Category: another day in the life

January is anything but boring around here.

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A hawk got itself trapped in the chicken coop this weekend.  The girls were out eating bugs in the yard, so there was no harm done really. And I got some close up shots of a hawk.

Edie’s birthday meant a dinner/slumber party for more girls than our house can reasonably hold. And there were still some friends she wanted to invite that I put the kibosh on because well, our house is only so big. 

Our dining room is almost the exact same length as our table with 2 leaves in it. The chair at the head of the table is actually in the hallway. And you can’t pull out the chair at the foot.

When inviting 8 girls, it helps to include your daughter in the final head count, which is actually 9.

There is a high pitched roar when you have 9 girls in your house.  It stops for exactly 10 seconds when they eat.

How can they eat and talk at the same time?

When a cake recipe says it’s perfect served with milk, that means 9 eleven year old girls will drink an entire gallon of milk with the cake.

9 girls at a slumber party don’t sleep.  Neither do you really.

11 year old girls are more than happy to have Martha’s Moist Devil’s Food Cake for breakfast too.  I used some strawberry jam as filler in between the layers, so therefore, it counted as a fruit serving.  Or so I told them. I also told them they had to eat that entire cake so that I could bake another one for Pat’s birthday the next day. 

One can only have so much cake lying around.

I love how good Pat looks in his sweater.

Peach Pound Cake also makes an excellent breakfast.

Edie managed to find a way to upstage Pat on his birthday, two days after hers, yet again. It’s always something, starting with when she was born and came home from the hospital on his birthday.  This year it was strep throat.  So while we didn’t get a date night like I’d hoped, we still managed to find some time to celebrate.  And I made him a fantastic dinner – Lamb Curry from my More with Less cookbook and a peach pound cake, with the lamb coming from our friends the Roystons, no doubt some lamb that a member of our family helped bottle feed at some point, or at least we imagine so.  We’ve bottle fed a number of lambs at their farm over the years.  And enjoyed eating them.

And with that, our holiday season that started with my birthday in October just before Halloween, is over.  I am not baking another cake until at least March, so help me.

Ant Music.

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It has recently come to my attention that I am long past due for some sort of contact-style card, a business card if you will.  Actually, I lie when I say it has recently come to my attention.  I’ve known for some time I need a card of some sort. 

I will spare you the long version of how I have put this off because what I really want to talk about is how I have spent the last 3 days, farting around on my computer, attempting to design this sucker myself.  I have this image in my head of what it needs to look like.  Blame that design background, the one I worked my way through college for, the one that I thoroughly enjoyed until I realized it wanted the same large chunk of time as that my Edie girl demanded.  The one that still pops up in small ways, like, envisioning this new card of mine.  That one.  Throw in my ability to bluff my way out of many a situation where I really can appear to know what I’m talking about, when the reality is, I have no clue.  My father used to always say, if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.  I live by that code.  Well, that and don’t ever let anyone tell me I can’t do something because I’m a girl.  Oh, and don’t throw like a girl.  Which took me probably 35 years and watching my own daughter do it to understand what he meant with that last one.

In talking with various marketing and graphic folks, I heard over and over that I could design this myself.  I bought into my own hype.  I allowed myself to be baffled by my own bullshit.  Hell, my own husband couldn’t quite understand that I had this idea in my head and I was trying my best to not just get it out onto the computer screen, I was trying to figure out HOW to make it happen on my computer screen. 

It seems my photoshop skills are not quite what everyone else seems to think they are.   I’m good at many things, but not at photoshop.

The whole card design involves the image of a mason jar.  As I just so happen to have some lying around, I thought I could take a photo of one, photoshop it and turn it into what I envisioned.  I took a shot and after two days of playing with it, was able to get it somewhere near where I wanted it, although in no way shape or form could I tell you how I got it that way.  But then I realized the tiniest detail was off and since I have that design background, I realized I needed to take some more photos and start over.  And then I was worried that it was going to take me another two days to get it where the last one was, the one with a line that was slightly off that probably no one but me would notice, the one that I had no freaking clue how I got it to look like it ultimately did, but it would keep me up at night knowing I had put my name on something that was slightly off.  Bad design at my own hands combined with incompetence. These are the things that I lose sleep over.

So I snapped this shot today.  Uploaded it.  As I opened it up in photoshop, Adam Ant’s Ant Music just so happened to play on the station I was streaming. 

