Honeymoon, day 2

Day 2. We went to Fort Mackinac in the morning, and must have rented bikes in the afternoon so we could go see Arch Rock.

The harbor, in the morning. Later in the day it was sunny.

Crows Nest trail, through the woods behind Fort Mackinac.

A tenacious tree.

The harbor, as seen from one of the peep-holes in the fort wall. No British flags ... so we're all good.

The view from Arch Rock.

Honeymoon, day 1

Since I never posted photos of our spectacular honeymoon on Mackinac Island last year, I'm going to use our anniversary as an excuse to sift through them again.

Day 1

Rob mails the marriage certificate -- signed, sealed, and soon-to-be-delivered.

Leaving the mainland, and wedding stress, behind.

Ahead of us were four days at this resort on the Island.

Four rockin' rocks. Everywhere we went, people had left rock arrangements to ponder.

Happy Anniversary!

One year ago today...

(Photos by Beca Essing -- who we would both hire again in a heartbeat!)

Goodbye Unemployment...

There has been cooking...

baked lotus root chips with cayenne pepper and salt

and weaving...

log cabin pattern with variegated warp

and noodling about on the guitar...

some kind of chord...

but on Monday I'm going to work for the first time in 10 weeks. I'm going to miss my days of R&R, and I highly recommend it even if you have to go kicking and screaming -- I needed a break MUCH more than I realized. But I'm relieved that I found a good job and that I will be a desk-bound business-casual heel-wearing member of society again.

How many lunatics live in my complex?

This many. This many lunatics.

BP8IENT

About 16% of license plates in Virginia carry a personalized message. Personalized plates are inexpensive here, and perhaps we who live in the area around DC also like to express ourselves just a bit too much. Whatever the reason, it makes for interesting reading while sitting in traffic -- another trait for which we are known.

I've always been a fan of personalized plates. When I lived in Michigan, I got a plate that told people behind me to "BP8IENT" when my 1998 Chevy Tracker didn't scoot away as fast as they might like. I kept the plate when I got a car with a bit more pep. Here's a photo of my Matrix parked next to a car with a contradictory message:

BP8IENT vs. IMP8NT (pardon the lights, I know it's a bad picture!)

When I moved to Virginia I got the same license plate.

Don't make me come over there.

I often spot my vanity plate nemesis driving on VA-28 when I'm on my way to work. 

MP8IENT

NOTE: Safe driving is a full-time job. Since this was taken on 28 during rush hour, neither of us were doing much driving.

Zellie loves to sew.

Altering my pants, in February.

Hemming Rob's pants, in March.

Actually, she just loves to get in the way of sewing.

Zellie's mad at us.

What cat wouldn't bask in the warmth of a stereo receiver? We even provided her a glass shelf to recline upon, so she wouldn't get fur in the receiver.

That all changed last weekend, when Rob hung our TV on the wall and mounted the electronicles next to it. No more kitty warming shelf!

Now Miss Girl must resort to lounging on sunny window sills, as Ceiling Cat intended.

Despite an abundance of sun, I still think she's mad at us for taking away her artificial warm spot -- especially during air-conditioning season.

Unemployment Towels

Not long after my last day at work, I started planning this set of towels. They're the most complicated project I've woven yet! The pattern was in an old issue of Weaver's Craft magazine (Issue 19, 2006), and it's called "Crocus in Snow". The original pattern was blue instead of pink. I have no idea whether pink croci exist, or whether they'd pop up out of the snow. But I like the pink; it's cheerful. Do petunias like snow? Probably not.

Yesterday afternoon I had a job interview, so while I was waiting for 1 pm to arrive I sat down at the loom, finished the last few pattern repeats, and cut the towel fabric loose from the loom!

I have now finished my unemployment towels, so I suppose that means I am ready to go back to work.

They started as a warp, or 423 pieces of cotton yarn that will run the length of all four towels.

Up close, the pattern doesn't look like much.

From a distance, the pattern appears: pink circles with yellow centers! Like magic!

Four neatly folded towels, resting on the loom that created them.

Two years and counting

Two years and two days ago, Rob and I both reluctantly (and separately) decided to go to a July 4th singles party sponsored by a couple of local singles groups. There were about 40 people there. I had already bought my ticket but didn't want to go. I told myself that I had to at least go, and I could always leave if it wasn't any fun. Rob went to the party but tells me he was talking to another woman on the phone while he was there. Sigh.

Out first meal together (I'm in the purple t-shirt and Rob's shirt matches the table). I think we were talking about where we were from, and how much we liked the Midwest.

Rob is armed with a water balloon and he looks like he's about to use it. 

After the picnic we went to watch fireworks. He has his left arm around another woman who was following him around all night. She even invited him to sit on her blanket to watch the fireworks. Ugh! I guess we all know how that story ended...

We went to the bar after fireworks, and shared our first nachos and beer.  I remember him showing me all of the photos he had on his iPhone.

Two years later, here we are! I have a much better haircut now. Rob looks pretty much the same. :-) To celebrate, we went out for a delectable lunch at Il Fornaio in Reston, which had a surprisingly good variety of vegetarian options. We are both very lucky to have found each other.

Please judge this Nook by its cover.

This week I joined the e-reading millions when I bought a Nook Simple Touch e-reader (is "Nook" supposed to be capitalized? I don't know...). I couldn't very well let it run around naked when I have scraps of fabric, batting, and interfacing stashed away unused, so I threw together this cover for it. This first attempt looks a little rough, but I plan to make a "real" one based on what I like and don't like about how this one works. I already don't think I'm going to try rounded corners again. What do you think?

