The Goblin Retrospective

2004

Lion and tiger.  But where’s the bear?

2005

Peter and…

Willy Wonka

2006

A stack of cards.  But where are their paintbrushes?

2007

A ninja and two Harrys

2008 

A magician (with hat trick), Santa, The (hopping) White Rabbit, and one Crazy Mama

The End.  The Tail End.  

Watch out for that light sabre, Rabbit!

Kid stories

Removing the grass one swing at a time. 

I love walking places with the kids.  We have a chance to notice things.  Lots of things.  Like street signs and grass and the incredible numbers of butterflies we had around here the other day and house numbers and what is in that trash can and cars and such.  

Yesterday, while walking to the local youth educational institution to retrieve Sonar X5, Sonar X3 and I were waiting to cross the street.  Halfway across, the red hand on the crosswalk signal started flashing.  Sonar X3 pointed to the sign and said, knowingly, “the flashing red hand means don’t dilly-dally.”  So true.  

***

Settling the kiddos down to bed the other night, I was stretched out on Sonar X5’s bed, and he curled up next to me.  I rolled and curled around him and told him we were spoons stacked together.  He stuck out his legs and stretched his arms straight down and told me he was more like a fork.  

***

Sonar X8 isn’t thrilled about the mountain of homework he has to do every night (frankly, I’m not either, but that’s another story).  Most times he does the work without much prompting, but sometimes it’s like pulling teeth.  Today was one of those days where he went off and started working quietly, but clearly he was not immune to distraction.  A row of five, single- and double-digit addition and subtraction problems were printed in one corner of the math worksheet.  After correctly answering each of the problems, he drew plus signs between the answers and wrote their total in the right-hand margin (also correct).  Then he decorated the ends of each—hm, what is the line called when operations are written vertically?  Horizontally it would be the equal-sign, but vertically, while it means the same thing, it must have a different name?  At any rate, he decorated their ends with little curlicues.  

First Day

Do they look ready?  

Our lives have long run by a seasonal clock, driven by the turning of the school year.  First as chronic students, and then as perpetrators of education, both higher and public, in three states, our lives have always ebbed and flowed semester by semester, graduation by graduation, summer break by summer break.  

In legend and lore, the return to school happens at the end of summer, as nature begins to reach toward fall.  The heat of the summer has passed.  The air is crisp and refreshing.  The leaves are beginning to hint that they might be ready to change color.  I know this because the advertisements for Back to School show shiny-faced young people wearing long pants and sweaters over their cute little t-shirts.  (And has anyone noticed the vests and the bubble dresses and the leggings this year?  It’s like I’m thirteen all over again)

This is not the reality in our world.  We have counted down to the end of summer vacation through the hottest, most stifling time of year for Coastal Texas.  The sea breeze that keeps things bearable the rest of the year often dies for a while in August.  The cooler temperatures during the recent rains, give way to a muggy sauna when the clouds pass.  Even the suggestion of a pair of long pants, let along a jaunty sweater over a scoop-neck T makes me want to melt into a puddle on the spot.  

But it’s time.  

Even without those advertisements and the mountains of school supplies in the aisles, I’d know.

  

I have this (rare) urge to clean the house.  To sweep out the remains of last year’s graduation and prom and football season and second grade.  To turn out the scraps of old lessons and homework.  To gather up the nubs of crayon and let the Sonars turn them into some kind of wax sculpture that will still draw.  Some people have this urge in springtime, I know.  Which, in a place where you’re packed into your house against the cold for several months out of the year, makes sense.  But here, where most of the winter sees us with the doors open wide, running around in our shirt sleeves, the jaunty cardigan slung over the back of the chair just in case, the Springtime just doesn’t feel like a huge shift from what came before.  

Whether it’s coming in August or September, whether I’m in Pennsylvania or South Texas or Southern New Mexico, the start of the school year just seems to be programmed into my blood.  Even before the high school football players start practicing in pads rather than t-shirts, or the marching band starts marching AND playing at the same time, I know it’s coming.  Partner is still in the educational business of course, but I’ve been out of it for the past five years or so.  Just when I thought maybe I’d recover from the pull of the school schedule though, my kids started getting big enough to be school players.  

This year, that’s ‘kids,’ plural.  Both Sonar X8 and Sonar X5 will be attending school.  Their clothes for tomorrow are hanging on the ends of their beds.  They’re tucked in (not sleeping) with butterflies about tomorrow.  

I have butterflies too.  :)

MS4 Swatch, Beads Revisited, and K'nex Swift

It’s a lovely rainy afternoon here, so of course, I’m knitting.  

Here is a photo of my MS4 swatch on US size 4 needles.  KnitPicks Gloss Lace Yarn in Celery, with assorted beads.  I’m not thrilled with the stitch definition, so I’m going to re-swatch with US size 2 needles and whatever the new favorite color of beads turns out to be.  Lemme know what you like.

I wasn’t sure where to put the beads for best effect in the pattern, so I just scattered some around.  To the far left is a handful of (juicy) Cranberry beads, then a few Green, then the Yellow (which are totally lost in the lace, and is now out of contention) and then an inch bead-free.  To the right of the swatch is a length of yarn with a few other bead color choices strung on it.  At the top is Blue-Green, which looks blue on the yarn.  Then Orange, Purple, Pink, and Glossy Coral.  We are all liking the Purple and the Orange.  

A smidge bigger.  

Below is the beginning of the Lace Ribbon Scarf from Spring Knitty.  I know this one wasn’t in the plan released earlier this summer, but that just goes to show I’m not very good at sticking to my directives.  I can’t recall what the yarn is and can’t find the ball band.  It is the remainder of the yarn I used on last year’s Mystery Stole.  

And here in this final picture for today, is the result of our collaborative creativity the past few rainy afternoons.  Because I need very little incentive to break out the K’nex and I found this page and this page, which employ K’nex and Tinker Toys to create inexpensive swifts and ball winders for knitters who are either cheap (like me) or only occasionally need to wind a hank into a ball (also like me).  This is the Yarn Swift Sonar X5 and I put together.  We modified liberally.  If anyone would like step-by-step instructions, let me know.  

The ball winder is still in the prototype stage.  Sonar X8 will get back to you on it.  

And yes, yes YES! I finished all three of the Stealth projects I had slated to knit during the Olympics.  They make a funny little set and I will photograph them to share later.  

Now back to the Deployment Socks.  

Renovations

We’ve lived in this house for more than three years.  We’ve made a few changes here and there as time has gone by.  

In the bedrooms, we painted, ripped out nasty old carpet and put in laminate floors (yes, we touched up the trim).

We took down the ceiling “decor” in the living room.  (Yeah, I don’t know why they did that either, but then, we painted our bedrooms orange and yellow, so…)  

Just this week we finally got around to fixing the hall.  I don’t have any photos, but there was a wallpaper border (The hall border).  And the walls were taupe.  Ick.  Before they were taupe, the walls were this color, with trim this color.  Yummy, huh?  

Well, we took about six partial gallons of whitish paint that have been languishing in the garage (only one of them was ours) and mixed them together to get a lovely, buttery, eggshell color of whitishness.  And painted all of that drab taupey color.  Oh, plus the inside of the front door is now Royal Blue (per sonars, who did not want me to paint it “that sick green” as in Barf green). 

The kitchen border used to look like this, but it is no more.  

And now the brick benchey thing that used to be in front of the fireplace and living room window is gone.  (See the post from yesterday for pics.)

We figured there was some kind of 2x4 frame in there supporting a brick facade.  Turns out there were eight million bricks stacked in there, though only the outside layer was mortared.  It took a masonry chisel, a three pound hammer, three hours and a lot of banging (watch iiiit), but Partner ripped out the whole thing down to the fireplace face (good thing that went to the floor, huh?).  

Now we’re not sure what we want to do.  The window there has some rot under it and so we may reframe it.  Or we might put in a sliding glass door.  There’s a sort of double door on the other side of the fireplace that we’d like to turn into a sliding door too.  We’d have a lot of window out onto a patio.  Whuddya think?  

Oh, and here’s another picture I was trying to post last night.  Sonar X8’s desk, inspired by this.  But now it sort of reminds me of a comfy pair of blue jeans.  

And here’s the boy reading the classics.  

 He was smaller then.