No other reason for the title of today's entry other than a bit of silliness.  Trying to keep my spirits up to combat the end of summer and the start of school. 

So what's been up here.... the garden is still producing at a pace that I can't possibly keep up with.  I'm freezing tomatoes, giving tomatoes to neighbors and trying to incorporate tomatoes in every meal.  That was easy last night with tacos but tonight is kielbasa and one doesn't usually think "tomatoes" with Polish cuisine.  (Not to disparage my ancestors but admittedly, one doesn't usually think "Polish Cuisine".)



(Also some of my homemade honey wheat bread in the picture.)


I have been knitting and made a wonderfully soft pair of mittens using some yarn I spun.   So from this


I knit these:




It was extremely satisfying to go from a pile of fluff that was the wool roving to something functional that I will wear frequently when the cold weather hits.  Knitting is actually a relative new comer to human endeavor ...knitting as we know it with pointy sticks and interlocking loops is about a thousand years old.  But spinning, spinning is old.  So very old.  Ancient.  People have been twisting fibers together since we lived in caves and all fabric was handspun until the late 18th century.  All fabric.  Vikings' sails.  Mummies' wraps.  Budda's and Queen Elizabeth's clothes.  All cloth, all thread, was made by someone twisting fibers together.  That blows my mind.   Anyhow...um, I made mittens. <grin>    (The Yarn Harlot writes about the age of spinning in her July 15, 2008 entry.)

Pattern: Easy mittens from 101 One Skein Wonders
Yarn:  My own. BFL wool from AllSpunUp. About 170 Yds.
Needles: US 6

I finished Erin's socks -- her little feet make anything look sweet.  (Yes, that rhymed. Sorry.)




We've had a last flurry of activity to celebrate Labor Day and the end of summer.

Megan dared large puddles to get her wet.



Erin had her first big girl hair cut complete with a wash and then loaded up her desk at school.

      

Aidan learned by watching Daddy.  (That one really tipped the cute scale.)




We had neighborhood movie night.  I'm very lucky to live in a neighborhood with a sense of community - we actually do things together.  (Not in a creepy Stepford Wives kind of way more in a we-all-could-be-cruiseline-activity-directors kind of way.)  There is a monthly craft night (which has morphed into carafe night but that's not really a bad thing), a summer camping trip, we host a Halloween Party, and, of course, the end of summer movie night.  One of our neighbors puts up a sheet on their garage and breaks out the 16mm projector.  There is just something so nostalgic about watching a movie with the ticka-ticka-ticks of actual film running through the sprockets.  The crowd gathered




Someone brought a wheel barrel full of gourds to the party.  (????? I'm completely at a lost regarding this tradition.)



Cartoons were shown.  There were the classics.


There was one about a .....



("Mind the pedestrian, Richard."  Extra points for identifying that quote.)

And nothing says mid-sixties Disney cartoon like a ...



chest out, lined-drawn, empty-eyed boy. 

Oh wait, no, this is Disney, specializing in singing bugs in top hats and spats.


There was also a 1940's Mighty Mouse fighting German sounding cats, a 1950's Casper, the Friendly Ghost fighting Russian sounding scientists (that one disturbingly ended with the US Air Force bombing a city park --?)  The kids ate popcorn, we cheered for the good guys, booed the bad guys, and enjoyed movies under the stars. 

I hope everyone had a good summer!