Harvest Ride and alpacas!

Instead of yet another triathlon, I convinced my spouse that it would be a much better idea to do a bicycle event. Notice that I didn't say race, I said 'event'. We had long heard that the drive along I-84 in Oregon was worth a look, so we headed south.

The Hood River Harvest Ride: 'a family-friendly bike ride through the less-traveled majestic back-roads of the Hood River Valley'. If kids can do it, it can't be that bad right? Five loops to mix and match from, produce stands and rest stations along the way? Sold.

Mt. Hood appeared on the horizon behind the orchards. (Mt. Adams was visible in the opposite direction). Mountains are so cool. I hope I never get tired of looking at them. I'm a little tired of looking at sagebrush, but that may be to expected.

After the ride, we were treated to homemade lunch (some hippie provided a huge tub of lentil salad...must have been from Portland) and fresh produce from the surrounding orchards. We left with bags full of apples and pears, all courtesy of local farms provided free for the riders. As we were nearing the end of one of our loops, it occurred to me that I should have searched to see if there were any yarn shops in the area. It's not a big town though, so I didn't really figure there would be much. Not but five minutes later, we saw a blue informational highway sign (keep in mind that we're on a country backroad in BFE) letting us know that CASCADE ALPACAS OF OREGON FOOTHILLS YARN 1.0 MI <----. One of those official state blue highway signs, and it and a couple others appeared along our designated biking route until the last quarter mile or so.

We had to go, natch. At the end of a twisting back road and up a hill, some alpacas and their adorable cria were hanging out. Surprisingly there were a number of cars in the parking lot, and people milling around looking at the alpacas. I guess the blue signs work? I suppose they worked on us...

Sammy was waiting in the car and couldn't contain himself with all of the awesome smelling fuzzy creatures milling around outside. He started barking his head off, and all of the alpacas came out to see what the fuss was about:

What's that guy's problem?

Right on the farm was a full service yarn shop. They had all kind of selection, but for the most part it was stuff that you could get anywhere. I wanted something hot off the alpaca!

You know how they say it's important to go local. I had a bit of sticker shock on the first skein I picked up...so I went in for something small. Only one ounce, so I'll have to think of something special and small to make (any thoughts?). A touch I enjoyed: each skein has the names of the alpacas that it came from. Mine is from Phoebe, Onya, Sparkle, and Dutch....I think Sparkle gave it that extra pizzazz, you know?

Coeur d'Alene or: Puppy's First Camping Trip

Getting the hell out of Dodge on weekends has almost become an imperative. On our way driving from Wisconsin to Washington we passed through Coeur d'Alene, a touristy town with replete with forest and a big lake. We headed up north to go camping on the outskirts of town, you know, experience the solitude of the forest and get away from it all.

Oh hai, interstate.

Well, we got the forest, but quiet was in short supply. The otherwise acceptable campground was situated about 100 m from the interstate. Still counts...

This was the first time we've tried to take Sammy camping. He loves hiking and generally running around outside like a crazed animal, but we weren't sure how he'd fare sleeping in a tent. The verdict is that he wasn't crazy about it...every time we'd roll over or move in any way he'd jump up and dart over to the door in the hopes that we were getting up to let him out. When either of us would leave the tent, he'd stick his head out the open zipper part of the door, plant his feet and refuse to move. Passive resistance, he was like a furry little Gandhi.

The trusty Forest Service dirt roads took us into some quiet areas.

Fancy terlet.

We hiked up to what was billed as a 'lookout' area.

Lookout...for someone shooting at you.

It may have been a lookout point a decade ago, but the treeline was way to high to actually see much of anything. The lookout building had since been used extensively for target practice. We had to find our own lookout points.

My spouse spied a store called CDA Yarn and Fiber downtown. He seemed to think that hadn't bought any yarn for too long and that I needed to get some. And really, who am I to argue?

Something called "Plymouth Earth Homestead". I'm a sucker for undyed yarns.

Malabrigo, pretty standard stuff.

We tried to get Sammy to go canoeing. He's done it before in Madison, figured it would be no big deal, right?

Dubious.

Mmm, yummy beef jerky if you come down here!

Big baby.

Hate you guys.

The second night, we were going for a nighttime walk through the campground, and spouse comes up to me and says, "Do you know what Joe Tiller looks like??" and I'm all, "Bitch, please, of course I know what Joe Tiller looks like." I suppose you might not, unless you are also a Purdue graduate (or just a fan)--JT was the football coach at Purdue while we were students there and was, how do you say, kind of a big deal.