You might not know this about me, but I freaking LOVE Adam Ant.  I’m a total child of the 80’s and Adam Ant is one of the most unappreciated artists of that era.  Ant Music should have been an anthem.  It’s one of my anthems.

So, I’m sitting there, opening this photo, singing along to Ant Music, which was followed by one of my favorite B-52’s songs, Legal Tender.  By the time they were done, I was done.  The image I had in my head was on my computer screen. Never underestimate the power of good tunes to get the job done. I don’t know if I actually learned something over the last 3 days or it was the music. Talk about singing a happy little working song. Whatever it was, it happened.

I suppose after all that, I should show you the image.  But on it’s own, it’s rather blah.  So you’re not going to see it yet.  I’ve now fallen into the font rabbit hole, whereby I spend way too much time playing with fonts, choosing just the right one.  It’s far less frustrating than where I just was, dealing with the realization that I don’t have the skills everyone thinks I have, which it turns out, I just might have actually. Maybe I should believe the hype.  No, the font rabbit hole is far more comforting on many levels, mostly in that I know I know what I’m doing there.  The bigger debate that I’ve been avoiding for way too long is now in front of me – and that is, exactly what to say about myself other than my name and contact information.  I do so many things, I could cover a business card with words.  How to narrow it down to make it be the sleek thing I imagine?  And in that narrowing, how to make it eloquent?  Because while “Goddess of the Universe” sums it up, it might come across as just a slightly bit pretentious and I’ve heard I should tailor it to what I actually do.  Which is sort of everything, although I keep being told I should focus.  But with opportunities popping up in every avenue, it doesn’t make sense to focus like all the advice I’ve given tells me.  The universe says otherwise and ultimately, it’s the universe I listen to.

It was so much easier two days ago when I could just blame it all on the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted to do on the stupid computer.

This so-called life.

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This holiday season found us introducing Edie to one of the best TV shows ever made about being a teenager – My So-Called Life.  The show tackles some serious issues – drinking, drugs, sex, guns in schools – and admittedly, when Edie came and asked me if we could watch it, she pulled the “Daddy said it was okay” and rather than asking him myself, I assumed that he had done the research to see if it was appropriate.  We all know what assuming does.  Turns out it’s not entirely appropriate for a girl who’s going to be 11 in a few short weeks, but as we cringe our way through certain scenes, we realize, we are not that far away from them being appropriate, so perhaps we should consider it starting the conversation early. 

What I loved about the show when it first ran practically 20 years ago was how realistic it was – that was MY 15 year old self up there – as if someone had access to my experiences & inner thoughts and actually made a tv show about them.  Watching it all these years later, I still think that’s my 15 year old self up there on the screen, but I also had this earth shattering moment where I realized that I’ve gone from being Angela Chase to being Angela Chase’s mother.  On about 10 different levels.

It’s not just that someday in the not-so-distant future, my own daughter is going to be 15 and will no doubt be very much like Angela – I can already see similarities between them.  I could see her identifying with the character, I could see her realizing which of her friends were Sharon & Brian, I could hear her & her father talking about how uptight Angela’s mother Patti was, and I could see Edie already identifying with how she just sometimes doesn’t want to talk to her mother, how her mother could just not at all possibly understand what she’s going through. I know that stage is unavoidable, that it’s part of her development and it’s not personal.  Heck, it’s even one of the running themes in the show how Angela so completely dislikes her mother.

The very first episode has a scene where Angela wants to sleep over her new friend Rayanne’s house – and storms off when her mother says she doesn’t know who this person is, or her parents.  How can she let her sleep over when she doesn’t know these people?

Right there, I realized I had totally forgotten how it drove me absolutely nuts that my parents gave me the third degree about my friends – where did they live, who were their parents, what did their parents do for a living – I remember thinking back then it was some value judgement on the part of my parents, after all what did it matter what someone’s parents did for a living or where they lived?  I’d have to say that at least half the arguments I had with my parents, if not more, were because of all their questions about who I was hanging out with.  About why they always wanted everyone to come over to our house, why wasn’t I allowed to go anywhere?

We all have things that we swear up and down we’ll never say or do as a parent.  Then, as you become a parent, you realize exactly why your parents said those things.  The ‘because I said so’ stuff.  You know what I’m talking about.

