A lot of my friends, on LiveJournal and elsewhere, are downright religious about food. I'm not just talking about diets predicated on a conventional religious belief system, such as keeping kosher. I have friends who are vegetarian, or even vegan, as part of an ethical belief system, although different friends have different motivations for their choices (concern for the conditions feed animals and fish are raised in, concern about the ecological impact of raising animals for food, a belief that it is simply wrong to eat previously-living flesh). And then there is the whole locavore movement, eating food from close to home. One of my LJ friends, sizztheseed, has written extensively about his efforts to grow what he can and supplement that with food raised close to his home, which is, apparently, fortuitously near the farmlands of southern Ontario. I admire his efforts, but can't imagine sticking to such a program myself.

On the other hand, I grow what I can. And I have gradually identified local sources for produce and eggs. Given a choice, I will, almost always buy local. Or local-ish, at any rate. For instance, I can get locally-made cheese and butter, but I honestly don't know where the raw materials come from. Likewise, there is a sausage producer in New Haven, but their meat surely comes from somewhere in the midwest.

And between the vegetable garden and my favorite local farmstand, I've been eating quite well lately. I stayed home from work today to do some errands. So, lunch was a large spinach salad. The spinach was purchased from the farmstand, and grown at a farm elsewhere in Connecticut. I have no idea where the red onion came from. The tomato was also purchased at the farmstand, and grown in southern Ontario. The cheeses on the salad were imported, as were the ingredients in my home-made dressing. For a mid-afternoon snack, I had strawberries from the farmstand—the first of the season, and the email from the farmstand Saturday night crowing about the harvest got me out of the house much earlier Sunday morning than is my usual habit; I needed these strawberries. (Of course, the cream on the strawberries wasn't local, but, dude! Strawberries! And cream!)

For dinner tonight, along with my chicken (supermarket all-natural brand), I had a salad of freshly-picked greens from the garden (lettuce, arugula, beets), some chopped scallion from the garden, and the first radishes of the season. When I picked the radishes, I noticed that the greens were in good shape, albeit fuzzy. And i remembered that last year, Norma of Now Norma Knits had had several posts on preparation of radish greens. So, I figured, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I treated the greens like spinach or chard. I washed them, spun them dry, and braised them in peanut oil with two sliced garlic cloves and a bit of scallion (I have lots of scallions!). I finished them with a bit of balsamic vinegar (also imported!). They were, in a word, OK. Not spectacular, but, on the whole, not bad. Next time, I'll season them with hot pepper flakes, I think. But, there will be a next time.

Yesterday was the Connecticut Sheep and Wool Festival. Among my purchases was this 2.5 lb roll of prepared fiber. It's carded Ramboulet from A Touch of Twish. Other than staring at it and fondling it, my intention is to spin it, using one or another of my trusty drop spindles. Then, I will knit myself a sweater out of it. That should take about half of it, so I suppose I could eventually knit two sweaters.

It is every bit as gorgeous in person as it is in the picture..

God Bless America in the Kate Smith recording, in place of The Star Spangled Banner, before a Philadelphia Flyers playoff game, WIN

God Bless America in the Kate Smith recording, in place of Take Me Out to the Ballgame, during the 7th inning stretch at Yankee Stadium (old or new), EPIC FAIL

I took a vacation day today, as the forecast was for great gardening weather, and there was day baseball on the radio. In three bursts, here's what I accomplished:

• I cleared a bunch of leaves from a corner in the back yard where they accumulate.
• I planted petunias in the three boxes on the deck.
• I spread fertilizer on the veggie patch.
• I sifted compost and spread some on the veggie patch.
• I fertilized the lilac.
• I pulled out some proto-dandelions.

And here's what I learned:

• Compost doesn't decompose as quickly as they say it does, even if you turn and aerate it. Eggshells and avocado peels are especially recalcitrant.
• You can't cheat mother nature. If you leave the SKU stickers on your avocado peels, out of sheer laziness, you're just going to have to pick them out of the compost when you sift it.
• The scallions I planted on the deck a few weeks ago are coming up. And the chives are coming back. I should have a chive omelet for breakfast tomorrow.

