Hawaii Photos are posted! Not much knitting, though!

I'm not dead! I'm just not posting much. I'm not knitting much.... I knit a little on a square of my Mitered Squares blanket last week at knit nite, and that's about it. I think about it, and want to knit, but then my hands don't feel like doing the actual work. Hrmph.

This past weekend was good - we went with a friend to the Farmer's Market in Mpls Saturday morning, and then she helped us find tennis courts and a way to bike to Theo Wirth from our house, and we played tennis and biked home, and there was cooking, and on Sunday, I cooked Sean breakfast in bed for Father's Day, and also cooked a nice tilapia picatta for dinner.

So in the absence of knitting-related stuff, I posted photos of our trip to Hawaii!

Here are the links to my Flickr sets:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/empire74/sets/72157620162709751/
These are the photos I took with my pocket camera. I also posted these to Facebook.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/empire74/sets/72157620274586440/
These are the photos I took with my trusty Nikon D80, including the stars @ 9000' at Mauna Kea, the helicopter ride over Hawaii (now with active volcanoes), and other awesome things.

Excursion!

I went to knit nite last night! It was good to see Becca and Janelle, and sit around listening to Janelle read to us from Wikipages on US military uniforms. I kind of fell down the wiki hole when I got home, and I made sure to share the love with Sean, knowning (a) his penchant for falling down the wiki hole and (b) the military. :)

Dunn Bros on W Lake St is, indeed, a most excellent location to sit and knit for a few hours. I got a few rows done on the Clapotis (need to remember to put another ball or 2 of that yarn in my bag for the trip!) and also started another mitered square for that blanket.

Had a lousy night's sleep due to how hot it was in our place when I fell asleep, which happened later than usual. It cooled off nicely overnight, but the wind was strong, and was blowing the blinds all over and making a racket, which woke me up every 5 min.

In a good mood today though - tomorrow's Friday and Sean might be home tonight! :)

There's good news all around...

Kindle has been located. It was by the turntable in the living room, where I set it down the other morning, distracted by re-enveloping the netflix movies to go back. Yay!

Cast on for the Totally Autumn throw last night, with my lovely red-blue-purple Malabrigo Merino Worsted yarn. I think this is going to make me very happy.

I'm hoping to make good progress on the Totally Autumn throw and on the Clapotis this weekend. And to do my May square for the Mitered Square blanket.

I think Sean and I are going for sushi for dinner and then to see the Wolverine movie. Yay date night!

Also, results back from the doc - no blood sugar issues (which is what I was worried about), no mono or lyme disease. But I do have borderline high cholesterol, so I'm going to revamp my diet and try to exercise as I can until I can get back to serious exercise. Got a couple of good books last night on lowering cholesterol through diet, and Sean says "Bacon and eggs are out for breakfast; muesli and skim milk are in!" Actually, it's oatmeal that's in, with Cheerios a close second. :)

Looking forward to my sleep study next week. I get to sleep in a sleep # bed for the first time. :)

Also? Looking forward to the weekend!

quick update

Haven't done a lot of knitting this week... did get a little done last night while talking to Ann online.... I'm now further ahead on the Clapotis (by 3-4 rows) than I was when I messed up the pattern before. I haven't worked on any mitered squares either.

I'm hoping to get some good knitting time in this weekend. I think I have the whole weekend off, and it's sorely needed. Between the craziness at work the last few weeks and the whirlwind weekend in New England last week, I would love 2 solid days to putter around and relax.

I should have some more photos up soon - tonight, if I can stay awake long enough to get the camera on and shooting photos. :)

And thanks to the people who're reading this! I'm over 100 site visits, and that's awesome to see! I hope to return to marginally interesting posts about knitting and my other crafty pursuits soon. Oh, and I start my lern2sew class this next Monday night!

Movin' right along....

I finished another one of the increase row repeats on the clapotis while talking to my stepdaughter on IMs last night. It's becoming a lot easier for me to keep track of where I am in the middle of a row of the pattern - and the spreadsheet I have makes it so easy!

I have a feeling I'll make more Clapotis' as gifts. :)

I think I'll probably work on mitered squares in the airport/on the plane over the weekend, mostly. easier to mindlessly knit. I'll have the clapotis with me, though, because sometimes, I just need to work with that beautiful egyptian cotton yarn!

So looking forward to the weekend.

Lern2Knit

I ran to 3 Kittens Needle Arts 15 minutes before they closed yesterday, since I was down at MSP dropping Sean off at the airport, and got some beautiful Egyptian Cotton yarn. With that yarn, I started the Clapotis last night. And then started it again. And a few more times. And now, I have no Clapotis on my needles. *sighs*

I don't know why I can't seem to follow patterns. Everyone else does. I'm so frustrated. I'm not giving up, and I'd like to state, for the record, that I did not blow up, use profanity, or otherwise comport myself in anything other than a dignified manner last night as I frogged and re-started the Clapotis many times.

This, my friends, is progress. But still, the fact remains that despite the photo in this post, I have no Clapotis on my needles. But at one of several points last night, I did, in fact, have section 1 completed:

But I can start again tonight. And keep going until I can figure out how to do it right and have the right # of stitches on the needle on any given row. I got all the way to row 8 or 10 of section 2, and then made a mistake. Maybe I need to get better at fixing mistakes, since all I can see to do, when faced with the wrong # of stitches on the needle, is to start all over again, since there are ssks and k2togs and ktbls and kfbs pfbs and I can't figure out how to work back through them. I know how to do them, which is a nice feeling. I read the pattern, and I know what all of it means. I just can't seem to translate it well into the stitches on my needles.

So, tonight, I will again attempt to get solidly into section 2 of Clapotis. Maybe I also need to re-type the pattern into something easier for my brain to process. I get lost in the k1s and the ktbls when I read it in a row (just don't visually process it well anymore), so maybe if I rewrite the pattern in an easier format for me to read, it would help.

I finished another mitered square yesterday (that makes 3, though I have no photo of #2 or #3 yet), and cast on for another one.

I'll figure this out. I just need to find the ways that work for me.