My turn

Finally, after making scarves for umpteen friends, two with the lovely green cashmere I was so wild about, I made a scarf for the Great Me. This will go with a nice white cardi I acquired via Freecycle....

See here: two stages, one a couple of days ago, just started, with the new tapestry juuuuust getting under way, the tapestry alternating as my hands can hold up



and here, as of yesterday, finished.



This is a one line lace pattern, which if you fancy getting into lace knitting, is just about one of the simplest, though it looks interesting when finished. It's so fast that if you want a nice piece of work to settle into, this is not it! before you know it, it's leapt off the needles and around your neck. But if you are a slower knitter and like to take your time, this might work for you.

The pattern is: cast on 24 stitches, knit two rows, then forever after: knit four, yo, k 2 tog, k 2. That's it, the whole thing. Just do that until you run out of yarn or interest, whichever comes first. Then do one row of knit, then cast off. Done! Use a big needle, bigger than you normally would for the yarn you choose, so that the lacy effect works.

This always seems to happen: I get a nice pattern, or some nice yarn, and plan to make something for me, then I end up making presents for other people and finally get around to me. When I got that nice simple slipper pattern, I made at least four pairs for other people before I got my own pair.

On other more stormy fronts, we survived the big nor'easter, with massive winds and rain for a couple of days, flooding all around. But we were among the few who did not lose power, a big deal, since HP's mattress is power operated to keep it inflated, and his bed works with the ole electric.

The only problem, aside from my inability to battle the wind and rain to get the garbage out of the house for two days, another big deal, a lot of it being invalid waste, better out of the house fast, was that the supermarket computers were very very slow, and it took minutes for each card transaction to work, but they did work eventually, and all was well.

We did have serious winds, with trees down all over the place, bringing down power wires, and no, we can't bury them, since the water table is less than 24 inches from the surface over much of this region. We live in fact on the largest freshwater aquifer in the Western hemisphere, a huge reason to preserve the New Jersey Pine Barrens, which grow over it. Did you know that even now there are unmapped areas of the Pine Barrens? hard to believe in such an industrialized busy state with more cars per highway mile than any other in the union, but 'tis so.

And the other effect felt chez Adams was that the few little ants that always show up in March in my kitchen were joined by thousands of brothers and sisters, all clamoring to get in out of the rain, let us in, we're DROWNING out here. I didn't notice a big influx on the kitchen floor, other than the opportunists crunching up the cat food, until I opened the dishwasher this morning and found a revival meeting of ants in progress...and the cats refuse to hunt them down. They prefer to hunt drinking straws and pens, which is why I never have a pen to hand at the phone. They're all under the fridge or the sofa. Pens, not cats.

I nearly forgot the other effect: the wind and rain ripped open the back of the mailbox cluster, you know, the kind on the street where there are 16 boxes with keys on the sidewalk side for the people, and two great big doors onto the street side for the mailman to open and stuff all the junk mail in.

So I retrieved two sodden little heaps from the box yesterday, from the day before, dried them out and found one was actually okay, well packed and the contents, a friend's journal, were intact, phew. But I have no idea if any other mail just blew away in the wind....

Then today, the box was still locked, but rain had still poured in again, and all the mail from yesterday was like papier mache, including my copy of FiberArts, sigh, AND my tax refund check. I trust that HP's refund check did not arrive when the boxes were wide open....but I will wait a day or two before panicking over that.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln....