Home

When I got home last night, I noticed three things:

- I'm pretty darn sure I made my bed prior to leaving, and it was, uh, no longer made. The cats like to crawl under the covers, so it was probably their fault.

- There was a former ball of yarn that stretched, in clumps, from the front door to the back of the bedroom. Don't think that was there before I left either.

- The apartment smelled like stale cat litter. I suppose this is a consequence of keeping an apartment closed up for roughly three weeks.

tasty crepes

I took another trip down into Arcata today, and among other things, ate some very tasty crepes. I got to sit at the counter of Renata's Creperie, where I could watch them making the crepes. The Crepe Normandy was yummy tastiness, and the dessert crepe, involving pears and blackberries and strawberries was also fantastic. Mmmmmm.

mmmm gyoza

I started the shawl last night, and worked a fair bit on it today.  It starts in the middle, and works out in a half-circle from there.  The lace pattern is not too difficult and the shawl is starting to take shape.  Yay.

We made gyoza today.  Gyoza are so much more fun to make when one has access to a food processor.  The finer you chop the various ingredients, the better they are.  This is a somewhat slow and tedious process when using a knife and a cutting board, but it's not bad using a food processor.  Then comes the wrapping - which is also a bit slow, but more fun if there's a movie and other people to help.  We used square wonton wrappers instead of round gyoza wrappers... one must make do with what's available :)  And then we cooked them, and then we ate them.  There was much tastiness, and it turns out that 1 1/2 year old boys also like them.  Yay.

cable hat

I bought more yarn at Knitter's Lane.  I seem to have been doing that a lot.  This is a light purple brushed suri fingering weight yarn... I saw it and wanted it, and decided I was going to make a shawl.  It's fuzzy and soft.  Which is sort of the point of brushed suri yarn.  It turns out that suri is a breed of alpaca that has a finer hair than regular alpacas.

We got home and made my first hat ever using a super soft alpaca yarn from yesterday's shopping trip.  Cables are fun.  And hats, it turns out, are also fun.

let it... snow?

Pumpkin pie is a tasty thing. It involves pumpkin, maple syrup, brown sugar, egg, milk, a pie crust and some spices.

We had eaten a bit of the pumpkin the day before, so we didn't have quite enough for what the recipe called for. Oh well. We also discovered that we didn't have maple syrup - so we used honey. Furthermore, the pie crust recipe I was going to use was invisible (or rather, in a book in a box 300 miles to the south), so we used a different one. And then it took a while to bake the pie. We hoped it worked.

As we had not managed to find everything we'd wanted on our grocery store run the day before, and we wanted to visit the local yarn store (I wanted to learn to make hats!), we drove into Arcata, the nearest largeish town, which is about a 30 minute drive to the west over/through some hills/mountains.

river

After a breakfast of pancakes shared with a small child and my friend, the four of us (if you count Lani the dog) went down to the river visible from my friend's back porch.

sea lion

I stopped at a beach outside Eureka on the drive south to Willow Creek, and there was a sea lion.  And the weather was beautiful.

halloween

Some people don't do much on Halloween other than eat too much candy.  Some people buy costumes.  And some people make them.