Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity

Monkey Pants have left the building

2007-04-24T21:39:00.000-06:00

Ladies and gentlemen (are there any gentlemen besides my husband reading?), Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity is moving.

You can now get your fill of the monkey pants at http://sarahjanet.wordpress.com. Please update your RSS readers and bookmarks and come on over and say hello! Exciting new photos are waiting for you over there, and all the archives can be found there for your convenience. (Should you wish to read everything I ever wrote.)

Thanks so much for reading Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity. I hope to see you over at Wordpress!

The Gryffindor Sock's Cultural Tour of Disneyland

2007-04-10T18:57:00.000-06:00

I'm home. Sigh. I had all these plans about blogging while I was gone, but (a) the wireless was REALLY inconsistent in our room, (b) I was really freaking tired whenever I was in our hotel room and was usually asleep, and (c) I was barely in our hotel room. We also didn't take very many photos. (I know. It was weird, and I'm a little annoyed - I have NO PHOTOS of Jana and only one of Ben. But they have a few photos, so I'll get those from them and will put them up at some point.) Some days we didn't want to haul the camera around, and Jamie forgot it once, and Jamie usually had the camera and isn't an obsessive photo taker of people like I am. Anyway.

Fortunately, the first day I was there by myself, which left lots of time for a cultural tour with the Gryffindor sock! As you may recall, my first pair of Gryffindor socks for my sister went on a Cultural Tour of Britain last summer, so I decided that my own pair would be perfect to take to Disneyland. (I'm not knitting many socks at the moment, so I need to get these started so I can have them for a Harry Potter intensive July.)

Let me set the scene for you. On Tuesday, I got out of bed at 5:50am in order to leave home at about 6:20 or so for an 8:00 flight. When I opened the door to take a photo for the blog (even at 5:50am I'm thinking of you!), this is what I saw:

Yeah. We had to have the plane de-iced before we could take off, so we were a bit late leaving and arriving. Fortunately, the flight was excellent. I had my own personal TV, so I got to watch The Holiday, which I LOVED. I knit on my Central Park Hoodie, which I'd packed as my secondary plane knitting. However, it was too early and I was too sleepy for Mountain Peaks, so I got all the way to the decreases on the back of CPH. Once we got to LAX, my luggage arrived fairly quickly (I'd tied some extra CPH yarn on the handles for easier recognition, since it's such a bright green), and I was off to catch the shuttle. Which unfortunately took a while, but eventually I made it to my hotel, where I checked in, dumped my stuff, changed my shoes, grabbed my sock, and headed to the park.

The yarn I left in my main pouch of my purse, and the needle I tucked into a well-hidden part of my purse. I'd heard conflicting things about knitting in Disneyland (the official word is "sorry, no," but as I quickly learned nobody actually seems to give a rat's ass.) I had a variety of plans for how to get around this, but nobody even blinked at it even when they laid eyes on it, so my carefully planned subterfuge was totally unnecessary. Upon our arrival in the parks, the sock stayed in my purse for a while. After all, it wasn’t even in sock form yet, so it felt it should keep to itself for the first few hours.

The parks were really busy, so I got a fast pass for Buzz Lightyear and headed to California Adventures, where I rode Soarin' Over California (one of my favourites, but the sock is apparently afraid of heights so it stayed stowed in the underseat compartment.) in the singles line, where I only waited about 10 minutes as compared to the 100 minute wait in the regular line (and man, was that satisfying!), and then we headed to Grizzly River Run where we both got wet. The sock was only a little damp thanks to my very reliable MEC bag, but it was still quite disgruntled. Fortunately, it was really warm that day and we both dried off quickly.

After that, I got another fast pass in California Adventures and headed back over to Disneyland. I went to get in line for the train, and when I realised how slowly it was moving, decided it was the perfect moment to cast on for my sock. I had a convenient spot on a bench, and made excellent progress on the cuff while chatting with two little girls who liked my green toenail polish. (I got a pedicure in anticipation of wearing sandals a lot.) The train finally showed up, and I went and got a fast pass and rode a few rides. I ended up waiting for the train AGAIN at the Toon Town station, by which point I managed to finish the cuff. (That was seriously the longest wait of the whole trip. For the train!)

After I had some dinner, I had a bit of time before my fast pass was valid, so the sock and I went on a photo shoot. It was hilarious. I couldn't believe more people weren't giving me weird looks, but I guess I'm still not the weirdest person in Disneyland.

Our first stop was a visit with one of my absolute favourites when I was a kid - Mary Poppins! I happened to see her and Bert show up, so there was virtually no line to see them. I wasn't really bothered enough to wait in lines for characters, but with no line, I couldn't resist...

(As always, click on photos if you want to see larger versions.)

They were very nice and I actually had quite a good chat with them. They were very accomodating about the sock.

Next, we went to visit several other characters, but in a slightly different form.

There was Pluto

(and unrelated to the sock, I hope you're appreciating the difference in weather, here. Flowers! Warm sunny weather! I weep, I weep. It's still snowing here today.)

Dumbo

Minnie

and Ariel.

We then wandered over to the castle, where one of the Disneyland photographers kindly took a photo of us, again without blinking. All of this nonchalance about a person taking photos of a partially knit sock really makes me wonder what kind of weird shit they get asked about on a regular basis.

We also saw some REALLY cute ducklings in the moat. They were teeny!

(I do have better photos of the ducklings but they don't have the sock in them. They kept swimming away if I was juggling the sock and the camera, so I put the sock away for a few minutes to take pictures of the duckies.)

Around the side of the castle is Snow White's wishing well, and the sock wanted to make a wish. Luckily, I had a quarter.

So the sock got to make a wish. (And although you can't see them, there are other people around the wishing well. Didn't even blink at a ball of yarn and a sock holding a quarter while someone took a photo.)

Next, the sock decided to storm the castle!

Unfortunately for the sock, I'm pretty sure that door is fake. So the sock decided instead to fulfill its lifelong dream of being a princess.

(No, I didn't buy my sock a tiara. I took that photo in the store. Although it does look awfully cute, doesn't it?)

Perhaps then, if it has managed to become a princess, the sock is the rightful ruler of Britain!

Nope, doesn't look like it.

The sock decided another route to fame and fortune might be more successful. Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me? M-I-C-K-E-Y S-O-C-K!

No? I don't think they'd embroider Mr. Sock on the back of a pair of ears even if I had been willing to purchase it a pair. (Which I did not.)

Perhaps, then, the sock could get a few tips about becoming invisible from the master! Can you spot the sock?

Anyway, the sock decided to abandon fame and fortune and concentrate on the rides. It thought about the teacups

but eventually decided to start with Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters!

(I know, it's an awful picture, but the line was moving really fast and it is HARD to take a photo with one hand while holding up a sock with the other and moving up a ramp while also trying to listen to your instructions for defeating Zurg!)

The sock got its own blaster

and in the photo you can email yourself, the sock is heavily featured, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working right now. (Seriously, the sock was doing the blasting in the official photo.)

Next up was Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Since I'm such a fan of it, the sock was determined to ride despite the fact that it clearly wasn't tall enough.

But it managed to smuggle itself in inside my purse. It put down the lap bar

but it clearly wasn't doing much.

So the sock rode in the little pouch for loose objects. It still seemed to have a good time.

We went back to the hotel at that point, and although we went back in the evening, I didn't take any more photos, since it was dark and really crowded. The sock did get to ride Pirates of the Caribbean (where flash photography is prohibited), Space Mountain (where I was too busy going "wooooo!" to take the camera and sock out, and it totally wouldn't have worked!), and wander around, although unfortunately the fireworks were cancelled that night. We had a good time together! I got quite a bit knit.

Unfortunately, after that first day, I wasn't by myself anymore. (That part is not unfortunate - although I had fun by myself, it was a lot more fun with the others there.) However, I didn't have nearly as much time to take sock photos the rest of the trip. The sock did make one final appearance in the Lego store, though!

That was on Saturday night, and you can see how much I accomplished. I only knit in line for rides, and then on the shuttle to and from Universal that day, and by that point I was almost finished the gusset decreases, which I finished in the shuttle to the airport yesterday. I knit Mountain Peaks on the way home, since I didn't have a tv this time and could concentrate on the shawl. The CPH and Mountain Peaks were on Denise needles, so I knew they'd get through security, but on the way home I risked my KP Circ for the sock. I made the airport party in Vancouver wait to make sure the sock made it through ok, but nobody even looked twice. Disneyland over 5 days, going in and out multiple times a day, Universal, and three airports - nobody even blinked. The only time I got any sort of remark about it was the flight attendant leaving LA who made me put it away until the seatbelt sign was off. All in all, it was a very successful knitting trip.

And a very successful trip altogether. We had a great time, did lots of fun stuff, enjoyed the weather (although it went down hill the last few days, it was still SIGNIFICANTLY better than here!), ate some very tasty food, and all in all had a fabulous time. Dear Disneyland, I miss you already. Love, Sarah.

Good thing it's only six weeks until my next vacation. So what does one knit in Cuba?

Flash your Stash 2007

2007-04-01T12:24:00.000-06:00

I was fairly new to the whole online knitting world during last year's Flash Your Stash, so I only observed and didn't participate. Besides, my stash wasn't that impressive then. These days, although I won't be winning any awards for stash size, despite what my husband thinks, it is a respectable collection.

I tried to think of something imaginative to do with my stash, but I was pressed for time and not feeling very creative. I did, however, label the whole stash on Flickr if you want to know what something is! If you click through to this first photo, everything has a note on it.

Is it a bad sign when it's actually not as much as you were expecting?

I had to go shower so I could go have a pedicure with Erin, but once Jamie got over the horror (actually, he mostly just rolled his eyes), he took over the photography. Here are some gratuitiously artsy shots!

(Why yes, our new camera does have a super macro setting!)

And just for the sake of full disclosure, here's the tub o' acrylic. I didn't unpack it because it isn't very decorative, but I did take a few quick photos.

So there you go. My stash. Hey, it's not like I'm collecting decorative plates, here. It's useful! And won't you all be sorry when there's a month long power cut from a huge snowstorm and you don't have a yarn fort to keep you warm?

"That was nice," said Plop. "What's next?" *

2007-03-25T23:45:00.000-06:00

First of all, thank you for all your nice comments on Rogue! I am very happy with it myself.

You'd think that after finishing Rogue, my very first sweater for myself, a beautiful and flattering sweater that I love so much, I might be at loose ends for what to knit. Now, I do, of course, have about fifteen other things on the needles. Since it's been a while since I posted about anything other than Rogue, a baby sweater, and sock pal socks, let's have a bit of a refresher, shall we?

In the "slow but steady" category, there is the Mountain Peaks shawl, which I am knitting with the gorgeous hand dyed silk my sister bought me for Christmas. (Beth, you should know that any time I've mentioned that my non-knitting sister bought me hand dyed silk for Christmas to another knitter, they have been VERY impressed. And that's before I mention all the other yarn! Even my stitch and bitch friends, who think it's weird that I knit for you so much, agree that it's a good deal when I get such things in return.)

Uh, anyway. Shawl. Last time we saw Mountain Peaks, there wasn't much of it, but it was going well. It looks approximately the same these days, but with another repeat of the same chart. So bigger, but with nothing new yet. I'll take a photo when something new is happening, because let's face it - in progress lace photos are basically a case of "and here is a slightly larger blob." The knitting of this shawl has been greatly improved by the arrival of my Magnetic Chart Keeper from KnitPicks the other day. I would like it a little bigger, but it's still extremely convenient. I actually forced myself to stop working on this the other day because I want to have plenty of it to knit while I'm on the plane. Since I'm flying by myself, I think lace will be perfect. Not too heavy, but interesting. (Not that flying with Jamie would really interfere with that. He has this weird capacity for doing nothing and will sit on a plane for three hours and do nothing except look out the window and maybe look through the in flight magazine. Weirdo. Flying with Jana involves much more giggling, but we're all on different flights for this trip.)

In the traveling sock category is poor Rachel's Christmas socks. The first sock is actually pretty much finished (I should finish it and cast on the second one, because I keep not working on it so I don't run out of sock in an inconvenient place.), and yet I still haven't posted a photo. That's because they're always in my purse. Sorry, Rachel! They will be done eventually.

In the pretending May is still REALLY far away category is one of the ongoing baby projects. It is making good progress. Given that I just heard about ANOTHER baby yesterday (one of Jamie's relatives), I should really get on this. Photos on this one will not be around until post-gifting, as giftees are reading.

Now, you'd think that would be plenty to keep me busy. Knit on the sock when I'm out, work on the baby project when I'm home, knit an occasional row on the shawl but mostly save it for the plane. No problem!

But there's that pesky knitalong nagging at the back of my mind. I have a lead! It's not the end of March yet and I'm already done three sweaters! There's still hope!

So I had no choice. I had to cast on for another sweater.

This is the Central Park Hoodie. I cast it on Friday night while I was (impatiently) waiting for Rogue to dry, which took FOREVER. If the outside was dry, the inside was damp. If I turned it inside out, the outside got damp again. Argh.

(I'm just about to do the second cable.)

Central Park is from the fall 2006 issue of knitscene, making this the first project I have knit from a print knitting magazine. Previous to this it's been online patterns or books. I'm knitting it in a very bright shade of Cascade 220. (I actually forget the colour, and it doesn't have a label because it's a cone. Ack!) It is a very bright and cheery green - I'd probably call it a Kelly Green. It's knitting up very quickly - the advantages of size 8s after a sweater knit on 5s! I'm hoping to finish up the back pretty quickly and then tackle the front sections before I leave, but we'll see how the week shapes up. I am pretty busy this week, so that may be a pipe dream.

Of course, the real question is...how much knitting do I bring to California? The shawl for the plane, and some socks for lines. But do I bring the sweater for back up mindless knitting?

Oh, the dilemmas.

*The title of this post comes from one of my favourite books of all time, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark, by Jill Tomlinson. It's about a baby barn owl named Plop who is afraid of the dark. My entire family can probably recite a good 60% of it, and it's a family classic. I highly recommend the audio book. (There's also a decent but not quite as excellent picture book version, but the chapter book is better.) Plop is always hungry, and eats everything his parents bring him and follows it up with "That was nice. What's next?"

Rogue in the Wild

2007-03-24T23:04:00.000-06:00

Rogue is done.

Conveniently, I finished it the same day we bought a new camera! So we had a photo shoot out in the yard today. It was a rather high speed photo shoot since I finished the sweater about 5 minutes before we had to leave to have dinner with Jamie's family, but it definitely got the job done. Unfortunately this is a crappy time of year for outdoor photo shoots. It's muddy everywhere, especially in our alley, I was standing in a puddle, and the snow is all gross and brown. Oh well. The sweater's nice! (Ignore our kind of decrepit fence, too.)

I clearly need work on my "posing for pictures of knitted items without looking like a dork" skills.

I love the hood.

See above re: looking like a dork. And this is apparently not a good nose angle. I swear I actually have quite a small nose.

It is DONE! Hooray! I wore it to dinner tonight (with no coat! Hooray!) and got many compliments on it. As you can see from the photos, the fit is really good. The cables look awesome in this yarn. And it's all mine! This is officially the first sweater I have made for myself.

Here's the knitty gritty:

Pattern: Rogue. Possibly the most photographed pattern on the internet, and with good reason. This pattern is excellent. It is easy to follow, well written, and thorough. Two thumbs up! I knit it in the 48" size.

Yarn: Bartlett Fisherman's Two-Ply in Light Sheepy Grey. This yarn was great to work with. It's still very sheepy, so it smells nice and wooly. There was occasional bits of straw or whatever in the yarn, and it changed consistency a lot when I washed it. (And the water was quite nasty afterwards!) But it holds its stitches like a hot damn. If you want to learn how to cable without a cable needle (which is the only way I cable any more), this would be a great yarn to learn on. It takes some serious convincing for it to unravel. Great for cables. Very woolly, though. If you want soft, this isn't for you. But it's definitely going to be well used in the long Edmonton winters. I ordered ten skeins of this yarn from KPixie, but I only used seven of them. (I have no idea what to do with the other three.)

Needles: The hem facing was knit on size 3 KP Options, and the body on size 5 Denises.

Modifications: I added an extra repeat of rows 33-38 in Chart A to add a bit of length. I'm 5'10", and I like my sweaters reasonably long. It's a really good length, although I wish the pocket was about an inch higher. Other than that, I pretty much knit it as written, aside from a few minor mistakes here and there. This pattern doesn't need modifying!

Start Date: January 10, 2007
Finish Date: March 24, 2007 (I knit a lot of other things in between.)

What I learned on this project: Closed cables were a new thing for me, and I really like them. This is also the first time I've used short rows, but it won't be the last. I really, really like the fit of this sweater. Just the right amount of shaping. I also learned how to do three-needle bind-off, although I ripped it out in favour of grafting the hood. My seaming skills continue to improve, although they're still my weakest link and my least liked element of sweaters.

This makes sweater number for the year. Woohoo!

Expect lots of photos in the next little while. I need to learn to use the new camera before we go to Disneyland (in 10 days! Yippee!) and it's conveniently Flash your Stash next weekend. Plus my laptop has a built in drive for the SD card, so I can upload really easily. We got a Canon Powershot S3 IS, and it's really nice. Much fancier than the old one!

Mmm, yarny.

2007-03-22T20:01:00.000-06:00

Mmm, yarn. At my Stitch n Bitch last week, someone mentioned that the yarn store in one of the nearby suburbs was changing over to an online only store, and were having a closing sale. I'd only been there once before, but it was a nice enough store, although their pattern selection was ridiculously out of date. Still, a yarn sale is incentive enough for a 20 minute drive, and since I had a free Friday afternoon, I headed out to check things out.

It wasn't actually quite as epic a sale as I'd hoped, but I still picked up a few things that I haven't seen in many other stores around here, since everything was at least 10% off.

I picked up two bags of Mission Falls Wool, which I like for baby stuff. I got a nice turquoisey colour

And kind of a burgundy-ish red that was really hard to photograph well. It isn't this pink, I swear.

(If you're really interested, click through the pictures to my flickr account, where you can see closeups. Flickr is sucking tonight, though, so in the interests of posting EVER, I'm not going to put them here.)

I also picked up 7 skeins of Briggs and Little in a nice bright blue. I thought about using this yarn for my Rogue and then ended up with the Bartlett, but I might make a cardigan or something with this. Possibly a sweater for my mother-in-law. It was definitely a good deal!

But the really good yarn I got last week is this.

That's Handmaiden Lady Godiva and it is absolutely glorious. Karen and Paul gave me a LYS gift certificate for my birthday (to which I say: woo!) and I decided that allowed me to justify the purchase of this kind of expensive but unbelieveably gorgeous yarn.

Oh, man, it is nice.

I have no idea what to make with it. I have two skeins. Suggestions welcome.

In other knitting news, Rogue is knit. It is not seamed, but it is knit. I am having a few logistical issues with the drying process, but soon! I'm hoping it'll be dry by tomorrow so I can have photos for the Sweater a Month KAL update. Plus I want to wear it to Stitch n Bitch on Monday. Pictures to follow. Upon finishing it, I immediately began to work on Mountain Peaks, which is coming along really well. I finished the first repeat of chart one and have started in on the second. (Of three.) So far, so good! (Knock on wood.)

Batteries in the camera died, so hopefully more pictures will follow next post.

Last minute knitted gifts is right!

2007-03-13T01:35:00.000-06:00

Well, nothing like finishing your gift 12 hours and five minutes before the baby shower starts. Yikes! After a strong start last week, the baby sweater took a bit of a dip over the weekend. Saturday I was busy having a birthday party and didn't touch it, although I did get quite a bit of Rachel's sock done. Sunday, I wasn't in a very knitty mood due to some bad news about my grandma, and then I went for yet another birthday dinner with my in-laws, where again, good sock progress was made but the baby sweater continued to be ignored.

When I got home on Sunday night, I buckled down and knit 90% of the first sleeve while watching the Amazing Race. I finished the first sleeve off tonight before dinner, and then started the second one before heading out to Stitch n Bitch.

Of course, because I'm an idiot, I left the book at home, so I had to trust my memory (always dangerous) and do frequent comparing between the two sleeves. I got home just after the main increases finished to discover that I was actually right, which was quite encouraging. I finished up the sleeve around 10:45 or so and then began to seam.

For such a teeny sweater, seaming was surpringly time consuming. The good news is, although the yarn is kind of a bitch to seam with (yeah, I know, use a smooth matching yarn - didn't have any, and did I mention the twelve hours to spare thing?), it is also very forgiving to seam with.

I wove in the eleventy million ends (damn intarsia!), and with 12 hours and five minutes to spare (aka at 1:25am), I finished.

Of course, I immediately got out Mr. Bear for a modeling session. His shortcomings as a non-baby-proportioned bear were quite obvious, but you get the idea.

Pattern: Sweetheart Pullover from Knitting for Baby.
Yarn: KP Crayon in red and yellow. I didn't use very much yarn - maybe two balls total?
Needles: Addi Turbo Lace Needles, sizes 4 and 6
Started: March 7, 2007
Finished: March 12, 2007 (ok, technically it's the 13th, but whatever.)
Modifications: I changed the intarsia on the front from a heart to a flower. I think I could have done a better job with the charting of the flower, but I still like it better than the heart. Lessons definitely learned for next time, if there ever is a next time with intarsia. Don't hold your breath.
I also modified the neck. I really didn't like the fairly constrictive neckline of the original pattern, so I just picked up stitches around the edge and knit a few rows of stockinette. It rolls in the same way as the original neckline, just several inches further down so it will hopefully be easier to stuff the baby into.

