Are you ready for some football (made of yarn)?

Just as promised, I worked diligently on my football afghan rectangular square over my week-long staycation. As you may remember, this is the fourth rectangle in the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket that I'm designing/knitting for my little brother in hopes of finishing it for his 26th birthday in July. By day two, I was far enough along on it to add the two extra balls for the laces at the top of the football.

Not much else of consequence got accomplished during the vacay. No real progress on the house, other than some minor cabinetry demolition that resulted in the death of the second stove's cooktop. (At least it was the old, less-nice stove.) I have a few writing ideas floating around in my head, solidifying. I made some headway on the starting the new novel front. I finished reading a couple of books, but really, I was just happy to sit around and not be working.

Of course, where there's sitting, there is inevitably knitting, so at least I did keep my promise to finish the football.

Finally. Now, to start on the square of the Michigan "M" in none other than maize and blue. One month and two days to go. Think I can finish another four or five rectangles by then?

Yeah, I'm skeptical too.

A Garden of my very Own: Food starts to grow

After a lengthy drought, the rain has started to fall in plenty here in Northeast Ohio. Boy, do my plants love the rain (so does my water bill). In fact, the little dwarf yellow transparent apple tree we just put in the ground a month or so ago is already producing fruit in its joy.

Originally, I was thinking that, in all likelihood, we wouldn't see apples for a few years, but I'm glad to be proven wrong. The swiss chard it really starting to grow too.

(This picture is a week and a half old now.

It's even bigger now, as is the kale and both lettuces. They're all just HUGE.)

And despite my fears of a complete rhubarb and asparagus patch failure, two of the three rhubarb roots I planted are starting to leaf, and two out of three ain't bad or so I've heard.

Also, most of the asparagus roots are starting to sprout too.

On the other side of the house, that one remaining tree that didn't sprout flowers in the spring with the rest of them? It's also a dogwood, a Kousa Dogwood to be precise. It will have blooms for the month of June and they will turn into edible fruit in the fall. How about that?

Apparently, it makes a lovely jam. Mostly, though it's just a very pretty tree.

As I type, I have already cooked my first recipe using ingredients from my very own garden. That blog will be forthcoming.

On Traffic and Increased Knitting Time

Here in my adopted city of Cleveland, they are filming the second Captain America movie. You might have heard of it or about it. I know I have and not because I've been hanging at film locations for glimpses of starlets or even watching the local morning news. No. Rather, because of just how much the filming of this movie has impacted my work commute.

For some crazed reason, the city decided that it would be completely okay to allow the production company to close a major highway (and one of the few bridges used to get into the downtown area across the Cuyahoga River), known as the Shoreway, for two weeks. As a result, alternate routes had to take on the something like 37,000 vehicles that daily make their way into and out of town using the Shoreway. What that means for me is this: my normally 30 to 45 minute commute into town has changed into a 55 minute (if I leave by 6 in the morning) to an almost hour and a half drive through clogged, near-stand-still lanes on Interstate 90. FOR HALF A MONTH.

After a week of this stop-and-go madness, I made a choice. I decided to give myself a birthday present in the form of an early weeklong vacation. That's right. Starting next monday, which is my birthday incidently, I am taking a week's PTO time and having a staycation. We weren't going to do a big vacation this year anyway, what with all the necessary house renovations, so this just seemed like the next best thing. By the time I return to the interstate the week after next, the Shoreway should be back open and the traffic patterns, more or less, back to normal.

What that means: more knitting time. Oh sure, of course I'll also write and work on the house, getting carpets torn up and walls washed, and we might decide on a daytrip or two, but the real prize is the knitting.

 I'm halfway through the football square of the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Afghan for my brother. This blanket has an impending but flexible late July deadline that I probably won't make, as you may recall if you are one of my eleven subscribed readers.

By now, it's clear that there is a football there. It's snail's pace intarsia process has nearly been the death of this blanket on several occasions. I had to stop work on it yet again when I realized/remembered that it needed separate little balls for each different section of color.

A long time and numerous math calculations later, I had the required seven balls in use right now, three of which are full skeins, with an additional two that will need added on before the football is done for the lacing at the top.

(It's sitting on the hand-me-down couch we got from my brother, humorously enough.)

It's a bit like trying to find your way through a maze. Working a row goes something like this: Start row with white, find which brown ball goes next, cross with previous white ball, knit with brown ball, find which white ball goes next, cross with previous brown ball, knit, and repeat process, concluding with white. All the while, I've been praying to the powers-that-be to not have any of these many many balls tangle on me. So far I've been mostly successful. *Knock on wood.*

Here's to staycations, knitting, and movie traffic... And here's hoping that my next knitting post will include pictures of a completed football square.

