More Bits & Pieces

".. at the end of the storm is a golden day .."


I woke this morning to a glorious fall day - intensely blue sky, big white puffy clouds, crisp air and warm sunshine. Back in the Dark Ages of my junior high years, I had a chorus teacher who favored all the classic choral music, and "You'll Never Walk Alone" was part of our repertoire. And so this phrase was immediately in my mind. Brunch on the patio, oh, yeah!!

Burbank received nearly an inch of rain in the last two days, nearly a third of our rainfall for all of last year. Lots of mudslides and flooded areas and power outages. We had a big shock last night; I looked out the kitchen window and couldn't see the barbecue grill! We rushed out, and it had fallen over, just below my line of sight from the window. Cause: We had to have the outfall sewer dug up and replaced last spring, and have yet to replace the paving over the big swath that was cut out of our old concrete patio. We've recently had some caving-in in that area, and DH has been investigating, but without yet finding the reason. Well, the heavy rains collapsed a 4-5 foot section, and the barbecue had been sitting partially on the soil, not on the concrete, so it fell over. The noise must have been masked by the rain drumming on the roof. We think there's no damage to the grill, but we turned off the gas connection and more investigating is needed.

I had a nice catch-up message from my good friend Jayne, she of the gorgeous See Jayne Knit Yarns, so I remembered that I haven't shown off the yarns I bought while I was in Vancouver in July. Here's all the goodies:

Here's a huge skein of Café au Lait, 860 yds of beautiful fingering yarn, based on some Henry's Attic yarn.




These are CBM private colors, hand dyed before my eyes. I had a bag of the South West Trading Optimum dk in a boring odd sort of grey, and Jayne made it up into 2 batches for me. One is a bit more intense, and there's 300 yards of that; the other 1200 yards are more pastel.






And then there's another special yarn. Elann had a small batch of Cashmere Wool tweed yarn (70% cashmere!), and Jayne turned one skein into this gorgeous Blaze of fall color, nearly 400yds.







This is a very special present from her to me: a skein of her popular 'Jeans and a Tee', but this is 'Jeans and a Purple Tee'. In a wild coincidence, the day the package with all this yarny goodness arrived, I was wearing - jeans and my favorite purple tee. LOL!!

You may have seen a theme to my favorite yarn colors here, blues and purples and lavenders. Ah, yes; there's quite a lot of these colors in CBM's Stash.


I thought I'd end with a cutesy thing. Some time ago I put out an old throw rug, for Midnight to lie on when she's outdoors with us during our weekend brunches. The last few weeks, I've kept finding it dragged off the porch, and it's sprouted long pieces of yarn, ripped from the rug backing. I mentioned it to DH, and last week he came in laughing. He'd just seen a squirrel trying to make off with the rug. When he came around the corner, the squirrel panicked, but found that the yarn was caught and it took a bit for him to free himself. Today when we went out to have brunch, this is what I found, caught in the plants by the back steps; I'd left the rug neatly folded by the back patio door. Squirrels!!