This is my second sweater of the year. I'm a member of the Sweater a Month Knitalong for 2007, and although I'm not optimistic that I'll actually make twelve sweaters this year, this does get me technically caught up again. If I can finish Rogue by the end of the month, which I really want to, there might be hope yet! I've got the yarn ready for my next baby sweater, and between that and the Central Park Hoodie maybe I can knit another two sweaters by May. I'm not so convinced that the summer is going to be sweater knitting weather, though. Maybe I'll sub in a few shawls.

Sweater update

2007-03-10T00:06:00.000-07:00

The weather here is absolutely insane right now. It is warm and sunny every day. People are wandering around in tshirts. I saw a guy in shorts the other day, but in typical Edmonton fashion, he was also wearing a toque. (Quite sensible, actually.) Considering it's the ninth of March, it's actually a bit alarming, but it is really, really hard to feel bad about global warming when you're sitting on a patio on your coffee break knitting in your short sleeves.

The downside, of course, is the snow is melting like crazy. I swear there's a puddle across from work that has tides and an ecosystem. There is a lot of splooshing. Jamie drove home with his window down the other day and actually got his hair wet.

Anyway, as I said, I spent my coffee break out on our balcony at work, which is gorgeous and a serious advantage to this branch. I have been knitting nothing but the baby sweater for the last two days, and as a result I'm finished the front and the back, the shoulders have been seamed, and the collar has been picked up and knit on. I changed the collar around a bit, because the pattern called for almost a mock turtleneck, and who wants to stuff a baby into a turtleneck? Nobody.

Unfortunately, Mr. Bear's fuzzy neck somewhat obscures that, but I am confident that the baby won't be pink and furry. The intarsia is a little more even than it appears here - this is taken at a funny angle.

You get a better view of the flower in this shot, with special guest star Count Numbear!

He came to visit with Mr. Bear. I didn't knit his sweater vest, unfortunately, but I am very fond of him and his little glasses. He used to belong to my grandma, and she gave him to me when she moved to Victoria.

Mr. Bear also went for a visit.

(Jamie is watching tv with some intensity.)

Before the baby sweater frenzy, I actually made really good progress on Rogue. Of course, now it's freaking 14 degrees every day and I'm going to finish a wool sweater, but it's Alberta, so I'm sure I'll need it again before too long.

I finished the hood, and once I got to the top, the pattern gave me the option of either a three needle bind off or a kitchener stitch. Since I've never done 3 needle bind off before, I figured I'd give that a whirl. Finished it off, went looking at other pictures, and realised that the kitchener totally looked better. So I painstakingly pulled out all the bind off and went looking for information on the kitchener.

Somebody has posted a cheat sheet for the hood graft specifically on Rogue, which was awesome. (Did I bookmark it? I did not.) It took two tries, but I think it looks waaaay better now. Not that you can see it in these photos. (I'm not very on the ball tonight with the photos.)

Which brings the sum total of Rogue to this:

Oh, and this:

Not bad. Once the baby sweater is done, it's full Rogue ahead!

Sock pal socks!

2007-03-08T15:04:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I received my fabulous socks from snowdrop, my Knitty sock exchange pal! She'd sent me a photo of some yarn choices, I told her I liked the pink ones (I know, who am I and when did I start liking pink? I don't know. I have, like, five pink shirts now. I'm not sure when this happened.) and that I'd liked a pair of socks she had up on her blog a while back, and that was it. I was much more nervous and sent her several dozen progress photos and nagged for feedback, but clearly snowdrop is much better at not needing hand holding.

They are FABULOUS. Look!

They fit like a glove, look great, feel wonderful, and are a very cheerful shade of pink. I wore them all day Sunday and kept admiring my feet. And forcing everyone around me to admire my feet.

Even my mother was impressed! (She thought it was weird that I was knitting socks for somebody else.)

Very unhelpfully, I can't remember what yarn it was (I have the tag at home), I don't know what pattern it was, and I don't know what needles snowdrop used to knit them! All I know is they are awesome. Thanks, snowdrop!

In other news, I had a date wrong. Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, as the new date is next week instead of next month like I thought. So it's not like I missed anything, right?

Yeah. Too bad that's the date of a mat leave starting, which means the baby sweater I thought I had a month for? I have six days. Luckily, I had the pattern (Sweetheart Pullover from Knitting for Baby, but with an intarsia flower instead of a heart, because I don't think the mother-to-be is much of a heart person) and the yarn (KP Crayon, my current favourite baby yarn), so I cast on yesterday for the front, figuring I'd get through the intarsia since it would be the most time consuming section.

Man, I HATE intarsia! It's so fiddly, and there are ends everywhere, and...bleah. Too bad it looks so damn cute. I'm about halfway through the flower, I think, but I now only have three bobbins (hee, I wrote "boobins" the first time) instead of the six I started with, so it's going much faster. I'm hoping to knock the front off tonight, cast on for the back, finish that by Saturday, and do the sleeves on Sunday which leaves Monday night for seaming. I'll be fine. Babies are small! So are their sweaters! The Crayon is definitely perfect for an April baby - it's nice and lightweight and very fluffy. Hopefully I can post a photo of the finished front tonight. Here's hoping!

Review: Addi Lace Needles

2007-03-06T23:16:00.000-07:00

Because today is my BIRTHDAY!(Happy birthday to meeeee!), I treated myself to a trip to the yarn store. They're having a sale starting on Thursday, so I managed to resist buying yarn, but I did accomplish what I set out to: purchase some of the new Addi Lace Needles!

The store (River City, for any of you locals who want to get your hands on these) just got them in yesterday and hadn't put them out yet, but I was stalking them and called to find out if they were in earlier, so they dug them out of the back for me. (A spouse or friend of one of the yarn store ladies came in while I was wandering around, and said "feel free to ask for help!" I smiled at him, at which point one of the store people came out and said "ok, Sarah, I've got the 3 sizes here that you wanted - what cable length do you want?" The guy kind of sheepishly said "ok, never mind, you clearly know what you're doing!" It was kind of funny.)

Now, I'm weird about needles. The ones I use the most are still my Denises, because I like how they feel in my hands, but I'm not wild about the cords and obviously, they don't work for socks. I have a few pairs of regular Addis in sock sizes, and I like the needles but hate the tips and don't like the cords much. I love the Knit Picks needles, but the nickel makes me a little scratchy, so I was THRILLED when I heard about these new needles. I took them out of the package, looked them over, and immediately bought four pairs.

I got size 1 (2.5mm) with a 32 inch cord (80cm), and size 4 (3.5cm), 5 (3.75cm), and 6 (4.0cm) with a 47 inch cord (120cm). The size one is for socks, obviously - my favourite size and length for magic loop. The others, I opted for a longer cord, as I can always magic loop a smaller thing but can't stretch a smaller cable for a bigger thing. I eventually want to get the size 2 and 3 as well, but figured I'd start with my most used sizes.

After I left the store, I went for dinner with Jamie, and transfered my current sock over to the new needle. I knit on that for a good half hour while we were waiting for our food, and when I got home, I moved my Rogue sleeve (yes, sleeve!) over to the size 5 and knit a few rows on that.

So how do they stack up? Let's compare, shall we? My apologies for the mediocrity of these photos. I'm not a photographer. Click on photos for larger ones.

Here are all three of my size 1 needles. Top is the KnitPicks, middle is the original Addi Turbo, and bottom is the new Addi Lace. Let's look at each of them, shall we?

First, the original Addi.

I really don't like knitting socks with these, because those tips are just not pointy enough. Still, the needle itself is nice and slick.

Here's the KnitPicks circ.

Nice and pointy, and without the taper that the Addi has, which I really like. Just as slick as the Addi, but I've already worn the finish off one of these. (Fortunately my Secret Pal sent me this nice shiny new one for my birthday!) I don't think that's all that normal, though - as they make me a little itchy, I suspect I might wear the finish off a little faster.

Here's the new Addi.

Obviously, much pointier than the original Addi, but with the taper that the regular Addi has. Pointiness is about comparable with the Knit Picks. (I poked myself with all three to test. See what I do for you people?)

What about cables? I didn't take any photos of the Knit Picks cables (there are a zillion out there in blog land), but I did take one of my old Addi to point out why I'm not wild about their cords.

Hmpf.

I love the KP Cable, but I had one pop out of its join last week so I'm a little disgruntled with them. Still, the flexibility is pretty incredible, and I am fond of the purple. So how's the Addi Lace cable?

And ten seconds later...

Pretty darn flexible. It's not quite as bendy as the KP, but it's pretty close. It's also a nice pink colour. More importantly, it has the size imprinted on the needle. Woo!

How's the join?

Great. It also tapers there, much as at the tip. It is really, really smooth.

Let's look at some of the larger ones. Here are the tips of my size 5 KP and Addi Lace needles.

The KnitPicks tip

And the Addi Lace

So how do they stack up? Here's my opinion.

The hollow brass needles are fantastic. Super light weight, and no allergy problem for me. (Yay!) They also seem like they aren't going to lose their coating as quickly as the KP. Reasonably enough, since the KP are a hell of a lot cheaper. That said, the resin on the Lace needles mean they aren't quite as fast as the original Addis, or KnitPicks when they're still new and shiny. Still, after about two rounds of my sock, I'd stop noticing. They're still REALLY fast. Just not quite AS fast.

The tips are really, really good. I'm not wild about the more abrupt taper, but I'll get used to it, I think. I also don't really like the taper at the end of the needle going to the join, but I'll survive. The KP needle has a shorter taper that I prefer, which means the needle itself is a bit shorter. (not by much.) The join is really smooth. Cable? Great. It's magic looping through my sock with no problems so far. Keep in mind that in the larger needles, I'm comparing an interchangeable with a regular needle.

The Lace needles are also noticeably lighter, which is nice. They feel good in my hands and not quite as stiff as the nickel-plated needles.

What don't I like? The lack of size availability, but I suspect that's a temporary problem. I prefer the short tapers on ends of the KP needles, but the tips of the 1s aren't quite as noticeably tapered as the larger sizes. I also think that's something I'll get used to. I wish they were as zippy as the originals, but I think I'll adapt as I knit with them, and the lack of any nickel is probably better for me. I wish they weren't quite so expensive, and I'm kind of tempted to send Jamie to a yarn store in London when he's there this summer, if they've made it over there by then, as they're so much less expensive over there.

But overall? Two thumbs up. Anyone else planning to try them?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to enjoy the last ten minute of my birthday. Stay tuned for a photo shoot with my sock pal socks! Here's a hint: they're FABULOUS.

Sock Pal Socks!

2007-03-01T16:38:00.000-07:00

Finally! I was working late today (and let me tell you, my day is going about six hundred times better than yesterday - helped significantly by the early birthday cake at work), so my break was at 4:00. Conveniently, Jamie was home and made dinner for me, so I had a few minutes to go outside at take photos. Natural light! It's a miracle! Also a miracle is the fact that there's any natural light at 4:00. Two months ago it was getting dark when I came home for my break. Spring is coming!

Anyway, I really wanted to take some pictures in the snow, since it's such a conveniently blank and bright background for photos, but I didn't want to get the socks all snowy. So I put down a plastic bag first. Problem solved.

You can't really tell that it's snow (there is a lot of it in our backyard!), but the pictures turned out nice and bright.

This is a really good shot of the colours - they look great against the snow and in the light.

This is a nice view of the stitch pattern - isn't it nice? It looks really good with the yarn, I think.

Taa daa!

Sunshine Yarns Black Olive Stripe, knit on KP Options size 1. The pattern is the Chevron Socks from Sensational Knitted Socks, with a slightly adapted heel and toe. (I forgot to take pictures of the heel, which is too bad because I think they're kind of neat.) Going in the mail ASAP to snowdrop!

My so-called mojo

2007-03-01T00:46:00.000-07:00

With the baby blanket off being snuggly with the cutest baby ever and my sock pal socks safely finished (and still not photographed or mailed, because I SUCK and had a crap day today and so didn't go to the post office), the pressure's off the knitting for a while. I've got a baby sweater that needs to be done in a month or so, but given that the last one took about three days I'm not too concerned. I started another baby blanket in the hopes of avoiding the panicked "the baby is here" knitting, which I thought was quite intelligent of me. It's a Pinwheel, a pattern I'm enjoying immensely, knit in Swish in a variety of colours. No photos of this one in progress, though, as certain impending babies have nosey mothers. It's very cute, though.

Monday, Karen and I went to see Music and Lyrics, and after a lengthy bout of indecisiveness on my part, I blew off Stitch n Bitch (sorry, SnB people, but I was too grouchy for small talk. You were better off without me.) and we went to the early show. However, that meant I had about fifteen minutes to eat and be ready to go when Karen picked me up, which meant I had about three minutes after I ate to figure out what knitting to bring. Because let's face it, despite the immense delightfulness of Hugh Grant, that's the kind of movie that needs knitting. Pan's Labryinth? Not so much. The Queen? Could go either way, but I survived without it. (I have seen a lot of movies lately, for whatever reason.) But Music and Lyrics reeeeally needed some knitting.

Unfortunately, all that was on the needles was the baby blanket, which has just enough yarnovers to totally screw you over in the dark, and Rogue, which still needs a hood and sleeves. But if you've seen the nineteen page pattern for Rogue, you know those pages of charts are not meant for movie theaters. (I could barely keep track while watching American Idol tonight, but I'll get to that in a minute.) I had my Gryffindor yarn already wound into a yarn cake, but guilt got the better of me. You see, I gave Rachel a skein of yarn for Christmas with the promise that it would eventually be socks. It is now almost March. I should really knit her some socks. So I grabbed the yarn and flung it up on the ball winder (incidentally, HOW did I ever survive without my winder and swift?), and was winding furiously when Karen called to say she was three minutes away. I posted Jamie on window duty and kept winding. She pulled up, I wound the last little bit, grabbed some needles, and dashed out to the car.

The movie was pretty mediocre, but I got the entire cuff of the sock knit, so I feel it was time well spent. (Plus it only cost us about four dollars each because we had several coupons.) Since then, I've made it to the heel of the first sock, which is pretty good for two days work. (I had book group last night - prime knitting time.)

Tonight, though, I actually had a free night, and after an insane day of work I decided that what I needed was American Idol and knitting. This plan was interfered with somewhat by Jamie's purchase of Rayman's Raving Rabbids for my new Wii. My god, that game is just obscenely fun. So I played that for several hours when I got home, showed Erin and Ashley how to play, and felt much better after shooting rabbits with plungers for a while.

Once my wrists were starting to give, though, I decided to really make my tendons suffer and pulled Rogue back out again. It's been on the back burner for a few weeks, since finishing the body on February 6th. (Wow, I didn't realise it had been that long. Sigh.) I left Jamie rampaging against the rabbits and went to watch last night's AI.

I knit through the whole thing, got the hood stitches picked up and figured out what I'd screwed up (pretty minor - just cast off two too many stitches, so I just picked up two extra.) I was happily knitting away while zipping through Idol (which doesn't take long - that show is all filler), when I realised I'd miscrossed a cable about four rows back. Again.

This time, though, I noticed, and it was only a little wee three stitch cable. I glared at it for a round, then, sighing about not learning my lesson, lined myself up over the offending cable, took a deep breath, and dropped the stitches.

I tell you, this Bartlett wool will take a serious beating before it loses its stitches. It's perfect for cabling without a needle (which is all I do any more), and it made it quite painless to drop the stitches and recross the cable in the right direction. Man, that was satisfying. I was feeling pretty darn impressed with myself, let me tell you. I got up to the tenth row of the hood when I realised something was weird. I counted stitches several times, consulted the chart repeatedly, and finally gave up and tinked. (Progress for me - I would usually ignore it and work out some way around it. I hate tinking.) When I got back the two rows to where the problem started, I realised what I'd done. I'd slipped the two stitches to be cabled, knit the next two, and lined them up for cabling, but I forgot to knit the stitches that I moved.

Whoops. So much for my so-called cabling mojo. Oh well.

Pictures of the sock pal socks (SORRY, snowdrop!) and Rogue's progress to follow soon. I'm taking my poor tendons to bed.

Oh, baby!

2007-02-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

First and foremost, thank you for your kind comments and emails about my friend's baby. I am happy to report he is doing very well and is now at home. He is also possibly the cutest baby I've ever seen. Definitely the cutest newborn. He is so, so cute. It's just ridiculous. Once he puts on that outfit Mum made, we're all going to die of the cute.

Speaking of which, thank you also for the kind comments on her outfit. She was quite impressed and I think briefly liked the idea of having a knitting blog before deciding she'd have nothing to say. (I think she finds knitting blogs a little weird.) Still, maybe when she retires I can convince her. Until then, I'll just feature her outfits here.

Anyway, after her spectacular outfit I feel like my present for the baby was a bit lame, but at least my photos have one up on hers - they have the baby in them! Now, don't say I didn't warn you. This baby is seriously, seriously cute. Here, I'll show you the blanket by itself first, because once the baby's there you won't be looking at it anyway.

Log Cabin, using Trillian's pick up reducing technique. Knit in Knit Picks Crayon on size six needles (uh, I think), using three full balls of each colour plus about a quarter of a second ball of each. Not much yarn at all - I now have a ton of leftovers. But that's fine, because this is great baby yarn.

As previously mentioned, this blanket was knit in the colours of the Zimbabwean flag. My friends were very impressed with this and both of them (the parents, I mean - the baby didn't really care) really liked the blanket.

Are you ready for this? You've been warned. The only problem with these photos is that he's wearing a hat, so you can't see his insanely adorable curly hair. I swear, it is like a little fluffy kitten, it's so soft. SO CUTE. (I don't have any pictures of him awake, because the whole time he was awake while I was there I was holding him, and I wasn't going to waste precious baby snuggling time to take photos.)

As you can see by his little hand in that second picture (if you haven't died from the cute), it's open and about to grab the blanket. By the time I left, his little hand was clutching onto his blankie while he slept. I'm telling you, cutest baby ever.

And no, I'm not having any of my own any time soon. But when he fell asleep in my arms and was making little snurfling noises? There was a brief temptation. But then I remembered that I wouldn't have any time to knit if I had a baby and came to my senses.

Still, the snurfling was pretty cute.

My mother's a rock star

2007-02-23T01:23:00.000-07:00

Man, I was doing so well with the posting, and then I fall off the wagon for a whole week. Curses!

Unfortunately, my life has been very un-blog-worthy. I haven't finished anything (until tonight), I haven't knit anything that's very interesting to look at in progress (hey, look, it's a log cabin but bigger! And a sock exactly like the first one!), and I haven't done anything all week except knit garter log cabin and knit a sock while watching Lord of the Rings extras. And American Idol. Isn't my life glamorous?

Fortunately, my mother is much more blog-worthy this week. As previously mentioned here, my mum is a total rock star knitter, but she doesn't knit much any more due to a bum shoulder. (She didn't knit at all for years after being as fanatical as I am when she was younger, so even the reduced knitting is an improvement.) Nowadays she limits herself to baby outfits, which seems like a good use of time. (She knows a lot of babies, luckily.) She knits for her friends kids and grandkids, for Dad's coworkers (all of whom seem to have had babies in the last year), and my friends' babies. (So far all of my friends that have had babies are also my sister's friends, so my mother knows them particularly well.)

Anyway, she used to knit for us all the time, and has an entire dresser full of hand knit and hand sewn clothes that she's saving in case we have kids. I should go take some pictures of them some time - they are really quite amazing. (My grandma also knit some of them, actually. Clearly this insanity is genetic. I'm trying to convert my sister but she claims my dad would never forgive her if she started knitting, which is probably true.) I think the last sweater she knit for me was in...oh, 1993 or so, which of course means it was neon. Black and neon, with intarsia shapes all over it. Stylish! My sister's last sweater was these enormous oversized blue sweater that went to about her knees. It was a very bright blue. I wonder if they're still around? You'd be amazed what's lurking in closets around my parents' house.

Mum and I differ quite a bit on what we like to knit. She finds the whole sock thing a little weird, and is a recent convert to circular needles only grudgingly. (I feel this is somewhat of a victory on my part, but she refuses to use nice ones. Sigh.) But she uses these teeny tiny needles and this incredibly thin yarn for these baby outfits, and they are always amazing. (I just make blankets and occasionally little sweaters.)

This friend of ours who had the baby is someone we've all known for years and years, and my parents are sort of surrogate parents to her, even more so than they are with all our friends. Mum felt this deserved a particularly outstanding outfit. As I said, we met her and her family in Zimbabwe (except Dad, who knew them all before that), and she's since moved here, gone to university, met another Zimbabwean fellow, and gotten married. (He is equally delightful.)

Mum and Dad got to meet the baby on Monday, so the outfit went along, which means it can now be revealed here! I had to promise that I would give mum credit when I asked if I could post the pictures of it on my blog (I don't think she reads my blog, but I can't imagine how I could get away with claiming credit for knitting this, since I haven't mentioned it even once and it is clearly way better than anything I've ever knit.)

Ok, you don't care about any of this. Here is her fabulous ensemble!

So we have a hat, up in the top right hand corner, with a dashing racing stripe along the top. Then there is the sweater, with its tasteful giraffe button on the side. Then, to the left, are the little mittens. Matching pants, and the booties with the giraffe buttons.

She sent me two pictures so you could all see two angles of the hat. (Clearly my mother should have a knitting blog.)

The giraffe buttons really are the crowning touch.

I'm not totally convinced that I'm going to send my mother my blog link (not like I talk about anything interesting anyway, but it still feels like a weird step!), but I'll pass on any compliments. It really is worth clicking on the bigger photos.

So there you go. My mum, the rock star knitter.

Update

2007-02-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

Uh. Next week? Not so much. Baby was born yesterday (boy!), and had a not great birth and is now in the NICU. They won't know much until next week, once things have settled down a bit and they can assess any damage.

So now I will be knitting the blanket like a maniac in the hopes I can get it done in the next few days. Any suggestions for what parents of a baby in a NICU need are most welcome. This is a baby who needs a cozy blankie!

