Countdown 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, France!

Where did the last month go? I swear, I meant to blog more frequently.

In five days, we leave for France and there is still so much I have to do before we leave.

On the knitting front, I’ve gotten back to work on our friends’ baby blanket. No new photo to show of the blanket yet though. I have finished my daughter’s matching mittens to go with her hat. We’re happy. In other personal news, I got my tattoo on April 6. It's amazing how much bigger 3" seems when it's actually on your skin! It’s healing quite well and I’m ecstatic that I got it!
I’m sure I’ll have tons of pictures when I get back. I’m quite worried about how long it will take me to sort through it all - eek.

Mega Milestone Year

Sorry I haven’t been blogging or blog reading in a while but there has been so much that has gone on since I last blogged and will be going on this year, I’ll have to give you the more interesting snippets in a nutshell; there’s just too much. I haven’t even been knitting as much as a result; something had to give. My compensation: improved health, reduced stress and ability to handle stressful situations SO MUCH better, an activity we can do as a family (my husband just joined us in family karate a couple of weeks ago), and improved self image. It hasn't been an all up year, I'm just not going to focus on the downs.

Knitting
Friends’ Baby Blanket

Daughter’s Dragon Hat – (mitts to follow)

Personal
My husband and I are both turning 40.

It’s our 15th wedding anniversary on May 6th so we’re going to France the first two weeks in May. I’ll be leaving my children for the first time since they’ve been born. My husband’s father and step-mother have been kind enough to offer to come and stay with the kids. They really are wonderful people.

I got my yellow belt in karate! My grading was on January 29th. I will be getting a yellow dragon tattoo (my first ever). Yellow is for the belt and the dragon symbolizes Goju Ryu karate.

I’ve dropped yoga because of time constraints. Karate takes a decent amount of training time. And I’ve started kobudo; gee, do I love martial arts or what. That will definitely take me a lot longer to make progress in; working with weapons changes a lot. I do miss the benefits of yoga for my back. Karate just can’t do that for me, so I practice certain yoga stretches and home and that seems to work. Like I said, a milestone year.

Karate Cake and Knitting

To answer yarndork’s question on where I got the pattern for my niece’s sweater, it came from a Sirdar pattern book: Gorgeous Babies Knitting Book 264

The pattern for the blanket I’m knitting right is free from the Lion Brand website. I had to register first before they let me download it. It’s called the Heirloom Baby Blanket. I hope to have something to show soon.

Today was the dojo’s Christmas party. I baked a Bundt cake using my Nordic Ware Castle cake pan and it turned out quite well. Then my husband thought of a game he bought last week which had martial arts related pieces in it. It’s called Ghost Stories and he thought it would be cool if we could put the game pieces on the cake; so we did. People loved it!
It’s a brown sugar pound cake which I downloaded from the food network.

Niece’s Snuggly Sweater is Finally Done!

I’m still alive but barely knitting. I’m not ignoring anyone’s blog because of a lack of interest – please don’t take offense. I haven’t even touched mine for 2 months.

I’m LOVING LOVING LOVING karate and am considering dropping yoga because of my huge time commitment to exercise and the lack of knitting. I know the exercise is a healthier option; I’m trying to find balance between my leisure activities and work. I’m also now afraid I won’t finish that huge stack of UFO’s and unstarted projects with pending yarn in my closet before I die (some 60 years from now if I’m lucky). It’s scary. You think I exaggerate but when I look at my UFO’s that are over 10 years old and I haven’t touched them, you’ll understand why a mere 6 decades (if I’m healthy enough to do anything) is a cause for alarm.

I had these grand plans of knitting things for my kids every and am feeling like a bad mother because I haven’t made them special hats, scarves, mitts or sweaters in the past 2 years. Okay, I made them dinosaurs last winter, but it’s a small drop in the bucket of what I would like to do for them.

It took me a little over 5 months to complete my niece’s sweater doing no other knitting projects – that’s gotta be the longest it’s taken me to do a single item. Anyways, I’m happy with the results; I think my sister’s family will be, too.

I’m on to a new project, not my UFO’s. Friends of ours had a baby not too long ago and were promised a blanket. I better get cracking and hope it doesn’t take me another 6 months to finish a project.

Scrabble™

Here’s one of my UFO’s (unfinished objects). It’s a Scrabble™ bag and it will say “Fran’s Game” on it (it is my favourite game after all).

I really haven’t knitted much since my last blog; hence, I’m forced t resort to unfinished objects. I’m pathetic, I know. I’m working tomorrow, too. Now, it seems my spare time is going to karate and yoga. That OK. I think it’s a healthier life style for me. I know I feel and look better. Their motto is “Energize Your Life” and it truly does. I do leave there felling stress relieved an energized.

My kids just got their yellow belts on Tuesday and that’s why we took them out for dinner yesterday and a movie this afternoon (because I need to work tomorrow). The movie was “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”. It was really good! I’m so proud of them.

Back to the Yarn

It’s about time that this knitting blog became a knitting blog again. I know; I’ve been pathetic in my knitting. Truthfully, I haven’t really had time to knit since coming back from vacation. Almost three months after starting, I have about half a sweater for my niece; so slow.

I just started taking a family karate class with the kids this past week. The style we’re doing is Goju Ryu (hard/soft). It was so nice to get back to it. The last time I took karate was 15 years ago when I was doing my Master’s degree. That time, I took Shotokan (hard). There are some similarities. Sensei and one other helper there said it looked like my former training was still with me (which was very nice to hear). I can’t tell you how wonderfully stress relieving and therapeutic it is to be allowed to hit someone!

Actually, I was very soft because I don't like hurting people. They kept telling me to strike harder; that's hard to get used to. Honestly, just punching empty air and the warm up before practice is very stress relieving.

My veggie garden is slowly coming to an end. Oh well, it had to happen sooner or later. I also have some interesting sunflower shots again. My son’s largest sunflower had small buds along the stalk a little while ago. Those little buds turned into flowers. I was very surprised; I didn’t know his sunflower variety was capable of that.

This sunflower’s stem was partially snapped in one of our storms. It’s amazing how resilient this flower is. Notice that it just kept on growing from where the stem snapped and curved upward again.

I really wish I had more interesting knitting things to show. I guess I’m going to have to start showing my UFO’s which got put to the wayside when higher priorities came along.

Mr. Golden Sun

Vacation was great! I needed another couple of weeks. We went to Alberta to visit my husband’s and his family. The cooler, rainy weather in Ontario followed me to Alberta and now back again to Ontario. A storm we had last week snapped the head off one of my son’s sunflowers. They are remarkably resilient. I’m amazed this one survived given it’s head is very weekly attached to it’s stalk.

One of the things we wanted to see this time around was the Columbia Icefield. To that end, we headed toward Red Deer and camped there for a couple of nights. It was the first time the children and I had ever been camping. The icefield was breathtaking. It is very odd to have to bundle up in the middle of summer to go onto an ice field. We even drank glacier water!

We went to Jasper in the Rockies to camp that night. It’s bear country. Luckily, the only wild life we saw was bighorn sheep.

On the way back to High River, we stopped by Sunwapta Falls and saw a very interesting van.

The next day, we went to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. It’s a UNESCO national heritage site and has a fabulous visitor centre.And here’s my favourite rainbow picture to date.

It was a good vacation but it was really good to be home again.