Ceridwen’s Cauldron

I woke up this morning to find the wrong cat on my bed. Baron was sleeping down by my feet, a position usually reserved for Miho. She curls up there, and the second I get up she jumps up and follows me into the hall, waiting for pats.

Baron rarely sleeps on the bed, doesn’t even stay there for more than 5 minutes at a time, but he didn’t even move when I got up. He just kind of sat there and eyed me blearily. He was still there when I came back in to get dressed for the day.

I went about my morning, and it wasn’t until I was about to walk out the door that I realized that I hadn’t seen Miho all morning. Not on the bed, not in the kitchen as I packed my lunch, not crawling all over me while I did my morning mail-check. Scott hadn’t seen her either.

She has a habit of jumping into closets when we open the doors, and I’ve been worried for ages that one day we wouldn’t notice her and she’d get herself stuck in there for a full day. So I went around the house opening closet doors, looking in odd corners and calling her name.

She didn’t answer.

Scott suggested that I check our bedroom closet. There’s no danger of her getting shut in there, as the cats know how to open the door - but she has taken to wandering in and sleeping.

And sure enough, high on a shelf, in the darkest back corner of the closet, all curled up among my sweaters, was Miho.She was so far back I could barely see her. I reached up and patted her and she blinked at me blearily. (”Whaaaaat? I was asleep.”)

My guess is Baron has taken the early-morning shift, and Miho is on vacation.

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I have tomatoes! Actually, I have known this since Wednesday, and I was so excited, it was all I could do not to rush right to the blog and tell everyone. They are green yet, but they are there.

There are two tomatoes each on the Big Beef, and as of yesterday, THREE on the Black Prince. The cherry tomato plants are flowering mightily and I found a tiiiiiny green tomato on one.

And there are zucchini as well – small as of yet, but there are 4 or 5 tucked at the base of the plant. The plant, incidentally, is a monstrosity.

The Brandywine, for its part, is still sulking. Although, Mousme visited on the weekend and said that it looks better than her brandywines, even, and I shouldn’t expect a heritage plant to perform as well as all the hybrids I have planted elsewhere. Still, it is being a serious underachiever.

The sunflowers are growing by leaps and bounds and need to be attached to the stakes again.

My strawberry plant has decided that it needs to expand and put out a runner, which extended across the deck. And then I caught it sneaking between the deck slats – trying to get into the unrestricted freedom of the back garden. I must watch the sneaky thing – it’s almost as bad as the mint.

I am mentally making plans for next year – peas, beans, carrots, more zucchini, and  a raspberry plant or two. Oh, and cucumbers. I shall train them to climb netting which I will attach to the back deck.

I think that’s all the garden news there is to be had. But tomatoes! And zucchini! It is VERY exciting.

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I finished the neverending socks. Photos to follow as soon as we get a sunny day and remember to take some.

In the meantime, I thought I’d talk a bit about how I started doing something as crazy as knitting socks in the first place. I mean – it seems a little odd, right? You can buy socks at any department store, and for way cheaper, and with much less time spent on them.

I could tell you that the socks I’m making are way better than anything you’d buy in a store (they are), but that’s not really why I make them. The truth is, I enjoy the process of knitting, and the fact that I can end up with something that looks like a sock at the end is something that I find endlessly cool.

But there’s even more to it than that. If you hang around here long enough, you’ll figure out that L.M. Montgomery’s books were really influential in my childhood years (and continue to be so in my adult years), and that my favourite was probably Rilla of Ingleside, which tells the story of Anne’s youngest daughter, who is a teenager during World War One. It’s a fascinating account of what life was like in Canada during the war, and my copy is broken-spined and dog-eared from the many times that I’ve read it.

The story goes that Rilla is just becoming a teenager, and is determined that the next four years of her life are going to be full of fun and parties. Then the war starts, and she finds her brothers and the boy she loves going off to war, and herself at home, doing all she can to support the war effort,  including knitting socks for the soldiers…

“I finished my sixth pair of socks today. With the first three I got Susan to set the heel for me. Then I thought that was a bit of shirking, so I learned to do it myself. I hate it–but I have done so many things I hate since 4th of August that one more or less doesn’t matter. I just think of Jem joking about the mud on Salisbury Plain and I go at them.”