Gah. It's moments like this when I realise that I'm an adult whether I like it or not.

Winner!

2007-02-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, folks, here it is! (Sorry for the delay, I’ve been sick.) The winner of the contest, and my 100th blog entry! Since there are conveniently six entries to choose from, I’m using this handy dice roller online to generate my winner. In order to reduce any claims of favouritism, I’m rolling the dice before looking back to see who is which number. My arbitrary contest is nothing if not fair!

And the winner is…two! (I have to say, pressing a button is less exciting than rolling an actual dice.) And comment number two was…You talk to your Rogue!

Which means our lucky winner is Sue, from The Potato Patch. (Great blog name, by the way. I have a fondness for the word “Spud,” as it’s Jana’s car’s name, which we named on a road trip to Vancouver in 2001. I told you I name everything!) Incidentally, Sue likes Barenaked Ladies, Anne of Green Gables, Star Trek, and The Princess Bride. Clearly we are kindred spirits!

Thank you all for your entries – I really enjoyed reading them, and discovering new blogs in the process! (I should admit here that I am really, really bad at commenting on blogs, because I generally use Bloglines. I am attempting to improve on this because I like getting comments, so it seems only fair to reciprocate.)

As previously mentioned, I’ve been sick this week, and it sucks. I didn’t leave the house from Saturday evening until yesterday (Wednesday) morning, when I went to work. However, my week is definitely improving – I came home yesterday to flowers, dinner, and a spotless kitchen. (I bought Jamie a World of Warcraft strategy book. How’s that for romance?) It’s a long weekend this weekend. Everything’s coming up Millhouse!My long weekend plans currently consist of knitting like a maniac. I was talking to my mum yesterday, and in doing so, realised that the baby blanket that I’ve been knitting on so nonchalantly is actually for a baby due next week. Ack! Add to that the sock pal deadline of the end of the month, and suddenly the pressure’s on. Those are the only two impending deadlines and then I’ve got some breathing room, so I’m hoping for a knitting marathon this weekend to get some things wrapped up. The baby blanket is up to about two feet by two feet, and I’m hoping for about three feet or so, so I’m making solid progress. It’s looking quite snazzy so far! Photos coming soon. (Sorry for the lack of photos today.)

One sock pal sock is finished, and the other one is trucking through the leg. I’m hoping to finish up the leg in the next few days, and hit the foot this weekend. I’d like to have them in the mail next Friday, and even then I’ll be pushing the deadline. (Sorry, snowdrop!)

I’ll be fine. Don’t panic. It’ll all get done. I still have Return of the King to watch this weekend, and all its extras – that’s a lot of knitting time!

And here’s to another 100 entries! Thanks for reading, everyone. Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity thanks you! (And, incidentally, someone mentioned loving the animals up in my header. I love them too! Aren’t they adorable? It’s actually a reversible stuffy that flips one way to be a monkey and another to be a hippo. Awesome!)

The Finalists!

2007-02-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

Man, you guys sure do think I'm weird. Hee! I heartily enjoyed your comments on the last entry. I had a hard time coming up with my six favourites.

I also have a few additions to comments made about my own six weird things. Several of you were amused by the idea of me buying Harry Potter in my wedding dress. Here's the evidence!

That's Jana with her back to us (doesn't her hair look nice?), my sister-in-law Donna next to her (she drove us around all day), my sister Beth in behind, and then me, obviously. It had just stopped raining about forty minute before this photo was taken. My photographer, to his credit, happily came along to the bookstore and didn't make a single remark about what a weirdo he thought I was.

Here I am with my two copies of the book. (One of them was for Donna. I actually pre-purchased them a few days before so I was just picking them up.) I got some hilarious looks in the bookstore. I did warn the store people that I was coming. I used to work at this bookstore, so it was neat to stop off there. Actually, you can see another weird thing about me in this photo - my earrings are Mickeys! They're very pretty, and you can't tell what they are unless you're staring directly at my ears. I bought them in Disneyland on my bachelorette trip with Jana the previous March. They're blue (my birthstone), and I liked them so much that I decided to wear them to the wedding. It made me happy to know I was wearing such silly earrings. Even my mother had to admit that they were quite pretty and that hardly anyone would notice what they were. (I did tell a lot of people, though, since it amused me.)

This is one of my favourite photos, and proof that our photographer was very on the ball. As soon as we got into the bookstore, Erin picked up the book to flip to the back and started reading it aloud to us. (Apparently she always reads the end first! I was horrified by that.) I grabbed the book from her and smacked her with it. If you know Erin, you can HEAR her laugh in this photo. She has a very distinctive (and infectious) laugh, and she laughs harder than anyone else I know. I like this picture because it's such a good representation of our relationship, and it's so natural! None of this posed crap.

As you can tell by these pictures, my three bridesmaids wore different dresses in the same fabric. Pretty, aren't they? The whole set of wedding photos is here should you want to stalk me further.

Uh, where was I? Right, the finalists!

Here they are, with comments from me.

For a book person, I watch a lot of tv. (LadyLungDoc, aka Somerset, who was my first downstream Secret Pal.)

This is totally true. It’s partly just that I’m pretty low on other responsibilities, so I have lots of time to both read and watch TV. These days I mostly just read before bed, because I can knit while I watch TV. Also, I hate doing only one thing at a time, so I’m usually either surfing the internet or watching TV while I knit. (Or both. As I write this, I have a sock in my lap that I’m occasionally knitting on, and we’re watching Lord of the Rings.)

I talk to my Rogue. (Sue)

Hee! This totally cracked me up. I should clarify that I really only talk to it in the form of blog entries. I don’t actually chat with it while we’re sitting around in my chair or anything. Mostly.

I named my laptop Neville. (Kaitie Tee)

Now, in fairness, it did need a name for the network, so I don’t think naming a computer is in and of itself totally weird. (Even Jamie’s computer has a name – Heximephicles – and he doesn’t name anything.) However, what is weird (and obsessive) about this is that when I was setting up my computer when I got it in the fall, I got about four steps into the setup process when it asked me for the name. I hadn’t even fully booted it yet, and yet I spent about forty minutes on the phone with Karen discussing what I should call it. I am very partial to the name Neville.

I name everything. My laptops have names. (Giles and Neville.) My car has a name. (Rosie.) My iPod has a name. (Rupert.) Even my cell phone used to have a name, although my current one doesn’t. I haven’t named my chair, though, even though it’s probably the inanimate object I spend the most time with. Mmm, chair.

It took you years to make your first pair of socks, and then you made 9? 10? 11? pairs in 4 months! (Michele)

Yeah, this was a little weird. I’ve mentioned before that I seriously wanted to learn how to make socks for years. That’s not an exaggeration. The first pair of handmade socks I was given was from my friend’s mother in grade 8, so I would have been…12. As soon as I saw them I wanted to know how to make them. (They were awesome socks which have tragically since been lost.) I knit my first pair of socks last February, 3 weeks before my 25th birthday. Once I learned, I was totally addicted.

You hoped your yellow-ish Sweet Georgia yarn was named after an obscure firefly character, rather than confronting the cruel truth - that Saffron does dye things yellow :) (lupinbunny)

This amused me immensely. I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable that the yarn could have been named after YoSafBridge, since Sweet Georgia yarns are frequently named after Jossverse characters. Still, I am willing to admit that I might just be being obsessive.

There are blue letters on your shower curtain. Seriously, who reads in the shower?! ;) (Jessica)

I totally picked my shower curtain because I think words are very decorative. (This is because I am a big nerd.) When Erin and I lived together, we had a page from the dictionary and a page from a thesaurus framed and on our wall. We also had a huge metal board that was covered in magnetic poetry. (That’s now down in our laundry room, which is the only part of the house we share, although we totally run in and out of each other's halves of the houses all the time. It's very handy having a neighbour like that - we borrow things all the time for cooking.) When Erin went to Washington D.C. last year she bought me a bag covered in the names of authors, because she knew I would like how nerdy it was, how pretty the names were all over the bag, and also figured it was a good size for knitting. (It is – perfect for a sweater and a sock. How’s that for a good friend?)

And I have often wished I could read in the shower. One time I was reading in the bathroom as I got ready to shower, and I was so caught up in the book that I came within about six inches of getting into the shower with my book. (This wouldn’t be so embarrassing if I was, like, nine at the time, but this was about two months ago.)

So. Clearly, I am a weirdo. That's ok. I've embraced the weirdness.

Stay tuned for the winner! And, hopefully, a photo of my first finished sock pal sock, or at least very close to finished. We've still got two and a half hours of Fellowship left so it's looking promising.

Six Weird Things: A Contest!

2007-02-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

Look! It's a Meme AND a contest, both firsts on Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity. I got tagged last week by The Lone Knitter, and I have to admit, I wasn't really planning to do the meme. I'm not wild about them, generally, and I'm also really lazy.

However, I'm coming up on a Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity Milestone: my 100th post! (Here, anyway. I have archives over at diaryland.) So I decided to have a contest. I contemplated various options for this contest, but eventually decided to incorporate it into the meme.

So, first of all, the meme. Six weird things about me. Well, there are definitely more than six weird things about me, but here are the six I came up with for myself.

1. I bought Harry Potter 6 on my wedding day. In my wedding dress. I have photos!

2. I hate having my legs touching when I'm sleeping. I fold the blankets in between so that doesn't happen. This is why I hate sleeping bags.

3. I like tomato sauce, ketchup on some things, and pizza sauce. I hate tomatoes. It's the texture - bleah! (I have a lot of weird texture issues with food. Do not get me started on mushrooms.)

4. I have the smallest toenail on my little toe that I've ever seen. I can barely get nail polish on it.

5. I didn't change my name when I got married even though I'd always thought I would. (I don't think that's weird, but enough people find it weird that I figured I'd mention it.)

6. I have almost no patience for most things in life, but endless patience for knitting. I don't think this is weird, but it freaks Jamie out. He doesn't understand how I get impatient after two minutes of waiting in a line or whatever, but can spend three hours untangling a skein of yarn or frogging three days worth of knitting. The only other thing I have any patience for is babies. Otherwise I am a terribly impatient person. Conveniently, knitting helps with the other things as well - waiting isn't as bad when I have knitting.

And now, the contest! This is my 98th post. What you have to do to enter is come up with something about me that you think is weird, based on having read my blog. (Don't worry, you are very unlikely to offend me based on what I've written about in my blog. I even have a shirt that says "Easy to annoy, hard to offend" that Karen and Paul made for me. I tend not to write about the things that you could offend me by calling weird.) It can be a knitting-related weirdness or not. Those of you who know me in real life can use a non-blog-related weirdness as long as you are confident that it's something I don't mind the internet knowing about.

I'll pick my favourite six weird things and post them in my 100th entry. Then I will draw a name from those six finalists, and that person will win!

What's the prize, you ask? Yarn, of course. I have three colourways of Lorna's Laces Shephard Sock, and you can choose one of them! (Two skeins.) (If you don't knit socks, we can talk about a substitute. If you don't knit at all, I can't imagine why you'd be reading this anymore if you don't know me in real life, so I'll buy you a drink or an ice cream or something.) I don't have a photo of the colourways on me right now, but I'll post them along with the finalists.

To enter, just leave a comment. Make sure there's an email address that I can reach you at (or use a name that makes it very clear that I know you in real life and know how to get ahold of you), and tell me something you think is weird about me.

Make sense? Let's hear it, folks. What's so weird about me?

Nice body

2007-02-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

First, and most importantly, it is ONE MONTH until my birthday! See how I'm helpfully reminding you with plenty of shopping time left? I thought that was considerate of me. Here's a helpful tip: I like yarn. There are also several knitting books I'd like to get (Knit Fix, A Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, Victorian Lace Today, A Gathering of Lace...you get the idea.) Also, yarn!

Ok, public service announcements aside, exciting things are afoot at Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity. First of all, there's a contest coming soon! Possibly some time this week - depends on what my schedule's like. Details to follow as soon as I know what the contest is. Prize will be yarn. (Mmm, yarn.) (Sorry, all my non knitting friends who read this blog. If you win I'll buy you a drink or something.) Also, did you know I have an RSS feed? I do! 10 people have figured that out - are you one of them?

Ok, seriously, I'll stop pimping myself out now. On to the real point of this post - the body of Rogue is done! And for once I remembered to take photos BEFORE Jamie went to bed, so they aren't bathroom mirror shots. Unfortunately, Jamie likes to fiddle with camera settings a LOT so they're pictures of me looking irritated with how many photos have been taken. Maybe I should learn how to use the self timer.

As mentioned, I had a ridiculously slothful second half of my weekend, which also included yesterday. I finished season 1 of House (great show! Hugh Laurie is awesome and alarmingly hot), and also finished the body of Rogue. Pay no attention to the needles hanging down all willy-nilly - the hood comes out of the neck cables, so the stitches there are still live. (I know it looks lopsided in places, but I wasn't standing straight on, because these pictures were taken in our small and mess front hall because it has the best light, so we're at weird angles to each other.)

That also makes it hard to see the neck cable, which is too bad because it looks pretty good.

Here's the thing about Rogue. Those lovely side cables (which also make for some very nice and well-fitting shaping) are really damn hard to take pictures of without looking like a total dork.

See? Eventually we opted to just cut my head out of the photo entirely so you couldn't see how silly I looked while flailing my hand up above my head.

Since I totally ignored pretty much any other responsibilities for two days in order to make progress (not entirely true, I did the dishes and a load of laundry), I neglected all the other knitting on the needles. You know, the ones with deadlines. A certain due date is looming, but more pressing is my sock pal's socks!

So once I finished Rogue's body, I set it aside and got to work on the socks. And I made excellent progress!

The observant among you may be thinking "progress my foot." At first glance, you're not wrong. The photo from January 25th shows this.

Compare the two, and I'm only about one stripe further along.

But the REALLY observant among you will notice different needles in the two photos. Yup, I frogged it. The whole damn sock. So this is sock pal sock take 2, and I'm already past where I was with the first version after frogging it on Friday. It was just going to be too snug on the Addi 0s, so I've moved to my KP size 1, and am happy with the change. (Not least because knitting on 1s is a LOT faster.) I liked the fabric a lot on the 0s, but I didn't like the fit. And it's looking good on the 1s, too. Here's hoping I can hit the heel by the end of the week. I'm going to Barenaked Ladies tomorrow night, which will not offer me much knitting time, and Thursday I'm working late. Hopefully the weekend will give me some time to really tackle it. I love the yarn, and I love the pattern, and they're absolutely perfect together. I hope snowdrop likes it as much as I do!

Superlame Supebowl Sunday

2007-02-04T19:23:00.000-07:00

Ok, the universe appears to have forgiven me. (Knock wood!) I've finished shaping the armholes on Rogue's back, and just have to knit flat for a while before I start shaping the shoulders. And by a while, I mean another 27 rows. I am having a truly exciting day that has led to me still being in my pajamas at 7:27pm. I know. That's pathetic. But the knitting! I've also watched several episodes of House, which I have out from the library. But then Jamie got home, and despite the fact that he doesn't give a shit about the NFL (He is a CFL man through and through), somehow he is still watching the Superbowl.

Watching the Superbowl in Canada is actually pretty lame, because we get dumb Canadian commercials instead of the excellent American ones. They aren't usually anything special, but there have been two that cracked me up. One is a GM commercial with one of those thingies that remove tires (I don't know. It's yellow.) being fired and trying to find a new job and eventually killing himself. I don't know, it caught me in a moment of weakness! I also liked the Coke commercial with the Grand Theft Auto guy.

ANYway, suffice it to say I have had a pretty lame day. I don't have any plans tomorrow, either. I think I might go see a movie in the afternoon. What's the point in having weekdays off if you can't go see matinees by yourself? I keep meaning to do so but haven't gotten around to it. There are enough movies I want to see before the Oscars that if I wait to go with Jamie, I'll never make it to half of them. Plus a weekday matinee by myself means I can knit without bugging anyone. (Not that I let that stop me in most movies, but if the theater is packed I don't usually knit.) Not that anything I actually want to see is playing at the most convenient theatre. Grr.

Right. As the universe is temporarily cooperating, Rogue photos! As you can see, I'm making good progress. I'm hoping to have the back done by tonight. (Maybe I'll go watch tv on the computer.) Please don't judge me about how dirty the mirror is. The only other mirror in our house has a sandblasted picture of me and Jamie on it. Kind of an amusing novelty, but not great for photos!

As you can see, the fit is fantastic. I am pleased with this, as I always get a bit nervous about gauge.

The side cable turned out great. I am going to ignore the miscrossed cables. I choose to think of it as a design feature.

I do have to turn my attention somewhat to my baby blanket and my sock pal socks, since those have deadlines. But man, this sweater is addictive! Maybe I'll get the body finished and then work on the other two for a while before I pick up the sleeves and the hood.

The universe is trying to tell me something.

2007-02-04T03:02:00.000-07:00

Well.

I had a two hour nap earlier today (Jamie was napping, and I am weak in the face of other nappers), so despite our late night last night, our busy day of brunch, yarn stores (ok, just one), napping, dinner, and the opera, I'm quite wide awake at 3am. (Not that this is particularly abnormal behaviour for me. It's far more strange that Jamie was up until 2.)

After getting home from the opera shortly after 11, I have spent the rest of the evening knitting and listening to the new Barenaked Ladies album in anticipation of the concert on Wednesday. The album, Barenaked Ladies Are Me (or BLAM, if you prefer) is not all that new, but I haven't listened to it much despite downloading it (legally!) on the day it came out. As a result, Rogue is now finished Chart A and is about to divide for the front and back! It's thrilling!

So thrilling, in fact, that I actually transferred it onto a second needle (only about 15 stitches need to move to make it not fall off its needle), tried it on, and took pictures.

When I plugged my flash card reader into my laptop, my laptop crashed. I got it rebooted (grumbling all the while), tried to upload the photos, and my flickr uploader crashed. Went to the flickr website. Flickr is down.

I can take a hint. I'm going to bed. Rogue photos will be posted tomorrow.

The opera was pretty good, by the way, but a little long. I don't have patience for much of anything after two and a half hours. Plus the leg room at the Jube is terrible, and their bathrooms are ridiculously small. Overall, though, an enjoyable experience. Plus it was fun to play stereotype with all the rich people. I think I saw more fur coats tonight than I have in my entire life up to this point.

(Incidentally, I'm coming up on a milestone post. Stay tuned for a contest of some sort!)

A sudden burst of culture

2007-02-01T23:18:00.000-07:00

Man, February already? That's just crazy. But also good, because January kind of sucked. Nothing major, just a series of minor annoying things.

February is shaping up to be a major improvement. Tomorrow night is Jamie's school's big band dance thingy, which I am going to. I'm wearing my excellent brown and pink dress, and I'm kicking myself for not finishing my shawl, as it's the perfect occasion. Oh well.

Saturday night we're going to the opera. Which is hilarious, because we aren't really opera people, never mind people who go to fancy dinner dances one night and the opera the following night, but apparently we're cramming our fanciness into one weekend. Maybe on Sunday we'll watch some Monster Trucks or something to balance it out. Jamie got free tickets from school, and we're sitting in the nosebleeds with a bunch of teenagers. Woo!

Next Wednesday we're going to see Barenaked Ladies (to which I say WOO!), and then all of a sudden it's halfway through February which means it's almost my birthday! Yippee! And then once we hit my birthday, it's less than a month till we hit Disneyland.

Awesome. Everything's coming up Millhouse!

I've had an oddly light on the knitting week. Monday night was Stitch n Bitch, so I got a fair amount done on Rogue, which I continue to lean towards ignoring the mistake on, although Cara over at January One is trying to convince me that I can fix it. (I appreciate her optimism. We'll see.) I think I might leave it until the sweater's done, although then if I screw it up I'll be even more pissed! But I'm not really a perfectionist, and it does look ok. I'm aiming to finish chart A tomorrow and then start tackling where it separates for the front and back. Maybe I can finish the body by the end of the weekend! (Ah, foolish optimism. Nothing like putting this things on the blog for some public accountability.)

Tuesday night I had book group and had dinner with Jamie, my mum, and her friend beforehand. I did get some of my thrum mittens done - actually, I finished them while I was at the meeting and got lots of admiring comments, but I decided the cuffs were too short so I ripped them out and re-knit them. (Just the cuffs. Not the whole mittens!) They are now REALLY done and ends woven in and everything. Except I don't think I'm going to keep them.

I know, I know. This giving away of knitting is absolutely chronic. Fear not, I'm definitely keeping Rogue, and my shawl. And I've got yarn for Central Park Hoodie on the way (thanks, Trillian!) - it's going to be in Cascade 220 in a very lovely green. Once I've made that, I'm thinking of making just a plain v-neck pullover in something sort of medium weight so I can wear it by itself. I'm going to use the pattern from A Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, which is a highly useful book that I intend to buy. (Have I mentioned lately what an awesome knitting book collection my library has? I suggest knitting books to them all the time, and so far they've bought every single one. Yay purchasing department! But they buy almost all the good new ones without any suggestions, to the point that I suspect there's a knitter down there somewhere.) Anyway, I'm currently debating what yarn to use for that - I get quite warm in sweaters, so I want something not too heavy.

I think after that I'd like to try my hand at a tank top. I have no idea what sort of pattern - I want something pretty simple, so I might just use the dimensions from the Handy Book again. I'll have to poke around for that - I am also quite clueless about yarns for that type of thing.

In other news, Karen put up photos of the cast cozy (as named by her husband - excellent name!) here. It's a little loose, but the thumb keeps it on quite nicely.

Don't ask about the socks. They need a trip to the frog pond. I'm choosing to temporarily forget that.

