Sorry, Rangers. I'm Ambrosia.

We went to a Rangers game (regular season, nothing fancy) a few weeks back. I brought some knitting. Lately I've been committed to working on a few larger projects, so I found myself running out the door with only a few minutes to find something portable. This is right after the most recent Knitty came out, and I just so happened to have 2 balls of Noro Silk Garden sitting out. I decided to work on a Spry hat.

Now, some might say that intarsia is not the best choice for a live sporting event. Perhaps. The concrete floor was sticky, and I was more worried about dropping one of the four mini-balls of yarn on the ground than I was about the game. Still, I pulled it off.

My fella might beg to differ. Josh Hamilton hit a home run and got something like two runners in? I'm not sure, because everybody in the whole stadium stood up and cheered except me with my four mini-balls of yarn in my lap that I didn't want to spill in the beer puddles.

"What are you doing?!" my fella demanded. "This is incredible!"

"I can't, I'm doing intarsia!" I told him, desperately stuck to my seat.

This didn't go over well with him. He brought it up again on the way home. "No, no, no," he mimicked. He did his imitation of knitting, which looks kind of like a baby playing with chopsticks. "Sorry, Rangers, I can't stand up and cheer, because I'm ambrosia."

At any rate, I survived the game and later finished the hat:



Here's a shot of the intarsia:




(Intarsia isn't that horrible. Really. It just gets a bad rep from knitters whose husbands have tried to take them to a baseball game.)

The Challenge on the Back of the Cheerios Box

We went to visit my parents last weekend. On Saturday morning, I got up before the fella and went in to breakfast. There was a plate of Cheerios on the table. I thought they'd been spilled, but as it turns out, it was a logic puzzle.

On the back of the current Cheerios box, there's a challenge:



Take away six Cheerios, but every row and every column must have an even number of Cheerios left.

My father, then my mother, had attacked this first. Then they tried it out on me. None of us figured it out, and I need to say here that we are a family of very intelligent people. (You just have to trust me on that one, sorry.) My father had even tried Googling for the answer but couldn't find it in such a way that didn't require him to fill out mailing list info. So we were stuck. In fact, we were drafting letters to General Mills telling them about the irritating typo on the back of their cereal box.

A bit later, in comes my fella. He sits down, asks about the Cheerios. We tell him. He stares at it for a bit, occasionally poking a Cheerio, here and there. Meanwhile, we start talking about how positively careless and cavalier those cereal box people are, how they shouldn't allow a problem like this onto the back of the box without thoroughly checking it, and don't you think there's a better way to spend a morning than to --

"I got it."

Huh?

Yeah. He got it in about three minutes.

(Jerk.)

Here's the answer:

Step 1



Step 2



Step 3




There you have it. And I didn't even ask for your contact information first.