On Friday night, I made this recipe with spare ribs from a local farm. They were awesome.

On Saturday, I made creamed spinach for lunch. (Thanks, Deb.)

This morning, I made pancakes. (I’ve posted about them before.)

I’ll have some knitting to show you soon. (I swear.)

I uploaded photos from my camera this morning and noticed a theme.

From the top: an impromptu lunch of slaw tartare with red cabbage from the farm, safety pins to keep my favorite jeans modest enough to wear out of the house, and the very pink beginnings of the second bobbin of the Winter Storage colorway I’m working on (my first project with my wheel’s fast flyer).

This rooster needs another cup of coffee!

“The creosote and tar smell of the railroad tracks woke him from the dreaming. The cinders made hollow crunching noises under his boots. He had come a long way with them; but it was his own two feet that got him there.” — Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1976) (My version is Penguin, 2006, p. 236.)

Do you ever read something that just takes everything out of you? I didn’t intend to just stop posting, but I read Ceremony this week and it stirred up a lot of things that I’ve been processing. Powerful books can be almost incapacitating. (This is good. Also, hard.)

Boh started to worry about the knitting pile. He told me so.

As you can see, I’m making progress on Bracken. (You can also see that this Jo Sharp Classic DK wool seems to attract Boh hair.)

I made myself a plate of very messy dumplings last night — the only wrappers I could find this week were enormous! I overfilled a few, and they ruptured in the cooking process…but they were still incredibly delicious.

(A few pictures from 2007 seemed appropriate, given Ceremony’s mostly southwestern setting.)

A bunch of folks from my department went out for Korean food this week, and I ate some incredibly yummy (and spicy) kimchi. My farm share included Chinese cabbage, and while I had initially been envisioning a hearty stir-fry, kimchi thoughts took over when I opened my fridge to make lunch on Friday. I got out The Joy of Pickling (I can’t recommend this book enough), and there were a handful of kimchi recipes to choose from. I started with the basic recipe, soaked my cabbage in brine from 12 hours, and then yesterday, added the scallions, garlic, ginger, pepper, and sugar. (Go get a pickling book for ratios and instructions!) I didn’t realize that kimchi only needs to ferment for 3-6 days, which means that I’ll get to taste-test this week!

Yesterday afternoon, I realized I was pouting, so I decided to be proactive about it. Applesauce makes everything better, so I dashed up to the orchards and picked out a peck of Golden Delicious and a peck of Cortland apples. Fifteen minutes later, I was chopping apples in the kitchen, and soon the apples were simmering away on the stove. I made two batches. I leave the skins on, and then I pour the whole pot-full through the food mill to smooth out the sauce. Yum.

Also, look! My plain and simple pullover is growing! I decided that it might be a good idea to try it on, and I am quite happy with the fit. This is going to be the perfect drapey short-sleeved sweater to pull on over a long-sleeve tee. Also, this marks the end of the first ball of yarn — 665 yards (8 oz) of local fingering-weight undyed alpaca.

Time for yarn-winding! Also, how did it get to be November? (For the record, I did not knit a single sock this October. I’m nothing if not consistent…)

It was a quiet Friday, spent trying to catch up with the week: lots of list-making and stock-taking, but also a longer walk to the reservoir with Boh to clear my head and stretch his (okay, our) legs.

It was a proper eve of Halloween — the sky was grey, the wind, howling, and the familiar scent of leaves settling and decomposing whirled about us. The seasons are starting to turn again, but there are some leaves, branches, whole trees, even, that seem to resist. These solitary bursts of yellow made me smile, and I found myself looking for pockets of color in the muted beauty of these woods.

Everything always seems more manageable after a walk along this path.

The oven helps, too. A friend of mine from college has this gorgeous cupcake website that you should all check out, and yesterday she posted a recipe for savory cheddar and scallion cupcakes. Moments after reading this, I was in the kitchen melting butter and measuring out flour. Yum.

I also finished the first bobbin of Winter Storage, and I’m hoping to start the next one this afternoon — but only if I can get some writing done today.

I’ll leave you with a bit of Boh humor. I caught Boh admiring himself in the mirror yesterday. He was so engrossed in his own reflection that I was able to snap a few pictures before he starting looking at me in the mirror. Silly, silly dog.

In order to face the week, I needed blackberry pancakes. (Mondays can be tough!) I ate them for breakfast and lunch, and they helped, like they always do. Moving on…

I knit this over the weekend for my friend H. (of wedding shawl fame) because tomorrow is her birthday! I just couldn’t wait any longer, so I gifted this yesterday, which means there is absolutely no danger of spoiling the surprise. I used more of my Hello Yarn Five Plum Pie handspun, and I still have about ten yards leftover — truly, a never-ending skein.

Calorimetry was one of the first patterns I attempted to knit — and while I finished it rather quickly, my skein of filatura di crosa 127 print (or whatever the pattern calls for, because I had not yet learned to substitute) won the day, and I finally understood why gauge matters. My first calorimetry was enormous! This time around, I read up on the pattern and followed some common modifications:

I cast on 88 stitches using size 6 needles, and worked only as many (decreasing stitch count) short rows as seemed like half of the width I was hoping for, and then completed the same number of (increasing stitch count) short rows to get to the other side, being careful not to run out of yarn.

