Rock It Tee – Yarn, Books & Roses

The Saturday Update: Weeks 39 and 40, 2021

The days are still warm, dry and sunny, but the nights are finally getting a little cooler. I spend my afternoons in the swinging garden chair on the deck, reading and knitting in the strange silence that has now descended on the garden: no more crickets, cicadas, migrating geese, or even the pit bull next door. All are now gone, and the only sounds I hear are the squirrels racing through the trees and the occasional drifting fall of leaves. The maple tree out back, usually a blaze of red color by now, is slowly turning a golden brown with a few flashes of red. Seriously? This is how you are going to finish up the year? Figures.

This is as good as it is going to get this year I guess.

The ground is covered with dead leaves as these sorry examples of autumn glory drift off the tree. We never had a freeze, and I think that these brown leaves coming down are the result.

The baby bunny of the summer has found a mate.

Over the last weekend I noticed lots of digging in the yard from the bunny, and then one night the flood lights revealed that there were two bunnies in my yard! My little guy was not all alone any more! Now my bunny, all grown up, is gone.

Next week we will finally get colder weather and perhaps some rain. There will be snow in our mountains and all of my leaves will be gone off the tree.

Summer, truly, is finally over.

Knitting

I finished the second Rock It Tee this week!

Can you see how I blended the three skeins of yarn from light to dark as I alternated them through the sweater? The lightest is at the top.

I am now down to only one knitting project left, the second Snark-O-Meter that I am rapidly finishing off with lots of cat help.

I finished up clue 4 last night and will start clue 5 today. This baby should be done in just a few more days of knitting.

Yesterday I cleaned out my little project bags, sorted yarn in the stash, and organized myself for a prolonged sweater knitting campaign. I’m tempted to start the Stephen West MKAL (Shawlography), but as I sorted I realized that I had the yarn to make several sweaters all stocked up and waiting to go. It isn’t all that cold yet, but eventually sweater weather will get here and it is time for me to switch over to sweaters and to start working my way through the stash again.

I also, through great serendipity, located a community knitting group last week that makes hats for patients going through chemo at the infusion center where I used to go to my (old, kicked to the curb) rheumatologist’s office. I know that center, located between oncology and rheumatology, as I used to sit in that waiting room every rheumatologist appointment. Why is the infusion center next to rheumatology? Because, little known fact, many rheumatology patients (along with other people struggling with autoimmune disease), receive chemo and infusions of biologic drugs. I know, only too well, what a struggle it is to control Reynaud’s Phenomenon while hooked up to an IV in air conditioning. I’m joining the knitting group and will be knitting as many little fingerless mitts and arm warmers as I can for drop off to the center along with the chemo hats.

There. Knitting plans for the rest of the year all worked out. 🙂

Garden

This is ridiculous, but all of my mental energy is focused on planting all the potted plants into the gardens (Where should I put them? This is a big decision.) and making an indoor home for the jade plants that have been outdoors all summer.

This plant tripled in size over the summer. I moved it to this large pot, but now it is… large.

I recently discovered that jade plants are poisonous for cats. Oh, no. I have had jade plants in the house for years with my cats, and never had an issue, but now that I know I’m worried about a cat/plant interaction. I have an indoor garden shelf system established to keep the plants indoors over the winter, but this pot won’t fit now. I’ve decided to use chicken wire to keep the cats away from the shelf with the smaller jades, but this one plant is going to be challenging. Ugh. I can move shelves to create more space, or I can build a cage to put over the plant, or… these are the days when I miss the greenhouse I had in my biology classroom.

Books

I loved, loved, loved All the Light We Cannot See, so when I saw this book was coming out I preordered it right away. When it dropped into my Kindle library I forced myself to take a break from The Murderbot Diaries to read this. Holy, Moly! Best decision ever. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a book to read and savor.

So you probably have already guessed that I am really enjoying this book. It is the tale of a ridiculous comedy written by an ancient Greek author that is preserved over time and that connects people separated by centuries who are caught up in the jaws of history. Sounds improbable when I write it down, but this works and it is really good! I don’t want to give out any spoilers, but the story moves right along at a perfect pace, going back and forth between the characters and the Greek tale in a way that links them together and brings meaning to their lives and the Greek comedy in an unforeseen manner that eerily connects to my life also. Owls are a recurring element of the stories in the book: as I read in the night it is to the sound of booming “who-who’s” from the Great Horned owls in my neighborhood. (Bunnies: make good choices tonight!!) I read on in this book that is essentially about the power and of legacy of books as I consider which of my books to leave in one of the community Little Free Libraries next week. The power of books, the legacy of lives, the preservation of who we are: a big message contained in a book that immerses you in a powerful story.

