Willamette Valley Music Fest
This post is for the locals. This weekend, May 17-18 is the Willamette Valley Music Fest. In its 38th year, Music Fest features over 30 bands on two stages, an art expo, food vendors and beer and wine concessions. Sponsored by the UO Cultural Forum it is free to everyone! There's a wide variety of music from indie rock to bluegrass, from folk to reggae.
It should be a really warm weekend, and sunny, so folks should wear sunscreen and plan to drink lots and lots of water. TheBoy and I will be there for part of the weekend (I'm not sure which part yet). I'll be running around with my camera, likely getting sunburnt through my SPF 85. If you're local, come out and enjoy some good music. You can find all the pertinent information on the website, and there'll be an insert in this week's Weekly if you want to see it all printed out on paper.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have no financial interest in the WVMF, but I am connected to the Cultural Forum.
Pay it Forward
I found this here, who found it here, who found it...okay, I won't actually continue any further back, but I am going to take the challenge up.
Here's the deal:
I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this PIF exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be yet and you may not receive it tomorrow or next week, but you will receive it within 365 days. That is my promise. The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog.
Hopefully, I've got enough folks reading that three of you will want to continue this on...I guess we'll just wait and see. You know you want to be involved.
Doing vs. Discussing
A big part of why I don't blog as much as I used to is that I spend a lot of my internet time doing research for other big things going on right now. No, I am not going to have a baby, just to clarify things. Let's just say it will be great in the end.
Awhile ago I had the pleasure of meeting Jodie for coffee downtown. What a sweetheart she is!
As a side note to our meeting, the Pumpkin cookies at Palace Bakery are delicious, and should not be missed if you get the chance.
The main purpose of our meeting was to deliver fiber that I had bought from Jodie's new Etsy Shop. Four ounces of merino in her "Hebrides Overture" colorway:
Note the cute little stitchmarker near the tag. It even coordinates with the fiber!
I love the portrait of the composer on the back of the tag! Cute detail, I'm not sure I would have known what he looked like otherwise. Classical music is certainly not something I know a lot about.
The fiber was dyed so that all of the blue is at one end, all of the brown at the other and the green in the middle. I'm spinning it starting with all of the brown, then I'll spin the green, then the blue so that when it is knit it will be a really interesting progression of color. Originally it was going to be a hat for TheBoy but we'll see when it's all done.
Aside from meeting with Jodie I'm not sure that I've done anything of any great interest lately, that I can talk about anyway. We're waiting on the cd of the professional photos from the wedding and then I'll post and link to some of my favorites. Overall we're very happy with them.
TheBoy and I have been spending a lot of time together, and there has been knitting. Gift knitting and charity knitting. I am in dire need to finish up my package for the charity blanket swap and send it off, my downstream pal should have gotten part of my gift to her ages ago, and the blanket is still here. Newlywed life is no less busy than wedding planning life was, I'm not sure why I expected it to be.
Out of Habit.
I have totally fallen out of the habit of writing in the blog. There have been lots of goings-on so I'll do my best to update things here. For starters, we're married.
TheBoy is also now TheHusband and apart from being able to call him that (which I do with remarkable ease and regularity) we've determined that we don't feel any different, just less stressed. To pull a reference from Spiral Staircase, I love him more today than yesterday, but not half as much as tomorrow.
Most things went off without a hitch. We had an issue with the first flowers that we ordered, but we were able to get replacements without problem. The weather was less than cooperative--it was sunny but pretty cold. So, instead of dancing we had "gather around the firepit time." It was windy. We had to put up the tents we rented because weather.com was suggesting that we were going to get rain--we didn't --but the tents ended up keeping everyone from having to pick little bits of tree out of their food. The food was fantastic. The cake was beautiful and delicious. We received many wonderful gifts--now we just need to send our thank you notes. We haven't gotten many photos of the event, I'm thinking about mailing cds to some of the folks we know took lots of photos in hopes of getting those back. We're also still waiting on the pro photos and I'm not entirely sure when we'll have those. We spent a few days away from home, but not many. We're taking our honeymoon in August, to go to the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. Yep, we're going to a web comic convention for our honeymoon. We're also going to be visiting friends in the Seattle area at that time.
We bought a new couch. It is giant and comfortable. We then also had to buy a new, smaller coffee table. It is far from giant, but includes a handy drawer for the remote at the end of the day.
We have finally also logged a win in the war against melting that our apartment had engaged us in. Now, the 1970's were a terrible time for energy efficiency in building materials. Aluminum windows were all the rage because they were Cheap. And my apartment complex took that Cheap factor and ran with it. Our west facing wall--which has no shade whatsoever--has two large aluminum slider windows, one that is 4'x6' and one that is 3'x4'. That's a lot of heat gain in the summer with just inexpensive drapes between the sun and us. (It's also a lot of heat loss in the winter, but that's less of an issue because the heat gain from winter sun helps to offset the heat loss from lack of insulation. Plus, I can always put on a sweater. What kind of a knitter would I be if that weren't a welcome option?)
Now, we've lived in this apartment for over three years now and in the summer it's a never ending battle to keep the apartment cool enough to keep us from melting. The first summer we spent a lot of time in the pool. The second summer I wasn't here, TheBoy was living alone while I was in Alaska and he taped paper bags and cardboard over the windows. Yeah, I can't live like that. Last summer saw the arrival of a portable ac unit which helped a great deal but required being moved to the bedroom on days when it was really hot. Yesterday, at 7pm, our apartment was logging in at 86 degrees, which was only a few degrees shy of the outside temperature. I had the ac unit and a box fan chugging as hard as they could and it was barely making a dent. Enter blackout drapery liner fabric from Joann's. It's on the expensive side, but after installing it (we cut it to size and just used the drapery pins to tack it to the back of the ugly cheap drapes) the temperature has been much more comfortable. It's currently 88 degrees outside [and likely to get a little warmer before it cools off for the night] and inside it's 76. Score one for blackout and TheMarrieds! It's much darker in the apartment but by tacking it to the existing drapes we can still open them easily in order to let in sunshine in the morning, before the sun moves to that side of the building.
Knitting news. I am currently in possession of the Charity Blanket Swap blanket. Now that the apartment is cooler I can crank that out and get it on to it's next knitter. I'm also working on the Mystery Stole 3. Signups close sometime today (if they're not already). I've finished chart A and part of chart B, and hope to have charts A-C done by the time the next clue is posted next Friday. I'm waiting for yarn to knit for two new arrivals, a grand-nephew who should be making his debut in October (there is a large age gap between TheBoy and his siblings. His niece is 25 and has been married for something like three years.) There is also a new Minnesotan who is expected to make their debut on the 29th of December, the second child of some very dear friends of mine. And I'm plugging along on a few other things as well, including something that is an extremely nerdy gift for TheBoy. He knows what it is but I'm going to wait to reveal it here on the blog for a bit yet.
Anyone that's in Eugene, there are bagpipers slated to play at Washburne Park on Sunday at 6.30pm. We're planning to be there. Depending on how hot it is, I'll probably have knitting. Leave me a comment if you're planning to be there as well.
Tel-Ewe-Phone
Sheep sculptures. As far as I can tell, their bodies are wrapped with telephone cords. I like this a lot, both in direct imagery [the cord makes a great wool-y texture] and also in the artistic implications of a flock of sheep made of telephone parts. I'm not entirely sure who created these, I found them using Stumble Upon which is an extension for both Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets you "channel surf the internet." Very good for when you're waiting for an enormous file to save at work.