Maple approves of spring.

my addiction

I am addicted to knitting. I knit while I listen to lectures, while I listen to board review CD’s, while I watch TV and listening to music in coffee shops. But don’t worry I haven’t completely gone over the edge: I do NOT knit while driving, in church, in the clinic or in restaurants (which I have witnessed).  Part of my addiction is my love of doing creative things. The other part is how I manifest a pathology that Adam and I both share. This pathology is “how can we find a way to be as self sufficient as possible” ie: we love gardening, we want chickens, we admire (and use) our neighbors homemade honey and candles, we make our own beer and Adam on one occasion has said “When we have more space I want to grow my own hops (an ingredient used in the beer)” and I have once said “Maybe one day I can get an Angora rabbit and I can make yarn from it’s fur.”

It is getting a bit pathological, or we just need to live on more property- however you want to see it.

Here are some pictures of a sweater I finished about a month ago. This yarn was a Christmas gift from Arder. Thanks Arder. It is a really comfortable sweater, that I have enjoyed wearing so far. I felt a bit silly posing for these, but oh well.

The brown sweater is my current project. It is a empire waist cardigan that is knit in bamboo yarn. The sleeves will be three quarter length. The best part is it is knit in one piece. I discovered on the green sweater that I hate having to connect a bunch of seams- to many opportunities to make mistakes. I am excited to finish it so I can wear it in May’s spring weather.

I am actually feeling relaxed as I head into my last month of school. My praxis/thesis is virtually done- just waiting on the final “okay” from my advisor. All I have in between me and graduation is 2 finals, one more paper and exactly 24 more hours of clinical (which will be done by the end of April). So basically I feel like I have a light load right now. I am so happy I doubled up on hours at the beginning of the semester and did all that paper writing while it was still snowing outside. That leaves more time for knitting, cooking, trip planning and maybe some furniture refinishing once the weather is warmer- oh and then there is that looming job search I can’t forget about…. My financial aid exit interview last week reminded me of that reality!

I still plan on submitting my praxis/thesis for publication. It has the ever so sexy title “Developmental Assessment of Young Foster Children” and focuses on the developmental needs of young foster children receiving health care in a primary care setting. So alluring, I know. (I am joking, but I really did enjoy writing it and hope it will be useful to those who may read it) For all those family members who have expressed an interest in reading it- I promise nothing that you would call page turning. Remember it is a RESEARCH paper, yes, with practical implications and some good insight for primary care clinicians, but none the less 22 pages of text with about 10 pages of tables.

Here is a pic from today- just relaxing in the living room on Easter and talking about the stuff we still want to see on the East coast. Happy Easter everyone!

IT’S ALIVE!

Que the out of control mad scientist laughter.

In the muddy and dark world you see below…

this picture was taken today.

It’s a start.

I have wort.

Actually, I had wort. Now, we have beer. Good beer, or, at least decent, ingestable beer. Wort is the sludge you ferment to make beer.

It took about a month, but it was worth it. Pictures below are of bottling day about halfway through the process. Wort ferments in a bucket for about two weeks, depending on the variety, then a secondary fermentation take place in the bottle for a couple weeks to carbonate. To my surprise, it turns out that beer-making with the exception of a couple nervous moments is mainly washing, waiting for things to boil, and then waiting again for them to ferment.

Siphoning from the fermenting bucket to bottling bucket in an effort to remove the yeast sludge that settled out. There was at least an inch at the bottom of the bucket.

I don’t quiet think she knows how she got roped into helping.

I capped and Elizabeth filled bottles.

The finished product.

After two very long weeks of waiting.

In other news, not much has been going on besides school and work. Elizabeth is stil running a crazy schedule, and fought off the flu. I’m doing my best to stay warm. Although when it hit forty this week after a month of nothing over ~30 I was down to a long sleeve t-shirt, woohoo? We’ve been cooking a lot. E just made her first Tiramisu, and we’ve been savoring the last couple days.  The following is the obligatory Maple picture. We’ve been practicing with the mapes not to attack anybody sitting on the floor with slobber. She’s getting better, sort of…

Thanksgiving

Our turkey keeps on giving. At this point in time I wish it would just go away. To feed the five people we had over for Thanksgiving, all of us away from family and such, we bought a 17 lbs. turkey. We now know this is way too much turkey. We got through one leg and about half a breast. There is still turkey, mash potatoes (we made way too much of this too) and cranberry sauce sitting in our fridge.  Any ways it was a bunch of fun.

