Eastburn Adventures

I've been a little busy lately doing stuff around the house, like endless loads of laundry, painting our master bathroom, and planning what to take on our mini-vacation to Hilton Head Island this weekend, so I haven't spent a lot of time on the computer - just barely keeping up with my e-mail and Google Reader (and now Wendy has me Plurking, too - I'm DarthKnitter there, as usual.)

Anyway, so I'm catching up on Ravelry and my friends' activity, and apparently EVERYONE, and I mean EVERYONE is queuing this sweater! I'm sucked in as well - it's adorable! I wonder where I can fit this in on The Plan?

The sweater I'm actually knitting is coming along - in fact, it's almost finished. I just haven't taken any photos yet. All I have left to do is to finish the bind off at the waist, reknit the sleeves to loosen them up a bit, and do some sort of crocheted edging on the neck. After over a year of working on this sweater off and on, will the never-ending mindless stockinette round and round and round, I think I'm entitled to say I'm almost finished. There'll be photos soon.

Who knew? I mean seriously - who? I wasn't all that excited about our recent trip to Hilton Head Island, SC mainly because from what I knew of HHI, it was just a lot of golf courses. Which is true - it's definitely a resort place, and if Robert and I played golf, we might have just stayed. We flew into Savannah, GA on Thursday and drove about an hour to the island. We stayed here. Way cool. But even cooler? The beach. This is a serious beach, people. When I think of going to the beach, Florida or Hawaii are about the only places that cross my mind. Or maybe a cruise to some Caribbean islands. But South Carolina? A beach destination? Boy - was I happy to be completely wrong. HHI is absolutely beautiful.

We spend some time on the beach, in the ocean (where I found myself surrounded by a school of sting rays - not once, but twice!), rode bikes, and had a fantastic time. On Sunday, we took a tour of Savannah before we flew out, where we saw a lot of historical homes, Paula Deen's restaurant (before the fire), and a really cool bridge.

I thought I'd just post some of my favorite photos from the trip here. You can see more on my Flickr page.

This has been a day. First, I got up and spent my usual 15 minutes in the morning on the internet, checking e-mails, blogs, Ravelry, Plurk, etc. One of the tech blogs I follow was raving about Firefox 3.0, and said to upgrade immediately, so I did. Bad choice. FF3 doesn't work with Microsoft Vista. (I know, what does? Vista bites, but my XP machine died in the flood.) I didn't have time to fix it then, so it was off to work. (I did spend about an hour this evening uninstalling 3.0 and downgrading back to the previous version, which is working fine.)

Robert and I drove to work separately because he wasn't feeling well. He ended up coming home at noon. I then had to go stay with my mom (who's not in the best health) while my dad had a doctor's appointment. It was only supposed to be for about 90 minutes, but I ended up being away from the office for about 3 hours. Thankfully, I have a very understanding, family friendly company. The good news is that I finished Robert's socks while staying with my mom. These are just plain stockinette socks, toe up, casting on 30 stitches and increasing to 74, with short-row heels. The yarn is Universal's Ditto, and it's pretty cool looking on its own, which is why I didn't do any pattern. But the first ball had a ton of knots in it that I had to cut, so there were lots of ends to weave in. I'll stay away from this yarn in the future. I also made progress on my sweater, weaving in all the ends, and ripping back one of the sleeves and started re-knitting it (the cuffs are just a little too tight, but that's an easy enough fix).

I hadn't been back to work for more than 30 minutes or so, when a storm came through. There was a tornado warning, and while I haven't heard yet if one was actually sighted, the winds did knock out power in east Springfield, and the roof collapsed at a local furniture store. Then I ended up missing Knit Together because I needed to get Robert some medicine. I did work on the sweater a little bit, but then Dish went out when another storm came through and I took a break. I'm so sick of rain, and while our flooding issues are nothing like what's happening in Iowa or along the Mississippi, it would be nice if everyone got a break from this weather soon.

Tomorrow's Friday, and on Saturday I'll be spending some time with Brianne and starting on my first pair of my SOS08 socks. Things are looking up.

I can't believe it - I have officially finished knitting my first adult-sized sweater! This was one of those projects that was never ending. I bought a pattern shortly after I learned to knit from Knitting Pure & Simple for a short-sleeved v-neck tee because it looked easy, and I really didn't have any guidance from anyone with regard to sweater knitting. If I knew then what I know now, I never would have bought the pattern because 1) it's your basic plain vanilla top-down raglan which you can find free all over the web, and 2) it didn't look like what I really wanted in the first place. Again, it was just because I thought I needed an "easy" pattern to learn how to make a sweater - wrong. The endless stockinette of the body nearly killed me, and indeed, this sweater spent months, months, and more months in time out. Officially, it took me 13 months to finish, but once I was seriously working on it, it probably only took a total of 3-4 weeks. My recommendation for a newbie knitter who's never made a sweater: 1) Get support from your local knit group or Ravelry, and 2) knit a pattern in pieces rather than in the round. Anyway, I'm glad it's finally finished, and now that I've conquered an adult sweater, I know I can make any number of patterns. It's kind of like when I learned to make socks - I didn't understand how someone could knit socks without a pattern and make them it a short period of time, and now I'm cranking them out with the best of them! (Oh, and the sweater is knit using the now discontinued Elsbeth Lavold's Silky Tweed, and the lace pattern is from WendyKnits' Vince Sweater.)

Speaking of socks, I'm on track with my first pair for Summer of Socks 2008. I'm making the Tidal Wave pattern in Hand Maiden Cashbah in Amethyst. I cast on using my trusty Addi Turbos size 1 1/2 (2.5mm) and drat it if my gauge wasn't off. Rather than move down to 0's again, I moved up to a size 2 1/2 and cut the total stitches down from 64 to 48, which will make these go very fast! I finished the heel tonight while at my great-niece's and great-nephew's birthday party. Another reason this is going so fast, the foot is all stockinette - the pattern is only on the leg.

And how cool is this? The Springfield Knitters ordered t-shirts for the WWKIP Day on June 14, where everyone (except me, because I was in Hilton Head) was going to the Springfield Cardinals game for a Stitch 'n Pitch to celebrate. Zarah worked with a knitter on Ravelry to get us all t-shirts with our Rav-names on them, and although they didn't come in time for the game, they're too cute!

My first pair of socks for Summer of Socks are finished! These are the Tidal Wave Socks pattern, knit in Hand Maiden Casbah in the Amethyst colorway. This yarn is so yummy, and seriously, after I was finished, I probably had eough yarn left over to make another pair. Steph from work loved it, though - purple is her favorite color - so I gave the rest to her. (Oh, and yes, I know the photo's wonky and it looks like the bottom sock doesn't have a heel - it does - it's just my sock blockers are 2 different sizes and I didn't realize I had the one sock turned wrong on the blocker.)

Pair #2 is started. I'm making The Lucy Sock by Wendy, and using Misty Mountain Farms Jubilee in Waterfall. I completed the first toe last night at Knit Together. Also at KT, I cast on for the Swallowtail Shawl. Then I frogged it when I made an error on like the 8th row. Then I started over. Then my cable caught on my knitting bag and pulled the needle out of all my stitches. Then I decided to wait until I wasn't so tired to start over. More updates on that later.

The other thing that's been going on is our air conditioner has decided to die. It's still working, but we have to be very fiddly to keep it going, and it's time to replace it. My dad, who was formerly in the business, after retiring from the fire department, was still able to get the equipment for us at cost, but because of his health is really unable to install it. So he lined up another firefighter who does HVAC on the side who agreed to install the equipment this past Wednesday. When this man came to our house on Monday to look over the equipment, he claimed that it wasn't any good and he backed out of the installation. What we believe really happened is that he recalculated his bid and decided he wasn't going to make enough money on the installation alone since he couldn't mark up equipment to sell us at a higher price. (The equipment is fine; my dad absolutely knows what he's doing, and this is the same brand that's currently installed in our home and original equipment, and it's lasted 19 years.) So, a warning to my Springfield, Missouri area readers - DO NOT do business with Jeff Owings. Period. We've made other arrangements, and in a couple of weeks we'll have a new high efficiency HVAC system.

I just got a new digital camera! WhooHoo! I've been researching, pricing, and saving for several months now, and finally found a slick deal on a Canon PowerShot G9. It's a high-end non-DSLR that's about as close as you can get to a DSLR without spending a ton of money. It's got 12.1 megapixels, a 6x Optical Zoom, and RAW capabilities (not that I'm an expert on that by any means), and there are a couple of external lenses available for it, so I'll be saving up to add on to my package. My Fuji FinePix was a good, reliable camera, but it's definitely outdated now and technology is so much better, and it's never really been the same since my sis knocked it over on the floor off of the tripod during our annual Peanut Brittle Makin' Days two years ago, so it was definitely time to upgrade. I look forward to playing with it and learning all the cool things it can do, and hopefully my photography will improve as well!

(And yes, this is a post about a camera with no photos. The battery is still charging.)