New SP12 question

What would you consider the perfect amount of stash?

That is an incredibly hard question.  I know that my stash is not the perfect amount of stash because it is predominately sock yarn.  I think it needs to be balanced so that if you want to knit something out of worsted weight, you have some of that…if you need some DK you have that, etc.  I don’t want to have the amount of stash that was linked to. That would overwhelm me.  I have a fairly healthy stash, but if I want to do anything but socks or scarves or fingerless mitts, I need to purchase more yarn.

Busy, Busy

This weekend was rather busy for us.  We had a load that delivered in Virginia Beach, VA on Wednesday of last week and found a good load that didn’t pick up until Monday of this week, so we decided to take it and hang out in VA Beach for the weekend.  That wasn’t really a hardship since three of DH’s kids live there and our brand new (three weeks old) grand daughter is there as well.

On Thursday, we went to see the brand new grand daughter, Taylor Avery, and of course her mom and dad.  She is a beauty (and I AM NOT prejudice, not at all).  Here, let me show you:

Here she is with her grandpa:

And then I’m holding her (don’t I look scared to death?) We got a lot of pictures of her sleeping, cuz that’s what new babies do.  We did get to “play” with her some, but she wanted to sleep a lot of the time we were there.

.  Shes a dolly alright and I hope that we get to go back and see her again soon.  Maybe the next time we go back her mom will actually go out when we go out instead of staying home all the time and avoiding us.  She’s a bit of an odd duck, but that’s okay.  I just sometimes get the feeling that she doesn’t like us much and doesn’t want to do things with us.

On Friday, Bill and I went to see his second youngest son, Joe.  Joe is a tattoo artist at the Blue Horseshoe Tattoo shop in Virginia Beach.  We both had something that we wanted him to do and he was a good egg and came in on his “day off” before he was to come to work to do our tattoo’s.

This is Joe:  This is Joe woking:  See me knitting?  I had to do that to distract myself because it hurt more than I remembered.  I have a cross on my other leg that I know hurt a bit, but this one hurt a lot.  It felt like he was tattooing the bone or scrubbing my skin with a needle.  This is what I ended up with:.  It’s Loopy, the mascot of the Loopy Ewe.  When I was at the Loopy Ewe’s Spring Fling back in April, someone had brought up the idea of having temporary tattoos for next year.  I thought, temporary, schmemporary….why not get a real one.  I asked Sheri, who holds the copyright on Loopy, and she kindly gave me permission to have a Loopy Tattoo.  So there he is.  I think my stepson did a great job, and if you want to see more of his work you can go here and see other tattoos that he’s done.

DH had a tattoo that he hadn’t really liked since Joe did it about 3 years ago.  It wasn’t what he had pictured and so he told Joe he wanted it “fixed”.  This is what it looked like before Joe worked on it: and this is what it looked like after:  .  DH is much happier with it now that the arms of the cross are longet and Joe fixed it by putting a much larger cross behind the one that was already there and then touching up the color on all of it.  Isn’t it pretty?  Here they are when Joe is working on DH:.  All of the tattoos that you can see on DH were done by Joe.  It’s interesting to see the progression of his talent and skill just in the five of them that Joe has done on DH.

After we left the shop, we went and got a hotel room so that we could shower and just chill for a bit.  On Saturday, when we checked out, DH took me to a yarn shop (surprise) to get a couple of things for baby knitting.  I have been made aware that my stash is sadly lacking in anything that isn’t sock yarn.  I had talked to DIL and she wanted a knitted bear for Taylor.  I also found out that her sister is pregnant and due in February and would like to have a bear as well, so I went to the yarn store and bought the yarn to knit them both the stuffed bear from Itty Bitty Nursery by Susan B. Anderson.  DIL also asked for some hats for Taylor, so I bought some soft yarn to make some hats and another sweater.

After the yarn store, we had lunch and then went back over to see the baby and go to the beach.  We couldn’t really go to the beach and swim and stuff because of the new tattoos, but we were able to walk the boardwalk and then walk down by the water’s edge and DS played in the surf a little bit.  We saw the skydiving Elvis’ come down and land on the beach for an Elvis festival the the beach front was having and we saw a group of kids from Campus Crusade for Christ that had split up and were fighting the crusades.  They were funny…all the guys had plastic or cardboard swords and were dressed like the characters from Troy, with the costumes made out of cloth and cardboard boxes.  We watched one team run down the beach and clash with the other, and in the end the “Christians” won the day with one man left standing.

Later, we met up with DH’s oldest son and fiance and went out to dinner with them for seafood.  We went to Rudy’s on the Inlet and I was a little disappointed. DH and I share most of our meals, and we ordered the crab cakes.  The crab cakes were good, but all of the stuff that went with it was way over done and mushy.  We also had a waitress that was more interested in gossiping with her friends than in doing her job.  Anyway, we then took a walk out on the pier and saw a bunch of boats.

I just found this…

Friday fill ins and thought it might be fun to do.

1. A smile is worth a thousand words.
2. Hand and foot is my favorite board or card game.
3. I would love to have more joy in my life and less stress.
4. When I think of the Summer Solstice, I think of warm evenings and lightening bugs.
5. I just remembered I need to check my gmail.
6. One of my favorite song lyrics goes like this: __________.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to sleeping, tomorrow my plans include going yo a new yarn store for yarn for the grand daughter and getting a tattoo and Sunday, I want to got to the beach and see my new grand daughter!

