I'm A Statistic

I was one of those people who thought it would never happen to me. I was wrong. My identity has been thefted.

I only have one credit card (hate debt) and I pay it online (too lazy to mail a check on time). I signed into the site this morning to check my balance and make my payment, when to my shock I discovered about 8 charges I had not made.

You can hear about it all you want, but till it happens to you, you just don't get it. It's kind of scary, and more than a bit insulting. The charges weren't huge, and they were all to video or music sites online (Blockbuster online, Napster, and the like).

I called and reported it, and my credit card company (Chase) was super cool. They took the charges off my bill and told me I would not be responsible for any of them. (Some places hold you responsible for the first $50 of unauthorized charges, but Chase waives that). They told me they'd send me an affidavit to sign saying those weren't my charges, and they'd investigate it from there. They also canceled my account, and will issue me a new card (with a new number) immediately. Oh, and they told me the three major credit reporting agencies would be notified so they can monitor and correct their records - because of course when the places where the false charges were made don't get paid, they could report them on me.

All in all it was fairly painless, but still ... yipes! That sucked.

I don't know what happened. I make a lot of online purchases, but I've been doing it for years, and this is the first time anything like this has happened. I don't know whether it was some individual at some company I ordered from who took the number from my order, or whether it was just some random computer hacker. Or maybe even from an in-person charge I made somewhere at some point. No way to tell, at least not from my end. I'd like to hope the investigation would turn up something, but I imagine it's relatively doubtful.

In more pleasant news ... the second sweater front is progressing well. That's about all I have to say about that.

It's supposed to rain and thunderstorm here tonight and tomorrow, so I don't know how much gardening I'm going to get done, but if I can, I will. Now that I've started, and actually have a hope of doing something right this time, I'm so psyched ... I can't wait for the times when I can just get out and work in my little garden. I check my new plants several times a day (no new growth to speak of yet - bummer) and I'm already busy planning other things I want to do.

Meanwhile, there's a Midnight Drunken (R) Horseshoe Tournament going on (okay, it's not midnight yet ... we started early) so I'm off to point and laugh.

Sweaters and Waterfalls

The weather took a cold turn, so I got some knitting done last night. I finished the left front of the cardigan! Woo-hoo. It looks excessively long for some reason, but it measures exactly what I wanted it to - 2" longer than my current sweater, because the current sweater is a little too short for me. I think a combination of pinning it out wonky, the angle of the picture, and the fact that it's laying flat on a bed instead of being worn makes it look worse than it is.



The good news is, my scheme worked. When I started the front, I had 13 too many stitches for my pattern repeat, but I needed them all to have the right width. So I decided to do a strip of plain stockinette up each side - 7 stitches on the arm side, and 6 on the buttonband side. I really liked the way it was turning out, framing the pattern. Then when I got to the v-neck, I realized I was going to lose those if I just did the decreases as directed, and I didn't think I'd like that nice framing strip of stockinette just disappearing up the neck.

So I did my decreases on the edge, but then moved one stockinette stitch in on each decrease row, replacing a pattern stitch with the plain stitch. That maintained the six-stitch stockinette border. I didn't know how well that was going to work, if it would look the way I hoped, until I tried it. But I'm really happy with it.



The one thing that didn't turn out as planned is the shoulder.



It's actually straight in real life, I just pinned it out poorly. But I wanted to add another 1" wide strip of stockinette at the top, before binding off the shoulder. I thought that would make a nice frame all the way around, and would make a nice shoulder seam - with stockinette on both sides, there would be no weird pattern juxtaposition at the shoulder seam. However, when I finished the neck decreases, the directions said to work even until the piece measured so many inches from the armhole marker, and it turned out it already measured that, right then. Not having anticipated that, I didn't work the last inch in stockinette; didn't want to rip it out and do it over; and didn't want to add an inch more to the length. So ... the front ends at the shoulder seam like you see.

I actually don't think this is much of a disaster, though ... it actually ended right at the end of a pattern repeat, so it looks okay (and had I done the 1" strip of stockinette, it would have ended somewhere in the middle of the pattern repeat, which I don't think would have looked as nice). My decision now is whether to do the back the same way, and just have the two pattern edges come together there, which probably wouldn't look so bad, with one set of leaves merging right at their mid-point, and the other set being point to point.

Or go ahead and add my stockinette strip on the back (since now I will know when I'm getting to it), and then have pattern on the front of the shoulder and just stockinette on the back. If I did that, I'd probably make the stockinette strip on the back wider, like kind of a mini-yoke, instead of just a one inch strip.

I'll have to put some more thought to that. And take into consideration how I want the top of the sleeves to look too. Wow - this designing thing is fun!

In gardening news: this was the other project I mentioned last weekend, that I didn't post pictures of because it wasn't done yet. It's still not technically 'done,' but ... here it is.




This was Greg's brainchild, built from scrap parts from his job that otherwise would have been thrown out. The bottom is a beacon light casing, now with a regular colored light bulb wired into a photocell that automatically turns it on near dusk, and off in the morning. The top is some type of plastic dish thing, I forget what it was originally for. It was white, Greg spray-painted the inside silver, and the outside green with a leaf pattern, made by placing leaves from a tree on the bowl, then spray-painting over them. I forgot to take pictures of that, though. The pagoda was mine - it is actually a cast iron tealight candle holder.

I'm still pondering how I feel about this. On the one hand, I like it in theory, and I'm generally perfectly okay with having unique things in the garden that one wouldn't otherwise necessarily consider 'garden stuff.' I like having a waterfall, and I have abandoned trying to build one from rocks - tried that, not going to work with this pond. For one reason, the space behind the pond is too cramped to work in, to build it right; and for two things, it's just too much of an enormous pain in the butt for me.

This looks quite intriguing at night, with the subtle light of the purple party bulb lighting up the rippling surface of the pond and the near surroundings.

But to be perfectly honest, the large amount of plastic is just bugging me. It just seems so incongruous. The bottom part seems overly large to me, too - out of scale with the rest of the stuff in that area. I've tried to figure out a way to camouflage it while still allowing the glow from the light to show, but I haven't thought of anything yet - there's no room anywhere near it to plant something to grow in front of it, it's hanging right out over the edge of the pond.

I am going to ponder it over the next week or two, giving it a fair chance to settle in, and see how I feel then. It may just be that I'm not used to it yet.

If I do decide I can't adjust to it in the pond garden, it won't be scrapped entirely ... I would like to use the components somewhere else in the yard. Whether as a waterfall, I don't know ... it depends on whether we put in another water feature. We could move the light somewhere else, and keep the silver dish, just mounting it on something else. We can find other lighting options, I'm sure.

Well. It will bear some thinking on.

Nice Weather + Long Weekend = Gardening Frenzy

I spent most of another whole day working on the pond bed. First I planted the perennials ... looks great, huh?


Yeah, well. If I don't kill them, hopefully they'll look like something in a month or two, and something even better by next year. Perennials do take time, but hopefully they'll be worth it in just having plants show up in the spring with minimal effort on my part. That's my grand scheme, anyway.

Meanwhile, I filled in the front of the bed with annuals.


They look better in person. I don't like plantings where there's a lot of space between the flowers, where they look like little soldiers all lined up in formation. But I know that to do well, they need some room to grow. If I treat them well, hopefully they'll fill out and spread together into one mass planting. (And if not, next year I'll plant them right next to each other and be done with it).

I think it's coming along really, really nicely.

Meanwhile, Greg did this.

He extended the patio, and then connected them together.

