I spent most of this weekend in a house in in Santa Cruz county surrounded by redwood trees and moss. I took the above photo this morning, when the sun finally peaked out of the fog.
It was too cold to do too much tromping around until this morning, but I’m glad I did have a look around. Because otherwise I would have never seen.. my first banana slug!
I normally find slugs and their snail relatives to be rather unpleasant, but I was quite amused by this guy. It’s so yellow!
Other creatures spotted this weekend included four cats, two horses, and (appropriately for this blog), a bunch of chickens!
The house where we stayed was someone’s housesitting gig and it looks like something straight out of the 70s, complete with dark wood everything, thick carpet, and a harvest gold sink. It also had strange octagon shapes everywhere, and as far as I can tell was heated entirely by fireplaces. There were three of them. This meant performing what I imagine to be some of the oldest human chores—gathering wood and tending the fire:
I did manage to get a decent amount of knitting done both at the house and during the car ride (photos to come). But the photo above shows one of my Friday morning projects: a crocheted poppy for Remembrance Day. I downloaded a free knitting pattern but it gave me nothing but trouble—knitters will understand that trying to knit in the round with black yarn with only one stitch on each of your double pointed needles is just asking for frustation. So I whipped this one up from scratch using a crochet hook.
knitbyahenshop 