Tuesday, September 30, 2008

September Roundup

I just keep getting later and later with these writeups, don't I?

In September I finished the following:

1. Waffles For Brunch forest green sweater.

Wow! That's it? How can that be it? I feel like I was knitting at the same pace as usual. I had most of the guernsey sweater finished, but it wasn't sewn together so it doesn't count.

Well, from my charity knitting I did mail out 9 pairs of mittens, 7 hats, 1 vest, and 2 sweaters (but was in too much of a hurry to take a picture.) They went to the Cheyenne River Reservation as part of a CIC challenge.

I do have a growing list of projects I want to make, so I'd better get crackin'!

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

What's perfect about it?

Today, I present to you some pictures of my current knitting project, as brought to you by a recent grammar lesson: verb tenses.

A word of note: I realize that when I write, I shouldn't be changing tenses, but I should tell the story using one tense. However, I'm practicing my conjugation so just bear with me.


Present Tense:
I knit
you knit
he,she,it knits
we knit
you knit
they knit

Use in a sentence:
I knit the garter ribbing at the bottom of the sweater.




Past Tense:
I knitted
you knitted
he,she,it knitted
we knitted
you knitted
they knitted

I knitted the body portion of the back, with an occasional purl blip every now and again.




Future Tense:
I will knit
you will knit
he,she,it will knit
we will knit
you will knit
they will knit

I will knit the yoke part of the back next. I will knit the cables the way the directions state, even though they both cross the same direction. I will not mind the non-mirroring effect, at least not enough to rip it out.




Past Participle: (In double checking my typing I found that I wrote "particle" here instead of "participle". This doesn't bode well for my understanding if I don't even know what it's called.)
I have frogged
you have frogged
he, she, it has frogged
we have frogged
you have frogged
they have frogged

I have frogged only a couple of rows on this sweater, and I have knitted the front to match the back. (This includes the non-mirroring cables.)




Present Participle:
I am knitting
you are knitting
he, she, it is knitting
we are knitting
you are knitting
they are knitting

They are not knitting this sweater; it is just I. (a flash of a future lesson on pronouns, which I hope I got right.)



You'd think that 5 tenses would be enough, wouldn't you? But no, there's more!


Present Perfect Tense (where I'm getting bored and will skip the conjugation. Plus, I'm not sure how.)

I have knitted the first sleeve and now I knit the second sleeve.



Past Perfect Tense:

I had bought enough yarn, so I finished the second sleeve. (Wow, that was hard to get a sentence for the Past Perfect.)



Future Perfect Tense:
I will have run out of yarn after I finish this sleeve. (What's perfect about perfect tenses, anyway? They're certainly not very easy to do.)

You'll be happy to hear that I'm going to totally skip the Progressive Tenses. You and I are both becoming extremely bored.

You also might be interested in hearing that I took these pictures at DS#2's soccer practice yesterday. I felt weird walking away from the other parents only to start throwing my knitted pieces of the floor of the gazebo and taking pics. However, the light was good and I'm not sure the parents even noticed.

The sweater is another charity sweater in kid size 6, knitted in Paton's Classic Merino on size 7 needles, with the ribbing done on 6s.

G.I. Joes' Party

Several days after I prepared for our non-hurricane, I went into the bathroom again and saw this:



Not only did the G.I. Joes have diving lessons, but apparently they called all their friends, both large and small (plus some wrestlers who live in the next county over), to come and join them. They must've had a fun time diving, and maybe some partying was going on, 'cause is it just me, or do they all look exhausted and passed out? (Ahhh.... we visit the run-ons again!)

I've finally reclaimed my trash can, so the troups need to go somewhere else to have fun. (Maybe they can invite themselves over to the wrestlers' house so that can do some fake fighting.)

Remember this blanket? I gave it as a present at a baby shower over the weekend where it was greeted by many ooohs and aaahs.



Since it was met with such enthusiasm, and since I enjoyed doing it so much, that I decided to make another one.

At least, I was going to make another one until, after many an hour fruitless internet search, I discovered that the yarn is discontinued. (Plymouth Encore Colorspun DK, and yes, I checked Ravelry's FSOT.)

Discontinued, I say. At this moment I'm at a loss on how to proceed. I have it fixed in my mind that this is the only yarn that will do. Shortly, I hope, I will realize that the blanket can be made out of absolutely any yarn that looks good; it's just a matter of picking one.

Monday, September 08, 2008

An ode to English plurals

A friend sent this to me today (I suspect she's sympathizing with my grammar struggles.)


An ode to English plurals


We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let's face it - English is a crazy language.





Sunday, September 07, 2008

Hurricanes, GI Joes, and Waffles for Brunch

Yesterday, when I was done blogging, I went to take my shower (trying to keep up-to-date and all.) DS#2 filled the trash cans in the bathrooms for flushing. I was telling DH of all my preparedness for the hurricane when he says,

"You know, it's passed by already."

"What do you mean it's passed by already? I'm not done getting prepared."

"What can I tell you, the hurricane moved quicker than you thought."

"Okay, well I'm taking a shower anyway, even if I don't have to. So there."

So, nothing much happened around here. We had one branch down in our yard, and it was a dead one at that, so it was time for it to go. (Am I allowed to have three independent clauses in one sentence even if I separated them correctly? I'm thinking not.)

We had electricity; hence, we had flushing of the toilets. (Ooooh, fancy, a semicolon plus a conjunctive adverb.)

The saved water didn't just sit around and do nothing, however. It seemed to become a diving pool for some GI Joes (which, as we all know, are action figures and not dolls.)



My first clue that something was going on was looking at the shower wall and thinking, "why is it so wet? No one took a shower here today. And then I looked up.

Okay, now I get it.

The fact that DH and DS#2 had a long discussion about it today: the way that the Joes can dive to achieve minimum splash and the probability of them reaching the bottom lead me to believe that I'm the only adult living at this house. (And even that is questionable.)

Here's a photo of my second finished Waffles-for-Brunch sweater. (I bet you thought I forgot about knitting, didn't you?)


Pattern is here. It's a very fast knit with a very nice process. The yarn is Lamb's Pride bulky in a hunter green (the color on the last set of pics is way more accurate). Needles are whatever sized the pattern called for. (Meaning, I'm too lazy to walk to the other room right now. I think they were 10's?)

The stitch pattern is 6 sts wide by 6 rows tall. That would be fun to try out a different stitch pattern and see how it comes out.

Now, if I was taking a composition course rather than a grammar course, it would teach me how to write a concluding sentence. However, I'm not. So I don't have one.

Maybe I should take a course in Random Thoughts. Now THAT I would get an "A" in!

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Run-onsRun-onsRun-ons

Run-on sentences, one of my favorite ways to write. (And I love sentence fragments, just like the last sentence. And sentences that start with "and".)

Run-on sentences can be fused sentences that just keep going without any end with the different ideas and clauses all smooshed together without punctuation which makes the reader want to quit and go knit somewhere in a quiet corner away from all the fusing.

Run-on sentences can also be comma-spliced, it only has a comma between two clauses.

Is anyone thinking about spit splicing right about now?



Fusing, comma splicing and spit splicing all just seem to go together.

I would show you pictures of the completed Waffles for Brunch (I love that name!), but my camera battery has died. I'll charge it up and get it ready for tomorrow.

Today is a nice relaxed day. Hurricane Hannah is coming up the coast, so we're just staying home and staying out of the rain. We're only expecting lots of rain and wind and maybe losing electricity. I'm getting my computer work out of the way so I can spend the afternoon reading and knitting.

We're taking showers and filling up trash cans with water to flush the toilets. Speaking of which... My daughter told me of a big argument she got into with a friend. The question was this:

Can you flush a toilet when the electricity goes off?

They were each emphatic witht their answers, my daughter saying "no--only once which will use up the water in the tank" and her friend saying "yes--it causes no problems". They ended up taking a poll of their friends, even texting ones from home. Half said "yes" and half said "no".

It turned out that they were both right. My daughter and her friends all had well water, and electricity is needed to pump the water to flush the toilet. Her friend and friends all had city water, so no electricity was needed.

Isn't it funny how sure you can be about an answer and be right and wrong at the same time?

I'm off to take a shower, do some knitting, and maybe flush the toilet. :)