"Go look in that RV and tell me that is not Joe Tiller." Come on, no way. So of course I had to creep up to the trailer and peer in. And the guy hanging out in the kitchen in what was presumably his jammies did indeed look like big Joe. But he's a generic walrus-esque looking older gentleman, so I really needed a better look, ala Hank in Breaking Bad. 

Hank suspects that this is the mobile meth lab RV...

Spoiler alert: it was an older couple in their undies playing cards.

OK, it didn't work out so well for Hank, so we refrained from excessive espionage, but a check of the license plates (Wyoming, where he retired) and a quick look at some articles on what he was up to these days (traveling across the west in an RV with his wife) confirms that we had a celebrity fellow camper. We made plans to don some Purdue sweatshirts the next day and stroll by while they were having breakfast.

And then it rained all next morning. They never came out of the camper! We were relegated to creepy stalkers. Maybe we'll run into him on our next camping trip.

 

Last night in Madison - REDUX

Oh. My. Well, that couldn't have gone much worse. I guess the apartment building could have caught fire or maybe some sort of alien invasion, but barring that...first our movers decided at the last minute they only needed Friday to pack and load all of our stuff instead of Thurs. and Fri. Then their truck breaks down and they don't show up until 1 PM on Friday instead of 9 AM. Next we get assurances that they can get done by 8 PM....then maybe 10 PM...then when ten o'clock rolls around and they aren't even close (we've lost our money for our first hotel reservation by this point, of course) they claim they can be done by 9 AM the next day. So naturally, they wrapped everything up by about 1 PM on Saturday and we lost the $$ for our second hotel reservation that we could have made it to if we'd gotten to leave in the morning. Apparently my future employer is as bad at hiring a good moving company as they are at hiring good employees *rimshot*.

I had to vacate the premises on several occasions due to suffering from Barely Concealed Rage Syndrome (BCRS). Sammy didn't seem to mind any of the ruckus and enjoyed nesting in the packing materials.

So it turns out we spent one more night in Madison. On our mattress. On the floor. With all of our toiletries, bedding, and generally useful shit packed away. I groaned when I saw the blanket the copilot dredged up. It was one of the first things that I ever knitted and it is TERRIBLE. I had successfully forgotten it existed. It's all uneven and has mysterious holes everywhere. I didn't know about things like, you know, gauge, or reading patterns, or purling. The thing is probably 5 ft. x 10 ft. (I had no idea it was 10 ft. until it came off the needles...surprise!), which is practical for a really skinny tall person, I guess. It's made with this cheapo yarn I bought at Wal-Mart, the fibers of which seem to get sucked into your lungs and stick if you breathe around it for too long. I hope it isn't carcinogenic.

From the dark days of my knitting history. Pro tip: Don't choose a blanket for one of your first knitting projects.

A good friend suggested we visit the zoo one last time to help ease my BCRS on Friday. My favorite guys were out and about. 

On Saturday I thought this place might help.

Why the hell not?

I grabbed some dust rose colored Malabrigo superwash sock yarn. I didn't take any pictures because a) it got squirreled away in the packing and b) the yarn clerk lady offered to wind it at the store and did a hilariously awful job. It currently looks like a big tangle. Yarn clerk lady was mortified and by that point I was like, "Eh...it's just that kind of day. Put it in the bag."
 
We've made it 7 hours to Sioux Falls, SD (original goal was Rapid City, SD, another 5 hours). Travel plans and hotels have been shuffled and we're a day behind. Who knows where we'll be next?

How I still don't have those stupid socks finished

Seriously, you guys. Still not done with these fracking man-socks. Well, technically I finished them, in the sense that they have all the components neccessary to constitute a sock: heel, gusset, toe, etc.  However, when the copilot tried them on together for the first time he astutely observed that they were not the same size.  So I drop kicked them into the revision pile and flipped them off, as one does.

This left me in a little bit of a conundrum on a recent trip to visit some friends in Berkeley + a work trip to WA.  If I wasn't going to revise the freak man-socks, I was going to need some yarn on-the-go. Fortunately, my friend had passed by a local yarn shop a time or two and took me for a shopping trip. 

I snapped a picture, since the name was so weird I figured I'd never remember it.

  I wanted to address a problem. I'm not much of a runner, but I do enjoy jogging in my Vibram Five Fingers shoes (referred to exclusively as 'feetie shoes' in my household).  In case you hadn't noticed, it's been getting a little nippy outside, and one cannot wear socks with feetie shoes--resulting in an exposed gap of flesh between shoes and running tights that is vulnerable to the elements. 

