Pumpkin Sunrise

  Good morning! How has your week been? Can you believe it's the last week of June? After some brutally hot temperatures we were graced yesterday with a beautiful day of low humidity - truly refreshing.  My backyard is quiet now that we stopped feeding the birds (raccoon raiding during the day, ugh). I will put the feeder out again in the fall and hope that Ms. Raccoon has forgotten all about the free ride.  We are knee deep in home improvements. Last week the insulators finished doing the attic, this week we have chimney/brick pointers removing bricks that are 'spalled'. What a NOISY day yesterday! Frodo, bless him, slept through the chaos, but Holly didn't know where to hide. She usually is under our bed but the jackhammering was on an outside wall to our bedroom. Poor Holly.  She is amazing though, once they leave she is out and about - resilient! Wish us luck! Next week or the week after is a  new roof and gutter installation.  While home improvements occur, I'm

  I finished this shawl last Friday and then forgot to soak and block it because of family visiting. However on Sunday I remembered. This is the second time I knit this shawl , it's a fun pattern and I recommend it.  Ravelry notes What are you working on this week?

  Yikes! Our weekend was full on busy fun.  My daughter and son in law are leaving sometime this morning and later on I am getting my second shingles shot. I am fully prepared for a horrible reaction and have nothing pressing on my schedule for three days. Wish me luck! We had such a nice visit. On Saturday, we were at the strip district . We walked about and breezed in and out of shops. We also had lunch but had to wait an hour for our food - I'm assuming someone didn't show up for work or they have a shortage of workers just like every other business these days. Yesterday we went to the Andy Warhol museum which I have never seen. We thoroughly enjoyed that experience. After the museum, we walked across the bridge to have a 'look see' up a street and then walked back over the same bridge to where the car was parked and drove home to the suburbs. I had fun in the city but now I am ready to hibernated in the suburbs for an entire week. I enjoyed our visit with our famil

  After two noisy days at the beginning of the week created by the insulating company, I basked in the silence of Wednesday and Thursday. Even the pets breathed a sigh of relief. Frodo did well and mostly ignored them. Holly hid under our bed for most of the first day but on the second day she put on her big girl pants and ran downstairs to be under the sofa that my husband (her beloved) was sitting. Of course that was the time the workers were propping open the front door for the blown in insulation.  Luckily, she has no desire to ever be outside and we fenced off the area just in case.  All of that strategizing exhausted me. (for those of you who are new here, we rescued Holly in the winter off the side of the road - she was close to death at 8 weeks old being abandoned by a not nice person). Around here, there was a heat wave that I skillfully ignored for two whole days. I walked as early as I could and briefly so Frodo and I didn't get too hot. My inflammatory arthritis does n

  On Monday while the workers were here in my house installing insulation in the attic and sealing the air leaks in the basement, I decided to start my grandson's Christmas sweater. Well due to the noise and disruption of the busyness of the past two days, I made numerous errors and was unknitting rows.  The good news is that I love the yarn and the re-knitting makes me happy. I bought the yarn and the pattern at a local yarn store. If you know me well, I am drawn to top-down seamless sweaters. What are you working on this week?

  How was your weekend? Friday night my husband and I had dinner on the patio, it was fantastic! The weather was perfect. Over the weekend, I've battled the bullying blue jays at the feeder who were over-eating, fighting with each other and not letting any other birds at the feeder. My feeder has a setting so that I can exclude by weight which is what I did on Saturday. Now I'm battling with my guilt that they cannot eat. But there was so much fighting going on! It's like recess at the playground, someone has to ruin it for everyone. I also have a multitude of red squirrels and chipmunks that stand at the bottom and pray for a seed to drop, their prayers are mostly answered. Oh and I saw the raccoon again this time at 8:30 p.m. so now the feeder comes inside the house at 6:30 p.m. The bird feeder is squirrel proof but not raccoon proof. The main point is that I am grateful there is NOT a bear like at our old home!! I wound up some lovely green yarn for our grandson's Ch

How are you all doing? How's your June month unfolding?  I've been pondering about creativity and how it ebbs and flows. Honestly last week was spectacular, I was casting on new knitting projects and completing art journaling pages one after the other. I basked in my creative pursuits. However, I wondered about when there is NOT a drop of creativity to be found, what do you do?  The number one action I always take with a non-creative state of mind is to just let it be. I've been a creative for so long that I know that it is temporary. I know that eventually I will be doing something creative eventually. Sometimes, I move towards new creative ideas or projects or I marathon read a bunch of novels while waiting for that creative spark. I've found that it's okay to not want to knit, or draw, or write.  To be honest, I sometimes do not feel like writing my blog (what!!). I wonder if there is anything else to say in the space that I haven't already said before. I won