Kayaking and Knitting

Well, I must say that the third entry in the Extreme Knitting Challenge blew me away. Check this out:



This is Cerridwen (formerly blogless, now blogful), knitting while kayaking! And this isn't simply a float down a river either. Cerridwen says:

[The picture was] taken last April while I was participating in a kayak race down a 10 mile stretch of the Verde River in Arizona. The river has class I, II, and III rapids! I am knitting the Wool Peddler's shawl for my neice from _Folk Shawls_. My family realised that I crossed the line from "enjoying" knitting to "psychoticaly obsessed" when I didn't put down the knitting except for class III's and a few class II's. It was a lot of fun.

The knitting survived the race unscathed. The same can't be said for me. :)

And yes, that is a shark on her head.

So, Cerridwen moves into 1st place, with Margene in 2nd place for achieving the highest altitude, and Jen in 3rd place.

A couple of notes on the Challenge:

There is no deadline for entries; I'll run the Challenge as long as there is interest

Your entries don't have to be recent; if you have pictures that were taken years ago of you knitting in the extreme, send them in!

Umemployed--Day 4

(Don't worry, I won't bore you with my day-to-day activities every day, just occasionally.)

Being unemployed is very interesting. Not only are there all the strange emotions (depressed one day, manic the next), but one also sees interesting things that one normally wouldn't see while at work. I opted to stay home on Tuesday instead of going into the office to pack up my belongings (that was the depressed day). The day was spent blogging, emailing, and chatting online. Things were pretty calm, until I heard an animal squeal. That was kind of odd. Then the neighbor's dog started barking. Being ultimately nosy, I went outside to investigate and that's when pandemonium ensued. Piper (the dog) had cornered a young groundhog. Then she attacked it. Since there was a fence between the two yards, I couldn't do much of anything besides yell at the dog and spray water on her in the hopes that she'd leave the groundhog alone. But it didn't help. She killed the groundhog. That shook me up quite a bit.

Then this morning I got up early (it's so much easier to get up early when you don't have to go to work!) to do some knitting. Jez was very interested in something on the deck. It turned out that a small family of cats took up residence overnight. There were two black and white kittens sleeping on the deck chairs, and the mother cat would occasionally come by to check on them. I'm pretty sure that these are the same cats that took up residence in our other neighbor's garage. Lyle had wanted to adopt the kittens, but never could catch them. I called her and she came over to get them, but they ran away. It will be interesting to see if the kittens return to L'Auberge Simonds tonight.

And in knitting news, I'm at the heel on the Sock of Caribbean. But I'm stuck. Well, I thought I was stuck. In trying to explain just how stuck I was, I figured out what I need to do. So, thanks for listening! Here's the sock:



Hopefully I'll be able to finish the heel today. I'm much happier with the second knitting, but we'll see how the second half of this short row technique works up.

Ciao for now!