And, left me a little planting place in front of the porch post, where he attached the trellis I bought Saturday. I want to plant morning glories there. I bought the seeds for them weeks ago but (again) haven't done anything with them, didn't start them indoors or anything, so I don't know how well they'll do this year. I've had bad luck trying to plant morning glories (a) from seed, and (b) in late May or early June, as they can't seem to get established. Of course, that was probably back in the old days where I just dropped them on the clay soil and expected them to grow. With some nice compost mix and fertilizer, maybe this time I'll have more success.

I think I'm learning one of the most valuable lessons about gardening this year. I bought this house 14 years ago, and one of the reasons I finally gave up on apartment living and bought a house is because I so very much wanted to have my own yard, and do it up with nice landscaping and garden beds. In the first few years I tried to do some things, but I had so many wrong ideas about it. For one thing, I either didn't know, didn't understand, or didn't care about the type of soil, and kept trying to insistently plant things in this almost solid clay soil, just as it was. I also never bothered with fertilizers and such, or if I did remember, it would be sporadically until I forgot to bother again. But probably my worst mistake was thinking I should be able to spend a weekend planting a bunch of stuff, and then just be done with it, and it would look like the pictures in the magazines.

Then for many years I just gave up and neglected this place badly. But this winter the gardening bug bit again, and I knew that this year I would have the time to devote to it. I got a good book, and began buying a few magazines. And this time, paying attention. And I think one of the best things I've figured out is that a garden is never a static thing, you plant it once, and you're done with it. It's an ongoing relationship.

I haven't been sure what type of plants I wanted or where. I tried to draw a garden plan like everyone suggests, and I did that to a point, but I know that I won't know for sure that the plants are where they should be until they've grown up a bit and I can see what they look like - whether I like them where they are, and whether they're happy where they are. I planted blue hardy geraniums and daisies in that bed, in an arrangement I thought I'd like ... but colored pencils on paper cannot replicate real live plants in your garden, and the little clumps that I've planted certainly aren't enough to judge by yet.

But I'm not worried about it, and I'm not even bugged by the fact that I spent $40 on perennials that are currently dead-looking sticks. Because I know that it takes time, it's not instant. And if I don't like the arrangement when the plants are finally filling out, I can always rearrange it until I do. And if I don't like the selection of annuals I picked out this year, next year I can plant a whole different batch.

I also finally understand the importance of giving the plants what they need to thrive - good soil, enough water and fertilizer, trimming, weeding. And that no longer just seems like a lot of work - it seems more like ... gee, I hate to sound sappy, but I'll say it - a labor of love. If I care for them, I'll have a far better chance of enjoying the beautiful gardens I'd like to have.

So there's my gardening philosophy blather for the weekend.

Lisa asked if my hands were still functional enough to knit. I'm gonna find out. I've missed working on my sweater, and I'm pretty well done with yard work for this weekend. Once I get myself cleaned up, I'm hoping to enjoy a little knitting on the porch before I pass out from total exhaustion.

Hey! I wonder if I lost any weight with all this physical exertion? That'd be a bonus.

Ouch. Just ... Ouch.

I hurt. A lot. It's been an incredibly busy (but productive) weekend. And I still have a day left!

Saturday I ran a lot of errands. Tyler got his stitches out, too! I also went to the garden center and got quite a few of the things I wanted for this year, not least of which was a bunch of plants.

I had ordered some perennials from Spring Hill Nursery awhile back, and unfortunately they arrived just around the time Tyler had the corn cob incident. But even if that hadn't happened, the weather had turned cold and rainy during much of that time, and I couldn't have planted them anyway.

So they sat in the box on the porch for two weeks and I did nothing with them. I was afraid I'd killed them, but it turns out what I did wasn't such a bad thing. When I finally unpacked them this weekend, according to the packing directions I found in the box, if you can't plant them right away, the best thing to do is leave them in their original packing in about 40 degree temperatures (a refrigerator crisper drawer is recommended). Well, they sat in their original packing material on the back porch, where it was around 40 degrees much of that two weeks, only getting into the 50s sometimes during the day. They seem to have survived just fine.

