I love jam too!

Most of you have probably never heard of jam. No, not jam, jam. Jam is made by Eric and Phineas who have a single Blenheim apricot tree in their yard in Santa Clara, CA. The Blenheim is listed as endangered by Slow Food USA because the land where it has traditionally been grown was more valuable as subdivisions during the dot-com boom. Fortunately their neighbor also has some Blenheim trees and agreed to let them use the fruit this year so the run should actually be larger than the usual 100 jars/year. This is great news for you since they would have been down to just 96 as of last night.

99 jars of jam on the wall... (okay, I'll stop there).

They opened pre-orders yesterday to their waiting list and sell on a first come, first served basis from that list. If you think you might need some jam, go to their site (www.welovejam.com) and get on their waiting list asap before it's too late!

The below review is from Food and Wine Magazine this past February.
Yes, I've already ordered and it's highly unlikely that I'll share (they limit you to just 32oz., hence the whole 96 thing up above).

I'll be away for a few days while we close on the house and lug our stuff to Utah but I should be ranting about how awful it is to move by next weekend.

hmmm....

As Jeanette said, this person has too much time on their hands. Then again, I'd probably have done it myself when I was in college and if I were to walk past it on the street (before it got gunked up), I'd definitely smile.

Apparently this person lives in Stockholm and has littered that city with knitting "graffiti" and has recently started a world tour.

Knitta please has some serious competition in the world.

Knitting challenge

Thuy issued a knitting challenge last week to replicate some cute baby booties she found. There is an apostrophe in the address so blogger doesn't want to link to it properly. To view them go here: http://www.papastour.com/products/children's-gifts/baby-booties/

She likes the blue, yellow, green and brown pair since they don't appear to require any sewing.

So I emailed her a pattern and started knitting a test version. Here's the result (almost finished). They're cute but they will only stay on a baby for a fraction of a second. I think they would be much improved if they had an i-cord tie.


If you can't tell from the photos, you start out by casting on the number of stitches required for the final circumference of the bootie. You work it for about three rows in stockinette stitch and then start a short-row heel.

Once you have increased back to the full set of stitches you join to work in the round. After two rows of all k, you start with a single yo right at the same location as the join and then for every row after that you k2tog, yo, k (however many needed), yo, ssk so that you have an increasing set of yo's forming the cute triangle over the toes.


Here's a close-up of the yo's:

They just need to be kitchener stitched (see, I always thought it was "kitchner" but I jfgi'd and knitty.com says it's kitchener) at the end and you have a bootie. You could easily finish a pair in an evening if you were going for the newborn-6 month size listed on that site. Or you could drop 25 pounds (!!!!) on a pair and wait for them to be shipped to you. Yeah, right.

more house pics

M uploaded some photos of the house today so we don't have to rely on the ones from the listing.

This is the subdivision:


And here is a nice view of the front gate:



And lastly, a photo of the biggest selling point for this subdivision, the massive desert tortoise reserve that is just a 2 minute walk from our front door with hiking trails that stretch for miles:



Gee, do you think I'm excited?

And for those who are getting bored with all of this talk about houses, M went on a hike that ended at the Narrows of Zion NP the day I had to leave Utah. It included slot canyons. I'm kicking myself for having to return to California and missing this hike now.

We got it!

The appraisal came in over our final price so we can actually buy the house. I'm still waiting for something to go wrong but I think we may finally be out of things that can.

(Erin begins breathing again for the first time in days...)