Unconscious Mutterings and other stuff

We’ll begin this week with some unconscious mutterings:

Red tape ::government
Crush :: orange
Magical ::  OZ
Sticky ::tape
Tile :: ceramic
Doubt :: when in
Inconsistent ::  ly
Kiss :: my husband
Inspiration :: Ravelry
Thanks ::  for the good times

If you want to play, go to Luna Nina and copy the same words that I have.

I’ve been knitting a lot, but haven’t been taking a lot of pictures.  I have done some knitting for KAL’s for Super the Summer Knitaway, and I did Christmas knitting, and also for a swap where I had to spin the yarn and then knit the shawl.

I knit some Clepsydra Mittens as a gift for my niece Lindsey to go with an Emma’s Star hat that I knit her.  Both of the items are knit from  Madelintosh yarn in the Cove colorway.  The hat used the sport weight and the mittens were in DK weight.  I started to do the Beaded Fingerless Mitts, minus beads, but I didn’t have enough of the sport weight and then I mistakenly bought the DK weight because I was buying by color not weight.

I knit the Horizontal Ribbed Hat for my other niece out of Koigu.  The colors in the yarn are blues, browns and yellowy oranges.  It turned out really nice.  I’m doing some fingerless gloves for her, using a basic pattern and then adding a cable up the top of the hand using the same yarn as in the hat and then adding a brown cuff.

I joined the plurk spin/knit along and had to spin the yarn for the shawl and then I had to knit the shawl.  I purchased 12 oz of fiber in two different colors to make sure I had enough for the shawl.  I spun it up and then knitted Kleio out of the yarn I spun.  I say I knitted Kleio, but what I really did is kind of knit the pattern.  Because I was using handspun, at one part of the pattern you are knitting a braid and it was twisting the yarn so badly and not untwisting as promised, that I lost some.  I didn’t have much to lose and so I cut two of the braids out and did other patterning.  I like the shape of it and love the colors, although they aren’t my colors.  I knit it for Beck, on Ravelry she’s Lemonhalf, and she assures me that she loved it.  Here is a picture:

We are getting ready to go home to pick up our mail and to take a trailer load of hay to my aunt and uncle.  We won’t be doing the hay fetching again, at least not from the person they bought it from this time.  He’s a jerk of the first order and it’s taking forever for them to load our trailer.  I’ll do another post from home to show you the swap package I got from Monet.

Also, I have been a member of BzzAgent for a while now.  BzzAgent is a word of mouth advertising kind of thing where you sign up for BzzCampaigns and they either send you products for free to test out or send them to you for a nominal fee.  One of the campaigns that I am involved in right now is about.me.  You can do an about me page for all of your social networking pages and have the info be the same for all of them.  If you are interested, click here

One Day Shy

It’s one day shy of 11 months since I posted on my blog…guess it wasn’t as much of a habit as I thought it was.  It’s been an interesting 11 months with some changes, but not as many as I would like.

We are still on the road, still driving a truck and still trying to build our house.  Trying to build the house without a mortgage is trying in these economic times, but we stay on the road and try to stay busy so that we can save money to buy building materials.

I still knit while we drive, but it seems like nothing ever gets finished, or I don’t get pictures of what I’ve knitted or what ever, so I don’t have much to show for knitting.

I did participate in an afghan square knit for a friend who is doing a raffle to raise money for breast cancer.  My square is the one in the lower left corner.  LisaLisa is the one who organized this and she is raffling it off in conjunction with something at Starbucks. This is the blog that she started to show what she was doing and why.  I knit my square in honor of my friends daughter, Laura Kutcha.

We were home in October, and this is the snow that we woke up to one fine Wednesday morning.  DH was going to work on the truck, because the compressor went out on it and we had purchased the new one the day before, but he didn’t because of the 9 inches of snow.

The boy is still home schooled and is finishing up 9th grade.  We don’t necessarily do things in the traditional school year, but we do do things  in a way that works for us.

This is the front of our house.  There is a porch that will sit on those boards that are above the stone foundation rocks.  This is the front of the house and where that big black tarp covered thing is on the deck is the end that has our bedroom.  This end is the kitchen and the living room.at I

This is some yarn that I actually spun myself, and I’m pretty proud of it…

WOW!!!

It’s been since June since I blogged.  I was going to blog about the house and the progress we’ve made on it, but there hasn’t been a lot, so there’s been nothing to blog about there.  The rest of my life is just that, life…it’s no more interesting than any one else’s, it just happens in more places.

