Trick-or-Treat

Todd and I carved pumpkins last weekend. We think that his turned out to look like a party guy (a little bit of "buddy christ" for those who have watched Dogma) despite the fangs and hypnotizing eyes. I'm not sure what mine is supposed to be, it turned out a little different than expected because the pumpkin is so huge. I had to keep extending the mouth until he looked somewhat normal. We ended up with a ton of seeds to roast and so I think I will be buying the large size in the future for that reason. And the seeds turned out yummy even though we didn't let them dry the 48 hours that the recipe says we should.

We even made it down to Cornbelly's. They had some cool things like the haunted beast (a giant walk-in inflated reptile, complete with organs and intestines) and the jack-o-lantern hay ride. I don't recommend them for their cornmaze, though. It was torn up from all of the short cuts people had taken through the corn. Ironically enough, we did get kicked out of the maze for taking one of them, so apparently they are trying to police the situation - they're just a little bit late. Todd and I also rode pedal karts, which was a ton of fun, but made me sore in muscles I didn't know I had.
It was a pretty good place because most of the fun things they have are open to "big" kids too, so I didn't have to jealously watch the "little" kids have all of the fun :)

Whoa Knitta!

Well, I know what I'll do with a semester off...
I'll make this...

and this...

One of these...

Then one of these...

and start this...

All in a little over a month. I haven't had this much time to knit in my entire knitting career. And I've been baking too, I made Apple Butter Banana Bread. And I want to make
Double Orange Cupcakes from Vegetarian Times and Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies. And yes, after eating all of those, I do have time to go hiking and work it off.

Proof of my hiking

Anyway, I really like having this semester off, Todd will have to twist my arm to get me to go back :)

Besides all that, we are getting ready for Halloween. Next weekend we are going to Cornbelly's and carve pumpkins. I found some very cool carvings at Pumpkin Gutter's. It's a pretty different type of carving than you usually see, carving just into the flesh rather than all the way through. My favorites were the muppets and Gandolf.

Gandolf looks pretty freaky all lit up like that. I love them, but I think my pumpkin will be pretty simple as I'm not so handy with a knife.

Another very cool thing is this skull font from Skull-A-Day, which is just an enertaining site any day.

Ok, well, I haven't knit now in like 20 minutes, so I better get on that, I only have 3 more months to go :)

Signs of Fall

The weather is cooler, the leaves are changing colors, the farmer's market is busting at the seams, and there's a pot of chili on the stove.

Last weekend I found everything I needed to make my favorite chili at the Salt Lake Farmer's Market. They had tomatoes, green peppers, onions, and garlic among many, many other things. And I found some little pumpkins to get me in the Halloweenie spirit. Though, I think that my dirty windows are the really scary part.

And I even started a costume...

Ok, it's not really going to costume much, but it's my back up in case I can't find a wig to be Yoko Ono, which is really who I want to be this Halloween. Plus I finally have an excuse to make it, I've been eyeing We Call Them Pirates for a while. I love all of Hello Yarn's patterns and they are free! How cool is that! Thank you!

A Good Birthday Present

So yesterday was my birthday and this is what I came home to:

1. Roses.

2. Much needed cookbook shelves.

3. A clean house.

I have the best husband ever!

Back to Real Life

Despite my disappointment at coming home from the Caribbean, real life has it's exciting bits too. This weekend, I went to the County Fair, the Fiber Fair, Spam-a-lot, and my birthday party. Not bad, eh?

Friday night, Sara, Brianne and I went out to the Salt Lake County Fair. We saw baby everything, it was so cute!

"We are too cute to be bacon!"

They had piglets and a calf and baby goats. They didn't have lambs or baby bunnies, but the sheep and fu-fu bunnies were cute anyway.

Jazzercise Sheep

Oh and I should have kept track of the name of the ice cream maker we got peaches and cream home made ice cream from. She had her ice cream makers hooked up to a tracker engine and it was SO good. We saw lots of hot tubs and RVs and fireplaces, not sure why these are always at the fair?
And they did have a good amount of knitwear there this year and every single piece had a ribbon on it, so either the judges really like knits or they didn't have enough competition :)

Speaking of knitting, I have a lot to do! With a fiber fair and a birthday, I gotta lotta yarn this month. Saturday, I did some shopping with Tan, Laurel, and Piper at the GBFAF, and then I came back on Sunday for my Redneck Shibori class. That was a lot of fun and I'm totally impressed with what Rit dye and some silk scarves can transform into.

Redneck Garden Scarf

Sunday, I also got my knitted things back from the GBFAF contest and I actually placed. Woo Hoo! My Mom's Lace Christmas Wrap won 3rd place and my gloves won 4th. They said they were impressed by anybody that can knit gloves. And it's not really that it's hard, it's just annoying going round and round in teeny circles for the fingers. I don't really enjoy knitting them, but I love having them.

