My DC - Week 32

Not all of my DC is pretty. Some of it is pretty sad like the National Bank of Washington building. I pass it just about every day on the way in to work and I often wonder about it. What was it like in it's heyday? What was it like before birds, repurposing and general neglect took their toll?

Look at the details on the building. Some of them are just so lovely. I particularly like the heavy looking metal doors and the round medallions on either side of the doorway.

Over the years I've occasionally seen the street-level windows used to display art by local artists but mostly this building just sits, sad and abandoned. That could be changing soon though. I did a little research while preparing this post and found a site proclaiming that this edifice will soon become the Armenian Genocide Museum.

O is for ...

Oddity - The quality or character of being odd or peculiar; strangeness, oddness, peculiarity, singularity.

I put "O" off for quite a while because the best I could come up with was Orange Juice. That was Stinkerbelle's suggestion and quite appropriate since orange juice is a constant source of debate in our house. Where is it? Who drank the last of it? When will I go buy more of it? It's the beverage of choice in our house and no matter how much of it I buy it's never enough.

That's lame though so I waited.

Then last weekend I saw something in my garden that made me stop in my tracks and scratch my head.

I stopped reporting on the garden earlier this summer because there is only so much you can say about tomatoes. They're big, they're small. They're green or they're getting really red. They just keep coming. It's all good but not too exciting.

Even now, in the beginning of October the tomatoes are still ripening in our little garden of apathy. At last count there were still about 8-10 of them in varying stages of ripeness. Yummy but not newsworthy.

There are also peppers growing out there. We've had lots of those this year. We put them on pizza and in salads and anything else we could think of. This picture was taken last weekend too and if you look closely you can see that just beyond the big pepper in the foreground there are the beginnings of even more peppers in the other plants. I doubt that they'll finish growing before the first frost but you never know. Stranger things have happened.

But green peppers aren't terribly exciting either. Having a garden that produces a prolific amount of peppers and tomatoes was nice but not newsworthy.

I also didn't write about the big dissapointment of our garden this year. The strange lack of zucchini. We got lot's of blossoms and the bees buzzed about them but no zucchini developed. It was so weird because last year we had tons of huge ones. They were like baseball bats! One was more than 13 inches long. But this year... nothing.

Till now.

In October.

Suddenly I spied a zucchini growing.

Two of them are hiding there under vines that ought to be dying.

How odd that they waited until October to get started.

Sahara Delayed

Today is the second day of Rosh Hashanah, a holiday on which I had hoped to debut Sahara. As you can see she's not quite ready to take a bow yet. Thankfully the High Holidays include Yom Kippur next week. Maybe I'll wear Sahara then.



The delay in crossing the finish line with this knit is due to several recent distractions - baby accessories, tiny hats, and scarves - and indecision.

Indecisiveness is the bane of this knitters existence. Do I use the yarn I have or is there a better one I haven't though of yet? Is the shape of this sweater going to look good on me or horrible? Should I use a solid or a variegated? I can ponder questions like these incessantly and second guess myself till the end of time. It's a real weakness.

The pattern called for a shirt tail hem knit in a contrasting color and accented with a diamond rib detail. I just couldn't see myself doing anything intentionally to draw attention to my hips. They do that quite enough on their own. So I was torn between a straight bottom with no shirt tail shaping or a shirt tail with no rib. I went back and forth until I finally reached the obvious and correct solution. I knit it as written but omitted the color change. Perfect.

Now lets see what other aspects of this sweater I can agonize over. How many ways can a person procrastinate over one silly sweater. We'll see.