i'm nauseous, i'm nauseous, i'm nauseous.........i'm better.

My poor baby! She got sick on Saturday and is still recuperating. It started with a high fever and puking every hour on the hour...still reading? Now it is mostly a snotty nose and cough-y chest. Oh and she says her ear "is asleep" this morning. I think that means it's stopped up. So anyway...that's the reason why I have not posted with any regularity. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I have no earthly idea how people can manage to actually do this every day. I'm beginning to suspect Wendy actually has a team of knitters in the closet she employs to get her amazing amount of knitting done, and Morey Amsterdam hiding under the bed blogging every day for her. I mean, she actually has a Real Job. Of course, she has no kids, either, just Lucy (the cat), who honestly looks pretty self-sufficient. Speaking of Wendy, have you seen her Dagmar? Well, here's my Dagmar, complete with Pink Chibi!


Still and all, I've been knitting on my Charlotte

for A While Now. I am still four or so rows away from being done. I decided the problems I was having with dropping stitches were due to the fact that I kept putting it down mid-row, cause those last rows are So Blasted Long! I started a sock out of some gorgeous Trekking, and wound up frogging the whole thing, because for the first time in...oh...EVER...72 stitches on a size 1 are Too Big. Hanh?!? What gives? So I am starting over, I have decided to use less stitches and size 0's and see what happens then. It actually may be the yarn though, cause this particular Trekking seems even thinner than sock weight. Extremely thread-y.
Aaaah, Good News! Fern has announced her ear is Awake! Yay!
In Other News...
I have been RAOK'ed! Sweet Romy of purlknit sent me a really cute postcard, with what my husband has dubbed "The Pig Shepherdess". (I tried and tried to take a pic, but it is really hard to get a good picture of something with such a shiny surface. So forget it.)
bye for now,
Angie

GeezLouise, I wish I could think of a title...

Or even think period. So help me, if I ever call ANYONE'S blog lame ever again, I hope God strikes me dead with a fully-loaded-runaway-Greyhound-Charter-bus, that's on fire yet! But I don't wanna be one of those bloggers who never manage to post without kvetching the whole time about how sad and sorry their life is, so...
Yep, I guess that's it for now! I'm having a case of the Mean Reds, if you know what I mean.
In the Knitting Knews...
I put down the Charlotte for a little break. I was zoomin' along, rather complacently (uh-oh), when all of a sudden, I became one of the few...the proud...the Stitch Droppers! And on a Charlotte, well, let's just say that involves lots of loud invectives, like,"OH BIDDELY CHEESE!" and hurling it across the room with one hand, while shaking my fist at the ceiling with the other. Lots of crying, ("Oh MAN! I don't BELIEVE it!") begging, ("PLEASE just get back on the needles!") and threatening the darn thing ("I'll just RIP YOU OUT and start ALL OVER!!!") while gingerly picking at the inscrutable lace pattern, to no avail. Then came the "Let's kiss and make up" routine, whereby I carefully tinked several rows, and seeing these are my LAST blankety-blank rows, they are around 300 stitches or so, and so an entire week passed before I was finally back where I was LAST Friday. So Charlotte is resting comfortably in her little plastic Woolie Ewe drawstring sac, and I started a sock instead, out of Trekking, one of my all-time favorite sock yarns. Color number 100, and boy is it ever pretty! All rainbow-y, and I love me some rainbow yarn!! All stockinette, and no-it-is-NOT-boring, it is a Relief! Cheers me right up.
Somehow, this week I also managed to wash a butt-load of wool. And I mean some stinky-nasty-reeky-greasy-fleecy stuff that takes at least three detergent washes and five rinses to get clean. Why would I do this, you ask? Good question, and I do have a good answer: fleas. SHRIEK! I found a flea on my ankle, and I suspect it came out of a fleece, since we have no pets, and no carpet, due to allergies.
This was after I found the rat in the birdhouse. SHUDDER! I'm not even going there.
Today I spent all day hoeing and weeding, in anticipation of going plant shopping tomorrow, and then I broke my toe! At least it feels like I broke it, and its all purple and bruised on the end. I rammed my foot into a baby high chair on my way running into the bathroom to check the water level in Fern's bath which I had told Courtney to do. Which it turns out, she did. ("See Mom, if you just trusted me, this would have never happened.") Well, at least my husband is good for a laugh. He says to me, he says,"You are such a nimrod." So I says to him, I says,"And what are you?" (great comeback, huh?) and he says to me, after peering up under his eyebrows for a second, "Uhhhh...a dorfus?" At which I burst out laughing, because he has obviously created a new hybrid of "dork" and "doofus", which truthfully, does sound a lot like him.
Well, tomorrow is my knitting day, and I'm gonna go early and try to get a good seat. After the article about us in the paper, we had NINE new women show up, and there are already too many of us to all go at once. (More than twenty-five came one time!) We used to have about six or eight of us die-hards, and that is a good number, you can really get a chance to talk to everybody, and see their show and tell objects, and discuss new patterns, and the like. Any more than that, and it devolves rapidly into a big group of women from all over East Texas gettin' together in one place for a "giggle and gossip". Not that I don't just LOVE to drink coffee and talk (a LOT), but I don't get a lot of knittin' done that way.
I will try to have a few pics next time, and hopefully not an entire week from now!
bye for now,
Angie

It's nice to have a circle of friends!

This is a "circle of sox" from the Wildflower Fiber Retreat in March. We had sooo much fun; spinning, knitting, felting, abusing our digestive systems...



These are BIG stitch markers from the lovely Cindy at http://sauvageblue.blogspot.com
The neat thing about RAOK's is they truly come as a surprise!

Hey look, we're (in)famous!

We got a write-up in the local rag! One of our ladies, Mary Claire, writes the gardening column, so she talked them into sending a reporter over to, um, report on us.
The photographer took a lot of pictures, but they only used a few. This only shows one small end of our group, a lot of people are missing, plus they got Sally's last name wrong! But all-in-all, it was nice of them to notice us!
Here is the link.(Hopefully, this works. I haven't tested it yet, so please forgive me if it doesn't work right.)
http://www.tylerpaper.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=14278772&BRD=1994&PAG=461&dept_id=226369&rfi=8

In other news, as you can see by the ring button on the side, I am a proud new member of RAOK, the "random acts of kindness" group. This is a SUPER active group, and I don't know if I can keep up, but I'll give it my best shot. (Usually my acts of kindness are planned well in advance, ha ha!) I have to download something or other, you know me, computer-ese always sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher, WAH-Wah, wah wah WAH, WAHwahwah!

I am almost to the end of my sweet sweet Charlotte! I may have to do another one, it's a fun knit, once you get the pattern down. I have started a Koigu virus at my knitting group too, you know that stuff is contagious! Not only that, I found Yarn Harlots book, At Knit's End, on the shelf and brought it over to read. We were all fixin' to bust a gut laughin', I recommend it most highly! If she gets within ear-shot of Big D, we would definitely be field trippin'!
You guys wanna see something funny? Go to http://www.knittingcurmudgeon.com/archives/2005_03_01_archive.html and if you don't get it, you might need to check this out http://wendyknits.net/archives/2005_03.html
and scroll down to March 24. A real Hatfields-and-McCoys feud, why I don't know, but it's sure fun to watch!
bye for now,
Angie