Tonight is the season opener of Lost. I’m reasonably excited by that.

Today a package was delivered to my door. It contains a brand new, shiny copy of Myst V: End Of Ages. I’m reasonably excited by that, too.

OK… Lost will obviously win the fight for my attention. But why did they have to both land on the same day?

Just to prove that I’ve not been idle, here’s a new finished object to show off. This is a large-sized “buttonhole bag“.

It was knit with two strands of chunky wool yarn on size 15 needles. I’m not overly fond of fun fur and eyelash, but I thought a little bit would add a fun funkyness to the whole rather retro color scheme.

The top pic is pre-felting and the bottom is the finished product. (Click on either pic for the larger sized version.) I felted it in my front-loader (YEA!), and I’m glad to know that I can actually do that successfully. I could have felted it harder and lost all stitch definition, but as you can see from the bottom pic it’s hard enough to stand on its own.

I encouraged the top to roll because I liked that look. I still need to add a lining. The finished bag is large enough (about 17″ at the widest) to make a nice-sized project bag so I want the lining to include a few little pockets to hold sundries..

In other news, the grapes are ripening and I’ve picked several pounds to give away to friends. I managed to save almost all the harvest this year from the furry little black-masked bandits that have robbed me the last two summers. I grow the variety Himrod, and have two vines on an arbor over my back patio against the south side of the house. Because I’m on the north side of the hill, the growing season in my yard starts late and is slightly shorter than the valley floor. Himrod is an early variety, but I don’t usually have ripe grapes until the end of September. This year the abundant sun and warm weather helped them ripen about a week early. The good news is that the harvest usually extends for several weeks, so hopefully I will have enough time to deal with the crop.

My grapes grow under my usual gardening philosophy of benign neglect. The grapes get nothing: No water or fertilizer, no spraying. Nothing. I whack them back a couple of times a year to keep them from taking over the yard and tearing the house apart and I harvest the crop when it’s ripe. That’s it. The two vines, each the size of small trees, reward me yearly with bountiful crops of some of the best grapes I’ve ever eaten.

On Tuesday, #1 Son and I completed a road trip that took us some 1300 miles through 3 states in 4 days. I was sooooo glad to get home and sit in a chair that wasn’t traveling 20 MPH down a highway.

Since #1 Son’s school doesn’t start until almost the end of September, I had decided to postpone my summer vacation until after Labor Day: kids in school, shorter lines, less traffic, better prices, etc. But Labor Day came and went and Vacation Day loomed without any clues about where to actually go. Finally, two days before leaving, I asked #1 Son to pick a direction and we’d just do a road trip. “East,” he said, and so east it was.

Day 1: Off to a late start, 2:30 PM found us just wrapping up lunch at Edgefield. Well… it is east of home.

From there we headed out the old Columbia Gorge highway to Crown Point Vista House. I haven’t been there for many years and I was amazed at the changes that restoration brought. Very cool and well worth a short journey from Portland. The other nice thing about the old highway is, of course, all of the beautiful waterfalls that you get to be up close and personal with. It’s a much more satisfying, albeit slower, trip than I-84.

After leaving the old highway just before Hood River, we kept going east. Since we’d had such a late lunch there was no need to stop for dinner very soon. So we just kept going. And going. Somewhere in The Blues, I recited a long story to #1 Son about a road-trip-from-hell in my younger years through the Blues in a Ford Pinto during a snow storm, when a semi passed me and then cut me off, causing me to skid and slide into the median. My companion and I spent a couple of very cold hours sitting in a snowdrift with two blown tires until someone finally had pity and sent a tow truck. We had been really, really lucky that the car hadn’t flipped sliding down into the ditch sideways. (So drive carefully, #1 Son!)

Nothing like that happened this time. Just after finishing my sad tail of long-ago woe, we stopped at a rest stop to “rest.” Four deer crossed the exit right in front of us. Because we were driving the Prius and it had switched to silent stealth mode, the deer weren’t frightened by any noise and we were able to watch them for a long time. A truck pulling a boat scared them finally and they ran off.

In Baker City we decided we’d had enough fun for one day, ate dinner and found a place to rest our weary heads for the night.

Day 2: From Baker City we kept heading east. But there’s a lot of east, and until you hit the Rockies a lot of it looks alike. Not that I don’t like the desert — I do, very much — but it’s not the most scintillating scenery ever. Cousin M lives in Lewiston and might not be too put off by a surprise visit. So at Ontario we turned left and headed north on US-95 along the Little Salmon and Salmon Rivers to Lewiston.

