The Friday Five questions are on a topic that is one of my current issues.

1. What time do you wake up on weekday mornings?

I'm trying to change this. Since I'm a stay-at-home mom, and we homeschool, I don't have to be anywhere in the morning. Mark gets up to go to work and I'm still struggling for consciousness much of the time (he goes to work at 8 a.m.) and I consider 9:00 to be the absolute latest that I need to be up and running, dressed, with the bed made. That's not so hard in the summer, but in winter I might never get up if it were left up to me. I still try, but it can really be a struggle. I'd really like to be up much earlier, like awake at 6:00 and actually getting things done by 7:00. It might help if I went to bed at a respectable hour, do you think?

2. Do you sleep in on the weekends? How late?

I like to sleep in on Saturdays. It isn't an option on Sundays. Still, 9:00 is probably about as late as I'm comfortable with sleeping in. That doesn't mean that I don't sometimes sleep a little later, but I feel so lazy if I do. When I was a teenager I used to sleep in until noon or even 1-2 p.m. on Saturdays, but I was constantly sleep deprived and really needed the extra zzzzzz's to make up for it. In high school I had to be up at six and often had school stuff like football games (I was in the band) that lasted well past eleven at night.

3. Aside from waking up, what is the first thing you do in the morning?

Make the bed (at least pull up the covers and smooth them out). I wish I could say that I get dressed before heading for the computer, but that often is not the case.

4. How long does it take to get ready for your day?

I can make myself presentable in 10-15 minutes. Sometimes less.

5. When possible, what is your favorite place to go for breakfast?

I actually like making breakfast at home. But, the weekend breakfast buffet at Golden Corral isn't too bad either.

About My Vacation

Yes, I'm going to bore you with vacation pictures. (groan) I was going to do this earlier, but I've been working hard to catch up, and I don't know where the time has gone. I have been going through all the pictures I took and getting them ready to put on the web, so there are plenty of those, and, just in case you're worried, no, I'm not going to get to all of them today. You can look forward to vacation pictures trickling in here little by little for a long time to come!

As you know, we went to California to go camping with my family in the Redwoods. We drove. It's about 14 hours from here to Sacramento, across a few mountains and a lot of dessert, and the part that seems the slowest is crossing the salt flats. If you have never seen the salt flats, here's what you're missing:



My kids thought that this looked a lot like a beach, since they had never seen an actual beach before. Well, we were going to California so why not take them to the beach, right? Well, we did, but not yet. Before going to the beach we met up with my penpal, Gwen, at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. If you just want to see the stuff they have there, look at their website, and if you have a chance to go, do - we all liked it a lot. A couple of the more interesting things we did there were:



Feeding the batrays, and



we got to see what we might look like as a penguin family.

Here's the whole lot of us on the beach:



That's me and Mark and our kids, Gwen and her kids, and my sister, Angela, with her husband, Joe, and their baby, Andrei, in no particular order.

More Aquariums

I don't know if I have mentioned it before or not, but Mark is a Scuba diver so of course he is into all this water stuff. We have plenty of indoor pets besides all the outdoor ones, but only two of them were water creatures.



Here they are. After looking at aquariums so much, we had to get more water creatures, so after we got home we got this:



We're still adding fish to it little by little. We talked about finding a new home for the turtle and the goldfish and using their tank to set up a new aquarium, but it turns out that we were more attached to them than we thought. In the process of populating the new tank, the turtle and goldfish have gained roommates also - four snails and a second fish. I can't remember what it is called, but it eats the same food as goldfish, and it is very pretty - silver with gold and black spots and long, beautiful fins, and big dark black eyes. I don't seem to have a picture of these new additions yet.

Remember to keep coming back to see more vacation pictures, including camping and the redwood trees. They really are incredible trees! More later...

Pioneer Day

Yesterday was Pioneer Day. This is a state holiday in Utah, the anniversary of the day that the Mormon pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake valley. You can read more about this history here and find even more about it here. Since Mark is a state employee, he had the day off. His whole family was in town so we spent the day with them, starting with the annual pioneer breakfast, and ending with fireworks. Yes, fireworks are legal twice in July in Utah. Here's a picture at the breakfast, which is perhaps the thing that draws the most people on this day:



The boy scouts do this for a fund raiser, and just about the whole town shows up. All day in the park there are activities, entertainment, etc. Last year my kids performed what they were learning in Highland Dance. They had only started lessons a few weeks before, but they did pretty good for their very first performance.



