Gardening, knitting and another show

Just when I think I've figured out this gardening thing (ha!) I get new surprises. Out among the apple trees out front, on which there are pinky-tipped sized apples, I noticed these while I was draining a bathtub. Yep, more pumpkins. Those seeds must really be out there biding their time. Add water, and poof! Even if it's not the season and it will be too cold for pumpkins to set, and who wants nearly-inedible pumpkins in Janurary, anyhow, up they come.

Not just among the apple trees, though, which was ground zero for the thrown pumpkin now almost a full year ago, I'm finding them still coming up among the mint. Remember, this is a strip along our sidewalk. It's not very big, and it's not very "gardeny." But that hasn't stopped the bigger baby pumpkins, nor, now that I looked today, more baby baby pumpkins! I have no idea what we'll do if they keep growing and growing and growing. I guess foot traffic on one side and parked cars on the other will keep them in check. Occasionally I imagine building an archway and training them up and over it, welcome to Bedlam Acres, or something. But really, it's just mostly interesting to watch.

In the "old dog/new tricks" category, I figured that I can't really knit from charts. Lace or colorwork. I apparently have to translate the chart into numbers in my head, and if I try to do it while looking at the chart, it adds a layer of complexity that messes up my knitting.

However, if I do that translation from the chart into a written list of numbers, I can knit like nobody's business. Okay, I can knit, period. So the chart for the second snail mitten in my-speak reads "Dk 3, 4, 1, 1, 1, 1, 7, 3, 7, 3. 1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 3" or something like that. I list the color of yarn first, in this case, dark, then just merrily go along from there. Weird to find out a little quirk-room in my head like that, but good since I think I can now take on more complicated patterns. Maybe I can finally finish Branching Out for Thing 1.

And finally, last night we went back to the Fillmore (without Thing 1) to see another show.

We're pretty sure we made the right call. The crowd was young and bizarrely (to me) tall. During the opening bands -- why oh why were there two? -- they weren't too riled up. It struck me while watching the first bands that it's kind of sweet that in a world with The Clash and The Rolling Stones and U2 and many other bands in it, boys (and it's almost always boys, another thought stream entirely) still want to pick up guitars and drum sticks and just shout out whatever's inside of them. Hit me like that quote from some writer about the nerve of writing poetry, that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Even though "Don't start a band" is fine advice, there are plenty of folks who just won't take it.

The speed Irish punky stuff brought out the mosh in many of the kids, though. Eric and an unidentified big guy, there with his 16 year old daughter, set up kind of a wall, so the surging, slamming boys were kept away from our bit of the front. Therefore, I got to leap up and down and wave my arms with the best of them, to the point that I was sweating in my boots, without actual injury. And that was a pretty big deal! Eric took well-deserved credit for introducing the band to me and Thing 1, and I'm so glad he did. They were a hoot. Big fun, and now that our Week o'Concerts is over, it's back to real life and maybe I'll get that mitten done.