Toe up and other cold weather pleasures

It has been very cold here in northern Illinois -- the thermometer in my car registered -7 F on my way home. I tried to buy gas and the card readers at the pumps were frozen. The dogs have been hesitating before they go outside and my children have been complaining about having to go to school.

All this cold weather has me thinking about knitting warm things. I bought Janet Rehfeldt's book Toe Up Techniques for Hand-Knit Socks at Christmas time and made my first toe-up sock. I found her directions easy to follow, even for a self taught left handed knitter like myself. I used Regia 4-Fach Haltbar yarn in one of Kaffe Fassett's Exotic Colors. Clay contains a number of my favorite colors and created an interesting pattern on my socks. Now I need to knit the second one.

The weather has also been great for sitting at home and reading -- especially when I have unexpected free time because all of the basketball games are cancelled. I am re-reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I love how she captures domestic details. In the book Mrs. Ramsey knits socks for the light house keeper's son. In The Voyage Out, one of the main characters works on a large needlepoint tapestry.

Happy Halloween!

I am home by myself opening the door for the trick or treaters. My children are out with their friends -- my daughter decided to trick or treat as herself because I failed as a parent and did not order her the whoopee cushion costume in time for Halloween. My son has been trying to think of things to claim to be as he trick or treats in his regular clothes -- I suggested a high school student but he said that was too obvious. He was trying to decide between child molester and serial killer when he left with his friends.

As the evening goes on, the trick or treaters at my door get older and fewer of them show up in costume -- it is a little cold out so in some cases the costumes may be covered up by jackets or sweat shirts. I have succeeded in giving out all of the candy that no one in the house will eat. So I can feel the evening has been a success. I also made popcorn in a pot on the stove for the first time -- I have always used the microwave bags or an air popper before. I managed to only burn a few kernels on the bottom of the pan.

I am also trying to transfer an address list from Palm format from a Treo to Outlook so I can have it on this computer. I am trying to decide how long is a reasonable time to wait before I assume it froze and will never finish.

I have been reading. I finished Crazy Aunt Purl's book Drunk, Divorced and Covered in Cat Hair over the weekend and have been thinking about the community of needlework bloggers. I have also been looking at the referrers that show up in my site statistics and found out that there are some blogs that link back to this post. The fact that technorati does not pick them up is a technical issue that I will look into later but it is cool to know that my comments have influenced someone else's work or that someone else has found my blog interesting enough to refer someone else. When I decided to start my blog, I wasn't sure anyone would read it. Almost 300 visitors a month seems outstanding.

Take a Stitch Tuesday

I have been trying to catch up on the Take a Stitch Tuesday challenge. Here is a stitching sample that contains buttonhole wheel, cast on stitch, and crested chain. I need more practice with the cast on stitch but I think that the rest came out reasonably well. I sketched an owl this morning that I also plan to stitch using these same stitches -- I will post my progess later.

I am continuing to read books by Chicago or Illinois authors. I finished Driving Blind by Ray Bradbury. I read many of his books and stories when I was younger. I still remember one story that I believe he wrote -- in it men are living on the moon. They have found life there in the form of some kind of animal and have the ability to turn into the animals and go out on the moon surface. One man makes the transformation and discovers how marvelous it feels to be free on the surface in the animal's body. He never returns to the space station. My next Chicago book is Because of the Rain by Daniel Buckman.

Pinkeep Exchanges

I came back from Texas to find my lovely pinkeep exchange waiting for me on the dining room table along with the package that I should have sent before I left. Here are pictures of both of them. The lovely purple heart and the brittercup designs pattern came to me, the Ewe and Eye and Friends flower basket and the JBW designs heart are on their way to their new owner.

A stitching update will be coming. I have been reading more -- I finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy and have been reading Women in Love by DH Lawrence. In a last attempt to finish reading 5 books by Illinois authors or about Illinois by the end of the week for the library summer book club I picked up some books that looked short and interesting yesterday. I am 2/3 of the way done with a book of short stories by Ray Bradbury. I will see how far I get by Friday.

Fruit and Flower Shares start . . .

I finished a 4th of July project today it is a Silver Needle Secret Needle Night kit. Yesterday, we had a fairly quiet, family oriented day. We had 4th of July food -- hamburgers, hot dogs, macaroni salad, potato salad and strawberries. Then we went and joined the neighbors to watch the fireworks. Our dogs stayed home and protected the house.

Today the fruit and flower shares started so in addition to vegetables, I picked up a bouquet of flowers and fruit. The vegetables selections included beets, Japanese turnips, cippoline onions, garlic, lettuce, cilantro, parsley, arugula and broccoli. The fruit includes organic blueberries, sweet cherries and black raspberries. I cheated and didn't keep the beet and turnip greens because I still have kale from last week and we will be on vacation part of next week but the newsletter had a delicious recipe for beet greens in a coconut curry sauce with pasta that I may have to try next time.

The flowers, as always, are beautiful and I enjoy having them in the house. We have flowers in our garden, but we grow random perennials and do not have much of a cutting garden. I love all the different colors of sunflowers that we get throughout the summer, you can see a deep red one on the right side of the arrangement.

As I have been shuttling kids to karate and back, I have been reading. I finished Sara Gruen's book Water for Elephants yesterday. It was very good -- she presents the main character in his 20s and 90s and presents both well.

A reading weekend . . .

Not much stitching this weekend but a lot of reading. I finally finished Memoirs of Hadrian this weekend. Yourcenar writes beautifully in French and the book was beautifully translated into English but this is not a quick read. I read through most of the discussion from the Book Group List. Unlike most of the readers on that list, I found Yourcenar grounded in the tradition of old French heroic literature with Racine rather than writing a novel about ideas and philosophy or starting the modern historical novel/non-fiction biography. The difference could be that I studied French Literature in college rather than philosophy.

I went on to read Elizabeth Bowen's book The House in Paris and Ayn Rand's Anthem. The House in Paris does a good job of portraying the events through a child's eyes as Henrietta observes the adults and Leopold in the beginning and end of the book. I am not sure that it does as well with the adult characters in the middle. I need to think about it some more. Anthem seemed to me to fit in with 1984 and Animal Farm or even with C.S. Lewis's science fiction as a modern day retelling of the story of Adam and Eve. Maybe now I will be motivated enough to finish Team of Rivals.

This blog is sometimes about books . . .

Last year I read 60 books. This year I have finished less than ten. I still listen to books in the car but I have finished very few actual books. That may be partly because I have picked such long books to read but is may also be because I just do not feel like reading. This is unusual for me and I am sure that it will change.

In the mean time, I have set aside Founding Mothers in favor of Memoirs of Hadrian by Margerite Yourcenar. This was a selection of the bookgrouplist which has now moved on to Ayn Rand. I am sticking with ancient Rome described by the first woman elected to the Academie Francaise. I am cheating in a way, reading Yourcenar in an English translation instead of the original French but it has been 20 years since I finished my BA in French Litterature and I rarely use the language. I find that I can still read French and I can understand a newspaper or decipher a French language web site but I do not use it every day.