Have a good week, everyone.

Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.

The Saturday Update: Weeks 35 and 36, 2021

The heat is hanging on and the cats and I are totally over it at this point. Yesterday we set a new heat record in my state: 99 degrees Fahrenheit. The sun is a sullen red ball in the sky and the sky is slate white with smoke from the west. The heat is unrelenting, there has been almost no rain, and fire season is still going on, and on, and on… Should summer be ending soon?

“Not yet!”, say the plants and wildlife in the yard. The cats have been busy chasing late season houseflies and the trees are abuzz with pulsing cicada sounds. There seems to be wildlife everywhere all of a sudden as the lawn and garden recover from the intense sun (but not the heat) of July and August. I even had to chase a little garter snake out of my garage yesterday! Summer is being especially tenacious, but I am seeing some hints of fall as flocks of geese fly over my house and the first leaves on the trees are turning.

The baby bunny is now hanging out in the front yard entertaining the cats as they watch from the front door. Do you see all of that debris on the sidewalk and street in the picture of the bunny? That is the mess being left by the squirrels as they harvest the Russian olives off of my neighbor’s tree. There is a really cute squirrel with an exceptionally fluffy tail digging holes under my trees to stash food for later… not nice, little squirrel!! Speaking of fluffy tails, look at what is happening to Mateo’s tail!! This kitten is getting a lot fluffier than I thought he would…

Garden

Everything that is pink is just flourishing at the moment.

My Autumn Joy Stonecrop is just covered with bees and other plants in containers on the deck have decided that they want to bloom too. Even the roses by my driveway have decided to get a last bloom in. For some crazy reason it is all of the pink plants… even the hydrangea is putting out some new blooms with pink edges. It makes me happy to see all that color coming back even if it will be drowned out by all the fall colors in the trees and shrubs in a week or two.

Knitting

I had several quiet days following my right heart catherization procedure last week (okay, I also slept a couple of days afterwards) and I ripped right through the next clue on the Snark-O-Meter. If you haven’t been keeping up with all of the snark, the Snark-O-Meter is the latest MKAL shawl by Sharon from Security (Casapinka) and I am having a blast this time.

It is getting too big to show off the fun stitches in this project in one picture so I settled for shots of each clue. The top left is clues 1 and 2, the bottom left shows clue 3, and the picture on the right is clue 4. Look at all of those great and interesting stitches and use of color!! I’m going to get a ton of use out of this shawl.

Since I finished the shawl in just a couple of days after the clue was released, and because Sharon is taking a week off to let people catch up on their knitting, and since I was admiring all things pink in the garden, I pulled out my new Rock It Tee that is being knit in a pinky/rusty colorway called Cinnasizzle. The actual yarn isn’t quite as hot pink as it appears in the pictures, but it is full of clay, pink, and rust colors that are just too fun to ignore. I’ve been binge watching Billions on Amazon Prime and knitting like crazy this last week with a nebulous thought that if I really apply myself I can get this sweater done before Sharon releases the next Snark-O-Meter clue in another week. Ha! This is clearly impossible, but that never stopped me before! To try is all. I’m below the armholes now and it is just knitting in the round for the next 15 inches or so…

Mateo is now 5 and a half months old. Isn’t he getting handsome?

I’m still waiting for my cardiologist to contact me with the next steps in the ongoing Blue-Lipped Zebra project. Things are really slammed right now in the health field as there are lots of Covid-19 patients and Covid long-haulers who need help, and my cardiologist is pretty overwhelmed with the case load at the moment. (How do I know? My pulmonologist, who is also slammed, told me. I feel so bad for them.) It is a little hard to be patient and to wait my turn, especially since some of those people who are bumping me back in the health-care line are the unvaccinated.

Last week I was mocked in public by someone for wearing a mask. Umm… retired high school teacher here. I called him out on it and he immediately stopped.

But still, it’s a little shocking that it even happened.

This is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. What a sad, horrible day that led to unpredictable outcomes that were far beyond my imagination at that time. How sad it is to reflect on all that has happened, and continues to happen, in America.

