OK, how the heck do you arrange these pictures?!! I am so glad that I could get them on here, now I just wish I could move them around where I want them to be! That first picture is of Julie, the proprietress of Knit and Pearl, Santa Barbara's newest specialty yarn shop. She is a kind and sweet person with a sharp eye and good taste. She is busily working to get her shop up and running in September. Yesterday I spent the afternoon helping her arrange her Manos del Uruguay display, the one she is peeking out from behind. Here is another shot of it. Unfortunately, my son's rinky dink digital camera (the only digital camera in our household) just doesn't capture the depth and brilliance of those Manos colors. The next photo is of the "living room." This is the area of the store where we can sit and knit and chat and giggle and pore over projects and laugh and, well, you get the idea. The color of the walls is lighter than the picture and the color of the couch is darker. It is a lovely, light teal/sea green and it is suede! That last picture is of her really cool sock display. I didn't get the top of it, but she is going to hang sample socks from it! It is quite charming and sits in the middle of the store for all to come and admire. By the way, that's Claudia Handpaint Sock yarn in there. Yum! She has got all manner of wonderful yarns in there: Louet Sales, Debbie Bliss, Blue Sky, K1C2, SWTC, Colinette, plus the aforementioned Manos and Claudia Handpaints, to name a few. Our little knitting community is all abuzz. On the homefront, my sister Sharon and her daughter, Rosie came over from Venice (about two hours from here) and we spent the day CLEANING OUT MY KIDS ROOM!!! How's that for family support? We got rid of SO MUCH STUFF! It was so empowering. You guys have no idea. Y'see, I have a lot of good qualities - I am usually really nice and friendly. Love people. I'm a pretty good cook. I'm told that I am artistic, a good friend, loyal and in many other ways very competent. But folks, let me tell you: I am a horrible housekeeper. I mean bad. Messy, sloppy AND dirty. Sorry folks, it's true. When they passed out the "how to be a great, clean, organized person" handbook, I must have been out staring at clouds or something. I seriously missed the boat on that one. Didn't get the gene. I try, I really do. In fact, it seems like I am cleaning all the time. Or at least thinking about it. And I cover it up pretty good. Like, my clothes usually look OK (I think). And my kids are usually presentable. Just don't stare into my van as I am dropping the kids off at school. Or pop in at the house unannounced. So anyway you can imagine how thankful I was to my sister and her daughter for slogging up here to help me. Really thankful. I'm hoping to get through some more of the house tomorrow. It's gonna feel really good to get it done. I shoulda taken before and after pics. Perhaps that's on the agenda for tomorrow. Hmmm....It'll be a big risk, posting my slovenliness all over the internet...but it could help me be accountable. I'll have to take that into consideration. No promises, but I'm definitely pondering the idea.

Ok, I can't even go into how frustrated I am after losing one post to God Only Knows Where (I hit publish and then I never saw it again) and then mucking up the other one so badly - accidentally erasing pictures and not knowing how to get them back in there when I was in the middle of the post...blah, blah, blah. Arrgh! Frustrating as all get out. Ok, but I did want to give a shout out to my new friend Abby at BarefootKnits. Look Abby! I did it! OnlyI did this by accident, so I still need your help! Abby is going to show me how to do links. I told you I was a goober at this stuff. She came to our knit group tonight. So fun to meet bloggers in person! I'll try and post again tomorrow about all the witty, interesting, fascinating stuff about Julie's new knitting store that somehow got lost in cyberspace tonight. Who knows, maybe by tomorrow I'll have all new witty, interesting, fascinating stuff to share. In any case, I'll leave you with an overexposed picture of my sweet Fig.

I am a Petunia What Flower Are You?

"You are a tried and trusted friend who will be there for your friends when they need you. But you have a tendency to be nervous about doing things that go against the norm."

As much as I hate to admit it, that does pretty well describe me. Booor-ing! But dependable nevertheless. Actually, when I cut and pasted the quiz, it did not print the description, so I had to "retake" the quiz so I could cut and paste it in. Interestingly enough, I came up "hydrangea." So I answered the quiz several more times, changing the answers on the ones that I was "on the fence" about. Surprise, it kept coming up "hydrangea!" So I guess I'm a petunia with a good dose of "show off" hydrangea thrown in. I am a bit of a show off, but basically, pretty ho-hum.

Here is the hydrangea description: "You are just a little bit of a show off and like to prove just what you can do. Every time someone double-dog-dared you, you proved that not only could you do it, but you could do it with style."

Let me know what flower you are!

