Knits With Cats
I'm a senior technical project manager at work, a knit project starter at home and a list-maker everywhere! I'm married and have too many cats, lots of books, almost enough rose bushes, and way too much yarn!
Green Theme
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Green-Tea Cupcake
38% Green-Tea
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This continues the green theme that's developed completely by accident this week, and because I've got nothing else except a whine because it's too hot to think here. It's almost 9 pm and it's still 86* outside - normally by this time it would be in the 60s - and 80* in the house (which actually feels cool; that's rather frightening!) It was 100 on the patio at 5 pm today. The weather guessers say tomorrow should be in the 80s and it should be seasonal Saturday. Hallelujah!
There are more finished objects to show. Maybe tomorrow...
Random Greenery
Jade Queen Sunflower (more chartreuse than jade; perhaps that will change as it opens)
Limelight Artemesia
Limelight Nicotiana (and a frog prince)
Lime Licorice Plant
Green section of the Roy G. Biv garden, a work in progress.
Knitted FO Alert!
For the gift box:
Hat and scarf set knitted from stash and leftover yarn. The breen (between brown and olive green) is a mohair blend bought in 1993 or so from I-don't-remember-where. There were 2 skeins, and I used every last inch of it.
The lilac and blue are Wendy Peter Pan Velvet Touch; lilac is left over from a chemo hat I knit in 2000 for a co-worker, the blue was going to be a chemo cap for another co-worker who luckily didn't need it. This makes the softest chemo caps (I'm told); I know I want a sweater of it, but it's so light and soft I might never take it off!
The pattern for the hat is Janet Szabo's Chemo Toque, free from Patternworks with the purchase of Berocco Chinchilla in 2000. I've made a couple of modifications for gauge. Scarf is a basic girl-scout scarf pattern found by browsing.
Here's close-up (fuzzy, my apologies) of the yarn, lest you wonder why I added blue and lilac!
Must Have Cardi Revisited
This is the beginning of the new, improved Must Have Cardigan. I love the flecks of color, especially in natural light. There are bits of red, purple, blue, lilac, orange and perhaps other colors. It's a bit scratchy, but should soften when washed, and if it doesn't, I'm not planning to wear it next to my skin.
And did I mention that I've had a skirt for a couple of years that is exactly the darker shade of green? I couldn't have done that if I'd tried!
Now I must chart the pattern or find charts already done. I am so not going to knit from the written directions. (Don't laugh at me. It's not that long since I complained on KnitU that some of us just can't follow charts, and it's not fair that we had to convert charts to words.)
Arbor (Satur) Day (photo alert! new camera works!)
All summer - since April, in fact, I've been working on an arbor for the entrance to the patio. When we moved here, I planted a Climbing Joseph's Coat rose and didn't realize how much it really likes to climb.
(Now that I think about it, I believe there may have been a rickety lattice trellis and gate thing there before. If so, it was low enough that even I felt close to the roof, and at 5'3" that doesn't happen often!)
Anyway, as weather permitted, I've painted the pieces (primed and 2 coats of paint), built and measured. The weather and life have conspired to make it take this long. First if was too cold to paint until afternoon, but the gardeners and their "mow and blow" stuff would come in the afternoon - it only took one time of getting stuff blown into fresh paint to learn that lesson. I ran out of paint at inopportune times. The wind blew when the temperature was right - all reasons that painting took a long time.
A couple of weeks I was ready to put the thing together and realized that I needed some additional muscle. Saturday evening Ken and I worked together, built the last sections, and put it up. He even found a hole in the brick that probably held the old, trellis to the house, so we were able to secure the arbor rather permanently to the house.
The rose and hibiscus look terrible at the moment. I had to severely prune the rose; it was climbing through the little trellis and covering the hibiscus (which has never looked like much, but does have pretty blooms - apparently it was damaged by frost before we moved in, and was thought to be dead) weighing it down. I've fertilized and watered, and will put down new mulch next weekend. By then the rose will have new leaves, I'm sure.
