SuzannaBanana's 'Knitting for the Large Headed Gal'

How to Disappear Completely

2011-12-23T23:31:00.000-08:00

Two weeks tomorrow.

I spend most of the day clearing out the office, going through all of the drawers and little corners where things collect. I go through every pocket thoroughly, even when I get so weary of the task that I want nothing more than to close the drawer back up, put the lid back on the box, come back to it tomorrow. I sort through every stack of paper, pull down every picture and postcard off of the memo board, read every letter and birthday card. Many of them go into a box in the garage. I cannot bring myself to get rid of them, but I am compelled to pull all of them down.

I move around the rest of the house, but there isn't much left anyway. One drawer in the buffet and half a dozen snapshots in frames. I change out all but two of the pictures. If my printer worked, it would all have been done today. I resolve to find another printer tomorrow. I clear out the buffet, and there isn't even anything significant enough for me to set aside for him. Expired coupons and a handful of screws. Only clutter.

I wander around again with a home staging eye. Have I missed anything? If someone new walked through, someone who had never met us together, would they have any idea? Did I leave a note tacked on the refrigerator, or some little trinket that hinted at a marriage? But no, aside from those two photos on the stairs, there is nothing.

I have erased him.

Thoughts on a Wednesday Morning

2011-12-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

"There's a point where 'I will show you how amazing I am, and you'll (love me more/be sorry you did this to me/be humbled by my coolness)' becomes simply 'I am amazing.' Not to make it all about me, but I know that feeling, because I've had it for a while now. It's why I know that I'm going to be O.K.

"And why I know that you are, too."

- Me to Doc, December 7, 2011

Gobbles

2011-11-24T20:08:00.000-08:00

You're never too old to make a hand turkey.

Maybe too drunk, but never too old.

Winston's Review: Horstia Maulbeerseide-Schurwolle

2011-11-17T22:29:00.000-08:00

Hello!

It’s me, Winston J. Schmidt.

I finally got a chance to review another yarn, because Suzanne hasn't learned that I can reach as high as the top of the pub table, even though I dragged her 40-year-old Raggedy Ann down from there and, well, things happened. Look for my review of Raggedy Ann yarn hair in the future.

Squirted! Squirted right in the FACE! I like it when it's not me!

Molly? I didn't get squirted in the face, because I think Suzanne kinda wanted me to do that so that she wouldn't have to make tough decisions about her dirty, old doll. Also, you have to throw a whole bucket of water on me to get me to stop doing stuff, which makes the squirt bottle kinda useless. And she didn't catch me with the yarn, so there's no proving that it wasn't you, even though you're not tall enough to reach up on your hind legs like a velociraptor and grab stuff off the counter, and you don't like yarn. So you didn't get squirted in the face, thanks to me making it ambiguous. You're welcome.

Anyway, I got a chance to review this ball of yarn, so here's my assessment.

Yarn: Horstia Maulbeerseide-Schurwolle

Yardage/Weight: 50 grams per 100 meters

Fiber Content: 50% Silk / 50% Wool

Color: Like, um, pasta? You guys, it really did look like spaghetti, and if a guy can't tell the difference, then you can't hold it against him for trying to eat it, right?

Texture: Single-ply, and sort of shiny and squeaky, and I hate to keep saying it but it really did look just like cooked pasta when it was sitting on the floor, where it just happened to fall after I gently brushed it off of the tall bar table with my face. I watched Suzanne try to untangle and re-roll the ball, and it looked kinda like it was already getting fuzzy and felted, and I don't like that stuff getting stuck in my jowls.

Flavor: Disappointing, because it didn't taste buttery or salty. After my last review, where the yarn had notes of barnyard and grass, this one was kind of a let-down.

Mouth Feel: Silky and slippery, and a little past al dente.

Review: Suzanne really likes this yarn, I guess. She made a sweater out of some of it that didn't look like pasta a few years ago, but then she accidentally felted it, which I could have told her would happen, since I did it just by chewing on it. A few years ago, when she heard it was discontinued, she bought, like, fifteen balls of it in this mustard color, even though she thinks it's going to make her look like she has jaundice.

To me, it's just O.K. It doesn't break easily in my mouth, and it doesn't taste like much of anything. Once I tangled up the ball a little bit, I lost interest in it. If she does make something out of it pretty soon, I probably would try to eat another ball, but it wouldn't be as good as that sheepy stuff.

In conclusion, Suzanne thinks it's great, but I wish she'd let me review more angora.

Sincerely,

Winston J. ‘Bug’ Schmidt

Old Roses

2011-11-16T22:19:00.000-08:00

Ween's Dahlias

2011-11-15T23:39:00.000-08:00

Garage Door

2011-11-14T22:15:00.000-08:00

I saw this while I was out stomping around today. I don't know why it affected me as much as it did, but I stood in front of it for several minutes before I took the picture and moved on. As I walked away, I thought, "I am a miracle. I AM."

A Frosty Treat

2011-11-13T17:52:00.000-08:00

Someday soon, the foot that made this print will be wearing a sock made out of this yarn.

Lake Tahoe Yarn Company Superwash Sock in Pink Roses and Milk Chocolate. It looks more like Neapolitan ice cream to me, which makes me just as happy.

The sample in the window was simple and very stripy, which wasn't bad, but I'm thinking of something with a little more texture. I'm open to suggestions, if anyone has a thought about it. I've got one skein.

Yes, it added to my stash, but I couldn't resist it.

Three Wishes

2011-11-12T23:16:00.000-08:00

I have three wishes you guys! The wishy thing was supposed to be yesterday, so I hope I'm not too late!

First, I wish that every day could be Burrito Monday, because that's when we get tortilla chips. I LOVE tortilla chips.

Second, I wish that I had a room full of red velvet throw pillows. I love those things!

Third, I wish everyone had it as good as I do, because you guys? I have it pretty good. I get chippy snacks, and nobody yells at me when I haul the red throw velvet throw pillows around the house, and Suzanne tells me I'm a BEAUTIFUL PUPPY, like, all the time! Yay!

Anyway, those are my wishes. Thanks!

Love,

Molly

p.s. I look all wrinkled because I'm wishing REALLY HARD.

Pieces of What

2011-11-11T21:22:00.000-08:00

Accountant Boy with Doc's dogs - November 11, 2011 - Truckee

SuzannaBanana's First Snowman

2011-11-10T23:59:00.000-08:00

Hey, kiddos! Belligero Clown again. This is me up in Truckee last summer. I'm not up there with the kids right now, on account of Doc's dogs maybe seeing me as a chew toy. I'm hoping next time, though. The little chick and I never even walked on snow before, so this was the first snowman she ever made. It was cool, no pun intended.

And check out how the snowman matches me. Dig those crazy eyes, would ya? Advil gel caplets. Yeah, the kids took 'em back down when we left. No mountain creatures took any anti-inflammatories on our watch.

Small Acts

2011-11-09T21:51:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I rescued a nightcrawler from the sidewalk. "Get back in the dirt, dumbass," I grumbled as it writhed away from the brittle oak leaf I was using to nudge it. It bucked away a bit longer, finally wrapping itself around the leaf's stem. I dropped it into the grass and watched it burrow down for a minute, then walked on.

Blurry

2011-11-08T23:45:00.000-08:00

The Great Train Caper

2011-11-07T22:23:00.000-08:00

Hey, kids! Belligero Clown here, or, as I’m known on Facebook, “Belligero Klaun”, because the little chick doesn’t want anyone to catch on that I’m not a real goddamn boy or something and delete my account.

With all the kitchen sink drama and whatnot, you might be getting the impression that nothing fun is going on around here. It’s getting kinda morose, which is like a fist to the poly-filled jewels for a clown like me. What’s my raison d’etre if it’s not seeing people happy? Yeah, I said raison d’etre. I went to goddamn college.

Lately, the little chick’s been having a rough time, so I started whispering suggestions to her in her sleep. I might have failed to mention, but I moved up from the lingerie drawer a few years ago, and now I have a snazzy pad in the nightstand, so I’m pretty close to her ear. What? It’s not weird. It ain’t like I watch her dream or anything.

Anyway, I may have planted some ideas in that great big noggin. I’d say, “Work from home today. Haul your ass out into the sun, because that’s why laptops were invented.” Or, “Today, why not celebrate happy hour in Central time? You work with a bunch of broads from Nebraska. Who’s gonna know?” Or, “Go get that nose piercing you always wanted. You’re a wacky dame. Fly that flag, toots!”

This one is the one I’m most proud of pushing. “Jump on a train to anywhere. Drink some beer. What the Hell? You’re not driving the goddamn thing, am I right?” Damned if she didn’t do it. Here’s how it went down.

The little chick and her friend Ween were out in the cul-de-sac chatting, as dames do on a Thursday in the middle of the day…

Clown? No fair. Ween works nights, and I was on a lunch break during a work-from-home day.

…which was my idea, so you’re welcome. Like I was saying, The little chick and Ween were outside chatting about bon-bons and feminine products and, I dunno, chick stuff, and…

Hey! Knock it off with that sexist bullshit.

What? You want me to tell everyone you were having a roundtable about the economic crisis in Greece? How long’s that story gonna hold water, honey? I got the pictures.

Well…

Yeah, that’s what I thought. So the two of them hatched this plan to take the train to Sacramento the next day and wander around there. I don’t understand the appeal of wandering around a place that doesn’t have dancing girls and free booze, but whatever. It counts as travel, and I get to leave the drawer for travel, so I’m game.

They go to look at a rental house for Ween, because she and her old man are splitting up and moving out of the court. They spend a little longer than they should deciding that the place is an irredeemable shithole, and pull away forty-two minutes before the next train leaves. The little chick knows a thing or two about train travel, and she knows how long it takes to get from Hell-and-gone out beyond her old house to the train station in the next town, so it’s not like she ought to be surprised when it takes forty-five goddamn minutes to get from one spot to another. We get to the train station, and wouldn’t you know? The train’s pulling away. It’s not entirely an accident, is what I’m saying.

“Maybe that’s not our train?”

“Ween, that’s our train,” I hear the little chick say. “The trains out of this station follow a pretty accurate schedule. Trust me, we missed it. The next one isn’t for two hours. Hmmm…two hours in Martinez…and we’re not driving…”

I know where she’s going with this, so I’m not surprised when she pulls me out of the bag a few minutes later and we’re sitting at a bar.

Creek Monkey Tap House opens at eleven, and we roll in there at ten after. The place smells like Pine-Sol and dishwasher steam. Ween’s in the health care field, so she’s pretty jazzed about everything being so tidy. We set about screwing that up right off the bat.

At this point, the little chick’s had half a waffle and a cup of java, and not like she’s eating all that much anyway, because she carries all of her stress in her gut. So what’s the smart way to start off the day? With a whole bunch of samples and a pint of the house brown ale. They don’t list the ABV on her pint, and she doesn’t ask, but let’s assume it’s pretty f$%king high, based on how things go later.

They order chicken wings, but that’s not much of a lunch. Here’s a weird fact about the little chick. She was so traumatized as a child, when her mom explained anatomy and locomotion to her by making a roasted chicken “walk” across the kitchen counter, that she has a hard time eating chicken off the bone. So even as many wings as they get, delicious as they are, aren’t enough to fill her up, because she leaves a whole bunch of meat on the plate.

And orders another Creekwater Brown.Ale.

They talk with the head Monkey for a bit, getting advice on their garage beer fridges and the foam situation. Doc’s trying to buy Ween’s fridge when she moves, now that all of The Chemist’s shit isn’t in her garage anymore, on account of they split up, too. Yeah, it’s been that kind of a year. No wonder everybody’s drinking. Point being, Ween’s fridge is blowing foam, and the little chick’s taps aren’t much better, so the head monkey hands us his card and tells us to give him a call so he can come around and straighten them out. Nice guy.

Then we realize that we’re about to miss another goddamn train, so the little chick shoves me back in the bag and we run back across the bridge to the station, the two broads laughing like crazy. We make it on board right as the train’s pulling away.

Stay tuned for Part Two: Hell on Wheels.

The Way We Get By

2011-11-06T20:08:00.000-08:00

Coping. Coping My Ass Off.

2011-11-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

One positive out of everything that's happening is that I've discovered that I like walking.

I'd always considered it an activity for people who couldn't handle real physical activity. "Well, at least they're getting out," I'd smirk to myself. I'd read studies that found little difference between jogging and walking, but never really believed them. How could something so simple make any difference?

In early August, my company launched an employee wellness walking challenge. My friends in Nebraska added me to their walking team, and I took it upon myself to lead us to victory. I quickly realized that our team already had a ringer in a guy who regularly runs several miles a day, so I settled in behind him.

And then, all Hell broke loose.

2011-11-04T17:29:00.000-07:00

The man wasn't kidding. This is fantastically aromatic garlic.

Does the Hole Define the Donut, or the Donut Describe the Hole?

2011-11-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

People expect this kind of thing from me, and I like to deliver.

"I don't want to give you my trash, now..."

"Anita, I promise that none of them will see a bin liner."

All three donuts were gone within five minutes. It was as though the Help Desk kids could smell them from fifty yards away.

Keep Your Secrets, Soothsayers

2011-11-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

I saw this sign while I was out walking the other day. I did not turn right.

Flying Apart: One in a Thirty Part Series

2011-11-01T19:35:00.000-07:00

This is going to be hard. This is going to be a really hard month.

Our twelve-year wedding anniversary was last Sunday. I don't know that we'll be together for another. A.B. says that we've grown apart, and I guess I can't disagree with him if I didn't see this coming. How do you spend eighteen years with someone and not notice when the wall goes up between you? How did I not notice?

Everything is changing so fast, and I feel adrift on the sea with no sign of shore in any direction. If I've never mentioned it, one of my greatest fears is of the unfathomable deep.

So, it's November, and I'm going to try for NaBloPoMo again, but I don't know how it's going to turn out. Some days will probably be funny, some days will be angry, some days will be like this one. Some will just be pictures, since I got a new phone and am crazy about the camera. Some might even be about knitting. We'll see how it goes.

Saturday in the Park(ing Lot)

2011-10-11T15:04:00.000-07:00

If you look out beyond the scarf-in-progress, you'll see Accountant Boy's back. If you look very closely, you'll see a rider on a bike even farther out. That's The Engineer, riding Doc's bike. He's bought a Harley, and is challenging himself to ride it every couple of days so that it doesn't get too intimidating, but he's getting his skills down on Doc's Ninja.

Me, I'm happy sitting in the shadow of the car, knitting and watching.

The scarf is longer than this now, about 17" and only a couple of rows into the second ball of five. I found a ball with the tag still attached, so now I can say that this is Ella Rae Camelsoft. It's lovely stuff.

A Conversation via Text Message #2

2011-09-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

August 28, 2011 - Operation: Absent Accountant Boy, day 5 -

Me: Deadbolt done, but the door’s giving me a little trouble.

Doc: Good news on the deadbolt! Which door – garage to outside world, or laundry to garage??

Me: Laundry to garage. The mechanism is too long, so the latch is sticking out. Wonder if it’s adjustable. Reading directions now.

Me: “Enlarge hole with file if necessary”? You f&$kers! F&$kity f&$k f&$k f&$k your f&$king file! I should probably stop and get a bite to eat, huh?

Doc: Which hole do you have to enlarge, btw?

Me: The round one. I think it has to be slightly more oblong so that the knob and the latch will fit.

Doc: That’s a big hole to make bigger. Does it have to be lots bigger?

Me: Figuring that out now. Weird how it doesn’t just work. The old and new are both Weslock.

Me: Ah! There is an adjustment. Yay!

Doc: Phew!!! That’s good news.

Me: Well, don’t get too excited, because I can’t figure it out. :-(

Me: Except that I just did. What is it with doorknobs and bad instructions???

Doc: Kind of like IKEA instructions. :-) Glad you got it, tho.

Me: I just pierced my own nose with a screwdriver. No kidding. Please come over.

Doc: O jesus.

You might be wondering how I managed to pierce my own nose, from the inside out, with a screwdriver while installing a doorknob. Here's the deal. I was trying to lever the mounting plate loose with a pair of slotted screwdrivers, because I didn’t realize that I could take the handle and the rose off after I’d snapped them into place - not having tried on the old knobs, because it was easier to cut the roses off with tin snips than to read the directions - and the smaller screwdriver snapped back and…you know what? It doesn’t make much sense when I try to explain it. The important part was that I pierced my nose from the inside out with a screwdriver, staunched the copious bleeding with a shop towel full of ice, then went looking for a bigger screwdriver so that I could exact my revenge on the doorknob. And by "copious bleeding" I mean "it won't stop long enough for me to tell if I've torn my whole nostril away from my face, so I guess we just keep going about our business and apply pressure". Which is what I did. Hardcore.

I was victorious, by the way. The new knob looks and works great, and my nose healed without too much trouble. I thought about popping a stud through there while it was open, a sort of jaunty reminder of my accomplishments, but the hole closed up too quicky.

When Accountant Boy saw the post on Facebook, he commented "Please for the love of God STOP! Somebody go over to our house and lock the tool chest!" I could almost hear him screaming from Australia. Sensitive to the fact that he might worry, being all the way on the other side of the world while I did God-knows-what to myself and the house, I managed to stay injury-free for the remainder of his trip. I got a lot of nagging projects tackled so that we wouldn't have to think about them every weekend.

I think he liked all of the work I did during Operation: AAA. I hope he did. It's hard to tell. Things have gone a little strange. But that's not today's story.

The Return of the Ding

2011-09-29T14:15:00.000-07:00

Odd summer. I don’t know where to start, so maybe I just won’t pick a starting point. We’ll jump in right here, right now, and we’ll catch up as we go along.

First things first, I won another contest! This lovely yarn, being modeled appropriately enough by our new friend Stone Turtle, came from Turtlegirl76. I was one of the many winners in her Heart Walk Donors’ Drawing. She did all of the hard work, and I got this gorgeous yarn. Not a bad trade-off. I think it’s going to become the center panel of Tenney Park.

“Wait, what? You mean you still knit? It’s not just a yarn collection out in the garage?”

Yes, as it usually does, knitting production slowed over the summer this year. It wasn’t for lack of trying; I did knit. I worked on Papeline for several weeks, stretching into months. When I finally got the body seamed together and worked the neckline, it was too small. This might have been casually related to me being too big. The jury’s still out on that one. Not debatable, the neckline was much too dinky. I think this was due to my gauge changing drastically between flat and circular knitting. I need to yank out that section and do something else, but I haven’t decided on the course of action yet. Finally, the arms are tight, really tight, because I have muscular arms for my size and…look, maybe it’s time to concede that I knit the wrong size, but I’m not ready to give up on it entirely just yet.

Thinking that knitting a great big tube sounded pretty good after the Papeline disappointment, I cast on for the Summertime Tunic. Back in July. Yeah, this is how far I’ve made it. It turns out that silk sort of tightens around Addi needles and cables in a particularly stubborn way, so it’s not easy to get into a grove and knit round after round. There’s a lot of shoving of stitches. I refuse, however, to stop knitting it, because I’m afraid that my gauge will change if I put it aside until next spring. I’m also a tad worried that I’ve knit the wrong size again, but I’m telling myself that this is not important right now.