Here is a picture of a sock I started today. It is the Mermaid sock from Cool Socks, Warm Feet by Lucy Neatby. The yarn is some Koigu that I have had forever. The camera does not capture the colors well at all, but let's just say it is one of those purchases that I keep wondering what was I thinking the day I bought it. The colors are sort of murky pink and barf-like. Not very characteristic of Koigu. I was hoping that making them up into a pair of socks would make me like the colors better. We'll see how far I actually get.

I'm actually a very fickle knitter. Right now I have a 3/4 done shawl, two sweaters, a couple of socks, a scarf and an afghan that I am rotating around. I'll probably finish the shawl and the scarf first, then rotate in another project or two and keep the other things hanging in the wings indefinitely. Once in a while, I will go through and finish most of the unfinished items. But some of them just have to die a slow death in unfinished objects limboland.

Well, the kids start school tomorrow, so I better get some butts in bed. I get a one week reprieve before starting my new job. During that week, I plan to scour out my house. We'll see how far I get.

Then it is off to work -- full time on September 5. I'm praying that it won't be as bad as I think it's going to be. I'm thinking lots of Taco Bell and a REALLY messy house. I'm wondering if working full time won't afford me a housekeeper to clean-up. Wouldn't that be nice? 

This is Figgy. She is a feral cat that is quickly becoming tame. I am completely enslaved to her. I have never been a cat lover. In fact, I am allergic to cats. Over a year ago, a wild tabby showed up and had kittens out in the no-man's land corner of our yard. My son noticed the kittens romping around from the back window but they would run for cover every time we tried to come in for a closer look. We began to leave food out for them but we could still never get close. Long story short, we now have the two grown "kittens," Figgy, a girl tortoise shell and Tommy, her all-black brother. About a month ago I trapped them and had them taken in to be spayed. Since they are "wild," the vet "tipped their ears." This is some kind of universal sign that the feral cat has been spayed or neutered. Only in Figgy's case, they near lopped her whole ear off! Poor thing, it makes me sick every time I see what they did to my beautiful baby! I'll get a better shot of it next time so you can see the hack job the vet did on her. So anyway, now I am a reformed cat hater, and I am head-over heels for this girl. For the past year, she has been hanging around our house and I would always talk to her and she would always seem to be listening. But no one could get close to her. In the early spring, she had kittens and it seemed that the pregnancy made her more friendly -- perhaps a survival instinct? In any case, I ended up giving her kittens up for adoption and after her milk dried up, she became "wild" again and I was not able to get near her. Then, after I left and came back from vacation, she was her old self again and has been ever since, even through the spaying. Every day she gets friendlier and friendlier. She jumps up on to the couch, walks on my lap and lets me scratch her tummy. I hope to be able to pick her up soon.

Okay, I admit it, I am a total goober when it comes to this blog. I have no idea what I am doing and the other day enlisted my 11 year old son to help me get my picture up in that right hand corner. He did a little better than me, but we couldn't figure out why we couldn't get it to work. Turns out, it was working, it just takes a while to work. So I get busy with other things and sign on a day later and - hello! There are three, count 'em, three pictures of me staring back at me as "posts." Yes, hello, that's moi, the three goobers staring back at you from cyberspace! Well, let's hope I was successful in deleting those three posts. That way, you only have to read about my lameness and not have to look at it. My mom and dad are in town. They own the totally overpriced shoebox that I live in and call home. The place has really become run down and we are looking at sprucing the place up and bit and hopefully, expanding as well. We interviewed an architect and a contractor and things are looking promising. Now I just have to plow through all the accumulated junk which has grown at an alarming rate these past ten years. I was a packrat before I had kids, but having kids has just seemed to exponentialize the whole pile-up/ acquisition thing. It is time to bulldoze through the clutter and just get rid of a lot of junk.

Hello Blogworld!

Here it is: a scarf, from Mason-Dixon Knitting, for my niece. I used Crystal Palace mohair merino and some ribbon yarn I had laying around.
I loved it so much I asked my friend Julie, who is opening a knitting store if I could make a sample for her store using the same pattern. That one is coming out beautifully -- Douceur et Soie and Colinette Giotto. Lovely.
Her store is slated to open in a couple of weeks and all us SNBers are all aflutter over the whole thing. I recently worked for a knitting store that went out of business that was located in the same spot as where she is opening. My dream job. Of course, it made perfect sense for me to transfer over to work for my SNB buddy when she made the decision to take over. But the dissolution of my marriage and the ensuing fallout kinda messed everything up. I'm knee deep in family matters and survival mode at the moment. Working part time at a yarn store right now just doesn't seem to be in my immediate future. Sigh.
So, anyway I thought I'd join in the masses and start up my own blog after all these years of gleaning ideas and inspiration, lurking, commenting, and wasting countless hours readings other people's blogs. I mean, what better time to start a blog?

We'll see how this goes.