Yay! I tried this on to take some pictures, and now that my hair is longer, I really like this. I may need to make one for myself.

I did manage to ply the polwarth. Here’s what it looks like before washing/thwacking:

This may be the softest, squishiest yarn I have ever spun. It is hanging to dry in the kitchen, and I can’t help but pet it each time I walk by.

In keeping with “hat-tober,” I cast on for yet another handspun hat — Cosy’s Super Hero Helmet Hat. I won the pattern on her blog a few weeks ago, and I am knitting it out of some of my earlier wheelspun: AVFKW Woolly Wonders corriedale in The Candle’s Nimble Flame. I’m using size 10.5 needles, and I love the squoosh of the garter stitch.

Apparently Boh also had a very busy day. (While I read, wrote, cleaned, knit, plied, grocery-shopped, cooked, etc., Boh moved bones back and forth from his box, growled at the electrician through the window, took notes on squirrel movement, and perhaps dreamed of rabbits, chipmunks, and deer.)

I stand in pretty much the same place to take my pictures of the reservoir near my house, so you can really see how much the leaves have changed over the last few weeks. Yesterday was the perfect day for a walk through the falling leaves.

We baked a loaf of no-knead bread, and enjoyed it with delicious marmalade brought home from a friend’s summer in France (thanks, K!) as our dessert last night.

Also, I thought you all might enjoy a picture of Boh’s “Um, can you wake up now?” technique. He has certainly made a new friend this weekend!

More knitting soon, I promise.

You know, the opposite of work. (Both are occurring this weekend, but the not-work is more fun to photograph.)

Boh likes to “hide” behind or underneath the blanket on my bed. He also likes to chew on it, or pretend to chew on it, as a way of getting my attention.

I see you.

Slow-roasted tomatoes and raspberry muffins. There was also applesauce — a lot of it — but I didn’t take any pictures. Oh, and some knitting!

I am ready to start the decrease rows, and I am absolutely in love with this hat.

I also adore this pastry cutter — a lovely surprise from a friend who found this at an antique shop and knew that I’ve been looking for a a pastry cutter with a wooden handle. I may have to make up a batch of pie crust to welcome this into my kitchen.

This is how I know that I’m feeling better. Last weekend, I could not spin – too much work and motion for my tired body and achy head. This weekend, I finished spinning all 3 bobbins of singles, let them rest for 10 hours, and late last night, after a fun evening out with friends, I decided to sit down and ply so that I could set the twist and hang the yarn to dry overnight. (It’s almost dry!)

I think this is Boh’s “get back to work” face.

Yesterday started out well. I blogged, put some tomatoes in the oven to roast, put on a handknit sweater, did some reading, and went out to brunch.

While I did all of this, my head became rather congested, and by the time I got home after brunch, I was starting to feel achy. Blah. I decided to go to the grocery store because if I was getting sick, I wanted to do so with a replenished refrigerator, and while I was packing my eggs (yummy, local eggs that you can pack yourself at my local coop), I dropped one of them, which seemed to confirm that I was not really at 100% yesterday.

So rather than annotated a less than fully formed bibliography, I did the things I absolutely needed to do, watched guilty tv online, drank a lot of tea, and late at night, forced myself to eat something. (Somehow I forgot to eat dinner. When I am not hungry, something is not quite right.) Oh, and I plyed my first skein of my CMF bfl sweater spinning project.

LOVE. This morning, as I wait to see if this was just a 24-hour bug or if I am going to feel lousy again (I always feel good in the early mornings, even when I’m sick, so I’ve learned to delay all decision-making about the day to mid-morning), I’m going to set the twist and hang my pretty yarn to dry.

Fingers crossed that today I’ll feel better. That bibliography is not going to annotate itself!

Despite the fact that I haven’t actively listened to any Michael Jackson since the summer, every time I go to abbreviate the garter yoke cardigan as GYC (you know, when I label photos and such), I hear the chorus of PYT in my head.

I’m just over halfway through the raglan increases now, and I’m hoping to separate the sleeves from the body before the end of the weekend.

I started spinning my CMF bfl yesterday as well. I’m going to work through this an ounce at a time, with the idea that if I keep 4 bobbins in rotation, I can spin 3 ounces and then ply them together, and then start on the next skein. In a perfect world, I’d spin all the singles first and ply the earlier bobbins with later ones to help increase my chances of uniformity, but since I only have 6 bobbins, and no storage bobbins, I’m thinking that working through this a skein of yarn at a time is the way to go, both for my storage options and my momentum. Speaking of momentum, today I should probably aim for more reading/writing and less knitting and spinning. The pace of the semester is really picking up, which means the book piles are growing.

I’m not even going to try for a smooth transition. I snapped this photograph of my lunch sauteing yesterday: fresh farm onions, bok choy, carrots, and homemade sauerkraut.

Time to hit the books. (Well, after I pour another cup of coffee and knit a row or two.)