7 Quick Takes (Vol 247)

February. The month when you start to see the light at the end of the winter tunnel….and you hope it is not a train. You know what you need to do. When you are done basking in the blather warmth here you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of melting snow in Sochi, Russia, over to Conversion Diary.

Oh, and incase you follow me with an RSS feed and wonder why you got this blog post twice…it is because I was a bit “quick” on pulling the post trigger and realized that I hadn’t written the introduction. Let’s try this again shall we?

Blather that even Vladimir Putin envies.

1.
I love the Olympics but I feel like I am watching entirely too much TV. I am not normally a daytime TV watcher. In fact, unless there is some huge news event that I am monitoring I rarely turn the TV on during the day.

But for these two weeks it is Olympics on the TV almost all day long.

And may I say, the “color commentator” that they have for the Cross Country skiing events, I am afraid that he is going to have a stroke by the end of every competition. I had no idea that anyone could get that worked up about a cross country skiing event.

I am exhausted just listening to him.

And one more thing….

Bob Costas PLEASE get better. Matt Laure is a poor substitute.

2.
It was a whopping 32F yesterday. I felt like I should break out the shorts and t-shirts it seemed so warm out there. And the weather person is saying that it will be in the 50s next week.

Heck we might even, eventually, get as warm as Sochi, Russia….where it has been in the 60’s. Which is what you would expect for a port that is able to sustain palm trees year round. But NOT what you should have for the Olympics.

Just saying.

3.

I treated myself to a trip to Half Price Books yesterday. I love that place. I have loved Half Price Books since I discovered their flagship store in Dallas during my nursing school days. It was a place of wonder and discovery, much less well “organized” than my current local HPB and therefore all the more fun. I could get lost for hours.

Why I am telling you this after showing you a picture of a woman standing on a step stool looking at books on the top shelf? Well it is because of what this woman is doing. Something that I dislike.

She and her companion (who smelled so strongly of smoke that I couldn’t share an aisle with him) were diligently going book by book, scanning them with their little hand held scanners, looking for books that they could buy cheap and resell at higher price. You cannot see it in this picture but that cart is full of kids books.

OK, I know that they have to make a living but I hate when these people do this. They act like they are doing something wrong, scanscanscan look around to see if anyone is watching scanscanscan. I am sure that the staff of HBP know they are there and that they are fine with what is happening but I just dislike it. I hate even more, I mean REALLY hate it, when I encounter these same kinds of people at our local library book sales. They are usually first in line and when admitted start grabbing books and making a huge pile in a corner of all their books. Now they might not buy all of these books, they haven’t scanned them yet, but the books are not available for someone else during this time. Then they scan the books, buy the ones that they can sell at higher price and leave the “discards” in an unruly pile in a corner.

It makes my blood boil. And I will admit, that for one brief moment when she was in the bathroom, I thought about taking some of those books and reshelving them just to be ornery.

Stepping off soapbox now.

4.
I have become a lazy blogger and therefore an inconsistent blogger. I am not sure at what point in the last several years I drifted into writing my blog post in the afternoon. It may have been a gradual things, a slippery slope that just kept me sliding down into bloggilaziness.

I am not really an afternoon sort of person. I don’t get as much done after around 1p as I do in-between say 6a and 1p. That is my “golden time”. So, when I am blogging in the afternoon what often seems to happen these days is that I will think, “Oh, I need to go and write a blog post.” But then I look at the clock and realize that it is 4p (or sometimes later) and I just don’t get downstairs to do it.

So, I am going to try changing things up a bit and blogging in the morning if I can. We will see how I do. Also, I am not really tied always to blogging using my computer. Now that I have a QWERTY keyboard for the iPad I can very effectively blog from there as well (which I did yesterday).

Of course no one may actually care when or if I blog……..

5.
In rooting around in my freezer this week, a place that is still a bit disorganized from the move SIX MONTHS AGO, I made a discovery…..

Three more packages of my homemade fruit leather. I had completely forgotten about these, not having been over impressed with my efforts at the time. I am surprised that I didn’t just throw them out when I moved the freezer contents from OCK to Chez Knit. But there they were.

I decided to try one again…..

Guys I LOVE THEM!! Tart yet sweet. Packing a fruit punch. I wondered why I hadn’t liked them all that much at the time and then I remembered what the problem had been. They had seemed just too brittle and dry. I have solved that problem though. When I want some I just take them out of the frig and put them on the counter for 5 minutes or so. They warm up a bit and soften up and are fabulous. I can see that I am going to have to make some more as soon as fruit season comes around. Actually, I have a boat load of apples in the frig from my apple picking extravaganza last fall so I may experiment with apple fruit leather.

6.
It is just about this time every year when I start to think about flowers.

Flowers that I am going to put in planters and pots.

February is the month when we all need to start thinking about color and sunshine and flowers.

This year it will be a bit different for me as I now have landscape beds that are taken care of by someone else. No more do I have a huge back garden to indulge myself in. But after watching what happens with the landscape crew I can see that there are some things that I will be doing. Once the snow recedes from the land (I sound like a northern version of Noah) I am going to start spraying the Hydrangea bushes with deer repellent. They have decimated the planting and this must stop. The landscape crew isn’t going to do this, not their job and frankly I doubt if they know or care. It is me or the four footed marauders deer…and I am going to win. I am not going to plant flowers in the landscape beds but I am going to extensively use pots etc. My brain is spinning with ideas.

Now if it would just get warm.

I may actually have to go out and buy a plant that has flowers on it just to get myself through.

7.
We all need a bit of laughter during the dark doldrums of winter.

Here you go.

You can thank me later.

I Have Found My People

So, I have mentioned that the first batch of beer turned out to be good....but light. That was to be expected considering that was what the kit was, "American Light". We have made it work, it is OK, tasty even, with a lime wedge in it. But it is still lite.

HHBL and I, as a rule, do not drink any kind of beer that has the term "light" or "lite" in the name. I seem to have found that I want a beer that tastes like a beer and not.....pissy water. I have also mentioned that we try to avoid any beer that has been brewed by one of the "Big Brewers" i.e. Miller, Coors, Budwieser. That also means that we try to avoid any of the lesser breweries that have been absorbed by the BIg Brewery Borg. You would be amazed what beers that encompasses. Yes, we are beer snobs.

Since I finished that first batch of beer I have been thinking about brewing my next batch. It has been a back of my mind obsession. So today I figured that I would pick up another one of the Mr. Beer kit refills. No reason not to start a new batch of beer, this time perhaps an IPA or ale as those are what we like best. The Mr. Beer website told me that I could pick up a refill at my local Target. I thought that was a bit odd but went ahead and swung by there on my errands rounds.

Nada.

I wandered the hallowed Target halls but didn't find where the refill kits might be. I asked at Customer Service and after the pimply faced clerk (who looked a great deal like Stan Shunpike) called someone with one of those little scanner things and that girl concluded that the refills could only be ordered on line I moved on.

I knew that there was one other place where I might find what I needed. It was a little place called Leeners and it was just around the corner. I found it, I parked, I opened the door......

And I heard the angels sing.

An entire store completely devoted to brewing beer, making wine and all sorts of other things like a kit for making fresh mozzarella cheese or BUBBLE GUM!! A true "do it yourself" candy store. But as I stood there in front of all the beer supplies, oh the beer supplies, I just didn't know what to do. I have done only one kit. I didn't see anything like what I had used before. Oh there were kits but I wasn't sure if they would work with my kit. There were parts and pieces that made up a whole but I didn't know what to put with what.

And this was when I had to make a decision. I had to ask for help.

I do not like asking for help.

Did you know that? Even if I need help I do not like asking for help. I want to be able to walk into a store and know just what I need and where to find it. To ask for help might mean that I don't know what I am doing, that I am ignorant.

I hate that.

But it was necessary. So I looked around for someone to help me. And that is when it struck me. I saw only women working there. Only women.

This place is owned and operated by women.

I can do this! I can ask another woman who obviously knows about beer (boy howdy do they!) what kit to use. I just happened to grab Kathy. With disappointment she told me that they no longer carry Mr. Beer kit refills but that the other kit refills would work. However they didn't have any IPA refills at the moment. She even went to the trouble of looking at what had come in the shipment that they were unpacking at that very moment. Nope, no IPA. I tried to tamp down my disappointment and started thinking about what other refill I might like to try when Kathy said,

Oh, I can just make you up a kit while you wait. It won't take long.

Whaaaaaaa????? Yes please.

And so Kathy grabbed some yeast from the frig. And some malt extract from a shelf. And she ground some of the barley for me. And grabbed the correct hops. And had me read through the instructions so I understood what I was supposed to do......

And I brought it all home.

Guess what I am going to be doing on Saturday morning.

A beer brewing store run by women.

I have found my people.

Now if they were also knitters I think my brain might explode.

