Petunia rambles on and on….

I’m ready for crocuses to come up across the front lawn, from the bulbs that the grandtwins helped me plant last fall.  Really, it hasn’t been that bad a winter.  Reasonably decent temperatures for most of it, but interspersed with absolutely bone-chilling short damn cold snaps that are just too much for an old woman to deal with first thing in the morning!  We managed to luck out again.  Last storm that blew through went north of us; we had about 15 minutes of snow and they got pummelled in PA and NJ.  Last night, oddly, they got ice and snow SOUTH of here, enough to cause havoc.  We missed it again; I woke to ice and snow residue on my car but the roads appear clear.  We’re almost halfway through February, but it’s still way too early to think “Hehe, we’ve gotten away with it.”  As my mother was fond of reminding us all, “The Blizzard of “88  (that was 1888, folks) was in the middle of March!”  (She didn’t remember it but her father did!)  It’s too damn early to feel cocky about winter, but I’m glad half of February is behind us.

During the past weekend’s chores, I found a sweater I had made that was almost finished.  It needed to have the ends weaved in and a good blocking.  Damn it, that’s all it needed.  Done.   I probably started this last summer, and pre-Ravelry, I really sucked at keeping proper records.  (Ravelry has probably improved that aspect of the craft for many of us)  

I am so ashamed.   I haven’t a clue what it’s made out of, other than that it’s got cotton in it.  Tonight, I’ll at least measure it’s gauge!  Maybe, if I dig to the bottom of the tote bag I was using last summer, I’ll get lucky and find a ball band?   (Or my memory will come back to me??)   It was made from Zephyr Style’s Glee pattern.   This is the 36-39″ size, knitted from the top-down, seamless.  I’ve used Zephyr Style patterns before, made Green Gables for Daughter.  I’ve liked both of them, for looks, for fit, for ease and for the clarity of the directions.  Darling Daughter/Photographer says, “It makes you look fat.”  Did she mean the sweater in general or just this shot?  Afraid to ask.  Admittedly, I cast on for this sweater AND quit smoking at about the same time.  Now I’m most pleased to say that I am STILL off the cigarettes, but I did gain a bit of weight, and of course, I’m carrying it all at my waistline.  (You can see the arms and legs are still skinny.      One modification that I made to this sweater is that I ended the split neckline higher than called for in the pattern.  I did this for 2 reasons.  I most assuredly did not want to fuss with attaching a long line of hooks and eyes.  I was concerned about getting that done neatly.  I wanted it open at the neck.  If it opened as low as the pattern called for, it would require some sort of tank top under it, and I wanted to avoid that.  Where I live, we have very hot, very humid summers.  ONE top often seems like more than you want to wear – I didn’t want to be locked in to wearing two at a time!  The down side is that my mods caused the upper neckline to be a bit “floppy” so that the underside of the stockinette shows.  I’ll make this one again; perhaps, though, I’ll adjust the whole front neckline further south, to still eliminate the hooks, leave off the need for a tank underneath, and get rid of some of the “floppy.”

Thanks to the capabilities of PhotoShop, you can’t see that Husband at the left was making goofy comments to daughter while this picture-taking stuff was going on.  You also can only see a bit of FuzzyButt, my Standard Poodle who spends far more time relaxing on my sofa than I do.  The expansion of my “central area” shows, though.

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Once again, I have signed up and will actively participate in the March of Dimes annual WalkAmerica. 

This year, there’s been a name change for the yearly spring event.  This year, it’s called the March for Babies, more clearly stating exactly who will benefit by the time and dollars donated.  My daughter has a team started, and others are pledging money to the March of Dimes/March for Babies because of her efforts.  It’s obviously a cause near and dear to her heart.  As many of you know, my little size 4 daughter carried a set of twin boys to term and delivered them (after being induced!!) on 05-05-05.  After an almost problem-free pregnancy and normal delivery, she welcomed her boys who weighed 6 and 6.5 pounds, healthy and normal in every way.  Sadly, not all pregnancies end so happily.  Multiples have a much higher chance of problems during the pregnancies, and for birth defects.  I’m proud to walk beside her, and hope our efforts, along with the efforts of many others, will help this cause.

