Oh, For Pete's Sake!

Really???....

We needed MORE wood????  Well, apparently now we have enough wood for two winters, which means next year we'll get more wood and have enough time for it to dry out for winter number three.

So, it was off to stack wood for us, while Mandy supervised:

I LOVE stacking wood.  It's SO much fun. (She says, dripping with sarcasm).  I grumbled that it was boring.  Paul said he thought it was good "together time" and then I felt bad for saying it was boring.  But it really was.  I'd rather have "together time" be going to get ice cream.

We also made a day trip to Manchester, Vermont this weekend.  On the way up we stopped in Bennington for breakfast at the Blue Benn Diner:

Very tiny but very cool diner with a huge menu.  I had eggs benedict.  Mmmmmm.

Then we went to a car show:

This cool car was there (electric - even back then!).  The owner's grandfather drove it to work at GE in Schenectady every day:

It even had a GE parking permit on it!...

From there we went to Yarns for Your Soul, a yarn shop in Manchester:

Towards the left you can see a knitted flag hanging on the porch!  A very nice shop with lots of nice yarn.  I purchased some Ella Rae Lace Merino in a gray/taupe color, of which I forgot to take a picture and now Paul has the camera (sorry Aunt K!).  I'll post one later.  I was looking for something to make my Altamont Fair project out of.

Speaking of my Altamont Fair project... I spent about an hour and a half yesterday trying to decide on which project to do and then what yarn to knit it with.  I ended up knocking out the Trousseau because I hadn't purchased the pattern and I already had the patterns for the others.  I knocked out the Catkin (even though I really like the two-color pattern) because I suddenly realized it had 8 zillion buttons on it.  And we all know how I am about buttons, never mind then being judged on how well I applied them.

Once I got the yarn from Yarns for Your Soul home and decided on the project, I had doubts about that yarn and color.  So, I made a trip to The Spinning Room.  Which project did I decide, you ask?....

The Celes scarf/shawl by Jared Flood!  I'm using Lamb's Pride Nature Spun Fingering Weight in the color "Nervous Green".  I have no idea what that color name means.

So, that's how much I've gotten done so far.  That is one repeat of the chart, of which I have to do three more times.  For that side.  Then I have to make that same thing again and then kitchener stitch (sew) the two sides together.  The idea for making the two sides and then sewing them together is so that they will look symmetrical when hanging around your neck/shoulders.  Once those two sides are done, I'll have to pick up stitches all the way around for a total of 530 stitches (!).  THEN, I'll knit a 12-15 stitch per row border all the way around, knitting in one of the picked up border stitches every other row.  If you do the math, that means the border is approximately 1060 rows!  I have exactly 2 months to finish it.

I also finished my Diamond Lace toe up sock:

I only made one.  The other one I'll start when I teach the class.  I absolutely LOVE the yarn (Malabrigo sock) -- 100% merino means it is very soft and feels so nice to knit as well as to wear on your feet.

The one drawback to the weekend was that plans to go racing in Englishtown, New Jersey were derailed by this:

That, apparently, is a car "sitting on the ground" (even though it's not, really).   We went to the race track on Wednesday night so Paul could test and tune the car since he has been struggling to figure out why it's not getting the times it is supposed to.  After that night, he decided to put the old springs back in the car.  The ones that were working before he decided to install new/better ones over the winter but apparently they weren't working very well.  Even thought the car was sitting fine before he took these springs out, now it is not.  It is sitting way too low and therefore cannot be raced.  Don't know why.  Ordered new springs.

Quote of the Day: (for Paul)
"I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
-Thomas A. Edison