Now it's fall...

It got cold last night. Sufficiently cold in my house that I had to turn on the furnace. (I know, I know...I was trying to hold out, there are a couple people in my department who kind of play the Energy-Savings Poker contest and see who can hold out longest in the summer to turn on the a/c in their house, and who can hold out longest in the winter before turning on the furnace. But you know? A neck muscle I injured years and years ago* has been acting up, and being too cold - especially when I sleep - seems to make it worse. So the Energy-Savings Poker people can just be smug in that they won this year, I guess. Because I need for my neck not to be all cramped up.)

(*Like, more than 30. I trace my neck problems back to the last day of one of the sessions of swimming lessons I had as a kid - I would have been five or six. It was chilly a lot of summers in Northeast Ohio in the 70s when I was a kid, and this must have been a chilly day. The swim instructors were letting us have a "free swim and play" (with their supervision of course). I was up on one of the slides that went down into the pool, just ready to slide down, someone called my name, and I turned sharply to look. Chilly day + wet little kid that's been in and out of the pool + sudden movement = huge muscle cramp in my neck. (I still remember spending the rest of the day lying on the couch with a hot water bottle on my neck, and the time-restrictions on watching television lifted for that day...) Ever since then, that muscle has been weak and prone to cramping or hurting. I suppose what happened is I tore the muscle and no one realized that that was what happened. (Besides, I'm not sure what they'd do for a torn muscle like that. Surgery there might be kind of risky, considering the number of nerves in the vicinity...)

Also last night, I got around to decorating my mantel for Halloween. (There are still ten days to go, no? Better late than never).



The thing hanging on the front of the mantel is a table runner my mother made for me and sent me this fall. Since I rarely use table runners on the table, I thought I'd prefer to anchor one edge with candles (and my big Petosky stone) and drape it over the mantel. Here's a close-up:



It's made with an interesting, sort of vintage-y "Basement Cat with Hats" fabric. (Some people who read I Can Has Cheezburger have taken to calling black cats Basement Cats...because in ICHC land, God is referred to as Ceiling Cat (and is a white cat), so his opposite would, of course, be Basement Cat.)

I also have my Halloween Domo-kun up there, and a little Halloween Hello Kitty (yes, they made her orange for Halloween) and my own cuddly Basement Cat that I mailordered several years back from Build-a-Bear.

I also finished one little thing over the weekend:



These socks have been on the needles for well over a year. That's mainly because (a) plain knit socks don't generally don't provide the same impetus for me to work on them as patterned socks do, where each row of the pattern feels like you're that much closer to the end - or it's fun to see the pattern develop and (b) I really, really didn't like the yarn.

The yarn is Wisdom Socks Poem, and it's very splitty, and the ball I had tended to go thick-and-thin on me (at one point the yarn was so thin it broke and I had to do a join). And it's scratchy. After putting these on to photograph, I immediately washed them with some of my hair conditioner in the hopes of making them softer.

Also, I think I'm kind of done with the "big blocks of color so you won't get matching socks unless you buy two skeins of the yarn" socks, like the Noro sockyarn socks. (the Noro sockyarn is nice for many other things - I love the shawl I made out of the Silk Garden Sock - but I'm just not in love with it for socks.)

I don't know. I still like variegated yarns, but more and more, I find myself reaching for more "predictable" colors (like many of the semi-solids) for things like socks.