Taking a break from wallowing in Wyoming photos and schlepping audio files over to the big shiny networked external hard-drive to help out a pal.  A few years ago, I met Eva at the Knitters Review retreat and I liked her instantly.  She is smart and funny and kind and she knits beautiful things–sometimes out of dog hair.  Eva wants to go to Antarctica, and you can help send her.  Please do.

This is how we’re starting. Photos, unmanipulated, as I sort.  The sorting will be no small feat–I’m going to have to buy an external hard drive if I want my laptop to continue to function.  The hard drive in this puppy is just too small.

If these are the only really good photos I get out of this trip, I’ll only cry a little bit.  You can see a bit of our side mirror in the shot.  I left that in here to assert that I am not dumb enough to approach a bison.  Bison kill people, particularly at this time of year.  These bison approached us on the road in Yellowstone, causing a huge traffic jam and allowing me to get way more detail than my lenses would otherwise allow.

This photo of from Mammoth Hot Springs.  The stink there was powerful, but so were the colors.

Those two are making me happy.  They’re making me happier on my own screen, big and shiny, but wordpress only allows so much.  If you want to see bigger versions, please go to my flickr set and look at the largest size.

Those are the only Wyoming photos I’ll give you for now.  Because . . . I can prove I’ve been knitting.  If you are Etain, go away now, please.  I want your daughter’s present to be a surprise to you, since newborns are just too easy to surprise.  I gave you that warning nice and early, mind you.

Scott’s new socks:

He liked the Harris Tweed socks I made myself a while back, so I made him a pair in some gorgeous Mountain Colors Bearfoot.  While we were in Jackson, I stopped off in Knit on Pearl to buy some wildfoot for the heels and toes.  Nothing like a boring basic to stretch the gorgeous hand-dyed artisinal yarn.

My new socks:

The mock cable wave socks (I won’t say the title as published–it’s wrong and it makes me itch) in gorgeous, soft, delicious String Theory Caper in “darkstar.”  I want to make a house out of this yarn and live in it forevermore.

Mom’s almost-done stole:

I want to dye it, but I’m afeared.  It’s cashmere/mink.  It’s soft as can be.  It’s just not the most exciting color.  I have yarn to make a hat too, so I’m poking around for good chemo cap patterns.

Etain–last warning.  Away, woman!

Etain’s new daughter is named Rowan, which makes me very happy.  Part of the reason it makes me so happy is that two of my favorite people are named Rowan, and we differentiate them when speaking by saying “Girl Ruadhan” (who taught me to knit and is wonderful) and Boy Rowan (who is in Tinsmith, and is wonderful)  So now, we can add Baby Rowan to the list, knowing full well she is also wonderful.  Right, so, Rowan’s sweater:

A baby surprise jacket, in Spirit Trail Helen (I think it’s Helen–I had it leftover from some other wonderful something) with handmade antler buttons I got at an event this summer.  I kind of want to eat this sweater.

Tags: antlers, bison, grand tetons, yellowstone

(how’s that for a lazy music allusion in a post title?)

Scott and I scampered off to Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana for a couple of weeks, and I forgot to warn you in advance. We visited family and then we visited the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. I fell desperately in love with Wyoming. I’m trying to come up with some way–any way–to find us real jobs there. In the meantime, I have thousands of photos to sort through, huckleberry bush options to research, wildflower seeds to foster, travel knitting to document, lonely pets to soothe, and lots of other ends to tie up. Suffice it to say that:

We both really needed a break
We had a wonderful time with Scott’s family in Utah
Altitude is very tough on me, but the views are worth it
Huckleberries are delicious, and so are thimbleberries
I love raptors even more now than I did before
Northern Harriers are beautiful dancers
Golden Eagles are huge. I mean huge. Huge.
Wolf puppies are very fluffy and everyone, human and wolf, is lucky I couldn’t reach them
Trumpeter Swans kick the crap out of Canada Geese just for fun, and they actually sound like they’re laughing while they do it
Coyotes are hilarious and cute when they hunt in tall grasses, unless you are coyote-prey
Pronghorn are really hard to photograph well unless you’re used to high-speed photography
Sour cream ice cream may actually be worthy of worship
Bison are fascinating, until you’ve seen 2,000 of them while looking for one single bull elk
Trout have a new nightmare, and that nightmare is named Lanea
Chris Rock and Scott are the same height.

I keep neglecting to review the books I’ve been reading. I have been reading, picking books over knitting needles more often than not, and a lot of what I’ve been reading has either come directly from Mike’s shelves or from recommendations he made over the years. My attempts to burn through our unread books and stop filling shelves so quickly fell apart this spring when everything got really hard. I take a lot of comfort in reading and in knowing I have good things to read once my current story dries up. Too much comfort–hence that year without book purchases. But these days, I’m letting such things slide and wallowing in books.

Time to play catch up–I’ll poke around my goodreads list and tell you what I think about what I’ve been reading. And you’ll forgive me for having little or nothing astute to say. This will take a few posts, but I hope to have caught up by the end of the month.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Wooohoooo! I love Stephenson!
Ok, I have more to say than that. More specifically, I love Stephenson when he reigns it in a bit. Anathem disappointed me a bit. Here, though, he kept things relatively tight. He looks at mythology a lot in this book, and that always makes me smile. As I’ve come to expect, Stephenson wrote a great female lead, a great male lead, some truly perplexing characters and plots. I wish I could read it again for the first time.

The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes and The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman. I cannot count the number of times the phrase “what do you mean, you haven’t read Sandman” has come up. I know I know, I’m way behind the times. Yes, I was born and bred a geek. But I also devoted my geeky energy to things over on crazy moon language land (i.e. Celtic linguistics) for quite some time. I like these, but honestly I think Gaiman does a much better job with just plain old writing. He’s a word guy, and graphic novels are about visual images, and these didn’t allow Gaiman to shine. Pity, that.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. This is a book I have tried to press on many people. I’m a huge fan of Chabon, and I am particularly intrigued by his continued forays into genre fiction. Go man, go! This novel is set in an alternate universe, wherein the US handed over a big chunk of Alaska to serve as a temporary Jewish homeland, post WWII. And in that alternate universe, there is a mystery, and our hero Meyer Landsman sets out to solve a murder mystery and accidentally discovers a terrible conspiracy. I love it. It’s a great book, and a great audiobook, and Chabon is wonderful.

Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
I’m normally a big fan of Unsworth. This one fell flat for me. It’s a well-researched historical mystery novel, which follows a disgraced monk as he joins a traveling group of players who witness a murder. I was reading this when a lot of sad things were happening, so it may be that my brain just turned against it. But, my head doesn’t like the book that much, whatever the reason.

Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die by Michael Largo
Great googly-moogly, this is a terrible book. I wish it had been good. No. It was painfully bad. Poorly researched and written. Sloppy. So sloppy, in fact, it’s a wonder I didn’t use it as kindling. In one sentence, the author uses “virus” and “bacteria” interchangeably. As if they’re the same things. Note to author: THEY’RE NOT THE SAME DAMN THING!

Photos of green things, some of which I made.

My new camera is here.  Click.

I’m pretty sure that’s a silver-spotted skipper.

Kayo asks: “Anybody want a free kitten?  We have several.”

Tags: Kayo, kittens

My Mom is the Executive Director of SIDS Mid-Atlantic, and she is helping to plan a great fundraiser to help eradicate SIDS.  The fourth Annual Brisan’s Bash will be held at Philip Carter Winery in beautiful Hume, VA  on September 19th.  There will be fantastic live music (I should get on that . . . ), grape stomping, food, wine, adorable healthy babies (I have that bit on good authority) and lots of fun. We’d love to see you there. I’ve added the details in a page linked in the header and pasted in the PDF here.

PDF invitation

The TWO surgeries my Mom has had still haven’t gotten all of the cancerous cells, so she has to have a mastectomy.  Just thinking about it makes me think very violent thoughts,  so let’s move on.

