West coast knitting

This blog’s been light on the knitting lately, so here are some Oregon trip highlights from that department.

My airplane project was this Pinstripe Slouch Hat in some Widdershin handspun.

It looked great for about 3 inches. But then the colors started to pool and stripe, which interfered with the vertical lines of the pinstripes. It was a particularly hard one to frog because I think it ultimately could’ve been okay. But why put in all the hard work of handspinning for something that’s just okay. There’s 457 yards there, which should be enough for a shawl for my mom…something with longer rows to eliminate striping. Do you have any to suggest?

In 2009 I wrote about my first efforts at carding, dyeing, and spinning a small bag of yarn from Read’s mom’s alpacas. There are many seasons worth of fiber stored high and dry in their barn, and Sally graciously said it could be mine for the taking. I picked through it all last week and with space bags and a vacuum, condensed two garbage bags full into three plane-ready parcels. If all goes as planned, it’ll be cleaned, blended, and carded at Still River Mill (and part of it turned into a Christmas present for Sally). I am REALLY pumped.

In Eugene we made a visit to Soft Horizons, my favorite little knit shop. They have this basket of mill ends in the back that always sucks me in. I picked out about a pound of different wools. I also bought a hank of Frolicking Feet in Navajo Sky – maybe it’ll work better for the Pinstripe Slouch Hat.

My homework is knitting Tami (of the Tulum trip) a new hat. She shrunk her last one in the washing machine (Tami!!!!). The shrunk one was awfully cute (see?), but Tami picked out a deep dark eggplant wool/yak blend that just might top it. And I do owe her a birthday present. In fact I better go work on it right now.

Down by the boardwalk

Me and my sunburn are lying in front of the box fan, nursing a beer and reminiscing on a July 4th so awesome it feels like a dream.

I’m part of a friend group that goes back to high school (for some of us, grade school). We’ve scattered to the far corners of the country and back again, so over the past decade even partial reunions have been a rare and treasured thing.

Last weekend the fates aligned and four of us (+partners, +Samson) converged at Meg’s apartment in Atlantic City. We leapt into saltwater waves, passed out on beach blankets, ate pizza with clam sauce, drank beers in the backyard, and referenced inside jokes that pre-date Y2K. What makes old friendships so validating?

Then yesterday afternoon I had to make a tough call: leave town at a reasonable hour and miss friends and fireworks, or stay for fireworks and get up at 3am for a 6 hour pre-dawn drive to work.

I consulted Samson, still recovering on the couch from a 48 hr. bender with all-you-can-eat-casino-buffets and blackjack. He’s always been the sort to push all the chips on the table, so we did our last night up right.

I took these with my new Lumix, set to 3200 ISO and +2/3 exposure.

Wandering through the North Shore

After weeks of cold rainy weather we finally have a hot spell. The pets have all responded by suddenly going from “curled” to “sprawling” as they sleep.

Read leaves tomorrow for six weeks in Peru and Mexico where he’ll do some research and intensive language study. Sadly, I’m not tagging along on this one, so I took the day off work and we threw together a quick trip out of the city. This was one of those open-ended adventures where we picked a general destination but no itinerary. We drove all along the little towns in the North Shore – Magnolia, Essex, Rockport, Gloucester – and stopped whenever something looked interesting.

We walked along the harbor in Essex…

…napped on the beach…

…walked Sam through neighborhoods of adorable houses and picked where we’d most like to live…

…randomly found an awesome yarn store where I bought some roving…

…and on the advice of a coworker, stopped at Woodman’s of Essex (“Best Place to Eat in MA” from Bon Appetit) for some fried clams. Woodman’s did not disappoint. We split a fried seafood sampler, chowder, and an ear of corn – all washed down with a cold beer. It was an indulgent and tasty closer to our early Memorial Day trip.

Yeah, we ate that whole plate. No wonder my stomach is making weird noises as I type.

Five Days in Tulum, Mexico: Take me back!

It was hard to come back to snowy Boston after sitting on white sandy beaches in a swimsuit. And it was hard to leave Tami, somebody I used to see every day in Oregon. But I did. Without too many tears (I was given strict “no goodbye tears” orders). Now that a little time’s passed I feel emotionally recovered enough to write out some notes from our travels:

Hmm this begins to capture just how bow-legged I am...

