Christmas is finally over. In a lot of ways I’m DAMN glad the holidays are done with, and in a lot of ways I’m not. Castle Rock was, once again, really really really wonderful.

(Dood. Critterboy just came in and told me that The Man Room is totally off limits to “you womenfolk” until told otherwise. Apparently there are birthday presents hidden in there for me. Whatever shall I do without unrestricted access to the man room???)

Anyway, back to xmas. We had heard from Critterboy’s mom a couple of days before we left that the daytime highs had been in the teens, with nights being WAY below that, so we were totally prepared for freezing our asses off. Totally. Prepared.

You KNOW what happens when you’re Totally Prepared for something, right? It. Doesn’t. Happen. In our case, the daytime highs the entire time we were there were around 63. Christmas day? 69. We were out front running the rc cars barefoot (more on that later). In Colorado. In December. Barefoot. Serious as a heart attack.

So, yeah. The weather was gorgeous, the family was (is) wonderful beyond belief, the food was decidedly abundant, the cookies super duper yummeh, the shopping last minute (a fine xmas tradition), many books, SOFT socks, new fleece (the North Face kind, not the sheepy kind), and the smiles non-stop.

Other than coming home to The Great Christmas Chicken Massacre of ‘05, it was all Good. (From the number of piles of feathers and chunks, we were sure we’d lost all five, but I saw something yellow go by the window early the next morning and it turned out to be Sunshine Chicken - ratty and missing a LOT of featherage, and apparently suffering from some sort of PTSD, but alive.)

And no, I didn’t take a camera with me, so I don’t have pictures of the finished deer quilt for the folks, or the finished faroese shawl for Auntie Pink, or the finished anything else for that matter. Or the pictures of Critterboy crashing a radio controlled helicopter into the Christmas tree. Or of the boys shooting nerf darts at the ceiling fan and then breaking said rc helicopter by trying to get the darts back OFF of the ceiling fan by buzzing it with the rotors. Or of me crashing one of the rc cars into a parked car. Or running it up under two parked cars and into the neighbor’s garage. Or the herd of antelope we saw on the way to the airport. Or any of the rest of it. So there! Nyah! (There were, mind you, pictures of most of that stuff taken while were there, so I’m assuming they’ll filter my way at some point, at which point I’ll share them with all y’all. Promise)

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Xmas came early for the Booger. Last night to be specific, since she’s going skiing and we’ll be with Critterboy’s family. So, thanks to Angela and a wonderful woman she found on the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Housecleaning Pages, the Booger now has her very own spinning wheel. Check it out:

Hooray for xmas! Go Booger with your fibery self!

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Heh. There’s been a slew of obnoxious christian-centric emails making the rounds into my inbox in the last 24 hours, some of which have sparked some damned amusing responses from friends of mine. I do love me my friends. Even the christian ones (hi Rob!). So, in light of some bitchin’ responses to the smarmy bullshit emails, go spend $6 at amazon and get this (instant gratification, here folks! It’s a DOWNLOAD!):

(or, if instant gratification is more than you can stand, you can spend $18 and getcherself a real, live book-form version here)

If nothing else, it will at least give you something to think about other than feeding the jingles to the lions…

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Ok, maybe not *kills*, but certainly maims. Spirit at least…

The Faroese Peaks Shawl that I’ve been werkin’ on. You’ve seen the huge disaster/recovery, but you haven’t seen any of the progress. Alas, I’ve been aslack. However! In the main body of the shawl there are 17 pattern repeats, 10 rows per repeat, 20 stitches increased every repeat. Then comes the border pattern rows, then a few (11) rows of plain garter stitch, and then! You’re done! Done! And we all know how wonderful THAT word can be. So I finished the 15th body repeat last night. And I was feelin’ all cocky about how close to the end I was. And then? And then you ask? Yeah. I got stupid and DID THE MATH. I still have 50 rows to go, not counting the bind-off row. At that point I had roughly 445 stitches per row. So… 50 rows x 445 stitches is 22,250, plus the 1224 stitches that will be added by the continued increasing, and you get: A HUNDRED MAJILLION HOURS LEFT TO GO. 23,475 stitches (providing I did all that figuring right, which, being that math isn’t my favorite thing, I probably didn’t.). And that’s only if I don’t screw even one up. Yeah. Right. Anyway. So, figuring, say, a VERY conservative 50 stitches per minute (nice roundish number), that’s 469.5 minutes. That’s a mere 8ish hours to go.

Ok, so maybe I only got as far as the realization that I had almost twenty five thousand stitches left to go last night, and maybe I didn’t really follow through on the math until just now, and… ok. I’ll just shut up now. 9 hours of knitting really isn’t that bad, all things considered. Hey! Is that an elephant over there?

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Birthday month has officially started. Please see the xmas page if you’re stumped for ideas of what particular gifts I might be jonesing to have lavished upon me….

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Ok! I promised pictures, and pictures you shall have!

