A non-knitting update

I am working away diligently on the latest Secret Project (which remains a secret, much to Brad's chagrin) but I have ALSO been otherwise occupied!

1. Gardening!
When we first moved to the main floor of our house last spring we were thrilled to have a garden. There's a raised bed in the back yard along the fence and beside the shed. At that time it looked like a patch of dirt over grown with Manitoba Maples and lots of dead sticks. No one had done anything to that garden for a long time. I really wish we'd taken a picture, because it was a total disaster.
We spent a day clearing it out, tilled it and mixed some better soil in, and waited. Brad's coworker offered us some plants from her garden, and I got a few from Nana. By September, the garden looked like this:

The lighting's all bad, but you can at least see some green stuff, including the hosta that survived the slug ravages.

This year almost everything's come back. One of the hosta has yet to appear and I think it died, but everything else is lush and full! We've had a terribly rainy spring, but we got about a week of nice sunlight in the backyard before the Manitoba maple and Chinese elm filled in their leaves and shaded it out. The garden grew like crazy, but it's calmed down a bit now. It looks like this:

MUCH greener! Everything we planted last year is super happy and healthy, and this year's additions are doing well too.

We got this Jack-in-the-Pulpit from a native plant stall at the Friends of the Farm plant sale. He was just a little sprout, but now he's all grown up with big leaves and all!

We had a sedum inside that had WAY overgrown its pot, so we gave it a haircut and planted the trimmings around the garden. They're very happy.

We picked up some lamium at the plant sale as well, they're doing quite nicely.

I found these rocks in the back yard to edge the front garden with. Now it looks less like a little patch of dirt and more like a garden! Soon the morning glories will grow up the lattice on the porch, and we'll probably pick up some annuals to plonk in the empty spaces.

 If you want more garden pictures, I've got an album full of them.


2. Getting a cat!
We adopted a cat from the Humane Society.

Her name is Guinness.

Originally she was called Smokey, but we thought that was a dumb name, and since cats don't really care about names anyway, we changed it. She's now Guinness, since she has the colourings of a freshly-settling pint, and the personality of a friendly, clumsy drunk.

She got stuck up here the other day.

She's a good kitty, and we are excited first-time cat-owners. Her favourite toys are cardboard boxes.

3. Getting older!
It was my birthday recently, and I got some presents.
From my mama, among many souvenirs from her recent trip to Vietnam, I also got some knitterly things!

A swift and ball winder! OH MY!

The ball winder arrived just yesterday, after much unexplained postal delay. The rest of the parcel arrived shortly after my birthday, but since they tried to deliver it to the wrong address (despite the fact that my mom had written the correct address everywhere possible) I didn't get it until last week.
Of course I had to try them out.

The swift is 'Amish style', which, as Brad was quick to point out, has less breakable parts than the umbrella-style ones and stows away more easily.

Such beautiful cakes of yarn it makes! And far superior to my old method of winding balls (drape the skein over the arm of the couch, wind a ball by hand onto a pencil.)

Brad also got me some presents. One was knitterly:

New project bag! With a piece of Secret Project peeking out from the flap.

It is a bag inspired by this Wondermark comic that happens to involve disaster and knitting. I should really get a print of that particular strip. Anyway, the bag is excellent, especially since Secret Project is starting to take up more and more space.

The other thing is also comic-related, but not knitting-related.

A Dinosaur Comics dry-erase board!

Having a Dinosaur Comics dry-erase board makes me appreciate Ryan North (the author) on a whole new level. Writing comics with a set layout is HARD.

The text on the whiteboard, provided by Brad the other night, brings me to thing 4.

4. Injuring myself
I went to pass a runner while biking and he suddenly and without looking changed directions. I hit him. I fell with my bike on top of me and sprained my ankle. He was just fine.

I did this on Friday. On Sunday it looked like this:

Ick.

By yesterday the swelling in my leg had gone down so that I actually had some definition to my leg and ankle, and today it's just a little bit swollen. The bruise looks awful and my foot is still puffy, but it looks a lot worse than it feels. Not a break, thank goodness, and that's the worst I suffered.


Okay, I can't end with an icky picture like that, so here's another picture of the cat.

Mrow.