The Easter Bilby Came to Visit

Yes, he did! He came with Youngest Daughter's friend Melanie from Australia. Seems that, in Oz, rabbits are such a pest/nuisance, that having an Easter Rabbit would be akin to us having an Easter Cockroach. Enter the bilby, an unassuming little marsupial whose claim to fame is a sorta-rabbity appearance. Oh, do Google it--you know you want to! In the meantime, blogtime has been rather cut short by the death of the computer. Yup, poor thing fried in an electrical storm--and how often does that happen in SoCal anyway? YD's husband, who is our resident computer guru, has declared it's deader than the proverbial doornail, so I finally broke down and ordered a new one. I am hoping that it will come soon, as I miss being able to upload pictures--and we've gotten some good ones lately, too. Daughter Meg took the camera out to get some shots of the baby daffodils, the camellias, and the roses. On another front, the WIP-busting is continuing. The blue butterfly shawl has been finished (got a great shot of Madge modeling it at SnB) and the beige Candleflame has also been extinguished. I made a serendipitous find in my garage--a box of blue yarns that I'd been looking at finally called to me strongly enough; I brought the box into the house, cleaned off its lid (my garage is not very tidy), and lo and behold, not only was there some lovely yarn in it, there was also the beginnings of a sweater--2" of ribbing and another 14" of a pretty lace pattern, still on my beloved ancient size 7 Balenes! Now, the best part is that I was actually able to figure out the pattern, and have done several more repeats--it's now going to be a shawl. Pics soon!

Thanks, Robyn!

Robyn took this picture of us working on the formerly-an-afghan WIP, now the Bundles O' Green Yarn. The funny "thing" with the X on it is one of the current objets d'art on the walls at Zephyr. The stuff on the coffee table is the projects everyone graciously put down so they could help with the unwinding. Thanks again, y'all--you're great!

As Promised

Here it is--the infamous WIP pile. I have to admit that it would be much larger, except for the fortuitous idea I had for the "ultimate WIP buster" aka the Frog Pond. Yes, Junieann, your Oregon Frog Pond has a counterpart here in SoCal. So the off-gauge (read: would fit three of me, and I ain't no petite princess) Yankee Puzzle has been reverted to a lovely ball of beautiful burgundy Jaeger Aran; the confused Elann shawl (Uros Aran, a lovely lovely yarn in a pretty pale teal) is back to basics; and thanks to my beloved Pasadena DayTimers, the 5-yarn afghan is once again 5 balls of yarn. (I'm hoping that there will be a picture soon of the 6 of us, 5 winding yarn and one person unraveling, since it was truly one of the more memorable sights at Zephyr!) Anyway, these beauties are, front, the blue Butterfly Shawl (need to finish one ball of yarn and bind it off, and voila!); Birch, in Rowan Kid Silk Haze, liqueur color; two pinkies--one is the fronts of a Divine wrap sweater, the other a feather-and-fan scarf in two glitzy fluffers; and the latest Candleflame Shawl, done in Reynolds Utopia and destined for St. Bernard's (Tariffville, CT) shawl ministry. The back row: the infamous MOTW, my latest Ab Fab (Colinette, Sorbet colourway), and a black-and-white boucle shawl. I have enough of the boucle to finish this one and perhaps even a second shawl. There they are, in all their glory. No new projects for a while, till they are all much further along. (Or have taken a short happy trip to the Frog Pond.) Note the preponderance of soft fuzzy yarns there? Wonder what that says about me...

Things-To-Do List

Simon is showing what he thinks of my busy schedule. I'm thinking I need to take a lesson! Well, at least the Great House Clearout is proceeding, even though it's at a snail's pace. Two more rather large objects were removed on Sat., namely the Maple Dresser and the VW Bug. Yes, Bugsy has gone to his new home in Pomona with Scott and Courtney; he apparently didn't have any problems making the drive out there. With the dresser gone, there is now room to move the small desk into this room, which ought to allow for a little more computer-table room.
One of the blogs I read has a policy of posting pictures of her WIPs once a month. I think that's a great idea--I just don't know if I can round up all of mine to take their pictures. Knitting stuff, sure; quilts, well--not very easy. And then there are the scrapbooks-in-progress. Well, maybe I will try to at least round up the knitting projects for April 1. Then the entire world (or at least the minuscule amount of it that reads this blog) will know what a bad case of startitis I have!
Hmmm...maybe it's motivation to frog a couple of things that I'm not loving any more. That would certainly clear the decks a bit!

