Abbie Won!

This is Abbie. She's the friend who convinced me that I could make these crazy figure suits and then actually wore the finished product on stage in front of people. She won third in her class in women's figure last weekend at the NPC Northern Bodybuilding competition.

I still don't quite get which machine in the gym prepares you to walk around in those ridiculous shoes.

Congrats, Ab!

Things have been even crazier than usual for us this fall, so I haven't had as much time as I like to spend in my workshop (can you ever have as much time as you'd like in your workshop?). Okay, so that was a rhetorical question. But because it's soccer season, I have managed a few minutes here and there to do some knitting.

I invented a lacy pattern for a shawl/wrap thing that I finished a week or so ago, that's the lovely grey thing up there. I made it from wool that I recycled from a sweater I bought at Goodwill. It was a really soft nice sweater, but it had a few moth holes, so I unknit it and started over. I have enough yarn left to do some hats and mittens, too, I think. I really kind of like the concept of recycled yarn, and when I get some free time (!?) I'm going to explore that some more.

I found this buttefly sunning himself in the garden infront of Latin School one day when I was picking up the boys. I had a dickens of a time getting a good picture of him, as the shutter delay on my camera and his willingness to keep his wings open didn't seem to mesh really well. But I did finally get a shot and through the wonders of photoshop I was able to brighten up the picture enough so that we could finally see him. I am so NOT a photographer. I do try, though, and I get the odd good shot.

I used the same pattern as for my lacy shawl to make a scarf. I used larger needles and a three wrap stitch for the loopy part instead of two wraps as I did on the shawl, so it's got a much more open knit. I used a couple of balls of yarn that I spun from a grab bag I bought last spring.

On the spinning wheel right now I have some alpaca/dog yarn in the works. Dog hair is not the easiest thing in the world to work with, it's awfully short, but it's clinging to the alpaca well enough to spin, I think, and I might be able to make enough yarn to have a Stella and Lucy memento to wear around my neck some day. I might knit Sam a hat from it, he is the most likely victim to appreciate a garment made of dog hair!

a little catching up to do

I am so in arrears about posting here, and I blame facebook. I have spent a little too much time tending to my farmville farm (a facebook app) that I haven't paid attention to any of the other parts of my virtual life...and then when I go to my favorite blogs, I see they are not updated, either...could all my virtual friends be tending their virtual farms? ACK!

anyway, now that the kids are back in school, things have gotten way crazy with all the driving around. Dan is doing a great job of getting his grades in shape, though, so I am hoping against all hope that he'll be in position to get his license in October when he qualifies to take the test. Not sure I'll ever be ready to let him go through the cut-in-the-hill during rush hour, but maybe to a practice now and then...that would be great!

Sam spent most of his summer traveling around doing boy scout things. He went to BadinPowel Leadership training, summer camp and Philmont, which is a high adventure backpacking thing in New Mexico. He was pretty tired when he got back, but he's grown up a little, too, I think.

This is Sam at graduation from NYLT (the leadership thing).

Stella missed her boy alot while he was gone this summer. This is a funny picture, because her body appears to be missing, and in reality, she weighs about 300 pounds.

The old dog. It's really hard to get a decent picture of Lucy, the black dog thing doesn't photograph too well, and she moves alot (although not as much as she used to. Sometimes we have to stop and make sure she's still breathing).

this is poor, pitiful Karen, after being forced to pull pork all morning on the fourth of July. she is covered in grease. Okay, i agree, I avoid the pork-pulling like the plague!

Dan is playing goal keeper for the soccer team this fall, which is interesting, since he never played goalie before this year, and only last year came back to soccer after an 8 year haiatus. He's working hard to learn the position though, and will probably get some good varsity time in later in the season.

Haven't had much time for crafting, which is a drag, because I'm driving so much. Not getting home until 9 or so most nights leaves me about pooped out when it comes to sitting down in front of the Huskvarna...but I have done a little knitting, actually designed my own shawl/wrap thing that I've almost finished. If I can only find the camera to photograph it...

Let's go to the FAIR!

Tom and I snuck out the other night and went to the Boone County Fair. I had been once before when the kids were little, during the day. We saw a baby beauty pageant which kind of frightened me, and some really pretty needle work, stuff like that. Boy, at night, though, it really gets cooking (both literally and figuratively!)

We watched the draft horse cinder block pulling competition. Those horses get into it!

And who can pass up the Holy Donuts? This one is a family favorite because Sam earned a whole school years worth of service hours 'working' in this trailer at St. Tim's Oktoberfest. I think the service he provided was eating the donuts before they could get cold. You know, a housekeeping sort of a thing.