First up - The Scarf. The one that critterboy says I should keep ‘cos he thinks it’s UNENDINGLY funny that I can’t see most of the stripes on it. What say you? Keep it and make another for the xmas pile? Make another for myself later on down the road? Share the love? (funny note here - in the picture I can actually see a hell of a lot more of the stripeyness than I can in person. wacky, that)

Then! OMG! The picturey goodness does not stop there! Oh no! Look! There’s more!

As usual, enclicken to embiggen, or in this case, to detailize.

And last but not least. George. Who really shall not be named George, but who doesn’t really have a name yet. Critterboy suggested Trogdor, buuuttt…. Not sure that quite fits. As usual, I’m open to suggestions.

and here he’s givin’ all y’all the Crazy Eye. Just for good measure.

There! Pictures promised AND delivered. Better than sliced bread.

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Ok, so it didn’t bite the dust (but you’re singing it now, arentcha?), but one more xmas knitting project is DONE! Done, I tell you! Done! Blocked and everything! #1? Done! #2? DONE! #3? Gonna be workin’ on that one for a while…

This one, #2, is one of these done in the leftovers from this. Woo! How’s that for picture-be-takin’ avoidance? That’s right, baby, I got your slack right here.

Critterboy swears I should keep #1 and make another one for the xmas pile. Maybe I’ll post pics at some point this week and let all y’all decide on that one. #3 is still cooking (and from the feeling of those long repeats, it’s gonna be for a while now, and judging by the math? Holy CRAP it’s gonna be a while…) Then it’s just on to #’s 4-9, and all is good. (no, not all of them are knit, so some will be finished a LOT sooner than the others). Whew!

AND! In other exciting news, we finally got around to ordering our tickets for xmas, so Colorado - here we come! Yay! I was beginning to worry about it, dontchaknow.

And (oh yes, there’s more)… I’m going to love him and pet him and call him George. And… See above. Since I got your slack right here (meaning you can’t use it, so get to work), I don’t have a picture of George yet. I’ll see if I can’t do something about that tonight. ‘Cos OMFG he’s cute.

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OMFG! Pictures!

While up in BC this past weekend, Angela gave me a little bump of wool in various shades of green and blue and rust(?)*, which as I’m pretty sure I mentioned at some point below, I spun up on Sunday morning. Last night and this afternoon I took a bunch of pictures of it. NONE of which really show what it actually looks like. (*I’m red/green colorblind, so, really, wtf do I know about it?). This one:

I think is the closest. I could be wrong. See above. The others… not quite. See? and see? and again with the not quite. And yes, totally wrong. Meh. Whatever. It’s green. With some other pretty colors in it. And it’s soft. And nice. And no, I haven’t measured it yet, so I don’t know how much I ended up with when all was said and done.

Moving right along.

Disastah! Terrah!
I’ve been working on a SUPER SECRET PROJECT (and, oh bugger, here I go showing a bunch of pictures of it… sheesh), and was cruising along until I got to the 11th damn pattern repeat. At which point it all went to crap. THREE TIMES. I had to completely reknit repeat 11 twice (I forget why now. short attention span, I know), and was 5 or 6 rows into repeat 12 when I noticed: BIG GODDAMNED HOLE. Not only was it a BGDH, mind you, but it was (insert much profanity here) many, many rows BELOW the last lifeline. What’s a girl to do? Each row is…. um… lots of stitches at this point. 5+155+37+155+5. That many. No way no how was I going to rip it ALL back and redo that many stitches and rows and omg it’s garter stitch and please make it stop. But oh ho! I am crafty!

Check it out, yo:
First things first: Gather your supplies.

Here we have: the offending piece of knitting (the pink blob), the pattern, a good magnifying lamp, needles, scissors, and yummy Canadian microbrew (and, apparently, a can of highly flammable spray-stuff in the background, just in case…). Wait! Where is the chocolate?! Crap. Oh well. Soldiering on.

Then! Um. I forget what comes next so Unicorns! Unicorns make everything better.

Ok, ok. Moving right along with the repair project.
I guess now is the time to really look at what we’re up against:

And then? What then?
Rip it! Rip it good! (just make sure you’ve put a lifeline in at the bottom of the section you are gonna fix.

Then you just pick up the stitches along the lifeline and go to town. Really.

Here we have, I think, 4 rows reknit.

And here we have 8 rows reknit, with only 13 to go. But I was tired, and I started making mistakes which had to be unknit and reknit and… decided to stop for the night.

There you have it. Updates! Photos! And yeah, I’ll post another picture when I get the reknitting of the lace section finished.

Edit: In response to Angela’s question in the comments, here’s how I did the green spinning:
I weighed the whole thing, and then just divvied it up into three roughly equal piles without regard to color. Then I split each sliver up into three or four lengthwise pieces, laid them on my left knee, and just grabbed them randomly as I spun. From that I got three bobbins full, which I then plied. I probably should have done it as a two-ply instead of a three-ply, but I really liked the way it came out as a three-ply.

And… I finished the repair on the lace last night. I still have to go through and even out the stitches in a couple of places in that section, but I figure that can wait until I block it (if any of you know different, PLEASE tell me now!). Pictures to follow, probably over the weekend.

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It’s the girlfriend in my head!

You will laugh. You might cry. And, probably, you will *totally* understand.

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