There are always parades for Pioneer day too, and some people dress up like the pioneers. In Utah you can't miss all the Pioneer Day celebrations (and other churches get involved in it too, having their own floats in the parades and joining in the festivities), but it isn't limited to this state. Church members worldwide celebrate Pioneer Day with much of the same activities as we have here. I didn't come to Utah until I was in college, but I remember going to Pioneer Day breakfasts and parades, and wearing pioneer dresses in California and even in Spain.

Back to Knitting



Here is Ragna so far. This is the back, although at this point it doesn't really matter which is back or front. The lattice pattern looks complicated, but I actually had it memorized after working it one time (the first reapeat of the pattern on the sampler, which I did make in to a headband, BTW). I could proclaim it boring, but instead I have decided that it is nice not to have to carry the chart around. All I have to do is knit until I reach the appropriate length. I am not using a cable needle. You really don't need one, and it is faster to cable without one. I have noticed that somebody's site had directions for cabling without a cable needle, but I didn't read them. The Viking Patterns for Knitting book also mentions that if you have the dexterity you should be able to cable without a cable needle also, but doesn't go into detail. I simply hold the stitches to be cabled in my fingers while knitting the next stitches, then put the cable stitches back on the needle and knit them in their turn. It is much faster this way and skips over the frustration of remembering where you put the cable needle, dropping it, losing it, etc. For wider cables I might want a cable needle, although one could simply rearrange all the cable stitches on the needle before knitting them. The danger of this method is that you could easily drop stitches, but if you do then you just pick them up again. It doesn't happen particularly often. Of course I am also knitting back without turning my work. That has gotten to be second nature to me now.



Realizing that I never did show you the Vigdis backpack after assembling it, here it is. It should have a button on the front pocket, but I never did get around to that. I probably will - things occasionally fall out of the pocket. There is a piece of cardboard at the bottom to strengthen it and hold the shape, and I ought to sew a lining out of cloth, but haven't. Would you like to see how the straps go? Click here. This picture shows the bottom also. The bead at the top slides back so the pack can be opened without having to untie it.

Miscellaneous Stuff

I have lots of camping pictures to show you and I plan to talk about my vacation and seeing my family, but I don't think I have time today. There is so much catching up to do after being away, and I can't believe how fast the summer is slipping away. Carol and Jonathan want to go to public school this fall, so I need to get them signed up. There will be a goat show in Vernal next month and the entry forms are due today (some are overdue already but I have been told that they will take them anyway). The house needs major picking up and cleaning that just keeps not getting done because we would rather do other things. And I really need to do some fiber processing, shearing, etc. And it's too hot to do anything! It was cooler in California than it is here (well, at least in the Redwoods where we camped and on the beaches, where it was actually cold). Please be patient with me - I will get back to posting more often.

The Friday Five

1. Do you remember your first best friend? Who was it?

My first best friend was a girl named Becky who was in my second grade class. I still remember her birthday every year (at least I am aware on that day that it is Becky's birthday).

2. Are you still in touch with this person?

No. We were both Air Force Brats. We corresponded for four or five years after I moved away, and then she just never wrote back to me again.

3. Do you have a current close friend?

Other than my DH, I assume? There are a few people I know and like enough to be close friends, but they seem to be too busy to actually want to hang around and do things with me. My close friend that I can tell things to and that I would hang around with if we lived in the same state is Gwen, the penpal who I am going to meet in just a few days. We only know each other through e-mail correspondence so far though.

4. How did you become friends with this person?

She joined an e-mail list that I was a member of, and when she introduced herself and everyone on the list started writing welcome messages I did too. From there we wrote to each other and found out that we have some things in common. We have written to each other for about a year and a half now and are like sisters who have never met.

5. Is there a friend from your past that you wish you were still in contact with? Why?

Since I am an Air Force Brat, and I moved around so much, I just miss having a connection at all with people that I grew up with. Among people I am currently in contact with, not counting those that are related to me, the one that goes farthest back is someone I worked with when I was in college. I was 20 years old when I met her. There are two people I knew in high school who I would like to still be in contact with. One, Cami, was my roommate in college also. I moved away so suddenly that I didn't have time to tell people I was going, and now I don't know where she is. She was a good friend and I have a feeling that we will meet again sometime. The other is a boy I knew in high school. His name was Trang. We were never more than friends, but he noticed me and cared about me at a time when I didn't feel like anybody cared. I probably wasn't even very nice to him. He wrote to me for a few years after I had moved away, even after I was married. Then I guess I felt guilty about still exchanging twenty page letters with this boy from high school and I just never got around to writing back to Trang after the last letter he sent me. I wish that I had, and I would like to know what he is doing now.