Worse than forgetting exactly how much it bothered me was the realization that I do that.  A conversation that keeps coming up among my mom friends, especially since the kids have moved up to the next level of school – 6 neighborhood elementary schools combine into one pseudo-middle school (it’s called an upper elementary, but for all intents and purposes, it’s middle school.) is how exactly to handle your kids being friends with kids who’s parents you don’t know.  How to handle when they are invited somewhere by these kids.  How to explain to your kids without sounding uptight, controlling  and possibly even slightly wacko that it really would be better if we could just host that child and their parents could come pick them up and maybe stop in so we could get to know them. 

Because no matter how old they are, handing them over to a complete stranger, letting them go out there on their own is slightly terrifying.  And wanting to know where their friends live, what their parents do, that starts to fill in a picture – and you need a picture to be able to let go.  I get it now. 

Just today she came home from school and while she greeted me with a smile and a hug, she immediately went looking for Daddy and proceeded to do her homework near him while he was working – and open up to him about her upcoming birthday party and who to invite and not invite and why and who already told her they can’t make it, which throws the entire guest list into chaos.  Things that Daddy probably doesn’t care about and really probably wishes I would take care of and listen to, but no, I’m chopped liver and he’s the one with all the right answers, even if he doesn’t think he has any answers.   I suppose it’s all part of the march from bringing these helpless little creatures home from the hospital looking over your shoulder to see if they really are letting you leave with this thing to sending them out into the world as responsible, productive members of society, which really is what our job as parents is when you get down to it – and they like to help matters along by realizing that indeed, we can’t fix everything, don’t always know the answer and even resenting us a little bit for it.  And there is not a damn thing we can do about it except realize it’s just part of the journey, that we were exactly the same way once and that someday, they really will understand.

4 days and counting….

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It’s the Friday before Christmas and in the midst of today’s pre-Christmas meltdown, I didn’t realize I was running out to do last minute errands at lunchtime.  Oh boy.  If I wasn’t heading upstairs to sew one last quick gift, I’d be popping open a bottle of something.

I got some serious Christmas baking on last night, knocking a few items off the to-do list like sugar cookie dough to be baked sometime between now & then in Betty’s kitchen for Santa Claus, Christmas biscotti (cranberry & pistachio) for Pat,  chocolate pretzels for Edie and Rachel’s pumpkin granola.

I’m not completely done yet – there still is no menu for Christmas dinner beyond Edie’s requested brussels sprouts and a yule log for dessert this year. Greens and chocolate cake sound pretty complete to me though.  Nothing is wrapped, but I don’t like to wrap early anyway.  Gives you something to do while you drink Christmas Eve.  And just today I finally got the last of the necessary ingredients to make Grandma’s Fruitcake Cookies, which are a holiday standard.  I know you’re wrinkling your nose at the idea of them and let me tell you – they are awesome.  Graham crackers crumbs, dates, pecans, coconut, maraschino cherries, a can of Eagle brand milk, squish together in mini muffin tins and bake at 350 for 20 minutes.  They are the bomb.

Edie still claims to believe in Santa this year, very likely the last year this will happen.  The older neighborhood boys have been cornered and told to not ruin this for her, as they will not get any treats from my kitchen ever again.  She’s heard kids at school talking and told me she still believed in Santa because she knew there was no way her parents would ever spend that kind of money on her for some of those presents she’s gotten over the years.  Who knew my renowned cheapness would keep her belief in Santa alive and well?

Enough procrastinating for the day.  I’ve got to go get my proverbial Christmas doo-doo in a pile.  There are only 4 more days people!  If you still need more things to help you procrastinate, head over to    Jen’s Holiday Homes Tour if you haven’t already. Cheers all.

I got a real name tag.

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Over the years, I have acquired a small collection of various name tags from different events I’ve attended.  By various, I mean, the names are various.  You see, I don’t always let a proper invite keep me from a party and some of the events I’ve attended over the years have had everyone’s name tags printed and laid out ahead of time, not allowing you to walk up to the door and get in if you haven’t made plans in advance. Which means if you are spontaneous like myself, you find yourself picking out a name and going with it.  Only once have I ever had anyone actually question the fact that I was not who my nametag said I was, because they knew the real ‘me’ and I was 20 years younger, several inches taller, noticeably thinner and a completely different race than the other version they knew that went with that name.  I found that telling the gentleman I was undercover for a very important investigation and that I would appreciate his cooperation, as it may or may not have to do with national security, I was not free to divulge anything further than that, in fact I may have said too much, helped quiet him.