That’s all I have today, I think, but if something else wanders into my brain, I’ll add it on.  Don’t wait up, though.

On my way to work yesterday while I was scooting down the highway, I was passed, very quickly I might add, by a pick-up truck that had “Reliable Lawn Service” written on its side.  As I live in Delaware, which is not exactly the Sun and Fun capital of the earth in February (or any other damn time of the year, now that I think about it), and early this morning it was only 14 degrees F. outside, I’m thinking there wasn’t a local “grass crisis” here, with stalks suddenly shooting up 2 feet in one day.  Lawn Service emergencies are pretty rare in this area, even in good weather.  I mean, he was really “hauling grass” down the highway.  I wondered where he was going in such a hurry.

And…

Somewhere in my travels, I found and of course bought 2 bags of Hershey’s Kisses in the new Chocolate Truffle flavor.  AND it’s dark chocolate, which I’ve always liked far more than milk chocolate – hell, I even like the color of dark chocolate better.    And I’ve found that resistance is truly futile around these damn things – I’m shoving them in my face almost as fast as I can unwrap them.  Hell, I may start eating the foil wrappers ’cause its quicker.  And ya know, those big Lipitors are starting to get right tasty.  Anyway, buy Hershey’s Truffles.  It’s some sort of 100th Anniversary promotion by the company, so they may only be available for a short time.

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Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.  He would be 199 years old today.  I did not bake a cake.  He was 56 when he died. 

Today is also my father’s birthday.  He would be 98 years old today.  No cake.  He was 45 when he died.

Actually, we’re not really sure about my father’s birth date.  Back in the day when most all births were at home, and records often depended on when someone in the family was found who spoke sufficient English and finally sent to go register the birth, accuracy was often an issue.  My father had a Birth Certificate, Essex County, NJ and Baptismal Record from a Ukrainian Orthodox Church in that area.  One says he was born on the 11th and the other says the 12th.  He always celebrated it on the 12th.  Thanks to Abe, he always got his birthday off from school!

Oh, that sounds bad!   And along that vein, it’s the dog that’s got the problem.  Again.  Still.

A co-worker said if a dog is fed chicken or turkey, that’ll give them wind.  Is that true?  That could be it; we eat a lot of chicken at our house, and despite years of asking Pop to stop giving the dog table scraps and feed her only her doggie-kibbles, we have found that it is probably possible for the dog to be taught new things, and clearly impossible for Pop. He still scrapes off the plates into her dish.  (The dog loves him dearly, though.  Perhaps it is because she is upwind of her own wind, and so it doesn’t bother her)   Daughter knows of zillions of internet sites and, some time ago, told us of one that bases your “Superhero Name” on your favorites.   A friend of hers was driving a Plymouth Breeze at the time, and loved the color of chocolate.  When daughter told us about this, the name immediately became a synonym around here for this sort of problem.  Our dog frequently suffers from “The Brown Breeze.”   It distresses her so much that she sticks close to us, for human comfort.  In the evenings, as I sit beside Pop, with him watching TV and me with my knitting, she sits lovingly at our feet.  Lucky us.  The Brown Breeze indeed.

