I was super excited several years ago when I was given a wood umbrella swift and a hand crank ball winder. It made it so much easier to purchase yarn because I could leave it in hank form until I was ready to knit or crochet it, and that is better for the yarn because there is no stress on the fibers when it is in the hank. When a new yarn shop in town opened two years ago...A Good Yarn Sarasota...I was amazed to see that there was an electric ball winder. It was so much faster and wound a really nice "cake" of yarn. I thought that electric winders were very expensive and therefore would only be found in full service shops. So...how delightful to see that Boye now has an affordable electric ball winder!
What is even better, is that you have a chance to win one of these at www.allfreecrochet.com!
Wish me luck.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Time flies when you are otherwise occupied!
I just realized that I haven't posted anything in almost two months. Not that I haven't had anything to post, just been busy with life.
On the stitching front, I am two thirds of the way to completing my son's afghan - the goal is to be done by Thanksgiving. A very cool crochet tie for him is about half completed. In the meantime, I finished a crochet bathmat, a tunesian crochet shawl, a knit hat for a friend who has lost her hair to chemo, and a square for an afghan for another friend who is also going through chemo. The socks I was knitting and the lace shawl haven't seen the light of day for months.
Aside from knitting/crocheting, I've been working a bit for our Supervisor of Elections helping enter data on the pollworkers they are hiring for this election in November. At some point I had to make a choice to either get involved in the politial side of things or help preserve the process. I chose the process. Until you get involved, you have no idea how complicated election law is and how many opportunities there are for each of us to make mistakes that affects our right to vote. The actual process of voting has gotten so much easier - the optical scan ballots work really well. But here we have something called "motor voter" that has really caused some issues. For one election a few years ago, we had people who came to the polls, said they had registered but they were not on the votor rolls. Apparently, the DMV hadn't forwarded the information to the Supervisor of Elections so we had no record that they had registered. Then there are the people who go to renew their license and are asked if they need to make any changes to their voter registration and answer in ways that causes their party affiliation to be changed - typically to No Party Affiliation and then they go to the polls in a primary and don't understand why their party has been changed and they can't vote for the person they want to. It is no wonder that some people get frustrated with the system.
I think my funniest story when I worked at the polls one year was the woman who came in, wasn't on the rolls and said, " I should be, I voted last month in Key West".....duh - you can only be registered in one county at a time.
And...next week I'm walking in the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.
Lots going on!
On the stitching front, I am two thirds of the way to completing my son's afghan - the goal is to be done by Thanksgiving. A very cool crochet tie for him is about half completed. In the meantime, I finished a crochet bathmat, a tunesian crochet shawl, a knit hat for a friend who has lost her hair to chemo, and a square for an afghan for another friend who is also going through chemo. The socks I was knitting and the lace shawl haven't seen the light of day for months.
Aside from knitting/crocheting, I've been working a bit for our Supervisor of Elections helping enter data on the pollworkers they are hiring for this election in November. At some point I had to make a choice to either get involved in the politial side of things or help preserve the process. I chose the process. Until you get involved, you have no idea how complicated election law is and how many opportunities there are for each of us to make mistakes that affects our right to vote. The actual process of voting has gotten so much easier - the optical scan ballots work really well. But here we have something called "motor voter" that has really caused some issues. For one election a few years ago, we had people who came to the polls, said they had registered but they were not on the votor rolls. Apparently, the DMV hadn't forwarded the information to the Supervisor of Elections so we had no record that they had registered. Then there are the people who go to renew their license and are asked if they need to make any changes to their voter registration and answer in ways that causes their party affiliation to be changed - typically to No Party Affiliation and then they go to the polls in a primary and don't understand why their party has been changed and they can't vote for the person they want to. It is no wonder that some people get frustrated with the system.
I think my funniest story when I worked at the polls one year was the woman who came in, wasn't on the rolls and said, " I should be, I voted last month in Key West".....duh - you can only be registered in one county at a time.
And...next week I'm walking in the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.
Lots going on!
Monday, August 30, 2010
I can eat THAT?