Mama's Shawl

Saturday night we all went to Spam-a-lot, which is hilarious! You've gotta go if you can. It follows Monty Python's search for the Holy Grail, they take all the good bits of the movie and wrote a whole bunch of new stuff. There were too many laugh out loud moments to describe, but just go see it, ya?

Sunday was a lot of yummy Indian food and awesome birthday trifle. I made 30 minute Matter Paneer and some Cappuccino Crinkles, minus the coffee (they really taste about the same to me). And I got lots of really good birthday presents. Woo pee! Thanks everyone!

Beatles!

As a long time fanatic, I had to post a link to Adventures in Leisure.  I just hope to have children that are this obsessed with the Beatles.  And yes, I do want to make one of these dolls!

Kokomo

Oh wow, am I behind. I have been so busy since we got back! Oh yeah, I was out of the country just 2 weeks ago, but it feels like forever ago. Our cruise was so awesome!

The Caribbean Princess

Jamaica and Mexico were definitely my favorite places. We also stopped in the Bahamas and Georgetown, Grand Cayman. Those were our beach days, which were very relaxing and beautiful.

On the beach at Princess Cays, Bahamas

But I' just love seeing and doing everything I possibly can,
so I had so much more fun on the days that we went on tours.

Laundry Mat in Ocho Rios, Jamaica

At Jamaica, the boat stopped in Ocho Rios and we jumped on a bus and headed for the Green Grotto Caves. It was a great ride, except for the scary left hand driving and constant honking, our guide said that in Jamaica you honk for two reasons, one to say hello, and another one to say get outta my way... yeah mon. But we got to see a lot of the countryside. There were a bunch of fishermen villages along the side of the road, with brightly colored shacks like this one:

These people have such a great sense of humor and all of the places we saw had so much character, it was really exciting. We drove through St. Ann's, where Bob Marley was born, and where Christopher Columbus landed in 1494.

The Green Grotto Caves were really, really cool. The sea level caves have been used for so many different things; they were a hiding place for runaway slaves, they have been rum storage, and they were even used as a nightclub in the 1990's. There were tons of fruit bats flying around and when we went into the below-sea level caves, it was so pitch black, I couldn't see my hand in front of my face.



Then we took off for Dunn River Falls, which is a 900 feet of waterfalls that lead into the sea.

And we climbed them! The groups form long chains of people holding each others hands, and you work your way up. It was so beautiful and kind of weird to see these gorgeous falls treated like a water park. Lucky Jamaicans.

In Mexico, the boat stopped in Cozumel, an island off the mainland of Mexico. We took a ferry to Playa del Carmen on the mainland, I loved the city and wish we had more time to look around.

But we got on a bus and road to the Mayan ruins, Tulum. Our guide was a Mayan descendant and told us that we were not in Mexico, we were in Mayan lands now. He told us that he didn't even speak Spanish until he learned in it school because they all speak Mayan in their homes.

Tulum is amazing. It's right on the beach and a lot of the structures are still in fairly good shape. Most of the stone carvings on the buildings have been worn away, but there was one building, the Temple of the Frescoes, that had one face that was almost complete.

Temple of the Frescoes

It's amazing that all of these buildings once had hand carved decoration all over them. Our guide said that only about 450 rich and noble Mayans lived in this group of structures and about 10,000 lived outside their walls. So I'm guessing that those were the people responsible for all of the stone work.

Tulum, Mexico

So the rest of the time we were on the Caribbean Princess, our hotel on the sea. I really liked sailing with Princess, the food is great and the boat has tons of stuff to do. We saw comedians, watched movies under the stars, and ate and ate and ate. And when we just could not take anymore entertainment or food, we watched the sunset.

We really should have just stayed there, getting home was a bit of a pain in the butt, we were delayed in Dallas and then our plane was cancelled, but Tan and Paul helped us get home and fix our broken car that was waiting for us when we got there. I was telling my mom about what a pain it was to come home and back to real life and she told me, "Well, what did you expect?Vacations just put it on hold, it doesn't make it go away." Aptly put, thank god for vacations!

So Dean, Bellatrix, and Ravelry all went into a bar...

Been feeling like I should update this. I haven't felt like much has been going on (unless of course you consider the times that I'm way to busy to post here), but once I sort of list it all out, I realize that I really never stop doing stuff :) So I've been knitting and planning knitting. Ravelry has inspired me to finish some of my UFOs that have always been perfectly good projects - just not in plain sight, where I might remember to finish them. I've finished a lacy scarf and started the 2nd glove to the one that I finished at least a year ago. I'm thinking about writing up a pattern for the gloves. They're pretty simple, but I need to start somewhere if I want to start designing.

