Great Mail Day and Stuff

First, some Stuff. I have to put up another pic of the weirdo cat, D.O.G. Note his leg is wrapped in computer peripherals. He doesn't care.

Another non-mail item.

Diantha carded up a batt of hand dyed, soft as a feather Corriedale that we processed from raw fleece, a tiny bit of nylon, and brown mill-end wool, and spun it together.

She called the resulting yarn of 110 grams/146 yards, Bella Swan, and we are going to list it in the morning in her Etsy shop.

I have made pretty good progress on the Mossy Jacket I am knitting for DD#1's friend's baby Kyrie. Here you see, I have the jacket body done, the bottom seed-stitch border and the button placket done, and I am casting on the neck/left side border.

Today is day 6 of the project, with not a lot of time spent on it (mostly riding places in the car). WHY in the world I stuck to pattern in knitting seed st in the border I will never know. It looks good, but I hate seed stitch. Story about why, sometime else.

Bleh.

Kyrie has a brother a year older, about the age of my baby Beverly. He never really got a "baby" gift from me either. So I want to knit him some slippers and a beanie, but nothing too warm because they live in FL. So I hand-dyed about 1/3 of another skein of this green Cottontots, to a warm woodsy brown. I am going to use the green for the cuffs of slippers and the brown for stripes in a beanie.

Quite manly really.

Tonight we made mini-hamburgers, because I got a good deal on a whole bag of little whole-wheat rolls. We had fresh-sliced tomatoes from the garden (and other veggies) with them. I also made an antipasto with garden tomatoes, sweet red pepper, and basil (also black olives, onion, aged grated cheese, garlic, and olive oil). It was delicious!


Now for the Good Mail Day. I just LOVE to get interesting things in the mail!

Beverly came down with a fever last night. She was quite wakeful all night, which didn't help my killer headache at all. Today she alternately slept and wanted to be held. She got 2 new books in the mail, which she LOVED and then fell asleep.

I got a simply GORGEOUS hand-dyed sock yarn from SimplyTwisted on Etsy. If you have never seen her shop, and you knit or crochet, you should go there and buy something!

Now, I wonder what obligatory Christmas-knitting project I can neglect so that I can make my selfish-self a pair of socks out of this? LOL

Last mail call, something also for me, just lil' ol' me. I got a holster for my gun! I really wanted an inner-waistband (IWB), left-hand draw (LH) but they were out of them. This one was actually $5 cheaper anyway, and it is good, high-quality heavy leather. The weapon pictured in it is our Lorcin .380, since I am temporarily without my Sccy CPX-1 (no, I actually don't sleep with it).

Pistol-packin' Mama, Lay That Pistol Down. (For those of you too young, this was a song that was popular about the time my own mom was little, ROFLOL) Or, put it on the back of your pants. Anyway, on a scale of 1 being disgusted to 10 being orgasmic, I am at about 8 (very, very pleased) with it.

Last pic. We were walking our local big-box store this morning when we came across this Falling-prices fail. Out of curiosity, I bought a yellow onion to see what it would ring at (plus I needed an onion, LOL) and sure enough, it was the higher price. We thank them for being so dang helpful!

Back... How Do I Fit It All In?

Finally back to blogging. I's been an interesting couple weeks. We have spent most days going to dd#1's apartment, a 45 min. drive away. We packed, cleaned out, scrubbed, and filled a storage unit. Then they had nearly a week wait while their mortgage agent got the closing date wrong.

A week ago today they finally closed. We started going up to their house again, coming home at 11PM or midnight. We peeled old wallpaper and painted (most main-floor rooms needed 2 coats; the bath and kitchen needed 3 coats).

We painted trim in the kids' rooms and a mural in Jeremiah's room. He said it had to have a road, a car, and four buildings, one of which must be a gas station! I made 2 of the buildings be an actual pic of the house & storage building... and one is a train station! He was THRILLED!

Here is a preview. Apparently I didn't take a pic of the finished product!

