It's November already?!

I can't believe it's already the last full week of November and the holidays are about to knock on the door. I knew the holidays were coming and have been thinking about knitted gifts for a select few, but I'm still woefully unprepared.

Let's see, Sean and Erica are expecting a little boy, Gavin, soon. Her original due date was late January and pulled in to mid January, but with the latest appointment (baby's going into a head down position and 6.5 lbs) we're anticipating her going at the end of December.

Erin's still in school, working an on-campus job and just took on a seasonal job scanning tickets at Snoqualmie Summit. She'll be down at Thanksgiving, but with the ski season opening up soon, I imagine she may need to go right back. She's coming down with her boyfriend, David, and staying at her mom's but we'll see her a bit.

I've managed to knit a hat and scarf for a gift basket, but neglected to take pictures (Lame!). I've finished a scarf for a gift and will be casting on for a hat for someone else's gift.

I've continued to read - I'm up to 78 books for the year - and the reading has interfered with the knitting.

There are photos from 2 events on the camera in need of downloading and touch-ups before I send out copies to people.

But bible study is wrapping up and that will give me back a few hours on Sunday and Monday to get these other items done.

I need to get back into regular blogging. I'm spending a lot of time at Facebook (Hello, Farm Town. I'm looking at you). I need to shoot for a weekly update. That wouldn't be too much would it?

I just need to focus.

The Big Read

Taken from Steph's blog.

The Big Read said that, on average, adults have only read six books on this list.

(It's interesting to see collections as a single work and then specific works within the collection called out. Have I read the complete works of Shakespeare? No. Different plays and sonnets? Yes. From what I understand, the list is a compilation from a poll which is why both collections and singular works are both listed.)

So ... copy this list, mark the ones you've read and see how you compare to the average.

I've made the ones I've read bold and italicized the ones on my to-read list.

1 Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
2 The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)
3 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
4 Harry Potter series (JK Rowling)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
6 The Bible (I've read parts, but not all. The begats and the laws drag me down)
7 Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
8 1984 (George Orwell)
9 His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman)
10 Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
11 Little Women (Louisa M Alcott)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
13 Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)
16 The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
17 Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
18 Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)
19 The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
20 Middlemarch (George Eliot)
21 Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
22 The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
23 Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
24 War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
26 Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
27 Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
29 Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
30 The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
31 Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
32 David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
33 The Chronicles of Narnia (CS Lewis)
34 Emma (Jane Austen)
35 Persuasion (Jane Austen)

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

37 The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Louis De Bernieres)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
40 Winnie the Pooh (AA Milne)
41 Animal Farm (George Orwell)
42 The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney (John Irving)
45 The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
46 Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy)
48 The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
49 Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
50 Atonement (Ian McEwan)
51 Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
52 Dune (Frank Herbert)
53 Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons)
54 Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
55 A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth)
56 The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
58 Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
61 Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
62 Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
63 The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
64 The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
65 Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
66 On The Road (Jack Kerouac)
67 Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)
68 Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding)
69 Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie)
70 Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
71 Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
72 Dracula (Bram Stoker)
73 The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
74 Notes From A Small Island (Bill Bryson)
75 Ulysses (James Joyce)
76 The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
77 Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome)
78 Germinal (Emile Zola)
79 Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
80 Possession (AS Byatt)
81 A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
82 Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
83 The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
84 The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
85 Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
86 A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
87 Charlotte's Web (EB White)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection (Enid Blyton)
91 Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
92 The Little Prince (Antoine De Saint-Exupe)
93 The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks)
94 Watership Down (Richard Adams)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
96 A Town Like Alice (Nevil Shute)
97 The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)
98 Hamlet (Shakespeare)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl)
100 Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)

It appears I've read 18 of the 100. Better than average.

Catching up

Let's see . . .

1) We've found The Dress. It's been purchased and taken back to E-burg to be altered.

2) I've been entering my books into LibraryThing. I'm just over 400 books and I have more to go. However, I don't think I have over 500. We'll see, I guess.

I've just finished Polly Evans' book It's Not About the Tapas. Great travel book about her cycling around Spain solo. I'm trying to keep the sidebar updated with books read.

3) I've knitted some dishcloths.

The usual kitchen cotton. The leftover yarn that's nearly gone. I think I have only bits and bobs of colors and 1.5 balls of white remaining.

4) I finally sat down and wove in the ends for the Little Sister's Dress.


I decided to add 2 different colors for the buttons to make it a little bit more fun.


5) In order to meet a March deadline, I finally started knitting slipper's for Chris, Erin's fiance. I'm using Cascade 220: black for the sole and edging and a heathered green for the top.


6) I'm trying to get over a cruddy cold likely caught from Rob. Who caught his from Kruz and Khylee. And speaking of Kruz, here's what he's learned to do:


This was easier to capture on film than him pretending to be a Jedi and making light saber noises and using the Force to move objects around.

End of January?

I'm not ready for the month to be over. I haven't done anything!

I've only read one book: Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. Fun mystery with sheep trying to figure out who killed their shepherd.

Completed knits for January: two whole washcloths!


Now this site, CubeeCraft, looks like fun. I may need to print some of these out for my cube at work.

And lastly, a photo from Christmas. The nephew mugging for the camera while his Auntie Chris tries to open the Nerf guns she bought him.

January so far

FO Knitted: one ballband dishcloth from leftover cotton. This pattern and the diagonal garterstitch dishcloth have become my go-to knitting when I lack energy for anything else.



UFO Knitted: the Little Sister dress in Knitpicks Dancing (Hula colorway). Being knit for a little girl due in March on size 3 needles in the 6 month size. Don't much care for this picture due to lack of stitch definition. It's really not a big mess the way it looks here.



Have also cast on for another ballband dishcloth.

FO Book: Finished Three Bags Full by Leone Swann. Really enjoyed this book and will have to re-read it since I feel like I missed small things along the way. I found myself flipping back pages to pick up on something the sheep were commenting about. Oh, it's a murder mystery with sheep trying to solve who killed their shepherd.

Upcoming post: The lovely gifts received from Lavender Sheep!