Smoke and Knitting

Taken from my front steps - what "unhealthy for sensitive groups" looks like

It's been on national news for days so you may know about the devastating fires along the northwest part of Spokane WA. That's a little over an hour's drive away from me, maybe 70 miles as the crow flies, so not endangering me per se. However, the prevailing winds funnel the massive smoke plumes right into our valley, so air quality has been dicey. I think we also get smoke from some of the big fires in Oregon. My friend Sherrie has a daughter who lives in a safe part of Spokane and put up an excellent post summarizing the magnitude of the event. So rather than me reiterating, I'll just direct you to her post here.

This is from a few days ago

I generally use airnow.gov to monitor the air quality so I know if it's safe to take my walks since I have respiratory issues. It may be hazy and in the moderate range most of the time but the last few days there has been little wind to clear the smoke out. Good for the firefighters, not so good for moving the smoke along. The fires (yes there are more than one) are far from being contained  let alone out so this no doubt will be what the rest of our summer will be like - heat and smoke. 

Sleeve stitches on waste yarn, back joined to front to knit the body

So not spending time outside, masking up if I do, and glad for my knitting projects to keep my mind off the feeling of doom the smoke and news about the fires has hanging over me. I'm happy to report that I stuck to my goal of knitting on my Watermark Cardigan knitalong every day in July. Well, almost every day. On the last day of the month, I was set to tackle a major part of the pattern where you remove the sleeve stitches onto waste yarn for knitting later and join the fronts and back at the underarm of the sleeve to knit the rest of the body. But I soon realized something was amiss with the directions - I had directions for the pullover sweater inserted here instead of the cardigan. I e-mailed support but it was late on Friday and figured I wouldn't hear back until Monday. Dang!

Rather than mope, I decided to grab the Autumn Wave sweater sitting right there next to me and substitute knitting a few rows on it to keep to my daily knitting until I heard back about the wrong page of directions. Here you can see the wave pattern emerging beautifully. Then with corrected directions in hand, I did the sleeve divide and have knit a couple of inches down into the body now. I watched the wrap-up zoom session and was encouraged by how many participants were at the same stage as I am, and still awed by those who were already done and showing off their finished sweaters. Well, I'm sure they were sitting there knitting row after row each day whereas I usually knit just two. I'm guessing if I keep that rate up, I won't be finishing this up until late September, maybe longer. But it will NOT be languishing!

One last thing, when stepping out on my deck to water plants, I saw a lot of movement in what is another one of those buckthorn trees down the way. If it was a bird, it was a big one, but after watching for a bit, I realized it was the squirrel again, so I grabbed my camera, cranked up the zoom and tried to get a shot.

One thing that kept confusing me was I could see light flashes through the leaves that turned out to be its tail and body. He wasn't crawling along a branch but was hanging upside down and stretching out to reach the berries!