Suddenly illiterate

I picked up a couple knitting/crochet books in Japan while I was there, although I can't read Japanese. I figured if I could do origami based off pictures, I could do some easy projects based off of visual schematics (nice logic, k). Besides... the books were so pretty and not-expensive that I couldn't resist :) [later I went to Kinokuniya here and looked at the same books... they were $5-10 more expensive!]

I started one of the patterns today. I have this thing for slouchy hats. I don't know if I will be able to do it, but I like trying to figure things out trial-and-error style, so we'll see :)

This is the cover of the book I'm using. It's called Apwoa;soj Knit Item :) Actually the first character looks familiar but I forgot what it is.

This is where I am so far! Looks like a woolly doily. Haha.

I'm so bad at finishing projects I'm almost finished with. I'm almost done with the lace shrug, but have to weave in ends. I need to finish installing the zipper on my fanny pack, then knit on the D rings. Then I'm done!

My winter break is now more over than it is begun ;.; I only have one and a half weeks before school starts again... It's hard to believe I started out with four weeks to do whatever I wanted with. I don't know what's happening to the time! I lost it all to snow.

December goals

I am going to start a goal list for things I need to do when I get out of school this fall quarter.

[ ] Finish the "little silk shrug" I started last year.[ ] Finish the "felicity" hip slouch beanie I started this quarter.

That's when I first started, about a week and a half ago?

There it is now, on top of my evidence base for a final paper.

[ ] Bake cookies. I bought chocolate chips in anticipation -.-;
[ ] Make HK style borscht. I first had it at LA cafe (the red soup)... but we no longer go to LA cafe, hopefully for reasons unrelated to the soup. Then I went over to my friend's house, and she made it for dinner... it was sooo good. To my surprise, she said it was borscht... but Chinese style. I guess good stuff will migrate across miles and cultures. Tomato (instead of beet) + water base (maybe throw some chicken stock in there?), plus onions, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, garlic and parsley, perhaps? Maybe add chicken or beef? Yeah baby. Get me some bread and butter and call it good.
[ ] Finish up resizing my dad's old shirt for my personal use. My dad was going to Goodwill this shirt with a beautiful plaid pattern. "I'd wear that if it were my size," I thought. So I took it from the Goodwill pile and pinned tucks and folds into the back and front to draw it in at the torso. I'm not sure if it will work out or not, but if it doesn't-- I have only robbed an unfortunate person of a good find at Goodwill. Anyway, I pinned the approximate measurements last year, but this is what it has been looking like in my room since then:
The picture of which reminds me of another goal...
[ ] Clean up the room for real. I'm more of a "mess manager" right now... but I really need to figure out what to do with all the papers, books and crafts around my room. There's not enough space for it all! Sub categories:
...[ ] Get a new craft drawer organizer. I have this thing which has been holding everything from stationary to my beads to my yarn and needles to random crap. The wheel in the back is broken, so the craft drawer organizer slouches dangerously to the left.
...[ ] Figure out what to do with all my OT program papers. This is just a pile of the stuff I accumulated last year, not knowing what to do with it all/being too lazy to look through everything and recycle the unnecessaries:

By the way... thanks to Dorothy for that CD on the top: OC Mix 2, which actually has good music (although I never watched the show). Anyway... that pile is representative of my indecisive nature about what to do with anything in my room. It seems necessary to have it out at the time, for easy access. The second step is that the time to have it out passes, but I forget about its existence, so it stays out. The third step is accumulation of a pile.

I think that last goal is big enough to last 4 weeks, potentially. So I'll call the list good for now :)

rakkasei zoroi

I think that's what the package says in Japanese. They're beautiful, delicious Japanese rice crackers with peanuts on the inside and various outers. I love them... I could eat them all the time. I bought these kind in Japan. There are some pretty good ones sold at Uwajimaya here in Seattle, but they don't have this kind of aristry. Something to be savored.

What now?

So it's October. What happened since August?

Garden
I went to Japan in September. While I was gone, my sister and parents were good enough to keep watering my plants! Unfortunately, no one weeded or stood up the fallen stakes, so when I came back the tomatoes were falling all over themselves. Then it rained, so I didn't go out to fix anything, and basically the garden looks like it's in shambles. Somewhere between leaving Seattle and coming back, my fire for the garden died down. I think I'll compost everything and just wait for spring to come again. Oh well-- it was fun while the sun lasted :)

Work
I work for a technology group on campus, and I recently switched from a cubicle to an office. Here's part of my desk:


Ooh, pretty! I have plants, too! (The one in the center in the clay pot-- it has been named Jimi).

Ooh wait.

Ooh, no. Is that a binder clip attaching the lamp to the stand? We are ghetto after all...

Hey, I try my best with what I have in the office. The lamp is from Ikea-- it's like $5 to $10 for the shade and the light fixture inside. I got the lamp stand from my boss, which is actually from Ikea too. It used to be a desk lamp in its own right, and had a lightbulb for a head. Unfortunately, I dropped the lamp when moving from Odegaard in Red Square, so the head (the lightbulb) broke off. So now I just use it as a stand for this other lamp I have :)

Knitting
In September, when I left for Japan, I began a new project. It is the Bridgetown Belt Bag, the pattern for which was published in Interweave Knits magazine in Spring 2006.

Here's where I was at the beginning of the trip, on our flight from Seoul to Hong Kong, I believe (about 3 hours total of knitting?)