BUT that wasn’t what I was referring to.  I actually started out thinking of the weather.  Really!!  (And, btw, the dumb dog actually is afraid of wind, the meteorological sort!  Was in a panic all day yesterday)  It was very bad and the winds are still gusting around 30mph.  Yesterday we had almost twice that much for most of the day, and I’m afraid to do a shingle count on the roof.  6?  14?  42?   Can’t be much more than that, from the sounds I heard yesterday.  One of our upcoming Household Needs clearly is a new roof.  This isn’t the time of year you want to rip the roof off your house, and I hope it won’t get too much worse between now and fit weather for the repair work.  It appears that our income tax refund won’t be a flat-out extra payment against our mortgage, as I had hoped.   Anyway, the northeast is getting hit pretty bad with cold.  I woke up to 12 degrees F. with the wind making that feel like 0 F.  It’s climbed a few degrees since then, but not a whole hell of a lot.  Forecasts are calling for 2 days more of this bitter cold, and then it may get warm enough for snow.   I’m told the snow went north of us this time; the news reports of a multi-vehicle, multi-injury traffic accident on a major Interstate highway several hours north of here due to blowing snow causing white-out conditions.  The vehicles just kept coming and slamming into the mess already there, in the area of Hazleton, PA.  I’m so glad that sort of weather is pretty close to “freakishly weird” here, and not a regular occurance.   I don’t feel like moving again, but that kind of blizzard-y stuff expected on an annual basis would cause me to start packing.

Among lots of piddly chores I did at home over the weekend, one nice task was doing the finishing on a sweater.  I weaved in all the ends while listening to podcasts on my iPod (Thank you, David Reidy. I enjoy every episode), which made that part nicer, and then I blocked it out.  Pictures when it’s dry.   Have another sweater ready to get the same loving treatment, and a scarf, too.   After that, the next project to go onto the needles will be a pair of socks that I started, loved, worked on mindlessly enjoying the beautiful yarn and colorway, increasing every other row just as directed.  Until they were wide enough to fit the feet of Sasquatch (AKA Bigfoot). 

What is truly sad is that in my extreme happiness with the feel and color of this yarn, I knitted along, two socks on two circular needles from toes almost up to the heels before I noticed that these socks bear no resemblance to the diameter of my skinny little feet.  My first thought, well, scream actually, was a loud, “What were you thinking?”  but, well, I wasn’t.  Not at all.  Thinking, that is.  Damn.  The plus side here – I’m trying to salvage something out of this – is that now, I get to play with the colorful goodness a second time!  That’s the best I can come up with.  I don’t suppose anyone will believe I did this on purpose, just so I could do it a second ……   No, let that go.

And then.  A “BIG PROJECT.”  Those darn ganseys.  I read Knitting in the Old Way last fall and those ganseys got into my head because there’s so much empty space inside there to run around in and now they won’t leave.  The “tradition” of them, the freedom of designing one exactly the way you want it, with the perfect combination of cables and pattern stitches lovingly chosen, the knowledge that working from a chart/graph rather than a “printed set of directions” will directly link me to all knitters of generations and cultures past.  Another factor is Pop saying “Are ya gonna start on MY sweater next?”  about 3 times a week.  For quite a few weeks now.  I’ve got the back/front section designed and graphed on Excel.  I’m thinking about a saddle shoulder/sleeve but I’ve never done one before.  I’d like to do some more reading about them before I attempt to design and graph one – and I want to show pictures of the style to Pop first, and get a “thumbs up” from him.  Then the swatching begins.

Also during my weekend from hell of chores, I actually found stash yarn that must have gotten separated from the rest of the “flock.”  6 skeins of Lorna’s Laces sock yarn, enough for 3 pairs.  It was like Christmas, re-discovering these treasures!!!   I also found roving.  And I already had quite a bit of roving.  And last weekend, I bought about 2 pounds of roving.   I think I function at that “Out of sight, out of mind” level.  If it’s not in my hands at this very moment, I don’t have it, I’ve never had it or ever seen it before and therefore, I need to buy it because it will disappear from the face of the earth for all time if I don’t.  This sort of thinking is what leads to hording and is common behavior in knitters, spinners and rats.  It also leads to storage issues at my house.  As the roving is all in beautiful colors (well, of course it is – I bought it all!!)  I found a large flat-bottomed basket and put it out on my coffee table, filled it with the colorful packages.  My thought was that having it out there, frequently seen by one and all, would keep me aware of how much what I already have.   It damn sure made Pop aware, as he now has to peer over it all to see the TV. 

Alright, maybe it wasn’t my best idea.