Crabbage

Oh, the joy of a bucket of crabs!

It's a great ending to any day when Hubby calls on the radio, meet me at the dock...I've got something for you...

and all the lobstermen snicker....and then they realize it's me he's talking to, and know what a crab fanatic I am, and know it has nothing to do with anything to snicker about...

And I go get a bucket of crabbies!

Sometimes it's shrimp, rarer still, lobster.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, all the fishermen would bring me Sea Bass if they happened to catch one that day. It was my favorite thing about being pregnant! That was 8 years ago; I guess nobody fishes for them anymore, I haven't seen one in a long, long time.

OK, back to knitting  EVIL, ahem, I mean, wicked....

Still frigging around the armpits. I took it off the needles and decided it was too 'short'. Yet another thing to dislike about this stripe pattern. I wanted the sleeves to be dark purple like the collar, but because it's too short, I'll need to do another stripe...making the sleeve fall in the lightest color. It's the color I wanted to leave out in the first place. UGH.

The other alternative is to do the sleeves in the dark purple anyway, and not have them match the stripe on the body of the sweater (which is probably what I'll do, as I really don't like that light color...)

There will be no photographic evidence of this beast until it is completed.

Don't  ask again.

In other news, I cannot find the pattern I used for my first socks. I either left it at the hotel over vacation, or threw it out with the huge stack of mail I went through when we got home. Either way, it sucks. I was so gonna do socks last night, but had to play with Evil.

Maybe it's for the best.

hehe, drool on, Michele!

Hmmmmm

Well.

I just put the kids to bed, and I'm ready to hunker down with the aptly named 'wicked' (because I do not like this purple striped monstrosity that I am forcing myself to knit...I am now calling it 'evil'), only to realize that I need Thing One to try it on to make sure I am ready to take the sleeves off. 

OOOOOOOh.

Do I wake her up?

What will I do all night, if not the 'evil / wicked'?

Shall I use this excuse to begin another project.......

Hmmmmmm

Big snowstorm forecasted for tomorrow. I had my crocs on today, no socks, no coat. I would have gone to work in my flip-flops if I could have found them.

I'm so done with winter.  What a gorgeous day. It was my gift from the Government for paying taxes. So, I guess that makes it an expensive day. 

Bringing that up made me re-live the pain of writing that horrible, huge check out to the IRS, and now I must have wine. Will contemplate waking that sleeping child while numbing the poverty pain I'm feeling.

There will most assuredly be knitting to show tomorrow, but you'll have to stay tuned to find out what it will be!

I did it!

Could I BE more excited about this? Is it a little weird to BE SO EXCITED about this?

I made my first pair of socks!

In real fingering weight sock yarn!

On size ONE needles!

AND MAGIC LOOPed  THE WHOLE THING!

And they were FUN, and EASY, and came out AWESOME!

It took 3 days to do the pair, and that was straight knitting- we were in a hotel, no laundry, cooking, cleaning, or work involved. Sat by the pool while the kids swam. They didn't mind, or at least Thing One didn't, as they are for her. She seems pretty pleased; I had to pry them off her to wash them.

    This is Melinda Goodfellow's (of Yankee pattern fame) multi weight sock pattern (top down), in Plymouth's Happy Feet (90% superwash, 10%nylon)...washed up like a charm, but the hotel was carpeted (and she slept in them ) so they are a little bit...fuzzy. 

But they're still awesome!

The sock bug has been gnawing on me since my invitation to Ravelry came. I think I did pretty good to hold back this long, don't you? My GOD! Have you seen the socks on there!?! And people are whipping them out in a few days, like a swatch! Does anyone work?!? (Note to self: screw the housework and let the kids feed themselves. Life's too short to not knit.)

Pitiful progress was made on the purple striped 'Wicked". I did not tear it all out, but I cut all the color stranding, and that looks much better. The reason I didn't frog has nothing to do with lack of courage...rather a lack of yardage. I did the math 3 times, and nothing will do but to use all 3 colors in the stripe pattern. My consolation is that Thing One just turned 7, and will outgrow the darn thing in about 2 months. I have it worked up to what I think will be the final increase row (the armpit) and it feels like knitting with the cord to my laptop after the sock yarn!

...must... finish...Wicked before beginning any more projects, or I fear it will be in a heap at the back of a closet somewhere...tho' the sock yarn beckons from the bag.....