The Rogue Rogue Cables

2007-01-29T12:37:00.000-07:00

Well. It is apparently not a good weekend for cables. Cara over at January One has had a crisis on her Central Park Hoodie, in a very similar fashion to me. (ie a cable a million miles down that you REALLY don't want to rip out to!) Reading that motivated me to look at some actual Rogues to see how it's supposed to look. And guess what I figured out?

Both sides are wrong. Great. But not, of course, wrong in the same way. Oh no! That would be too easy.

Here's a closeup (not a very good one - sorry) of one of the side pretzel cables.

This is the line of the cable on this side.

Here's the other side.

And this is the line of this cable.

Not at all the same. I have NO idea how I managed that, but there we are. So now the question is, what do I do?

I have to confess, I'm leaning towards "nothing." It's not like it's in a very noticeable place, and it's not like it looks COMPLETELY terrible. Does it? I don't think it does. If anyone is looking that closely at my hip we have bigger problems. But mostly, I'm not convinced I know how to fix it, and at this point I reeeeeally don't want to rip it out. (That is just not an option.)

Still, I feel like a moron. An irritated moron. One day, I will knit a flawless cabled sweater. But that day is not today.

Maybe Central Park. But let's not jump to conclusions.

To knit.

2007-01-29T01:04:00.000-07:00

I have been working all weekend on Rogue, because I'm a terrible person who's ignoring the socks I'm supposed to be working on. I'm making excellent headway on Rogue - I'm on row 53 of the body chart, which is actually a little deceptive because you repeat 6 rows of the chart multiple times (I threw in one extra because I like my sweaters long), so I've actually knit much more than that.

Much to my chagrin, I found a mistake in one of my cables, right back at the beginning, and after despairing over it for a few minutes, have decided to leave it. (If I were as popular as the Yarn Harlot, somebody would have noticed the mistake in one of the earlier pictures and pointed it out. Alas.) I figure it adds character, and it's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, although annoying since it means the two sides don't quite match. I know I could drop down to fix it, but we're talking dropping 90 or so rows of cables. No thanks. I tried overstitching it to make it look better, but I just don't really get how to do that, so unless someone can explain it to me, I'll leave it. It's down around the bottom - I won't be able to see it when I'm wearing it!

Anyway, after excellent progress despite having to work yesterday (dinner at my in-laws on Friday gave me lots of knitting time while I watched Barnyard with Jamie's cousin, and yesterday I hung out with various people over at the International House of Party, and got yet more knitting done), Rogue is now closing in on dividing for the front and back, which is encouraging progress. I was planning to knit it exclusively for the next few days until the body gets finished, but then I looked at the weather forecast for this week. (This was a moment of forethought that is highly unusual for me, I should note.) It is supposed to be really cold by Thursday and Friday - lows in the minus 20s. Brr. And when it was freezing earlier this week, I was cursing myself for not finishing my thrum mittens yet.

So! Eight more rows before I hit the thumb on the second mitten - encouraging progress that leads me to optimistically believe I can finish by Thursday despite working every day this week. (I volunteered for more hours because my desire to have lots of spending money in Disneyland outweighed my desire for lots of knitting time. There are few things I like more than knitting, but Disneyland is one of them. Two months this week until we leave! Eeee!)

Anyway, the mittens are now at the top of the list, but they won't take long. (HOW did I not know about how excellent mittens are to knit before now? They're so fast and cozy and nice! More mittens are in my future - hopefully more thrummed ones for my mother.) Once they're done, Rogue and my sockpal sock will go back to sharing time, with occasional forays into the baby blanket. (I think I will try to knit one strip a day.) The Mountain Peaks is on hold for now, partly because it's not exactly shawl weather, but also because I think it'll be excellent airplane knitting so I'm saving it for my trip. (I'm flying alone both ways due to the world's most complicated vacation set-up between the four of us, so I plan to spend the entire flight there knitting and listening to Disneyland music to get hyped up, and the entire flight back knitting and listening to Disneyland music to depress myself. Do I know how to party or what? And the complicated vacation set up involves multiple cities, three different arrival dates and two different departure dates with Jamie and me taking different flights home despite leaving the same day. It's ridiculous, I know, but we will all be in the same place for approximately 48 hours. I'm there the longest, though. Woo!)

Once Rogue is done, I plan to buy some Cascade 220 to make the Central Park Hoodie. After chasing around to several yarn stores, I got my hands on a copy of the KnitScene that had the pattern, and it looks like just what I wanted in a cardigan. (Please don't talk to me about my obvious cabled sweater problem. I am aware of it. After that I want a boring plain v-neck sweater with no cables in sight, I promise.) I decided to do Central Park over A Cardigan for Arwen, because I think it's more my style. (Erin agreed - she was very patient about looking at pictures of both to decide which would be better. I have very tolerant friends. And might I add, two other people were knitting last night at IHOP, so the conversion is gradually occurring.)

And of course, there is the endless parade of babies to knit for. The next one after this current log cabin isn't due until April, but it's going to sneak up on me. The yarn for that is in the mail - I think it'll be another hoodie, since that was fast and cute.

I like this idea of having one of each type of thing on the go. Once I finish my sock pal socks, I'll cast on Rachel's socks. Once I finish Rogue, I'll start in on Central Park. Once I finish this log cabin, I'll start another baby blanket. Once I finish the mittens, I'll cast on a baby sweater. (Small and mindless - seems like a good category!) And once I finish Mountain Peaks (which seems like never in my mind right now, because it's such a big project), I'll either hit the Reversible Rib Shawl, for which I already have the KidSilk Haze (mmm), or the Sea Silk shawl with the Sea Silk I just ordered.

Oh, sure. Totally manageable.

How did I think my knitting list would get any better after the Christmas knitting was done? Good grief.

Emergency FO

2007-01-26T01:33:00.000-07:00

So my friend Karen is, as those who know her are all too aware, kind of prone to medical bad luck. (It's apparently contagious, as her husband is having a rough go of things too.) She always get the weird things, has the weird injuries, goes for the obscure over the usual. Last week, she had the misfortune to break her wrist. (This isn't particularly weird, just bad luck.) She managed to fracture the bone that takes the longest to heal, so she's stuck in a cast for a while. Unfortunately, Karen is also always freezing, so the fact that none of her mittens fit was a cause for concern.

So she's lucky she knows me, isn't she?

She called me last week and asked if I could make a mitten that would go over her cast. I looked at the cast (photos of it are on her blog up there), and since her thumb is cast part way up and therefore immobile, I figured there was no point in giving it a separate thumb. Since the cast covers the rest of her arm, it didn't need to be terrible long, so in the end, what I came up with is essentially an oversized baby mitten. So now Karen will have warm fingers and also won't be able to scratch her face with her super long baby fingernails! So that's a relief.

We went to Calgary last weekend and my friends very tolerantly came to the yarn store with me. (Yay! That's a sign of good friends, when they'll go to the yarn store with you even if they don't knit. Jana is just starting to knit but she's not at the point yet where she gets enthused about yarn store field trips. Give me time!) While we were there, I spotted two baskets of Cascade Fixation, which I immediately realised was perfect. First of all, it's not wool, which Karen is allergic to. (Of course she is.) Secondly, the stretchiness would be great for a cast mitten because we need it to go over the large and inflexible cast but then stay on. So I figured it was perfect.

I sent Karen over to pick out a colour. After rummaging around for a while, she came up with the exact same colourway that I used for her socks. (Broadripples. I am quite impressed that my eye for her taste is so precise!) Conveniently, I had some leftover from them so I didn't need to buy any more. I also bought some DPNs, which I rarely knit with but kind of like for mittens. They're Crystal Palace Bamboo and they are REALLY freaking nice.

Here it is! I finished it earlier this evening while watching Veronica Mars with Jamie. (Incidentally, it's a good thing that show is so good, because it's the only thing that gets Jamie away from World of Warcraft.)

I tried it on, but it looks ridiculous and kind of phallic on me. (My hand is in a fist.)

I'm hoping that it'll work. This is 11 inches around and Karen's cast is 13 inches, so that seems like a good amount of ease for it to stay on fairly snugly. It's quite grippy yarn, and the cast is quite grippy too, so I'm optimistic. I'll hopefully get a picture when I try it on her. It also needs a good name. Castitten? Castmitt? Brokitten? FractureMitt? Splintten? I don't know. I'm open to ideas. (It's too bad nobody would ever need one for more than a few months, because it's an idea that I think could do quite well up here. It sucks to be mittenless in the mornings when it's cold and the sun isn't up yet.)

My other WIPs were slightly neglected so I could finish this quickly, since it's a time sensitive project. (If I'm going to go to the trouble to knit it, I want maximum usage out of it, since it'll become essentially useless once the cast comes off unless someone has a very small and oval shaped head.) However, I'm making some good headway on Rogue

which I continue to love a ridiculous amount. I attached the kangaroo pocket today

so now that isn't flapping around bugging me. The whole thing is getting pretty long!

(For the three of you knitters out there who haven't knit Rogue, it's got a turned hem at the bottom, so that ribbing doesn't actually count towards the length. It is, however, a very nice turned hem if I do say so myself.)

I put the Log Cabin onto two needles yesterday so I could see how the size is coming. It's getting there, but I've got a loooong way to go. I'm not sure what the best strategy for this is going to be. We'll see how it goes. I figure I'm about a quarter of the way to where I'd like it to be.

And here's my sock pal's sock, all snuggled up with his friend Rogue! Aw. Isn't that sweet? Clearly they've resolved their differences. Although I wouldn't be surprised if I came out tomorrow morning to find a pile of frogged yarn and a Rogue trying to look innocent. Maybe one of them better sleep in the knitting basket.

It's going slowly but surely and looks great. I estimate needing another six stripes before I split for the heel flap.

Busy busy! It's a good thing I had a good knitting day, because although most of my day was actually kind of pleasant, I had an embarrassing and painful incident earlier. Erin and I were at the mall after our delightful evening of wedding dress shopping (it's fun going with someone who's the sample size, because she can try anything!) and having dinner, and I fell off my shoe.

Yeah. You read that right. Fell off my shoe. You see, I wear clogs, because they have excellent support and make my ankle not hurt (in fact, after two years in clogs almost exclusively, I no longer have pain in my Achilles Tendon! This is a major life improvement). Unfortunately, the nature of clogs is that they're highly inflexible and quite tall. So this evening, I lost my balance and my ankle turned in my shoe. This is not the first time it's happened - I quite often sort of tip over off my shoe. (This makes me sound like the least coordinated person ever. Which I'm not, I swear.) But today was the first time that this caused me to totally bite it.

I pretty much collapsed on the mall floor, which caused some alarm to Erin (who didn't see what happened until I was inexplicably on the floor) and the nice person in the store we were walking past. It took me a minute to collect myself - my leg essentially buckled under me and my other leg crashed into my foot and the very hard shoe while I hit the ground with my leg and elbow, which was a barrel of laughs - but nothing was broken and I picked myself up. Erin very nicely didn't laugh at me at all and was quite concerned. I was mostly feeling kind of dumb.

But now my stupid leg REALLY hurts. The leg that didn't collapse is actually the one that's really hurting - I think it hit the floor first. I've been icing it and stuff, but it hurts like hell. And now the ankle that turned itself is really starting to throb, so both legs are sore and stiff, and I'm going to be hobbling around having to explain that I fell off my shoe.

Great. Quick, somebody invent me a good story for what I did.

Dear Rogue, I love you

2007-01-22T02:13:00.000-07:00

Please don't think that just because I'm seeing other projects, I don't love you as much. I do! You're my favourite project ever! (At least, I'm pretty sure you are, but I'm not going to think too hard about that because that's pretty much a never ending spiral of "no, wait, I think I love THIS best!") Look at how much progress I made on you this weekend! I didn't knit anything else for two days straight. I can prove it!

Here's where you were on Thursday.

Here's where you are today.

See? You're almost ready to join up with your pockety friend! Only a few more rows. And as mentioned in that previous entry, you're not a small sweater. I'm not a small person. A Rogue for me has more than 200 stitches in a round. It's not like these are fast little nothing rounds I'm accomplishing here. The fact that you're nearing the pocket join is really quite impressive.

(Uh, actually, speaking of that, since I memorized this part of the cable so easily, I sort of stopped keeping such good track of where we are. I'm hoping you can help me out there, Rogue. You're easy to count, right? Sure. Let's go with that.)

Anyway, despite what it might look like, you're still my favourite. Try not to get too worked up about this.

I know. It's a sock. I said I needed a break from socks. I said I knit too many socks and was really excited about knitting a sweater for a change. I wrote that whole entry about how it was too cold for anything but a nice cozy sweater. I know. I'm a tease.

But look at the colours, Rogue!

That is a seriously good looking sock. It's so bright! So cheery! Such a nice contrast to your sensible but unexciting beigeness! Look at how it's striping so perfectly!

I'm not abandoning you entirely, Rogue. Just sharing you a little with your little socky friend here. I have a deadline! There is a pal with cold feet waiting for some delightful green socks. I have a duty to uphold. Don't worry, you'll get finished. I can promise that even more so now that I put you onto some extra needles and tried you on and discovered you fit perfectly. Perfectly! See? We're meant to be together. Your turned hem even flips itself up, just like it's supposed to. This isn't anything meaningful, Rogue. I'm not even keeping them! It's just a temporary thing.

Don't be mad. I still love you. How could I not? Look how pretty you are!

WIPs on Parade

2007-01-19T00:53:00.000-07:00

I totally got out of the habit of taking pictures of works in progress during the Christmas Knitting Mania, because I knew I wouldn't be posting them until they were finished. However, given the nature of the current WIPs, it will be a long drought without pictures if I keep forgetting to do photo shoots. (Do you like how I say that like before the Christmas knitting I took WIP photos all the time? I just flipped through my archives and the only WIP photos are of the sock's cultural tour. Geez, I suck.)

Fortunately, I remembered this evening, and whipped out my new blanket, perfect for photo shoots. As I mentioned, I seem to be burgundy obsessed at the moment, so the nice light blue blanket that my in-laws bought us for Christmas will be excellent for photos of projects. I finally got around to putting the really good lamp next to my knitting chair (there is space thanks to the tidying now), so I hve reasonable light. I know you should take knitting photos in natural light, but we get very little light in our house (which has its advantages and disadvantages), and it's cold and snowy out, and I don't want to dump my knitting in the snow. So this will have to do. It's a pretty bright light, so it will do the job for now. Better solutions will be pursued.

After my surprisingly successful monogamy around Christmas, I've gone back to my usual slutty knitting. It's nice having so many things, actually - I have something different for every mood.

First up is the beginning of my beautiful, beautiful Mountain Peaks Shawl, pattern here. This pattern is fantastic. The only lace I've done is Branching Out and Pomatomus, yet I am following the charts with almost no trouble. (of course, I'm only on chart one!) Even better, when I was reading over the pattern in advance (!), I was confused about one thing emailed Miriam, and got a fast and helpful reply. Awesome! Two thumbs up for this pattern so far. We'll see how I do when I get to the short rows.

This is the silk that Beth bought me for Christmas. It is very subtly variegated, which just makes the lace look like the sun is shining on it. Glorious! It is so shimmery.

It's more burgundy and pink than it looks in those pictures - a great colour for me. I'm hoping it will go with the dress I'll have for Erin's wedding.

That's right! Erin is getting married! Ashley proposed on her birthday (January 3rd), and they're getting married next summer. (For those of you who don't pay much attention to these things, Erin was my roommate before I got married, and she was the greatest roommate ever. We had a blast. Imagine my delight when she moved into the basement suite in our house last year! So now she's my downstairs neighbour, and she was also a bridesmaid in my wedding.) Not only that, but she asked me to be her maid of honour! Whee! She's leaning towards burgundy for dresses, so I'm hoping I can wear this. (Because let's be honest here, my lifestyle does not really offer up too many opportunities to wear silk shawls.)

As previously mentioned, I have, after wanting it for well over a year, picked up Rogue. Flush with my success on Samus, I decided I was up to the task, and once I printed off the (awesome and well written) pattern, I felt pretty confident about it.

Here's its progress so far.

It's in Bartlett 2-ply yarn, which is very sheepy and full of lanolin, which means my hands are way less dry than usual. (This is clearly an excellent winter knit for Edmonton.) It's a bit scratchy, but when I washed my swatch (!) in wool wash, it got very cozy, so I think it'll be perfect. It's exactly the oatmeal-y colour I wanted.

I finished the kangaroo pocket at Stitch n Bitch the other night, which looks great. (It's a little wonky in the photo because the needles are in behind it.

I was a bit nervous about the closed cables (it says ADVANCED cable skils on the pattern, and I hate to presume about my own skills), but so far so good.

I am loving knitting this. The pattern is SO good, and it's a great mix of mindless and attention requiring. Two thumbs up! My knitting is very satisfying at the moment, can you tell?

My log cabin baby blanket is also coming along well. I'm using Trillian's technique to avoid some of the picking up, so it's scrunched up in this photo because it's all on one big circular. (I love interchangeables.) The colours are also so bright that they really don't photograph well.

I really like how the Crayon is looking in the log cabin style, and it's so nice and soft without being too heavy. Excellent for babies - I will definitely be ordering more of this.

And, finally, my thrum mittens. It's been a bit neglected this week (so many projects to choose from means some get neglected), but one is done and the other is in progress. This is a Fleece Artist Thrum Kit. Highly recommended - it's SO soft.

Outside...

And inside!

My mother was so impressed with this that she actually sort of hinted that she'd like a pair! That's totally unheard of for her. By the time I'd get a chance it'll be spring (curse you, spring babies!) but I'll hopefully be able to make her a pair for her birthday in November. (Somebody remind me in September when the babies have settled down a bit, ok? And nobody get pregnant for the next few months so I can have a lull.) She'd never heard of thrums before but apparently her hands get really cold, so it seems like the least I can do.

I have a few other things in the immediate queue - I promised a few things to people, and since poor Karen broke her hand she made a very pitiful request for a mitten that will go over her cast, which seems like a manageable project that will drastically improve her life until the cast comes off, especially once it gets colder. I'll have to figure out the best way to do it once I see the shape of the cast tomorrow. We're going to Calgary tomorrow (woohoo!), so we'll hit the yarn stores and find some nice non-wool yarn to make her some broken hand mittens.

Isn't that selfless of me? Going to the yarn store to buy yarn for my poor broken-handed friend? I know. I am a giver. Mmm, Calgary yarn stores.

Now the question is, what knitting to pack? Hmm. Decisions decisions. Unfortunately, due to broken hand I'm driving, so I won't be able to knit with my snazzy new headlamp. Poo. Still, I'm sure there will be knitting time. Maybe I'd better just pack everything.

Haircut!

2007-01-16T21:59:00.000-07:00

The last time I got my haircut was May of 2005. I hate getting haircuts for several reasons. Firstly, I'm cheap. I'd rather spend haircut money on yarn. Secondly, my hairdresser moved to Toronto, and he was awesome. I am still mad that he moved. Thirdly, I am incredibly lazy about my hair, and most of the time it's easier to just leave it long.

But it reached that critical tipping point where it was getting stupidly tangled, so I decided I needed a haircut. I also wrote a really good haircut into my novel in November and it made me want to cut my hair. (Yes, I know I'm weird.)

Anyway, my sister has been harassing the hell out of me for photos (I think I liked it better when she pretended she didn't read my blog - now she's even commenting on it, for god's sake!), so here they are. Apparently this is blog on demand now.

Before photos, taken when Jamie was already asleep in my rather grubby bathroom mirror. Apparently I have found the thing I won't wake him up for. Trying on a sock at 2am? No problem. Taking "before" photos of my hair? No. Huh. Good to know. (Although I suppose it's a factor that I could take the photos myself, even if they are crappy. You get the idea about my hair, right?)

The front. Note the general untidiness. It's not that I had bad hair - my hair is, fortunately, quite nice without any effort on my part. It was just kind of boring.

The back. Note very random and uneven wave. This is the general state of affairs - my hair has quite a nice wave, but a very random one. Also, admire our nerdy shower curtain with words all over it.

After! Note the super nerdy Star Wars poster in the background. This was taken in the computer room, which is a very nerdy room. I am standing in front of the yarn stash bins.

It's a terrible picture of me, but my hair looks good.

Here's the back. Note the lovely spirally waves!

My hairdresser (she also did my hair for my wedding, so she wasn't totally random) was great - this took less than an hour including washing and drying. She also grasped my requirements very quickly and definitely accomplished all of them. (Low maintenance, not poofy, must go in a ponytail, better defined waves.) Thumbs up to my new haircut!

More FOs!

2007-01-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

And this time they aren't even Christmas presents! That's right, both of these are 2007 FOs, although the socks were started back in December.

First! The last pair of socks. My brother-in-law got ordained last week, and when we started thinking about what to get for an ordination, we were kind of stumped. We looked at the official Church of England stores in England (seemed like a natural place to look!) but all the fancy stuff was really damn expensive. Like, insanely so. So that plan was quickly abandoned.

Fortunately, I had a brainwave shortly thereafter, and this idea was born!

They are socks with a little priest collar on the top. I had some help from the Knitty chat on these, and what I ended up doing (after several attempts) was knitting flat black ribbing for a while, then casting on another 12 stitches or so and joining it in the round. Then I did a hem turning row (reverse stockinette so it folded over nicely), then knit ribbing for several rounds. Except the newly cast on stitches, which I knit in white stockinette. I tacked down the folded over part when I finished the socks, and the collar looked like this when they were done:

Here is my brother-in-law with his new socks!

(Isn't his outfit snazzy? He had the second nicest outfit out of all six people who were being ordained.)

So! Once I finished those I turned my attention to the five impending babies. This sweater was originally going to be for the April baby, but once I finished it I decided it was too warm for the April baby and it got reassigned to the February baby. Whose shower, conveniently, was today.

