It’s Furious Balancing

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “otherwise you wouldn’t have come here.”

I’ve been working on a stealth knitting project for the past week, and I finally get to write the FO post since it was given to the Birthday Girl  this morning. She loves it.

Pattern: Scrunchable Scarf by Susan McCone (KnitList)

Yarn: Rowan Kidsilk Aura, Color 750 (Ivory), 2 balls

Needles: U.S. Size 8/5.0mm

Size: After blocking, approximately 4″ by 48″

A very easy pattern, and it’s the yarn that really sets the scarf apart as special.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t photograph that well.  The silk gives it a lovely sheen and the mohair has wonderful loft.

The thought I had as I was knitting this was that it would be a perfect scarf to wear for a “special occasion” evening.

It was graciously received.  It was given to a co-worker who has watched me knit for a few years; she knows how happy it makes me to work with high-quality yarn.

I hope I got all the cat hair out of it before I gave it to her…

One of my cousins is a veterinary student at Virginia Tech.  She had a Facebook status update yesterday about the dedication of the Law Enforcement K-9 Memorial at the campus.  She was surprised, as was I, at the number of dogs killed by “friendly fire” in the line of duty.  One commenter then mentioned bullet-proof vests and I found  a non-profit organization dedicated to providing vests to these dogs.

Vest ‘N P.D.P. is able to use 97% to 99% of the donations to purchase vests since the head of the organization pays her own travel expenses.  All donations are tax-deductible and you can donate via PayPal. 

I can easily pass on  buying that next skein of yarn I think I “absolutely have to have” and send in a few bucks.  I not a “dog person,” but these dogs deserve to be protected.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I feel like that wet cat at the moment, but I’ll spare you all the whining. Enjoy your Caturday, cats and kittens!

There was an interesting news blurb today.  Broadband Internet access, as of July 2010, will become a legal right in Finland.

I was going to say that I would smooch Suvi Lindén, the Minister of Communications, but I discovered that Suvi is a lady and I’m hopelessly heterosexual.

Hell, I would smooch her anyway.

Teh Husband and I occasionally fantasize about where we would retire.  I have several non-negotiable requirements:

1. Urban.
2. Decent lattes.  Please note that Starbucks is not “decent” by any stretch of the imagination. I’m talking independently-owned local cafés, cats and kittens.
3. High-speed Internet access.
4. It can’t be anyplace that has 10 months of summer a year, or unbearable heat in general, or insufferable amounts of sunlight.
5. It has to be in a Blue State.  I encourage you to follow that link.  Not only does it show a “regular” map of the US, it also shows cartogram versions rescaled by population.

Well, I think Helsinki might trump Paris now. French coffee is simply not for me, and I’m hearing grumbles and rumbles about their Internet “three strikes” policy.

Finland!  Beautiful Finland! The Fish Slapping Dance!  The Majestic Moose!  No, wait, that was Sweden…

If anyone knows about the quality of lattes in Finland, please let me know.

As I was walking to my usual Wednesday evening manicure appointment, a young woman passed me on the street and said, “I like your Noro Striped Scarf.”

I stopped and we had a quick chit-chat about how we love Noro Silk Garden and how addictive those Noro scarves are to make, and then she mentioned she worked at the LYS and how they had just gotten in a new shipment of Silk Garden and how I wish she hadn’t had mentioned that since it’s payday tomorrow and how she understood that feeling since that’s where her own paycheck went and how she had enough yarn to last her a solid year of knitting but, hey, it was good insulation for the upcoming winter, right?

You never know when you will run into another knitter.

I made banana nut bread yesterday — from a brand spanking new recipe — that turned out really, really well.  You lucky devils get the details because, in the spirit of Blogtoberfest, I know you don’t care what I had for lunch today.

The base recipe is on allrecipes.com at this clicky linky thing here.  I added a few things (vanilla, pecans) but the credit and adulation should go to the recipe’s author — Shelley Albeluhn.  It turns out wonderfully moist and flavorful.

Banana Banana Pecan Bread

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ½ cup (i.e., 1 stick) butter, room temperature
• ¾ cup brown sugar
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 3 large overripe bananas, mashed
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ½ cup pecans, chopped (or walnuts, or no nuts if you’re not a nut person)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175° C).  Lightly grease a 9×5 inch loaf pan, or whatever normal-size loaf pan you have.
2. In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt.  In a separate bowl, cream together butter and brown sugar.  Stir in eggs, mashed bananas, and vanilla.  Stir banana mixture into flour mixture, stirring just to moisten.  Fold in pecans and pour mixture into prepared loaf pan.
3. Bake in preheated oven for 60-65 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into center of loaf comes out clean.  Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto wire rack to complete cooling.  Let cool completely before slicing and devouring.  Om nom nom nom.

