Monday, October 19, 2009

14th Western Canadian Scrabble Champtionship

Off to Calgary this morning: the beautiful land of Alberta.  Playing Scrabble.  See you in a week.


Saturday, October 17, 2009

Emergen-C and the Flu

If you are feeling ... headachey and a touch of the sore throat...there's a number you can call...don't be afraid...
picture courtesy of RogueSun

Well, you can't call, but you can buy a product called Emergen-C or its generic equivalent.  My SIL stirs up a glass of the fizzy mixture in water a couple of times of day when she feels the need for a Vitamin C boost.

Here is a great review of the product where the reviewer says, in part:
... so I began the regimen: One Emergen-C at 5 am. Another once I woke up (again) at 8. Another when I got to work, two more after lunch. In all, I think I must have had six or seven packets of that goodness yesterday—probably not a dosage you want to subject your body to every day, but these were trying times.
It is now not quite 5 AM, and I have downed one dose of the Walgreen variety in cranberry flavor, am on my second cup of coffee, and actually feeling better than I did yesterday at this time before the wonder product was in my system.  (Yesterday I drank three of the packets with the recommended 6 oz of water and begged off obligations; in other words, so I could lie around and do nothing.)

Who knows, with 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C (1,667% of your recommended daily allowance) in each packet, maybe there is something to it.  It can't hurt.  And water is certainly good for you.

Drop Scarf with Beads

This clapotis scarf finished off with dimensions of 61" x 6.5" and was decorated with 8 mm seed beads along the diagonal lines created by the dropped stitches.   The beads are glass, and in colors ranging from lavender to cobalt blue with various hues of lighter and darker blues interspersed.  They beads were sewn with one strand of Knit Picks Shimmer yarn, a combination of 30% silk and 70% baby alpaca wool.   Don't let a little wool in the fiber fool you, it is as soft as a baby's bottom.  This same yarn was used in the scarf construction.  Although it is lace weight, I held two strands together to construct the scarf; so it ended up more of a fingering weight.

The beads added a touch of more design into the scarf, and although they were tedious to apply, the look was worth the extra effort,  IMHO.

There was no ready model for the scarf, so an outside tree trunk accommodated the scarf for photographic purposes.

Here is a picture of the clapotis scarf half way through:


Combining beading and knitting was a first attempt at gilding the lily.  The pattern for the scarf is free and available here.