I plan to knit my way though the reflection, waiting, and sadness this week. You all be safe out there!

Have a great week everyone.

Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.

The Saturday Update: Weeks 31 and 32, 2021

Life has been rushed. I created a lot of internal deadlines for myself and I have been rushing along every day trying to meet them. After weeks of waiting I finally got the installation date for my new fences; that meant that I needed to do some major yardwork to prepare for all that construction and hauling away of stuff. Whew. I handled it. My flower beds are cleaned up, plants are pruned, and my new fence and gate look great!

The bunny survived the invasion of fence-related chaos and is back to entertaining the cats every evening and morning.

Sharon from Security (Casapinka’s very snarky cat) released her latest pattern last Saturday. I decided that I need to get my current knitting project finished before the first clue dropped.

I started a new series of books that I needed to finish up quickly so that I could get other books, checked out electronically from my library and getting ready to vanish into the ether in two weeks, read on time.

I’m doing major cleaning and dragging bags of stuff out to the trash every week. That trash pick-up day is another deadline every week as I clean out drawers and closets and let old belongings, not used in at least a decade, head off to a new home or the land fill…

Whew. Busy times!

Garden

My bougainvillea is blooming like crazy!! By the way, can you see the pretty new fence in the background?

I am putting my energies now into moving and installing some new bricks and then planting several of the potted shrubs (like the mini-roses and my hydrangea) into the ground before winter. Next year they can bloom in the cleared garden in the background!

Knitting

It was quite the drive, but I did get my new sweater finished with a few hours to spare before the Snark-O-Meter from Sharon from Security (Casapinka) dropped.

This is my second little layering piece that is knit loose enough for summer wear (well, cooler summer wear) and then will serve as layering pieces in the fall and winter. This loose little V-neck top, The Rock It is just perfect!!

Well, let’s talk about Snark-O-Meter. I have been dreaming about colors and digging in the stash for weeks. I would decide on a combo, but then the next morning I would remember a different skein of yarn in the stash and the amended quartet of yarn would suddenly become my new favorite. I finally settled on a color combo that I know will go with almost everything that I wear.

I know, I know… it is conservative, but very wearable. Can you see that there are little flecks of black in the red yarn? The gray has a slight sheen from silk which makes the drape really nice and shines around the other colors. Snark-O-Meter is a mystery knit-along (MKAL) and the other knitters are already showing off their beautiful color combinations on Facebook. People are worried about being too slow, and others are asking for help from other knitters. Encouragement is everywhere, Sharon is shoveling out the snark while hunting for her stolen squad car (again?! Sharon, you need to take better care of your things…) and threatening to busticate knitters who don’t read the directions. I love this group!!!

I still have those other sets of yarn waiting to become something. I may cast on a second shawl in some crazy colors that I will also be able to wear. Also, they are colors that I just simply love!!

The last couple of years have been hard, to say the least. Some of the knitters in the Sharon Show group on Facebook have been giving away their extra sets of yarn to other knitters who are struggling right now. I look at my unused sets and wonder how many I can put together for the next MKAL. I’m going to bag the yarn and as soon as Sharon/Casapinka put together their next project I think that I should offer them up. Seriously, who better deserves my extra yarn then these supportive, cheerful, cat loving knitters. I wish I had thought of it sooner. I’m trying to clean out a lot of stuff… this is one way to do it.

Quilts

I really focused and worked steadily on a quilt that has been languishing for the last several months.

It is done! There was some help from the cats…

It is a huge relief to finally have this done. I cleaned up the sewing room and put everything away this weekend, and noticed that I have a really cute quilt kit just waiting for me to start it in the cupboard…

By the way, this quilt is an art quilt by Pine Needles called “Calling Me Home“. I used about half of the blocks in the entire quilt to make my wall hanging.

Books

I just raced through this series. The setting is hundreds of years in the future in England. There has been a terrible war, all the life has mutated dramatically in a race for survival and all the world is dangerous. People survive in small enclaves, their history and old skills lost, and the remaining technology is like magic to them. Because contact between surviving groups of people is restricted by the extreme hostile environment mankind is slowly fading away.

