Sunday, November 30, 2008

The Village, The End!

Landscape lights crack me up. I have to pick up some more of them.

This church was one of my first houses. My husband bought it because it looks just like one next to the house I grew up in.
The street, with its lights lit.
And finally, the rich guy's house. You can tell he's rich because he has a private gate, see?

Saturday, November 29, 2008

The Village, Part Two

Here is the village, with this side of the mountain being the expensive/exclusive side of town, and the far side being the actual town.

We just found this sign in Michael's yesterday, and laughed - - that's what it looks like at the entrance to Vail, at the covered bridge.
Ah...the cabin is where the guy lives who wants to be by himself, and the house below that is the rich guy's house. He owns the mountain. Inherited it from his grandfather, in fact, who made his money bootlegging.


This is a bad shot in the dark, but please....notice the full moon.....

Building the Village, Part One

DD and DS2, unconvincingly pretending the camera is not pointed at them.
Master Builder, who had the vision for this year's village.
The beginning.

Good bye pumpkin collection, see you next September!


Friday, November 21, 2008

More!


What a surprise!

Yep, I took this through the window and that's my ghostly shadow you see - but look at the snow! It's only snowing at all, let alone heavily, in a very narrow band and we are in it! Honestly, when I woke up at 7 and left my room I nearly fell over as I walked down the hall and looked out the window.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Weirdness

I don't know if these pictures will convey the weirdness of this sky, the afternoon sky looked like this to our north while the rest of the sky was clear. We really began to worry that it was a forest fire. These pictures are from my cell phone, so the quality isn't that great, but here goes.




As soon as we pulled into the driveway it started it started to snow really hard and fast, so it was a snow cloud, of course. A rogue snow cloud.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Anathem

Note to DS,

I am still only halfway through Anathem simply because much of my reading time lately has been in bed and Anathem lives downstairs. I am really enjoying it and want to point out two of my favorite lines so far:

"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."

and

"That man behaves so much like the villian in a work of literature, it's almost funny."
"Yes....it's as if he'd never even heard of foreshadowing."

Cracked me up.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Slippery Shirts

This post might look as if I am bragging about my sewing skills, but it's not. It's for my kids and my mom who aren't here in my house right now to see what I did.

Okay. It looks just like bragging. Here goes...

DH wears, to play racquetball and do work, a lot of what we call Slippery Shirts because we are a weird family and we make a lot of names for things. They are performance fabrics because they wick and stretch. I ordered some Power Dri from the mill that makes Polar Fleece fabric, and made a shirt for him based on his favorite shirt. Black is hard to photograph, but here's a picture of both shirts, the old one on the bottom and my new one on top.

Here's a picture of just the new one - it looks really good! The machines were great - I didn't use the sewing machine at all, just the serger and the coverstitch. I added the green at the inside back of the neck to keep it from stretching but it was an afterthought so it's not very neat. But the stitching is all really nice, I love that coverstitch machine. He can wear it to see how it feels, and now that I have learned so much from the last class I took, I can make any changes to it that he needs.
All right I'm finished. But it's not really bragging, it's just - - showing my skills!

Go ahead Mom - click on the picture so it's bigger and just look how nice that hem is!

Thursday, November 13, 2008


A little reminder to fans - pomegranates are in season! Look at the amount of seeds that came from one the other night; they were delicious.

I found a really easy and clean way to peel them without staining everything in sight and picking up seeds from across the room.

  • Cut off the blossom end of the pomegranate, without cutting through the seeds.
  • Make 4 or 5 slices through the skin and into the white part, from nearly top to bottom.
  • Soak the pomegranate in a bowl of water, with enough water to cover it.
  • After 5 minutes of soaking, keeping the fruit under the water, pull away the peel at the cuts you made. The whole thing will come apart easily and most of the seeds will fall into the water. You can push the rest of them out while it's still under water. Drain, dry, and they'll stay fresh for a day or two covered and in the fridge.

Remember this recent blog picture of the woods right out the back door?
Same view, this morning. Lot of leaves down! Still looks inviting though.

Monday, November 10, 2008

My weekend in pictures

Saturday morning I drove to a suburb of Baltimore and checked into this hotel where I met a few of my friends. We used this....to get to the Baltimore Convention Center... which is in the Inner Harbor so we could attend this... which is a huge annual gathering of ... knitters! I met lots of nice people, a few authors, learned a few things, and bought some yarn. The next day my two friends left because they had been there for days and their time was up, but two other friends drove down from Delaware. I took the train by myself and met them in the city, then at the end of the day took the train back up to where I'd left my car and drove home. Missed a turn in the middle of horse country on the way home, but a quick call to my brother who is a whiz at helping me out when I'm lost, and I was back on my way.

I bought a few projects....
This hat, but not in those colors, for a baby gift. It looks like fun to knit and it's adorable. I bought yarn and a pattern for a sweater that I unfortunately cannot find a picture of to show you, because it's very new. I bought this book....
to help me design a sweater for DH. I also bought one of these Buddha buttons, the large one, for something as-yet-unplanned for myself because I thought it was just so cool looking.

I bought a few Christmas presents too, but, you know. Can't show em.

That's my story, it was fun to be with so many other women (and a few men!) who knit. Now I have to clean and get to work on a BIG project for school that I am very late on, and will take many many solid days of work, which I don't have, so it will take weeks overall. Yikes.

Friday, November 7, 2008

Ah, Fall

Look at the woods, don't you just want to go for a walk in there?

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Fall Back Day

Have you changed your clocks?

It's looking pretty beautiful around here, and last week DH and I stopped to take pictures of it all. Today might be a good day to put the camera in the car too. Here's a lovely view of a farm not far from here....

And one of the many ruins of houses/barns/homesteads around us....
Isn't this one gorgeous? Unfortunately as I was trying to take more pictures someone let out the dogs on an adjoining property and I got back in the car real fast!
Then there was this sign, on the fence of a stunningly beautiful property with what looked to be meticulously restored buildings and gorgeous plantings. As you cross over a little stone bridge and round a bend, wham! this sign just jumps off the fence!