Home again

Home again, jiggity jig. (Is that from Mother Goose, or something else? Whatever it is, it's hard-wired into my cerebral cortex.)

There's not much to say about the trip but we survived, and everyone in Ohio is doing as well as expected between heart attacks and major surgeries and getting put in nursing homes and driving me batshit. (I'm actually talking about three different individuals, on the medical problems. One single person did not have all that happen at once. Thankfully. I will not discuss how many are driving me batshit.)


While we were there, my in-laws were cleaning out their basement, and since we drive around in a '91 Suburban large enough to have a stewardess, we got a bunch of stuff. We were planning on taking home the riding lawn-mower, but we wound up with a chair and footstool, too:

Strangely, I had just been saying I needed a wingback chair for the living room. It's very comfortable to knit in (already tried it), and as soon as I figure out how to wedge a table between the chair and the wall to hold knitting stuff, I'm set.

Other photos will be posted, as will a tutorial on how to put your sleeves and body together on the steeked jacket, as soon as we FIND the pictures and I get it together and take some photos.


Once in a while, the insanity actually works around here. Just when I can't take it any more, something cool happens, and I remember Alexander Fleming (the bio does not add that Fleming was a slob and made his discovery of Penicillin by accident because his lab was a mess), and once again give up on any idea of being organized.

When we were getting ready to leave Monday, I realized I had two skeins of yarn soaking, waiting to be dyed. They'd already been there a while and I was afraid to leave them for the next week while we were in Ohio. So I dyed them in a hurry on Monday night - such a hurry I didn't even wash them after the dye process. Just laid them down and left. I got home, and washed them, and am amazed to find that I've discovered a way to produce really intense colors with food coloring. There are deep golden yellows on the green skein and dark ruby red and indigo on the red/purple skein. Hee hee hee. I invented a new dye process.

A few weeks ago, I sent a skein of coffee sock yarn to my mother-in-law to knit; I figured since I taught her to knit socks I owed her a skein of something fun. I'd wound it up into a ball for her, first. Now Gadget Man, my father-in-law, wants to use the ball winder when he comes to visit next. He wants to know how it works. I think I just gained an employee for free. Heh heh heh.