I wish I could’ve stayed longer.  No surprise there. I mean, look at that beach!  With only 5 days I had to work hard to get a proper suntan that my coworkers would envy. Tami carefully monitored my color. Every time a bartender or hotel owner heard how long I was in town, they gave me a pity-filled frown and said, “But why so short?” Seeing as how they work in the tourism industry, I suppose they had personal reasons for wanting me to take a longer vacation. But when your office is an open air bar on the beach, I think you can drum up real pity for a sunburnt Bostonian on her last day in Tulum.

I’d choose Tulum over Cancun. Lemme clarify. In college I was talked into the classic Cancun Spring Break week. It was some of the best people-watching I’ve ever experienced and I absolutely fell in love with the ocean, but the physical built environment (granted nobody would leave the hotel mile with me) was too…Vegas-like. Big roads, big resorts, glitz, lights. In comparison, downtown Tulum is scaled for the pedestrian. Little restaurants, little shops, and small streets. It’s grittier – on either side of our hotel were tar-paper roofed houses guarded by scruffy dogs – but everyone was friendly and we never felt unsafe. Actually, nobody was nearly as troublesome as the drunk American boys swarming the beaches and pools of Cancun. Also it’s worth noting that Tami speaks excellent Spanish, which made it easy to navigate all sorts of daily interactions.

Margaritas on the beach

Akumal, where you can snorkel in the bay with giant sea turtles. When they eat seagrass they chew like cows.

Tacoqueto, where there's no written menu. You just point to the pot of what you want.

Chicken tamales (with a little bag of hot sauce) from a foodcart

Back-lit wall of glass bottles along the main drag in Tulum

In Tulum you have an important choice: stay at the beach or stay in town. They’re only about 2 miles apart (40 peso taxi ride). I think each have their perks, but Tami chose in town and it worked well. The hotels are slightly cheaper and you’re within walking distance to internet cafes and lots of eateries. Here are photos of our two hotels: The Secret Garden & Hotel Posada. Hotel Posada was plagued by some 8am construction next door (our walls shook with the hammering) and their customer service response was umm…frustrating. But the place is beautiful. Secret Garden took the prize though. They had all the necessities: clean comfortable rooms, a shaded inner courtyard, two on-site friendly dogs, and a cute owner whose sister bartends down the street.

the courtyard at Secret Garden after a morning rain

the winding pool inside Hotel Posada

My very favorite thing on this trip was the Gran Cenote. Just a couple miles from downtown Tulum, it’s more than worth the 100 pesos entrance fee. The best way I can describe swimming in the cenote is that it felt like a Katie-sized freshwater aquarium. The water is crystal clear and underwater you can see fish from 30 or 40 feet away. The one upside to the  construction at Hotel Posada is that we were up and at ‘em early, and we had the cenote to ourselves for a while. Around 11am a big group of Japanese tourists showed up wearing flippers, and they were followed by several European families with a dozen kids under the age of 5. Suddenly it wasn’t a private aquarium anymore. So if you go, go early.

Snorkeling the Gran Cenote

so many fish...

Tami snorkels through the tunnel

I made some progress on the Neulottu naisen jakku cardigan too. It’s such a joyful color, especially next to that ocean and those chairs.

Progress on Neulottu naisen jakku

Neulottu naisen jakku: back panel and sleeves

Thank you Tami for a vacation so good that I hope we can make the February Getaway an annual thing. Readers – any suggestions for a destination in 2012?

Trading Snow for Sand

That’s right. In about 10 days I’ll be sitting on the beach in Tulum, Mexico with Tami. Plans are in motion. I ordered a new swimsuit. Tami and I picked out a place we want to eat ceviche. And I changed my desktop at work to this image:

(c) th00.deviantart.net/

And, as any knitter must do for an upcoming trip, I lined up a new project. This fall I wrote about Lilia and her lightning quick response to translate a knitting pattern from Finnish to English (seriously, how cool is that?!).

copyright: Pitsikuduja

Neulottu naisen jakku has been on my queue for a while and I finally found the right yarn – Peace Fleece Worsted. It’s a happy, happy green that’ll help get me through the end of winter. I cast on last night, and by Tulum, I should be working on the radial pattern.

Peace Fleece Worsted in shaba

If you’ve been to Tulum, feel free to share tips on where to eat or what to do!

Memorial Day Weekend in Sisters

For Memorial Day Weekend we went to visit Read’s aunt and uncle in Sisters, Oregon. I remember driving through Sisters heading the opposite direction when I moved to Eugene.  It’s where my Dad got a reminder that in Oregon, you can’t pump your own gas (“Sir…SIR! Step AWAY from your car!!”). I also recall a lot of quaint, wild-west-themed lettering on the storefronts, which I was happy to see is still the case. We took a walk downtown on Saturday and passed one of Read’s favorite childhood landmarks: Sno Cap ice cream.

