What Housework?

When did Halloween happen?

So I'm getting ready to put together a blog post before we leave for Massachusetts this weekend (wrestling tournament for my younger stepson) and I find this among the unposted photos:

And this:

And it occurs to me that I haven't been paying attention to the days flying by.

Here's the deal. There's work, there's a little writing, there were about 30 bushels of apples (that's 65 pounds per bushel), the animals, the house, the family, knitting (mostly for Christmas, not for sharing here, as the recipients read this thing) and so it goes.

The blog is the place where I make note of all the small but special parts of my life that I otherwise might not notice or appreciate, and the fact that I haven't photographed or posted much just shows that things are, as I suspected, slipping past me. I think I need to slow down a bit.

I have one photo that sort of sums up my daily routine:

Laundry and turkeys and autumn sun. Could be worse.

Oh, there are goats.

Don't be fooled by the innocent look. They hop the fence whenever they feel like it and raid the chicken coop feeder.

Speaking of chickens, meet the new girls.

It's hard to get good poultry group photos, as they jerk around a lot. These hens are egg farm rejects I intercepted just days before they were sent to the great cat food can in the sky. They've had one year of laying so they're probably about 18 months old, and technically they're "spent," meaning having molted once, they won't lay every single day. Two bucks each, and I've been averaging 1-2 eggs a day from them as a group. (Short days = few or no eggs.)

Anyway, institutionalized chickens aren't the healthiest looking things (which explains the pale-yolked, fragile-shelled qualities of supermarket eggs). They're scrawny, their combs are pale and floppy, their beaks have been trimmed (although these girls' don't look too bad), and they stink to high heaven.

The first couple of weeks, they didn't dare venture outside the coop. But now they're starting to, and you can't get a still picture.

(That's ice from the waterer there.)

Their combs are standing up now and they're acclimating to life on the outside.

They are very talkative, more so than my homegrown birds, and very curious. They have quickly come to associate me with food, and Flora, the lightest one above, runs right to my feet whenever she sees me. It does my heart good to see them peck the ground, run around, roost, and enjoy natural chicken behaviors, most or all of which are denied battery-farmed chickens. Of course, they could end up as fox food, too, but then again they'd already be dead if I hadn't snagged them.

The turkeys are growing, but once again will be spared from the Thanksgiving dinner table by my softie husband (a wild turkey hunter, wtf?). Next year, he swears.

Two of them insist on roosting outside (the white one is hard to see on the left, but the other is above the turkey house).

And of course, there is always Milo. The most affectionate killer cat ever.

We're heading into the holidays, not typically a mellow time and weatherwise not conducive to colorful  photographs. But picture me knitting away as time permits. I finished my handspun sweater but can't bring myself to photograph it until I rip out the cowl neck (itchy!) and the not-so-clever garter stitch raglan seams (stretchy!). If the weather had been colder, it would have been done by now.

I'm up for "Crock-Pot Friday" at work tomorrow, so I'll be up to my eyeballs in beef stew and dinner rolls tonight. 

Have a good weekend. Pet your cat.

Who wants a cat?

Just kidding, we're keeping him. But Milo, he is truly a possessed semi-feral animal.

The pictures above show him in the morning. He comes in for breakfast after a night spent terrorizing the local small animals. He expects affection done just right; pet him the wrong way and he eats your arm.

Each day, I go upstairs to shower and make the bed, and within seconds, he races up there, alternately running around under the sheets and then hiding under the bed, the better to attack my ankles. After a few minutes of making the bed with one hand, and using my other as a defensive shield on my legs, I get cranky. I wait for Milo to attack my forearm and then I walk out into the hallway, shake my arm vigorously until he lets go and drops off, and then race back into the bedroom and lock the door.

My hands look like I get a daily manicure from Edward Scissorhands.

Anyway. Life is busy. There are some things to report, such as that my older stepson proposed to his girlfriend last Sunday. (He bought the ring in July, but has been waiting to ask her father for her hand. Let's just say they do things a bit more formally in Oklahoma than in Vermont!) Both of them are still in college, but again, in OK this does not seem wildly impulsive. In Vermont, I knew exactly one person who got engaged while still a student. He also just started a full-time firefighting/EMT position at the Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City, even though he has half a semester to finish out at OSU. Should be interesting. He's a hard worker, and at worst he'll have to take one more class next semester, on his dime. The wedding will be in Oklahoma next summer (!) but he wants to have a huge second reception back in Vermont. At our house.

Okie-doke...

Back in the relatively uneventful life of Jessie, there has been some knitting.

I made some Fleece Stuffed Mittens for my daughter from the Robin Hansen book, using unspun wool/angora rabbit for the thrums and two strands of my Long Trail sock yarn for the mitten. Delicious.

You see two mittens but I actually knit four in total because I had to rip each one out once. I'm so tired of thrums. And, it turns out, my 10yo LOVES them, except not to actually wear in public, let alone school, because they are very bulky. Nice. See if I ever knit her four mittens again.