It's for my friend who's from Zimbabwe, who I've known since I was 13. My family went to Zimbabwe that year, and our dads worked together so we met and hung out several times while we were there. When we were 19, she moved to Edmonton for university. (Her dad did a degree here so she was born in Canada and has Canadian citizenship.) We started hanging out again, periodically, and our lives have been remarkably similar since then. Of course now she's having a baby, so I told her she's on her own for this one. (She tried to convince me otherwise, but then I pointed out that my babysitting skills will be much more useful if I don't have my own kid, and she was swiftly convinced.) We don't see each other often but it's always fun when we do - she's one of those friends that I don't need to see often to have an awesome time with.

Here's Mr. Bear's closeup.

It's the Hooded Sweater from Debbie Bliss's Special Knits, and it's kind of a stupid construction but the sweater is SUPER cute. Especially the little pointy hood.

So cute and elfy!

It's knit in Mission Falls 1824 wool, which is superwash merino and deliciously soft. It was very quick to knit - I finished the actual knitting in about five days, and then just needed an hour or two of seaming. My seaming has definitely improved - the hood in particular looks really nice.

Incidentally, I'm really noticing my prevalent fondness for dark reds. I chose this one because it's a great generic gender colour (and will look super cute on this Zimbabwean baby!), but trying to take photos of it on my...dark red furniture was kind of a challenge. My sister's sweater? Burgundy. The shawl I'm knitting? Burgundy. The Kid Silk Haze I just ordered for my Reversible Rib Shawl? Burgundy.

Good thing I'm knitting my Rogue in Light Sheepy Grey. I clearly need to branch out.

Good weather for a knitter

2007-01-11T00:32:00.000-07:00

It is really, really, really cold. So cold that when I came home for lunch today, I abandoned my jaunty Malabrigo hat and matching Socks that Rock mittens, and dug out my old but thick Wool-Ease hat and scarf set and put my fleece mittens back on. It was kind of depressing, even though I like the Wool-Ease hat because it's enormous so my hair fits inside it. (I hate the feeling of hair smushed down against my neck, especially when it's in a ponytail, so I just fold it up inside my hat.)

It is also cold enough that I've totally abandoned my shawl (what, are you kidding? A shawl is useless for at least four months. To the bottom of the basket with you!), have left the baby sweater with one sleeve left to seam up and sew on (I can't wear it, therefore it is currently useless to me), and am not even looking at the socks I'm supposed to be knitting Rachel. (Sorry, Rachel.)

So what am I knitting? Rogue! That's right, the long put-off sweater is actually on the needles. I was working on the turned hem tonight (k1p1, my least favourite type of knitting in the universe) while Jamie and I were watching Veronica Mars. I was grumbling about the endless rounds of ribbing and expressing my disbelief that somebody in my Stitch n Bitch knit a Rogue for the Knitting Olympics. (16 days!) And then I said, "mind you, she was skinnier. This wouldn't be so bad if I was less fat."

Jamie had the most hilarious confused look on his face. He was quiet for a minute, and then finally piped up. "How would it be easier to knit if you were skinnier?" Clearly he was wondering if my excess flab somehow interfered with my knitting technique somehow. He seemed kind of relieved when I explained that it actually just meant I needed a bigger sweater.

So Rogue is almost finished its turned hem (1.75 rounds of 12 left to knit), which means it's approximately eighty million hours of knitting away from finished, which means it'll be done right when the weather improves. But damn, will I be happy I knit it next year when the weather sucks this bad.

In the shorter term improvement department, I caved into something I've been wanting to do for a while. Flush with the triumph of knitting my first mittens last week, but discouraged by the fact that they aren't quite -30 kind of mittens, I stopped in at the yarn store to buy myself a thrum mitten kit. Fleece Artist, in lovely pinks and burgundys and oranges and blues. I am very excited about it - the roving is so soft I can't wait for my hands to be all snuggled up with it.

Unfortunately, I want to knit them on my 3s. Which are currently in use for the turned hem of Rogue. So I continue to slog away at the ribbing, desperate for thrum mittens to protect me from the evil weather.

Think anyone would notice if my turned hem was only 11 rounds?

Babies

2007-01-08T02:15:00.000-07:00

It's been a whirlwind weekend and despite the fact that I've actually had several things to blog about, I haven't had time to blog.

That's actually a lie. Our company left at about 4:30, but since then I've pretty much been knitting solidly and barely talking to Jamie. (I need nice quiet time after having company. Fortunately, Jamie was happy to go questing or whatever it is you do in World of Warcraft and note that I don't actually care.) We watched a couple of episodes of Veronica Mars over dinner, at HIS SUGGESTION and my god, the glee I am feeling at having converted not just Erin, who I knew would love the show (and does, and agreed that it's better than Buffy after only 7 episodes, so just wait till it gets really good!), but JAMIE! Jamie doesn't watch TV. Or at least, not in an orderly fashion. He watches quite a lot of tv, actually (more than I realised before we got married), but he watches things like the news, and a lot of sports (his one really stereotypically male behaviour, actually, is his surprising tolerance for virtually any sport. I have seen him watch a snooker tournament.), and random specials on the History Channel, but he only actually watches one show regularly. (That show may or may not be a soap opera that rhymes with Hays of our Chives, and it's totally his guilty secret and is quite hilarious.) Anyway, Erin was up here the other night for the frequently postponed Veronica Mars marathon, and Jamie just happened to be around. And watched. Six straight episodes. (Erin and I made seven but Jamie went to bed before the last one.) Given how much he rolls his eyes about Buffy (despite having watched and thoroughly enjoyed Firefly), I consider this a major victory. Now that I have the DVDs, I have an elaborate plan for converting others. I did this with Firefly too (very effectively - every single one of my friends has now seen the entire series, I think, with a few exceptions here and there), and the advantage of VMars is that it's still on, if difficult to watch here. Here's hoping I can continue to convert!

Uh. I had a point, and this was not it. Oh! Right. Company left at 4:30, and I've been knitting ever since.

There are five impending babies in the next six months. Many people react to news of babies with delight or congratulations or what have you. My reaction to the news of another pregnancy is "oooh, what should I knit?"

I realise this is weird. (Although I'm willing to bet it's the standard knitter's reaction.)

Anyway, I have plans for some of these babies, who are conveniently fairly spaced out, but I don't have the yarn yet for the most impending baby. (It is in the mail, though.) So when my sister-in-law and I went to St. Albert on Friday to check out their yarn store, I picked up some Mission Falls 1824 wool to make a super cute little hoody. (The baby that this sweater is for does not belong to any of the mothers who read this blog, so none of you get too excited, here.) It's the hoody in the Debbie Bliss Special Knits book, if you're so inclined.

My god, why have I been wasting my time with adult sized clothing? Baby sweaters! They rule! I cast this thing on at about 4:30 on Friday, knit for about half an hour before heading out for the night (to a two and a quarter hour ordination, for which a very special FO post is impending), and then yesterday I only had a few hours of knitting time. My father- and stepmother-in-law were in town for the ordination, and stayed with us last night, so I had a strenuous afternoon of pedicures (I have purple toes that match my purple shoes!) and a lengthy dinner took up most of the evening. (It was really freaking good, though. Edmontonians, I recommend Flavours Modern Bistro on Whyte, which we went to on Erin's recommendation.)

So yesterday I finished the back (in a day! I love baby sweaters! Even better is baby sweaters knit in aran weight on size 8s - none of this fiddly little baby weight stuff on size 1s that my mother does. Although her sweaters are ridiculously gorgeous.), and then today, after going out for breakfast (yum), and then to Best Buy (to Wii-stalk), and then to a movie (Pursuit of Happyness - very good), I was in need of an evening spent knitting. (I didn't knit in the movie, which is unusual for me, because I didn't really have anything movie-appropriate. Memo to self, cast on a sock.)

So I have been knitting for a solid evening now, and the entire back and all the hood is done. I followed the pattern exactly even though it was kind of counterintuitive, and now I'm kind of regretting it. (Why am I binding off the back, then casting on for the hood, then binding off the hood, then seaming the bottom of the hood and the back of the sweater? Why didn't I just pick up stitches, which I like, so as to avoid seaming, which I hate? I don't know. It's a mystery. I didn't have the confidence in my understanding of patterns, especially as this one isn't terribly well described and is accompanied by truly useless photos, but now that I've done all the knitting I see that I was exactly right and I should have done that. I need to have more confidence in my knitting. My mother even complimented me the other day! Was this a parenthetical aside? Oh dear.)

That means only two little wee sleeves are left to go. I was worried about running out of yarn (the Mission Falls yardage is a little shy of the suggested Debbie Bliss Cashmerino), but then I remembered that baby arms, like the rest of a baby, are teeny! And I looked at what I've knit and looked at the sleeve instructions, and I'm totally fine.

And while it is very, very tempting to just do the sleeves right now even though it's 2:32 AM, I am going to be sensible and go to bed (and read my new book), and save the sleeves for my day off tomorrow. And maybe some of my other yarn will arrive tomorrow! And there will be much rejoicing.

And there will be the casting on of a sock, because I'm a little twitchy without one on the needles for the first time since, uh, I learned how to knit socks, I think. And these ones will be for me! For the first time since I figured out how to make socks actually fit human feet! Woohoo!

Reorg

2007-01-04T19:07:00.000-07:00

I am not a neat person. This is an understatement of epic proportions. And with so many projects on the go over Christmas, the yarn situation got a little out of control. All the leftovers for all the projects were hanging around my knitting chair, along with the patterns, the accessories, and the needles. Never mind all the other crap that I seem to accumulate.

It was pretty out of control. Now, I'm posting these photos to make the transformation more impressive, but for god's sake, don't show my mother.

If you click through to that, there are notes on the photo explaining what everything is.

I know, I know. I am ashamed.

So today, I decided enough was enough. I spent an hour in there with a garbage bag, my needle cases, and my yarn tub, and I restored order.

I even put a pillowcase over the basket so that yarn would stop snagging. I've been meaning to do that for, oh, two years?

Once upon a time the whole table was done with the gold leaf style look, but it's started to peel off. But look, you can see my new headlamp!

Man, I feel so much better. Except now I have to reorganize my stash, because with all the yarn that was hanging around here safely tucked into one of my bins, it's a little overfull.

If you click through to that, there are notes detailing what's inside.

Anyway, things are feeling a LOT better in my little corner of the living room. So now I can knit the night away guilt free!

The last of the Christmas knitting

2007-01-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

Here they are! The last pairs of Christmas socks. I did also give away a felted purse, but I knit it months ago and forgot to take a picture.

Here are Melly's pirate socks! They're knit in Lorna's Laces Black Purl (hence the name), and they're just twisted rib all the way down.

They're ankle socks, because I knew Mel didn't like long socks.

Here are Jana's Jaywalkers.

They're knit in cmtigger's Mickey Mouse yarn, which I couldn't resist once I saw it. (Mickey's pants are red, his bow tie is yellow, and he's black, hence the colours.) It took me a couple of starts to get it to fit, and the final version's legs are kind of pooly, but the feet striped REALLY well!

And here are Karen's Broadripples.

My favourite thing about these is the ripply top. These are knit in the suggested yarn (which NEVER happens!), Cascade Fixation. I think the colourway is Denim.

Here's all of my Christmas presents (except the bag), lined up and ready to be wrapped on the 23rd. (Look at all the time I had left over!)

But to get to that state, I had to weave in approximately a million ends. I actually feel like that isn't much of an exaggeration. Here's the aftermath of that:

They got me.

2007-01-03T22:08:00.000-07:00

God dammit.

For months now, I have been resisting lace. I look at other people's shawls, and I admire them, and I secretly wish I could own one, but I know perfectly well that I do not live a life that requires a lot of shawls, so why would I invest so much time into an impractical item like that? Besides, I like to knit while multitasking, so anything that requires that many charts just isn't going to work for me.

But then, Pomatomus sucked me in. And I told myself that it wasn't lace, it was socks! I have a long and loving history with socks, so that's ok. Yeah, there was a chart, which I swore I'd never be able to understand, but look at Pomatomus! They're worth learning charts for. And besides, Branching Out was a total bust, so clearly I'm just not meant for lace.

But then I finished Pomatomus, and the chart was suddenly making total sense. And then I picked up Branching Out again, and it worked! Well! It looked good! It took a little tinking and a little thinking, but I did it.

And then Beth gave me that gorgeous silk for Christmas and I got it into my head that it needed something really epic. 100% silk! How often am I going to have that? Not often. And the colours were so nice, so I started sort of casually looking at some lace patterns. But the scarves just didn't really suit what I had in my mind. So I started looking at shawls. At first, it was just the straightforward ones, without too much lace. But somehow, in my mind, this yarn was something light and delicate and gorgeous and not at ALL me.

And then I found this shawl. Yeah. And it is all mountainy, and light and airy, and...gah. I thought about Icarus, or Swallowtail, but I kept coming back to this one.

So I bought it. And I printed it, and I read it over, and it made sense in my little brain. And I looked at the charts (all five of them. Five!) and I didn't run screaming, so I cast it on. And I started knitting.

And now I've finished the first chart and am 22 rows in, and I love it. Even though I have to look at the pattern constantly, and have to count stitches and move stitch markers and focus like the dickens, I love it.

God dammit. Those tricky lace bastards got me.

My yarn for Rogue has shipped, but until it arrives, I'm going to finish up my project for later this week and work on my beautiful, beautiful shawl. Where will I wear it? I don't know. I don't care. I just want it to be mine. I plan to write about the experience, since I think I'm not the only one intimidated by these huge lace things, and I'm hoping to prove that it isn't that bad. (Knock on wood.)

So. I'll be here in my chair, knitting my insane shawl. I think all the Christmas knitting has addled my brain. Do I really think I can do this?

Yeah. I do.

Keeping it up

2007-01-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

The last few Christmas FOs will be posted at some point in the next day or two. Photos of the post-Christmas projects (several of which are already finished!) will follow shortly thereafter. I'm hoping to stay in the updating habit a little better this year, unlike previous years where, post-Holidailies, I disappear off the edge of the universe.

In other attempts to keep updated, I've started posting to my booklog again. It's here, and while I don't pretend to have many insightful things to say about most of what I read, I do read quite a bit. So if you're looking for book suggestions, that's the place for you.

My knitting plans for the new year feature a little knitting for myself, a novel concept around these parts. When I was working on my Secret Pal questionnaire, I declared myself an Intermediate Knitter for the first time. That was a good feeling, because I genuinely meant it. I feel I have reached intermediate after years of being a beginner or possibly an advanced beginner. I have tackled a wide variety of patterns and styles and ideas. I've knit sweaters that fit, socks that work, and lace that actually looks like it's supposed to. I'm feeling pretty good about my knitting these days.

Rogue will probably change all that, because to be perfectly honest, it scares the crap out of me. I keep reminding myself that when I started Samus, I didn't know what I was doing. I'll learn as I go. And the instructions are very clear, and everyone in the universe seems to have knit one except me, so I can pester people for help. (There are major advantages to being behind the knitting times.) Just one thing at a time, right? Right.

Of course, then I'll tackle the Reversible Rib Shawl, which I am longing to own even though I have NO IDEA where I'd wear it. (Somebody get married so I can buy a dress to go with it!) It doesn't look hard, but lordy, it looks tedious. Here's hoping I find it soothing rather than boring. I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway. Photos will be up in the next few days. (Jamie has to go back to work next week so I can occasionally reclaim his computer.) The last of the knitted gifts were distributed yesterday, to warm reception. But more about that later on.

A lightbulb over the head moment

2007-01-01T14:23:00.000-07:00

When I was knitting Erin's Tubey, members of my Stitch n Bitch made several comments about how brave I was to knit with black yarn. It was late August at the time, so there was lots of delightful sunlight, I had nice big needles (size 7, not exactly enormous but at least six times the size of these sock needles), and the pattern was totally straightforward. I didn't really get what the fuss was all about. Tubey turned out beautifully, the black didn't kill me, and I teased my SnB about their elderly eyes. (They admitted as much, though.)

And now, I am knitting a pair of black socks. Sock weight black yarn on size one needles, in the dead of winter. Even with my (highly inadequate) lamp on (I want to get one of those ones that's a stand up lamp with a spotlight attached), I was struggling to see individual stitches. I had to tink back half a row of the heel flap because I slipped where I should have knit and knit where I should have slipped. I was starting to despair of finishing the damn things in time when it occurred to me.

I got a head lamp for Christmas.

So now I am knitting away happily, my tidy stitches lit up perfectly with the four LED bulbs in my wonderful head lamp. Which means it's 2:26pm on New Year's Day, I'm sitting in my living room in my pajamas, home alone (having been ditched by Erin), with a headlamp on my head. It's probably just as well that I'm home alone. No photographic evidence this way.

I may look like a dork, but man, it is improving the knitting like you wouldn't believe. Thanks, Mel!

New Year

2006-12-31T13:33:00.000-07:00

I may never be able to post another photo. Jamie's computer conveniently has a port on the front for the camera's flash card, so I always use his for uploading pictures. And unfortunately, we haven't gotten our networking to work properly yet (don't even get me started or my head might explode), so I can't even get to the pictures that are on the computer but not online.

So what's the problem, you ask?

I gave Jamie World of Warcraft for Christmas. It's a good thing I have many delightful hobbies of my own, since I'm fairly sure I'm never going to lay eyes on my husband again.

And so here we are at the end of the year. The last few days have been pretty uneventful - mostly just working, with a brief visit from Jana to spice things up a little. I'm fairly sure that I saw Jana more in 2006 than I have in any other year since she moved away from Edmonton. This is a very good thing that we're hoping to continue into 2007.

As for resolutions, they aren't anything epic this year. I'm hoping to get back into updating my book log, because I really miss having that record. I plan to knit for myself more, something I've already started with a hat and most of a pair of mittens already done, another hat (in glorios Manos) already started, and the yarn ordered and pattern purchased for my very own Rogue. There are a lot of babies to knit for, but that's ok. Babies deserve hand knit items. I've now knit something for most of my friends and family (with a few exceptions), so I don't feel quite so compelled to only knit for others. That does not mean, however, that I will only knit for myself. Because I do really like to give knitted gifts.

I also want to write more this year outside NaNoWriMo and Holidailies. Although this was my highest output year ever for NaNo, and for the first time ever I've actually done all 31 days of Holidailies (woohoo!), it's not really very structured writing. I know I can do better than I have been doing, and I really have no excuse not to.

So, 2007, bring it on. Happy New Year, everyone!

Socks, part one

2006-12-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

I made a lot of socks for Christmas. Eight pairs, to be precise, and I still have one more pair to finish and give away for a non-Christmas event coming up next week. (No, Erin, I did not knit you socks for your birthday. Sorry. You got a sweater. No complaining.)

As with all the photos on this blog, you can click on them for larger versions.

The first pair was actually knit over the summer. They were originally intended for my sister-in-law's mother, who was quite sick. Unfortunately, she passed away before I could give them to her, so I finished them up and saved them for my sister-in-law.

They're just basic stockinette socks in KP Sock Garden Hydrangea, which I bought before they discontinued it. They striped quite nicely, I thought. Top down, and I believe I knit these on a 40 inch Addi Turbo size 1. I wouldn't stake money on it, though. Memo to self: keep better notes on projects in the new year. They fit Donna very well and she really liked them. She had the distinction of being the only member of Jamie's family who got a knit present on Christmas Day. (My stepmother-in-law also got a felted bag from me, but that wasn't on Christmas.) I knit for all of them last year so they get a year off from knitted gifts. I might knit my mother-in-law a sweater at some point, though, because she would really love that.

Next up is a pair of Jaywalkers that I knit for Chantal. They're actually my second pair of Christmas Jaywalkers, but they're the first ones I gave and I haven't put up the pictures of the first pair yet, so here you go.

Chantal saw me knitting the first pair (which were for Jana), and admired the pattern. (She knits, so she is more likely than most to pay attention to what I'm working on. Although to give my non-knitting friends credit, they are all very tolerant of me rambling about knitting. Extensively. Especially Karen, although she wants to learn. Still, it is appreciated! And they're all taking up knitting anyway so I choose to take credit for that.) Fortunately, I'd already planned to make her a pair of Jaywalkers, and I decided to test out Cara's favourite combo of Jaywalkers and Socks that Rock.

This is, of course, the famous Grumperina Jaywalker, which pretty much everyone in the universe has knit at some point. It is a delightful pattern even if the fit is a bit of a bitch, and I love how quickly it knits up. This pair is in Socks that Rock Queen Rock colour, and it was knit on a KP 32 inch circular, size 1.

As you can see, it striped quite nicely on the legs but is pooly in the feet. My other pair is exactly opposite, which kind of amused me. (Photos of the other socks will probably be in the next entry.)

Next up is one of my favourite pairs. I decided back in the summer that I was going to knit my sister's boyfriend a pair of socks, but I changed my mind several times on what kind of socks they'd be. But then, inspiration struck, and I contacted Dani over at Sunshine Yarns. (Memo to friends who never know what to buy me: Dani has gift certificates and I LOVE her yarn. She is the one who dies the fabulous Gryffindor yarn.) She did a fantastic custom dye job for me and sent me the yarn for these:

Dave's first guess (reasonably enough, since he lives with the Gryffindor socks) was that these were Slytherin socks. But they are, in fact, Roughrider socks. As in the CFL football team that is Saskatchewan's only professional sports team, and therefore is much beloved by Dave and pretty much everyone else in the entire province. (There's not a lot else going on in Saskatchewan.)

He was very impressed, and was most amazed at how accurate the colour was. (Dani kicks ass.) He wore them for all of Christmas and enjoyed them immensely, particularly since they managed to be warm but not sweaty. I'm very pleased with them. They were knit on the Addi size 1 40 inch. Straight stockinette, nothing fancy. These were in Dave's stocking.