 

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The Perfect Thing To Go With Curling

This year, in the spirit of The Yarn Harlot’s original Knitting Olympics, I am working to finish a project that I cast on shortly before the start of the actual games.

It is going to be a stretch to get it finished.

I am going to have to knit hard.

Stay focused.

Watch endless ends of Curling.

And as is my way, it is a project that deviates from the pattern as written. Heaven forbid that I just do the pattern as written, right? What sock pattern have I ever left truly and utterly alone.

I am making it sound like I got out graph paper and pencil and reworked the entire pattern. That is very far from the truth. I looked at a boat load of the already finished projects on Ravelry (this pattern is actually written as a really long scarf), thought about all the sock yarn in the stash and decided that I would just make the whole thing bigger and badder and…..

It is going to be so freaking AWESOME.

This is actually the wrong side of the wrap. And I have to tell you that I love it. LoveLoveLoveLove. What is not to love about a project where BOTH sides are just so utterly pleasing. I can hardly wait to finish this thing. And that is why I might just actually get it done before the closing ceremonies. I get up in the morning and want to race through what I have to do so I can sit down and knock out a row. I am finding the linen stitch to be completely hypnotic in it’s working. 600 stitches PER ROW. Row after row after row after row. Each row taking around 20 minutes to finish. With fringe forming at the ends. I am not all that fond of fringe on knitted things (that is an understatement) but with this Rainbow Wrap of Awesomeness, it is going to be just so “right”.

Back to knitting.

I cannot stop myself.

7 Quick Takes (Vol 246)

Guys, I almost forgot it was FRIDAY!!! Chalk it up to menopause brain. You know what you are supposed to do. After you have looked over my Gold Medal winning blather you need to click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of Bode Miller going down hill, over to Conversion Diary to see what else is going on.

An Olympic sized pile of blather.

1.
You know what happens when you don’t pay attention to the calendar?

You end up with a year of Amazon Prime that you hadn’t intended to sign up for.

I am usually on top of these things, you know. Amazon “kindly” offered me another trial of Prime, a month for free. I had some things to order so I said, “SURE!” all the while knowing that at the end of the month, before they charged my credit card, I would cancel.

And then time got away from me.

Dope Slap.

So you can bet your bottom dollar that I am going to make Amazon Prime work for me this year….and then cancel.

I have already written myself a note to remember.

In the words of one of my nursing professors, “If you didn’t write it down then it wasn’t done, even if you did it.”

2.
Just for those who have inquired about the actual socks that I keep saying I have…..

This is half of the drawer full. And the socks in the bottom left corner are the pair that was finished last night. I have already wound the next skein of yarn for the next pair of socks. Now to decide on the pattern.

I don’t care if I have a “sock” issue. Every time I look at them I am happy.

And we ALL want me to be happy.

3.
Let the orgy of TV watching begin!

I don’t normally watch TV during the day, unless I sit down to watch something specific on Netflix. But as of 7:30p tonight I will be watching as much of the Olympics as is humanly possible. We do not have a DVR so it will have to be what I can catch on the NBC stations.

Skiing, Ice Hockey, Biathalon, Ice Skating, Luge……

CURLING!!!!!!!

4.
Second gigantic batch of beef stock is done and in the freezer. I think I can stop for a while now.

But it is so darn addictive to just throw all these disparate parts into a large roaster, add water and then let it cook for 24 hours. And when it is done……….

Magic.

This time, after I had strained the stock and let it cool I got to thinking about the fat that solidifies on the top of the stock. I hate to waste anything so I got onto the internets and found that I can reheat that, render out the water, put it in a container and either keep it in the frig for a bit or freeze it. I fried onions in some of it for our French Onion soup this week.

Amazing.

5.

We had homebrew last night. It is pretty good for a first attempt. The kit came with a “light” beer and I would say that this tastes very similar to Corona. I really wanted to add a lime to it. But as there were no limes to be had….I did without.

Next up will be an IPA. I think I am going to stick to refill brew packs for a bit and then perhaps branch out into doing most of it myself. But I need to do a bit more reading before I venture down that road.

I generally don’t like a lighter style of beer but I like this one just because I actually made it.

6.
I am contemplating the purchase of a canning size pressure cooker.

PRESSURE COOKER PRESSURE COOKER PRESSURE COOKER

There, that should get the NSA to come knocking on my door.

Where was I? Oh yes. In my continuing quest to be as “non-processed” food as I can I am thinking ahead to the coming summer and what I might need a PRESSURE CANNER/COOKER for.

I think the best option is to have this lady,

tutor me on the finer points of pressure canning. If it can be canned I believe that MrsPinecone can and has done it.

And besides, if I go over to her house to learn then I can hang with these crumb crunchers….

7.
And to round out the week let’s just have a selection of Instagram pictures.

Because I really don’t have ANYTHING better to do with my life that document it on Instagram.

I Wouldn’t Have Bothered If They Didn’t Cost So Much

These socks are no more.

Let us have a moment of silence for “Phoenix Rising”, pattern: Fawkes by Monkey Toes, knit with Malabrigo Sock Yarn in the colorway “Light of Love”. They lived three good years. I enjoyed our relationship for a time. And then, on Tuesday evening…….disaster.

It is Winter here in the Frozen Northeast Ohio. I might have mentioned that. And in the winter time I wear wool socks to make sure that my feet, from my toes to my heels, stay nice and toasty warm. If my feet aren’t warm then the rest of me will not be warm. And personally I feel like my tootsies are worth the effort of hand knit socks. It’s a mutual foot love fest around here in the winter.

I had noticed recently that my Phoenix Rising socks were wearing a bit thin in the heels department. I even mentioned it at knitting on Monday night. We all knew what was on the horizon. On Tuesday I was sitting on the couch, knitting and watching an episode of “Hoarders” when I felt a slight draft on my feet. A slight disturbance in the Foot Force, if you will. I looked down…..

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Drat.

And now came the dilemma. What to do with Phoenix Rising. The first, and most obvious solution would be to take some of the left over yarn  from the original project (knit in 2011 by the way) and darn the heels. Not a difficult task and a good idea only there really isn’t all that much of the yarn left and what is still available in my stash is already being used in the Never Ending Sock Yarn Mitered Square Blanket so scratch that idea.

Next option is the tried and true “just put in a new heel” option. This also isn’t all that difficult and the good Lord knows I have PLENTY of sock yarn to put in a contrast heel. I would have had to replace the heels on both socks but that wouldn’t take all that long.

But I nixed that option for several reasons. Along with replacing the heels I would also have had to replace the toes, which were also showing some wear and tear. Again, not a difficult thing to do. However, the fiber on the foot area of the sock, between the toe and the heel was also wearing a bit thin. That is a problem. I am sure I could find a pattern for knitting a reinforcing instep for a sock. But by the time I found the pattern and knit the thing….I could have knit an entirely different pair of socks with yarn that wears a bit better. The time outlay just wasn’t worth it.

Guys, I have 40 pair of hand knit socks in the sock drawer at the moment and another pair that will come off of the needles this evening most likely. It isn’t as if my life will be bereft of socks if Phoenix Rising is no more.

I know, I know. I have a sock problem. I readily admit that I might need a sock intervention.

Then what did I decide to do?

Obviously the “easiest” thing to do would just be to pitch them into the garbage and go on.

Ummmmmm, do you know how much a skein of Malabrigo Sock Yarn costs?? They generally run around $20/skein. That translates into about $10/sock. That isn’t the most that I have ever paid for a skein of sock yarn, but it certainly isn’t the least. If this was yarn that I had purchased from Michael’s or JoAnn Fabrics then I wouldn’t have bothered to go to the trouble and time of snipping the yarn just above the heel flap, carefully picking out the yarn, frogging it, re-skeining it, soaking the skeins thereby insuring that my hands will be freezing for hours since I have to get them wet with very cold water…..

Hanging the skeins and drying them (which is where we are in the process as I write this), and finally re-winding them (and measuring yardage). All in order to get only about half the yardage that I started with.

This is what happened to the rest of it. Sniff.

And all because I cannot, psychologically, contemplate getting rid of Malabrigo yarn.

But I can guarantee you that I will not knit another sock with Malabrigo. It just doesn’t withstand the clogs.

Why Do I Keep These Part Ad Infinitum

iPhonography. Did you even know that such a thing existed. We all take pictures with our phones. We snap selfies and landscapes and food and the occasional pet.

And what happens when to those pictures after you are done snapping away? Are they deleted when your phone will no longer take a photo cuz there is just no more room. You know who you are on that one. All the photos that were a good idea at the time……

If you are me (and don’t we all wish we were), then you do a bi-weekly “photo dump” from iPhone to computer.

And don’t think about it again until you realize that there are A LOT of pictures in that file on the computer and maybe you need to look through some of them and decide if you should keep them.

