Gus's Sweater

Fin's current teacher returned from maternity leave as he first term teacher left to have her baby. Having knitted the baby surprise jacket I had a lot of the Drops Fabel yarn left over so decided to knit a sweater for the little lad.


He is now 6 months old, so I needed to knit something both age and season appropriate. The pattern is a free pattern from an Australian company called Carnival yarns. Edited April 2012: Link to the pattern is no longer active but it would be fairly easy to improvise a hooded vest if you are looking to create something similar.


I didn't make any changes to the pattern - just knitted it at a smaller gauge. I really like the pattern and may have to try to make one in worsted to get a larger garment. This used 2 balls of the Drops Fabel sock yarn. I used 2.5mm needles and got about 6 stitches to the inch.

Great race

Flushed with success after my 5K race I decided to enter the Saratoga to Los Gatos Great Race. This is a 4 mile race from Saratoga down highway 9 to Los Gatos. It's a real family event and I was delighted that the boys and Nigel wanted to participate.

Here we are at the beginning - looking fresh and raring to go!


We went with Bill and Duncan, and all started off together. Duncan decided he would rather walk so we met up with them later at the finish line. I had rather expected that we would walk at least some of the way - I had no idea whether the boys could run 4 miles or not. In the end we all ran the entire distance - some slower than others!

En route we met more friends and ran in different groups for the rest of the race. It was a timed race and we all had chips - so were able to report our official times: Nigel and Adam finished first in about 47 minutes, I ran with Belis and we came in at 52 minutes, and Fin and Nikash crossed the line at about 58 minutes*.



Here we are at the finish - tired but happy. Not only are the boys looking forward to next years race but they also want me to find another race that we can all do together.

* Fin tells me he ran the whole race, and also that they found a broken radio and a flip-flop on the road....so I suspect they had some diversions along the route.

Spring skiing

We spent 4 days over spring break at Bear Valley. The skiing was perfect spring skiing; sunshine, no crowds; in fact, no people at all. It was like having a private resort.


We met up with several friends over the days and the boys had the fun of skiing all over the mountain with their friends.



They also hit the terrain park - perfecting their board slides and jumps. (Below is Fin)


We took the video and to the thrill of the boys posted the video on YouTube - it's apparently the epitome of cool to have a video on the web. (Below Adam attempting a grab).


We rented a cabin in Arnold, and the boys made a little sledding slope to make the most of the fresh snow when we arrived, but the fresh snow had melted after all that sunshine.



We bought our season tickets for Bear for the 11/12 season so hope for more lovely ski trips next season.

Creek clean-up

Our cub scout pack sponsors a section of the Creek Trail, and every year we go and pick up the trash that has accumulated along the trail.

This year our clean-up date turned out to be after the wettest few days of the year. We decided that it was not very scout-like to cancel our community service because of rain, so we went ahead with the event.


It was pretty exciting to be walking alongside the creek which was more full than I had ever seen it, sections of the trail downstream were closed due to flooding, but the town approved our section being open.

Only 5 cubs turned out but we still managed to collect 10 garbage bags full! Just as we finished the rain stopped!

Blast off!

Fin and I went to the Library launch event on Sunday. This is to kick-off a fundraiser for new furniture and fixtures for the town's new library that will open in 2012. The theme for the event was Lauches and space so they invited Edward Lu to speak which was our main motivation for attending the event. He talked about his 3 space missions, in particular the last one which was a 6-month stay at the International Space Station with a Russian cosmonaut after travelling in a soyuz rocket.

He was an excellent speaker - entertaining to both the adults and many children in attendance. At the end of his speech he invited questions from the audience and Fin was the first one in line.



His question was "Does travelling in a rocket make you feel sick?". The answer was that it does not, but coming back to earth after 6 months of weightlessness does!

There were also some other space-related activities; here is Fin launching his stomp rocket.


Edited to link to the Weekly Times in which Fin has a quote: http://mytown.mercurynews.com/pdfs/losgatos.pdf Page 6.