The nice thing about having a blog that nobody reads is that one can write whatever they want and there are no crappy comments. The bad thing is that nobody reads it. I don't know how to get it out into cyberspace because I struggle with computer stuff and have to stop swearing and walk away before I can settle down and come back to try it again. I also have to work on it in complete silence. Remember when we did homework with the radio blaring? That doesn't cut it anymore. My old brain can only concentrate on one thing. I will figure this out sooner or later. I managed to get the blog to show up on Ravelry but the posts aren't showing up. I don't know what to do about that.

My shawl is coming along nicely ever since I went to Kinko's and got the charts enlarged. I'm on chart 4...4 of 10...and for some reason I think I can get it done in time for the Dakota County Fair. That's probably insane since the registration and drop of date is a week away but I will keep knitting. It's so hot outside that I can stay inside and knit. Nevermind the job, the cleaning and the daily chores. It's all out knitting right now.

I'ven thinking about friendship as I furiously knit on this shawl. How people come in and out of our lives and why that is so. I recently connected with an old friend from high school on Facebook and it's been so fun to find out about her life and write a little back and forth. I have an old, dear friend also from high school who is going through a bad time and it's fascinating how one's heart, I guess, soul kicks in and wants to help in such a bad way because you have known this person for so long and have seen the road they have traveled. It's also amazing to me how people can be friends for so long and then one day not. They can know almost everything about you and you can know almost everything about them but one day it becomes too much. I guess that must be it. it's a hard thing to live with...you must examine every side of it and sometimes it isn't pretty. They know too much and you know too much. Is that it? Or am I just not a nice person? Not a good friend. Things roll in and out of my mind as I knit and somedays it's fun and somedays it's not. I always think that it's a good thing to try and think things through but this one is tough.

For some reason my keyboard is not allowing me to go back and correct text without erasing the following word. Sigh. See?

No pictures please! My gloves are so beautiful that they can't be bothered to stand still for one second to be phtographed. Actually, the computer won't allow the photo upload or download or any kind of load. The file is too big. Sigh. I don't know what that means but trust me....the gloves look fine. They are the Starry Night gloves from one of the fabulous Woolgirl kits and they are beauties. The only thing I have left to do is the weaving in of the yarn between the fingers. I think I can manage to do that today and then get them in the sink for a nice soak and block. Hooray!

The shawl is on hold. Damn. I noticed I had one less stitch than I was supposed to right in the middle so I ripped that section back a couple of rows to fix it. I also had a raging, painful tooth at the time. Why we do these things is beyond me but still, I ripped it back. Seeing as how my head was pounding I couldn't concentrate well enough to get the offending stitches knit back up. I had to put the thing in the corner. I should have put myself in the corner with a big dunce cap on my head. New Rule: never, ever do this kind of stuff when head is banging.

I've started back in on my Batik shawl that had been languishing in the corner. The print was so small on the charts that it was a struggle to work the pattern. Yesterday I fixed that problem. I took the tiny charts to my neighborhood copy shop and they enlarged them for me. It's a whole new world.....as if I got new glasses. I worked on the shawl in the evening and am now almost done with the first chart. It's so much easier when I don't have to hold the pattern up in front of my face and then knit a few stitches before I hold it up again. Much easier on the banging head. And the banging head is so much better today that I might be able to figure out how to download photos and fix a few things on the blog. Good things come to those who wait and take their meds.

It is so stinkin' hot outside that I feel like I'm about to melt everytime I leave the house. It's just way too hot and I don't like it one bit. This is not summer in Minnesota...it's summer in the middle of Florida. Wet hot. We had a rain storm yesterday and I figuered it would cool things off a bit but I was wrong. It was hot rain. Gak.

All this terrible heat has been made worse by my nasty stinkin' tooth ache. Sigh. The tooth has been going bad for awhile but there was always hope that it was just a piece of popcorn stuck in some funky little place in my gum. Not this time. It was a back tooth and was in such bad shape that I needed it pulled. I opted for novocaine and gas and throughly enjoyed the gas. It was also nice and cool in the dentists' office so it wasn't all that bad. I liked floating above the chair. What was bad was the resulting dry socket and remaining piece of root that was wedged down in the sore, aching hole in my mouth. I suffered and pissed and moaned all weekend, taking handfuls of Advil so that I could get some sleep. Every day I would say to myself, 'it will be better tomorrow'. After a stinkin' hot day at work and more Advil it wasn't so I called the dentist. I gave up. I am not a tough guy. I got into see someone right before the doors to the office were locked. They lock them at 5:30 and they mean business. I guess if I would have shown up at 5:35 I would have been pressing my swollen face to the door and crying.

I don't like it much when a dentist looks into my mouth and says, 'Oh'. I got another giant shot of novocaine and he dug around in there for awhile with a sharp picky thing. This is when I take my glasses off and try not to bend the hell out of them while I try to relax. He pulled something out, packed some nasty tasting brown thing in and I was good to go. I was such a relief to not have the side of my face banging away that I almost didn't mind getting into a hot steamy car. Almost. This morning I am very thankful for air conditioning and Advil. I will try ti keep hope alive that my tooth will settle down and that a cold front will move in.

Every year I try to knit something to enter into the State Fair. Sometimes I win a beautiful ribbon and sometimes I don't. It's always a crap shoot but that's what makes life exciting, right? It also validates all the time I spend knitting. A couple of years ago I won a big purple ribbon and consequently almost peed myself with excitement. I don't know about this year. I'm kind of behind on what I'm knitting to enter and neither of the yarns are playing nice.

On one set of needles is a beautiful blue glove. The second one, at least. I have made so many stupid mistakes knitting these gloves and I can only blame the pattern because that's how I can live with myself right now. I've ripped back and re-knit. I've undone one little section down 8 rows and knit back. I've tried them on a million times. The yarn has a very tight twist so it's always in some kind of kinked up state but it's also not plied very well so it splits. Over and over. I have gone back and fixed split stitches so many times that I'm sick to death of it and now just cut off the offending sticking out loop. Oh, I hate them. They are not Fair Worthy.

On the other needle is a shawl. I love to knit lace and have so many shawls now that it's just plain gluttony. I love it. I can't explain it. The harder the pattern the better. The shawl on my needles now is a re-knit. I was never very happy with the first one I knit because it just wouldn't block out to a nice big wingspan. It stayed in it's tight little triangle no matter what I did. I should have used a bigger needle. I know that now. There is a big learning curve to knitting lace. Well, I undid the tight little shawl so I could use the yarn over again because I did love the yarn. I learned that if one finds the exact right little stitch in a field of stitches, one can just pull the knitted on edging off in one piece. It's fabulous. But I also learned that this particular yarn does not want to unkink. At all. It's been wound, rewound, dunked in water, and wound again. Kinks. My shawl looks so sloppy with all the kinked up knitted up yarn that I fear it will not be Fair Worthy either. I'm counting on a good soak and a vicious blocking to make it look nice but I don't know. I'm probably going to go ahead and enter both things and then be mad and sad when neither of them win anything but have a terse little note hanging off that tells me I need to be a tidier knitter.

 This is what high humidity does. Brings out the smells that you don't want to smell. I have a little vestibule...or air lock...from my front door to the living room. It's only about 4 feet square and has a lovely french door opening into the house. It's cold in the winter and hot in the summer and, if one is not careful, a cat can be shut in there for any length of time and nobody would know. Especially a cat who doesn't meow very loud. Well, you just know I shut the cat in there. He can sneak around behind and get into wherever you don't want him to be on silent little cat feet. By the time I discovered him he had sprayed all over the place. Ick. And he was mad. I washed the floor, I washed the walls, and I threw out the floor mat. Then I washed it all again. Sigh. It still smelled. I washed the whole deal a third time and put a packet of lavender in there. That worked fine for awhile. It worked until the humidity kicked in and now when I open my front door I get slapped in the face with mind bending odor of cat piss and lavender. This cat has never peed anywhere else in the house. He is a charming and tidy cat but fear got the better of him and he even looks horrified when the door is opened. We are all horrified. I believe I might have to tear the wallpaper off the walls to get rid of the stench. Washing with soap, vinegar and a special pee removing formula sold to me at the pet shop has not helped. Neither has the lavender.

We, hubby and I, saw the movie Page One last night. It was very good...a fascinating look behind the scenes of the flailing newspaper industry vs. instant news online. It also took a look at the hometown David Carr, he of the brilliant mind and sardonic wit. The day-to-day operation of a newspaper is nothing to sneeze at. So much work, so little time. The bankruptcies and layoffs that go along with that are no laughing matter either. In this day of instant news, instant needing to know, and people with their heads glued to their cell phones the newspaper seems all but dead. I'm so sad about that. I'm sad that we lose the sense of permancy that an actual newpaper gives us. I'm sad that holding and keeping an actual book is no longer cool. Having an I Pad is. Reading the headlines and not the content seems to be the way of the world now. I am getting old. The feel of paper and the resulting rustle of turning pages is satisfying to me. Holding a favorite book...feeling the heft and smelling the scent of a much loved story makes my heart leap.

The fact that I'm able to write a blog using the same technology that I am complaining about it not lost on me. And that I have a link to the Huffington Post on my sidebar isn't either. I enjoy my computer time but I don't want it to consume my everyday life.  

Oh man....it's not easy to start a blog. First a person has to have something to say and then they have to figure out how to say it.. I have done neither very well. I'm still working on it but seeing as though my mind is a hot mess because of the stinkin' weather I have to write things down about how to make a blog and then try to remember where I wrote them. I need a dedicated blog notebook and a pencil. And then I had a nice photo of the Louet Euroflax yarn that I am struggling with but the computer gods won't let me download it. Sigh. I'll get the hang of this if it kills me.

So this yarn...this Louet...is not easy to knit with. It's more like stringy twine than yarn and has no give. I'm attempting to use this expensive twine to knit Liesl from Coco Knits as a cute summer/fall top. I will also attempt to find out how to create a link to said pattern. We shall see. The needles called for are 8's. There is no way I'm getting anywhere near gauge on 8's. If I keep knitting I will end up with a tank top for a Volkswagon. Hell. This means I will have to rip out what I've already done and knit a mess of gauge swatches. I hate that. And seeing as how I have about $100 worth of yarn I can't just throw it all in a corner and forget about it. Hooray! It's gague swatch day.

I did learn something fabulous about casting on when I researched the Liesl on Ravelry. I learned how to do something called 'the everlasting long tail cast on'. At least I think that's what it's called. It makes casting on a large amount of stitches a breeze and you never have to worry about running out of yarn. You have to start with two seperate ends of yarn. You can use the outside and inside ends from a yarn cake or, in my case, two seperate balls. Tie the two yarn ends together using a slip knot and hold them in your right hand or slip them on the end of your needle. Then....start your long tail cast on. Ta-da! No running out of yarn and having to yank the whole thing out to start over. When you are done casting on cut off one of the ends and start knitting with the other. Undo the slip knot at the beginning and commence knitting. Yes, you will have a couple of extra ends to weave in but, in the end, it's so much easier to get the correct amount of stitches on the needles.