Tuxedo Kitten – Yarn, Books & Roses

The Saturday Update: Week 24

June continues to misbehave: we had three days above 100 degrees Fahrenheit this week and several severe thunderstorms with tornados! My arm is still swollen and painful but the numbness is starting to improve; as if in solidarity one of my knees started to complain just today. Sigh. Knock it off, you guys! My new refrigerator came today and I am so happy to have dependable food storage again. Besides, it is just beautiful and shiney! The flowers in the garden are starting to bloom and the roses in particular are looking mighty fine. I have started to knit again every night and I also found some interesting books to read. I bought new glasses and ordered a bunch of fun stuff from Amazon. (Do I need purple and gold washi tape for my journal? Why yes, yes I do. I also got pink and gold replacement bands for my Fitbit and a pair of pink/grey comfy pants.) I went to the yarn store and bought more yarn… that may have not been wise, but I want to believe that I will return to full knitting capacity soon. 🙂 Okay, June isn’t being all bad… it was Hannah’s one year adoption anniversary this week.

Hannah on the 15th (her adoption anniversary date) and little kitten Hannah on the day I brought her home last year. I tried to recreate the picture from her first day home but she wasn’t all that interested and I was lucky to get the shot that I did. To celebrate her anniversary she got crispy pink paper to play in (that is always a big hit with her) and some bows to drag around. Last night I applied to adopt a kitten companion for her from the Cat Care Society and today they called me to approve the request and put us on the list for kitten alerts. Hannah was adopted from this shelter and they consider it a priority to get her a little friend. Yay!

I’ve requested a male, orange tabby kitten. We’ll see what happens. Hannah can’t wait.

Knitting

I’m working steadily on the mitts for my knitworthy niece who is a huge fan of all things Mandalorian. I am now up to the fingers of the second mitt.

I need to do some duplicate stitch detail work and then there are all of the ends to weave in, but the end is definitely in sight now. I’m almost tempted to make a second pair but I have soooo many sweaters and other projects that I need to get done. This pattern is Mando (Natela Astakhova).

Garden

The roses are blooming! The roses are blooming! The roses are blooming!

From left to right, these roses are Hot Cocoa, Princess Alexandra of Kent, Cinco de Mayo, and Home Run. We had lots of rain this spring and I have been watering every day since then; this is the best crop of roses I’ve had in quite a while. I really was responsible this time with the roses as I covered them with frost clothes if there was even a chance of a hard freeze and I fertilized them early in the spring. This week they got more fertilizer and they are all looking good with lots of buds on the plants still waiting to bloom. Yay, garden!!

Books

I have two books going right now; one is text and the other is an audiobook. They both are really holding my interest and curiously they even look similar.

How crazy is it to be reading icy blue books when trapped in an heat wave. I’m only half way through The Doors of Eden and even less with The Cold Millions, but both books are thought provoking and really interesting.

And that’s all I’m going to say about them right now. 🙂

Have a great week everyone.

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

Scleroderma Update: My rheumatologist had my hands x-rayed this week and I have severe arthritis in both of them, but especially the one that is now acting up. I was kind of surprised and I’m hoping that they can do something to help with the swelling and numbness. My echocardiogram results also came back and I do have a hole in my heart, but an email came from my pulmonologist yesterday saying that it isn’t big enough to account for the whole panting/blue lips thing and he wants to do some more testing. Fun. We have an appointment next week.

The Saturday Update: Week 13, 2021

Spring has arrived here in my little part of the world. The weather is balmy, the sky is endless blue, and I hear birdsong every morning now. Yay! I headed off the the nursery on Friday and bought some nice bedding plants that can withstand a spring snowstorm or two and planted them that afternoon. Look at what else I found!

So cool, right? My front rose garden is covered with these little white flowers and the occasional crocus as pops of color. Some of my perennials are putting out new growth and I am feeling pretty good about getting the outside gardens going again. I think that all of the rose bushes made it through the winter, but in another few weeks I’ll know for sure. Please, no big snow storms, Mother Nature!!

Knitting

I kind of set a goal for myself early in the year to knit a pair of socks each month, so late last week I went into knitting overdrive and got March’s pair of socks finished. They are nothing fancy, but they are done!

