Kettles and kids

Canadian Tire has this kettle on sale for half price this week. We decided to take advantage of the deal, which was advertised in their flyer, as our existing kettle had a damaged lid and had started leaking around the spout. Tai Chi Man had done a repair on it, but this half-price deal seemed to be a well-timed hint that it was time to get a new one.

It has a feature that I like and hope works well....you can set the temperature that you want it to heat the water to. So it's not 100 Celsius or nothing. You can heat it to anywhere between 30 and 100, which is great for things like hot water bottles which can't take boiling water. And we like our hot water bottles!

Talking of boiling water, something happened earlier in the week which I've been meaning to tell you about. I went out to have my hair cut around lunchtime the other day. Before I went out, Ninja Boy put a pan on the stove to boil water for cooking pasta. I left the kids to their own devices and walked up to the salon (yes, nice and close, it's handy having a little shopping centre within a few minutes of our house) and then I walked the "long way home" giving myself a bit of exercise in the process.

When I walked in the door, I was informed that Ninja Boy had attempted to "burn the house down". Ah yes, good news, just the sort of thing I want to hear when I get in!

Turns out he had turned the hotplate to maximum to heat the water, then gone downstairs to watch what Lego Nut was doing on the computer. He promptly forgot that he was making his lunch and even (this is what blows my mind) started on his own computer time once his brother had finished. The oldest went upstairs for a drink of water and discovered a very hot dry pan and a very hot stove. The element had been on for, what, an hour and a half, and nobody had been aware of it all that time. Thankfully nothing was sufficiently close to the heat source to catch fire. And the pan survived.

The vision of fire trucks parked outside my house putting out a fire is not one that I want to see come true.

Lovely afternoon

Thank you to my friend Anne for taking me to the Lake Tai restaurant for a belated birthday lunch. Not only do they have great vegan food, but they are also across the road from the Art of Yarn. I went in there afterwards and a whole hour just slipped by - don't know how THAT happened!

I picked up some yarn, carried it around for a while, found something else, put the first choice back, found something else and put the second choice back. The yarn I finally decided on was this...

Araucania Pima Cotton, hand-dyed in Chile.

Very pretty. Not sure exactly what I'm going to knit with it yet, but it will go with me on my retreat next weekend. I do need a bag for my tarot cards, so that might be the first thing I make with the green/brown. It will be interesting to see how the colours appear in the knitting - it always looks quite different on the skein.

I also visited a local bookstore to look for something for Ninja Boy's birthday. He turns 13 tomorrow. When Computer Geek was the same age, we bought him a journal and asked various friends and relations to offer advice for his "coming of age" journal. I thought of doing that again, so had a look at the journals in the store. There was one possibility, a silver one with Asian characters on it. Then I looked around the books to see if there was an appropriate teen book I could get instead.

I found this...

The Dangerous Book for Boys. I had a good look through it, and whilst I wouldn't say that the information contained in it was dangerous, it does have a lot of interesting stuff in it which I think will appeal to the birthday boy. We shall find out tomorrow!

A little designing

I'm grabbing the opportunity for a mid-afternoon post while the two younger boys procrastinate instead of finishing their math. Today they're learning how to multiply and divide decimals - not too hard once you know where to put the decimal point in the answer. However they are busy goofing around with my exercise ball instead.

Yesterday afternoon I knitted up a gauge swatch with some Sirdar Just Bamboo which I've had for months. I only have four 50gram balls so can't make anything particularly big, but after seeing a cute little garter stitch baby sweater in Weekend Knitting I thought I'd have enough for something similar. Borrowing the measurements from the schematic, I sketched out a design for a sleeveless baby top with a hood.

The back and front are very simple, both the same shape, with a slit opening at the front to allow extra room for the baby's head to go through. When I've knitted them and joined them together, I'll pick up stitches around the neck and knit a hood. Not sure exactly how yet, but I'll figure it out as I go.

I'm knitting it in garter stitch from side to side - that'll make the stitch-picking-up part easy. One stitch for each ridge around the neckline.

I've made good progress on the back since I photographed this yesterday, but I'm very close to the end of the first ball and I'm hoping I'll have enough yarn.

Knitting stalled...stop...life getting in way...stop

A quick telegram - er, I mean blog post - to say the baby blanket has not grown at all the last two days.

Monday is usually my housework day. I did the bathrooms but the vacuuming was put aside so I could start blitzing the kitchen. Dusted the tops of the wall units - yuk, don't do that job too often, the dust was flying everywhere! Started tidying and cleaning drawers and cupboards. Still lots to do on that.

The joy of cleaning was interrupted by a visit to the dentist - we were collecting a nightguard for Computer Geek (so he can't grind his teeth in his sleep).

And Ninja Boy and I had a Taekwondo class in the evening. So the knitting was neglected.

I did get to the vacuuming today. I also had a haircut this morning and a visit from a friend this afternoon (we traded fruit - she brought prune plums and took peaches home).

