Birthday Camera

The very first picture:

Flowers from my staff:



One of my cool special effects to highlight the fiberoptics bundle:




Oh yeah...the camera.

RHIP

One of the benefits of being The Boss is that you can spend an entire afternoon quietly goofing off in your office reading your new book and nobody will hassle you.

Something Visual

(...That's not too abysmal...)


The finished mittens for Eldest:

The finished glittens for myself:

They look like some sort of crustacean claw, don't they?

Just this evening I bound off the top of a small plain hat out of the rest of Ray's "Happy" yarn--two mittens and a hat from one skein! (Go buy some, y'heah?)

And also:

On Friday September 21 I chopped off every last bit of anything still blooming to make an impromptu bouquet. Damned if my bee balm didn't up and send forth three more new blooms which are only now starting to fade.

Behold: still blooming on Sunday, October 21, 2007 in Zone Freaking THREE.

Something Textual

Yeah, yeah, I've been completely absent from the blogging world for a while. Oh wait, I forgot: we're the blogosphere when the talking newsheads are trying to sound trendy by mentioning us. Bite my tired keyboard ya morons; you'll impress me far more by learning how to speak the language.

Can you tell I'm a weensy bit cranky today?

Catch-up: My crazy mother came and went without major incident; we can thank hotel pools, complicated jigsaw puzzles and knitting for keeping me from going completely bugfuck while in her presence and wine for keeping me from doing same after she went back to her hotel room. She and Youngest Duckling hit it off pretty well which was a good thing since the Big Two didn't much care for her. I was surprised both at how much she'd aged in the past four years and at how much anger I had bubbling up each night.

But hey, I've done the Right Thing and lived through it which is more than can be said for many.

Also finished Eldest's blue-and-white mittens and am very nearly done with those glittens I showed you last post. Yeah yeah I know they're more correctly called "shooter's mittens" but since I don't currently shoot and have no plans to purchase firearms the half-glove-half-mitten moniker works just fine.

Did these puzzles too. Started them with Mom as something to do on the last day of her stay (10/8) then finished them the following Saturday night. Guess what are now mod-podged permanently together and packaged for mailing her way?

What I haven't been doing much is blogging. Partly because I've been waiting to get a new digital camera and partly because I've been having enough trouble maintaining correspondence with the people I've actually met in the flesh...but largely because my tiny corner of the virtual world just hasn't seemed that relevant lately. Writing is a selfish and time-consuming occupation and there are so many people doing it better and more frequently both in virtual and paper forms that my own words of wit have faded.

Some of the print words which have impressed me of late are these. So much so that I think hers may be the book everyone gets from me for Christmas this year.

(For the virtual words which impress and amuse me you have my blogroll.)

I gotta get back to the Real World now....

Happy Glittens

I need another project like I need a full-body tattoo but last Friday night after stopping by a wake I cast on for this:

The yarn is Ray's "Happy" which has to help, right?


As mentioned previously, mittens are a good judge of how much Actual Knitting one is doing since they go pretty quickly. Although you can't see them I started the decreases on the little-finger side last night.

For those of you wondering, the plastic yarn needle is what I've been using as a cable stitch holder. All my plastic knitting pins are either in use or MIA so I've had to make do with a poor second.