04.06.10
Just Checking In
Hope everyone had a nice Resurrection Sunday. Ours was quiet except for a short-lived excitement created by a little rocking and rolling from the Baja earthquake. Thank God it was mild for us considering it was a 7.2 in Baja. It was a rolling kind of earthquake rather than the jolting shaking kind. And it was kinda long in duration as far as earthquakes go. Then today I just read that there was another earthquake in Sumatra. Oye, Haiti, Chile,Taiwan, Baja, now Sumatra. . . what is going on?
Other than that, things have been business as usual here in the Brown household. I continue to read books. I’m still reading Dark Sun: the Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Still want to blog about The Day We Lost the H-Bomb, but just haven’t gotten around to it, yet. Just picked up Sugar Fix at the library today. I also bought another book that I haven’t started reading yet called Nuclear Showdown, North Korea Takes on the World. Then some of the nice ladies in my knit group have been knitting scarves for a charity. The organization is called “Handmade Especially for You.” They supply handmade comfort scarves for these abused women. One of the ladies in my group has been knitting up a storm for this charity and has recruited a few of us by giving us yarn to knit, too, heheh. Apparently, Handmade Especially for You has donors who supply them with all sorts of yarn. They wind them up and make little kits, so that all you have to do is just knit up the ball of yarn until it’s all gone. And it goes really super fast, too, because the scarves are knit on “large” needles such as 15s or 17s. I didn’t pick out the yarns or colors. They do that for you, including the fluffy parts on both ends. I still need to tuck in the loose ends. Here are how the scarves turned out.
While I’m on the knit subject, I also finally learned how to do entrelac, so I can now tick that off of my list of things to learn. I’ve only made a small swatch as I’m not sure what to do with this stitch as of yet. I was originally gonna make a scarf with this stitch, but decided that I didn’t like how the back is not as presentable as the front, and I tend to like my scarves reversible. Plus the yarn I was using is self-striping, and I didn’t like how the colors were pooling. But here’s the swatch I made.
I think I’ll reserve this stitch for something that’s not reversible, or try to figure out how to alter the pattern so that it is somewhat reversible.
We also got a little more rain the other day! Yay! That always is good for the plants, which by the way, we have our first produce. . . artichokes!
We planted this artichoke plant last year, but didn’t get anything until this year. Plus during our winding spell this plant fell over on it’s side, and I was concerned that we had lost it. Brian just propped it right back up with some rope and viola! We now have artichoke!
My seeds were pathetic. . . and before I could replant, Brian came home with these!
I feel like I’m cheating getting them all started up like this, but oh well! If all goes well, they’re gonna be organic string beans!
Then something Matty ordered in the mail a while ago finally came. . . His paulownia tree.
We didn’t expect it to be so small! Ha ha! But Matty likes it just the same. I like how he and his dad have been working in the yard this year. When it gets cleaned up a bit more I’ll try to share some pictures of our herb garden. I’m hoping that we’ll get some fish back there, too, but we’ll see. It got kinda wild while we were away in the Philippines and it rained like cats and dogs. Boy, did the weeds grow up like they owned the place. We’re still trying to catch up with that between my regular house chores and hobbies. Hopefully soon we’ll have a handle on it.
As another nice garden surprise this year, it appears that one of our random seed planting bloomed into this.
I love poppies! Flowers do make me happy. This reminds me that once upon a time I wanted to try to plant edible flowers. Hmmm. Another thing to add on my list. . .
Okay, well I think I’ve rambled on long enough, so will start working on dinner now. Oh! Speaking of dinner, I should share some pics of Aaron’s lumpia wrappers. That little guy is such fun in the kitchen. He definitely encourages me to try new things. But I’ll have to share those pics later.
Marlakins
