Make Me

Musical Fun, Garden Fun

Crazy last two weeks. Really.  I spent the weekend recuperating.  But Friday night I did get the chance to see The Drowsy Chaperone.  Loved It!  It was like watching a campy old musical.  Sad to say it was not a full house, but at least we got the opportunity to upgrade our seats. If you get the chance, I'd highly recommend seeing it. 

We got rush tickets the night of the show for $20 in the dress circle.  Not as close as I'd like to sit, but seems the Civic has filled in their center aisles to add more seats.  Can they do that? Isn't that a fire hazard or something? Now those center dress circle seats kind of suck because you have to cross miles of seats just to get there.

Color Purple is coming in December and I'm excited about that one as well.  I have the soundtrack, but I haven't really taken a good listen because I want to be surprised.

On another note, I happened on a short winter gardening seminar at Anderson's Nursery.  Here's a tip if you have snails - use a product called Sluggo. It's Iron Phosphate, organic, safe if you have pets and also acts as a fertilizer. You should use it every three weeks. 

Good soil additives are gypsum and chicken manure, although the lady next to me swears by fish emulsion and earthworm casings.  Sounds smelly to me, but I priced the fish emulsion and it seems a good deal.

I'm going to get a nice big plastic tub and try onion sets. Planted at 1 week intervals, 5" apart you can harvest the first growths as scallions rather than thinning. 

My winter veggies are going to be lettuce, spinach, little fat carrots, bok choy and broccoli rabe.  I wish I could try potatoes.  Maybe sweet potatoes?  Sunday is soil prep day.

Day of the Abnormally Large Bugs

It's been a low-key kind of day.  Except for watering the plants, not much has happened. 

I was about to go out on the balcony to water and check on the laundry (that Wonder Wash is great! It really gets clothes clean!) when a HUGE beetle flew into the sliding door. It was a bit discombobulated for a bit, flying around but not really getting anywhere before it finally flew away. But I got a chance to look at it while it was stunned and flopping about on the ground. I'm willing to bet it was nearly two inches long.  If I hadn't been busy being all icked out, I would've snapped a photo.

Then out the front door I went to water the Hibiscus.  Something fluttered and moved. There was noise.  It was a HUGE grasshopper!  Huge!  See! I wasn't joking!  I decided not to take my trash out while it was still around. huge bugs that make noise when they move about totally freak me. Getting this picture gave me the shakes I'm still battling as I type this!  If it got in the house I'd have to move out until for sure it was gone.

Anyway, I was wondering what had been eating my aphids. That hibiscus was a regular aphid condo.  i saw one ladybug over the summer but I didn't think one ladybug could munch that many aphids even if it were bulimic. Then a few months ago there was a grasshopper of normal dimensions but it was quite dead.  This guy over here is about three inches long and the body is about an inch high.  Interesting at a distance, not so much when it is outside your door.  I wouldn't be surprised if the thing knocked to come in.

There have been so many bugs this summer. What is the point of living in southern California if I'm going to have to deal with bugs on a regular basis?  Eariler in the spring we had an outbreak of beetles on campus. Big black beetles that were like stink bugs. All over the place. In my office - like they wanted to be enrolled or something.  Now, because they've spread some sort of bargain rate manure all over the eight pieces of available lawn that haven't been slated for new buildings, we have flies.  Scads of flies.  A bevy of flies? A pride of flies?

Last week I was standing under a pine tree and something BIT me.  Ick. If this is going to be what summertime is like from now on, I'm done. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to barricade the door in case Grasshopper Greg decides to storm the castle. *shiver*

No New Yarn Here

karabella yarn
Originally uploaded by Hilari

Um. Yeah. I don't know how it happened. Really. All I remember is going in to Two Sisters and Ewe to see if they had a copy of Wendy's Custom Knits and I have a brief memory of a sale sign and then everything went black.

When I came to I had a bag full of yarn and my visa card was $80 lighter. Yipes! Oh. And no book.

I think this just may become one of the sweaters from Fitted Knits. I bought all the off-white that was there (at $3/skein) and since it still wasn't enough for a sweater, I got some in grey as well. Trim, right?

Making a test run posting directly from Flickr, so no links cuz I'm far too lazy to HTML.  Let's see how it looks.

What I Found on My Desk or Just Call Me Lady Link-o-Lot

I found this fascinating: Bicycle Spinning Wheel

But that doesn't mean I'm going to spin. But you spinners out there might want to take note of all the spin stuff on Etsy. Cool huh?