....and the summer cotton calls from the basket....(eeek, 3 projects there!)

...and Donna will be looking for some goodies for the Museum in just 2 short months.....

I need a clone! 

    

I'm on vacaaaaaaatiooooooon!

Well, we made it to the mainland, but had to 'jump ship' (meaning the island) a day early because of the weather. Made for some interesting packing/planning. I may have to buy underwear, not sure what any of us has for clothes...

We had one hell of a ride over, but the Cap'n did me the favor of going the back way, so at least it was only reeeeaaallly bad for a short time. Thank You Al!

The panic started at 3:30 this morning, when the wind WOKE ME UP. Oooooh, you know you're in trouble when it wakes you out of a dead sleep. By 9am I couldn't feel my feet. Some even wondered if the boat would run at all, but I didn't think it was blowing hard enough to warrant that. I am worried about tomorrow's run, the high winds are going to be accompanied by high seas, and that's a recipe for a cancelled boat ride for sure. And that, my friends, is why I bolted a day early!

But all is well...I can feel all my body parts again;  we ate, we shopped, we swam.

And all the snow they threatened us with...turned to bucketloads of rain. 

Didn't it rain!

We were looking for Noah, it was that bad.

We are thinking that it will be too slushy to fish on the lakes tomorrow, so I think it will be another swim, eat and shop day.

Our friends are going to meet up with us tomorrow, so they can swim, too.

It's awesome here in the hotel, before the rest of the world lets out for school vacation. We had the whole pool to ourselves- and a good thing, too, for I actually donned a bathing suit (gasp) and went swimming with my kids. Ain't happening after Friday when the place is full, I can tell ya!

I'll have lots of pics to post, but If I don't shut the lights, nobody will go to sleep, and, well, I have been up since 3:30....

Waiting for a big storm.

     Well, the weathermen are all tweaky with excitement over this HUGE storm coming in tonight...which means we'll likely see an inch or two on the ground tomorrow. I wonder if they have to meet statistics to keep their jobs? Like, they have to be right a certain percentage of the time?

One of our local guys isn't even making 50% - we watch sometimes just to see what he'll come up with!

     Since my house is all clean, I spent the day (not knitting) cooking for our big ice fishing trip. I made a triple beef stew, 3 meatloaves, stuffed eggplant, and a shrimp stir fry dish. I fried up peppers and onions to put on sausages, but can't cook the sausages until the day before we leave.

I have mac and cheese, and a big pan of chicken- broccoli-ziti to do by Wednesday!

     Tomorrow is packing day, where I try to fit everything we own into bags. I detest being someplace that isn't home. I need my stuff. And don't get me started on hotel beds. I have amended my ultimate Christmas gift ( a level 4 Bio-hazard suit complete with Oxygen supply) to include a Luma-lite. I'll never get it, but that's probably good because I'd never leave my house- but that wouldn't matter because I'd be so busy bleaching everything that fluoresced under the luma-lite. And I'm not naive, I know that's everything.

    

     In knitting news, I am not loving this version of wicked. I don't like the stripe thing going on. I didn't want to use the lightest color, and I can see the dark color behind it. It's kind of pissing me off. I also am not liking the jogless join I'm doing. It's freakin' jogged! I can't stand it, and I just decided right this minute that I'm frogging the whole damn thing.

I'll re-do it...neck wider, stripes smaller (4 rows vs. 6), and a REAL jogless join. Yeah, yeah that's it.

UGH!!!! (I was done the whole damn yoke.)

   It isn't the re-knitting that gets me, any knitting is good knitting, and any time you re-write a pattern you know going in that it's trial and error...but the beauty of 'Wicked" is how EASY it is. 

   Wine first, then frog.

Caught in the act!

We all have them. The days when you wake up and just know there will not be a single productive minute to account for at the end of the day. Mine was today. I woke up feeling...just miserable. In fact, I went to bed feeling miserable-enough to make a deal with hubby to get up with the kids and get them off to school. He did it, too, and I stayed in bed until.....wait for it....8:45.

8:45!!!!!!

I wasn't even asleep! I just laid there like a slug. I got up because I couldn't stand it anymore- the house was empty and I was wasting those precious quiet minutes laying in bed!