I like this recipe much better than the recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, that uses, of all things, Crisco/vegetable shortening.  Ew.  That shouldn’t go in banana bread.  Srsly.

Bon appétit!

Knitting women… chuckled when they heard that FBI agents, ever on the lookout for agents of unfriendly powers with subversive pamphlets, apprehended a woman passenger on an incoming liner whose papers included such scribbled notations as “K2, p4, k6,” and demanded a translation of the code to which the vast State Department Library had no key.

No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting
Chapter 14 — The Forties: Knitting in War and Peace
Anne L. Macdonald

I’ve been on a Victorian literature kick lately.  It started with Drood, which led me to Wilkie Collins‘ The Woman in White and The Moonstone, which took me to Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, which somehow took me into the village of Cranford.

It’s a slender volume that  “recounts the events and activities in the lives of a group of spinsters and widows who struggle in genteel poverty to maintain their standards of propriety, decency, and kindness.”  It’s much more entertaining than that sounds.

I had not heard of Elizabeth Gaskell until now, and I have to say I admire her writing style a great deal.  Here’s a bit I particularly enjoyed:

[E]very lady took the subject uppermost in her mind and talked about it to her own great contentment, but not much to the advancement of the subject they had met to discuss….I asked Miss Pole what was the very last thing they had ever heard about [Peter], and then she named the absurd report to which I have alluded, about his having been elected Great Lama of Thibet; and this was a signal for each lady to go off on her separate idea.

Mrs. Forrester’s start was made on the veiled prophet in Lalla Rookh – whether I thought he was meant for the Great Lama, though Peter was not so ugly, indeed rather handsome, if he had not been freckled…. [I]n a moment, the delusive lady was off upon Rowlands’ Kalydor, and the merits of cosmetics and hair oils in general, and holding forth so fluently that I turned to listen to Miss Pole, who (through the llamas, the beasts of burden) had got to Peruvian bonds, and the share market, and her poor opinion of joint-stock banks in general….

In vain I put in “When was it – in what year was it that you heard that Mr. Peter was the Great Lama?” They only joined issue to dispute whether llamas were carnivorous animals or not; in which dispute they were not quite on fair grounds, as Mrs. Forrester…acknowledged that she always confused carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she did horizontal and perpendicular; but then she apologized for it very prettily, by saying that in her day the only use people made of four-syllabled words was to teach how they should be spelt.

I was never aware that llamas were carnivorous (and I had to look up graminivorous).  Perhaps the Monty Python troupe was correct.

If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.  ~Buddhist saying

I’m applying this thought to my knitting today.  I’m at the very beginning of two rather lengthy projects and need the Positive Self Talk.

Project One is the new incarnation of Socks for The Husband.  The first attempt was too loose after the calf, so I frogged it.  I hadn’t gotten very far along when I (wisely) thought I should have him try it on.  Since I’ve only knit socks for myself, I kept looking at the few inches of ribbing I’d done,  thinking — This looks awfully big.  Is it really big or do I only imagine it’s too big because he’s got Giganto Feetz? When in doubt, try the thing on.  Ripping back part of a sock is much preferable than ripping out an entire sock.

This new sock-knitting attempt is from a recently published pattern — Oliver — that I discovered when catching up on Franklin’s blog.  There’s some unique shaping going on in the gusset and arch that is supposed to help the socks “fit like a glove.”  I can get behind that. I think it’s worth $7.00 if I get a pair of socks that actually fit him.

I’m currently in the “work in k2p2 ribbing until leg measures eight inches or desired length” bit.  This is my mindless take-to-work knitting, or the designated project to work on while surfing the Innernets/watching a DVD/sitting in a waiting room.

Project Two is Hanami. This is going to be a Magnum Opus.  I’m 13 rows into what’s an approximately 500-row pattern.  This is fussy lace knitting with lots and lots of charts.  If I can work a few rows each day, I’ll know I’ll get an FO out of it eventually — a drop-dead gorgeous, awe-inspiring, phenomenal FO at that.  I’m glad I gave myself a self-imposed time limit of a year to complete it.

Yep. Put one foot in front of the other. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I am not dead.  In fact, if I were dead, I suspect I would be feeling much better than I do at the moment.

I also seem to have lost my Knitting Mojo.  I have cast on and frogged 3-4 projects in the same number of days.  If you happen to see my Knitting Mojo, please send it my way.

I’m calling in sick on the Obligatory Blogtoberfest post today.  I’ve got a fever and I’m feeling really, really rotten.  If I’m dead tomorrow, I’ll let you know.