The ongoing blanket

 Mostly better; gearing up for exam week next week. I'll get a bunch of grading tomorrow and more on Thursday, and I have to write the systematics final some time. 

Tonight I had a little bit of time to relax, so I added a few more rows to the corner-to-corner garter blanket:

It's hard to photograph now because the diagonal side (where the active knitting is) is too long for the needle, so I have to bunch it up. I want to keep going on this, though - I have a whole other giant cake of the yarn and so I will either start decreasing after this one runs out, or once it is longer than my height on one of the edge-sides. (it's getting close; it's probably a meter and a quarter at this point; I'd like it to be two meters. I'd also like another color change or two....)

This is the big Lion Brand "Mandala" cake (they call it a "bonus bundle"; it's almost 1200 yards in a cake). The colorway is called "Sasquatch," which I find amusing. ( actually think the colors border on being 70s-fabulous, like maybe you'd see them in airline seat upholstery of the era, or in a vest a hippie would wear)

Garter stitch is easy and it's good to work on when you're tired and don't want to concentrate but it does take a LONG time to get very far with it. 

And a couple more photos that didn't make it into the post yesterday evening:

I suspect that sign is as much a "hey, stay on the trails, you louts" as it is any real danger - I've worked in the field a lot here and while snakes are always a possibility, only once did I see a venomous one (a baby copperhead; we just gave it a very wide berth and it was fine) and have very occasionally seen clearly non-venomous ones like rough green snakes (Opheodrys aestivus) - which are actually kind of cute - and "rat" snakes*, which are usually on their way getting away from you by the time you see them. 

(*used to be Elaphe obsoleta, but I think they're in a different genus now)

And also an onion - probably Allium canadense, that's the most common one here and it makes those bulblets up in the flowering head: