Tour de France KAL update

Brewgal is in danger of being dropped off the back of the Peloton. The race has reached the Alps, and I have reached row 57 of the Baby Surprise Jacket only to discover that instead of the 114 stitches in the pattern, I have 116 stitches in the center section of my jacket. At some point I picked up 2 stitches. Do I rip back and start over? Abandon? No way. I've just got to figure out how to distribute my 10 stitches over 116 rather than 114.

Need more coffee.

I also made an equipment change after stage one. I'm now working on circular needles. The straights I picked out were sticking to the yarn.

Look! A sleeve!

It's also brewday in the Brewgal household. Here we see Brewguy heating water for the wirt boil (technically called the "hot liquor"). It is heated to a temperature in the 160 degree farenheit range. The water is used first for the mash, and then later for the sparge. See what Brewguy is doing in the background? He is about to spring the fruit fly trap.

We have an abundance of fruit flies. I think they came home with us from West Virginia. We first tried the paper over the glass trick, a trap suggested to us by a former neighbor who was a professor of biology. He was conducting experiments on special species of fruit flies in his lab and used this method to trap wild fruit flies. You place a small amount of sugar water (or beer) in a jar or glass, cover the top with a piece of paper secured by a rubber band and poke a small hole in the top with a pencil. The fruit flies can go through the hole into the glass but can't find their way back out. When the trap was full he microwaved the jar.

We've used the same method, sans the microwaving. With our luck we'd only create a species of microwave-proof fruit flies.

The paper trick didn't work last night. Brewguy got up early to brew and discovered that instead of being inside the glass, all the fruit flies had clustered on top of the paper, like they were waiting for the club to open. So he trapped them by placing a flower vase on top and released them into the wild.

It's the Hav-a-Hart of fruit fly traps.