Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Other stuff’ Category

It was bound to happen… but you’d think it would have happened years ago. I’ve been living in the country for a long while.

Little dog Rita, who is 9 or 10… got skunked last weekend. Her first time. (not mine, at least not with dogs)

We got home from fishing about 10:15 pm. Probably our last fishing trip of the year. Let little dog Rita run around in the yard while we are chilling out and unloading the boat. It’s dark, it’s nice out, and little dog likes to run around in the dark but stays pretty close.

Ron and I were both sitting on the porch and here comes Rita up on the porch. She gets to the rug I have out there and starts rubbing her face on it, just about the time the smell caught up with us. Oh NO! Skunked!

Stinky little dog, but I know what to do about that. We have peroxide and plenty of soap or shampoo. So I let Rita in, catch her up and put her in the bath tub. Glass doors, so she can’t get out of there and go roll around anywhere in the house.

Gather up what I need, and get to bathing the doglet. Wet her down, soap her up, and then pour peroxide on her and rub that in, too.

It worked pretty well. I couldn’t soap up her face where most of the smell seemed to be, but I rinsed that with the sprayer a lot. Rita got a wet face, and was NOT happy, but hey, skunk smell has to go.

Rita slept on the couch that night. Still too stinky to sleep in bed with us which is where she usually sleeps.

The whole house smelled like skunk, too. But I have some Febreze air freshener. Guess what? It works! Yes, it left a perfume smell around the house for a little while, but it totally knocked out the skunk smell. I can live with perfume for a short while. After 30 min or so you couldn’t smell either the skunk or the perfume, so that to me is something that actually works.

However, the bathtub still smelled like skunk. Only place in the house with the smell, I finally got rid of that by giving it a good spray with tub cleaner and washing it out. No hurry… it’s wasn’t bad at all considering how Rita smelled when she came back from meeting the skunk.

Now for the hopeful bits: I hope that Rita never gets so curious again about a skunk. Skunks are a lot like cats… and pretty oblivious to dogs running around I think. But some dog comes up sniffing at you… whammo. I always figured that the dogs think they are just some strange sort of cat. Cats let the family dogs sniff… who is this, a stranger cat? Yes, a very strange cat indeed… :)

I don’t know if I have a photo of Rita here on the blog, so I’m gonna take one to upload here…. elderly brat terrier… and she’s asleep on the floor behind me. Ignore the color weirdness of the carpet, it’s because of horrible CF lightbulbs.

She doesn’t look any the worse for being skunked. Has been cleared to sleep on the bed since Sunday. Mom’s dog, though, and that’s why she’s sleeping right behind my chair now. If I say Bedtime, she’s in there like she’s been shot. :) (or as Ron would say… runs like a scalded dog)

If we do ever do this again, I will get out the tomato juice for the face stuff. I know it’s the acid in the tomato juice that is supposed to neutralize the skunk odor…. and I’m thinking that dogs would be happier with tomato juice being slopped on their face. I can see Rita trying to lick that off… :) I wonder if V8 would work as well as straight tomato juice? heh….

Glad to not be skunky….

hugs,
Vyx

Meant to do more blogging but both of my grown up children were here for the long weekend. Plus, Sarah had a guest here from Friday evening to Sunday morning, so it was a house full! I love having lots of people to cook for, but actually wasn’t expecting my son and his girlfriend that first night… just BARELY made enough food.

So, here is a photo from Easter a gazillion years ago. Sarah is 3 years older than Richard, and this photo is probably from ’87 or ’88. No, wait… it actually says on the back of the photo! 1987. We don’t have a really great scanner, I did the best I could…

My kids in 1987

I am sure there is a better version of this photo, but I couldn’t find it. One where part of Sarah’s head isn’t cut off. That’s one really nice thing about digital cameras, you can always see what you get.

Between this that and the other thing… I almost didn’t get a photo of them again. Today Sarah reminded me, as Richard was going home to Tulsa this afternoon. So I went out quick and snapped a few… and then set the camera up to take some of all three of us.

