It's all uphill.

We live in a great place in the event that Portland is flooded, but it means that in order to get to our house, you need to go uphill. From any direction. There's no way to head out from our house and have a downhill on the way home. The best you can do is head out along the ridge which will keep you at approximately the same elevation...

Why has this become a big deal lately? Because I've been doing my absolute best to minimize my car trips, and those hills sure are a bugger with a 35-lb preschooler trailing along behind my bike! It is fun to see my fitness improve by leaps and bounds, though - there's a huge hill on the ride home from Owen's preschool and the first few times I rode up it with him in back, I had to stop and walk the bike up the last half of the hill. Now I can get up it no problem. It's still a heck of a lot of work, but I don't feel like I'm going to barf when I get to the top anymore! I've gotten so that I really miss taking the bike on the days when I have to drive for whatever reason. Rainy season is going to be tough...

My knitting has lately been an uphill battle as well. I've been working on a few things, but I haven't started working on new designs to release at TNNA in January and if they're going to be ready, I've got to get my tushie in gear. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're married to me), I've been too busy playing Little Susie Homemaker. I made another batch of applesauce yesterday AND an apple pie with a made-from-scratch crust. We went up to Hood River on Saturday and visited a bunch of apple farms so there are now about 30 lbs of apples and 20 lbs of pears in our kitchen waiting to be put to good use.

The pie crust was not at all pretty (I need plenty of practice rolling it out so it forms a nice circle that actually fits in the pie pan), but boy did it taste incredible. The recipe used butter and coconut oil - yummy! I remember when I was a kid, coconut oil used to be one of those evil oils, but it's actually quite good for you. We also made French Toast on Sunday and Bill used coconut oil instead of Crisco to grease the pan, and boy was that tasty. I am completely and totally obsessed with whole foods now. My next urge is to figure out how to make pasta! Maybe if Bill is reading this he'll note that I'd love a pasta-making attachment for my mixer for Christmas. Hint, hint! ;)

Tonight I'm having dinner with my friend Leslie and two other Portland participants in Cat Bordhi's Visionary Retreat - Marta McCall and Judy Becker. Unfortunately I'm going to have to drive, but I love getting together with my designer friends so it won't be too difficult to make an exception. Now it's time to get back on the bike and go pick up the kid!

OMG!!! You have to watch this video RIGHT NOW!!!

In the spirit of all the flamethrowing that's going on right now, I've decided to pass around my own version of the viral video. I think that everyone who has not seen the entire exchange between Sen. Obama and the infamous Joe the Plumber needs to watch it in its entirety.



There has been so much distortion, rumor and innuendo surrounding this entire exchange that I was literally floored when I watched the whole thing. They are surprisingly nice to each other, and it's actually a very interesting exchange. The big accusation of the week is "OMG!!! Socialism!!!" but in reality, Obama's comment about "spread the wealth around" is about reversing the upward flow of money perpetuated over the last 8 years. Rather than continue to give tax breaks to those who need them the least, Obama wants to let the Bush tax cuts (which McCain originally voted against, BTW - is he a socialist too?) expire.

I sent my ballot off the other day (we in Oregon all vote by mail, which is a tad bit of a letdown but at the same time very convenient), and I was so thrilled to be able to vote for a president of color (although I don't think that white people have to worry about Obama representing "their" interests since he is half white and was raised by his white mother and grandparents) who is all about hope rather than the politics of fear and division. I personally can't wait for all this election hoo-hah to be over because it's really getting scary - the fact that people actually believe that a terrorist/terrorist associate could be running for President of the United States is just beyond belief. But then again, many of us fell for that whole "weapons of mass destruction" line, too, and you see where that got us...

As we come upon election day, please vote. And please consider voting on the issues rather than the soundbites, or the color of a particular candidate's skin, or the stylishness of their shoes. If you're still undecided, go to each candidate's website and read over their platform. Don't make assumptions. Don't fall for the lines fed to you by the opposing campaign's ads or the special interest groups. Think critically, and vote for the candidate who you think can bring this country through the next 4-8 years. It's not going to be an easy job, and we need someone who can git 'er done. Someone who makes good decisions when under the gun. Someone who plays well with others. Make your voice heard! VOTE!!!

Mmm!

Well, it seems like I can only manage to post once a week these days. Last week was rough, with Sydney home sick most of the week and Bill out of town. Today Owen is home sick and I'm suffering as well, although I've dusted off my Neti pot and that's definitely helping. Right now my stomach is rumbling while I'm waiting for these beauties to cool enough to be eaten:



I'm reading a very interesting book right now, called In Defense of Food, and it is changing (or, I should say, re-energizing) my view of what our family should eat. It builds on what I learned from "The Book" (aka Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) last year and motivates me to bake that bread and pick those green tomatoes...



The motto of In Defense of Food is "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." I love it. He also debunks much of what we've been taught over the past several decades regarding low-fat and, recently, low-carb diets. He talks about how harmful hydrogenation of oil is to our health and how saturated fat isn't necessarily to blame for heart disease and diabetes (but refined white flour and sugar most certainly are). It's really making me think about everything we eat and how far it comes from the actual plant or animal. Baking bread at home allows me to control every single ingredient in that bread. I can use whole wheat flour, molasses instead of high-fructose corn syrup, butter instead of hydrogenated oil.

I've been doing plenty of knitting while nursing my cold, although nothing I can show you. I did get an exciting bit of news last week - you'll need to watch this space in early December to see what I'm talking about. We had the first book photo session this past weekend and had a great time - there were chickens, children and cherry tomatoes involved. It is motivating me to get back on track with the book projects and knit, knit, knit!

Yesterday I got together with my knitting guild friends Donna, Katrina and Amanda for a birthday breakfast for us late summer/fall babies (that would be me and Amanda), and look what I got!

This will become Flamethrower Socks.


Shawl pin!


And this is the coolest little bag with a weighted bottom (so you can put your yarn ball in it, pull away and the bag won't move):


I love my knitterly friends!

I think my bread is just about ready to eat (and I'm getting distracted by the author of In Defense of Food, who just happens to be on Fresh Air right now), so I'll leave you with the aroma of fresh bread floating in the air... Yum!

Wasting time...

It seems like all I do lately is piddle away the day. You'd think that I'd be upset about this, but I'm actually quite enjoying myself. My design work is the main thing to suffer, but my family is more than happy to have home-cooked meals, freshly-baked bread and a clean house. This seems like a cycle I go through every fall - perhaps there's something about the shortening days that make me go into nesting mode?

Yesterday is a perfect example. Bill was gone most of the day, which normally fills me with dread. However, yesterday I decided to make the best of it. Instead of sitting the kids in front of the television, we baked cookies (although I couldn't let the little monsters help because they would bicker constantly about who got to do what, and how it wasn't fair if they didn't get to do exactly the same things, or sit on the taller chair, or mix with the bigger spoon...), took a long walk which was interrupted early-on when we ran into friends from down the block and had to stop and play for awhile, read a bunch of library books, made mud pies in the backyard, collected leaves and sticks and pressed the leaves in a book, yada yada yada. We topped the day off by making homemade noodles and watching the Simpsons Movie in our pjs and sleeping bags on the tv-room floor.

It was a great day, but I got very little knitting done. I've got the old design malaise back again and I'm hoping that it doesn't last too much longer. I've got a book to write, and new designs to work up for TNNA. I've got other designers lined up to add patterns to my line and test knitters waiting patiently for something new to come down the pipe. We're having a book photography session this coming weekend and I have at least one more pair of socks that need to be finished before then. But I just can't help myself - perhaps my creative spirit needs a bit of a break now and then to recharge, and it just so happens that the change of season brings it on.

I should be writing a knee-high pattern down to distribute to the test knitters, but instead I think I'm going to search for recipes to use up our green tomatoes that aren't going to ripen before they freeze off the vine. I caught a snippet of the Splendid Table radio show on NPR last weekend that was talking about making a pie out of green tomatoes that's better than apple pie. Sounds intriguing! Anyone have any favorite green tomato recipes (besides fried green tomatoes, which I've tried and am not crazy about)?

Wow, where did that week go?

It's amazing how quickly time goes by here at the Gardiner house. I can't believe it's already been a week since my last post, even though I'd pledged to post more often. I have been keeping myself busy, though! I've been biking Owen to school at least one way most days, along with keeping the house clean (still on my FlyLady kick) and making healthy meals for the family almost every night. I signed up for menu mailers from the FlyLady's cohort at Saving Dinner, and let me tell you, I am a believer. Even Bill, who was extremely skeptical at first, has to admit that he's been eating pretty well lately.

The way Saving Dinner works is you sign up for a particular menu (she has several different types - I've been doing the low-carb/body clutter since I'm determined to get my butt back in shape this year), and then every week you download the new menu. It provides a coded shopping list (so you can easily see which ingredients go with which meal in case you want to substitute) and recipes for six meals along with a soup to make for lunches. While there are definitely meals we've liked better than others, we haven't had any real stinkers.

