My friend and fellow knitter Patti has been working at the downtown Seattle Food Bank. The food bank is in dire straits this year, and under new management that’s working to improve the situation.
Patti is collecting warm hats and scarves, any gender and size, in advance of what is forecast to be a pretty rough winter.
If you can donate a bit of knitting, it will be well appreciated! Please email Patti at aardwolf@comcast.net for the mailing address.
We had a batch of cold cloudy weather over the weekend that made everyone realize that it’s true, our so-short summer is coming to an end. The weather caused me to dig out my Drops 103-1 sweater, in order to postpone that first fire of the season.
It turns out that when I washed it before, I didn’t rinse it well enough. It had a slightly greasy, slightly tacky feel. Knowing that this will only attract dirt and make it harder to wash again, I decided to suck it up and re-wash it right away.
This is also the time of year when I sigh, and evaluate The Pantry Situation. The “pantry” is a shelf where I store canned goods and such. I try to eat everything off the shelf over summer (turning that stock), then stock it up for the fall and winter.
October and November are usually the stormiest months. But in December and January there’s the possibility of getting snowed in. I like to keep seven days of canned goods (seven cans of three different things, there ya go) plus misc stuff like granola bars, instant coffee, fancy crackers.
I’ve done a good job at whittling down last year’s supplies.
Pretty much down to the stuff that I just won’t eat, plus a can of beans. I’ll eat the beans.
Not sure what to do with three cans of coconut milk. (Even less sure why I bought three cans of coconut milk in the first place. Curry sounded REALLY good to me at some point.)
Several boxes of Kraft Mac and Cheese, but either I’ve finally grown up (unlikely) or they have changed the formula (very likely) because I find it inedible now.
Not to mention things that have fetched up on the shelf like driftwood. The wrist brace from last year’s broken bone. My cheap metal-and-plastic yarn swift. A box of Swiffer Duster refills.
The ennui, it overtakes me again. Maybe I’ll deal with the pantry next week.
I did a bit of swatching over the weekend, when I didn’t feel capable of knitting anything smarter.
This is Patons Soy Wool Stripes (SWS). The color is called “natural geranium.” I was going to make fun of that color name until I remembered my August-flowering primrose out on the porch.
Yet Another Loosely Spun Single. I can see why this ended up snoozing in my stash for so long. When I first got on the Joann’s mailing list, I started using my monthly “50% off” coupon to buy a single skein of SWS for stashing.
Now, lo these many years later, I realize that it’s a lot cheaper to not buy yarn than it is to buy useless yarn at half off.
I have two skeins of geranium, and one skein of the brown-and-blue stripe mix. The yarn is pretty, and soft, and has a nice shine to it, but I’m a little stumped about what to use it for. I browsed other Patons SWS projects on Ravelry, but nothing grabbed me.
What have you made with this yarn? Did you like it?
To bring my non-American readers (I know there are many of you) up to speed: the last few weeks has seen a MASSIVE egg recall for salmonella contamination. Last I heard the recall affected half a billion eggs.
I have learned a lot about eggs since I started keeping chickens.
1. The United States has one of the worst food safety records in the developed world.
^ Just as a thumbnail overview, here is the rate of food-borne illnesses for 1996-1998:
United States: 26,000 cases per 100,000 citizens.
France: 1,210 per 100,000
I don’t understand how you can look at those numbers and not get outraged.
2. There is a vaccine for salmonella which was approved for use in poultry in the United States by the USDA in 1998.
3. The guy who ran this colossally huge battery hen operation found it cheaper to pay the fines than to fix the problems. He had been paying the fines for years.
How you can run such a filthy, disgusting operation and still be the nation’s single largest egg producer is an excellent example of why #1 is true.
4. With very few exceptions, eggs at the grocery store come from battery hens. That’s just how eggs are made, here in the US. With cruelty.
The only exception is eggs labeled “Certified Humane.” This includes Wilcox and – in Washington – Steibr Farm eggs. Not sure about other brands.
5. Eggs are naturally sterile. There are several overlapping biological mechanisms which keep eggs bacteria-free. (If it weren’t that way, we wouldn’t have chickens in the world left to lay them.)
You have to screw things up pretty badly for the contents of an egg to be infected with a pathogen.
In fact, trustworthy eggs don’t even need to be refrigerated. A surprising number of chicken owners store their eggs on the kitchen counter. I only keep mine in the fridge because my counter space is limited.
6. It doesn’t have to be this way. We deserve safe food. It is possible to sell us safe food – other countries do it all the time! But in order to fix the problem, we first have to admit that it exists.
7. Eggs don’t come out of the same hole as the poop. Without going into too much detail: there’s a flap.
I didn’t have much gameplay time this week, and I’m ever so tired, so I’m going to keep this week’s update short.
Furthermore, I understand this is the last Sunday of summer vacation for a lot of you out there. I salute your return to school! Today is the first day that’s really felt like fall. I fear the summer has come to an end.
Verich and a guest partied hard at Verich’s birthday.
I love watching Sims dance! I do miss the “Smustle,” though. This was a group dance in Sims 1 and Sims 2. Once you declared it was time to Smustle, every Sim on the lot would join in.
This entire batch of Sims is very athletic. Look at ‘em go!
I decided to amuse myself by setting up the Floor Hygeinator that Simon built. This is a thing you place on the floor, and when you walk over it, most of the time it poots out a sparkly refreshing cloud.
But sometimes it goes wrong, and emits a green stink cloud instead. What does it smell like? Farts? Rotten eggs? I don’t know, but I know that it’s a smell bad enough to induce vomiting.
Umlaut FINALLY died. Dude was 113 days old! It was starting to seem like he’d never leave.
As a parting gift, his ghost tripped the Floor Hygeinator on the way out. It pooted green (bad) on poor Wingdings.
Sorry, darling!
Isn’t Wingdings adorable, by the way?
Even though like most teenagers, she’s a terrible cook.
Wesley is a pretty cute kid, too. When he became a teenager, he ended up with the same hairstyle his dad had at his age.
Meanwhile, Verich got old, and I finally let him retire.
Now that the kids are all in school, I’ve been sending Verich and Patricia out into the yard all day. One day I hope to see a meteor strike!
Patricia finally got old. I gave her a pair of Daisy Dukes, to celebrate the hot new bod she worked so hard to acquire.
“Daisy” just doesn’t seem befitting a woman of her age, though. So I call them “Erma Dukes.”
