I Am Learning to Crochet. Please Admire My Washcloth.

When I asked the older kid what she wanted to do over Spring Break, she said she wanted to learn to crochet. 

I have had no interest in crochet, and not a single crochet skill, but when has that ever stopped me from commencing a craft project?

Well, at some point or other, *someone* must have had *some* interest in crochet, because I pulled out this full set of Clover crochet hooks while I was digging out the stash yarn, but y'all know how bad I've always been about buying shit whenever the kids expressed even the mildest interest in something. I hit that homeschool strewing lesson hard, and kept hitting it, ahem.

It's not a hoarder house, y'all. It's a hoarder HOME.

Anyway, this hoarder home comes with a complete set of Clover crochet hooks and enough cotton yarn to do any number of crochet projects (it's also great for latch hook!), but the how-to books you've got to get from the library.

Might as well get them all, then!

Of these, Everyday Crochet has the best illustrations for how to do a slipnot, a foundation chain, and single crochet. I've never even seen someone crocheting before, so I really relied on the illustrations.

Side note, but this is another way that generations lose this type of cultural knowledge. If we'd seen people casually crocheting all our lives, then the very act of how to hold a crochet hook and yarn wouldn't feel so foreign, and learning the skill set would be loads easier.

The kid also used this book to figure out how to translate everything into left-handedness. It's like regular crochet, only backwards!

Here's my glorious foundation chain:

I had a rough time figuring out single crochet, so I switched back and forth between Everyday Crochet and Crochet: Learn It. Love It. Neither really made it clear to my muddled mind exactly how to count your stitches or where to put your first stitch after turning, so the kid and I spent a lot of time crocheting a few rows, then frogging it all and trying a different way.

This got frogged, lol:

At this point I'd just about cracked how to keep my edges straight, but I had not yet cracked keeping even tension, ahem:

Couple of wobbles on the edges, but look at that mostly even tension. It's a keeper!

I spent another couple of evenings crocheting while watching TV (don't tell the copyright police, but the older kid also taught me how to bitTorrent, and then we got caught up on Our Flag Means Death), and then Everyday Crochet taught me how to fasten off and weave in my ends.

And now I have the one thing that I've always, always wanted: my household's fortieth washcloth!

I meant for it to be square, but I got thrown off by the fact that 25 stitches long is not the same distance as 25 stitches tall. Is it supposed to be? I haven't learned gauge yet.

Whatever. I love it.

Check out Luna guarding me from the neighbors, who have the audacity to be outside on their own property:

I don't know if it's her age or the older kid's absence, but she has gotten SO protective of me. There are a couple of badly-behaved free-ranging dogs who interlope on our property (the one thing that I HATE about the country. Well, that and the giant Trump flag flying on a literal flagpole in front of another neighbor's house. Why on earth would it occur to you to mount an honest-to-god FLAGPOLE in your yard?!? And he doesn't even fly a US flag! It's literally just I Pledge Allegiance to Trump over there!) and they genuinely frighten me, but when Luna's with me she makes it very clear to them that she will kill them before she lets them get anywhere near me.

She also investigated my yarn to make sure it was safe for me.

It was!

If I was smart and methodical, I would make two more washcloths so I could learn double and half-double crochet, but seriously, this time last year the younger kid died on the hill of having a specific and exact number of towels and washcloths in a specific color to take to college, and to achieve that amount in that color at the lowest price I bought towel sets that came with washcloths, then another whole set of just washcloths, but then when she actually saw what the whole kaboodle looked like she obviously walked her request back, because I promise you it was an objectively absurd amount of washcloths, but just kill me now I'd already washed them so now we still own an objectively absurd amount of washcloths, but they're in my linen closet where I have to look at them every day, and not in the kid's dorm where I could have happily forgotten about the whole thing.

So Jesus Christ NO, I'm not going to make two more washcloths.

Instead, I'm amping up my skills by learning how to change colors, and I'm making myself a pair of striped fingerless mitts. 