Doc and I talked about “need-to” knitting versus “love-to” knitting a couple of weeks ago, as we both have a collection of each type, and the obvious point hit me like a screwdriver to the face. (That story’s coming soon.) I’m only going to get slower on the “need-to” projects, because my “love-to” itch isn’t being scratched. I have to have both, even if it seems like the “love-to” project is going to take time away from the “need-to” project.

Feeling good about this new direction, I went out to the garage and stuck my hand in a basket, drawing out a ball of this camel-blend yarn that I impulse-grabbed at Tuesday Morning last year. I saw a scarf at Forever 21 last weekend that looked lovely, cost about ten bucks. “I could make that scarf, and it’d be even better. Sure, it’ll cost more than ten bucks, and it’ll take me more than an hour to make it, but it’ll be camel instead of acrylic. Plus, it’s guaranteed to not be too small, because it’s a goddamn scarf. Confidence booster. I can’t lose, Doc.” We studied the stitches, which turned out to be simple K3,P1 across on all rows. I don’t know what it’s called, but it makes a neat rib. I’m now alternating between this and the Summertime Tunic, with no guesses about which I’m going to finish first. Probably this one. It feels good, and I’m having a good time knitting it. I sometimes forget that those are two important things.

The Morning News

2011-08-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

"Hey, Winston! HEY WINSTON! Are you awake?"

"Not really, no..."

"Wanna hear a SECRET? A super-SPECIAL SECRET?"

"I'm kinda, you know, sleeping right now, and there's only a few minutes where we get to be on the bed before Suzanne and Accountant Boy go to work, so..."

"But it's the BEST secret EVER! Pleeeeaase? Please ask me what the secret is! C'mon!"

"O.K., but then can I go back to sleep?'Cause sometimes a guy likes to nap in the morning, and you're kind of loud, and..."

"I am NOT loud! I'm joyful! Everyone loves my exuberance. So can I tell you the greatest secret EVER?!?"

"Uh, sure?"

"...you're my best friend..."

The Joy of Making Doc Laugh

2011-07-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

I don't know what they were talking about, because I was at the other end of the garage talking to my neighbors. Half of me wishes I were there, but the other half enjoys wondering. Sometimes the mystery is as good as the reveal.

Where Do I Put This Jacket?!

2011-07-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

From: SuzannaBanana
Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2011 11:06 AM
To: Doc
Subject: Reverie del Taco

I had a dream last night, a dream too involved for me to thumb-type it out. It’s already fading from memory, but here’s what’s left.

I’m backstage at some event, a dance or club, or maybe the EE Ball 1997. That seems about right, since it was at The Gift Center and this looks like an antechamber I passed on the way to the ladies’ room. The room is small, with primed but unpainted sheetrock and beige office carpet. There are clothes racks, a box that used to hold t-shirts, and a couple of chairs. People are queued up, presumably to drop off their smoky garments to be dry cleaned while they go back out to the darkened, noisy club. There are two girls working at this makeshift dry cleaner, and they are dressed like extras from an episode of Law and Order, any episode of Law and Order where Brisco and Curtis have to go to what Dick Wolf imagines a rave would look like. Plastic skirts, four or five asymmetrical pony tails each, purple lip gloss. The line isn’t moving, because everyone in the line is too intoxicated to figure out how to move.

I am holding the jacket from Accountant Boy's favorite suit, the silvery olive one that he wears to summer weddings. I walk up to one of the girls and ask, “Where do I put this jacket?” She stares at me stupidly. I look down at the white folding chair in front of us, which has another sport coat draped across the padded seat. “Look, I see other jackets, and I’ll put this one with them, but I need to know that this is where they go. Is this where we are supposed to put the jackets?” She blinks at me, then starts talking to her friend. I ask everyone else in the room, but it is as if they are unable to process the words I’m saying. It’s not that they’re ignoring me. It’s that they cannot comprehend what I’m asking, as though they don’t speak my language, so they stare at me after I say something, then just turn in another direction. I am so frustrated that I begin to cry.

The scene shifts subtly, and now you and I are the ones working. I get the impression that you’re wearing some type of Be-Dazzled™ bra top. It’s got dark sapphire “gems” all over it. It looks lovely against your skin and with your hair. I am wearing something similar, but I can’t remember what it looked like, other than that we look a bit like cocktail waitresses at the Stardust.

I am still holding the jacket, and I ask you where it’s supposed to go. You keep responding in a way that isn’t a completely relevant answer. “Where does this jacket go? THIS one? The one I’M HOLDING?”

“We take in jackets. That is a jacket.”

“WHERE DO I PUT IT?! Am I not asking the question correctly? O.K., Suzanne, be clear and concise.” I stop and take a deep breath. You look at me intently, ready to try to listen and understand. I say, in as slow and measured a voice as I can muster, “I am holding a jacket. I would like to put the jacket down. Where do I put the jacket?”

“We clean jackets.”

“DOES IT GO ON THIS CHAIR?”

“There is a jacket on the chair.”

“But do I put THIS one there, too???”

“You are holding a jacket.”

This scene is interrupted, thank God. Two guys come in and drop a very large suitcase on the floor in front of us, the kind that zips open from the side, like a trunk. There is a pile of cloth tied into a long, crooked roll in the middle of the case. Something wriggles under the thin canvas, and at first we think that it is a person. We look up at the men as they walk away. “Hey, you can’t leave that here!” They keep walking. When we look back down at the suitcase, the canvas has changed into long bolts of silk in tropical colors, saffron, lime and blood orange. The wriggling continues, then a tiny, tawny dog pokes its head out from under the fabric.

“Chihuahuas! Look at that one! He’s a little badass!” The little badass Chihuahua steps out a bit further from under the silk and looks up at us. He has big ears, big head for his body, and enormous eyes, but he doesn’t look weird for it, not alien. He’s clearly a puppy, but he’s already got some pretty good muscles on him. He stares up at us with cheerful defiance and wags his tiny tail at us. We laugh, delighted at his bravado.

And then I woke up.

The Plan

2011-05-03T10:35:00.000-07:00

Twelve days...twelve days...twelve days...

The 100th running of the Bay to Breakers is happening on May 15th. I've been training for it for weeks, with a little more than one more week to go before I have to rest in preparation for race day. I'm worried, readers. Excited, but worried.

Bay to Breakers and I have a stormy past. The first year we entered, AB and I finished in just over two hours. That's an average of about 3.8 miles an hour, even with the slog of the 11.5% grade of the Hayes Hill and a "mandatory" stop at the bison paddock so that I could take pictures of them. Even at that pace, I bruised my toenails so badly that two of them fell off. We had not prepared at all for the event. My running shoes were too short, and neither AB nor I had run more than a mile or two at one time. We hadn't done any training on pavement. He could have finished faster, but he slowed to keep pace with me, and I struggled to keep pace with him.

The second year, we trained a little harder. I did more cardio at the gym, and trained with weights twice a week. AB did at least a couple of full miles on the treadmill. We still raced together for the first few miles, but I encouraged him to run ahead at mile 6, and he gratefully sprinted away from me. He finished at 1:32, and I finished a few minutes later. We felt great.

And that's when things went horribly wrong. "Let's walk back along the race route and see all the floats." I knew what AB really meant was "let's walk back along the route because I want to see the party that's going on behind us." I often think that AB thinks he missed out on a whole lot of the college experience by meeting me when he was so young. We didn't go to keggers, and we never went to Cancun. We studied, and we had jobs. We were responsible adults, which feels like a synonym for "boring" in retrospect. I feel bad for him, bad that the opportunity to experience the Spring Break culture passed him by. So, when the opportunity to be among drunken revellers presents itself, I sometimes cave in to his wistful suggestions.

So we walked back a couple of miles, and then a couple more. We ended up all the way back at the panhandle, stepping around people passed out on the grass and urinating in the street. What we'd neglected to factor into the plan was that these people had been drinking for several hours by the time made our way back down the route. Some of them had been partying for the entire weekend. It wasn't as interesting as he'd hoped it would be. It was actually kind of gross. "You wanna walk back to the buses, or catch a cab? Remember, the bus line is back at the park, so we'd be walking in the wrong direction to wait in line for an overcrowded bus full of sweating drunks." When presented like that, the obvious choice is to get a cab, right? We thought we'd walk up a few blocks to the Haight and hail one. Easy. We felt smart.

Who would have thought that it would be impossible to get a cab on race day, with fifty-thousand people jammed into the park or passed out within a mile of it? People with forethought, that's who. The cabs stayed far away from that half of the city that day. Well, we didn't know. So we kept walking, thinking eventually we'd see one. We were not carrying phones for some reason, so we couldn't call a dispatcher. Walking, walking, walking, periodically pausing at bus stops in case we'd found a line that didn't go near the park and wouldn't be full. Dozens of packed buses lumbered past us. More walking. Eventually, we came down to Van Ness and started to see cabs and half-full buses. "Well, we're so close now that we might as well keep walking, right?" We agreed on this, not realizing that we were still two miles from our car. I don't know if it would have made a difference if we had known. We were marching for the pride of marching at that point. We laughed merrily at our own stupidity as we skipped across streets and past confused tourists. "I think we took a wrong turn somewhere! Do you know which way we go to get to the race?"

We got back to our car at the Metreon, turned the heated seats on and drove home. When we got out of the car, we realized how much damage we'd done. Everything stiffened on the drive home. AB's legs would not straighten out, and my foot felt like someone was hammering a railroad spike through the right edge of it. We hobbled into the house - him hunched over like he had a hernia, me hugging the wall and hobbling - and fell on the couches, unable to get back up for the rest of the day. I had to hop up the stairs on one leg, because I couldn't put weight on my foot. Later, sitting at my computer with my leg up on another chair, I used Google Maps to plot out the hike we'd done. The race is 7.5 miles. We'd covered more than seventeen miles on foot.

Still, that was my best run yet at 1:38. "Next year, we're going to CRUSH this thing!"

For one of us, this turned out to be true. AB finished the race in 2009 in under 1:30. I took considerably longer, in part because it was hot that day, but in larger part because I didn't have him to pace me. We'd decided to run the race separately right from the starting line. I was proud of him, but very disappointed in myself. Things went awry that summer, with Daisy moving, my job ending, and the house needing so much preparation before it could be rented again. I got out of the habit of working out, and eventually stopped going to the gym altogether.

Last year, we registered and paid to race, then slept in. Our excuse was that we'd just taken Molly in and didn't want to leave her at home, but the truth was that we'd done absolutely nothing to prepare for it. I hadn't made any effort to stay in shape in almost a year. I was in the worst shape of my 30s. It was depressing. "We'll decide tomorrow morning..." We stayed in bed with our eyes closed until 9:30 the next day, neither of us letting on to the other that we were awake. Once it was too late to make it to the race, we got up and went to Starbucks. "NEXT year, we're totally doing it."

And that's this year.

I've been running at least twice a week for a few weeks now. I bought a treadmill when my beloved chick gym abruptly closed, and The Amazon's been giving me running goals each week. AB has also been running, and doing the Insanity DVDs. I did my six miles last night and, while it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, I'm not feeling at all bad today. I'm running on the road tonight, so that race day won't be the first time in two years that I've tried it. It'll be good, no matter how I finish. I keep telling myself that it's just one event, and that my REAL goal is to finish and not be crippled with sore muscles or plantar fasciitis for weeks afterward, and that's true.

But still. I want to crush this thing.

Adapt

2011-04-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

My finger is still in its round-the-clock splint, three weeks having turned into six. Last week, the hand surgeon said that it was healing up well after what was probably a mallet injury, and that the ruptured tendon was getting stronger again and...wait, what? New injury, months after Suzuki-tastrophe 2010? Ruptured tendon!? I might have taken the whole thing more seriously if the word "rupture" had come up sooner. I probably would also have freaked right the f&*k out about it and irritated everyone close to me by waving my hand around and wailing in a play for sympathy and free beer. Mostly the latter. Maybe it's a good thing he didn't bring it up before last week.

When the splint is taken off, for five seconds so that he can put on a fresh one and retape it, my finger does look better. "Look, Dr. Schilling! It straightens out after I bend it. It looks almost as good as the right one."

"No, no-no-no-no. Leave it straight the whole time." He's a mild-mannered guy. That's as close to yelling as he gets.

"O.K., but I'm not bending it now. I'm just fluffing up the knuckle wrinkles so that they'll match the other pinkie..." I do not add "...because I am a weirdo," as I'm certain that he has already realized this. He redoubles his efforts to quickly lash a fresh piece of aluminum to my hand.

I couldn't stand being idle any longer, so I figured out how to knit with the splint covering half my pinkie. All I have do do is double-wrap the yarn around the base of it, and it doesn't seem to migrate up and get caught in the tape. Work resumes on Papeline!

Shipwrecked!

2011-04-02T16:41:00.000-07:00

"Dark days, Sword-face. We've shipwrecked here on this desolate place, no friendly flag on the horizon for many a month. Without my sextant, I cannot but guess where we've landed. I foresee no return to the glory times."

"Cap'n, yer wallowin' terrible deep in the bilge. Chin up, sir! Always keep a weather eye on the horizon. Ain't that whatcha always say to us mates?"

"Aye, Sword-face, aye. But this time I be feelin' too low to lift my gaze o'er the rail. We've seen naught but hardship. My adornments have all shriveled and dried up, and there's no hope for their return. We be among the naked savage every day, threatened by the slavering beasties, wi' no hope of rescue."

"I dunno, Cap'n. This here ain't so bad. Warm air, dry land, and the companionship ain't lackin' in looks..."

"If ye be talkin' about the wench behind us, ye've proved yerself a fool, Sword-face. She don't e'en have a head. Not too companionable, if ye ask me."

"Well, sir, if ye asked me, I'd tell ye it makes her more companionable."

Hey! Watch it with that, boys.

"Oh, so ye've finally decided to come to our aid in our time of dire need? Awfully kind of ye, lass."

You know, Pirate Skull Planter, if I didn't know better I'd say that you were being sarcastic. And what's this naked savage business? I put you in the master bathroom because it was the brightest spot in the house and I put you up on the counter to keep Molly and Winston from knocking you around. We're not going to turn you toward the backsplash every time we get into the shower, you privateering prude.

"Ye couldn't have moved us when you moved the Greek wench onto the credenza? She made out a'right in that deal."

She's in a dark corner, near a heating vent. Not a hospitable climate for you, Cap'n. I thought being in the moist air for part of the day would be good for your "adornments", but they slowly died anyway. I am sorry about that, by the way. Clearly, I don't know how to take care of the easiest plants in the world to care for. Speaking of which...

"Might I inquire as to why we're havin' this impromptu reunion on the cask lid, then, lass? If we've all made berth where ye've seen fit to strand us, what devilry is afoot now?"

Speaking of which...

"I ain't too concerned about it, Cap'n. Long as the Greek wench ain't too far out of me line o' sight."

Speaking of which...

"Πάρτε αυτούς τους δύο ανόητους μακρυά από με!"

SPEAKING OF WHICH, I brought you all down here because I have a surprise for you. Pirate Skull Planter? You are a fine and true planter once more. I have once again voyaged to faraway lands for you, my good sir.

"Beyond the map? Ye don't mean...ye couldn't mean...the Straits of Martinez Home Depot?!"

Yes. After braving the Narrows of Self-Checkout and crossing the vast Sea of Asphalt Parking Lot, I have returned from this magical place with treasures. And I bought special air-plant adhesive and fertilizer, so that your finery will remain a source of pride for many a fortnight to come. I'm going to keep at this until I get it right, Cap'n.

"Lass, ye've made my black, miserable heart a little less dark. My apologies for th' insults and such."

"I ain't makin' no apologies. Seems to Sword-face that everyone's gettin' a good deal exceptin' for Sword-face."

Sword-face, you're not being left out of the dividing of the share. How would you like some adorning of your own? You've been a faithful mate to ol' Pirate Skull Planter for so long, and you've probably seen more travel than he has, since you came from the untamed lands of Treasure Island. You've earned it.

"Much obliged, ma'am! Aye, this ain't a bad day at all for Sword-face! I got this fancy headdress, I got to look up that pretty wench's dress, and the cap'n ain't in such a bleak mood no more. Ain't a bad day in any accounting."

"Μπορώ να πάω πίσω στο credenza, τώρα; Είχα αρκετών αυτών των δύο ηλιθίων."

I can't get you guys back to your home port, because the facilities manager...uh...harbor master says that we can't have plants in the office because their soil harbors pests, and I won't risk your safety by smuggling you in. It'd break my heart if he threw you out while I was away from my desk.

"Aye, but we be unsoiled, lass..."

He be a hard man, Pirate Skull Planter. There's no reasoning with him. Can you make go of it in this new place?

"Aye...but could ye perhaps turn us around some of the time when ye're indecently exposed to the elements?"

It's a deal, Cap'n. It's a deal.

Sunday Morning Talk Shows

2011-03-27T22:26:00.000-07:00

Molly: ...sigh...

Winston: ...

Molly: SIGH!

Winston: Uh, Molly? I'm kinda, you know, trying to sleep, and...

Molly: I know, and it's REALLY hard, huh? How can any of us sleep when we're worrying about my luscious paella?

Winston: Your what? 'Cause I was only thinking about how much I like sleeping, but...

Molly: That's what I'm SAYING, though. It's really hard to sleep when you have a LUXURIANT PATINA!

Winston: It's really hard to sleep when you're sighing on my face. I don't have a levitating pancetta or whatever.

Accountant Boy: Luxating patella, guys. It's called a luxating patella. But you seem fine, Molly, since you spent last night kicking me in the back.

Molly: Yay for Molly! Physical therapy resistance training! YAAAAAYYY!

* * *

Meanwhile, my hand surgeon told me that my finger isn't straightening out as well as it did last year, and recommended that I keep it splinted for three weeks. It's not going to help it hurt less, or make it less stiff, but it might make it less gnarled, so I'm going to give it a shot. There goes my tensioning finger, so no knitting. If it works, at least it'll look more like the other one. I'll take my victories where I can get them.

Reclamation

2011-03-10T10:55:00.000-08:00

Way back in January, I mentioned that I had a new knitting goal for this year. You might think that it’d be the same as the knitting goals I come up with every year, which are to knit more, knit faster, and not buy yarn to replace the yarn I’ve used. Yes, I still have those goals, but I’ve added another one, one which I think is going to complement the first three. My main goal this year is to wear what I’ve made, and do something with it if I think that it isn’t currently wearable.

This was prompted by a big closet clean-out that I did right after Christmas. I took everything out and threw it on the bed, then tried it on before putting it back in the closet. If it didn’t fit, it didn’t go back. If I didn’t like how it hung on me, it didn’t go back. If I never wore it, even though there was nothing obviously wrong with it, which meant that there was something about it that just wasn’t right for me, and it didn’t go back. What I was left with was a much less crowded closet containing only clothes that fit and flatter me right now, a dozen skirts and pairs of trousers folded into a pile on my bed, and several sweaters that I never wore wadded up next to them. I boxed up the too-small clothes and stored them, because there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to wear them in a few months. Then, I dealt with the sweater collection.