And the shawl I'm knitting is coming along. I've finished 10 out of 14 repeats of the main chart, and have more than 300 stitches. That's a fuckton of stitches, and by the time I'm done I'll be well over 400.



The blue/purple/brown blob is the shawl as of a few days ago. It doesn't look like much. But the thing about lace is that it comes into its own when you block it, as shown in the gold swatch. That's made from leftover yarn from a pair of socks I knit last year.

The pattern: Adamas, by Miriam Felton
The yarn: Socks That Rock Mediumweight, in the Jubilation colorway (the swatch is in 24 carat)
The needles: US 7 (4.5mm)

Last week this time it was starting to snow. And snow. And snow. Today, the second day in a row of 60°F temperatures, the snow is almost gone. Yesterday when I went out to retrieve the lid to the compost pile—it had blown off in the storm—it was so muddy and slippery that I couldn't survey the back yard without slipping. Today was another story.

I had lunch with a friend and ran some errands afterwards (yet another garden center doesn't have onion sets in yet). When I got home, I wanted to do nothing more than take a nice long walk. But I took a look at the yard and decided that I could start cleaning up.

Looking at my LJ records, which serve in some measure as a gardening journal, I see that my first cleanup of the year last year was some two weeks later. One result of deferring the cleanup was that my crocuses weren't happy. There were enough leaves over them that they didn't thrive, and, when I finally raked away the leaves, those crocuses that came up were bruised. And so, I didn't have the carpet of purple crocuses that I had envisioned. Thus, one of my first priorities was to rake out the area where the most crocuses were planted. I think my timing was OK. There are a few crocus leaves peeping up, but no blossoms to be bruised.

The tulips on the side of the house have been peeping up for a while. In the winter, that area gets a lot of sun, and the wind patterns were such that there wasn't a lot of snow drifting there. The daffodils? I'm kind of letting them fend for themselves. The main daffodil area is mixed in with the pachysandra in front of the house. There are still leaves to pull out of those beds, but they'll wait. I contented myself with cutting back the snapdragons that I hadn't gotten to in the winter. The snapdragons aren't supposed to be perennial in this growing zone, but, planted right next to the house, they do seem to come back. My mother has tried to convince me that they must just be reseeding themselves. That may be. But they also have live stems in March, so I rather doubt it.

I also picked up a bunch of sticks and such like from the front yard and cut back dead flowers from the border to the front walk. The Dusty Millers still look OK—the nice man at the garden center tells me it's hard to kill them—so I left them, and will leave them until there is new growth. Once I cut back the dead stuff from the sedum, I saw some nice new growth. But not much of anything else.

It's still too wet to do much with the large flower bed and with the patch of irises by the stairs to the deck. And I'm going to try not to think about the area in the corner that needs major fertilizing for anything to grow. I put in a flat of vinca there my first year in the house, and there are maybe 5 plants left alive out of a flat of 40 or so plants. And we won't even talk about the poor excuse for a mountain laurel that's too stubborn to either die or bloom. (I don't get weeds either in this area.)

It was nice to get out and work in the yard—a lot nicer than the snow shoveling that was my exercise at the beginning of last week. But I'm still annoyed that I can't get onion sets to plant on the deck. Agway says they'll have them in on Wednesday. I'm tempted to give them a call to check and then take off from work early to grab some. After all, it will still be light when I get home, and I can plant some before dinner.

Right now I have parked in front of my house:

(1) Car wrapped around telephone pole, driven by local college students on the way home from hockey practice (fortunately non-fatal combination of college kids, icy roads, and an SUV that, as the grownups know, doesn't stop any better than a normal car)
(2) Their friend's car
(3) A cop car
(4) A sheared off sign warning of the curve
(5) A tow truck trying to figure out how to remove the hockey players' car
(6) A bunch of guys with flashlights inspecting—or trying to inspect—the telephone pole for possible damage

This street is the only entrance to a decent-sized neighborhood, so it's a very good thing that a snow-plow did manage to get past.

