Work In Progress

Competition - update

I fear that I may have lead some of you astray with my last post!

It is a competition, but between me and the clock.  I would say between myself and Abigail, but, as she hasn't been born yet, that seems unfair.  The wife of a guy that works for me is having their first kid. Due date: April 17th.

Now, I've actually known about the pregnancy for six months so I'm not sure how I found myself with only 21 days to complete a blanket.  My only defense is that when I found out, it seemed there was plenty of time.

And Boy #2 found his camera so I can show you what the blanket looked like Saturday night after the soccer game:

Six repeats down, seven to go!  With 13 12 days to go, I'm cautiously optimistic...

Competitive Knitting

This past weekend was opening day for the baseball season.  We made it to opening night, though the home team's performance was a bit disappointing.  Check out the killer green suit on the right side; his yellow tie has little "A's" symbols on it.

We continued our sporting weekend by taking in a soccer game.  We managed a tie in that game.

[pretend there is a cool picture of me in front of the soccer field with my knitting.  Boy #2 (the photographer for this post) may have misplaced his camera before he downloaded said picture.]

And that pile of white that you see?  That's my ongoing competition.  800 yards in 21 days.  I can do that right?  I just need to make twice my average knitting yardage per day.  But it's a simple repeat, so I remain optimistic....

And an outtake. :)

Hiking and running

I'm trying to get back to running, though I find it comes mostly in fits and spurts.  I have some new running goals for this year and to get myself back on the wagon, Partner and I have signed up for a few races.  The first was quite steep.  The first 3 miles (uphill) took me 57 minutes.  The last 4.2 miles took 58 minutes.  Guess which portion was uphill!

I''m leaving to see my parents for a few days and want to offer some sun therapy.  Don't be too jealous, considering we continue to watch and see if the street floods down to our basement, we need the sun therapy here.  But if this is any indication, I think the flowers will be wonderful this year.

Stinson Beach run in Marin.  We started in Stinson Beach and went up towards Muir Woods.  Partner gets credit for all of these pictures!

AND then it was back down to the ocean......

The California coast north of San Francisco is one of our favorite places so after our run we went for drive and saw a beautiful still life.

A few weeks ago I finished my first 1/2 marathon of the year.  I'm happy with the way I'm running, but I did miss my goal of getting in under 3 hours by two minutes (it's a relatively flat trail course).

 

And my awesome friend who ran with us.  She is running tomorrow in a road half marathon.  I know she will finish in less than 2 hours because she ran this course in 2 hours 10 minutes!  10 minute miles on trails! I can't do that on flat roads.

Alright! Hope you all have a great week.  Maybe I'll finally get some pictures of knitting up here.

Zen and the Art of Running

Training for THE marathon continues.

Last weekend I spent time with my wonderful friend Janice in San Diego.  Sundays are our long run training days so she took me to a local reservoir lake.  A wonderful feature of the track was 1/4 mile markers all the way around the lake to let me know whether I was staying on pace or not.

At the end of the race, I told Partner that I needed Zen and the Art of Running, not realizing that someone had written the book already.  The reason, I need such a book, you see, is I've fallen twice during our training.  Both times because I was really mad.

However, mad appears to push concentration from my mind and allows the karma boomerang a clear path.  Or, an asphalt path, in my case:

Zen and I, it appears, may be a little bit apart

So, perhaps, if I'm going to make it through this little adventure, I need to calm down a bit.  I've just finished reading Born to Run, which I've found to also be very much about the mind/body connection in running. He talks in one section about relaxing into the run and just running to run and not to "get" something (weight loss, winning, etc).  Sounds good. I'll let you know if I ever get there....

The book is also a pretty fascinating read from a running/psychology/ physiology/ anthropology/ cultural/ health/ adventure story perspective.  It's a lot in less than 300 pages.  

Otherwise, training is going well.  I've missed one training day because of my ankle hurting (ahem, may be related to picture above).  We're running a 10-km race this weekend to keep motivated and check our endurance.  In two weeks, we step up the distance quite a bit and will run 10 - 20 miles every Sunday for 16 weeks. *sobs briefly*

Eighteen weeks to race day.

56 miles run, 268 miles to go.

p.s. - On a similar note, Melissa is going to do the 3 Day Walk for Breast Cancer.  Unfortunately, she's hit a bit of a training wall and could use your support.  And she has some apropos items available to thank you for your support. 

It's Spring at the Bat

Spring is here and that can only mean one thing:

Baseball is back!

And with baseball, comes baseball knitting:

The long dormant Oakland Athletic's supporter scarf, in the style of the Thin Mint Scarf.

It was a pretty good night for baseball - the rain had stopped the day before, there was recognition of old and new baseball players, and a little firework action during the National Anthem.

Unfortunately, the home team's game started to unravel (more) near the end of the eighth inning.  As the baseball gods would call it, so did the scarf's:

pardon the grainy-ness... these are camera phone shots

As I was turning the scarf, row after row, I kept thinking I was seeing a hole in the green with a little yellow shining through.  *Note to self: investigate all apparent holes in knitting before continuing*

In the 8th inning, after 20 something rounds, I finally looked closely at the "hole" only to discover that during the waning hours of last season, I'd split the yarn and knit twice into one stitch.  Since it was a single strand anchoring a column of stitches, I knew it would eventually break and leave a run in the scarf.  There was nothing to do but tear back to the offending stitch.

Fortunately, by the end of the game, I'd worked my way back up with one loose stitch per row where there had been two.  It's still a little ragged looking, but I'm distributing the loose yarn through the rows. 

Unfortunately, after tying the game, the home team managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  The opening night crowd was subdued on the way back to the parking lot.  

Let's hope the team can find and fix their mistakes as quickly as I did!