Some of the sweaters were store-bought and just faded enough that they didn’t look sharp enough for work. If they looked decent enough to donate, they went into a bag and went to Goodwill. Some of them were just slightly too small, which is more an issue with me than with the garment. Those got folded up and stored in the cedar drawer under my bed. My beloved chick-gym went out of business a few weeks ago, and I bought one of the treadmills from the liquidator. Freed from the “I can’t drive to the gym in the dark” problem, I’ve been running three times a week. It’s only a matter of time before the smaller clothes rejoin the rotation.

A few of the sweaters were simply bad designs for me. Even at my very fittest, I don’t look good with garments that cover my bust and end at mid-ribcage. This style of cardigan makes me look like a post-op augmentation patient, and I ought to know that look, because I was once a data entry clerk at an implant manufacturer. Fun fact. I also gain weight around the middle and don’t have a strongly defined waist. I look good in things with empire waists, or that tuck in at that point and then flow back out to mid-hip, but not things where either the color or the entire garment abruptly stops right there.

So what was I thinking making cropped sweaters? The only one that doesn’t make me cringe when I come across it is the (not)Two-Tone Shrug, which avoids all of the worst shape offenses by not having much of a front profile. It also creates the illusion of a more slender back, because it curves in where my waist should narrow. (not)Two-Tone is safe, then, just waiting for me to tone up and wear it. The others, though, need some help.

I’ve had Cobweb shifting around on the shelf for almost four years. I wore it to Kitten’s wedding but, although I love the color and the feel of it, and I said that I could see myself wearing it all the time, I’ve never worn it again. Not once. I love how soft it is. I love the lace. I love the beading. It’s a great shade on me, especially when my hair is darker, like it is now. It’s a shame that it has been demoted to “nice thing to brush my hand against while I’m hanging up my shirts”. I feel sad when I see it in there, and when I occasionally pull it out so that I can lovingly refold it.

My plan for it is simple. I’m going to make it a full-length cardigan. I’m going to pick up along the bottom and knit down in the lace pattern. I haven’t decided if I want to pull out the crochet scallops. I might have it tie at one side. I still have a bunch of the beads, so there are all sorts of possibilities for beaded closures and ties.

Anthropologie-Inspired Capelet is another story entirely. I didn’t like it as I was knitting it, I didn’t like it when I finished it and laid it flat to photograph it, and I’ve never worn it. It’s too stripy for my taste, and there’s nothing that can save the style of it for me. I’d thought about pulling out the bind-off and continuing down to hip length with a coordinating solid yarn, but then I’ve still got all of that busy variegation up at my widest point. I can’t add a solid border around it to make an additional yarn color look intentional, because the seed border at the neckline is part of the body. When I come across this one, I get angry. I do not stare at it lovingly as I hold it up in front of me. My most common response is to grunt, “Ugh! Stupid f&%king mistake!” and shove it roughly to the back of the closet. This yarn made me much happier in the skein than it does knit up.

So there’s no hope for it in its current state. I haven’t decided if I want to reuse it for socks, or as an accent stripe or faux-Fair Isle in a solid sweater. I have decided that it’s not going to sit in my closet anymore, so that’s a start.

My final two reworks-in-progress are Pas de Valse, which desperately needs me to work a crochet border around its edges, and a lacy tie-front sweater from Banana Republic that I’ve been meaning to recreate and improve upon for several years.

PdV should take all of about two hours to finish once I commit to it. I had a lot of problems with that pattern and it shows, especially up around the collar. I need the crochet edge to flatten everything out and cover the evidence of my crimes. It’s the main reason I haven’t done an FO write-up about it yet. Even though I’ve been wearing it since January – with decreasing frequency and increasing displeasure – I don’t consider it done.

The Banana sweater is still in my closet simply because I keep thinking that I can use it as a template and whip up a better one. I mean, look at it. It’s three rectangles of great big lace knitting, with ties in awkward places. I got it off of the clearance rack, probably because it didn’t look good on anybody, even the models. Here’s how I think the photo shoot must have gone down. “It’s meant to hang straight, tie directly over the crotch, but not very tightly, and slip off your shoulders if you turn your head more than a centimeter in either direction. I need you to lean forward and slouch your shoulders. Annabella! SLOUCH, damn you! You are having a good time on your beach vacation, and so much fun that you are unconcerned that your flimsy cover-up is neither flattering nor conforming to the shape or your body as you listen to your sandy-haired boyfriend in the cargo capris play the ukulele by the campfire. Slouch and laugh whimsically!”

I have to guess that’s how it went, because I never saw a photo of it, which means that it slipped into the stores under the radar, and slipped back out without being featured in any catalog. Nevertheless, there’s something about it that appeals to me, because I’ve had it for six years and I keep trying to wear it, even though the ties are too long and the shape is so weird. I have cotton in my stash that would work for it. In fact, that’s probably a good use for cotton yarn, because it’d be lacy enough to remain lightweight.

This, then, is my main goal for this year. If something isn’t working, don’t let it sit around and continue to not work. If I have a dozen skirts and pairs of trousers that don’t fit, they shouldn’t confront me and make me feel ashamed of myself every time I open the closet door. If I took the time to knit something, that time was wasted if the thing sits in my closet for five years. I should wrest back control of these things. Gotta get with the moving forward.

My Best Friend Winston by Molly

2011-03-06T21:17:00.000-08:00

Hey, you guys! Hi! It's me, Molly! I wanted to tell you a story about my best friend Winston. It's called "My Best Friend Winston". Here it is!

My best friend Winston likes the sunshine, and so do I. Sometimes, we try to soak up the rays together. Sometimes we end up trying to soak up the EXACT SAME RAYS! And that means I end up sitting on him, and that makes him REALLY HAPPY because I'M happy, and he still gets to be warm because I'm warm. It's a win for EVERYONE! Plus, he's just the right height for sitting on, and if it bugged him he'd get up, right?

He looks sad, but you guys? That's totally how he looks all the time. I always look like a lovable scamp, and he always looks sad, but the difference is that I AM a lovable scamp, and that's just his face.

Anyway, my best friend Winston and I like to lie in the sun together, and sometimes we do it outside and I try to protect his soft, pink belly from getting sunburned, because I am a GOOD FRIEND.

And sometimes we sit on the sofa together and I protect him while he watches television. Nobody's going to throw him into traffic on MY watch.

See, I'm his best friend, too. It's a two-way street. A two-way street where nobody gets thrown out into TRAFFIC, even when they horf on the freshly cleaned carpet. He's such a good friend that he even tries to help me clean up when that happens. We look out for each other. So, he doesn't sit on me because it might hurt me. He sits on Accountant Boy instead.

Most of the time it's not even about sitting on him or kicking him out of his favorite spots. I just like being near him, and he's not very good at that yet. Dr. Nice Lady at the weird place with all the TASTY cookies says that he's a 'different' kind of dog, so he still has to learn to like curling up with other dogs. I'm teaching him to wag his tail and wriggle, so I KNOW he can learn the other stuff. And I'm learning to not sit on him all the time, too! Sometimes I just squeeze in next to him.

I love my best friend Winston. The end.

* * *

One sleeve down on Papeline, halfway through the next. This yarn is so smooth and lovely, and almost all of the rowing evened out when I washed it. The odd thing about it is that there is a very slight tonal variegation to it, which wasn't obvious in the skein. I actually like it even more since it's not completely solid. I cannot wait to finish this one so that I can wear it.

Short Sentences, Simple Things

2011-03-02T11:13:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you just want something classic, simple. Sometimes you don't want to have knit something that grows increasingly awkward to handle as you knit it, knitting a round, untwisting the work, knitting another round, for a hundred rounds or more. And then doing the same for the other sleeve. Sometimes seams are fun.

That's what this is going to be. It's a good, old knit-in-pieces pullover. It's Papeline from this year's Winter/Spring Knitscene. I'm almost done with the first sleeve.

I'm currently suffering from what I like to call 'winter brain', so that's about as much as I can write at one time. I'd say more about it, but not being able to write about winter brain is one of the hallmarks of winter brain.

Procrastination

2011-02-25T22:10:00.000-08:00

The Tweedy started to hurt my hand, and it seems like it might be a little bit wide. Now, maybe this is just a matter of me only having a couple of inches of the back done. Maybe if I kept going, I'd see that it's actually the right width. Or maybe I'd only be torturing myself for another two dozen rows, and I should pull the whole thing out and restart it on smaller needles. I can't decide.

This indecision really took hold, and I've been unable to start much else as a result. What if I start another sweater and my gauge is all wrong on that one, too? What if my gauge is right, but I make the wrong size? What if I make it the right size, but then I, through the miracle of some heretofore undiscovered force, suddenly lose ten pounds and it ends up being too big? Horrible doubts.

And this is the result. I grabbed a bag of Lion and Lamb that was supposed to be made into a sleeveless wool turtleneck, and rethought its destiny. Firstly, I now accept that I haven't looked good in turtlenecks since I was, oh, I don't know, maybe four years old. Secondly, I've outgrown super-variegated sweaters. Just don't like them anymore. Finally, let's face facts. I live in a climate where the summer temperature regularly crest the triple-digits. Sleeveless wool turtleneck? Sleeveless WOOL turtleneck? When was I ever going to be comfortable in that thing? What was I thinking? Since I bought this yarn at Stitches more than four years ago, I can tell you that I probably wasn't thinking about any of those last three points.

This wasn't even TSEBA yarn. I didn't like it enough to save it for the perfect project. It was just sitting in the bin, mocking me with its Carnevale-like festiveness.

I picked up some needles, wound up the three skeins, and off I went. Seven days later, I had a Clapotis.

Details
Pattern
Clapotis by Kate Gilbert (Ravelry Link)

Size
The one in the pattern. I increased to the number of stitches listed, knit until the first skein ran out, then noted how many straight rows I'd knit to that point. I knit the whole second skein, then knit the same number of straight rows I'd knit with the first skein before starting the decrease. I ended up with only a few yards leftover.

Yarn
Lorna's Laces Lion and Lamb in Tuscany. I loved this yarn in the skein, but not so much once I started knitting it. In sunlight, it looks like the Easter-themed wrappers on Hershey's Kisses. Under incandescent light, it looks like the decor in Harrah's Las Vegas. Most of the time, and especially at work under the florescent light, it just looks bland, which is odd. It's so colorful, but the individual colors blur into each other into a less interesting whole. That being said, it's a really soft yarn, and was wonderful to knit.

Needles/Notions
Brittany Birch size 7

Time
Exactly one week, although I had a cold for part of that time and knit while watching perennial favorite movies.

Modifications
I screwed up on the straight rows, decreasing too much on the rows where I dropped stitches. I realized it about halfway through, so I made up for it by increasing on the drop-stitch rows for the last part of the straight section. It's very, very slightly curvy on one side for that reason.

Conclusion
It's a Clapotis. It's done. I don't like it as much as the first one I made. It's heavy in worsted weight yarn, and it's not my favorite color. Still, it's pretty and it's comfortable and warm. I took it to work, where it'll be my chilly-office wrap. You know. For when I wear sleeveless turtlenecks.

Katje

2011-01-28T23:05:00.000-08:00

I wanted to have more pictures of this one, but I haven't gotten around to it. If I wait until I remember to get out the camera and take more, and make sure my hair looks good, and make sure the lighting's right, nobody will ever see this cardigan in all of its crimson glory. Phone photography, or what I've started calling "phonetography", is going to have to do.

Notice in this first picture that there is a lighter spot in my hair, just behind and above my ear. This is what happens when you don't make sure that your hair dye has fully saturated every section of your head. I gave myself calico head. I intended to re-dye it a few days later, but then time got away from me, and then the color washed out enough to not make the patches totally noticeable. Again, if I waited until conditions were perfect, nothing would ever get done.

Details
Pattern
Katje by Julie Weisenberger. Ravelry link here.

I bought this pattern a couple of years ago, because I really liked the great big hood. As a person with an unusually long head, normal hooded garments don't do much for me. I can't ever put up the hood without it looking ridiculously undersized. This one looked like it might work, and I loved the way it draped around the neck. I saw the sample at Stitches a couple of weeks later and tried it on, and fell even more in love with it.

Size
Medium

Yarn
Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran in Merlot. I have a note that says that I used thirteen balls, and I think I wrote it before I added the rest of the bottom border, but it can't possibly be right. I think there was some confusion when a few of the balls made their break for freedom. I just weighed the finished sweater and came up with 548 grams, which is almost all of eleven balls, which sounds closer to the truth.

Needles/Notions
Addi Clicks, size 6 the whole way through.

Time
I can't remember, to be honest. I know I started it on April 4th, 2009, because I put that in Ravelry and I never enter a date in there if I haven't cast on for the project. I cannot remember when I finished it. I seem to remember trying to get it done for...something...but I can't remember if it was for Cinco de Mayo, Memorial Day, or...nope, can't remember. I know that it was done before the accident. I want to say that it took about a month.

Taking out the bound-off edge and adding to the border took a little more than a day.

Modifications
I haven't ever used Kathmandu, but I think it's a little less weighty than Silkroad Aran. The sample sweater felt lighter, and had more drape than my version. As a result of mine being heavier, it seemed to lack balance between the big, heavy hood and the cropped silhouette. It hit me at the wrong spot, and I spent a few months wearing it uncomfortably and tugging on the edges, wishing it were longer. I ended up adding an additional four inches to it, and balancing out the weight of the hood with a more proportional seed stitch border at the bottom.

I didn't make the knitted belt, even though I have one more ball of this yarn left. I probably won't belt it anyway, because that's not a good shape for me.

Conclusion
I wear this sweater all the time. All. The. Time. I have to fight the urge to wear it to work every Friday. It's comfortable, not itchy in the slightest and warm without being stifling. I wore it today, and it handled weather from 37 degrees and foggy to 65 degrees and sunny without seeming to be either too little or too much

The short rows at the neck make for a flowing, graceful hood. This is great for me, because, as you might remember, I can't tolerate hats. If I want to keep my ears warm when I'm outside watching the dogs play, this is the way I have to go. I'd probably use the hood construction again on other sweaters.

Actually, I'll probably make this one again in a different yarn. I love the pattern, and I get a lot of compliments on the garment. I feel good when I wear it, which is the ultimate gauge of success.

Trione Winery, January 2011

2011-01-21T22:03:00.000-08:00

I didn't make any resolutions this year, but if I had, this would be one of them. Take more pictures of us.

I go through phases where I really like pictures of myself. It's usually centered around events, like weddings or vacations. I used to think that it was due to the lighting in a particular spot, or that I'd taken extra care with my hair and makeup. It didn't occur to me until now that it was a matter of practice.

I have a friend, we'll call her Lazlo, who never seems to take a bad picture. She always looks good, never a weird look on her face, a droopy eyelid, never a head tilt that gives her three chins. Now, granted, she's taller and she weighs about a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, but that's not why. I figured out how she did it a few weeks ago. We were out on New Year's Eve, and I said that we should have someone take our pictures.

"Oh, wait!" she said. "I'll take it. I take the best pictures of me." She held her phone out as far from us as she could reach, and damned if she didn't take a really cute picture of herself. Me, not so much because of the aforementioned chin/eyelid combo, but she looked adorable and casual. She took a few more, and I started to look better by the third shot as well.

I watched her for the rest of the evening, and noted how she was doing it. When a camera pointed at her, she smiled, then adjusted her smile a little bit so that it wasn't overwhelming. She looked straight at the camera, then tilted her chin down just slightly so that it wasn't jutting forward toward the camera. She made tiny adjustments, not enough that you'd call it a pose, but enough that it wasn't completely candid. I don't know if she even knows she's doing it anymore, or if it's become second nature for her. Whichever the case, if she knows she's in a picture, she looks good in it.

Last weekend, we went wine tasting with Lazlo and her fiance. The first day, we took a series of "well, it's cute of everyone else, and it's a memory of the day, so......" pictures. It bummed me out.

The next morning, I took a few extra minutes getting ready. I put on the sweater I felt the most confident about, the reliable old Simple Knitted Bodice, and my favorite necklace. I made sure my lipstick was solid, brushed my bangs out of my eyes with a little bit of wax, and we were off. I felt good.

"Honey, quick! Take our picture before we go to the next winery." A.B. pointed the camera at us, and in the couple of seconds that it took him to find shutter button (I don't have the fancy iPhone with forward-facing camera), I took an quick inventory of my facial features and made a few adjustments. I smiled a little more softly so that I wouldn't look too gummy. I tried to keep my head a little more level so that I would look less like a really short person craning to get into the picture, which is usually how the A.B.-and-me self portraits turn out. I put a tiny bit more thought into it, instead of grinning like a fool and hoping for the best. It made a difference! I love this picture.

Now, if we can figure out how to stretch A.B.'s arm so that he doesn't look like he's leaning back to get in the shot, we'll be in business. I guess we could let other people take the pictures, but, you know, baby steps.

One-sleeve Wonder

2011-01-20T21:59:00.000-08:00

So exciting! So very exciting! Yaaaaaay!

"What," you may be asking. "What is so exciting? Did you finish the Tweedy Aran Cardigan already? How unusually productive of you. Congratulations! Is the just a closeup of the whole thing?"

No, not exactly.

"Oh, yeah. It does look like it's not seamed. Is that all that's left? Where's the rest of it?"

Just the sleeve.

"Yes....just the sleeve to sew up, and that's why you're so excited?"

It's just the first sleeve. I'm only as far as the first sleeve.

"Oh. Well. Hmmm."

But I'm super excited to say that I got this much done, because now I know that there's hope. It seems as though it's taking forever for me to get through even a few rows a day. Binding off that sleeve was the high point of my week. Which is kind of sad. Look, it was exciting, O.K.? Just go with it.

Here's the odd thing. When Winston reviewed this yarn last week, he brought up the apparent color difference between my yarn and the picture on the website. Look at how pink it looks under this light. It's just about the color on the website. This colorway does not look this pink in any other light I've had it in, either at home or in my office, day or night.

The reason I'm pushing so hard to get most of it done by the middle of February is that I need to know if I'm going to need more. If I know that I'm going to run out, then I'll go to Stitches at the end of the month and talk with the Black Water Abbey folks. That would be my only reason for going to Stitches this year, as I'm still working through yarns I bought there six years ago. This sleeve took about three ounces, which is about 3/4 of the ball. I have six balls total.

This is the light that's throwing the pink flare on the yarn. It's two plates of glass sandwiching what looks like really heavy soldering wire, with two dozen little white lights poking down through the top of it. It's creepy from above, like a bunch of wires plugging into the head of the Borg queen, but luckily I'm not tall enough to see it from that angle. This is the same light that I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, the one that makes my skin look warm. It's odd, because the light looks so white that it seems like it would make everything look cooler, but it turns out that the opposite is true.

Winston's Review: Black Water Abbey Worsted

2011-01-13T14:42:00.000-08:00

Hello!

It’s me, Winston J. Schmidt.

