I know what day it was Monday. The writer’s Zoom meeting happened. I learn so much about the history of Southern Oregon at these meetings. After years in California and then in Nevada, I find learning about my newest home, even though we’ve been here a while, makes me even happier here.
Okay, I have to admit something. In spite of the constant knitting, my show of choice while the fingers are busy, it Outlander, yes, again. The more often I watch it and have finished the books, so I guess I’m going through withdrawal. And with the craziness going on, this is a bit of comfort and guaranteed distraction.
So for the rest of Monday, I will go back to my distractions.
My first hat on the Flexee Loom. Just off the loom.
I used this method of decrease for the crown of the hat:
But with the Flexee loom, I could decrease further. I started with 80 pegs as the instruction for an adult hat on the enclosed page. I think that I should have made a few more rows to fit my size adult but I was anxious to see how it would work. So I did all the decreases per the video then moved the loops around to remove links of two every other grouping. In the first case, it was all the lighter color links. Then I did the decreases from the beginning with the video again. Again, at the end, I move the stitches around so as to remove every other link. I followed the video one more time and this time finished as Kristen suggests. I love how the crown looks.
Ah, look at the time! I think we are heading for Monday. I barely remember watching Sunday Morning. Hence the answer to #WDIIA and #WTIIA.
I didn’t have a picture nearby but the ball sits with me. That starts my stream of consciousness. Beach ball. Summer. It is still in the 80s, I’m sure at this time. The bugs will invade within the hour as they have been for the past few evenings. Ugh! The bugs make me wish for snow!
Summer used to be my favorite season. That was when I could go to the beach or pool to swim. I love being in the water. I wasn’t a beach bunny that liked to be out on the sand getting a tan. If I could I would be swimming. Diving down to the bottom. Swimming on the bottom as long as my breath would last. I even remember having tea parties on the pool floor. Just thinking all this is helping my body temperature lessen.
Walking on the sand at the beach. The delightful cool wet sand after the heated sand that seemed to release muscle aches but then started burning the soles of my feet. The water lapping up to my feet with foam and sometimes seaweed. The sand leaving from under my toes as if it were alive. The cold water nearly causing pain, definitely causing me to screech. And then I would hear the transistor radio of someone on shore my favorite summer song. I knew it was summer when I heard it.
My next to favorite song that reaffirms summer is:
Thank you for helping me cool off and remember my favorite memories of summer past. Maybe sometime we will be able to enjoy all that again. Meanwhile. memories will have to do the job.
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “song.” First, find a picture–the closest one to you. Your prompt is the title and/or the lyrics of the first song that comes to mind when you look at the picture. Have fun!
But it wasn’t apparent at first. It was after lunch when we realized the trash hadn’t made it out to the curb. Oops!
Anyway, I had to share the daughter and boyfriend’s socks on their feet.
From this, you can see what a cute couple they are!
But the current finished project was this pair of slipper socks. They are headed to the charity, Hat Huggers.
There was enough yarn leftover that I have started a smaller pair of anklet slippers. I hope I have enough to finish that project.
I took pics of the Flexeeloom as I am making a hat for an adult. I know it seems weird to have a loom that wriggles around, but it is light and sturdy and I love working with it. Working the two-by-two ribbing is tedious on most looms and can actually hurt my hands. This loom is like working with butter.
As you can see I can wad it up or stretch it out and the stitches stay on the pegs and the work is fast and easy. Here is where I left off today.
This is the underside.
This is from the top.
Oh, look at the time! It is nearly tomorrow! S0 this concludes #WDIIA and #WTIIA Friday edition.
Okay. Not my favorite book. But it certainly filled the bill for missing information.
We watched, as usual, Independence Day on, yep, July fourth. I wanted to watch our DVD but the machine ate the DVD. Luckily, the show was on Live TV. We recorded so we could watch when we could get together as a group at the same time. We, also, recorded ID Resurgence. Getting all four of us in the same room at the same time is rare. So we barely got ID finished on 7/4. IDR happened on the fifth.
We’d seen Resurgence before and were unimpressed. This time we seemed to be more into the identifying stars and characters from before. That’s when we noticed that there were characters that seemed to be important but were unknown to us.
My husband watches shows with Google ready. It was when I asked him who is that and why are they supposed to be important? I don’t remember them from ID.
This book is the missing piece. Though it isn’t exciting enough to have a movie of its own, without it Resurge keeps you wondering. Maybe this should have been a series of three one hour shows? At any rate, this helped make the final show make more sense.
On the other hand, I am no more interested to rewatch Resurgence now that I know what I do. And it seems this could have the possibility of another movie or two as we learn more about aliens of all kinds and the hope of global cooperation.
I’m finally getting around to reading some blogs. This was on my friend, Willowdot21‘s blog. It brought tears to my eyes. It seems quite appropriate for our times. Click on her blog name above to see the whole blog. She has some amazing tunes breaking up her days in the life.
One-liner Wednesday is the easiest blog prompt. It is brought to us by Linda G. Hill. Go check it out and join us as we play.
My two FlexeeLooms. The heart-shaped loom is the first book put together. All those links come in cellophane packages that contain square or rounded ended pinkish or purplish two pegged units. There are tons of YouTubes of folks unpacking these fun pop-beads of knitting. Do any of you remember pop-beads? I think that was the 50s? I loved them. You could make a necklace or bracelet out of them. These peg-units are a bit stiffer than the pop-beads of yore but as I understand it the stiffness helps the loom-knitting to be done without breaking apart. I can’t wait to play with these. More, I mean, with yarn. With seven socks in the making I need to wait a minute to play. Here’s an unpacking YouTube.
