My new Favorite Emma Shot

Pout baby pout! Yeah that's the stuff. Look all distant and thoughtful. Like "Where did I put that chunk of bone I was chewing last night?" Yeah - That's the stuff baby.

Emma is 1 year old today!

Our sweet little Emma is one year old today. (We adopted her on April 28th and they said she was about 11 months old - so that makes her about 12 months old today - so why not?) I took her to the vet to get a lyme disease booster shot. Happy Birthday Emma - Have a nice needle in your leg!

In other news....

Tom starts his new job on Monday. I could probably right for a week on that - but I won't. At the moment he is outside building a Deck for Emma. Eventually we will put her house on it. We don't have a house yet - so for the time being it's just a pup deck.

In knitting news - Well. Not knitting much these days. I knit two rows on my scrap afghan in the last week or so. A row takes about 45 minutes to an hour depending. The yarn I am using right now is slippery and puffy - so I am a little worried I may have dropped a stitch in there somewhere. What evs.

This weekend we are taking Emma to the Charity Dogwash. That should be interesting. I am really happy Tom is off graveyard shifts so that we can do stuff like this together. If he was on the night shift I would have to go alone and I am a raging chicken shit - so mostly I would just get drunk and hang out in my house.

Joined Facebook this week. Just what I needed. Another addiction! ;) I posted a video of me singing to my dog. I am such a dork.

Our New Furr Baby!

So we adopted our puppy this last week. On Tuesday April 28th we drove an hour and a half away and picked up our sweet little girl. Her name was Prada - but they said she doesn't know that name so we changed it to Emma. She is 11 months old and she weights 24.7 lbs. They think she is an Australian Cattle dog (Blue Heeler) and probably some Border Collie - which explains her blue eyes, and maybe some sheltie. She loves her ducky and today I bought her a sheep toy that she threw around and got all excited about. We came up with a schedule where I walk her in the morning and Tom walks her at night. I found out quite quickly that walking a dog who pulls you along up and down hills is a better work out then I was getting on my tread mill. :) I am hoping once I get used to the morning walks (whose training who here?) I will pick up the tread mill afghan again. But for now I am content with walking the dog.

We hope to add a cat to our family in the next month here. There were hundreds available at the Animal Humane Society when we checked 2 weeks ago. They only had 22 dogs at that time - and they were all "Bully Breeds" so we opted to use a different rescue shelter for our puppy needs.

I am looking at dog sweaters to knit her. I picked out the "Buster" pattern on the Berroco web site - but I am not too thrilled with the yarn choice. It calls for Berroco Softwist which is wool and rayon. Hand wash or dry clean only. Um... For a dog? My girl gets dirty! I am thinking a machine wash wool would be a better choice. Maybe I will cruise the KnitPicks website to see what I can find.

Totals and photos for the first row

The first row was completed on Friday March 27th. I took 2 pictures of the first row on it's own for posterity. This is what it looks like laid out on my dining room floor. If I was more confident about myself I would have lay beside it for scale - but I am so not there yet - so this will have to do.

Here are the stats as of the completion of the first row:

Total time: 9.45 hours

Total distance: 24.96 miles

Total calories: 3222

I missed two days in total on the project so far. And the last couple days I ate hella bad - so my weight loss is in question. (Big sigh here.) Friday I gorged at a pizza party at work and Saturday Tom and I hit Red Lobster. (And the food I ate was the equivalent of shoving a stick of butter in my mouth...So....goood.)

So I am now on row two and have sewn the first two squares on row two. I realized my stitching abilities are a little .... sad. Also - my gauge is all over the place from knitting on the treadmill. One day I power through in under 30 minutes and my square is tight and hard - the next I plod along and finish in 40 minutes and my square is loose and pliable. So this is going to look VERY homemade when I finish it. (Which is the nice way of saying Ugly as all heck.) Whatevs. Ain't nothing going to breaka my stride!

So here is what I want for row 2:

Since I am being fairly diligent with the treading every day I want to work on the food and water consumption. I can't break every time someone thrusts pizza or Red Lobster in front of my face. I need to find healthy alternatives. My day to day is a huge struggle with food. I never know what to eat and when. Mornings I am not really hungry. Lunch I tend to eat in my car while reading. And dinner? Oy. So I need to find healthy meals to eat that will make me feel good.

Probably that means more time planning out menu's and grocery shopping and cooking more. I know a carb heavy menu makes me sleepy and crabby - so I want to focus on veggies and protein. I think breakfast is the hardest because I am soooo sick of eggs and I feel like if I eat it starts the hunger up - and then I want to eat more and more. But I know I can't keep skipping breakfast either. Argh. Where are the magic food pellets when you need them.

Sometimes when you are feeling low the world smiles on you.

I had a tough week. I missed two days on my tread mill this week and Tom finally got his severance package from the EVIL EMPIRE. One of my dearest friends who I have worked with for 7 years now - today was his last day. I pigged out on pizza and came home feeling pretty low. When I went to go get the mail this evening I was surprised by a little package with some tea and a pen and a post card that read "Keep up the good work on the treadmill afghan!" (HalloweenTango - You ROCK!)

