No! No! No! No!

No, this isn't another NoNoNoNo photo post.

I've totally botched the Ice Queen cowl I was making. I've frogged it, and I'm going to start it again. I'm inexplicably dropping stitches and not discovering it until 40+ rows later. The stitches weren't unraveling (thanks to my lifelines), but they were too far away--and there are yarnovers and knit-togethers--and it was just not possible to recover.


(This photo is about 20 rows in. I had 60+ rows when I ripped back.)

But I am not going to be defeated by simple yarnovers and knit-togethers. It's a simple feather-and-fan pattern(!), and I've done that before. I think the problem is just super-thin yarn on very slippery needles. Since the yarn sticks to itself a bit (it's alpaca), dropped stitches don't show up as such. I only noticed several unattached loops as I was looking back at the beginning section. I'm just going to have to be obsessive about counting stitches (there are 26 to 18 stitches in each pattern repeat); and if there's a stitch missing I've got to stop assuming that I skipped a yarnover and start looking for something that has been dropped.

NoNoNoNo 4-13

Dogs in torment:





No one's tongue is long enough!

Note: The dogs were supervised the whole time they were polishing off the peanut butter jars. When they no longer could lick and started to chew the jars, I took the jars from them, scraped out the last tablespoon of peanut butter (extra crunchy), and spread it on a dog biscuit. If you try this at home, make sure you have enough jars to have one for each dog. Otherwise, there could be warfare.

Yesterday, it was turkey necks. Waiting for delivery:



(Note that they're hooked to different posts in the carport.)

Sam is concentrating:



The lady-like Jacey:



(The SciFi channel recently reran the original series V. Remember how the aliens could dislocate their lower jaws to devour huge chunks of food--something that boa constrictors can do, too? Jacey may be an alien. Or a boa.)

The landscapers recently cleared lots of vegetation and debris from the banks of the creek. See the 3-foot-diameter pipes?



Compare that to the same location in September:



That's a very sturdy little bridge. If it goes, though, I'm stranded. There's no way out of the condo complex that doesn't involve crossing that bridge. And there have been a couple of occasions when water has been over the top of the bridge. Fortunately, I live on the high bank--and the high end of the high bank--so I'm actually not in the flood plain.

And some local vegetation seems confused about what season it is:







But this tree seems to be getting into the seasonal spirit:

NoNoNoNo 1-3

November is national novel-writing month--NaNoWriMo. Participants make themselves crazy trying to write a 50,000-word novel in one month.

But, as friends of mine realized, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then 50 pictures equal one novel...with a lot less pain. So several of us are celebrating Non-national Non-novel Non-writing Non-month--NoNoNoNo. Here are my first three entries.

Two knitting projects underway. Socks for my sister for Christmas:



The pattern is called Jaywalkers. The yarn is KnitPicks Felici in the Martinique colorway. (It politely stripes itself, thank you very much!) One sock is to the point where I'm ready to start the heel; the other has a few more rows to go to match the length of the first.

And a cowl/smoke-ring for my nephew's wife:



If you look closely, you can see the beads. (You can click through to the photo on Flickr.) The pattern is called Ice Queen. The yarn is Misti Baby Alpaca. The pattern calls for 80+ rows, and I've done a little more than 20. The white threads you see are lifelines: bits of thread run through the stitches so that if I drop stitches or run into some other problem, I can rip back to a point where all the stitches were correct and were captured on the lifeline. (There's also a provisional cast-on, which is all the white thread at the beginning edge.) Eventually, there will be a second cowl--in white with the same beads; that will be for the other nephew's girlfriend.

And an Owwie!:



The upper dark place you see is an old scar--one she had when she came to me. The red mark is, happily, a scratch rather than an actual cut--an angry scratch that didn't quite break the skin. I have no idea how she managed to do this, but my best guess is that it had something to do with Sam.

Doesn't it always?