Counting stitches and counting rows are not going great just yet, and I'm currently ignoring the fact that I'm definitely making this too big for my hand, and I thought my two yarns were the same weight but now I think they might be slightly different and it's messing up the tension or something, but I'm confident that come next autumn, I'll be walking Luna with the perfect striped fingerless mitts of my dreams on my hands.

Also, if you want anything crocheted for you that's rectangular and done in single crochet on hook size K, I'm your person!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day 9 in New Zealand: Across the Southern Alps to Christchurch

In all the New Zealand travel Facebook groups that I joined in preparation for this trip, pretty much everyone else in every group was all, "I'm going to spend three months in New Zealand--where should I go first?" or "I'm going to buy a car in New Zealand, travel in that car for eight months, then sell it before I go home--any free car camping tips?"

And I can see why! There is SO much to do and see that it was agony to narrow down our itinerary to a doable nine days, and then even more agony to stick to that itinerary once we were there. So cool places like Milford Sound and Lake Taupo will have to stay on my must-see-someday list, as will, I am so bummed to say, seeing the Southern Cross with my very own eyes. I'd measured my expectations, because I'd read that it can be pretty rainy in the Spring, but come on! Not even one clear night for stargazing?!?

Next time, I guess!

But we DID get to every other must-see-on-*this*-trip on our lists. The kid wanted to see kiwis, albatrosses (she actually saw plenty of those at sea!), and a rainforest, and she did. I wanted to see glowworms and geothermal stuff, and I wanted to show the kid her first glacier--and I did! My partner wanted to see Hobbiton and Weta Workshop, and the Southern Alps by train--and on this day, he finished off that list!

We had plenty of time that morning for the drive back up the west coast to the train station in Greymouth, so we got to stop whenever something looked pretty, and browse around the little towns we passed through:

I also did the last of our souvenir and Christmas stocking shopping in one last grocery store--the Cadbury and Whittakers did okay in the checked luggage on the way home, but the smaller chocolates and the Jaffa Cakes got mauled nearly to crumbs, dang it. 

In the early afternoon we returned our rental car in Greymouth, and boarded the TranzAlpine train to cross the Southern Alps. It was so pretty!

We spent a LOT of time out in the open-air observation car, where the best views--and the best photos!--lived--

--but it was a five-hour trip, so we also had a lot of time to just hang out together, which was really, really nice, too:

Like, even though we'd been practically living in each other's pockets for the past nine days, almost all of that time had been either sitting facing the same direction in the car, or doing some kind of activity that required most of our attention and all of our breath. We're not really restaurant people, so we'd actually spent very little time facing each over a table and chatting. It was nice to have all the downtime in the world to chat, trade crossword puzzles (the New York Times Wednesday puzzles are our sweet spot) back and forth, and set out all our snacks for a proper feast:

We didn't see much more of Christchurch than the view out of various taxi driver's windows, so add that to my to-do list for next time, too! I also didn't see much more of my kid, as she was booked on a separate--and MUCH more convenient!--ticket. Even though her first flight left Christchurch just an hour before ours, she ended up getting back to Indianapolis TEN HOURS before us! She was nearly to Auckland by the time we boarded our own flight there--

--already in the international terminal and getting ready to board her flight across the Pacific by the time we arrived, and by the time we had settled in to our long layover in Houston, she was picking up our car from the economy parking lot at the Indy airport and heading home for a nap and a shower!

Also, Air New Zealand food isn't the worst, but it's not great, either. The roll and the two glasses of wine were the only real winners here:

When we FINALLY got back, and the kid rolled up to the curb at Arrivals to pick us up, my partner was so hungry that he basically had her take us straight to Wendy's, which was kind of gross and hilarious. We'd joked the whole time in New Zealand that we were on a "corn fast," on account of none of the foods we'd consumed--not even the sodas!--had high fructose corn syrup, so I guess ending the corn fast also meant that our vacation was really over, too!

Here's our whole trip:

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day 8 in New Zealand: I Meet a Glacier

This day is all about mountain hiking and meeting a glacier.

But first--breakfast!

Serving pancake stacks at the cafe across the street from Pancake Rocks is pretty much the best synergy I've ever seen. OBVIOUSLY we simply had to have them!