It’s been a couple of years since my first yarn review, mostly because Suzanne is usually too smart to let me review her yarns anymore. Lucky for you and me, she doesn’t know that I can stretch up on my back legs and reach stuff on tables without making any noise, and that I also learned how to silently stick my face in her purse.

Well, she knows NOW, Winston! She reads her own blog! We are so going to get squirted! Squirted in the FACE!

Molly, this is my review, and I do it my own way. That’s why it’s called “Winston’s Review”. I don’t get a lot of stuff that’s just mine anymore, so I’d like to do this all by myself, O.K.?

O.K., but if we end up out in traffic, it’ll be YOUR fault.

Yarn: Black Water Abbey Worsted

Yardage/Weight: 220 yards per 4 ounce skein

Fiber Content: 100% New Wool from Ireland

Color: Mountain, although Suzanne’s worried that they’ve changed the colors a little bit in the few years since she bought it. Their Mountain on the website is way more pink than this one. This ball looks like it’s closer to Ash Violet, although I can’t tell the difference by taste. I need to watch out, though, because if she runs out on account of me eating it, then someone's not going to get chippy snacks next time we have Burrito Monday.

Texture: 2-ply, and kind of rough when I first picked it up in my mouth, but then the lanolin kicks in and makes it really soft. It’s not at all hard to cut through it with my teeth. I was able to break it in three places, including one spot in the middle of the rolled ball, in less than a minute. The other day, I tangled up a good two-thirds of a ball pretty quickly, but she was able to roll it back up without having to break anything but the end where it met the knitting on the needles.

Flavor: Sheepy! And it smells like freshly cut hay, which makes it irresistible. Really. She should lock it up in a Winston-proof box when she’s not knitting with it, even for five minutes, because a guy can only take that kind of temptation for so long.

Mouth Feel: It seems like it’d be scratchy, but it’s actually kind of moisturizing and soothing, like if Suzanne put lotion on her legs and then put on socks, and then took off the socks and I put them in my mouth. You know. Like if that actually happened.

Review: This is a tasty yarn with a complex finish. It’s also hours of fun, and has a good re-chew factor. I’ve had the same ball in my mouth three times, and it still feels supple and substantial.

In conclusion, I really like this yarn. I wish I could walk around with it in my mouth all day.

Sincerely,

Winston J. ‘Bug’ Schmidt

Cameo

2011-01-12T11:11:00.000-08:00

First, I saw splotches. Then I saw Jesus. Then I saw an Afghan hound wearing earrmuffs. Earmuffs with Jesus on them. Wasted several minutes guessing at Christ's merch and licensing deal. Then I ate the apple.

WTHAYW Thursday

2011-01-06T19:10:00.000-08:00

What the Hell are you WEARING?

Sweater
It's Bristow from a few years ago. Until recently, I didn't know what to wear it with, so it didn't see much time out of the drawer. The shoulders are a little roomy, and my own shoulders are a little wide for my height, so the silhouette was wrong with jeans or straight trousers. I had the same problem with straight skirts. It made me look top-heavy. It needed a skirt with enough body to balance it out.

The sleeves have always been too long, and I've debated for years about cutting them and moving the seed stitch border up, but now I've grown used to rolling them.

Skirt
Calvin Klein from several years ago. It's 97% wool, which I'd never paid attention to before. You can't see much from these shots, but it's pleated all around from low hip down to the hem. The pleats stay crisp all day, while the rest of the skirt remains wrinkle free. I don't know how this is accomplished with wool, but it's wonderful. The skirt is weighty without being too heavy, and feels like a quality piece. Even though it's a few years old, it doesn't look dated. Either it's a classic, or it went out of style and back in while it was sharing a hanger with three other skirts. I bought it at Macy's on sale, a great sale if I remember correctly. I never buy anything from there that isn't on the half-off rack. It was a little big, but I'd planned to take it in. It then went into my closet and was promptly forgotten. I pulled it out a couple of months ago as part of my "dress fancy" campaign and discovered, to both my delight and dismay, that it fit, almost too closely. It's a size 8.

Shoes
Sudini suede boots with leather crisscross detail, bought about four years ago on sale from Sierra Trading Post. I have a thing for Sudini boots. They fit my feet, they fit my calves, and they last forever. I was disappointed when Nordstrom stopped carrying them in favor of Munroe. They're not the same. Their brand motto: "Sudini - the shoes that make love to your feet." Totally worth the risk of buying online.

Jewelry
I still haven't replaced my beloved sterling hoops. I've now decided to try to solder the pin back to the body. Failing that, I'm going to find a metalsmith who can recreate them. Accountant Boy tried to cheer me up by sending me links to earrings on Amazon.com, but none of them looked right. There are a couple of potential candidates at a jewelry store downtown, but I don't know. I liked my cheap earrings.

In their absence, I'm trying out other pairs in my jewelry cabinet. This pair came from an employee sale at Accountant Boy's office. The gift shops from about a dozen wineries cleared the odds and ends out of their back rooms and sent it back to the corporate office, where it went onto long tables at 90% off. I paid four dollars for them, I think. This tells us two things, dear readers. First, that there's a lot of money to be saved by buying some basic tools and making your own jewelry, and second, that you shouldn't EVER buy anything other than postcards at a winery gift shop. They'll rob you blind then steal your glasses.

They're cute and feminine, and I like them, but they started to itch by the end of the day. I still miss my hoops.

The Verdict
I've worn the sweater and skirt combination a couple of times so far, but this is the first time with the boots. This pairing is better than the tights and shoes. Other than my knees, I felt warm and comfortable all day. I'd probably put it together once every couple of weeks, just to avoid the "if it's Thursday then it must be pleats and cardigan" syndrome.

I was going to dye my hair tonight, but now that I've seen it in this light, I'm thinking about giving it a few more weeks. On the other hand, that lighting is really kind to the roots. It's been more than two months, and they're starting to show when I blow it dry in the morning. We'll see what color it is by tomorrow at this time.

Lessons Learned
1. The lighting over my dinette set is fantastic. Start taking more pictures there.
2. Self-portraits are way easier with a tripod. Stop trying to balance the camera on boxes of cookies.
3. Quality pieces are timeless.
4. Bangs are still too short to be swept to the side without looking stringy. Commit to them straight across for a few more weeks.

Gingerbread Eichler

2011-01-04T22:40:00.000-08:00

This is what happens when you give an art project to a bunch of engineers. This gorgeous post-modern masterpiece didn't hold together for the trip to the front of the room. We got about five inches away from the table before it collapsed. In our defense, we weren't told about this part of the design spec, and we ARE all application engineers. You can't change requirements on the fly like that and expect good results from us. Plus, I was tipsy enough to end up with icing in my hair. It sure photographed well, though.

When I realized that I wasn't going to make my highest yearly post count without three meaningless entries a day, I decided to take a day or two off. That went about as well as you'd expect. Apparently, it takes more than seven weeks to make a new habit stick. No point in dwelling on it, when the answer is just to pick it back up again and keep trying. That applies to so many things in my life right now. Pick it up again and keep trying.

I've got a couple of finished sweaters to write up, and a new knitting goal for this year that I want to discuss. More on that tomorrow.

Blunder Pulled Asunder, Part 1

2010-12-22T12:48:00.000-08:00

Wow. I had this so very, very wrong. In addition to the cables crossing the wrong way and the selvage stitches only making occasional appearances, I had the cable length wrong. I was crossing them every twelve or fourteen rows, depending on how badly I was screwing up. It's supposed to be every TEN rows. I thought they looked too rectangular, but continued on without looking at the pattern for some reason.

Restarting was as good move.

It's My Soul Up There

2010-12-21T09:39:00.000-08:00

There’s a little black spot on the sun today...

What’s up, Mol?

It’s the same old thing as yesterdaaay…

You O.K., pup? You seem kind of blue, and you’re singing ‘King of Pain’.

Oh, hi! I thought we were being reflective and pensive, and I was trying to match the mood. And your pose. And your hair color. YAY!

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

I have stood here before, inside the pouring rain...and I LOVED IT! Rain makes me feel like a real collie out in the field! Hey, you can be a shepherdess. It’ll be SUPER FUN! We'll herd Winston! Go change clothes so you don’t look like you’re going to a funeral. Quick!

I’m busy doing WTHAYW, and I’m in a foul mood, so that’s probably a no on the "sheep" herding. Besides, it’s the start of winter, and that always gets to me. I feel like crying all the time. Stupid lack of bright sun.

But it’s still there behind the clouds! It’s like an INVISIBLE sun!

What the Hell are you WEARING?

Sweater
Old Navy Shawl Collared Cable Sweater. This sweater cost a whopping $15, and it was worth every one of the fifteen-hundred pennies. And not a penny more. It sits on my arms funny, it’s drooped to become a tunic, and it wrinkles with normal wear. What kind of bulky, acryli-cotton sweater wrinkles like that? Reviewers on ON’s website said that they’d had to try on each individual sweater, because the fit of the garments varied so widely, even in the same sizes and colors. I have this same sweater in tan, and the fit is different enough to feel like a different style of sweater.

Trousers
Ann Taylor Loft from a couple of years ago. These are the offending trousers I talked about in this post. I thought that maybe covering most of them up with the sweater would give them new life, but it only made me feel even less charitable toward them

Shoes
Sudini round-toed boots, several years old. I wear these when I don’t feel like navigating the world in my Clarks, which have a higher heel. They’ve stretched to the point where I have to wear hiking socks with them.

Jewelry
None. No jewelry. Hours earlier, after ten years of reliable wear, the pin on my favorite pair of earrings – the sterling silver hoops with hinged clasps - snapped off in my hand.

The Verdict
This is my “I give up” outfit. I didn’t have the energy to do anything more, but had to put something on and go to work. Looking at it in the pictures, I think it shows. It’s not a horrible outfit, but there’s nothing positive about it, either. Nothing about it made me happy, except for the earrings, which picked this particular day to finally give in to metal fatigue.

Lessons Learned
1. Don’t wear a baggy, wrinkly sweater with baggy, wrinkly pants. It will not look comfy-chic. It will look as though I’m about to have a depressive episode.
2. The mood boost would have been worth spending a few minutes more on putting myself together in the morning.
3. Do not base my fragile sense of wellbeing on a ten year old pair of stainless steel earrings, because people walking by my desk will now be able to see me crying.
4. Color is my friend.

Paradise Wherever You Are

2010-12-19T09:33:00.000-08:00

"It's like summertime on my toes! I love it," I exclaimed as the pedicurist put down her brush. "But it's kind of sad, because I'm only going to see them, like, five minutes a day, because I always wear socks."

"Turn up heater, be barefoot," she replied. "More happy!"

The Mulligan

2010-12-18T23:31:00.000-08:00

Yes, this is the same piece from a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it is shorter than it was. Someone read the cable pattern wrong, and forgot how to count, and forgot to keep two selvage stitches on each side. Someone is now grumpy, and more determined than ever to finish this cardigan within a month so that she can move on to something completely new.

WTHAYW Thursday

2010-12-16T13:48:00.001-08:00

It's Thursday, which means it's time for my newest feature...

What the Hell are you WEARING?
Yes, I know "'What the Hell are you WEARING?' Wednesday" has more of a ring to it, but today's not Wednesday, and I'm not going to backdate this post to make it seem like I wrote it on Wednesday, so let's move on.

Sweater
Forestry by Veronik Avery, knit in Berroco Ultra Alpaca in Irwyn Green. I’ve loved this sweater since the day it came off the needles a year and a half ago. The alpaca halo obscures the cables a bit, but I don’t mind it. It sheds like crazy, so I can only put it over tops that I plan on washing, lest people think that I’ve been groped by Kermit the Frog.

Top
Banana Republic super-soft scarf tee, this season. I loved this top in the photos, but in practice it seems kind of, well, stupid. It’s a long-sleeved tee with a little snap at the back neck, and a big rectangle of the same material with its own snap, and you can snap the scarf onto the tee and look like you’ve got a bulky bunch of jersey wrapped around your neck. Why? Why not just wear an actual scarf? The neckline is a wide scoop, perfect for showing off jewelry, and it makes a nice undershirt, which is really why I bought it. Maybe I’ll use the ‘scarf’ to line a hat or something.

Trousers
Old Navy, this season. Reviewers complained that the lining in these trousers was too noisy, and many of them have cut the lining out entirely to get rid of the problem. This causes a new problem, as the wool is incredibly rough, and the friction of it rubbing against leg stubble might be powerful enough to start a forest fire. I’d have preferred the lining to the scratches. Funny story, though. My dry cleaner/tailor decided that, in addition to simply being hemmed, these slacks would be great with a Bermuda-length lining. No, I don’t understand the rationale behind it, and no, I did not ask for it, but now the lining stops just above my knees. And it’s noisy, like I'm walking around with a parachute wrapped around each thigh. And my calves itch. Maybe sometimes it’s worth paying more than fifteen dollars for a pair of pants.

Necklace
Glass bead that I bought at a craft fair a few years ago, tied around my neck with a leather thong. I've tried to fancy it up in the past, but it doesn't look right on a chain, and it gets lost on a string of beads. When this bit of cord wears out, I'll put it on another one.

Shoes
Clarks Artisan heeled loafers, this season.

The Verdict
I like this outfit, but it’s not my all-time favorite combination. The pants are a little too light next to the cardigan, not enough contrast. The fronts meet the front of the pants at a wide point, which makes me feel as though I look bloated. The tee exposes about an inch too much skin at the left and right edges, and my collarbone itches from rubbing right up against the wool of the cardigan. The cardigan collar flares out wide around the neck as well, which means that my hair keeps getting stuck under it. That’s what’s happening in the first photo. It’s happened roughly fifty times today.

Lessons Learned
1. Don’t wear these pants with this cardigan. It’ll lead to a day of unsatisfying tugging and smoothing, followed by me complaining that I'm too busty, followed by many of my friends telling me to shut the Hell up.

2. Buy a sewing machine so that I can hem my own clothes, because my dry cleaner/tailor has gone insane. Seriously? Above-the-knee lining? Is that even a thing?

3. Carry hair elastics. Possibly get a haircut. I've been watching my hair change in the pictures over the last couple of months, and I've had this brilliant revelation about it. It might, just might, require periodic maintenance.

The Festival of Consumption

2010-12-14T17:40:00.000-08:00

This still doesn't explain eggnog.

Too-Little Red Riding Hood

2010-12-11T22:23:00.000-08:00

I kept meaning to write this one up as a finished object, but something kept holding me back. It's been done since May, and I have worn it several times, but something just wasn't quite right.

This is Katje, in Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran, a lovely scarlet shade called Merlot. Of course, since I love Silkroad Aran so much, it's been discontinued. I could only get a few balls of the colors I really liked. I have thirty balls in Casket, a lovely pumpkin color, but couldn't get any Venetian and could only get a few balls of this one. I bought as much as I could last year, and didn't properly catalog it before throwing it into the big stash bin.

In the interest of just making something - anything - with this Too Special to Ever Become Anything (TSEBA) favorite, I cast on for Katje and knit like the wind. I don't know how long it took, but I remember it being fast. I know it wasn't more than two months, because I broke my finger on June 5th. I think it was three weeks.

Toward the end, it was a real nail-biter. I had all of the Silkroad Aran that I was ever going to have, and it was barely going to be enough. Because the edges are knitted on, I wouldn't be able to easily add either length or width with a contrasting yarn. I had to bind off the last couple of stitches with spit-spliced ends from farther up in the garment. I was relieved that I'd made it, even with almost no yardage to spare. The few inches I had left are currently being used to hold a darning needle. That's how little there was.

Wearing it for these last few months, I kept getting the feeling that it was too short. I'd tug on the bottom, hoping that it'd magically drop down a couple of inches. If it wwere simply a cropped cardigan, that'd be one thing. The hood, though, gives it so much weight at the top that the cropped lower edge looks disproportionate. It doesn't look all that weird in the photo here, and people tell me it's cute when I wear it, but it's just not comfortable. I can tell that it rides up too much in the back. I meant to wash it and block it this weekend to see if I could fix it, but Silkroad Aran doesn't really do that. If anything my SRA garments shorten up as I wear them. "If only I'd had a couple more balls of it. Dammit. If only!"

And then these turned up while I was digging out the Pure Merino Heathers for Ysolda Teague's Vivian.

Yes, they were there the whole time, pinned under a bunch of Henry's Attic alpaca. They weren't with the rest of the balls because I hadn't bothered to put them into a bigger bag when I got them, and I didn't realize I even had them because that purchase was a "put it in the bin before I have to admit that I bought this much" purchase. This is what comes of lying.

My finding them, then, is what comes of telling the truth. I'm going to take them as a reward for my admitting to Accountant Boy that I bought too much yarn. Thanks, yarn faeries!

I plan to pull back the last couple of rows sometime this week, knit down for another 1 3/4 balls, then bind off again, maybe in seed stitch this time. And then there will be a finished object post, and much rejoicing.

Q&A with Surly Sue

2010-12-09T22:35:00.000-08:00

Is that Pas de Valse?

Yes, it is.

It's been 368 days. Is it finally done?

Yes, it is. Sort of. Probably. There were problems with the back neck pickup edge of the collar, and I'm probably going to have to tack the outer edge down in the back in a couple of places to hide it.

What's up with this picture? Why is the exposure all weird?

It's late, and I think I'm getting a cold, and therefore am unable to bother doing a better job. The exposure's all weird because I am naturally a very pale lady and this is a very dark garment. Compromises had to be made, because my phone can't handle both of these things in the same picture.

Why did you use your phone when you own half a dozen other cameras? And what the Hell are you wearing under your charcoal-grey sweater to bring out its detail?

I used my phone because I wanted an excuse to cover my face, because I've spent all day alternating between fighting a cold and repainting my kitchen tile grout, so I'm not feeling all that photogenic at the moment. I haven't even gotten around to brushing my hair. That's a black shirt under my charcoal-grey sweater. I know it doesn't work.

Is this the worst FO picture you've ever taken?

No, because it's not an FO picture. I just wanted to capture the moment when it was actually (mostly) done, for the sake of posterity.

But why is it making me dizzy? Is every straight line in your house on a different vertical axis? Where do you live? The Mystery Spot?

It's making YOU dizzy? Think about how I feel. I LIVE HERE.

Will there be better pictures, maybe tomorrow?

God, I hope so. Stay tuned.

Ollymay On Irefay

2010-12-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

Hi, everyone! HI! It’s me, Molly!

I want to talk to you today about this NEAT thing that some of my internet friends call ‘fire time’. They call it ‘fyur tyme’, but I looked it up when I was pretending to randomly step on Suzanne’s keyboard, and I’m pretty sure I spelled it right, so HA! Wait! Don’t tell her I can do that! If she thinks I’m too smart for my own good, she might get mad at me! I don’t want to end up back in TRAFFIC in the RAIN!

Molly? Quit worrying about being thrown into rainy traffic. What kind of monster would do something like thaaa….oh. Let me rephrase. Molly, quit worrying about Accountant Boy and I throwing you into rainy traffic.

