Finishing a hat

I finished my summer hat last night and I love it! I hope to post pictures and a vague pattern/tutorial soon, so be expecting that. And I have much to say about my niece's visit. For now, though, I need to run to the grocery store before the temperature rises above 100*.

My niece

My darling niece is staying with us for a few days and it is so much fun to have her around! She is my brother's daughter and she is 16, but not annoying like most teenagers are. I credit my mother with making her a well grounded person. She's a bit strange, too, which means she and I get along quite well. And by staying here she has a chance for a little privacy and quiet, which she doesn't get much of at home with her insane, evil father and her two very loud younger brothers.

Yesterday we went out to try to find some school clothes for her. Like me, she is not a little wisp of a thing so attractive clothes can be hard to find. I love that she has her own sense of style and that she is confident enough to express herself with her fashion choices. She didn't find much that she liked, so tonight we will be continuing our quest with a trip to Hot Topic. It's where she wants to go, so that is where we will go, but not until tonight when it is a bit cooler and we can use M's car that I don't fear will overheat or stall if I run the AC. In temperatures over 100*, AC is more than a convenience to those of us who are prone to heat exhaustion.

It is just really nice to have her here. See? I'm not all evil where minors are concerned. Just most of them. And all of them until they are old enough to be somewhat self-sufficient and think past the next few minutes. But my niece is cool. She's at that point where she's not a kid anymore, but she's not quite an adult yet, either; so many her age get lost without a real sense of who they are, but Ash seems to know herself pretty well and she's seen enough crazy and unpleasant that she may be able to avoid most of it. She seems pretty mature to me, but not like she's in any rush to be a grown up. Really, she's pretty amazing to me and I love her very much.

Here's a random pic from the ice cream contest we went to a few weeks back. It's a dog with his matching human.


And here are a couple videos of Cat. Because she would smother me in my sleep if she saw that I had posted a dog picture and nothing of her. (grr... stupid thing doesn't want to finish processing. I may have to try again later.)

So many things...

So many things just don't make sense to me these days and it really is affecting me on a deeper level than eve before.
I hate, hate, HATE what the current administration has done to this country. George W. Bush and his cronies have made so much of the world hate us, and I can't disagree with them. The man is an imbecile at best and more likely downright evil. His stunt at the recent G8 meeting left me mortified; sadly, it is only a typical sampling of the dumbing down of our nation. People were so incensed that Clinton had sex and lied about it. Sex, whether in or out of his marriage, is not any of our business. This man, however, has gotten thousands of people killed and lied about it. Why hasn't he been impeached??? Gaaah! It makes me so very angry I can hardly stand it.

There is much more I have to say about this and I definitely will, but M just called and is on his way home, so I'll postpone the rest of my rant. (Oh, and the cookies are done and are delish! I use this recipe, but a TBL instead of a TSP of vanilla.)

Buddhism and a day in the kitchen

Today is a kitchen day, but things are not going so well. My tea ball broke and spilled tea all over the floor. I buy tea bags, but make my own blend of different kinds of tea. It's the best iced tea I've ever tasted, so I'm sticking with it. For a gallon, I use 2 regular family sized Luzianne or Lipton type tea bags, three of the smaller green tea bags and three of the Earl Grey green tea. I've mixed all of these together and now just use 2 TBS of the mixture in a coffee filter inside a large tea ball. I also sweeten it with stevia. Good stuff, and so much better for me than the Diet Coke.
I bought a bunch of mushrooms recently because they were waaay on sale, but they are so much more than I can use before they go bad, so I combined them with some yogurt, spinach, garlic and dill and threw it all in a blender. It's all frozen now, but the little sampling I had of it before freezing was pretty tasty and zesty. I think that it will be a nice soup stock for making other things.
I need to get back to the kitchen to make some cookies. I promised M some tollhouse cookies when he gets home and he does love it when I spoil him. Heh... I would too. I do miss being spoiled. He is a sweet man, but he's not the most thoughtful guy I've ever known.

I'm considering Buddhism as a way of life. It seems to fit the way I view the universe far more than Christianity never has done. It just feels right. We'll see how that develops.

