Dogs Steal Yarn

A parting shot before it all unravels

The sweater, that is. The empire waist cardigan.

It's just not working. I still like my original idea. I still like the yarn. I don't like the two of them together. The heavy collar and cuffs are great, but not in cotton, which is already heavy enough. I think the cuffs work, actually, but now that the sweater is at a point where it can be tried on, I tried it on and just wasn't happy. The seed stitch collar hangs...well...heavily and doesn't sit right. I also wish I'd knit a smaller size for myself. I swatched but I didn't take enough into account the degree to which cotton drapes and grows.

I think I'm going to frog the whole thing and use the yarn, which I do like quite a bit, for something better suited to it. A drapey little cardi. Something unstructured and easy. Maybe sort of like an adult Yoda sweater. And then I can do the empire waist as planned in a wool yarn that can stand up to all that seed stitch.

I think.

I'm not going to frog it right now. I'll sleep on it and see how things look in the morning.

Not on the road yet

We didn't close yesterday, thanks to lawyers. It looks like Thursday is the day. In the meantime we're staying with my mom, having a nice visit with her. We wanted to be on our way by now, but no worries. At least we're getting some extra time with my family this way, and we don't need to be in Portland until October 1st.

I'm almost done with the empire waist cardi and will post pics soon. Hopefully tomorrow. And then I'm hoping to get the math done and post the pattern here by the end of the week. And then after that we'll most likely be on our way and it will be all socks all the time. Besides the usual comfort knitting of rolltop stockinette socks, I also packed yarn for Cassie's Loksins! pattern and Wendy's River Run pattern. River Run, along with many of the other sock patterns Wendy has been designing this summer, will soon be available for sale at The Loopy Ewe, but Wendy gave me the pattern as a birthday gift last week so I already have it and will be casting on the minute I finish that cardigan. I'll be using Vesper sock yarn in the Algae colorway. Again, photos soon. Tomorrow, I hope. I need to remember where I packed the camera cable. And as soon as I have a mailing address again, I'll be ordering more of those sock patterns. I especially want to knit the Snapdragon socks.

It's been one kindness after another lately, actually. I've been so lucky... The yarn I'll be using for the Loksins! was going-away gift yarn from Irene and wait till you see this colorway. It's Sunshine Yarns Poppy, and it's pretty much perfect Cari yarn. And Cassie gave me the gift of time. I was panicking that I wouldn't be able to finish the cardigan before we leave and I really really want to have that finished and posted before we go. Cassie stepped in and knit the belt for me. She spent a weekend knitting 50" of seed stitch. Just one more reason to love her. And then I was running out of yarn for the cardigan and there was no more available in the colorway I'm using on the Knit Picks website. I sent a semi-frantic email to Cher, the inhouse designer at Knit Picks, and she managed to find three balls (one partially swatched. She sent me everything she had!) in her office. So now I have enough yarn. And unexpectedly (thanks to the slowness of lawyers) enough time. And two great sock patterns waiting for me.

And the open road with my guys.

Extremely fortunate, I know. Believe me, I know.

And now Billy is massaging my shoulders as I type.

Sigh.

Life is good. (But please keep those good thoughts pointed in the general direction of our lawyers in Midtown.)

Photos tomorrow, really. I'm determined to find that camera cable.

Our stuff is in a moving truck

Well...this is the last few hours in our house in Brooklyn. This evening we'll head to my mom's in Jersey, and it looks like we'll be closing on Monday and then hitting the road.

Please think good closing thoughts, as I won't truly relax until the business part of things is done.

And now to go dig up St Joseph....

Birthday wishes DO come true!

Thanks to the lovely and talented Julia, who shared her last Ravelry invite with me, I'm in! (And this is not the first time that Julia has been exceedingly kind to me, I might add. Wonderful, that woman.)

Username: DogsStealYarn

I'm not sure how much I'll be able to get up there in the midst of the move and road trip, but I'll do my best. No stash photos for a while, though, as the stash is now in boxes.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes. I've been having a fantastic day with my guys, cardboard and packing tape and all.

Happy birthday to me

I meant to scan in one of my old baby photos for today's birthday post, but then I went and packed all the photos. And then I meant to have Billy take a new photo of me for today's post but forgot to do that, and now it's after midnight so officially my birthday and Billy is asleep and here we are, and so we'll have to make do with some random photo I found lurking in my iPhoto files. It's actually more in keeping with how I'm feeling right now than a smiling current birthday shot or some cute baby photo would, so it's just as well.

I've been promised blueberry pancakes and the luxury of Billy running baby interference while I drink a leisurely cup of coffee, uninterrupted, in the morning. I'm actually going to get to drink my coffee hot! Before the baby was born, I never would have predicted that the promise of a hot cup of coffee sipped rather than gulped would please me so.

The house smells of cardboard and cheap packing tape. Everything is in piles and heaps or in boxes. Nine minutes ago I turned 34. (Or I'll turn 34 at 8:10pm. Depends on how much of a birthday purist you want to be.) With everything going on right now, there won't be much celebration beyond that hot cup of coffee. But I do hope there will be cake.

Certainly, cake.

(And maybe I'll finally get my Ravelry invite? Though that might be too much to hope for. There were still something like 1600 people ahead of me when I checked the queue yesterday.)

The most wonderful thing happened on Saturday. We had planned to have the Salvation Army come pick up all the things we'd set aside for donation when I went through the boxes in the basement, but they couldn't come until the 31st, and we'll be long gone by then. Well, on Saturday we instead decided to take advantage of the traditional Brooklyn method of freecycling and set the stuff out in front of the house, unwrapped so people could easily see what was there. Less than twenty minutes later there was a crowd of neighbors sifting through the stuff, carrying armloads away to their houses, coming back for more. And SMILING. Big grins...the kind I always get when I find something I really love or have use for on the street like that. It felt so great to not only get rid of the stuff we don't need or want anymore, but to also get to see other people really excited to have it. I was going to post on freecycle.org about everything we put out, but everything found a new home the old fashioned way.

Drive-by linking

No time for a real post, so here are a few links to blogs you should be reading that you might not know about yet:

Sutton, college friend o'mine. He and his wife just moved from Baltimore to Montana. Do read back into the archives aways for getting-ready-to-move hijinks and dispatches from Bird Camp

Lizbon, who I finally met in person last week after several months of talking about meeting in person. Her blog is one of my favorites.

Mother of Chaos, who I've never met in person. I adore her blog, though. You will too.

Okay. Back to the moving boxes. Cassie's on her way over. If she doesn't blog for the next few weeks it's because I packed her in a box to bring her to Portland with us. I haven't yet come to terms with the fact that I'm leaving my friends behind. And Cassie is small. She could live quite comfortably in a wardrobe box.

The countdown...

How have I lived in Brooklyn all this time and not known about Liquid Love: A Sophisticated Meeting Place? Photo snapped from a moving car, hence the fabulous quality and composition. No, I didn't go inside. I wouldn't want to ruin the mystery.

Well... Ten days. The movers come to carry all of our stuff away in ten days. This weekend, with the help of our dearest darlingest and oh-so-ready-to-give-birth-any-minute-now Alicia and David (we were hoping the activity would speed things along. Hey Al, are you in labor yet? How about now? Now?), we sorted through EVERYTHING in the basement. We made a huge to-be-donated pile and threw out a hell of a lot of stuff. All the books are now packed, and will be mailed by us rather than moved by the movers (so much cheaper that way). The yarn is almost all packed.

Oh! Get this. Billy wanted to pack the yarn, and I told him I wasn't sure yet what yarn I wanted to have on the road with me. (See, the empire waist cardi has to be done before we leave and I've decided that it's nothing but socks for the road trip. Socks Across America, doncha know.) I already had two pairs in progress set aside, but what if I finish those before we arrive? My darling said, "Well, we can just stop at a yarn store and get you more." Dear man.

So...yeah...packing is well underway and I got rid of a ton of stuff this weekend. Boxes and boxes of stuff from the basement and a bookcase full of books. Today the goal is to sort through my clothes and make a sizeable pile for donation.

And I bought a new Moleskine. The writing in the old one is lost forever, but nothing to be done about that.

Posting around here is likely to be an unsavory combination of spotty and boring as we head toward the move. I suspect the road trip will provide a bit more interest.

Happy Monday and all that.

And just for fun, if there's a bar near you with a name on par with Liquid Love: A Sophisticated Meeting Place, let's hear it in the comments. Commenter with the funniest/oddest bar name gets...um...the honor of living near an oddly named bar.

Thumper gives lessons in letting go

I already knew I needed to get rid of stuff--lots of stuff--before the move. But now the moving estimates are rolling in and I REALLY need to get rid of stuff. The moving companies charge by weight and if the estimates are even close to accurate we need to lighten the load a lot before we go. I've been able to let go of some things, but I was having a hard time with it.

And then today...

This morning my cell phone, already badly battered by Thumper's persistent experiments in gravity, hit the floor and fell apart. Completely unfixably dead. So I had to go buy a new phone. A nuisance and money I hadn't planned on spending, but not really a big deal because I'm not the fancy phone type. And then I tried to make a call from the new phone and found that I hadn't been saving phone numbers in the old phone to the SIM card. And the old phone won't turn on, so...no phone numbers on the new phone and no way to get them out of the old phone. Okay. A hassle but no tragedy. I've mass-emailed all my friends to get them to send me their numbers again. (If I had your number and you didn't get an email, check your spam filter.)

Cell phone. Fine. Not a big deal.

What came next though...

Thumper has been cranky the past few days, cutting four teeth at once the poor guy. And I've been going kind of nuts with everything that needs to get done. Clearly what we needed was a playdate with our neighbor Celine and her two kids. We headed toward Prospect Park and decided to take the boat ride that goes along the lake. It was lovely, breezy and not too warm and muggy like it had been. Thumper was kind of fussy and restless, but it was okay. And then, fast as lightening, I swear because I never took my eyes off him, Thumper pulled my notebook from my bag and threw it in the water. And then it was gone.

My Moleskine. My beloved, half-full with ideas and snippets and thoughts and sketches and pieces of stories and the new novel notebook. Gone.

If I can lose my notebook and survive, I certainly think I can get rid of things that mean a lot less. I'm ready to get serious about getting rid of the things we don't need or love. Unfortunately, the clock is now ticking. We need to be out of here by 8/23.

I just need to white-knuckle it through the next couple of weeks. It might not be pretty.

Checking in

In the midst of the getting-ready-to-move flurry, we've also been doing this:

And this

And this

(Yep, that's the empire waist cardi. I warned you it would be slow going on that one. I've got an inch left of body to knit until the join, then I'll start the sleeves. I'm determined to get it done and get the pattern posted before the move.)

Meanwhile, the listmaking and planning and emailing and phone calling and stressing involved with closing on two houses, moving, and planning to drive cross-country is done while listening nearly nonstop to this and then there's lots of playing with Thumper thrown in for good measure, and that's usually done while listening to this.

I can't wait to be done with the planning and just hit the road with my guys.

Oscar's happy ending

Knitting friends are the best kind of friends, aren't they? We reached a bit of a crisis in the search for a new home for Oscar, and Melissa (sadly blogless. You're all missing out.) swooped in to the rescue. Her brother and his family have a pecan orchard in Missouri, where Oscar is quite welcome. There are two dogs, one other cat, and a fancy rooster, if I recall correctly. So he'll be an outdoor cat, with no couches to destroy, but he won't be joining a community of barn cats, so no barn cat hierarchy to worry about. And there's a llama next door!

How perfect is that? Can you feel my relief pouring from your screen?

We'll be dropping him off on our drive out west. Yes, we've decided to drive to Portland with the dog and the baby in the midsized handmedown car we're getting from my mom. Maybe we're nuts. We'll be angling south from New York to visit Billy's brother in Austin (and Anina! Anina, we're headed your way!) and then tool around through New Mexico maybe and then up north to see Yellowstone and maybe some camping and then it's on to glorious Portland.

Taking the southerly route at the end of August. We are nothing if not brilliant and blessed with impeccable timing.

Any sights we absolutely must see on our way across? I heard a vague rumor about a corn palace?