kitchen skills:
Potato pancakes and a pizza in the shape of Florida (minus the panhandle). Recipes by Deb, of course.
frolicking skills:
lounging skills:
catskills:
whale skills?
Boh, my best friend M, and I met up for a long weekend of mountain air, good food, and bad tv. Crosswords were completed, legs were stretched, brains/selves tired from work and school were rested/restored.
Thanks, M. I love that we continue to make time for frolicking.
I am by no means healthy, but progress (in the form of a hacking cough) is occurring. The good news is that my nose no longer begins to drip the second I look down, meaning that yesterday I was able to do some of my wallowing in illness while knitting.
Sickness trumps gift-knitting, so even though there are a few more WIPs to finish in the Christmas pile (Thuja for my uncle, that acrylic scarf for my mom), I decided that I could knit a few rows on my 28thirty yesterday. As you can see, I knit until it was time to separate the sleeve stitches from the body, and then I let my sniffeling self try it on before bedtime. I love how this is coming along, so much so that I think I am going to take it with on my mini-spring break weekend adventure to the Catskills. (Fingers crossed that my health is much improved by the morning.)
Yesterday I made a very simple couscous vegetable soup — saw this post over at everybody like sandwiches and decided that it was just the thing my sick self needed.
This guy has been a huge help to me this week. Dogs know when you don’t feel good, I think, because Boh has been extra kind in the cuddling and quiet time department. He has certainly earned some frolicking time in the Catskills!
Yep, hard to believe, but I get even cornier when I’m sick. I’d be willing to categorize this particular sore throat/headcold combination as “sick-as-a-dog” if I didn’t have a perfectly healthy canine snoring peacefully on the couch behind me. I wish he’d stop rubbing it in.
I’ve consumed a couple of quarts of miso today, and I’ve also worked on ingesting as much superfood as possible — which means I even mashed up a few cloves of garlic and threw them into a homemade lemony salad dressing in order to up my allium intake. Hot showers, lots of herbal tea, a pre-bedtime mug of Therma-Flu (which I’m working my way through as we speak) — and some pouting to the boy round out the day’s medicinal treatments. I WILL be better tomorrow. I have to be. I’m so bad at being sick.
I did a very little bit of knitting today — when the full on head cold developed, it became hard to look down without also encouraging the snot to pour out of my nose. I did, however, discover that head colds go nicely with spinning. Standing makes it easier to breathe, and I felt less silly with something to do while standing in order to inhale less laboriously, which prompted me to start the second half of my January Spunky Club fiber:
Apologies for the busy and somewhat blurry photo. I didn’t have the heart to wake and move Boh off of the more plainly colored couch.
Alright. Fingers crossed that I wake rested and find my health returned.
It has been gently raining for the last several hours — maybe even all through the night, and I am sitting here with my first coffee cup of the day, listening to the different sounds of the drips on the driveway, the water hitting the branches of the pear tree by the window, the fat drops falling from the gutters in a different kind of rhythm, and I’m wishing that I didn’t have to go anywhere today.
We had a really nice weekend — a bit crazy busy in that both of our academic schedules had events and dinners and guests well into the weekend, but lovely in that we found time to hike in misty forests, pick our first bag of greens at the farm I joined, and discover a chili-cook off in the grocery store of a nearby town.
I failed to document these events with more than my mind’s eye, and I’ve been too busy to knit this week, so here are some snapshots of Monday morning.
Nope, I didn’t knit this — but someone did. This slouchy, sheepy cardigan is a find from my new favorite thrift store in town. The sweater has been clearly loved — a few small holes, some evidence of repair, a missing button, but I just could not leave it to languish on the hanger. This sweater is perfect for reading, tea-drinking, and crafting, don’t you think?
And it cost me 9 dollars. Crazy. While wearing this sweater, I made some progress on my toe up socks at a lovely craft night/This American Life radio gathering hosted by a dear friend. Here’s the Monday morning kitchen photo of how sock number 2 is coming along:
I can’t wait to wear these. Maybe by the end of the week?
Also, we enjoyed more “Deb appreciation time” this weekend, in the form of smitten kitchen recipe preparation. On Friday afternoon, I made her key lime coconut cake. I halved the sugar in the frosting, but otherwise, followed Deb’s instructions. This is a a fantastic dessert — light, citrusy and a little sweet, with the added bonus that it is easy to rationalize eating a slice for breakfast.
We also made a recipe from Deb’s archives for dinner on Friday night: the indian-spiced vegetable fritters. These were absolutely delicious, and the process was just what we needed. Nice to be in the kitchen together chopping, frying, stirring, etc. after a long week. We were too busy eating to take lots of photos, but I do have one of the final batch of fritters in the frying pan:
Again, yum. I ate the last few fritters for dinner on Sunday straight out of the fridge, and they were just as tasty!
How did it become March? As seems to be my blogging/morning routine, it’s time to pour a second cup of coffee and continue reading. Have a great day!
Wednesday is the day I get to stay home. I have no obligations calling me to campus, but I tend to have the most important book of the week to read — often for a meeting Thursday morning one-on-one with my advisor. These are the books that tend to speak to me, and these meetings, while often incredibly challenging, leave me with a feeling of affirmation that this is what I want to be doing. That part feels good.