But knowing they were dormant, bare root plants - which look like nothing more than dead sticks at the moment - I knew I'd need to fill in with a lot of annuals until those perennials get established and do some growing. In fact, even after they do I'll probably still fill out some areas with annuals - they're pretty, cheap, and I like them.

So I bought impatiens and violets and some other things I can't remember right now, but here's a picture of them all anyway.


Before I could do anything with them, though, I knew I had a ton of work to do in that bed. First, removing two large shrubs.


I wanted those two round evergreen shrubs to come out, so I had the whole area from the tall pointy evergreen to the pond to plant up. That was the first chore of the day. It took me and Greg both digging around them to finally cut them loose, then I hauled them out forcibly, put each in the wheelbarrow, and wheeled them to their new home by the back fence - which also involved digging two large holes, then heaving the shrubs out of the wheelbarrow and into the new hole.

And that just about did me in. That was only the beginning, but the whole rest of the day was just sheer determination and willpower, because I hurt all over by the time I was done with those shrubs. Comparing them to the 40 lb. bags of compost I hauled around later, I think those shrubs weighed between 50 and 60 lbs. Ouch.

After that I dumped three of the bags of combined compost and manure which I found at a local hardware store into the new de-shrubbed bed, then dug that in ... over and over and over. I just kept going through, digging it all up and turning the shovelfuls over, then taking a 10 minute break, then going back and doing it again. Four or five times. But I can't believe the difference it's made! That whole bed consisted of very hard clay soil - like most of northeast Ohio. I'd made the mistake in the past of trying to plant things there without doing anything with it, and it was always mostly a disaster. Shrubs and hostas seemed to do okay, but any type of flowers usually just withered and died. I finally did some studying up, and knew I had to seriously condition that soil if I had any hope of having a nice garden bed there.

So when I found those bags of compost and manure, I knew that was the ticket. And I was amazed at the difference after all that digging. The soil looked wonderful, crumbly, soft, all the big lumps of clay just sort of disappeared. I didn't know it would happen that fast. I thought it might take weeks or months before the compost began helping the soil, but it was pretty much instant.


I still want it turned a few more times, there are still a few too many clumps for my liking (small ones, though) and my energy was flagging rapidly. So I didn't get anything actually planted today, but I should be able to do that tomorrow (if I can move).

I did accomplish one whole project, though. The strip of dirt behind the pond is too narrow to plant anything in, especially with the soil so compacted back there as it is. I tried to plant a few things back there last year, but it was just pointless. The only thing that will grow back there is weeds, and that's what happens. I decided since I can't (or am not going to) move the pond forward, the easiest thing to do would be to cover that strip of dirt with the flat rocks, then to have anything growing back there, put a planter basket on the fence wall with some trailing plants that can hang down over the basket and maybe even as far as the edge of the pond.

So I did get this planted and put up.


It's got three petunias (because I just like them, my dad always planted petunias), and in between those, two Calibrachoa plants called "Million Bells Trailing Blue." They are supposed to hang down over the planter, so when this fills out, I think it will be really cool. I still have to get in there and clean out the weeds and mess behind the pond, and fill it with rocks - I didn't get to that today.

So ... a huge amount of progress. And there's still quite a bit to be done. Right there in the front of the pond, I have to get some more dirt in there - the soil level is too low since I built up the wall with those big flat rocks. I'm not sure where I'm going to get the soil from, I think I have some bags of topsoil in the garage, maybe that'll work. I have to dig that bed through a few more times, then plant all my plants. It's not going to fill it out yet, I didn't get enough in that one trip. I wasn't sure how many I'd need, and ... well ... I can only do so much at one time. Just getting the middle section cleaned up was a major ordeal. The ends can be worked on over time. There is so much to do here now that I've started wanting to fix up the landscaping, it's all going to have to be done over quite a bit of time.