Hickory Syrup

My mother-in-law knows that my husband and I appreciate locally made and manufactured foodstuffs (and nonfoodstuffs for that matter, as our Libbey glass dishware can attest). That is why our Christmas gift from her included a gift basket of locally made cheese, chocolate, baked goods, and beverages. It was probably one of the best Christmas presents I've ever received in the way that it was so catered to our tastes. It went over so well that, for his birthday, my husband received a bottle of Soaring Hill Hickory Syrup from a shop in Tecumseh, MI.

The company is located in Adrain, MI, in the city where my husband I met and went to undergraduate school together. I have a lot of good times bottled up in Adrian, and I had high hopes for this sugary concoction. Thus, when a weekend morning of leisure breakfasting presented itself (and those aren't easy to come by), the pancakes were made and all three of us--the husband, the son, and I-- all sat down for a taste test.

Neither of us had ever tasted hickory syrup before and we were a little skeptical. According to the label, hickory syrup is not tapped as maple syrup is. Rather, hickory bark is boiled with sugar to produce a syrup consistency. I was hoping that even if it didn't taste all that great as a syrup, we could use it as a marinade for tofu or tempeh or even ham or chicken for the boys.

All that worry was for nought, though, because hickory syrup is smooth and sweet and tangy and delightful. It's sweetness is light, while the hickory taste gives it depth and interest. Best of all, this treat comes with a ecological stamp of approval. If syrup wasn't slow enough drizzling from bottle to plate, this locally-made, small-business-created syrup is slow food at its best. I hope that you too will consider keeping Soaring Hill in business. I know I plan on doing my part.

Inspired by Tolkien

Though it's been on my bookshelf for a few years now, I have only just gotten around to reading John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War, a nonfictional look at JRR Tolkien and how his life in and around the first World War impacted his writing. I bought the book while at a local library booksale. I have to admit to being quite a fan of Tolkien, which includes a fondness for The Lord of the Rings but really, birthed in an avid love of The Hobbit. I first read about Bilbo and company as mandatory summer reading for honors freshman English in high school (because my freshman English teacher--and later, my newspaper advisor--was and always will be the best teacher I ever encountered, which is saying quite a lot due to the amount of good teachers I have been taught by other the years). I loved it so much that when I gave birth to a son six years later, the Hobbit was the first chapter book I ever read to him aloud. He was roughly six months old, rocking in a baby swing on the porch.

This might seem excessive, but alas, extensive reading has been a part of my child's life always. His second grade teacher once commented on how he wished other parents would do whatever I do with my kid to make him so adept at reading and the teacher asked me what that was. I mentioned reading to my son throughout his childhood, mostly my homework from three different English degrees (As a habitual speed reader, I can only read every word of something if I read it out loud). In particular, I noted that I read him the entirety of Dante's Inferno when he was two and maybe it was that... But then again, maybe it was Tolkien.

I later invested in the Hobbit Playstation 2 game for him when he was old enough to play it and shelled out the dough to take him to the movie in the theaters. The Lord of the Rings has nothing on the Hobbit. Not in my blog, but I digress.

I have to say, a lot of nonfiction, especially that which is biographical in nature, I just find boring and tedious, but Tolkien and the Great War was rather engaging and its points were well-informed and well-thought-out. That Tolkien should be influenced by the war in which he participated is inevitable. However, it's not the sort of theory that one often hears about Tolkien, partly, I assume, because he is considered a writer of genre ficiton. After all, none dispute the ways in which Hemingway was influenced by war.

War aside, I'm gaining a lot of insight into the life of Tolkien. Pre-20th century writers, particularly British writers, always seem to have their hands in a lot of pots. They study at university when just out of the tweener age (not that tweeners existed back then, but I digress). They know several languages, gain military prowess, travel extensively, and develop early excellence in several subject areas that often relate very little to English. If they were men anyway. Even the women, though, accomplished quite a bit in their proper "sphere:" drawing, writing, calligraphy, clothing design, needlework, gardening, baking, cooking, child care, nursing, and social grace, as well as learning to play a mean pianoforte.