In crashing parties, one must act with complete confidence and authority. 

Last Thursday evening was the holiday party for the local weekly that I’ve done some projects for this past year. Despite the fact that I’d been up & down all week with the upper respiratory bug going around town, I felt we should go and make an appearance.  Besides, I was feeling better that day, surely I was on the mend. (When they say that bug is a 10 day to 2 week bug, they aren’t joking, btw.  I was most definitely not on the mend, but that’s a completely different tale.)

As we walked in, there was a table with a guest list at which you were supposed to check in.  There was also a small collection of name tags which were clearly for people who are affiliated with the publication throwing the party.  Among the name tags was one for me, with my real name on it.   Even better was a title – “Green Expert”, a nod to the fact that I wrote (and partially photographed) their Green Homes and Living special edition this past fall, although in no way do I consider myself an ‘expert’ in being ‘green’.  Honestly, of the 18 pieces in that, 8 of them are some of sort of interest or project of ours around the house.  All I really did was write about us and just tried to make it not sound as personal as I do in this space.

I’ve had a good bit of encouragement lately from friends and family telling me I should just write a book already.  On what I ask and they all say, on just being me.  From what I’ve gathered, one should have a certain niche, a focus if they are going to pitch anything that’s going to be published.  If this blog is any indication, I’m all over the place – baking one day, canning the next with mentions of knitting fail, dinner fail and girl scout troop craft fail.  I’m more of a B+ personality than I am a type A.  I’m the underachiever of the overachievers, the overachiever of the slackers, not excelling at any one thing, but rather, doing a few things pretty okay.  Sometimes making everything perfect, staying on top of every little detail is just way too much energy that could be better used doing something else, like having a glass of wine with a friend or better yet, curled up with a book.  How does one go about putting that into a proposal for anything published? 

Not quite eighteen months ago, I was laid off and pretty quickly decided that I was going to just figure out a way to make a living out of being me.  Since making that decision, I’ve been much happier with my every day life, although cash flow can be a bitch.  I’ve made some things happen, I’ve had some things land in my lap.  It seems that in casting a wide net, I’ve caught a number of things that I’m pretty okay at – writing, teaching, cooking at the top of that list. 

When I started this post, I had every intention of talking about the party last week, how I danced with the guy dressed like a Christmas tree, because really, when there’s a guy dressed like a Christmas tree, you need to do something with him, right? Instead I had this moment where I realized that there was some link between the fact that I have a collection of fake name tags to the fact that I had a real name tag with a title that I found amusing to the fact that I am still very much trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.  That this idea I keep hearing from people as something I should do – write a book – somehow needs to come to life.  And somewhere, in that link, is the theme.

The Oatmeal Post.

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It seems every blogger in Charlottesville has at least one blog post on the subject of oatmeal.  This one is mine.

Oatmeal has been my go-to winter breakfast as long as I can remember.  It’s evolved from those instant packets that you just add hot water to, to cooking it on the stove in a pot to my current daily microwave version. 

I know, there are so many great ways I should try oatmeal.  I’m sure everyone has one they want me to try and while I’m quite sure they are lovely, my daily oatmeal is yet another one of those habits I have had my entire life and I do not feel the urge to mix up something that still works quite well for me.  That whole idea behind not fixing what’s not broken.  After all, I am the gal who’s worn the same thing since college – black tshirt, demin, boots (or clogs).  I am a creature of certain habits.

I like my oatmeal with raisins, cinnamon and brown sugar.  I eyeball the amounts every morning, a sprinkle of this, a pinch of that, and it tastes the same every day.  Well, except for the day I confused the jar of ground cayenne with the ground cinnamon.

I like quick oats – they cook faster.  Plop them in a bowl with the toppings, add water, and microwave for 2 minutes.  Stir and eat.  I actually have tried variances on this, but I always go back to what’s quick and what works. After all, I was a devoted instant oatmeal gal for the first 20 years of my life.  I want fast and easy in the morning.  I am capable of making other forms of oatmeal – the wee one in our house finds my go-to version boring, so on her behalf, I have mixed it up, getting so jiggy with it, I’ve used fruit butters in the mix.

