waiting for the Great Pumpkin

I hollowed out and carved my very first pumpkin today, at the ripe old age of 29! (It's the very simple one on the right that mixes up the devil and the vampire — because if you can't mix up your tropes on Hallowe'en, when can you?) Jack o'Lanterns and Hallowe'en were never a big part of my childhood, so until now I never had any reason to develop my essential squash-decorating skills.

Now our pumpkins are lit and we are awaiting the invading hordes. (Most of the children in our neighbourhood are young, so I am anticipating sooner rather than later.) We are trying to figure out the etiquette: do we leave the porch light on and the Jack o'Lanterns? Or Jack o'Lanterns only?

I will report back later on whether we bought enough candy or not:


(There are a lot of kids in our neighbourhood. Also, the Pringles and the extra box of chocolate don't count — the Pringles were for me and the extra box for a friend.)

the once and future garden

In one final attempt to not utterly ruin the garden next season (as we have so spectacularly done, to date), Pd and I actually spent an afternoon taking care of it. Apparently things like it when you do that.

Pd weeded the entire patch of lawn. We don't actually have much of a lawn — it is maybe 50-feet square — and once it was verdant and green. We even mowed it and everything. But then there was a grass-frying heatwave, and it turned out that our outdoor hose has a blockage in it so we couldn't water, and then it all turned brown and dead. And then it became green again, but the green were opportunitistic weeds, not grass, and it's sort of ... stayed that way.

Anyway, now it's weedless and kind of sad looking, because instead of weeds it's just brown and dead, with clumps of dirt taken out of it. But we have hopes for the future! We will probably either seed or sod in the spring.


I planted the garlic. It's just an experiment right now, so six bulbs only, in a sunny spot I've staked out for my food plants (such as they are). I also planted 18 tulip bulbs in the front garden; three different kinds. They're staggered from early to late spring, so we'll see what happens. (I planted them kind of randomly. Honestly, I just planted a bunch of them where I'd pulled up weeds, because then there was already disturbed soil and a blank spot. It seemed as good a way to randomize as any.)

18 tulips sound like a lot, but it really isn't.

I trimmed my strawberry herb pot, and brough it indoors.


It fell over, when we were in Iceland, and wasn't watered, and I've basically let it slowly die. But it fared better than I thought it would, left to its own devices, so I thought I might as well salvage what I could. The sage, rosemary and oregano should be fine, and the bunching onions and garlic chives are reasonable. The tarragon was crushed by the sage and rosemary and is utterly gone, as is the basil. Really I am only doing this because I want fresh rosemary and oregano throughout the long winter.

And finally, the pièce de resistance:


I finally planted the strawberry plants, and do you see? Blossoms! Two of them! They won't turn into berries, not now; it's too cold. But still! I didn't think they would blossom at all, not after all the neglect and mold problems, but voilà!

They may not survive the winter. I decided to plant them because, at this point, what have I got to lose? Either I throw them out now, or they die over the winter; what's the difference? So I planted five of the stronger-looking ones, with the healthiest leaves; that was all I had room for. In theory these are annuals, unless they send out runners (which I did not see), so they may just die back and never return. But they are also in front of the rhubarb (which we never did harvest) — the sunniest, happiest corner of the garden, so we shall see.

woolly mishmash

Today is Voting Day (in Ontario)! Go vote!

/civic duty.

I was going to blog one final time this year about the garden, but it turns out that the photograph I thought I had uploaded ... hadn't. Sometimes that happens, thanks to a bug in iPhoto 9. I keep hoping that Apple will fix it, and they keep ... not. (One day I will write a post about how iPhoto is simultaneously brilliant and profoundly irritating. It's a microcosm of Apple, really: when it works, it's fantastic, but it's an entirely closed loop which is not only incapable of playing well with others, but doesn't actually deign to acknowledge that others — such as, for example, PhotoShop — even exist.)

So, moving on. I will blog about gardening tomorrow. Other parts of my weekend:

On Friday, a friend and I went to the Creativ Festival. It was a lot smaller than I'd anticipated (I had thought it would be three times the size of the Frolic, because you've got knitting and quilting and scrapbooking together, but no). Mostly, I went because I wanted to buy some Habu, which did not work so well (the store had brought only enough of each colour for a scarf, and I was planning on a cowl and a skirt), but I put my name down for mail-order. I don't really need or want the yarn until Christmas, so hopefully that will work out. (Will blog more about Habu when I get some. I've been wanting to try it for a long, long time, but it was only recently that I found out where to get it in Ontario. The yarn itself comes from Japan.)

Lack of Habu aside, we did get to pet some qiviut, and — tentatively — some vicuna, which was so lovely and soft (and $210 a ball, hence the tentative). I think they're really trying to get people hooked onto qiviut as the new (more expensive) cashmere but, soft as it is, I don't think I could bear to knit myself a $150 scarf. It's lovely to pet, though.

We saw a pumpkin-carriage-shaped store display:


I'm not actually sure what they were selling (it wasn't yarn), but the display was neat.

And we also saw this:


Okay, one: knitting and crocheting for breast cancer research is a good idea, but knitting and crocheting for breast cancer is not. I know that adding "research" makes the sentence kind of long and less catchy, but honestly, "research" is kind of the crucial idea in that sentence. Cancer does not care whether you knit or crochet anything, and it certainly does not give a damn whether or not it is pink. We do not want to support the cancer, we want to cure it.

