Wednesday, September 19, 2007

I Won!!

I won the most recent bout of the beat the gas price contest. You’ve played it, I’m sure. You see that the gas prices are going down. Just how low will they go? Do I get it now or if I wait until this afternoon will it go down more? Sorry, you lose, it’s just gone up 30 cents a gallon. Or it’s going up and you wonder when if it’s going to come down. You keep driving, waiting for the downward turn. It’s a little like playing chicken with the train, train.

I don’t usually think too much about it – I have a little car with reasonably good gas mileage and I don’t have far to drive (nothing in Springfield is very far). But on Sunday evening I noticed that the stations closest to me were $2.75. It was time to fill up. If I fill up on the way to work Monday morning, I’ll still get it at that price because prices usually go up about 11am on Monday morning. Hummm….what to do. I’ll pass. About 10am I had to go out to run some errands. By that time the price had actually gone down to $1.69. I cave and fill ‘er up. Low and behold, by lunchtime the price had jumped to $2.95!

Nice going, right?! I don’t win the contest very often so it’s sweet when I do.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The Squirrel Cometh...

I was going to start out with other stuff but I have to tell you that I’m in the middle of the great squirrel wars. I actually have plants on my porch that are growing and thriving. That’s huge for me. I usually have quite the black thumb and often say that I never met a plant I couldn’t kill. So anyway, now I have these plants. My local squirrel has decided that it’s much easier to dig up my plants for his little treasures than dig in the hard ground around. I’ve tried the stinky spray that’s supposed to keep them away. It kept me away because I couldn’t sit out there with that stink but did nothing for the little critter. Someone at work told me to use red pepper – critter loves it. So now I’ve brought out the big guns. I went today and got some river rocks – nice and heavy river rocks – and have placed them in all my planters. So tomorrow we’ll see if they are any deterrent at all or if he’ll manage to move them out of his way. I’ll let you know.

Now that I have that off my chest, now we can get to the fun stuff. Here are my recent necklaces I’ve made. Such fun! I also made a couple of scarf pens but didn’t manage to get pictures before I gave them away.








I also got started on my Danish Skrå-Trøyer sweater this weekend. Here’s what I’ve gotten done so far. Doesn’t look like much, does it. You try knitting 400 stitches with 1 strand of worsted weight and 1 strand of fingering weight on size 1 needles! The fabric isn’t that thick but it’s very firm which makes it quite difficult to knit. You can’t just shove the stitches up to the end of the needle and knit away. You have to sort of feed it up slowly or it will shoot off the end of the needle! Ask me how I know that!!



But I’m very pleased to have gotten it started as I have a goal to finish it by the end of the year so I’ll have to get moving.