Life's A Stitch

Updates in a nutshell

I do need to update this blog. I can't figure out an excuse for not doing so. The kids are out of the house, not for the evening; they all maintain their own household, for now. I still work the same full time hours. Extenuating circumstances dictate that I don't knit as much. So what is it that crunches my time into little morsels? Point form to the rescue:

• I am knitting occasionally, putting on a maximum of eight rows each time to the Flared Lace Smoke Ring. Still don't have a surgery date, but my goal is to bind off the day before, exchanging stitches for stitches.
• Creative endeavours include a video slide show for my sister and I to show at my mother's funeral. People ask how is it a funeral when she died in November? Remember that fiasco? Cemetery closed fr the winter, body in storage, funeral delayed? Bizarro. I'm not sharing the video until the event. I figure we all need to be together to hold each other in comfort.
• Still walking on the 10,000 steps a day plan. In order to earn that many paces I need to add a 40 minute walk to my routine almost daily. A healthy time suck.
• Life modernization included the recent addition of an iphone and the accompanying learning curve. Definitely a step in the right direction.

What to use to illustrate this post? Gracee at 10 1/2 years and grandbaby Rye at 10 1/2 weeks:

 

 

 

Pop on Over

In the injury induced absence of knitting I was on a creative quest. Popovers. Soda can sized airy puffs, right from the oven, melted butter on top. A restaurant near my childhood home specialized in popovers.

For you Brits, they have the same ingredients as Yorkshire Puddings, but cooked in a different pan. Yorkies baked in a muffin tin come out lower and cakier. Still good, but not popover good:

The pan is the secret. I mentioned this during a recent visit from my Minnesota SIL's and I was presented with the ultimate Nordic Ware popover pan. Similar to a muffin tin but doubly deep. 

The recipe:

Ingredients: 2 eggs, 1 C flour (works best with white but whole wheat gives impressive results), 1 C milk, 1/2 t salt, 1 T margarine for the pan, cooking spray and flour for dusting.

Procedure: Bring all ingredients to room temperature. Spray pans with cooking spray and dust with flour. Place a half teaspoon of margarine or butter in the bottom of each pan. In a large measuring cup beat eggs slightly. Blend in remaining ingredients just until smooth. Let rest for half an hour. Heat pan for five minutes in 450 degree oven. Remove from oven and fill each cup halfway. Return pan to oven and cook for 20 minutes. reduce heat to 350 degrees and cook for twenty minutes more. Serve warm from the oven. DO NOT open oven door. If your oven has a window, park yourself in front and watch the show, the magical continuous rising of popovers is akin to the legendary listening of corn growing in the midwest it happens so quickly. And the scent...

We also baked them with an ounce of grated cheese on top. Yumm.

Leftovers are wonderful the next morning for breakfast, toasted and served with melted white cheese and jam.

A word of warning. These are not meant to be sweet treats. Sweeten them after baking with powdered sugar, jam or syrup. I added one tablespoon of sugar to the batter causing a disastrous outcome. Tough spongecake would be the best description.

We all agreed, the pan is the key to success. My SIL bought the competitor's pan and had less than satisfactory results. The Nordic Ware pans are pricey, as they are made in Minnesota, but with each batch the cost per popover gets way more reasonable. Sort of like your Addi knitting needles.

Need more convincing? Pop on over and I'll bake you some.

 

That's my boy

Remember him? Now one course away from his undergrad degree in film making, the boy, who had such a hard time getting through high school, is pitching for a feature length documentary. The primary purpose of this post is an ask - to distribute this far and wide, social networks, contacts who might have an interest. Who knows, it might make it to someone with the right link to the larger film world.

It's a video, go ahead, click on it. Prepare to laugh. Can you sense my trepidation? The things you do for kids:

  

What the lion needed

Walking downtown, on my way for a consultation with a hand surgeon, the result of my Maui Owie, I noticed the telephone poles paper bombed:

A hour later, after my appointment, there had been some takers:

I took one. Can you guess?

Courage. Primarily for wrist/arm surgery scheduled for the end of June. Right side. Courage. No knitting for months. I'm just a little chicken, as in the attitude not the bird itself. I can picture the image that that phrase conjured up.