I was so touched! So I took a picture of it so I could post it up on ravelry as a proper thank you - and then put on my work out shoes and headed down to the treadmill. I completed my 16th square tonight - which means once I stitch them all together I will have completed my first row. 1/16th of the way to an afghan. Wow. I am tickled!

And now - off to a nice hot bubble bath and a glass of wine with my book. Awesome!

Tombs of Endearment

Just finished this book today and have to say it was another fun read. I don't really understand why I like these books. The "Who Done it" is always predictable, the main character is slow to figure things out - AND YET I find myself really enjoying the books. I am quite anxious to read the next one in the series. I know it comes out sometime in 2009 - just not sure when. (Guess that's a pretty easy thing to figure out though. Amazon to the rescue!)

In other news - My 15th square on my treadmill is complete. Tomorrows square will be the last one in the first row. I am already hurting in the motivation department. I suppose that will be true with any lifestyle change. *sigh* I am just looking forward to a nice bath with a glass of wine and digging into my next book before I make dinner. I think tonight (unless Tom veto's my dinner plans) will be shrimp on a bed of linguine. We will see. Last night I had a salad and 20 soda crackers with butter. Cripes. I have to figure out how to feed myself better.

Also - I should maybe start another knitting project. I want to make so many things but with the 30-40 minutes of knitting on the tread mill everyday I find my motivation at night to start a new project is pretty nill. (Not to mention finishing a project I already have going. I am talking to YOU felted bowl that is not even half done!)

Photo's from Day 12

I just finished my 12th square and thought I would take a couple of pictures to show my progress thus far.

The first picture is my afghan with the 12th square still unattached at the end there. The charcoal color was a bit adventurous for me since most of the colors I selected up to this point look kind of like an Easter egg got sick and barfed up this yarn - but in a good wool/mohair way.

The second photo is of the square I knit today. It's got a ruler under it to give a sense of scale and to show the 4 1/2" that it possesses.

I am starting to think 16 squares across might be kind of mad. Like the afghan might be insanely large. Which could be good - but I need to think about that a little. 12 squares is already the length of the table.... Hmmmm.

You can see I keep long tails on the squares. That's what I am using to attach them to each other. I am SOOOOO happy I had the brains to start attaching them as I went so I didn't go bonkers when I finished the afghan looking at a mound of squares and thinking - oh crap - I have to attach all these together! Also - I decided to attach each square in chronological order - so there is no fuss about what square to attach when. I pick each color each day based on my mood or the holiday (st. pats day was green) or my whim. When I finish the afghan it will be a visual diary of every day I spent on the treadmill.

The Origins of my Tread Mill Afghan

In an effort to trick myself into doing some exercise I decided I would start knitting while using the treadmill. I began my adventure on March 10th.

Since I have several skeins of Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Bulky in my Stash I thought I might as well use that. (Love that yarn.) The yarn recommends a size 10 1/2 needle so I grabbed my needles - picked a skein (balling it first) and a metal mixing bowl and headed down to the basement and got on the treadmill. I cast on 3 stitches and started knitting the washcloth pattern my mom taught me.

Here is the pattern:

cast on 3 stitches.

Increase rows: Slip the first stitch. Knit to the last stitch. Knit into the front and back of the last stitch.

Decrease rows: Slip the first stitch. Knit across until you have 2 stitched left. Knit the last two stitches together.

I started walking on the treadmill that day not even knowing how many rows I would knit or how big I wanted the squares. I just jumped on and started. At around 15 minutes I counted my rows and decided on 25 rows being a good number. (It ended up being the perfect number but I had no idea at the time that was the case.) My first square was completed after 33 minutes 10 seconds of walking sedately on my treadmill. I covered 1.33 miles and burned 175 calories. The color I was in the mood for was (I believe) Supreme Purple.

In case anyone is wondering why I needed a mixing bowl to knit on the treadmill - I put the ball of yarn in it and let it bounce around in the bowl while I yank the yarn from it. The thought of that yarn rolling all over my gross basement floor is just too much to handle. Yuck.

A few days into my afghan/exercise regimen I mentioned to my awesome co-worker and knitting pal that I was doing this. She's a math whiz and helped me work out the details of my afghan so I would know how many squares I wanted to make and what time line I was talking.

Here is the math:

Each square measures in at about 4 1/2" x 4 1/2".

I decided (rather randomly) that I wanted the afghan to be 6' x 6'. (Images of snuggling under this monster next winter with my husband were floating through my head.)

With those measurements we determined I would need 256 squares to get a 6' x 6' afghan.

Huh. I definitely had no idea what I was getting into. And thank Jebus for that!

So where I am currently sitting in terms of squares etc....

Current number of Squares: 11

Current number of hours on the tread mill: um... somewhere between 6 and 7 hours. Simple math is escaping me at the moment... (sad but true. I almost didn't graduate college the year I did because I was so shitty at math. But that's another story.)

Current distance walked: 17.07 miles.

Current Calories burned: 2209.

Pounds lost: 6

Yesterday is the first day I missed since starting. Let me tell you the guilt at missing one day when I was physically able to - but couldn't (aka - didn't) make time for it is rather consuming. But I can't bring the day back and today is a new day - so onward!