I also knit something more enjoyable: Ishbel. (Note the yucky incandescent-light photos; short days have come to Vermont.)

Ah, you say, "But Jessie, you are not a knitter of lace. You have a pathological fear of yarn-overs."

No, I'm not. And yes, I do. But this was far too easy and fun to be lace. I don't know what it was but I loved it. Knit with my bamboo blend sock yarn in the "Martha's Gown" colorway.

I didn't get a good picture of it, and you'll notice that my points on the edges ended up fading away and even curling a little. I'm not sure if it was the fiber content or my blocking procedure. (Note: If the only rug in your home is on the floor next to your husband's side of the bed, make sure you don't leave any stray pins around. Men can be so whiny.)

I still haven't done anything but the sleeves on my handspun sweater. The yarn, in case it's been too long for anyone to remember, is this:

I think I want a pullover, but I can't decide on the yoke. Round yoke? Raglan? Turtleneck? Hoodie? I just don't know. But it's so cold in my office, I need to make up my mind soon. There's a Downy commercial on TV these days where a woman steps off the elevator at work wrapped in a down comforter. That's what it looks like at my office; two people actually bundle up in blankets at their desks.

However, I'm already planning Christmas knitting (not for the 10yo, oddly enough). The bright side of our personal economic crisis (which is, I'm happy to say, easing up a bit, 10 months or so after it started) is that we've done quite a bit of Christmas shopping, as odd as it sounds. Rather than have the big all-out shop-a-thon in December, we're picking up one or two things a week as the grocery money allows. It's not going to be a normal over-the-top Christmas (which I hate anyway; my husband's the crazy one), but I'm thinking we may be able to avoid the mall altogether this year. One can only hope.

Okay, as I am going on and on, let me say there's been a lot of this:

Pumpkin pie made with the only little pumpkins I managed to get out of our garden. I had to buy more this week and today I'll make a pie and put the rest of the filling in the freezer for this winter. So delicious. We're still rocking the freezer full of our own meat and frozen veggies and fruits. Nothing beats the flavor.

Also, I had a shop update last night, which many of you already know from A Piece of Vermont Yarn & Fiber's mailing list. If you want to receive extremely infrequent updates, sign up here.

Bamboo Blend sock yarn, two skeins of each:

Late October:

Gingerbread:

Mountain Laurel:

Olive a Sudden:

Merino/Tussah silk 80/20 blend top. Remaining colorways are

Truth or Dare, 4 ounces:

 

Wildest Dreams, 8 ounces:

Okay, I think I've gone on long enough this morning. The house is a mess and the chickens want out of the coop.

Have a good weekend.

How have you bean?

Thanks to everyone for all the condolences (X3). Honestly, there has been little time for mourning around here -- it's the harvest!

Granted, we're hardly a real farm, but that doesn't mean we haven't been up to our eyeballs in corn, apples, some tomatoes, carrots and even beans.

On a whim this summer I decided I wanted to plant some beans for drying. I was hoping for mostly navy beans with a few kidney beans and something new: soldier beans. Unfortunately, the navy beans didn't take in the soggy part of the garden, and most of the soldier beans succumbed as well. But these unassuming looking pods, which I dried on the vine,

Yielded these beautiful beans:

Now, I do like a lot of soups and stews in the winter,

so even if I could have bought the same beans for less than a dollar,

this was a lot more fun, and more satisfying.

Before the beans, there was corn. We didn't plant any this year, but a friend of mine helped me pick six brown grocery bags full (approx. 150 ears!) of beautiful sweet corn from her own crop.

I spent two very long evenings shucking, blanching, cutting, bagging and freezing some 44 bags of corn. The freezer is full, and I'm exhausted, but the freezer is full.

I've only picked a few carrots; I'm leaving the rest in the ground to freeze a bit and sweeten up. They're not beautiful, but they're tasty.

Then there are the apples. The goats, having run out of anything good to eat in their pasture, have been jumping the fence daily to work on the apple trees. Can you see Trooper on her hind legs grabbing an apple on the right-hand tree? (Picture taken through grimy kitchen window)

So far, we've picked about 10 bushels of apples. A bushels weighs around 65 pounds, so that's pretty good, in my opinion. We've made apple butter, applesauce, apple leather, apple pies, frozen apples for later pies, and a lot of cider. Twenty gallons or, technically, 40 half-gallons, so far.

We have barely scratched the surface of our apple crop... and we had to take a chicken out of the freezer just to fit the last few half-gallons of cider in!

I just got my car back. I had to put it into the body shop for two weeks to fix a certain disaster. (Did I ever mention in the blog how one day this spring I left my E-brake off and left my car in neutral and went into a store and came out and found my car had rolled backwards from an upper lot to a lower lot down a huge embankment and crashed into three cars at the bottom? No? It was nothing, really.) I did a lot of walking and a lot of planning to make sure my stuff and I were in the right places at the right time. It was tricky but I did start to get the hang of it. By the way, home to work: 1.4 miles. Twice a day, five days a week, you do the math. (And that doesn't count errands during the work day.) I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.