Of course, I don’t hate it like Rilla did, but the idea of knitting socks captured my imagination, and I asked my grandmother to teach me how it was done. She bought me my first set of double-pointed needles, and taught me how to purl (I already knew how to knit). I never finished so much as the ribbing on those socks, incidentally. But they were also made out of a terrible grey acrylic yarn, and were far too large to fit any human foot.

I also don’t blame Rilla for hating  the socks – if they were all one drab colour, it’s no wonder she did. Socks get LONG when there’s nothing to break up the monotony.

Anyway, the reason this came up today, is because the Yarn Harlot (a Canadian knitter and blogger) is one of the people behind a Sock Museum, where you can see the evolution of the sock, and find links to historic sock patterns, including the American Red Cross’ World War One Sock Pattern, likely very similar to the ones that Rilla was making.

I have added the pattern to my list of socks I want to make.

One wonders – does that make it fan art?

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It is a conspiracy. Against me personally.

First, Zellers did not have the yarn I wanted. And never does, ever.

Then, The next Zellers I went to also did not have the yarn (there are two within striking distance, I thought I would check both.)

Neither Zellers had bamboo knitting needles in the size I wanted, though both, of course, had the sizes above and below the one I wanted.

And then I said, fine, I’m going to go look for other things, and that’s when it got nasty.

Nobody has citronella lanterns, despite them being everywhere last year, and despite the oil being plentiful. Not home supply stores. Not hardware stores. Not garden centres. Not Pharmaprix, where they had stacks of them last year.

Likewise, none of them had even so much as a citronella candle, also usually plentiful this time of year. (These I eventually did find at a dollarama, but still no torches.)

EB Games did not have the kind of memory card I needed. (Doubtless when I find the memory card, they won’t have the controller I want to go with it.)

Every kind of beer is in stock at the Loblaws except the gluten-free kind I was supposed to pick up for my aunt, which they are completely sold out of.

They did have Mystique cider, but only because I wasn’t looking for it at the time (they never have it when I want to pick some up before a party).

Yeah, I know, as far as annoyances go, they’re pretty small. But it’s getting to be every time I look for something it is conspicuous in its absence. It is making me grumbly. And yet – it is strangely hilarious.

At least, if you’re not me.

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My office is essentially just one big, open room with desks in it, and my boss sits right next to me.

Every once in a while, he wants to know if one person or another is around, or at their desk, so he stands up, looks around, and plunks himself back down.

He looks entirely like a gopher when he does this.

And though I have been sitting here for months, and I have seen him do this probably several hundred times, it is somehow still funny.

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You should see my zucchini plant! I walked out onto the deck on Saturday to do some much-needed weeding, and there were four gorgeous flowers on it. They are big and impressive. Hopefully it’s a good sign of things to come. The tomatoes, which are in the same bed, are blossoming nicely as well, with the exception of the Brandywine. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, except that it’s a sad little plant. It’s not brown, but it doesn’t grow much and its leaves are all wilty. Every so often I see new growth, but otherwise it just looks unhappy. Poor thing.

I pulled up more than half of the sunflowers (woe, they were growing so well, but they have to be a certain distance apart) and put stakes in. They’re too small yet to really need the stakes, but I figured it’s better to put them in sooner rahter than later.

The impatiens are growing fairly well, but the farthest corner of the bed is likely not getting enough sunlight, and it’s getting all of the roof runoff, so the plants look sadly muddy and trampelled.

I went through the side yard and pulled up as many of the weed trees as I could find, along with a bunch of bindweed. (It’s growing up inside the cedars. The war continues.) We had a landscaping company in earlier in the week to cut down some saplings and pull up the stumps of the weed maples that were growing in our cedars and under the deck – much to my relief! The cedars still aren’t trimmed, that’s the next thing (landscaping company again, it’s way too big a job for us to do ourselves)..

The pool is now up to an only-slightly-chilly 21 degrees. Nice for swimming, particularly if you’ve just been gardening.

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Due to a breakdown in the signals on the train line last night, Scott and I (along with t!) ended up having dinner downtown and catching the late train home. Which left me ample time sitting in the station with my knitting.

Which meant that by the time I got home I had 4 rows (1/2 repeat, 288 stitches) left before the toe decreases. 

And so, on the train this morning, I finished the foot and  started the toe.

I wanted to do a little dance, but that looks weird when you’re on the train (and I wouldn’t want to drop any stitches at that point) so I will just say….

WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

(Reasons why the toe is exciting: it is in a different colour yarn, it has a different pattern, and it decreases in stitches every other row so it goes fast!)

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I just cannot tell you how done I am with the Very Third Pair of socks. They are not finished. But I am done.

It’s no reflection on the project itself – the socks are great. Beautiful, even. The yarn is perfect. The pattern works so well. They look exactly as good as I’d hoped they would, perhaps even better. And yet, as I reached the toe of the first sock, I was finished. Done with the pattern. Bored out of my mind. Ready for something else.

However, I’m damned if I’m going to spend all that time making one sock and then not have it be wearable due to not having a mate. So I immediately cast on the ribbing for the second sock, and as that was only 15 rows I finished it quickly, and since then I’ve pretty much been going on stamina. (Well, apart from the heel turn. That’s just fun.)

The foot in particular has been a slog, and so I’ve started giving myself little rewards – fact is, this pattern is the only thing I’m working on that’s simple enough to do while talking on the train, and I can get a repeat done on the train ride home while chatting with friends. On the ride in, I do something else – another pair of socks, or reading, or writing, or whatever. And then on the way home I work away at the Neverending Grey Sock, pattern repeat by pattern repeat, until I get to the toe, which is kind of exciting again.

It is going slowly, but it IS going. Well enough that I can encourage myself to get a few rows done on the ride in, and in my free moments at lunch, just so that there is less to do and I can be on to something different early next week.

So I’m down to three pattern repeats. Three.
That’s 24 rows.
That’s 1728 stitches.

And if you think that I’m not recalculating that number as I knit, you would be sorely mistaken. Because I am. ALL THE TIME.

With any luck, there will be some pictures this weekend. In the meantime… one stitch at a time.

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(I figure if I update on the garden every Monday, at least I know I’ve got a minimum of one post a week)

Now, THAT felt like a weekend. I convinced Scott to take the afternoon off on Saturday, so apart from vacuuming the pool (which he did) and some minor weeding, we spent the afternoon in the pool and spa.

(Actually, we also tried to spend some time at the Ste. Anne de Bellevue farmer’s market, but as they had a car show in every. single. one. of their public parking lots, and had shut down the main street, and since I dislike driving in circles looking for parking, and since getting parking there is difficult even when the parking lots aren’t in use, we gave it a miss and got our veggies at the supermarket this week.)

The sunflowers are up! After my posting last week that they hadn’t sprouted, I came home Monday evening to find every single seed had pushed its way through the ground. Now I have to thin them out to 45cm apart.

There are flowers on some of my tomato plants – the ones I planted mid-May.  They’re all looking good, except for the one brandywine I planted, which is just looking kind of sad and wilty. I don’t know what’s wrong with it – it’s in the middle of all the other plants, so it’s not like it’s getting less sun or water. It just doesn’t look as good.

I ate the first strawberry out of my strawberry planter. It was sweet and delicious. I can’t wait until they start showing up in the stores!

The impatiens look good, as do the pansies. We bought a branch trimmer on Saturday, and Scott cut back the branches around the play house in the back. I can actually see the cabana now, and it’s going to do wonders for the pansies in the farthest window box, which were frankly too shaded before.

I’m going to have to cut back all of the mint if I want to get the bindweed out of the side bed. They’re just too intertwined. Karine is going to take some of the mint, I plan to make mint jelly, and after that … Um, anybody need some mint? Maybe for a little window planter? It will grow back in by the end of the summer, I’m sure. I’m not weeding it out yet, just cutting it down. Weeding it out will wait for the fall.

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After two and a half months of waiting, missing parts, waiting for parts, having something else break, etc., etc., on Thursday our spa was finally repaired. I was excited, though a little disappointed that one of our house’s best features was busted during the first visit by anyone from my family.

Of course, with at least two of my aunts due to visit this coming week, this meant that the house would show at its best.

Yeah, until yesterday morning, when the hot water heater wasn’t working, all of a sudden.

I called the company and they’re shipping us the replacement part, but it won’t be here until Tuesday at the earliest. So it’s cold showers for us until then, and maybe when my aunts show up they won’t be able to shower.

You can imagine how fucking thrilled I am by this. So thrilled I am absolutely and completely LIVID. And since this happens when *my* relatives are due to visit (again), and we’re batting 0 for 2, I’m beginning to suspect the house hates me.

Honestly. AUGH.

And do NOT. DO NOT leave me a comment saying ‘this is what happens when you’re a homeowner, oh well”. No, not even if you’re only joking. I am seriously not in the mood for it.

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