HA! Here’s a new one for this blog… Pictures now, words later (probably).

O made bread. I made bread. These two are her loaves. Mine were ugly (but tasty). We ate an embarrassing amount of bread today.

Two pics of O making butter. It’s really hard to shake the jar when you’re laughing. Homemade butter is yummy, though. Three an a half loaves worth worth of yummy, apparently. I feel no shame.

Then we made goat cheese.

We also made mozzarella, but it was yummy, and there are no pictures to show for it.

Nihon Vogue sweater number… 5? I think? More pics of it in the gallery - click on the picture to go see the rest.

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O got to go north to Lower Canadia with me a couple weeks back, and got to spend some quality time with Satan’s Handpuppet. Evil puppy is hard to photograph, as he never. stops. moving. ever.

All the pictures are like that - in focus kidlet, totally blurry evilpuppy.

Except this one, where he was going in for the NOM! on the camera:

Then there was some shoulder-surfing by Spike:

O also had a hat to show off (although she swears she made it AGES ago) - she spun it, she knit it (hell, she pulled the “pattern” outta her bum and made it up as she went along):

And, finally, more cherry blossoms, ‘cos they make me happy.

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Haven’t felt much like blogging lately, not because there’s anything wrong, mind you, but because every time I’ve thought of something to write about, I’ve been hours away from a computer.

I do have pictures to post, and there has been progress on the Nihon Vogue stuff (and the WooBoo sweater? it’s perfect in every way. I love it. I wear it a LOT - the purple one, on the other hand, not so much. I will be unravelling that one, redoing the swatching and the math, and reknitting it. I love it, but I don’t love it in its current form).

In the mean time, go check out Critterboy in the news: Seattle PI article about the MSG150 (the three in the pic are his coworkers, who started the whole thing).

And then check out what some people are doing with their lunches: bento gallery (and great source for bento-style lunch boxes!)

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And by “this” I mean:
a)driving to lower Canadia twice a month to torture my brain with Nihon Vogue knitting class (I’ve cried now, Lara. Your work here is done)
b)new contacts (I’ve cried now, Dr. Sugarpockets. Your work here is done) and
c)peanut butter ginger chews (I’ve cried now, Chimes. WTF were you people thinking?!)

Pictures forthcoming of NV project #? (3? 4? - round neck pullover), in which I’ve learned several important lessons: 4×4 rib is NOT my friend on any level, weird Japanese cables are NOT my friends, setting in sleeves with Jean’s (admittedly gorgeous) crochet chain technique is hateful (see “a” above) the first… oh, 6 times through or so, dark purple vaguely fuzzy yarn is NOT my friend when it comes to the aformentioned crochet chain technique (although I looooooove this yarn), and, um… I seem to be getting really, painfully nearsighted in my advancing years (see “b” above).

Oy.

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Fifteen, indeed.

On this day, fifteen long years ago, the Booger came into the world, all tiny and toothless. Now she’s about as tall as I am, has outgrown my shoes, and has become a really wonderful person that I’m proud to know.

Happy birthday, Mouse Pie!

(this was taken last summer, I think, with my cell phone, while moving, on a road trip to Oregon, I think, and no, she’s not driving)

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My friend Angela is getting a(nother) spinning wheel, this one from a maker I’d never heard of (Crisp).

So I googled, as I am wont to do when I need to find stuff like a picture of a Crisp spinning wheel.

This, mind you, is what Teh Google offered up as “helpful” suggestions as I started to type:

(Yeah, I clicked on it, ‘cos I had to know. It’s a WOW reference. So boring. So very, very boring.)

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The Blue Moon Fiber Arts barn sale, to be specific. And a couple of random shots from the ferry, just for good measure.

The BMFA barn sale was held in, well, a barn. In Scappoose, Oregon. This place is actually a B&B, with a guest house (which we stayed in), the main house (where tasty breakfast was), and another giant-er guesthouse, plus the barn and some alpacas (llamas? I can’t remember, and I didn’t get any decent pictures of them). Most of these are from there, complete with the obligatory “box o’ stuff we came home with” shot, plus a couple of sunrises and a sunset, which go a long way towards explaining why I occasionally don’t hate my commute.