The nook itself is a lot of fun. I am already persona non grata at the libraries in Fairfax and Loudoun counties for my tendency to hang onto library books longer than they would like. Reading e-books frees me up from having to make trips to the library, and it reduces the weight on the the end table on my side of the couch. So far I'm not excited by the selection of e-books that are available for loan from the library, but I hope that will change with time. For now I've loaded up on a few e-books that I have purchased and some others that are out there on the interwebs for free (yay, Sinclair Lewis books!).

Without warp, there can be no weft.

The first post-planning step in weaving is to make a warp, or a collection of threads into which the weft will be woven. These can be all one color, many colors, or a repeating pattern of two or three colors, but they need to be the same length and they are often quite long.

The easiest way to create a warp is to use a contraption called a warping board that allows string to be wound around a series of pegs. My first couple of warps were wound on the warping board of my co-worker who taught me how to get started, but if I was too impatient to wait until I could go over to her house I would create a warp using a combination of dining-room chairs and pegs clamped to tables. That gets rather tedious when I need 400+ ends that are about 5 yards long.

My first unemployment project was to make a warping board for myself. I used this pattern from All Fiber Arts:
http://www.allfiberarts.com/library/graphics/gallery/wrpbrd_pln.gif. It's a bit hard to read, but the pattern was good enough. I modified it slightly (of course) because I don't see myself ever needing a 16-yard warp.

Here's the end result! It's not beautiful, but it works.

A froggy morning

For our Sunday morning nature fix, Rob and I headed to Riverbend Park. We were walking through the woods when I saw what looked like a meadow and heard what sounded like rocks being thrown into the back of a truck. What I thought was a meadow was a very still pond covered with duckweed, and the sound was the percussive chirping of a chorus of frogs! Capturing their poses was worth delaying our hike.

For a trail map of Riverbend Park, use the Hiking Upward site.

I know, I know...

I'm a bad, bad blogger.

I took a break from the blog without intending to. Meanwhile, nature has been explored, yarn has been woven into fabric, 6.5 years of work at an automotive consulting firm has been wrapped up, Virginia summer has arrived like an annoying house-guest who won't leave, Michigan has been visited, and voluntary unemployment has been undertaken, struggled with, agonized over, and then thoroughly enjoyed.

I have a backlog of photos to post. I hope to get through most of them before I find another job, which will probably happen both sooner and later than I would like.

Whole lotta weaving going on.

I'm making progress as a weaver. I'm working on my first set of dishtowels, all the while asking myself why I'm doing this when they sell perfectly good towels at the store. My conclusion is that it's challenging, satisfying, and (most importantly), while I'm weaving there is not a single glowing rectangle anywhere in my line of vision unless Rob is trying to play "Words with Friends" with me on the iPhone. It's also good to be a total beginner at something once in a while, and to be reminded that impatience will only get me broken warp threads that will cause even more frustration later on.

I decided to tackle a log cabin pattern as my first real project, a project that has a pattern and everything! As so many other weavers have said, log cabin weave does seem magical since the weave structure is just plain weave (one over, one under, one over, one under ... rinse and repeat). The magical pattern blocks of stripes that appear to be rotated comes from the order of the warp and weft threads. That means I have to attentively count weft threads while I weave, or the pattern will switch on me before I am ready.

Those are 457 individual warp threads, each 5.5 yards long, to give me four dish towels.

The work in progress

See the magic!

The last picture is of the fruits of my impatience, also known as broken warp threads. Since they're not connected to the back beam anymore they have to be weighted in order have the same tension as the rest of the warp. The key works well, and so do pill bottles with a couple of screws in them. These bobbers fascinate the kitties, especially when I am actively weaving and the threads dance a bit. All the more reason to keep it all covered up when I'm not around.

Gratuitous Cat Post

It's time ... as "totes adorbs" as the kitties always are, it's always good to put more cat photos on the internet. Cat photos, as we all know, are what the internet is made of.

I took this picture of Mr. Pumpkin napping in the sun while I was home resting after a bad day at the doctor. Someday I want my own sunning basket, complete with handles to facilitate my being moved to a better spot without even having to ask.


Shortly after Rob and I moved into our new apartment last summer, Miss Giselle terrified and amazed us by jumping 13 feet from the loft railing down to the living room floor below. Rob says she bounced, but I didn't see her hit the floor. She shook her head, shot us a "What??" look, and sauntered off. Realizing that 1) she has concluded that stairs are for clumsy bipeds and 2) as a cat, she is going to do what she is going to do, we decided to install wall ramps so that she can climb up and down from the loft in a species-appropriate manner. (Landlord be damned!)

Now that she's mastered climbing up and down, she likes to pace on the railing and sometimes she'll just sit on the railing and watch us. I call her my tree-trunk kitty, but she's not very well camouflaged in this explosion of apartment-white. She doesn't seem to mind.

And just like that, it's over.

Rob's retirement from the Air Force is finally upon us. He's not officially done until later this spring, but they had the official ceremony last week. Rob's mother, three of his siblings (all of his sisters), two nephews and a niece were here to celebrate with us.

The whole gang

Receiving the Defense Meritorious Service Medal

The retirement pin makes it official! But wait . . . It's not a going-away party without presents and cake! In addition to two very good bottles of wine (which we haven't opened yet), they got him a unique and thoughtful gift to enjoy long after the wine is gone. We now have a set of eight special wine glasses -- seven of them are engraved with a rank (and date) that Rob attained during his 24-year career, and the eighth is engraved with his entering and retiring dates.

We are all very proud of Rob, and excited for the next phase of his adventure.