Ask a Geologist

For the kids (of all ages), I am putting in some fun stuff and one of them is Ask a Geologist. It's under fun stuff.

Geology and Fine Arts were my double majors at Uni, and it may seem odd, but these two diverse disciplines wedged together like two tectonic plates and fought for dominance until I was about mid twenties with motherhood and craft overtaking the Fine Arts, and camping trips thither and yon standing in for the Geology. It was so fabulous to show the kids all the layers of rock in a road cut and what they could mean, and all the amazing variety of rock and cobble that weathering plucked and replanted hundreds of miles from the point of creation.

I was hoping for another Geologist to spring up out of the younger generation.. No luck.. They all did pick up the arts and crafts, and have an enduring love of sewing, yarn adventures, as well as camping and trekking. One of our daughters was a back country crew boss for Americorp and was based in Yosemite back country for a few years, too. They all love to play in the dirt- there's that Geology- as they are gardeners with endless energy to work the soil. So, the Geologist transmogrification is complete =0) and I couldn't be happier.

Finally But it was rather fast at that

I've got the all clear on the bones of my head, and the soft parts, too. Whew! Now on to the rest of life, just taking care not to ever take such a crashing spill again.

Emotionally, today was a wash. I hope everyone else's day was better. Please hurry on Winter! We need you! Fall here is just as hot as Summer. I have to figure out how to stay cooler and to knit more. Sitting in a kiddy pool seems too hard on the back, and the Lazy Boy wouldn't stand up to a soaking wet woman squidging her damp self back into it every half hour after a spray down with the garden hose.

Another must-do is to stay away from all the bad news that floats in the windows. Hardly anyone I know is responsible for it anyway. I know a few responsible-for-the-present-situation people, but they are either so old or so unread that they just don't know any better and can be forgiven for it. Forgiveness does as much for the forgiver as it does for the foregiven. I choose Peace and Forgiveness.

Well, that's enough about quilts

I've decided on a Majacraft wheel. Now to nail my feet to the floor so that I'll stop waffling around trying to leap to new conclusions.

I wanted something beautiful, like Pugknit's wheel, but I need something completely practical based upon the reality in which I live. I will have to settle for the beauty of function and some beauty of form thrown in. That's not completely an Arts and Craft Model statement but it will have to do. Now to save the dough for it.

Don't want to sell the dog, the knitting machine or the hideabed, but it's not looking good for the hideabed. It's been used about three times in 7 years. Shouldn't sell the yarn stash but could sell off my small collection of real pre 1960's Cianti bottles, the kind with the real straw, on ebay. This is desperate.

Here's another quilt top you didn't see. The blocks were all made from fabrics from your grandmother's stash and some of the whites from scraps from your clothing when you were growing up. I wanted you to see this here because it's now a quilt very far far way at the Evan O'Neill Memorial Veteran's Home in Massachusetts. I told you about him, he was the son of one of my quilting buddies. He was killed in Afghanistan. All the members of our quilting group made one quilt each for the beds there, and a block for a special wall hanging to be hung in the Lobby.

Hello Girls. I found a picture of one of my two raffle Christmas wall hangings so thought I'd show you what I was doing in quilting before I got bigger plans of making everything into a business. Big mistake!

This is one of two identical ones for two different raffles. They are really a nice dark Christmas green but this is a very old and grainy picture.

Making do

I couldn't find any straight short 2's in my needle stash so some little DPN plastics from the 60's where pressed into service with a needle tip on one end. Every once in awhile when people found out that I knit, they gave me some of the neatest stuff from their mother's or grandmother's attic (the word "drawers" just sounded very bad here). One lady gave me these little guys, and a piece of thread lace her grandmother was making. It had gotten rust from the steel needles but I am going to figure out how to take a close up anyway and share it. It's very lovely. I think it was for the edging of a nightgown or something.

Finally the weather is cooling off and I don't feel like the robot,Reet, suffering the breakdown of his positronic brain in that ScFi novel!

