Last Days of Slow Rhythms

This week I was acutely aware of the countdown to school. I will lose my natural sleep rhythms. Gone will be the days of waking at a decent hour, and staying up until midnight. Gone will be the possibilities of poached eggs on toast or a quick smoothie for lunch. No more morning walks. No more afternoons listening to podcasts while I knit, or hours spent reading.

Nope. All will be back to structured time when I will have to decide which to do with my non-working time--walk, read, or knit. I rarely get to two in a day, and almost never all three. But it will be good to work with students again. So good!!

We are only opening online, which is no way to do school, but is better than the risk of face-to-face with teenagers.

This week a sweater has seemed to be flying off my needles! It is the Harebell cardigan that I have wanted to make for so long. I wanted to make it in the Cherries color, but the yarn is on closeout (Already?! I think. But then, that tells you how long I've had this on my wish list) and so I went with this rust color--which could also be a sort of cherry color--like dark Washington cherries.

I made a gauge swatch. I always make a gauge swatch for a sweater. Always. The bigger swatch here is using the needle size from the pattern, and the smaller swatch is the one I made using a smaller size needle to get the correct gauge. Even though there is only a half size difference in the needles, you can see that the swatches are very different, even though there is just that little bit of difference.

And here is the sweater! I am so excited about it. I really, really hope it fits well.

I've also been harvesting load after load of tomatoes. When I ordered these, they came in a packet of four. Two plants up near the house yielded four total tomatoes--all from one plant. The two plants back away from the house have grown in gigantic, uncontrollable monsters, full full full of tomatoes.
Next year, I plan not to piddle with the area nearer the house and enlarge the back area.

In the night, some creature--probably a possum or raccoon eats the ripe tomatoes. He waits for them to get ripe, just like I do, then eats it. So, I've started picking these about one day early just to outwit him. Although, there are so many tomatoes, there are enough for him too!

Pumpkins sprung up in our natural mulch pile where I threw the Halloween pumpkin carcasses. We had a great little patch going and lots of blooms and several ripening pumpkins.  However, the leaves began to wilt and I noticed one pumpkin was getting a hole and had a rotting looking stem vine. This could only be one thing--a boring insect larvae from a type of squash bug. Rrrr! So, I ended up cutting all three of the lovely growing pumpkins, figuring to get them before the insects. One is pretty much a goner. I poked open his hole and dug out four or five feasting larvae (yuck!), them left him outside by the gate. The other two I brought into the house, hoping that if they keep cool enough in the air conditioning they might hang on til October. Maybe.

We've been eating what we can from our garden and from the local farmer's market. Lots of delicious eggplant!

Our crazy blooming flowers are slowing down a little, starting to look tired. I cut back a hydrangea, hoping I've cut it right and at the right time so that next year it will bloom again. The cut blossoms get very dry and keep their shape and don't need any water after the initial drink you give them right after cutting. I have discovered that this works best after they have finished their pollination stage which is when they are at the top of their color. You have to wait for them to fade a little.

 I hope the next week goes well for you all. 

Days Past: Cycle Touring/Days Present: Knitting a Cardigan

Summer is as hot as ever (maybe even hotter than ever) and my unstructured school holiday days are running out.

One of my goals this summer was to seriously get back to my Lush sweater.  I know, who knits a wool sweater when the temperature is nearing 100 degrees?  But, I have had the yarn for years and always mean to get to knitting, but things get in the way.  One of those "things" was that I knit the lace panel for a size medium and it turned out waaay too big.  The sweater is supposed to fit quite tight to highlight the lace.  I double and triple checked my measurement math and decided that a small was actually what I needed to do, so I put the whole project on hold. For a few years. *ahem*

Recently, I redid the lace panel and then faced my fears of integrating it into the cardigan by picking up stitches.  I am now past the part where you separate the sleeves. I know I had to do all this before the crush of school. And I did!  So, now it's just the basic back and forth of the body, the sleeves--which I will make shorter than the pattern, and the button band.

It looks small--but of course it is on 24" circulars, so it would.  But I think it will work out okay. I am also nervous that I will run out of yarn because I bought it on close out and its discontinued. So--as always--I'll just keep on and hope for the best until I get enough of it made to try it on.

We have a couple of home projects going on, and one of them entails clearing out our storage shed. I have a bicycle I love that I have decided to sell.

It is sad for me to sell this wonderful bike.  But the truth is that I do not ride it anymore. Unfortunately, where I live is too urban and not bike friendly. To ride properly I would have to carry this elsewhere in my car and go for a ride.  I am just not likely to do that.

This is a serious touring bicycle and I have spent many days cycling from one town or campground to the next, spending the night in a tent--or once a monastery!--along the way.  I once spent an unforgettable freezing cold, rainy, spring break cycling across the Florida panhandle. I also spent a much more pleasurable week riding across Holland.

April 1996

It was tulip season when we went and we could smell the hyacinth for miles. In the picture, the yellow are daffodils and the white are hyacinth. My son was nearly two and we are stopped for a snack or lunch maybe--bread and cheese and jam I'll bet.

Holland is blessedly flat (mostly, except for the dunes which make a fantastic environmental contrast in a week of mostly fields and farms). Holland has a bike path network across the whole country.  We rode from one campground to the next, often staying in little cabins called trekkershutten along the way.  These are basic little cabins.  You needed your own sleeping bag as I recall, but some had a little cook stove inside and most were set up to include a small store where you could get fresh bread in the morning. Lovely!

Trekkershutten 1996

I am so lucky to have had many, many adventurous days on my touring bike. It will be sad to see it go. However, I hope I am passing on the means for someone else's adventure.

Spring Flux

Old man winter seems to finally have given up and moved on.  The best of spring's blossoms have passed and now it is the sweet, swift slide to summer.

Life is in flux right now--like the season--and I am trying to keep myself calm and reasonable.

The flux:

• School is almost out and the students are like ponies anxious to leave the stable.  It takes all I've got to keep them engaged. 
• I am hunting for a new job closer to home, and my window of opportunity is closing in.  
• The bathroom re-do is still in the works.
• My youngest son is having housing problems in a town far away where I can do little to help.  
• The house next door, connected to many nostalgic memories, is scheduled for tear down later this week.

• Also, the house on the other side of us sold and may be torn down as well. 

These tear downs unsettle me.

Our part of town is a hot little market right now--little houses on lots of expensive land.   I called this blog 'Notes from the Buffer Zone' because this neighborhood was a street of small, old houses smack between a few streets of stately old homes and a street of scraggly unkempt and condemned houses.  When I first moved here 30 years ago, we laughed and called it the Buffer Zone.

Well, of course the condemned houses were torn down (along with the woods behind them) and developed and now my street itself--which used to be students and artists and senior citizens in the Buffer Zone days is rapidly becoming something other.  It is odd to watch this transition.  I never would have thought that houses on my street would sell for over a million dollars.  It is a disturbing kind of gentrification.

But, on the be calm and reasonable side of things--I am very happy in my little house. And happy that at last, the garden is in!

It is not too lovely to look at with fencing all around, but I've spied wild rabbits in the yard. Last year they devastated our beans and cowpeas right as the seedlings came up. So, what better way to keep bunnies out, than to use a pen (well several pens) designed to keep them in? 

While gardening, I found this little nest made partly with soft rabbit fur.  I wonder what kind of tiny birds lived here?

Also, I have been s-l-o-w-l-y knitting this little fair isle cardigan sweater. I am finally up to the yoke.  I need to finish this as I have lost some of my motivation for it.  It really shouldn't take as long to make as it has taken me.  It's just that I only get to do a few rows at a time because bits of it take focus--like sit in a straight backed chair at a table kind of knitting focus--and I just don't feel in that mood very often.

I have also been knitting another hitchhiker shawl at the same time which has slowed progress on this little cardigan as well.

I am sure that by my next post here in the blogisphere, many of my concerns will have played out.  I'll just keep my eyes on the small delights of the season, keep breathing, and have faith that the universe will smile kindly on us all.