Yarnivorous

G'day all! Happy Halloween, or more likely when you read this, All Saints Day. I gave out chocolate!  We had trick or treaters!  Alas before the rest of them showed up we went to a neighbour's and joined their Halloween party for a while. I dressed up a bit - I put on wings and my weird new hooded tunic and played with some black and silver eyeshadows.  I did a bit of face sculpting and greyed my skin up, and I think I looked suitably ghastly with razor sharp cheekbones! Anyway, umm, what else happened today? I love this dahlia - it's months since I took this years photo of it and it is still flowering away It rained a lot this morning.  We had well over an inch yesterday and then this morning, after I emptied the rain gauge, we had nearly another centimetre.  But this afternoon I managed to stand in the sun for a whole five minutes!  Yay! They call me helmet head Blue sky!  A miracle! Oh yes, my day started off ...

G'day all! Today was a very dull and boring day.  The weather was intensely bland - we got another load of rain, drip drip drip, grey skies all day long.  I didn't go for a walk - see rain.  I did do my rehab exercises and felt very virtuous afterwards.  The weather forecast isn't exactly grand either - rain tomorrow, probably not raining on Saturday, rain on Sunday, Monday (my birthday), Tuesday...  you get the idea!  Welcome to autumn in Seattle. So, seriously people, don't come and visit in late October or any time in November unless you like grey skies and rain.  Cos you surely will get a lot of them! If you were a baby cardigan, which button would you like on you?  Ducky?  Yellow flower or white flower?  I haven't bothered trying to find matching colours - the blue ones are all tractors, the purple/mauve ones are all disgusting ucky colours so I decided contrast was good! Choices, choices.... A friend invited us out to...

G'day all! Ever get that feeling of everything being oh so close, being almost there but knowing that you still have to put in more effort before you get something completed? Yep, I'm living it. Ah Ballard - palm tree and claret ash. Claret ashes arose in Australia! After I finished fixing all the bits I could see to fix in the current training module I'm creating and said it is ready for first level testing, I went out to the garage and did a bit more priming.  I thought we were past priming but we've used this stuff called oriented strand board, or OSB, for the walls and ceiling of the garage.  OSB is like enormous particle board - instead of tiny pieces, it has up to hand-sized flat pieces that go every which way.  Think paper but with large flat pieces and paper that is half an inch/13mm thick (or more).  Some of the wood used is oily and this is causing a problem.   Even after about four layers of plaster/spackle goop, primer and ceiling white, ...

G'day all! One thing about grey days - today I sat down and put in a decent chunk of time on my work.  Admittedly, I spent double the hours fixing things up that I expected I would take, but some of the stuff I was fixing is not exactly cooperative, or at least the program I'm using isn't.  Plus I'm using an older version of the program and it doesn't work the same way that the current one does and the fixes that worked on the newer version don't work as well on the old version. All very mysterious.  It will be fixed eventually, just not as soon as I would like it to be. Capitol Hill got a bit of sun late in the day So today was grey.  Gray, as can be expected when the sad and tattered remnants of a cyclone pass by.  Winds were negligible, but the rain sure hung around for long enough (and we got 14 mm) and the grey for longer.   The clouds were moving along at a good pace though and we started to see a bit of blue sky by the end of the day. In...

G'day all! So this morning I swatched (me, swatching!) the lovely pansy golightly colourway of my wonderfully squishy Dream in Color Smooshy and I looked at it and I looked, and... So pretty in the ball I'm making the baby bolero in some light green Bendigo Woollen Mills baby yarn instead. Still cute!  Probably will go with more stuff too than a purple and grey one. Since this morning I've knitted only that much.  I'm not used to knitting to gauge either - it feels so thick and squishy!  I'm using two strands to make the weight up.  It is a quick knit but I feel slow, possibly because I've been doing things other than knitting today, like going for walks, doing laundry, spinning some yarn, helping DH with the garage, dealing with my Oz taxes - oh bob did that take a long time! I walked up to see the Olympics. Alas the clouds were low I use the ATO's e-tax to do my taxes.  It is easy-ish and it gives you hints along the way.  It just ne...

G'day all! Today was a pretty quiet sorta Sunday - off to the market, get the farm fresh eggs that we like so much (supermarket eggs just do not compare), pick up a pile of autumn fruit and veg (cauliflowers are in!  Apples are in!  Pumpkins are in!), putter back home, clean out one of the vegie bins in the fridge. DH fixed up the roof around the new skylight today - we've had a small bucket under a leak.  With any luck, we won't have a leak now that there is roofing material right up to and around the skylight along with the flashing...  The flashing might be great but it doesn't work so well if the rain is falling straight on the non-watertight under-roof structure (Americans make complicated roofs.  We just whack up enough substrate to hold up the tiles or sheet metal, but American roofs have to have layers of strand board, then membrane (generally), tar paper and finally the roof-stuff itself, asphalt shingles).     Pretty cool car, dunn...

G'day all! I'm doing pretty well with this blogging every day for Blogtober.  I've missed a couple since I started nearly 20 days ago but I did travel and sometimes it catches up with me. It's actually been amazingly difficult getting my feet back on the ground after the New York trip.  I've had no energy for days.  Manhattan is high energy, lots of over-stimulation, lots of noise and visuals and I don't always respond well to that.  I like my slower pace here in Seattle.  I actually do pretty well with the over-stimulation for a while but it does wear me out. Of course since I got back, the weather has been mostly foul.  We've had quite a bit of rain and some weather that's gone from dreadful to pleasant and then back to pretty dreadful again.  Not having sun in the morning makes a huge difference to waking up - when it is grey grey grey, unrelentingly grey and drizzly, it takes a lot more effort to get going. We had half an hour of sun toda...

G'day all! So I'm knitting away on my cardigan.  Knitting knitting knitting. Hmm, that's odd. The needles I'm using are ... 0.5mm narrower in diameter than they should be. Aw dangit!  I've been using the needles for the ribbing on the whole sleeve.  On both whole sleeves. Confused rhodo.  Wrong season, dude! Just as well that I'd only gotten about 8 rows into the new sleeve then. Rip it back again and start with the right size needle. Golden grove Now the other sleeve is a full inch less in circumference.  It is the sleeve that can be snugger fitting without a problem.  Hmm.  Do I leave it or do I rip it back too?  The problem there is since the colour blocks are 20 rows each, I broke the colour off at each colour change.  With the thicker needles, I won't have enough yarn to complete the 20 rounds. Are these birds cosmopolitan?  Yes, but this pair might be the American species, not the Eurasian (Can you...