Stairs.
Before:
This is the best shot I have of the stairs before we started doing any remodeling. This is actually from the day we closed on the house and I wasn’t really focused on getting great shots of the stairs from the top, but you can at least sort of see what they had in for carpet on the stairs.
After:
The left shot is the three steps from the landing to the upstairs hall; the middle is the main staircase from the top; the right is the main staircase from the bottom. Folks who make carpet runners for stairs are tricksy - see how the pattern lines up on each step? It’s kind of neat, but totally unplanned on our part!
And this is what Jali thinks of all this remodeling nonsense:
Neuroses.
For a little dog, she has some bit neuroses.
She has abandonment issues. Which is understandable; she was abandoned, pregnant as far as we could tell, in the wilds of Mississippi when she was about 3. By the time she was caught, by the ranger at the summer camp I was working at, she’d whelped the litter and we can only assume none survived. She was malnourished (because scavenging garbage doesn’t really make for nutritious eating) and rather pathetic, but still savvy enough to wag her little tail at the sucker who walked around the corner. *smile*
But yes, neurotic. At it’s worst - when we move - it’s quite obvious that she’s panicked. But even when it’s not so bad, it’s .. bad. Like if either one of us starts to pack, for a day or a week. She *hates* when a bag or a suitcase comes out. She *knows* at least one of us is leaving. Leaving her. Alone.
There are times when it’s unavoidable - I’ll have to pack a suitcase for a week away. I’ll put it off as long as possible so that she’s not traumatized quite so long, but it’s always miserable. She doesn’t do anything bad. She just.. looks at you with those big brown eyes that look like she’s going to cry at any minute (except that she’s a dog and can’t cry) and sits there. Miserable.
And it’s no better when she gets to come with us because we can’t explain to her that yes, we’re packing, but it’s okay, because we aren’t going to leave without her. Until we start to pack *her* things, she doesn’t understand. (And once we start to pack her things, she gets so terribly excited that we have to wait until just before we’re leaving to do it or she’ll drive us nuts or kill herself from anticipation.)
We’ve learned some tricks - like letting her out the back door and then hustling out the front door with bags that we’ve surreptitiously managed to get packed and loading them into the car. Or distracting her when it’s just one of us leaving with a Kong full of peanut butter.
But sometimes, no distraction is readily available, so we.. wait. And wait. And wait some more. And finally the morning we’re supposed to leave, we run around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to pack at the last minute. And remember that we need socks and toothbrushes and shoes and where’s my belt?
All because the little dog with the big neuroses has also claimed our hearts.
Rust, varnish and mud.
Note: My extended family has recently broadened their internet horizons and since at least one of my uncles (Hi, Uncle Jerry!) likes to know what we’re up to, I’ve pointed them here. This shouldn’t change what I post about, but you may find that I put in more explanation than usual to keep things clear.
Things might seem quiet lately, but only because I’ve been trying to work in the garden and start working on some home improvement stuff lately, so I’ve not had much progress in knitting bits to report. *shrug* I’m still working on the Flaming Candle Scarf during my morning commute and I have the front of the Brioche Bodice about half complete, so there might be more interesting things to see in a few days.
In the yard, things are growing fast. The yellow flowers that I think are a variety of coneflower are doing well and very pretty. The phlox hasn’t started blooming yet, but the plants are getting to about the right height to start kicking out flowers. I have one lonely little orange lily stuck in the midst of the yellow flowers that’s just bloomed the last day or two and I’m trying to decide if I should snip it and bring it inside to enjoy.
(All pictures are clickable thumbnails; clicking on the picture will open a larger verison of it.)
There’s a mystery flower popping up in the front lawn direcly underneath the bushes. It’s beautiful, but I have no idea what it is other than to speculate based on leaf-shape that it’s related to a bleeding heart. The flower looks more like a fuschia to me, but they aren’t supposed to grow “wild” here. Part of why I want to identify it is so I can figure out how to transplant it before we pull those bushes out or it will probably get pulled out with the bushes when they go.
The roses have also started blooming, both the bright pink bush in the front and the light pink old fashioned ones in the back.
The bush in the front seems to have become infested with “rust”, though, as has the big bush that I haven’t identified yet, so we picked up some fungicide today to try to make it go away. I have to wait to spray though because it’s threatening rain this afternoon.
The apple trees also appeared to have some sort of disease issue, but I looked it up on the Extension website and they said that it wasn’t something treatable, but also wasn’t something that was likely to cause permanent damage to the trees. We might not get as much fruit this year, but since we don’t actually harvest the apples to eat anyway, I’m not worried about it. They did advise, however, that we clear the deadfalls away completely at the end of the year to prevent this from coming back.