At 4.30pm, Ninja Boy and I were to be found at the Taekwondo dojang again. The instructor had asked us to help out with the kids white belt class as there were some new students and he would appreciate the extra instructors. There was a good instructor/student ratio in that class - four black belts and six white belt kids. After that class, there was another for kids with a bit more experience, so we stayed to help out at that one too. And THEN we trained in the mixed family class - all ages and belt levels. And that's not all - we stayed on for a fourth hour and participated in the boxing/kickboxing class. It was a mighty relief to get home and have a shower and something to eat!

I shall have to drag myself off this computer soon if I am to knit a few rows before bed - so no Bookworm for me tonight.

New knitting to report

I love how this first side of the Brea Bag is looking. I found this while I was browsing the 'net the other day looking for inspiration.

I was actually thinking of knitting a backpack-style bag, but when I saw this, I was hooked.

I found some Bernat Satin at Michaels in "Wine Mist" to substitute for the angora. I'm using two strands of yarn held together with #9 needles, as per the pattern. This yarn has quite a "woolly" look to it, which was particularly noticeable when I was finishing off this section of the bag at the beach today.

That segues very neatly into the following photos. It was a fairly warm day, but there was a lot of cloud and we had a couple of showers during the afternoon. After visiting a teashop with our friend, we weren't daunted by the weather and took the plunge.

The water was ICY cold. J and I went in and were out again quickly, but the boys were in and out as if they were polar bears.


They enjoyed the home-made popcorn that I'd brought - funny how being outside seems to give you an appetite.


The water was really clear.

There are two diving boards, a zipline and a knotted rope to make getting into the water faster... and more fun!


More showers and some sunshine this evening resulted in a rainbow plus it's reflection (look carefully to the right and you will see a reversed rainbow).

Summer living

A couple of 97 cent pool noodles certainly create a lot of entertainment. The beauty of the beach access that we have been frequenting is its simplicity. Just a patch of sand, a couple of picnic tables and a dock.


The boys can amuse themselves for ages with some rocks, some sand, some sticks, some water - and the entertainment value is increased even more with the addition of a couple of buckets and shovels and the aforementioned pool noodles.

The other day, the pool noodles were being used as light sabres and the boys were Jedi knights, albeit skinny half-naked ones!


And to change the subject completely, here's some great summer eating....fresh local tomatoes with a little green onion, olive oil and good salt. This was my breakfast today - a perfectly alkalising meal made with tomatoes bought from a local farmer. They taste so good that I bought 30 pounds of them! We are eating them at every meal.

Summer is here

What a beautiful day! The weather is finally bucking up and I have been able to toast myself in the garden a few times in the last week.


Today, one of the kids mentioned they'd like to go to the beach, so once all the housework was done that's exactly what we did.


We went to a small lakeside park about 5 minutes drive away. It has grass, sand, a playground and water. We decided to limit ourselves to an hour in the sun so that we didn't burn.


While I applied some coconut oil and reclined on my favourite beach quilt, the boys ran off to the playground. It wasn't long before they were hot enough to brave the lake. They went in up to their middles. It was cold enough to numb the skin. I know - I went in up to my neck! Our first dip of the year.


Computer Geek of course didn't come with us - the beach and swimming are not his "thing" any more. Ninja Boy and Lego Nut had a good time pottering at the edge of the water and looking for cool rocks. (See sidebar for the guide to who I'm talking about here!)


I brought a thermometer with me, the one I usually use for cooking. We put it in the lake water, but I don't think the 19 degrees Celsius reading was representative of the temperature - it was in the shallow water right near the edge. The air temperature was 26 degrees, but when I left the thermometer resting on the quilt itself, it went up to 52! We measured a temperature of 35 degrees in the grass in the sun and 21 degrees in the grass in the shade of a tree. And my flip flops were 40 degrees, according to the kids!


When we came home, the wet swimwear and towels were hung out to dry on the deck (and that's my Sunrise Circle Jacket drying on the table too).


I know summer's here when there's a quilt on the swingseat and some of the houseplants have been moved outside for a few months. Our deck is like an extra living room in the summer.

Cookies and fun

Lots of baking today - coconut chocolate chip cookies and apple muffins. I bagged them up in fours and put them in the freezer - they'll be coming out again very soon, but I wanted them to stay as fresh as possible.

In between the rainshowers, I suggested to the two younger boys that we go outside on the trampoline. They always seem more willing to go outside and bounce when I'm out there with them.

We had a lot of fun - just plain jumping gets boring pretty fast, so we were pretending to be things, like a seed, a firefighter climbing a ladder, popcorn, a swimmer in shark-infested waters (then we lost our legs, then our arms!), a tree in a hurricane, a worm when it's raining and you have to get out of your tunnel before you drown.....and when we were out of breath we just lay down on the trampoline looking up at the sky, wondering what shapes the clouds reminded us of and watching the clouds travel and evolve. Eventually a big grey cloud moved overhead and we moved inside just in time to avoid the rain!

It's at times like this I wish I could turn back the clock and have all three of the boys out there goofing around with me.....but the 16 year old isn't interested in the trampoline any more, or horsing around with mum.