When they took the living room carpet up on Sunday, there were about 20 years worth of pet pee, grime, mold spots, and a burned area that looked suspiciously like a cat under a Christmas tree. So I spent part of Sunday (after finishing the mural) and part of Monday this week scrubbing the hardwoods on my hands and knees. Hard work, plus I hairline-fractured my right wrist in my one and only motorcycle mishap 5 years ago, so that has been quite a strain. Anyway the floors are passable until they can light-sand and buff them.

Monday Tony and Artemas painted the ceiling twice (someone had painted it Charcoal, for some reason) and moved in the biggest pieces of furniture. Des and I arranged them, cleaned the kitchen, cleaned about half the other boxes out of the storage unit, put up curtains and art. The house is starting to look like home.

You can only imagine what effect all this has had on me own home life. Whew. Hard to keep up, really.

But! I did manage to finish a mini-quilt for a swap I was in. Being as I am a couple days late mailing it, I made a pillow cover that will fit a 14" pillowform to match. I hope the recipient will like it. Kaleidoscope is visually one of my favorite patterns, though difficult to execute accurately. These blocks are 4" finished, so the quilt top is 22" high by 26" wide. I called it Afrikaleidoscope.


And, Diantha and I managed to wash some wonderful raw Corriedale wool that we can add to batts to put in her shop. Here is a picture of the crimp on this fiber before washing. Note how fine it is and that the staple is 5" long! After washing, the wool is so white and fluffy, it is like a cloud. Simply gorgeous.

So Friday I bought a new weapon. I didn't go intending to purchase one, but my dh had seen a couple the day before at Coal Creek Armory, where we took our CCW class and where we go to use the firing range. So, being game, I went to look. I have had a Bersa Thunder UC9 on order since early Feb. which hasn't come yet. Apparently our non-2nd-amendment-controlling government is not allowing them in the country from where they are manufactured in Argentina. As you can see, it is a fine firearm.

But what they had at the armory was a Sccy (formerly Skyy) CPX-1 9mm. The weapon plus an extra, 10-round magazine was less than $200 so we bought it. And I absolutely love it! I took it into the range just for a minute to shoot one clip and I just LOVE the way it feels in the hands. It has an ambidextrous operation, slide locks open when the magazine is empty, manual safety plus a double-action trigger pull of 9 pounds, which is heavier than my dh's Keltec (at 8#), which is the entire safety on that firearm.

So today we went to the range to blow off some steam and some ammo. (All shots shown were from 21ft except those I shot from 45 feet.) Richard did well. On the left, the grayed-out shots are from his Kel-tec, the white from my Sccy, first time he ever fired it. He said, "There is something wrong with this weapon... it is too accurate!" LoL!

This target of mine (on the right) has an interesting story. The brown shots were from 45ft., farther away than one should ever have to shoot for self-defense unless being fired upon. Most courts would say that if one is that far away, the threat of death isn't imminent and one should find another way out. Still nice to know, that any of these "brown" shots would land within the body, even at that distance. And note one of the shots went clean through the hole in the target that was used to hang it on the peg in the store! LOL! Total accident.

Oh here is another story about that target. See the ONE white shot way down at the bottom? I was shooting the small cluster in the upper right (1 oclock) in the 9 ring when a piece of brass ejected and, even though my tank top didn't have a very low neck, went RIGHT in my cleavage and burnt me! I clutched at my shirt to isolate the hot cartridge so it wouldn't burn me more, and completely forgot to lay down the weapon. For a second there I was jumping around with a loaded gun in my hand, trying to retrieve that shell! Thank GOD I didn't have my finger in the trigger guard, but I think I scared a couple people there for a minute. LOL. Anyway after that I musta been good and mad at it, cause that's when I got all the center-cluster shots.

One more. I don't like Richard's Kel-tec. The vertical grip grooves dig my thumb web and the gun, weighing nothing, kicks too much to suit me. But just to be a good sport, I shot a 6-round clip from it, the brown circles on this target. Where is the 6th shot, you say? It went through the tape holding the target to the backstop. Then just to be a brat and show I could do better, I did 2 mags worth of ammo (loading only 9 rounds each) from my Sccy.

I hope I never do have to use my weapon in self-defense. But if I do, watch out world.