I’m still here!

Med school is kind of sucking up most of my life (imagine that!) but I have been crafting a bit on the side!  I’ve got lots to share with  you all, just as soon as Mike sends me my camera charger from Regina!

Hope you are all having a lovely fall and that your brains aren’t falling out of your ears, wherever you are!

x0

nothing says ‘baking prairie heat’ like a wool hat

the pattern is Marigold by Marnie Maclean in Patons Merino from my stash.

there’s a whole lot of these out at Chief Whitecap Park right now: beautiful saskatoon berries baking in the sun, being gobbled by birds and waiting to be enjoyed by anyone willing to work a bit for them.

What do you do with them?

you pick them.

are they good to eat, you ask?
they think so.

I hope you do too. Guess what everyone is getting for festivus this year.

jam making notes- 4L (that’s about 16 c.) of saskatoons. 11/2 c. blueberry/pomegranate juice. 2 c. honey from the farmer’s market. 2 pkg. Bernardine Low sugar. Stewed to perfection following the instructions in the Bernardine packaging.
I use my aunt’s method of heating up the jars in the oven to 300degrees, heat up the lids in water on the stove top, add boiling jam to jars, put lids on, screw on the sealer and let cool. I do this because I don’t have a water-canner. You have to be quick and very careful not to burn yourself, but it works well and i’ve never had a problem with jars not sealing. Of course, I always make jam on a sunny day and that makes all the difference.

CAVEAT:
In my own defense- I was not
a) drunk in the real sense of the word (ie. too many libations)
b) my shortrows are actually perfect and not the problem here.

Last night I stayed up late waiting for Mike to arrive safely to Regina through a massive thunderstorm. I started a new pair of Fibertrends clogs for my uncle. I was congratulating myself on excellent ahead-of-time festivus preparation and good usage of random scraps of Patons Merino from my stash.

yes the colours kind of put your teeth on edge, but I can promise that the recipient will be all over their garish combination.
So, all happy with myself, feeling pretty confident since I’ve knit this once before, I cast on and got started. I fired up itunes and dug in to listen to old episodes of Cast-on. I was just flying along, toes a-tapping.

Heel looked good. Scary garish colours, but still everything was just fine.

the top looked great. all my little shortrows were lined up exquisitely.
on the whole, everything was going smashingly.
Then I switched to the smaller sized circular and something felt wrong.

Let’s go in for a closer look shall we? See anything strange there? look closely at the join where the split in the heel is relative to the rest of the foot.

Still think everything’s okay?
Take a look at how many stitches there are on the right hand side of the join.

that would be 4 + the slip stitch.
Now. Take a look at the number of stitches on the left hand side of the join.

that would be eleventy- billion.
sigh.

my perfect short rows are about 8 stitches off centre.

Damn you Brenda and your rediculously entertaining pod-cast.

Today there was mail!

Well packaged mail! from The Small Object

I mean, seriously…the cutest packaging ever.

I bought 2 vintage twine holders and a pencil box.

Because, well, because they’re really cute people who will hold my yarn!

isn’t that the happiest yarn holder you’ve seen in your life?
for G-d’s sake. he’s wearing a top hat! all jaunty like!

Now there’s actually a reason for these cute little fellas- Inspired by the folks over at Mason-Dixon Knitting recently, I started the Lace Ribbon Scarf from Knitty.

It is a beautiful river of soft chocolate that makes me so happy to knit. EXCEPT! that the lovely washable wool that I’m knitting it with is in a cone.

A cone that bounces around all over the place and falls on the floor and picks up dog hair and lint and crap. This does NOT make me happy to knit.

Now the offending cone of yarn will be well ensconced in a happy twine holder and I will be happy ALL THE TIME! well, at least while i’m knitting this scarf.

Also- photos of the cute pencil box

In other exciting news-
the garlic chives are all blooming!
Which means: Garlic Vinegar! So pretty and so yummy for salad dressing!

Mike and I went on a little ‘holiday’ to celebrate the end of his classes and the end of my job.

It started with the obligatory self-photo shot in the car.

We first made a very important pit-stop.

Did you know it’s ‘illegal’ to take photos inside of a SK liquor board store?  How silly is that rule.

We then mosey-ed on up the road to Rouleau.   You might know it better as

Dog River: home of everyone’s favourite gas station

It totally doesn’t look like a set.  I was really surprised to find out that the gas station and Ruby’s Diner were actually built for the show.  They totally look like they are re-constituted local landmarks.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about check this out.

From Rouleau, we went on to Moose Jaw where we spent a night at the Temple Garden’s Spa hanging out in the pool with ALOT of seniors and prentending we were more fabulous than we are.

The best part was the hotel room

with the king sized bed.  We figured out that the room with the bathroom and entrance actually had a larger square footage than our entire house.

The view from our balcony was lovely too…

Part of our ‘package’ was tours of the tunnels.

THIS WAS SO COOL.  Like many towns/cities in the prairies, Moose Jaw was riddled with underground tunnels that led all over the city.  They were originally built usually to move supplies to hotels, restaurants and stores from the CP stations.  Over the years they got forgotten about, boarded up and generally most people assumed that they didn’t exist.  One day, about 15 years ago, a car fell into the road on man street and ta-da! the tunnels were rediscovered.  They have created tours around them, cataloguing some local and national history in a very fun way. THe Chicago Connection was really fun and it talks about the possible connection with Moose Jaw and Al Capone’s Rum-runners in the 20’s. The Passage to Fortune is really sad and terrible.  It covers how 100’s of thousands of Chinese men (mostly) came to Canada from the 1880s to the 1940s seeking fortune and were treated HORRIBLY by local and national governments, business people and locals.

