The garden has absolutely exploded in the past two weeks.

Here is what it looked like on July 18:

I can’t see my pepper plants anymore.  Poor planning.  From last night until this afternoon, I watched a zucchini grow an inch and a half.  Crazypants.  I harvested one yellow cherry tomato last night which Paul and I split.  It was yummy.   No other tomatoes ready yet.  But pretty soon, we will have cherry tomatoes, zucchini and beans coming out our ears, then bigger tomatoes and hopefully corn.  And Paul says, “Clearly, we need to expand next year.”

If you’ll recall, I only got two pea plants to come in because “peas are fussy.”  The other day, when Paul came home from work, I was talking to him about my day, yammering on, blah, blah, blah and I realized he did not seem to be listening anymore (with all my very important blah, blah, blah-ing, I have no idea why something might distract him…).  He was staring out the dining room door.  Then he suddenly leapt out the door and into the backyard yelling, “There’s a rabbit in there!” WhaaaaaT?????

Here is what used to be one of my two pea plants:

All the flowers and the two little tiny growing peas nibbled off by A RABBIT!!!!!  In our FENCED IN garden.  Which has  RABBIT PROOF FENCING.  Rabbit proof, my a$$.  We chased him around with the gate open and him trying to leap through the rabbit proof portion and not getting out, from the inside (oh the irony).  He finally found his way out the gate.  The next evening we saw who we assume was the same rabbit sitting out there looking at the fence and we chased him away.  I could just see the thought bubble over his head, “Hmmm.  Now which part did I jump through….?”

Ok, that rabbit has gotten enough blog time.  On to some knitting….

My Shawl Society Amulet has sadly been put on the back burner and very soon there will be another pattern coming out and I’ll feel woefully behind.  But, I had to move on to knitting projects for fall classes.  While we were at Washington Park seeing Chicago, I started knitting the Sultana Cabled Hat:

I got this far:

And now I am ripping it out.  I love the hat and think it is so pretty. This was going to be a cool pattern to teach too, because it has a cable that needs two cable needles. Fun!  BUT.  My hands started hurting when I was knitting it.  Maybe it’s all the knitting I’ve been doing anyway and this put me over the edge but the small circular needle and the cables requiring some tight knitting just made them hurt.  In fact, I had to stop knitting for a few days to let my hands/arms rest.  Horrors!!!  I didn’t know what to do with myself, especially in front of the tv.

So, I think I will do a different hat with a pretty slip-stich pattern instead: Tamarugo

Then, I taught the What Alice Found class last Saturday:

And showed everyone the pictures of the superhero masks I made for the doodlebugs.  They all agreed that would also make a great class, especially to have before Halloween.  So, I knit the class sample for that:

Then I started the Frida Baby Cardigan in my new favorite Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Tonals:

And then I got all excited about finding this Silverleaf pattern and had to start that, too:

In doodlebug news, we painted al fresco the other day:

They love that they get to wear Uncle Paul’s old car t-shirts as their smocks.

That was before it got REALLY, REALLY hot and I found this super funny cartoon on Facebook:

I laughed so hard.

And finally, tomorrow is Deirdre’s last day of running The Spinning Room yarn shop!  We will miss her as an owner but will be lucky enough to still see her at knit-ins.  And I was lucky enough to have her want me to come back and teach classes after I sold the shop to her and I am thankful to her for that.  She was great to work for and did a great job with the shop.  I made her a cake:

And after a two-week shutdown, The Spinning Room will open again on August 16 with six new owners!