I found myself without raisins the other morning. Vaguely remembering my mother, not being able to find my preferred raisin cinnamon spice packets once upon a time, handing me an packet that featured dried apples with my preferred spices, telling me to try it, that I should branch out. It was a good substitute, but I prefer to eat my apple every afternoon as a snack, not in my morning oatmeal.  However, there I stood the other morning, with no raisins on hand.  Desperate times.  I reached into the fridge and grabbed an apple.  I chopped it up and threw it in the bowl in lieu of raisins.  I cooked it.  I ate it.  It was a good substitute.  I branched out.  I actually ate it that way two mornings in a row this week. And now that I have raisins on hand again, I might try combining the two.  Talk about getting jiggy with it….

It grew.

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Last year, my Girl Scout troop helped put together a little food drive at their school.  I was exceptionally proud of them and blogged about it.  Yesterday,  we went back to their old elementary school and helped out with this year’s drive.
We partnered with the same troop as last year, with their troop taking the lead this time around.  They made the posters and morning announcements reminding their schoolmates to bring in donations.  This year we had a third troop join us in the job of sorting and packing the donations.
I love that as each one of the girls walked in that cafeteria yesterday, the first thing each one of them said was “What can I do?”.  Give them a little bit of direction and every last one of them was off and running.  They worked together well and it’s oh, so good to watch that in action.
Just like last year, the recipients of the drive are families within that elementary school community. This year though, I think my girls had a little bit better understanding of exactly what that meant.
The best part though was seeing an idea I had summer before last take root and grow.  I might be the slackest Girl Scout troop leader out there – I’ve been told by our local Girl Scout council that I’m “robbing the girls of the true Girl Scout experience” because we don’t sell cookies.  We also don’t do a whole lot of crafts, we’ve never been camping (we do have plans to do that this year though, maybe), heck, from about March through the end of the school year every year those girls campaign to throw out whatever the plan is and just go run around and play on the playground outside and I let them.  Slacker or not, I came up with a pretty kick ass service project that other troops have not only joined in, but continued with.  It grew. 
I’m damn proud of that.

Gratitude.

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So I’ve been kicking around the idea of some lovely gratitude post in honor of Thanksgiving this week and while I can think of many things that I’m grateful for, getting it all written down and not sounding utterly cheesy and sentimental is another thing all together.

In the last month, two different friends have been diagnosed with cancer. We have at least three friends whose parents have been diagnosed within the last few months as well.   Another has been posting about the unexpected adventure her family is having while she’s on book sabbatical in Jerusalem.  These things remind us not only what’s important, it’s that we should be grateful for all the little things that make our happy little lives exactly that.

In our house, every day is a day where we are vocal with our gratitude.  Before we eat dinner, everyone at the table takes a turn sharing what they are thankful for.  Some days it’s rain, some days it’s sunshine.  For years, Edie was grateful each and every day for “Daddy coming home from Friday” regardless of the day or the last time he’d actually been away.  Some days we’re grateful to be getting over a cold, other days it’s having had an exceptionally good day, others it’s just be to sitting at the table with each other.  Some days we’re not even sitting at the table, we’re in the den, curled up on the futon, plates in our laps, with “Jeopardy” on mute while we finish saying Thanks. Someone is always grateful for “Jeopardy” on those nights.

I am thankful for everything I have – my family, our friends, our neighborhood, our house.  I’m thankful for our health, I’m thankful the car is running well this week, I’m thankful Edie is having a sleepover tonight with her bff  that she’s known her entire life who lives on the other end of our street that I’m pretty sure we made snort at dinner with our very politically incorrect tales of what it was like to go shopping at two different grocery stores Sunday in the pre-Thanksgiving madness with everyone taking their grandmother there and just parking them in the middle of an aisle and how Edie got run over by the same woman more than once while at Whole Foods.   I’m thankful that if Whole Foods is going to be the closest grocery store to our house, that it has the best price on a gallon of milk around.  I’m thankful that all of Edie’s activities but piano lessons and Saturday morning soccer games all take place at her school, two blocks up the street and that she is capable of walking herself there and back.  I’m thankful she was given an electric piano upon which she practices and I’m thankful that she puts it on the organ setting when she wants to mix it up.  Nothing makes your day more than that, I assure you.   I am thankful for my husband, who can fix just about anything, saves the world for a living, puts up with me AND is good looking to boot, even if he does turn on the most horrid country station and then walks out of the room, made better when said station plays Johnny Cash doing “Sunday Morning Coming Down”.  I’m grateful he walked out of the room to go put a movie on for the girls and when he came back in it was with a bottle of wine in hand, to pour me another glass.  I’m thankful for all of you that read my babble and tell me you like it.  Happy Thanksgiving to each and every one of you. 

