AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

searching for new running routes

I'm definitely a creature of habit.  I order the same coffee drinks, eat the same pastries (or other things), and run in the same areas.  Except now I can't run the same routes I was running before.  Usually my running routes start from my home, and I just plot a circular route without too many loops that will take me out and back.  My first long run is this Saturday, so I am back to the drawing board, using my favorite mapping tool: GMap Pedometer.

I might be running with a friend this weekend (half marathon training goes a lot faster if you have somebody to run with), but even if I don't I have a 7 mile run to get in.  I was thinking of starting my run at North Quincy and running along Quincy Shore Drive and the beach until I get close to Quincy Center, going through my stomping grounds as it were, and looping back.  Just over 7 miles.  I've been over most of the area, but I'm not quite sure how the roads and traffic is where Sea Street crosses the Southern Artery.  I think it will be OK, especially if the run is on the earlier side. 

I was supposed to go running yesterday, but I'm a morning runner through and through.  This can be a problem, because it means that I don't tend to go running if it is past that window of two to three hours after I wake up.  Definitely something for me to fix.  I'm still trying to perfect my training.  It's just too easy for me to say that the walking is enough or that running on the treadmill will be enough today even though I know that the treadmill is an easier surface, though far more boring!

Today is Sunday's run (25 minutes, easy peasy).  Tomorrow is yoga and speedwork (treadmill), and hopefully from there I will be caught up and able to get back into a routine.  Faster times, trim legs, and less stress all from the power of pavement.

i cot a code

Only two days before July 4 with my inlaws visiting, and I have caught a cold.  My joy knows no bounds!

I can be fairly productive when I'm sick (years of practice going to school even though I was sick), but I tend to do less crafting and more reading when I am under the weather.  I'm still working my way through the cross-stitch.  I'll be ecstatic when it is done.  I love doing cross-stitch, but it is not the fastest craft I've ever done and it only feels speedy if I exercise Constant Vigilance and project monogamy.  Project Monogamy is not my strong suit, so I have been browsing patterns and yarns on Ravelry.  I won't be starting anything new, because I have a deadline project that I want to finish in the next two weeks and a couple of summer knits that also should be finished in time for summer.

In time for summer.
I love misty rains, but this has gotten a little silly.  Quincy (according to the weather stats I saw a day or two ago) had 5.21 inches of rain in June.  More than 2 inches above the June average.  It's been wet, gloomy, and a little on the chilly side for the month.  It's supposed to get a little better, but I'm not convinced it will happen yet.  Definitely a case of I will believe it when I see it.

Saturday and Sunday are supposed to have lower to tiny chances of rain, which will be good.  I signed up for a half marathon in the fall, and my first training day for it is Sunday (a short run).  I am still trying to find the best running routes in the area, but obviously I'm not trying too hard.  The pavement has not been quaking under my running stride!

With no knitting, just a little cross-stitch, and copious rain, I haven't done much with the garden either.  There has just been no need.  I cushioned my potato plant this morning, because it had fallen to one side.  Silly plant was listing like Pisa.  I've been doing a lot of reading in the last few days about gardening, and I was wondering if anyone in the New England region had planted a cover crop like clover over their entire yard in the fall.  I think the soil in the entire yard needs some help, so it would be great to know what steps I should take and when!  Yeah, I want to be like Norma when I grow up!

making of a craft room

Or in my case a craft closet.

I started off with the best of intentions.  We have a guest room with a large, deep closet.  Most of my craft stuff is in that closet, but like many things in our new house it is apparent that I was pretty good about cramming things into the darnedest spaces and so not quite all of my craft stuff fits in the closet (and the bottom 3-4 drawers of the dresser with most of my yarn).

Some of this is due to organization.  There simply isn't any.  I don't have the energy or inclination to cook dinner and organize my craft stuff when I get home from work, and I haven't had an iota of time on the weekends (my fault - Chronically Overscheduled could be my middle name).  I'm trying to decide how to organize the rest of my cross-stitch and move enough of the random project bags into an organized area that I can do things like get to the sewing machine or the loom without taking a 100 pieces of yarn and paper and what have you and moving them only to need to do the same thing to put the sewing machine or loom back.

Each set of shelves is two shelves tall (IIRC), and the two opposite the door are the skinny ones that you can knock off if you hit your head on them.  Ask me how I know.