Sno Cap in Sisters, Oregon

Read’s aunt and uncle live at the end of a couple miles of red cinder gravel. They have a spectacular view of the 3 Sisters mountains. I did a lot of knitting and we all did a lot of talking, cooking, and coffee-drinking…everything you need for a relaxing weekend. 

On Sunday it rained. Read took this picture out the kitchen window. 

Sisters, Oregon

I’m going to use this picture to illustrate something I figured out today…and wish I’d figured out much earlier. I’d noticed that my photos were sometimes blurry or fuzzy on this blog. They look fine on my camera, in iphoto, etc. but…wordpress wasn’t preserving that crispness through the uploading process. 

I should have troubleshooted this earlier, but for some reason just got around to it today. It’s what I suspected — photos need to be resized in a photo-editing program before uploading them to WordPress. The automatic resizing that WordPress does for you doesn’t always preserve the photo’s quality like you want it to. 

Since I don’t have Photoshop, I finally joined Flickr. You can grab URLs from various sized versions of your photos and upload them that way. The “medium” sized photo is 500 pixels wide…which seems to be working well in WordPress. Now I want to retroactively fix all of my photos on here. 

For comparision, here’s the same photo uploaded the “old” way…where I relied on WordPress to automatically resize my original photo file. It’s just not as good.

Same photo, different uploading method

Where do YOU take your knitting??

Last night I watched a commercial where an iphone-owner bragged that he didn’t mind being put on hold anymore because the iphone lets him simultaneously pay bills, watch videos, and play games. It made me think of how when I graduated from high school everyone gave me calling cards for presents so that I could call home from the dorm phones for free. Then I felt old.

One day I’m going to walk into the cellphone store and there won’t be any phones that just call people anymore…which will be okay. I guess it will provide me with additional ways to occupy myself when put on hold. Or waiting for the doctor. Or sitting on a long flight. For now my go-to time-occupier is knitting. Seriously, you can take it anywhere.

For instance, last weekend my friend Emily invited me cross-country skiing in the Oregon mountains. I haven’t been skiing since I was a kid in Ohio, where it was very flat and very cold. I remember that it sometimes involved blisters and very tangled falls, but was fun. So off we went, and wow what a day. Blue skies! Mountains! Sunshine!

Hoodoo ski area in Oregon

A couple miles in and I was feeling the burn. Turns out a “flat” trail in Oregon means “full of little hills” if you’re used to the glacier-flattened landscapes of Ohio. And going downhill kept resulting in wipeouts. Emily and her friend spotted a monstrous hill to the right and got all excited about taking a detour to go up and down it. I respectfully declined, sat down on the backpack to wait, and then remembered I’d packed my knitting in the backpack. Now I can add “cross country-skiing” to the list of situations where I’ve been happy to have my knitting.

So where do YOU take your knitting?

check out the ice-wipeout-knuckles

Our lunches were in the backpack (my seat). Emily thanked me later for turning her sandwich into a panini

Quiz

Q. What do you call sitting in a hot spring in the rainy forest surrounded by naked people, listening to one of them play a didgeridoo?

A. an uncomfortable situation

B. the opening scene of a horror flick

C. a relaxing Saturday afternoon

 

Cougar Hot Springs courtesy of http://www.uoregon.edu/~ecolrest/diversions.htm

Trick question! The answer is D: a mix of all of the above.

Okay just kidding about the horror flick part. I have to stick up for Oregonians there, because although I’ve witnessed  philosophical rants, strange musical performances, and a whole lotta PDA at the hot springs, I’ve never felt unsafe. Maybe a little grossed out (picture PDA the likes of the “lover” hot tub skit on SNL…only nude), but all in all, everyone is very respectful.

On Saturday morning my friend and her fiance drove out to Cougar Hot Springs and were kind enough to take me along. If we didn’t work 8-to-5 jobs we would’ve gone on a weekday – that’s your best insurance for having the place to yourself. But hey, if there’s gonna be a crowd at least let it be an interesting one. And the didgeridoo player had that covered. On a whim we stopped by a roadside BBQ place on the way back to town. The Wagon Yard was AWESOME. Great prices, cute atmosphere, and one of the best pulled pork sandwiches I’ve ever had. 

In knitting news, I finished my sockyarn mittens and gave them a test drive on the bike commute to work. The best part is that I recently upgraded to a new red rain shell, and the mittens’ stripes look even better next to the red coat. Three cheers for unexpected accessory coordination!

sockyarn mittens...finished!