I restarted a diet this past week, only this time - because I'm trying to get my husband to follow it as well - I'm using the various cookbooks that you can buy for this diet to try and find tasty interesting meals and snacks to keep us motivated.
Diets have such a negative connotation. People always ask, "what can you eat?" or "what have you cut out?" as if a diet is somehow a punishment for prior indulgences. But as someone much wiser than I once pointed out, a diet is what you eat, some are just healthier than others.
So in the process of looking for interesting things to make, I stumbled on three great things this week. The first was lemon blueberry muffins. Oh my, with lemon zest and lemon extract and fresh blueberries, these turned out to be very tasty. And, on this "reduced calorie" diet, you may have two with a small serving of fruit and it's only 400 calories (which is a meal). The second was just a simple chicken recipe - coated in whole grain breadcrumbs and chopped walnuts and baked - sliced and served over field greens with....the most amazing tasty pomegranate dressing - dont' recall all the ingredients, but you use 100% pomegranate juice and you cook it till it reduced by half and then you drizzle it over the chicken/salad. Sweet and tart and totally yummy. I saved the best for last....who ever heard of a reduced calorie diet with Stuffed French Toast? This was amazing - finely chopped semi sweet chocolate combined with that fake cream cheese stuff that starts with an 'N' that I can never spell, spread on a 1/2 inch thick slice of italian bread, topped with a matching slice, dipped into an egg/vanilla extract mixture and then cooked in a skillet with a little margarine. Topped with sliced strawberries mixed with orange zest and a little sugar. WOW - Sunday Brunch at it's best.
With food like this, this "diet" could be fun.
Diets have such a negative connotation. People always ask, "what can you eat?" or "what have you cut out?" as if a diet is somehow a punishment for prior indulgences. But as someone much wiser than I once pointed out, a diet is what you eat, some are just healthier than others.
So in the process of looking for interesting things to make, I stumbled on three great things this week. The first was lemon blueberry muffins. Oh my, with lemon zest and lemon extract and fresh blueberries, these turned out to be very tasty. And, on this "reduced calorie" diet, you may have two with a small serving of fruit and it's only 400 calories (which is a meal). The second was just a simple chicken recipe - coated in whole grain breadcrumbs and chopped walnuts and baked - sliced and served over field greens with....the most amazing tasty pomegranate dressing - dont' recall all the ingredients, but you use 100% pomegranate juice and you cook it till it reduced by half and then you drizzle it over the chicken/salad. Sweet and tart and totally yummy. I saved the best for last....who ever heard of a reduced calorie diet with Stuffed French Toast? This was amazing - finely chopped semi sweet chocolate combined with that fake cream cheese stuff that starts with an 'N' that I can never spell, spread on a 1/2 inch thick slice of italian bread, topped with a matching slice, dipped into an egg/vanilla extract mixture and then cooked in a skillet with a little margarine. Topped with sliced strawberries mixed with orange zest and a little sugar. WOW - Sunday Brunch at it's best.
With food like this, this "diet" could be fun.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Back to School and other musings
My son returned to college this week and I'm not missing him. Does that make me a bad mom? For some reason I've never had a hard time leaving him, even when he was three months old. I think there is a part of me that is very practical. In each case I knew either I was leaving him or he was going to be away from me and I thoroughly researched where he was going to be so that I developed a sense of comfort that he would be okay. Once I felt that comfort, I didn't look back, I dropped him off at Daycare, nursery school, school, summer camp, college, got in the car and left. Don't get me wrong...I love to hang with my son... but he is where he needs to be and I am where I need to be and it will all be fine.
The silver lining is that I now have control of my house back! No more nasty bad for me snack foods in the fridge and pantry, no more loads of wash going just when I want to do laundry (yup - he does his own wash and has since middle school when he asked how to use the washer). Now I can reprogram the DVR and delete Family Guy, That 70s Show, Mythbusters etc. He is back with all his friends and I'm happy!
The silver lining is that I now have control of my house back! No more nasty bad for me snack foods in the fridge and pantry, no more loads of wash going just when I want to do laundry (yup - he does his own wash and has since middle school when he asked how to use the washer). Now I can reprogram the DVR and delete Family Guy, That 70s Show, Mythbusters etc. He is back with all his friends and I'm happy!
Friday, July 2, 2010
What a great name!
I was chatting with a friend about those books that I read on vacation. They were expressing surprise that I had read three books in 12 days. So I explained that they were not "literature" but more what I like to call Chick Lit. As I had mentioned, they were all about knitting, specifically Knit Two by Kate Jacobs and both of the Blossom Street books by Debbie McComber - The Shop on Blossom Street and A Good Yarn. Their response was perfect....Knit Lit!
Where has time gone?
Sometimes I wonder where time goes. The past month has been a time warp where I only seemed to know what I was doing today and tomorrow but had no idea which day of the week today or tomorrow were.
It all started with the anticipated at some point in the future but unexpected at the moment death of my wonderful Father-in-Law. Amidst the confusion of the moment and the attempt to juggle propriety with the schedules of children and grand-children, we managed to book, cancel and rebook flights, re-arrange a previously scheduled vacation that couldn't be totally postponed due to meeting relatives who were coming from overseas (more later), get through a very tough week burying my Father-in-Law, missing a plane flight and losing half a day with above mentioned relatives, meeting relatives, more plane flights, lots of driving, discovering the mountains of North Carolina and Great Smokey Mountain National Park, and finding the best goat cheese ever along with the BBQ at the Farmer's Market in Cashiers, NC which you knew had to be great when you saw all the bikers had stopped there for lunch. After a quiet week home peeling Georgia peaches, baking pies and trying to get life back on track, I was asked to host visiting clergy whom I had never met for five nights.....which has actually turned out to be a lot of fun.
Not a whole lot of time for knitting, even though I took a lot with me on both the flight and the car trip. I made the mistake of also taking along several books and fell blissfully into my occasional pattern of finishing books so quickly that I had to buy more. I think I just was at a place where I needed to escape into the lives of some fictional characters who seemed to be having a less stressful time than I was at the moment. Interestingly, they all revolved around knitting or knit shops, so although I wasn't physically knitting much, I was still thinking about knitting and yarn. Oh! the one thing that I did do was begin to teach my niece to knit - and she is a whiz!
Back to the relative I mentioned, she is my second cousin, which means that her father and my mother were cousins. This was almost a bolt from the blue. About six months ago I decided to try, one more time, to find some information about my Mother's family. While genealogy is slow and sometimes difficult in itself, it can be much more challenging when most of the information you have contains names that are not accurate because someone decided that the anglicized version was more palatable in the US in 1900s than the actual names that your relatives are still using. Having discovered at age 23 that my mother's maiden name was the name she had legally changed it to, and not the name she was born with was interesting to say the least. Anyway...about 40 years ago I had an opportunity to meet several relatives in London. If I knew then what I know now, it would have been a whole lot more interesting and I would have asked a lot more questions and made sure to have seen them again before they passed on. However, I did have a few names to hang on to. So...when I went searching on a genealogy website and saw that there was someone looking for someone who I was pretty sure I had met and was related to, I sent off an email through this website to the poster. After a few exchanges, it turned out that some of the relatives I remembered meeting were her parents! She was coming to the US to see her son and her sister and so we decided we would try to meet. In the meantime, she sent me all the names of all the relatives beginning with my great grandparents. I went from almost no information to information overload in a very short period of time. Now I have much more information about my Mom's side of the family, factual information, anecdotal information, stories etc. and it makes me feel more connected which is nice. Now my sister and I are trying to get the same level of detail on Dad's side of the family which heretofore had seemed to be more complete! Here is a photo of my second cousins (yup, a story in and of itself - married first cousins)
So it has been an eventful month, very focused on family in several different ways, and we are all slowly settling back into a routine where I know the day and the date, have appointments and make plans. I'm starting to find time for knitting again. On the needles at the moment are my beaded lace scarf, my son's afghan which I'm tempted to confess to hating and am almost ready to just pay someone to make, my husband's socks (and I have to replace one needle in order to make the mate since I stepped on it and broke it = stupid move), and a surprise for my sister in law. Photos later!
It all started with the anticipated at some point in the future but unexpected at the moment death of my wonderful Father-in-Law. Amidst the confusion of the moment and the attempt to juggle propriety with the schedules of children and grand-children, we managed to book, cancel and rebook flights, re-arrange a previously scheduled vacation that couldn't be totally postponed due to meeting relatives who were coming from overseas (more later), get through a very tough week burying my Father-in-Law, missing a plane flight and losing half a day with above mentioned relatives, meeting relatives, more plane flights, lots of driving, discovering the mountains of North Carolina and Great Smokey Mountain National Park, and finding the best goat cheese ever along with the BBQ at the Farmer's Market in Cashiers, NC which you knew had to be great when you saw all the bikers had stopped there for lunch. After a quiet week home peeling Georgia peaches, baking pies and trying to get life back on track, I was asked to host visiting clergy whom I had never met for five nights.....which has actually turned out to be a lot of fun.
Not a whole lot of time for knitting, even though I took a lot with me on both the flight and the car trip. I made the mistake of also taking along several books and fell blissfully into my occasional pattern of finishing books so quickly that I had to buy more. I think I just was at a place where I needed to escape into the lives of some fictional characters who seemed to be having a less stressful time than I was at the moment. Interestingly, they all revolved around knitting or knit shops, so although I wasn't physically knitting much, I was still thinking about knitting and yarn. Oh! the one thing that I did do was begin to teach my niece to knit - and she is a whiz!
Back to the relative I mentioned, she is my second cousin, which means that her father and my mother were cousins. This was almost a bolt from the blue. About six months ago I decided to try, one more time, to find some information about my Mother's family. While genealogy is slow and sometimes difficult in itself, it can be much more challenging when most of the information you have contains names that are not accurate because someone decided that the anglicized version was more palatable in the US in 1900s than the actual names that your relatives are still using. Having discovered at age 23 that my mother's maiden name was the name she had legally changed it to, and not the name she was born with was interesting to say the least. Anyway...about 40 years ago I had an opportunity to meet several relatives in London. If I knew then what I know now, it would have been a whole lot more interesting and I would have asked a lot more questions and made sure to have seen them again before they passed on. However, I did have a few names to hang on to. So...when I went searching on a genealogy website and saw that there was someone looking for someone who I was pretty sure I had met and was related to, I sent off an email through this website to the poster. After a few exchanges, it turned out that some of the relatives I remembered meeting were her parents! She was coming to the US to see her son and her sister and so we decided we would try to meet. In the meantime, she sent me all the names of all the relatives beginning with my great grandparents. I went from almost no information to information overload in a very short period of time. Now I have much more information about my Mom's side of the family, factual information, anecdotal information, stories etc. and it makes me feel more connected which is nice. Now my sister and I are trying to get the same level of detail on Dad's side of the family which heretofore had seemed to be more complete! Here is a photo of my second cousins (yup, a story in and of itself - married first cousins)
So it has been an eventful month, very focused on family in several different ways, and we are all slowly settling back into a routine where I know the day and the date, have appointments and make plans. I'm starting to find time for knitting again. On the needles at the moment are my beaded lace scarf, my son's afghan which I'm tempted to confess to hating and am almost ready to just pay someone to make, my husband's socks (and I have to replace one needle in order to make the mate since I stepped on it and broke it = stupid move), and a surprise for my sister in law. Photos later!
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Warning: Unsolicited Product Plug
I don't normally rave about products - but this is an exception.
There have been some times in my life when, despite all the "where is your mother when you need her" do-it-yourself books, online tutorials etc. I just could not get that stain out of the (fill in the blank).
The first incident that I recall really struggling with was the red dirt from the baseball diamond when my son played Little League sometime in the early 90s. I tried everything. Finally, one thing that seemed to work was Fels Naptha soap = but not the flake laundry soap, the scruffy bar soap that nobody sells. Fortunately a bar lasts a long time, so once you found one, you were good for a season or two of stains on white synthetic baseball pants.
Then when I moved to Florida, one day there was a knock on my door and some poor kid was stuck promoting some product called "Supreme" that was supposed to be this wonderful multi purpose product. It even shined brass he said as he proceded to clean one square inch of my door handle. Obviously I had to buy the stuff - how else was I going to get the rest of the handle clean? Well, turned out that this "Supreme" stuff worked wonders on the baseball pant stains too and was much easier to use than that bar soap stuff. But all good things come to an end, and I ran out of "Supreme".
Fast forward to son in a college fraternity. How they manage to get things like footprints in the middle of the back of a dress shirt that even my fabulous dry cleaner can't remove, or random red juice/punch/who knows what stains on shorts, is beyond me. But the stains on the shorts are no longer beyond me because I found Nature Bright.
I found this stuff by coincidence - a story that doesn't need to be told here. It is made by Shaklee - a company about which most of us have heard. They make all kinds of cleaning products in concentrated form and you dilute the stuff with water and get bazillion ounces for $19.99 compared to the cost for bazillion ounces of (fill in the blank).
The demo looked pretty good (the iodine dissolved in water disappeared!) so I bought two different cleaning products - one of which was this Nature Bright which was purported to be "better than Oxy Clean".
Home came the two pair of red stained shorts and one with a mysterious mustard/curry colored stain. I tried spraying the spots with the solution and nothing happened. I figured I had nothing to lose so I filled the sink with cold water - poured in some of the powder - swished it around to dissolve it and put in the shorts. The next morning.....drum roll please.....NO STAINS!
I was in shock. Given the cost of those J Crew and Polo Ralph Lauren shorts - that Nature Bright was a bargin! And I have lots left. I'm even tempted to buy some more and give it to my son to take back to school. The parents of all his fraternity brothers can thank me later.
There have been some times in my life when, despite all the "where is your mother when you need her" do-it-yourself books, online tutorials etc. I just could not get that stain out of the (fill in the blank).
The first incident that I recall really struggling with was the red dirt from the baseball diamond when my son played Little League sometime in the early 90s. I tried everything. Finally, one thing that seemed to work was Fels Naptha soap = but not the flake laundry soap, the scruffy bar soap that nobody sells. Fortunately a bar lasts a long time, so once you found one, you were good for a season or two of stains on white synthetic baseball pants.
Then when I moved to Florida, one day there was a knock on my door and some poor kid was stuck promoting some product called "Supreme" that was supposed to be this wonderful multi purpose product. It even shined brass he said as he proceded to clean one square inch of my door handle. Obviously I had to buy the stuff - how else was I going to get the rest of the handle clean? Well, turned out that this "Supreme" stuff worked wonders on the baseball pant stains too and was much easier to use than that bar soap stuff. But all good things come to an end, and I ran out of "Supreme".
Fast forward to son in a college fraternity. How they manage to get things like footprints in the middle of the back of a dress shirt that even my fabulous dry cleaner can't remove, or random red juice/punch/who knows what stains on shorts, is beyond me. But the stains on the shorts are no longer beyond me because I found Nature Bright.
I found this stuff by coincidence - a story that doesn't need to be told here. It is made by Shaklee - a company about which most of us have heard. They make all kinds of cleaning products in concentrated form and you dilute the stuff with water and get bazillion ounces for $19.99 compared to the cost for bazillion ounces of (fill in the blank).
The demo looked pretty good (the iodine dissolved in water disappeared!) so I bought two different cleaning products - one of which was this Nature Bright which was purported to be "better than Oxy Clean".
Home came the two pair of red stained shorts and one with a mysterious mustard/curry colored stain. I tried spraying the spots with the solution and nothing happened. I figured I had nothing to lose so I filled the sink with cold water - poured in some of the powder - swished it around to dissolve it and put in the shorts. The next morning.....drum roll please.....NO STAINS!
I was in shock. Given the cost of those J Crew and Polo Ralph Lauren shorts - that Nature Bright was a bargin! And I have lots left. I'm even tempted to buy some more and give it to my son to take back to school. The parents of all his fraternity brothers can thank me later.
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