I wanted to show you all the progress on the bandage. There's another foot to knit but then it gets washed in hot water and dried, and rolled up to be sent. The knitting machine is coming out for this next time, though it will take adjustments to keep the edges from rolling. The little bag has tortoises in a line along the handles. One of the stitches on my machine. Gotta love um!

Girls, you never got to swing in the hammock between the trees, but it was so peaceful and cool there during the hot part of the day. B, that is your sculpture. The one that spins with the wind. I put it in the garden and the jays love to stand on the very sharpest tip and do their surveillance. We still feed them peanuts from time to time.

I spent some very pleasant and cool afteroons looking up at the canopy of the elms from our hammock. The tree people ground the stumps out on sunday. The milky smell from the wood sap still wafts in the windows at night on the cool night air. My daughters loved these trees and played under then with their bunnies all scurrying about helter skelter in and out from under the deck.

One of mother's coffee can baby. 35 years later and the day before it was removed. This is the tree that was trimmed after lightning hit it one year.

Busy week

The Chinese Elms have been removed. They are, those 35 year old beauties, now simply history and exist in only a few pictures.

They came to our house in coffee cans, twin volunteers from my mother's tree, and only two feet of spindly sweetness, each. We nursed them through an annual attack of Nightcloak butterflies for about ten seasons, as well as a poison, seeping down through the soil from the garden behind us. This was another neighbor who hated the huge Mulberry tree in our other neighbor's yard. They didn't seem to care at all that other gardens were even further downstream, as they poured gallons of herbicide on the roots of the Mulberry. You could see the path of destruction through our yard leading right down to, and engulfing, the Elms. We flooded our yard to flush it out of our soil and into the street, feeling sorry for whatever it would eventually sicken as it made it's way via the storm drains to the sea.

I also found out that the pain I've been having for a year was caused by several cracked ribs that didn't heal properly after a bad fall. And today I went to have a CT scan to see what I did to the part of the brain pan that hit the cement last June. They are comparing the CT's. I am comparing the new me with the old me. So far it seems to be only dexterity in my hands, a thickening tongue, and hearing loss but that could be from not wanting to listen to this world anymore. That might explain the far away stares, too. People do get disconnected as they see or hear more than they ever could be expected to take in and survive.
Is that not so?

DD got a spinning wheel, a little Louet she says. The woman who owns the shop where she bought it put it together for her free of charge. That was very sweet of them. Sometimes people do the nicest things. I will go see this little wheel someday and decide if it is the one for me as well. Escaping into fiber arts and the other gentle arts can heal many disappointments. It's a blessing that women have these things to turn to. The little bandage is now fully half as long as it needs to be to be bundled up and sent away. Soon it will have sisters and brothers to accompany it. I've found that I am knitting a good thought and a little prayer into each stitch as it goes on the needles.

Summer time is busy!

I am reading four books, two of which have a time limit so have had to set the other two aside. Now I'm reading What's the Matter With Kansas, and Moral Politics ---- what? No underline?

I've also gotten a first obscene post (political) here and so have changed some things. I'm pretty sure I know where it came from. They love to post anonymously but can't break certain habits that make the posts very characteristic. She/he followed here from another forum I used to post at. So, if it shows up again, it's easy to get rid of. I'll let my pet Martian eat their posts. He's well trained.

Torrey Pines Beach: a view down, from the cliffs

Yeay! Summertime and the Sea!

Well..... the picture didn't come out well at all here so I will just upload it through Hello and Picasa.

I am happy that summer is here. I love this picture of Torrey Pines taken from above, on the trail in the Torrey Pines preserve, so it's my summer seasonal header, too.

The knitting of the bandage started this am ( I will get the piccie up soon as it's longer- very plain but beautiful in it's white simplicity) and it is a joy of a project to do. I put Naprous' link in the "Things to Do For Others" Header. There is another favorite place called "Ugly Quilts" that is very worthwhile and a person even gets to do some creative designing with re-cycled clothing.

Got all my threads for knitting the Bandages

Today DH and I went shopping and I got two sizes of thread to make these bandages for tropical sores. This is very mindless knitting and I am glad of it. Mindless is how I feel at the moment. Thanks to Naprous from Knitter's Review for the information and the web site for this cause. Now I feel like the minutes I can steal away from HTML fiddling will have a higher purpose!