The other shelves are deeper and much sturdier (my little line drawing is definitely not to scale).  The filing cabinet fits under one (that side has a pole for hangers, because it is a closet after all), and the other is deep enough to fit a white drawer and shelf affair (like this one only with a drawer on top and cheaper).  I have my craft stuff in a disorganized array on most of the shelves minus the lego shelf.  I also have a huge duffle bag full of fabric on the floor.  There really isn't any room to move around and do anything in there, and there really won't be until I get stuff organized.

Any tips for your favorite yarn and craft organization schemes?  I have soap and candle making stuff (not much), cross-stitch (a ton), yarn (ditto), and fabric.  There are other odds and ends in there as well for the moment, but I'd love to get a start on things. 

And the filing cabinet is at least in part for my cross-stitch.  It's what I bought it for when I was still a single chick living in Somerville.  The boxes of cross-stitch patterns, kits and supplies are patiently waiting for me to recreate my file structure for all of them.  I know this won't happen this weekend with family visiting, but it would be nice to get to the end of July and not shudder each time I walk into the room.

my happy little potholders!

I got my potholders last week and have barely had time to photograph them much less use them (it's pretty bad when I have blog fodder for at least a week's worth of daily posts and they get spread out of three weeks, because I don't have time to write all of the posts... sad, so sad).

I got these lovely potholders / hotpads:
So pretty!  I want to figure out how the petal one was sewn down and made so well, because that was the pattern I tried and then ripped all of them out!  These are all gorgeous, and I have them hanging up next to my very plain aprons (where I will hopefully remember to use both the potholders and the aprons with greater regularity).

I wish that more of these had little labels on them, so I would know who to thank (other than the organizers, Adrian and Maritza).  They might have put labels on and had them fall off.  I know I was bad and I put my labels in the bag, but I was running out of time and couldn't find a pair of scissors to attach the labels to the potholders themselves.

The only one with a name label was the one from Terri at Purple and Paisley (this is the link to the other hotpads).  Terri had some amazing quilts in progress!  I love the idea of making a quilt, but mixing colors is not my strong suit!  The flower hotpad has seen a fair amount of use, so I really appreciate it!

nostril breathing

I don't know why, but I love getting these little stress dots (and they are available all over the place). 

I normally consider these little dots a joke.  That they can't possibly work or that they work based on your skin temperature, but I'm a cold blooded creature (for a mammal).  Normally my skin is the coldest in a room full of people, and I'm still wearing bulky hooded sweatshirts, wool socks, and cardigans.

Not today.  Today my little stress dot (and the pilates class I took) have me remembering to breath deep, keep a limbic smile on my face, and remember to keep things in perspective.

While it has gotten to brown and even black today, it has been easy to think about things and take that little breathing space and go back to green.  Always a good lesson to remember and one I have all too easy a time at forgetting. 

Today is the farmer's market, a quick dinner (though of what, I do not know), and possibly furniture assembly.  Not bad for a busy Thursday.

boggled

I do have a potholder swap post coming.  Pictures are taken (though I won't use most of them), but I keep forgetting to write down the details!  Details!

Details like I just went to Ravelry to see if more people had made one of the tops that has been in my queue forever (for-ev-er), and I noticed that somehow I had gotten up to 52 queued items!  Dang!  I'm never going to get to some of these items no matter how gorgeous they are!  How realistic is it that I am going to knit a top queued in 2007?  Not great, and getting less great all the time.  But I just don't want to give up on these projects.

Of course, these days I'm not knitting at all.  Instead I'm doing cross-stitch.  The piece I'm working on for the new house has been my only project since June 4th (Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals), and while there are a few days here and there where I didn't do any stitching the effort has been pretty consistent.  I'm on the backstitch, so the end is in sight!  Then I will wash and block it and decide if it is going to get the bell pull treatment or framing.  After that it will probably be back to all knitting all the time, but it has been wonderful to get back to one of my original crafting roots.

pictures from my garden

I have two grow beds for my garden this year, started in the first week or so of June.  With such a late start and knowing only what I've gleaned from reading the Norma (which would be more, but I'm pretty bad at the plant thing), I talked to some people at the farmer's market selling seedlings.  I have one tomato and 6 pepper plants in this bed.  There is also an empty spot for swiss chard seeds that I've been too lazy to plant (they are growing like mad on a paper towel) and a filled spot with a purple potato that decided it wanted to LIVE!

With the tomato and the peppers, I have the little labels that came with the plants.  I can tell you that I have Zebra tomatoes (which may or may not happen by the end of summer) and Flamingo peppers.  We're all about the animals here.

