Confessions of Fidgety Fingers

I have gotten rather busy lately. My work has provided me training for a programming language. It is Monday through Friday from 6:30 to 8:30, and then Saturdays from 10:00 until noon or 1:00. This has reduced my knitting time quite a bit. I have started to exercise daily, and due to the class, I am exercising during lunch, which is one of the times that I was knitting. I have put my wife's sweater jacket on hold, so that I can focus my time on Christmas presents. I'm still working on my great aunt-in-law's mittens, but I'm in the middles of the last repeat of the cables in the hand. I'm working on my sister's kitchen set while I'm at home, and I'm most of the way through the oven mitt. I'm not sure which project I'm going to work on after these as I bought some sock yarn while i was on vacation, as well as some bulky weight yarn. I was able to post the pictures from my vacation to my Flickr account. As well as from the wedding I went to...

I got a new car today. It is going to be a bit of a change since I'm use to driving a Ford F-150. And now I'll be driving a SmartCar . Isn't it cute.

Yea for vacation. For me vacation is a two week camping event called Pennsic . This is very similar to many of the other SCA events, but just on a larger scale. this year, due to the economy and gas prices, there was only 10,500 attendees, and we have been running close to 12,000 and 13,000. My vacation started off with a bang. We had picked up a good friend of our, and her two kids, as they were going to ride with us. After getting most everything packed, and having dinner, I decided to clean litter one last time. As I was taking the first litter box out a small bird, a wren I believe, flew in to the house. It took us close to an hour to get the very frightened bird out of the house. At one point we had to move the cats out of the main section of the house, as two of them (Hammy and Dewi) were very interested in the bird, and one of them, Hammy, had actually caught it in mid-air and brought it down to the floor. He then didn't know what to do and let it go. The followin...

big surprise there.

I'm going to diverge from my normal topics for this post,a nd discuss the podcasts that I enjoy. I'm going to stay away from the standards for knitters, like Knit Picks' , Cast On and Diva Knitting . I listen to a few National Public Radio (NPR) podcasts. I daily listen to Marketplace . I find the commentary that they provide very insightful. I follow that up with the weekly recording of Marketplace Money . To help keep me up-to-date on the science front, I listen to Science Friday . Just so that I don't feel overburdened and heavy from all the serious stuff, I listen to Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! , a humorous political quiz show. Lastly, for a bit of quirk there is This American Life . I'm a fan of all sorts of fiction. Unfortunately, I have problem finding time to actually sit down and read. The first of such podcasts I found was Escape Pod , which plays mostly science fiction stories, but was also has created two spin-offs of Pseudopod for horror ...

I'm almost done with the first mitten for my great aunt-in-law. I have less than an inch to knit on the thumb and then I'm done with the first mitten. I would have been much further along on this, and possibly done, but my wife and I spent a long weekend over the 4th of July with her parents. The recipient of the mittens live with my in-laws, so I couldn't work on that present while I was there. So I decided to work on a kitchen set that will be the Christmas present for my sister. We stopped at Joann's on the way out of town, as I knew from the pattern that i needed a bulky yarn. I found a nice variegated yarn and we headed to the mountains of North Carolina. When we got there and settled down I pulled out the pattern. I then noticed that this is a felting project. I checked my new yarn, and it was only 20% wool. I knew there was a yarn shop in town, so the next day I headed down to town and picked up some nice 100% wool yarn. I got the two pot holders knitt...

There isn't too much to report on my knitting. I'm still working on all three of the projects from the last posting. I would be done the first of the mittens, but one day when I was working on them while my wife was having some oral surgery, I wasn't sure if I had the cabling in the body, so I ripped it out to the ribbing, and had to rework the body. I'm working on the last 4 rows of the body, and then I'll be decreasing for the top. I would love to work on them over the upcoming long weekend, but the recipient will be around. I'm thinking about starting the kitchen set for my sister, but I need yarn. If I can't find anything that I like, then I'm just going to work on my wife's sweater jacket. We had another yard sale last weekend (6/28/08). This was a rather poor yard sale, as we made less than $500 for the cause. The weather wasn't too hot, and we didn't have any rain to speak of. The only reasons that I can come up for how poor w...