I’ve been neglecting the blog lately and neglecting quite a lot of other things too. I don’t want to blog about sad things all the time, but unfortunately these past few months have been full of a lot of sadness for me. In the early morning hours of Monday, April 12th, our most beloved boy, Buster, passed away. He was […]
Both of my “bully gals” are gone now. Gabby and Pinkie — mother and daughter. They had very different personalities, but both were wonderful, sweet dogs and loyal friends. Pinkie was born, along with her 9 brothers and sisters, in our back yard. We hadn’t planned on breeding our dogs. This was our first and only litter. If we could […]
I love autumn. I’m just beginning to realize that this is probably my favorite time of the year, when the heat of the Northern California summer is reluctantly fading away, the mornings are crisp but the afternoons are still tee shirt weather. I can sense the change in the earth’s position to the sun; the light has a different quality […]
I haven’t been here in a long, long time. There’s plenty to write about — I was especially looking forward to sharing my experiences at this year’s Ride for a Reason in early August. I’ll get around to that eventually, but not today. What’s been most on my mind lately is the loss of one of my three dogs. Gabby […]
It’s hard for me to believe that the month of May is nearly over! I’ve had a pretty busy holiday weekend, and I’m hoping that things will settle down a little bit once I get back into my regular work “schedule.” (I used quotes there because my workdays never follow a set routine, and a lot of it depends on […]
I have no excuses for failing to blog. I have plenty of stuff to write about as well as some photos to share, I just never got around to posting. I’ll admit right now that I’m hoping to take part in this year’s Tour de France KAL, so in that case I’d better start getting back into the habit of […]
Two weekends ago the Big Guy and I decided to take a drive to go see some California Redwoods. We both love seeing these trees and it had been a long while since we’d taken the time for such a trip. So we got a rental car, checked our atlas, and hit the road to Calaveras County. Since it’s barely […]
Well, it was windy and rainy and cold — but there was nowhere else I would have rather been yesterday but at the top of Howell Mountain watching the Tour of California go by. Two days before the race, Friday, the Big Guy and I drove from Sacramento to Napa to scope everything out and pick a good place to […]
A week or so ago I started knitting my Chris’s Blues wrap using three balls of a beautiful hand-dyed blue worsted wool I’d bought last August on eBay. I bought this yarn on impulse, just because the colors appealed to me (as well as the price). But it came with very little information. I bought a hank that weighed 150 g (no yardage listed), and when I began winding it on my swift I soon realized I had three separate balls of yarn. Which was a relief, because it explained why I had six different ends sticking out all over the place. “> But not knowing the exact yardage confused me; I wasn’t sure how to choose my project. My original idea was to knit up a sort of keffiyah with it; the mix of blue colors complements my skin tone perfectly, so I thought this was a brilliant idea. Except I didn’t know exactly what a keffiyah was supposed to look like, and of course there are no patterns for such on Ravelry. Instead, I settled on the New England Stole (Ravelry link). It’s a very nice, simple pattern done in beautiful wool. Except that the wool used for the original is nothing like what I’m using. It’s bulky; I’m using worsted. Her gauge is 3 stitches per inch; mine is closer to 5 stitches per inch. The original yarn is put up at 100 g (138 yds) per […]