Of course there was a game and ride area, but we old people got to skip that. But the Ferris Wheel was purty anyway.

The highlight for Tom and a frighteningly large number of other people was the mini-car demolition derby. The lady behind us was apparently a connoiseur, because she seemed to know an awful lot about the drivers from previous week's fairs and competitions. Whatever!

Oh, the humanity!

This car won the demoliton derby beauty contest. We didnt' stick around long enough to see if being pretty is a benefit in a demoliton derby, however.

I did NOT eat any of this stuff. Okay, I had fried pickles from the next booth over, but I have a feeling that if I had tried either the reeses' cups or the oreos, I would either be back there for my ninety ninth serving, or trying to sell the kids so that I could go back for the 100th.

I have to put in a plug for the incredibly handsome and talented young men who were directing traffic (this is Daniel's friend Erick).

and, of course, the junior horsemanship competition. This young lady was really nice and explained how it works to us city folk (well, suburbanites, anyway.).

Oh, Crud!

I really was planning to keep up with this blog business...not so much because I think anyone cares, but because when I check on myself, I want to know what I've been doing. Apparently, I've either been to busy to post or too depressed to care.

anyway. this past weekend was the Midfirst Ohio Hot Air Balloon Challenge in Middletown. My mom is the media broad (I was going to say 'chick', but 'broad' seems so much more powerful!). So I sent Dan up for a few days to help with whatever was needed. Then Karen and I went up and spent the night on Saturday and got to run around in the golf cart pretending to be important. The problem with that is that when you are driving a golf cart around a big event like that, people seem to think you should know something about what is going on. They ask questions and expect reasonable answers. I'm not going to be driving the golf cart around by myself there anymore, no matter how many cute skydivers I get to transport around the grounds.

Dan spent alot of time holding bee parts. Lily and Joey are the "Little Bees" and Dan was part of their crew.

Tom and Sam stayed south and went to Schutzenfest. Tom took money at the gate and Sam walked around and ate one of everything and played some sort of game that involved gambling on color choices made by a drunken rat.

Georgia on my mind

Georgia wasn't really on my mind, but I clicked on the 'georgia' font this morning to see what comes up. No time like the present for a change of scene, I always say! Okay, I don't always say that, but it came out anyway!

Karen got a real kick out of seeing an authentic 'old man on the beach with a metal detector' when we were on Tybee last week. She was so excited..."Mom! There's one of those guys! Take a picture!"
I love it...the guy was so blissed out, just sweeping along, listening to whatever comes through on that headset. I hope he found some treasures!

Savannah with troop 380

Okay, we survived the trip to Savannah, on a bus full of scouts and moms and one dad...52 of us, all together. Very minimal drama, considering all the adolescent and perimenopausal personalities present. We actually had a great time.

Here we are the first night, at Lighthouse Pizza on Tybee Island, where we stayed. This was a pretty good pizza place. They had REAL CRUST! Look! The parents are all still in good humor! Granted, it's mostly relief to be done with the 12 hour bus ride, but we enjoyed the food and the company, too.

On Tuesday, our whole group went to Lady and Son's restaurant. This is Paula Deen's place (that's me on the right, posing with the cardboard cutout of the lady herself. The food was really good, although it was your basic fried chicken buffet. There was baked chicked and some sort of chicken fried steak, too. Also greens, okra, green beans. The dessert was awesome: Gooey Butter Cake. The name alone was worth the price of admission.

Okay, so you see me up there, with the cardboard cutout....that's my daughter, below, with the real live Jamie Deen. How cute is he? OMG...

Karen wasn't quite as thrilled, but we'll save this picture for her...she'll appreciate it in a few years.

Friday's Yarn

This is what I have on the spindle right now. It's kind of felty, but it's spinning up fairly nicely. I got it in a grab bag of fibers. Hope there is enough for a pair of mittens or something. If not, it will go in the increasingly large pile of "yarn I have spun but don't have enough of to make anything with". wow. That is some serious grammar, in that sentence there.

Hmm...the blue stuff above are also from the same grab bag of fibers, the pink and purple stuff came from somewhere else. I should really try to keep track of stuff like that. Or not. I get really caught up in what stuff is, where it came from, what I should do with it, like it's the Westminster Dog Show of fiber or something, when really all I want to do is sit and be hipmotized by the spinning wheel and then knit and crochet and make stuff, it doesn't really matter what. I just kind of like the rhythm of repetitive motion. Doing the same thing over and over again releases extra serotonin, and I like serotonin.

I like dopamine and norepinephrine, too, but serotonin is my favorite neurotransmitter. At work today I'm going to learn all about GABA and glutamate, because those are the NT's released by my neurons of interest these days, but they aren't my favorites. But they can become my favorites if I can learn how to get my neurons to make them on command, because then we would get a grant and insure my job for a little longer...and then I could buy more fiber and spin more and knit more! I knew I could get that little train of thought to circle back around!

This green and yellow stuff is from a bunch of fleece that I got from our friend Jamie. He's the chief technician at our shop http://goodyeardealers.com/richwoodautomotive/ . He was raising sheep for a while, so he knows "people" and got a bunch of fleece from someone...three bags full! Can I just tell you that sheep are some nasty ass creatures? Raw fleece can be a little full of poop and other ickies! But I spent last summer washing the wool and I card and dye a bit of it now and then. I dyed this stuff with kool aid. Skein on the left is plied with the same wool in a different kool-aid, the one on the right is plied with some embroidery thread that came in a big chest'o'thread that Tom gave me for Valentine's day last year (how sweet is that?).

This stuff is also Jamie wool, dyed with kool aid. I might actually branch out in to real dyes one of these days...you know, order something from the Dharma Trading company like a real fiber artist...but I am cheap, and I can get enough kool aid at Krogers for a couple of bucks at a time to keep me busy and happy, although perhaps a bit limited.

Enough blogging, time to check in on Facebook and then maybe read that GABA/Glutamate paper!

Things That Make Me Happy

I took pictures of things that make me happy yesterday. I recognize the irony of "things" making me happy, but since I can't take pictures of the moments that make me happy, I have to take pictures of the things that represent the moments. I am not so spiritual that I don't also love THINGS, too...but I hope that it is the quality of the THING that I love...a color, a shape, a smell...an esthetic quality?

These are my Joseph's Coat Roses. Joseph lives next to the garage. His flowers start off in little red buds and then change between red and yellow and orange as they go through their bloom cycle. I love these roses because they are pretty, they represent the beginning of summer, they have survived in my yard!

This is my Itty Bitty Buddha. I love him because he's so tiny and so cheerful. He regularly disappears behind piles of papers on my desk, but then reappears to remind me to stop and breathe and to find some joy.

This is a little book I bought from the tibetan monks at the Kenton County Library the other day. I like pretty books. I made paper for a while in my crafty life, and I like that this is made of handmade paper by Tibetan Refugees living in India. I hope that I was able to help someone with my measely contribution, and I hope the person who made it was happy to be doing something pretty.

These are the germs who live on my desk. The red one is Necrotizing Fasciitis, alias Flesh Eating Bacteria, alias Streptococcus pyogenes. He has a knife and fork. The little lavendar one is Epstein-Barr Virus, aka Mono. She has pretty eyelashes because she wants to kiss you and give you her disease. I love funny science jokes. We science geeks are some of the funniest people I know, but unfortunately we usually only understand each other.

I made this hat. I love making things. I love the repetitiveness of knitting and crocheting and sewing. I love spinning wool. I spun the wool in the purple and green stripes in this hat. I also love making stuff up as I go along. I don't know if anyone will ever actually wear that hat, but I had a good time making it. Wouldn't it be cool if lots of people loved my weird hats and wanted to pay me alot of money for them? Of course, then I would probalby hate to make them.

I love driving through the cut in the hill and across the river in the morning. I love living in Kentucky, and I love working in Cincinnati. I'm not so thrilled with my job right now, but I think that's more about me than the job. But that's another post. I love seeing the sunrise over the hills and the river. I think the river is cool because it represents a force of nature, a place for recreation, but also a place of commerce and industry.

I like coming to work in the morning. I like to listen to books on tape or WNKU. I feel like I am getting a fresh start every time I cross that river and swoop through the Lytle Tunnel and up Reading Road. It makes me feel like a grown-up, like I'm going out to DO SOMETHING.

I am sucking at my job right now, I can't seem to do any experiments right and I don't know why. So actually GETTING to work isnt' always such a great thing, but COMING here is good. And it will get better. I know this because I've been beating my head against the wall of science long enough that I know that there are portholes along the wall. Although if I get fired for spending all of my time on facebook and blogspot, the portholes might become fewer and farther between....

Beaver Lick Baptist Church

As promised, I have photographed the Beaverlick Church...not the Church of God, that one is farther down the road and I didn't have time to run down there last night...but the Baptist Church is at least as cool. And look! the Gallatin County Bluegrass band is going to be playing there!

I was trying to take a minute to stop and appreciate the beautiful weather last night on my way to a meeting. I have had no aptitude for joy the past few weeks, so I have to force myself sometimes. These are weeds, viewed from the window of the Windstar Family Carriage, in the lot behind the Speedway where I paid WAY too much for gas last night.