Article Pract had a cool deal of "Employee Picks" that were discounted 20%, and I picked out some Berroco Ultra Alpaca (with a name like ULTRA how could you go wrong? And the color was Berry Pie Mix). So while I was in Washington, I made myself some....wait for it....

LEGWARMERS!

 

They're back in style, I swear.  And they're totally functional. 

And toasty warm!

The question is: can I wear them in public (in non-running situations?)

A blue yarn

I heard through the grapevine today that there's a sign on my LYS's door saying they are closed for the month of July, but that it is for all intents and purposes closed indefinitely due to [INSERT GENERAL OWNER DRAMA HERE]. I'm not entirely sure what this drama is and don't want to start some bizarre unfounded rumor (maybe like the owner is actually going to convert it to a leather S&M shop, his true passion) but I am bummed. This is where I go for all my tools, to relax and drink coffee, and to indecently fondle yarn. There was a whole wall of Cascade 220 in every color imaginable. I made my first sock there, and did my first two color work (albeit just a useless ring of fabric, but it had two colors, dammit).

If I were a yarn, I would certainly be blue right about now.

Please, do feed the animals!

One can't really be sure what to expect when entering a park claiming to have elk, bison, bears, and other various arguably wild animals...where you are free to feed any of them with bread you can buy at the park. When my copilot suggested a trip to the Olympic Game Farm while we were in Seattle this weekend, I was slightly concerned. It seems like a terrible idea to feed a bear, considering it's entirely possible that human flesh is what they really have a hankering for. But I wanted to tour some of Puget Sound, and did I really need both arms? As long as I held on to the right one, I'd probably be OK.

My copilot, a buddy and I set off for the park on Sunday morning. It was gigantor. You pay your entry fee and they give you some bread and basically set you loose to drive around (with the caveat that you should keep moving around the buffalo in case they decide to, I don't know, tip your car over or chew on it or you or something).

There were peafowl just randomly wandering around every part of the park.


I really wanted to take some of these guys home, so that guests would feel like they were in some sort of surreal, Dali-esque dream whenever they came over. Alas, none of them fit in the trunk.

We went through a group of yaks that were very friendly:


They seemed to enjoy petting and a gentle scratch as much as the food.

"Can I keep him?"

The co-pilot made a friend too:


We sallied onward to the bears. My trepidation was in vain--they were safely behind an electric fence, but you could toss bread to them.



That's right--he's catching bread in his mouth.

They seemed to be as entertained as we were. This one would indicate when he was ready for another toss with a wave of his paw.

We moved on to another section--home to a large herd of European Fallow Deer. These guys and gals were aggressive:


They continued to follow us, poking their head through the window and vying for position. Then the car in front of us encountered the big guys:


Uh oh. There was a lot of girly screaming as the bison approached our car, but I reassured my copilot and buddy that I would protect them. I rolled up the window a tad so we wouldn't get the full monty:


Ewwww. It was all slimy, and it's tongue was practically a prehensile hand. It didn't help that we'd watched part of a Star Wars marathon on FX the night before, and an icky Jabba the Hut tongue was fresh in my mind. It slimed the window. Fortunately it's a rental car.

The last group we encountered were some elk, and by comparison they were polite and refined. It was the first time I'd seen an elk and they were impressively HUGE.


They politely popped their head in, retrieved their snack, then withdrew to chomp on it. Definitely a unique experience! Also, some of the largest piles of poo I've ever seen.

On our way home, we decided to check out a psuedo-famous ice cream place on Bainbridge Island--and Google Maps informed me that right next door was Churchmouse Yarns & Teas. Score. A yarn/tea shop is a 'retirement dream' for myself and another good friend, so I owed it to us to check it out. I'm kicking myself for not taking any photos, but this place was AWESOME. So much high quality and hard to find yarn and literature, and teas to boot.

The staff asked me several times if I was on the yarn tour. I was not, I didn't know that such a thing was going on. Apparently it was the 5th Annual 'Destination Yarn' for the Puget Sound area, where 25 LYS were participating. "Why the hell am I not on this tour??" I was thinking, but soon got my answer: my copilot and buddy navigated the store as awkwardly as if they were in Victoria's Secret with their respective moms. Going to twenty-five yarn shops would probably have made me liable for dude-torture (and would have been hell on my wallet), so it's probably for the best. But here's a sample of the goods:


This one actually has a motivation--I'm going to do a psuedo-Knit-A-Long (KAL) with WifeMomKnitter's Stitch n' Bitch group through Ravelry--so this is what I picked. It's virgin wool, so I could dye it any color, but I kind of like it plain...is that weird?