*sigh* must return to kitchen and make cookies now, and clean up the spilled tea. Oh, and laundry MUST be done today. I really don't mind doing any of that once I get started, but the motivation is so frequently lacking.

One last note for today: I am now (proudly) listed as a designer on Ravelry! I debate with myself whether or not I am truly worthy of the title, but when I saw that one of my patterns from a few years ago was already up on Rav and had someone making it, well, might as well make the leap. I will try to take better notes when coming up with patterns so that I can put them out in case anyone else wants to make them, but I am lazy and a sloppy note taker.

Okay, cookie time. :) Nothing friendlier than a house smelling of freshly baked cookies.

A whole week of no meat

Today marks the first week of not eating meat. I almost slipped up when I was making something for the boys and without thinking nearly made some for myself, too, but I caught it in time and avoided it. It's been easier than I thought it would be so far and I feel really good about it.

Progress on the top I'm knitting is going well, but unfortunately I don't like the waistband I made, so back to the drawing board on that bit. The bottom of it is really turning out quite well, though.

M is a little sad (although he won't let on) that the boys and their mom are moving further away and we won't be able to afford to see them as often. As guilty as it makes me feel to say this, I won't mind only seeing them once a month. They'll be an hour and a half away instead of the half hour or so that they are now. They will be closer to their maternal grandparents, so that will be nice for them, but I know M will miss them a lot.

What about the things that go bump during the day? Just curious why they don't seem as troublesome to anyone. Aren't they probably the same things that go bump during the night?

teeth of gelignite

What a good day we had! If we hadn't had the boys today I doubt we'd have bothered with going out, but it turned out great! This morning we went downtown to a car show...





Of course it was already uncomfortably hot, but even I found the cars interesting. M and the boys loved it. After spending about half an hour there we headed a block west to watch the parade go by. It wasn't much, but the boys still enjoyed it.









































After that it was back home to cool off for a few hours and, as always, feed the boys. It seems like there's no time for much else except feeding times when we have them. They behaved so very well, though, that we decided to go out to the fireworks show tonight. A wonderful time was had by all. (My camera doesn't do sound with the video, but here are a couple of 30 second AVI clips of the fireworks. The rest, if anyone is interested, can be found here.) The park the fireworks display was held in was enormous and although there were more cars than I could even begin to make an accurate estimate of, we weren't crowded at all. There had been a light shower in the early evening which had brought the temperature down nicely. We brought a blanket and some snacks and settled ourselves in the middle of a soccer goal. We had a good unobstructed view of the whole thing. For a change, a really good time was had by all. Even parking was stress free since there was a complimentary shuttle taking us from the lot we parked in across the highway to the field itself. Tomorrow there is an ice cream tasting that we'll probably be going to, so quite the busy weekend for us.

Random update

It's my third meat free day and I have to say that so far I am loving it! This long holiday weekend may be a little tricky since we have the boys (and for an extra day . Ugh.) and we'll be doing Fourth of July activities which will almost inevitably include barbecue. Eh, I'm not going to fret about it. I know it's too soon to be sure, but I think I can feel a difference. My digestion seems to be having fewer issues, so we'll see what happens.

I'm knitting a summer top. I had an idea in my head, drew a couple of sketches, and then went online to see if I could find something similar. Is it still my design if I take disparate elements from several different patterns, change them substantially but still use them as inspiration, and combine them in a totally new way? I think maybe it is. I'm using the patterns as help in construction instead of as actual patterns, so I think I'm okay here. It's not like anyone will be able to look at my finished piece and say that it looks awfully similar to another one. I'm really looking forward to finishing this one and having my first real wearable that I've designed and knitted. Hopefully my notes will be good enough to make a real pattern from. Pictures as soon as there's something to show.

I planted some herb seeds a week or so ago and they are beginning to sprout. :)

I really don't want to have the boys tonight (or at all) but M says how much he wants to spend time with them... then when they are here no one wants to spend any time actually doing anything together. What's the point of them being here if they are just going to stay in their room on their computers the whole time?

Bad cramps today. Ouchie. I slept on the couch last night with the heating pad and will probably go curl back up with it as soon as I am finished here.