I can’t believe that it has almost been an entire week since my last post. I really meant to write every day! I actually compose blog posts entrys throughout my day. Most of them sort of sound like this “Knit blogger gets stuck in traffic…” or “Knit blogger pays $6.50 a pound for American cheese…” It is probably good that most of these in-my-head-posts do not make it on my actual blog.

Today, as you can probably tell from the post title, we went blueberrry picking. We brought Grandma and Grandpa too. Agents J and B combined picked 5 pints, I picked 5 pints, and Grandma and Grandpa combined picked 20 pints. They were raised picking berries so it is hard to get them to stop, But at $2.00 a pint there has to be at some point, some stopping. When I say that they were raised picking berries, it is really no exaggeration either. For example, the children in my dad’s family would be sent out to the blueberry fields to pick a certain amount (probably at least over 50 quarts) and not allowed to return until they had done so. And back in those days the berries were tiny, not the huge ones that we have now. Today, I was “reprimanded” several times for not picking more than I did. Grandpa grumbled to me in his low gruff voice, “What are you doing taking pictures, don’t you know you are here to pick berries!” I better include (with much love and fondness) his photo for you to get the full effect.

Now, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you may remember that it was just about a year ago that my mom was diagnosed with lymphoma. Well, she just had a whole round of testing and a new checkup and is officially in remission. AND, her hair is back and it just as full and healthy as ever! She doesn’t really do photos, so I just have her back and all her hair is under her hat. She would really like me to wear a hat too, as she reminds me all the time, but I’m not really a hat person.

As for other things going on – I think I will do a list update…

Knitting – Still working on Spring Forward socks. I hope there is still time left in the Summer of Socks to enter.

Spinning – I’m working on plying some roving from The Painted Sheep. It is bfl and it is just lovely!

Blogging – My 2 year blogiversary sort of just passed without much fanfare. I never got my act together to have a contest or anything, but I do have a new blog upgrade and this nice new theme!

Etsy – I’ve been dyeing every little chance that I get. I’m working really hard on learning the business part to this and I’m currently working on making spreadsheets and paying taxes. I also just had an Etsy-anniversay with my first sale being July 14, 2007. Today I hit 364 sales. I’m not really sure what I expected when I started, but I think 364 is pretty respectable. Etsy is a pretty good venue for me as it is flexible and fits with my crazy life with kids. Although I have flirted with starting my own website, I think for now, I am going to stick to Etsy and see what happens as the girls grow older.

Girls – Agent K is doing field hockey camp this week. She is going to play on the high school team in the fall and can you believe this? They practice everyday from 3 to 6. That means that she will leave the house in the morning at 7 and get home after 6. Long days – she better start eating and sleeping more right now! Agents B and J are just hanging out this week working on making videos to show to the LLamaFarmAuntAndUncle when we visit this weekend.

IHA – He hurt his back this weekend doing some *heavy lifting*. Hopefully some PT will get him feeling better before our long drive to Michigan in the middle of August.

Work – I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately since it was last July that I stopped working at the yarn shop and started working at the library. Though I miss some of the customers and my coworkers from the yarn shop, I do very much like working at the library better. No one complains about the prices, people are more respectful, and it is child friendly. It doesn’t have yarn, but it has books and I can take them home with me and not lose half of my paycheck in doing so.

Well, that is is for now as I have some more paperwork to do before going off to work tonight (where I will do paperwork). Have a great day and thanks for reading!

Fern, Sage, Catnip, Valerian, Butterfly Bush, Cardinal Vine, Morning Glory, Sumac, Oregano, Tomato, Evening Primrose…

At Leaves of Clay, the nature is in the pottery. Michele creates each of her pieces to be unique by pressing different leaves into the clay to leave their own lasting impressions.  I recently purchased this natural and rustic vase from Michele after lurking her site for quite a while.  I also bought these precious little green bowls.