Beth also got socks in her stocking. We always put silly Christmas socks in each other's stockings (this year I didn't get any, but I did get sock yarn which is even better so no complaints here), so I decided I'd make her some. However, since she was also getting a sweater, and got a pair of socks in August (you can see why my Stitch N Bitch thinks I only knit for my sister!), hers were the last pair to get knit. Hence, they are kind of little short socks, but she likes that so it's ok.

Aren't they festive? Those are, again, straight stockinette socks in KP Sock Garden Hollyberry, knit on Addi size 1s. (I stocked up on that yarn before they discontinued it.) They also fit very nicely.

And then, there is my crowning glory. The socks that, six months ago, I was absolutely convinced I'd never be able to knit. The socks that taught me how to read charts, and more importantly, how to read my knitting. That's right. The mighty Pomatomus.

These took me longer than any other pair but I think they are the nicest. They're for Kristy (who better appreciate them, dammit), and they turned out really well. As you can see in this picture

they pooled totally unevenly, but I don't care. The scales are fantastic, and they are also the first time my mother ever looked at something I was knitting and said "goodness, how do you do that?" That was a proud moment. These are in Socks that Rock Ruby Slippers, which is an awesome colourway, and were knit on my KP Size 1, I think.

So those are the first five pairs of socks. The other three pairs will follow shortly - their pictures have been taken, I just haven't put them up on flickr yet. Stay tuned! (I know, you're waiting with bated breath.)

It was a lot of sock knitting, and I'm a little teeny bit burned out on socks. I think once I finish that other sock, I'll take a small break. I've already made myself a hat and am working on a pair of mittens (my first mittens! I love mittens! They're so cute, and the thumb is so neat, and they're so fast and easy compared to socks!), and I've ordered the yarn for my Rogue and for the first baby blanket I need to make, but I think I'll be back to socks after a week off. Once they aren't deadline socks, I suspect they're going to be a lot more appealing.

Plus, I have yarn for my own pair of Gryffindor socks. And that is going to rule.

Branching Out into Branching Out

2006-12-29T17:35:00.000-07:00

When I started knitting Branching Out, I'd never knit lace before. But I understood all the theory behind lace, so I figured what the hell? The whole idea behind Branching Out is exactly what it says it is, right? And all these internet knitters are totally nuts about lace, so why not see what all the fuss is about?

So I started it. And I knit a little, and then I frogged it. And started it again. And frogged it again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I probably knit that first repeat ten times. I took it to Britain to knit on the train (fewer distractions on the train), and I sort of kind of started to get it. I got to the second repeat with minimal disaster - not to suggest that it was flawless, because it was far from it, but I was surviving.

And then I didn't touch the stupid thing for almost six months. It was near the bottom of my list of Christmas knitting, as I had other things planned to give my mother. Also, being that she is a total rock star knitter, I didn't really want to give her something crappy. She never knits for herself anymore, having been sidelined for years by a shoulder injury and now pretty much limiting herself to baby outfits (and they are always incredible outfits), but still. She knows her shit. Plus, she taught me how to knit so I felt like I needed to really not suck.

So between the total sucking and the lack of time and the million other things to knit, it got sidelined. I picked it up again after finishing almost everything else with about two weeks to go. I knit a repeat or so, and then discovered that my lovely laceweight yarn was tangled. Like, really, really tangled. And I stared at it for a while, and then I decided that I couldn't face untangling laceweight.

So I frogged it. It was only about three repeats, but it was still painful. I ditched the yarn and rummaged through my stash until I found another skein of laceweight: Shadow in Jewel. It was a lovely colour that I knew mum would like, so I wound it up (the previous yarn predated my winder and swift, so it was wound by hand rather poorly, hence the horrible tangle that ate the universe) and cast on again.

And somehow, it stuck this time. I switched over to the chart, having learned how to chart from Pomatomus, which was ONLY in chart form (thanks, Cookie, for making me love your socks so much I was forced to learn charts!), and suddenly I was actually getting it right. I only wanted a little wee mini Branching Out for her to wear to work with the blazers she wears all the time, so I didn't need one that could actually go around the neck or anything. I did some math and figured 22 repeats would do it. I knit it in every spare minute - coffee breaks at work, parties - and I learned to tune things out when I needed to work on the lace rows and join back in on the purl rows.

There was a while there where I had to put it down, because I was convinced I'd run out of time. Beth's Christmas socks weren't done, I still had to weave in eleventy million ends, and there was all that wrapping to do. But then I had two days off, and I finished the sock, and suddenly, it was do-able.

And here it is.

Mum loved it. Her first remark when she opened up the box was "good heavens, did you make this?" Which for someone who is as knitty as she is, is quite a compliment. She wore it around all day and said she was looking forward to showing it off to all her friends. I can't even remember anyone else ever knitting her anything (the same theory as buying books and yarn - too intimidating!) so it was nice to be able to do that. It was probably the most satisfying gift I gave this year.

A Samus for my Sister

2006-12-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in the previous post, I knit my sister a sweater. I don't have the photos of her wearing it yet, but I do have the ones I took before I gave it to her.

This sweater was actually mentioned several times on this blog, but not directly. It was the mystery project mentioned here. You see, if you look at this sweater, it has a rather elaborate cabled waistband. I had a spreadsheet on my computer set up to do this (I didn't use charts yet, so I needed the written instructions), so I was tied to my chair in order to knit it. (Uh, not literally tied, although sometimes I got very tangled in the yarn.), and the first half of the waistband took forEVER.

Fortunately, as I mentioned rather cryptically in that entry, I learned how to cable without a cable needle (Thanks, Grumperina!), which sped the process up a great deal.

So here it is in all its glory. This is Samus, from Knitty.

It was knit in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in Hollyberry, on a Denise size 7. I have no idea how many balls of yarn I used. (Sorry. I'm a bad knitblogger.) It is lovely and pretty and my sister really likes it. I'm going to put some form of closures on it (a zipper? Toggles? This is to be decided), but other than that it's all done, including the endless, ENDLESS applied i-cord around the entire edge of the sweater.

It is an excellent pattern and very easy to follow. Instructions were clear, photos were helpful, and the sweater looks great. It's pretty good for my second sweater ever, I think. (Tubey was the third.)

Yarnmas

2006-12-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

When my family asked me for my Christmas list this year, the number one item on it was yarn. Yarn is an excellent present for me. I like yarn! I use yarn! It is something I will get to enjoy and think of you! But much like many people don't like to buy me books because I have a lot of them and know a lot about them, most people are a little nervous about buying me yarn. (Reasonably enough.)

Fortunately for me, my sister does not feel the same way. Whose sister rules? My sister! (And her boyfriend too, although I'm not sure how participatory he was in this. However, I can't fault that as my sister received a hand knit sweater, photos to follow, so it's not like Jamie was highly participatory in her gift. Although he does clean the house while I knit, so he did help.)

Anyway, Beth went with my stepmother-in-law on a trek to several yarn stores around Vancouver, where she lives. In my stocking, I found this!

Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, in the colourway Flames which I specifically mentioned to Beth as being one I was very partial to. (Have I mentioned that my sister rules? She listens to me talk about yarn and looks at websites and makes encouraging remarks! This pays off as I knit more for her than anyone else, so it's a sound strategy, but it is nonetheless appreciated.) This was in my stocking. Yay!

This was the first package under the tree that I unwrapped. It's handspun hand dyed yarn, and that's all I know. I'm pretty sure it's 100% wool, and the colours are really awesome. It's a little scratchy so I gave it a bath in wool wash and we'll see how it is after that. Suggestions welcome for what it would look best in that doesn't need to go next to the skin!

And, finally, the really awesome one - this is 100% silk. Woo! The colours are GORGEOUS and it's 100g of laceweight, so I could really do something quite epic with this. I have no idea what. I'm a little intimidated by it, actually - I feel like I'm not smart enough for this yarn. But I will soldier on and make something with it. It's already wound up and looking pettable over on the desk.

I did get many other excellent gifts - a laptop backpack (which will be really useful for travelling when I take my laptop, as it means I won't have to take a backpack AND my laptop case), both seasons of Veronica Mars (woohoooo!), a gift certificate for the bookstore (yay!), Season 1 of ER on DVD, and a shirt that I picked out myself. But the yarn is the most exciting, I think. Jamie bought me yarn for my birthday, but that was yarn that I specifically asked for. This is randomly chosen yarn! By a non-knitter! Isn't it impressive? Clearly the knitting knowledge is in the genes even if she doesn't know how to knit.

Yet.

Christmas: Original Flavour

2006-12-26T16:29:00.000-07:00

So we're 50% finished with Christmas. Today, it starts all over again with Christmas Eve II: Christmas Evealoo.

My sister and her boyfriend get in this evening, and so we're wrapping presents tonight and watching Muppets and hanging stockings, and then tomorrow we're having a full Christmas. Which is actually quite excellent, because yesterday we spent about four hours opening presents (yeah, I know), so it was nice to go see my parents and just hang out, and this way the presents last for longer.

As detailed in the previous entry, the highlight of my gifts was the impending Wii, but my in-laws also got me a variety of highly excellent things. My brother- and sister-in-law got me a hilarious Pirates of the Cowibbean shirt, in which a cow is wearing a peg leg, an eyepatch and an earring and has a parrot on his shoulder (hee), and the dice game from the Pirates movie. My other brother- and sister-in-law got me a really nice outfit, and their kids got us a board game. (Artifact - I hear it's good. Do any of you friends of mine know how to play so we don't have to try to figure it out?)

My mother- and stepfather-in-law got me a subscription to Entertainment Weekly (woohoo!), a movie gift certificate and a pile of gift certificates for my favourite movie rental place (which my father- and stepmother-in-law also got us, although for a different movie place, which means I can rent a ton of TV on DVD to watch while I knit), some snacks, a variety of little goodies in my stocking, a chocolate fondue kit, and SHOES!

Whee! Shoes! Now, usually I am not very exciting about shoes, because I wear my Dansko clogs pretty much all the time and my running shoes if I'm not wearing my clogs. But my clogs have a tear in them, so I asked for a new pair. So I got a $200 gift certificate for Gravity Pope, which is the best shoe store in town that happens to carry the Danskos. Awesome! I'm way too cheap for shopping there usually, but this meant I could go shopping with abandon. I looked up their website and discovered they were having a HUGE boxing week sale, so I called up Kristy today (ah, it's good to have friends whose immediate reaction to "wanna go shoe shopping?" is "let me get my coat.") and we headed down. Normally I would avoid Boxing Day shopping (unlike in the U.S., it's a holiday here so everyone in the universe is out shopping except for the poor people who work retail), but since I'm busy the rest of the week it was my only chance to go before Sunday, and I figured they'd be sold out of everything by Sunday.

It was an absolute zoo in the store, not helped by the malfunctioning security system that kept going off randomly. After several attempts by the helpful shoe guy to find my size in clogs that were on sale, he brought me a black pair and a brown pair. (I was tempted by the red ones but they weren't on sale, and I decided I'd rather have two pairs than one red pair, even though they were excellent.) I settled on the black ones and decided that if they didn't have any other shoes I liked in my size, I'd get the brown ones too. I rejected several pairs - I have big feet and many shoes make them look like boats - and a lot of the ones I liked they didn't have in my size.

But then I spotted these.

They aren't as pink as that photo would have you believe - more of a purple. And they are so cute and, more importantly, comfortable! And they are totally the cutest shoes I've ever owned, and they were on sale! So I got both my clogs and these for only the price of GST. Woo!

I'm going to wear them to the airport and freak out my sister. The fact that I have purply sparkly shoes with a heel on the will totally knock her over. Hee.

And tomorrow is another round. Woohoo!

Whee!

2006-12-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

Ok, technically, it isn't the first gift I've gotten - I got Cars from Kristy (I watched half of it earlier today while wrapping and knitting a mitten), a headlamp from Mel so I can knit in the dark (particularly good in the car when someone else is driving), a page-a-day knitting calendar from Erin and Ashley (woo! Nerdy!), as well as a restaurant gift certificate from them, and a hilarious sock monster kit from Colin, which is going to be a source of great amusement to me, I think.

BUT! Jamie and I just got home from church, and we exchanged presents as per tradition. Since we're running around with each others' families on Christmas Day, we do our presents after the midnight church lets out. It's technically Christmas but it gives us a few minutes to ourselves.

There was a little tiny box under the tree for me, and I thought it was the earrings I'd requested. (Lest you all think I've become some pod person who wants bling for Christmas, I wanted sleeper hoops, which is pretty much the plainest kind of earring in the universe.) But I opened it up, and it was Jamie's cufflink box. Inside which was a coupon for a Wii.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I asked for one and totally didn't think I'd get it (well, I knew I wouldn't get the physical item since they're impossible to get, but I didn't think I'd get a coupon either), because when I told Jamie I wanted one after playing it a while ago, he told me I was being whimsical and didn't really want one. But apparently, he played it and realised that, actually, it's really ridiculously fun and I wasn't just being whimsical.

So as soon as they're available for people who DON'T want to get up at 4AM to line up, I'm getting a Wii, baby!

Whee!

Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope you have an excellent day.

The first gift is given!

2006-12-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

After a frenzy of photographing and wrapping earlier today, all the knitted gifts have had their pictures taken (as well as a group shot), and are wrapped up and waiting for their recipients. I was a little nervous that they weren't all going to be done before the first one had to go out, which is why I stayed up half the night weaving in ends, since I knew the first gift would go out today.

And that gift was...Tubey!

I'm not putting all the pictures of Tubey right onto the blog, because some of the photos have little bits of other gifts on them. So if you know me in real life (unless you're Jamie, because he was here when I was taking photos so obviously none of them are for him), don't go click over to flickr, okay? It doesn't give much away, but still. You can enjoy the pictures here on the page - there's only a little hint of one other gift, and it's for someone I'm pretty sure doesn't read my blog anyway.

Here's a shot of the neckline.

A closeup of the colours:

And here's Erin wearing it! (She has a shirt on underneath that got a little bunched up, but you get the idea and you can see that it fits really well.

One of the crucial elements of Tubey is the cross-back measurement. This pattern is knit in two tubes (hence the name), with the sleeves in one big long section, which means there's not a ton of stretch across the back. I was quite nervous about this, because if it doesn't fit well it's (a) uncomfortable, and (b) looks crappy. Before Erin moved into our basement suite, a bunch of her clothes were stored in the garage, so I snuck out one of her shirts (I knew she wouldn't think it was creepy - we lived together for a year so I frequently handled her laundry and not in a creepy stalker way) and measured it across the back. After that I basically just had to hope for the best.

It fits perfectly. Yay! Even better, Erin really likes the design, as I thought she would. It suits her, she likes the colours, and the fit is excellent. Woohoo!

I started Tubey on, I believe, August 11th, and finished September 22nd. (I didn't, however, weave in the ends until yesterday, because there were a million and I HATE doing that.) It was a fast and pleasant knit, and a very well written and easy to follow.

Tubey was knit in Knit Picks Swish, which I HIGHLY recommend using for this sweater. It's not too expensive, it's soft which is great for a next-to-the-skin sweater such as this one, and the colours are very nice. It's also washable, although we haven't washed it yet. (Since Erin and I share washing facilities, I decided not to attempt to wash it without her seeing it. She almost busted me several times as it was!) The colours are black, ballerina, bordeaux, and I think the other one is capri. (I didn't take very good notes, clearly.) It was knit entirely on a KP Options needle size 7, with magic loop for the sleeves.

It was a great knit, and I am so freaking happy that Erin liked it so much (she totally squealed, as predicted), and it fits so well. Here's hoping the other gifts are equally successful!

(Even better? Currently in my lap is a mitten. A mitten for ME! Which is already well past the cuff. Yayyyy! I'm even using DPNs, which I haven't done in about six months. I decided to go old school for my first mitten. And after making a million socks, it is just speeding by! I'm using Socks that Rock heavyweight, and it is looks awesome.)

Done. Done!

2006-12-24T03:15:00.000-07:00

Sweet merciful heavens. I did it. I just wove in the last end on my last sock. There is still one thing blocking in the other room, but everything's woven in on that so it just needs unpinning.

That means two sweaters, eight pairs of socks, and a lace scarf, all ready for Christmas. And with a whole day to spare!

Of course, I still have to wrap everything tomorrow. Oh, lord. But first, a photo session! I will take a bunch of pictures and do a post-holiday wrapup some time later this week once I've given away all the presents.

I can't believe I actually did it. My god. Last week I'd pretty much given up on any hope of finishing the scarf, but here I am! With more than 24 hours to spare!

What the hell am I going to knit now? I might actually have to cast on something for myself!

Nerd Tree

2006-12-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

There has never really been any doubt that Jamie and I are big nerds. We aren't necessarily the same kind of nerd, although there is definitely overlap. I am a book nerd, a knitting nerd, and just sort of a general nerd. Jamie is a music nerd (although a very specific type of music nerd, as he's never heard of Debbie Gibson and didn't recognize Prince, so he's obviously not an 80s music nerd), a Lord of the Rings nerd (although not a terribly hard core one), a Star Wars nerd, and also a general nerd although not in the same areas as me.

Our Christmas tree is a pretty good reflection of this nerdiness. (Note: if you really want to see close ups of our ornaments, you can click the photos to go to flickr.)

This is only one of the many nerdy instruments on our tree. There are two trumpets (this one is really heavy and actually quite realistic, at least to my unprofessional eye), one saxophone (a tenor, alas, even though I play alto), a French Horn, and a lot of bells.

Then, there are the Star Wars ornaments. I went on a bit of a spree last year and put a bunch of them in Jamie's stocking.

This is the M-Peror. Yes, groam. He has a little matching friend on top of our tv, where he lives with the Spud Trooper and Darth Tater. I wanted to get the R2-Potatoo, but he's expensive and hard to find.

This is a Naboo Starfighter that makes battle noises! It's pretty cool, actually - you can see the little R2D2 riding in it. (Yes, I had to ask Jamie what kind of ship it was. We also have two mini ships - the Millenium Falcon and a TIE Fighter but I didn't take photos of those.)

Darth Vader here is actually quite elaborate. You press a button and he breathes and says a variety of ominous things. The sound is surprisingly good for, you know, a tree ornament.

Look, he's overseeing the Death Star! Hee. I didn't notice the well-placed ball until I'd taken the first picture but then I couldn't resist another one.

Frodo and Sting, who doesn't glow but is surprisingly pointy.

Frodo and a Starfighter, together at last.

Now, you may be thinking that thus far, this is an awfully Jamie-nerdy tree. Fear not.

This is the super awesome hand knit sweater ornament that one of my Knitty Secret Pals, poppins, made for me. Isn't it cute? It's pink and stripy and it's the first ornament I put on the tree. It's sitting straight across from my knitting chair where I can see it. I kind of want to make myself a full sized version - I like the colours!

This is one of my favourites. Debbie gave it to me last year, because she said it made her think of me. Hee. I like that people think of me when they see nerdy reading things!

This isn't a great picture, but check it out - her shoes are TOTALLY sparkly. My mother-in-law gave this to me several years ago.

This is one of my favourite ornaments simply because it is just so random. It is exactly what it looks like - a little teeny wire basket with eggs inside. It is very small and I have no idea what on earth it has to do with Christmas, but it is very cute and silly.

This isn't actually on our tree, nor is it specifically Christmas, but man is it nerdy.

That is the Disneyland Castle, with Mickey and Minnie standing in front, lit up by Christmas lights on our mantle. I am very fond of it and it looks particularly nice this time of year. This might be the nerdiest thing in the whole room, but it is also my favourite.

This isn't nerdy, but it's very sweet.

Jamie's cat Pood died several years ago, so Jamie made up little photo ornaments for all his family.

So there you go. Don't worry, there are plenty of non-nerd things on the tree, much to my mother's relief, but those aren't quite as entertaining. I like that our Christmas tree reflects our personalities. It wouldn't take long for someone to figure us out, looking at this tree.

The mess in the rest of the room would go a long way to get to know us, too.

No more shopping!

2006-12-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

The Christmas shopping, it is finished! Halle-freaking-lujah.

Of course, I am such a fabulous friend that I'm taking Mel shopping on Saturday. Yeah. Saturday December 23rd. AKA the worst shopping day in the universe. I am clearly the greatest friend in the history of the universe. (Especially since not only does it mean dealing with stores, but missing several hours of possible knitting time.)

And now Jamie has put the lights up on the tree, and we've had the traditional light-putting-up while watching Beverly Hills, a classic Christmas tradition to be sure. (Jamie is totally getting sucked in and it's hilarious. His alternate dialogue is worth the price of renting the stupid show.)

Even better than being done my Christmas shopping? I'm done work for a week. A glorious week of nothing to do but wrap presents, eat, open presents, and sit around. Ok, and knit furiously. Whee!

Oh, and face shopping on Saturday. Right. Woo.

Finishing the job

2006-12-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

The applied i-cord that ate the universe is finished. Its recipient is blocking as we speak, and the heavens are rejoicing.

Although I inherited many delightful things from my mother (ability to read really damn fast, mad bad poetry skills, a knack for libraries, etc.), one of the things I'd rather have passed on is her hatred of finishing knitting projects. By finishing, I mean the actual seaming, blocking, etc. I hate it, and I'm not very good at it. Mum is pretty good at it (reasonably enough, since she's been doing it for like, 50 years at this point), but she foists it off whenever possible.

I might actually take a class. I plan to knit myself a Rogue in the new year (WHEE!) and the yarn store I go to a lot offers one on one finishing technique help, so I might knit up the parts of the sweater and then take a class to help me finish it. Because I don't want to knit up that whole glorious sweater and then wreck it in the finishing. Maybe that can be my Christmas present to myself.

Anyway, it's done, and blocking, and the only other sweater waiting to be finished is Tubey which has NO SEAMS (yay Tubey!) and just needs eighty million ends woven in.