I planted the 4 O’Clocks and cukes in the interior bed and they seem to be surviving and maybe starting to thrive. The tomatoes were not as successful in the side bed. I think there’s a rather large colony of ants that managed to eat all the little baby tomato leaves in the course of two days. So in addition to the fungicide, we also picked up ant spikes to try to kill the colony. Once I’m not seeing active signs of ants in that bed, I’ll plant more seedlings (I didn’t plant all the first one I started because I worried that something might happen to the first set).
Inside, I’ve started stripping varnish off the window in the dining room. The orange stripping stuff we got works very well and is pretty easy, so that’s been kind of a fun project. I’m hoping to finish the window today and maybe start on the door frame between the dining room and the kitchen. The stripper says it works on paint and varnish and I would *LOVE* to get the nasty pale teal paint off the woodwork in the kitchen. It that goes well, the upstairs bathroom will be next, even though it’s “out of order”.
So far the stripped wood is beautiful. There enough of the color of the varnish soaked into the wood itself that it’s still dark even after a light sanding, but with all the old varnish stripped, you can actually see the wood grain. We may just sand it down and put a coat of polyeurethene over it instead of reapplying varnish.
I haven’t set up the pottery wheel yet, mostly because I’m still trying to devise a way to bring it to WW (which is a camping event for the SCA in Black River Falls) to set up at Artisan’s Row, which I’m coordinating this year. I’d love to have the wheel there for folks to try, along with some handbuilding stuff (assuming I can get Mark to spend some time on the Row doing handbuilding since it’s really not my area of expertise), but it’s rather cumbersome and we already load the car *full* to get our regular equipment there. There’s a possibility that we could make two trips, but that just seems extravagant, especially with gas prices where they are. But I’m not resigned to leaving it home yet, either, so it’s still in the garage awaiting a decision (it will eventually live in the basement, but since WW is so close, I didn’t want to carry it down there just to have to carry it back up in a couple weeks if I can find a way to get it there).
I need to do more beating of the bushes to get artisan’s for the Row, too. It sounds like we have a strong Dyer’s Corner contingent. I’ve also heard from an armorer, but I’m not sure if he will end up on the Row or over in Smith’s Corner, and one of the Shires is taking on scribal stuff. There’s a couple folks who’ve expressed interest in music, which I think would rock - imagine spending a day working on a project with a group of live musicians playing period (or period-esque) instruments in the background! - so I hope that pans out.
I’m a bit surprised not to have any carvers, cooks, or spinners/weavers/knitters yet, so I think I’ll drop a line to a couple guilds and see if I can get any takers. It seems that groups centered around a common theme will be more feasible, so I’m trying to promote that idea while still making sure it’s clear that individual artisan’s are more than welcome. I’m not inclined to stress over it overmuch, though. At least some stuff will happen, so that’s a good start.
In other more or less random news, our white Taurus died this week. The transmission went out on Jack while he was driving up the big hill on the way home. The car is 12 years old, so it’s not really worth putting more money into it to fix it. Fortunately, we commute together so we don’t *need* to replace it immediately. We’re doing some research and so far we think we’d like to try to get a used Pontiac Vibe, though we’re also planning to test drive a PT Cruiser to see what we think. Our second car just needs to get decent gas mileage (we don’t need something we can load up for events and the like because the grey Taurus works just fine for that), but we can’t afford to buy a new one, so we’re keeping an eye out for good deals.
Jali also had her annual check up this morning, complete with Distemper and Rabies shots. She’s getting old, so the vet essentially confirmed that some of the things we’ve started seeing in the last year - cataracts, trouble with her back legs - are just signs of aging and not anything acute we need to be worried about. He gave us some glucosamine treats for her that they’ve had good success with in helping with arthritic joints in dogs and suggested we use a special dental formulated food to keep tartar from building up and possibly causing infections, so we have a small bag of that to try out.
Productivity
Yea, pictures! All are clickable thumbnails.
So this wasn’t finished this weekend, but I did take pictures of it all together in one spot finally.
This is the fleece that mamacate sent me with my beautiful drop spindle. It was gorgeous to work with and now that I’ve spun some with other fleece I realize really just how much it helped to have a hand prepared fleece. The fibers weren’t packed too tight to pull them out in drafting easily, the wool was soft and beautiful to spin. I’m a little surprised that all that fluffy fleece only resulting in a comparatively little bit of yarn. Gives a whole new appreciation for how much wool is required to really make a sweater..!
This one shows the little snippet of merino from Carol. It’s beautiful, but it was slippery and as I was spinning it after most of the fleece from mamacate, the spindle was a bit heavy for it. I think starting with it from an empty spindle would make it easier to work with.
And now, onto a new fiber art! As I mentioned awhile back, my mother-in-law gave me an old rigid heddle loom at Christmas. I decided pretty much immediately that I wanted to use it to weave my first hand spun yarn (see above). Which meant I had to learn to warp it and then actually go through the motions and get it started. I sat down this afternoon and read the little instruction sheets and cut my warp strands and threaded the heddle and tied all the little knots and now it looks like I have Yet Another Fiber Hobby(tm).
I’ve only done a few passes, but I’ve already learned some things I’ll do differently next time. For instance, the holes in the heddle are rather small, so to get the warp yarn threaded I had to use a needle, which was too large to fit through one of the holes in the heddle (note the periodic gaps, which became a planned design element after I discovered the first, and possibly only, one). That added some time to the set up.
And now that I’ve started weaving, I wish it would pack more tightly, which is pr’bly due to my history with the tightness of most tablet weaving. I think that if I used thinner warp threads it would pack more tightly and also show off the weft yarn a bit better. I wanted a contrast, but the red really drowns out the subtle color shifts in the brown.
But, for a first project, it’s more than acceptable. *smile*
And lest you think I’ve been neglecting my knitting, rest assured that I did some of that this weekend, too. Most notably, I finished Jack’s sweater.
I did not, as it turns out need any of the extra skeins, but I’m glad I had them as it was darned close. The yarn is Cascade Cotton Rich and produced a rather heavy fabric, but it’s what he wanted, so it’s all okay. If I did it over, I’d do the neck differently as it is rather large.
..and because usually knitters post pictures of their feline companions with their knitting, here’s an obligatory picture of my little black pig who snuck in and curled up on the sweater while I was out on the porch taking pictures of my yarn in the natural light. She’s a comfort creature and given a choice will curl up on any piece of clothing one of us has worn and discarded in a convenient place. I guess even though Jack hasn’t worn the sweater yet, it smells enough like me from being knit that it meets her criteria.
My hopefully-next finished object will be the second of this sock. It’s the Cashsoft from Kim’s stash and it’s absolutely divine and soft and lovely and I can’t wait to wear them. The pattern is a study in screw-ups-come-design-feature. I also cast on with the Noro Lily I got recently in a trade for a ribbed tank, but that’s likely to take a little longer than the second sock to finish.
Things I want to get done in the next couple months include Rogue (finally!) and a couple of the projects in the Winter Interweave Knits, namely the Fair Isle 101 sweater and the socks. There were a couple other projects that piqued my curiousity, but I can’t recall them off the top of my head and am too lazy to dig out the magazine. The Fair Isle 101 sweater will be the precursor to the Blackberry Ridge sweater kit I got for my birthday/Christmas, so that will likely follow in time to wear it next fall.
I also managed to get my bike trainer set up (though I’m missing the rear axle and can’t seem to track down anyone who sells replacement parts; hopefully the manufacturer will email me back tomorrow) and do the first matwork workout from the Stott Pilates series. I need to learn not to use my neck and remember to engage my powerhouse all the time, but it was a good start.
Indecision..
(Quickly: Yes, Jali’s fine now. It took awhile, but she perked up Sunday sometime and finally kicked out the rest of the yarn that she ate last night. We’re all much happier now, though pr’bly her most of all because now she’s back to getting fed at the normal times again.)
So at the board meeting last week, I found out that there’s an open house and annual meeting December 6 and that at said open house and annual meeting, there will be a silent auction for which members of the board were expected to donate items. This is not an issue. Not only do I work at the University, which has an art department and a theatre department, I am also able to relatively painlessly whip up rather nice looking knitted bits given a couple weeks notice.
So off I go and decide that I really don’t want to try to do a drop stitch pattern in the vanilla worsted weight mohair, but that the Falling Leaves pattern from Knitty might be nice. And I start out and get through a couple patten repeats and it’s just.. ugh. The wisps, which are quite substantial and not anything like the wisps in the KSH I used for my Birch, looked matted rather than snuggly. I decide that it was likely because I was using US 7 needles. So I (carefully) frog it all out and start again with US 11s.
