First things first

Mark your calendar now!

3/14/15 at 9:26:53.589

Happy International Day of Peace.

I see you shiver with antici…

…pation.

I took these just over two weeks ago. Already, the tulips are long gone, and the lilacs are nearly all spent as well. The pale-green new leaves have grown into full canopies on most trees in the area.

I’ve mentioned before that my husband is a cake-baker extraordinaire. Sylvia always gets amazing birthday cakes, and this year was no exception. She requested “a fairy cake,” and Jan delivered. The outside was covered in green buttercream with piped-icing lilies of the valley (which were just starting to bloom in our yard during her party) on the sides and various fairy-garden-inspired ornaments on top.

Jan prides himself on making sure that everything on his cakes is edible (with the exception of wooden support posts inside tiered cakes), which is why he uses fondant (blech) only if the cake recipient/client really wants it. He thought about making the top decorations out of marzipan, but didn’t have the time or materials on hand. So he used gum paste, which is technically edible but tastes pretty awful. We explained this to Sylvia, but this was clearly a case of “in one ear and out the other”: as soon as a hedgehog-bedecked slice of cake was placed before her, she popped the little gum-paste critter right into her mouth.

Here she is, right before her face melted into an “oh, I don’t want to eat this and I wish I hadn’t put it in my mouth” expression. I told her she didn’t have to, so she very unceremoniously spit out a very chewed-up gum-paste hedgehog onto her plate, then happily dove right into the rainbow-colored cake!

Here is Neil Gaiman’s reading of his latest book, Blueberry Girl, a charming benediction for girls in which he wishes them all sorts of happinesses and wisdom. He wrote it for Tori Amos’s daughter (his god-daughter), and I’m delighted that he and illustrator Charles Vess teamed up to make this lovely poem available to everyone.

Yes, I have recently acquired more yarn. But I didn’t buy it! (I am continuing last year’s practice of knitting only from my stash and purchasing new yarn only on very rare occasions.) I won it in a contest held last month on It’s a Shantastic Life! (Shannah is a hoot. Stop by her blog sometime and you’ll see what I mean.)

The prize package arrived the other day. It contained the sock yarn I was expecting (in very bright colors—this is quite a change from my usual brown/grey/green tones) as well as a little make-a-cat-out-of-pompoms kit and one of the coolest coffee mugs I’ve ever seen. Can you see the texture on the outside of this thing? That’s right: knit stitches and purl stitches—and cables, even. I am totally going to enjoy some good coffee in this when I cast on these spring-colored socks. Thanks, Shannah!

After frogging that ill-conceived ruana and using a niddy-noddy to wind the yarn into skeins last summer, I carefully put all ten or so skeins of that Nature Spun worsted into a basket…and promptly forgot about it. The yarn recently resurfaced, and I determined to get it into usable shape soon.

So yesterday morning I filled the bathtub with enough cold water to soak all this yarn, squeezed out the excess water, and hung up the skeins to dry. I’m guessing they’ll be ready in a day or so. In the meantime, the bathroom smells like a wet dog.

The cake may be a lie, but this pattern is the real deal. I have no idea what I’d do with this when it’s finished, but I really, really, really want to knit a companion cube.

Show your favorite geek how much you care by knitting him or her a pair of mittens that say “I love you” in binary. And they have the Linux penguin, too!

And here’s a Drupal knitting chart for those who love open source efforts.