Praise the Lord and Pass the Metates!

Hallelujah! The baby blanket is done! I finished the 592nd French knot at 9:17 this morning. The blanket is now blocking and will be delivered to Mom, Dad, and Baby on Tuesday. I certainly hope they like it. And yes, there will be a picture, but later.

We have another friend whose wife will deliver in a couple of weeks. I had planned to knit a bear or some other stuffed animal. But yesterday morning, as I was embroidering French knots, Tom says to me "Why don't you make them a quilt?" And me, being quintessentially me, gulped and blinked and said "Okay."

I've made one quilt in my life, for my brother's second son. That quilt was hand-pieced and hand-quilted and it was a dang good piece of work, if I do say so myself. My second attempt at quilting was a king-sized quilt, machine-pieced. It's in pieces, in the attic, and I'll probably never finish it. Tom's idea is to find Superman flannel fabric (assuming it's a boy) and cut out squares and sew them together with the machine and then machine quilt it. Thirty minutes to cut out the squares and a couple of hours to sew them together and then another couple of hours to quilt it. Sigh...it doesn't work that way. It also means that I need to re-aquaint myself with my sewing machine and try to sew a straight line. And given our schedule for the next couple of weeks, I won't be able to even start looking for fabric until the second week in August. And quilt sewing cannot happen in the wee hours of the morning because my fiber room is next to the bedroom. I'm going to have to think on this.

In knitting news, I've started the second Rasta Colors hat and the Jaywalker sock is a little bigger. I'm almost at the point where I can start knitting my mother's boob. I'll use the leftover Martina, so it should be nice and soft. The boob might become the new early morning knit.

Eating Local
I joined One Local Summer where at least one dinner each week is made of all local ingredients. So far, I've done pretty badly, mostly due to poor planning. I do okay with the veggies and fruit, but the main dinner ingredient isn't local at all. I suppose I could search out rockfish or make meatloaf from the ground beef from our local cattle farmer, but I keep forgetting. Oh well. I'll do better after we get back from San Francisco and the beach.

Nonetheless, I'm trying to eat as locally and organically as possible. It's nice to have a farmers market within walking distance and I stock up on veggies to grill later in the week. The only way to cook at the height of summer is to grill outside. I've found a source for local eggs (not that we eat a lot of them) and possibly for local milk, too. There are some things that I don't think are produced locally (wheat, sugar, all manner of spices). But that's been the way of it for hundreds of years. Most spices were imported from the Orient.

Politics
My apologies for this brief foray into politics. The current conflict between Israel and Lebanon (more accurately, Hezbollah) is breaking my heart. In my opinion, the aggression from both sides is uncalled for and is causing too much suffering. Phil from the running club put it rather eloquently. "Escalation leads to...escalation." The more rockets that are fired, the harder Israel will strike, which will lead to more rockets being fired and lead to more retaliation. It's a positive feedback loop that doesn't have a good end.

Why can't everyone get along?