Yarnivorous

G'day all! Wow, we are in the few days of December, the dying days of 2012.  This has been an incredibly quick year, and I am told that as I get older, they will go faster and faster.  No wonder people cry out, "Stop the World, I want to get off!" A tropical Christmas - tacky!  Fab! Christmas has come and gone, with its good cheer and fellowship.  Christmas carols have been sung for another year, woe and alas - I like singing them even when trying to sight sing the descant or the alto line, depending.  Sometimes I sing the bass an octave up but I won't blame one particular friend for that cos I also latch onto tenor lines as well.  Christmas presents have been opened and admired and as yet are still sitting under the tree except for the camera lenses which have been put to use on the cameras as appropriate (my phone, the Big Camera). We have seen a juvenile Snowy Owl up at Sunset Hill, when I decided to drive up there for sunset a couple of nigh...

May all your days be merry and bright, and we might get to see some of the white stuff here in Seattle! The top of the tree, with birds and gifts. And yes that is a fungus - cos nothing says Christmas like a red and blue toadstool with purple glitter.

G'day all! It is the shortest day, the longest night of the year and I am sooooo glad that the days will not get any shorter.  Indeed sunset is already getting later (though sunrise is also getting later, but that is ok cos sunset is the thing I notice more!).  The earliest the sun sets up here in Seattle is 4:18, but because we have a ridge to the west of us and umm well this is Seattle, often it gets dark earlier than that. In good news on the sun front, we've seen the sun both yesterday and today!  Yesterday was gorgeous for a good couple of hours in the afternoon. Aurora Bridge, Fremont And then I got to see sunset, well the sun go behind clouds, at Sunset Hill. Close enough to solstice. It is amazing to see how far south the sun is compared to how far north it gets at midsummer.  See the Olympics - the little teensy range in the pic above?  Well at midsummer, the sun sets north of them! (Am having difficulty finding pics but trust me ...

G'day all! How did it get to be halfway through December already?  It means we have been in the States for almost a year!  Wow, time flies when you are having fun! I'm hoping this December is not a December when Things Happen. I believe it was December 2005 when we moved into our house - we bought a nice little place.  I thought that move was pretty traumatic, after living in the one rental for nearly eight years.  Ha.  Little did I know that in 2007 we'd move to the States, Fort Collins in Colorado (a place that I really enjoyed but moving?  Nuh-uh). In December 2007, we had to fly to Canada (only from Colorado, thank heavens) to get new visas for DH's new job.  We spent most of a month tooling around there (visiting family I didn't know I had, visiting friends, being given a most generous trip across Canada on the train by DH's parents who had flown across for Christmas with us in Colorado... whoops since we couldn't be in the States any lo...

G'day all! I was looking at someone's blog and thought I'd play along with the 2012 reverb she had joined.  Now that I'm doing it, I'm not so sure about doing it but it might give me and you some insight! Day 1: How are you starting (the month)? By running frantically, trying to get stuff done for a work conference.   It got done in time :-)   Then I slacked off somewhat, well focused on something else - making Christmas presents.  They are now (mostly) sent off so I can get more work done and clean up the house for Christmas. Day 2: Your most significant outlay? For the year?  Hmm, either moving here to Seattle or buying a new car (cos we couldn't get a second hand one as the sort we wanted is extremely popular.  I have to say I seem to have accumulated a certain degree more yarn and fibre and quilting material and rain coats and books and pictures and plants and .... Day 3: What do you really wish for? Imagine a scenario where you only had o...

G'day all! I have a shiny new computer.  It has red and blue LEDs inside it.  Ooh err.  It should be very fast and should last me a while - my laptop lasted nearly five years and still would work if you could get the fan controller to behave. DH installed our favoured operating system on the new machine and umm, well, let's just say I am very, very , very , VERY   VERY disappointed in the user experience so far.  There's been two new iterations of the system since I tried to upgrade the OS in my laptop.  I've been running ubuntu, btw. I don't know if it is my system is not linux friendly (or more specifically ubuntu friendly) but I can't make it do basic things like set up the mouse buttons to do what I want to.  I can't pin programs to the task bar (that we had to reinstall because their new idea about taskbars is show all the programs in a bar on the left of the screen).  I can't configure anything on the system except for the ba...

