Socks, wonderful socks

This is the sock yarn that I received from elann.com this week. It's Elann Esprit Print (cotton with a little elastic) in Fourth of July (you guessed it, the red, white and blue), Brazilia (the coffee and chocolate shades) and Canyon Sunrise (the apricot/peach shades). I bought three 50 gram balls of each, thinking that if I was going to make my sock legs longer than usual, I'd need more, but that sock took less than one ball even with seven inches of ribbing on the leg. Talking of ribbing, you just HAVE to see the photo of the guy in the T shirt that the Yarn Harlot posted the other day - ribbed for her pleasure, indeed!!!

Those pink aluminum needles in the photo are my favourite sock knitting needles - and they are 4mm, not too skinny, so the work grows fast. I started this sock on Tuesday night (during K's Taekwondo class - he goes from 6 - 7pm, I have my class 7 - 8pm, so I get some good knitting time in) and finished Thursday night. I made lots of socks last year and really enjoy wearing them, but you really need to keep knitting them as they do wear out (I have had to darn one pair already).

The pattern I use is from a library book - Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns. Multiple sizes, multiple gauges - my gauge with this yarn and the 4mm needles is 6 stitches to the inch, so I cast on 48 stitches.

With the third ball, I could probably squeeze out a pair of runner socks - just the foot part, perfect for wearing with runners in the summer when you don't want to have white ankles!

Unacceptable!

**Warning - Samantha - Close Your Eyes! - Do Not Read Any Further! - I am about to do a little venting about Mike Holmes. Nothing bad about Mike, mind you, just about the result of watching his show.
We recently got these from the libary. They are a lot of fun to watch and we all really enjoy them. However, the results of watching a whole season's worth in three weeks can be dangerous...life changing, in fact.

We are pretty big into DIY around here. We've redone a bathroom, taken off a leaky roof and put on a new roof, put in carpet, tile and laminate wood floors, done all kinds of outdoor landscaping projects. We've done plumbing, electricity, new hot water tank and too many other things to mention or even remember, but this kitchen reno is taking us a little longer than we thought. Today as I was sanding and puttying drywall (yet again), I thought to myself - Blast that Mike Holmes. ( there, I've said it...now I will cower in my kitchen while I wonder if Samantha is going to come barging into my house and "teach me " not to talk about Mike that way). The problem is that I used to be able to quite happily slap-dash my way through many a home improvement and now, it seems, I just can't do it anymore. I keep looking at my kitchen walls (where I had to take tons of old tiles off leaving me with loads of adhesive gobs and holes, and try to repair it for paint instead of tile) and thinking what would Mike say? And the answer is a resounding, "Unacceptable!"


(this is what the drywall looks like that I am trying to make nice enough to paint over)

What's a slap-dasher to do? I would gladly have Mike and his crew come to my house and fix it (duh! - and not just because of the tank top, lovely muscles and overalls thing either), but I don't see that happening. So I am left to mend my slap-dashing ways, and it is time-consuming, I can tell you. I can't tell you how pleased my perfectionist father will be to hear of this turn-around in my approach to home improvement (many a time I have seen fear in his eyes when I offer to do a job on his reno), perhaps I will get more jobs in the redoing area of my folks place instead of all the demo jobs. ;-)
At any rate, I better get back to the kitchen, it is time to sand some more and then hopefully I can apply some primer. I really want to put on my rock backsplash and just be done with it.

And here is a little peek at some future home handymen . E with a hammer that big? Be afraid!!

Just a little pet peeve.....

I haven't done a pet peeve list yet (and do you really want to get me started Nicola? Could be dangerous.) but the other day we went into town and I noticed a sign that really annoyed me. On a main intersection on the highway there used to be a gas station which is now closed. I can tell it is closed because of the chain link fence all the way around it blocking the entrances. The fact that there is no building left and the gas pumps are gone is also a pretty good indication that, yes, the station is, in fact, closed. In case these teensy clues had escaped your notice and you thought maybe you would drive through the fence and up onto the huge piles of dug-up gravel so that you could fill up, the company has done something to help you out. They've put a huge sign on the fence that reads - This station is closed, please give us a ding at our other locations. Isn't it great that they took the time to make a sign that tells us the station is closed? What on earth we would have done without that valuable information I cannot say. ( I'm not saying that there isn't a valid reason to tell where the other locations are but to state that the station is closed is ridiculous ) So anyway, I guess stating the exceedingly obvious is one of my pet peeves. (But I'm alright with sarcasm)

Baby Surprise Jacket

Finished! A baby surprise jacket from Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitting Workshop book. The first part of this went very slowly, as it wasn't the only project on the go, and I was knitting on 3.75 mm needles, but once I gave it the attention it deserved it finished up fast. It's made in Bernat Softee Baby and I used less than one ball. It looks very odd when you cast off....

....but some nifty folding results in this....


Two straight seams across the top of the sleeves and five buttons later you have a finished baby jacket - I would say it's probably a 0 - 3 month size.

Raw should mean raw!

I can't believe this! The US is going to pass a law that allows pasteurised almonds to be labelled as raw.

Not only will it be very difficult to buy raw almonds, which is going to be a big problem for raw foodists, but it will be acceptable for the nuts to be mislabeled as raw.

There is a petition online - here is the link... http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/mandatory-almond-pasteurization-is-wrong.html

This is totally unacceptable - here is a news article which explains the issue very well. Almonds which have been heated will no longer be living food and will no longer have the life-giving enzymes intact.

Please consider signing the petition!

Traditions.

I love traditions. They are something that I don't really give much thought to most of the time, as they are just a part of my life. It is only when I am talking to other people who don't have the same traditions that I really realize how important they are to me. I am grateful to my parents for taking the time to give me these traditions. As a parent I now realize that it was a bit of work for them to keep these up and make them a priority. I am pleased to carry on many of them with my boys and also to add new ones to our lives as well.



Here is one of my favorite tradtions.




And this one is pretty good too!!

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Hey, how come we don't have a label for chocolate?? That must be an oversight on our part.

**O.K. - I've fixed it, we now have a chocolate label...it really is a must-have!

Who do we believe?

I have watched Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, and found it very believable. But tonight I was watching another video, The Global Warming Swindle, on Google Video. This documentary, which was made for British TV, was also very believable.

Al Gore showed us a graph that seemed to indicate that carbon dioxide levels and the earth's temperature went up and down together, leading us to believe that the increased CO2 was causing the higher temperatures. However, in The Global Warming Swindle, we are told that the temperatures went up first, THEN the CO2 increased a few hundred years later.

Apparently, the greatest cause of global warming is....the sun. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? Increased solar activity has historically resulted in a warmer earth. Our oceans are the main producers of carbon dioxide but, because of the size of the oceans, changes are very slow. The video stated that it cannot be human activities of the last 60 years that are causing current global warming and weather changes, because the cause of these effects probably occurred hundreds of years ago.

It really makes me wonder what to believe, and I feel that once again we are all being manipulated by the people who are funding one side or another. Obviously, there's an agenda here, and I think we have to follow our own intuition as to what is right for us.