There's an oriole in the pear tree

Not, "There's an Oreo in the pantry," or more bizarrely, "There's an Oreo in the pear tree," which are the two things the Fool thought I was calling to tell him, rather than my latest ornithological observation.
(I'd just called him to go on about what a pill his son was being, so I felt like I should give him something nice to think about too. Instead, he thought he was getting some kind of weird cookie update.)
I finished a pair of socks for Rachel the other night. These were so much fun to knit; Socks That Rock in Puck's Mischief, a pattern from Knitting Vintage Socks. Now the needles are free again, which is good, as I have a sock project in the works that's going to be a lot of fun.


We've been gigging a lot lately, which has been a challenge because Jamie is really trying hard to learn to walk and so tends to be kind of clingy when he's not staggering around holding onto furniture with one hand. It's tough, because we take these gigs months in advance and sort of guess as to what Jamie might be up to when the actual date comes. These days, our strategy centers on keeping him well fed, because he seems happier with a full stomach, like anyone, really. But usually, Jamie ends up on our backs. He slept on my back during the Saturday night Milwaukee Irish set dance gig.



Then on Monday, the Cosmic Otters played our home dance, which was terrific fun. We did well, too, which makes me happy, because Friday night, at the Delafield contra dance weekend, I think we'll be in great form.


Jamie hangs out with the Fool while we tune.

I had to take a couple breaks to nurse, and Jamie wanted to sit on my lap while I played guitar, which is nice in concept, but trying in practice, because he likes to hold the guitar neck. One set of tunes like that, and then he went back on the Fool for the rest of the dance.


I don't get this expression of his at all. But note how he's fretting the bass strings at, like, the 11th fret. So helpful. At least he wasn't messing around with the tuning pegs. I hate to think what will happen when he figures out how to turn them.

TGIF!

It has been a trying week chez Sock Knitters. I don't know what it was - the heat, the hormones, a thousand small annoyances - but I'm glad things turned around.*
Today, Jamie and I went to the local crunchy moms' playgroup. They're nice people, although in chatting with one, she remarked that she's been in a bit of a mood too this week, which she credits in part to the digestive system cleanse she is on. She was explaining what she's been drinking for 10 days now and how her body has been reacting, and let me just say that if I were doing that, I would not have time to go to playgroup, because I would be too busy looking for places to hide the bodies. I couldn't help but think that if she ate something, that might take the edge off, but, eh, not my colon.**
I'm glad she finds it rejuvanating.
Jamie had a great time.
The host mom put out a wading pool, so he puddled in that for a while. Then he crawled down the porch steps and we went for a ride in a swing hanging from a tree. Then the big friendly dog came over and snuffled at me and licked my cheek while Jamie shrieked with laughter, and then we practiced walking barefoot in the grass and ate some watermelon and blueberries.
Honestly, I think everyone should get a day like that.
This afternoon, I went back to the eye doctor. I have an infection in my right eye and I've been wearing my glasses all week and squinting into the sun when I drive and muttering about smeary fingerprints on the lenses and fooling around with eye drops, and this has not made me cheerful. (Annoyances #756-761.)
Jamie was parked in his stroller by the sink, banging the cabinet door happily, and I was knitting a sock when she came in. We had this talk:

DOCTOR: Oh, what are you making?
ME: A sock.
DOCTOR: What else do you knit?
ME: Uh, well, most things. I make sweaters sometimes, and hats, and occasionally a fancy dishcloth, but I like socks because they're portable.
DOCTOR: (Carries on with eye doctor stuff.) Is that yarn different colors, or are you changing yarn as you knit?
ME: It's variegated yarn - I'm too lazy to do it the other way. So, um, do you knit too? (thinking
she is showing a lot of interest in my knitting for a Muggle.)
DOCTOR: No, but I've been thinking I'd like to learn how to do something with my hands like that.
ME: You know, there's a knitting group that meets at the Panera across the street on Friday nights.
DOCTOR: Really?
ME: Yes. (Aside: I love how people say that, like I'm going to say, 'Aw, no, I'm just kidding. A knitting group? Come on.')
DOCTOR: Do you charge money?
ME: Uh, no. We meet at Panera and sit and knit.
DOCTOR: At a big table?
ME: Well, there's at least a half dozen people, so, yeah, a big table. We get there around 6, 6:30 p.m. and we knit until they kick us out.
DOCTOR: Really? So I could come after work some time?
ME: Yes, you could, and I bet someone would show you how to knit.
So she has my email and I told her if she was going to come, to drop me a line, and I would bring some extra needles and yarn to teach her with.
Here's the socks that helped net a convert.
Feather-and-fan, oh, how I love thee, feather-and-fan, turning goofy pooling variegated yarns into organized stripes. I'm even going to knit a short row heel so I don't interrupt the nifty striping thing going on. It's made of Blackberry Ridge wool in the Tropical Fish colorway, and I bought it one winter when I was sick with a cold, (so judgment was impaired) and needed to look at something colorful.


