I think five months of radio silence is a sufficient time of transition, no?  Adventures have been had.  New friends have been made.  New projects started, some old projects abandoned, some finally finished for good.

I’m rural living once again and holy crap, I’ve got time on my hands to spare out here.  Fall demands baking and knitting and movie watching on the couch.   On my computer.  Which is less than ideal but a helluva lot cheaper than a new TV. 

I have been to the coast and the mountains and the river.  I bought a wetsuit took up boogie boarding in the frigid Pacific Ocean.  Books, trashy and otherwise, have been consumed by the dozen in the past couple of months.  Camping, hiking and feasting took up my summer, along with some good visits with very old friends.  The transition continues, but I’m looking forward to sharing what I’m up to again.

The growing season is not here yet.  Monday I took the dog and drove into the first 75 degree day of the year on a little vision quest.  My journey led me to Sauvie Island to take a mellow and highly enjoyable walk along the Wapato Greenway.

Sauvie Island is situated just north and west of Portland in the Columbia River.  If you’ve never been, this is an agricultural oasis worth seeing.  All summer you can harvest you-pick berries, peaches, and apples, or purchase other produce from several market locations on the island.  In the fall, heaps of Portlanders turn out to frolic (only sometimes drunkenly) through the Corn Maze or pick up pumpkins and squash for Halloween festivites.  I went there looking for some signs of spring on a beautiful day.

I was not disappointed.  I’ll go back once summer is in full force and get blackberries and blueberries by the pound.  My next weekend adventure is going to be some time spent at the Scappoose Bay Paddling Center learning how to kayak.  Well worth it with so many gorgeous estuary systems to explore in the area. 

There’s something particularly satisfying about the first few days of sunshine in the Pacific Northwest.  Everyone is extra super nice to one another just because we’re all so thrilled that it’s not raining.  That it’s actually warm.  This is not to bemoan the rain, it’s part of what makes everything so green and lush and gorgeous.  But let’s just say those first couple of days of nice weather are celebrated with a singular relief and anticipation for the summer to come.  The dog is having it, and so am I.

I didn’t realize it until Morgen posted Clapotis no. 2, but I have, in fact, been knitting the same beautiful scarf pattern.  And I gotta admit I love it, too.

I used Highlands Kid Slique yarn from Prism.  This yarn is a double strand, one of mohair, the other of a shiny and colorful rayon blend.  I also added beads to the pattern which involved a level of yarn separating OCD over three skeins that I won’t be repeating any time in the near future.

The indications for changing the pattern to suit worked great, I knit this on #13 needles at half the width of the original.  It’s almost a shame that summer is coming and I’ll have to hang it up for the season.  Nah.  I take that back.  I’ll gladly do the sun dance for whatever nice weather we get around here in the next few weeks.

We were at Dad’s this weekend for some R & R and woodstove fires and car fixing.  My Sunday morning looked something like this:

Add to that some coffee and breakfast and a couple hundred pages of a good book and it makes for a fine weekend.

I imagine Morgen would agree with me when I say that not knowing if you’ll continue to have a job and/or looking for work is kind of stressful.  To say the least.  Particularly right now.  If you deal with it for long enough it goes beyond a persistent nagging worry about how you’re going to pay the bills and transcends it, becoming something more like fatalism, a great mental gallic shrug.  I’m not really a negative person by nature, so this feeling has inspired what I like to call little zen moments of life.  Moments where you can dump all that mental static and just enjoy whatever it is you’re doing, wherever you are.  A few from the past week:

• Waking up to snow and sunshine and ice crystals on Sunday morning.
• Standing in the middle of a creek with my fishing pole getting hailed/rained/snowed on.
• Listening to a girl with a beautiful voice sing songs she’d created in a dark bar on MLK.
• Finishing a book that immediately earned a place among all-time favorites in my heart: The River Why by David James Duncan.
• Drinking a cup of flawlessly brewed Ethiopia Mordecofe at Kettleman’s with the perfect amount of brown sugar and cream.

It’s usually the little things that deserve to be appreciated most, and honestly, I get tired of fretting endlessly about contingency plans.  The plans still have to be made, of course, but it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the little things in the meantime.

My meantime this evening will involve a long conversation with Charles Shaw (cabernet? merlot? pinot?), delicious bruschetta, and a Katamari challenge versus a petite blonde with very sharp elbows.  Cheers.

The weather is really more rainy than cold in PDX right now.  I’ll take it.  For the past month or so the heat has been on the fritz in my little office and I’ve been hunched over my space heater trying not to freeze.  I dug a ball of blue Filatura di Crosa Print 127 out of my stash and made these little beauties:

Not quite enough on one skein for both gloves, but I made lemonade out of my lemons and came up with that green accent block from another color of the same type of yarn.  I really need to start taking pictures in better light. 

Lately I’ve been making frankenpatterns.  It’s pretty empowering to be able to take a bit from this pattern here, that pattern there, and make something more free form.  Also, it never ceases to amaze me how much you learn from doing the same project more than once.  It really gives you a feel for how certain techniques work and a better “vocabulary” when it comes to reading completed work.

Like so many of us this year, I’m trying to keep things pretty basic over the next couple of months.  If you’re in Portland and interested in seeing some pretty ideas for your home or garden, check out the Yard, Garden & Patio Show this weekend at the Convention Center.  I’ll be representing my rocks, as per usual. 

After the disastrous mass-extermination that I accidentally waged on my garden starts last year, I’m going to keep it simple and only grow some tasty red currant tomates.  Those managed to survive and even thrive under my (apparently) aggressive tender care.  

I can almost smell spring.

Inspired by those cheesy 100 Places to See/Things to Do/Books to Read, etc. guides out there, and finding myself with some down time as I waited for unsuspecting potential customers to alight on the rocky ledges of my retail trap… er.. tradeshow booth, I created a List.  So, in no particular order, things I’d like to accomplish:

1. Learn to weld.
2. Learn to kayak.
3. Catch a salmon.
4. Write a novel.
5. Visit Siwa, Egypt.
6. Own and use a spinning wheel.
7. Swim under Havasu Falls.



8. Complete a Masters degree.
9. Own a home.
10. Own a small business.
11. Get paid for my opinion/advice.
12. Hike the Pacific Crest Trail.
13. Soak in the Three Forks hotspring.
14. Go on a horseback riding vacation.
15. Swim in the Pacific off Baja, California.
16. Host a salon.
17. Raise pygora goats.
18. Build a small house. 





19. Go to Portugal with my mom and sister.
20. Build a treehouse.
21. Spend a month in Greece.



22. Complete a sweater (attention span of a goldfish, people).
23. Learn how to belay and set a top rope.
24. Surely about a million other things I haven’t yet written down.

Now you try it.  It’s fun.

Two hats recently completed:

Wanna see what they look like on?

The magenta yarn is a Filatura di Crosa 127 Print colorway and all of them are gorgeous.  When you’re knitting circular patterns for simple hats or gloves you get this effect:

It’s kinda hard to take pictures of the top of your head by yourself.  Next time I’m enlisting volunteers.  If you’re not watching football today (I’m just going for the food, football bores me to tears), get out and buy a little something local.  Be it yarn store, cafe or whatever, it’s a good time to give a little love to your local small businesses.  We’re all in this economic crap basket together.  And I’m a firm believer in perseverance.