And while it’s looking much softer and snugglier, I’m not sure I like how.. well.. big it is. It’s not what I’d call delicate, and something about that just isn’t sitting with me. So, in an effort to get opinions before it gets too late to reasonably finish another project in time for the silent auction, here are some pictures of it now (as yet unblocked.. it will be blocked when it’s finished which will pr’bly not only draw the pattern out more, but also make it at least a little wider):
(Sorry for the holy huge pictures, batfans.. I can switch them to thumbnails if anyone’s having issues viewing the page properly..)
This is a closer shot - it *looks* right in terms of the wispiness, but it’s so wide that I’m afraid that the pattern is too delicate. It’s not a scarf that I can imagine someone wearing as an accessory. It’s a scarf I can imagine someone wearing that is slightly prettier than your average scarf but will also keep you warm. In which case I’m afraid people won’t bid on it because, well, this is southern MN and people pr’bly *have* substantial and dressy scarves already. Or something.
This one shows how far along I am. It’s going very quickly and I think I’m about a third of the way through considering that I want to make it long enough to wrap around the neck/face at least once and still have reasonably long tails.
So.. what do you think? Is it just.. not right? Or am I being overly critical and just need to tuck away my criticism and finish it..?
Addendum.
The dog seems to be on the road to recovery. She slept soundly through the night (or at least she didn’t move once she curled up between my feet) and was certainly not as energetic this morning as she usually is, but also was not in any obvious physical discomfort and a mid-morning nap seems to have revived her spirits. She didn’t get breakfast this morning in an attempt to let her system calm down. Here’s hoping things will work themselves out.
In the mean time, I’m working a half-day from home today so I could be here in case things took a turn for the worse. It was productive in spite of my not having planned to be working from home, and therefore not bringing home with me anything that would have been useful. I did, however, have the ever-growing stack of surveys in my briefcase, so I spent the better part of the morning going through and completing them. The College Board one isn’t done yet, but it’s close; the rest have at least my parts completed so I can send them off to whoever else needs them next on Monday.
Because I’m home, I also decided it was a good time to full the Lucy bag. It’s been through something like 7 agitation cycles and is pretty close to done at this point. I’d like the shoulder strap to firm up a bit more, though, so I’m being stubborn.
The Board meeting last night, since I skipped right over it in the doggy distress, was good. I think I’ll like working on the Board - the other members are enthusiastic and down-to-earth, which helps my comfort level a lot. There’s a fundraising thing this weekend that I’ll be missing due to other plans, and a work day for the lights in the park thing on Monday, which I’ll be able to make the afternoon for. The annual open house and member meeting is in early December and all the Board members are supposed to make something to put in the silent auction. I’m eyeing all that lace-weight stuff I’ve recently acquired and wondering if two weeks is enough time to throw together a couple lacy scarf bits. Of course, if I use the worsted weight mohair stuff, it’ll go faster.. *ponder*
I’m also going to email the Art department at the University and see if any of the students might be interested in donating some of their work for the auction, and drop a line to the Theatre folks to see if I can snag a pair or two of tickets for an upcoming show. Then I’ll just need to figure out what appetizer to bring..
Hrm.. since I’ve already worked the half day I am supposed to.. maybe I’ll take off for the Cities a little early and have dinner with mom and dad.
The problem with fiber and pets..
.. is that pets sometimes *eat* the fiber. In this case, Jali managed to down a fair chunk of KnitPicks Crayon last night.
This is not, in and of itself, terribly surprising. She was a stray and has always been terribly food oriented. However, she hasn’t really eaten non-food things for quite some time. Until recently, that is. She started sometime in the last year (we think pr’bly because of all the changes - she lived with mom and dad for awhile, then moved to a new house, she’s getting old, change is harder) by eating more and more paper-like things - tissues have always been too tempting, but she stepped up to actual *paper*, and then started in with Jack’s socks (usually dirty) every now and then.. so it’s not really *all* that surprising that she’s moved onto other things. But this was the first time she’s ever eaten yarn, and it’s not because it hasn’t been available. And it’s not as if the yarn was there all day and she decided to munch.. she was “alone with the yarn” for all of about 10 minutes, when both of us were home. So that trend is disturbing in and of itself (according to the emergency vet tonight, it may, in fact, be sign of senility.. *sigh*).