My kids today, July 6, 2010

Sarah and Richard went out with buckets yesterday and picked blackberries…. they brought me TWO gallons! I bet they could have filled another bucket. (we use ice cream buckets for picking) I ran the berries through the food mill thing that takes out the seeds and piths yesterday, and then poured it all into one big pot and stuck it in the fridge. That was all I had time for yesterday.

Stayed home from work today and made jam. 3 batches: 9 pint jars and 4 half pint jars. I was afraid I was going to run out of jars! That’s a lot of jam, and the blackberry is no where near to being done, but that’s okay… we’ll pick em and freeze them. If I can figure out a way to get the juice to my sister in Virginia, I’ll send her frozen juice so she can make wine.

So, this last photo is of me and my kids, and I look fat and sort of tired. But I was just done with all that jam making! :)

Sarah, Vyx, Richard.... me and my kids

Sarah went off tonight to visit with a local friend, Richard went home to Oklahoma. I need to go back to work tomorrow…. so this is all for tonight!

hugs,
Vyx

Today after lunch the gal next to me says that the new young man put another wrapper into the cigarette disposal can. This is one of those cans with the long tube on top, clogs up if you try to poke trash into it.

I’d told him right after he did it the first time that it was not a good thing to do.

So, when I hear he had done it again, I gave him one of my “looks” and told him no trash in that.

Poor kid. He didn’t do it. The gal sitting next to me made it up just so I’d give him one of my “looks”!!!

I told her that was rather mean to him, just to get me to give him a MEAN look! But it was rather clever at the same time, and I thought it was kind of funny. :)

hugs,
Vyx

We got about a half inch of ice. It was still doing the freezing rain this morning, but switched over to sneet and then finally snow around noon. The above photo is a close up of the walnut tree branches. Below is the yard… and I tried to get a photo of this view about every 2 hours today.

When it changed to sneet or sleet or whatever it was, it was hard to tell, except more white stuff showed up on the ground.

When it finally started snowing it was coming down heavy. I tried to get photos of the snow falling, but with a point and shoot camera that I don’t really know how to use very well… it didn’t work out. But here is some snow…

It’s STILL snowing. The wind is blowing like crazy, too… and from the north east. Weird, very weird. This storm system is moving steadily to the east, so why the heck is the snow blowing from the east? Ah, I guess it’s because of the layers of weather interacting… but it’s still very weird in my opinion!

More snow…

Some more snow before it got too dark to take pictures. Well, I do have a few more on the camera, might post em later.

In case anyone has forgotten, clicking on a photo opens up a bigger view of it. I resized all photos to about 800 px wide, so they aren’t too huge but get you a bit more detail.

Hardly anyone in the area has lost power… the electric companies did a good job of getting the right of ways cleaned up good. The biggest power outage I’ve heard of was when a car took out a major pole. Duh, stay HOME when the roads are bad. I can’t believe how many people feel like they HAVE to go somewhere when the roads are so messed up. I just took photos of someone in a pick up truck turning around almost in our driveway. He had about a 10 inch hole of cleared windshield, maybe wipers not working. Not going fast, but someone was behind him. Backing out, well he wasn’t IN our driveway quite, so he backed out in the fairly deep ditch. Made it okay tho, must have 4WD. He turned around and went back the other way (north)…. it’s still quite a bit of climb from here going south. Going north its a slide down to the lake, then a climb… and then either more up or more down and up depending on which way you go. I know the snow will drift really bad over the top of the hill south of us… if I’ve got 6 inches of snow in the yard that hill will probably have a lot more on top.

South is town, well, the small town closest to us. I don’t need anything. But I’m sure there are other people who do… even though we had a LOT of warning on this storm.