In my narrow grow bed I have corn.  I would show you the picture, but it is apparent that I turned the soil over and buried some grass and that's about it.  If I took a picture today, I would be able to show you two whole shoots.  A far cry from whatever number I actually put in there (umm, 5 or 6??). 

Next to both of these I have a mound.  It's a very small mound, considering it is for pumpkins.  Everything is probably way too close together, but I didn't want to turn over a large amount of ground.  There is no picture worth showing of this either, because it looks like I did even less effort in turning the soil over (and getting rid of the grass) than with the thin grow bed.  Also, like the thin bed, until this weekend, I could show you nothing growing until about Saturday.  Now when I looked over the weekend, I had two decent sized shoots.  Not sure when or how I should thin them out, or if I should even bother despite how tiny the plot I've given them is.  We'll see.

All is not lost in my growing efforts.  In the middle of the picture (ignore the grass... I'm pretending it is mulch) is the potato plant I plopped into the ground. 

See!  I can grow things.  And now I have the rest of the summer to prove that I can either 1) really grow things, or more likely 2) show how quickly I can kill them off.  Of course, killing them off would be a lot easier if Mother Nature gave me less rain and more blistering hot sunshine. 

(I'm actually pretty proud of the plants, because they are growing and mostly look happy despite being in one of the shadiest spots in the yard.  It's what I get for not spending a good day thinking about how much sun everything gets back there.)

I also have a PowerPlant in the kitchen slowly growing basil for me to use the rest of the summer.  Right now it is almost time to take off the little domes.  Just a couple of days more!

pretty in pink!

Have you ever seen anything so pink in your life?  It is Norma's rose petal jam, which I am saving to go over homemade ice cream (this weekend, you will be mine!).

I was going to make homemade french vanilla ice cream, French style with the custard base.  It's rich, creamy, bad for you, but oh so delicious.  However, I've also wanted to make the Fleur de lait from The Perfect Scoop for over a year.  It is a base similar to the Sicilian style gelato I made last weekend of milk cooked and thickened with corn starch.  I have cooking quality lavendar, which I could add to it.  That would recreate (with the jam) a wonderful ice cream I had many years ago at Herrell's called hearts and flowers.  Delicious!

Of course, I have two ice cream canisters, so there is nothing other than time stopping me from making two batches of ice cream.  The other option, especially with the Fleur de Lait is to use the jam as a swirl, like the oh so tasty caramel and peanut butter (and fudge) swirls in so many commercial ice creams.  I've done that kind of thing before, and it almost always helps keep the ice cream more scoopable!  Yum.

my friends are the best

Yesterday was our Housewarming Party (no gifts please edition, because we never finished all the wine from the housewarming for our condo).  The day was perfect.  The afternoon rain showers failed to materialize, and we were mostly able to enjoy our back yard after the obligatory tours of the house.

I had the Summer Entertaining issue of Cook's Illustrated (or Entertaining magazine), and I put together the stuffed burgers which I made slider sized.  I should have made more of them, because people seemed to really enjoy them.  I scrubbed down the grill and made grilled corn.  We ordered jumbo pizza from Spukies (28" round pizza, which is huge!), and generally had fun during the day light hours.

Eventually we all moved inside to eat the little ice cream pies (s'mores) and try our hand at the Gelatinis.  They weren't as strong as they were supposed to be, because we didn't have enough gelato for the 8 or so people still around at that point.  I will have to try again with a double batch of gelato (or fewer people, though it was fun to hang out with everybody).

We really did mean no gifts, so when my friends brought a huge polka dotted box with a bow out I studiously ignored it.  I'm pretty good at that.  When they asked what they should do with it, I said put it back in the car.  Eventually they had the Blackbird egg me on to actually open it, and my friends got together and bought me a Kitchenaid Stand Mixer.  My eyes are still huge!  It was one of the things I never put on my wedding registry, because I was uncomfortable putting anything that expensive on there.  I hated the feeling that someone might feel obliged to buy something really expensive even if it would be something that I would use constantly.  Thank you guys!  It's just in time for me to try my hand at making little individual cakes all prettily plated like you would see at Tartelette or Cannelle et Vanille.  As soon as I finish all of the dishes and rearrange the kitchen counter to give the stand a permanent home!

They won!

And it was great fun to watch, and not quite as frightening as the BU win in the Frozen Four.

It's bedtime.  I have made the gelato base for the first round of gelatini experiments, a quick chocolate ice cream, a pumpkin ice cream, marshmallow sauce, and am completely imbued with sugar.  I wonder if I will be able to sleep at all...