However, writers beyond a certain date in history start to lose this universal knowledge gain (possibly because lower classes began to develop writerly careers and they had no time to devote to expansive, extraneous learning or trips to India). As a general rule, I have found this to be true and so, when a professor expounded on the many talents of Emerson or Pope while I was in school, I took heart in the fact that nobody does that sort of thing in modernism and post-modernism (barring T.S. Eliot's intelligence-touting poetry, which we can all agree was just him being intentionally obtuse) and I didn't need to worry if I never scuba-dived in the Bermuda Triangle, discovered an error in the Theory of Relativity, or became fluent in Japanese.

Not so anymore. Tolkien, a penniless orphan boy raised into adulthood by a clergiman, studied the Classics and philology and began learning the Finnish and Gothic languages in high school. By the end of college, he was already inventing, with proper sound-shift laws, what would become the languages of Middle Earth, not to mention risking life and limb for his country directly upon graduating. Sure, he did this a century ago now, but it still inspires me to learn Gaelic in my free time (rather, my imagined free time) or at least, a few new songs for my acoustic guitar.

I feel inspired to stop lazing about and accomplish something. I want to take a ballet class. I want to enroll in computer programming. I want to write. (This, of course, is the positive side of reading this book, the negative being that nawing feeling of guilt every time I sit down for an hour of Agatha Christie's Poirot on Netflix.)

Overall, it's been an interesting read. I've already gotten this much out of it and I'm only on chapter five.

Progress and Completion

There I was, frantically working on the Mason Dixon Knitting dishcloth cotton Baby Kimono for its Wednesday completion date while traveling to visit family over the long weekend, when it happened. Yes, though I had packed not only the kimono but my brothers ginormous, seemingly doomed Maize and Blue Stained Glass Blanket, with its many skeins of yarn, just in case I finished the kimono ahead of schedule, I forgot to pack the as-yet unused ball of Peaches and Cream yarn I needed for the kimono.

Thus, upon finishing the first front, I had to disengage and hope that I would have enough time when I got home on Labor Day night. Instead, perhaps partially out of guilt, I took up my brother's seemingly doomed blanket and tried to figure out whether or not what I had knit on the new square thus far was salvageable.

What do you know? It was. All the problems I saw with it when last I worked on it just weren't there anymore, so I have to chalk them up as wild hallucinations brought on by blanket fatigue. With the problems no longer an issue, I spent a good chunk of Monday banging out rows on the blanket, until, that is, I realized that I forgot to bring the extra skein of white I need to start on the white-colored interior detail of the football I'm intarsia-ing for this particular square. There I was, Monday afternoon on a four-day vacation week with absolutely no viable knitting to do. I could blame only myself.

Here it is, the bottom brown-only portion of the football, right before the white striping and laces come into play.

Either that or I have a very large mustache.

Back at home after an hour and a half drive, I got to work on the second sleeve/front of the kimono from Monday into Tuesday, finishing it up for a quick soak, block, and sun-drying on the back porch by around 3 p.m. By 6 p.m., I started in on the seaming, pausing to play a game of Scrabble before the kid's bedtime, and sewed on the buttons just shy of 9:30 p.m., having searched for and found the perfect shade and size of brown buttons in a mason jar of assorted buttons I purchased at a consignment shop last summer.

It turned out just as Mason Dixon Knitting predicted it would: quick, cute, and practical, despite the fact that before I seamed it up, it looked like this:

Mom-to-be seemed to like it and I hope baby feels likewise. I figure, since the baby will be born in the summer, a nice light cotton jacket will help keep him warm on chilly summer nights.

I even made my deadline, even with the additonal knitting done to my brother's blanket, though I did learn a valuable lesson: In a vacation situation, you can never bring too much yarn.

A Garden of my very Own: Planting

The herb garden is in. Unfortunately, a lack of rain has hindered its growth thus far, but I have high hopes that continued watering will result in big bushy plants. The rosemary, thyme, and savory, for example, are all supposed to get around 15 inches in diameter, hence the hefty spacing between them.

There is a climbing mint plant not pictured that's in the back there by the rhododendron. I'm hoping it can take the amount of shade and expand out into ground cover. I can't think of anything I want more for ground cover than a bunch of mint.

I also bought a chocolate mint plant. I'm not sure what type of root system it will have, i.e. if it sprouts shoots with a wandering root system or not as some mint plants do, which can be rather invasive to other plants in the garden). Thus, I planted the chocolate mint in a bed that is largely overgrown and not-yet cleared. If it wants to take over there, I'd be more than fine with that.

While clearing room for the mint, I noticed a shamrock in the smaller bed below being strangled by weeds, so I ripped out the weeds and so far, the shamrock seems to be doing well. It promptly responded to its new situation by budding copuous amounts of yellow flowers for its small size. I take that as a good sign.