ANYWAY, fire time is when you throw waxed paper into a drafty hole in the wall and set it on fire. The end. I don’t see the point of it, because it doesn’t make anything warmer and we don’t cook anything on it, and Winston’s afraid of it even though there’s glass between us and the fire.

There’s good stuff about fire time, though. Suzanne likes it, and she sits on the floor next to the drafty hole with the burning waxed paper, which means I get more of the couch. YES! And then, when the waxed paper stops blazing, Suzanne hits it with an iron rod and makes it burn some more so that it won’t set the house on fire while we’re asleep, which doesn’t make much sense because it’s behind glass doors the whole time and it’s not even warm on the hearth bricks. But that’s my favorite part of fire time, because then I get off the couch and sit beside her, and she opens the glass doors and we let our faces get warm together.

That’s my take on fire time! YAY! Love, Molly!

p.s. - Ixnay on the affictray alktay. See? I'm really smart, you guys! I'm learning LATIN!

* * *

I missed my knitting deadline on Pas de Valse, with only fifty-nine sleeve rounds left to go. I’m shooting for Friday now, because to Hell with the arbitrary “it’ll be this many months since I started it/since I said it’d be done/this many months since Buddy…” crap. I’d like to wear it on Friday, and I’d like to move on to a more colorful, interesting project. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve also blown the NaBloPoMo goal for this month, and I’m not going to backdate posts to try to make up for it. I never really got behind the theme, at any rate. If I had to spend the month talking about our cultural Zeitgeist – had to spend the month talking about it – my entries would have turned into nothing more than hate-filled essays about ‘Glee’ and celebrities on Twitter and Justin Bieber, and you can find that stuff anywhere else on the web. Maybe I’ll want to talk about those things, but now I won’t have to talk about them. Ah, sweet freedom that comes with walking away from a commitment! It tastes like licorice.

The Persistence of Loss

2010-12-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

Miss you, guy.

Loose Ends

2010-12-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

This is one deadline I really wanted to make. I don't know why it matters, but I wanted to be done at the one year mark. I've got four more rows on the cap, then the rest of the sleeve. Maybe if I knit for my entire lunch hour tomorrow, and pick it up again as soon as I get home...

Peaches and Cream

2010-12-04T23:59:00.000-08:00

Norcross, Georgia, September 2010

Nine-Point

2010-12-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

Another Friday on the cul-de-sac. I love my neighbors.

This Year's Girl

2010-12-02T17:55:00.000-08:00

This is me, late 2010.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to start paying more attention to how I looked. In part, Lanesplitter kicked off this new campaign. I'd forgotten how much I liked skirts, and hadn't realized how few pairs of pants I have. A few pounds from now, I'll have half a dozen new pairs to wear, but for the moment I'm stuck with what fits and hasn't worn out over three winters of me wearing them while saying that I needed to get into shape.

The bigger motivator was our office move. On the first day in the new building, I wore a comfortable, work-appropriate pair of trousers and a light blue cardigan. The trousers have been my favorite, not because of how they look, but because they're machine washable. They're starting to fade at the seams, and they only hold their shape for one wearing now. The cardigan has been a disappointment since the day I bought it, but it was easy to find in my closet. Some seasons of Banana Republic cardis are great, some are just passable. This one was the latter. The hem, even though it's ribbed, rolls up on itself everywhere except at the button bands, which makes for an odd fold right at the center front of the garment, like an arrow pointing down to the worn seams in the crotch of my bland slacks.

Dressed in this nondescript outfit, I made my way into the building and to my new desk. Our new offices are sleek, full of frosted glass and muted grey fabrics. Everything is new, everything is uniform, and everything is clean. More on that later. The important thing to note is that, unlike our old offices, the ceiling tiles aren't water-stained, and the mismatched desks aren't held together with Scotch tape. It looks professional.

My new aisle-mates were moving in as well. One of them is a woman a few years older than I am. She is always dressed perfectly in lovely dresses, coordinating jewelry and stylish boots or, on Fridays, in a sweater and dark-wash denim. She is the epitome of "Office Style, 2010". She'd just finished losing a good deal of weight right before I met her, so most of what she has is less than a year old. I'd see her around the old office and think about how sharp she looked, how maybe I should step it up a notch, too. But then, every morning, I'd reach for one of the same three pairs of pants and figure out what to throw on top of them that would get me out the door looking decent.

I stepped across the aisle to chat with her. Even on moving day, she was in a graphic print wrap dress, the neckline of which showed off the multi-strand beaded necklace she was wearing. She looked like she belonged in that new office, in the Herman Miller chair. I was suddenly aware of how unflattering my own ensemble was. "Oh my God, I hate what I'm wearing."

"Why? There's nothing wrong with it."

"Well, there's nothing right with it either. It's just...blah."

I spent the rest of the day uncomfortable. If it hadn't been our first day in the new building, I would have feigned illness and gone home. That's how bad I suddenly felt about how I looked.

When I got home, I threw the pants and the cardigan in the laundry and piled a couple of wet towels on them. I didn't want to be tempted to salvage them just yet. I then went into my closet and took a hard look at what I still had. I had skirts that might have worked if I had the right tops, and I had dresses that I didn't wear because I thought they weren't warm enough, or I thought they made my back look fat, or I thought that I "just didn't wear dresses to work." I took some things out and tried them on.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be, and I found some things that I didn't even remember I had. A couple of sweaters and some tights, and I'd be in business. I went to Old Navy and picked up a few things, moved a couple of pieces to the front of my closet, and started the new week with a new attitude. I've taken pictures each day, but today's outfit is the first one I really liked.

This dress is three years old, bought at Nordstrom. I think it's one of their house brands. Here's what I don't understand about sizing. It's a petite large. I am not large. What the Hell, clothiers? Way to make people feel broader in the beam than they already do. The cardigan's from H&M, bought earlier this season. You can't see them, because I don't have a long enough mirror with enough light, but I'm wearing a great pair of black tights from Target, and mid-heel Clarks pumps. I loved wearing this outfit all day.

I got this haircut a few weeks ago, and I love it. I'm resisting getting it cut again because I'm afraid it won't be replicable. Most days I don't have time to blow it out in this style, so I've taken to using a curling iron with a great big barrel. It's more work than I'm used to putting in when I get ready in the morning, but I love it so much that it's worth it.

I'm calling this and future what-I-wore posts WTHAYW (What the Hell are you wearing?). Taking pictures of the outfits is helping me to see what I like, what I don't like, and what something actually looks like as opposed to what it looks like to me when I look in the mirror.

What does this have to do with the the Zeitgeist? Like I said, this is me. Right now. And I like me right now. When I scroll back through old posts in a few months and in a few years, I want to this one to remind me that this is who I am. What did people look like in 2010? Here you go.

Zeitgeist

2010-12-01T23:01:00.000-08:00

The theme for NaNoBloMo this month is Zeitgeist. "Try to capture the mood of your culture and your life as they exist right now. Use every tool in your blog box: words, photos, music..." I've spent the day trying to figure out exactly what that means, and how it's different from what I already do here, and on Facebook, and on IM at work. In truth, I had to look the word up several times today, because I kept forgetting the definition of it.

I'm pretty sure I'm shooting wide of the mark here, but here's the mood of my life right now, expressed in photography.

My bed is unmade, one of the three vacuums out in the house is just peeking into the frame on the right, and the picture is grainy because there isn't enough light in most rooms of my house to take a clear photography without a flash. The area by the stove is the exception, which is why I usually take so many shots there, but it's filled with paint rollers stuck to trays, dirty dishes, boiled chicken that we forgot to refrigerate last night, and an empty Sauv Blanc bottle. I'm just about to change out of my work clothes so that I can repaint the grout around the cooktop. I am exhausted, and everything is in disarray.

This ought to be a challenging month.

Things What Irritate Me

2010-11-30T13:13:00.000-08:00

Ice Unrealized

You’re standing in front of the refrigerator, pushing on the ice dispenser. No ice is coming out. You know someone is standing behind you, and they might need to simply get into the refrigerator. You push your cup against the dispenser button again. “Huh. There’s no ice,” you say. You still do not move aside for the person behind you. You think that there might magically be ice in the next five seconds, and you might miss it. It’s an ice maker, not a slot machine. Still, you huddle in front of it protectively, guarding what you are sure will be your payout.

Taking a more proactive tack, you open the freezer door, stick your hand all the way down into the ice maker bin, fondling the mechanism with your bare hands. “Huh. I wonder what makes it make more?” You close the door, stick your cup back into the dispenser bay again and listen to the motor whir. You are surprised that it still does not produce ice. The person behind you helpfully offers that, as this model of refrigerator does not have the ability to flash-freeze water on demand, you’re out of luck at this break station and you might try the huge cafeteria about sixty feet away. You appear to be beyond listening. “Maybe it’s ‘cause it’s the end of lunch and everyone took all of it,” you mutter, glancing around accusatorially. You still won’t back away. Press. Whir. Nothing. Whirrrrrrrr. Still nothing, no frosty jackpot.

I am the person behind you.

Look, brain trust. That’s a standard refrigerator/freezer combo, like the one you’d see in your home. It can’t pull the heat out of the water any faster than this. Commercial ice makers can freeze water more rapidly, but this is not a commercial ice maker. Pressing the button repeatedly and making the motor grind in an irritating fashion will not speed up the process.

All I want is my can of Coke, which I am proud that I remembered to bring in this morning, even in my exhausted state. It’s in the refrigerator you’re blocking, and your refusal to accept the reality of the situation, along with that metallic whirring, is giving me an enormous headache.

“I wonder why it’s not…” WHIRRRRRRRRR.

Oh, for f&%k‘s sake. I swear to God it’s getting louder.

Sometimes it’s hard to work in an office. With people. I REALLY need a nap.

***Update – I went back to get a picture of the offending ice maker for this post, and she’s STILL THERE, sitting at the little table next to the fridge. The minute the ice tray drops cubes into that bin, she’s on it. But it hasn’t happened yet.***

Not Unto Temptation

2010-11-30T11:03:00.000-08:00

See? SEE? This is why I've been deleting every Yarnmarket and Jimmy Beans and Dreamweaver email I get without opening them. The one time I click on a message from Elann.com in the last seven months, and there's Berroco Pure Merino Heather staring back at me in pesto green. It's beautiful, and there are still 50+ balls available, and I do not need it, and I already have sixteen skeins of it in cinnabar in my stash...

But it's so very pretty, and that color is great on me, and I'm vulnerable right now because I've been on call and working overnight for two days, so I'm barely functioning, much less able to resist the temptation to spend. I'm holding out for now, but for how long? For HOW LONG?

I need a nap.

Squash-cicle

2010-11-28T22:21:00.001-08:00

Hey, you guys! Hi! It's me, Molly!

You know what I got, because it's Thanksgiving and I've been good? Frozen pumpkin Kong! If I'm good and stay on my bed, I get to have the WHOLE THING, and I can make SLURPY SOUNDS with it! It's DELICIOUS! THANKS, SANTA!

Molly, sugar? Thanksgiving isn't really when...

Hoppity-hop-hop! Hoppity-hop-hop! Santa's on his waaaaay!

Oh, what the Hell. Happy Thanksgiving, baby.

Saturday Evening's Post

2010-11-27T20:54:00.000-08:00

Looking back, it seems like I haven't talked about this particular work-in-progress. It's Pas de Valse, and I've been working on it for almost a year. I have an arm and a half left, then some cleanup, and it's complete.

You can almost SMELL the magic!

2010-11-26T20:37:00.000-08:00

It's the day after Thanksgiving, and you know what that means. It's Christmas...it's Christmas time, yeah. Not safe for work or minors, but it should be. Spread the joy! Touch the Affenpinscher! Lick the mustache!

No, I'm not drunk.

Sleepytime

2010-11-24T11:55:00.000-08:00

Worth a Thousand Words?

2010-11-23T20:58:00.001-08:00

I started to write about color, but then I realized that I was saying the same things I said a couple of years ago, and I mean almost word for word. It was as though I were plagiarizing myself. It's no less true than it was back then, though. I get distracted all the time by things I find visually appealing.

A couple of weeks ago, it was the light from my desk lamp shining through these Haribo gummi bears. I spent several minutes trying to capture what I was seeing with my phone camera. I couldn't quite get the saturation I was seeing, so I ran the picture through a CameraBag filter to get it to look this rich.

Yesterday, it was a pattern in the carpet in front of me. I was supposed to be listening to employee survey results. I was in the front row, ten feet away from the man speaking, but instead of looking at him or at the projection screen behind him, I found myself mesmerized by some carpet splotches that started to look like the face of Simba the lion. "Does the pattern repeat? Do the other ones look like the Lion King, too? I wonder if I'd be able to get back in here later to check it out."

Lion Cub, MGM Las Vegas - Summer 1997

I've been having trouble with sitting down to blog every day. It's harder than I thought it would be to write something new each day, and getting harder every day I try. I have theories about why it's happening, most involving overexposure to social media and television. But my theorizing will have to wait. Mantracker's on.

So Long, Stinktown

2010-11-22T22:57:00.000-08:00

Outside the AutoZone, Pacheco, California - November 2010

Our offices moved over the weekend, and I am just beside myself with the anxiety of change. How will I be able to do that drive every day again? How will I adjust to the new cubicle that sits at the intersection of two corridors and is so open that everyone can see what I'm doing all the time from 50 feet away? How will I live without the comfort of live plants near my desk? How will I get into the work mindset every morning without the ritual of stepping over the debris of the hobo camp as I walk up to the building?

I'll probably get over that last one pretty quickly. So long, Pacheco parking lot! You've pushed your last screw into my tires.

Lawn Jockey

2010-11-21T23:22:00.000-08:00

Spent the weekend working on the house. I think we may have got some things wrong...

Video Prozac

2010-11-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

So it's come to this already, huh? We've got another six weeks of daily posting pledged, and we're already missing days and putting up YouTube videos?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ATjLj_q9Ng

At least it's a good one. Thanks for the link, Doc.

Purple Sweetarts

2010-11-18T22:23:00.000-08:00

When did I start it? Last December. Where did I leave off? No clue. Where's the pattern? Uh...

It sure is pretty, though.

At a Cafe by the Sea

2010-11-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

The Answers to Questions Nobody Asked

2010-11-16T17:33:00.000-08:00

So what were the answers to last week's Tease post? What in the blue blazes was I talking about?

1. Long drive - the arduous journey to Tulare to work the bar at the Historical Museum's 25th Anniversary celebration. Accountant Boy hurt his back bowling with me last weekend, which made three hours each way in the car especially unpleasant. The theme of the event was 'Night at the Museum' which meant that...

2. We had to dress like people from Days of Yore, come to life just for the party. We went with 1920s, since we couldn't get a clear timeframe for when Tulare's infamous Front Street district was at its peak. While Accountant Boy already had a vest and a snap-brim cap from a themed party several years ago, I had nothing in my closet that fit. (I buy dresses for weddings, and usually exercise like crazy leading up to the events, so I'm normally about a dress size larger than anything on the fancy side of my closet.)

When my mom informed me that my hips were too big for anything in their collection, I started worrying about what I was going to wear. It consumed my thoughts for several days. Then I remembered one of the tenets of my new creed - "I'm done with all that."

What does that mean to me? It means that I can keep worrying about something and make myself sick over it, or I can just get rid of the thing I'm worrying about. A few weeks ago, I had this great revelation about my fishtank. I haven't enjoyed fishkeeping in years, but we still had a tank, and I still worried about the fish in it, fretted because I didn't make time to change the water, cringed every time I walked past it. I came in from the yard one day, looked at the tank and said, "I'm done with all that. Why am I stressed about three fish and a bunch of plants?" I called the girl across the street over. "Ash, you have fish, right? Take my fish and put them in your tank. There's nothing wrong with them, but I'm tired of owning them." We scooped up the fish, pulled up all of the plants, carried all of them across the street and put them into their new home. I came back, tore down the tank and the stand and hauled it out to the garage, steam-cleaned the carpet where it had stood so that there wouldn't be dents, and was done with it. It felt so good to not worry about that one thing anymore. A.B. didn't even notice it was gone for three days.

So, worrying about my costume to the point that I was having a hard time working, I finally snapped and said, "I'm done worrying about all of this. I'll go buy a dress right now and then I can stop thinking about it." I bought this one. Not cheap, but at least it was authentic, not that cheesy all-fringe look you get from Halloween costume flapper dresses. I researched finger waves, then went for the easier solution of buying a waving iron. I felt really good about my decisive, successful moves toward a solution.

And then my mom said that it'd be better if I dressed like Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke.

3. Gland expressing - oh, don't make me tell you about this. I don't know what I was thinking even bringing it up.

4. A trip to the butter factory - this one, the most straightforward of my tease topics because it's exactly what it seems to be, did not happen. My oldest brother, Big Guy, works for a dairy processing plant. He's the mechanic in the butter room, keeping all of the packaging machines running. For years now, he's been trying to take me on a tour of Butter, but we never manage to make it work. This was the weeks' greatest disappointment for me. I love factory tours, and I know he's proud of his work and wants to show me around. Next time, I hope.

Lanesplitting

2010-11-15T22:11:00.000-08:00

Ugh, readers. Just ugh.

I tried to get a good picture of myself in this skirt, but through no fault of either my knitting, the pattern or the yarn, every one of them looks like I'm about four months pregnant, or, more likely, like I'm trying to smuggle contraband into the country under a pregnancy pillow. As I am neither with child nor a drug mule, this is not a comparison I want to make when I see pictures of myself. But there it is. These four might not look that bad, but bear in mind that they're the very best ones I took, I'm sucking in my midsection mightily in them, and anywhere that you see a fold in the sweater, assume that there's an equally deep fold of me underneath it.

Yes, I know the solution is to exercise more, and I'll be able to do that more regularly once my office moves back down near my old gym. That doesn't fix today's pictures, or the few from this weekend where I thought, "Oh, that's just a bad angle making my shoulder look beefy. And that's a bad angle making my waist look thick. And that's a bad angle giving me jowls." The photos from this weekend had more 'bad angles' than a remedial geometry class, and I hate them so much that I don't even want to share them.

I know, however, that if we wait until I feel lean and tight enough to properly model this skirt, we could be waiting a good while, and I don't want to have yet another finished item go undocumented and, in all likelihood, unworn until then. This is me right now, and this is how I look in my new skirt, so I'm going to face it and move forward.

Details
Pattern
Lanesplitter by Tina Whitmore, Knitty First Fall 2010 (Ravelry Link)

I picked it because it's like nothing I've knit before. I don't usually think to wear skirts, much less knit skirts, but I'd like to start. Also, I figured I could get it knit with less than one of my many not-quite-sweater-length skeins of Interlacements worsted.

Size
16" long, 36" hip circumference. This gives me about two inches of negative ease at the hip. I went with a shorter length because I have fairly short legs.

Yarn
Interlacements Dyer's Choice (Oregon Worsted Stripe in a non-standard colorway), Knitpicks Shadow in Lost Lake, and Cascade 220 Superwash. I used exactly one skein of Shadow, which I carried along with the Interlacements to thicken it up slightly, so the skirt totalled about 440 yards. I used about fifteen yards of Cascade 220 Superwash for the waistband.