Since 2014 is another year of clean out here at Chez Knit, especially photo clean out, I thought I might regale you with some of the, shall we say, lesser iPhone endeavors that I have found on my computer hard drive.

Once I humiliate myself then I will feel OK to hit the delete button. Everyone has to have their own form of motivation. And possibly explanation for why I took the photos in the first place.

I don’t even think we should discuss my closet love affair with McDonald’s cheese burgers. The perfect mixture of salt, fat and preservatives all packaged as food.

I might be in trouble after posting this. We call those recliners the “Chairs of Inevitable Sleep”. Obviously.

Does anyone, and that includes me, care that I stood next to Jim Tressell (former coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes) and sneakily took a picture.

This one definitely goes in the delete bin.

I was bummed when forced to throw out my cheese stick science experiment. It had sat in the cheese drawer of the refrigerator for EIGHT years and still wasn’t moldy. Some people objected to moving this very important contribution to the world of science.

I don’t understand why.

This is my foot having a foot massage by a very nice young woman who spoke no English. She is actually filing my heels.

TMI?

Genius. Sheer genius. But I am still not going to keep the picture. I might, however, go out and buy some of these.

I have absolutely no idea. And yet, I went ahead and downloaded it to my computer. The mind boggles.

HHBL and I were moving an old King size mattress out to the curb before the move. I made him stop so that I could take a picture of this feat of super human strength.

He just shakes his head at these things.

Can someone remind me why I took a picture of pigeons on the sidewalk?

Alpha, why are you taking yet another picture of my nose in such a way that it makes me look like the canine equivalent of Jimmy Durante?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Short shorts, a white t-shirt AND a clutch purse. My fashion sense amazes me sometimes.

And obviously I didn’t take this one with my iPhone considering this was taken in 1978 and I wouldn’t have even contemplated a phone that wasn’t connected by a cord to the wall. If you wanted to have a “private” conversation and your roommate was in the room you had to take the ROTARY telephone, stretch the cord as far as it would go, slide the cord under your dorm room door, take the phone physically out into the hall and then talk in a very quiet voice.

Good times.

I have no idea how this photo got from my computer hard drive TO my iphone and then back again.

Magic?

I will be staring in iPhone Photo Hoarders soon.

Super Bowl By the Numbers

1. I am still walking through a fog today due to the after affects of the annual Super Bowl extravaganza at LaurenLeap and The Tech Guy’s house.

2. I took exactly four iPhone pictures before I descended into food madness. And…..I didn’t even BRING Big Bertha with me. I knew she just needed to stay home.

The stuffed mushrooms that I brought, just waiting to be heated in the oven.

Cheese fondue! Oh be still (possibly literally) m palpitating heart. I suppose we should have waited for the other guests before we started sampling from the pot…….

But we didn’t.

Add another ale to my growing taste collection.

Let the Foodapalooza begin! This picture only gives you a SMALL idea of what we had to eat. What you cannot see is the salad, the stuffed mushrooms, the Jana’s Doo Dads, the potato skins, various other dishes and later on…... the chocolate fondue.

And after this picture I just put the iPhone away, opened my mouth and started shoveling stuff in.

3. Oh Payton. I feel so bad for you. And to be perfectly honest, I am not sure what team was wearing the Denver Broncos uniforms but it certainly wasn’t the team that sent the Patriots home for the year. I really dislike Super Bowl games that are a blow out. It is much more fun to have a closely played game that comes down to the last seconds to decide.

Last night was not that game.

4. Today I got up and remembered why I have pretty much banished certain foods from my life. We don’t keep any kinds of chips or crackers here at Chez Knit because if the bag is open, I am going to shove the chips in my cavernous maw. And then I am going to feel sluggish and yucky. That would describe me to a tee today. And also the fact that this morning I woke up and it felt like I had spent 3 months in the Sahara desert.

Water….must….drink….water.

5. The best commercial of the night…….

Doberhuahua!!!!!

Or perhaps the Jaguar commercial with Ben Kingsley, Tom Hiddleston and Mark Strong.

I would like Mark Strong to just do my voice mail greeting for my phone. Seriously!!

6. Whose brilliant, and I am saying that with HEAVY SARCASM, idea was it to mess up a perfectly fabulous Bruno Mars performance by introducing The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Good Golly.

7. I am trying to detox today with things like green tea and a smoothie made with my homemade yogurt and frozen fruit.

And perhaps about a gallon of coffee.

8. Man I hope I feel better tomorrow.

9. I am glad that we do this only once a year.