Off the Bench

Today I wrapped up a lengthy carpentry project. Not because it was long or complex though- it had just been around a while. When I bought my house, lo these seven years ago- (What? Seven? *counts on fingers* Yes, seven. Aieee.)- where was I? Oh, seven years ago, the former owners abandoned quite a few odds and ends in their struggle to stuff several tons of clutter into a moving van. Much of it, I simply threw out, but there were some items my thrifty compulsions just wouldn't let me trash. One of them was this bench:



Now, this was clearly something that had been knocked together out of scrap lumber in the wake of some home improvement project or other, but it was a more-or-less functional piece of furniture. However, brief experimentation soon proved that anyone attempting to sit on it had a better than even chance of getting a splinter...well, we won't go into detail on just how I determined this wasn't a good thing to sit on, okay? So it was removed to the basement until it could be rehabilitated into something less likely to draw blood or cause pain in the posterior.

Earlier this spring, I decided its time had come. I ripped off the top boards (too warped to save) and sanded down the body of the bench. My original plan had been to put on a wooden seat and use this as a sort of window seat in the library, but once I had it sanded down, I decided that the original construction was pretty crude, and that it really wasn't a good candidate for indoor furniture. So instead, I repainted the frame with three coats of exterior latex, and replaced the top surface with plastic decking material- suitable for people to sit on in wet bathing suits.

Woats thinks it's pretty nifty.

Me, I'm just glad it's no longer taking up space in the basement, and has been restored to functionality. One project down, 673 to go....

Summer Time

I was leaving for work yesterday, and thought with pleasure as I walked out of the house, "Isn't this great? It's so warm, it feels like summer!"

Then I stopped. It's June. It's supposed to feel like summer. Okay, technically summer doesn't start for a couple of weeks, and the pool is still darned chilly. But. It's June. I looked around the yard. Rhodedendrons blooming. That's summery. Irises, check.


And there's a flowerbed beside the retaining wall we replaced last year that's starting to look pretty colorful. There's a bit of a story there...when I bought the house in 2002, the retaining wall was concrete, and had a slight but definite tilt. The house inspector pointed it out to me and said sooner or later, it would need to be replaced. In subsequent years, the wall leaned a little more each year, until last fall it hit about 7 degrees off vertical, and a few small chunks fell out. We decided that its time had come and had the wall replaced last year. It left a big area dug up and rather then reseed with grass, my husband suggested planting wildflowers.

He's a big fan of wildflowers, in large part because he keeps hoping they'll completely take over and we'll no longer have to mow. (I haven't the heart to disillusion him. Besides, I like flowers.) So last year on vacation in Colorado, I found interesting-looking packets of Colorado wildflower seeds in a Gifte Shoppe. We planted them as soon as the ground thawed in the spring, and they're doing pretty well. We also put in a flat of violas from the farm stand, already in bloom. (I wanted the area to look more like a flowerbed in progress, and less like a bed of weeds until the wildflowers started blooming.) The violas turned out to be an outstanding choice--they've been blooming for about six weeks and are putting up new buds. And now we're seeing the wildflowers start to come in, and I'm entirely charmed.


The bright blue ones are probably my favorite, but I like the cheery orange and yellow-whites as well. There are tiny white flowers so delicate you have to look closely to see them. The big clumps of color are the violas, but the pale lavender blooms with a tinge of darker purple at the centers are wildflowers. And there are a couple of varieties that haven't started to bud yet- we're curious to see what those will look like. (Now I'm wishing I'd written down what seeds were supposed to be in the packet!) But they definitely look summery.

In fiber news, I've just finished a pair of Checkerboard Mittens, from Fox and Geese and Fences by Robin Hansen. One feature I thought was very clever--a frequent problem with square colorwork patterns is they tend to contract into vertical ridges. But this pattern takes that characteristic and makes it a design feature. The inside of the mitten has a smooth surface of short floats, which trap a layer of air between the vertical ridges of the checkerboard. I expect it to add substantially to the insulating power of the mitten.


And here's the inside, which I though looked kind of cool.


So now I'm debating whether to make a hat to go with the blue Spruce mittens, or to go for the trifecta and make a pair of Sawtooth mittens from the Hanson book. Because nothing says 'summer' like mittens....

Some Dastard Has Stolen May

Really. I mean, I look back, and I can account for most of the individual days, but an entire month? No way. The whole thing is a blur. Fortunately I have a suspect. See, the early part of May was spent frantically preparing to go on vacation. Add extra hours of work- and extra hours commuting because when I'm off schedule I hit the peak hours of commuter traffic. Yeah, that can account for a lot of lost time. And then I got back from vacation. And there was the catching up period. So, I don't have it pinned down to a specific person yet, but I'm quite sure that whoever stole May? Works for my employers.

The vacation, however, was completely worth it. We went to London and walked.

St Saviour's Dock on the South Bank

We went to Oxford, and my husband's cousin took us punting on the river.



We went to Cambridge, and viewed colleges.

King's College Cambridge

We went out to Richmond Park.


Did you know that the Thames Valley from Richmond is a protected view?

I can totally see why. Gorgeous.

If you'd like to see more of the trip, there's a slideshow of photographs. I'm still working on the trip diary (also known as the meal-by-meal account). Writing it after the fact is kind of contrary to the concept of 'diary' but it turns out that if the computer crashes in the middle of your PDA synch, you can lose the file being transmitted from both devices. It's a rule of nature that when this incredibly rare error occurs, it will happen to the file you most wanted not to lose. It is possible that there was some extremely bad language uttered on this occasion. (Sorry, Mom.) It'll probably take me another couple of days to finish recreating it.

There was time spent on planes, trains and waiting in restaurants, so of course there was knitting:
Primavera socks, in Online Summersock Cotton. A lovely pattern, and the socks are very comfy. I did wind up adding an additional pattern repeat around the foot, and two around the ankle to accomodate my largish feet.


And of course time marches inexorably on, so there have been other projects started...but more on that later. I woke up this morning to find it's June, and I'm determined to keep both eyes firmly on it. They're not getting this one too!