Well, here it is. The in-progress shot of my Asilomar project quilt, destined for Daughter Kate's wall. She chose the colors, I chose the pattern. There's a border yet to be added, and then it will be ready for quilting. I was planning on doing some work on it tonight, but turns out that's not going to happen. We had a "workday" here today and I got good and tired out. Oh well, it's all good!

Several Frustrations

Been trying to post some pictures, and for some reason they are disappearing into the ether. Blogger and I have to have some serious chats about this. In the meantime, I've been trying to get my tax stuff together so my Wonderful Tax Guy can whip it all into shape and tell me how much I owe Uncle Sam and Uncle Arnie. This has meant putting an entire year's worth of transactions into Quicken.
The reason this has been frustrating is that I had already put most of last year into Quicken. Unfortunately, the data is locked in the dead hard drive of last year's incarnation of the Computer From Hell, or at least, the Computer From A Seriously Defective Place. (When my son-in-law told his daughters, age 6 and 8, that they have a better computer than Gramma's, it's time for an upgrade.) The backup method chosen could have been better: never try to back up on a floppy disk with a diseased floppy drive. Nuff said? So I've been trying to figure out how to do this, and not have to redo it AGAIN. Perhaps there is a miracle in my future.
Or a shopping trip to Fry's.
This has seriously cut into my knitting and quilting time. However, tomorrow the Hope Quilters (the newest incarnation of the former Ugly Quilters, so called because we made pretty quilts out of ugly fabrics) are meeting to work on some more quilts. The output is pretty impressive, I have to say: we've sent quilts to City of Hope kids, to Casa de Esperanza in Tijuana (there's that Hope thing again), to Maryvale, and to Katrina-displaced dialysis patients. I'll try to get pictures and see if Blogger will let me share them. We're still using some truly awful fabrics, but every so often Ellin will sneak in some "pretty cloth" just because she has trouble doing uglies for so long. Ugly fabrics, by the way, are those things we bought in a moment of sheer optimism and then, five or ten years later, look at and wonder what on earth we were thinking. What was the designer thinking? Or drinking. Or smoking. Or whatever.

J.O.Y. to the World

Pasadena Daytimers SnB group is my Wed. guilty pleasure. We meet at a coffeehouse called Zephyr which lets us monopolize their cushy sofas and feeds us iced tea, lattes, omelets, panini, and other goodies for as long as we like. Among today's topics was the sheeplike tendency of humans to "follow the leader" even when good sense would seem to say, don't go there. One thing led to another and we arrived at the JOY KAL. All we need to do now is find a project of stupefying stupidity, because, you see, JOY stands for Joke's On You. We think it will have a serious chance of taking off.
The raccoons are from Asilomar: they hang out by the steps to the dining hall and look adorable, thus hoping to score some of our "leftovers." Too bad, guys, the food was so good this year that we all ate almost everything except the design on the plates. There were 4 or 5 of the little guys, cute as could be. I will probably post more pics from my week at Asilomar since the place is a wonderful retreat--you can find more at www.visitasilomar.com

Pictures, Whee!

Here it is--the tangled mess called MOTW for short. My first successful attempt to upload a picture to the blog, too! Since this shot was taken, I've finished the back (the part that was OTN in the picture) and had to go buy another set of size 5 circs to cast on the sleeve. Because, of course, the original set is with the sleeve, wherever it is. In this photo, the pink blob is Asia and that orange thing is South America. The yellow is another ball of yarn. Perhaps now that I have the blog, I can actually do a little work on this thing and show some progress pictures. Ya think??

Misery Loves Company

The TKOF Yahoo group came up with a challenge--to get out our oldest, moldiest, most repellent UFOs and see if we could egg each other on to work on them. Mine is, without a doubt, the Map of the World sweater from VK. The pattern is fine; in fact, I made and finished a cardiganized version, in wool from Peter Jones, way back when. I don't like this yarn. It's cotton, it feels icky, and the dye comes off on my hands and needles. Besides that, I've already knit both sleeves at least once. But Daughter Kate loves it and wants it, so what's a mom to do? Hopefully Blogger will let me post a picture soon.

Look Out World, Here I Am!

So! After thinking about this for a while, I've decided to take the plunge. (Thanks, Marie!) My nom de blog, mehitabel, is inspired by Don Marquis's creations, archy and mehitabel, and if you've never read his stuff you have a treat in store! His mehitabel is a black cat, whereas in real life we had a black cat named Archie. If I ever figure out how to scan in old photos, you'll get to see Archie; otherwise, the digital camera can at least provide some shots of the current "pack." I'm hoping also for lots of pics of my current and future projects, too. Right now, I've got a whole lotta UFOs in the quilting and knitting departments, including a couple of particularly nasty ones. You'll get to see, don't worry!