There was one more project worked on today, but it's not done and I don't want to post pictures till it is. But I'll give you a teaser ... we're putting in a lighted waterfall at one side of the pond. And it's not made out of rocks. In fact, it's not made out of anything 'natural' at all. This probably falls into the category of 'junkyard landscaping.' But it's going to be cool when it's done.

And now ... I'm going to go have the hottest bath I can get my hot water heater to give me, and hopefully come out of that able to move and absent my current layer of garden grunge.

But wow ... it was a good day.

I have readers?

Wow. People actually read the blog. Thanks for all your great comments, Lisa.

I don't remember where I first learned about the lifeline, but it is just that. It's kind of tedious to put in (I haven't put one in yet on Snowdrop) but when you hit the disaster you can't fix, it will save the project. I've read that some people use dental floss - anything small enough and slippery enough to easily thread through your stitches on the needle (or on the cable, if you're using a circular - the easiest way to do it). I used some 8/4 cotton warp yarn because I happened to have a whole spool of it from my weaving attempts. It worked pretty well too.

The shawl yarn is wonderful, and I don't know if I ever said what it is. It's Silky Alpaca Lace by Classic Elite. I got this from Patternworks. I've never knit with laceweight yarn before, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I can tell you this yarn is luscious. It's silky soft, and very easy to knit with.

Thanks for the encouragement on 'doing things my way.' I think, really, I'm kind of lucky that I have such problems with published patterns, because that's what spurred me on to start trying my own things, and trusting my own creative impulses. And I think this is the most fun I've ever had with a project, planning it out myself, being able to choose so many of the creative aspects of how it will turn out - the pattern, the edgings, the type of neckline, the length of the sleeves, everything. And hopefully what I learn from this will allow me to, if I ever find a published pattern I'm just dying to make, adapt it to work for me.

Doing my own designs has always been both my dream and my downfall, because with past hobbies I've tried to dive into my own designs too quickly, before I'd learned the necessary skills. That would end up frustrating me to the point where in some cases I gave up the hobby in question.

Knitting's different ... I took it more slowly, learned some of the skills I need, got frustrated for an entirely different reason (problems with published patterns), and now know I can learn any other skills I need to finally branch out into at least semi-designing my own stuff. (Even if I am "cheating" by using The Handy Book of Sweater Patterns ... although I decline to consider that cheating, and instead look at it as merely letting someone else do the math). ;o)

Of course, whether or not this current sweater works out remains to be seen ... but so far, it's going great, and if for some reason there is a problem with it, at least it will count as a learning experience that I can hopefully recover from. My attempted trick on the neckline is working out pretty good so far ... pictures tomorrow.

And I didn't know dogs can't have raisins! Good to know ... this dog will eat anything that falls into his path (as we've seen).

The Yarn Fairy Cometh

Okay, the FedEx Ground guy probably wouldn't appreciate that. But the important thing is, my yarn for the summer cardigan showed up yesterday ...

... so I can go back to work on that project, too. Woo hoo. Last night I got to where the sleeve goes in, and marked that. Then I have to knit 5 1/4" past that point (1/4"? Really? How much difference can that possibly make?) and then start the v-neck shaping, which is where I experiment with my scheme to maintain the stockinette stitch border.

Waiting for the yarn to show up, I did some more on Snowdrop.



It seems to be going amazingly fast for such delicate yarn. I mean, it's no where near done, but my progress surprises even me. I ran into another snag the other night, where I got things quite screwed up and even dropped a stitch, which I didn't even know until I saw it's tiny little loop sticking out of the knitting several rows below. Had that been in an intricate pattern section, I probably would have been in big trouble ... because I don't know how to fix a dropped stitch that involves yarn-overs and what not. Although I probably would have had a crash course in it, because there was no way I was going to rip this out and start over. (Note to self - quit being so cocky and get the freaking lifeline in soon).

Fortunately - very, very fortunately - it happened in an area of plain knit stitches, and I was able to chain it back up with my tiny crochet hook, and fixed it. Incredible luck.