When not trying to schedule errands around my husband's truck availability, keep the goats contained, and blanch every vegetable in sight, I was working, cooking, tearing my hair out about bills, and pretty much not having time to sleep (and being sleepless anyway; see "bills," above). I spent this past weekend mostly relaxing and knitting. I've really missed having free time.

In knitting, I finished the sleeves for my handspun sweater. Sleeve photos = deadly dull, so I'll spare you.

I also made a quick hat for my SIL at her request, to go with the sweater I made her last year. I worked it up in Lopi but decided to line the brim with something softer. I also knitted a swear word into the hem just to make her giggle. But I won't show you that.

Here's my unconscious husband "modeling" it.

Even better, I finished a project I'd started a few months ago: Gloves!

Since finishing them earlier today, I've come up with several reasons why you should knit some, too:

• Like socks and mittens, they are portable
• They look so much harder than they are
• Each finger takes only a short time to knit, so you feel like you're making progress really quickly
• You can customize each finger to fit your own fingers, something those of us with odd-shaped fingers really like
• Did I mention they look harder than they are?

This pattern is Good Basic Gloves by Rita Buchanan, from Homespun, Handknit (Ravelry link here), and all I did was note how many rows I knit for each finger so both hands would be the same. A nice treat was that although you do have to join a new strand of yarn each time you start a new finger, if you leave a long tail you can use it to sew up any gaps between the fingers.

I came off this project all jazzed to start some new mittens for my daughter tonight. I'm going to make her the thrummed mitts from the Fox and Geese mitten book, which I love. When I was spinning at the Shelburne Farms harvest festival (where I did, surprisingly, sell a lot of yarn), I met a vendor who sells angora rabbit fiber. Check out Apple View Angoras, in Fairfax, Vermont. I bought a small bag of angora/wool blend roving and I want to use it for the thrums. Sadly, I don't have the right yarn for the project so that will have to wait.

(Typepad users: I'm getting in my last post before getting switched to the new Typepad. I'm currently peeved with the new reply-to-comment feature, which is not at all user-friendly. And to all my readers: If you didn't receive a reply to the last comment you left, check the comments on the previous post; Typepad automatically makes me respond to the comment list rather than in a private email unless I remember to take two additional steps. And I'm forgetful.)

Autumn is coming to Vermont. This is the best time of the year, in my opinion, even if it does give way to winter. But, after the crazy month that was September, even winter isn't sounding that bad.

Enough with the "circle of life"

RIP Hoss.

For the record, in the space of less than a month we (a) lost our favorite little rescue poodle Sophie to a truck in our driveway (b) put down my 18 year old cat and (c) last week had to put down our yellow Lab, Hoss. He's definitely in a better place, but that didn't make it any easier.

Despite the pall of death around here (competing with the gloom of financial insecurity -- good times!), there are bright spots. Two of our chickens each hatched out one chick.

This wench is so protective, it was all I could do to get a picture. She puffs up and hisses whenever you try to get close to her baby.

Then our little bantam Maude, sitting on a clutch of infertile tiny bantam eggs, hatched out a full-size egg I snuck under her. She and the baby are living in the food storage area of the goat pen and she squawks and complains loudly the whole time you are in there trying to do chores.

She tucks the baby under her wing. Sometimes, she puts it sort of behind her wing, like a football carry, and it looks like she has two heads. Very cute. The baby will be bigger than she is in a few weeks but she doesn't care. We adoptive mothers feel the maternal instinct just as strongly as anyone else. Trust me.

Speaking of which, school has started and my little baby girl is now in fifth grade. Yikes.

She helped me the other day with one of our new fall traditions, making applesauce. I picked up a basket of drops from under our apple trees:

I quartered them and simmered them and then she put them through the food mill:

We got tons of applesauce and a dozen little jars of apple butter (made in the crockpot over two days -- what a great aroma in the house!), and the pigs got the apple peels and other leftovers. Win-win.

Today, my husband is fine-tuning the apple chopper he's been working on, and if it works, we'll be making cider tomorrow. We have three trees of Macintoshes, which are good but not very tart for cider. The fourth tree seems to be Cox's orange pippins, which strikes me as unlikely, but they're old, old trees, so anything's possible.

Here's what looks like a plain old American meal, right?

This, however, has an important distinction: The applesauce, mashed potatoes, pork and peas were all raised or grown right here on our property. And they're extra tasty, and not just because I'm being smug.

So all this death and life and raising animals and having them slaughtered and all (we put 22 chickens in the freezer a couple of weeks ago), it's hard sometimes. But then I read on Ravelry that you can buy bacon at Wal-Mart or Costco or somewhere right off the shelf; it's not even refrigerated.

Listen up, people: That is just plain creepy.

