Happy Halloween!

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Tonight I'm going to a friend's house to watch scary movies. Should be good times...

In other news, I dyed my hair with hennaforhair.com's blond kit last night. It's not really henna, it's cassia. It doesn't change the color of hair that is darker than blond and has a golden yellow dye molecule. That's not the primary reason for my use of it. It conditions hair like nothing else (except actual henna). Really, amazing stuff. I'm also experimenting with other henna mixtures using small samples of my hair taken from my hair brush over the past month. So far the two formulas I've tried, "Cinnamon" and "Sunshine" from hennaforhair, have both dyed my hair very distinctly red... One, the Sunshine, dyed it a rather orange tint, in fact.

Also, I really think I'm going to get a Mach II from Spinolutions. I found a dealer who I will be able to visit when I'm in VA. She's on the way to DC. So I hope in the next six months or so I'll be able to go try her wheel.

No, no, really...

I'm really pretty sure that if this wheel is half as amazing as it looks like it is, I want it. So much.

Check this out:

Weekend projects...

My friend Joe and I planted fruit trees on Saturday. My mom has been wanting a yard full of fruit trees for the better part of 30 years and something has always happened, either to them once they've been planted or to prevent trees from being planted at all. But now we have them. An Anna apple tree, a Dorsett Golden apple tree, a papaya, a mango, a Florida Hass avocado, a Meyer lemon tree, a Persian lime, a Key lime, a Valencia orange, a Hamlin orange and a Brown Turkey fig. It was quite a day, filled with digging and hauling and peat moss. We already had an Anna apple, a Brown Turkey fig, a pink grapefruit and a lemon tree. The lemon tree and the pink grapefruit both used to be orange trees. They died back in freezes back in the 80s, their graphs died or something, and when they grew again, they started producing other kinds of citrus fruit. I think this is the neatest thing about citrus trees. Both are much more than 30 years old now because they were here before the house was built in '79 and the land was still an orange grove.

I took the subject area exam on Saturday as well. I'm confident that I passed it and will be very surprised if I didn't.

Today, I went to the yarn shop but forgot to take along the notes about projects that I want to get started on soon, so I didn't get any needles or yarn for planned projects. I did get some yarn though. I can't go there without picking up something. I got some Qina in Wisteria and some Angora yarn in peacock green.

And then this evening, I made banana bread. I hope that it will be delicious and strongly suspect it will. I should post the recipe. My mom has been using it for about 30 years.

I've been working constantly this month. There have only been two weekdays the entire month of October when I haven't worked. So very busy. It's good because more work means more money, but it's still been quite a lot of work and I'll be glad to have some time off. This week, I know I'm working Monday and Tuesday, but I'm not sure about the rest of the week yet.

Edited to include recipe:

My Mom's Banana Bread

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
3/4 cup mashed very ripe bananas
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Cream the sugar and butter together in a mixing bowl. Add vanilla and eggs. Beat together as if you were making scrambled eggs. This will help the bread be lighter. Add bananas. Stir until well mixed. Add all dry ingredients, a little at a time, stirring together in between. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a loaf pan and pour mixture into it. Bake for 50 - 60 minutes. The very center of the bread will probably still be a little moist and the corners will look like they are too dry when it's done.

He's okay...

At about 11:20 this morning, my dad got into a car accident. If he wasn't wearing a seatbelt, he probably would have been killed (everybody, always wear your seatbelt!). Someone who was speeding ran him off the interstate (and they didn't ever stop), he lost control of his car, hit another car (apparently driven by a nice young woman who goes to USF - she wasn't hurt but her car was pretty badly dented on one side and it spun around on the shoulder of the road), went off the road, and then his car flipped over and landed on the driver's side against a barbed wire fence next to a cow field. He climbed out through the passenger side window. He's got a bruise and cut on one elbow, a cut on his forearm, and a cut on the top of his head, where he must have hit something, although he doesn't remember doing that, and his knee that he injured almost two months ago while working in the garden got banged pretty good against the driver's side door and now it's as bad as it ever was again. Poor Daddy... but no concussion and he's okay and glad to be breathing.

We don't know if the car is totaled yet. It's been towed to the Toyota dealership he bought it from back in '01 and we'll hear tomorrow or the next day from the insurance adjuster as to whether or not it will be declared "totaled."

The school secretary tracked my mom and I down in the teachers' lunchroom about halfway through our lunch period to tell us. Scared my mom half to death. Luckily, my dad had called the school and there was a phone in the teachers' lunchroom, so she got to talk to him right away. I was going to leave school and go get him to take him home, but my dad's cell phone died before he could tell her exactly where he was (isn't it awful when that happens? Like, that's what people have cell phones for, but sometimes they just die right when you really need them), and Mom didn't want me to go on a wild goose chase up and down the interstate trying to find him because he had been at the dentist in St. Pete and might be anywhere or might be picked up by the tow truck before I got there. He had said before the phone died that AAA was sending a tow truck to get his car, and that if his phone died, he'd call her again when he got to another phone, either the tow truck driver's or when he got to the Toyota dealership, if he couldn't get a ride home and needed me to come get him. However, (again) luckily, the tow truck driver very kindly offered to drive my dad all the way home even though our house is about 8 miles away from the dealership and he didn't have to do that, so Dad called once he was home, not much more than an hour and a half after the accident happened.

Nupps

I don't get them. I don't get why. And I don't think they look good enough to excuse the considerable trouble.

I'm working on the Swallowtail Shawl right now. I've don't one row of nupps. I'm thinking that's the only row of them I'm going to do. I'm just hoping that it won't look too odd to only have the one row and no more.