Also, the yarn is 100% acrylic, which just seems wrong.

Finally: the end is near for my sock-yarn sweater, and I finally managed to take a proper-ish picture. The colour is even reasonably true.


I have one week to finish a pocket and a half, and then some massive blocking needs to take place. There was a bit of a gauge accident and it's a just a little bit on the small side. I know it's dangerous to rely on blocking to fix it, but it's wearable; it's only tight in one place (the curve of my shoulders) and I am not going to frog all that stockinette just to add ten stitches to the shoulder. Also, I think Malabrigo Sock tends to block on the looser side. So we shall see.

so much for hibernation (also: cookies!)

I don't mean to keep summing up my life on a weekly basis, but it's been a bit insane around here since Thanksgiving. We've started on what I've taken to calling our "winter schedule," which is:

Monday: climbing
Tuesday: dancing (Latin and ballroom)
Wednesday: curling (for me)
Thursday: curling (for Pd)

And then Fridays and weekends off (except for the usual Saturday climb), except — inevitably — all of our social obligations get shunted on to these days, and at some point I just want to curl up in a corner and ... I don't know, sleep. I don't even have the energy to snarl any more. Most of my recent conversations go something to the effect of," Yes, yes, absolutely ... I'm sorry, I just missed the last five minutes, what?"

Which I'm sure is very endearing.

Anyway, I made cookies last weekend. I wanted to test the oven (somehow, our oven thermometre got lost in the move; it's really the only thing I've noticed missing), and turning it on without actually making something is such a waste. These are the cookies I used to make with my mom, when I was six. They've got good juju.


My mother has moved on to more sophisticated baking; I have not. I have a theory that, on the whole, one is either a natural cook or a natural baker, and I choose to be a cook. Probably because the first time I chose to be a baker, I burned the Muffins-For-Dummies. (You know, the premixed kind, where you add an egg and that's it? Yeah.) Or the time I tried to make shortbread, and it turned into a crumbly cake. I've had some spectacular failures in cooking, too, but I don't know — for some reason, baking failures are far more demoralizing.

Anyway, these ones are smaller than usual because I forgot how much they do (or do not, as it turned out) spread during baking. They're good, though. And I like them small; I make mini-muffins, too. I never want the entire muffin or cupcake or normal-portion of fudge anyway, and it's like knitting — if I'm going to make something and have control of the process, then I might as well make something I actually want.

Speaking of which, I also made my first "winging it" risotto from scratch last weekend. (Literally: I discovered midway through the process that the bacon had gone off, and there was no time to return to the grocery store.) I was very proud.

all the leaves are brown

The thing I really like about our neighbourhood is that there is practically a tree — generally, a big one — on every lawn. (We have one, too, but it's wee.) That means lots and lots of leaves in the autumn, though. It seems like it was sudden — one day last week, everything was fine, and then the next day all the leaves seemingly went whoomph onto the ground.

The ones that are left, though, are at least putting on a good show.


Meanwhile, I've been knitting, but I have no finished objects to show you. I am knitting Still Light (Ravelry link, sorry; there is no other), which is called a tunic but is actually a dress (-tunic). In fingering (Malabrigo Sock), on 2.75 mm needles. Did I mention that this sweater-dress-tunic-thing has no cables, lace pattern or anything else; it's just miles and miles of stockinette?

Not that you can tell, exactly, but I am persevering through the boredom and am on the home stretch — the final 10 inches of stockinette on the body:


After that, though, will be the horse lattitudes of the sleeves, and I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to manage that. Somehow, stockinette on a loop is still better than stockinette on circs. (And, ironically, I began knitting this because I felt like I needed a break from — get this — the second half of a pure-stockinette sock. Frying pan, have you met fire?)

two unrelated things

The full Iceland set is up on Flickr. I hadn't finished putting in all of the meta-data in iPhoto before I uploaded (quite frankly: I forgot), but the photographs themselves are still pretty. Above is Lóndrangar — sea pillars from an extinct volcano, on the edge of the Snæfellsnes peninsula. The water beyond is the North Atlantic. It was stupendously beautiful, even if the weather was not.

In terms of my more current activities:


Still percolating. It's a little bit subliminal, really. The Christmas magazines are out (two of them, now), so it's time to be thinking about this, seasonal 20-degree weather, acres of calendar time and lack of snow be damned. I may have entirely leapfrogged over Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving and Remembrance Day.

warming the house (literally)

It's October! ... which means that magazines, which have this strange tendency to run ahead, are in November mode, which means that the Style at Home that arrived at my house on Friday was all about entertaining. At Christmas.

I'm just going to let that percolate for a while.

Anyway, point is, it's October! I'm very grateful for the chill, because all the best cooking happens when it's cold (think about it; you'll realise it's true). Last Sunday I cooked up a storm; I made Marcella Hazan's bolognese sauce, which I cribbed from my brother-in-law many Christmases ago (see? percolating), and a risotto from the Earth to Table cookbook (above). It sounds terribly busy and complicated, but it really isn't; it took about two solid hours in the kitchen, and then some sporadic visits to stir the sauce, but that's it. Even the risotto was dead simple, now that I know what I'm doing.

This weekend, we are tentatively going to make ravioli using the leftover stuffing from the time I made stuffed zucchini. (Very yummy, takes about an hour, too, but very messy.)

There is nothing better than filling the house with yummy smells while it's cold and wet outside. (And yes, my cold is mostly better.)