Also, flat whites:

Fun fact: I now want a twinkle light kiwi sooooo badly, but probably not badly enough to change up my electrical outlet for it...

It was another beautiful drive, snugged between the mountain and the sea, down to Westland Tai Poutini National Park, where the goal was to introduce our kid to her very first glacier.

Hopefully she'll see many more in her life, but just in case they all melt before she can, she'll always have the memory of Franz Josef Glacier.

I was surprised to discover that you can actually see the Franz Josef Glacier from the parking lot!

Honestly, that's not a bad option if you've got some other hikes that you'd rather do, because the view isn't *that* much better from where the most popular walk ends at the Trident Creek Falls, but still. If 3000 meters is as close as you can get, then 3000 meters is where we're going!

Fortunately, this early in the day the weather was PERFECT for hiking--

--AND for seeing a real, live glacier from just 3000 meters away!

It's kind of a bummer, though, when you look at that long plain of gravel and you realize that if it hadn't melted, Franz Josef glacier would actually be right THERE where you could touch it. Sigh...

We wanted to do another hike in the area while the weather was so nice, so we decided to follow Roberts Point Track to the first of the cool swing bridges I'd read about.

Peters Pool was just as prettily reflective as we'd been told it would be, although you could see that the weather was already changing...

But it was still lovely and light when we got to the first swing bridge on the trail:

My partner isn't much for swing bridges over glacial streams, so he hung back and took our pretty pictures while we enjoyed the bridge crossing:

The big kid and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, however. This was our best look at the "glacial flour" that makes the rivers coming from the glacier look so milky:

On the far side of the bridge, we spent a little time looking around while a few other hikers crossed--

--and then we all enjoyed the hike back, especially when the glacier came back into view. 

This was such an exciting warning sign! 

The weather later that afternoon didn't feel workable for the whole Fox Glacier walk, so instead we drove over to this viewpoint outside of town. It was pretty overcast, but fortunately we could still see enough of Fox Glacier to say we'd seen it:

Definitely too overcast to see Mount Cook, though, which was kind of a bummer:

The evening's major adventure was more prosaic: repack all our crap so we could all fly home the day after tomorrow! My partner hadn't been very impressed by my purchase of this luggage scale, but omg did it come in handy, because he was VERY impressed (in a horrified way...) of my purchase of books and crow-like scavenging of lovely rocks over our trip. We had to divvy up the books and the rocks to keep my luggage from being overweight, and we further divided up the delicious snacks so that if someone's bag got lost, perhaps not all of our Whittakers and Cadbury and wine would be. And then I had to practically sit on the kid to convince her not to leave behind her foul weather rainsuit, she was so sick of it, but I'm sorry to say that I could not save her rain boots. I hope that they're happy on the feet of some other New Zealand adventurer right this minute.

Ah, well. I'm sure she'll regret it when she says she needs rain boots for the next round of bizarre environmental scientist antics that she's currently applying to and I tell her that I already bought her perfectly nice rain boots so the next pair is on her, humph.

All packed up and ready to go, we await tomorrow's adventure: the TranzAlpine Train across the Southern Alps!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day 7 in New Zealand: To the South Island, and Then We Kept Going South

Time has no meaning, because honestly it was zero problem to hop up at 4:15 am and drive through a sleeping Wellington to the Interislander Ferry. 

Really, I preferred it. There's no traffic to fight at 4:15 am!

My favorite thing about riding in a ferry is how well you're herded. I genuinely love nothing better than driving nose to tail at 3 miles per hour in a single line, and at every decision point there's a friendly figure in a high-vis vest to tell me exactly what to do. It's so stress-free not to have to think for myself!

I'm not much of a sailor, and I'd heard that the Cook Strait can be very rough, so as soon as the captain came on the intercom and said that our passage would "not be optimal," omg I started popping the Dramamine like they were Pez.

Not so my beloved and loving partner. Just as he does in every situation in which his spouse might desire comfort, entertainment, and distraction (*cough, cough* 14-hour flight *cough*), he found a seat, sat in it, and proceeded to fall deeply asleep, ne'er to awaken until the announcement came 3+ hours later that it was time to get back to our cars:

We have barely pulled out of the dock, and the man is sound asleep.