But I didn't accomplish a damned thing today. Didn't make beds. Didn't clean bathrooms (HAVE to be done every morning or it smells like the Orient Heights train station in there. Boys.)No laundry. Didn't empty the dishwasher. Hubby got the kids breakfast, lunch, and ultimately, dinner. (gold star for him today. Must be said, however, that this is the FIRST time-without exaggeration- that I left him to his own devices with the kids, EVER. That's 7 years, if you're counting.)

I did some knitting, but not much. I mostly just sacked out on the couch.

And so, because the fates just HAVE to mess with me...I had unexpected (though welcome) company tonight! Our friends have just returned from a week in Florida, and dropped by to visit. I hadn't showered in two days. My kids had trashed the living room. Even the cat was dirty. I could have died when Emmie headed off to use the bathroom! 

And the kids were starving because it was dinnertime...but I was only going to open some canned soup, so I had nothing cooking. AAAH! My house is always clean, and I always have something cooking!    SO. NOT. FAIR.

Fortunately, our friends are good people, and just laughed at it all. (Though she was kind of pale when she came out of the bathroom.) They even agreed to stay for dinner when hubby offered to make steak and cheese subs. He makes steak and cheese subs? Since when? And I'll be damned, they were good, too!

Needless to say, as soon as they left I sprang into action. I had both bathrooms sterilized within 10 minutes. I took a shower, cleaned the tub, emptied the kitty litter, emptied the dishwasher, refilled it, washed the pans and bleached the countertops, picked up the living room, put away two loads of laundry and washed two more. And all before midnight, so, you know, it still counts as the same day.

I still feel like crap, but my house is clean *happy dance*. 

Tomorrow I will put a color in my hair even if it kills me.

But right after that, I plan to sit on my ass and knit all afternoon.

Right after I find some excuse to get Emmie to come over...to see my house!

Happiness is

...when the ferry boat actually makes it to the island, despite snow and high winds, and brings GROCERIES! It also brought a reporter from the Bar Harbor Times who is doing a story about the grocery delivery project,( EEK reporter issues), but I was the post office employee today, so thankfully I wasn't interviewed. Some days I just love my job! Especially when it gets me out of speaking to a reporter, as I will inevitably say something ridiculous or extremely embarrassing; such as the time I mentioned my resistance to get on the boat in all but the fairest weather, which has since been broadcast all over the country so when people meet me they say, "Oh, you're that one who lives on an island and is afraid to ever get on the boat! How could you be afraid of the water?!? Why do you live out here?" (Sigh, it's not ALL the time, just really rough weather.)

Took me years to perfect an answer for this: I use a quote from "Jaws", "It's only an island if you look at it from the water". (Thank you, Peter Benchley)

Yeah, it pretty much leaves them speechless but I still look like a moron.

 I have learned it's better for all involved for me to just avoid the reporters. This leads to some interesting situations which have included hiding in the bushes and walking up a very steep trail through the woods with an infant on my hip. All I could think was, yeah- this would be the REAL story if I get caught.

   Anyway, the groceries worked out great this week, no frozen eggs or melted ice cream, so all is right with the world.

In knitting news, I finished Alexa's 'wicked' in that horrible ribbon yarn (those on Rav know of what I speak), and it was so fun, and came out soooo cool that I immediately started another one for Thing One in some Encore I had in the stash. It will have to be striped to be done from stash, not what I wanted. It's all the purples left over from Patrice's Crazy Stripes sweater. Natch, I had to resize the pattern because Thing One is 7 years old. I'm going to post it on Rav when the sweater is done- when I know it works out right! I've seen more than one request for more varied patterns for that 'in between' age of 8-14 years. This was really easy to resize and I  omitted the shaping so it's a little ...less....ummm......bratz. 

Looking at a foot of snow for the weekend...Tammy has the post office for the next few days....I feel a knitting binge coming on!!!

Today is the day!

It's the blog's first day. And of course, absolutely nothing happened today, except a half -assed snowstorm. Even that was uneventful and not exciting...a mere 2 inches that melted as quickly as it came.

And so, look at knitting. 

   I show you these particular mittens because they are missing. I made them for Thing One, aka my daughter, for Christmas. I wrapped them, put them under the tree, and haven't seen them since. We apparently have evil fairies who steal xmas presents living in our house. It would actually explain a lot.

Oh, and yeah- I know the date is off in my photo. Evil fairy, I guess.