One more thing...

From now until January 1 we are having FREE SHIPPING over at Lulu & Bea -- there's corduroys and baby booties and long-sleevers and aprons -- all the good stuff. Snap 'em up now!

Unplugged.

Well, I was hoping to unplug for two weeks. No blog, no flickr, no ravlery, certainly no facebook, no email, nothing. A little break from all things plugged in.

However, I'm waiting for a baby to be born to my friend Summer... and I can't unplug until I know the wee one has arrived... So come on baby!

And I'll be back here in this spot January 4th. Or so. : )

Not to Be Left Out...

I mentioned Em's workbook. Bea wanted me to mention hers, too.

Hanging Around with Em

He's been working hard for days on a very important tool for the eleven-year-old boy: the rubber band shooter.


And since I don't want to be the only one, let me tell you what song has been stuck in my head for days now because of this rubber band contraption... here... Now let's all get up from our chairs and couches or wherever we are and let's put on our powder blue suits and do some dance moves with those guys.

Seriously.

You watch and do some of those moves and tell me that doesn't make you smile.

Hang in there until the end of the video and then imagine this: what if we all got together and did a virtual dance like that one with our extra-long extra-strong rubber bands?! Hey? Now wouldn't that be good times?!

What I'm Making :: Wednesday

TA-DA!!!! The M&K Eco Ull pullover vest. Done.

I tried to get a little brooklyntweed with the photo... how'd I do? Not bad, right?


Now, it's far from perfect but I'm pretty happy with it. I kind of miss it from sitting on my lap while I was knitting, it was nice and warm. (Let's note here that I failed to follow the directions for how to make the "V" properly as they were written in the pattern. Let us note also that I failed to follow the directions I was given at the LYS, too. I just did whatever. And it's still a V. But not a proper V. Luckily, Lucian doesn't seem to care.)


See the sunlight on those tiny cables? Nice, hey? I messed them up a little bit on the back side of the vest but we're not looking at that...

Now, it was no small feat to get Lucian to agree to a photo shoot. I promised I was not taking pictures of his face, just the vest, so he kept a terrible expression on his face the whole time just in case I was lying to him...


Oh, Lucian.

Chicken Love :: Chicken Question

We have some serious chicken love going on around here. As you can see.

Back at the beginning of November our ladies started laying eggs, cute little pullet eggs. Here, in the darkest days of the year, they decided to start doing that! What luck! There's nothing finer than fresh eggs in the morning, still warm. (One morning, I went down and was collecting the eggs and one of the hens was in the box still and I reached around under her and pulled out some eggs and then she stood up the slightest bit and I saw the egg come out. I had never seen such a thing before! WOW.) Anyway, one of the chickens, and I don't know which because they mostly all look the same, started taking off in the morning. I would open the door to the coop and they would all run out into the yard but this one chicken would fly up and over the fence and enjoy herself in the garden. After a few days she started coming up the hill and I would be in the kitchen and suddenly feel like I was being watched. And I was. She would be standing outside the kitchen window on the back porch looking at me sideways. A few more days, and she started venturing around the front of the house by the shop and next thing you know she discovered the bird feeder in the front yard and then she started bee-lining it out of the coop and up the hill as fast as her little chicken legs would take her and she'd spend most of the morning pecking around under the feeder and messing up the leaves I'd carefully put on the flower beds.

For months now, when I go down at night to put them in I call "Pretty Birds!" and she comes running from the spot where she likes to roost on the far side of the coop on the outside. She runs up to me and then sits down and waits to be picked up. And I pick her up and carry her in to the other birds and she coos sweetly in my arms.


Then the snow came. And the ladies and Roosty the Rooster don't want to go out of the coop and get snow on their dainty feet. So they stand in the doorway cackling loudly (and cockadoodledooing). The first morning this happened I stood there talking to them and telling them it was just snow and it was going to be a long winter and if they were going to give in now it was going to be really bad. And I should know. Suddenly, there was a flurry of feathers and wind and the chicken who likes to go up to the house was perched on my shoulder. And she wouldn't get off. So I gave the rest food and water and checked on the pigeons* all with her riding on my shoulder. Finally, I peeled her off and she ate the food scraps I'd brought down while the rest of them stood in the door way carrying on. And later she appeared up at the house. Emmett followed her tracks and discovered that she's been laying eggs in a little spot under a rose bush beside the gate by the front porch. There were five cold eggs and one warm one sitting there.**

Well. We got a lot of snow the other day and she flew out into the snow when I opened the coop door. But it was up to her little chicken breast and she couldn't get around in it. So I picked her up and carried her to the front yard. She stood on the porch for a few hours, standing on one foot and then the other in the snow. I took her back out the back door after watching this for awhile and handed her to Bea who was watching the big kids sled. They sat like this in the sled for a long time.


