Puppy love
Wednesday July 22nd 2009, 6:57 pm
Filed under: "Wrapped in Comfort",Life,Non-Knitting

One blocked Monterey scarf, here you go. The patterns didn’t line up together with the yoke-to-body increase row missing, so it took some playing with. I’ll post later how I did it.

Today, I had to drop some files off for the surgeon and found myself coming back via the main road into Stanford for the first time in months.

So.  Here‘s a link to an older picture to give you an idea of what the area has always looked like, give or take a few trimmed-off dead fronds; the view is an announcement that You Have Arrived  at Stanford University.

I didn’t have my camera this afternoon, and even if I had there was no place to pull over to use it.   But my stars!  The trees!

I thought, okay, I can see doing that. Maybe.  Under duress.  We used to have a date palm and one of our kids fell into it and had to go to the plastic surgeon’s–the fronds are as sharp as sewing-machine needles and the trunks are nothing you’d much want to touch either if you didn’t have to. Drunk students? Did someone sue the University?  Why did they do this?

Poodle cuts.  They gave the palm trees poodle cuts.  Shaved them smooth as can be all the way up and liposuctioned the trunks into rigid verticality, then turned the crowns into slicked poofs above, leaving the fronds at the top announcing, tadaaah! with their arms thrown out wide. Dig the new haircuts!

Poodle palms.  Huh.  There’s got to be a good reason, but I don’t know it yet.


16 Comments so far
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Love your adaptation to scarf – it’s a beaut!

Comment by Barbara-Kay 07.22.09 @ 7:21 pm

Poodle cuts? Maybe they’re emulating whoever does the Poodle cuts around here.

Humor:

PARKING PROBLEM

A man was driving down the street in a panic because he had an important meeting and couldn’t find a parking place. Looking up toward heaven, he said “Lord, take pity on me. If you find me a parking place I will go to church every Sunday for the rest of my life and give up drinking.” Miraculously, a parking place appeared. The man looked up again and said, “Never mind. I found one.”

Comment by Don Meyer 07.22.09 @ 7:50 pm

I’m sorry, but I can’t get the thought out of my head that a band of gardeners were out there singing “Funky Poodle” as they “groomed” those trees!!

The one time I made it to the left coast, I adored the palm tree lined streets – perhaps some PTB big-wigs tired of the sight?

Comment by Cathy (catsandyarn on ravelry) 07.22.09 @ 8:20 pm

Oh yeah, lovely scarf!

Comment by Cathy (catsandyarn on ravelry) 07.22.09 @ 8:21 pm

Ah, the whimsy of a well-coiffed tree! For a while I had a palm in my foyer but getting in the house was like running a gauntlet. I wonder if there’s a health reason for strimming the trunks. My cordyline gets a lot of bugs in those frond stubs.

Comment by LynnM 07.23.09 @ 12:58 am

The scarf is gorgeous. The colorway is so beautiful. Lucky recipient!!!

Love the picture of Stanford area. So different from New England.

Comment by Joansie 07.23.09 @ 4:41 am

The scarf is so beautiful! The giftee is going to feel very gifted indeed! Thank you for showing it…it’s even more beautiful than I had imagined!..and I had imagined it as being very beautiful. 🙂
-Abby

Comment by Abby Baker 07.23.09 @ 4:50 am

Please reassure me that you have missed out on a project in the past? lol I don’t recall ever seeing anything you knit come out wrong. Beautiful colour too!

Again, you add a smile to my day. For a minute, I could not understand what you meant by “poodle cuts” and then my bilingual brain kicked in. 😀 You didn’t type “puddle” but “poodle”! hahahahaha

Goes to show how artistry can express itself, huh? (the gardners, not mine…)

Comment by Suzanne 07.23.09 @ 5:12 am

That scarf is lovely! The palms? Not so much, eh?

Comment by Channon 07.23.09 @ 7:03 am

The other thing to consider is that any wind would knock an evergreen over (or a tree that hung on to long fronds/dead fronds.) I do recall seeing hotel staff in Majorca trimming palms while we were there. Maybe there’s a height where this becomes an issue (too tall, less stable.) Let us know!

Comment by LynnM 07.23.09 @ 12:05 pm

Wow… Maybe it’s an attempt a really big Bonsai?

Comment by Diana Troldahl 07.23.09 @ 3:00 pm

Gorgeous scarf!!!
Poor palm trees. What a horrible sight that must have been!

Comment by karin maag-tanchak 07.23.09 @ 4:56 pm

I love the scarf! I love the yarn!
I guess I think of palm trees on exotic islands, mid-ocean. 🙂 They seem to me to have been artificially planted in the US to an ungrateful hillbill-ete, that is. Do they occur there naturally, or is this another thing man has done? I’d truly like to know. I’m ignorant on the subject of palms.

Comment by Toni Smoky-Mountains 07.24.09 @ 5:10 am

The lace scarf is, as always, beeyootiful!

Um, poodle cut trees? What an odd mental picture

Comment by Carol 07.24.09 @ 8:36 am

Your palm trees remind me of the Christine Lavin song Santa Monica Pier…the lyric says the palm trees all look a bit like Tina Turner looks from behind– a delightful happy song, about enjoying the moment. 🙂

Comment by RobinH 07.27.09 @ 1:27 pm

I grew up on a street lined with palms in SoCal. They were the very tall, skinny ones (Washingtonia). The basketweave on the trunk was trimmed away when it was found that rodents were living there. The tops of the palms accummulated dead fronds that would sail away in the wind endangering pedestrians, so eventually they got trimmed too. No easy feat as the palms were over 90 feet high. Also palms have very small root systems and would topple easily if they were not so bendy in the wind. I loved ’em, still do.

Comment by Judy 07.28.09 @ 12:00 pm



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