What’s more disturbing is that it’s caused some rather significant physical trauma (not surprisingly; nor is this the first time she’s eaten something she shouldn’t that has had adverse effects). She apparently managed to keep it all together all day until Jack got home (I dropped him off and then, without coming into the house, ran off to a Board meeting). Apparently, she saw him, got so excited, and then lost all her self-control right there. He thought at first she was being spiteful - she can be rather willful at times - and yelled at her. It took him a few minutes to realize she was in distress and not intentionally being bad, but by then she was scared and thought she’d been bad, which made it all the harder for him to try to help her. *sigh*
By the time I got home from the Board meeting, he had things cleaned up. So when she stopped in the arch between the dining room and the kitchen and acted like she was in trouble when I got home, I knew something was wrong. Jack caught me up and then the emergency vet called back (Jack had called and left a message, then called again and talked to him, but he called us to return the message not realizing he’d already talked to Jack) and we talked to him again and the upshot is if she’s still in obvious physical discomfort in the morning, we have to take her in for x-rays and barium and all that possibly leading up to surgery. But that’s the worst case scenario. The emergency vet was pretty sure she’d pass the remaining yarn by tomorrow morning and be on the road to happiness, and advised us to give her “a glop” of petroleum jelly to help ease things through in the meantime. The advantage to having a dog who’ll eat anything is that.. well.. she’ll eat anything. :/
In any case, at the moment, she’s not in any obvious physical distress, but she is considerably more subdued than she usually is. We suspect she’s exhausted from a day of rather extreme discomfort, which would explain the lethargy. Here’s hoping a good night’s sleep will solve everything. Including Jack’s guilt about yelling at her..
In the meantime, this week of all weeks, I’m not dealing particularly well with a sick little pig. If things are not well by morning, I will neither be at work tomorrow nor at the event Saturday. I .. haven’t been able to figure out what to say to others when pets pass mostly because I can’t imagine what anyone would be able to say to me that would be any comfort whatsoever if it were Jali..
*sigh*
Knew it’d happen sometime..
So.. I somehow managed to mess up Birch while knitting in the car this morning on the way to work. I think I fixed whatever the problem was, but I was so frustrated with how long and putzy it was to fix that I put it down and didn’t want to go back to it for the Stitch’n'Bitch over lunch. *sigh* I’ll take a look again tonight and hopefully it will already all be fixed and not require anymore intervention on my part. It was going so *well*, too… I’ve decreased down to half the number of cast on stitches, which, given that it’s a triangle shawl that started on and edge and not a point, means (at least if my geometry is right) that I’m about 3/4th of the way finished. So. Close.
And since it’s got me in a cranky mood, can someone explain to me why people try to sell “hand beaded stitch markers” for $12-$15 for a set of 4? I mean.. well.. maybe it’s just me, but a stitch marker is a tool. Tools don’t have to be pretty - it’ s not going to be incorporated into my final garment like a button or something, it’s just something I’m using as a place holder. So paying $15 for *four*, when I tend to use them in higher quantity as a general rule (Aran sweaters, to mark every few pattern repeats in lace patterns, etc.) seems.. a waste. I mean.. am I missing something?
(Yes, yes, I understand that hand crafted items are often more expensive.. I’m questioning why anyone would bother to make hand crafted stitch markers, I guess. Seems unnecessary and possible annoying. I mean, if I’d used beaded stitch markers to mark every 50 stitches in Birch, I’d have spent way too much time untangling the little dangly bead bits from the fabric to make them any kind of asset.)
On a completely different topic.. does anyone have any suggestions for commonly used (and therefore generally “acceptable”) outcome measures for transfer students? We seem to be incapable of defining outcome measures that are suitably comparable to outcome measures used for new freshmen (graduation rate, first year GPA, time-to-degree, etc.). I’m guessing that the lack of inclusion of outcome measures for transfer students on the larger national surveys points to their general absence, but it just seems like that can’t be the case. *SO* many students transfer at some point in their undergrad careers that it seems patently irresponsible to not measure outcomes for them. *sigh* But then.. well.. a lot of higher education common practice lately has struck me as patently irresponsible (like the similar lack of learning outcomes measures for higher ed - we know they jumped through the hoops, but not if they learned anything in the process).
*grumble*
At least we seem to have identified what’s been causing Jali to be so itchy lately. We’re about 95% sure it’s a food allergy. We recently switched her to Beneful, which seems to have something in it that she’s allergic to. So back to Pedigree we go. (The switch wasn’t really for any defined purpose other than a latent feeling of guilt that she must get bored eating the same food day after day, month after month, year after year. Pedigree is all just little brown nuggets. Beneful is fun shapes and multiple colors and ostensibly different flavors. Sort of like the difference between Lucky Charms and Cheerios. I mean, wouldn’t you get bored if all you ate, for every meal of your life, was Cheerios?)