* Pigeon update: We thought we were down to three pigeons not long after the four came to live with us on Emmett's birthday. Then Em discovered a nest with two little eggs in it up in the rafters of the coop. A couple weeks later the eggs hatched and then we started seeing four pigeons swooping and winging around above the garden and then sitting on the roof of the coop -- when we thought they ought to be feeding the babies. But I guess every new mother needs a break from the infant maybe. A few days later after seeing all four out, Em found another nest in another spot in the coop rafters and lo and behold -- two more babies! We have eight pigeons now. Will they keep multiplying at this rate? If so, we are in big pigeon trouble...

** My chicken question is this: How do I get our loner of a chicken to stop laying her eggs at the house? Is there some way to retrain her? And also, is there some way to get chickens to be interested in the roosts that were built for them? They are the right size according to the books but the chickens don't want to roost there. Instead, they sit on top of and in the nest boxes. Which makes the nest boxes really gross. Any suggestions?

Memory :: Monday

This is me and my Opa. Most of my life he and Oma lived in Winnipeg but for a bit they lived in Fargo where this picture was taken. I remember the feel of that red shag carpet and how much I loved to lie on those stairs because I could fit perfectly on one. Those were the steps down to the basement. I liked to play on them when we would visit: I would bring my model horses with me and each stair would be a different stable. One time, Opa came down to visit me and accidentally stepped on the leg of one of them and it snapped in two. I cried and cried and I didn't want to cry! I knew it was an accident, but those horses were like best friends to me when I was little and I cried like that leg was broken for real. And Opa felt terrible and he went right to his work bench and glued it up for me, good as new.

I remember when we visited them once at Christmas time. They showed me on the nighttime news that Santa had been spotted by the weather radar and was right around Fargo! So we went out for a drive to see if we could find him and oh, it was exciting! But we didn't find him. And when we got home, all of our presents were under the tree. (I don't remember which adult stayed behind to do that, but one of them did. Now I know!) I was incredibly disappointed -- we had just missed him! If we hadn't gone chasing all over town looking for him we could have been there when he arrived to deliver our presents! Oh, it was sad.

And I remember when I was a little bit older visiting them in Winnipeg in the summer time. Opa was pretty sick with emphysema at that point but he liked to do things with me and I remember sitting side by side on the balcony of their apartment building and he gave me drawing lessons. We each had a pad of paper and a pencil and we drew the buildings off in the distance. He taught me about perspective. And shading. And he tried to teach me how to see something in such a way that it could be recreated. I loved those lessons.

He died when I was eleven, the first person I really knew and loved to die. I remember what I wore to the funeral: a brown plaid skirt and a satin cream colored shirt with pearly buttons and lace at the neck. Into the grave where the urn went, I put one of my favorite stuffed animals that had a beaded friendship pin I'd made for Opa pinned to the ribbon around its neck.


I wish he was still around -- I think he and Lucian and Emmett would really like each other. Opa was a tool and die maker and I think he would like my guys who like to work with their hands, too.

#4

No Faces Assignment

Create five telling portraits of five different people, without including the face of the subject. - Chris Orwig



Beatrix


Emmett


Roswitha


Robert


Henny

And then we were asked to do a self-portrait. There's not much I like less than a photo of myself. Especially taken by me -- ack! Which is not to say I don't appreciate self-portraits of other people's selves... I like to see those and I'm looking forward to seeing the faces of the other people playing along with this, the last photo assignment. However, since I did one last week I seriously considered calling it good enough. But that felt like cheating and I didn't want to be a cheater. So here is another picture of me. I put it through the paces in Picnik I'll tell you, until I came up with something I could stand. Just barely. Eeks.


The version of a picture of myself a prefer: cartoon style...