I'm no expert, but I've navigated that particular curve in much worse road conditions, so I suspect that they were going too fast for road conditions. This suspicion is heightened by the piece of bumper that ended up in my front yard, about 20 feet from the phone pole.

Yesterday, I was out all day. One of the groups/forums I participate in on Ravelry (account required) organized a jaunt to WEBS, an amazing yarn shop in Northhampton, MA. So, about 30 wild and crazy knitters from all over the Northeast (at least the area delimited by a geometric area with apexes of New Haven; Cape Cod; Portland, ME; Rutland, VT; and Albany, NY) converged. And shopped. WEBS had been alerted to this plan, and were prepared with an open classroom for us to leave stuff in, goodie bags, and extra staff to facilitate check-out.

Lunch was a little chaotic, though, as the one Northhampton native was suffering from a sinus infection and went home to sleep it off. The plan we finally arrived at was to go to an Irish pub downtown, which I was assured was not walking distance from WEBS. So, I got in the car, together with another equally confused participant, and headed for downtown. Within two blocks, we passed an Irish pub, but decided that that couldn't be where everyone else was headed for, because it was totally within walking distance. Instead, the two of us lucked into a parking space downtown, with time left on the meter, and had a nice lunch by ourselves, because, as it turned out, almost everyone else was at the Irish pub that was totally within walking distance. No matter. While we missed out on the bawdy bar jokes, we still had fun.

I came home with a large bag of yarn, and plans to photograph it all this morning for my Ravelry stash pages. One problem, though. It's been rainy and overcast all day, and so no photographs, not of the new yarn, not of the various projects I'm working on or have recently completed.

Most of what I bought was sock yarn. Most of it was expensive enough that most non-knitters would freak out ("$20 for a pair of socks! You know you can buy socks, don't you?"). But I was delighted to find a new stock of my absolute favorite summer sock yarn, a Plymouth Yarns wool/bamboo blend, which comes in at $10 for enough yarn for a pair of socks. I had picked up a ball of it last spring at WEBS. After knitting a pair of socks (Ravelry link) with it, I'd tried desperately to find more, and had had no success to speak of. The yarn, Rockin' Sox, didn't even appear on the Plymouth Yarns web site. In the meantime, I'd tried a wool/bamboo blend from another manufacturer, one with a reputation for higher-quality yarns, and been disappointed at the number of rough spots in the plying that I encountered. Well, yesterday at WEBS, I found more of the yarn I wanted. But somehow, this year, it's called Sockin' Sox, but it's definitely the same thing. So that was a total win.

In addition, I bought enough Lopi Lite for a sweater. Mind you, I have enough yarn stashed for three or four winter sweaters (I realize that, in some circles, this would show me to be a rank amateur). But, of all my winter sweaters, the one I like the best is a very simple pullover knit in a heathered dark charcoal Lopi Lite. I made this long enough ago that I have no picture of it anywhere that I can locate, and it's softened up wonderfully (it's very rough yarn when you're working with it). So, I bought enough yarn in a light olive green to make another pullover. (Actually, I bought more than enough, because one always does.)

And I bought something that I once swore I'd never buy, sock blockers. These are forms whose primary function is to make socks look pretty when you photograph them. I'm such a dork that I had a sock along with me so I could make sure I bought the same size. (Actually, it's the finished mate to the sock I'm currently working on for my sister.)

I had to re-login earlier today, and discovered a comment that had been waiting for moderation for three weeks. I'm supposed to get email notification of comments from people not on my friends' list, but somehow this one must have gotten eaten by a spam filter. Sorry, Norma!

So, I was driving home around 7 o'clock this evening, and spotted a car with no headlights on. I flashed my highbeams,

( and )

I stopped off at the grocery store after work for a little pre-snow panic buying.

