Kiss My Knits!

Sorry. It had been days since the squirrel showed up. I couldn’t resist. And you can’t tell me Scarlett isn’t eyeing that squirrel. The minx.

Unless someone else is hideously impaled by a crossing guard between now and 9pm or so, tonight is D&D night. Unbelievably, I am still a week behind in posting. Fortunately nothing too outrageous happened last time, so there won’t be much catching up to do. And I won’t be doing it tonight. Em stays up later than she used to so I don’t have time to dig through my notes before the game.

Earlier today I was making cookies. When they were ready, I put my hand in my oven mitt and felt a sharp pain! What happened? Was I burned? It didn’t feel like a burn, it felt more like a sting. And sure enough, I removed my hand and a wasp flew out of the mitt. It wasn’t a bad sting, and the wasp eventually paid for its crimes.

So yes. I had the real life equivalent of a random encounter. Out of the blue, I was attacked by an animal while performing a perfectly ordinary and mundane task. This is the world’s way of telling me that it is time to get back in the D&D saddle. Game on!

This morning on my run, I brought my camera. I wanted to take a few pictures of the Greenway before I got started. This picture was taken from the bridge on the section behind Park Road Shopping Center. You can see how peaceful it is, and why it’s pleasant to run or walk there. Note also the turtle. This was taken about 9:30.

I put my camera away and went running. On my way back over the bridge, I noticed that the turtle had been joined by a second turtle. I thought that’d make a better picture, so when I got back to the car, I got my camera and came back to the bridge.


Holy turtle soup, Batman! Two turtles had turned into at least five. Clearly, this rock is the happening place to be if you’re a turtle along this stream. It rained a bit last night, and the stream was higher than usual, so I have to assume that’s why they’re all crawling on top of each other. It might be some kind of “Shells Wide Shut” kind of situation, but I think it’s probably just about having a prime sunning spot and not wanting to give it up to anybody else.

What I want to know is, why this rock? There are plenty of others. This one must have some kind of cachet with turtles that I as a human cannot see.

Just after I shot this, the little one on the right slid back into the water. I guess it didn’t have a reservation.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to do some knit graffiti, meaning knitting little things and “tagging” public places. The movement started in Houston with the loose group Knitta and has spread. In London, Knit The City has done some amazing things.

Jane Prater recently expressed some interest in this as well, so we’re working on getting a group up. However, you don’t need a group to tag. Following a suggestion to make your first yarnbomb something that has meaning to you, Jane tagged her own tree. I saw it in person and it looks even better than the pics.

My problem with doing instead of just thinking is that I don’t have a lot of free time. When I sit down to knit there are so many other projects I think I should be working on that I don’t often work on stuff just for whimsy’s sake. However, on Tuesday I realized quite clearly what my first knit tag should be.

Public property? Check.
Easy to remove? Check.
Not hazardous to tag? Check.

Here it is, an IPD. That’s Impalement Prevention Device. A bright orange acrylic tube covering the bolt that felled my husband on his bike. It’s not a substitute for filing down the bolt, but it’s a start. Hopefully this will serve double duty and help stop anyone else from running into the bolt. I’ll be curious to see how long it stays on before someone pulls it off.

This product of my 1974 KnitMagic marks my first step into stirring up a knitstorm.

Call me a kninja.

Tuesday morning, my husband biked off to work as usual. He commented on his way out the door, “You know, I’ve saved $60 by biking instead of taking the light rail!”

Later that day, he was felled by the irony bandit.
Tale of the bike wreck, with slightly gruesome stitches pic.

We got some old slides that belonged to my husband’s father scanned yesterday. The fine folks at Biggs Camera here in Charlotte did the work. It was very hard to see what they were on the very old 2″ slides, but turns out they’re from New Year’s Eve 1960 going into 1961. His dad remembers because it was so unusual to get snow, and that’s why he took the pics.

Yesterday was my husband’s birthday, and having these turn out so nicely and being able to talk with his father about them was a great birthday treat. Kudos to the guys at Biggs for turning this order around in just two days.

For the graphically inclined, tutorial on white balancing using Photoshop. I used this technique to further color correct some of the scans, and I’ll definitely use it again. Very handy!

Em’s root canal yesterday went fine. There were some bumps. I had understood that it had been verified that insurance would cover the sedation, when apparently that was not the case. We’re working with the endodontist to get the insurance company on board.

Em has to be sedated because bless her heart, she’s a very anxious dental patient. She is fearful of doctors and dentists in general, but when it turned out that the sedation would come via a shot instead of the mask which she was familiar with, her scream could be heard from space.

Everything went well, though. It took her some time to recover, and in fact she still looks a little beat to me today. She’s been having her dolls play that they’re injured. One of her dolls frequently gets a broken ankle from snowboarding, and yesterday she said, “I think that when Gwen found out she had to have a cast on her ankle, she must have felt really scared, like I did when I found out that I had to have a shot in my arm.” That’s the first time I’ve heard her verbally empathize with someone that directly. She’s been doing it unconsciously for a while, having her dolls act out situations similar to her own, but I haven’t heard her say it outright before. Projecting your own emotions into someone else’s situation is a great skill to have.

As I was playing with her last night, I had one of her dolls go trick-or-treating.

Me: Trick or treat! What do you have for me?
Em: A root canal!

Note to self: skip Em’s house at Halloween.

A lot has happened in the last few days. A LOT. I’ll post when I get the chance.

This is a long shot, but I have a favor to ask.

I almost never go to McDonald’s, but I did last week and they were having an American Girl giveaway with their Happy Meals. Em went nuts for the little American Girl book which included paper dolls in it. Trouble is, the books are a series of eight. We’ve only been able to locate three, and the promotion ended this past weekend. Mommy’s little collector really wants the remaining five.

Does anybody happen to have any of the American Girl Happy Meal toys that they don’t want? We have Kit, Julie, and Felicity. I’ll pay postage if you’re not local.

I appreciate the consideration!

I’m about out of shipping containers, and pricing out my next batch, I realized that I can get white boxes in the same size for a slight increase in cost. It’s fairly negligible, but if everybody’s happy with the brown, there’s not a lot of point in taking on any extra cost. I will point out that Jayne’s original box was white, although my box doesn’t have the same dimensions. That’s because a) the foldy boxes are expensive enough that I’d have to raise prices, and b) shallow enough that I worry people would accidentally slice their hats opening the box.

Here’s an old pic of a brown box. The white box would be exactly the same size and dimension. I think the stamps would really pop on the white. I’m curious as to what people think.