i'm dreaming of a white

halloween?

winter is here

meaning i was up at the resort yesterday selling tickets. didn't wish i was out that much because it was cold and windy. today would have been gorgeous though. oh well. everyone and their dog was up there. okay, not literally, because the canyon is a watershed, but you know what i mean.
on the dog subject. i am hanging out with harley again this week. he seems to be of the notion that i need to get up at 3 in the morning, however. he is wrong.
making progress on SOP's socks. pictures to come!!!
no work anywhere tomorrow. aaahhhh.
thursday i picked up the prints i had made for the show in bountiful. dunno if i mentioned it. the gallery that hosted one of the juried exhibitions i was in earlier this year invited all of the artists to have work at their holiday sale, so i am preparing 3 works for that. 2 black and white and one color. have to have those in next week, but i am excited. it would be great if one of them actually sold! not counting on it, though.

haiku5

slobber drool wet nose
head upon the leg at ease
pants warmly soaked through

haiku4

flakes fall eyelashes
glisten under stark white sky
sunlight prism dance

haiku3

swip plip blip it comes
whine whimper nudge nose bump paws
rain dog stealing sleep

haiku2

poncho. wretched thing.
never ending freezing breeze
rises up my back

haiku1

crystals form inside
my head. steam above the grass.
this place. mine. alone.

out my window

shallow thoughts

have you ever looked at your list of 'recommendations' from amazon? have you ever clicked on the link 'why was i recommended this?' (i wish they would have said, "why was this recommended to me?" instead, but oh well). honestly, i cannot imagine how purchasing 'japanese for busy people' resulted in their recommendation for 'Star Trek The Original Series - The Complete First Season', but it did. i am also unsure how purchasing 'Art and Fear' and 'The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition Collector's Gift Set)' caused them to recommend the Logitech MX1000 Laser Cordless Mouse, but there you have it.

241 yards of sweet goodness

finally wound one skein of the beaverslide wool into a ball last night and started a swatch. oh my goodness, that ball is big! 241 yards big! this picture shows it next to a ball of brown sheep: the stuff that comes in the big, loopy hanks. that makes a nice-sized ball itself, but this is huge. and beautiful. and made with no dyes or chemicals.

sorry for the crappy picture. lighting sucks at 5 in the morning.

the easy beanie

so, there is this cool blog, you all know it, you've been there, schmeebot and last week i got the chance to work with it's creator, Thuy, on her "easy beanie". It is a cool hat and a cool concept: all knitting, short-rows, and a bit of grafting. and you end up with a beanie like this:

except you probably won't have doodling on the whiteboard behind you.
i made it out of the same yarn as my fingerless gloves, which i finished while volunteering for my local public radio station's pledge drive this weekend: elsebeth lavold's angora (60% angora, 20% wool, 20% polyamide). oh, i am also really happy with the gloves and made some changes to the pattern, basically devising a pattern of my own to combat the dreaded pinky-finger web. i'm going to do more work on my pattern and post it one day. really.

american gods

i finally bought a book. i have bought, maybe, two books for myself since Rich died. but, i finally bought a book, American Gods, that i am excited about reading. let me try to explain. Since Rich's suicide, the only book i have devoured, torn through, dove into, was the latest Harry Potter, although the DaVinci code came close. i borrow books from the library and, 9 times out of 10, i do not finish them before they are due. i have gone from reading several books a week, to maybe one every couple of months. i have no focus. (in any are really, i am still very foggy much of the time). with rich's death, books lost their ability to distract me, to absorb me. so did music actually; i listen mostly to news now. my road trip was the first i have really listened to music for enjoyment. i always listen to the lyrics too much.
anyway, i am excited about american gods. after listening to neil gaiman's plays for the voice, i needed more. there was a depth to his stories that intrigued me. we'll see. i decided that, at my present rate, i was better off buying it than getting it from the library: i am getting too many fines.

last of the road trip pics

well, at least of the digital ones.

