Happy Easter!

Hi Mom,

Rushka has been at the door, waiting for the Easter bunny to arrive! I don't know what kind of impression she is trying to make, though, since she has decided that the first from our household to greet Peter Rabbit should be her new best friend - can you see who it is?

That's right, it's Dick Cheney! Nathan & I have allowed to keep him around so long as she keeps carrying him around by the head and chewing on his ears every once and a while for good measure...

As you can see the sun is out and the flowers are in bloom so it feels like spring! Well, really, it's sort of felt like spring since February but now we are actually at the point that I have been wearing t-shirts off and on for the past few weeks (when it's not windy, foggy or rainy, that is - this is San Francisco.) My tulips are up and blooming in the window boxes and they look so beautiful:


Sorry to hear that you are being so disrupted by the work on the house, but it will definitely be worth it in the end - if only to give you an opportunity to sort through things like photos of a political rally from 1995! I cannot believe how much Canadian politics have changed - from a new party in Quebec to my old classmate Justin Trudeau running for parliament to Steven Harper actually, illogically, becoming Prime Minister. Right now I am getting most of my news through the podcast Quirky Nomads, hosted by a woman who left California with her family, moving to Canada to get away from Bush. Let's just say she's not impressed with the leader she's ended up with instead!

As for my home projects, I finally finished my t-shirt rug last week after a big push at the end (fueled by the final episodes of Project Runway Season One)


Hmm, it's not quite as neat and pretty, or even the same shape, as the original pictured in the book! All I can say is that she must have 1) had t-shirts that were all EXACTLY the same weave and construction to get all the rows of different colors to be the same width and 2) cut her strips 1" wide and not the 1/2" wide noted in the pattern because 3) her rug is much more square than mine, which has become a runner. My aesthetic crisis with the overall appearance aside, though, the rug is already very popular with Nathan who thinks the garter stitch ridges feel great on his feet. So it is now at home in our kitchen where I can smush it up against the wall and have at least one straight side!

I have also started on my cabled water-bottle cover, dorky though it is. This is coming along nicely even though progress is rather slow. It's not easy knitting this in a splitty cotton blend, particularly with trying to keep the left side of the cables neat and tight. I swatched several times with different methods of wrapping the stitches coming off of the sides of the cable section to try and firm this up but I am somehow inherently loosey goosey. In the end it shows up much less in the actual item than in the swatches, though, so that is some comfort. I think it's pretty at least!


So far I am over half-way done with the first (long) side. I have also managed to avoid loosing my cable needle in the various trains, buses and cafes I have worked on it in so that feels like something! I think I am going to knit the two sides separately, then join them in the round to make the neck (why does Rowan always want you to knit everything in individual tiny pieces? Even socks and mittens!)

Working so much to alternate wrapping styles and tighten up my cable twists, though, did finally offer a flash of insight into the gapping of my entrelac squares on the left edge of my right-side pieces. That, combined with my general displeasure with the color-block effect - by row 26 I found out that I didn't have enough of the original color to finish and would need to add another pink section at the end - led me to make the drastic decision to just take it back and start again.

Yes, that's right, I frogged 25 rows of knitting (Nathan was aghast when he figured out what I was doing), leaving only the cast-on row and some really big balls of yarn:


I have already re-started, alternating the knit-side rows in the original dark color and purl-side rows in the new pink color. With the two colors moving in opposite directions this actually takes much better advantage of the weavin effect that, to my mind, entrelac was designed to emulate:


I am much happier with my Lady E now! And hey, I get to have the joy of knitting it all over again - isn't the knitting supposed to be the fun part?

I hope that you and Dad are able to have a happy Easter, with at least some of the craziness of the renovations in check. We are going to keep it easy here, although I do have an urge to bake a ham after seeing the one that Martha made the other day - it looked too good! It will be just Nathan and I this weekend after a small run of guests. Diane was in the Bay area last week and took Thursday afternoon off from her interrogation duties to explore San Francisco with me. Nathan joined us for a seafood dinner - she even tried the oysters, which I give her major credit for!

Then Glenn was in town from Sunday to Wednesday for business meetings (we had a great steak dinner with his boss from Mitsubishi that I think I am still full from 4 days later) One of the things they were checking out were the inroads of rice crackers on store shelves in the area - yes, that's right, the same kind rice crackers that you buy trayloads at a time! (Theirs by the way are the Mr. Christies ones in a box) Apparently they are really popular in Canada and Australia but they can't get the store presence they want in the US. After reminiscing about your tuna fish salad on seaweed flavored crackers, Glenn & Nathan gathered for me all the necessary ingredients (the sweet pickles were the hardest part to find). So that is what I think I am going to go make myself for lunch!

Hope you & Dad have a great day -

Megan