And Pomatomus has less than one repeat left before the toe, and then there's the straight stockinette, and my god, the end is in sight!

And then I just have to wrap everything. Gah.

Year in Review

2006-12-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

So. How was 2006? Since I was lousy at updating here this year, I figured I’d write a brief year in review post. Not least because part of the reason I’m lousy at updating is my life is not really daily post exciting, and I’m running out of things to talk about.

2006 started off rather unusually for me, in that I really didn’t know what was going to happen. My life previous to this year was fairly planned in advance. 2005 was a major event year, with two major vacations, a move, and getting married all lined up in advance of New Year’s. 2004 was a little more unpredictable, with a new job and a proposal that I wasn’t anticipating, but I also moved that year and much of the year revolved around that – planning with Erin for our apartment, finding an apartment, moving into it, settling in, etc. 2003, I was still in school, which is always kind of predictable, and although the post-school life was a bit of a gaping maw, it still felt a little more predictable.

This year, though, I started the year without any major plans for my life. For the first time since 2002, I didn’t move in 2006. This was a significant life improvement, let me tell you – an entire year that didn’t feature a single box to be packed or unpacked, aside from presents that I mailed. (Those are the good kind of boxes to unpack.)

January was not a very exciting month. We were totally broke from Christmas (we’ve toned down somewhat this year in the hopes of not being quite so broke afterwards), and most of the month was spent bopping around at home. I went to visit Jana, briefly, for the first time in several months. But apart from that, January was pretty uneventful.

February, of course, featured the Knitting Olympics, which although it may not seem like a major event, was fairly pivotal. That was the point in time where I went from being a fairly enthusiastic knitter to a totally obsessive one. And given that I knit my first pair of socks during the Olympics, it was also the beginning of a slippery slope. I think, if my math is correct, that by the end of the year I will have made sixteen pairs of socks since February. That’s pretty good! (I’m no stariel, but it’s not too bad for my first year of sock knitting. I’m sure there will be more next year.)

The other major event of February was my much beloved Lucy’s death. I still try not to think about it too much, because it depresses the hell out of me and I miss her more than I care to admit. There was a brief moment last night, decorating my parents’ tree, that it hit me again, because Christmas has always featured Lucy as long as we’ve lived here. It’s strange and sad that this year, neither my sister nor my cat will be here on Christmas Day. Fortunately, my sister is coming the next day. I wish I could say the same for my kitty. I miss her.

In March, we went to Vancouver and Victoria to visit the various and sundry people who live there, which was quite delightful. I hadn’t been to Vancouver since my fourth year of university, and it was nice to be able to hang out there for a while. Jamie hadn’t been in even longer, and it was good to be able to go away for a fairly low key vacation.

April was the beginning of the Oilers playoff run that would consume the city and my family for two months. That’s really the only eventful thing that happened in April – it was not a very exciting month. May was much of the same – we started going down to Whyte Avenue after the games to enjoy the mayhem and just participate in one of those rare group insanity moments that are entertaining until people get stupid about it. (Flashing? Kind of amusing. Lighting stuffed sharks and ducks on fire? Probably dangerous, but still a fairly witty commentary. Lighting large fires out of things you found on the street? Less entertaining.)

June, of course, brought our trip to Britain, which was awesome. We were there for about three weeks, some of which overlapped with my family. There are actually a couple of entries about the trip (I know, it’s a miracle) here and here. It also brought the loss of the Oilers in game seven (which I’m still embarrassingly depressed about). Sigh.

July featured the tail end of our trip, the Exhibition where Jamie discovered that he can no longer handle spinny rides and nearly barfed more than once, which means he will be totally lame on the teacups in Disneyland and therefore can ride them with Jana, who is equally lame, and Ben (Jana’s husband) and I can have our own teacup and spin like maniacs, woo!

July is also when I began my ridiculous Christmas knitting list. I had a few other things to finish up (mostly socks), but the only non-Christmas gift I have knit since August was a Gryffindor tie for my Halloween costume. I feel like that’s pretty impressive, actually – I don’t usually have that kind of dedication. I can’t wait to be able to post about all the things I’ve knit, because I’ve learned a ton and my knitting has improved a LOT since the summer, so I should actually have some knitting content after Christmas. (Some of you are thrilled, and some of you are groaning, I’m sure.)

The main event of August was my brother-in-law’s wedding. This actually also took up a lot of July, as Jamie and I were extremely helpful and did a lot of legwork and moral support. I was also extremely useful on the day of and was greatly appreciated for my mad wedding planning skillz. I also decided that my Welsh relations should hire themselves out to come to weddings, because it wasn’t quite the same without them. (I am looking forward to my sister’s theoretical wedding for this exact reason, because I figure it’s the only other wedding I’ll get to go to with a bunch of my friends and all my excellent relations. And I should really write another entry about the rest of our wedding, because it was super awesome fun.)

Post-wedding, I went to visit Jana for a while and go on a yarn crawl, which was a nice break from the wedding madness. Then, all of a sudden, summer was nearly over and it was Fringe time, which featured meeting Nathan Fillion, among other things.

September featured a new laptop, Neville, who I am quite fond of but will probably never love like I loved Giles. It also mostly featured knitting that I can’t post about yet. (Why didn’t I do this post next week? Oh well. Next week maybe I’ll do a Knitting Year in Review.) It also featured a new job, which is about five minutes away from my house and very convenient. (It’s actually the same job, just in a different place.) I also chaperoned band camp for Jamie, which made me feel approximately eight hundred years old. (Damn kids.)

October rolled around and NaNoWriMo started to gear up, along with Socktoberfest. I did knit several socks in October, but I also discovered that the Edmonton NaNo community has become kind of insane, and planning NaNo is starting to get fairly time consuming. Thank god for Karen, who agreed to be my co-ML this year. We got things together, threw an awesome kick-off party, and then had an excellent November. October also started out with a super fun random road trip, in which Erin and I drove to Red Deer to meet up with Jana. We stayed in a Travelodge (in the Sleepy Bear Den, featuring creepy bears everywhere you looked. We got a free stuffed bear which has since become a running joke between all of us, where we try to hide Creepy Bear somewhere to freak the other out. He even came to Calgary with me at the end of the month and hid out in Jana's bathroom cupboard and in her bag.), and hung out and painted our nails and watched bad TV and I taught Jana how to knit. I had to talk Erin into coming, but we had an awesome time and we're planning to do it again at some point. It's amazing how getting out of town can improve your mood by so much, even if it's only an hour and a half away and you're staying in a random motel. I also went down to Calgary with Jamie, who had a conference there, and hung out with Jana and went yarn shopping and generally did very little besides read, knit, and hang out, and it was very restful.

November, of course, featured very little besides NaNoWriMo. There was a little bit of knitting when I was procrastinating, but mostly novelling and planning NaNo events, which I think actually took more time than the novel itself. I did, however, hit a personal word count record with over 70,000 words, but I think the novel isn’t great and I liked last year’s better. Oh well. Can’t win them all, I guess.

Jana and Ben did come and visit though, which was awesome. We went to the Waterpark and just generally had a very fun time. It was nice to see them when we weren’t scheduled for fifty thousand things – generally they come up for a wedding or something, so it was nice just to hang out. I think I've seen more of Jana this fall than I have since she moved away, and it's been awesome. They're coming up again next week for her cousin's wedding, and even though I'm working part of the time it will be great to see them. I'm going to go visit in January, partly to hang out but also to see their NEW PUPPY who looks insanely cute.

NaNoWriMo was very successful, and our Thank God It's Over party was also a big hit. It was nice to be able to reclaim our lives, though, and Karen and I both had a total non week the first week of December to recover.

December so far you're pretty much caught up with, since I've actually been updating. (Thanks, holidailies!) And now I just have to hope that the knitting is done in time (one thing has been abandoned as unrealistic, once I realised that I still have to WRAP all of these things!), buy a couple more gifts, and try to find the Christmas spirit that so far hasn't really hit me.

It's been a good year. Nothing very eventful (aside from our trip, I suppose), but I'm not really complaining. I like things to be mostly predictable. It doesn't make for thrilling blogging, but it makes for pretty good living. And these days, I'll take that. There was a point in my life where I'd have bitched that my life was boring, but now? Boring doesn't seem so bad.

Plowthetic

2006-12-18T17:19:00.000-07:00

I don't understand this city. They finally decided last week that they were going to plow all the residential streets (which, you know, woo hoo and everything, but this shouldn't be such a huge deal, because we live in freaking Alberta and therefore they should flipping plow the god damn streets all the time!), and so this morning I got up to find the plow out in our crescent. Woo! Fortunately, I park out back, so I didn't have to plow-dodge to get out (which Jamie did), but when I come home for lunch I park out front.

So I headed home at lunch time with great enthusiasm because I was looking forward to not having to slalom down our street. Except I turned onto the street before ours, and it was...not plowed. And then I turned onto our street and it was also not plowed. The crescent at the end of the street? Totally plowed. The street leading to the crescent? Still snowy. The street that the plow had to DRIVE DOWN to plow our crescent.

What the fuck? Who's running this gong show? And they wonder why people make fun of municipal government. My god.

DVD Nostalgia

2006-12-18T01:43:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if Dawson's Creek or Beverly Hills 90210 is worse, but I spent two hours today watching the latter. (Fitting it in around the Survivor finale, which is possibly the worst of the lot, but my favourite won so I don't care.)

I didn't really like this show much when it was first on - I was nine when it started, so some of it was kind of lost on me. My sister, though, was 11, which was the perfect age to be totally sucked into all the drama. And we tended to watch each others' shows even if we didn't like them, because we had this elaborate system of sharing the TV that we both understand perfectly and nobody else, including our parents, can grasp even now. (I don't know why - it's perfectly logical.) Anyway, as a result, we watched mostly the same stuff and as a result dragged each other into a lot of shows we wouldn't have chosen on our own. (Beth gets credit for Friends, which I really objected to watching, and I get credit for The Simpsons, which Beth thought was stupid. There are many other instances of situations where we grudgingly admitted defeat several months or years down the line, but those are the two notable examples.)

Anyway, this show takes me back to being a pre-teen/teenager more than any other show, I think, probably because unlike almost everything else we used to watch, I haven't seen a single rerun since the show ended. And it's just so nineties. My god. The hair, the clothes, the slang...gah. It's like a bizarro time capsule in soap opera format.

And of course, I'm dying to watch the whole show now. Stupid addictive TV on DVD! I've got the first four discs out right now, and I'm going to burn through them this week while I knit. And then I will go back to the movie store and rent the rest of the season, because I have no shame.

On the knitting front, I've pretty much admitted defeat on the lace scarf, but everything else is going well. I'm going to have to have a Pomatomus blitz one day this week, but I'm starting to think I might actually make it! I'm nearly half done the applied icord that ate the universe, and once that's out of the way I can actually see the end in sight.

Fortunately, I've got the West Beverly gang to get me there.

The circle of life.

2006-12-17T02:54:00.000-07:00

Late. Sleepy.

Why is it that I can stay home and stay up half the night knitting and watching TV and not feel like I'm going to die of exhaustion, but the minute I stay out until nearly 3 I may keel over any minute. I suspect I'm out of practice. I drove home down the party strip in Edmonton, and there were dozens of scantily clad girls trying to hail cabs and looking freezing, and it seems like a long time ago that that was my life. (Not that I was ever scantily clad in December. I was rarely scantily clad in the summer, although I did occasionally rise to a skirt. However, girl in fishnets and mini-skirt? You're dumb. It's cold! We live in Alberta! It's December! At least put a pair of freaking tights on.)

Anyway, instead of being out all night drinking, we were out all night playing video games. Oh dear, we've become lame. It kind of cracks me up, actually, that from the age of about 14 to 17 or so (when I started university), activities with friends tended to be renting movies, watching tv, playing games, whatever. But mostly staying in. Then, there was a five year flurry of going out every weekend, drinking and dancing and picking up guys and staying out until all hours. We'd survive on four hours of sleep on a regular basis which I totally can't do any more. And now, we're back to staying in most nights, playing games and hanging out and watching movies. (Although I guess we were technically out tonight, as work let me use our program room for Karen's birthday party.) It's all a giant cycle, I guess. Circle of life, blah blah blah.

Still, we generally have better food now, and can go home whenever we want because our parents aren't picking us up, and hey, back when I was in high school we didn't have Guitar Hero! Which is ridiculously fun, and my husband is alarmingly good at it. It is a close runner up for best game ever, but that honour still goes to Rayman's Raving Rabbids for the Wii, which is the most hilarious and insanely fun game I've ever played in my life.

DAAAAAAAAAAH. I'm going to bed.

Tree guy

2006-12-15T21:04:00.000-07:00

It's the little things that put you in the holiday spirit. Don't get me wrong, I like the big things, like presents or turkey or family or whatever, but it's really the little things that do it. Things like watching the Grinch (already done once and likely at least another time before Christmas - it's a good wrapping movie), or listening to a particularly good Christmas CD, or eating a Christmas only cookie.

One of the big little things for me, though, has always been our tree guy. I don't even know his name - it was only last year that I discovered it wasn't Ed, even though he worked at Ed's Trees. But every year for the last fifteen, probably, we've bought our tree from the same guy. He remembered us every year (probably because we buy a really good tree so he makes lots of money off us), and he was very excited two years ago when I was getting a tree for my first apartment. He even gave us a deal on it. (It was a pretty puny little tree, although I was VERY fond of it.) He always gave me a chocolate when we paid, and there was something very satisfying about the continuity. I am in charge of picking the tree - it's only Dad and I that get to go, although Jamie has been allowed to accompany for the last two years since Dad has been sick and needs the help in tree-hauling. I sing Christmas carols loudly in the car to Dad's protests, even though he secretly likes it. We don't tell mum how much the tree costs, and everyone's happy.

But this year, there was a different tree guy. We got a perfectly nice tree - two of them, in fact, one for my parents' house and one for us, but it just wasn't the same without the tree guy. I don't know where he is, and I can't ask because I don't know his name. But it's sad, knowing that we have a tree that was sold to us by someone who wouldn't know us if he saw us on the street.

Maybe he retired from the tree business, or moved away, or just wasn't there today. I don't know. But I missed my tree guy.

Letters from a shopping trip

2006-12-14T18:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Bookstore,

Thank you for having awesome Christmas music and helpful staff. The Charlie Brown Christmas CD is an excellent choice. Also, the parking is so good! How often can you say that ten days before Christmas?

Dear Bookstore owner,

Thank you for giving all your former employees a discount. My bank account is forever in your debt. Or, more to the point, I suppose, it isn't in fact in your debt. Thanks!

Dear Books,

Why must you be so irresistable? I work in a library, for god's sake, and yet I still wanted to bring you all home with me for myself. I didn't, but it was close. Quit it with the interestingness!

p.s. just kidding. Please don't stop being interesting. And please leap into my mother's bag for me if you see her in the store.

Dear Visa,

It's almost over, I promise. Only two more presents!

Dear drug store,

I know it's not your fault that the benefits system can't accept two different last names. But damn, that's lame. It's 2006! Almost 2007! I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has a diferent last name from her husband-who-has-the-benefits.

Dear benefits,

I love you and your delicious cheap drugs, but damn, get with the times! Different last name! Learn it, live it, love it.

Dear giant pile of snow that I parked next to,

You are very hard to resist. Nine-year-old me would have been all over you. Do you think people would look at me strangely if I climbed on you?

Dear lemonade,

Thanks for being on sale! I was going to buy you anyway, because I love your deliciousness enough to pay full price, but my husband glares at me if I don't wait for a sale.

Dear lineup,

Thanks for going elsewhere this evening! That's the first time ever that I didn't have to wait in line at that grocery store. Thumbs up!

Dear self,

Remember to shop at 6pm on Thursdays, as apparently that's the lineup free portion of the evening.

Dear corner by my house,

You are really freaking slippery and I'm getting tired of your attitude every time I try to turn into the alley to get to my garage. Even Erin is slipping on you and she has a brand new car! Knock it off. It's been above zero all week! Melt, damn you!

Dear husband,

Thanks for making dinner even if you put my pasta on a PLATE like a weirdo. It's still tasty, although I think it's tastier in a bowl. Still, pasta on a plate that I didn't have to make myself is tastier than self-made pasta in a bowl.

Dear knitting,

Aren't you done yet? God.

Dear blog,

Sorry, knitting calls.

Love,

Sarah

Victory at the Laces!

2006-12-13T18:23:00.000-07:00

Several months ago (like, June, I think), I started a scarf. A lace scarf, Branching Out to be specific, which was a fairly major step for me, since I was kind of afraid of lace. Winding the stupid yarn by hand nearly killed me, and I managed to get about one and a half repeats on the scarf after several froggings. I think I probably started the stupid thing about five times, and it still wasn't quite right. I gave up for a while, because there were other things higher on my Christmas priority list.

I picked it up again yesterday (not because my other knitting is done, but because of a brief moment of optimism that my other knitting WILL get done), and discovered that the yarn is...really damn tangled. I got a few more repeats out of it, but after about half an hour spent detangling, I made the agonizing decision to abandon it. I had another skein of laceweight yarn, and I didn't want to hate the scarf so much I couldn't stand to knit it.

So I pulled it off the needles. Today at lunch I wound the yarn and cast on again, and I've already gotten two repeats done. And the really awesome part is I haven't screwed it up yet. At some point when I was muddling through the repeats yesterday, something clicked. And now I can knit it without my brain exploding, and not only that, but I can actually follow the chart.

A chart! This is revolutionary! The chart revolution was actually due to Pomatomus, which came without written instructions. (Reasonably enough - that pattern would be impossible to do in words.) When I started Branching Out I avoided the chart and just went by the written instructions, because my brain doesn't work in visuals very well and generally prefers words. But somewhere in the Pomatomus process it clicked, and now I can zip along on a chart like nobody's business.

So sorry, chart people, for doubting you!

Now that I've written about it, though, I'm sure it's going to turn into a horrible disaster. Tempting fate and all.

Bleah

2006-12-12T17:57:00.000-07:00

My stomach is disgruntled, my eye is weird and puffy and twitchy (no, it isn’t pink eye, because I’ve had that before and recognize its horrible awfulness immediately, because I had the worst case of pink eye ever that appeared in less than an hour after spring concert one year and then didn’t really go away for nearly TWO MONTHS because it kept jumping from eye to eye like a gross pink pogo stick), and my wisdom tooth hurts. (Well, more specifically, the area around my wisdom tooth hurts.)

Aren’t I just full of the holiday spirit today?

On the bright side, I returned all my overdue library stuff today (yes, I am aware that it’s disgraceful given that I am here every day), which marginally improved the state of the living room. Very marginally. Our house is a total disaster, but I have been knitting in every spare moment and using the to-knit list as an excuse to avoid it. Jamie is stupidly busy and never home, and so things are in rather alarming disrepair. We’ll have a major clean at some point, but that’s hardly an exciting event to look forward to. I like having a clean house, but man alive, I hate the cleaning part. However, if we don’t clean, there isn’t room for a Christmas tree (have I mentioned that our house is small?) so at least there’s motivation. Time, on the other hand, may be a problem. We are now at less than two weeks till Christmas. I’m busy tomorrow night, Jamie’s out Thursday, we might be going out on Friday, and Jamie’s weekend is ridiculous and my Saturday is booked solid from 9am to midnight, probably. And then suddenly it’s a week till Christmas and gaaaaah!

I hate days like these.

But I have Thursday evening free for Survivor, so I can knit around that, and then I have Friday off, so I can spend the whole day knitting with another bad TV marathon, which means another trip to the video store for more delightfully awful DVDs. (They didn’t have Beverly Hills when I was there, which is a damn shame.) Saturday I have to work, but Sunday evening is the Survivor finale, and my incredibly exciting life can continue.

Of carjackers and charity

2006-12-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

Non stop action this evening after a slow couple of days. Just as Jamie and I were about to leave (both in separate directions), the back doorbell rang and Jamie opened the door to find a cop with a police dog. He needed to take a look inside our garage, because there was a carjacker on the lam in our neighbourhood, and the light in our garage was on.

!!!

Keep in mind the kind of neighbourhood I wrote about just the other day - this is a lemonade stand and water fights on the lawn kind of neighbourhood. Not generally one you'd associate with carjackings! But we're pretty close to Whyte Ave, which is apparently stabby central these days (one of the hockey blogs I read rather hilariously suggested calling it an "Edmonton handshake" or a"Whyte Ave how'd you do" if you get stabbed on Whyte, which is clearly very offensive and horribly demeaning to those who have been stabbed but is nonetheless very funny, and don't worry, I'm already going to hell anyway), so it's not totally inconceivable that this sort of shit would happen.

Anyway, there was not a carjacker in our garage. Erin had just left so the light from the garage door opener was still on, and we were pleasantly carjacker-free. Always a good thing.

Fortunately, from that I went to Stitch n Bitch, where we were wrapping up items for the charity knitting drive that the person who runs our SnB organized. We had around 300 hand knit items ready to go out to the Edmonton Women's Shelter, and my faith in humanity was greatly restored. Well, my faith in knitters, anyway. It was fun, and I got some knitting done, and many people admired my Pomatomuses (as they should, because that pattern is amazing), so I got to be societally useful and hang out with fun people at the same time.

SnB actually kind of reminds me of NaNoWriMo a little bit. It's this eclectic bunch of people that I would never otherwise come across in my daily life, all hanging out due to one common interest that other people probably find pretty weird. And while I wouldn't hang out with some of them outside the context of NaNo or SnB, it's fun while I'm there, and many of these people whose paths I never would have otherwise crossed turn out to be the type of people I would choose to hang out with. It's nice to know that in this weird post-university life where your friends are no longer in all the same places as you and your activities aren't arranged for you, it's still possible to meet people.

(Knitting update: Finished a sock today, and Pomatomus is well into the foot. My god, there is light at the end of the tunnel!)

