Life in the Middle Lane

I would say "Fast Lane" but that would be exaggerating. However, between work and laundry and back and forth to baby sitters and sick kids, it's not been easy to keep up with blogging. I have had plenty of knitting and reading time, but that's been at WORK, where it's been so slow lately. I don't know if my first week was a fluke or what, but it went from being crazy busy to worse than slow. Slow would be something like 4 a day, or 5, considering I'm there for 10 hours not including lunch. Fortunately, if I don't have anything going on by 5, I can go. Hopefully it will pick up soon. I only did 2 and 1/2 hours yesterday and it was nearly painful.

On my days off, it's either been torrential rains or blinding heat, so I haven't been able to get the garden sorted out yet. ACK! My seeds and seedlings are going to bake =( Maybe some will live. It's SO late.

With all the storms, though, we've had very interesting cloud and lightning displays.

I took this one for the bird - this light post is in most
of my sky pics, at least this time there's
something different
about it

This is the first time I've ever attempted to get photos of lightning, and I did it the hard-I'm-much-too-slow-for-lightning-way. I'm most proud of the last one.






Rebecka Gecko laid her two pretty little eggs. Compared to her size these eggs are huge. They come out all squishy, though, and harden later. I'm pretty sure it was a couple of days before I noticed the eggs. I'm glad she put in a place that made them very easily removable.


I removed them to their own little incubation spot, as directed by some website or another. Apparently we have some time to wait, so it'll be a while before we have any hatchlings.


Last year, some very pretty flowers migrated under the fence to my yard from my neighbor's yard. I tried and tried to get a good picture of them, but the color was always off. This year, armed with a better camera, I can finally show you both the real color and the name. They are called Mexican Petunias. Ain't they purty?




Finally, sock progress. As I said before, I have tons of knitting time at work, and these socks are coming along pretty well.



I'm using the gusset increase directions from Socks From the Toe Up by Wendy Knits. I am having a bit of an issue not knowing exactly which form of M1 she uses. I started out using kf&b increases, but it looked nothing like the increases in the picture. (the directions don't get specific about which M1 is used, I looked) So then I started doing the M1 where you take the yarn from the space between the last two or first two stitches, but it left a gaping hole. Then I used the same yarn from between those stitches and twisted it good, which closed up the hole. I'm still not sure I'm doing the same M1, but it'll have to do. I didn't rip back every time I changed my increases, I'll call them my 'learning' socks. Ripping back socks made on needles size 0 is not an option unless it's really an awful, horrible, obvious mistake. These aren't mistakes, just experiments. I think they might be a teensy bit too long for me, though. The jury is still out on that one.

One more little bit of news, I now have a Wii Fit which is totally fun and great motivation for exercise. I have nearly always disliked working out. It was fun in school and I liked doing yoga while in massage school, the couple of times we did it. The great thing about the WiiFit thing is that your progress is measurable, it counts every minute you work out, and measures your balance while doing the exercise and you get points for each one according to how balanced you were, etc, so you compete against yourself. It's cool, I like it.