Finito!!

Finito #1

The Vanilla sock!!



Happy Birthday Mom....Basil (the bear) not included. I figured out that if I actually worked on the blasted thing I'd finally finish it.

Knit Picks Dancing, wool/cotton/nylon blend. It is rather thinnish and has quite a bit of give. They no longer have this yarn, but mom loves it, so I'll have to find a good sub. I'm thinking something with bamboo. Let me know if there are better options.
No idea what color. The way it knitted up reminds me of Sweet Tart candies. (Yes, I'm loony, why do you ask?)
Knit on two #1 circs.

Finito #2

RIP MJ

Please, please, please, no mas!! Reverend King he is not! He was a sadly, self-destructed individual.

Finito #3

Finally, over the holiday, we got to one of the state parks we've been interested in for a long time. It is on the "endangered" parks list. PA, like so many other other states has a huge budget shortfall, and there are 20some odd state parks that may be closed due to the budget short fall. We have some glorious areas in PA, and it would be a shame!

This is Trough Creek State Park. It is over an hour south east of us. What I liked:



The Rainbow Falls. But I could have done without the felled tree down the middle.














The Falls stairs, which looked a heck of lot like Cirith Ungol for you Lord of the Rings geeks.















The Balanced Rock, a remnant from one of the ice ages. It is balanced precariously over Trough Creek. One of these days they expect it to tumble over the precipice. I hope the idiots who think it is the place to proclaim their love for each other with magic markers stop before it happens.









The cliff side view.













This is taken along one of the ridge trails. Only problem with this park is that most of the trails are up! Makes for tiring hiking. But the views are wonderful.














This is a suspension bridge. It is wonderfully swingy, and made me very nervous to cross. It felt like being in a ferris wheel.






What I didn't like were all the signs that reminded us that rattle snakes are protected, and there are lots of snakes in the park....Not a snake fan, alas, and I kept wondering who would protect me from snakes.......! Thank goodness I didn't meet any.

Well, thanks for that...

This is for the anonymous commenter, who explained that she is anonymous only because of technical issues. Please know, I appreciate your comment, regardless of mode. We might wish to agree to disagree however.

I thought you, and anyone else who cares, might like to know that the genesis of the "elderly hippy dippy" description comes from the self descriptions of elderly (or maybe aging would be a better adjective) hippy dippies of my acquaintance. Some I count among my good friends. I also never said that ALL of Brattleboro was of that description, just the few that began the idiocy on your council, and wasted tax money on a public vote. And just so you know we have plenty of those types who sit on our very own town council, and waste our tax money on a regular basis.

As for being jealous. HA! (Maybe even double ha!) I have had more people tell me how lucky we are to live here than I ever thought possible. Just this week I met a realtor in another city, who waxed poetic, about clients selling their homes to move here to retire. They don't call it Happy Valley for nothin'. So jealous....hardly. We have woods, hippy dippies, little traffic (outside of six weekends a year) and a Wegman's (which is why I'm never moving).

I am jealous of Brattleboro for one reason though, you have one of the most talented, and charming, artists I've ever had the pleasure of meeting living there. We met him something like 30+ years ago, and if he had a web site I'd give him a plug.

If you spend....

...your time reading blogs.....ya don't spend any writing blogs.

I think this is going to become one of the sayings I use on my header. I'm going to play catchup today, because, even though I've been knitting, my frogging has been keeping my knitting from showing any progress.

We spent the 4th of July, just hanging out at home. The weather was shaky so we didn't go hiking or even go out to see the fireworks. Instead, we WATCHED THEM ON TV! I kid you not. But when you can hear the rain pounding on the roof, you just know you made the right decision. That and the fact that you have a great goblet of sangria loaded with berries at your elbow, just adds to the satisfaction.

Right after the fireworks, my DH flipping through the channels found a park ranger on our local access channel leading a tour group at Gettysburg, describing Pickett's charge. The battle of Gettysburg took place July 1 - 3, 1863. The guide was a geeky looking fellow, who turned out to be a state historian, and he was incredibly interesting. Because DH and I are both suckers for history, this turned out to be better than fireworks. Gettysburg is roughly 2 hours southeast of us--a pretty easy drive, but neither of us have ever toured the battlefields. We decided that we will try to do something like that later this summer. Besides the Boyd's Bear museum is in the vicinity.....

We did finally get to hike later in the weekend. We hiked a tiny part of the Mid-State Trail.

The Mid State Trail, Pennsylvania's longest and wildest footpath, extends 270 miles (currently) from the Mason-Dixon Line at the Pennsylvania-Maryland border near Artemas, northward to near Morris, in Tioga County on the Pennsylvania-New York border.

In an email to a relative, my husband wrote "we hiked Mid State Trail also
known as "The Wildest Trail in Pennsylvania". We didn't see any black bears or rattlesnakes, though, which is part of the reason for that name. Ummmm....he neglected to tell me the rattlesnake part of this.

We had hiked a bit of it on Friday evening. Only about a mile or so along the ridge. On Sunday afternoon we decided to hike to a trail known locally as the "Indian Steps" which was probably not used by indians, nor is it steps. Just one of those weird local things. It is about 2.5 miles further along than we hiked on Friday. I can tell you that the majority of the trail was unrelenting rocks. We were both wearing Bean knife-edged hiking boots, and it was a good thing. The first .5 mile or so is an easy jog down a track used to service the high tension lines at the top of the mountain. Once you leave the area of the towers, though, rocks, rocks and more rocks ...the perfect home for snakes...Yoi! And the perfect recipe for twisted ankles. I hate snakes--even more than twisted ankles. It also made the going so slow we had to turn around before we reached the Indian Steps. We were probably close, but could only guess based on our pedometer readings which refused to agree.



I love this though. This is the view over Rt 45 to the north west.










This is DH overlooking the view to the south east.



Yeah there is a great swath cut through the forest for the power lines. But even with that there is something weirdly powerful about it.


I think that next time we're going to hike UP the "steps" to the Mid-State and see how far we get.

Next time, Art's Fest!