The worsted on its own was a little too bright, but the carryalong yarn muted it just enough to make it look rich and tweedy. I'm glad Accountant Boy weighed in while I was picking between Lost Lake and Vineyard. It would have been a very different look if I'd carried along a wine-colored yarn.

Needles
Addi Clicks - size 8. I love these needles.

Time
October 19th through November 11th, 2010.

Modifications
I made it shorter than the pattern, which was really easy to do. I only used one skein of yarn, since Interlacements color repeats are so much shorter than Noro. I crocheted a waistband instead of folding one over elastic. I figure this way it'll be adjustable if I decide to take it in later. I can unravel the superwash crochet rows and redo it.

Conclusion
I love this skirt. I loved watching the colors shift along the rows as I knit, and the squishy feel of the work as it grew longer. I used some stash yarn and it came out exactly as I hoped it would. I'll probably make this pattern again.

Just as soon as I lose a few pounds.

Winston's Idea of a Good Time

2010-11-14T21:18:00.001-08:00

I make my own fun.

Sincerely,

Winston J. 'Bug' Schmidt

Bonnie and Clyde Tend Bar

2010-11-13T20:46:00.000-08:00

"Nobody's going to take a better picture of us at this shindig, huh?"

"Nope."

"We look fabulous, though!"

"Yep."

"You and me against the world, sweetie?"

"You got it, doll."

Tease

2010-11-12T21:41:00.000-08:00

It started off as this.

It wound into this.

It became this. I'm still fascinated by it.

Full FO post as soon as I get some modeled shots of it, probably early next week. The rest of this weekend is going to be full, with a long drive, a pricey 1920s floozy, gland expressing, and a trip to the butter factory. Ponder that combo, and see how close your imagination comes to my reality.

Pumpkin Pie

2010-11-11T15:29:00.000-08:00

This might be the perfect pie/custard/desert/breakfast food ever. It's good cold, stays good in the refrigerator for at least two weeks, is relatively light on calories, can be served on a paper towel and eaten in the car while driving to work, and it tastes delicious with coffee. The Bisquick settles around the edges and makes a very thin crust, or at least enough of a shell that the outer edges don't feel all custardy when you're eating a piece with your hands. When made with non-fat evaporated milk, and eighth of a pie is only about 200 calories.

There's one in the oven right now, and it's making the house smell fantastic. I'm in too much of an apathetic mood to write up anything more interesting today, so here's the recipe.

Impossible Pumpkin Pie

16 oz. pumpkin
12 oz. evaporated milk (regular or non-fat)
2 Tbs. butter
2 eggs
3/4 C. sugar
1/2 C. Bisquick
2 1/2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
2 tsp. vanilla extract

Heat oven to 350. Mix all ingredients in a blender. Grease a 9-inch pie pan or a 13x9-inch dish. Pour mixture into the pan. Bake until knife inserted into center comes out clean - 50 to 55 minutes. I like to bake it a little longer, until a couple of inches of cracks form around the edges. Let it cool, then serve. I usually chill mine for about a day before serving.

It doesn't look pretty in the pan, and it's not all that visually interesting when sliced, but trust me, it's delicious. My pictures aren't doing it any justice, either, but...ugh. Not in the mood to try harder.

Happy Pirate

2010-11-10T00:00:00.000-08:00

So Faux Meaty

2010-11-08T20:07:00.000-08:00

"Dmmmmunnuhphhh?"

Yes, Bernini's David?

"Whhhphh phnuey iph thph ahbuhmuh mphcuhluh phuhm?"

What finery is...what?

"Ahbuhmuh mphcuhluh phuhm?"

About your miniscule fume? What are you talking about?

"Ah. BUH. Muh. Mphculuh. PHUHM!"

Man, I can't understand a word your saying. Let's talk about the scarf. It's a catch-up Finished Object post from earlier this year. By the way, you look quite handsome wrapped up in it.

Details
Yarn
Elsebeth Lavold Silky Tweed - two skeins and
Berroco Softwist - one skein

I bought the Silky Tweed a few years ago from Webs, back when it was being cleared out. I'd intended to buy more of it if I ended up liking it, but never got around to it. The Softwist was left over from the Two-Tone Shrug I made a couple of years ago. The Silky Tweed ended up in one of those Lantern Moon small project bags, which I kept shifting around to different spots in my house. When it came time to put the leftover Softwist away, I shoved it into the bag as well. They looked good together, so I figured that they should stay that way. As it wasn't enough to make a full garment, I spent the next couple of years planning to buy more Softwist. It became a Too Special to Ever Become Anything (TSEBA) yarn.

Pattern/Design Thoughts
I tried a few motifs, and I thought about making granny squares with it, but nothing seemed right. I finally got frustrated with my inability to decide, and just started double-crocheting. I winged it from there, thought about making the various stripes thicker or thinner, but ultimately came up with this pattern.

Hook
Brittany Birch, size F

Time
I packed that little embroidered sack of yarn into my laptop bag and took it with me on a business trip to Nebraska. I started crocheting it when the plane was over Nevada, worked on it in my hotel room that week, and finished it up right before crossing back into Nevada from the other direction. May 9th through 14th 2010.

Conclusion
I love how this came out, and that the yarn isn't sitting in TSEBA-ville. For a while, I was worried that it looked a little like vegetarian bacon, but I've made peace with it. I've worn this one a few times, and I'm happy with how it's holding its shape. Good scarf, nice body, good form...

...oh! About your muscular form?

"Yepphhh!"

Don't talk with your mouth full.

Squishface

2010-11-07T20:47:00.000-08:00

You guys? You know what? My new best friend Molly is exhausting.

Sometimes a guy just wants to come downstairs and hang out on the couch without getting his ankles bitten. Sometimes he wants to stare out into the rain in quiet rebellion, refusing to walk out and get his feet wet, without another dog high-stepping out into the downpour and cavorting like a field spaniel, making him look like a ninny. Sometimes maybe he doesn't want to have another dog jumping on his neck and growling like a honey badger. Sometimes.

Then again, sometimes he does, and that's cool, too, because he loves his new best friend, and he gets a lot of sympathy-treats and special time on the couch because he gets to act put-upon. It's good.

But, I tell you, that guy's going to end up exhausted.

Sincerely,

Winston J. 'Bug' Schmidt

Girlfight

2010-11-06T20:06:00.000-07:00

As part of my post-a-day campaign, and because I'm copying Jo, I joined up with NaBloPoMo. I dug back through and found a lot of prompts that I thought were interesting, but this one jumped out at me.

Two teenage girls are slugging it out in a parking lot. What do you do?

What do I do? I tell you what I do, and what I'd tell anyone else to do as well. Call the cops, and stand very far away. Why, you ask? Because there's nothing more vicious than a teenage girl in a fight. With boys, it's all dominance displays, chest bumping, trying to get the other one to back down. Girls, on the other hand, just f$%king go at it. Fists and feet fly. Heads get pounded into the street. That old stereotype about slapfighting and barely touching each other is wrong. That's how sissies fight. Girls actually do a lot of damage.

When I was seventeen, I was mugged on my high school campus. By a girl. Yeah, she was a lot bigger than I was, and there were a couple of guys with her, but she was the leader, and she did all the work. The police found my purse and my license under a trash bin in the park a year later, but for those dozen months I was sure she was carrying it around, about to come find me if she got bored. "I'm gonna GET you, bitch," she'd snarled in my ear. Terrifying.

A couple of years later, I was home visiting from college and stopped in to see some of my teachers. My chemistry teacher came into the teachers' lounge, and I saw that he had an eye patch. He'd tried to break up a girl fight in the halls, and one of the girls knifed him in the eye. He lost an eye, readers! He tried to break up a fight between two teenage girls, and now he's half-blind.

The question gets more interesting the more I think about it. Here's a followup question. Two teenage BOYS are slugging it out in a parking lot. What do you do? Ask the question of women you know, then ask the men. See if their responses are any different. See if chivalry plays a role. I'd bet that most of the men will say to break up the girls and let the boys keep fighting. If a man gives you that response, reach over without warning and box the man in the ear and say, "Stop underestimating girls. They'll f$%k you up."

Friday

2010-11-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

Progress is being made on Lanesplitter, but as it's just a biasing rectangle at this point, it's not that interesting to talk about it. In a piece of good news, I found the skein band and saw that I have more than a standard skein's worth. 600 yards gives me some breathing room, figuratively and literally. This is the closest I've come to getting a true color picture of the work.

I'm wearing Juliet today. Fingers crossed that it doesn't stretch into a knee-length tunic.

What's with the boring post title? I decided to make up for my lack of blog posts over the last couple of years by posting every day between now and New Year's Eve, some days more than once. I'm trying to beat my annual max, set in 2008. Sure, I can think of something to say every day. Ask anyone. I never shut up. It's just that I can't always comer up with a pithy title.

"Friday." Heh.

Dragonfly

2010-11-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

I used to have a real problem. A yarn problem. A yarn buying problem.

When I first started knitting, I was naive. I didn't understand what 'closeout' really meant. If a yarn was marked as a closeout, and I thought I might even remotely like it, I bought all of it that I could find. Sure, I know now that closeout yarns might hang around for years, or might simply be colors closing out, not the yarn itself. Now I know the difference between a closeout and a yarn that had truly been discontinued. I didn't know back then.

The problem with this is that I also tend to go overboard. I'd buy all of the "can't ever have it again" yarn at a store, brick-and-mortar or online, then go look for more of it at a different store. I'd buy as much as I could, then agonize about what wasn't in my cart. I ended up with a lot of yarn this way, yarn that I still haven't used.

I had four or five websites that I'd visit every morning, seeing what was on sale, seeing what was running low that I might miss out on having. I'd usually buy something, and usually not just a ball or two of it. What if I couldn't get more of it? I needed enough to make...oh, whatever I might someday decide to make, and I needed to know that I wasn't going to run out.

Stitches was the worst thing in the world for me, especially back in those days. Not only was I surrounded by huge displays of yarn, but I was also seeing yarns that I was sure could not be had anywhere else. Most places have websites now, but back then it was a once-in-a-year opportunity. You went to Stitches and you stocked up on rare, exquisite things. I still haven't forgotten the one thing I didn't buy several years ago, the short skein of fingering-weight camel that came with the name of the man who'd shorn the animal and spun the fiber. It was eco-friendly, and artisanal, and eclectic. What was I going to do with a $200 75-yard skein of camel? No clue, but the IDEA of it seemed so delightful that I'm still - six years later - thinking about it. I don't think I'd buy it now, but the emotion involved with not buying it then is still almost as strong as it was when I was pacing in front of the table with the skein in my hand, agonizing over my decision.

Daisy and I both fell prey to that mentality. I once made it sound like we were more in control than we were, but the reality is that we enabled each other, and neither of us ever saw the full scope of the other's problem. My yarn went into the yarn cave, hers into boxes in the attic, baskets on high shelves, bags in the closet, or crates in the garage. It wasn't until I moved and consolidated my stash into my garage that I saw just what I'd done. I should haul it all out into the center of the garage and take a picture of it.

I'm still not sure that Daisy knows what yarn she has. She sent me a couple of balls this summer with a note that said "1986 called. It wants its scarf back." They might be that old. We thought we'd seen all of it when she was packing, but new skeins and half-finished projects keep wiggling to the surface. Some of it, like "1986" and the yarn for this project, transferred over to my stash. Some of it was moldy and, with great reluctance and difficulty, she threw it away. Most of it went back with her.

We both watch Hoarders, text each other sometimes when it's on. We both recognize ourselves in some of the episodes. "I might use that someday. It's still good, once you unwind the outside part. I can rinse out the smell. I bought that when (x) happened. It reminds me of the time we..."

There came a point not too long ago when I realized that it really was a problem. I'd order yarn, race home to get to the boxes before Accountant Boy saw them, empty out the yarn, catalog it, shove it in one of the overly full bins, break down the packaging and shove it in the recycling can before he could see it. Sometimes I'd tear the shipping label into little bits and throw kitchen scraps on it so that it wouldn't be legible. The day that I actually CREATED kitchen scraps to hide a shipping label, I knew I'd gone too far and had to stop.

I've been knitting from my stash since then, digging in and pulling stuff out to knit without regard for any special plans I may have thought I had for it. I don't visit any of the big websites anymore, and I only skim the catalogs for ideas before throwing them in the recycling. I bought a few balls of camel/merino at Tuesday Morning the other day when I was in a bad mood, but for the most part it's been going pretty well.

Details
Pattern
Juliet by Sarah Johnson (Ravelry Link Here)
Size
Knit as a large, but my gauge was tight, so it's actually a smallish medium

Yarn
Jo Sharp Desert Garden Aran in teal. I used 555 grams of the stuff, which is just slightly more than 11 skeins. I have two more of them left.

Daisy bought this yarn at Stitches in 2004. I remember standing next to her at the Webs booth when she was looking at it. I'd never seen that much yarn in one place. It was exciting. Anyway, she gave it to me a couple of years ago, and I spent some time trying to figure out the perfect project for it, because, you guessed it, it's not available anymore. It finally became Juliet because I needed an easy, quick project to get me knitting again after this summer's finger madness. Little did I know that I'd turn it into a three-month endurance event.

Needles/Notions
Addi Clicks, size 8 the whole way through.

I found the button at a bead store with Daisy a couple of years ago, after she'd pushed this yarn off on me. I bought the button specifically to go with this yarn.

Time
Early August to mid-October. I know that I didn't get to the lace until about October 1st, because I was in Atlanta when I hit that part. In a funny twist, I knit the last couple of inches of garter while watching Hoarders in my hotel room.

Modifications
I knit the large because my gauge was tighter than was called for. I pretty much followed the pattern, except for adding a set of 3-6-9 short rows at the back so that the garter line wouldn't ride up. I went for nine lace repeats so that it'd be an inch or so below the bottom of any belt that I'd wear.

Conclusion
It's a cute top, but the bulky garter stitch makes my upper body look bigger than it is, and I don't need help in that area. I need to remember that I don't like this bodice style. I would have liked this even more if it'd been stockinette on the top.

The body has a nice swing to it, and I'm pleasantly surprised by the way the pleats are staying in place. I wasn't expecting either of those things, and don't think it'd drape like this if it were wool.

All in all, it's a winner.

Eleven/Seventeen

2010-11-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

If Wishes Were Horses

2010-10-27T10:05:00.000-07:00

VocabuLazy

2010-10-21T00:00:00.000-07:00

I am overjoyed to be knitting again. I started to say "there aren't words", but this is obviously untrue, because I am typing them. That phrase irritates me every time it comes up in a conversation. I usually throw things at the television when I hear it, shouting, "There ARE words. You are USING WORDS. You're just being lazy! Challenge yourself to say something original, you hipster f$*k!" I should point out that I most often hear "there aren't words" in news stories where someone is describing a puff pastry that they bought off of a push-cart after being alerted to the location via Twitter, and it's usually some perfectly styled guy who doesn't appear to have a day job, since he's able to ride his fixie all over San Francisco with his "ironic" Hello Kitty messenger bag slung across his narrow chest, chasing gourmet puff pastry push-carts and hoping to get on the news. If someone is standing in front of what's left of their house after Godzilla flattened it, shell-shocked and barely vocal, they lay a legitimate claim to "there are no words". I'm not heartless, you know. But, hipster dudes trying to sound cultured while talking about curbside creme brûlée? No pass for you.

Where were we? Oh, yes. The joy of knitting again. This swatch is the start of Lanesplitter. The yarn is from Interlacements, bought a couple of years ago at Stitches West. I'm hoping I'll have enough of it, because it was an odd colorway and I only have 560 yards of it. The swatch is two different shades because I was testing out carryalong yarns. After staring at it for a couple of minutes and consulting with the artistically-inclined Accountant Boy, I went with the green. This isn't the best representation of the colors, but it'll do for now. The wool feels so good in my hands, especially after all those weeks working with cotton. The colors are entrancing. I am so, so happy to be back at it again.

Juliet is done and almost dry. More on that when I can model it.

My Most Delicate Flower

2010-10-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

Splendor in the (Gr)ass

2010-10-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

"You know who you remind me of? It's been driving me crazy, but now I've got it."

The nurse at the surgeon's office looked up at me expectantly, clearly waiting for me to guess.

"Uh...I have no idea..."

I'm usually afraid to hear the answer, and I don't dare volunteer one of my own. When I and MTV were both much younger, I'd get compared to video jockey Martha Quinn.* I didn't mind it so much, except that it meant that I was little-sister-cute, and that wasn't exactly how I wanted to be seen when I was seventeen. A few years of college and a dye job later, I started getting Cheers-era Shelly Long, for both the hair and the dense vocabulary. It was not meant as a compliment. I can't remember the other suggested doppelgangers, but I know that I didn't like most of them.

I stood there and attempted to look like nobody in particular. I twisted my face in a number of different ways, as you do when you know that someone is scrutinizing you. I tried to not flare my nostrils, which guaranteed that I'd be flaring my nostrils. I didn't know where to look while she was staring at me, so I kept shifting my gaze around, twitchy. I was pretty sure that at one point I actually did look like Shelley Long.

She waited a few uncomfortable beats longer, then, finally gave up on making me guess.

"Natalie Wood!" she said, triumphantly. "But you're too young to know who that is."

I did, in fact, know who Natalie Wood was, and I was very flattered. When we first got cable, it seemed like HBO played 'Brainstorm' at least three times a day**. I remember thinking that she was so beautiful, and I sat through that mediocre movie at least a couple dozen times just to watch her. It was quite an honor to be compared to her. I acknowledged it in the only way I could, having been taken so by surprise.

"What a coincidence! I was thinking of taking up pleasure boating, now that I'm giving up on motorcycles."

She scowled at me, then handed me a sheath of papers. "Fill these out. Someone will call you back in a few minutes."

I am an ass, sometimes. At least I don't look like Shelley Long.***

I'm still a few inches shy of being done with Juliet. I'll probably finish just after the weather turns too cool to wear it.

* MTV not only used to play videos, they had hosts who announced them. And sometimes, when they'd run out of videos, they'd just play long musical pieces while showing rockets launching. Really. You young kids have no idea how revolutionary it was.
** This was an even bigger deal than you'd think, because our cable box didn't have a remote control. Back in those days, you committed to what you were watching, or you stood up and pushed a button ON THE TV.
*** Not that there's anything wrong with that. I have nothing against Shelley Long. But go back and watch early episodes of Cheers, then tell me what woman in her right mind would want to be Diane Chambers.

Ultrasuede

2010-10-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

Stay Hungry

2010-10-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

Yeah, baby! That's what I'm talking about! Push it! PUSH IT!

Oh, hello, fellow knitters. You caught me mid-set there. Little Lefty Pinkerton has been working hard on the strength exercises in anticipation of our final visit to the hand surgeon on Monday. We're hoping to make him proud, show him the fruits of our perseverance. Might not get full function back? I know he said it in an attempt to set realistic expectations.