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Thanks to all of you who sent me birthday wishes! This year is getting off to a crazy start already, so my email-returning has been a bit sporadic thus far, but I really really really really appreciated all the good wishes. It was definitely one of the best birthdays in the past many years.

Nihon Vogue is crankin’ right along, with one sweater of eight completely finished and pronounced “beautiful” by Jean, one torn out three times so far (yeah, so far - it may get ripped out once more before all is said and done), and one half finished. I have to have the half-finished one done, and the next one knit to the armpits by the 20th. Ipe! I’ll get pics of the first finished one posted ASAP (I’ll be handing that one off to its recipient Thursday, so I need to get cracking on the picture taking), and will try to get some progress shots of the next three while I’m at it.

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Denver? It’s snowy, dontchaknow.

Driving to Denver over, say, CHRISTMAS, is… interesting. Also? Much less full of homeland “security”. Bonus points for that.

This is what most of our trip looked like:

Pretty, but cold. Very, very cold.

For those of you who always complain about the total dearth of pictures of yours truly, here’s not one, but TWO of the Booger and I freezing ourselves blue in front of a giant bear statue at the Natural History Museum in Denver (which is now called something else, but whatever):

and, last but not least, the ‘icy on the inside’ bit (no. don’t ask. and don’t tell me it’s on the wrong hand.)

And? Work just told me to go home, ‘cos it’s my birthday and my party is gettin’ started without me.

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Go. Squee at the cuteness. Buy.

http://hansigurumi.etsy.com

And? Bonus points for the instant-gratification factor. Patterns arrive in your inbox almost instantly. Yummeh!

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Saw this on the blog of one of my most favoritest authors and decided to play along and see what it had to say about my brain.

Hmmm…. Guess that explains some things.

Mr. N (whom you have probably not previously heard of), responded with “I could have told you that”. Such a nice boy that one.

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Seattle-ites are well known for the passive-aggressive nature, so seeing a nastygram that someone had left on the windshield of a truck in our parking garage, was not a surprise.

Also not surprising was the spelling on the note. The note-writers in this building are notorious for their bad spelling.

It seemed, somehow, necessary to not only photograph it and post it, but…. fix it. (Too vs. to is one of my pet peeves, right up there with there/their/they’re and your/you’re - and yeah, I know, my grammar and punctuation often sucks. Whatever with that.) This is how I left it:

As usual, enclicken to embiggen

As was pointed out to me later, what I *should* have done was to correct it and then GRADE it. But, alas, I wasn’t thinking. And that truck? Very tall. Me? Not so tall.

In other news:
- Had dinner with Denise last night. Very yummy. We all ate too much.

- Bought another stack of Japanese knitting books at Kinokuniya before said dinner. They were very heavy when our bellies were full.

- Nihon Vogue has begun! I get to go to The Best Place On Earth (aka Canada) twice a month for the next 9 months. Woo! (and yes, as a matter of fact, I AM already behind on my homework. Gonna make something of it?)

- Acupuncture is magical. Just sayin’.

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or “More random blackberry pictures”. ‘Cos I know you guys live for that kind of thing…

(Dell 1710 printer left in photo for scale)
I stopped at the Pike Place Market this morning to pick up some flowers as a thank you for my friend Livia. This is one of the few things that I really love about the market - the ability to get off a bus at 8:30 in the morning, walk a block down hill, hand $15 to someone who’s head you can almost see behind the wall of flowers, walk out with a bouquet of flowers you can barely see around, walk back up the block you just walked down, and be on the next bus heading up the street. I wasn’t even late for work. Go me.

And? For the TOTALLY random shot - Critterboy and I were heading to… the opera? probably. Something. At any rate. We were parked on the ferry behind a Scion xB, that had, on the entire back of it, for reasons we absolutely couldn’t fathom, THIS:

Yes. We had Ronald giving us the old jazz hands! over the hood of the truck all the way to Seattle. It was a VERY long ride.

Clowns are scary, people. Don’t do that to your fellow commuters!

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You know it’s going to be an amusing conversation when it’s with this guy and it starts “so there’s this big goth event in Arkansas…”

(and yeah, he always looks exactly like that)

(and yeah, I swear I have Genuine Knitting Content[tm] to share, I just need to plug in my camera and download the pics. this weekend, maybe.)

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