I like the contrast between stockinette (the smooth "v"s) stitch and garter stitch:


Here's where I am, now, in early October (about a month's worth of knitting):


It's unfortunate, but I have problems staying awake in my classes (even though there's only 22 people in my class!). So, to help my awareness disability, I knit during class. My instructors have been good enough to let me do this. I finished the straps (the 2 tails) this last week over two days of 3 classes).


I think the tails make my beltbag look like some kind of Japanese monster from a Studio Ghibli movie. The next steps for the project will be making the pouch part of the beltbag, sewing it on, and knitting/attaching two D-ring loops to the V side of the belt bag. The beltbag closure will be kind of like those belts with the two metal rings on one side. You put the end of the belt through both, then pull it backwards through one, then pull tigher to conform to your waist size.

I'll also have to "block" my knitting. I hate blocking because for some reason it just demands too much patience. But it's worthwhile-- it's supposedly magic for making knit pieces look like the way they were intended. Like ironing a terribly wrinkled shirt.

I think this belt might end up being too loose on me. I knit it larger, thinking it couldn't possibly fit around my waist. I neglected the stretch factor, though. Well, we'll see.

Rabbits

My garden's going. I've planted:

• 5 tomatoes (now fruit is maturing) -- here's my mom's beefstake tomatoes, still green.
• 1 zucchini (still flowering and fruit maturing. Weird thing is sometimes the flowers fall off without growing a zucchini fruit, and sometimes it's growing a fruit and still flowering-- and if the flower falls off a growing fruit, the fruit stops growing. I've only got one good sized zucchini, and its flower wilted this last week. I asked a man at the local gardening store, and he said that's normal and not to worry, and if a leaf has mildew (white and powdery-- which some of my leaves did have), not to worry about it. It's good he told me about that because i was cutting those leaves off :p
• 1 cucumber (little cukes are starting to sprout!)
• Swiss chard (Fordhook-- I've only got maybe 6 plants I'm confident about. I got the sprouts confused with some kind of weed, and so was weeding good plants out :( I'll know next time...)
• 2 peppers (1 is developing fruit, the other is flowering. The latter was delayed by slug trauma earlier in the season).
• Kale (Dwarf Siberian-- a good grower, esp. once it has a couple leaves to run off of)
• Radishes (red globe-- I've got to thin these out soon!)
• Turnips (purple top white globe-- I have to thin these out too). You can see the radish and turnip sprouts at the top:
• Lettuce-- two varieties, a romaine and a bibb. They're the lines of green at the bottom in the above photo.
  
• Sugar snap peas (worried about this one-- not sure it'll germinate.. it's been over a week and I see nothing. We'll see...)

Recently we've been seeing rabbits in the yard. They have been known to eat the kale, so every time we see them we run them off. This last week, I ran off one rabbit and a couple minutes later my dad ran off a second rabbit-- there were 2! I thought there had only been 1. Then I went out to water the plants and to put out garlic and red chili peppers-- apparently rabbit deterrents-- and saw 2 baby bunnies under the deck!!

I had to conclude we had run off their parents. And the next day, the baby bunnies were still under the deck with no big rabbit in sight. And the next day-- I counted 5 baby bunnies. I feel bad!! We de-parented 5 baby bunnies. They're still living under the deck. My mom cut up and apple from the yard and they ate it. But when they're bigger, I know they'll be after my kale. I am a little torn about what to do.

These ones look scary because their eyes are glowing, but they're pretty cute normally... Hamsters with bigger ears :)

More garden

I check back the next day and my plants are progressing even now! Yay! My tomato got reddish! Now it's orange! Amazing... it was just yellow yesterday.



My strawberries ripen at different times and they are all tiny, maybe 3/4ths of my thumb in width. I ate one today, and it was great. But small. Dumb squirrels! I'll eat you out of my yard!


My bell pepper plant sprouted a flower :) This breed is supposed to make jalapeno sized bell peppers that are red, yellow and orange. Hopefully it does that.


Everyone's been saying how the weather's delayed all the growing seasons for plants, so I have some hope that maybe summer will go longer into September. Delayed summer means my allergies are still on!! --even though it's July and the grass is supposed to be done with.

Gardening

Lately I've been into gardening. Somehow, the idea of growing one's own food is very enticing. And, just growing things is somehow rewarding... caring for it, watering, weeding. I even cleared land to plant my plants!

I may be turning into my grandmother, although she never directly taught me anything about knitting, crocheting, sewing, or gardening.

One of my pots of strawberries, above. Squirrels keep getting the berries! Argh...

My bell pepper plant. I hope it flowers in time.

A bush cucumber. I just put it in and it's early July, so I hope I didn't plant too late.

Above three: I have 2 tomato plants in pots. A "4th of July" medium sized tomato (just starting to blush yellow... so not quite ready on the 4th of July as it claims), and a cherry "sungold." I got them at the Bellevue Farmer's Market and they were expensive, but they are working out better than the $2 tomato plants my mom got from Fred Meyer, so far.

My zucchini plant, "costata." It is growing leaves ferociously, but I'm not sure when it's supposed to fruit. By the end of summer, I hope.

I just sowed seeds for kale and swiss chard today, in hopes that I'll be able to harvest some in the fall/winter. We'll see how that goes. My mom is skeptical of plants that start from seed. I have a ton of kale seeds left over. I'll either have to clear the rest of the garden plot (a couple hours!), find an existing clear spot to grow them, or just keep the seeds for next spring. Or I could find someone to give seeds to. I don't know how to cook or fix chard OR kale, so I'll have to research that. I was just desperate for something to grow in midsummer, and my options were limited.