I think they are very pretty. Especially when the trash and stuff has been cropped out...maybe that's where my joy is hiding...behind the stuff I need to crop out. I need to upgrade my mental photoshop!

Now that I have figured out how to download the pictures from my camera to the computer, maybe I'll spend some time on photography. Not like I don't have seven thousand other things I should be doing, but there was a time when I really liked scrapbooking...and maybe that time can happen again...

I used to be into making photo essays. Maybe that is what I should try to do today. I have some fun series from the late eighties/ early nineties of St. Alphonso's...one year with T.Fox as the common element, another year with Gumby in all the shots...come to think of it, Gumby was in all my New Orleans pictures, too...I wonder what ever happened to old Gumby Dammit.

I think I'll make today's photo essay on 'finding out where my joy is hiding'

Camera downloading issues resolved!

This might just be a good sign. I have managed to figure out how to unload the memory card from my camera...which has almost two years worth of pictures on it...and copy it to the computer and then erase the memory card so i can make new memories! woo hoo! AND ALL ON A MONDAY MORNING!

Last week was a week full of mondays...so maybe I used them up and went straight to thursday this week! I've always liked thursdays. Thursday is Friday Eve, after all.

This is Esther. She's my mini frog...a Xenopus, but a tiny one. Not sure if she's so tiny because she's some kind of mutant variety or because she was treated with growth hormone at a young age so that she would metamorphose before she reached her full potential as a tadpole, but it doesn't really matter. She is a delightful desk companion. She lives in a 4inch cube of water on my desk, with her best bud Gary the snail and a little bamboo tree.

I had to do surgery on her a couple of weeks ago because she swallowed a hair and it was hanging out of her mouth. I couldn't just pull it out, because I didn't know how far down she'd swallowed it and I didn't want to yank her guts out with the other end, so I just chilled her down until she went dormant and cut the end of the hair off. I guess she's suffered no ill effects, because she sure is perky!

Prom

Old Dan went to prom on Saturday night. thank GOD they aren't old enough to drive themselves, so we got to drop them off and pick them up...I even got to chaperone the after prom party. which I probably won't do again, because four days later I am still feeling the effects of sleep deprivation...

from the left: Mackenzie, Dan, Sarah and Leanne. Although Mackenzie is Dan's girlfriend and official date, I thought it was very nice of Sarah and Leanne to coordinate their colors so nicely. I think they are trying to look like Charlie's Angels here, but Dan is more of a James Bond guy, I think. Pictures at Boone Woods Park.

Big Bone Lipstick Park

Before Sam could read, this is what he called Big Bone Lick State Park...close enough, you know?

We are truly blessed to live in an area with such colorful names: Below is the Beaver Lick Trading Post, which seems to change owners at least once every year and to manage to open for at least two or three weeks at a time before closing again.

These places are located On Beaver Road, between the Beaver Lick Church of God and the thriving metropolis of Rabbit Hash. In Sugartit. Honest to God. Except that some chicken hearted community leader somewhere along the line decided to change the official name of the town to Union. it still rocks!

catching up

I've been so busy driving people from one event to another that I haven't had time to take or post pictures of anything that has been going on, but fortunately, Grandma Mort is better equipped to record my life, and is willing to do so!

Here are Mackenzie and Dan in "The Man who Came to Dinner. Dan played the grumpy dad of the family, and Mackenzie was the patient wife. hmmm. the kids at Latin School did a great job with this play!

Karen had grandparents day at school last week, here she is with Grandma Mary and Grandpa John:

the kids used to call John "Grandpa Mary" because they call my parents "Grandma and Grandpa Mort". So complicated!

I also have another kid around here somewhere, but Sam has been laying low, so I don't have pictures of him right now. He's getting ready to go to Philmont with some friends from scouts. This is a high adventure backpacking trip to New Mexico...I think maybe he needs to get out there and do some stadium steps with that backpack on if he's going to get up and down that mountain!

I've been doing lots of sewing but haven't had time to take any pictures (or more appropriately, haven't taken the time to take any pictures). Also a little spinning, some knitting, and I discovered freeform knitting and crochet, which might be my new favorite thing to do if I can figure out what to do with the things I have been making!

The Olden Days

Theresa posted this to her facebook site the other day...I am just cracking up...what goobs we were! this is at a Dead show in Columbus, circa 1988. Joan and I made our tie-dyes, I think. And poor Robin looks like she's just trying to tolerate us. I really don't remember a whole lot about this show....