These guys were knit with Classic Sock yarn from Spun Right Round in the colorway “Hellbent”. This yarn is a 4-ply hard twist merino yarn that is advertised as perfect for socks, so I took a chance and cast on. It’s a knitting experiment! If they hold up to wear okay I have some more yarn like this in the stash just waiting to join them in the sock drawer…

Once the socks were done I went back to knitting the Goldwing sweater and made some progress. I have now finished the body and am working my way down the first sleeve; Hannah has been tons of help with the sleeve knitting… NOT! I have to flip the sweater around while working on the sleeve and that makes the knitting look like a cat toy to her. Still, we are making good progress.

Books

Have you ever found yourself reading books that had similar themes? Without meaning to I have gone down the rabbit hole reading books about… artificial intelligence and the personhood of human-like constructs.

These books ask the question, “What is personhood?” while taking you on adventures that are engaging and action-packed while forcing you to consider why some individuals have lesser rights than others. In A Closed and Common Orbit the artificial intelligence of a ship (Lovelace) moves into a robot body after a catastrophic failure and reboot that makes her continued presence on the ship uncomfortable. It’s a rocky, and illegal, transition but over time Lovelace, with the help of her irrepressible engineer/friend Pepper, is able to move into a life that is hers alone.

Then there is Murderbot. Oh, dear. I am currently consumed with Murderbot. Imagine being a highly skilled and intelligent construct of organic and machine parts that is designed to provide sophisticated services to clients who hire their services from security corporations. Known as SecUnits, these constructs are lethal bodyguard units capable of multiple types of responses; they can conduct electronic warfare and control other units (like drones) while shooting their way out of any ambush or hazard; retrieval and secure safe passage for human clients is their specialty. They are lethal units, valuable corporate possessions, and their compliance with corporate priorities and directives is controlled by implanted governors that “punish” any failure by the SecUnit. They are “things” and have no rights. Except… what if a SecUnit is able to hack the governor and can begin to make decisions for itself? Meet the hero of The Murderbot Diaries as it goes rogue and begins to find its own way in the universe. I love the Murderbot!! This is Space Opera to die for with a main character (snarky, media-watching, anxiety-ridden, loyal to its friends) that grows on me with every single new book. Who could have thought that a Murderbot could be so human as it struggles to deal with… humans? I just started the 5th book in the series today and I am seriously upset that I have to wait for the next one to get published.

Lucky for me I have Klara and the Sun waiting for me in my library. Klara is an artificial intelligence. Klara is solar powered. I can’t wait to meet Klara.

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 10, 2021

Good grief, there is a blizzard outside! This has been a crazy week with lots of trips out of the house, but it looks like I’m going to spend the next few days dealing with snow. There is already 15 inches on the ground and more is on the way as the storm is expected to last until sometime tomorrow.

Knitting

I have been making progress on my Goldwing!! Check it out…

I finally made it through all of the colorwork and now I’m just racing along in the stockinette body.

I am really happy with how the colorwork looks and now that I’m going down the body I should take the sweater off the needles to try it on for fit and to see what the length is on me. I laughed to see that there is now a Goldwing KAL being launched by Jennifer Steingass in her Knit.Love.Wool Ravelry group as the pattern just turned 1 year old. Talk about bad timing! If I had only waited a couple of months to cast on this sweater! I struggle with the Ravelry format for groups, but maybe I will check out the group and make a better effort to figure out how it all works. It’s okay to join with other patterns from Knit.Love.Wool, and I have two more of her patterns that I plan to knit this year so I could jump in with one of those. I have to add that I am discovering this pattern to be extremely well written with lots of meticulous detail.

A new KAL launched today from Casapika (and Sharon from Security) that has sent me back into the yarn stash to poke around to see what I can put together for a cute little shawlette (Raspberry Cordial) with two contrast colors. This is the Anne of Green Gables KAL that I am talking about, and it is a short little one that will only last two weeks. I need one skein of tonal or speckled yarn with a couple of mini-skeins as accents to the main color. Of course Hannah helped me as I did this…

Hannah: there was a lot of digging in containers of yarn… I helped!!

I finally settled on three different yarn combos for the shawlette:

Now I have three options. The one on the left will have the raspberry colored yarn for the main color and the purple and gold would be the accents. Cute, huh! However this is not something that I would probably end up wearing a lot… I have had the Backyard Chicken combo for years and it would made a shawlette that I will wear, but it is kind of… not exciting. The third combo, plums and grays, will made something that I would wear a lot and is the more safe option. To be honest, I have lots of knitting already and probably won’t cast on right away, but a knit-along is so much fun, and I love being part of the Sharon Show community on Facebook, and how long would it take to make a little shawlette… I’m pretty sure I can find needles in the size that I need…

Garden

Books

I’m hooked. I finished the 5th book in this series last night and the 6th book is already downloaded onto my Kindle. To my joy there are several more books in the series. 🙂

That’s it. The snow is still coming down and my area is currently experiencing white out conditions. It’s hard to be certain but I’m pretty sure I have more than 2 feet of snow outside right now so this is going to be a huge storm. It is a mess and there is lots of shoveling ahead when this finally stops. Good times!!