G'day all! Ok, the post title doens't make lots of sense but it may or may not rhyme... lol About six weeks ago I saw that my friend over at Celtic Caston was doing a knit along for a Berroco pattern called Aidez .  Well I hummed and hahhed over it (not hemmed and hawed - we have different vowel sounds to Americans!) and then saw some yarn in my very local yarn shop (The Tea Cozy) that would do nicely and umm, well, I started knitting.  After I bought the yarn (cascade Eco+ in purple heather, shade 7811), of course. Waiting for breakfast Despite a little issue with row gauge because I did not use the correct yarn and did not allow for row gauge to be off - always a critical issue in a raglan sleeved item and I knew it would be (ahem!) - it fits quite nicely.  It is nowhere near as loose as the model on the Berroco website. The back Hmm, I look like a bit of a linebacker there... not that we play American football much in my country.  I guess holding...

G'day all! This post comes to you care of my phone, as I have had another crack at breaking a computer (though I have not in any way damaged my work laptop, it's done it all by itself).  Celtic cast on has a knitalong happening for Aidez, a free Berocco pattern.  Excuse the lack of links, they are hard to do on the phone, no cut and paste.  I thought I'd best show my progress as the knitalong ends in a couple of weeks...ack, better get my skates on! Plus the shot is pretty average but what do you expect from a phone? So far, I have done both the sleeves and fifteen inches of the back, plus the fronts are now a good twelve inches long. This means that I should be able to get it done in two weeks, surely? I've knitted this much in just under three weeks. Time will tell! Thanks for the birthday wishes, btw, they were much appreciated! anon!

G'day all! Happy birthday to me!  It is my birthday in Australia but not quite here in Seattle yet. Birthday sorbet yesterday with my friend L. Over the years, finding out where I am from is becoming increasingly interesting to me.  Who am I?  Where am I from? This is something that is difficult - my parents are dead, my grandparents are long dead (my father's parents so long dead my mother never met them), my cousins are old enough to start popping their clogs....  I'm at least third generation, more like fourth generation Australian.  One of my sisters has traced our lineage back to the Second Fleet, she thinks (lots of people with the same names is an issue).  So yeah, not only am I a colonial, I probably have convict blood in me, a matter of some pride in Oz. This would look a lot nicer if embiggened. Apparently I look Dutch or possibly from some part of Sweden.  I don't look particularly Norwegian if the people I see around here a...

G'day all! I started quilting because of Dana over at  Old Red Barn Co back in 2009.  I've been participating in most of the quiltalongs we've done through her Flickr group, oldredbarnco quiltalong .  This has to be the quickest project ever. The challenge was to find a colour palette on one of the many colour palette websites and design a quilt/wall hanging/lap quilt/mugrug/something quilty from it.  The challenge was announced around 24th of September and we had until today, Halloween, to finish it.  OK, it was not really a smack down but I just like the word.  Technically it is a quilt challenge throwdown! I've been meaning to play along but I couldn't find a palette that reflected what I wanted to do.  I really wanted to use colours like the ones in this picture: By Ballard Locks I wanted to make something that was all fally/autumnal, though I was also thinking about having bright autumn leaves on wet concrete (something I am seeing a ...

G'day all! It is a remarkably dull day here in Seattle today.  Seriously dull to the point of wondering who turned off the lights?  Even our new monstrously bright light is struggling to cut through the gloom. Maybe I just moved to Mordor or something.  With sights like this around the place (clearly taken on a non-gloomy day) it is possible Gruesome gibbet Someone has had fun decorating I have had an interesting time recently in the Confucian sense. Two days ago this laptop shut itself down in the middle of a hangout (google video chat).  I have detected a serious disk error!  Goodbye! But it restarted ok and my boss and I had further discussions about it and he decided that either it goes to be fixed or he just gets a new machine (he's making the assumption that it is going to be pricey to work out if it is the hard disk or not) and ships it to me. So yesterday I sat nursemaiding it through a BIOS disk check and a Windows disk check....