We’re skipping Celtic Summer Camp this year for the first year in a very long time.  It’s bittersweet–I will absolutely miss spending that time with my tribe in the woods, but it’s not the most relaxing way to spend a vacation, and our minds are understandably elsewhere.  Instead, we’re heading out to Utah at the end of August to see Scott’s family and then up to Wyoming to see the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone.  I am really looking forward to the whole trip.  We haven’t been on a vacation like this since our honeymoon, and our honeymoon was practically local and very modest.

I’m using the trip out West as an excuse to buy a proper camera.  It should be here within a week or so, and I’m excited to play with it.  I’m lucky enough to have lots of friends and family members who are experienced digital photographers, so I’m sure I can get some great tips from them.  If I’m really lucky, I’ll even be able to borrow a decent lens or two.

New hedgerow socks for my Mom, who is healing from surgery and gearing up for chemo and radiation.  The Frija is officially a hit with my Mom, who loves the color and the yarns’ exquisite softness.

The hedgerow madness continues.  I finished these socks and needed movie theater knitting, so I grabbed the leftovers from a previous pair of hedgerow socks and cast on a hat.  “Inventive” isn’t an appropriate descriptor for my knitting at the moment, and I’m ok with that.  The hat kept me busy through the new Harry Potter film (don’t worry–no spoilers here) and is fetching so far.

Both projects are sitting on the flagstone path I’m building on in our back garden.  It’s far from complete, and I need more stones, but it already makes me happy.

Our friend Mike saved me from myself a couple of weekends ago, clearing out a big section of our garden that had reacted too well to this spring’s copious rain.  The annoying English Ivy and Virginia Creeper was joined by a touch of poison ivy and some really aggressive American blackberry and multiflora rose.  My poison ivy allergy has reached a new height, and I don’t want to risk any sort of reaction or infection when my Mom starts chemo, so Mike stepped in.  I’ve continued clearing the next portion, which is free of poison ivy.  Now I’m contemplating what to plant in this area, Kayo’s favorite spot.  There are tons of roots from mature trees, lots of shrubs that need hard pruning, a young volunteer pin oak which I hope will supplant the aging silver maple, and soil in need of some serious help.  I have visions of loads of compost and mulch and shipments from the Arbor Day foundation.

I’ve been repeating myself a lot lately.  As I’ve mentioned, it’s been quite a spring here for us.  I’ve been feeling overtaxed and overwhelmed and not terribly interested in taking on challenging projects–unless dirt and stone were involved.  Hence, the wall, mindless reading, and some repetitive knitting.

As I was building, I had a bad stacking day. You can see where my relatively smooth (I say “relatively” fully aware that an actual mason would point and laugh at my efforts) wall turned into a chaotic mess once it curved past the downspout.

Well, out it came.  I removed about half of the wall and restacked, just as I would rip back if I found a nasty mistake in a sock.  Of course, I couldn’t just drop down to the error, and stones are much heavier than yarn, but you see the analogy, no?

The wall is done.  At least for now.  When the time comes to replace the (horribly placed, crumbling, evil, ugly, plant frying) sidewalk and reface the (ugly, crumbling, boring, stained) front porch, I know at least part of this will be removed and reworked.  I’m ok with that.  Frogged stones rebound even better than frogged yarn does.

My knitting projects are revolving around old favorites.  Old favorite yarns and patterns, preferably associated with dear friends and destined for loved ones.  I made another Fand’s Stole to use up the last of the gorgeous yarn from Spirit Trail. It still needs to be blocked and I have a few stray ends to weave in, and I don’t know whether I get to keep it, but I love it.

And I’m working on another pair of Hedgerow socks for my Mom.

I’m making these out of Frija with some grey that Anj gave me on the heels and toes.  There’s more knitting waiting in the wings for my Mom–specifically a chemo cap or two.  She was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and had a lumpectomy last Friday.  She is healing well from the surgery, is brave and strong and ready for what comes next.  Once she heals from the surgery, she’ll undergo chemo and radiation, and then cozy handknits will come in handy.  It’s the least I can do.  In fact, I plan to do more, and to hit you up for donations and help as I do, gentle reader.  Who feels like kicking cancer’s ass with us, hmmm?