There's a bonus too! Because this is an old house there have been many additions and changes over the years. There are two cable conduits to the shop from the house which carry electrical, telephone and computer lines. They are overhead at the entrance to the patio - the new arbor (and the rose, once it gets growing) will hide them!
RIP Must Have Cardigan
Remember this?
It's the beginnings of the Must Have Cardigan. I love the pattern, and love the color of the yarn. Together? Not so much. It's been frogged, and I'm swatching with some lovely green tweed Irish wool, bought on eBay years ago. It's a heavier weight yarn, and needs much larger needles. That's a good thing, because I have less of it and no way to get any more.
The replacement camera just arrived, so there should be photos tomorrow!
TGIF
It's been one of those weeks: long, frustrating for no apparent reason, and just meh.
On the plus side, I did find a new doctor whose philosophies agree with mine. The weather has been lovely all week. Fifty-two of the 62 roses in the front yard have been heavily trimmed and fertilized, so beautiful blooms should burst forth in the next couple of weeks.
On the minus side, the replacement camera has not arrived, so no photos today. (The old camera is playing with me again.) The weather is predicted to start warming over the weekend, and to continue that trend until Thursday or Friday - getting near 100* again.
Tomorrow is Saturday. SuperSlow weight training at 9, then a visit to OSH for new perennials. That sounds like a good start to the weekend!
1001 Books
| As seen at Fillyjonk's , from the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die , only the ones I've read. At one time in my mis-spent youth, I was married to an English professor whose specialty was 18th and 19th century literature - his influence on my reading at that time was rather strong! At any rate, of the 1001 Books, I've read 184. I admit I was surprised at what wasn't on the list: Shakespeare, Donne, Greek classics. Interesting none the less.
"1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" by ukaunz 2000sThe Plot Against America – Philip Roth The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer 1900s Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald Life is a Caravanserai – Emine Özdamar Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker Jazz – Toni Morrison The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg Get Shorty – Elmore Leonard Vineland – Thomas Pynchon Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe Beloved – Toni Morrison Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez The Cider House Rules – John Irving Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis Contact – Carl Sagan The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera The Color Purple – Alice Walker The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco Smiley’s People – John Le Carré The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams The World According to Garp – John Irving Life: A User’s Manual – Georges Perec The Shining – Stephen King Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice A Dance to the Music of Time – Anthony Powell Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Fear of Flying – Erica Jong I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles The Godfather – Mario Puzo Cancer Ward – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn 2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe In Cold Blood – Truman Capote The Magus – John Fowles Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey Herzog – Saul Bellow Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut The Graduate – Charles Webb The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn The Collector – John Fowles One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein Catch-22 – Joseph Heller To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee Rabbit, Run – John Updike Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico The Once and Future King – T.H. White On the Road – Jack Kerouac Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber Seize the Day – Saul Bellow The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov The Story of O – Pauline Réage The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin Casino Royale – Ian Fleming Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham The Third Man – Graham Greene The Man With the Golden Arm – Nelson Algren Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh Animal Farm – George Orwell Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck Finnegans Wake – James Joyce Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien To Have and Have Not – Ernest Hemingway Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy England Made Me – Graham Greene The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers Threepenny Novel – Bertolt Brecht The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers Brave New World – Aldous Huxley The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner Les Enfants Terribles – Jean Cocteau Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence Rashomon – Akutagawa Ryunosuke Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs The Jungle – Upton Sinclair The Forsyte Sage – John Galsworthy The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1800s The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells Dracula – Bram Stoker Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz The Time Machine – H.G. Wells The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson Ben-Hur – Lew Wallace Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy Little Women – Louisa May Alcott Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll Silas Marner – George Eliot Great Expectations – Charles Dickens Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe Moby-Dick – Herman Melville The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 1700s Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne Candide – Voltaire Fanny Hill – John Cleland Tom Jones – Henry Fielding A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe Pre-1700 The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Gargantua and Pantagruel – Françoise Rabelais The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous Metamorphoses – Ovid Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus |