Why I hate Daylight Savings Time.

Daylight Savings Time is just a huge inconvenience for me! It puts Diana in Arizona just one hour behind us, instead of two, so instead of being able to call her when I get to work at 11, when it is only 9:00 p.m. in Phoenix, now when I get to work at 11, it is 10:00 p.m. in Phoenix, and she is already asleep or very close to it! Which means I hardly get to talk to her at all (well, not daily, anyway, which is the prescribed dosage!) for six months of the year!

Also, Kim is still in Taiwan and she was 13 hours ahead of us, which I had gotten used to, but now she is 14 hours ahead, and when I get to work, instead of just getting back to her room to chat with me on Instant Messenger, she is halfway through her break, and sometime she only has a couple of minutes to talk, because she has to go back to the classroom to get ready for the afternoon classes! Do you see how I am terribly inconvenienced?

So that is my complaint today. I am going to have to try to update more so Diana will know what is going on here, and she will just need to do the same to keep me filled in!

So, here's what I have been doing in the last couple of weeks since the damn time change...

What I am knitting:

When I got home from Scott's I quickly knitted two very cute winter hats for the boys, because while we were there it snowed and Carolyn got out their winter clothes, and the hideous hat Carl was wearing was a crime against nature. I had to make something better!

After the cute hats, I started the new Knitalong with the people at the yarn shop. We got the last clue on Wednesday and I'm almost done with my first pair of socks knitted from the toe up! I'm pretty impressed with the pattern we used, and the yarn, too! I don't know if I will ever bother to make another pair of socks from the toe up, but these look good.

Now I have yarn to make a sweater for myself, and I still have a half-finished dress that I am knitting for Maddy, plus socks! I always have socks to knit!

What I'm reading now:

While we were in Utah, I got a lot of good suggestions for books to read, and I've had a chance to read some of them. I read about a book a day because I have a lot of downtime at work, so I can't remember everything I read, but I can say that I finished Hogfather last night, a book I picked to read because I like some other books by Terry Pratchett, but this one wasn't one that I loved. I picked it because it was Christmas-y, but it was so existential that it took all the fun out of it. Yawn.

When I finished that one, I started a mystery called January Kills Me. It's not Art, but it's entertaining, and I've already downloaded the second book by that author (something about February). What I love most about my Kindle is that there are so many books by independent authors - people who would maybe not get published by the big publishers, but they can get published on Kindle and sell their books affordably, and I get to read them! Some of them are good, some are okay, some aren't very good (some are just werewolf porn), but I love that I can have access to so many books!

Okay, that's all I've got for now. I will fill you in on the Great Lipstick Adventure later. Also, Kim will be home in 3 weeks! Woot!

In which a rabbit has a jacket!

I finished the two Rabbit Surprise Jackets and took them to SLC to give them to the rabbits, and wasn't I surprised when they didn't fit!

It turns out that a jacket meant for a human baby is way too big for a stuffed rabbit! Who knew?

Since it was very important that Soren's rabbit have a jacket, I did not give up! Carolyn ripped the jacket back and rolled the yarn into balls for me, and I started over from scratch, just making it up as I went along.

I have knit many, many sweaters, so I know how to construct one, and in the end, the jacket was perfect.

We didn't take apart the second rabbit jacket. Carolyn thought it was pretty, and she is saving it for a real baby, either one of her own, or to be a gift for someone else. Carl didn't care if his rabbit had a jacket or not.

Whew! I'm tired of making rabbit jackets!

In which there is yarn.

So the yarn arrived from Karin today and I'm working on Peter Rabbit's jacket again. This shade of blue (Dusk in Knitpicks Essentials yarn. I think they are calling that yarn Stroll now.) is the most beautiful shade of blue I have ever seen and I wish I could make a sweater for myself in this color.

And now for the weather: it is freezing here! Even I am cold, probably because I have to wake up and come to work in the middle of the night, but tonight I am wearing a sweater over my shirt, and also socks, and I am still cold. I have a wool shawl in the drawer that I am going to put on, too.

What I'm reading today: I am almost finished with Arabella, by Georgette Heyer, and then I'll start reading book five of Septimus Heap, Syren. After that I am planning to read Blood on the Ice, a book about hockey-playing vampires. I'm so intellectual.

In which rabbits will not go naked!

Rachel and Maddy and I went looking for more yarn for a Rabbit Surprise Sweater, but we couldn't find what we were looking for in either of the stores we stopped in. Rachel suggested we should check her stash, and in it was exactly the yarn I had in mind, but there wasn't enough of it!

I took the one ball that she had, because I knew who would know if that yarn was still available - Karin! It was a Knitpicks yarn, in a color that I thought was called Dusk, and Karin checked the website and said it was backordered until November (!) but that she had some in her stash that she could send me! Woot!

So I started the rabbit jacket again, and knitted on it tonight until I ran out of yarn. I'll start the jacket for Carl's rabbit with another color, because his rabbit doesn't need to meet any literary description, and I'll work on that until I get more yarn from Karin.

Speaking of Karin, we had agreed back at the beginning of the year that we would do a sock exchange, and then I immediately forgot about it. Well, Karin didn't forget, and I got a beautiful pair of socks in the mail last week from her! Maybe I should get started on a pair of socks for her now, since she is sending me emergency rabbit sweater supplies!

Still reading Septimus Heap and today I got a text from someone in the knitting group, asking me the titles so she could get them from the library. I hope she likes them as much as I do. I looked them up on the Amazon website, and it looks like there are two more out, and there might only be one more that will end the series. I finished re-reading the first four, and I'll start book five this week.

I was talking on the phone to Rachel tonight, and I could hear Maddy fussing around in the background, and Rachel said they were baking a pizza in the oven for dinner but it wasn't done yet. Poor Maddy was bored and hungry! I suggested that it was a good time to try a video call, thinking it would be a good distraction for Maddy, and oh my goodnees, Maddy loved it!

She especially liked that she could see herself on the screen too, because you get a little window that shows the view of yourself on the camera, inside the bigger picture of the person you are talking to. She thought it was so delightful to see Rich and I on the screen, but what she liked the most was showing her belly and seeing it on camera! She kept pulling up her shirt to see her belly, and then laughing at it!

Because I know how much you care about rabbits...

So here's the thing, I ran out of the sock yarn I was using for the Rabbit Surprise Sweater with only a few rows to go! I could weep. It was just an odd ball of some brand I had never heard of, so it's not like I can just run to the corner store and get another ball of it, so now I am going to have to go shopping and find some other sock yarn to make the rabbit jacket!

I know what you are thinking, you are thinking that I have lots of yarn in the yarn room and why can't I just match some yarn that I already have, even if it's not a really good match? It's only a jacket for a stuffed rabbit, so how close a match does it need to be? It doesn't have to be perfect!

Well, you would be right in thinking that I have lots of yarn, and also that it doesn't have to be a perfect match. But. Aside from the fact that I want Soren's rabbit's jacket to be wonderful, there is the problem that blue is not one of my favorite colors, so there isn't just tons of blue sock yarn in my stash - there is hardly any, actually. In fact, that ball I was using was the only ball of blue sock yarn I had.

I know, blue is everyone's favorite color, and I don't know why I don't seem to have any, but I just don't. And now that I think about it, my Local Yarn Shop (LYS), doesn't have a whole ton of blue sock yarn, either. Not that I am going to go to my LYS to buy yarn for a rabbit jacket. I love Soren, but I don't want to spend that kind of money on an experimental rabbit jacket. I don't even know if it's going to fit the friggin' rabbit!

So I am going to take a little trip to the fabric store to get some cheap inexpensive sock yarn. I hope they have blue.

In which it is fall.

It's Fall and today was a beautiful day. There was some rain in the morning, and then it was sunny, and Rachel and Ash came over to work on the door they are decorating for the movie trailer they are planning to shoot in Kim's room next week.

Have I mentioned that before? They are planning to make a series of short films, based on a book that Rachel is writing, and they have made a donation page for it that you can friend on facebook, called The Locksmith Project. They are going to shoot the trailer to put on the donation page, and since Kim is gone for a while, they have moved everything out of her room and they're making it look like a room in an abandoned house so they can shoot the film in there. Ooh! I should take a couple of pictures of the room in progress.

So while they worked on staining the door in the backyard, Maddy and I took a walk through the crunchy leaves and around the block, and eventually Rich and the dog came out to meet us and walk back to the house with us.

They finished with the door just in time for us to go to yoga, and ow, I am so sore from that workout we did tonight! We did a lot of back-bending things, but I think the one that I'm still feeling is one of the standing poses. I took some Advil and a hot shower like I always do after class, and my back is feeling better now.

I'm about halfway through knitting Soren's Rabbit Surprise Sweater, and it looks like it's the right size. I bought some buttons for it today, gold ones, because the Peter Rabbit story mentions the jacket having gold buttons. I bought enough buttons for Carl's rabbit's jacket to have gold buttons, too. It's a good thing these Surprise Sweaters are so much fun to make, since I need to make two.

While I knit, I'm reading the Septimus Heap series that starts with Magyk. I'm re-reading the first four, and I just found that there are three or four more in the series, so I'm excited to read those, too! They're like the Harry Potter books, they're a series for kids that grownups like, too. They're by Angie Heap if you want to look them up.

This is nice - I'm in bed and Rich is sleeping. The dog is sleeping at the foot of the bed, and it's so peaceful. I'm going to knit and read for a while and enjoy my night off.

Men get old and pearls turn yellow.

I've gotten out of the habit of writing, but I'm going to try to get back to it. I like being able to look back later and see what I was doing months or years ago.

The title of this post is what Scott said when I told him how depressing the Three Dog Night concert was. The band members were old, the audience was old, and when the three senior citizens came out on the stage to introduce the band, one of the old dears said, "Let's show them how Freeport can rock and roll!" and I turned to Rich and told him that it was all so sad I could weep. I was staring into the face of my own mortality! I've heard from a few people that they thought it was a great concert, and someone said that she was reliving her youth, but I just thought it was sad.

In other, more cheerful news, I am knitting a blue jacket for Soren's rabbit, Peter. Carolyn said that Soren wants a jacket for Peter since they read the story of Peter Rabbit - you know, the one where Peter loses his jacket and his shoes when he is chased out of Mr. MacGregor's garden. I have been looking for a pattern for a rabbit jacket for a couple of days, and then I thought of the shape of the rabbit (which Carolyn carefully measured for me) and I decided to try making a Baby Surprise Sweater out of sock yarn. The sock yarn and smaller needles should make it just about the right size for Soren's rabbit. If it works out, I'll make one for Carl's rabbit, too, but in a different color.

Maddy is growing and can say a couple of words now. She can say quite a few words, really, but she usually doesn't bother. She said "No!" loudly and clearly to our dog the other day when he was bothering her, and she says "Out!" while banging on the inside of the front door. She wants to go out and pick up fallen leaves and carry them around in her hand like a bouquet. Now that the leaves are drying up, she likes to shuffle across my yard and listen to the leaves crunch under her feet. Rachel is planning to rake up a big pile for Maddy to play in this weekend.

Kim is doing fine and will be home in a little more than two months! I miss her!