Don't Look Now, She's Blogging!

Sadly, I have no pretty pictures to show today. But I have been knitting--in my copious spare time!

Okay, so I'm not done with any of my pairs of socks. (I swore I was going to finish two of them before I cast on anything else. Or... did I swear I would finish two pairs before casting on any more socks? Did I just find a loophole? Awesome!) Ahem. Anyway. Not done with the socks. But I didn't cast on more socks, so that's something, right?

What I cast on was a duck-billed platypus from this book. I got all fired up thinking about the two couples I know that are having babies, and I decided to knit each baby a whole tableau. After spending some time working on the platypus (and after buying all that yarn, enough for approximately 12 toys), I've come to realize that the naysayers were right--I can't possibly be that ambitious. Each kid gets one or two, and that'll be enough.

The platypus is just so damn cute! I modified the pattern a little--as written, it has you knit everything flat: body, four legs, tail, bill, two cheeks, and a nose plate thingy, then seam them all up and sew the pieces together. That's an awful lot of seaming for one platypus! So I decided to be clever and work each piece in the round. I was even clever enough to graft the ends of the leg/foot pieces, rather than binding off and seaming. So far, so good--I haven't out-clevered myself yet. Right now I'm working on the bill, and I think that this might be the place where my brilliant plans backfire on me--either that, or it'll be absolutely brilliant. My plan is to work the bill, the two cheeks, and the nose plate thingy as one piece. If I can make it work. It'll involve stitch holders and possibly multiple sets of needles. I'm optimistic. I expect to be finished this weekend.


I hope everyone's St. Patrick's Day was as pleasant as mine was. I decided (on my way home from work last night) to make corned beef. I also managed to forget something important at my office. I decided to swing by the office before going to the store to buy my corned beef, and I waited until 6 to leave, to let rush hour traffic disperse. Got my stuff from work, headed out to Kroger, and picked up a 3 1/2 lb brisket. (Why does meat look so much smaller at the store? And what makes me think that I'm a linebacker who can eat 3 1/2 pounds of corned beef?) Got home, and realized that it was going to take 3 1/2 hours to cook my meat. A more reasonable woman would have saved the corned beef for another night. Not me! I cranked up the oven and got out the roasting pan. Who says that 10:30 is too late for dinner? And of course, being a big paranoid freak, I still had to call my mother and make sure that it was supposed to be that pink. Silly, silly me--not only did I know that corned beef was supposed to be that color, I had also checked the internal temp and knew that it was well above the minimum safe temperature.

But regardless of the hour and my paranoia, I really enjoyed my corned beef. (And I had snacked earlier in the evening, so I wasn't completely starving!)

And today? Today, I had a corned beef sandwich for lunch. Yum!