How's Robb?

... Some time last year, I bought a charming hand-knit cardigan at an estate sale. It had a lot of interesting features that I wanted to explore.  I thought it might be a fun challenge to see if I could reproduce the sweater, without the benefit of a written pattern. I've got the back panel almost finished.  I'll be putting this on stitch holders until I knit the two fronts and the two sleeves.  The sleeves are going to be a challenge, because I really don't understand what the original knitter was thinking.  Her method of working is a bit of a mystery to me.  So far, this has been a fast, fun project.  I hope I don't get bogged down and abandon this sweater when it is 95% completed.  That's what happens to me, far too often.  I start a really ambitious project, and then get utterly stuck at the end.  Sigh....  I can't do anything the easy way, can I?

... Last night, around 3:30 in the morning, I woke up very confused.  Something was going on -- our windows were rattling, and I was overcome with a strange feeling that I could not name.  I imagine there were cartoon question marks hanging in the air over my head.  I was dead asleep, and could not access the part of my brain that produces language.  Robb had been awake a little bit longer and informed me that we were experiencing an earthquake.  By the time he said those words, it was all over, and I promptly fell back to sleep. This was apparently a 6.0 magnitude earthquake. That's big. Thankfully, Robb and I spent a good deal of money when we first bought our house, getting the foundations up to current earthquake standards. The area around the quake was not so lucky. Merchandise was knocked off the shelves in American Canyon, which was the epicenter.  (In other news, you can buy wine at the Walmart in California.) Brick buildings -- which do no

... Our chickens are too adventurous for their own good.  Upon reflection, this probably explains why their water bottle was knocked over the other day.

.... A week ago, our baby chicks looked like this.  They were insanely cute little fluff-butts. In seven days, they've grown tremendously  The chicks have sprouted actual chicken feathers.  Their fluffy baby-down is almost all gone. When I look back at the blog, I see that we got our first set of chicks back in March of 2012. ( Click here for baby pictures. )  Because it was early spring and too cold to allow the chicks outside, we raised that batch of chicks in a well-heated cardboard box in our garage.  The current batch of chicks have spent the better part of their lives outside, right from the start.  The weather is great, and the chicks are thriving. Both Robb and I think that these chicks are benefiting from being in an environment where they have something to do.  These chicks have been foraging for food since we got them.  They eat grass, and have little chicken adventures, climbing all over the place. One of the reasons we got chickens in the first

... Our silly hen Harriet has stopped being broody .  She has finally realized that there is no purpose in spending the entire day sitting on an empty nest. Towards the end of her broodiness, Robb and I started locking her out of the henhouse. Her behavior was disrupting all the other hens, and she wasn't eating or drinking -- just sitting, staring into space. During that time, Harriet was not to be deterred.  She wanted to sit on her nest, no matter what. At one point, we closed up the henhouse, but left the top of the nestbox open. We were a little worried about parasitic mites, so we had dusted the nestboxes with diatomaceous earth, and were airing things out. Harriet seemed determined to get back to her nonexistent eggs.  She flew up onto one of our beehives, and considered her flight options. (Do you like our Saint Catherine's Lace? It's taller than I am, and is a magnet to all sorts of interesting bees.)  Robb and I were pretty shocked when Harriet got u

... The weather has been balmy, and our new chickies are fearless, so we've been putting them outside in the portable chicken pen. The hens are unimpressed.  Harriet, who was supposed to be their surrogate mother, seems to want to kill them.  She screeches herself hoarse whenever she notices them.  Good thing she spends most of her time camped out in the henhouse, trying to incubate non-existent eggs. Smog is fascinated.  He is trying to convince us that our back yard is the Peaceable Kingdom , and that he should be allowed to "play" with his new 'friends." Our chickies seem unconvinced. As for the garden itself, maybe the less said about it the better.  It's in an awkward in-between phase, which isn't being helped by the drought conditions here in California.  If you want to read what real gardeners are up to, check up the fun at Daphne's weekly garden jamboree .

... Let's say you woke up one morning, and said to yourself, "Self, I want to do a painting that looks like gigantic, oversized printed chintz fabric.  I want the final product to be over twenty-five feet tall." How might you go about doing such a thing? Well, if you were me, and you were in charge of painted scenery for a major regional theater , you would have to consider a lot of factors. You'd know that the final painting could not show a lot of brush-strokes, because that would not look "printed."  You would realize that the painting would have to be built as multiple panels, because there's no truck (or lane of traffic) that could accommodate something this large.  Breaking the painting up into pieces would be great for transport, but would mean that the image will have to be perfectly aligned, in order to not look stupid or amateurish.  You would have to custom mix all of your own paint colors.  And you would have to do all this on a reall