Turkey Day

As I was posting this enormous comment on the Pioneer Woman in response to the question "How was your Thanksgiving", I realized I should really make it into a blog entry on its own. So, here you go:

Well, the meal was a little hit or miss. And it inspired me to wax poetic and become rather verbose in the description thereof.

I was up until 01:30 the night before, waiting for the brine to cool because we forgot about the darn stuff until midnight, and it takes a while for things to cool off. Even when sitting outside in the 10F CO night, it took a while. But the end result was an amazing turkey.

Due to my husband and myself being on some rather strict diets, we only cheated a little bit...the "cheat" involved about a cup of homemade applesauce (no sugar, organic apples from our local CSA...SO GOOD) and a couple of pieces of my homemade bread. The bread was challenging, as I made a double size loaf and forgot to take that into account with the baking time. The first time I cut it, the knife came out...gooey. Ew. Back in the oven it went, and was the last thing to be served, but was by far the most popular item on the table.

My mother in law handled the gravy (I am not a gravy girl, so I don't try), whilst my husband took care of the turkey. The turkey, that was supposed to have a coating of canola oil to give it a beautiful brown glazed appearance. My intrepid love realized we had none in the house, so used Pam.

...

So, whilst the in-laws and the husband were out giving the yaks treats, I was babysitting a turkey that set off the fire alarm constantly due to the unfortunate flash point of Pam. I also had a neighbour's cat underfoot, as she randomly showed up yesterday and decided she wanted to be with us for the holiday.

But though the food was beautiful and made from scratch, with only the veggie stock in the brine coming from a box, the one real downer was over napkins. For, you see, three days ago, I had in my hot little hands about 3 dozen cloth napkins. They got "tidied", which means they will never be seen again. I was tearing around the house with the one solitary napkin I could find in my hand, getting unreasonably worked up. When I was told for the four thousandth time "it's FINE" I had a little explosion of noise that startled the heck out of my in-laws. So. Aside losing my mind and yelling at everyone over napkins, we had a great meal, and were pleased that my husband's folks were able to fly in from the East Coast to join us.

Finish-it Friday

Part of my grand scheme of having thematic days includes Weaving Wednesday (which didn't work out this week due to...I don't know. I was distracted in the morning and in pain in the evening. I failed, but I'll climb back on the weaving horse, promise) and either Finish-it or Forgotten-Object Friday.

This one has been working out pretty well. Basically, either I finish something that has been sitting on the edge of completion and just needs that last little push, or I work on something that I haven't worked on in at least a week.

Today ended up combining the two, and I finished two hats that are gifts (for a mother and daughter) that have been sitting on my desk for the better part of a month. It was the pom poms that stopped my progress.

I hate pom poms.

I like the look, but making them irritates the piss out of me. These managed to finish off one of the teeny tiny balls of yarn I had left from making the hats, so that was semi-useful, but as my sister can vouch (she called me mid-pom pom creation), I swear a lot when I'm making them.

I'm sure some people enjoy these, otherwise they would have fallen out of favour. I am not amongst that population.

Right. Enough bitching about pom poms. The upside is that I finished the hats, and I should be able to ship them out tomorrow. I hope they fit!

Related to this: last night I finished the fingerless gloves I was knitting for Daven. They match a hat I'd knit him a bit ago, and he'd requested them since hands get cold when using keyboards. Between those and the house slippers I knit him a few weeks ago, he's slowly getting kitted out in hand knit goodies.

Now, if only I'd finish his darn sweater. The hold up? Not pom poms, but good guess. No, it is that he has these monkey arms that go on forever, and though I've got the body finished, it has no arms yet. I'll get to it. Maybe next Friday. :)

In case you have interest in such things...

I started a new blog that I'm using to track my progress with my new bodybuilding program. It is located here: http://braveharlot.blogspot.com/

Feel free to ignore this at your leisure. :)

In fibre progress, I've been spinning and weaving and knitting like a mad woman, as per the usual.

I finished the weaving project that seemed to take forever, and I do have photos that I'll eventually get up here. I had some fascinating weaving-related drama, where I found that my math was Totally Messed Up (TM), and I had about twice as much width to my current project as I needed. This necessitated chopping off some of my warp, which was somewhat nerve wracking to do, and starting over. Three times. Kept getting narrower. Hopefully I've got it set up correctly now. Bloody thing. It is a stole for my mother, in two contrasting shades of purple. The sett is for a honeysuckle overshot pattern, though I'll just be using that in three stripes on each end of the stole, with the vast majority in the darker shade. This is for Lent, so I've got an actual time frame involved, meaning I have to *work on it* to get it done in time. We'll see how that goes.

I finished up spinning the two shades of teal alpaca I had, and decided to navajo ply them, as well as pair them up with a beautiful unprocessed fleece I picked up from the Estes Park fibre festival. I've broken out my drum carder, and have been enjoying making big floofy batts to spin from. I have plots in my mind for a sweater, if I get the yardage for it. Since I'm processing the lion's share myself, I'll probably tweak a pattern so that it customized for me. I'm envisioning another Norwegian style sweater, though I think I'll want to pick up some white alpaca to have as a third contrast colour. And maybe a purple. But first, I work on the silvery gray.

I've been knitting on this for the last couple of weeks, in a perfectly wonderful obnoxious colourway of Zauberball (fuchsia). It is very trippy, and the bright colours make me ridiculously happy.

I, of course, have a billion other projects on the needles, but those are the top ones right now.