redux, times 2

The second go-round of the greyhound toque turned out much better.  I made the chart with fewer rows and used slightly different lettering on the chart.

This is with Cascade 220 Superwash wool.  I am making two for our greyhound rescue group’s annual fundraising picnic and auction in September.

I did the "jogless jog" on a couple of those colour changes

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I need a bigger styro head

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because I keep pulling the wool over the eyes of this one

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do what it says!

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Adopt a Greyhound

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And in the “we know what side our bread is buttered on” department:

"Daddy's not done eating yet ... so we're not moving"

I had planned to have bbq chicken breast, grilled veg and a salad for supper last night.  The weather was so cold and nasty I just did the chicken and veg inside.  I made the Memphis Blues bbq sauce and grilled the breasts first on my grill/fry pan, then finished them in the oven.  I roasted the veggies in the oven, too.  It was pretty good. (And yes, the poopers got a little morsel or two of chicken when we were finished.)

chocolate chip cookies for breakfast?! Why not!

I had made these so called “New York Times” chocolate chip cookies a year or so ago.  I came across the recipe again on a new-to-me blog and they looked so tasty I decided to try them again.  If I remember the last time, they were okay, but for some reason I didn’t make them again.

This time, I measured all the dry ingredients on my scale.  I realized as I pulled the first batch out of the oven that I’d forgotten to sprinkle a little sea salt on the tops.

tasty cookies

You do have to plan ahead; the recipe calls for the dough to be chilled at least 24 hours.  Mine was closer to 30ish hours.  They turned out really tasty!!

the prototype

As mentioned before I was working on a design for a greyhound toque.  I first tried the running greyhound silhouette figure but it wasn’t working too well working the in the round (too many long, long, long floats to be carried).  Then I whipped up a little chart with some text.

I'll have to try the jogless jog next time

The text says “Adopt a Greyhound” with a little heart at the end.

moments before the ripping

I thought the width of the band was too wide, so the next version will have fewer rows.

and I messed up the "G"

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I didn't get the heart centered on the space between the end of the beginning/text

So I have ripped it out and have started again.  Because I will be making the light/mid grey band thinner/not as tall, there will be more black on the hat.  Everyone loves black, right?

Busy Airport

This is pretty cool – so many planes!  This is one hour of runway traffic at Logan International Airport in Boston – compressed to something like 2.5 minutes:

There’s always time for banana bread

I tried really hard yesterday to not do anything – no work, no housework, etc.  I did want to make some banana bread because I had three bananas that were perfectly rotten aged.

Again I used the “Flour’s Famous Banana Bread” recipe . There are differences in this recipe that I’ve found online to what is in the actual cook book.  The recipe in the book calls for 1.5 cups of flour, not 1 2/3 like this one. The amount of mashed banana is 1 1/3 cup. Nuts are 3/4 cup. The oven temp is 325°. And the baking time is closer to an hour. My first time it took 1 hr and 5 minutes because of the pan. This time I didn’t fill my large loaf pan all the way, and I put batter in two mini loaf pans. The minis baked in 38 minutes and the big loaf took 55. It baked perfectly this time, no goopy top and because I didn’t fill the pan, it didn’t overflow like last time.

delightful!

There are many recipes I want to try in that book; I think I’ll try the brownies next.

I had been working on a greyhound toque the past couple of days.  I have almost finished it; it’s likely going to be a prototype and/or be ripped out and done over.  The original idea was to use that greyhound chart I mentioned in a post below, but after doing half the chart I admitted to myself that circular knitting doesn’t lend itself well to intarsia style charts.  I had to brainstorm and come up with something different.  I’ll take pics before I rip it out.

a run in the yard

the fang, always the fang!

I’ve noticed that Ava does that quite often; wedges her needle nose into the arm of the couch.

I'm sure she's comfy ...

After the big fella mowed the back yard, we went out for a little stretching of our legs.

they crack me up! "Look, it's Drake!!"

Next door is a little Boston Terrier named Drake.  He’s very cute and very fast!  I tried to take a few pics, but the auto-focus kept hitting on the chain link fence instead of little Drake.

oh, hi mommy! We're playing with Drake!

always time for a little cookie!

After that Drake went back inside, probably to nap!

Apollo hanging with his dad ... and never too far from the beer.

