woh is me

or is that woh is i?

in any case, in my room, i have a constant reminder of my works on hold: the sock that i have never finished for sop. forget about second sock syndrom, i can't even make it that far:

now this project really started going downhill when the black yarn started puking out huge knots from the center. no, wait, maybe it started going downhill when i adjusted the pattern to fit the different gauge of the yarn i had chosen... no, it was probably when i decided to do a sock as my first fair isle project as well as my first sock. yes, that could have been it.

my second woh, which is also my oldest, is hidden in my nightstand:

now, this is a woh for no particular reason. eventually it will be the big bad baby blanket from stitch n bitch, but for now it is, well, not a whole lot i do love the feel of the yarn and when i am aching for something soothing to knit, this wins out. comes way before the socks for sop, i assure you.

now comes the polkadot purl top:

this was the dreaded tubular cast-on project which resulted in much foul language on my part. why is it a woh? well, i got to a point where i had to set it down for a while and i am not exactly sure where i am. frankly, i am too lazy to figure it out right now.

before i started counting my wohs, i though that was it. three wohs are hardly anything to be sorrowful about, really, but then i remembered (okay, i was reminded as i pulled it out of the bottom of a bag):

the hemp bathmitt. oh, this was going to be SO MUCH FUN. this project is so very much on hold that i stole the needles it requires for another project (which i have long since finished, i might add). it turned out that this project made my fingers ache. i obviously need to knit more loosely, a fact i fail to notice when i knit with wool.

in addition, i have the double trouble sock woh"

a project that came to a screeching halt when my crystal palace needles fell apart (as they are wont to do) and i had no epoxy. the needles are still not repaired and all i have done are the toes.

finally we come to "oh woh! what was i thinking?":

the poncho. i actually had myself believing i might wear this thing and worked on this quite steadily during my roadtrip last year. but i realized that i would not be wearing a poncho as long as i remain in my right mind, or as close as i get to being in my (or anyone else's) right mind and have since canabalized the yarn for other projects. so i guess this isn't a woh at all, it is just a frogging waiting to happen.

just in case you were wondering, woh can equal woe, it can also equal whoa, but it never equals wow.

short walks

i dog sat for my friend Carol last weekend. Her dog, Blackie, is a real sweetheart and one of my favorites and we had a good time - except that my keen sandals, which are great in the sand and water, give me blisters on the bottom curve of my heel when wearing them on asphalt and after our walks this weekend, i can barely walk at all anymore. AND my bike shoes hurt also AND getting in and out of any shoe pretty well hurts. AND i haven't been taking enough pictures AND i forgot my camera when i went to the arts festival this weekend AND i am out of things to complain about, so i will just share two pictures that i did manage to take while out and about this weekend:


and that would be how much exactly?

time sink

other than the super-speedy ballet-tee, knitting - and any other enjoyable activities - has been almost non-existant this summer. if i get a half hour in here and there, i am doing well. one of the things i have been working on is this:



the rib pattern said hello to me one morning as i was fighting with my covers as they dragged me back into bed. the overall sweater pattern is thanks to knitting fool pattern generator, with changes as needed due to the rib pattern and what it meant for the raglan increases. Which, by the way, i love so far because of their organic-ness. i may be able to finish it for fall, or autumn at the latest.


closeup of the raglan increases.


the other thing i've been mostly-not working on? well, i've been completely-not taking pictures of it, so it will have to wait.

10mm is beautiful

the ballet t-shirt from lopp-d-loop which i finished in 3 evenings during a week where i was home before 8 pm just once (and that was not on an evening that i worked on this shirt.


don't think i can wear it to work...

but i like it anyway!

um... did i mention

that i finished the chamomile sweater?

whoohoo!

lazy lizard trip - day 7

on which lmmh concedes that if her trip had lasted as long as posting about it has, she would be really happy with her benefits package.

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day seven meant leaving. heading back to slc. as much as i thought it would be great to shower, i had no desire to actually go back, i have to admit. we decided to try to hike a trail we had started on last year and had turned back after a while. This time, we set out to do the entire loop - heading up a hill and then down into a canyon and then coming out along the road again - or so we thought.

near the top of the hill, there is a lot of petrified wood. so much in fact that you would be amazed that there is some random guy out of torrey who has 'placed' petrified wood along the trail in attractive poses so that he can charge people to take them on his tour. what is amazing is that if you walk past these obviously positioned objects, you run into massive tree trunks of petrified wood emerging from the ground, and it is so natural in comparison to his placed objects that their configuration looks silly.

we headed down into the canyon, scrambling over rocks and down slots, making sure as we went that we could always get back up what we were going down in case we had to turn back.






the walls got steeper as we went, of course.



but we were still pretty sure we could make it through and get back down to the road.

until we ran into this:

at least a 100 foot drop to the next flat surface. thwarted! we turned back, enjoying scrambling up all the rocks as much as we enjoyed scrambling down them.

the rest of the day, we played tourists. We went to the visitor center in capitol reef and bought postcards, went up a pamphlet-guided nature trail, but stopped short of walking along the boardwalk to see the petroglyphs - too many people! it was rough running into so many people after 5 days of near solitude! then we stopped at a friend of sop's in Torrey and hung out and talked and then slept on their floor. a great trip indeed!

lazy lizard - day 6 (cont.)

in which pictures that sop has taken are shown and lmmh lives up to her name.