Brunch (not entirely) fail.

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You might not realize this, but in addition to pickling everything in sight, I’m also a big fan of turning things in fritters – you know, shred it, add flour, baking powder, seasonings, egg & milk and fry it up in a nice little patty presentation.
Latkes are essentially fritters. Squash are excellent fritters and we eat corn fritters weekly during the summer, when I buy corn on the cob by the gallon. You can make a meal of corn fritters, adding some cheese and bacon bits to them….
I’ve been experimenting with spaghetti squash lately. I like it, but serving it in lieu of pasta with some sauce, especially a red one which is supposed to be healthier than say, a cream sauce, gets kinda old kinda quick to me. (That may be my next experiment with it now that I think of it – a spaghetti squash alfredo dish, because I like to mix my healthy with my not so healthy, everything in moderation you know, including moderation.)  I made a wonderful little casserole with spaghetti squash a few weeks ago, combining it with ricotta and spinach that went over well.  I had a squash in the fridge I needed to use up, so I threw it in the oven Saturday evening.  As it cooked, I thought how it might be very well suited for fritters – after all, it’s naturally shredded.  I mean, hello, it’s just asking to be frittered, yes?
For various reasons, the spaghetti squash fritters got bumped to brunch Sunday morning.  I added about half a finely diced onion, a few minced garlic cloves, finely chopped parsley, salt, pepper, baking powder, flour, beaten eggs and milk. 
I wish I had photos of lovely golden brown fritters to show you, but for the most part, they turned out looking exactly like that batter there.  No matter how much flour I added to absorb the liquid, the batter remained exactly that liquidy until cooked. Honestly, all that liquid did in the frying pan was turn solid.  They were edible – I think the spices is what made that so – but they didn’t look pretty.  I may have added one too many eggs.  I may have added too much milk.  I may have not fried them in enough oil. It may have been A, B, C or D: All of the above.   At any rate, my grand inspiration to share a delightful new way to enjoy spaghetti squash was most certainly not realized. Sigh.
That’s the thing with experimenting in the kitchen – even the best cooks have failures. Sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.  Or the fritter fries….

In progress.

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Now that the canning season is winding down, I’ve been able to move out of the kitchen somewhat and onto other projects.  First up, a check on the progress of Pat’s sweater.

 From that angle, it doesn’t appear as if much progress has been made, but really, it has.

 See?  That’s a few inches there.  There’s 360 stitches per row.  The first few rows took me about an hour each, but I’ve managed to pick up some speed and can now do a row in 30-45 minutes.  I’ve completed the armpits and am now starting to shape it, heading up to the shoulders. I had Edie help me with the math and I think I have about 60 rows or so until I can start the collar.  If I sat and did nothing else for an entire work week, I might get it done by Christmas.  I think I’ll shoot for his birthday towards the end of January.  That seems do-able as well as gives me a project for those lazy days after Christmas when I like to sit around, watch tv and eat cake.

I also went ahead and bought another cone of yarn, ensuring that the last of the two cones I had on hand for this will be enough. Whenever I get nervous and go out and buy more yarn to finish a project, I ensure myself leftovers.  I haven’t decided what I’m doing with the leftovers yet.  Thoughts?

I’m also whipping up a pair of fingerless gloves for the lucky coworker that my husband drew in his office holiday gift exchange.  She had fingerless gloves on her list of suggested gifts.  I’m using some merino from the stash that I inherited when the university students moved out last spring.  Someone left two large boxes of yarn out by the curb that my friend Eddie found and dropped off here.  There was a mix of acrylic and really nice stuff (like this merino), but most of the nice stuff was in some weird colorways.  I kept some for myself and shared some, just for projects like this.  This yarn is from a local farm and is dreamy to work with.  The pattern is a slightly altered one from Knitty called Fetching– they are quick and easy.  I knit the left handed one seen there in a night’s worth of television watching. 

