think red wednesday v 6

The You Can't Make This Stuff Up edition:
from Freecycle listings here yesterday

"Lucy" the Rooster
Well, he's pretty useless. Can't lay eggs, too small to eat (he's a
bantam- small breed), has a cross beak so he can't be bred and he
prefers to be hand fed, starts crowing around 7:30 am- you get the idea.
But- he's pretty much the tamest thing ever, comes when you call him,
can be carried around by small children for hours, and will perch on
your shoulder for a pretty good imitation of a pirate's parrot.

If you decide you want him you need to have reasonable facilities to
house him, enough space that the neighbors won't hear him, maybe some
hens for him to hang out with, and the ability to drive away fast from 3
sobbing children who will miss him very much.
Serious inquiries only please.

This isn't Lucy but i can't post without a picture.
I laughed till I turned red over that one.
Awkward segue: how's your Red Scarf project coming along? Mine's foundering. But I'll get there by the October deadline. My thoughts have never been so focused on just what it takes to get a kid to college, physically, bureaucratically and emotionally-since I'm smack in the middle of that this week. The little details is what gets you- who's doing that for foster kids? I'm thinking the scarf with a couple of gift cards, to Staples or Target, might be just the thing for my donation this year.
.

guess who really won?

Me!

I was hunkered in the knitting bleachers cheering on the homegirls in the Ravelympics. If they awarded a gold medal for blatant coveting of finished objects, it would have been mine. Luckily, the talented Baby Beth tore up the field in BagnTote event and gave me one of her FOs, this fab cotton & bamboo grocery tote. I test shlepped with it all weekend. LOVE IT! Thanks Beth--and happy bday, too. Go read her thank you speech to all her trainers & suporters.

saturday: colorful with a touch of knitting

The breakfast of clowns fourteen year olds.

Bouquet from my crazy flower garden out front.

The beach chair sock yarn, striping satisfyingly.

thinkred wednesday v5

In which I squeak under the wire to remind the dubblya dubblya dubblya to keep the Red Scarf Project and kids who have aged out of foster care but are heading off to college in your thoughts.
Norma just posted a fab red scarf on her blog and damn if I'm not going to make one in that same pattern. Absoloodle. (a character in a book I just finished reading says that all the time and it's stuck firmly in my brain).

Plenty of red in this exhibit. Nice segue. Clumsy yet direct . Come swill wine with us at the Sept 7th opening or knit along on the evening of Sept 17th. Knitting at the art gallery- not bad, eh? Details below, I'll find some more legible way of posting them soon,I promise. Meanwhile, save the dates.

everyone poops*

I meet some of the best people on the job. Also some of the cutest.

Last week I was on assignment for a magazine, shooting a woman who started this brilliant charity, The Diaper Bank. It turns out diapers and cleaning supplies (we're talking soap, shampoo, detergent, bleach) are not covered by food stamps. So, say you're not quite getting by, you can get some food but your kids need diapers? No way. And babies being what we all are, they need fresh diapers. Instead , there're babies swaddled in reused plastic diapers, as in lots of germs and unhappiness. Squalling babies lead to snapping tempers, germs lead to..well you know, and not having fresh diapers means you can't drop your kids off in any kind of childcare to work or go to class. It's one big nasty situation.

(I know some of you are saying why not go cloth? Lack of washing machines, many laundromats do not allow cloth diapers and to make things worse, you can't get laundry detergent for washing diapers with food stamps, either).

Anyway, you can read about The Diaper Bank here.

By the way? That little cutie is a beneficiary of the charity, he came by to pose with the founder but was happy to sit alone for the test shots until she got to the warehouse. I tried to pack him up with my equipment but didn't get away with it.....

* the title refers to this classic book, a huge hit during the toilet training days around here. Dave and I can still recite most of it by heart, more than a decade later--the two humped camel page? So special.

again with the grilled beets

I put this salad on the table for lunch yesterday and said I ought to charge myself $13 . Which is the kind of nerdy thing we say when we're particularly pleased with ourselves for a dish we throw together here. Grilled (& chilled) local beets, arugula, goat cheese. I drizzled olive oil and balsamic vinegar over it and had a slice of sourdough baguette too which made it even prettier but decided to sit and eat it instead of making more photos. Sometime you have to live life instead of shooting it, right?

It was part of our anniversary celebration day of diminishing momentum. In the course of 24 hours we devolved from weekend getaway to staycation (the most overused and annoying phrase of summer oh8) to afternoon outing to eh, why go anywhere. Granted, we had a beach down the street and kayaks ready to roll, a bottle of prosecco and great weather.
Plus a trip to the farmers market earlier left us with a kitchen full of choice organic grub.

Anyway, my point is, it was better than going away. In our amazingly long (for these days and for people who aren't really that old) marriage we have nailed, absolutely to perfection, our ability to hang out together, even though we don't get as much chance to devote a day to it as we used to. It'd be nice if our joint talents added up to remodeling homes and reselling them for great profit or some other sort of financial magic but, still, there's something to be said for the art of hanging. (I got some happy sock knitting done too but I'll hold off on that action and leave you with more farmers market.)

think red Wednesday v4

I cast on for mine. What about you?

That's it for today. Except for what Norma said.

i love a knitting request

Especially if it has an element of challenge.

That's my nephew, you might notice him in the center, as seen on Saturday. He sweetly asked me to knit him a "funky tam", something he can stick all his dreadlocks up into . Not in Jamaican colors. And not all wool - too hot for where they live and his homegrown insulation.

Suggestions? I'd love to go with a Taos Beret from Shear Spirit - I know I can nail the size/floop factor, having cranked out a few of these babies in the past year. But the brim isn't right.

And what yarn? All cotton=sag. Something of a blend would be good. This should be fun.

set up

My plans for the weekend are pretty much set, now that the drive down to Delaware last night is over. Bad traffic and hail storm softened by the purchase of a jack to plug iPods into the car speaker. We sang the whole way . (mom! you are still out of tune, stop, please, stop)

think red Wednesday v3

Seeing as I'm keeping the Red Scarf Project in mind on Wednesdays, I honored it this week by putting together some yarn for this year's scarf. It's not due till October, plenty of time.
Some red and blue-ish teal leftovers from this, some sari silk, and some of the always lurking old partial skeins of Brown Sheep I've accumulated since way back when.

But let's not linger on that. Let's linger on the sari silk. I could stare at it all day. It's a little rough when knit up all alone but definitely can get by on its looks.

intentional

It's a month since my yeahwhynot try to post daily declaration. Didn't quite pull it off but I definitely blogged more than I have in any other month. I'm looking at it like the yoga teacher says- do it with the intention of getting where you want to be.

This weekend's preoccupation? A spur of the moment tag sale. The lawn mower that didn't work, the wheel barrow with a flat that was always too heavy for me, that kind of thing. I had a moment, fleeting, when I almost put out a basket of this yarn. Then I got a grip, went for Stuff That's Clogging the Cabinets. When you only have the night before to throw a tag sale together, it's triage time. A whole big cabinet worth of kiddy craft supplies, emptied! It really is time to let go of the rounded scissors when you're driving your son to college at the end of the month, right?

I was getting all misty eyed about the hours and hours of clay and glue, painting and drawing and making we used to do, how it was so much a part of life around here. Then I realized, one son is heading to culinary school for college and the other was busy at a forge doing this all weekend.
I guess they're taking it in their own direction. OK.