It’s nice to have something to break up the knitting…

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

The Saturday Update: Week 9, 2021

This was a crazy, busy week. I made two major treks across town to medical appointments, pulled out the power drill and made repairs to the indoor garden, polished off two books, reintroduced myself to my spinning wheel, and made some major knitting progress. People, I ordered a new phone with an awesome camera!! And in the middle of the week this other really exciting thing happened…

I’ve been cleaning out the cupboards (this is all your fault, Highland Heffalump!) and discovered some really nice roving that I bought years ago at the Interweave Yarn Fest. Look at it!! This shining softness is handpainted 50% yak/ 50% silk… about time to do something with it, don’t you think? I decided to add a little spinning to my days.

I started with the magenta roving and quickly remembered that I don’t exactly love spinning silk as it is hard for me to smoothly draft in my usual long draw, but the finished product is worth it. Right now I’m just trying to get back into the spin of things and hopefully this final yarn (which will be lumpy and pretty artistic with its uneven twist and thin stretches) will make a stunning (and arty) cowl some day. I am still thinking about how to tackle the multicolored roving… by the way, these fibers are from Greenwood Fiberworks. Anyway, Hannah thinks that the spinning is great fun and I’m starting to enjoy the zen of spinning again as I get the hang of working with the silk.

Knitting

I finished my socks and really buckled down and worked on the Goldwing sweater this week. I’m happy with the socks, and the sweater is slowly growing in spite of the exceptional assistance from my feline knitting supervisor. I have so many sweaters all kitted up waiting for me to get to them, and the cold weather is going to be gone before I know it, so I’m pretty motivated to get at least one sweater done this month. I’m more than half way through the colorwork yoke so the speed should really pick up in a few days when I’m finished with the colorwork and the sleeves stitches are placed onto holders. Of course, that’s when I get to try it on to see if it will fit…

Garden

Hannah likes to explore ~~get into trouble~~ in the indoor garden EVERY SINGLE TIME I work in the craft room. No wonder I’m having trouble spinning a smooth thread. She stands on the light fixtures as she climbs up onto the top shelf of plants, and wouldn’t you know it, both of those fluorescent grow light bulbs burned out last week. Funny. I wonder how that happened?

Hannah: It is a mystery. Also, the plant that jumped out and landed on the floor last night is also a mystery…

I tried to order more light bulbs online and quickly discovered that they are no longer made. I eventually decided to replace the light fixtures and bought LED grow light stands that attach to the shelves in a way that makes them virtually Hannah proof. The light is kind of a funky pink, but the plants seem happy so all is good.

The garden is pretty cheerful these days as my microgreens are looking happy (little do they know that they are going to be jumping into a blender in a couple of days when I make a smoothie…) and my newest African violets are blooming like crazy behind them. I just love that color pink! Perhaps inspired by the violets, the orchids are entering a second round of blooming and the latest plant is just now getting ready to open its buds; as an added bonus it looks like the orchid will coordinate smoothly with the blooming violets. Maybe the plants like Hannah knocking them around after all.

Books

I am completely hooked by this set of mysteries now.

I am completely enchanted by the Gaius Petreius Ruso mysteries. Ruso and Tilla are back in Britannia now, married and looking to settle into a new life together. Ruso wants/needs a job to make that happen, and the two of them become embroiled in a case of two missing tax collectors and the vanished taxes they were transporting when Ruso accepts a job as an investigator. This book sailed smoothly along as I listened to it while spinning and knitting, and I feel that the author has definitely hit her stride with the series. Ruso and Tilla have grown as characters, old friends have reappeared in this new plot, and the murders ( there are always murders, it seems, when Ruso is on the case…) and intertwined conspiracies are well developed and told in a straight-forward fashion that is easy to follow in an audiobook. I was up late into the early morning hours finishing this book and will be downloading the next installment in the series tonight. Hey, I have a sweater to get finished and this series is the perfect companion for me and the kitten as we work away.

Have a great week, everyone!!

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

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