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.

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.

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?

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.

The UK cut their rate of food-borne illness in HALF, and practically eradicated salmonella in eggs by instituting a voluntary vaccination campaign. The eggs from vaccinated chickens earned a red lion stamp. Eggs with those stamps could command a higher price.

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.

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.”

What.

Bad cafe cameraphone picture aside, I think it’s pretty clear that this scarf has gone completely off the rails.

As a challenge to your knitting and spatial logic skills, I ask you to put on your Knitting CSI hat and deduce what happened. I’ll put the answer in the comments.

1. Howard writes like he’s being paid by the dependent clause, with headache-inducing sentences like:

“The lower reaches of the East River have teemed with traffic since the earliest Dutch settlements in the 1670s, and I spent most of my childhood living up on the bluffs above Old Fulton Street, the site where, in 1814, Robert Fulton inaugurated regular steamboat-ferry service between Brooklyn and Manhattan and made Brooklyn boom.”

Here’s another whopper, chosen at random:

“Still, I don’t know if I side with the locavore, or his critic, who claims that the titans of agriculture have it right, that massive quantities of food packed inside cargo containers hauled aboard enormous trains (which advocates say carry unimaginably heavy loads 435 on one gallon of gasoline) and in the holds of oceangoing ships are much less wasteful in the long run than weekly – nay, daily – parades of local artisanal producers trundling off to greenmarkets in beater cargo vans or late-model Subaru station wagons to sell their certifiably wholesome foodstuffs to eager urbanites, holed up, isolated, and ignorant, without the means or practical skills necessary to grow their own food.”

2. Howard has no business owning animals.

He has no interest in animals, no empathy for them, no aptitude for their care, and no inclination to research their needs. He is one of those people who think of animals as animate objects, like toys whose batteries don’t need changing.

I stopped reading after “the songbird debacle,” when he bought a dozen songbirds for his two year-old daughter on a whim, neglected them for a week (in which nine of them died), and killed the remaining three in a drunken rage (one with his bare hands). Yes, really.

You’re welcome!

You can literally look at your knitting and calculate how much time you’re throwing down the drain by ripping back. In the case of my latest project, I would be throwing away about two hours of work. Two hours! It’s discouraging.

But then I think, “If I finish this item, will I be unable to overlook this error?” Because if so, then the entire project is a waste. ALL the yarn and ALL the time, wasted.

In this case, it was a fairly minor error. I wasn’t paying attention when I started knitting Karen Baumer’s Multidirectional Scarf. (Link: Ravelry/non-Ravelry) I slipped the first half dozen SSKs backwards. You’re supposed to slip the stitches knitwise, but I slipped them purlwise out of habit.

You can barely even tell, but this caused the seam between the two directions to sort of hump up. Is this a huge deal? No. If it was in a sock (I never notice a damned thing about my socks) I’d have let it go. Heck, if it was at the part of the scarf that goes around the back of your neck, I’d probably have let it go.

But every time I set it down, I couldn’t stop poking at the humped part. My fingertips reached for it on their own, pulling and prodding and trying to get the knitting to lie flat.

I looked into the future, and I saw myself constantly fiddling, fiddling, fiddling with the end of the scarf. Stopped at a red light, tugging on the stitches. Waiting in line at the post office, fussing with the seam. Endlessly annoyed by this tiny little thing.

So I sighed, and I wrote off those two hours of my life, and I ripped it back.

I finally captured the color green in this skein of Noro Cash Iroha. As you can see, I had to sneak up on it after dark. This picture is taken with my desk lamp, against the notebook I keep ever beside my elbow.

I enjoy a good swatching. Sometimes I’m just not prepared to commit to a pattern, but I want to knit anyway. Swatching to the rescue!

In this case, by swatching I learned that this is a loosely-spun single with an oddly cottony feel. Which is a pity, because that’s one of my least favorite kinds of yarn. But those of you who enjoy a good Malabrigo squashing will probably enjoy this yarn.

I used to keep all my swatches. Until the day I confessed to the extent of my swatch library, and one of you said something along the lines of, “I knit the swatch and then I rip it back and start knitting the real thing with it.”

This struck me as being so eminently sensible and thrifty that it’s what I’ve done ever since. Wish I could find the comment now, but I think it’s lost in the Great Database Black Hole of 2007. Le sigh.

(Clashes a bit, doesn’t it? Ouch.)

Technically this scarf, knit in Lion Brand Wool Ease which is 85% acrylic, doesn’t need a full wet blocking. But I always like to give things a real wash before sending them out in the world. If for no other reason than to wash out some of the cat dander.

I’ve dialed back a lot of my charity knitting in recent years. The Red Scarf Project is one of the few that I still knit for. Let’s face it: there are a lot more efficient ways to get warm clothing to the unfortunate than to knit it by hand.

Unlike other knitting charities, the Red Scarf Project is one that wants knitting because of what it means, rather than as an item of clothing. These are kids who grew up in the foster care system, who grew out of foster care at 18, and yet still went on to college.

It’s an amazing accomplishment, but they have no one to be proud of them for it. Nowhere to go on holidays, no one to send them a birthday present. They have friends, to be sure, and partners, but it’s not the same as family, is it?

I tell you what, though. A hand-knit scarf really means a lot to these kids.

A few years ago, I happened to be driving past the UW campus on February 16th. (The scarves are distributed on Valentine’s day.) I saw a girl walking down the sidewalk, wearing a big red scarf knit in that “X’s and O’s” cable pattern, smiling like the happiest girl in the world.

Was it a Capital-R Capital-S Red Scarf? Was she an OFA kid? I can’t say, but the memory has stuck with me.

The OFA will be accepting scarves until December 15, so there’s still time if you want to knit one! They prefer quality over quantity, so this is a time to dig deep and knit or crochet something really special. It’s going to a kid who’s going to love it and cherish it for a lifetime, so it’s worth the effort!