I love that she mostly uses whole ingredients rather than packaged stuff - I've found myself shopping around the outside of the grocery store (as in, hitting the deli & meat, dairy case and produce section and avoiding all the processed-food aisles) for the most part and we are all eating so much better. I really wanted to shop the farmer's market heavily this summer but we've only gone a couple times. However, we do have our freezer filled with local, pasture-fed beef and pork, we've got our backyard eggs, we've got a ton of green beans and a fair number of tomatoes from the garden (all the carrots have, sadly, been eaten and the watermelons and zucchini just aren't going to make it - they're still flowering), and I just signed up to have local dairy delivered to our door every Thursday. In glass bottles. How cool is that? When I told him, Bill immediately had to dig out Skeleton Crew by Stephen King and make me read the short story about the milkman...

I've also been on a total canning tear. In addition to the pickled beets I posted about a couple weeks ago, I've made dilly beans, diced tomatoes and today was all about the apple butter. Tomorrow is applesauce day to use up the rest of the 20-lb box of apples we bought, and after that I'm thinking of making some green tomato relish to use up the poor tomatoes that aren't going to make it past the first frost. I decided to stop using recipes from the internet and bought the Ball Blue Book. Canning is so much easier with that book in front of me - they detail everything to do (and not to do) very nicely.

In a final spasm of domesticity, today I got back on the bread-baking wagon and whipped up a loaf and a half dozen dinner rolls. My friend Chris is starting sort of a "lost arts" cooking school, and last Friday night a bunch of us got together for her to practice her teaching on. She taught us all of her tricks for bread and bagels (bagels will be made later this week - I love cinnamon sugar bagels with a filthy passion but they don't have them at the bagel place around the corner from us), and her tips and tricks really helped. Sort of like taking a knitting class from a really good teacher - even if you already know the technique covered by the class, sometimes it's worth it just to get those little tidbits that are inside the teacher's head (Joan Schrouder classes are like this). I must've done something right because the kids fell on those rolls like a pack of wild dogs. Chris is going to teach us all how to make yogurt and cream cheese next.

I also spent a fair amount of time packing up samples and patterns to send to various shops. Yarn Harbor in Duluth, Minnesota is going to have a trunk show of Gardiner Yarn Works patterns for the rest of October and November, along with A Good Yarn, which is a new yarn shop up in Port Orchard, Washington (yes, it's named after the Debbie Macomber book and yes, she's involved in the shop). Locally, Dublin Bay Knitting Co, the source for enough Handmaiden and Fleece Artist to fill up your bathtub and roll around in, has several samples of ours as well including the fabulous Amethyst Wrap which was the hit of our booth at both TKGA and OFFF.

At the moment, I'm trying to decide if I want to watch the rest of the presidential debate, which I have Tivoed, or if it's too frustrating since I already love one of the candidates and despise the other... I might watch the last half hour of Michael Clayton instead. I'm working on a crochet design, of all things, and it is very, very fun! I'll let you all know if it turns into anything, other than a pain in my left wrist!

Clarification and pretty stuff

Knifty Knitter brought up a good point in her comments to my last post - not all rich people are exploitative and it's not necessary to exploit others in order to have plenty yourself. I was railing against those who DO exploit others in order to have more money/stuff than any human really needs. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would find my family's lifestyle lavish, what with expensive private preschools, numerous vacations and me able to stay home with the kids and work at a career that I really love but, let's face it, has been a financial drain until this year where I am FINALLY turning the corner towards profitability. There are many different levels of rich, and many different ways to get there. I got an e-mail from the Obama campaign today that summed up my feelings on the so-called American Dream quite nicely:

"We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job -- an economy that honors the dignity of work."

That's what I was trying to express rather awkwardly in my last post. When I first graduated from college, I worked at a start-up software company that grew extremely quickly during my first few years there. The executives got quite rich, but they also offered us great benefits and decent salaries, recognizing that they weren't the only ones working hard to ensure the company's success. I didn't and don't begrudge them their wealth for one second. I worked there when offshoring became all the rage, and they kept all the work in-house even though offshoring promised an easy way to increase profitability by getting rid of higher-paid workers. Anyway, enough about me. Let's look at some yarn.

I've pulled together some gorgeous yarns for the socks in my book. Here are just a few samples...

Mt Colors Bearfoot in Marigold (love that orange!):



Handmaiden Casbah (so very, very yummy):



Dream In Color Smooshy (yum, yum, yum):



And my current fave (which just arrived in the mail today), this gorgeous red (the photograph does NOT do it justice) from Curious Creek Fibers:



It's the same color as the strawberries I just bought and made into more freezer jam! Tasty!

Now I've got to stop procrastinating and get a few different patterns written up (my Knit-Purl sock club pattern is due today, and I just finished the last pattern repeat on the second sock this morning while watching the Nicholas Cage remake of The Wicker Man). I can't seem to say no to anything new that comes along, which is really making book work difficult! How do you say no to Kate Gilbert and the Twist Collective, though? (Stay tuned in November for more on what I've been doing there...)