Reminds me of my son, the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz so many years ago, whose Earth Day Birthday is today. That baby boy was saved from being named Forrest due to the coincidental timing of his day of birth, lest people think his parents leaned toward things hippie.  Now at 22, here he is with his new nephew:

 

 

Two months overdue

Better late than never. Some favourite Palm Springs vacation pictures from February.

Lynn at Lake Cahuilla:

Chuck at the wine tasting fund raiser at the Empire Polo Club, deeply discounted because the polo ponies were quarantined for Equine Herpes. A case of the truth being stranger than fiction.

After a few more tastes of wine:

Another lion, this one drooling. Perhaps he had too many tastes of the vino.

The cool look of a California canine:

My souvenir. After a few more tastes of wine, what I bought at the Arts Festival:

A reasonable purchase until we figured in the cost of shipping. Live and learn.

One more shot of the lake:

 

 

 

Something caught my eye

I felt like I was being watched. Way way up in the trees in the corner of our lot, something caught my eye:

Zooming in we see the culprit:

The dilemma:

Twice before, our electricity has gone out because the raccoons nest near the power lines for warmth. Somehow they chew through the wires without electrocuting themselves. The electric company very nicely rewired the connection to our house, but have given us a stern warning: Three times you're out!. Next time we pay for the repair. 

Suggestions? Not reall thrilled about cutting down the trees.

 

Indulge me

Indulge me...I'm the grandmother. Besides, there's knitting content:

11 minutes overdue

Here we are the day before, in a nearby national park, doing some Canadian winter walking to encourage my daughter's labour to start:

I think that baby's dropped:

It worked! Next day we were off to the hospital, and dear baby Rye Christian made his debut 11 mintues late. 12:11 a.m. March 10, 2011, 8 lbs 5 oz, 21" long:

And today's my birthday and I can't think of a better way of spending it, than with the new happy family. What a gift they are.

He's very cute and it's not just Mor-Mor (Danish for mother's mother, which would be me) talking. You see we had this conversation in the hospital just before we left. Rye's dad broached the subject. 

"Do you think he's really cute or do we think he's cute just because he belongs to us?" 

Hmmmm. We pondered the implications of his query. Are we braggy family members? Was this a design of nature, a special magnetism put in place to assure we take care of him?

Just then the nurse arrived to do the required carseat check. When she finished she said," Good luck to you. He's really cute....and I don't say that to all the parents." 

Nobody's in trouble.....yet.

I had occasion to call my adult children recently. We had been away quite a bit this fall and there were many comings and goings of said children and acquaintances in our house during our absence. Finally tackling the laundry basket of clean linens that had lived at the foot of our bed for months, something on the floor caught my eye, black...lacy...panties. As if they had fallen from our bed at some point onto the floor, definitely not mine.

I call my children and my husband, just in case.

"Nobody is in trouble....yet." I explain the un-Nancy Drewlike caper of the wayward panties. "I don't need to know names. I don't want the dirty details. I just want someone to tell me that there is a plausible explanation.

My son cracks up, didn't need a phone to hear his peals of laughter from five miles away. Hmmmm nervous laughter? "Better ask the sisters," says he, "definitely did not sleep in your room while you were gone." 

"Right" says the husband, "I had a woman  in our bedroom while you were away dealing with your mother's death, impressing her with the laundry that hasn't been put away in months." I really didn't think it was him and his words were reassuring,

Middle daughter matter of factly said "I slept in your bed. Alone."

"They're mine," claimed the most unusual suspect of our family, the least likely member of the crew. Eldest child, then seven months pregnant, the cinderella of the lost panties, related the truthful tale. Her wedding photographer from six years past offers free baby bump photos to former clients. The instructions included the wearing of fancy foundations. After the long drive there and back, my daughter took a leisurely bath in our soaker tub, undressing at the foot of the bed. 

Phew. Only in our house.

That was then and now we're on babywatch. Exciting times ahead.

A goal achieved

It was something I was saving for retirement, one of the items on my very long list, but I got spooked hearing of your many tales of data loss woe. Three full weekends, four old hard drives, and 14,000 pictures later, the task is nearly finished. Backed up in duplicate on DVD's stored offsite, and on a backup drive, I can now breathe a sigh of relief.

So that accounts for the lack of knitting production, but there's some progress there, too:

So far, so good for a project that contains not one plain knit stitch nor purl rows for relief.