weekend

The weekend flew by. I spent too much of it going through the pictures from the vacation, which (now) started almost a month ago. Too much time at the computer on the weekend, when I spend all workweek in front of one. I think the highlights are posted here. I didn't post any of the stuff from after I went back home, when the girls went off east to Montana.

Other than that, it was housecleaning, pet maintenance, and errands.

One of the errands was to get pet supplies for the chickens. At the store there was a guy buying a 50-lb bag of chicken layer food and another of chicken scratch. That store is the only one around that sells the stuff. We started talking with him about chickens, because he obviously had them. He showed us a picture of his and I described ours. He wasn't sure what breeds he had. Afterward I thought that I should have asked him for his email address to talk more chicken.

Back home, I asked the kid, again, what she wanted to do together before she left for the week. The night before she was crying because she was leaving and we didn't do anything together during the day (on Sat), so we said we would do whatever she wanted the next day (Sun). She just sat around and later played on the computer. My wife had to push her to get her packing finished, but she wasn't interested in doing something until late in the day. That thing became a game of Risk, capital style. In those rules, each player picks one of their territories to be their capital, headquarters, and the other players try to capture the other headquarters. It's quicker than the regular Risk, which can take hours.

At bedtime she was teary and didn't want to sleep alone, so I took her bed. This morning she was crying about her imminent departure. We tried to console her that she's going to be busy doing things with the other girls at camp and she should write to us in the evening if she misses us. It didn't work very well. She can receive and post letters, but no mobiles, MP3 players, etc. We will see how it goes. We have already sent a card to her, plan to send a couple more in the coming days, and my wife wrote a few cards that apparently will go to the "counselors" and they can dole them out on specified days.

I spent some time doing some crochet work too. I've been working on this shawl for the wife for months, kind of off and on. The body is done and I've started on the trim. She wanted Fun Fur around it. The pattern is a hybrid of a poncho and a shawl, mostly a shawl, done with bulky yarn and the trim idea from the poncho. The poncho pattern says 69yards for the Fun Fur, so I bought two skeins of it, which were 60yards each. Plenty, right? The perimeter of the shawl is a little more than the poncho, but I'm on the second skein and haven't even gone around once. The poncho pattern shows that in the first round the trim has five stitches in each space of the shawl stitches. In the second round, there should be five stitches for the bottom (outer square) and three stitches around the neck hole. A triangular shawl has an edge around the top/neck and a two-sided edge around the back. By my estimate, it's going to take over two for the first round. Because of the three or five stitches in EACH of the (posts of the) first-round stitches, that's 3-5 times MORE yarn than the first round. How did the designer of the poncho come up with 69yards total? Ugh. I ordered some more. Many more, well, six, for a total of eight or 480 yards, which still may not be enough. I'm planning on four stitches per stitch/post in the second round.