I got some new yarn that I'm planning to use for the Bellatrix socks. This picture really doesn't do the color justice, but the name does: Electric Midnight! Found it on Etsy from Spindle Cat Studio.

I made a zine, my very first, for the My Town swap on Swap-bot. It was kinda fun, a lot of work, but nice to have a record of the things I'm doing in SLC right now. It's part travel guide and part stories about life in Salt Lake City. It's called, "Oh My! Salt Lake City" and there are exactly 3 copies in existence.

Have been thinking a lot about our cruise. As the ticker above is showing, it is getting very close and so I've been trying to plan out everything. Our big dilemma has been Hurricane Dean. We have been watching it's course non-stop. It happened to visit every place we are going except the Bahamas. It's ended up passing them all up with minor damage, so we'll go down and (hopefully) be able contribute some money to them :) Now I'm just crossing my fingers for clear skies until the 10th of September.

Also been looking at a lot of people's art online. Mostly with the help of Craftzine. They find so many interesting art projects, it's just amazing. One that's just great is High Concept Softies. The broccoli and crazed bunny just makes me laugh. Then there's Mamaqilla's felted fiber gallery, which is so good, it's kinda creepy. If you go to this page, you can see step by step pictures of how she does it. Another place I've been playing on is Indie Public. It's a community website for independent designers and the people who love them. Basically designers can post pictures of things they've made and offer to sell the pattern if they want. It's very cool and I think that with all of these online communities, I really could spend the rest of my life on the Internet.

Ravelry!

OH MY GOODNESS! Did they know? Did they know that if they sent me my Ravelry invite on a Saturday morning that I would spend all of said morning on Ravelry? It is SO cool! I'm really surprised I got in. I signed up for an invitation about 3 weeks ago and I kinda thought they were only inviting podcasters and all those famous people that I'm not. But I got in early!

Anyway, what have I been doing for the last 3 hours. Well, first looking at patterns: there are 1582 sock patterns listed on Ravelry, all of which can be saved as favorites so you can go back to them later. Then I started playing with My Notebook. I can upload my stash, books I own, needles I own, and FO's/UFO's. They track your blog posts for you and there's even room for notes about your yarn and projects. And I can't help but think, I will never have to remember anything ever again! Yay!!! Look for me, I'm yarnpie.

Chicago

I really think I had way too much fun in Chicago. Too much fun to consider it a business trip anyway. Don't get me wrong. It was A LOT of work. I haven't been on my feet for that long in 6 years. It's been since I moved from the lovely world of working in sandwich shops to working in an accounting office. And constantly engaging people is pretty much what I don't do all day. I sit in my quiet office and interact with a computer, so the trade show was a nice change of scenery. But like I said, I really had too much fun to consider it work.

The moment we got off the plane, we had to rush to get to the hotel and get ready to go to the city. Our hotel was a half hour cab ride from downtown Chicago, in good traffic. But it was going to take us an hour and a half because it was rush hour. So we had exactly 20 minutes to get ready and the hotel had given away our room. Oops. So we did finally make it downtown in time to see the bean before dinner.

So cool, so weird, who knew that a giant reflective bean in Millennium Park could be such a famous attraction. After dinner, we walked down the block to see WICKED at the Oriental. Oh so a dream come true. I have been waiting to see this play for 2 years! And it did not disappoint. It is the best play I have ever seen. It's hilarious. Especially Glinda the "good," who is actually really stuck up and full of herself, and likes to swish her hair in an extremely strange fashion. And Elphaba, who is the wicked witch of the west, and concerned with animal rights. The singing was perfect, the costumes were awesome, and the story is excellent. Loved it!
I know that some many be concerned, I was in Chicago and how ever did I get my Harry Potter book. Never fear, I reserved one at the downtown Barnes and Nobles. We went to the midnight sale and I started it in the cab on the way home. I absolutely love it! I'm almost finished and that's all I'm going to say about that right now.
Here's me working. Everyday we had 9am-5pm in the booth and then ran to get ready and get in a cab for the city. Another one of these awesome excursions (all planned out by my boss, by the way) was the architectural tour. We floated the Chicago river and the tour guide told us about the city. My favorite building was the Corn cobs:
I can't remember their real name, but we did end up back there another night and went to the House of Blues at the base of the building. The art that covers all the wall space in there is so cool and there was an awesome blues band from Chicago named Rob Stone & the C-Notes playing.

So I love this city, did I mention that? I think I'll be going back for another look around because I saw tons of art galleries that were all closed by the time we made it downtown. Plus I think Todd would appreciate their taste in pizza.

Wanna be a Simpson?

Go to simpsonsmovie.com and make one. Todd Simpson

Joanne Simpson