Vacation photos

The battery charger for the camera is missing a few important parts. Specifically, the part that plugs the battery pack into the wall. So until we track that down, there won't be any new pics of my projects on the blog.

Might I distract you with photos from the Oregon Coast?

Brian grew up ten miles south of Newport, Oregon, and his family still lives in the area. Conveniently enough, his parents run a bed and breakfast so when we come to visit, there's always the chance we'll get to stay in the suite. (When there's guests, we sleep in Brian's old bedroom. Which means that we still get the home-cooked breakfast, but we have to forego the comfort of an attached bathroom.)

This group of sea lions was on the Newport docks. They like to laze around and bark, in the hopes that someone will be so enthralled with their charms that they'll drop their lunch. I think of this particular group as the alley cats of the sea. 800 pound alley cats.

Brian's father taught me how to use a spinning wheel during this trip, but I sadly have no pictures to commemorate the event. However, here's one of Pop and our friend Meghan and the spinning wheel.

Haceta Head Lighthouse:

40 miles to the north, Yaquina Head Lighthouse:

And my favorite sunset picture (out of the ones that I took) of the trip:

Some of our friends from Nome came to visit us for the week. As it had been so cold in Northern Alaska the week before that 20 people had dropped out of the Iditarod, Hayley, Kara, and Meghan were very excited to be somewhere where the daily low temperature was 35 F, instead of minus 35 F.
And because no seaside vacation is complete without building a beach fort:

He is Risen!

I gave up posting on this blog (and checking out other people's blogs) for Lent. (Lent marks the forty day period between Ash Wednesday (forty days before Easter, how handy is that?) and Easter Sunday. It commemorates the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness before he began His ministry. It is traditionally a time of waiting, contemplation, and denying oneself in order to concentrate more fully on God. )

While some Christian traditions have specific things which one does or does not do for Lent--my Orthodox friends are going vegan on Wednesdays and Fridays for all Lent--the Church of the Nazarene does more of a "choose your own adventure" approach to Lenten devotions. This year, I realized that I've been spending a great deal of time in vain self-glorification (and yarn-glorification) and decided to not blog for Lent.

Unfortunately, I reached the decision to give up blogging for Lent during the Ash Wednesday service and neglected to do a post to explain why I'd be MIA for the next six weeks.

Note that I didn't give up knitting for Lent, just the blabbering about it. I should have more pictures of my assorted projects coming in a few days.

Projects that lead to insanity

Every so often, I'm overcome with guilt for not making this blog more about knitting. After all, if it's titled "Naomi Knits," maybe it should have some yarn-related content. Maybe I shouldn't use it as a soapbox for whatever thoughts are bouncing through my head. Perhaps I need to confine my topic to knitting, or even just continue with my usual slavish imitation of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. Then again, it's my blog and I'll write about whatever I feel like writing about.

The last several weeks have been very busy for me. There's a new staffing grid at work. The upside of this is that there are more nurses on night shift, and every so often I get to eat lunch during work. (Thank God for Pepsi, or I'd probably collapse from hypoglycemia!) The downside of this is that now the staffing office calls me much more regularly on my nights off to beg me to come in and work extra shifts.

Consequently, I have a backlog of projects that I've photographed over the last few weeks and have yet to show off.

To begin with, I love stuffed animals. When I found an adorable pattern for miniature teddy bears in a knitting book, I was unable to resist the pull of its cuteness. (Yes, that is a US quarter in the picture next to it.) Next, I realized that the bear needed clothes and crocheted it an outfit. Lastly, I shipped it off to my mother-in-law, who has made dollhouse miniatures for years and therefore was truly able to appreciate the insanity that this project represented. (Total time: 20 hours= one half pair of socks.)

When I'm not knitting, I've been working on dyeing. I've been dyeing yarn with Kool-Aid and food coloring for about a year now, but lately I've progressed to dyeing roving. Ever since I blew all my Christmas money at the Wool Peddler on superwash wool roving, I have been experimenting to see precisely what happens when you dye roving with my usual methods.

And here is the single I spun from it:

And here are the socks I am knitting for myself:

I'm not sure how much time I have spent on this particular project, but so far the total is at least 45 hours, and I only have the cuff of the first sock done. I don't suffer from insanity--I enjoy every minute of it.

Physical fitness sucks!

Due to the growing size of the American population--both collectively and individually--the health-care system I work for is trying to increase the amount of exercise people get. Exercise is important, and does an amazing amount of good things. I think it's great, and I recommend it whole-heartedly to my patients.

However, every time one of my patients says "but I hate going to the gym!" I have to agree with him or her. I hate going to the gym too. I hate jogging, I hate aerobics, and don't even get me started on Pilates.

Working as a nurse, I'm on my feet for most of every twelve hour shift. I'm walking, bending, reaching, and moving patients the majority of the time. I love my job, but some days it's really hard physical work. And when I get home after a long night, I just want to sleep for as long as possible until it's time to go back to work. (To my yarn, especially that skein of Knitpicks Shimmer I've been promising to make something out of for weeks: I love you, but I'm afraid to do anything with you because I don't want to screw it up. It's not you baby, it's me.)

On my days off, when I'm not frantically trying to do laundry, clean, or do crazy things like making something for dinner that didn't come out of a Hamburger Helper box, I like to spin and knit. (More pictures soon!) The last thing I want to do is go to the gym.