My list was: Stoneyfield Farms yoghurt, Breakstone sour cream (I had a coupon), Joseph's low carb pita, Farmstand brand shelled walnut pieces.

What I came home with: yoghurt, sour cream (on sale, on top of the coupon), an avocado (needed), and a jigsaw puzzle of the front page of the Boston Globe from Nov 5, 2008. The puzzle will make a nice birthday gift for my mother.

I'm especially annoyed about the pita. I like the low carb pita, and my blood sugar responds well to it, which is to say, very little. But it's really hit or miss whether it's available when I shop. When I complain about its absence, the store manager will tell me that he's not responsible; the Josephs distributor decides when to restock. This is the case with other supermarket departments as well. The supermarket provides shelf space, but takes no responsibility for product selection. But they also insulate the people who are responsible for product selection from complaints about this selection. There are three different stores that I sometimes shop at that sometimes stock this particular product. I shouldn't have to go to all three of them in hopes that I might be able to stock my pantry.

Well, I had three items left on yesterday's to-do list.

(1) Vacuum as much floor as I can
(2) Clean the half-bath off my bedroom
(3) Put away all the knitting books

I am half-done and that will have to do. I did some vacuuming, in the bedroom and the hall. There's enough stuff on the floor in the living room that I can't really vacuum without dealing with it.

More to the point, I dusted down an empty book shelf downstairs in the spare room. It was empty, because I'd had other things in mind for it. But the wall shelf upstairs in my "crafts" room (which has become more of a junk room) was buckling under the weight of the knitting books. So, after 7 years in the house, I revised my plan, and put all of the knitting books and magazines downstairs. It's less convenient, but the shelf will hold the books with no problem. So it's all good.

And the bathroom? Well, we will not speak of that again.

If you read my knitting posts you know I knit socks, a lot of socks. I have a scary number of handknit socks, and have knit additional socks for other people. The thing about knitting socks is that you're left with dribs and drabs of leftover yarn. Sometimes I use the leftovers for swatching something else, and I once made a pair of baby socks as a gift for one of our post-docs. But, that barely makes a dent in the pile of leftovers. So, I read with interest about a year ago about a project making wonderful use of such leftovers, a blanket.

Finally, a few weeks ago, I realized that the time had come. Following Shelly's directions, I grabbed some sock yarn and made a square:



It's a very small square, about 3.5" from point to point.



Shelly had something like 760 little squares in her blanket, and my estimate of what I'll make is comparable. Fortunately, there's virtually no sewing. Once I have the first 25 squares or so, new squares are added by picking up stitches on the edges of already completed squares:



At this point, I've joined up 7 panels of 6 squares each and added some additional squares to the next row. And I've used much less than half of my accumulated yarn scraps. Each square evokes a project. The royal blue is my first ever pair of socks, made with Fleece Artist merino purchased in Nova Scotia. The socks have long since worn through, but the leftover yarn will take its place in my blanket. The green and purple striped yarn in the picture above is Lornas Laces Shepherd Sock, purchased in Alexandria, VA, when I was visiting a friend for Passover. I still have the socks I made from it. And so on. Each square tells a story, and reminds me of a time and place: where the yarn was purchased, where I was when I knit it up, and who the project was for. It will take me a long time to finish this blanket. I'm less than 10% done, and it's no longer a portable project. While it sits draped over the arm of my sofa, I have other projects that travel with me: not surprisingly, I'm working on another pair of socks.



When I'm done with these socks, I'll have another pair of socks, and some leftovers for my blanket. But I'll have something else, in addition. Instead of a pattern, I'm using a custom template for these. This is something I've been working up to for a while. Most commercial sock patterns make assumptions about the density of stitches that I don't agree with. So, if I follow these patterns, I have three choices: knit a sock that doesn't actually fit me that well, knit a sock with a stitch density I don't like, or modify the pattern. My template will enable me to knit the toe of a sock, make some measurements at that point, and then make a sock that fits me perfectly.

And when I'm tired of knitting with skinny yarn, I have just under 4 oz some roughly worsted weight handspun (by me!) that's waiting to turn into a scarf.