Koli is a young man who breaks the rules and gets banned from his small village. He begins a long journey with a thought of saving humanity; his companions are few, and not all of them are still alive. They face danger, fight battles, make choices, and in the end, reach their goals. It’s hard to convey, but the voices of the characters, their insight into the human condition, made this series extremely engaging. These people are primitive, but they are not unsophisticated. I love the books and raced right through them. 🙂

Have a great week everyone.

Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.

The Saturday Update: Week 29, 2021

It was a lovely week last week; hot and sunny with cooling afternoon thundershowers. Perfect. I rested up the entire week recovering from the exceptionally busy week I had the week before that and got lots done outdoors.

The new kitten, Mateo, continues to grow at an accelerated rate and is eating like a bottomless pit. He is now 3 months, 3 weeks old and is much less clumsy but still unable to jump up onto counters. Whew. No rush there. By the way, do those front paws look kind of big to you?

Hannah has recovered from her visit to the vet and all the vaccinations and is returning to her playful self. There is a little problem here, though… she wants to play with the kitten all the time and me or her toys… not so much. I’ve been giving her more attention during the kitten’s naps and she is slowly rebounding to her previous endearing interactions with me and her toys. This has been a big month for her, after all, and she is coming through it like a trooper.

Garden

The garden continues to flourish in the good weather but I have some concerns for it as there is another heat dome building and this time it will be much closer to Colorado. I took pictures of the flowers this afternoon as I’m not too sure what they will look like in another week…

There is a lot of blooming going on with the roses and for some reason the insects haven’t been munching on them as much as usual. Look at how happy and fresh these blooms look! This is the second blooming of the season and I am feeding the roses again this week in the hopes that I can get a third blooming next month.

The garden is full of volunteer plants that are popping up from things I put in the garden in years past. The big winners are snapdragons… they are everywhere! I put in a picture showing all the new buds that are emerging on the plants (2nd from left) and one with dried seed pods that already dropping seeds on the same plants (3rd from left). I am moving some of the seeds to gardens in the back flower beds as I work clearing out weeds and I’m hoping that there will be a new crop of snapdragons back there next year. I’m also seeing cute little Johnny-Jump-Ups appearing in the gardens like the little purple flower in the last picture. It’s becoming kind of a Darwinian garden in this flower bed over time as the plants that are more successful are taking over my flower bed and other places in the yards.

Knitting

I haven’t said too much about it, but I’ve been battling tendonitis in my right shoulder that was putting a huge crimp in my knitting activities for the last six weeks… the pain radiated down my arm and I lost all feeling in my fingers and some function. The concern, of course, was that my knitting days were coming to an end due to joint and nerve damage from my systemic sclerosis. My rheumatologist started me on a new drug and sent me to physical therapy and I am finally, finally, recovering the use of my arm and can knit more than a half hour at a time again. Whew! People, I am back!! Am I buying any more yarn right now… no. Sadly, no.

I got busy on a new sweater and made some good progress this week. I am making the Rock It Tee using some great speckled yarn from the stash and I am so pleased with how it is working out.

The tee is constructed from the top down and you knit back and forth while shaping the raglan sleeves and the V neck in the front. In the picture on the left you can see that I have just joined the knitting below the V neck to allow me to knit in the round (so much easier on my hand) and the picture on the left shows the raglan sleeve shaping. I am almost at the point where the sleeves will be taken off and placed on holders and then it will be simple knitting in the round to the bottom of the sweater. Yay! My next ball of yarn looks a little darker so I am going to start blending it into the current fabric as soon as I’m below the sleeves.

Books

The Ten Thousand Books of January was great! I had just finished a book about books, doors, keys, and some crazy-ass magic associated with them, so I was a little worried about this one too. Nope. This was a straight forward book within a book that told a great story. I really enjoyed it and loved every minute of the books, doors, keys, words, and crazy-ass magic.

Have a great week everyone.

Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.

The Saturday Update: Week 28, 2021

The weekend was busy and I am running late, but there is so much going on I thought that I should get my update entry out there so that next week’s edition doesn’t grow to completely unmanageable proportions. It’s a plan, anyway.

I had appointments every single day last week, and two on Friday. I ran lots of errands while out of the house and by the time the weekend arrived I needed to do a little recovery. So what all happened? I bought a new refrigerator (!), made the arrangements for new fencing and a gate into my back yard along the side of the house, went to physical therapy, and met with my primary care physician. Whew! The Blue Lipped Zebra needs to write an update, but that’s another post. I also took Hannah in to visit the vet and get caught up on all of her shots.

