random musings

so I was surfing through the Ravelry site today looking at knitting patterns. As I was reading the descriptions of the gorgeous lace shawls featured in that section I noticed quite a few of the pattern names refer to rich, famous, beautiful and/or powerful women such as Nefretiti, Persephone, Cleites, and Boudica. I wonder if knitters subconsciously believe they can acquire a bit of the magic those women had by spending hours in the deep knitting concentration required to produce the delicate lace patterns. This reminds me of some cultures that believed you could acquire some of the power of the animal or enemy by eating them (i.e eating the heart of the buffalo for bravery).

Since I am knitting a sweater named the "Can Can", I guess I am secretly hoping to gain a magical ability to dance on stage in a Vaudeville show with a big puffy skirt :). I just finished the front, so far I haven't spontaneously broken out into song and dance, but I'll keep you posted.

Yolo County Fair

We went to the Yolo County Fair on Saturday. What a great deal, it's totally free. It had all the essential summer fair elements; FFA animal auctions, pie baking and gardening contests, meat on a stick, tons of tractors both old and new, flashing lights, midway barkers, screaming riders, cotton candy and lots of happy families.
We visited with all the animals, Aidan particularly liked the very friendly sheep that licked his fingers. We observed an auction and as we entered the building Craig cautioned me strongly about raising my hand or making any kind of gesture at all, as the last thing we need is a lamb in the backyard. It just so happened that that particular lamb went for $30 dollars per pound!! It must be some gloriously good lamb or the little FFA girl had some grandparents planted in the crowd.

We visited most of the exhibit halls, I think my favorites were the garden exhibits and of course, the giant vegetable exhibits. This enormous butternut squash could easily be mistaken for a baby seal!another big hit was the Entomology table put up by UC Davis, the students there were letting people gently get to know the hissing cockroaches and the very strange Walking Sticks.

Bug update

The wonderful people on BugGuide.com have identified both the mysterious caterpillar and the beautiful moth I posted about earlier this week.

The caterpillar is a Common Buckeye, more formally known as Junonia coenia , who will one day look like this!

while the beautiful moth is a female Sphinx moth, also know as Eumorpha achemon. Just to be fair, I copied this picture of the Sphinx caterpillar, quite a bold pattern, but the brown color is not so exciting.

Name that bug!

We had a BBQ this weekend and I think the highlight of the whole evening for everyone may very well have been the fantastic nighttime bugs. Even after a couple of beers I was still able to capture a couple of pretty great pictures of our uninvited guests. Now I have to research just what these critters are on my favorite entomology website, BugGuide.net.

this caterpillar is about 2"

the moth was by far the largest I have ever seen

now, I wonder if they are related?

How to tell when it's really hot out

it gets really hot here in Winters (which is kind of funny given the name of this little town), so hot we think 90 really isn't that bad. We have become like the Eskimos who have something like 22 names for snow, similarly we have many names for degrees of hotness, such as: superhot (90-95), double sun hot (95-100), based on the double ringed sun graphic in the Sac Bee indicating a really hot day), surface of the sun hot (>100) and for the very worst days: center of the sun hot (>105).

We have an indoor/outdoor thermometer mounted in the kitchen, but sometimes I need a little independent verification of just how darn hot it really is out there, so I have devised this technique to test the actual outdoor temperature:

grand times with grand baby

Aidan, my 20 month old grandson, has been visiting with us for the last 2 weeks. His greatest amusement is taking stuff from it's assigned place and redistributing it across the entire square footage floor of the house.
We have visited many fun places like the Sacramento Zoo, Marine World, Steinhardt Aquarium and many local parks.

Playing in the kiddie fountain at Discovery Kingdom (formerly known as Marine World)

teasing the fish with baby fingers in the Butterfly Garden

We went to The Old Clam House in San Francisco after visiting the remodeled California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park


in this video the little guy enjoys some new tastes and smells as he happily gobbles down calamari (also known as squid).