The actual process of reading a book for a Thursday meeting? Time consuming, because it needs to be read carefully (and should be, given that it is more relevant to my fields than most of what I read in my other classes). It is so easy to read 20 pages, only to realize that your mind was wandering, and you didn’t really catch what so-and-so was getting at in chapter 3. That does not quite cut it during Thursday meeting, so I’ve taken to using Wednesday to get other things done during the reading process in order to make sure I’m paying attention. All this to say that, despite the fact that I have no actual pictures of the reading process, I can show you lots of the things I got done yesterday, in between chapters:
Hung out with the dog:
Baked oatmeal-cranberry-walnut cookies, based on Deb’s recipe from earlier this week:
Worked more of the foot of the sock, in 5 or 6 row increments throughout the day:
After a particularly long chapter, I took this guy to the dog park:
What a ham. I also managed to do laundry, bake a loaf of bread, and have an ichat knitting date with a dear friend. I realize that this post makes grad school look like a piece of cake, but I stand by this particular approach to Wednesday: solid, focused reading, a chapter at a time, interspersed with productive tasks (laundry, errands, food prep) and fun (knitting, playing with dog) helps things to stick better, and means I don’t waste as much time losing focus/drifting off/etc. Note to self — do this more!
Apologies if the blog is getting a bit repetitive! These days I feel like my schedule looks a lot like this:
Read (a lot). Knit (a little). Repeat.
Time to pour another cup of coffee, read the epilogue, and make some thoughtful notes for my meeting.
Or should it be up? I am thrilled with the way this turned out. I haven’t done any of the regular tidying — weaving in ends, closing up small gaps near picked up stitches, etc. and it looks terrific! I’ll try to self-edit as I post, as I may have done some rather excessive photo-documentation of my very first toe-up sock.
The yarn is Madelinetosh Sock in Colorway Pool. I’m using size 2.5 needles, and I modified the tutorial for a 52 st sock to account for yarn weight and my gauge. When increasing for the gusset, I increased one side of the sock to 40 st, and then when it was time to work the heel, worked something like k12, ssk, k13 in order to center the heel over the center 13 st (1/4 of the regular sock stitches). I picked up 9 st along the decreased edge, and followed the instructions to get back to my magic number of 52.
As I’m unfamiliar with judging when to start the ribbing near the end of the sock, I do have a little bit of yarn leftover, and my ribbing is a good inch and a half. I can’t believe how quickly this flew off my needles once I picked it back up. Excited about my toe-up momentum, I stayed up late last night and worked the toe of sock number 2.
Unrelated, but entertaining:
He sat/stood like this for good ten minutes yesterday. My laundry is ready to go into the dryer, and I am ready for a second cup of coffee. Wishing you a productive Wednesday, and lots of toe-up sock confidence if you’ve been afraid to try it. This particular tutorial made the process painless — and I’ve certainly done my share of floundering with other sets of instructions. Thank you again to Andrea over at knittingbybicycle for clear notes and photos of the first section of the toe. What are you waiting for? Go check it out.
This week, I’ve been reading a lot about Progress (with a capital P) and modernization in the 19th century. Something about all the language of improvement, advancement, expansion, etc. made me pick up my toe up sock project again (despite the fact that I think I most enjoyed reading things that explored the uneasiness with ideas of modernity that existed alongside the narrative of Progress).
Strange light in my house this morning — these socks have a lot more green in them than you can see in this photo. The lights and darks are definitely pooling, and there is a big weird dark splotch near the top (a function of the calf shaping I’m adding rather sporadically), but I actually love the big chunks of light/dark that make stripes.
After several false starts, this sock is flying. This expansion of my sock-knitting skill set would not be possible without this tutorial over at knitting by bicycle. The heel does not involve wrapping, and for that, I am extremely grateful. I’m so excited about being able to knit tall socks without worrying about how much yarn I’m using, and I’m thinking that this is going to turn into an almost knee-sock! (Yay.)
I took this picture last week: fried eggs, homemade bread, good coffee, and at least ten minutes with the New Yorker = a good day.
Back to work — hoping to reward myself with finishing this sock today!
Hooray! The seaming is finished. And it wasn’t even that bad. (Note to self: Remember this the next time I let a sweater languish because it needs to be seamed.) Baby sweater seams go super quickly.
Details:
Mission Falls 1824 Cotton, 3.5 (?) balls. (might have been 4.5)
US 7 needles
3-6 mo size.
I would definitely make this again.
The goal was to have this finished in time for my weekly independent study with my advisor — which isn’t for another two hours. Victory!
Time to get back to the book we’re discussing…
The keyword there is “feeling,” folks. Yesterday was such a day: only a few hours of academic work was completed, but I managed to go grocery shopping, make all sorts of deliciousness in the kitchen, teach someone to knit, and attend reading group.
Smashed chickpea salad, adapted from Smitten Kitchen. (Shocking, I know.) My version lacked olives and bread, to make it a sandwich, but this was even better than I expected.
More applesauce bread (I’ve been making at least a loaf a week lately) and Mark Bittman’s basic brownies — I know I’ve posted these before, but it has been several months since the last time I baked them. These were for a friend’s birthday. and they were every bit as good as I remembered them to be. And so easy! Why aren’t you making them already?
Yesterday afternoon, after several days of green grass and muddy walks with Boh, the snow began to fall again, in huge, wet flakes. Yay!
Progress on the baby sweater. At last. The ribbed baby jacket is blocking, and is almost dry. This afternoon, I will sew the seams together and weave in the ends. I ended up making a buttonhole in case I go that route, and after looking at snaps yesterday, I think I’d prefer a bright button. If I can’t make it to the yarn shop, I may swipe the blue button from my gathered cardi. We’ll see…
Time for coffee and actual productivity, instead of just feelings of productivity!
barefoot rooster 