Of course, I took it as a challenge. When my official physical therapy course ended, I bought the equipment to continue it on my own. I looked up the normative data on grip strength for women my age, found that I'm average for my right hand, decided that I should be above average and started working on that hand, too, even though there's nothing physically wrong with it. I might not be in great shape otherwise, but I'm going to have freakishly strong hands. I wonder if it will help my knitting speed.

Speaking of knitting, I am happy to hear that I'm not the only one with sewing issues, or the only one still knitting. It's just that I spent September looking at the knottygnome and stitchywitch blogs, insides twisting with jealous admiration. Go check out their work. It's quite humbling. Actively squashing the desire to be a seamstress.

Finally, today, you might be wondering what's up with all of the blog posts. Four days in a row is a record for me. It's part of my new outlook on life, my new creed, if you will. There are several parts to this creed, which I shall explain at nauseating length in a later post. You will, beloved readers, probably want to be at least partially intoxicated for it. The tenets of my new creed include "I'm Done with All That", "I'm Forty Years Old, Dammit", "Embrace the Cliche", and "Because F$%k It, That's Why". Those sound pretty negative, I know, but believe me when I say that they're actually affirming. And there are more positive-sounding tenets, but they don't have catchy names yet. For now, just know that the relevant piece here is "Go Big or Go Home".

Reflections

2010-10-07T20:10:00.000-07:00

This is a thing of beauty. The light, the reflections, the cool tones of the garnish tray juxtaposed with warm glow the golden lager, and the rakish angles all combine to form an image that pleases my discerning eye. This picture is completely unretouched. I took it at this angle intentionally, to add to the feeling of cheerful disorientation. I look at it often and try to figure out what exactly about it I love so much.

Yes, I took this with my phone. I then emailed it to Accountant Boy with the following message: "We want the funk! Gotta have that funk! At the bar. You should stop what you're doing and get here immediamente. Love, Doc, the Chemist, and me."

I had a whole piece here in which I reflected on the knit-blogging community's abandonment of knitting in favor of sewing. It was full of introspective musings and longing for days of yore, back when knitting was the hot ticket, before everyone moved on and left me in the dust, surrounded by thousands and thousands of yards of unknit wool. I felt so alone. I then went through my bookmarks to find support for my disheartening theory, and discovered that I was skipping about three-quarters of the bookmarks in my list. My phone rearranged them in an odd way, and I go to most of the blogs through my phone because it's the only way I can browse at work, so I got out of the habit of visiting most of the sites I used to frequent. Long story short, most of us are still knitting. I actually look like the LEAST productive blogger I know. Uh...HOORAY! Yay, knitting!

Carry on.

Living in the Fisheye Lens

2010-10-06T20:02:00.000-07:00

(What's the Story) Morning Glory?

2010-10-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

My backyard here at the new house, which will continue to be the new house for another five years, at which point it will have been our house longer than the old house and will lose the modifier, is a wild and unstructured place. Accountant Boy rebuilt one-fourth of the deck's total surface a couple of months ago, but the rest of it is still unstable, one heavy foot away from catastrophe. We haven't taken the time to figure out the irrigation back there, so some things are overwatered and some are dying from a lack of it. We bought some Japanese maples at Costco early last spring. They're still in nursery pots. We like to say that we're pacing ourselves.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I looked out there at the vine that I couldn't remember planting and saw that thing. I remember throwing some morning glory seeds in the ground, but it's been a while, at least a couple of years. When a leafy vine cropped up around a withering rudebeckia, I assumed it was a stowaway from the nursery. It didn't bloom for eighteen months, but it didn't die over the winter, even with the snow. Tough plant. And now it's blooming, which is amazing given that we don't water it and it's living in the notoriously crappy Pleasant Hill soil.

Everything in the ground went wild this summer. This is the cosmos that we grew from seed. See what looks like a sapling trunk in the picture, near the plastic Holstein's ass? It's actually a cosmos stem. Yes, these are the same cosmos that you buy in 6-packs at Home Depot. Mine grew six feet tall.

It may not be formal, or purposeful. It's not the garden I had at the old house, that's for sure. Back then, we designed everything, planted that yard from flat dirt, knew the botanical and common name of everything in the ground. I planned very little of what's growing in either the back or the front yards here. We simply threw stuff into the earth and hoped for the best. If it perseveres, we're happy. If it thrives, we're surprised. It has been a surprising few weeks. It's wild. I love it.

Work continues on Juliet. I'm finally down to the lace portion. What I neglected to mention last time was that I'm knitting it at the wrong gauge. Yes, I did do a gauge swatch, but I did it not long after I got the O.K. to lightly use my pinkie, and while my thumb was still in a brace for twenty-three hours a day. I thought that, as it was just knitting, no purling for the first third of the project, it wouldn't be a problem. My tension couldn't be that much more loose, right? Heh. I like it at this gauge, but I'm knitting it as a large so that I can get a small/medium, so it's taking a little while. The Theraputty is in the picture for color adjustment. My phone camera couldn't get the color right without it.

Why the phone camera? Wasn't I just whining about how I don't take out my "real" cameras anymore? For some reason, the lighting in my office and the processor in my Sony don't get along. None of the white balance settings work, even with helpful color contrast object thrown into the mix. My phone, on the other hand, takes wonderful pictures at my desk, with clean, accurate white balance and brightness. My phone won out in the morning glory pictures as well. I took shots with both, but the one above was the most true to life. The big Nikon would more than likely best both of them, but that defeats the purpose of the kind of spur-of-the-moment photography I like to do. For now, the phone wins.

Tenacity

2010-09-13T20:45:00.000-07:00

"At this point, we probably should...but, you know, let's try one more time." He bent my finger farther, beyond the point where we'd been able to move in in therapy, well beyond the point of excruciating pain, and tried for another grab. "Shoot," he said under his breath. "They never do this. We ought to schedule a time in the O.R. to...maybe one more shot at it?"

I admired his tenacity. As a tenacious sort myself, I willingly went along with his attempts. Well, you can see how well that worked out.

Anyway, all of the pins in my finger have been out for a couple of months now, and it's starting to move a little more freely. I can bend it in so that it doesn't stick out when I make a fist, and I can stretch it almost all the way straight. If I keep it warmed up and limber, it almost feels like a normal finger. I've put a lot of time, attention and effort into it these last few months.

All of that work has taken its toll, and has made me think of things that haven't been getting my time, attention and effort.

The pictures in this post were taken with my phone, not a proper camera. I haven't been making the time to get out the good camera and get the right lighting and composition in my shots. It hasn't mattered much, as I've only been looking at them on my phone, not posting them or sharing them. I've also been relying on my phone too much for email, which means I'm not keeping up there, either. I haven't been writing.

For the first couple of months, my finger was so swollen and sensitive to any kind of jostling that I couldn't do much exercising. While the pin was sticking out of it, I couldn't get it wet. It goes without saying that I couldn't hold a leash and walk Molly and Winston. It's been better than that for a few weeks now, but I haven't gotten back into exercising.

I also haven't been knitting, lately because of my hand, but it's been longer than that since I've made anything that I really loved. I started Pas de Valse back in December, and all that's left are the arms. Just pick up the stitches and knit them down to the wrist, but it's been untouched in my knitting box for at least four months.

It's funny. When I could have been doing all of those things but wasn't, I kept coming up with reasons why they weren't possible. Not enough time, have to clean house, have to keep an eye on the dogs, have to sort through the mail, too tired, too hungry, too much to do to get anything done.

Once I really COULDN'T do all of those things, I found that I really missed them. I thought about why I wasn't doing them back before the accident, and realized that it was just laziness. Oh, I have a lot of handy excuses, like "I don't like where my computer sits", and "I'm too out of shape for anything I knit to look good anyway", but they all come down to that. It's frustrated me all summer, realizing that I'd let so many things slide.

Now that my hand's almost better, I'm trying to refocus on creative things. I've countered "my computer's in a bad position, and the chi's all wrong" by getting a newer, smaller, much more portable laptop. I can sit with it on my lap and type for hours instead of fifteen minutes. I don't believe in poison darts and bad chi, but I know I haven't been good at writing at home since we moved, and I think it has to do with every spot where I can put that big, old laptop. Now I don't have that excuse.

I joined my old gym again and started back with The Amazon last week. My physical therapy sessions have become less about my finger and more about my upper body anyway, so it's like working out three or four times a week again. It feels good.

I still haven't picked the grey sweater out of the box and finished it, but I plan to do so within a few weeks. In an attempt to get back into the swing of knitting, I picked what should have been a quick, gratifying project. That's it up in the first picture, Juliet in Jo Sharp Desert Garden. Of course, I would pick a project and a yarn that would tire out my already compromised hand after one or two rows. I wanted to be it done with it in a week, but it's been more than a month to get that far. Seven more rows until I can bind off the sleeves, but they're taking forever. I keep thinking I should start something else, or just finish the grey sweater, but then I think, "...maybe one more shot at it?"

Damned tenacity.

I'm Molly!

2010-07-01T20:37:00.000-07:00

Hey, you guys! Hi! It's me, Molly! I'm supposed to tell you ALL ABOUT ME! Yay!

I'm from the STREETS! When Suzanne's friend found me, I was wandering around in TRAFFIC! But then I got to ride in a truck, just like a construction worker!

Our friend found her in a busy intersection near the county dump, dodging traffic in a rainstorm. "I closed my eyes and waited for the thump, because I knew she was going to get hit and I couldn't watch." She made a lucky break for the median, and our friend sprang out of her truck and grabbed her. She had her Mastiff's spare collar in the truck, so she hung it loosely around Molly's neck. Having no space in the loaded cab or bed to put her, she placed her on the lock box, instructing the construction worker in the passenger seat to hang onto her through the sliding back window. She rode to safety that way, splayed flat across a slick, metal tool box.

They tried to find her family, because she was such a good dog that they were sure she must have been lost. After days of searching lost and found pages, and posting fliers at shelters and ads on Craigslist, it became apparent that nobody was looking for the little red puppy. All hope of finding her owners was gone, but they couldn't bring themselves to leave her to an uncertain fate at a shelter. "She's just too good of a dog. We have to find someplace for her."

And then that nice lady and her nice guy took me into their pack, and I got to play with a LOT of dogs! And then they brought me here, and I was really careful to do everything right when I met all of the dogs out here, so that I could be a part of this pack, too. And guess what? IT WORKED! See how I cozied up to my new best friend Winston? I'm SMART!

Over a couple of weekends, she met Winston, then Doc and The Chemist's dogs. Once we had a good feeling that everything was going to work out, we brought her in permanently. Our friends were sad to see her go. If their hands weren't already full with several foster dogs, I have a feeling that they would have kept her.

The only hitch in the handoff was that she came to us with a bum leg, the result of playing in a field and catching it on something sharp. The gashes were bad enough that they required surgery to heal. Her first two weeks here were spent with her leg wrapped up in cotton gauze, sports tape and an outer coating of duct tape. It's been a gauzy, tape-covered couple of months here at Casa Banana.

And then? I ATE the TAPE! YES!

And the Cone of Shame, too. She had that thing off in record time.

Molly is an enthusiastic, sharp young dog. It's a lot of fun watching her grow and learn. Everything we let her do is the best thing she's ever done, and everything we give her is the best thing she's ever been given. She approaches everything in her life with boundless optimism and joy. If that's not obvious in the pictures, it's because it's impossible for me to get a shot of her while she's being enthusiastic and joyful. She moves too damned fast, and I'm usually laughing to hard to take the picture. She's a good time.

I LIKE BONES!

Yes, thank you, sweetie. You like everything, don't you?

Let's see! I like bones, and Bully Sticks, and Kong toys, and Winston, and you guys, and Ernie, and eating, and my friends at the veterinary clinic, and socks, and watching the fish in the fishtank! Yep, I like EVERYTHING!"

It's not fair to compare her first few weeks here with Winston's, because she didn't have the enormous burden of learning to deal with Buddy. She's been allowed to run and tumble instead of spending countless hours on a tie-out while being taught to respect the tiny king. Winston didn't have that kind of freedom for months. I think that she's benefiting from the more casual atmosphere. Wherever she came from, however she happened to end up in that intersection, she doesn't seem to have gone through months of confinement. Winston came to us after more than six months in a kennel in Oakland. As a result, she seems to have come into her own a lot faster than he did. Who knows? Maybe none of that matters. Maybe Winston's just a more reserved dog than Molly, and that's O.K.

Yeah! So I'm teaching him to be more confident! We wrestle, and we run around the house, and we run around the back yard, and we play this game where Winston grabs one end of the rope and rolls on his back and then I drag him around on the carpet! He LIKES that game!

He does. I don't understand it. He played it with us, and now he's taught Molly to play, too. I used to try to get him to stand up and play tug with me, because dragging him around by his teeth across the carpet seemed cruel, but he'd pick up the rope and flop right back down again.

He hasn't been as successful at teaching her to play ball. I think the ball is just a little too big for her. None of these pictures do a good job of showing the size difference between the two of them. She's about forty pounds to his sixty, and not nearly as bulldog-blocky. She's definitely a mix of pit bull and something else, but everybody's guess at the "something else" is different.

Sometimes we practice being CALM and MATURE! Here's me and my new best friend Winston being GOOD QUIET DOGS!

This is a new one for Winston. Buddy wouldn't often cuddle with him, maybe only a handful of times in their lives together, and his other canine friends don't do much of it, either. He doesn't quite know what to do with her when she sidles up to him. He likes it, but he's not quite sure how he's supposed to respond.

Oh! And I like drinking a bunch of water and then running around until I throw up on the carpet! And sometimes on my new best friend Winston's feet! He should learn to dodge better! Love, Molly! By the way, that's me! I'm Molly! Hi!

Le Pacte Des Loupes

2010-06-23T19:19:00.000-07:00

Until I can knit again - still some weeks off, if my friends, coworkers and well-meaning strangers are to be believed - I might as well pass the time by catching up on some earlier finished work. This lovely short scarf is...

Domina?

Yes, Bernini's David?

Domina, there are things afoot in the villa about which I, as your steadfast champion, need to be informed.

For example?

For example, what has happened to your lovely hands? What has damaged them so badly that you can no longer craft beautiful adornments for The David? Where you attacked by the pack of wolves?

Wolves? What are you talking about? David, there aren't any wolves here.

Aren't any wolves..oh, fairest lady! How I have failed you! Not only has that scoundrel of a husband allowed wolves to overrun the grounds while I remained anchored on this hateful pedestal, but the trauma has wiped the horror from your mind. Would that I could have stood between you and their slavering jaws. I turn from you in defeat and shame.

Have you gone insane, my stationary friend? I broke my finger in a motorcycle accident. You know that. I mean, yeah, I was on some powerful pain medicine after the surgery, but I'm pretty sure there weren't wolves roaming about the place.

But they were everywhere! Did you not...oh, accursed sound! I hear their diabolical howls. Hide! I beg you! Take shelter behind my muscular frame. I shall hold them off while you flee.

David, that's just Molly, whining and throwing her food bowl around because she's up in her kennel. Molly. You've met, remember? She drinks at the water di...majestic pool at your feet fifteen times a day.

Good lord! You have NAMED the beast?

Details
Pattern
Wisp from Knitty Summer 2007

Yarn
Artyarns Pearl Rhapsody (kind of like Silk Rhapsody, but better) in color 2268...I think. Molly ate the skein wrapper. I think it was 260 yards, and I have about a yard left.

Daisy bought this yarn on her cross-country trek home to Maine and sent it out to me. It languished in a basket for several months, and was at risk of being a Too Special to Ever Become Anything yarn. Readers, you know how I feel about TSEBA yarns. Something had to be done before it got any closer to the dreaded garage bin Vortex of Indecision. Yarns go in, and they never make it back out again. I went into my queue, picked the closest thing I could find, yardage-wise, and just started knitting.

Needles
Brittany Birch, size 8. In retrospect, this project would have been a lot easier with lace needles, or even the pointier tips of the Boye interchangeables, but the BBs weren't too bad. The yarn felt better on wooden needles, so I stuck with it.

Time
It was my lunchtime knitting, so I didn't really keep track. I finished it about two months ago, and I started it right after finishing the crochet throw.

Modifications
Only because I screwed up at the beginning and didn't do the setup rows right. The ends don't match, because one end has the support for the buttons and the other doesn't.

Conclusions
I liked this pattern. I think I'd like it a lot more if I were to knit it again with pointier needles. The finished scarflette/wrap/whatever is shorter than I usually like regular scarves to be, but then again, it's not supposed to be a full-length scarf.

I can see wearing it as a cowl once I find the right buttons for it. It'll look stylish and sophisticated while I'm driving down the road in the follow car, trailing behind all of my motorcycling loved ones. But that is a story for another day, when I can stand to type for a bit longer. My left hand is about to give out, and I can feel the pins moving around under the dressing on my pinkie. It's creepy, actually. I'm going to wrap this up and stop moving for a while.

Yes, Domina! Be still, in the name of all that is holy! There is danger in the wind. Can you not detect its menacing miasma?

David, for God's sake, there aren't wolves in the house. That's the smell of the pan from last night's dinner. It's garlic. We're perfectly safe.

Hush, noble lady. They are watching...

The Shepherd's Hook

2010-06-19T19:55:00.000-07:00

On Trying New Things

2010-06-16T11:57:00.000-07:00

Text message to Doc: I am riding a motorcycle! :-)

Many people I know ride motorcycles. Big Guy and his lady friend, several of our neighbors on the cul-de-sac, many people at work, and Doc and The Chemist are all avid riders. Most importantly, Accountant Boy used to ride, and wants to start again.

I, on the other hand, haven't ever had a desire to ride a motorcycle. The whole idea of being exposed and vulnerable out on the road, and all of the work involved in even the most basic maneuvers put me off of them before I'd even sat on one. Let me reiterate. I had never sat on a motorcycle and gripped the handlebars in my life. I rode on the back of Big Guy's bike once, when I was in high school.

To be honest, I haven't even enjoyed riding a bicycle in the last twenty-four years. Once I learned to drive a car, there was not turning back. I tried to pick it up again at UCSB, because biking to school was so much more convenient than walking, and I lived too close - embarrassingly close - to drive. It didn't stick, though. Once we graduated, I got rid of my Roadmaster. We bought mountain bikes a few years later, but we've only ridden them twice in the last dozen years. For me, four wheels make more sense than two.

Everyone told me that I should at least try riding a motorcycle. "Take the beginning rider course, and just see if you like it. If you don't, no big deal. How will you know if you don't try?" After months of hearing this from every rider I know, it started to make sense. Was I resistant to riding simply because I'd never done it? Was it the same resistance that held me, paralyzed with fear, at the top of the high dive when I was ten years old? Would it be fun, the fear an amusing memory, once I'd done it? Was it that Santa Claus situation, wanting to do something so badly but being terrified of it at the same time?

Whatever the case, I kept telling people that I just didn't want to ride. Although I appreciated their confidence in me and my ability to be a rider, I did not have this confidence in myself. I was even willing to entertain the idea of being a passenger. However, I spent so much time thinking about it, and had so many conversations with riders about it, that I convinced myself that I was in the wrong.