I don't want to get into a whole social/food argument on my generally noncontroversial blog but the growing distance between Americans and their knowledge of the source of their food really disturbs me. Not having to think about where your food comes from, as long as it's cheap, is not my idea of human progress.

Don't read  Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" if the guilt trip is too much, but remember that when he says, "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much," he means to eat FOOD. Nonrefrigerated bacon is so far removed from real food (and from the poor animal who provided it) it should be illegal to sell it.

Rant over.

I won't bother showing you the first sleeve of my handspun sweater, as I've decided it's too narrow and need to start over.

But since we're on the subject of handspun, check out the A Piece of Vermont Yarn & Fiber. I've just put up four bags of dyed carded fiber, made of black Vermont alpaca blended with commercial BFL and Vermont Romney and Corriedale, available here.

Storm:

October:

Equinox:

Solitude:

I'm a bit paralyzed in the knitting and spinning departments right now. I can't decide if I want to spin the Border Leicester I started a while back, knit my new sweater, finish my gloves, finish my long-hibernating Gothic Leaf stole for a wedding we're attending in October. spin some new stuff for mittens, knit thrummed mittens, or what. So I look at patterns on Ravelry.

Next Saturday, I'll be spinning at the Shelburne Farms Harvest Festival again with my favorite spinner and most-likely-future-daughter-in-law's-mother Donna. If you're in Vermont, check it out; it's a stunningly beautiful place.

Sophie would just like to add a public service announcement:

"I'm pretty sure Michael Pollan said to never, ever eat mutton."

And so it goes

Thanks for all the condolences on the loss of our little poodle Sophie. Now you can do the same for my old cat, who we finally had put down two weeks ago at the ripe old age of 18.  We had a visiting vet come to the house and it went very smoothly, if a little tearful on my part. I got this cat as a kitten from the humane society in 1991, the year after I graduated from college and the year before I met my husband.

He was slowing down just as Milo came into our lives so much of the past two years has looked like this:

Though I haven't seen the movie, I suspect his attitude resembled that of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.

The cat is buried between the apples trees just a few feet from Sophie. But that's not all. Now that I am over that whole ordeal, we have a very sickly yellow Lab who probably isn't going to make it through the week. We're going to try one more visit to the vet and then we give up. Sigh.

Anyway, the whole birth/death thing is alive and well here on the farm. We've lost a few baby turkeys here and there, including Rocky's mother to a coyote. Rocky and his siblings survived the attack, but since then two have disappeared (possibly even Rocky; we can't tell them apart anymore). The last two are still sad and lonely without their mother and occasionally manage to sneak under the wing of an older turkey. Mostly they wander about forlornly, peeping.

In brighter news, we had our first calf born. The mother is half Holstein, half Hereford. The baby is a quarter of each of those and half Angus. Here are some random photos immediately following the birth but before the calf had tried standing up.

We thought it was pretty exciting, but in Vermont no one takes much notice of calves being born. If we'd been in Miami or Chicago maybe it would have made more of an impression on people...

A big personal milestone today was that I finished spinning the yarn for my sweater.

The color is more accurately this, I'd say:

For my own future reference, I spun a total of 1255 yards weighing a whopping 51.5 ounces, or 391 yards per pound. I presume I will not need that much for the world's plainest sweater, but it's nice to know I have enough just in case.

As for the sweater, it's going to be big, comfy, warm and pretty much nondescript. I have discovered over the past 20 years that Vermont is freaking cold in the winter, my office in particular. I need warm and classic, not trendy.

I love my February Lady Sweater but I wasn't able to wear it a single time between December and April because I need sleeves that cover my wrists or I freeze. (I just checked and in our area of Vermont, the average high in January is 28F. The average low is 8F.)

I cannot get enough spinning these days, possibly because the combined stresses of money and dying pets makes me want to go to my happy place, and it's usually at the wheel. I just dyed up an interesting combination of local black alpaca and our sheep Sophie's Border Leicester fleece.

I love the way the BL takes dye but I have to say it: This wool is not soft. I guess it can vary from sheep to sheep and Sophie's beautiful, lustrous, long-staple wool is in no way next-to-skin soft. I'm planning on using it for a winter wrap or stole or something, not next to my bare skin, and I'm spinning it as soft and loose as possible to make the ends less prickly. It's a fun fiber to spin, I will say that.

In this case, I space dyed 8 2-ounce batts all pretty much the same and I'm spinning them just like that. Unlike my sweater yarn above, I'm not looking for a heathered solid; I want multicolor blends and stripes throughout. As soon as the sweater yarn dries, however, I'm casting on for my sweater, so the spinning may take a backseat for a while.

I actually did manage a small shop update at A Piece of Vermont Yarn and Fiber yesterday, although I don't believe there's much left.

