More Weekend Fun

I've been having the best weekends lately!

Saturday before last, Donna and I went to work on the World Record Sock at A Knitted Peace in Littleton. That shop is one of my favorites - great staff, great selection, lovely store.

Here's Donna, seated at the sock...


Here's me working on it....


And the both of us...


And a couple of little kids that came later to work on it with there moms....

There was a little tag below where I was working on the sock and it said, "[child's name] - 6 years old worked here - be careful!" I wonder if she'll be the youngest. I wonder who will be the oldest?

I didn't get a good shot of Sam working on it but she has a bunch of pic's of it as well.

That's not even the full length of the cuff, people! And that table is probably about a 6 footer. It's a traveling sock in the truest sense - it's being shipped all over the world and when it's finished, it'll be about 14' from cuff to heel. I'd love to see how they turn that heel! It'll be at Knitted Peace until the end of August. If you go and work on it, you get to put your name in the book those names will eventually end up in the Guiness Book of World Records! I tried to make it all the way around the sock but only made it halfway. Sucker's big!

Then, August 2, a bunch of us went to Stitch and Pitch to watch a Rockies game.

String was there with a table full of free yarn. Sale bin stuff, but who's gonna turn down free yarn? And then, when you got to your seat, there was another free ball of something in your cup holder from Knit Knack (also sale bin stuff but still free!). Candace, one of our group, got the bright idea to go to the empty seats behind us and get more yarn. Pretty soon we were all doing it - it was like an Easter egg hunt!

Towards the end of the game, the leftover stuff from Knit Knack was being passed around in bags and you could pick what you wanted. Then at the last inning, they came with what was left in those bags and started chucking it into the crowds!

After the game, our group of 12 went to an Indian restaurant for a great meal. Then the light rail home and bed. I got home around 1am!

This guy was holding a big blue ball of yarn for his wife. Obviously really happy about it, while he watched the game. Sweet guy!

Then last weekend, D and I took the kids to Breckenridge! We got a 2 night stay at a nice hotel for $50 because we agreed to go see a timeshare. Totally almost bought a timeshare! But we didn't. Maybe later. Maybe not. Who knows? We have a lot of big news around here that I'm kind of keeping to myself until it's all worked out one way or the other (I'm not pregnant, if that's what you're thinking). So things are kind of up in the air financially right now.

But our Breckenridge weekend was stellar!

There was rain and lots of it. Sometimes, slushy rain. And it snowed up at the top of the mountain. We couldn't have been happier! After ten years of soul sucking heat and not much else, in Tucson, we love all this different, crazy weather. All weekend long, it'd rain for a couple of hours, then the sun would peak out for a couple of hours. It was lovely!

We drove up to Keystone and the boys spent quite a long time throwing rocks and sticks in the river.

Then the boys played in the play area, which strangely, had a jail and stocks...

When I asked Trevor why he was in jail, he said he stole a purse. He's weird.

On Sunday, we went to Frisco (which has a nice little yarn shop - I think it's called What's Needlin' U). The boys played on the statues...

and they were having there Founder's Day shenanigans with a free ice cream social. They have all these tiny cabins in the town park that you can walk through. They are original buildings from the frontier days that had all been moved to the park as a sort of museum. Very cool!

On our way home, I took a bunch of pic's of the bark beetle damage. Apparently, there's this beetle that kills trees. See the brown trees? Dead.

Lots of trees....

Whole mountains of dead trees. See that mountain on the left? See that little green triangle in the middle? That's all that's left of live trees on that whole mountain. All the reddish brown coloring - dead trees.

One of the bigger problems the beetles are causing besides mass murder of trees is the fire factor. Look at all the brown on that mountain. It's just one spark, one lightning strike away from total devastation.

A newspaper we saw in Breck. told about a man who is using beetle-dead trees exclusively in his log cabin building business. Great idea! But I doubt he'll be able to keep up. There's no way anyone could keep up. If they went in and just started cutting all the dead trees out, the beetles would just jump to fresh ones without even being seen.

Years ago, I read that the cure for syphilis - part of what's in the shot they give people - is primarily made up of herring sperm. Fish sperm. How did anyone come up with that being the cure for syphilis??

My connection to bark beetle's is this. I wonder what's out there that no one's thought of that would take care of them but not hurt other things. I hear cayenne pepper poured on an ant hill will take care of the whole colony. Wonder if that would work on bark beetles. But then you have the problem of also killing all the ants in the area and they aren't hurting anything. See what I mean?

Some yay-hoo called into a radio station, once, when they were discussing the beetle problem and suggested they bring in a certain bird that only eats bark beetles. Won't work. A) what bird only eats one bug? B)What happens to the environment when you bring in a natural enemy of one thing and when that one thing is gone, you're stuck with all these birds that don't really belong there either?

Wishing I could save trees, Ruth!