Back from vacation, and I'm exhausted.

The tomatoes are growing! Turns out what they really wanted was to be left by themselves for a long weekend without my poking and prodding. The Rabe is about an inch and a half tall! Amazing little boogers. The basil seeds are molding however…maybe I shouldn’t have left the plastic covers on the trays while I was out of town, but I have this fear of the cats discovering them and thinking “ooo, fancy new litter boxes with real dirt.” Taking the bitter with the sweet I’d have to say that everything is pretty good in garden land, I’m going to thin the Rabe when I get home tonight. I’ve heard other gardeners say that they don’t have much heart for thinning, but I think it’s sort of fun. Only the strong will survive, and everyone else will be pulled up by the roots…har har!

Kentucky was great, and I could ramble on about it endlessly but it would be a lot of names of people and a lot of "and then we went there" and "and then we drank Bourbon." If you really want to be subjected to that, let me know. This is the second time that Dready and I have roadtripped together and we seem to have some bad weather mojo (or juju as Dready says…but that might just be French for mojo). When we went to Chicago for Thanksgiving it took us 6 and a half hours instead of 4 because most of the Michigan portion of the journey was driven at a 30 mph crawl in a white out blizzard. The Kentucky and Indiana weather demons have a bit more imagination. We were being good little out of town tourists on Saturday and went to the Maker’s Mark Distillery, to pay homage (ask me anything about Bourbon I know it all), and on our way back we were hit by two tiny blizzards. Suddenly instead of being surrounded by pastoral farms with grazing cows and weathered barns we were in the middle of a snowstorm, windshield wipers going on full and unable to see 10 feet in front of the car…then mysteriously we were back in the pastoral farmland again, with not even a flake of snow on the ground. Freaky! Then when we were driving back the same thing happened in Indiana while Dready was driving, only worse and with more cars on the road, and she proclaimed it to be the scariest thing that had ever happened to her insisting that I take the wheel. Then it happened again when we were about 40 miles away from Lansing, and it was so bad that everyone who was stuck on the highway was limping along at about 5 mph. It probably only lasted for 1 minute or less, but that seems like a long time when you are sure that you are about to die.

We pulled off into a gas station and called the Manimal to get him to check the weather and he said “There’s nothing on the radar,” in a tone of voice that sort of implied that I was insane. It had stopped snowing by that point, but it had been bad enough that we were contemplating staying where we were until the plows or the salt trucks came out to clear the road, but we were thirsty for Michigan beer, damn it, and had been looking forward to it for 5 and a half long hours of driving. So with some trepidation we got back on the expressway, and after driving for about a minute the road was entirely clear, and there was no snow to be seen anywhere! Insanity! We have two more road trips planned, one to Philly in March and another to Santa Fe in June, and I can’t wait to see the expressions on the New Mexicans when we pull into their state on the heels of a freak blizzard in the middle of June.

Now a confession. I came to this blogging thing fairly recently, and therefore I am the only knitter in the known universe not participating in the knitting Olympics. Also it seemed like the idea was sort of to watch the Olympics while knitting on your Olympic project and I don’t have a television so that seemed impractical. But by freakish coincidence I did end up watching the opening ceremony, and I felt sort of…guilty? is that possible? about not stitchin’ something up. So I worked on the skull shrug. Unhappy news about the skull shrug: evidently I cannot be trusted with bamboo yarn, it does not have the strength necessary to hold up to my rugged knitting style. A strand broke along the edge and it is starting to unravel, and because it’s on an edge I can’t figure out how to pick up the stitches and get them to not look all wonky. It is a black half sweater with a big red skull on the back though, so I think I’m going to patch it with some red silk or something, and just let it be all raggedy and goth like, it’ll be better that way…really, I’m not pissy about it or anything. And I’m half way through the second row of skulls on the “we call them pirates” hat. I am not a pattern follower, but I’m following this one. I even learned how to do a provisional cast on, aren’t I proud of myself, yes I am thank you. And it’s my first fair isle ever, and you know what? I think I like it!

And did I mention that my tomatoes are growing!!! Yay!

And (since I’m starting sentences with “and”) it’s only 5 more days until the Fiber Festival. I’m gonna buy me some big ole’ balls of fluff so that I have something to spin that’s more fun that this awful linen that I’ve been suffering through for the last 3 weeks.

And if that’s not enough for you then here’s a link. You can take this quiz to find out what kind of yarn you would be, if you were yarn. I know that it’s totally legit and everything because it said that I would be Merino…and that’s my favorite thing to knit with, so I’m sure that it’s right. It didn’t specifically say that I was Kona Superwash Merino hand-dyed by Nancy but I’m sure that’s just because it wouldn’t fit in the little pop-up window.

It was nice to be gone, but it's good to be back.
RAGNAR!!!!