ADD Knitting….

This weekend I did what I do best…. avoidance. I prefer to call it ADD knitting… that way I can blame it on some poor defenseless disease. When in doubt I will blame my problem on being ADD. It works for so many Americans these days I thought I would join in. Oops! Was that a soapbox I was tripping over? I need to be more careful. Anyway. I have been watching all the beautiful items Melody has been knitting and feeling a bit frustrated. All my projects are long and involved. Can you say polka dot intarsia blanket one more time? Not me… I am toast! As soon as this one is done.

This one is for my nephew’s new little girl.  She is precious and I love knitting this for her, but….. it takes forever!!!!  While I have been slugging away at this, Mel has made a bazillion fun things.  And then last night I went on Ravelry and found the most amazing blanket (somebody slap me… another blanket?).  This one looked like some amazing intarsia….. a Mario blanket.

This amazing blanket was created by Gege and she explains the whole process on her blog ~ Gege Crochets. The really amazing thing is this beauty is not knitted.  It has been crocheted.  It is tunisian crochet!  Of course I had to YouTube it and find out how to do it right away!  I cannot crochet.  I have tried and tried and end up throwing things… mostly balls of yarn, but still.  This I can do!  Probably because it is so like knitting.  Now I can finally say I can crochet!!!  And my version of crochet has a fancy, sexy name!  Tunisian crochet!

By the way, in case you are wondering… I am avoiding exercising right now.  I am always avoiding something. Hmmmm, what I else can I do…..

Pass the yoga please…

In my never ending battle to get fit, flexible and less fat…. I know that doesn’t sound very positive but I wanted all f’s.  Anyway, I have crossed over into the world of Yoga.  It was and continues to be a scary cross over.  But it works… if I can control my giggling and I have done so up to now.  My good friend unknowingly signed us up for a basic plus class… thanks, Kerrie.  Strangely enough, I did okay.  Transitions were tough, not as smooth as it should be and my flexibility is definitely marginal.  The good news is it is the best thing I have done for my back in a long time.  Saturday we had a two hour workshop called Align the Spine.  My spine definitely got aligned before we left the class.  Our last movement was the relax pose using a yoga strap.

It doesn’t show the yoga strap here, but we had one and it actually helped.  As my body relaxed one of the vertebrae in my lower back popped.  In the quiet it sounded like a pop gun.  It sure did feel good.  A few minutes later there were two pops on the right side, not as loud, but equally as soothing.  What is even more wonderful is that when I get up in the morning I can stand straight up right away.  I haven’t been able to do that in years.  I am a yoga convert!

I have included this video to better show how to wrap the strap. It wasn’t exactly how we did it, but it might actually work better.

I am never going to bungee jump!

This is too funny!

Working in the yard….

Today was the first day in quite awhile we haven’t had rain.  It has been so wet here the farmers still don’t have the crops in.  Hopefully this next week they will be able to get this accomplished.  Our yard chores weren’t nearly that big.  Just some trimming here and there, pulling down a vining plant of some sort, getting rid of dead limbs… on the trees.  (My limbs are not working as fast as they should because of a  new workout video I have tried, but judging from the pain I am feeling, they are not dead.)  Most of our leaves are gone.

done

The video is the only tree in the yard that still has leaves… it was taken this morning after my walk.  This afternoon I took another video.  We have a sharp shin hawk that loves are back yard.  He doesn’t catch much here, but he sure comes and visits alot.  Sometimes he tries to hide in one of the big evergreen trees and other times he just sits on the fence or on a low branch of a tree.  I wish I had a zoom on this flip camera, but he is something.  As it turned out… he took a “potty break” in our back yard.  I missed him flying away.  Darn my impatience.

done

12 things about our school…

Normally I don’t work on Mondays.  That is always a good thing…. Mondays are….. well, they just are and always have been.  Today was an exception.  We had a teacher’s work day.  Indiana no longer gets 1/2 days of schools… some state administrator thought that one up… go figure.  So now we have to take a whole day and today was one of those,  The morning was spent team building.  It was very fun and enlightening.  One of the exercises was to have your team take a song and change the lyrics to reflect things about your school.  There were a lot of really good presentations.  We had the Brady Bunch changed to our name, YMCA changed to the school initials… complete with choreography, a rap song complete with hoodies and sun glasses, and Like a Virgin (with lyrics changed… we are a Catholic K-8 school.)  That last one was a pretty racy choice!

My team chose the 12 days of Christmas and we had it all choreographed.

At Our Lady of Mount Carmel the first thing that we see is

Our faith filled community…. you know how the song goes…..

Our last verse was

At Our Lady of Mount Carmel the 12th thing that we see – 12 students with Swine Flu (we hold up pig masks we made with paper plates and a Popsicle stick)
11 Dress code infractions (we each demonstrate a different infraction – mine was sandals)
10 parent e-mails (demonstrate typing fingers)
9 months of teaching (shaking fingers)
8 grading deadlines (we all pull our hair)
7 “something” snow days (forgot that part of the lyrics… hey, I am doing this by memory!)
6 specials teachers (I do a step out ta da – I am one of the specials teachers – computers)
5 monthly meetings (chin on  fists – remember to drag this out when singing)
4 praying priests (make the sign of the cross)
3 teaching sisters (we point at our teammate – a Dominican sister)
2 tiny principals (again, printed out their photos 8X11 and cut out and put on popsicle stick – held them up and crouched down)
And our faith filled community (sound it out to fill all the syllables – we all join together.)

We were a hit and we’re taking it on the road!  It was quite the work out.   All of the presentations were impressive when you consider we had very little time to put them together.

I put this in my music category… but I really think I’m stretching it.

What do you say….