Hannah was so good at the vet. She took her shots like a champ and purred while they drew blood to test her for FIV. I insisted that I needed to stay with her during the blood draw and we got through it all with the minimum of upset for my girl. Whew! Then the pain and stiffness arrived. She growled if I tried to pick her up and wouldn’t even put weight on her front (vaccinated) paw for two days. Mateo, fully loaded with kitten energy and dying to rough house with his big sister, had to be distracted all weekend as Hannah hid out recovering from her vaccination reactions. Today Hannah is back up and the two cats are again chasing each other. Yay! Mateo goes for his shots next week…

Hannah wasn’t too sore to miss watching her baby bunny every day through the garden window. Mateo hung out with her when he was sleepy and is turning out to be the best little Hannah-companion ever. Except I’m pretty sure that he is going to be a lot bigger then Hannah when he is done growing!

Knitting

I finished Ranunculus!!

I am so, so, so happy with the final project!!

This is a pattern that is shockingly easy to modify and the pattern overtly support this. I tried to record what I did in my Ravelry notes as I’m pretty sure that I will be making another one of these. I’m exceptionally happy with the edging that I used on the bottom of the sweater and on the sleeves. I had cast off the sleeves while knitting (following the directions) and then decided that I wanted a better behaved edging that wouldn’t roll up my arm. I considered knitting Icord, but ended up ~~stealing~~ using the edging from a previous sweater, Misurina. I picked up stitches along the bound off sleeve edge and immediately launched into the edging: twisted stitch ribbing and then three rounds of stockinette before binding off to create the neatly rolled edging. The edging on the sleeve is stable and well behaved. I knitted a matching edging along the bottom of the sweater with a few more rows of the ribbing. Pretty awesome little sweater, don’t you think?

Today I wound the yarn to cast on my next little summer sweater. I’m getting into these little layering pieces that I can use on cooler summer days now and layered over long sleeved tops and under cardigans in the winter.

Garden

The weather has been exceptionally kind to the garden and the roses are just now starting to bust out with their second blooming of the season. This is kind of early and means that I may get a third blooming before the first hard freeze of the fall. I’m so pleased with the gardens in general. I always plant little bedding flowers hoping that they will reseed to create more plants in the coming years, but it doesn’t always work out for me. Except this year! I had planted miniature snapdragons two years ago that put out a couple of little volunteers last year that I took good care of. This year the garden, soaked every few days with another rainstorm, produced dozens of new snapdragons. Okay, these plants are all over the place and not just in the garden, but I’m going with Mother Nature and taking good care of them because I am now just plain charmed by the abundance of color.

The original snapdragons were a light orange/pink in color, but the second generation of offspring are in a whole range of colors from yellow to hot pink with all the shades of orange in between.

I pruned the roses in front last week and gave the plants a good feeding so there should be new growth coming in the days ahead. The roses in the back, fed a couple of weeks ago, are already blooming again. Stay away from the rose, baby bunny, you hear me?!

Books

I spent a lot of time reading this weekend recovering from the adventures out of the house last week (and protecting poor Hannah from the wild kitten!). I finished The Starless Sea, blazed right through The Last Thing He Told Me, and then jumped into The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

The Starless Sea is a rich, complicated book with multiple story threads that slowly emerge from other related stories. It relies on metaphors and imagination an awful lot, and I would have quit on it more than once expect for… it was so well written that I kept wanting to memorize little phrases to keep them with me always, or maybe rip out some pages to fold into little stars to hang somewhere, or buy some clothes with bees on them, or go dig through the pantry to find some clover honey… Truthfully, the author almost killed the book with her endless creativity, but in the end the story lines pulled together, things almost made sense, and I stayed up way too late to get to the end. I liked the end. Then I went online to look for some bee jewelry, but then I am a sucker for bees and stories.

The Last Thing He Told Me rolled right along in a simple, well-constructed story that kept me completely entertained throughout. The twists and turns in the story’s plot were plausible and not obvious, the connections to the characters were perfect, and I quite frankly loved it. Perfect book to read following the brain-frying twists of The Starless Sea.

Then I picked up The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Hey, can you see how beautiful that cover is? It has hanging keys and doors: these are big elements of The Starless Sea. I’m only a few chapters in, but already I’m captured by the story…

Have a great week everyone.

Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.