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!

2 Comments | In: General | | #

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.)

Comments Off | In: General | | #

Being that there isn’t any really good coffee available on my side of the pond, I end up getting my early-morning-jumpstart-the-functionality coffee at the Starschmuck’s at the ferry dock. It’s not great, but it’s consistent, and that’s KEY first thing in the morning. Most mornings it’s the same group of people, shuffling along, mumbling their orders, and all is fine. Today, however, I hear LOUDLY from someone two or three people in line behind me reply to the person taking orders down the line:

“I need a venti nonfat breve caramel macchiato*” Um…. yeah. I’m sure they’ll get RIGHT on that, honey.
At least it was good for a (well stifled) giggle.

*If you need a glossary of terms to make this REALLY amusing, start here.

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See? Glass!
DAMN I hope they clean that mess up…

5 Comments | In: General | | #

OMG!OMG!OMG!OMG!
We’re FINALLY getting new windows in the bedroom! WOOOOO!
The entire east wall of our bedroom has, until this morning, been single pane glass. The. Entire. Wall.
At the moment it looks like this:

Ipe!
Soon, though, it will be loverly and have some sort of insulating quality and ventilation and and and and. Yeah. I’m kind of excited. Can you tell?
More pictures as Critterboy provides them.

1 Comment | In: General | | #

If you’re seeing either a)a whooooole lotta green before the text starts or b)the right-side nav pane showing up at the very bottom below the posts, please know that I am fully aware that it’s a problem at the moment, and that it appears to only be an issue on windowsXP/IE6 combos. If you’re having an issue with it, please go get Firefox. Firefox rocks. Or, if you’re really groovin’ on the Internet Explorer, upgrade to IE 7. Why IE 6 is borking the layout I’m not positive yet, and probably won’t have time to dig through the css to figure it out until next week.

5 Comments | In: General | | #

I’m on hold with the Seattle Aquarium at the moment, and the hold music is “Saturday Night Fish Fry”….

2 Comments | In: General | | #

I finally finished the Japanese Feather socks. I’m not sure why I stalled out on these just beyond the heel on the first one (heh. I typed that as “just beyond the hell”), but I did, and they languished for ages and ages and ages, sitting all melancholy-like on the nightstand. On a whim I picked it back up a couple of weeks ago and spent some quality time trying to figure out where in the hell I was on the pattern. Once I had that, I whipped out the rest of that first sock in about an hour, and immediately cast on for the second, which just seemed to fly off the needles too. Go figure. I absolutely LOVE the way these turned out, even if I was totally incapable of taking a decent picture of my own foot. Wouldn’t figure it would be that difficult, but I swear my ankles aren’t that wide and my feet aren’t *that* short.

And, of course, not one to leave well enough alone… I give you more random pictures from my morning commute! I know you were waiting breathlessly for them.

The view from my bus stop on the way to work:

One of the meadowy places at the new Olympic Sculpture Garden has, in the last couple of weeks, completely BLOOMED. From above the whole thing is PINK! with these flowers. I’m not sure what they are, but I love them.

And the metal tree in the sculpture garden, which I totally didn’t realize was metal until the morning I took this picture and the sun was making it sooper shiny. Who knew?

There are a few more BSG pics on my phone yet to be downloaded, and I think a couple more Lusty Lady marquees, so those will be coming in the days to come, as it were.

Ooh! And the seagull (possibly even the same one as in the masthead) is back on the nest on the piling, so within the next 20 days I should have baby seagull pix. Newly hatched seagulls are REALLY cute. Almost as cute as the baby bunnies I got to play with yesterday. They were cute enough that CritterBoy, who is horribly allergic to bunnies, couldn’t resist petting them. It was like some sort of freaky magnetic field that just sucked him right in.

5 Comments | In: General, KSKS, Socks, knit-o-rama | | #

Shazam!

Still too tired to really think, but at least had the sense to take today off to recover from BSG. In some ways the trip was entirely too short, since there were people that I so rarely get to hang out with, and in some ways it was way too long (hotel bed from hell and soooooo far to drive). I spent some more time spinning today, since I always come home from the festivals re-energized and inspired about the spinning, but mostly did as little as humanly possible.

Oh, yeah, and I redid the header and changed the color-scheme. It was time.

3 Comments | In: General | | #

Well, another BSG is over (well, over for us at any rate, it still goes all day tomorrow, but we’ll be on the road headed to Belmont Station in Portland to get some tasty beer and then home to the north lands to sit on the deck and drink the tasty beer).

This year, like last year, was a hell of a lot of fun with much merrymaking with people we just don’t get to see often enough (waving madly in the direction of Sheila and Michael, Tina and gang, Barb, Jen, Jessica, Peggy and Rebecca, and Natasha, and I know I’m missing some), and meeting people in person whom we’ve only known through the internets (hullo Joanne and Laura and Tammy!)

Much fun, entirely too much food, a ginormous rental car full of fiber (’The Behemoth’), and NO FLEECE. Woo! Go us with our uncanny restraint. We’ll thank ourselves later.

