ten days later she comes rolling into town

Apologies. My mother's old house in the country where I sometimes spend a bit of time has internet, but not the free-floating wireless lan kind of internet and it is not allowed too complicated to hook up my computer to the internet there is. I also don't mind periods without the net for a while if I can just have some time to re-internet afterwards. I thought about composing a blog post to post when I came back, but didn't feel like it. I was in a murderous mood, after all.

I don't know how many kilograms of dandelions I pulled from the ground with the help of my trusty sword the gardening tool I have no English name for, but I managed to clear a lot of ground. After determining that extermining every little sprig of dandelion would lead to madness and would require at least a month or so, I attacked the big fat ones which were already preparing to blossom and take over even more of the garden. In this I was successful. On my last day there, I even ate salad made from the most delicious dandelion leaves and buds that I had selected. I really wanted to take the salad bowl outside to show the other dandelions that I was a barbarian who would eat them all if they didn't stop from spreading, but it became dark and rainy outside and I didn't feel like it anymore.

Apart from battling dandelions, I cut the roses, the lavender, the spreading Fallopia baldschuanica and raked dead leaves and grass out of a sad, neglected little patch of garden. I also dug some holes for concrete blocks which are supposed to hold a wooden platform. I didn't leave the garden much. And I didn't take any pictures of the plants, either. Unusual.

I did, however, take pictures of plants in Bonn. Pictures of buildings and other things, too. The building above is one of the buildings of Bonn University from the garden side. It used to be a palace of the archbishop of Bonn. The university also uses another palace and several beautiful buildings in another part of Bonn.

But I won't give you a complete tour of my trip, just a few pictures. On the left is the cloister of the Bonner Münster from the 12th century. I really liked the way they had designed the garden and the capitals of the columns were also very beautifully carved with leaves and animals.

Searching for a supermarket, I found the most beautiful street in Germany. At least in spring. It's the Heerstraße in Bonn and would be one reason for me to move there. 500 meters of pink cherry trees. You can see it even in this picture - the light under the trees is pink!

Now about knitting. I did take some knitting to Bonn - luckily, because I had already finished my book in the train on the way to Bonn. Out of two balls of Lana Grossa Alta Moda Estate, I knit a neat kerchief with a slip stitch pattern that gave me a bit of a headache, but managed to make the knitting more interesting.

I named it Bonna, thinking about the Romans that had puttered around there for a while, before they built a big fort. Bonn also is the birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven and if it hadn't been the capital of Western Germany for 41 years and the capital of Germany for another 9, it would just be a lovely little town on the Rhine, overshadowed by the much larger Cologne. As it is, it has a large number of museums and government buildings and interesting, very different areas.

I also knit in the country and discovered that I won't need as much i-cord on 250 as I thought. Maybe not any, we'll see. The skirt of 250 is finished which enabled me to determine that the sleeves will actually be longer, because I have an extra ball of yarn to spend on them. Then I unraveled the top and thought about its construction. I think making side increases and then decreasing them again to make a sort of diamond shape might be the way to ensure that I have enough space for my boobs, but smaller armholes. We'll see, I'm not above unraveling the top again if I don't like it.

With those beautiful early medieval cups from the Rheinische Landesmuseum in Bonn (note the bunny on the left), I wish you happy Easter and shall go off to knit a little - unfortunately my right hand is a bit sore from gardening, so I need to be careful.

the triumphant return of the knitting capricorn

Yes, that's right - the thesis is DONE! 241 pages, 1211 footnotes almost 2MB filesize. I overshot the target of the laser pointed at the moon and built a whole secret moonbase!

There's still a lot of formal stuff to do and of course the exam, but graduation is on the horizon. As is cleaning up my room ... the mountains of clothing, yarn and paper need to be sorted and stored away and there are plenty of other things on my to-do list.

I have been knitting. Sometimes furiously. Sometimes furtively. But I had no time or energy to take pictures, even though there has been a lot of sunlight during this winter. That shall be remedied as soon as possible, seeing how I have a new digital camera now.

Remember this one?

I finally had the chance to make a real one! Very appropriate for the year of the rabbit.

Anime original for comparison:

milk and snow bunnies

There are new summer yarns at the yarn store. Deliiiiiiicious summer yarns. My favorite shade of pink. Shiny stuff. Yarn that looks like it should be in a Klimt painting. Vibrant colors - for some reason I'm really being drawn to orange and yellow. Lots of tape yarn (have no use for tape yarn, but it's pretty). Incredibly soft yarn. Exciting new fibers.

See, continental Europe hasn't picked up on all the exciting new fibers out there. And there are a lot less handdyers and handspinners and small yarn companies. There are some, but definitely not as many as in the US, UK or Canada (don't know about Australia). So ever since my favorite yarn company, Lana Grossa, started releasing a line of organic yarns with non-common fibers, I've been over the moon and tempted to try them all. I got a lot of single balls for cowls, mittens and the like.

I've tried their cotton, bamboo and soy yarn, cotton and soy yarn (soy! unheard of! and there's even soy sock yarn) and the wool and alpaca yarn, and dang, I never got around to trying their yarn with maize fiber. But! Yesterday I bought a ball of yarn consisting of cotton and milk protein. It's called Latte and it's soft and pretty and I just wanted to try it.

I've been wanting to try it ever since I saw it. I wanted to get my hands on that milk yarn and squoosh it until it liquidized. I wanted to knit something with it. Something white. Something cute. Something squooshable.

Enter Natsume Yuujinchou, second season, second episode. Natsume Takashi, the protagonist, is able to see all the spirits that live in everything and can inhabit anything in Japan. Some of these are evil, some are good, many are neutral. While he's trying to return the names of the spirits that his grandmother collected in a book, he also comes across spirits that have turned evil for a reason or need his help and he tries his best to help them. It's sweet and sometimes sad and makes you a little wistful, but it isn't one of those anime that take a katana to your heart. For a katana-to-your-heart-dealing-with-spirits anime, try Mushishi.

In this second episode, a forest guardian spirit living in a statue needs Natsume's help but tries to possess him first. Natsume evades possession and the spirit, Gen, possesses a snow bunny that Natsume made instead.

Yeah, you can see where that ball of Latte is going.