I am going to play Unconscious Mutterings with Claudia today…

1. Block :: your shawl
2. Comforter :: quilt
3. Santa :: Clause
4. Tape :: your mouth shut
5. Humor :: is the spice of life
6. Charity :: for those less fortunate
7. Receipt :: for your donations
8. Hospice :: care
9. Stuffing :: blech
10. Binge :: eating

As always, if you want to play, link it back to Claudia’s blog so that she knows you played and everyone else can see your answers.

I have some knitting content…finished Wendy Knits Lady Bertram Shawlette a couple of weeks ago and finally got it blocked.  I can’t get flickr to work for me and let me post pictures, so I’m going to either have to use another service, or figure out what flickr is doing.

I’m going to have to play with things so that I can post the pictures of the things that I have.

I was doing so well

and then I decided that I can’t blog everyday…my life is just not that interesting and to blog just for the sake of blogging is not what I want to do.  So anyway, if I can keep up a pretty reasonable schedule of blogging I will be happy and the fact that I have blogged 15 times this month is pretty good.

We’ve been working on our house, and until yesterday and today, you really couldn’t see the progress because the changes were just little and not very noticeable.  But yesterday we started hanging the floor joists and now you can see some real progress:The floor will sit on top of these and then we’ll have a deck to stand on.  After we get all 47 of them hung we’ll start putting the sub-floor down and then we can take the wall up another 5 feet.

We have a Jack Russel Terrier that I’ve shown before.  One of her character traits is that she is nosy…she has to check everything out.  We were working on the joists and all of a sudden she had walked the beam and jumped up on the joists to see what they were:Now this is something that you would expect from a cat, not a dog because dog’s don’t usually have this type of balance, but here she is.  There is about 14 inches between each of these boards.  She also walks the walls of the house:  and the beams inside the house:

To be fair, I had called her to come to me and that was the only way to get to where I was, but still, she jumps the walls and gets on the beams and walks to where she wants to.

I’ve been helping on the house and even have a hammer of my own…we had to color code them so that we knew who’s was whose…think the boys will use mine?Nope…me either!

We got a picture of a gorgeous sunset tonight and the boy went out and took several pictures of it:

and here’s another one:

I had posted about the Medano Fire and here is a picture of the smoke cloud that we can see sometimes from our house…this one was taken on June 20th, but the link will take you to the current info about it:One of the effects of having a wild fire burning so close to your town is that a bunch of wild land fire crews move in to fight it.  We were having breakfast last Sunday and some people came into the restaurant we were eating at and asked if they would feed up to 130 fire fighters that night for dinner.  Now this is a pretty small establishment and there is usually one waitress and a cook on duty.  There is no way that two people could do that, so DH and I volunteered to come in and help with the serving and dishes.  DH was a sport and spent the whole night washing dishes and we ended up serving 87 dinners to the fire crews.  I bussed tables, filled pitchers, drinks and etc.

Look what my friend Sarah of Perfect Day Yarns dyed for me:  

I asked for a solid or semi-solid brown to complement another of her yarns called Stout Old Ivy to knit one of Wendy’s Patterns, Norwegian Rose Socks.  I love that she named it Mother Trucker cuz it was for me…I LOVE Sarah!!!!!!  Go buy Yarn from her…her cashprose is yummy, as is all of her yarn.

I also was able to get a skein of Wollmeise from a destash:

Makes you want to like the screen, huh?

Still in Colorado

I have decided that I might not post every day for NaBloPoMo, but I am posting considerably more than I was before, and that’s a plus. I am getting more in the habit of posting, and again, that’s a plus.

I want to take some pictures of the yarn that I have in the truck so that I can post it, and I might do that when we get back to the truck. I also want to show you what I got at Estes last weekend, and I will try to do that when we get back to the truck.
Here is a picture of the Churro ram that we stood around and admired for several minutes. We were also chatting with the owner about raising and keeping churro, because DH wants them for their wool.
He’s rather good looking, for a great big ram.

This is a picture of our Jack Russell Terrorist, Kenni. She decided that it wasn’t time to get up in the hotel room over the weekend and so she got back under the covers and went back to bed…yes she’s bad, and yes she sleeps under the covers every night.

I went over the the NaBloPoMo website and looked at the prompt for today:  If you could take a train journey through any part of the world, where would you go? Gosh…that’s a little bit of a tough one.  I love our country and would love to go through the northwest on a train and see things that we can’t see from the highway.  I would also love to take a train tour of Ireland because I really want to go there and see the whole of the country.  I would also like to go take one through Europe because I would love to see parts of Europe, especially Germany, France, etc.  See…kind of tough for me because of the amount of places I would like to go.