So when I went to the doc last week for a checkup and saw the box on the form about "How often do you exercise?" I wrote "never--I'm a floor nurse." And then I got to thinking: How much exercise do I get in twelve hour shift? Several studies have been done on how many steps nurses take, so I thought I'd wear a pedometer myself to test out my progress.

While I forgot to switch the pedometer over to the actual step counter, it registered 5.27 miles walked last night. And when you consider that out of any hour I'm working, I'm sitting down charting for about half of it, this works out to about 960 calories burned. I've got to start thinking of exercise in other ways than just going to the gym.

Lake of ghosts

I grew up about five miles from a popular local landmark called Rock Lake. It's a nine mile-long slit of a lake that was carved by retreating glaciers, and it's ringed by hundred-foot cliffs. There's only four places along the entire lakeshore where the cliffs ease enough that you can get a boat in the water.

Living so close to it, we drove by it a lot. The school bus drove past it four times daily, and the family I baby-sat for lived a couple of miles on the other side of it. Some lakes have seasons, but this one has moods.

It is so deep in parts that the bottom has never been found. The spring floods which feed it each year also bring enough silt that one can only see about a foot into the water before everything is obscured. The frigid water is about 45 degrees year-round, and the glacial gouge that forms the lake acts as a wind tunnel for its legendary sudden storms.

This lake has always reminded me of Elizabeth the First of England: strikingly beautiful, an heir to and participant in a fascinating history, majestic--and very dangerous to take lightly.
Much of the early history of the lake has been lost. The majority of what remains is known only through tall tales, folklore, and the ramblings of old men. Before the white men came, the Palouse Indians who called the land home would camp on its shores. Their legends speak of a fearful monster living within the lake depths, able to overturn entire canoes with one flick of its massive tail.
Chief Kamiakin was buried not far from here. After the white men desecrated his grave, his people reburied him in a secret place near the lake. And a century later, some say he walks the shoreline still.
The generation before my grandparents spoke of the trials of building a railroad along the cliffs above the lake. According to more than one story, feuding between Irish and Chinese railway workers led to uncounted lives being lost to the lake as an entire train sank in its waters.

My parents and grandparents spoke of the prosperity the railroad had brought to the area--and the desolation when it left. And for every happy tale of idyllic fishing trips and beautiful picnics, there was a cautionary tale of those who had misjudged their own abilities in light of the lake's treacherous power--"and were never heard from again."

But what I remember most about Rock Lake are the Easter services. Every Easter Sunday, the various churches from the outlying communities would gather at the lake at sunrise. And amid the slicing wind which always keened like the voices of the souls lost in the lake, we proclaimed the eternal truth: "Christ is risen!" And even the wind would answer back: "He is risen indeed!"

Families that lead to insanity

We visited my parents and family in Washington state last week. Now, I love my family, but the fact remains that they will drive you crazy if you spend too much time with them. And after spending the first 18 years of my life with them, is it any wonder that I'm a bit off the wall sometimes?

When I say "parents," I really mean "Mom and Aunt Tig."

Aunt Tig (on the left) is Mom's older sister, who helped raise my brother and I after Mom and Dad's divorce. Voila...parents! (Although I've gotten many uncomfortable looks from friends over the years when I introduce these two women as my parents. I guess the fabled open-mindedness of college students only goes so far.)

Nope, no pictures of EJ from this trip. Following his latest Army-sponsored surgery, my favorite Purple Heart recipient is using his convalescent leave to visit Dad's family in Wisconsin. I'm sure he's having fun with them, since they're just as crazy as Mom's family, but with more aunties and uncles and cousins to increase the noise and insanity levels.

I did get to see my little sister Christy (we adopted each other in first or second grade, a la Brian, Billy, and Brad) and her little girl Brooklynn for the first time in two years. Did you ever stop to think about just how hard it is to take a picture of two adults when the only other person in the room is a two year old?

Christy is, of course, the one on the right. She's far more photogenic than I am, but she's such a wonderful person it's impossible to hold it against her.

And I bet you don't need to be told who this is:



Doesn't Brookie look just like her mother? I swear she's Christy's little Mini-Me.

Unfortunately, even though we were going to Washington for five days, Brian still had to do his grad school work. So he spent much of the time we were there sitting on the couch typing on his assorted assignments. (And getting cornered into sharing hunting stories with my grandfather for two hours, but that is a story for another day.)

Socks that lead to insanity

I finally finished Jessica's socks.



The picture doesn't show it off particularly well, but in addition to the 5-rib cable running down both sides of the cuff, I ran a 2x2 cable down either side of the instep. When I got to the toe, I had yet another lapse of sanity, and managed to coordinate my decreases so the cable continues and becomes partof the toe shaping.

They took five weeks, which makes them the second-hardest pair of socks I've ever designed and knit. The grand prize winner in the "Nomi Went Nuts While Knitting" competition is this pair of socks:



(it does have a mate, I'm just too lazy to get up and take a picture of them together.)


They were my 2005 Christmas gift to myself (and I seem to recall someone asking if I could do cables that were two-colored...) and like many other small good things, they took nine months to complete. I started them in December 2005, and I finished them in September 2006 as I visited my brother in the hospital.

And what am I doing now? I'm working on a pair of socks in a self-striping yarn that I hand-spun from superwash roving.


They say that admitting you have a problem is the first step...