The super-summarized Italy photo recap

It’s been just over a month since Read and I returned from our travels across the Atlantic. I don’t want to post about the things I knew I would see and everyone else sees (not that they aren’t spectacular. Michelangelo’s David is beautiful). But websites and guidebooks (heck, wikipedia!) are at your fingertips…I certainly wouldn’t be telling you any new or rare information. How about I show you a photo collection of the unexpected-and-delightful according to Read and Katie? 

1. Speaking of the expectedly impressive, the Sistine Chapel is quite a sight. But before you get to the grandaddy of all ceiling paintings you walk through about four miles of the Vatican and every single ceiling is elaborately decorated. Even the smaller Italian cathedrals have paintings, mosaics, and carvings over every surface. So when you go to Italy remember to look UP.

hymn room in Sienna's duomo

 

"map room" in the Vatican

 

ceiling in the Vatican

 

2. I’m a fan of fonts. Granted I didn’t do so well on that font quiz that got passed around my grad class last year. But I do like them, especially handwriting fonts (rabiohead!). Ancient sites like the Colosseum have lots of carved Latin lettering that’s slightly off-kilter, crooked, and very human. Anyone else out there understand my joy over this tablet? 

tablet at the Colosseum

 

 3. Read’s mom and stepdad helped us find a little apartment for our stay in Rome. They used vrbo.com, which is the same site that they use to advertise their apartment in Oregon’s wine country. Rome was my favorite vacation stop, due in part to our apartment. I loved it, and I love the vrbo site (I was just using it yesterday to find a spring break spot in the southwest). Coming home to our own little kitchen, entryway, and balcony sure beat a hostel or hotel.

apartment in Rome, near the Colosseum

 

4. This isn’t really something from Italy, but it’s something Read figured out while we were in Italy: in lieu of a tripod, use your 2-second timer to stabilize your camera during lowlight shots. That was old news to my photo-hobbyist uncle, and if you’re really into photography it will be old news to you too. But it helped us. We already knew to put the camera in manual mode and turn off the flash, but with such slow shutter speeds just the act of pressing the button resulted in blurred images. A 2-second delay allowed us to hold my little canon point-and-shoot very still and capture crisp images, even at night. 

Use your 2-second timer to stabilize lowlight shots

 

5. And finally, this recap would not be complete without showing you my prized souvenir from Sienna – the perfect leather boots. Because they’re not too rounded and not too pointy, with a heel that’s not too tall and not too short. And they’re leather…soft, buttery leather. I’m paranoid about subjecting them to an Oregon rainstorm so I carry them to work in my backpack and pull a little Mr. Rogers change-up once I’m in my office.

the most beautiful leather boots in Sienna

 

http://www.verocuoio.it/

Goodbye two thousand and nine

I’m a bit late on the new year’s post and the Rose Bowl is partly to blame. This year it pit the team of my childhood -Ohio State- against the team of my current hometown -Oregon. I offended fans from both teams by saying I was having trouble knowing who to cheer for, but in the end I had to represent the midwest. It’s hard to counter twenty-some years of indoctrination and besides, there’s something fun about being the only Buckeye in a house full of Duck fans (ME vs. THEM!!). Especially when your team wins.

I’m not a diehard fan by any means (I don’t know all of the players names, I understand rules but not strategy) but I really, honestly enjoy watching football. Read and I got so worked up watching the game that we came home, flopped on the bed in our fan gear, and fell asleep for the evening. 

I had fun reading the new year’s themed posts on my blogroll, like this photo montage from dooce.com, an impressive “year of making” from Artsy Craftsy Babe, and craft highlights from Elsie Marley. Outside of the craft sites, you must read the 2009 recap from passiveaggressivenotes.com.

In my own little world, 2009 was a big year. I moved across the neighborhood, started this blog with Bethany, said goodbye to friends who moved across the country, learned how to use my spinning wheel, got hired on a permanent basis at work, lost my grandfather, got engaged, and traveled across the Atlantic. You never know what a year will bring, and 2010 promises to deal out some extra big adventures. But before I can welcome in the new it feels right to say goodbye to the old, so here are some images from 2009:

winter sunset over the Pacific

 

convincing Sam to ride in the bike basket

 

new milestone: a handknit sweater good enough to wear outside the house

 

canned Oregon peaches

 

swimming in the river to beat the heat

 

pre-Rose Bowl, when I'm an Oregon fan

 

first skein of hand-dyed & hand-spun yarn

 

Venice just before dawn

 

hometown church on christmas eve