The past few days have been terribly hot. Temperatures above 100*F (or 38*C). The high today was 103*. And that’s not counting the heat index. The thing about Chicago is that it’s humid. It’s the kind of heat where the breeze is hot and sticky, the air feels perpetually damp, as though you jumped into a hot bath with all of your clothes on.
Yesterday was hot, too. We started our day with a matinee of Brave, which is an awesome movie and I highly recommend it, and then we went sailing. I somehow managed to drop the rudder on my big toe trying to pull it out of the water and my toe is not happy with me – it hurts to walk – but I think it will heal just fine. We came home afterwards to rest and eat and hydrate, and around 5 o’clock we lost our power. That meant that while it was 100 degrees outside, we had no means of cooling ourselves.
We have managed to spend a significant amount of summer without air conditioning over the past few years. The tangy artificial air bothers us, not to mention the amount of energy it sucks up. We try to strategically place fans to encourage air circulation. But when it’s 100 degrees outside you are left without power for 3 hours, you really start to wish. I get the feeling this summer is going to be ridiculous, too.
As the day progressed and began to cool off, I popped open the fridge quick to grab a cold beer, and staggered out to the back porch to crochet. I’m working on this crochet pattern that works up scrap yarn beautifully, and since I was using sock yarn in bamboos and cottons, it didn’t feel that hot.
I have a half dozen of these little bracelets right now. They need to be blocked and finished up, but they are awesome. They use 0.07 ounces of yarn. That looks like this much:
I went stash diving, and found all of these remnants to make more.
I’ve got some that are really long and use about .60 ounces, but those are harder to gauge the length on when you are weighing it, and I have to devise a more uniform method for working those out. The bracelet pattern has been written in my notebook though, and will be out soon.
The nice thing about the stitch is that it can be used with any weight. Here’s one using leftover chunky weight from an earlier project.
At some point in the evening, we rallied ourselves enough to head to the lakefront for fireworks. By the end of it, we were all dragging our feet, aching for our beds and a fan.
This picture was taken by Ellette. She’s getting really good at this.