Gone for a While

Knit bloggers are entitled to a vacation, right? Right. So, okay, we're taking off for California tomorrow. That's not an easy thing to do when you have a farm, even a microscopic farm like mine, but I have farm sitters arranged and we're all set to go. We don't see my side of the family much, so this will be good. My grandparents have this camping trip every year and they ask if I can come every year and it's always been too far away. Well, this year we decided we would be there. I might get a chance to blog from California once or twice - we'll see - and there will definitely be pictures when we get back. Besides seeing the relatives, I will get to meet my penpal, Gwen, who has been like a sister to me for over a year now, and we are going to take the kids to see the ocean. My kids have not seen an ocean before.

I'll do lots of knitting on the way of course. I haven't gotten too far on Ragna yet - I have the four sections for the bottom of the back joined and a few rows past that. I'll take Ragna, but I might work on miscellaneous smaller stuff instead while I'm travelling. We'll see....

Publicity

You may have noticed, down at the bottom of the page, that I have been getting referrals to this page from Deseret News. They did an article about blogs in Utah, and picked me to write about. Cool! If you haven't already, go ahead and check it out.

Kids Growing Up (the four-legged kind, that is)



I'll leave you with a picture of a couple of the kids. This was taken a couple of weeks ago. They have grown quite a bit more since then.

New Knitting Project - Ragna



I have started swatching for Ragna. This pattern is in one size only, and I would swim in it, so I am using a slightly finer guage of yarn and one needle size smaller and hoping for the best. I'm too lazy to figure out if it is actually going to fit me, but my gauge is just a little smaller than that specified, so it should work. I decided to use the center part of the chart for swatching, thinking that it would make a nice headband, and then noticed that the way I am doing it is exactly the way that the hat is started, so I could continue on and make the hat. However, I might decide that a headband is what I want afterall. I have lots of hats and don't wear them all that often.

The sweaters in this book (Viking Patterns for Knitting) use the basic sweater construction where you knit the front, knit the back, knit each of the sleeves, and then sew it all together. I have been thinking about doing them seamlessly. They are not raglan designs though, so the obvious way would be to knit the body tubularly, with steeks for the armholes. Then stitches could be picked up for the arms after cutting the steek. But I'd rather sew side seams than do all that. Another possibility would be to knit the body tubularly up to the beginning of the arms and then switch to back and forth knitting the rest of the way up (attaching a second ball of yarn). I'll think about it, but maybe side seams aren't such a bad thing afterall.

House Chickens

How do you know when the chicks are grown up enough to go outside with the rest of the chickens? Here's how:

• They don't know that they are chickens.
  
• Either that, or they don't know that the rest of us aren't chickens. Either way, they don't stay in their box anymore and they think that everyone and everything exists for their use.
  
• They think that the dogs are running a terrific taxi service.
  
  
• When one of the kids curls up for a nap, they just pile on top like chickens do when they sleep.
  
  
• The real clincher is when they start helping themselves to people food.
  
  

The chicks are now living in the chicken house with the big chickens, but the children visit them regularly out there. Out of the four hatchlings, only two of them survived to this point. Keeping baby chicks alive isn't as easy as it looks.

Flowers
My hollyhocks and daisies bloomed at the same time. I need to plant something that will bloom from mid-spring until these start (early summer). We get a few early flowers from various bulbs, and the daisies and hollyhocks will keep going until it freezes, but we have quite a gap in between. I know I could just get some annuals, but I usually don't, and for some reason the chickens and goats always manage to get anything new that I plant. Hollyhocks are a great dye plant, so I'm fighting the bees (which think that those flowers are theirs) and collecting the spent blooms until I have enough for the dye pot. That job is enough to keep me busy. There are lots more flowers now than there were when I took this picture a few days ago.



The flowers are so dark purple that they look black. I chose this type because it has a lot of dye in it. My fingers turn purple when I collect the flowers.