Desert wildflowers: a photographers road trip

Anza Borrego Desert State Park

Here in lovely Southern California we have the amazing miracle of wildflowers blooming in the middle of the desert every year for a  few short weeks.  Due to our recent rains this year is even better than usual (or worse if you have allergies!).  Up until now I have never had the opportunity to go see them, but my brother Grumpy invited me to go along with he and his wife, Chatty-Cathy, on a visit to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park to take some pictures of them.

So after getting up early (for me) on a Saturday morning and driving for a couple hours to get out there I was suddenly confronted with a hike, uh, hike?  No one said anything about a stinking hike!  Oh well, here we go anyway!  Good thing I was smart enough to wear jeans and sneakers.  None of us got exactly what we expected.  We all were assuming we would observe flowers as far as the eye could see, not so, this is the desert after all.  What we did get was the normally brown and dry desert plants awash with color.  Mostly yellows and greens with some reds and purples, it really was quite lovely.  The sounds of the bees was amazing, I don't know where they all came from but the buzzing was non-stop around the plants.

Cost Cutting Shenanigans

A few weeks ago I went to Target to pick up my weekly needs of basic household stuff, you know the really fun things like shampoo, trash bags and toilet paper.  Now, I have never really thought too much about what companies do to cut costs and raise their profit margin, I know they do some crazy silly things, but again, I never gave it too much thought.  Until I put my rolls of toilet paper away in my cabinet and noticed this:

In case you were thinking what's the big deal, they reduced the width of the toilet paper roll by 1/2 an inch and did not reduce the price.  Not that I'll switch to a different brand, the Target brand is still less expensive than any of the others, but it just irks that they seem to think we as consumers are stupid (though unfortunately many are!).  Mister Vonkymeed thinks they maybe saved a whole roll of toilet paper per package by reducing the width of the roll, oh well I guess it's just that much less toilet paper for Destructo-boy to unroll onto the floor.

The gift of shopping

My birthday came around again just recently and I received the thoughtful presents of gift cards and cash from a few people.  Some consider it impersonal, but I love these kinds of gifts.  Not only do I get something for nothing (yea!) but I also get the gift of choice, of searching around to find what I want the most.  I know some people hate to shop and being given a gift card would be tortuous, but I am just not one of those people, at least not when shopping for toys for myself!  Sometimes this takes awhile, I still have a Christmas gift from Pops-in-law that I haven't spent yet, but it will happen just as soon as knitpicks emails out those darn 10% off codes! 

Birthday money is good I reflect while gleefully perusing the knitpicks website trying to decide what I will spend my ill gotten gains on.  Do I want to make the scarf, or the shawl, or the sweater, or the shell, oh the choices!  I think maybe I will finally get the $80 worth of yarn to knit myself the lovely Josephine sweater coat I have been eyeballing for over a year.  Pops-in-law was a bit aghast that I would spend that much on yarn, but you do get what you pay for (100% merino wool and machine washable to boot) and I want something NICE.  I also got a lovely Amazon gift card from some friends and am also looking over my wishlist there and at new items to see what to spend there, maybe a book of knitting patterns?  Hello, my name is Missus Vonkysmeed and I am a yarnaholic.  So thank you my thoughtful friends and family, I do love the gift of shopping best of all!

Victory is mine!

Success!!  The scary scabbard sweater has been completed, and with minimal errors towards the end.  Once I got past the armholes for the last time it went much more quickly.  I adjusted the quantity of pattern repeats to have the hem hit me at my hipbones, a much more flattering length on my post-babies body.  So, for the body of the sweater I worked about 3 fewer repeats then were called for before increasing for the morphing of the side cable from a braided cable into a horseshoe cable.  Then I was only able to do 3 repeats of the pattern for the horseshoe cabling rather than 5, but it still looks pretty good to me.

For the hem I followed the pattern and did a tubular cast off on the bottom hem which I have used successfully before.  Not this time though!  I seem to be forever casting off as though I am attempting to restrain a would be assailant.  I COULD NOT get the thing over my hips, it was a struggle just to get it back off over my shoulders.  Need I say just how frustrated I was at this point?  Yeah, just a bit.  So with Mister Vonkysmeed's urging I decided to work on the sleeves before fighting with the hem again. 

I made the unusually wise decision that as I had only 1 skein left, dividing it in half might be the best plan for ending up with sleeves of identical length.  But do I have a kitchen scale with which to scientifically make 2 out of 1?  Nope, so I had the great joy of unwinding that last ball of yarn all over my family room.  And guess who wanted to join in the fun?  If you guessed Destructo-Boy, than by George, you are a winner!  So I had Mister Vonkysmeed hold onto him in the back half of the house until I managed to tame the yarn beast into submission.  Trying to madly wind balls of yarn with an 18 month old screaming at the other end of the house is not exactly relaxing let me tell you!

Huntin' Easter eggs

It never changes, every Easter that dang rabbit comes hopping around leaving eggs everywhere.  Why couldn't he just leave the basket of goodies next to my bed but no, he had to leave an egg with a hint leading to another egg, which would lead to another and so on.  Oh, I guess it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun without the hunting part would it?  Oh all right, it would have been kind of boring to not have to hunt around for it.

The Momster (yes, I now know it was her and not some demented furry creature) would spend hours working out clues for me and older brother Grumpy to track down Easter morning.  After our 5 minutes of racing around the house from egg to egg she would complain about how quickly we went through the egg-clues and got to our baskets.  Granted, we worked it out pretty quickly, but do you think maybe there are more hiding places for an Easter basket than the dishwasher, the clothes dryer, or the tv cabinet?  We cottoned onto that ploy pretty quickly so there were several times we actually discovered the basket before we were supposed to by 'mis-interpreting' a clue.