The All-New Bunrab

According to http://www.eskimimimakes.com/ and my friend Angela, this is Annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week. We are supposed to pick which "house" we belong to. Well, it's pretty clear that I belong to The House of Bee: Bees are busy and industrious, but can flit from one interesting project to the next as bright and shiny things capture their interest. Yes indeedy, as evidenced by the number of unfinished projects I have, I am indeed flitting from one project to the next.

Pictures of assorted tote bags and plastic bags holding unfinished projects - this is just what happens to be at the surface in two rooms right now; there are more!( Pictures behind cut so it won't break your Friends page )

I threw in a couple unfinished quilting projects in there, too.

Now here's pictures of knitting projects I've finished this year:

::yes, this is empty space::

And despite all that, I bought more yarn at Stitches earlier this month. Sigh.

We're at the KOA, where, as there was last time we were RVing, there is free wireless internet access.

This RV is fun! It wallows a bit, though not nearly as much as a 29-footer. The 19-foot compact RV is also narrower than standard RVs, so it's much easier to drive down narrow roads. Which we certainly did earlier! Our lunch stop was in Stanardsville, VA, to visit w/ my nephew Michael and his family. Mike and Erika live on an unimproved road off another unimproved road (unimproved is one step up from dirt road; an unimproved road hasn't been paved but it has been graded and had gravel spread on it) off a 1.5 lane paved road. Miles from anywhere. It's a nice house, though, with a lovely wooded setting. Their son Oliver, almost 3, continues to be delightful - I brought him a play blanket I had knitted (it's on Ravelry, where I'm also bunrab, for those of you who are crafters) and he said "Thank you!" immediately without any prompting, and then sat down and started playing on it right away - it's a knitted piece out of superbulky cheap acrylic, that has a stretch oif grey road with a double yellow stripe, a winding river, and a section of railroad tracks knitted into it. And Oliver just happens to have a ton of toy trains and cars to use on such a blanket. The Junebug - their daughter June - has grown a lot in 2 months; she's not quite 6 months old yet.

The drive was pretty uneventful. Some disagreements between one set of maps and another and one GPS and another were fairly easily resolved. No major traffic jams, didn't see any major accidents, or even many state troopers! We pretty much stuck to the speed limit - the posted limit on various roads seems to be a pretty good fit for what feels comfortable in the RV. As I said, it does wallow a bit.

Things we forgot to bring: my handicapped parking tag (no biggie, since the RV wouldn't fit in most handicapped parking spaces anyway), pillows - they don't come with the RV, one provides one's own pillows and linens; Steve's music folder so he can practice. He brought the euphonium, which fits under the table I am typing at right now, and I brought the soprano sax; my bari sax parts will sound odd practiced on the soprano but it works to keep my fingers and lip in shape.

Tomorrow we go as far as, roughly, Birmingham, AL, where we'll have a visit with avanta2, whom we last saw in Little Rock on our move from TX to MD in the rented RV then! She's going to think we automatically hatch out of an RV every day.

Fairly tired now. A few minutes of mindless knitting (I brought along enough knitting, crochet, and cross-stitch projects for 6 months, never mind 3.5 weeks when I'll be driving a good chunk of the time), and then we wrestle the sheets onto the cabover bed, somehow finesse the pillow lack by using a bag of yarn or something, and fall asleep.

"See you" tomorrow!

Reading: Liquid Jade (about tea); Beyond Red and Blue (about politics); Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (interminably long fantasy, which I am about 1/3 of the way through after 2 weeks of hacking away at the underbrush.)

Music: Went to BSO concert last Friday, going to another one this Friday - that would be today! - last one of this season. Baltimore Symphonic Band played at Charlestown Retirement, here in Catonsville, on Tuesday. Bel Air Community Band will be playing at Shamrock Park in Bel Air on Sunday evening at 7. Next Montgomery Village concert is June 28.

Knitting:


Started June 1, finished June 12! No pattern, just two rectangles, with a V-neck worked into one of them. It's knitted, not crocheted. Has baby cables in it. Craft cotton in the big cheap skeins, one skein.

And before that, there was this one, in May, same deal except I hadn't figured out as much about the shaping yet:



That, and cleaning bunny litter boxes, and cleaning up the old house, packing a bit more at a time each day - almost completely empty now, and it's already being shown!

Although I have been knitting for years and years, it may surprise you to know that I have only ever finished ONE sweater - and that was a long time ago. I started several sweaters during my years in Austin, but never got anywhere near finishing any of them. In fact, when we were packing up to move from TX to MD, I pulled the needles out of three unfinished pieces of sweaters and gave the yarn to Goodwill: one I had lost the pattern to so I couldn't ever finish it, another in a scratchy wool I hated and would be too heavy even in Baltimore never mind Texas, and the third in a color that would not look good on ANYONE on earth, and I have no idea why I ever bought yarn that color. Another two unfinished sweaters came with me, though I don't know where they are at the moment. So I started another sweater, for NaKniSweMo. I haven't officially joined the Ravelry group for it, though I have a Ravelry account, because for one thing, I'm not making a 50,000-stitch sweater, and for another, I would be highly surprised if I did finish it. My personal goal is to see if I have the patience to finish at least one side during this month, patience having been the biggest reason I haven't knit anything larger than a hat or a sock in years. I am older now, and perhaps I am a bit more patient - we'll find out. I have only finished 12 rows so far - it was more, but I had to tink 4 rows, because the abbreviations used in the pattern are nonstandard and I had to guess at what they meant, and then go back when it was clear I had guessed wrong. Bernat's pattern sheet says to see their web site for a glossary of abbreviations, but guess what? The abbreviations on this particular pattern sheet are NOT on their glossary page. I have fixed the problem now, by experimentation, but I am going to drop them a nasty note about that. Also, the pattern is printed on half a sheet of paper - in both English and French! - so you can imagine how small the print is, and how hard it is to even find the next row. In the process of formulating that sentence for this post, earlier, I realized that what I'm going to do Friday is go to a copy shop and enlarge the damn thing, so I can stop wasting time peering all over it. The yarn is Cot'n Corn, and as you knitters know, all those exotic-ish yarns made of soy and corn and bamboo are really just viscose (rayon) whose cellulose happens to come from some plant other than a tree. So it has all the weaknesses of a viscose blend, including splitting, and fraying at the ends. But it does feel nice to the hand, and it will be a pleasure to wear.

After 6 weeks, I am only halfway through The Sot-Weed Factor and I don't think I'm going to be able to finish it before it's due. It is funny, but nonetheless very trying. Most of the action happens by way of discussing it, and most things have to be discussed several times, at least once with someone who doesn't understand what the protagonist is saying, another time with someone who disapproves, and a third time with someone who is reminded of something else by it and therefore has to digress to THEIR tale. Anyway, I have reached the Traveling Whore of Dorset. Maybe if I spot a used copy in a bookstore for real cheap, I will pick it up so that I can finish it over the course of, say, a year.

Speaking of books, what I am reading right now is Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm which is very funny, a parody of a certain class of English idealistic novels of rural life, of which DH Lawrence's were perhaps the most literary. The surprising thing to me isn't that it's funny - I knew it would be; the cover to this edition is by Roz Chast! - but that it suddenly puts Tobacco Road in perspective. I had read Tobacco Road a month or so ago, and mainly thought "ewwww" but now I can see that even though all the reviewers took it seriously, and even Caldwell himself claimed to be seriously exposing American Southern rural life, in fact he was really perpetrating the same kind of parody upon the American versions of the same sort of novels. (Cold Comfort Farm and Tobacco Road were written the same year!) So, in retrospect I suddenly find TR much funnier.