August 30, 2004
Pass the Bon Bons, Please
I think there is no more loathsome, oily, fat, slimy, slobby creature than Jabba the Hutt—except, after this weekend, me. In fact, you might as well just call me Ryan the Hutt and be done with it. The combination of the Olympics broadcasts, having access to cable channels, and having the recliner and the remote control all to myself was lethal. I don’t think I moved for 48 hours. Okay, that's not entirely true. I ate. I slept. I knit. I visited the powder room. And I did scare the crap out of the dog once in every 24-hour period by leaping out of the recliner, slapping the leash on her, racing her around the block, and jumping back into the recliner.
The Mysterious K reports no major trauma as a result of the family reunion, despite the dire predictions from our Dear Readers. She mingled with family as needed, and spent the rest of her weekend at a local stables watching a friend ride, and breathing in deep lungfuls of hay, horse sweat and leather—the ultimate in perfume if you love horses as we do. The Mysterious K and I were both avid riders in our younger, less Jabba-like days (her: quarter horses, Western, and trail riding; me: Arabians, English, and dressage. No surprise there.) and still dream of owning our own horses some day—although at this point we could barely get on them. No, not even if we stood on a box. Even now, though, her friend is tempting us with a $95,000 race horse that's free to a good home. Me, on a racehorse. Har, har, har.
For everyone—but especially for Dear Reader Jenny in Pittsburgh—here are a couple of photos TMK took of the results of the Fischer fire. The darker areas show you how close the fire came to this house (which did not belong to any of her relatives, thank goodness). Isn’t that sumpin’? Those firefighters—awesome human beings all around. TMK reports that the air still smelled like charcoal and that, when it rained, it smelled like a wet campfire—damp, burnt and sulphurous.
Most importantly, however, The Mysterious K arrived home with this bounty, white peaches picked just a few hours before. I don’t think she had been in the house five minutes before we were both standing at the counter face down in bowls of sliced peachy goodness. My new life as Ryan the Hutt continues!
Knitting Knews
Here, for comparison, a repeat of the photo of the undyed Freddie, followed by the as-promised-although-belated photo of the “new” Freddie. On the left, the unwashed, unmordanted, no-heat-applied skein which came out a beautiful silvery peach; on the right, the more formally processed stuff which is a medium terra cotta. Now, what to do with 700 yards of heavy-laceweight alpaca since I have sworn off laceweight knitting?
Thanks to my 48 hours of inertia, all pieces of the striped sweater are finished and all the ends are woven in. I need to knit the neck, seam all the pieces together, and voila! And the answer to the burning question is, I will use purple to do the seaming. Thank you to everyone for their input! And good attempt, Kit, at trying to convince me to change colors from stripe to stripe to stripe but...nuh-uh.
Ferals tonight!