What you see above is some bamboo/merino/nylon sock yarn and some Falkland Superwash (DK weight).  Not to harp on it again, but you join the no-pressure A Piece of Vermont mailing list quite easily (and unsub whenever you want) to get immediate notification of updates. The Falkland Superwash is really quite lovely, but it's a pain to put into skeins as it comes in giant hanks rather than cones. I do have more I plan to dye this week, though, if time permits.

And for spinners, I have some hand-blended dyed batts (for that heathered look) coming in a few days.

I have so many different things going on sometimes I forget to make time to go out in the shop. But I really enjoy playing with color and fiber. I hope I can be a little more consistent in  my updates.

Cross your fingers for the dog. At this point, unless they discover something missed in earlier exams, we're not doing him any favors by letting him go on the way he is. And if we do put him down, we'll only have Milo left.

And that's a scary thought.

 

A happy turkey tale

A week ago Tuesday, the hen turkey who had been sitting on eggs in our old doghouse hatched them out while I was at work. When I got home she was out in the field with three poults. I checked in the doghouse and found a fourth, almost dead.

Seeing it lying on its side, twitching occasionally, I heard my gradually improving farmgirl instincts telling me to let nature take its course. Apparently, it had been somehow inferior, couldn't manage to walk and therefore couldn't eat or get to the waterer, and so now it would die. And almost all of the animals we've tried to save have ended up dying.

But I had to give it a try.

I carried the poor thing inside. We dipped its beak in water and sugar water. It kept falling over and one of its legs seemed weak. I gave it to my daughter and told her that it would probably die soon but we'd at least make its last hours comfortable.

And that's how Rocky came into our lives.

See him sleeping under the blanket there?

My daughter and stepson took great care of him. He survived his first night in a box in our office, safe from Milo. He peeped for his mother incessantly, unless we held him. And he made a full recovery.

We held him. A lot. He liked to sleep in my daughter's hair.

Each day he got stronger. We took him outside as much as possible and he caught and ate bugs from the get-go.(Side note: my daughters nails are courtesy of her Migi Nail Art Set, a birthday present from my stepmother and fantastic for fun nails; I have a watermelon slice pedicure at the moment...)

I got home from work on Thursday and my stepson declared that Rocky would come when he called. I didn't believe it, so he had to show me. First he put Rocky out in the grass and got a distance away.

Rocky poked around in the grass until my stepson peeped in his best mother-turkey voice.

Immediately, Rocky turned and ran for him.

And I do mean "ran." See the closeup:

He continued to imprint on us, and we continued to fall in love with him.

Rocky spent much of Saturday morning helping me weed the garden, wandering off to chase bugs and pulling his own weeds but always running back between my feet for a little reassurance.

By late Saturday, however, we had reached a critical point. Rocky had (a) found that a life outside a cardboard box in the office was the life for him and (b) decided that, as his mother-substitutes, we were all responsible to stay out in the grass with him, all the time, or else he would peep loudly at every moment. He had gotten brave enough to want to explore the house, not cuddle, so our options were growing limited.

Saturday evening we reunited him with his mother.

She is afraid of us and keeps her distance, but she was intrigued by Rocky and his little turkey noises. He saw his siblings and ran right over to them. The mother opted not to peck him to death, always a risk, and you could almost see her checking her math over and over ("I swear I only had three, but he looks like one of mine...."). We had to retreat because Rocky kept deciding he really was ours, not hers, but once we hid from him, he settled for his real mom.

The next morning, I saw the mother walking across the yard, three babies right under her feet, one lagging about ten feet behind but always catching up. You know who. There was one scary moment where they all got in the pasture and Sam, the curious beef calf, got soundly reprimanded by mother turkey for his inquisitiveness and all the poults scattered. One by one we found them in the tall grass and returned them to their mother. Three out of four of them ran right to her. The fourth ran back to us, right between my husband's feet.

Oh, Rocky.

But eventually, with our encouragement, he got the idea and I'm happy to report that after a full week, he's doing well and fitting right in. Here's hoping they all make it to adulthood; you never can tell with turkeys.

In yarn news, I had a little shop update I'm calling Knotty But Nice. It's three colorways (six skeins) of bamboo blend yarn, all of which I've had to tie at least one knot in. For that reason, they're 20 percent off.

From top to bottom, that's Emerald, Shadow, and Froggy Went A-Courtin', available here:

 

My own stress reliever, spinning, has kept me quite busy over the past couple of weeks. I finished spinning the three-ply bulky for my husband's yet-to-be-designed Aran, getting me one step closer to my Sheep-to-Sweater 2009 goal:

I have three pounds there, which should do it.

I wasted no time in getting the dyepot ready for something else. In December, I had combined a bunch of leftover dyed fibers, like silk, black alpaca, BFL, walnut-dyed BFL, and some other stuff:

Carded up twice (months ago), it looked like this:

And so, 26 batts sat on a shelf for months while I got sidetracked.