We spent this afternoon visiting with my hubby’s son and wife and seeing our new grand daughter.  Oh boy is she a sweetie.  I will have pictures tomorrow, or maybe later today, when I take them off of the camera.  Our poor daughter-in-law is doing the no sleep thing right now and hating life.  First time mothering is really hard when you haven’t learned yet to relax and let things be.  She’s still in the worrying stage and that’s okay, but I think she’s running herself more ragged than she needs to be.

I guess I need to get some sleep so that I can do all of the things that are planned for tomorrow and the next day without running on empty or fighting a headache all day.  Now I can do that because I finally got the contract sent back to the company that we are picking up a load for on Monday.  We get to go to Seattle, where hopefully it will be cooler and way less humid.

Ciao!!

Secret Pal Twelve Questions

For the Secret Pal Twelve swap, the moderators have decided that they were going to ask a question of the week every week…I missed last weeks, but I will answer it now and answer this weeks.

Favorite Summertime Drink:  I think that my favorite summertime drink is a strawberry limeade from Sonic or half sweet and half unsweet iced tea with LOTS of lemon.  It makes it almost an Arnold Palmer, but I control the sweetness and the amount of lemon.

The question for week two is:

As a kid, what did you look forward to most about summer vacation/break/holiday?

I think that the thing I looked forward to the most was the sleeping in and getting to do what I wanted to during the day.  No school, wasn’t that the best?

Now I need to get knitting, or at least finishing my knitting projects for the baby.

Our first loads on our own

It’s good to be back on the road, after being at my sister’s for 6 weeks, although we are planning on being there for today and tomorrow to get our mail and for DH to do some more repairs to the truck. when we left WV, we went to PA an took a load out to KS, NE, and KS. The load had three stops and paid well. We took a load out of Kansas and went to Montana, Billings to be exact. Now going to Billings paid well to take the stuff up there, but, the problem with taking things into Montana is, there is next to nothing coming out of there.

We delivered the load to Billings on Wednesday afternoon and figured we would be able to pick something up on Thursday. We got up early (like 0500 MDT) and started looking at the load boards. There were a couple of loads that looked promising and I called about them. One of them was hay that was coming off of the Indian reservation going to CA. That paid the bare minimum that we need to stay afloat, but because it had been raining, they weren’t loading. The trucks couldn’t get to the fields where the hay was sitting to be loaded. The only other thing that was in the area was 120 miles away, weighed more than we can legally carry, and paid less than $1.25 per mile. We didn’t find anything on Thursday, and Friday was a redux of Thursday in that the better paying loads were either not being loaded due to rain, or too heavy for us to carry. We ended up sitting for the weekend and then Monday morning it looked like we were going to be sitting because the same loads that had been on the boards on Thursday and Friday were still on the boards on Monday. Also, on Friday, we had found a load that was going to CA that paid decently, but the person that we were dealing with in the broker’s office dropped the ball and never called us back. We did all of the paperwork that they requested, although it did take a while to send because of the crappy internet service in Billings, and then he never got back to us with the confirmation. I kept calling him and he was going to “get right back” to me, and then he said that we weren’t answering our phones. Now I can see if we hadn’t answered one of our phones, but both of them that had full signal….I don’t think so.

On Monday, when the same loads were on the board that had been on the boards on Thursday and Friday, I was starting to get discouraged. I was puttering around online and reading this and that and decided to refresh one of the boards….lo and behold, there was something new and it was a light load. I immediately called about it and booked us on a load going to Utah carrying a 23,000 lb military fire truck. It was picked up at a reserve center that had gotten some newer ones, so they were sending these (there were two of them) to Utah to be stripped and then given to the Air Force to be used for target practice.

When we delivered the load to Utah, we booked a load the next day going to Marion, IA. If you don’t know where Marion is, it is a little north and east of Cedar Rapids. You know, as in the extremely flooded Cedar Rapids? I didn’t realize where this load was going when I booked it, and wouldn’t have been worried anyway, as we don’t watch the news very often. I got a little worried on Thursday evening and Friday morning when we did start watching the news and saw the conditions there. DH was up at O’dark thirty on Friday morning driving. When I woke up he immediately had me get the computer out so that we could look up the information that he had been hearing on XM 171 about road closures and massive flooding. I found out that we could get to Marion, but we couldn’t use a lot of the back roads that would make it shorter. The only road in and out was I-380, and some of the lanes were closed so that emergency personnel had their own venue to get in and out.

When I was trying to get my computer running on Friday morning, I found out that it had crashed big time, and I had to totally wipe the disk and reinstall everything.  I am still trying to get some things back that I haven’t gotten out of my back up.  I am thankful that I signed up for Carbonite online back up.  It keeps you backed up all the time and every time you change a document or folder, it backs up the new edition of it.  With my online service and the slowness of it sometimes, it takes a while for me to get my stuff back, but it is all there.

We were home for a couple of days again, and now we get to take a load down to see our grandbaby.  I have several pairs of baby socks and two sweaters for her as a baby gift.  I made one of those tulip sweaters and I knit two baby surprise jackets, but the first one, the one that’s in my ravelry queue is weird and I knit the second one…don’t have a picture of that one…that turned our gorgeous, yay!!!  Now I just need to put the buttons on them both and wrap the package.

I’m getting geared up for SOS (Summer of Socks) and want to knit a pair for one of my aunts and my grandma.  They are taking our son for two weeks in July (by their invitation) and I thought that might be a nice gift to show our appreciation.  I should be able to get at least the two pair done before we drop him off in the Seattle area the middle of July.

We are on our way to pick up a container to haul out of Baltimore and down to Norfolk, VA.  Not many mile, pay is reasonable and we get to see the grandbaby.