sunday

Sunday was good. I had the bright idea of hunting out a geocache near our home so I talked most of the family into going with me, entered the co-ordinates into the GPS, stashed a few items of “treasure” in a bag, and off we went.

It was a little cold and windy but the trail was steep and I was soon overheating. It was great to get the exercise though, and the best thing was that we found the cache. You have to accept that sometimes you just can’t find it – someone may have moved it, or the co-ordinates are off – in the case of one cache that I have the details on, I’m sure it’s where the wildfire went through a few months ago so it’s probably a melted unrecognisable lump now!

Geocaches usually hold a notebook and pen for you to log your visit plus some small treasures that you can trade. It’s fun for kids but also for adults. It gives your hike a sense of purpose.

We ate dinner (soup, salad and sesame flatbread – I love soup on a wintery dark evening) early and I had the dishes washed by 5.30. That made for a long evening of knitting. I finished the pecan socks – I’m always amazed by how fast they go if I just put my mind to it – I suppose I am so often doing little bits here and there when I’m out and about that I expect them to take ages. You’ll see a little grey in the toes – that’s the grey woolly nylon that I put in to make them a little stronger. These are the most basic socks that I make.

I’ve had a few sock books from the library lately by people such as Wendy Johnson, Cat Bordhi, Cookie A, et al, and whilst I love their sock designs I tend to fall back on the old favourite. I think it’s probably because I knit my socks at a looser gauge than they do – if you’re using fingering weight yarn at 7 or 8 stitches to the inch, then it’s easier to work one of their designs.

Please note the environment in which the socks are being photographed – that’s my living room floor which is currently strewn with many hundreds of Hot Wheels cars. In one way, I’m glad that the boys are playing with them, after months of them being stuck in a box, but the vacuuming will be somewhat tricky later on if they don’t get picked up.

The pink sock grew last night too, so I can start the gusset increases next. I put that blue marker on there to signify the instep. I prefer that side to the other one, so I want it to be on top of my foot.

I’m going to put in a request here for healing thoughts/prayers for my dad. He’s due to have surgery this week – Friday the 13th, can you believe that? It’s a major procedure as he has an aortic aneurysm that has to come out. He feels fine but the doctors say it has to come out – he’s known about its presence for a couple of years but apparently it’s getting bigger.

I expect he will be reading this so Dad, I love you, and we’re all looking forward to a successful outcome and speedy recovery.

 

knitting…yes, really

In case you thought I’d forgotten that this blog is called NicolaKNITS, here – TA DA - is some knitting progress. I’m calling these socks In the Pink for obvious reasons (when you start a new project on Ravelry, you have to come up with a name, otherwise they’d just be another pair of socks)!

This is the Bernat Sox skein that I bought from Zellers. I haven’t finished the plain elann esprit ones but this yarn is prettier. I had a bit of hassle with Judy’s Magic Toe-up Cast On, or whatever it’s called, so ended up doing an “easy toe” (that’s what the book calls it) with a provisional cast on. My gauge seemed to be tighter than anticipated so I originally increased to 60 stitches instead of the planned 56 – then I put it on over my toes and found that it was too wide – I ran a lifeline through the round of stitches just before my last increase and frogged back. Now I’m continuing on with the 56 stitches and hoping for a perfect fit.

I returned the library book today and I can’t for the life of me remember the name of it, but the intention is to make a gusset heel which makes a V shape at the heel – it looks very neat and makes a change from my usual slip stitch heel flap.

This is the cardigan so far. The back and front yokes were joined under the arm, I changed to a larger needle and started the cable pattern. The cables are causing my fingers to tire quickly – that is, the cable rows plus the row after each cable row. The stitches get pretty tight. So after a few rows of this tonight, I moved on to the sock!

A close-up of the cabling. The pattern has you work three twists then a short stretch without.  I haven’t quite finished the first repeat here.

The weather has been quite mild lately and I’ve only needed a vest or light sweater under my coat (or no coat at all – my internal thermostat is running hotter than it used to). It will be nice to have this heavier cardigan for snuggling on the sofa when it’s really cold out.

An Echo in the Bone (spoiler alert)

OK, if you’re planning to read this book, don’t read this post.

I read the 800-plus pages of Diana Gabaldon’s latest epic in about 5 days. It would have been less, but, you know, I had to sleep, feed the family, etc.

In this book, Jamie and Claire continue having their usual adventures. The theme of the Outlander series? Whatever can go wrong, WILL go wrong.

Jamie and Claire are planning to sail from 18th century America to Scotland to pick up  Jamie’s printing press and bring it home. Well, nothing is ever simple, and they get sidetracked, waylaid, almost killed a few times…the usual. It takes them about 10 months to actually get to Scotland because of the war with the British getting in the way.

Brianna and Roger, meanwhile, are living in the 20th century, settled at Lallybroch in Scotland with their two children. Life seems to be good, but then events take a downward turn.

The most frustrating thing is that Diana has left us once again with an unfinished story – a cliffhanger – a child is missing, Jamie and Claire are not together, some loose ends from previous books have been tied up, other loose ends have been created – and I am left wishing she’d just get to the end of the story and give us…..closure, I suppose. Aren’t seven mega-thick books enough to tell us the life story of Jamie and Claire? I’d think so.

If you’re interested in reading the series, start with Outlander – then Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, The Fiery Cross, Drums of Autumn, A Breath of Snow and Ashes (if you’re in the UK, then the first book is called Cross Stitch). People coming to this series now have the benefit of not having to wait three years between books!

PS: I just started a forum conversation about this in Remnants on Ravelry if you want to join in the discussion.

we did it

I’m happy to say that Ninja Boy and I successfully crossed Okanagan Lake – twice – today. Back in August, when we were still doing Taekwondo, one of the goals our instructor set was to run across the bridge and back as a condition for our next belt testing. We started with the Couch to 5K program and, whilst we are no longer practising TKD, we persevered with the jogging and this week made it to 30 minutes non-stop.

Today we drove down to the bridge, parked the car, had a 5 minute warm-up walk along the road, then headed off onto the bridge. There’s a huge hump in the bridge so that boats can go underneath. (The old bridge had a lifting mechanism that would raise a section of the bridge to allow sailboats to go through, which had the unfortunate effect of holding up the traffic in both directions for 10 minutes. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but that is one busy road.)  Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that there was a bit of uphill slogging balanced by a pleasant downhill

Back in the summer, I checked the length of the bridge using my car’s odometer – 2 km – so we knew that we’d be jogging for at least 4km. It took us 20 minutes. That’s an average of 5 minutes per kilometre, or 12km/h.

Considering that (back in August) I thought it would kill me if I attempted to run across the bridge and back, I think I did rather well!

 

world vegan month

I was under the impression that November 1st was World Vegan Day, but have since seen information to the effect that this is actually World Vegan MONTH. In the spirit of this, and because I just read this on Vegan.com’s blog, here’s a link to a site where you can sign a petition to

STOP FEEDING CHICKEN SHIT TO COWS

Yes, you read that right, they feed chicken “litter” to cows – isn’t it a lovely thought that the meat you might be eating (or the milk you’re drinking) has been raised with such a nutritious diet.

If this, or any of the other compelling information that is readily available out there about the benefits of plant-based diets, encourages you to eat less meat, here’s a vegan blog that has lots of delicious recipes for you to try.

monday monday

I love getting comments – it’s nice to know that there’s someone reading my ramblings, and even though I can look at my blog stats and see that I do have a regular slew of visitors, comments are just the icing on the cake.

I was very flattered to receive a comment from the Babycakes bakery, no less, on my post of the other day where I raved about the recipes in their book. I guess they keep tabs on any mentions that they receive online.

The book-reading is going slower than I had hoped – life keeps getting in the way. I pushed Ninja Boy out of the door yesterday afternoon to have a 30 minute jog, the final week of our Couch to 5K program. We skipped a week a couple of times, but we’ve hit the goal, and now I think we should jog across the Okanagan Lake Bridge and back (as that was the original reason for us starting the jogging). I estimate that to be 4 kilometres – if we can do that, I will be very pleased with myself. When I think back to the summer, when we jogged with some other Taekwondo people as a warmup for a fitness class, I was hopeless (admittedly it was about 30C/90F), and the thought of crossing the bridge and back made me want to lie down in a darkened room. Now I believe it’s doable. It does have quite an incline where the hump in the bridge allows boats to sail underneath, but we live and train in a hilly area and it shouldn’t be too hard.

Today we went and played Monopoly with friends, then visited the thrift store where we found some buttons (one of which has been sewn on a crocheted bag that I made for Lego Nut’s new camera), some knitting needles for a proposed kids knitting class that I intend to lead sometime, and a cotton fair isle sweater that was hanging in the men’s section but doesn’t look at all masculine so I intend to wear it. Just have to give it a quick wash first.

I hope your week started well – talk to you again soon.

 

almost forgot…

if you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because I’m stuck into An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon, which I picked up from the library today….all 800 plus pages of it….I foresee an unproductive week!

babycakes

Babycakes is the name of an awesome recipe book that I’ve had from the library the past few weeks. The author is the owner of a bakery of the same name in New York City and the best thing about it is…..it’s vegan! Many of the recipes are gluten-free – the ones that aren’t use spelt flour. She uses a lot of coconut oil, and the only sweeteners are agave syrup or evaporated cane juice.

Above are some chocolate chip cookie sandwiches which I made today. As if chocolate chip cookies weren’t wonderful enough, these are sandwiched with vanilla frosting. Surprisingly, the frosting in the book is quite low in sugar – I made a half batch, which was the perfect quantity for this recipe, and there’s only one-eighth of a cup of agave in it. We all loved these cookies.

I have had to return the book today but made sure to write out a couple of recipes first – the gluten-free cupcakes and the apple pie look divine!

I hope you all had a Happy Halloween. My boys didn’t show any interest in dressing up this year. We don’t trick or treat as we expect that most candy won’t be vegan. We didn’t even carve any pumpkins. However we did go to a private house not far from where we live where they had set up a “haunted house” complete with spooky scenes, sound effects, skulls, cobwebs etc, and a couple of creepy cloaked and masked people who kept appearing to scare us. It was fun and worth the $2 each that we paid for the scare (all the money goes to charity). The boys received a loot bag at the exit and it turned out that a few of the pieces of candy were OK (as in vegan, not as in healthy)!

Boo!

 

excitement!

I’m looking forward to tomorrow. No, not because it’s Halloween, though going to the “haunted house” tomorrow night should be fun. The reason is that I have (drumroll please) An Echo in the Bone to pick up at the library!

This is the seventh (I think) in the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon and I can’t wait to read what happens to Jamie and Claire next. I haven’t seen any reviews or spoilers, so it will all be a surprise.

I would vote this series as the best of all time. It totally spoiled me in that I can no longer read trashy paperbacks (no great loss there, I suppose). The love story of the 18th century Jamie Fraser and the 20th century Claire Beauchamp Randall is so detailed, so deep, so….LONG! It is beyond compare.

If you haven’t started reading this series yet…do it now!

The Two Ronnies

Just a quickie before I (finally) head off to bed…a youtube video that takes me back to when I was a teen. The Two Ronnies (Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker) was a show that I loved. Our family spent a fair amount of time watching TV and in those days of the good old BBC there was lots of quality programming and of course NO commercials. (The BBC still doesn’t have commercials, but the independent channels do, though I don’t think they’ve quite reached the awfulness of North American commercials as far as intrusiveness and cringe-worthiness go. However, I may be wrong – I haven’t lived there for 15 years so things might have gone downhill.)

I recall when I was at a vocational college, the year after I left secondary school, we had an end-of-year show put on by the students, and I paired up with another girl and we did a Two Ronnies- type sketch where we pretended to be newscasters. This was a regular part of their show and was always hilarious.