Well, in the interim, I started working at the coldest office in Vermont. (Seriously, at your workplace, do more people than not wear fingerless mitts at work? Hats? One coworker even wraps up in a throw.) I felt the need for a seriously warm sweater, but very simple so that it would hold up long after current trends fade. And I felt I had to fight my blue/green tendencies. I was thinking rust/red. So I dyed the batts like so:

I like dyeing up the majority of the fiber in several lots of similar hues, and then throwing in a few accent colors for interest. I split up the fiber into halves and then quarters and so on, until I got down to 32 piles like this:

So far I've carded 20 of them, but I couldn't resist starting to spin. Batt:

Spun into singles:

And into a bulky two-ply:

It comes across as a brick red/rose/rust color, a little paler than I had expected. But  I like the way you see those other colors. And it's realllly soft.

I'm hoping it knits up with a subtle bit of striping because if I'm going to knit a totally plain pullover I think it could use a bit of visual interest. I have no idea whether it will be what I envision. But I'm sure having fun in the planning stages.

Meanwhile, summer goes on. Back on July 5 we went to see rescheduled fireworks at the lake. The kids went swimming.

 

There's been a lot of animal news here, besides Rocky. For one thing, Wanda the hinny moved to a new home. Once we witnessed her chasing and biting the goats we realized she wasn't going to be happy without horses. Fortunately, friends of friends picked her up the very afternoon we decided we couldn't keep her. They love her and she likes their horses. And the goats are so relieved.

On a sad note, our new super-friendly turkey Annette got hit by a car and killed just over a week ago. Annette, we hardly knew ye. Don't know if I mentioned it before, but Dave the peacock got hit a couple of months ago, and the peahen disappeared to sit on a nest and never returned (we are now peacock-free, which should please the drivers on our road).

And last but certainly not least, our dearest little poodle Sophie was killed this week. Right in our driveway. She had a habit of doing laps around vehicles when they pulled into the yard, and this time it was dark and the driver didn't see her. It was quick, at least.

For anyone who doesn't know, Sophie was a rescue poodle who had been a breeder in a New Hampshire puppy mill/garage for 5 to 8 years before she came to us four or five years ago. She was always the sweetest, most darling little baby girl and although I hate to get all emotional about pets, given how many animals come and go from this place all the time, we will really miss her. My poor daughter is going to be grieving a long time. My husband hasn't said much, but given that every picture I have of her includes him, I'm sure it's hard on him, too.

What's more, our other dog may need to be put down this week, and my old, old cat is not far behind him.

Anyway, here's to Sophie, Sophe-Sophe-Sugarloaf, the Sophster, Sopherloaf.

 

Good dog.

Peas on earth

We've had peas.

Every night for about a week, I picked a bowl of peas, at least as big as this one. Then, we shelled.

Giving us:

I'd say the time and space it takes to grow peas is enormous in comparison to the final yield. I put 15 cups in the freezer. And we ate a lot fresh. So good, if not so plentiful.

There was a birthday this past week, as my daughter reminded us.

I wonder how old the person was who proofread this gift bag:

We had a party last night, featuring all kinds of games of skill, including "find the Swedish goldfish in the whipped cream, without using your hands":

Great fun.

Instead of cake, there were these:

Homemade chocolate-chip cookie ice cream sandwiches.

I highly recommend these as a cake alternative, but I made them too big; none of the kids could finish them.

Life continues to be summer-crazy. I have done no knitting recently but I have been spinning, spinning, in every spare moment on my sheep-to-sweater project (in the sidebar to your right). I thought I was almost done, and to my dismay found that I only had 1100 yards of bulky, not enough for the Aran I wanted to design.

Then I came across two more bags of fiber in the spare room, another 15 ounces (400+ yards). My joy at having more yarn to work with was dampened by the fact that I'd have to spin a whole lot more. But I'm dealing with it.

I have little else to update, other than that our darling new hinny is not working out too well with the goats and sheep, and when she chases them and then bites them, they tend to jump, or run through, the electric fence. It's been kind of stressful this week, to say the least. (If you're local, and can give Wanda a good home around other equines, she's free and adorable, just out of her element here. Call me.)

And last, Booga J wasn't kidding about her granola recipe. Fabulous. I tried it last week and made about 3 quarts, which were gone in two days. I've made another batch. It's really easy, really yummy, and it makes your house smell fantastic, especially if you use the cardomom that's recommended in the recipe.

I used oats, almonds, and chopped dates. The variations are endless, however. Try it, you'll love it.

Last but not least, I just got A Fine Fleece, by Lisa Lloyd, out of the library. Beautiful, and good whether you spin your own yarn or not. Whether I will ever find time to spin the yarn for my own sweater, or have enough money to buy that much yarn, I don't know. But I love the patterns.

Now I need to go amend my compost heap.

Edited to add:

Meet Annette, a Narragansett turkey. She's teaching the other birds that eating out of a human's hand means extra treats.

Her name is Wanda

But what is she?

She's not a pony. She's not a donkey. She's not even a mule.