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lmmh decided to try sop's 'floating the river' hypothesis as well (not a theory, since it failed to be proven by sop earlier).


the floating thing didn't quite work out, but was fun nevertheless:




a lovely walkthrough beautiful landscape while drying out and ending the day.

and this means...?

i think they are all out to annoy me.

lazy lizard trip - day 6

in which sop and lmmh do not use proper care when dealing with the sun.

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the day started with two cups of tea, one was just not enough on this fine morning - we had to say hello to both earl AND lady grey. then we slowly gathered bits and pieces from camp and headed up pleasant creek (river? stream?).

the trail starts out on a road, which then turns off along a canal created by the diversion of pleasant creek to the town of notom. after a fence, the canal becomes stream again, going back to its natural state. there were so many things to discover and explore: lots of side areas to wander (or is it wonder?) around in.

first, some still nameless flowers;



then, this cool flower/bean-pod plant that also marks a point where the gaffer's tape that had been holding together my camera since day 3 gave out and ruined another roll of film. but let's just focus on the cool flowers for now, why don't we:


this was the hottest day of the trip so far. we hiked until we finally got up on a ridge where we could enjoy the beauty of ... a rancher's house. just when you think you are alone. on the way back, with our sunscreen well sweated off, we went to float the river:



the river was not quite deep enough - i think i managed to float about 5 feet once - but it was loads of fun anyway! i'll hit up sop for the pictures he snapped of me and add those later. this would be no fun at all if i couldn't embarrass myself regularly, you know.

how long is my lost love?

ah, the power of a comma.

lazy lizard trip - day 5

in which the Lamp Stand receives a new name, and our subjects are amazingly still able to ride on...

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the day started with a trek to get some fresh water. we hiked a little ways up long canyon where there was a stream inlet that appeared not to be as silty as the rest of the stream. plunking the filter in we got 5 gallons before the filter wanted to be cleaned. as we were near the end of the trip, we figured the 5 gallons would do us. we then jumped in the truck and set off to the campsite and the mine.

there was an offspurt road before the road to the mine that we figured might get us to Lamp Stand, so, after parking the truck, we headed off to that. finally, we saw something that might, if you squinted, may have served as a Lamp Stand to some rancher at some time.


what is that in the background?

with a little bit of help, that is:


we hereby dub thee "The Gin Stand"!

obviously, someone thought others might need some help in seeing Lamp Stand as well and kindly left that help in the shade of a nearby rock. sop opened and sniffed, and it was indeed gin, so he took a swig:





not wanting to be shown up (i am an itsy-bitsy bit competetive), i went for it as well:




your results may vary.

we sobered up while biking along the burr trail, taking random side roads to hone our sand-riding skills, finally heading back to camp past the fields of desert cilantro:

(which is just a name sop made up when i was oohing over the scent - it really does smell like a sweet cilantro! - he had me convinced we could pick a bunch and sprinkle it over our dinner the night before.)

oh! then we decided to head into capitol reefer:


and we finally found a campsite between the park and notom sometime after dark.

lazy lizard trip - day 4

in which we head out on our bikes once again, this time in search of the elusive Lamp Stand

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the road right next to our camp at the cottonwood tree (as i type this i realize that i am sticking out my tongue in concentration; i am a lousy typist) is confusing. not that it is extremely winding or has a lot of side roads; it is confusing in that when you head out you feel like you are going downhill, but you have to pedal hard for the simple reason that you are actually going uphill. it makes for a nice treat when you are heading back to the tree, but it throws you off a bit when you are leaving.

on this day, we headed out on this gravity's fool road through long canyon with a side road leading to an item noted as 'Lamp Stand' on the BLM map.

this part of the road starts out with about 6 miles of road winding through the canyon: massive cliffs and rock formations on either side. Then you head up over a rise and get to look down into this:

you can hang out at the long canyon overlook and watch the swallows catching air. in my next life i want to be a swallow and just cruise around catching breezes.

following the overlook, you get about 1 mile of steep downhill and then cruisey rolly hills. Five miles later, we took the dirt road for the Lamp Stand.

Now, let me insert a few comments on BLM maps here. First, i am very glad they are available. Second, in their effort to turn BLM maps into tourist maps, they have added icons at point of interest. These icons are perhaps a little large for the scale of the actual map. Looking at the map, it would seem that Lamp Stand, and an arch right next to it, should be visible from the dirt road we followed. Of course the icons covered approximately a square mile each of actual map space, so it maybe was a bit misleading...

the road to Lamp Stand, or something near Lamp Stand, is dirt and sand and FUN. and we got to our buddy Jack and a number of his relatives, also:


we found an old uranium mine and a cool camp site, but we did not find the Lamp Stand, even up on the rocks of a nearby mini-canyon:

where could that thing be?


oh, and i should mention that as my estimation of my fitness level had fallen considerably the day before i was very much NOT looking forward to going over the overlook again, but it was not nearly as brutal as i had feared. So much less brutal that it was quite a lot of fun.