…. when you have been MIA for weeks?  I have no idea.  I cannot tell you why I needed the time off.  Nothing bad, no big stress, not necessarily busy, no excuses….    And then when you’ve been gone awhile you think maybe you should wait until something big happens before you start again…. so…. okay… the Colts won again today!!!!  6 – 0… good enough?  I guess the truth is today I woke up with a renewed energy… mental and physical.  So… I’m back.

I did go outside and document the weather changes.  It hasn’t been a beautiful fall.  Just when it got pretty the rain came and knocked it all down.

Here are some more hydrangea leaves…. I love the photo shop accents.

I love the artsy look of the outline…

A couple of weeks ago my friend Kerrie and I went to Darlington to photograph a covered bridge up there.

Zip! Zap! Boom!

Although it may look hard to do, zipping or whatever the correct term is… is not hard.  The hardest part is stopping.  You are supposed to put your hand back behind you flat on the wire and put pressure…. this will slow it down.  What ends up happening many times is the person on the receiving end catches you.

done

The next one is our young guide who was at the send off stage of the trip.  She would hook us up and send us off.  She then followed last.  This video shows her on the last run and she is shooting all of us waiting for her.  She is young and full of fun, so excuse her enthusiasm.

done

This gives you an idea of what we did.  Ten zips and 5 rope bridges.  Too fun!

Zip! Zip! Hooray!

What month this has been!  A wedding, grandbabies visit for a week, school starts and then this weekend.  I am exhausted.  This weekend some friends and I had planned a day of zip lining in Ohio.  I think I mentioned it in an earlier post, but I am too lazy and tired to look it up.  This was the weekend!  Bad news… it  looked like rain.  I was afraid we would drive 4 hours only to find we were rained out.  I called Hocking Hills Canopy Tour and they informed me they zip in the rain, but not lightening or torrential downpours.  Now this was disheartening…. weather predictions were pointing at just that type of conditions.  But, we had no choice.. it was paid for and so we waited and watched.
In the meantime other events were going on of which I had no knowledge.  I was surprised at a friend’s house while helping her with some computer issues… (I’m not sure we ever got finished).  Newly married son Beau and wife Mo flew up to surprise me.  Stretch was in on it.  I won’t even go into the length of story telling that went on to cover this surprise.  I  will only admit it was well worth it. I’m not sure I have ever been so surprised… or happy about being surprised.  It was so wonderful to see them.  They ended up going with us to the zip line and it made the trip even better.

Sunday morning arrived way too early…..

Ugh… there is only one thing that will remedy this early…

We stopped at friend Kerrie’s house and they had made a Starbuck run!  Yeah!!!!!

This at least made everyone civil enough they would pose for photos.

By the time we reached Ohio it was light out.  The weather was holding……. and we weren’t discussing it.

We had our “children” packed in like sardines” in the back so they could sleep on the way there.

Four hours later, two pit stops and we were there!  Woo Hoo!  Here is Stretch with friend Kerrie and her husband Brad.

At this time I might mention that Kerrie shared with us her fear of heights.  I don’t know how I missed this before.  I was sharing with her videos from the website the night before and it was the first time I was aware of her fear….hmmmmm.  Meredith was demonstrating how we were going to get her over the rope bridges.  It was going to be a sandwich walk so she couldn’t look anywhere.  Below is how effective it worked… of course my son Beau was no help.

done

Kerrie had a wonderful sense of humor throughout the day even though she was terrified.  We were all so proud of her and couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to accomplish what she did knowing of her fear.  I will be posting zip videos tomorrow, but today’s entry took so long between uploading video, upgrading the blog to accept video and just being so darn tired!

New arrivals….

At our house there is a new arrival!  It is a new Dell computer.  My old one crashed ….hasn’t burned yet, but it is still causing me frustration.  It was a good computer, but I work them pretty hard.  I love my new machine, but it is still lacking some essential software…Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.  Please remember to write down your serial numbers!!!!  That is the only thing between  me and my software.  I can’t figure it out.  I know I registered it but they show no sign of it online.  So, today, between errands, I will fight with Adobe to get a serial number for my software.  This said, please realize the following photos are raw and untouched.

Another new arrival came in August at the Indianapolis Zoo.  A baby giraffe!  Meet Juani!

Can you see how protective mama is?  She wasn’t sure about Kerrie and I setting our camra and tripods up in view of her baby.  I taked to her and told her what a wonderful mama she was and with a little time and no incident she came around.

Just like other babies, Juani is very flexible.  He can bite his own tail!

Just like other children he listens attentively to everything his mother says….. (not!)

… and he holds still for bath time… at least he did for awhile.

It sure was a great way to start a beautiful Sunday morning… communing with animals and admiring the fauna.  God sure knows how to create some unusual things…. the patterns on the giraffe….

Check out the detail of the design on the tail… amazing!

I have more photos to share later… now to workout.

Where were you?

Where were you? and what were you doing? used to be a question one asked in reference to the assasination of JFK.  I still clearly remember that moment in time.  I was in a 6th grade Social Studies classroom and I heard a loud exclamation outside the classroom and we all knew something big had happened….

September 11, 2001 found me in another classroom… a computer lab teaching 25 5th graders.  Sister Clarine walked in and pulled me aside and asked me to turn on the television that was facing away from the students.  We did and watched silently and in horror as the drama unfolded.  I knew Sister was contemplating how she was going to handle this news with a school of young students.  I have never been so thankful that I work(ed) in a school where prayer is not only allowed, but encouraged and taught.  The classes were told in a gentle way.  They were not shown anything visual… parents could be with them for that.  Classes went in groups to the church and prayed and prayed in the classroom.

So strange that two such big moments in history happened in a classroom for me.

Time has an amazing site of photos of that time.