Countdown to launch

The new TKGA is rapidly approaching launch -- Friday should be the day!  I don't expect to have much knitting time on Friday.  Do check out The Knitting Guilde Association New Website, and if you're a knitter, consider joining!  (If you're not a knitter, you can still donate.  Donations are always welcome.)

The socks are finished and in the mail.  Filius' Christmas hat is started, yarn is still enroute from Cornwall, and I hope to have another test knit next week.  In short, knitting is going most beautifully.

The electrician came on Saturday as promised, and everything is ready for the installation of the bookcase.  Well, except the actual bookcase.  When the builder and I talked timeframes, the most specific we got was 'by the end of the year', so everything is still on schedule.

For some people, fall is hunting season.  We're more the gatherer sort than the hunter sort in this household, but Canis is a big fan of exploring fields and seeing what he can find.  Yesterday, he brought a spine back to my mom's house. I'm not sure where in the yard he has it stashed for snacking on, but it's somewhere.  And about 2-3 ft long.  It may go with the 6" bone connected to a 6" bone connected to a scapula-looking bone, which my mom's dog left on her front porch a few days ago.  Maybe the spine will show up there too?

On that lovely note -- happy fall!

Fall!

Fall is here, with a bit of frost some mornings and a delightful whiff of harvest in the air.  Sometimes the whiff is a bit pungent, with the punge of a thousand hogs, as the farmers inject slurry into the harvested fields while they turn under what's left of the beans and corn.  (Why is it beans and corn?  Why not bean and corn, or beans and corns?) 

Vir and I took the annuals out of the garden this past weekend, leaving just two Swiss Chard plants and some hardy herbs.  We're in good shape for hibernating, and not being sorry about it when we want to get into the garden next spring.  A bevy of jalapenos went to a neighbor, green tomatoes are ripening in the back room, and Filia and I spent an hour or so on beans -- separating the dry from the not-dry, and the Calypso from the Green from the Lima.  I've three little pots of dried beans, and two trays of beans drying in their pods.  I'm fairly sure that a cup of dried beans is not worth an 8-ft row of pole beans, so beans will probably not make an appearance in the garden next year.  More room for sweet peppers! 

In just twelve days, Offinger Management will cease to manage the knitting guild (TKGA).  We've been busy working on the website, and records, and I am looking forward to our launch!  I love getting records all tidy and in order.  It's one of my happy places.

Another happy place is my bookcase, and things are started to get close to activity there, too.  The electrician is coming this weekend to move two outlets, and the builder is making calculations ... and I will be so thrilled when it is done, and I can organize my books, and sit downstairs to work at the computer, and just bask in all the book-y, organized glory of it.  Actually, I can just sit here and bask in the imagined glory of it all, too.  Hmmmph.  Need to spend more time doing that with respect to heaven, rather than my own wee creation here on earth. 

The doily got finished, and I am now working on a pair of socks in CoBaSi.  I do believe that I like the yarn, and will probably be ordering more to make myself some socks.  The pattern is Maudie, by General Hogbuffer.  I do hope his parents didn't choose that name!  The socks are for a gift, but I am contemplating making myself a stocking-length pair.   

Yarn is in the mail to me, from Cornwall, to make Grace's Cardigan.

Filia is working 3 days a week, Filius is in college, Vir is keeping busy with counseling AND discovered last week that he is a Mavericks hockey fan ... and we are all well. 

Until next time...

A picture-rich blog

It's been a week full of activities.  Amazing how much organizing one can find to do when one is working to build a database of guild members from a variety of partial sources.  I can spend hours, poking away on the computer.  It's wonderful to bring order out of chaos.  And I'm trying!

But, life continues on.  Women's Prayer Fellowship was at my house this Saturday, so I made some cinnamon rolls.  They did not cooperate. 

Cinnamon Rolls after rising in the fridge overnight

Cinnamon rolls after baking

I thought that the yeast might be faulty, so I looked up how to check one's yeast.  I mixed a half-cup of water with however much yeast the web page said, and some sugar, and waited 10 minutes.  Was there some foam on top?  Indeed, there was!  But was it enough?  Another web page came to the rescue ... the foam should reach to the 1 cup line.  My foam reached to the 1/32" line above the liquid, measured in the center. 

The culprit.  Yeast that had aged beyond viability

In the afternoon, it was time to continue prepping the garden for fall.  The weather can turn to Cold, Damp, and Unpleasant-for-garden-work any day now, so it's good to get the work done while it's warm, sunny, and, well, workable. 

Clearing the garden ... a Trophy Kale!

I've been wondering why all my kale was of the fuzzy, prickly kind.  I had 5 kale plants this year, and each was supposed to take up one square foot of my garden.  One or two were of the prickly sort (all of them came from the seed packet ... must be a variant), but as the season went on, they ALL seemed to be prickly.  I figured out why when I pulled this single, solitary kale.  That's a gallon bucket in the picture for scale.

The beans live on

A good year for Basil

Knitting has been happening around the edges of life, mostly because I don't have anything with a deadline or a serious purpose.  I cast on for a doily, because I had thread and small needles.  I should have used larger needles, I supposed, because the doily - per the book - measures 15.75" across with 000 ndls and size 70 thread.  I'm using size 30 thread and the doily may make it to 10" after blocking. 

000 needles and a doily.  33% smaller than other doilies knit with the same yarn and finer thread

And I retired my 2014 slippers! 

Retiring slippers (these are the soles)

The new slippers