started snowing when you glance out the window. Here are the drifts in our parking lot:

And the tree looks like none has even fallen yet. Between the leaves it dropped in the fall and our current blizzard conditions, whatever this tree might be is fast taking over oak trees as the winner of the messy category.

Another fun trip to the fish store last weekend! It’s taken me a while to post because all of the things are hard to photograph. It’ll be 50 pictures later and this is the best that I’ll have. I’ll keep working at it, but here’s a sample for now.

We have a small colony of 5 red mushrooms, captive bred. I was thinking that they would be pretty, but boring, but it turns out that they’re constantly moving and slowly sucking in and out, so they’re quite interesting to watch. I still don’t think that they have appropriate water flow, but we’re working on that and hopefully the little guys will start looking happier. The largest is about the size of a silver dollar when he’s extended this much.

We also have a new little cleaner shrimp. (“Jacques” — thank you, pixar.) Last night he molted, which was alarming at first (I saw that brightly colored tail floating around in the tank and my heart sank), but interesting once I realize he was alright. We’ve heard that these guys set up cleaning stations for the fish, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. It’s hard to picture the gramma getting spa treatment…

The photo above is after it picked up extra food that fell through the xenia (see below for the story), but here are some better options if you want more professional photos of him and his lovely tail. 🙂

We’re also the happy owners of new zooanthids (round little tubes with a fringe of antennas that grow in colonies) and yellow polyps (similar, but taller tubes, larger fringe, and a “button” in the middle of the face). Our original three zoos that came attached to our live rock have been thriving, as seen on the left. We have two colonies, and at last count, there were over twenty zoos. These new ones have thus far been impossible to photograph (not enough contrast with the rock they’re on), but you can at least get a sense of the colors, and I’ll keep trying. (You can see one of our blurry bluelegged crabs on the edge — whatever muck was on that rock, they loved it. We had to move it to the gravel after 7 (!) started fighting over a particularly yummy spot and knocked the whole thing down.)

Other than the new guys, the big excitement in the tank concerns the xenia (ever growing and branching off a separate trunk!) and the clowns. About a week and a half ago, the clowns suddenly stopped ignoring everything not man-made, and started very methodically brushing by the xenia. They worked up to swimming through, and even though they still spend the majority of their time in their usual spot in the corner, there’s definitely an ongoing interest in the xenia. We brought it up at the fishstore and were told that this dance is used to gradually accumulate anemone’s proteins so that eventually the anenome recognizes the clown as part of itself and doesn’t sting it. The xenia is tolerating it, but we’re keeping an eye out, since two clowns taking up house could be stressful. I don’t know how we’d discourage them exactly, but…

Then, this week, the clowns started racing over to any food we put in the tank (not atypical, they eat like golden retrievers) then zipping back to the xenia and spitting it out. As funny as this game was, I lost my amusement quickly — the gramma and clowns weren’t getting any, the xenia was getting littered with pieces of food it can’t digest (enter Jacques’ role…) and I was getting worried about leaving the food in the tank, since extra food decomposes and can poison the water. I’ve started reaching into the tank and putting the food closer to the gramma (he hates the hand, but seems hungry enough to ignore it) and the clowns have desisted a bit. Only 55 gallons, but always busy.

P.S. WOW. This is a tank full of zoos, xenia, and other awesome easy corals… Something to aspire to? It’s beautiful. 🙂

Just a quick post to heap praise on the tulips at Pike Place Market. I’d never seen the pointy-ended tulips before, but the colors are great. The purple has come out more and more as they’ve opened, which is neat to watch. I picked these up a week and a half ago, and they’re still going strong and acting thirsty. 🙂 Not bad for an end-of-the-day $6 bouquet!

With the addition of the torch coral and the new location for the xenia, we had to work a bit on the placement of the blowers in the tank. Now instead of having a basic clockwise flow around the edges, we have two back-to-front diagonal currents from each of the back corners. The corals (as hoped) seemed to love it, but the surprising effect is that it’s completely changed the behavior of the fish. Click and Clack love playing in the currents in the middle of the tank now, which impinges on the gramma’s turf, and it appears that there’s been something of a challenge to the current hierarchy. For example, Click (the braver of the clowns) stood his ground when the gramma tried to intimidate him away. (Clack held out for a few seconds, then retreated until things looked safe again.)

Then later, the clowns swam above the opening to the gramma’s home — an unusual spot for them, especially with the gramma out and keeping an eye on things.

They’ve even been around to the far right side of the tank, which is usually a no man’s land. The gramma has also been out and about on the left side of the tank more. Wonder if this will keep up?

In a nod to spring and an attempt to quell my desire for a real garden, we went out yesterday and bought new plants. The original plan was to find indoor plants, since right now all we have is this one, brought home from Kevin’s office when it wasn’t getting enough light there:

However, Classic Nursery only really has outdoor plants (good to remember for the future) so that’s what we came home with. I got gem pink antique viola’s and bacoba (small white flowers) to fill the hole left by last year’s impatients (center) in our planter by the front door. I don’t think it will be enough sun for them, but they’re very pretty for now and the people at Classic Nursery said that they’ll cope for now and in about a month it will be alright to put the impatients back in. At that point, I can re-pot them for the back porch. It’s also noteworthy that the elephant’s ears (broad red/green plant, center-right) is sending up buds which look like they’ll be a florescent salmon pink. The color is a little overenthusiastic, but I can’t wait to see them bloom.

My herbs from last year are all still going strong. The pineapple mint completely took over the planter over the the winter so I ripped it back fairly brutally last week. I’m not sure it will come back, but if it doesn’t then I’ll plant something else in its spot and do a separate container of regular mint without much regret. The english lavendar is growing hard — it about doubled its spread over the winter and has grown about two inches over the last two months. I can’t wait till it starts blooming. The honey melon sage (far right) is looking good even after I trimmed it back hard in January. I love the flowers, but it tries to take over the pot and grows so tall that it blocks the other’s sun. I may have to consider re-potting this one, too. The other two herbs are mysteries to me — I lost the labels. I think the variegated yellow one on the left is some sort of oregano, and I haven’t the foggiest about the maroon/dark green one at the back. I’ll have to bring in cuttings at some point and figure out what they are and if I still want them.

Given the early success with the herbs, I decided to try some more plants out back. Enter the dill, lettuce and spinach. I’m questioning whether both the amount of light we get and the size of the tub will be sufficient, but if it works out, I’d be psyched. Time will tell…

When it gets a bit warmer, I’m going to try another tub of basil, lemongrass and chives. I have a small planting of chives now (nearly two months old), but I bought them without realizing that they were covered in aphids. I tried spraying them with sugar water today, as a last attempt at attracting ladybugs, but I don’t think they’re long for this world: