Summer Doldrums

Meet this month's Full Moon. This is, depending on how fond you are of the movie version of Pocahontas, either the Blue Corn Moon or the Sturgeon Moon.
Take your pick.

I know it's not a great picture but at least this one looks like a nice circular moon. For a while there, all I could get when I tried to photograph the moon was UFO-like curlicues.

Maybe the camera's brief illness has restored it to decent moon-shots.




Had to take a picture of my Combretum fruticosum--I don't know if it has a common name. It has been through a lot, this poor little plant, in the many years it has lived here with us.
It came as a one-gallon potted plant and was our membership gift for joining the LA County Arboretum. Once upon a time, the Arboretum, like all the LA County facilities, didn't charge for admission, so it was a great place to take the kids on a Sunday afternoon--feed the ducks, visit the Hugo Reid Adobe, ogle the Queen Anne Cottage, go sit by the waterfall. Then they started charging, and all of a sudden it wasn't affordable--so I saved up, and clipped coupons, and got us a family membership so we could still go whenever we wanted to, regardless of the current state of the family budget. This plant has always reminded me of that time, of good times shared as a family. Plus, of course, it has these very strange looking blossoms. It reminds me of a Bottlebrush, but the leaves are very different.


Stash diving--which in my case is very close to dumpster diving--has been going on. Behold 11 boxes of mostly yarn, on their way to new homes. Some of t hem are going to an eBay reseller and it will be nice to think of them moving on to new homes. However, the sheer volume of what's remaining is making this seem like less of a good plan, so I've come up with another bright idea which I will share with you all when the time is right.
Soon, my pretties, soon!


Since my knitting mojo seems to have taken flight after the fiasco that was my MS3--which I haven't ripped yet, it's still in time-out and I have a very faint hope of fixing it and restarting it--I tried to think of some way to get it back and operational. So, here's my new project, really thrilling, although I put it in my new Trader Joe's tote bag just because it's so doggone cheery and colorful. How can you look at this thing and not smile?
It's another comfort shawl for the ministry in CT. I found 4 skeins of well-marinated Jiffy (how long has it been since the label looked like THAT?) and I'm hoping it will be enough. If it's not, oh well, I'm sure I have something else around here that will look okay with it. When I finish the first skein, I'll know if I have to go find some pink or blue or white in the further reaches of the stash to make some stripes. Stripes are okay, aren't they? I mean, they won't look like "I was running out of yarn and decided to punt" will they?
Guess what? This seems to be doing the trick. I got all that you see here done last night, watching Big Brother and Design Star and something on E! about 40 fashion disasters--summer is for train-wreck TV, the kind you know you shouldn't watch but you just can't tear your eyes away from it. At least I have some knitting to show for it!