Etsy is like a never-ending bowl of soup. There's just stuff and more stuff.  I knew there was a blog, but I never really looked at it before.

In other news, I'm set to organize my drafting table today.  This is where my computer sits in my living room.  At the moment it is covered with yarn I photographed for Ravelry, earrings that still need to be listed on the Lazy Lima Bean, packing materials, pens, about 5 different lip balms (I'm a hopeless addict), the remote for my AC, rulers, Kathie's heart charms, a jar full of Swarovski crystals I don't know what to do with, a box of square tags, the postal scale, stamp pads that don't fit in the drawers, a Swiss army knife, two emery boards, a Roma tomato, cell phone charm blank (?) business cards, about 1,000 yarn bands, colloidal silver spray (for my sinuses), a bag of three wooden shaker pegs, yarn scraps, a color wheel (so that's where that is!), ribbon from Global Gardens, scrap paper, stickers, a photograph of my grandparents from the 50s, a plumbing bill from 2002, tomato soap from Karen's Soaps (smells like tomato leaves!_, Louis Armstrong Christmas CD case, a teensy canvas blank, a Sims2 brochure, a Far Side comic, a brown shrink plastic square, a packet of bush bean seeds, wearble mini scrapbook kit, packet of Emergen-C Vitamin C drink mix in Cranberry, my old library card, a tin of mints, a Hello Kitty notepad, a Christmas notepad, a mini highlighter, cilantro seeds, a big tub of Amazing Glaze, my missing red hoop earring, instructions for a Sony USB flash drive, a brochure from the Park Bench Pattern Company, a template for a small paper purse gift tag, my 2007 W-2, an unfinished earring, a key to who-knows-where, hand cream, drill bits, a tagua nut bead, quarters, plant tags, a Magenta rubber stamp, dust and crumbs.

I dunno. Maybe it doesn't need to be cleared.

Refinement & Ease

You should see me y'all! I am so on the ball, it's scary.  I've been clearing out the crap from the house and working on projects nearly every night. I've been stocking the Bean, even if I'm only listing one thing a night.  Tonight I cleared off the dining table so I can spend next week on stationery and cards.  I've knit four more little pouches this week and will stitch them up tomorrow at coffee.

I also purchased a Wonder Wash and did my first load of laundry last night.  I'm happy with how it works, although it's large enough to take up quite a bit of the tub and I'll have to find a good place to store it.  I'm planning on draining the rinse water for watering the plants.  I think I will get the spin dryer next month. I'm feeling all self-sustain-y right now, so I hope you'll pardon my smugness.

I'll have to post photos another day, my camera battery didn't charge up properly. That kind of put a damper on my Etsy schedule because I was supposed to come home and photograph the hats. I also got some Etsy goodness in the mail today and I'll have to share that later, too.  Now the schedule says it's time for bed.

'Night!

I Know! Let's Play A Game! Yay!

Can you find the varmint who ate the inside out of one of my precious tomatoes?

Look closer

If you want a live shot now you're going to have to look three stories below.....

Change is Good

I've been feeling the overwhelming need for change.  Maybe I've been reading Purling Dervish too much, but it did start with the look of the blog.  Now I'm feeling the urge to change how I blog.  I'm not sure what that means yet, but I've set an unveiling date of November 21, 2008.  That's m'birthday, ya know. 

But I don't want to give away my beans before they hatch - they're worth two in the bush, doncha know.

Went to Lori's tonight and there were a slew of knitters there. And there was wine.  And new yarn.  Could it have gotten any better?  I don't think so. I started a Santa Cruz hat.  It's from some mystery yarn I found in my stash. No ball band.  Nothing.  At first I thought it was from the hand-dyed we did at Wendy's Dye Day back in 2006 (!) Hope I have it finished by the weekend. Cross your fingers.

The Latest

When I first started knitting I would work on these little swatches with remnants of yarn.  I'd just work till I ran out of yarn.  Every now and again I would stitch them up to help me with my seaming.  I have these little pouches and whatchadiggies all over the place.  One of them came in handy when I got my new iPod Shuffle and started riding the bus to work.  My purse has so much crap in it, it's nice to know what I've got in hand by texture alone, so this worked perfectly. If you're just starting knitting, there's a lot of little lessons in a swatch like this: right & left decreases, seaming, buttonholes, different stitches. 

Anyway, people have been commenting on my wee pouch. So I thought I'd make up some more and see if sell them at the Christmas craft fair.  Maybe try out a couple in the Lima Bean.

These two just need buttons.