Today's list, in no particular order (updated at 6:15 PM and again at 11:15PM):

(1) Vacuum as much floor as I can
(2) Clean the half-bath off my bedroom
(3) Put away all the knitting books

Tomorrow is another day...

(4) A little grocery shopping and maybe look for a new dish drainer at Target I didn't like the dish drainers, but I did look
(5) Grind meat for chili
(6) Make chili It's simmering away on the stove now It's quite good, for something made from a mix, albeit a gourmet yummy mix I bought at a festival. (Of course, I added chopped beef, shredded cheese, and cut up green onion and cilantro.)
(7) Knit or spin or both
(8) Watch and mock the NHL skills competition

Maybe I should get dressed and get started.

Dear WFSB,

Yes, it's snowing. We get that. It's been forecast for several days. And you are showing a playoff football game. Even though it's Baltimore vs Tennessee, some CT residents actually want to sit in their warm, snug houses and, you know watch the game. These people do not need to have approximately 20% of their television screens filled with a crawling listing of all the towns and cities in Connecticut that have overnight parking bans, due to the storm. Oh, look, bingo is cancelled at churches in Milford and Ansonia. And Thomaston still has an overnight parking ban, as does Waterbury.

And, some arcane rule means that, even though Comcast carries WCBS from New York, when WCBS and WFSB have the same programming scheduled, the WFSB feed appears on the channel allocated to WCBS. As a result, the only way I can avoid seeing, yet again, that Stonington has an overnight parking ban, along with Thomaston and Tolland, is to turn off the TV and go shovel some of that snow, or something.

ETA In another instance of the awesome power of an LJ rant, within a few minutes of this posting, WFSB decided that they no longer needed to give screen real estate to a repetitive listing of storm closings.

I suppose I should be grateful that Comcast is willing to provide a pixelated, artefact-ridden video signal with distorted audio for The NHL Network for the World Junior game between Canada and the US. But, somehow, I'm not. Out of all of the digital channels on my system, including the other sports channels that they throw in for free when I pay them $7.99/month for the NHL Network,* this is the only one that they can't manage to keep on the air. I've subscribed to this channel for two months, and this is the second time the channel was unwatchable, and there have been two additional times when there was no signal at all (I suppose that counts as unwatchable as well).

The good news, though, is that by the time I called to complain, so had many others. I'm not the only hockey fan who'd planned to stay in on New Years Eve and watch this heavily bally-hooed game. There were multiple trouble-tickets open on this issue. It's nice that they recognize that hockey fans care about actually seeing hockey, not to mention that if they sell a value-added service for $7.99/month, they ought to actually provide that service. All of the Comcast CSRs I've talked to about problems with the NHL Network have been quite pleasant, as was the tech who came out last week. But that doesn't negate the fact that I can't, ever, count on watching scheduled programming on the NHL Network.

ETA: Picture and sound are back, with 4 minutes to go in the second period, within 2 minutes of my posting. If I'd known I had that power, I would have posted this during the pre-game!

*This is a matter of framing. Comcast would say that they are selling me a package of about a dozen sports channels (NBA-TV, NFL Network, channels dedicated to tennis, NASCAR, college sports, etc.), but, if it weren't for the hockey, I wouldn't be subscribing, so that's what I'm paying for, and, if I watch an occasional hockey game or Thursday night football game, well, they're available, but nothing actually worth subscribing to.

Consider three yarn photographs:



The skein shows clearly delineated segments of blue, green, brown/orange, purple, and, perhaps, black. It seems so in the coiled skein as photographed, and is more apparent when the skein is stretched out around my swift. The color progression is regular and even.



When the yarn is wound into a center-pull cake, the colors are still evident, but it is by no means clear how regular the progression is.



But, when the yarn is knit into a sock, the sequencing appears much more chaotic. All of the colors are visible, but one would be hard pressed to see in the finished sock the orderly progression that is clearly evident in the skein.