If you have any interest in Canadian History, I highly suggest making a visit.

Moosejaw is a lovely city.  They have preserved all the old buildings downtown, gutting them and creating a really neat area with old architecture and new shops and cafes.  For a while, Moose Jaw, Saskatoon and Regina were all vying for the capital of the Province.  Moose Jaw is a really wonderful place.

We enjoyed it very much.

We had snacks at Coffee Encounters on Main St.

We wandered around 3 quilting/knitting shops.

We bought really good fudge (and that’s saying alot because I really HATE fudge).

We had lunch at

Which according to Craig, Mike’s roomate in Regina, is the best Celtic pub west of Newfoundland.

(he might have a slight bias, being that he is from NFLD).

We ran into some of Mike’s friends from Regina, also out to the Spa for the day.

Nothing says holiday like being mostly drunk by 2pm in the afternoon.

We ate lemon squares that were ALMOST as good as those from the Rhineland Bakery in Victoria.

We wandered around some more and met a very interesting man.

This is Chris Weber of CWStringworks.  He repairs stringed instruments.  In the above photo he is standing with his 9th mandolin that he rebuilt.  It was beautiful and so was the music that he shared with us.  He is also part of a fun celtic band called Crofter’s Revenge.  If you ever need any stringed instrument repair, he is your guy.

The holiday wasn’t just about eating and wandering, it was of course all about knitting!

I finished a gift for a former colleague and her new baby

These are Saartje’s booties (pdf) and they are so cute they make me want to have babies, just so I can put them in them.

I also made her the tulip bib from One Skein by Leigh Radford and gave her a bottle of Nutrimetics Baby wash.

This is almost the end of the Cotton Ease, and thank G-d.  I will be so happy to have it out of my stash for good.

I finally got started on my first Rocking Socks Club package of 2008.  And I’m so in love.  The best part about this whole thing is that they send me colours that I normally would never choose and it forces me to knit outside my comfort zone.  Yay!

Um… there was also some yarn purchasing.

Mike lives 3 houses down from

and they carry

You can clearly see that I am being positively influenced by the Blue Moon folk in my new colour choices.

All in all, a wonderful whirlwind holiday.

i’m not very brave when it comes to sharing my hopes and aspirations and plans with the public.

I wish I were because i know that sharing fears and taking about hopes is helpful and half the fun of having plans. I always feel that if I share my hopes and plans and things don’t work out then I’ll be known as the girl who failed. or who flaked out on whatever it was that I was doing. This year, since I left my master’s in october has been all about transition, waiting, planning and waiting.

When mike and I moved to SK last spring for me to start my Master’s and to prepare for him to start his in the fall, I knew somehow that the choice that I was making, going into the lab that I did and working with the supervisor that I did, was wrong. It just didn’t feel right. I knew I didn’t want to teach in the school system again, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I like going to school, I like the idea of being an academic so I figured why not.
Alot of my life has been like this: I don’t know what I want to do, but I don’t know if I don’t want to do that, so ‘why not’?

The only thing that i ever truly wanted to do and could see myself ‘doing’ for the rest of my life was being a doctor.
I have always been CERTAIN that I was not smart enough to do that. I failed chemistry in the second half of first year. and got a d in physics. I held a solid B+ average for 3 years. Pre-meds don’t have solid B+ averages. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t hardcore enough. I was surely meant to do something else. I just had to accept that an figure out what it was that I was ’supposed’ to do, if it wasn’t medicine.

As the summer started and I felt progressively more icky about my situation with my supervisor. I did some secret things, “just to see” what might happen. I wrote a letter to the College of Medicine in Saskatoon requesting special permission to apply (this is because of B.Ed program not being a ‘full’ academic program because of the internship according to their criteria, you have to have been in a full academic program for 2 years to use your grades for admission. it’s not a big deal they were fine with it. anyway.)

Then I spent alot of money and signed up to write the MCAT.

and I did really well. like scary really well for the first time writing it. especially since i hadn’t taken basic chemistry and physics in over 8 years.

so i applied to the college of medicine in october, ‘just to see’, and waited.

In april, I got an email for an interview for March 15th. On March 15th, I had my ‘interview’ (it’s the new multiple mini interview process that you can read about here if you are interested).

I had fun in the interview. I actually had alot of fun, in a weird twisted gut nerve wracking way.

and I waited.

And yesterday I got a letter offering me a seat in the incoming class for August 2008.

I’m going to medical school. I’m going to be Dr. Ziola.

A happy International Day of the Midwife to all.

a couple of links for your interest and empowerment

www.trustbirth.com (please take 3 minutes and watch ‘IMAGINE’)

http://www.canadiandoulas.com/saskatchewan.htm
http://www.canadianmidwives.org/saskatchewan.htm

birthintobeing.com

www.thebusinessofbeingborn.com/

and just to keep it the craft content up-
here’s my favourite midwife

In response to your comment: Spring, jen?

does this look like spring?

i don’t think so.

On thursday it was +18C.
Does this look like +18C?

i don’t think so.

Every year the tulips burst out of the ground with optimism.

Every year the prairie spring fights back.

I think these tulips need some help with staying warm.

How about some handknits?

Patons Kroy 75% wool 25% nylon
basic toe-up sock with spiral rib and short row heel. Picot edging.

Maybe I’m just as foolish as the tulips, but i have to hope: spring’s got to come… eventually……right? RIGHT?!

Until spring spring does decide to grace our (semi-frozen, covered in dirt and dust) door, here is some ’substitute sakura’

and a picnic for good measure

I just keeping hoping that old adage: “fake it ’til you make it” has some sort of truth to it.