 Also on my needles is a poncho for Edie.  I’m trying to surprise her at Christmas, which means working on this when she’s not around.  Which means outlasting her at bedtime.  Thankfully she’s got a sleepover this weekend, so I’m hoping to make some real progress, because outlasting her at bedtime is really hard.
  I’m basing her poncho on the poncho I knit for myself several years ago that was only slightly based on a pattern.  Her poncho involves a good bit of counting stitches, looking at my poncho and math.  Oh math.  How I don’t like you.
The yarn for Edie’s poncho is also from the stash, some of it from the discarded stash Eddie dropped off.  I’m hoping I have enough and am resisting going out to buy more until I really have to. Really.
This last project is something for me.  I found this yarn (which I can assure you does not glow like this in real life) for $2/ball at the Fiber Festival last month.  I had gone telling myself I was not going to buy myself anything unless of course, I found a deal too good to pass up and especially if it involved orange yarn.  Clearly the yarn gods were listening.  I want to do a lacy scarf with this, but I’ve had the hardest time finding a pattern I can work without having to rip it out and restart it 4 times.  These two have passed the test, but I’m not sure about committing to either one.
Yes, this one is lovely and open, not to mention knits up incredibly fast and easy,  but I just knit myself an orange zig-zag scarf last fall.
 
 
 And while one can have multiple black velvet pants, black wool pleated skirts and black cardigans, how many orange zig zag scarves can one really have?
And while I like this pattern, something about it says Old Lady Acrylic Sweater to me.   I like it, but I’m not sure I want to commit to it.  I’m starting to think that maybe I should knit a cowl out of the orange yarn but I’ve yet to find a pattern I really like, so I’ve started pondering the idea of maybe just making one up.  I know, it’s a huge, HUGE step for me, poncho not withstanding.  For what I have in mind and from what I’ve read, I think I can do it.  I am starting to see the appeal of a cowl, and I want something new & orange to go around my neck, so why not?
I have not completely abandoned the kitchen though.  Currently sitting on my counter are two hot pepper ferments:
On the left is a roasted poblano ferment.  My friend Kathy brought some to last Sunday’s swap and it was quite tasty.  I swapped her for a jar of it, in addition to her recipe, as I still had a few gallon bags of poblanos sitting in my fridge, waiting to be dealt with. (Also, it was soooo good, I wanted to make sure I had a supply before eating it all!)  I had a goal of getting a few more jars of pickled peppers, another batch of fermented peppers and at least one batch of chili rellenos out of what I had grown this year.  I can report complete success – I got two more pints of pickled peppers, a batch of Kathy’s roasted ferment AND I have exactly enough good sized peppers to make chili rellenos for the fam for dinner soon.
The ferment on the right is a mix of chili peppers from my friend Cynthia, some of Grandpa Jack’s habaneros and my jalapenos.  They’ve been sitting there about a month or so now.  I’m not exactly sure what my next step with them is going to be, as it’s an experiment, but I can tell you that when you open the jar, your sinuses totally open up.  I read that fermenting chilis was the key to a good flavorful hot sauce (Tabasco is fermented), so in my quest to make a good hot sauce, I thought I’d try it.
I haven’t totally stopped canning, but it has been winding down.  I did several batches of applesauce and apple butter from a few bushels of apples I got out at Henley’s orchard. I came to the realization that I could make a batch of applesauce in my stock pot in a fraction of the time (45 minutes) it took me to make it in the crock pot (about 4 hours), although with the crock pot, I can come & go and not have to keep an eye on it.  I also get nervous about burning the bottom of my pot, as I’ve done with things in the past.  So far so good, I even did a batch of cranapple butter on the stovetop, which took less than 2 hours on low (vs. overnight on low in the crockpot).  I’m not totally giving up the crockpot, as it makes far less of a mess than doing it on the stove and I can leave it unattended, but it’s nice to know I can put up a bushel or two of apples in no time flat on my stove top.
 The cranapple butter came out tasting like cranapple juice –  you mostly taste the cranberries, but they are sweet thanks to the apples. I threw some cranberries and a bit of water in a pan, cooked it for about 10 minutes, then threw it in with the applesauce, about a half cup of sugar and cooked it down until it was the right consistency. Edie has a big thing for cranberries and claims to be ‘over’ apple butter, so I thought she’d like this.  The freezers got a few apple pies while I was at it.  My two basement chest freezers are now at capacity, I’m out of half pint jars and down to my last half case of pint jars.  I might try a small batch of pickled cranberries before I completely call it a season until strawberries come back around, but as you can see, I have some knitting to knock out in the next few weeks.