Did you know that quite a few Esty shop owners will also ship to other addresses too?  Michele was very accommodating and sent a thank-you gift off to LFG for me.  Of course when you send direct you don’t have the opportunity to fondle the item before sending it back off again, but in this case, we will be visiting LFG in VT in a couple of weeks so I can see her new candle holders in person.  They are the kind with leaf impressions also.  According to LFG, this greatly confused LFB as he was reading off the list of plants and didn’t know where they were.

I was also tempted to buy some of her buttons too. I had them in and out of my cart a few times before I decided to wait until I need some buttons.  Hey – I wonder how many buttons the new Knitty sweater uses. Did you see it yet?  It is Hey Teacher by Hélène Rush.  I LOVE it!!!  And, oh, it is rustic-y and has buttons!

Since I’m in promoting mode, I have totally forgotten to mention that LlamaFarmGirl and LlamaFarmBoy are now selling their LLamaFarmPoo.  It is called Llama Llama Poo Poo and you can get more info on their website.  If you are interested in very clean and soft llama fiber, LFG now has her own Etsy shop at www.llamafarmgirl.etsy.com.  Her fiber is dehaired and ready for dyeing or spinning.  Very yummy, I promise!

Oh, I think the sun is coming out!  Maybe I’ll have a chance to take some more fiber photos.  Have a great day everyone!

I did it! It took almost 3 hours and I have to give many thanks to David Cumps.  I have to say that in the spring I had attempted to take a php class and I just didn’t really get it.  I think if they could have related the class more to my blog and less to making a recipe website (cooking – bleh!), maybe I would have been more interested.  But tonight, I am so proud because I worked it out.  It took me forever to find phpMyAdmin and the table to edit and then I had to find my back up file and unzip it.  I also have 33 categories so just typing in all the data fields was rather time consuming.  I had to add the category names and slugs in the wp_terms table also because when I went to my wp-admin, it would not let me edit my categories, so that involved a little more trial and error.  I do believe they are all working now so please feel free to have a walk down memory lane.  I was just looking at some older posts and I can’t believe how much Agent K has changed just in the last year and a half.

Thank you for being so patient with my blog upgrade and theme change.  I still have some behind-the-scenes stuff to update, but I think I’m done with the major changes for now.  Perhaps on to some fiber content soon?  I hope!

Ok, so the plaintext theme didn’t last long. I liked it, but I just found one that has an easy to change header. Unfortunately, I do have to leave for work in a few minutes, so I have to leave you with this funky purple header for now. I promise it will get better and I will settle on a theme soon!

So what are your thoughts on this plaintxBlog theme? Is there anything missing from my other theme that you liked? If I keep it, I will do some customizing. I have to see if I can add a colorful header and warm it up a bit. I liked the old theme (Pomodoro) because it was warm and cozy, but it wasn’t cooperating so much with Wordpress 2.6 and it was rather busy. Did I ever mention that I’m not good with decisions?

At least that is what we did!  We went to Nantasket Beach to be more precise.  It is in Hull, Massachuesetts which is south of Boston and north of Cape Cod.  I think that Cherylz had the “best-est guess” with the South Shores.

So, on a completely unrelated note, we upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 last night and, apparently, I have lost all my categories.  They are there but invisible.  I think the fix for that is very time consuming, so I may remain “category-less” for a while.  It happened because I was so far behind in my upgrades that we should have upgraded to 2.3 and then 2.6 but we didn’t read about that until after it was too late.  There is some info in the Ravelry groups that tells how to fix the problem.  I swear, I’m just going to skip the whole general internet thing and just look things up on Ravelry.  Knitters know everything!  Anyway, please just excuse any strangeness in my blog for a while.  I think I may be changing themes soon. As soon as I find a new one that I like that is.  I’d like to go for a plainer, less busy look.  I love the 3 columns but it just looks so crowded to me.  I’m thinking of Cutline 2 column because it is easy to change the header photo, but it is missing a couple elements that I really like. (Btw, IHA uses Cutline 3 column just in case you want to see it in a real life blog.)  If anyone has any favorite, easily customizable Wordpress themes to recommend, I would love to hear from you!