She's a hinny. That means she's like a mule, but the opposite; where a mule is a cross between a male donkey and a mare, and hinny is a cross between a stallion and a jenny (female donkey). She stands just over 3 feet tall.

As with almost everything else here on the farm, she was a freebie. She just arrived last night, and although we're delighted with her, the goats still think she may actually be a T-Rex:

Wanda is around 11, and was rescued by a local horse trainer who moved last year from North Carolina and brought Wanda with her. She is supposedly trained to pull a cart and give rides but she was apparently abused.

She follows us around the pasture.

I think she's going to like it here.

We are back from camp and back to work. Things are still fairly dismal on the financial front but are looking up. My husband was able to return to light-duty work after two weeks off (and unpaid, thanks to self-employment) for a huge second-degree burn across his right palm. Hopefully our disability/accident insurance will pitch in a bit for that. And there is actually a spark of interest in construction around here. As much as my husband dreads working on bids all the time, it's refreshing that he has some to work on.

Camp? Picture rain. More rain. Slugs. Clouds. More rain. I worked Monday and Tuesday, we had to spend a day running around paying bills and seeing burn specialists, and like that, but the last four days were peaceful. I mostly sat around the fire drinking coffee or the occasional beer, knitting and knitting and knitting.

I made some stuff. Like these boot socks for my husband:

I don't have a good picture of them, but I used two strands of Long Trail fingering weight sock yarn held together, one dyed maroon, the other undyed. I tend to knit this yarn with 0s, so I used 2s and they were a bit small for the job. These are some pretty rugged socks.

Notes (mostly to me): I did them toe-up on 52 stitches with short-row heels. I like the look of the toes and heels in a contrasting color but I made the short rows down to 13 stitches (half of 26) and I think they could have been a bit deeper.

I finished those and then moved on to these:

These are Merletto Mitts and I love them.

You can't see in the picture too well but there's no lace on the left edge. That's because I misread the pattern and inserted the thumb gusset in the lace instead of the palm, so the lace wraps a bit around the thumb side of my hand. But the two match so who cares?

These were made with my own hand-dyed bamboo blend superwash fingering.

As soon as I got home and wove in the ends on the last two projects, I got a hankering to try gloves. I have made mitts with half-fingers in them and was surprised that gloves are not as fiddly as I expected them to be. So I cast on in some DK(?) hand-dyed from my stash (EVERYTHING is from stash these days) the Good Basic Gloves by Rita Buchanan from "Homespun, Handknit."

I love them so far.

The palm/wrist area is a bit loose (which I found in the Merletto mitts as well) but across the hand is perfect. I chalk this up to having extremely large hands and relatively small wrists. What I especially like is that I have some oddities to my hands (very short, squat thumbs and messed up short hand-bones leading to my pinkies that make my pinkies start very low on my hand) and I've been able to tailor the gloves to take those things into account.

I like to work both gloves (or socks) at the same time on separate needles but I've misplaced my other 2s, so I have to finish this glove before starting the next. I hope I don't lose interest...

The garden didn't suffer too much while we were gone but the peas seem to have hit a holding pattern. I thought I'd be harvesting them a week ago but they haven't grown a bit in days.

Last, we also have a new turkey hen, Annette, of whom I have no pictures. She is a Narragansett who was abandoned with four others at an old house a few towns away. The other four flew away but she stayed, only she likes people and the way she followed the homeowners around made them nervous. Within minutes of arriving here she was eating out of our hand. Dave the Peacock took her on a tour of the grounds and she's made herself right at home. I'll get pictures next time. Here are some of our regular turkeys and two of the four "babies." They're getting big.

Time to get ready for work.

Happiness is where you make it

A view out back last night. In between showers we had the highest-arc rainbow I've ever seen. After about a half hour without fading, the left side showed up to complete the arc. Unfortunately, it sits right over our neighbor's house, which ruins the pastoral photo op.

Anyway, happiness. I just got a comment from a reader saying she finds happiness in my blog at a time when her own life is short on it.

I wrote back to say that we have a lot of happiness here these days, but also a lot of stress. I'm busy, and tired, and the financial roller coaster we've been riding for over six months now doesn't look like it's going to come to an end in the foreseeable future.

And yet, I'm happy. How is that possible?

It's the little things. Like my garden. Check out my lettuce patch:

I've been having a giant green salad for lunch every day. This makes me happy.

Things are growing, slowly but surely. And we're leaving for our annual camping "vacation" tomorrow, just two towns over, which means my peas will no doubt be ready for picking next week, the little beasts. But aren't they cute?

The photo above is one of my shell peas. Knowing the yield on a row of shell peas is pitiful, I followed some old farming advice (basically, why plant in straight single rows if you're not using power equipment to plant, weed and harvest?) and planted a wide row. It might be a little overplanted...

The onions, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, beans, squash/pumpkin/cuke vines are all coming along nicely. I even threw in some broccoli plants (about the only things I didn't start from seed besides the onions) even though I have a mortal fear of broccoli worms.

Taters:

All these make me happy, even though I know I'm going to be overwhelmed with harvesting.

The baby turkeys are doing well and growing fast. Can you see all four here?

They make me happy, as does the laundry hanging on the line back there.

Even rotten Milo makes me happy. This morning he thought he'd maybe ambush some birds at the feeder. (He didn't. He almost fell to his death jumping up there in the first place.)

This picture was taken on our back porch where we have our morning coffee in the summer time. (Makes me happy, 'course.)

And tomorrow, we go camping for 10 days. Even though we can't afford it, even though I'm working half of next week, even though my garden needs me to stay here, even though I don't really enjoy camping all that much (even in a camper with a bathroom), even though I don't know how we're going to make it through the rest of 2009 -- I'm still happy to be getting away with my family. And I'm going to have plenty of much-needed time to just sit and knit.

Happy.

What makes you happy? (Don't you dare say "money.")

Home is where the heart is

Ah, it's a crazy, beautiful time of year. I love it but I'm truly exhausted these days. There are now about 15 hours of daylight and I think we are squeezing every possible moment from every hour. I wish I could save some of these for February.

We got a new beef cow, Sam, who's about a week old in these pictures.

My brother-in-law decided four cows (with two on the way) weren't enough, so here he is. It's a bit dicey, bottle feeding a sweet little baby knowing in a couple of years he'll be dinner, but I think I've mastered it now. (Come to think of it, we have 70 meat chicks arriving today...)

The other animals are doing fine. Here's Gert (or Polly, I can never remember):

And here's one of the Steak brothers, Chuck or Flank (again, I can't remember -- and I didn't name them):

And, as always, piggies.

I love this sleeping pig picture mostly because of the pigeon on the roof. I don't know why. Click to make it bigger.

Calvin:

Maude the bantam and her adopted baby:

Maude is in the front. Her baby, soon to be a full-size laying hen (or rooster), is still a chick but is the same size as she is.

Just beyond the frame of the sleeping pig picture, to the left, is the new garden space. It's huge! These pictures are a couple of weeks old (I'm telling you -- I have not had a spare minute to blog), so imagine everything the same but bigger.

Radishes among the carrots:

Lettuce, lots of lettuce.

Peas (these are dwarf shell peas; I've got snap peas as well):

Onions:

Potatoes (we planted over 100, but about half drowned. We still have plenty!)

I've also got almost 30 tomato plants, basil, plus butternut squash, jack-o-lanterns, baking pumpkins, zucchini, yellow squash, and cucumbers. I admit I "weeded" one vine and I can't remember what it is, so scratch one of the last three in that list.

In between work, family, softball, gardening, farm work, yarn work (not much), cooking, cleaning (again, not much), and general spring insanity, my husband and I actually got to go on a date. Will wonders never cease.

Since, however, we are "too poor to even pay attention," as my husband says, we picked an unusual destination. An older man in the next town has a "museum," almost 6,000 square feet of collections of stuff, some antique, some not. That includes old gas pumps, Coke machines, tractors, farm tools, toasters, telephones, maps, brochures, menus, yardsticks, bottles, apothecary items, Victrolas, a couple of player pianos, oil cans, irons, lunchboxes, Coca-cola memorabilia, sprinklers, and so on and so on. It's amazing. It took over three hours for a whirlwind tour. This was my favorite find:

It's a great wheel, totally intact, right down to the braided cornhusk holding the spindle on.

 The catch, however, is that the man is a collector, not a dealer. He refuses to part with anything in his collection. He also gives tours but doesn't charge admission or even take donations.

I asked if he'd sell the wheel and he said, "I can't, because if I did, then I wouldn't have it." He is sitting on probably millions of dollars of stuff, some of it worth money individually, much of it worth money because of the completeness or size of the collection.

A lot of it isn't even old, it's stuff that we'd throw away, like take-out menus or McDonalds French-fry cartons or a SpongeBob lunchbox. Even a McDonalds ashtray -- remember when there was such a thing?

But when you see it in a collection that spans years or decades or even a century, it becomes part of an important timeline. He even has parking receipts from Disney World every year from 1976 to the present. (Parking has gone from $.50 to $12 a day, in case you were wondering.)

"Not everything here is old," he said. "But someday it will be."

So, I have to go get ready for work, but I'm going to leave you with a few of the 100 or so pictures I took of his collection. Collectors might go ga-ga over some of his stuff but he doesn't own a computer and when I asked if he ever sold or bought on eBay, he smiled and said, "How do you spell that?" This stuff is not going anywhere.

Many pictures below. (Everything is underlined from here on in, and I can't seem to make it stop.) Click for larger. See if you remember any of this from your youth. Or your grandmother's.

Wax cylinders, before vinyl records.















Old Mickey Mouse:





Ka-boom:



Not just another gadget:



Look closely:

























Anyone up for a cruise? Or not.







Mind boggling.