I’ll be down at the Oregon Dunes on a Tracking weekend Thursday through Sunday, so you won’t likely hear from me. Hopefully, I’ll have great stories and pictures upon my return. Here’s the link to the trip I’ll be on. I’m going along as the Teaching Assistant and Photographer for the trip. How lucky am I?!

In the meantime, here’s a picture of a track from two winters ago in Onalaska. Can you guess what kind of animal it is? Is this it’s front foot or back foot? Left or right? What was the temperature like when it stepped here, and has it warmed up or cooled down since then? Was this animal in a hurry? If you found this track, what sorts of other tracks and vegetation would you expect to find nearby?

This is seriously the sweetest corn I’ve ever tasted. Seriously, I’m not just biased because it came from my own garden. I had to call mom yesterday to ask her how to tell when corn is ripe. She gave me some pointers and I decided tonight to have a go at a couple of them. OMG! I’m pretty sure I saved the seed packet so I can look up what kind it is. I planted it late, and we don’t really get enough heat here in the summer to grow much corn, so I didn’t really expect to get any corn at all. But a few of the plants got big enough to produce a medium sized ear (that’s not a full-sized plate in the picture), and it was so worth it. I was saving a chocolate/coconut muffin for dessert, but after the corn, I’m not really wanting anything else sweet. This probably means that it’s bad for me or something, doesn’t it?

And also, it’s a good thing it was that fabulous, because shucking them was an adventure.

Quite a while ago (6 months ago?), Kathy came to visit, and she bought us both some sock yarn and patterns for making toe-up socks. I had previously only made a couple hats. I tell you about my relative inexperience in order to justify the sad state of the socks to come. The first sock actually came along pretty well. I followed the instructions in Janet Rehfeldt’s “Toe-Up Techniques for Hand Knit Socks”. The book is brilliant and it helped me to understand how the sock gets shaped to a foot as you go. The fact that things did not turn out as planned has nothing to do with her instructions and everything to do with my inattention to them.

The first sock actually didn’t go too badly.

A little loose around the toe and heel, but definitely wearable as a house sock. But alas, and I’m not sure what happened, then there came the floppy sock of shame.

And by “I don’t know what happened”, I mean that I know exactly what happened but it’s too embarrassing to admit that I made such a dumb mistake and then chose not to frog it way down by the toe when I had the chance. Nope, I stayed in knitterly denial right up to the cuff, even managing to convince myself that there was no point in trying it on because it was going to be just the same as the first one, right? Mmm-hm. Right.

I’ve even washed it in super-hot water and dried it in the dryer, hoping that even though it’s superwash wool, it would shrink a little bit. Alas. So probably I will rip it out all the way to the first row after the cast-on (cuz that’s where the mistake started) and re-do the whole thing.

But first I’m taking a break from that project to make some wrist warmers. I’m using some of the wool that I spun myself on Kathy’s spinning wheel while I was in McCall this summer. It’s thick wool and #8 needles, so it’s going quickly. No pictures here because it will be the first post on a new blog project that I hope to have started in the next couple weeks. And by “couple weeks” I mean in something less than a year.

Click for a larger view. This is one one Olympia’s local characters. He carries his cats around with him on his bicycle, and I see him panhandling around the West End most days. At first, I didn’t approve at all. Living on a bicycle is no life for a cat, I thought. But as I saw him around more and more, I saw that these cats really love him. The black one will sometimes ride on top of the kitty carrier attached over the back wheel, and one day I watched him climb from the kitty carrier to the man’s shoulder and ride around a parking lot perched there happily. I’ve wanted to give the guy some money, but I think that giving gifts to someone who has no means to reciprocate is demeaning. Finally it occurred to me a couple days ago that paying someone for pictures is a socially acceptable model, and I asked him what he would charge me to take a few pictures of him with his cats. An interesting conversation followed, which I wish I had pursued further, and these pictures.

Last night I went to my local knitter’s get-together. I’ve wanted to go for a long time, but then I almost chickened out last night. I’m so glad I went! The knitters were all super cool. (One thing I realized I like about knitting and crafting groups is that there is usually a range of ages present…the oldest woman was maybe in her 50’s, the youngest 20-something.) There were about a dozen people there, and I ended up spending most of the time talking to someone whose name I forgot (along with everyone else’s). She’s from Texas, but moved here to go to Evergreen. She was in her late 20’s or so. She lives off the grid in a trailer somewhere near the college. She’s planning to spend a couple months in Brazil this summer, where she’s going to study capoeira. Anyway, she was very groovy.

And, as I was driving to the bookstore (where the knitter’s meet) I was thinking about how I need to find out if the Deaf Coffee has started up again. And I was thinking that if I’m going to a knitting group, and climbing once a week, and working a couple of evenings, I’m running out of time to add in more groups. Well, how fortunate is it that there turns out to be a deaf woman at the knitting group! I heard her talking and recognized the deaf accent and asked her if she could sign (I signed the question to her). I was the only other person there who could sign, and it was so fun! She could read lips a bit, so she could catch bits of what was going on in the conversation, but with me there she could ask all about what other people were making and stuff. Of course, I don’t know the signs for things like “lace cardigan” so I ended up finger-spelling a lot, but she was very tolerant. She goes every week, and she said there are a couple other deaf women who often come. Whoo-hoo!

And just in case anyone is searching for Deaf Coffee meet-ups in Olympia, they’ve started up again at Cafe Artisan (which used to be Cafe Veritas, it’s the same place where it used to be, just a new name) every first Friday of the month.

Scene: It’s a warm summer evening on the southern tip of Puget Sound. It’s a rare clear night and, with the power out and street lamps dark, you can even see the stars. I am walking along the streets in my t-shirt and shorts. It’s a little muggy. I live in an upper-middle class neighborhood…lots of manicured lawns, two-car garages, clean sidewalks, two-story houses.

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Woman in a white skirt walking her little dog, to her neighbor on the front porch: (bitterly) Well, how do you like living in a third world country?

Neighbor: This is crazy. There’s no reason for the power to be out on a street like ours.

Woman: I know. It’s unacceptable. I called the power company and they said they have power out to 982 customers right now, and I told them I DON’T CARE THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!

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Man talking on his cell phone as he walks past me: It’s weird. I’m on my way to this dinner party and all the power is out on the street. I feel so exposed in the dark.

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I walk past a house running their generator. The power has been out for about an hour. They have their loud generator running and through the window I can see that they are sitting in the living room with the lights on. Mom, Dad, and teenage son are all reading something. Because god forbid that they should have to leave the lights out and actually talk to each other or something. But I was less cynical about that family tableau when I walked another block and came to the second neighborhood generator. In that house, none of the lights were on, and all I could see through the window was the blue flicker of the large television set.

It’s hard to have a positive attitude about people in general.