More pix in the gallery.

3 Comments | In: General | | #

I’ve been seeing a lot of butterflies in the past couple of weeks, most of them appearing to be Western Tiger Swallowtails, which is very cool, since it seems like it’s been MANY years since I’ve seen any at all.

Tonight when we went to cover up the chicken coop, this one was sitting on the window ledge, looking a little worse for wear. When I put my hand on the ledge next to it, it climbed right up onto my hand and just sat there for about 15 minutes while I tried to get a decent picture of it.

Sadly, I don’t think it’s long for this world - its wings were pretty shredded, and there was the big chunk missing from the bottom of the right wing. I put my hand back to the window ledge and it crawled back off and just sat. It was awfully neat getting to be that up close and personal with it, though.

1 Comment | In: Wildlife | | #

Lizzy Chicken, begging at the window last night.

That’s it. Nothing more to see here. Move along.

3 Comments | In: Chix | | #

These have been collecting on my crackberry for the last few months, and I finally got around to downloading them this morning. So. Here you go, in alphabetical order:
Another submarine heading to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (this one was this morning):

The results of the first half of the Sheep to Shoe kit from Blue Moon Fiber Arts:

A castle. Can’t remember where this is… Whidbey Island? Port Angeles? Port Townsend? Something. It’s some guy’s very-out-of-character-for-the-neighborhood house:

One of my coworkers, slurping up the last of his panang curry with a straw on a dare: (yeah, not from the morning commute, but on the phone…)

The defective goose. This is the same piling that the seagulls use later in the summer. Bear in mind that goslings don’t fly, and that’s about a 20′ drop to the water. (I found out later that the day after they hatched the goose pitched each baby over the edge at high tide to another goose waiting below, who flipped them upright, and then the whole family swam away. Say it with me: “awwwwww!”)

Random downtown building on valentines day.

The marquee at the Lusty Lady. The marquee gets changed on a several-times-a-week basis, and is almost always funny. It’s one of the things that the group I ride the ferry and bus with always make a point of checking out on our way by. I should probably add a page just for this, and see if I can keep up with them so you can all share the amusement.

And… the first sub that I saw go through. And yes, I realize you can’t really tell that blob is a submarine, but it is. If what I read was correct, that’s the Seawolf (although might be the Jimmy Carter).

So. There you go. A few of the sights of my morning. Every day.

7 Comments | In: General, Lusty, spinny spin spin | | #

Hey, y’all. Remember me? I’m not sure I do, really, but that’s ok. It’s been a crazy few months. There are stories, but I won’t be telling most of them.

There’s been work. And a (not very) Random Stranger From The Internets (ok, so maybe not really a *stranger* - we’ve “known” him for about 3 years, but this was the first time we’d actually met him all in person like). And a wedding (not mine). And some more work. And Very Little Knitting. But hey! I have pictures, so it’s all good, right?

There was a gigantic shawl knit for Melissa of Peace Weavers (which I swear I have a picture of, but I can’t find it to save my own life. Ang? Help?) edit! Found it! (It’s the Lady Of The Forest shawl from Ilga Leja)

And then there was the RSFTI, who we adored before we met, and are utterly smitten with now. (Along with most of the bride’s female relatives…)
This one being my favorite pic of him from the weekend - he’s the one on the left, the guy on the right being another one of Critter Boy’s imaginary friends, who flew in from Hawaii for the meetup (on his way to somewhere else I think).

Lastly, the “what I did with my summer weekend” series… The label on the roving claimed it to be biffle from Dicentra in the Eomund colorway. I believe the biffle and Dicentra bits, but from the pics I’ve seen online, I’m not buying that it’s the Eomund colorway. No clue which one it is, but probably not what it was labeled as. Whatever, though. It’s purty.
Pre-drafted goodness:

Followed by the mandatory ‘in progress’ shot:

And, finally, the rare Biffle Boa, in it’s unnatural environment:

7 Comments | In: General, Outings and get-togethers, knit-o-rama, spinny spin spin | | #

aka “shoes with a learning curve”.

I finally retired my red Dansko clogs. I got them WAY back in the day right after Dansko came out with the red ones. 10 years ago? 12? Long damn time. I’ve loved those damn clogs, but they were desperately in need of being replaced. And now they finally have been.

My intention was to replace them with a new pair of Danskos in the black latigo. I found some, tried them on, and loved them (of course), and then I saw these:

And that was that.

I knew when I bought them that the soles were wood (with fairly chunky rubber treads on the bottom which are SUPER squeaky on the waxed floors at the office), and you’d think that would have brought up some fairly obvious points:
1 - There is NO flex here, folks. Wood soles are HARD.
2 - Going up stairs in shoes that don’t flex takes some learnin’.
3 - As does driving.
4 - And going down stairs.
They are, mind you, shockingly comfortable.

It wasn’t until I looked them up on The Internets to show to the Booger that I discovered that part of the reason these are SO hard all over? Steel toes. Who knew you could get steel toe clogs. Mas macho is what that is.

10 Comments | In: General | | #