after driving through wyoming, i came down the mirror lake highway through the Uinta National Forest. it had been raining and snowing and was generally gorgeous out. Then i saw a little sign that i am surprised i hadn't noticed before. Right at the turnout for Lily lake was this sign:



so, i flipped a U-ie and pulled off.
The lake is about 10, maybe 15 feet from the road, so quite a hike. the sun was starting to set and the clouds were full. lucky me.
here's what i got:

rock on

little leprechaun, rock on!

so very gifted

last friday, i took B to the grocery store and to pick up his mail. he caught typhoi fever while in cambodia (because he left as a child he is not immune) and had spent 10 days in the hospital in london. he passed out at a restaurant there in front of about 1,000 people. anyway, we ended up going to lunch after the post office and groceries to one of my favorite places, koko kitchen. koko's is a small, family-run japanese restaurant and we had miso soup and kimchi rolls (sushi). turns out miso soup was what he was supposed to have had at the resdtaurant in london before he fell flat on his face.
anyway, B gave me a beautiful gift: a scarf, and chopsticks and chopstick rests. so fabulous!





then, on sunday i met my sister and her family for dinner and my sister gave me a gift from her trip to new york:

5 skiens of denim silk! 4 dark and one slightly lighter! i can't wait to make a spring top out of it! it will be gorgeous!

thank you!!!

lilypad

eventually, i want to put my blog elsewhere and have a few galleries of kwips and fwip (knitting works in progress and foto works in progress), but for now, let me show you something i really like.

roadtrip, part two

yes, i am awful. only slowly adding these pictures, but, such is my life at the moment.
finally, a picture of dinosaur national monument (more to come, i pick up film today!)

and here is flaming gorge:

if you look at a map, you will note that i took the long way home. driving from vernal up through flaming gorge and then through wyoming... ah, wyoming...


actually, i LOVE the big sky feelings of wyoming. it was gorgeous out, it had been storming and the clouds were full of moisture and energy.

first installment- road trip

i broke away last weekend and headed to Dinosaur National Monument. Very Cool! i need to go back and explore further. I only went to the main entrance on the Utah side, and it is rather hard to wander, as it is not as rocky as southern utah, and so you need to keep on pre-determined trails.
These first pictures, however, were taken on my way there, and not in the park itself.


a break on the way, getting some fresh air:

almost a camp spot: (only a few hours in to the trip, but it was so beautiful here, i almost stayed the night)

early the next morning:

the beanie

so, i have leftover noro kureyon yarn from my FMB and as well as planning on using it as a stripe for some yet-to-be-thought-up sweater, i decided to make the one-skien kureyon hat from the knitting garden. So, i took the pattern and yarn on my road-trip (pics to come), but didn't start, or finish it until i got back. what adjustments did i make? (yes, you know i made adjustment). well, first, the pattern is flat, and i knit in the round, casting on 65 stitches so that i can stitch the first and last ones together to give me a total of 64. Then, i ended up knitting much more that the 11 rows after the ribbing stops because my first attempt made a nice yarmulke, but not a very good beanie. Then, i followed schmeebot's advice on beanie decreases to shape the head. Then i added a itsybitsy icord topper. basically, all i used the main pattern for was the number of stitches to cast on and how much ribbing to give it. ah well, i am really happy with it and it was a VERY quick knit.

we interrupt this blog

for a pissed-off announcement.

SOP's garage was broken into last night while we were away at a party for a friend of his who was hurt in a bike accident and is now paralyzed from the waist down. What was stolen? SOP's bike (which he had just started to ride again) and my dad's compressor that SOP had borrowed for the roof work. i feel sick. my dad recently lent his chainsaw to someone who broke it and didn't offer to get it fixed or anything and now this! SOP will check to see if his insurance will cover any of the replacement and either way it is time to check out Sears. sigh. it's a big compressor, too, so we are hoping some of SOP's neighbors noticed something. now i need to get the serial numbers for the compressor as well.

today's post was going to be all happy about my great road-trip this weekend and the beanie i started and finished and lots of pics, but that will have to wait. maybe a little later.