The yarn is Schaeffer Anne, a light fingering weight yarn. The colorway is, tantalizingly, called Knitorious.

WFSB in Connecticut just cut into the Jets-Seahawks game, during play, with a breaking news item: The storm is over. It's stopped snowing. Yep, that's worth interrupting a Jets drive for.

1) Ate breakfast.
2) Brought dry clothes upstairs. They were washed and hung to dry on Friday.
3) Shoveled walk and driveway. Yesterday, after 45 minutes work got me about 10% of the way done, I paid a neighbor's son-in-law who's starting a landscaping business to snow-blow the rest of the 6-8" deep heavy snow. Overnight, we had another 3-4" of lighter snow, so I could deal with all of that myself, in about 45 minutes.
4) Reheated some turkey-kale soup for lunch; I made the soup on Friday, from a carcass I stuck in the freezer last winter.
5) Photographed some finished knitting projects.
( Details and Pictures )
6) Watched most of the Patriots-Cardinals game. There was snow and it was a blowout.
7) Heard the plow come by again.
8) Spent another hour shoveling the inch or so of new snow since the first time I was out today, including the mass of crud that the plow threw up at the end of the driveway. Pondered the stupidity of the article on the ergonomics of snow-shoveling that I read in this morning's paper. It advocated pushing the snow in front of you rather than flinging it to the side. I already have snowbanks that are, in some places, two feet high. If I pushed the snow to the side instead of flinging it up, I would eventually squeeze my car out of my driveway.
9) Developed a craving for hot chocolate.
10) Came inside and made hot chocolate.
11) Turned on the Jets-Seahawks game. There is far more snow in Seattle than there was in Foxboro.

Good job cutting out the last minute of the third period of a tied game for the monthly test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

Aside from anything else, the test failed, as the audio wasn't audible.

From this morning's NY Times

Summary for those who don't care to click: it's possible to eat well for under $50 a person, not counting wine. Gee, ya think?!?!?

Today did not start out very well. I got to bed late last night (I decided fairly late that I needed to wind a ball of rather sticky yarn so I can start a scarf today, as it's cold enough for scarves now). And the college boys on the next street were being noisy enough at almost 3AM that I considered calling the police. (I should call during business hours on Monday to find out what the local noise code is.)

I woke up around 8, wondering why the radio wasn't playing. (Even though I don't have to get up early on weekends, I still set the alarm.) I tried to turn the radio on, but nothing happened. It finally occurred to me that that's precisely what should happen when there's a power failure. The clock-radio has a battery to store all of its settings, but you can't listen to the radio on battery. So, I turned over and went back to sleep, assuming that the power would, somehow, be fixed.

Around 9:45, I woke up again. The power still wasn't back. So I stumbled into the kitchen, and squinted at the phone book, looking for the trouble number for United Illuminating. But, I got an "all circuits are busy, try your call again later" recording. Twice. That's more than a little scary.

I do have a boom-box radio in the kitchen, that will run on batteries. However, it has digital tuning, and the LCD display is broken, so it's almost impossible to see what you're doing. I mostly use it with the AUX input to listen to my XM inside, but, fortunately, it was tuned to a known station, from New York, when I switched away from the AUX. The known station was on its normal programming (sports talk), but it's a New York station. I was able, very carefully, to tune in a local station, that was also on its normal, albeit non-local, programming. Even though it was some Fox news crap, it was still strangely reassuring. At that point, I looked up, and my microwave was blinking 12:00. I waited a few minutes for the cable modem to finish resetting itself, and went to the UI web site, trying to figure out what had happened. According to the site, about 25,000 customers in my town were experiencing an outage, but there was no indication what had happened. As of now (12:30), more than half the town is still out.

I have a bunch of errands to do, and a pot of soup to make, so I'd better get going. But I'm wondering whether my normal stores (grocery, liquor, etc.) will have power and whether traffic lights will be working. This could be interesting.

At least I have yarn ready to go so that I have something to knit during the hockey games tonight.