What Housework?:

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.

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.