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Cruet by Mosquito Mud Pottery

Earlier this week I picked up this great cruet by Mosquito Mud Pottery of New Smyrna Beach, Florida. They’ve been open since 1998, and make bakewear, dishes, teapots, and sushi sets. I’ll use this to hold small quantities of olive oil – much prettier than just pouring it out of the plastic bottle.

Av and I have really wanted to see the Montgomery Biscuits Minor League baseball team play for a while now – and the evening we were in Mobile, the Bay Bears were playing the Biscuits. The Biscuits won…it was a good game.

I know it’s too warm outside to be wearing scarves, but…..I really like these! Next week I’m going to learn how to make something else, like a pillow cover, but for now I am really enjoying these.

The image above is my second completed scarf, made with Karabella “Barbados” using size 13 needles.

This scarf above is made with Karabella “labyrinth” using size 9 needles. It is taking a long time since the needles are so much smaller than the 13s and 15s I’ve been using. I’m calling this one my “Santa Fe” scarf because of the colors.

This scarf is my fun scarf. It’s made with Berroco Suede, and Crystal Palace Yarns “squiggle” (which is a really good name for it!). I’m knitting these together on size 13 needles. I think I’ll have enough to make two or maybe even three scarves with the amount of each that I bought.

My first scarf!

Last Wednesday, one of my friends taught me to knit – I have been wanting to learn *forever* – and guess what? It only took about ten minutes for me to get the hang of it, and with the help of my trusty Knitting for Dummies book, I even finished my first scarf in three evenings. Now I just have to get back to the knitting shop for more yarn and I will be a scarf machine!

Last weekend, we went to Montgomery, but part of the trip took us through Wetumpka, which is pretty well known for its impact crater.

The “impact structure” – or astrobleme – or crater (I don’t know which is most correct) in Wetumpka was formed when a iron asteroid or meteorite hit 80-83 million years ago back when that part of Alabama was under water. I’ve read that the asteroid was something like the size of Jordan-Hare stadium, hitting the earth at a speed of 10-20 miles/second, and that the displacement could have been shot all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I couldn’t really find a great picture to take of the crater, but below are some of the other pics we shot in Wetumpka:

Bank Clock in downtown

Theater, built in the 1930’s

 

Elmore County courthouse

The eight columns are made from Missouri marble.

Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church (moved here from Rodney, Mississippi)

This organ is so pretty in person

Grand Gulf Military Park (Grand Gulf, MS) is **amazingly** beautiful. Grand Gulf was a town on the Mississippi River that used to be pretty large, but now there isn’t much (save the park) since the river changed its course and engulfed the town. The picture above is one of the first buildings you reach in the park – it’s the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic church which moved here from Rodney (Rodney also used to be a LOT bigger before the river’s course moved *away* from it). A lot of people call Rodney a ghost town, but people live there still and there are several hunting clubs around; in fact when we drove there a couple of years ago, we must have seen over a dozen deer along the roadside. I’ll blog more about Rodney later.

 

Grand Gulf Cemetery

The cemetery pictured above is sooooo pretty. There are also trees here that drop huge (some of them had to be close to a foot long) purple seed pods. I brought a couple home to figure out what they were, but I don’t have an answer yet.

Looking downward at our Volvo from the 75-foot observation tower

Av climbed the 75-foot observation tower where you can see the Mississippi River. The river is about a half mile from this spot.