I agreed to take the beginning course, and went with my very eager friends and an equally eager Accountant Boy to CycleGear, where I bought gloves, boots and riding jeans. I'm not going to pretend that shopping for gear wasn't fun, and that I didn't get too caught up in it to listen to my inner voice, which was still trying to tell me to not ride. That's exactly what happened. I quelled my inner voice by shouting over it. "But look at this beautiful Dainese jacket!".

We bought our helmets at another store, really nice, full-face helmets. Big Guy told me that I should get a skid lid, but I told him that I loved my chin too much for that. "All your gear, all the time. That's how I'm going to roll, Big Guy." He chuckled.

Text message to Doc: I am in the emergency room. :-(

Four and a half hours into the first day of the riding course, I went down while turning a corner. I think, based on the scuffs in my new boots and the gouges in my helmet, that I hit a patch of gravel as I was turning. My head bounced off the tarmac, followed in close succession by my shoulder, my knee, and, apparently, my hand. It happened so quickly that I was back up and cursing before anyone noticed that I'd hit the ground. "Stupid! I can't believe I did that. God, I am so pissed off right now."

The instructor picked up my bike and told me to get my gear back on and keep riding. I held up my helmet, which was now not entirely intact. He played around with it for a few seconds, then handed it back to me. "Mount up!" He walked away before I could tell him that my knee hurt, and my hand felt like I'd slapped it pretty hard on the ground. Therefore, I felt like a sissy for complaining about it. What should I, as a rider, do after falling like that? Clearly, dust myself off and get back on the bike. That's what I was expected to do.

My helmet had other, more prudent ideas, and fell apart once more as I tried to pull it back on. I couldn't get the instructor's attention again, and A.B. was concentrating on his turn in the emergency braking exercise, so I killed the engine on my bike and stepped away to figure it out on my own. A man from the sidelines, there to watch his young daughter get her license, trotted over to help me. "I don't think I can fix this," he said. "You shouldn't wear it." He paused for a second and looked at me. "Hey, are you O.K.?"

"Well, my hand does kind of hurt." I pulled my gloves off, right one first and then the left. "It's redder than normal, but I did slam it pretty hard when I fell." Having only been told to check on my helmet, not knowing that I'd dropped the bike, A.B. rode up just as I exclaimed, "Oh! I don't think I'm supposed to be able to press on it that way and make it move!"

"O.K. We're going to go to the emergency room and get that looked at," A.B. said in the most measured tone he could muster, given that I was injured and that he was not a little grossed out by my dislocated and rapidly bruising finger.

"I'm just not going to look at it, because it didn't hurt until I looked at it."

"Let's just get to the car."

"Wait! My helmet! Get all of the pieces. And could you carry it for me? Because I don't want to take my right hand away from my pinkie..."

"Yeah, I've got it. C'mon, honey. Let's GET GOING."

Now, it might be hard to tell, if you don't spend much time looking at my fingers - and why would you, because that might be considered weird and intrusive - that there's much wrong with my pinkie. I, however, spend a lot of time looking at my fingers, because I love my hands. I think they're beautiful, as hands go. I spend a lot of time looking at them when I'm not busy typing. Is that vain? Maybe. The takeaway here is that I love my hands, both for their form and their function, and I know exactly how each finger should look.

This one? Wrong. The last joint isn't bending the right way, and it's missing its characteristic lateral wrinkles. Also, the knuckle is all screwed up. I've broken off half of the piece that would hold the first and second phalanges together, and now the joint isn't stable. They tried to pull it back into place in the ER, but it wouldn't stay, because there's nothing to anchor it. The little piece is now floating around where my knuckle should be.

And now, two hours prior to the surgery, I'm rushing to get in one last blog post before beginning what will probably be eight weeks with my hand in a cast. Eight weeks of showering with my arm wrapped in a grocery bag. Eight weeks of having to plan where I park my car, because it's not easy to back out of a parking space with your right hand on the wheel, especially after a quarter of a century of doing it the other way. Eight weeks without knitting, without (easily) typing, without being able to walk my dogs...yes, there are two dogs now, and I haven't even had a chance to tell anyone about the second one. Weeks, and then more weeks of physical therapy to try to make it work right again.

I'm able to write this now because my finger is only in a splint. This is the first day since the accident that it's felt good enough to use it. I've suddenly rediscovered the muse and feel like writing again. Of course there's a second half to even this lengthy story.

And I have so much to say about riding and knitting and work and summertime and dogs and...I'm out of time. We're heading off to the surgery center.

A Conversation via Text Message

2010-05-20T20:39:00.000-07:00

Doc: Looks like Volvo driver decided to go thru insurance. May need some statement/claim help.

Me: We'll happily give it, once we figure out how to make the steam cleaner work. Winston is unsettled at the moment, and now I am, too, b/c I can't clean up the evidence of his unsettled lower digestive tract. Hoping A.B. didn't want to do Insanity workout tonight. It will not be pleasant.

Doc: Oh no! Is it a bissel? I have a little experience with them. Sorry about the digestive unsettling - hope things dry up quickly. We have a gallon of natures miracle if you need any. ;-)

Me: YES! Oh, that would be wonderful. As it stands, I'm pouring solution directly on the floor and sucking it up with the hand tool attachment. Funny, but not effective.

(Forty minutes later)

Me: Accountant Boy is on the case. it's only a matter of time, now. I'm enjoying a frosty Boddingtons while I watch.

(Twenty minutes later)

Me: We were trying to figure out where the last of the smell was coming from, and then...

Me: ..yes, right on - and in - A.B.'s running shoes. You can't tell me that's not some kind of message.

Doc: Yikes - sorry I failed with the callback. Glad u got backup! I'm at cooking group @ work, will be joining The Chemist for a hoppy beverage around 9pm when he's back from company dinner. Hope Winston's belly is feeling better soon.

Me: Might we join you for a refreshing beverage, or is it a couples thing?

Me: "In my SHOE!"

Doc: I think I laughed, and then threw up in my mouth. Or maybe it was the other way around. Oh god. What a catastrophe. Betcha ten bucks Buddy wouldve given him two paws up.

Doc: Of course - time-to-be-firmed-up. Can call when on the way if u like?

Me: We'll already be there, because...Jesus. How do you get the picture out of your head? The horror...the horror.

* * *

Still knitting, still trying to make time to catch up on blogging, etc. And I was going to do just that tonight, but when I walked into the house and smelled that specific, evocative odor, I knew it wasn't going to happen exactly as planned. Winston eats a high quality food, which makes his feces especially fragrant. From a distance, it's not unlike walking into a kitchen where a beef stew has been simmering for several hours. Up close, it's not so pleasant. The point is, you know what's up with him the minute you open the front door, and exactly how much work is going to have to go into making it right. So, while I'd love to talk about the things I've made and the things I'm doing, that will have to wait for another day.

I'm going out for a beer.

Neoprene Cockfighting Suit

2010-01-29T17:35:00.000-08:00

"I just had a flash of a dream. It was a tight shot of a woman's hands wrapping blue neoprene pads around the legs and feet of a rooster. There was an even tighter shot of the neoprene covering the rooster's talons. I watched as she then put a full body suit on him, pressing it firmly closed at the breast, and pulled a tiny hat over his head and fastened the extended neck guard, all also made of neoprene, under his beak. I didn't see any more of the woman than her hands. The whole scene took about ten seconds, and it looked like background video from a newscast."

"Sounds to me like someone's angling for a spot on Donny Deutsch."

"That's my big idea? Protective gear for fighting chickens?"

"It practically sells itself!"

"No, no it doesn't. Because here's what else I remember. The suit completely enveloped the body of the rooster, pinning his wings to his body. How long do you think the cockfight's going to last if the roosters lose their balance, fall flat on their backs and end up futilely kicking the air with their little neoprene legs?"

I had that dream a little more than a year ago. I still don't know what it means.

Meanwhile, I finally decided that I hated the idea of a Big Kureyon garment, but that I hated the idea of ten balls of the stuff sitting in my stash bin even more. My knitting friend, let's call her Natasha, and I recently took a crochet class. I already knew how to crochet, but it sounded like fun, so what the Hell. Anyway, someone asked the instructor what would happen if one kept adding rounds to a granny square, as though there were some punishment to be meted out for not stopping at the prescribed number of repeats. "You'd just have a bigger square. But why would you want to do that? It'd be so boring."

Challenge accepted, my good man.

Details
Pattern
No pattern.

I took a ball of Kureyon, chained six stitches, joined, made granny square rounds until I'd almost run out of yarn, then fastened off the last loop. It ended up being eleven rounds for each of the big squares.

It seemed like it was going to be too small when I finished, and I spent a good bit of time thinking about how to stretch it out to twelve squares. No matter how I did the math, I was never going to get more than eleven out of it. I'd play around with Post-It notes during conference calls, rearranging the squares on my desk in as many ways as I could think to shift them, but all of the best arrangements, meaning those that would make the final product look like a blanket instead of an unfinished craft class experiment, had either nine or twelve squares. I finally came up with the four little squares solution.

And you know what? The instructor was right. It was really, really boring. The only thing that kept me going was watching the color changes happen.

Yarn
Noro Big Kureyon in color 8, long discontinued. I used about eight and a half balls of it.

The color's hard to photograph. The close-up under the bright light captures it, but that's not entirely true, because it's never under that kind of light in my house. It ends up looking murkier than that most of the time.

The yarn itself is, well, it's Noro. Some of the balls were continuous, some of them had three or four knots in them. The color repeats weren't consistent from ball to ball, which is obvious when you look at the squares. Each was started with one end of the ball and worked straight through. No two are the same. That's the nature of Noro, and that's why I don't work with it much. That much inconsistency drives me crazy.

It made a fairly stiff blanket, because the yarn is bulkier than it seems in the skein. It'd work almost as well as a rug.

Needles
Brittany Birch hook, size I, except when I'd forget and pick up the H by mistake. I don't think it happened too often, though.

Time
About two weeks to finish the squares, mostly on lunch hours. It took another week for me to get around to linking them all together, and a couple more days before I felt like weaving in the ends.

Modifications
None, because it wasn't a pattern.

Conclusions
Is it the most finished, elegant blanket I've ever seen? Well, no. I got bored when sewing in the tails, so some of them cross back over other stitches. The wool is more rustic than I usually like. And, you know, it's granny squares. It's going to be more country than rock 'n roll.

But here's the thing. I was never going to make anything else out of that yarn. Ever. I got a good-size blanket out of it, especially after washing and blocking. It took three weeks total, and that's with a few days of staring at the stack of squares and sighing because I didn't want to put the damned thing together. I got rid of about 1400 yard from my stash, with enough left for a scarf.

The most important thing is that I like looking at it when it's wrapped around my feet. The colors really are beautiful. All in all, a success.

...and then I saw this. Now I feel inadequate.

Green (Late Autumn Ground)

2009-12-14T20:59:00.000-08:00

Domina, a word, with your permission?

Yes, Bernini's David?

Domina, the David cannot help but notice that the most hirsute member of the household has not been under his watchful eye this week. Has he gone on a campaign to Gaul?

Oh, David...yes, in a manner of speaking. I think he'd like the euphemism. Yes, Buddy is on an extended campaign at the edge of the frontier.

I take your meaning, Domina. This saddens the David. The tiny master did so entertain me with his capering schemes, his boisterous goadings. "Slay the Philistine, you cast-resin fop! Stop him before he eats my entire dinner! Useless, you are. USELESS!" Such a wit he had, for he could not possibly have meant it in anything but jest. I regret not being a better guardian of his repast. I shall miss him. See how I furrow my chiseled brow in consternation and regret?

And surely you must have noticed my distress, for you have made this lovely garment for me. Why, thank you, Domina! The David is comforted.

Nice segue, my high-relief friend. Let's talk about knitting for a moment, shall we?

I'm still not of a mind to do the formal write-ups on my projects, but I'm finally producing things that I like, things that work in some way. I had a string of "hey, guys? I used to know how to knit, right?" projects this summer, but it's getting better now.

With that in mind, here are the details on this scarf. It's two skeins of Knitpicks Swish Bulky in Verdant Heather, knit on size eleven needles. I cast on 32 stitches, did a two-by-two rib for about six rows, then did a cable cross on two of the four sections of eight stitches. It was an experiment in reversible cabling. Basically, K2, P2, K2, P2, hold four to the front on a cable needle, K2, P2, K2 & P2 off of cable, K2, P2, K2, P2, hold four to the front, K2, P2, K2 & P2 off of cable. I worked a few more rounds in ribbing, then did another set of crosses over the stitches I hadn't cabled in the last go 'round. It made this neat sort of tree bark pattern.

I decided that I wasn't going to care about getting the crosses spread out equally. If the cables varied in length, so be it. This was my lunchroom project, so I tried to not put too much pressure on myself with it. I ended up with fairly uniform crosses anyway, with only a couple noticeably shorter than the rest.

This yarn ended up being much easier to work with than I'd though it would be. I used all but about a foot of it. The color reminds me of the mossy grass in the yard. It's been raining for a week, and the brown of summer is giving way to the rich, damp, dark green of winter. The color is only correct in the middle picture. It's beautiful.

Anyway, I made a scarf and it looks like a scarf. That's progress. I'm a knitter.

Thank you, everyone, for your comments about Buddy. I always did see him as a kindred spirit to Ripple, though they never met. He was a remarkable cat. And I still can't sleep if it's too quiet in our room. I hadn't realized how reliant I was on his weight pressing into my ribs and his purr in my ear. He used to stay next to me until I fell asleep, then head off to do whatever important work he did at night. If it got chilly enough, he'd stay up longer. He only stayed on the bed for the whole night if it was especially cold. It snowed here for the first time in a decade on Sunday night. Dammit, Buddy.

More knitting updates, possibly tomorrow. I've finished some nice sweaters, and haven't taken the time to document them.

Farewell, My Tiny King

2009-12-07T01:06:00.000-08:00

This is not a post I ever wanted to write.

Our beloved Buddy Katzmann Schmidt left us this morning. He was doing what he loved, frolicking around the house and enticing Winston to forbidden chases, when he lept from the stairs, suddenly collapsed, and went limp. He was gone before we could get him into the car.

Buddy was more dog than cat, more human than dog, maybe something else entirely. I've always thought that either of the first two comparisons might be somehow insulting to him. Still, it's hard not to make them. He trotted up to us when we called him. He'd sit in front of me and meow when he wanted to play Koosh-on-a-wire, just like a dog would. There was a time when I felt bad for bringing him inside permanently, so I taught him to walk around the yard on a leash. When I'd call Winston over to play, nine times out of ten Buddy would race in from another direction and sit between us, stopping the big guy in his tracks. "Buddy, goddammit, stop screwing with him." And then, invariably, Buddy would jump up onto the ottoman next to me and watch Winston and I play ball. It was as though he wanted to help with the training.

He didn't do typical cat-like things. No jumping on the counters or climbing across the back of the sofa and slapping at the back of your neck while you were trying to watch television, no clawing the upholstery, no sudden bites when he'd decided that he'd had enough of you. Buddy never had enough of anyone. He never demanded love, but he never walked away from it, either. In our ten years with him, he spent countless hours next to us on the couch, sometimes tucked under our arms, sometimes just resting against our legs, and never had enough of us.

Buddy would have been eighteen next spring, a good long life for a cat. But it's never long enough.

It's two in the morning. I have to be at work in six hours. But I can't sleep, because he's not curled up at my side. I'd hoped that typing this out would make me tired, that this was what I needed to do before finally being able to settle in next to A.B. and Winston, but it's not helping.

I'm haunted, not by my last sight of him, but by the memory of him in the days before. On Friday, he sat behind the chair I'm sitting in now and meowed at me. When I turned around, he hopped smartly to his feet and marched into the kitchen, where I kept his favorite toy. We played for a few minutes, and I marvelled at how well he still moved. "Nice chase, Buddy! We'll play again on Monday when I get home from work." It was an after-work think, Koosh-on-a-wire.

Last night, at the BadRap charity event, I talked about him to dozens of people, telling them what a neat cat he was, how he had Winston firmly under his control. We all laughed at the thought. "You should get that on video and share it with the group." Buddy was an inspiration to many cat-loving pit bull owners. I promised that I would remember to record the next time Buddy cut Winston off on his way to a ballgame. But, of course, I never did record it.

This morning, Winston and Buddy were both on the bed. Winston was laying across Accountant Boy's ankles, and Buddy stretched out to face him, laying across my feet. "Look! Buddy's learning a new trick! He's doing The Winston!" We stayed in bed for a long time, not wanting to move them. Later, I looked behind the recliner to see why the vertical blinds were askew. Buddy looked up at me, slats surrounding him, pale sun lighting up his bright, green eyes. He looked stunning. "I should get my camera. You look so handsome. I'm so happy that you're my cat." I told him that all the time, several times a day. "I love you, Katzmann." That look, him staring up at me inquisitively from behind the recliner, was the last look we ever shared. I reached down to scratch his ears, then went upstairs to get dressed. I was up there when A.B. shouted desperately for my help, even as we both realized that there wasn't anything that we could do.

All I can see when I close my eyes are images of my beautiful boy, happy and active, defiantly youthful and vibrant. They're wonderful images, all of them. I'm lucky to have so many. I can't believe that I won't see him again. And I can't sleep.

Acorn

2009-08-31T22:34:00.000-07:00

Confession time.

I lost all interest in talking about myself for a while, and as a result I lost all interest in blogging. I then grew depressed over my lack of creative motivation, which pushed me even further away from here. I didn't do any of the ambitiously planned things that I said I was going to do while I was unemployed. It was not all that I thought it would be.

Just at the point where I thought I was going to lose my mind, vacuuming the house three times a day and spending an entire week not needing to put on shoes because I didn't stray beyond the edge of my property, I got a new job. Good news, yes, but not so good for blogging. My new job is more restrictive than my old one when it comes to the Internet, and I've kind of been enjoying actually working when I'm at work.

I have been knitting, but I haven't been all that great about writing about it. I finished Forestry more than a month ago, and I took some not-so-great pictures of it, but I forgot to write down what size needles I used. I started on one of my oldest projects in the bin, and I'm about halfway through the chest/back/arms. I swatched some silk last night. It's good. I'm just not writing much about it.

In short, this isn't a 'give up' post. It's also not a 'catch up' post. I may never go back and write about the mods I made to Forestry or the sweater I'm making now. If someone were to ask me about either of them, which is improbable since I've done an even worse job of keeping up over at Ravelry, I'd try to come up with more information. Otherwise, it's a done deal.

What does that mean for "Knitting for the Large-Headed Gal"? I hesitate to call this a relaunch, because then I'd feel compelled to keep up, and I don't write well under that kind of pressure. It's why I took a job nearly identical to my last one instead of running off to become a writer. For me, writing is like being in a pen with a silverback gorilla. I have to look askance at it while picking at the grass in front of me, never staring at it head-on.

It's an acorn year for the oak tree in my front yard. A pair of doves built a nest above my deck last week. It's almost the end of summer, but things continue to make a go of their fresh starts.

Let's move forward from here.