I also noticed that my strawberry plants both had a tag recommending they be planted with rhubarb, asparahus, and raspberries. I do not have raspberries yet, which will be planted along the back side fence-line, but I do have asparagus and rhubarb. In the spirit of suggestion, I cleared part of the side front bed behind our mailbox for a perrenial strawberry-rhubarb-asparagus garden. The bed, though overrun with weeds, also had a fabric covering it to keep out the weeds. This meant that the clearing didn't take nearly as much time or energy as the herb garden crabgrass situation. I got home from work, cleared the bed, stopped for dinner, and had the entire project done before dark. It's been over a week now, however, and still no growth has occured on the asparagus or rhubarb plants. This gives me no small amount of anxiety.

After so much garden success, I started in on the bed against the back fence in the back yard. I had high hopes of widening the bed and putting my remaining vegetable crops there for this year. As you may recall, this particular bed is overrun with pricker bushes. Well, I took my hoe and I got down to business. I hacked out weeds and vines and yet more of that seemingly useless weed-stopping garden fabric, underneath which I uncovered a hive of wolf spiders, all of whom carted egg sacks. This told me  that 1. I needed to be careful not to get bitten by fangs as well as pricked by thorns and 2. They had obviously already mated with and killed the males if the eggs are already on their mommas' backs. I stopped gardening for a while to watch the spiders (from a safe distance) and contemplate the joys of mate-acide in arachnids.

Makes the crabgrass seem harmless in comparison, doesn't it?

While hacking away at the back bed, I noticed I had hacked away what appeared to be edible. I confirmed it with my husband. Yes, 'tis true. We apparently already had rhubarb. I butchered one plant, which I hope regrows, as the roots are still intact, but I managed to avoid hurting the second.

That being said, we didn't need to buy any rhubarb and probably wouldn't have if we'd known these were back there. However, more rhubarb is a heck of a lot better than not enough rhubarb. Besides, none of the newly planted rhubarb has sprouted yet.

With the knowledge that I seem to be able to spot the good plants in the weeds without too much difficulty (barring the butcher of the occasional rhubarb plant), I continued my crusade, hoping against hope to get a viable garden out of this prickery bed.

Not far into my new efforts, I was stopped again. If you can believe it, this time I found wild strawberries. I called my husband over again. "If I find asparagus, I'm throwing in the towel," I said. Fortunately, I did not find any asparagus, but I did discover that those strawberries have been very busy. Half the back lawn is actually comprised almost entirely of wild strawberries. They are everywhere.

And here they are under the forsythia bush:

Despite my best efforts, I could not tame the pricker bed of doom, so I decided to leave it and its few repeat plants and instead, just clear out the rest of the front bed where the asparagus/rhubarb/strawberry garden is. Now, while this bed does have that nifty fabric, it also has weeds intermixed with assorted viable nonedible perrenials. Thus, clearing this bed was a lot more work, involving sorting the good from the bad, transplanting, discarding, and saving plants from weed strangulation. Slowly, that mess became this:

And then, in the midst of my work, I discovered another annoyance. That catnip plant I bought for the  herb garden and decided to plant indoors instead to keep stray cats away?

Well, it's not the only catnip we own, apparently. Unless of course, this isn't catnip and just looks a lot like catnip and drives my cat insane in the same manner as catnip without being catnip. But I doubt it.

When it was all over, the weeds were gone, some plants were moved to other areas of the yard, and in the midst of the remaining thornless rose bush, catnip, evergreen tree, random bushes, and hostas, I planted my veggies. I started by planting my two pepper plants in a cinder block, as recommended in a pinterest post I saw and wondered about. It claimed that peppers grown in cinder block, which conducts heat well, tend to produce better and have faster fruit maturation.

Then I planted three zucchini plants,

two eggplant varieties,

two cucumber plants (which I plan to trellis),

and one lone beet.

While I was clearing the front bed, my husband took the liberty of clearing the back bed behind the main garage. In this bed, we planted three hierloom tomato plants, one hybrid, and two cherry tomato plants.

In the same weekend that all this went down, my mother-in-law came down to see our house for the first time, and with her, she brough us a gift: One semi-dwarf Montmorency cherry tree (now planted but pictured here unplanted)

and one dwarf yellow transparent apple tree.

Obviously the ugly shed is not completely down yet, but until the rest of it goes (along with the dilapidated fence), it will help to harbor the little tree from the elements until it gets a little stronger.

I can't wait for things to start growing.