What Have I Been Doing? you might ask. Or not.

But I'll tell you anyway.  

I have been busy!  Knitting away, cooking, having things done to the kitchen and generally jumping from project to project, with no organization in play.  

That's me.  OCD or something.

But here is my current project, which needs to be finished by Christmas, and since I just finished the chart this morning, I know I'll make it.

It will look like this

when I finish (with a turquoise pom pom on top) but as the Powers that Be are my witness, I will NEVER do intarsia or stranding again.  NEVER!!!

Because this is what is involved:

a tangle of yarns that keeps getting more tangly and annoying and time-consuming to untangle.  

So there, knitting.

To go back in time, I made this gorgeous pie for Thanksgiving:

It is from this Williams Sonoma recipe, and although I am not normally a fan of pumpkin pie, this tasted pretty good to me, and I overheard another guest tell the hostess that it was the best pumpkin pie she had ever had. (There is brandy in it, so there's that.) I just happened to have the leaf punches, from WS of course, so I could copy the top perfectly. And I've just realized that this is the photo from WS, and I wonder what happened to the photo of mine. hmmmm....  Anyway, mine looked like this.  

Another project:

I've been cooking in the dark since we moved in here 20+ years ago, and just the day before Daylight Savings Time went away, I had can lights installed.  Let there be light! said I. And now there is!  Doesn't mean I like cooking any better, but when I do cook, I can see what I'm doing.  As Martha says, It's a good thing.

But we lived with multiple holes in the ceiling until I finally found a painter willing to repair them and paint the ceiling. It was surprisingly difficult to find one and someone told me that lots of people have painting done before they entertain for Thanksgiving.  Really??? That's about the last thing I would think about if I were having a mob over for dinner, but ok. Anyway, I wasn't having anyone over; we went to our friend's home. So no hurry, but now the ceiling no longer looks like this:

Blurry photo......  I think there were about five holes in all, but they are all gone.

Since the weather has suddenly turned knitted-things cold, I can wear my hand knit socks, and I do!  In the house I wear them with my Birks, easy-on, easy-off.

Classy with a K, right?  (And no, H and S, I do NOT go out in public like this.)

BONUS!  I realized that I promised more photos from my trip in the fall, but instead I'll just post this one.  One of my favorites: 

A very relaxed Archbishop.  I think he is in the York Minster.  

Why I Will Never Knit Fair Isle

I am currently working on a Christmas stocking for new baby, and I have made so many of these that you would think I would know what I am doing by now---but NOPE. I don't know how to do fair isle, intarsia, or stranding or whatever the skills are that this project requires. I just sort of do whatever and hope for the best. So Santa looks OK from the front, right? Except for the missing eyes which I will duplicate stitch in when the whole thing is finished, along with the baby's name and the year 2008. Do I know how to duplicate stitch??? Well, not exactly. The knitting guru at the LYS showed me how many, many months ago when I started this project, but now I'm a little unclear. I'll work it out, or ask for help---again.

The reason I say that I will never do any beautiful fair isle knitting is in the picture below:
Knitting fair isle designs requires working with more than one color at a time. I hate working with more than one color at a time because doing so means that I will have this mess on the back while I am trying to knit. I end up with the strands all wound up around each other and have to keep unwinding them as I go along. The only thing that made this stocking easier than all the hundreds (I swear) that I have knit in the past is that our guru told me to just work with 24" or so of the yarns (except using the whole ball for the background color) so at least I didn't have to wrestle with three balls of yarn while I was knitting. Now that Santa is finished, I can go on to finish the foot, sew the whole thing up, stitch in the eyes, name and year, and it will be finished. Thank goodness!!!


What is shown in this picture is what has allowed me to get back to knitting without so much pain. It reeks---it's made of whatever wet suits are made of and it REEKS and always will, according to the therapist who gave it to me. But it allows me to knit. (My sincerest apologies to anyone who gets stuck sitting near me.)
While I have been catching up on my knitting, I have been catching up on shows I had not watched before. Law and Order, of course, and also House. What an odd show:

Each episode is as follows: A patient with weird symptoms shows up at the hospital. Dr. House, loveable but scruffy and crabby, and his team mis-diagnose the patient a whole bunch of times. Since the patient is mis-diagnosed, he is also treated incorrectly for his mysterious condition. Those treatments cause more symptoms. Sometimes members of the team go to the patient's house to snoop (look for clues to his illness); sometimes they don't. Then in the last ten minutes or so of the show, something suddenly occurs to Dr. House, he has his team treat the patient appropriately, and everyone lives happily after.

The End.

Well, the end except for this question: House is forever popping pain pills without benefit of a drink to swallow them down with. How does he do this? I can't do this. Just wondering.