* Things that helped turn the week around: Iced coffee with skim milk and one packet turbinado sugar; great garage sale deal wherein I got two Jamie-sized playground balls, a cute outfit and a bucket of baby-sized cars that hook together into trains for $7; the eggplant in the fridge we are going to slice, grill and serve with balsamic vinegar and bread crumbs sauteed with garlic and red pepper.

** We were discussing cooking at playgroup, and I mentioned that last night, we made Cajun shrimp with corn flapjacks, and this woman and another mom asked me to share the recipe. I thought to myself, "I bet if I said I'd sauteed our dishtowels in motor oil for dinner, that would have sounded good to someone who has had no solid food for a week."

Random addendum:


Squee! Babies! The Dad Pit from the Midsummer's Party, where all the various dads hung out on the rug with their babies while the moms took pictures. Jamie is the oldest, but not the biggest, of the bunch.

Too hot to think of a title

The Fool and I had a reckoning with the contents of the fridge Sunday night and all of a sudden, we found where all the good Tupperware went. Eek. We were jockeying the leftovers from the Midsummer's party into place when we realized matters were dire.
(Good party, btw. We were pleased. I was especially pleased because I resisted the urge to add six additional dishes at the last minute and drive myself crazy.)
Anyway, it was a good weekend, even though the Internet was down intermittently for several days. On one hand, it made it hard for me to work on stuff for this fiber festival I'm volunteering for, but on the other hand, it also made it harder to waste time goofing around online.

It also brought you the following conversation:
FOOL: I would have biked to the train station today if I'd known it wasn't going to rain.
ME: Why didn't you check the weather this morning?
FOOL: Internet's down.
ME: We have a radio. And a television.
FOOL: (silence.) Um. I don't really know how to work that.
ME: ???

He pointed out that to use the radio and TV to learn the weather forecast, you have to find the right station and then hang around until they give you the weather, and ....
It reminded me of a talk I had with my father when he visited my junior year of college and stayed at the duplex I was sharing with two other girls.
DAD: Where's the microwave?
ME: We don't have one.
DAD: You don't have one?
ME: No.
DAD: How do you heat up water for tea? (immediate, "I can't believe I just said that" expression.)
ME: Well, Dad, this is a kettle, and we fill it with water and put it on the stove, which is this big box over here with the buttons along the back and then ....
DAD: Smartass.
ME: At least I know how to boil water.

Anyway, the cable guy came out and reported that the problem seemed to be with their hardware, but just to make sure, he would replace the cable that runs from their box to our house. He told us it seemed like something had been chewing on it.
The Fool believes the Gerries are trying to prevent us from slandering them online.
I say that if the cable company would bury their lines like they're supposed to, then nobody would chew on them.
After that excitement, our dryer broke down early Monday morning. Sigh. I can't in any good conscience blame the woodchucks for that, either. I think it's the age of the dryer. The Fool was delighted to find a repair company that specializes in "vintage dryers." I'm just happy the rain has stopped long enough for me to hang out all the wet laundry.
Been knitting socks. My drive to finish projects ended when I cast on a feather-and-fan sock out of madly variegated yarn today. I told Thorny over the weekend that someone needs to sit on me next time I try to buy crazy variegated yarn. I love it in the skein, but it's so challenging to knit.
If I had more needles, I'd cast on more socks, I'm afraid.
Poor Jamie. He spent a couple minutes today trying to play peek-a-boo with Angus, but Angus is not impressed.

I feel like this woodchuck thing...

... is kind of like when I said on the blog that I was ready to have a baby and everyone jumped in with all these weird suggestions for things I could do that might bring on labor.
I half suspect it's a conspiracy among blog readers to see what they can get other people to do by sheer force of commentary.
Yes, we have used cat litter lying around. And the Fool is not as shy about "watering" the yard as some might think. Any more ideas for things we can do in the yard to cement our neighborhood reputation? Eh?

