Tuesday 30 October 2007

Ravelry - I'm In! And Blah, Blah, Blah

I lost this post yesterday when I hit a wrong key so I'll summarize and carry on.

I've been afflicted with knitting ADD lately. I've been trying new techniques and patterns - hopping from one project to another. I have done quite a bit of knitting, I just haven't finished much lately.

I thought I'd check out how far up the list I was to get onto Ravelry and what a surprise! I was already a member! I have no idea when I got accepted but I'm in! My user name is Geri (I couldn't think of anything clever and was afraid I'd forget). So, of course, I spent 'scads and galores' (as my late mother would say) of time searching projects for some yarn in my stash, looking at many people's monkey socks and starting to catalogue some of my projects and yarn. Man! I could spend many, many hours recording information on that site.

This morning, I met Anne Marie for coffee at Chapters (the Canadian version of Borders or Barnes & Noble). We drank lattes, yakked, looked at knitting and scrapbooking books and decided to go for lunch at East Side Mario's. It was very good. After lunch we parted ways as we both had stuff to do. I wandered back to Chapters to look at the magazines. I spotted a knitting magazine that outlined how to knit mitered squares. I couldn't decide whether to buy it or not so I had a good look and tried to memorize the pattern. I decided to knit a sample mitered square and used some left-over sock yarn. The trick according to the magazine was to purl the first and last stitch of each right side row. That way it would be easier to pick up the stitches to create the next square. Well now I'm hooked on mitered squares. I think I was also influenced by looking at the Koigu book "Knits from a Painter's Palette".

When I got home, Skip was in the back yard running the lawn mower over the leaves and garden debris to mulch it onto the lawn. I started taking the fabric top off the gazebo on our deck and then Skip helped me take the rest of the gazebo down. There's certainly more light in the family room as a result. Of course, in the summer, the gazebo is a good sun shade for the deck and family room. So that was one task hanging over my head that we got accomplished.

Another thing I amuse myself with is planning trips. Anne Marie and I are going on a shopping trip to Buffalo at the end of November. Some of today's discussion involved these plans. I also would like to visit my sister in Petrolia at the end of the first week of December and go for brunch with the retirees from the high school I taught at for 11 years in Sarnia before moving to this area. I'll have to drive home after brunch because it's Scooter's piano recital that night in Toronto.

Also, Skip and I are going to be Winter Texans this year! I've been searching for vacation rentals in southern Texas. Skip went to a bird-watching festival last year in the area and after that we decided we needed to spend some time there during the winter after I retired. A lot of the properties I've found have been rented but today, I heard from someone who had a nice 1 bedroom condo with a queen bed, and also 2 bunk beds and a pull out queen sofabed. The price is right so I think we're going to go for it. I'm still hearing back from other people I requested information from so will hold off booking until I assess all the information that comes in this week. It's almost a 3300 km drive to our destination so it'll take us almost a week to drive down. We're good for about 600 km per day but that's about it! We'll retrace our route to Indianapolis from last summer and then proceed in a south-westerly direction to Memphis, Little Rock and Dallas before heading south to our ultimate destination, South Padre Island. For years, I've wanted to spend a good chunk of time during the winter in the sunny south.

Back to knitting... Today I ran out of yarn on my Zig-zag Scarf from "Modular Knits. I need to find the other 2 balls of yarn so I can complete it. I haven't touched Mark's socks in a couple of days so need to get back to that. And then there's the sampler scarf to work on.

Tomorrow I need to bake the Halloween cookies I started on the weekend. I got to the 'chill dough in the fridge' stage and then got doing other stuff and didn't get the dough rolled out when Scooter was here. I'll take a bunch to Scooter next Monday when we meet him to go to the Royal Winter Fair.

Other things in the lineup this week: meeting with an antique seller at my MILs house tomorrow afternoon, lunch with Paulette on Wednesday and we're getting our flu shots on Thursday or Friday. Stay tuned...

And a post script --- I just heard a commercial for Rickard's Red (beer) to the tune of Borodin's "Polovetzian Dances". Good grief.

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