JOTD

Yesterday, Susan and I sat with our friend SueAnn for a few hours at the farmer's market.  It was a fabulously beautiful day and SueAnn is a very good joke teller.  This is one of my favorites:

A man was hired to paint a church.  Thinking to make a bit more profit on the job, he added some water to the paint to make it go farther.  He was almost done with the painting when it began to thunder and lightning.  Pouring rain soon washed all the paint off the building.  A loud voice boomed from the sky: "Repaint, repaint and thin no more."

(Happy Sunday!)

The Pig

The quarterly Relief Society meeting in Gaye's ward last week included exchange tables, i.e. you bring something you don't need and possibly find something you do need.  No money changes hands and the only people who might have a little less fun than the rest of us are the ones who have to clean up the left-overs and take them to DI.

Here's what I found:

 

I am very excited!  A new bank for change!!  Today was initiation day as I sorted the change from the past week.  I have been dividing it between five collection vessels.  That's not counting the pennies or dimes which have their own containers.  So the pig gets added, making it six.  There are two banks that are nearing capacity and then we will use a kind of Franklin method, adding the change to fewer banks and fewer banks as they fill.  The goal?  The three original banks will take a long time to fill but when this pig is full it will be time to buy an iMac.

It's good to have a plan.

Had To Try It!

 

Quite good!  The only thing missing was the melted butter!  :-)

PCC

I brought three recipes up to Seattle with me to test.  The dip recipe comes from Debbie MacComber's site, is really good and one that I will make again:

Beer Dip by Jo Anne Haydon

2 (8 oz.) pkgs. cream cheese, softened
1 pkg. dry ranch dressing mix
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
8 oz. beer (any flavor, even non-alcoholic will work)

Mix all ingredients together, until well blended. Chill and serve with crackers or pretzels.  It's even better, if there is anything left, the second day.

(Amy prefers the cream cheese pictured above.  I try not to buy any as I am incredibly weak.)

4x

I could be stressed about this but I am not.  I was the first to sign up for the two socks at a time Magic Loop  or Two Circulars class.  I was excited to give sock making another try!  I can do it!!

Not happy with what I did that first night so I ripped it out and got a slightly heavier weight yarn and slightly bigger needles.  Watched a YouTube video on the Magic Loop cast on and decided to start one sock rather than two, just as a practice/warm-up.

After about 6 rows, I was fairly confident I knew what I was doing, ripped out the practice work and cast on two socks.  Was amazingly successful and went to bed happy about the experience.

This morning I picked up where I left off and was doing fine until I suspected I had the work upside down, kind of.  Fiddled around a bit longer but decided it would wise to just carry it to the store and seek help.  We fixed the problem.

At home again, I got back at it and then was sure there was still something wrong because I was still picking up an extra stitch on one side of each row.  Figured out how to work around that and then as I was really thinking about it I realized that I was only knitting half a row at a time.  One row on sock one with an increase and one row on sock two with an increase, turn the work and knit a plain row on the back of sock one and knit a plain row on the back of sock two.  I thought I was on row 22 and actually I had only knit 11 rows and those rows had increases on just one side.  I was going to have to find a person with stub feet with the top of their foot in a noticeable wedge shape, wider on the bottom. 

Heavy sigh.

Must try again.  Perseverance and all that.

Surprised...But Not Really

I love my Dyson Animal!  I think I have had it about five years and while they are quite pricey, it was a tax refund purchase so you know, then that makes it a prize.

There was a mind set change involved though because it is bagless and I wasn't so sure I wanted to see what was getting picked up.  As it's turned out, the clear plastic canister is no longer clear but rather frosted because of all the dirt I vacuum up that has been carried in by my roommates.

A couple of months ago I discovered another release button and I no longer have to reach inside the canister to extract the dog hair that gets compacted in there.  I know, gross.  I have periodically been washing out the canister and this weekend was truly amazed to discover yet another release button that gave me access to the filters.  The side of the yellow filter piece has pictures that show you exactly how to care for the two pieces!!  The not really surprised part of this story is that the blue foam insert was black when I pulled it out and when it was finally clean ( a lot of water) it says right on it that it should be washed every six months.  Sigh.

Cleaning all those parts has yielded one sparkly and no longer stinky vacuum cleaner!  Yay!

Bellingham

Western Washington State University is located in Bellingham which is just a hop, skip and a jump from Canada.  I was hoping to visit Tristan and see where he lives and schools but then there was the I5 bridge that broke, which is the way to get to Bellingham plus it was the Memorial Day weekend with extra people on the roads.  So, we didn't go until Tuesday and Tristan had class until 4 so it really was a last minute visit.

We wondered if this bridge was functionally obsolete!

As the passenger, I could scrutinize the bridge structure.

Our creative detour provided quite a good look at Burlington.

Many sculptures on campus and this one was very interesting.

Can you see the umbrella painted on the side of the building?

Ha!

I love the texture of these stones.

We saw another piece by this sculptor in the Olympic Sculpture Park!

Red Square, the bricks are wet from rain not the fountain.

Construction going on behind this sculpture.

Calder wannabe?

Sculpture of a different kind... there's a lot of rain here.

The most beautiful campus.  You feel like you could pitch a tent 5 feet off the walking paths.

The library.  Wow.

Classrooms!

Man Pies, where we had dinner. This is the outside front of the building.

We drove through Starbuck's for a Mocha Frappaccino Grande for the trip home (80 miles).
 Brian knit the cup cozy!

The broken bridge.  Getting dark and so I filled in some light. 
(click on the picture to make it larger)

It was far too short of a visit and fairly exhausting but I'm so glad we got to go!