But mostly I'll probably be working on the sweater. Every time I've tried to knit a sweater, it's taken forever. For once (well, more than once I hope, but for now) I'd like to make this in something reasonable - 6 weeks would suit me. That's going to be a lot of knitting.

I'm not sure it's going to turn out as summery as I originally planned. I intended to make the summer cardigan out of a cotton yarn, but after I started on this I remembered that I'd gotten this one test skein that wasn't cotton, but it was inexpensive and the blurb in the catalog said it was incredibly soft, so I decided to try it. It is incredibly soft, almost merino-ish, and it's very nice to work with - but it's acrylic and nylon. The more I get done on it, the heavier it feels. Not weight-wise, it's very light that way. But 'heft-wise' or whatever you want to call it. It just feels thick and fluffy. It may be a bit much for warm weather, may end up being more of an autumn kind of thing. Well, that's okay. My 6-week goal is overly ambitious, and I probably won't get it done till fall anyway.

This is (hopefully) only the beginning of many successful sweater projects, so I can always make my cotton summer cardigan next winter if this doesn't work out - and I'll still have this one, so I'll be happy.

I Gotta Tinkle!

Greg brought me a present from the event.

He said they call it a "tinkle," a mini-mini inkle loom made just for the purpose of testing designs, so you don't have to spend all the time (and use up a lot of fiber) on the regular inkle loom just to try things out. How cool is this? It came with extra pegs, which you can add to any of the extra holes in the board, to - I assume - make things different sizes. Or regulate tension. Probably adding pegs at the beginning and then taking them out as you weave would help with tension, since bands get tighter as you weave them.

I'm looking forward to playing with this ... and dying to try out the loom I haven't gotten to yet ... so much fiber, so little time *sigh*

Sometimes I go through phases, months long even, where I'm not the least bit interested in knitting. Then other times I become completely obsessed with it. Guess which one I'm in now? I had four days off and could barely get myself to put it down. The only things I got done yesterday were washing and drying some laundry (not put away yet), washing most (not all) of the dishes, and sorting through a stack of mail on the kitchen table. Other than that, kept knitting.

Eventually this phase will wane, too, and I'll get back to being obsessed with weaving.

I'm making good progress on the shawl. I got a lot done last night, and (knocking on wood with crossed fingers) made no mistakes. Even while watching TV. I think I sorted out what the biggest problems were. Of course, dropped yarn-overs is always a concern. Two other things were contributing to my problems Saturday night. I've noticed that in this fine a yarn, my yarn-overs tend to roll over on top of the stitch next to them, and when I come to them across the wrong side row, they look like one stitch. If I'm not paying attention and purl them together as one stitch (very easy to do), then when I get back to the right side, I'm short a stitch in that section.

The other thing that was causing me grief is that the stitches right next to my ring markers are constantly rolling over the marker, and ending up on the wrong side of it. When I would get to the end of a section and be a stitch short, I'd assume I made a mistake, rather than checking to see if the missing stitch had actually migrated to the next section.

I've more or less solved these problems by knowing they exist and watching out for them, and by counting stitches as I knit, on both wrong and right side rows. Since the pattern repeats are only a convenient 8 stitches wide (except the center panel, which is 11), it's very easy to check each little section as I go, and know at the end of the row it's all correct. Checking the whole row at the end is a bad option, for the same reason it quit working on Triangles - when the shawl begins to get bigger, spending the time to go back over a whole row and count all those stitches is (a) something I'm not patient enough to do, and takes more and more time as the project progresses - time I could be knitting; and (b) leaves more room for error because of counting so many at once. Not checking at all is just kind of dumb (and I don't know why I wasn't doing this before).

But checking 8 stitches at a time, I can keep up with. And this kept me on track all last night. So I'm optimistic about Snowdrop, and it's progressing quite nicely.

I also think I figured out how to fix my 'frame' dilemma on the sweater. More on that when I try it.

But now *sigh* it's time to go get ready for work. Culture shock, to be sure.