I got my picture back. In fact I like it better. Now to get a different font without having to wrestle with someone else's linked CSS! But really, I should declare a truce and just knit.

A higher purpose!

Flower Basket is gone.. Oh well, me and HTML

we are mortal enemies now. I really would take a fork and knife, a steak knife actually, to HTML if I could. The pieces of it would be re-cycled in the composter. My flowers would benefit most, and HTML would be buried as it should have been a long time ago, with all it's little rules like, "No white space!", "Not so much as a comma out of place!" I miss my little picture. The link is broken. May it rest in Peace.

PS.. I still hate HTML but I may have won this little skiffufful... Tomorrow is another day. I plan to make HTML pay for this. There has got to be a way to make HTML pay for my headaches, baldness, and stomach lining etchings.

New Header

And man what a job that was. With help from the Knitter's Review Bloggers it is finally going together. I've just got to go knit now to get my head back. This is one of the Seasonal theme headers, Christmas in July? I will change it more now that I know where it is. I must find better Text and Colors for the title.

All and all, it has been kind of fun. I must now go install a new toilet seat just for the heck of it. Then to knit and to rest my eyes.

Sweater things are all in one place and I am going to knit it this afternoon. Brother and Sister coming tomorrow for lunch. Yippie! I haven't seen my brother for several years.

Well, well...

I've lost all the links now. I'm just too tired to be going and getting them back for awhile.

I had the pattern and the WIP and climbed up into bed and got all comfortable on my pillows. I picked up the work, looked at the pattern and read that I needed the larger needles Annnnnddd, that little cable needle and neither of them were with me. Once I get into bed and get the pillows just right, and this was at 12:30am, I do not budge! So, I will get that first row started today, Noonish.. The bright side is that there is better light and I'm more awake. The down side is that it laundry day and there's a lot of it. Since both things will be there tomorrow, which would you pick?

Right! I'm doing the knitting!

I lost a link in my fiddling!

Sorry Amy.. I was editing and lost it but I love your blog and am putting it right back in!

Wow that's over!

Firecrackers in the middle of the night didn't happen this year. I wonder who moved away? Jasper can't stand the buzzing of a pager, but he is deaf to thunder and fireworks which is a blessing for him and that little ticker of his.

Ok.. I'm being brave today and will get the first row of that lettuce Aran and the stitch markers on tonight after midnight. It's quiet then, and I'm not a bit nervous at that time due to camomile tea, valerian root and various arthritis medicines smoooothing the way to sleep and mindless knitting. What comes of mindless knitting may be frogging but that will be tomorrow. So, tomorrow may just be Frogday, better known as Wednesday. For now this is the grand plan. My life is tiny, but it's all I've got. Using it well will be the best thing I could do with the gift. Thank you to the powers that be for giving me these fingers. I am soooo happy not to have been born a cloven hooved creature, though some may argue that point with me, philosophically speaking.

All in A Day

My DSis came over on Friday with some good news and some bad news. She is getting worse, and though she feels better and is losing the edema that the medicine caused (25lbs worth) she has started to explore the possibility that she will be disabled sooner than she thought. She does not want to quit her job but it looks more like she won't be able to hang on to it. She works with her hands. Her head and other hand have started to shake now and there's just no stopping this disease. She has Parkinson's. I'm really not dealing with this very well, so I can only imagine what she is dealing with. Our brother is coming down for a visit after July 4th, so I imagine we will get together some and talk about this. I can feel my own life stalling out because of this sick worry so I know that this is happening to her. She is nearly ten years younger than I am so she has been my baby a long, long time.

The next project poised for the leap, the Lettuce Alpaca Blend yarn from Knitpiks. Please don't trust my camera, this is a nice color. DH is color blind so he sees this as a nice dark tan. Poor fellow. I keep dressing him in greens!

Also, can someone tell me what is wrong with my African Violet? I feed it and it blooms but something has to be wrong with it.