Knitting and Such

It looks like I have the day off today. I called in this morning to see how busy it is and whether or not it would be worthwhile to come in to work. It seems it isn't busy at all, so I'm on call in case something important does come in, but other than that, I have the day to myself.

In the knitting, the No. 20 scarf (that's what I'm calling it) from Victorian Lace Today has been restarted. I was using the variegated Angel Hair, had about three repeats finished when I somehow ended a row with 4 stitches short. In all honesty, I wasn't feeling the love with the yarn/pattern combination and I figured this was they yarn's way of agreeing with me.

This time, I'm using Fleece Artist Suri Blue (50% suri alpaca, 50% blue face leicester) in Buttercream. Oh my, this is nice yarn! I'm much preferring the way this knits up to the way the Angel Hair was knitting up.

For those of you interested in such things, the pattern calls for about 600 yards of yarn; the Suri Blue came in a 100 gram skein, with 600 metres, which is about 656 yards, so I should have enough. I'm working the scarf on 3.75 mm needles, rather than the 4.0 mm needles called for in the pattern. We'll see how it goes.

As for the fires, they're still burning. Above is the view from my little deck. You can see the low-hanging smoke off in the distance, hugging the hills.  That's the Rose Valley fire. That fire is about 150 hectares in size and is uncontained.

The Glenrosa fire, which is to the left of this picture, and not visible from where we are, now sits at about 350 hectares and is 40% contained. A third fire, the Terrace Mtn. fire has expanded to about 850 hectares. That one isn't threatening any homes, so they haven't been fighting it as aggressively as they have the Glenrosa fire. From everything I've been hearing, today they may be pulling some of the crews fighting the Glenrosa fire and moving them over to the Rose Valley fire. That one is situated in a fairly steep valley and will be a difficult fire to contain. 

The smokiness isn't too bad here in town today. Having seen satellite pictures, the smoke is drifting south in an almost straight line down into Washington state. Last night, there was a huge cloud of smoke hanging above the city; it was from the Terrace Mtn. fire and it was nasty-looking, and was quite high up in the atmosphere; we weren't smelling any smoke, thankfully. 

The forecast for our area for the week is more hot, dry weather. Temperatures are forecasted to go up to 32C (almost 90F) today and remaining in the mid to low 30's for the rest of the week. Hopefully, the winds will remain calm, as they are right now.

On a lighter note, here's a link to a really cute knitting video. I know I'm a knitting fanatic, but...  :)