Karen's Korner

The Exorcist?

karenskorner — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 18:23:51 +0000

Exorcist Playset

Originally uploaded by Croshame

This just goes to show that there is a pattern for everything! If you want to make it, you can find it on Ravelry.

It’s just a jump to the left…

karenskorner — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 18:10:44 +0000

and a step to the right.

Glee is going Rocky Horror this week!

http://www.hulu.com/watch/186617/glee-time-warp

I know it won’t be as good as the original http://www.youtube.com/watchv=zJYnqDAXkEg but ya gotta give them credit.

Back again

karenskorner — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 02:56:30 +0000

I’m back again after a very long hiatus. Things have been so busy that I haven’t had time to breathe let alone write. Still teaching Spanish, no library job yet, but I’m still looking. It’s hard when you have a very limited area to search, especially when it’s a rural area! I have tons of students this year, at least for me. I’ve picked up one new school as well. So far all the kids are great but I need to get more organized.

I haven’t been knitting much. Well, actually I should say I have finished much. I have a neck scarf I’m working on, a bag I need to finish, a shawl I want to start, mittens to finish and who knows what else in down in my craft room!

I’ve also taken up cake decorating again. Now that I have my grand-daughter, I have a great excuse to make cakes for birthdays. I’m tackling a Dora the Explorer cake for her 2nd birthday. It’s not too hard but uses fondant, which I haven’t worked with before. Hopefully it will turn out great!

I’ve joined the 2010 Birthday Swap on Ravelry and am getting some great stuff for my partner. I hope she likes it. I thought about buying a pattern with the needed yarn but decided that might not be a good idea. What if she didn’t like the yarn? So I’m buying her some patterns and some yarn she likes. Plus I’ve picked up a few little goodies for here. I need to go to the Kansas store to buy her some made in KS items. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow. Take daughter & G-daughter with me and we can stop off for a picnic.

My goal is to continue this blog so I can have a place to post what’s happening in my life. No one will probably read it, but it’s good therapy, right?!?

Crazy Horse

karenskorner — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:05:41 +0000

We’ve been back from South Dakota for a couple of weeks now but I still want to talk about Crazy Horse. That place was amazing! I didn’t realize that basically the family of the man who began carving Crazy Horse are the ones working on it. I also didn’t realize that they don’t accept federal or state funding. It is completely funded by private donations.

We went in the evening which gave us time to look around and watch the laser light show. I really enjoyed that. It depicted the passage of life in the United States, and the process of work that Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski went through while working on the monument. It was very interesting and I enjoyed it very much.

There are also an American Indian museum and you can see other sculptures that Korczak Ziolkowski made in his lifetime. There a grand plans for the ground including building an Indian university for medical studies. All of this will take a great deal of time and I will be surprised if it is all finished within my lifetime, especially the monument. Although with the equipment and technology we have today, work on the monument is probably going faster than is was when Korczak Ziolkowski began back in 1947.

The monument as it is today. I didn’t realize how large it was. Mt. Rushmore can fit into the uncarved part behind Crazy Horse’s head. Also the tunnel you see is 10 stories high!. They are working on the horse at this time and the white outline you see is part of the horses head. The tunnel will eventually be the opening between Crazy Horse’s arm and the horse.

An upclose night shot of the head. You can get an idea of how large it is by the equipment beside it. That is not toy!

This is what the monument will look like when completed. It will be a 3D monument.

Custer State Park

karenskorner — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:06:13 +0000

We went to Custer State Park today. It was a little rainy at times but the weather was very cool. We took the Needles Highway to the park which is a scenic route with winding hairpin turns. I really enjoyed the park and surrounding area. There was great scenery and lots of animals to see. We stopped at one area and there were several people looking at something on the rocks. It was ground squirrles, which like prairie dogs are cute but incredibly annoying. This is the type of park that has animals, such as buffalo, walking whereever they want. We passed by this one on the side of the road.

Most of the others we saw we out in the fields.

We also saw some antelope.

As well as a few donkeys!

I really enjoyed this drive. Tonight we are going to Crazy Horse. I’ll let you know how it is!

Prairie Dogs, Deadwood, & Free Roaming Cattle

karenskorner — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:43:29 +0000

There are prairie dogs here that are the size of small raccoons. They are huge and apparently well fed! The tourists stop to take pictures of them, which I can understand. I, on the other hand, think they are one of the most annoying creatures around. I’m not sure what they are good for except hunting practice.

We went to Deadwood on Thursday. We had planned to stay until the Jack McCall trial reenactment at 8:00 pm but there really wasn’t a whole lot to do there, except gamble. We did visit the Adams House museum, Wild Bill Hickok’s gravesite, saw where he was shot, spend $40.00 in a slot machine, and walked around town some. There really wasn’t enough to do to justify staying all day except gamble and we didn’t feel like doing that.

