Wild Turkeys

I take a walk pretty much every day. By "walk," I mean at least a couple of miles, usually more.

Frequently on my walk (with Sage) I spot wild turkeys, the Meleagris gallopavo silvestris. (That term I just found by googling "wild turkey." I didn't want you to think I'm a connoisseur of wild turkeys.) This area has several flocks of them.

For awhile recently, a flock of twenty was residing in the trees behind/beside our house. In the mornings we'd see them swoop down to earth after spending the night in the trees, away from predators. Once back on the ground, they began their daily ritual of roaming the neighborhood. This fall them seemed to enjoy eating seeds from the wild grasses beside the roads.

One time I wasn't aware a flock of wild turkeys was sauntering across our front lawn. I was standing at the kitchen sink, looking out, when a turkey, visible only from the neck up, went past the window. That sight gave me a start for a moment. Turkeys will never be accused of being beautiful.

This summer I got into the habit of picking up any turkey feathers I'd find while walking along the roadside.

When I got back home, I'd stick the latest feather in with the others in the flower pot of Swedish ivy and geraniums beside our kitchen door.

The Swedish ivy and geraniums will soon be history. This morning's temperature was in the mid-30's.

And the turkeys, I suppose, are about to seek their winter habitat deep in the woods. Turkey hunting season in Maine is in May and early June, so they have plenty of time to fatten up. I don't know a soul who hunts wild turkeys, though.

Sisters

Yesterday was a beautiful autumn day with a clear blue sky and warm temperatures.

I left my house at 8:15, drove up to Topsham to pick up sister #1, then drove on to Boothbay to pick up sister #2.

I don't know when was the last time the three of us sisters spent time together, just the three of us.

We wanted lobster rolls for lunch, so first we looked around Boothbay Harbor for a likely place. We didn't find what we were looking for, so we then drove out to East Boothbay.

Bingo! We stopped at the East Boothbay General Store and, as you can see from their menu above, found lobster rolls.

Here's mine: 1/3 pound of delicious, fresh lobster meat nestled in the tasty roll.

After lunch, we then headed onward to Ocean Point.

I parked my car, and we walked along the pebbly beach for quite awhile.

After our pockets were weighted with sea glass and a few interesting rocks, we called it a day.

My two sisters and my thumb pose for a photo. 

I'm the "baby" of the family of six. Two of my brothers have died, so that leaves my two sisters, one brother, and me.

Here I am with my older sister. A kinder person you'd never find.

So it was a good day. I'm glad we were able to spend some time together.

"Cake" hats

It seems that everyone on Knitting Paradise is talking about the new Caron Cakes yarn. I decided I'd better join the fray.

I went to Michael's a couple of weeks ago, my 40% off coupon on my iPhone, and selected this cake.

It's 80% acrylic, 20% wool, with 383 yards of worsted weight yarn.

The regular price is $7.99, but with my 50% off coupon that day, I paid roughly $4.

Then I had to decide what to knit with my Caron Cakes yarn.

I settled on more hats to donate to various organizations which collect winter hats for those who need them.

I wasn't sure how attractive the hats would be, due to the long color changes. But I soldiered on.

After a couple of weeks of knitting, the Cake was almost gone, and I had five hats off the needles.


Here, my new knitting partner, Sage, helped me knit one of the hats. "Help" might be a strong word here. "Got in the way of" might be better.

My favorite pattern for knitting these hats was the Barley Hat. It's a free, well-written, and easy pattern.

I like the quality of this yarn. It reminds me a great deal of Plymouth's Encore yarn, which is my go-to yarn for knitting washable children's items.

Here are the five finished hats. Also here lies the little bit of leftover yarn. Five winter hats for a little over $4. Not bad.

A thief among us

I hate to admit it, but we're living with a thief.

Yesterday I decided to fix myself a broiled cheese/tomato open sandwich.

I assembled the sandwich and left it on the kitchen counter.

Then, as the oven broiler was heating, I decided to step into the bathroom for a quick second to see if there might be some Tylenol in the medicine cabinet. (Sinus infection. Fun.)



I was gone 30 seconds at most. I grabbed the Tylenol (hallelujah!) and returned to the kitchen.

And I found this (below). I stared at it for a second or two, wondering if this was how I'd left the sandwich, or if something had happened to it during my quick trip into the bathroom.

Then I noticed Sage, our nine-month-old puppy, lying on a kitchen scatter rug and licking her chops.