This is just because I've been told Socks That Rock yarn, well, rocks. It's quite tough to find, so I grabbed some while I had the chance. It's a favorite of the gal that taught me to knit my first sock, so there's gotta be something to that.

Shawl inspiration. I'm a sucker for knitting history.

Sun in the rainy city

A dude with a heavy accent passing by my office just remarked to his friend, "Because, I mean, a bird in the hand is worth two bushes". I just needed to share that with someone.

Moving on. Visiting the rainy city required air travel. I won't bore you with the details, but involved were a seatmate repeatedly getting up and down while somehow simultaneously oozing further over into my seat, a dude warbling off-key to his iPod, a woman with epilepsy, and a cat. I've provided the set-up, I'll let your imagination come up with the punchline. What could I do? I pulled out my sock materials (I was ready to start the second sock, finally) and tried to go to my happy place.

Here it is, my moment of zen:

From zero to sock cuff in one travel segment flat.

I realized that it made me feel better because I was at least controlling one aspect of what was going on. As in "That lady might be having a tantrum and delaying everyone's flight, but I can still make a hell of a sock!" When you think of it that way, it seems wrong somehow--but if knitting is a vice, I think it's on the benign end of the spectrum. I mean, I could have stabbed the lady with my knitting needles instead. I think that would have been worse (but maybe we could have taken off earlier).

Aside: One observation I've made consistently during my approximately bi-monthly air travel is that non-knitters are extremely impressed with double-pointed needle (dpn) knitting. The fact that five needles are in play must look intimidating or something. Oozer seatmate said "Wow!" when brought out my knit tools. He also later asked if it was going to be a sock for a baby, so I let him see the circumference and observed that it would have to be one big-ass baby. He agreed.

The airline experience was tempered by beautiful weather, skiing with the copilot (unfortunately, it wasn't cold enough for him to give the ski gaiter another test run) and a trip to a Seattle yarn shop called Stitches. It's a combination sewing & knitting shop, ~2/3 the former and 1/3 the latter. It's also next door to a sex-themed store, so you can do one stop shopping (because a bird in the hand is worth two bushes...if you know what I mean).

They had a wide variety of needle sizes in straight, dpn, and circular, but if you don't like Clover bamboo needles, you're out of luck (Clover needles are my favorite, so I was in lots of luck). They had a small yarn selection, but it was all good stuff, it spanned almost the entire Cascade line and offered many beautiful colors. They had some pretty sweet buttons too, but with no real need for buttons (and under the watchful eye of my copilot) I abstained. I did get some yarn for an idea that's been rattling around in my head for a new pattern, but I want to finish up the Infinite Cabled Hat (and possibly the South Face Hat, but I'm feeling intimidated by the two-color stranding after my lousy swatch) and get the pattern written up. I think I'm going to offer this one for free as well, since it was an easy design. I've been reading some forums on Ravelry about design, and it seems that some designers resent free patterns offered by hobbyists and people trying to get their foot in the design door. What do you guys think?

Working hard

You've all done it, don't judge. You're desperately trying to focus on a comparative study of radiation damage accumulation in copper and iron, and all you can think about is the fact that you haven't been able find your size 4, 29" circular needle and you need it to continue work on your sweater tonight. OK, maybe not exactly that situation, but some permutation of trying to work that ends in online shopping. I'm just trying to do my part to prop up the economy. Of course, one has to factor in all that time working that was lost--but since I'm a graduate student, I'm sure that there's zero impact on that front anyway. Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy have covered this topic before...

"Graduate students are the worst people."

But I digress. I'm all about supporting my local yarn shop (LYS), but I'm away from my home base, working on a project in Berkeley, CA. Trying to drive/find parking here...takes patience, shall we say, so I resorted to searching Amazon.com. A close friend of mine works for Amazon, so I validate supporting the corporate giant by imagining that I'm supporting him personally. The first item Amazon suggested was this bad boy by Oriental Touch:



That's 14 sets of bamboo goodness for $25 right there. Now, one could conclude that for such a screaming deal, the needles must be gnarled twigs for someone's front lawn, or maybe just vessels for splinters to migrate into soft flesh. Always a sucker for a bargain, I'm going to find out! Oh, and I also ordered the circular needle that I need. The multi-pack double-pointed needle purchase could be classified in the same category as grabbing a Hershey bar and a Cosmo in the checkout line.