At Whitebird I pointed out the old highway that snakes down the mountain in hairpin turns for miles and miles. As a newly-minted driver, I drove that highway in a fog so dense I could barely see the road ahead. It was probably a good thing. (My mama: You can’t drive this road! My dads: She’s doing fine. Let her drive. [he then put his had over his face and went to sleep while mama panicked in the back seat]) When I reached the bottom the fog lifted. I turned back and looked up at the road I’d come down. Then I pulled over and asked someone else to drive. I felt sick to my stomach.

#1 Son thought the old road looked like fun. This driver was glad that the new road is straight and relatively boring.

Cousin M’s birthday was the next day, so she said we were her “birthday present” when we showed up unexpectedly. And we had a very nice evening chatting and catching up.

Day 3: From Lewiston north to Colfax, then a left turn across the middle of Washington, over Snoqualamie Pass and to Seattle. Lots of long, long, straight stretches of road on I-90. The pass was lovely, though.

Negotiating the Seattle rush-hour traffic as quickly as possible, and with only one wrong turn thanks to GPS Navigation, we made it to the Bainbridge ferry with time to spare. From the ferry we drove across Bainbridge and then up and across the Hood Canal bridge to Sequim. We were tired. It was dark. We found a place to crash and slept.

Day 4: With a few stops along the way to check out various points of interest, we followed US-101 around the Olympic Peninsula and down the Washington coast, then across the Columbia to Astoria. We made another left turn at Astoria. (Sometimes this seemed like a car race: Drive fast, turn left.) Then it was a short sprint along OR-30 home.

Whew.

The fur kids were glad to see us. We were glad to see them. I was happy to sleep in my own bed and not have to drive anywhere the next day. Pics will be up somewhere as soon as I get around to it.

The Prius, I am happy to report, averaged 53 miles-per-gallon over the trip.

This was the first road trip during which #1 Son was a legal driver. I really appreciated turning over some of the driving to him while I knitted. The “secret project” is coming right along and should be finished on schedule!

I’ll be away-from-the-blog for a few days taking care of some family stuff. Blogging, if any, will be sporadic and short.

I have some new finished objects to show when I get back. I’m quite pleased with how they turned out. And I know I need to get Sensational Shirttail up in the gallery. It will be there next week some time.

In the meantime, I’ve finished mommymonster.com’s move to the new servers. Check it out!

#1 Son moved home yesterday. I could tell because all of his worldly possessions were piled in his room when I got home last night. (Readers will remember that he moved out “only for the summer, Mom.”)

Moo Cow was curled up on top of #1 Son’s clothes, purring. She’s happy he’s back. Captain Kidd was whacked out because something in his tiny little universe changed and he wasn’t consulted. He got over it by bedtime. Phoebe could care less.

After three months of silence, last night it became obvious that I will have to again get used to going to sleep with the TV in the family room and the lights in the kitchen on. But I’m so glad to have him back, that I can adjust pretty darn quickly. Although I don’t begrudge him the opportunity — it was good experience for him — I missed him a lot. He’s good company.

This morning there was a body-shaped lump in his bed. We’re back to business as usual.

Well… not quite usual. This week is the first time in 12 years that I haven’t taken the first day of school off from work in order to make sure that buses were met, someone was at school on time with the right supplies, etc. This year there was no last-minute frantic search for just the right notebook. (One year I went to three different stores to find 4 tear-out graph-paper notebooks. There were several of us moms looking, and when some were finally located we were ready to fight over them.) This year I didn’t have to fight the traffic trying to get in and out of the school drop-off.

This year school is fading back into the background noise of something that other people’s kids do.

I now have a young man ready to start college at the end of the month. It still brings a lump to my throat.

I’m seeing reports on the local news that gas companies and/or local service stations are asking people not to top off their tank, but to wait until the tank is almost drained before filling up. This is supposed to prevent runs on gas station.

Why? This makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

Let’s say I drive 500 miles per week and use an average of 10 gallons of gas to do so (hey… I drive a Prius). That means that every 50 miles takes about 1 gallon of gas. If I decide to buy 1 gallon of gas every 50 miles rather than 10 gallons of gas after 500, I’ve still used 10 gallons of gas in roughly the same amount of time. The difference over the span of a week to the local gas station is zero. They’ll get to see my smiling face more often, but they won’t be selling me any more gas.

If the price of gas is going up, then I’ll come out ahead because some of the earlier gallons of gas will have been purchased at a lower price than the last gallons. If I wait until the end of the week, the gas station (or probably the oil company that supplies them) will come out ahead because I bought all of those same 10 gallons at the highest price.

So who benefits if I wait? The oil companies.