(A side note: My father had a long history of peeing in the yard, much to my mother's embarrassment. We have a really secluded house and yard - it's on a couple of acres, and when the trees are in full leaf, you cannot see the house from the road - but she was still worried that someone would drive by and see. I always thought it was one of those things fathers do to drive their teenage daughters to a premature grave. I expect, with two acres of yard to work in, he saw it as a time-saving measure, plus his birthright as a guy. So when we moved in, I kept telling the Fool that my family had a long history of peeing in the yard - it would keep other fiddlers out, it would prevent the neighborhood dogs from stopping by, it would tell the wildlife who was boss, all sorts of crazy reasons, just to yank his chain. He steadfastly refused, until he read in the Rodale composting book that it would activate the compost heap, and then, whoa Nelly, it was my father all over again.)

Yesterday, Angus told me that there was something interesting on the front deck. I looked out, and it was one of the weegees, getting even bolder. Getting into the garden isn't good enough, it seems. (Speaking of which, the zucchini and squash are up, so is either the swiss chard or broccoli raab. I did not buy row markers, and will have to wait until it gets bigger to see what it is. It's too organized to be weeds.)

Anyway, the woodchucks are giving me time to knit.


I like to think of this as my Provencal dishcloth.

I have some friends who just finished an especially arduous move from an apartment to a house that included the following stress-inducing elements: two weeks in an extended stay hotel suite with the entire family and all the pets; a moving company that went out of business and neglected to tell them; a title company that waited until the last possible minute to provide any of its documentation, thus nearly giving people heart attacks as they got certified checks with 15 minutes to spare before the bank closed, and causing the delivery of the house keys to be held up until the end of the business day on a Friday ... anyway, I feel like one artistically knitted dishcloth just isn't enough and maybe I should wrap it around a big bottle of wine before I send it off. But it was a lot of fun to knit, even though I haven't figured out how to finish it. The pattern says to Kitchener, but I should have used a provisional cast-on if I wanted to do that. I got the pattern off Ravelry.


Icarus, fully unfurled.


Attempted detail shot of the edge. There are beads there, I swear.

And now off to the Despot for a screen repair kit. Someone with claws tore a hole in the screen last night and the Fool has declared there will be no opening of the sliding glass door for ventilation until the bug ingress is closed.
Someone tell me this counts as a fiber craft - I would really rather be knitting or playing with quilt fabric or ... yeah.

Tuesday morning, the Fool....

... does weird stuff before I wake up.
He took the advice about using human hair to deter groundhogs, but rather than have to explain himself at the barbershop, he decided to go trim his beard in the garden this morning, hunched over the hole one of the Weegees dug.
At least it keeps all the hair out of the sink.
As soon as we get some sunlight, a few knitting photos....

Monday evening, watching Jamie taunt the cat

He has one of the crinkly cat balls in his hand, and he's crinkling it like mad, which is driving poor Angus absolutely batty, as he's convinced any minute now, Jamie will throw the ball for him, but no, instead, he just keeps rustling it.

Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me

My view of the show. We remarked that it was a lot like listening to it on the radio, except sitting outside with thousands of other people.

We're fans, chez Sock Knitters, of this public radio quiz show, and so whenever they do a free live taping, we try to be there. Last night, they taped in Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, and so around 3 p.m., Jamie and I got on a train, rode downtown, ran a quick errand at an art supply store, met the Fool, bought salads for dinner, and met up with our friends.
It's been cool and wet here this summer, and it rained for most of yesterday. Even though we had a rain plan, the weather broke and we were able to enjoy - with the help of tarps - a picnic with friends and the show. Jamie was especially interested in a carton of fresh apricots that were brought for sharing. His verdict? Small and nice to hold, and also good to eat.
It was so cold, however, that Chelsea was wearing her wool socks, handknit by Rachel (who you've met here before.) I took the picture so Rachel could see that Chelsea is showing the socks a good time, not just stuffing them in her shoes for hours on end.
CalicoSarah, our Ravelry friend, stopped by to say hello, too, and we compared sock knitting projects until Jamie decided to start grabbing for needles.


KnitPicks yarn, Broadripple pattern, I think?

Jamie had a four-hour nap yesterday, so he got up at 6:30 a.m. today. But he fell asleep again at 8:30 a.m., so I have no idea what's going on. We're checking out a new playgroup today. It's through a local group of moms interested in natural health, green living, that kind of crunchy granola stuff. I've been assured that they're fun people; I asked a woman I know who's been to these what's appropriate to bring for the potluck snack portion, and she rattled off a few typical healthy choices - but then she said, "I think if you wanted to bring a pitcher of margaritas, everyone would be cool with that, too."
I'm playing it safe, and bringing everyone's favorite neo-hippie, gluten- and dairy-free treat ... hummus! With sliced cucumbers!
Wish me luck; I feel like I'm going on a blind date.