(See header photo for mug shot.)

How she managed to grab two slices of tomato and the cheese slices UNDER the tomato slices, without disturbing the bread or the other two tomato slices is beyond me.

We live in perilous times, for sure.

Butternut squash soup

I put my garden to bed last week. It's always a chore I dread, but it never takes as long as my dreading has me believing it will.

I was surprised to discover, as I pulled out overgrown plants and weeds, that this was a banner year for butternut squash.


I love butternut squash cut into chunks, tossed in olive oil with some potato chunks, seasoned, and roasted. Delicious.

But I also love butternut squash soup.

This recipe, from Allrecipes.com, is quick, easy, and excellent.

I mean, if the eleven-year-old who visited us this past weekend absolutely loved it and begged for more, then it has to be good, right?

The ingredients are simple: butternut squash, onion, garlic, chicken stock, a bouillon cube, a few other herbs, and you're done.

Ken gave me a hand-held immersion blender two-three years ago, but I didn't like it at first. It has sat in the cupboard, unused. I decided to give it another chance and have found it works beautifully in blending this soup into creamy deliciousness.

Could it be that I'm an artist????

No, there's no chance of my being an artist. If I were, surely the ability would have shown itself by now (although there was Grandma Moses, come to think of it...O

The "watercolors" in this post and in my header were done with an app called Waterlogue.


Here's a photo I took of Sage beside my red geraniums.

And here's Sage after being "Waterlogued."

A cardinal outside my kitchen window one winter.

 Same bird, Waterlogued.

Wild violets in our back yard.

Ditto.

A hanging flower basket in Camden, I think it was.









...and Waterlogued.


This app is fun to fool around with. I do feel a bit guilty, though, that genuine artists have to put creative effort into a watercolor, while all I do is click a few buttons.

Little Girl's knitted top

When I haven't been canning tomatoes, freezing tomatoes, making oven-roasted tomato sauce, making green tomato relish, or making salsa, I've been trying to squeeze a little knitting into my day.

I'm finding it harder to just sit down and knock off a couple of rows now that there's a puppy in the house. Sage takes tremendous interest, which is to say way too much interest, in everything I do. Her interest extends to trying to steal my yarn, my needles or my pattern, whichever is handiest to her. So before I can start knitting, I have to make sure I've built a little fortress around myself to keep the enemy too-curious puppy away.

I have managed to complete a "Like Sleeves for kids" knitted tunic top, though. This will be for our little friend Phoebe, who turns four in November.

I spotted a completed "Like Sleeves" at the Cashmere Goat in Camden in July. I loved its simple design, so I bought the pattern and yarn.

I used Plymouth Encore yarn for this project. The pattern calls for 100% wool yarn, but I'm not sure every child is comfortable in wool, and I'm not sure every young mother wants to wash woolens by hand. Plymouth Encore is only 25% wool, and it's machine washable.

The "Like Sleeves" pattern is translated from the Japanese, I believe. It's a simple, straight-forward pattern, but I did get a little confused here and there.

The title, for instance, baffled me until I realized that "Like Sleeves" means "Fake Sleeves." There's a sentence about midway through the pattern that says, "Those stitches just worked will be upper back body and work in row." I never did figure out what "work in row" means, so I ignored it and no harm seems to have been done.

The most confusing bit of instruction, which caused me to lose two full days of knitting time as I paced the floor and tried to decipher what it meant, appeared in the "Finishing" portion of the pattern. Now that I look back on this, I realize I was being thick-headed, but this is what threw me for a loop: "With circular needle and RS facing....knit 11 sts on waste yarn...." I thought this meant I was to do a provisional cast-on, which I've never learned and don't want to learn. I couldn't figure out why I needed to do a provisional cast-on while knitting the neckband. I looked at Youtube videos of provisional cast-ons, I visited Ravelry and read the notes of others who've knitted this top, I fussed and fumed.

Then finally, on Day 3 of No Progress, I finally saw the light. The instructions are NOT saying "knit 11 sts ONTO waste yarn, they are saying, "Knit 11 sts WHICH YOU ALREADY HAVE ON WASTE YARN." Phew. That I could do. Why I'd insisted on misinterpreting that line of instruction is beyond me.

The Like Sleeves top is now done. Yesterday I started knitting a hat. The hat shouldn't cause me stress because I've worked with this pattern many times.