On the way back we drove through Keystone and stopped to eat and shop. We ate at the Ruby House Restaurant. It was very good and if you happen to go to Keystone, SD I would recommend it. It is a little pricey though but worth it. We drove back on the Old Hill City road which the 1880 train winds around. It was a very curvy and slow driving road but with great scenery. Just a few miles out of Hill City we came up on some cows roaming down the road. There were about 10 head and they were all young, maybe a year or two. A little farther down we came up on several more head grazing in an open, unfenced area. I assume they got out of somewhere but who knows, maybe someone still believes in free range cattle! LOL

It was a good day in all. We relaxed in our room and watch a little TV, something we really haven’t done since we got here.

Mount Rushmore

karenskorner — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:15:58 +0000

We went to Mt. Rushmore today. Of course we come to South Dakota and we bring the heat! The weather last night said this was the 1st heat wave of the summer and it was expected to get to 95 today, which is a heck of a lot better than 100 or more but still hot! Even with the heat though, we enjoyed ourselves and spent a few hours there. We took tons of photos, I think Les had over 250 photos so I won’t post them all but I will show a few. More will be on facebook but probably not until we get home.

It was exciting to see everything in person. Sure we had seen Mt. Rushmore on TV and movies but there is nothing like seeing it in person. It’s just amazing to think about the work that went into constructing the monument and the fact that is was constructed from 1927 to 1941! It was very dangerous work.

There is a crevice in the rocks you can go into and take a picture. I loved the effect.

Some of the pictures Les took look like we were right up by the monument. I think Roosevelt is my favorite of the carvings.

We came back later for the night show. It was nice and I’m glad we went but I enjoyed the day trip much more. Lighting up the monument at night was very beautiful though.

1880 Train

karenskorner — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:52:38 +0000

Our first full day in South Dakota we rode the 1880 Train. It’s an old steam train that runs from Hill City to Keystone. It’s only 10 miles between the towns but the ride round trip takes over 2 hours. It was a very nice ride. The train goes through the Black Hill National Forest but there are private residences located in the forest. These were originally owned by miners in the area and were either sold or passed down through the generations.

On the way to keystone we rode in a car named Oreville.

It is a restored rail car that was restored to look like it did when it was new. They said that 4 types of wood was used for the interior – pine, oak, elm, and Honduran mahogany. I loved the windows, they were a beautiful green glass.

On the way back we rode in a different car which had larger windows that were better for taking pictures from. Except I didn’t take as many pictures!

The scenery is beautiful!

First Shawl

karenskorner — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:54:17 +0000

I finished my shawl last week. I think it’ll be good to use around the house when I get too cold. I was worried all the way through about unraveling the fringe at the end but it was soooo easy! The pattern is the Dropped Stitch Shawl from Knit Picks. I’d link it but it seems they took it off their site, or at least I couldn’t find it.

I like the way the yarn knitted up into verticle stripes. The yarn is Brett Marble dk in the MT 5 (Granite) colorway. If I were to knit it again, I would have used the whole extra skein of yarn I had to purchase. This took just over 2 skeins and I think I would have liked it to be a little longer. It’s a 100% acrylic yarn but feels very nice.

Below is a (not very good) picture of it. It was very windy that day and I didn’t want to wait another day to take the picture. Now I’m just down to 4 WIPs (works in progress) plus the sweater I started for Emily, the sweater I want to make for Timmy and the socks I want to start. That’s only 7, not too bad….

Traveling to South Dakota

karenskorner — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 23:22:28 +0000

We left for vacation Monday morning around 10:00. Stopped off at work to check and yep, I got my new textbooks! YEAH! The trip was pretty nice. I started Emily’s sweater and made it a little over halfway through the back. I also brought the yarn for Timmy’s sweater, yarn to start some socks, plus a dishcloth I started knitting in June ad never finished.

Any, vacation. It only took a little over 8 hours to get here. I haven’t been through Nebraska and South Dakota before. It was intererested, a few miles before Chadron, we rounded a hill and BOOM! there were trees every where! We were in the Nebraska National Forest. I didn’t even know Nebraska had a forest. Somehow the words Nebraska and forest just don’t go together. It was nice though and ended almost as suddenly as it began.

South Dakota is very pretty. The highway we were on went through Wind Cave National Park. It was cool as there were buffalo, antelope, and other animals roaming free. And by roaming free, I mean free – no fences. We passed by some buffalo that were on our shoulder of the road. Those are huge animals! They could do some damage to my car if they wanted to. A few miles later we passed some bikers headed the other direction. I thought that would really be scary- passing by the buffalo on a motorcycle!

We didn’t have a hotel reservation for Monday night so checked out some hotels when we got to Hill City. We could have stayed at the Holiday Express for the low price of $180 but instead we chose the Super 8 for a bargain price of $100. It was decent, except someone apparently can’t drive right and ran into my car in the parking lot. They hit the back bumper and didn’t dent it but did scratch about a 2×4 inch length of paint off. It looks very ugly but will be easy to fix when we get home. And do you think the people who did it left a note! If they did it was on invisible paper written in invisible ink. Oh, well it could have been worse.

More to come later – with pictures!