We’re back! And once again I’m low on time before I have to leave for work. I guess it is the typical Monday morning thing. I’m having a hard time drumming up the motivation to get myself to go. Does that ever happen to you?

So, would you like some clues before the big Mystery Vacation Reveal?

Clue 1: There were waves. There were even surfers riding the waves. I’m assuming with the presence of surfers, I can actually upgrade my claim and say that there were indeed big waves.

Clue 2: There was a carousel. This was a rescued carousel from an old-time amusement park torn down to make way for condos. (Carousels remind me of high school freshman English class. You too?)

Clue 3: This is the view from our hotel room balcony. There was beach, pavement, and lots of eating establishments.

Clue 4: There were boogie-boarding lessons. Oh yeah, and the air was HOT and the water was like ICE!

Clue 5: Huge difference from low tide to high tide. At high tide the remaining beach area was very tiny and compact, but at low tide, it felt like it took minutes to walk down to meet the water. This was a huge beach and even walking along the beach, we never reached either end.

Clue 6: The girls stayed in the water so long that I read an entire book in 2 days — The Society of S, in case you are wondering, and it was excellent; a cross between Twilight and Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

Clue 7: We rode a ferry and saw this skyline. I actually still feel like I’m riding on the ferry and that was yesterday morning. (Does this ever happen to you?) I wish this darn computer would stop swaying back and forth.

OK, that is all the clues I have time for right now. It took about 4 hours to get there. It could have been shorter but as IHA’s usually very efficient and helpful navigator did not know where we were going, we had some rotary issue problems. (Oh wait, that could be Clue 8: Lots of rotaries!)

OK, I’m off to get ready for work, but please feel free to go ahead and guess. I think it is only LFG who knows where we went…

Tomorrow we leave for our grand adventure! This is a vacation totally planned by IHA, and the girls and I are completely clueless about our destination. As always happens when you mention that you are going on vacation, people ask, “Where?” I think they are a bit surprised when the answer is “I don’t know.” Everyone thinks this mystery vacation is really cool and a number of people have mentioned how they would just love their spouse to help with planning a vacation let alone planning an entire thing. Now, with all this anticipation and having piqued a lot in interest in where we could be going, there could be some repercussions on IHA’s reputation if this turns out less than fantastic. Which I know that it won’t though because we will have fun anywhere as long as we are not camping. Which we aren’t camping, are we, IHA?

Now, I’m having a really hard time telling if anyone is interested in my spicebush swallowtail chronicles but I’m going to keep at it because I think it will be fun to look back on these posts next year. Yesterday, caterpillar #1 turned into its chrysalis. The girls even saw it happening though I was at work. They saw its last molting when that yellow “skin” came off from the previous phase and they saw it spin the strings that attach it to the blueberry bush. How cool is that? Here is what he looks like now. Seriously — this guy knows how to mimic a leaf:

I worry that he is going to bake out there in the sun everyday, but I’m going to trust he knew what he was doing when he picked that spot. I can’t find caterpillar #2 right now. I think he might be in that yellow phase somewhere. I think he may have also left his spicebush. Maybe he is looking for a cooler location for his change of life?

I was hoping to be able to write some posts to publish while I was away but that didn’t really work out. I haven’t even learned how to moblog yet, though I think IHA can post from his phone to his blog so if we have time, we’ll let you know where we are. Have a great weekend everyone!

One of my Spicebush Swallowtail guys has moved to the blueberry bush and turned yellow.

He is currently only attached at the bottom and maybe there are a couple of fibers there at the top too now that I’m looking closely. To put things in prospective here he is on his bush. He really isn’t all that big. His cohort is still in the looking-like-a-snake-living- in-a-curled-up-leaf instar stage. I guess metamorphoses don’t happen overnight.

I have no idea how long it takes for the complete transformation to chrysalis, but I hope that nothing happens to him and we get to find out .

We only have 2 more days before we leave on our mystery vacation. I asked IHA to check and see if there are any yarn shops where we are going, and, indeed, he has confirmed that we will be near one. Yay.