I thought that book 7, Echo In The Bone, was my favorite of the Outlander books. Nope. Written in My Own Heart’s Blood wins. It was fantastic!
Regardless of the time the characters land in they all grow and help us learn the rules of Gabaldon’s Time Travel.
What can I tell you that won’t spoil it for you?
As usual, there is a lot of research evident in the reading and as one supposes, there are instances of poetic license, which Diana Gabaldon admits that she has it framed on her wall.
The most exciting part of the book is as Breanna talks about Doctor Who in a chapter called, Thank You For The Fish. (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). Now I really wish I had a TARDIS so I could play in all three universes.
And I wish I could move on to book 9 but my Audible credits don’t come until the middle of the month. A quick note about why I read by Audible most often now. Actual reading is impossible for my eyes. It seems a tracking issue. So I use a lot of Kindle Text-to-Speech. Though TTS works well for most books when there are other languages involved I want to hear the words pronounced correctly. Davina Porter is able to range the language barriers and character ages and sexes with apparent ease. I love listening to her.
If you get the chance, the books are as good if not better than the shows, and the Audible versions are the best of all the worlds. Enjoy!
I think it is Sunday. The day and date faded in and out all day leaving me wondering.
We did watch CBS Sunday Morning. I remember having tears and laughter as the show progressed between the deaths of the famous and Jim Carrey’s humor. The most impressive moments of the show were these:
Amazing.
But as with most shows these days, a lot centered around COVID19 and our new normal.
I knitted my day away. We actually finishing Independence Day Resurgence. I didn’t find it so awful as I had the first time I watched it. And my husband and I found interesting faces and storylines that seemed not to tie in as they should. Come to find out there is a book (Independence Day: Crucible) that should be between the two movies. So I ordered it. I will try to read it when finished with this Outlander (at chapter 117 of 142-?)
The ID2 story seems more to ring true with COVID19’s global threats. Never in my lifetime do I remember having so much in common with other countries. Sure we lived through the ducking beneath our desks in case a bomb hit. Like that would ever help. But we were very young and the in-class movies showed us the importance.
Then we had an assassination of an actual president, that we most loved. In our protestant house, there was fear of him. My parents hated that I was glued to the set as Catholic services and movies kept the sadness front and center of everyone’s minds. But I don’t remember much about how the world handled it. It was mostly global in our heads.
How about the moon landing? That was massive. But was it? It was USA landing and claiming. Sure we connected in country but maybe that wasn’t as global as we thought.
So as a reverse independence day started occurring in March, as our social groups grew smaller our minds seemed to see farther than we have, well, at least in my lifetime. On the movie Independence Day, it was by Morse Code that we connected globally to attack the enemy. For twenty years the world stayed in harmony until the next threat of the alien beings tried to kill us all.
Do you think there will be a day as we fight the enemy that all countries will unite and kill the virus and we will be at peace? Will we find a happy ending to all this? This is far harder than shooting guns and flying spaceships. The enemy is unseen. So small most of us wouldn’t know what it looks like. We wear masks not to protect us but others. There is no shield we can hold up. It is only in seeing loved ones or people two degrees from us that we can see it not as a laugh but as serious as the insectoid/octopuslike aliens.
How odd to have something so deadly pointed at us and to stand weak, yet caring for others. The old adages of TV Westerns where the hero stands between the bandit and the loved one doesn’t apply. None of the rules of the games we have learned work for this. I know my mother and parents of we older boomers worried about the scum in ponds that could, in their minds, cause polio. But I don’t think that disease was as contagious as this. I know it was horrid. I remember stories. But I don’t remember meeting anyone who had it. I did meet a couple people later in life that had recovered from it with crutches and skinny legs. I was still too young to understand anything about it. We still got to go see our grandparents and go to church and school.
With the #WDIIA, we have a prompt that helps us to meander through our thoughts. Today, the day after Independence Day my thoughts see a tiny invisible thing that is more powerful than what Will Smith had to deal with. Today means that it is day 1 on fourteen days we who are more vulnerable have to stay isolated because others need their crowds. How many will die because you need to party? Couldn’t a day of introspection of how we won our Independence and the lines left for us, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” be better than beer and hotdogs? Isn’t my life as important as your need to carry a gun?
Okay, that was a lot of wandering around. I know others can say all this so much better than I. But I needed to say it. And now it is nearly Monday #WTIIA
I just want to toss this out there. It is fun reading about the American Revolution on the Fourth of July. This may be the best Outlander book yet. And you know how live television mentions a holiday all day long? We’ve watched very little live TV today. Instead, we watched Independence Day. Yes, it is a classic for me. But then my book reminds me. Then I’m watching Roswell and there are all kinds of references to the movie. Never has life pointed to all we stand for and what we have to lose by not being our best selves and caring for others. I hope we can do that. Just like the movie we are fighting something globally. And this enemy doesn’t care about your religion or politics. So while we are trying to celebrate our Independence, Let’s embrace our unity and humanity.
Working on my series: Haven.
Doodler (zendoodle.com)
Music major: voice and piano
Mom of four great adults
Reiki II practitioner
I have been on disability/retired for 10 years now from depression, anxiety and fibromyalgia.
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