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built like a brick shi... er, linebacker

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"the white-haired gentleman from Colorado"

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Ava rips it up a little

I tried to get some running shots of her, but she’s pretty much a velcro dog with me.  If I walked to the other end of the yard and turned to call her to run to me, she’d be right on my heels anyway.  Also discovered that, as with Sabrina, my camera in sports mode has a really hard time focusing on the brindle coat.

big boy chilling

We had to go run some errands, get groceries, etc. today.  Then I worked for 3+ hours.  I think tomorrow I’m doing nothing much.  No work, that’s for sure.  I might bake banana bread – I have some bananas at the perfect amount of over-ripeness.

Last night I cast on for another pair of Noro Kureyon socks.  I have been also trying to knit up some sort of greyhound toque that I can donate to our adoption group’s fundraising picnic/auction in September.  I was using this graph from Erssie (37 st x 27 rows), but it’s quite wide and to do basically intarsia in the round is a big pain in the ass.  So back to the drawing board.  I’ll have to see if I can draft some smaller, repeating motif that is more fair isle-y than intarsia.  We’ll see.

I think I pulled something

I was laughing so hard at this video:

OMG! Love the Benny Hill music, too. Watch at the 27 second mark where the truck takes out the driver. He gets up later …

stress reducer

I had 138 emails this morning that I had to deal with (accumulated over three days).  Gah!  Time spent doing mundane administrative things like that takes time away from making progress on my files.  I didn’t need to reply to that many emails, but each one had to be “handled”.

By the end of the day I felt more organized and had my work plan for the rest of the week, but getting there was a drag.

I had seen this recipe a few days ago and wanted to try it:  Thin & Crispy Chocolate Chip Cookies.  The big fella knew that I was frustrated with my work today and he came into the kitchen where, instead of making supper, I was baking cookies.  He commented that his yard work is a stress reducer for him and that baking and cooking must be mine.  And he’s right.

about 2 dozen

Add a tall glass of icy cold milk and you have:

Supper of Champions

The recipe is interesting in that it calls for melted then cooled butter instead of room temp butter.  That means you could whip these up whenever the whim took you and not have to wait for butter to warm.  And it uses only an egg yolk, not the full egg.  I reduced the vanilla to 1 teaspoon (recipe says 1 tablespoon).  These are very tasty and easy peasy to mix up.  I’ll put them on the recipe page.

forecast calling for mild zoomies

Ava’s flaky skin and super coat blowing continued, so after we took them for a walk today we gave her a bath.

She’s a goofy spazz.  She got a little wound up!  I’m sure if our main level was completely carpeted she’d have been all over the place.  As it is, we tried to confine her to the carpet runner paths so she didn’t wipe out on the laminate.

I’ve been brushing and brushing her and even after the bath (buckets of fur in the bath water) when I was brushing her it was coming off in huge clumps.  So far she’s not flaky.  We rinsed her really well.

Had a 10 hour day today – board meeting with 2 hours of driving time, then meeting followup.  Back at the other contract tomorrow!

finally got ‘em done!

after what seemed like months and months:

but was actually only a month

These are my usual women’s size, 64 stitch cast on, 2.25 mm needles.  The yarn is pretty stiff and scratchy, but when I put them on, they didn’t feel that awful.  I’ll give them a good wash and see if they do soften up and bloom.

Noro Kureyon sock yarn #236

The colour is pretty true in these photos.

in the stretch

for a  little bit of a dog, she can sure take up a lot of space!

oh, how touching! kiss kiss!

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exactly WHAT is going on in here?!

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nuffin. We wasn't doin' nuffin.

Apollo, for some reason, for the last month or so, hasn’t been going on his spare room bed.  But then last Monday he decided to start using it again.  Ava has no qualms whatsoever about jumping up there with him.  She’ll pretty much go wherever he goes.  His little shadow.

fish eye

I got a little camera to carry in my purse for those times when I didn’t want to carry my big DSLR.  (And because my BlackBerry camera is crap and I can’t upgrade to a newer one for another year.)  This camera has some interesting little modes/settings on it.  For instance, I can turn a greyhound into a bull terrier:

you're still handsome, big boy!

by using the “fish eye” mode.  He looks like Blue.

Blue and Don Cherry

Ava just looks weird.

my nose is too pointy for the fish eye!

There is also a “minaturizer” mode.  I recently came across a blog that outlined how to do this with your DSLR and Photoshop.  This is way, way easier!

minaturized greyhounds?

It makes your subject look minaturized compared to its surroundings. I’ll have to try a better subject to demonstrate the effect.

Anyway, more work, always more work to do.  I’m shutting it down for tonight and going to try to finish the toes on those socks!