Fortunately, we had a bit of time before we actually entered the Cook Strait for me to enjoy myself:

Eventually, however, they closed the outside deck and began to make periodic announcements that people should vomit in a baggie and not in the ferry toilets, and so I spent the next good long while sitting at the furthest window forward and watching the bow go up and down, periodically overdosing on Dramamine and thinking VERY firmly to myself that I was not going to vomit.

Also, I'd left my earbuds in my other fucking bag. Not all adventures are pleasant!

Also also, Cook Strait IS genuinely notorious. I wasn't just being a baby!

I swear to god I about kissed the ground when we arrived in Picton, but above all, we must carry on with the sightseeing, so rather than engage in my most preferred activity of the moment, which was to die, we instead bought some Christmas candy at a local candymaker, and did a wine tasting and bought some wine at a local winemaker:

I actually just finished that bottle of wine a couple of nights ago, and I miss it! I don't normally love white wines, but this one was very nice. Also, fun fact: instead of a tasting room, the New Zealand wineries have a "cellar door." More semantic translation fun!

So... it may have been after-effects of the seasickness, or it may have been jetlag, or to be honest I definitely overdosed on Dramamine in an anxious panic there on the Cook Strait, so it may have been that, but after we got back in the car I dunno what happened for a good long while. I just sort of greyed out, and when I was back online we were on the coast!

Did we even eat lunch at some point? I really have no fucking idea. All I really recall from the entire drive from Hunter's Winery to the coast is that in this rental car, every time we turned it on it would connect to my phone via Bluetooth, which was AWESOME because there was a screen that would display my Google Maps on the dash for my partner to see. Do newer American cars do that, too? I wouldn't know, because our personal American cars are a billion years old, ahem. Anyway, when it did that, it would also for some reason connect to my Spotify and just start playing the Fleet Foxes radio playlist, which... is fine, I guess? I mean, it was almost Thanksgiving at that point, which means that White Winter Hymnal is pretty much required daily consumption. But also, that playlist is less than three hours long, and it came on EVERY time we started the car, and played continuously the entire time we were in the car, and the couple of times I tried to turn it off, or even to change playlists, it fucked up the GPS so my partner suddenly couldn't see where he was going in the middle of traffic, so I eventually was too scared to touch it and we just listened to Fleet Foxes radio whenever we were in the car. So ANYWAY, I'm not sure what else happened during that drive, but what I recall from it is just sort of a Fleet Foxes, and Fleet Foxes adjacent, sense memory. 

This Vampire Weekend song is very good, by the way. I heard it maybe 1,000 times over the nine days we were in New Zealand?

Oh, you know what, you guys? I have literally just had the realization that I probably should NOT have chased 3+ Dramamine with a couple of glasses of wine at 11:00 am. Whatever, it's fine. Neither of my travel companions can remember whether or not we had a proper lunch that day, either, and neither of them were compromised.

By the time we reached the trailhead for the Cape Foulwind Seal Colony Lookout (three and a half hours later, ahem...), I was more or less fine-ish and ready for a nice hike in the brisk fresh air!

The hike was almost exactly as was described--there were no "foul" winds (although it was VERY windy... was that what they meant by "foul?"), but there were rocks, and there was a lookout, and from the lookout, we could see seals on the rocks!

There is no soap opera that can match the drama of seals fighting over nothing on their rocks:

The drive down the coast afterwards was breathtaking (my partner states that the drive across the island was also breathtaking, particularly the part that followed the river, but I have no memory of this), and we got to our last stop at Punakaiki at just the right time, right at high tide so we could see the blowholes near the Pancake Rocks:

Lol at the photo below, because I was fighting for my life on those stairs!

Our hotel was in a beautiful spot sandwiched between the cliffs and the beach, and the kid and I had a lovely, long walk along that beach before it started spitting down rain again. We had a delicious, hot pub dinner, long, hot showers, and we were going to try to find a movie on the local cable, but I fell asleep before it even got started.

Tomorrow, we see the glaciers!

Here's the rest of our trip!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!