So, that’s the weather report…

Hugs,
Vyx

So, two weekends ago I dyed some wool yarn for my friend Jan. I used procion mx dye, which is mainly for cotton and other fibers of that sort but will work on protein fibers if done in the right way. (using acid to fix the dye, rather than soda ash like on cotton… you can’t use soda ash on wool, but you can on silk)

Before I dyed all the yarn I did a couple of test runs on short bits of yarn. The color came out beautiful.

Not so when it came down to the actual yarn. I got a big shock… the yarn came out MUCH darker than I expected and while the color was pretty much the same color… there were also whole sections of the skeins that came out even darker… totally a different color than I was going for.

It looks horrible in this photo… the actual yarn is much better. My camera skills are not that great, and I was shooting with no natural light. But still, you can see what the sample looked like on top there. And how the actual yarn is quite a bit darker.

I was all AUGH AUGH! However, my experience in dyeing stuff allowed me to dye all that wool in TWO batches and have it come out pretty much exactly the same. Even down to dark spots. That was part luck, part skill and frankly pretty amazing. I =do= have skills! Hand dyeing any sort of fiber can be a gamble to get the same color on repeat, but I was very careful measuring everything out… and even the boiling of the yarn.

The first batch took over 6 hours to get up to a simmer. My instructions said to heat slowly, so slowly is what I did… VERY slowly. That’s probably why the yarn got so much darker than I expected. I was worried about felting the yarn in the dye pot, so extra careful.

The next day I did the second batch. I didn’t use the simmer burner for that batch, but I still took it very slow… even after re-reading my instructions. The instructions say bring from room tempurature up to a simmer over a 45 minute period. Somehow I missed that snippet the first dye batch! But I’m trying to exactly duplicate the first dye batch… so very, very slow again. Probably only 4 hours to simmer though, not 6 or more, hah!

One of the reasons I did the yarn in two batches is that a POUND of wool is actually quite a bit of yarn. It would all fit into my 4 gallon stainless pot, but not swish around very easily. You can’t stir it too much or risk felting… but to not stir could mean the yarn at the bottom getting too hot from the burner. So, having it move around more freely is a good thing.

Up this weekend… the lime green yarn gets a transformation. Another horrid photo… and the test is way too dark so I’m going to use a lot less dye to start out.

This, however, is an acid dye. That means it’s MADE to dye wool, unlike my procion mx dye. From what I’ve been reading, when I hit that sweet spot in tempurature…. the dye will all disappear from the dye bath and go right into the yarn. In other words…. instead of a murky dye bath the water will turn =clear=!

How cool is that? I can’t wait to see it happen! I’m going to start with 1/8th of a cup of (mixed up) dye for 1/2 pound of wool. It’s a beautiful spruce… blue green. At a lower strength than full strength dye like the sample it should come out amazing. Of course any other color than that pale lime will be great, lol!

Back to the mx dye on wool… I used Dharma Trading Company’s “Chocolate Brown”. I’ve used this on silk with vinegar, and it comes out a really nice maroon… pretty much like the test bits on the wool did. It’s a mixture, tho, not a true color. But still, I expected it would work nicely on the wool, and it did on the tests. Lots darker on the wool and actually made brown in bits. Very red brown, but still. The odd thing, in my opinion, was when the dye bath had cooled and I got to rinse out…. the water left in the dye bath was cobalt blue. I’m thinking that must be a component of the mixture… and it doesn’t take on wool (or silk) when used with acid. Cobalt Blue mx is one of my favorite dye colors… not as useful for mixing as Turquoise is, but splendid by itself. Works great on silk when used with soda ash instead of vinegar. Just a brilliant dark, and slightly green, blue. It is one of the better mx dyes, and not a mixture.

So, that’s my little story of dyeing wool yarn. Did I tell ya I was saying AUGH AUGH AUGH when I was rinsing the yarn? Seriously freaking out. Then I got to mail it to my friend and cower while waiting her email when she opened the box. Jan loves it, and I get to try again with pale lime yarn. That’s my plan for this weekend, when it’s supposed to rain all day tomorrow.

Hugs,
Vyx