It's Over

It's official. Once you've been to the Minnesota State Fair, summer is over. Once you go through the ritual of spending almost an entire week's worth of calories and fat intake in one afternoon, fall arrives. Welcome fall.

This is not an entirely bad thing. I am actually quite eager to get back to a "normal" life after the chaotic schedule we've had this summer. We've got one last hurrah to go and then we're back to being empty nesters once again.

The garden sure looks like fall is on its way. Several hail storms have ruined all chances of having my garden photographed for Martha Stewart's magazine. (Like that's all that would keep me out.) While the foliage is hurting, the late bloomers are picking up the slack.

Now I'm glad that I didn't have the heart to pull up the few Morning Glory volunteers that managed to come up in the rock bed around the house. Seriously, never plant these things unless you want to live with them sprouting in your garden for the rest of your natural life.

The mums, too are starting to open up. I'm partial to this one since it was one of the first things I ever planted in my garden after we built our house. At that time, those few mums were bigger that some of the shrubs we had just put in. We've come a long way in eighteen years.

Unfortunately, my knitting hasn't fared (no pun intended) as well. Sporadic progress on the all-over cabled pullover I've been working on came to a screeching halt when I finished the back of the sweater and finally admitted to myself that I wasn't loving the results. Even though the yarn I'm using is one of the yarns suggested in the pattern, I think it's too heavy for the project. It's billed as a worsted yarn, but seems to be closer to an Aran weight, and the knit fabric is just too dense to allow for a nice drape. It seemed pointless to continue.

However, thanks to Ravelry's new and improved search engine, within a short amount of time I had a few ideas for how I could use this yarn with some of the patterns I already had on hand. So far, I'm still in the swatch stage and haven't had the heart to do the big rip-out, but I should be on my way to re-using this yarn soon.