The Tunbridge World Fair

Last weekend we took up Erin’s offer to crash at her family’s place and experience the Tunbridge World Fair with a couple other YSNers. And was it an experience. We saw tons of cattle, pigs (racing!), chickens, rabbits and about everything else that moves. I think I ate more fried food in those 4 hours than I had all year (photo documentation below).  The historical farm part though is always great. It’s amazing to see the ingenious ways people make tools and components of life taken for granted nowadays by hand.

Yeah, I don’t know why, but apparently the local USMC (reserves?) runs the parking/tickets.

And… I’m tired after watching this guy do a few swings.

Interesting, but not nearly fried enough for me.

Now that’s just 400-some odd pounds of plain weird.

*** Disclaimer*** I did NOT eat all of everything below. I might have wished I did, but other people there stared at me funny after I said “sharing shmaring. That’s for kindergartners”.

Now these are vegetables I can get excited about.

At this point in time I had to remind myself this event requires pacing.

Can’t go to the fair and not have a corndog. The mustard was for Dad.

These are special fries. You want to know why they’re special? Because anything covered in gravy is special. That’s why.

At this point in time I’m feeling a little lethargic. I need something to wash that all down and get my system back on track. What’s that there? Sugar with a little bit of lemon? Awesome, just what I needed.

Ok, I didn’t actually eat this. But Erin got some fried dough, and I decided that the existence of fried dough the size of a plate needed to be photo-documented and shared with the world.

An in between heart-attack snack.

Dessert!

The only moderately healthy thing we ate while there, and with the amount of butter on there I’m not sure it still qualifies as a vegetable.

I’m still in a food coma…

August the month of Dogs – Peace – Fruit

and part of September….

What did we do that kept us so busy that we couldn’t keep y’all up to date? A little bit of this, a little bit of that, like berry picking, dog training (which is progressing noticeably), hikes, cookouts, staying up too late for the Olympics more than once and for periods – nothing. I can’t remember a whole lot of detail about most of those, so here, enjoy some pictures.

Blueberry/Peach picking.

West Rock park.

From the top of West Rock you can see East Rock in the background.

Maple (a.k.a. mapster, the stir, spazimodo, the beast, occasionally little shit, and most commonly Mapes)

Berry picking part two. Eli shared some of her raspberries with me. She was quite attached to them.

Yes, Erin’s shirt says Dogs – Peace – Fruits with a black fuzzball underneath. I’m not sure what it means, but somehow it’s an accurate description of our goings on this last month. Maple, Olympics, and Berries. Weird.

Next edition – Vermont and the World’s Fair.

Long time no blog…

It’s been a couple (alright a lot) of weeks since we last posted anything. We’ve been pretty busy over that time period, and have a lot of pictures to post. We’ll be getting to those all pretty soon along with stories.

In the meantime… we’ll be back in California December 19th for Christmas. Use the time remaining to prepare yourself.

Albanizzle

Yesterday we carpooled up to Albany for Mike and Susan’s wedding. We braved the land of scattered thunder showers for the event and emerged a little wet, but very glad to have gone. The whole event was great. It spanned the whole afternoon from 2 to midnight! The food everywhere was great. We had fun spending time with everybody from New Haven and catching up with those we hadn’t seen for a while.

The reception was a held at the Crooked Lake House, which was pretty darn cool. Here are a few pictures from the event.

More photos coming as we receive them.

#10 Yankee Stadium

Elizabeth and I caught the Yankee game against the A’s today. The game was fun, but seriously seriously hot – low 90s, humid and in the  sun for the first couple innings. One more stadium to cross of the list. Until next year that is and they move into their new stadium.

It was a really good game, Joba was good, and Gallagher was decent and worked himself out of jams. It was pretty entertaining, when you weren’t wiping the sweat out of your eyes. The Yankees eventually won 4-3 in 12 innings, but we didn’t make it that long. The heat was just too much for us.

It was hot.

Joba Chamberlain.

The new Yankee Stadium