Lame but productive!

2006-12-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

Man. I was just talking to my sister on MSN and realised that in the last 24 hours, all I have done is eat, sleep, watch Dawson's Creek, and knit.

That is possibly the lamest weekend in the history of the universe.

Fortunately, I'm going out tonight which may redeem me somewhat, and I have big exciting plans to watch Amazing Race when I get home, which isn't exactly going to win any coolness awards, but at least it's better than Dawson's Creek. And I have gotten a ton of knitting done! By the end of the evening I should have the leg of my second Pomatomus finished (those of you who are knitters are probably familiar with that pattern, those of you who aren't knitters probably don't care, and those of you who actually know me in real life should not google that because it's a present for one of you!), and considering I cast it on yesterday at about this time, I think that's pretty damn good.

Tomorrow is two weeks to Christmas. I don't have too many days off between now and then, but I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe, I can get this ridiculous list actually finished. Here's hoping, anyway.

That said, memo to self: next year, choose something a little less time consuming for mass production than socks. Maybe nice wrist warmers or something. Because this is ridiculous - with the exception of a Gryffindor tie for my Halloween costume, I haven't knit anything that wasn't a Christmas present since August. I want to knit something for myself!

Of course, there are now FIVE babies due in the first six months of next year, so it looks like it'll be all baby stuff, all the time. Five! That's crazy. And I'll just recover from that and maybe have time to knit myself a hat or something and it'll be Christmas all over again. Good thing I like knitting for other people.

Party like it's 1999.

2006-12-09T21:54:00.000-07:00

I am having the girliest evening in the history of the universe. I rented four discs of Dawson's Creek (god bless video stores with excellent tv on dvd sections and nice staff who don't make fun of what I'm renting) and have been knitting for three straight hours. Unfortunately, I totally fucked up the last ten rows of my knitting and just frogged it, but that doesn't really reduce the ridiculously girly evening thus far. The yarn is even pink, for god's sake!

Jamie is out, although he did ask a lot of questions about the show when he was briefly home for dinner, and I suspect that he could easily get sucked into making fun of it. (Which is really all I'm doing. I picked discs at random based on ones I seemed to recall Pacey being all cute in. What? Oh, like you don't like Joshua Jackson. And it was rent three get one free!)

I have to say, though, this show has been somewhat ruined by Katie Holmes's recent insanity. I don't really buy her as the delightfully innocent Joey Potter anymore. Not that she was ever very believeable.

Am I blogging about Dawson's Creek? Jesus. What is this, 1999?

Also went Christmas shopping this afternoon, which was wildly productive but mostly on my mother's behalf. Knitting going well. Now if you excuse me, I have a really bad show to watch.

Do you think it's a sign?

2006-12-08T22:31:00.000-07:00

There's this house a little ways away from us that always has a ton of Christmas lights. They've got candy canes all along their eavestrough, and a Christmas tree of lights on top of their front door, and all sorts of other crap all over their house. And then they have a huge stinking spotlight on a sign that says "Jesus is the Reason for the Season."

Which is all fine and good, but if that's the case, shouldn't you tone down the large quantities of godless lights? Maybe they just want to make sure other people see the sign. Catch their attention with the overuse of lights and then surprise them with the sermon out of nowhere. Because, dontcha know, there's nothing more effective than a lawn sign to make people change their minds. "By god, you're RIGHT! I'm going to return these gifts and throw out the Christmas tree when I get home! Thanks, anonymous sign!"

I kind of feel the same way about bumper stickers. We saw a really awful anti-abortion one at West Edmonton Mall a few weeks ago, and we were speculating as to whether anyone has ever actually had their mind changed by a bumper sticker. Like, what, you're just sitting in traffic, and the overly cutesy rhyme on the car in front of you is going to cause a sudden epiphany? Wow, I had no IDEA abortion was actually murder! Bumper sticker, you've saved my life!

(I only have one bumper sticker on my car, and it's a Barenaked Ladies one that says BNL in the style of the European country stickers. It amuses me, because at least five people have seen my car and asked "ok, I have been trying to figure it out for three kilometers, but I'm stumped - what country is that?" I also have a bumper sticker that says "I'd rather be knitting" but I haven't put it on yet. Mostly because my car is always really dirty. But neither of those are trying to convince other people of anything, they are merely statements about me.)

In other news: Christmas shopping continuing to be under control, with several more presents purchased in the last few days. The second sock of the most recent pair is now onto the gusset decreases, with two more socks to go after this one. The end is sort of, almost, possibly starting to appear in the distance. There is hope for me yet.

Golly, mister, I'm just a girl!

2006-12-07T13:41:00.000-07:00

So yesterday pretty much sucked. It was like the nine circles of hell, except every single circle was a different kind of bureaucratic hell. Doesn’t that sound like fun? It started off ok – I had the day off, so I slept in and puttered around the house for the first part of the day. I finished a sock (woo!) and cast on its mate, and once Jamie got home I talked to him for a while and we figured out our plans for the day. I got dressed (eventually) and we headed out.

First stop was my parents’ house, where we were signing the papers to officially sign the car over to me. (Don’t ask, yes we should have done it ages ago, nobody tell the authorities!) We filled out the little bill of sale, and Dad conspired with Jamie on a few Christmas presents, I drooled over their two new PVRs (like TiVo, but through Shaw, and I'm so jealous I may die), and oh, picked up some mail. (A few things still go to my parents.) The mail featured two letters from Revenue Canada – it’s a pain in the ass to change addresses with them so I haven’t done it yet, since I figure I can still get mail at my parents’ so it’s not a huge deal.

So I open up the two envelopes from Revenue Canada. One of them tells me that they’ve reassessed my taxes, because they reassessed Jamie’s taxes. Fine, we knew that, because he got a reassessment notice last week. Never mind that they’ve reassessed us once already – apparently they just like to change their minds on a whim down there. Oh, by the way, please send us $400.

Gah. Stupid bastards! Thanks for sending it right before Christmas, JERKS. God, I was pissed.

So then I open up the other one, and it’s another reassessment from the GST credit people. I am not exaggerating when I say this is at least the fourth reassessment from these guys on our GST credit eligibility. (I don’t even understand how they decide who gets it or what the hell it is, so don’t ask.) Once we combined our accounts after we got married, they decided we didn’t get a GST credit any more, so we had to send back what we got in 2004. Despite the fact that we didn’t get married until 2005. Stupid and annoying, but whatever. But then they reassess us again, and send me a cheque. But then Jamie gets a notice saying he has to send them a cheque, despite the fact that I got one from them. Does nobody talk to one another down there? Apparently not.

So I’ve been getting smaller GST cheques of late – it used to be around $80 a cheque, now it’s been around $40. Whatever, it’s free money, no complaints. Except now they’ve reassessed us AGAIN, and they want $100 back.

WHAT THE HELL? These stupid government agencies apparently just reassess on a whim, and then decide it will be a delightful Christmas present to send you a bill. Thanks a lot, jerks.

So I stomp around the house for a while, and then we head off to the AMA to deal with the insurance. Whoopee – more money to spend! Just what I was in the mood for. We get to the AMA, and go to the registration people only to be informed that we need insurance first. Fine. We go to the insurance side. After waiting for a while (this is why I keep knitting in my purse), we get directed over to see this guy.

We explain that we want to add a car to Jamie’s existing policy, which already has me on it so I can drive his car. He starts rambling about what we need to do and the accident he was in last week and how he didn’t get collision and regrets it and so we should definitely get collision! At first, he’s just kind of mildly irritating but sort of amusingly stereotypical, so I ignore it. But as we get further into things, I realise that whenever I ask him a question, he answers Jamie.

I mention this. He says it’s Jamie’s policy so it’s a privacy issue, and therefore he can only talk to Jamie about it. Well, that’s great, bucko, but I’m sitting right here so even if you’re talking to Jamie, guess what? I’m going to hear what you say! So you could acknowledge my existence without compromising his privacy. But apparently not, so I suggest that perhaps we can make it a joint account so that, you know, he’ll talk to me. He says that we can just do that over the phone, so I seize the opportunity to deal with this guy less than necessary and go with that.

Next up, he starts to explain how much it’s going to cost. Jamie’s insurance comes up at the end of December (worst timing ever!) and he paid it last week for the next six months. So when he gives us the quote for December to June, I point out that Jamie’s portion of that is in fact already paid.

Yeah. He seemed to think that I just wasn’t understanding the math (terribly complicated that it was, you understand), and got very huffy (to be fair, I was pretty huffy too), and said, incredibly condescendingly, “let me see how I can explain this so you’ll understand.”I sort of stared at him for a minute, and then said, “no, I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I’m not disputing the amount, I am saying we already paid part of it.”So he starts writing down numbers and huffing and puffing and glaring and me, and then he starts to explain it to Jamie. Ok, first of all, thanks, I can in fact add two numbers together and you don’t need to treat me like an idiot. But the fact that he was STILL ignoring me sent me nearly over the edge. Even Jamie was starting to get irritated at this point, and Jamie is hard to irritate. (Unless you’re putting things on him when he’s sleeping.) So he picks up the phone and calls somebody else, and he’s clearly trying to explain that this lunatic woman is being insane and could this person on the phone please tell him how to shut me up.

Except the person on the phone pointed out that yes, we had paid part of it, and no, we didn’t have to pay the entire number that he kept trying to find ways to explain to me, and if he just turned the page over it was right there on the back!Of course, he didn’t apologize or admit that I was right or anything, but whatever. We didn’t have to pay twice; good enough for me.

So Jamie paid (he gets air miles), and we left to head back over to the registration side of things. Where they promptly told me I couldn’t register the car in my name if my name wasn’t on the insurance. Which you’d think the insurance guy would have known. So back over to Mr. Insurance we go. I explained that we’d need to make it joint so I could register the car in my name.

“But why don’t you just register the car in his name?”I stared at him. “Because it’s my car.”“Yeah, but you guys are married! It’s not like he’s going to leave town and not tell you!”I stared at him again. “But it’s my car.”“Well, that’s a lot of work for not really any good reason.”

“Regardless, it’s my car and I want it in my name, and besides, we have different last names so it’s probably smart to have both of them on the insurance.”“Oh, you probably confuse a lot of people with that different last name.”

At this point, I was seriously about to explode. What the fuck business is it of this guy if I didn’t change my name? (Which I didn’t, by the way, for those of you who didn’t follow the saga of Sarah’s name. It is the same as it’s always been and Jamie’s name is nowhere in there. I am surprised by how happy this decision has made me.) Jamie, fortunately, recognized the signs of me about to lose it, and suggested that he could deal with adding me to the insurance. This was a wise move on his part.

So I went back over to the registration side, where I ordered two marriage certificates (yes, we’ve been married nearly 18 months and don’t have marriage certificates; what of it? But this idiot made me realise that it would probably be prudent to have proof that we’re married, and since I was there I figured what the hell.) and got a new license, since the old one had my parents’ address on it. (My new picture looks remarkably like the old one except my hair is pulled back. The nice registration lady told me she thought it was much nicer – she was very friendly and quite appalled at the insurance guy.)

Jamie FINALLY made it over, and was followed very shortly by obnoxious insurance guy. He came over to me and said, “well, now that you’re on the insurance, I guess we’ll need your signature!” And he was just so fucking condescending about it, like, I was playing at being a man or something. Gah! The nice registration lady rolled her eyes at me very sympathetically, and then proceeded to get our registration done in about two minutes.

So now I have to decide if I can be bothered to write a letter suggesting that perhaps this guy should realise that he doesn’t get to tell people whose name they should have insurance in, or imply that cars aren’t for girls to worry about, and that perhaps ignoring the person who owns the fucking car that he’s insuring is not the best policy. Because really, it isn’t 1950, here, it’s 2006. And guess what! Women can own cars and they don’t need to have their husband’s name on the insurance to do so. And sometimes they don’t even have the same name as their husband!Jesus. And after that we had to go to Future Shop AND Best Buy, and I stood in about fifteen lines and dealt with at least another three kinds of idiotic bureaucracy, but at least I got some Christmas presents bought, and Jamie took me out for a pity dinner afterwards because he recognized the signs of impending explosion, and by the end of the night I was mostly recovered.

I’m still pissed about that guy, though. What an idiot. Heaven forfend a girl wants to be able to deal with her own goddamn car. Perish the thought!

Stuff on my Husband

2006-12-06T01:45:00.000-07:00

We live on a very quaint kind of street. It’s a crescent, so there’s pretty much no traffic, and there are a ton of kids (all of whom seem to live either next door or two doors down) who are constantly outside doing very imaginative things. They never seem to be inside playing video games or watching tv, and from our front window we frequently see them zooming by on bikes or rollerblades or scooters. (In the summer, obviously. Currently we are knee deep in snow and nobody is scooting anywhere. There is only trudging.) They have lemonade stands and draw on the sidewalk and are generally quite delightful neighbours, in a very stereotypical kind of way. (Their mother is also quite sarcastic and very friendly, even though we TOTALLY CANNOT REMEMBER HER NAME. Argh.)

Included in our picturesque neighbourhood, of course, is a myriad of friendly animals. There are a pile of bunnies who seem to live in the area (snow hares, which are brown in summer and white in winter), and we see them fairly regularly and their footprints even more frequently. The people two doors down have the cutest puppy in the world (named Belle, I learned at the lemonade stand, and my word, it is cute. And yes, it’s named for the Disney character, and the girls were very impressed when I knew that), and there are also several cats around.

Much though we get mocked for it, Jamie and I are fond of these neighbour kitties, and I bought some treats to give them when they came to visit our stoop. (We have a great stoop.) Two in particular came quite regularly, and would sit on our stoop and eat their treats and let us pet them.

Jamie seemed to find it quite hilarious to wake me up in the mornings by bringing a visiting cat in and putting it on my head. Sometimes my stomach, but usually the head. Now, I was woken for years by my cat batting my nose, so I don’t actually mind being woken up by a cat, but it was always a little alarming.

Unfortunately, I think I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve been up before Jamie, so I could never retaliate.

Until one night, when I came home really late and found a cat on the stoop. Now, usually they’re home safe in bed by the time I get home, but this one particular evening the cat had escaped for a night on the town. He was sitting patiently there, obviously hoping for a treat (having missed dinner, obviously), and as I gave him a treat a thought occurred to me.

So I picked up the cat (very friendly) and took him into the bedroom. Jamie, naturally, was fast asleep, so I put the cat on his head.

Man, it was funny. He took a minute to wake up, and when he did, he was totally confused and couldn’t figure out (a) what was on his head, and (b) why it was there. But the best part was, the next morning, he had no recollection that he’d been woken up with a cat on his head. (Karen loves this story. She gets absolutely hysterical even remembering it now, and I think it was at least six months ago!)
Anyway. The moral of this story is that my husband remembers nothing from when he is half-asleep, which has led to many temptations of amusing things to do to him when he’s asleep. I mostly resist, but tonight, I gave in.

I’m making a pair of socks for someone with the same size feet as him, and he’s been very helpfully letting me try them on him periodically to check for sizing. But he went to bed around 11, and I hit the part where I thought I’d need to decrease for the toe fairly soon. So I went into our room, turned on my lamp, and untucked his foot. I pulled the needles around (I use magic loop, so one big long circular needle) and tugged the sock over his foot.

He didn’t even move. I burst out laughing and he still didn’t wake up, so finally I poked him (I know, I’m a terrible wife, but it was really funny!) and asked him if he knew what I’d done. He still had the sock on his foot and he had no idea. Man. Hilarious. I went back 20 minutes later to check it again and he still didn’t move! That is a sound sleeper.

So now I’m really tempted to start a website called stuffonmyhusband.com and see what I can get away with. Any suggestions?

(He’s going to kill me for this entry.)

(And incidentally, the sock is only 14 rounds away from done! Victory is in sight!)

Strange Christmas

2006-12-05T17:51:00.000-07:00

This Christmas is going to be a little weird. First of all, my sister isn’t getting into town until Boxing Day. So Christmas Day itself will mostly be spent with my in-laws, with a brief foray over to my parents’ house, which is, no kidding, six blocks away from my in-laws’. (That’s really why we got married. Sure, there was love and commitment and all that other crap, but really, it was the convenience of holidays that sold us.) We got the easiest set up of all our siblings – my sister-in-law’s family lives in B.C. (although they rarely spend Christmas with her family), my other sister-in-law’s family lives about an hour outside Edmonton, and my sister’s boyfriend’s family live in Saskatchewan. Given that they live in Vancouver, they win the “least convenient holiday” prize. So this year they’re spending Christmas in Saskatchewan and then coming here afterwards.

So my family Christmas is on the 27th this year, which means we’re having full duplication. Last year, we spent most of Christmas with my family with a stop in at the in-laws, where we opened stockings and presents with all of them and then went back to my parents’ house while they had dinner and everything. This year, though, since neither of us will be at home, my parents are having roast beef on Christmas and we’re doing full blown Christmas all over again on the 27th. Stockings, tree, dinner, turkey, everything.

Fortunately, I really like turkey dinners and presents, so I’m not really complaining about twice the Christmas. This also means three stockings, which is quite excellent – Jamie and I do our own stockings at home (we decided last year that we should really try to establish a few traditions of our own rather than entirely mooching off our various parents), then we get a stocking at each set of parents’ house. Clearly Santa stays busy with us around.

Although we don’t do a lot, it is nice to have a few of our own things going for us at home. We live in a pretty small house, but we have room for a respectable tree (real, of course – fortunately Jamie and I have nearly identical opinions on pretty much all Christmas traditions, which makes spending Christmas with each other’s families much more manageable. Theoretically, anyway – ask me on Boxing Day), and over the weekend Jamie hung up our very tasteful lights, which feature lovely blue LEDs down our banister. We have a nice mantle, even though we don’t have a real fireplace (Jamie got a fake fireplace from his parents for Christmas last year, which sort of cracks me up), and we have enormous white stockings with gold music all over them. It’s all very tasteful. Jamie runs mini lights along the top of the mantle, and they reflect off the mirror and behind my little crystal Disneyland castle. (Shut up, I love it.)

We come home from church on Christmas Eve, at which point it is technically Christmas Day, and we open our presents, which dates back to before we got married. We wanted to have a moment to ourselves at some point on Christmas, and everyone was usually in bed post-church so Jamie would allow presents to be opened since it was technically Christmas by then. Last year, Jamie went to bed post-presents, so I filled his stocking, and then he filled mine in the morning. (He gets up before me. This is also how we did Easter this year – we each got our own hunt. His was ready when he got up, and mine was ready when I got up. It’s actually very convenient.) We got up in the morning and opened stockings, got dressed, and headed over to my parents’, where we had stockings with all six of us. (The stockings last year were a little out of control as all of us bought for each other’s stockings. This year we’re scaling down a little, I think.)

This year will be similar, except I suspect we will miss stockings over at my in-laws, because my niece and nephew will be there and I don’t think they’ll want to wait. But there will be stockings there for us, and then we’ll have breakfast with them (I have no idea what they have for breakfast on Christmas, actually – my family does cinnamon buns and fresh squeezed orange juice) and then presents, which will take a million years because there are 10 of us and they go crazy for presents in that family, and then we’ll go see my parents (no presents, though – saving those for the 27th), and then head back for dinner.

It’ll be strange, not being with my parents all day and not even seeing my sister. Not to mention the rather obvious lack of cat. Last year, I bought this stupid wind-up monkey for my dad’s stocking. It played the cymbals as it marched along, and Lucy LOVED it. She was blind and kind of decrepit, and we hadn’t seen her play with anything in months, probably even years, but she just latched onto this silly little monkey and batted it around for ages. We were all very aware that we were lucky she was alive after her near miss the previous Christmas, and watching her swat that monkey was probably the highlight of our Christmas. We won’t have to keep her away from the tree, or make sure she doesn’t try to eat the presents, or put her inside the boxes that the presents come in. I can’t put fifteen bows on her head and try to tie ribbon to her tail. It’ll be strange and sad and lonely, but we’ll survive.

At least my in-laws have a cat. Maybe she’ll sit still for the ribbon tying.

When it was bad it was horrid.

2006-12-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

So the holidailies prompt for today is to write about Christmas music. Given that I write about Christmas music every year anyway, I figured I’d actually follow the prompt.

Ever since I moved to the library closer to my house, I rarely use my iPod in the car on the way to work. Before, I had a 15-20 minute drive to work, so it was well worth hauling out my iPod and transmitter thingy and hooking it up. But now, it’s usually about five minutes in the car and I’m at work, so by the time I hook up the iPod and then disconnect it, I’m spending more time fiddling with it than I am actually listening to it. If I’m in a particularly crabby mood, I’ll make the effort, but generally I just listen to the radio for those few minutes.

I was flipping stations this morning (I hate radio commercials), and I discovered that one of the stations has switched over to holiday music. (Miraculously, they actually waited until December to do this, which these days, is leaving it remarkably late. I think today might have been the first day of it, actually, which means it’s only three weeks of Christmas music! Given that I’ve heard people in other places say their stations have been in holiday mode for several weeks already, I should make a point of appreciating the station for actually waiting until you could legitimately claim it’s the holiday season.)

Christmas music to me is very firmly divided. When it is good, it is very very good, and when it is bad it is horrid. I hate bad Christmas music with a fury that is not worth the amount of effort it requires to uphold. Stuff like Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer is bad enough – those goofy kind of dorky songs get on my nerves, but not in a blinding rage kind of way. But then you have the ones like that god damn Cat Carol about the fucking cat who DIES on CHRISTMAS and sure, it’s nice that he saved his little mouse friend but hi, my cat almost died on Christmas two years ago (and did die in February, and I miss her and am kind of depressed about Christmas this year but that’s another entry), so let’s avoid the horrible maudlin songs about dead cats, please. There’s also this stupid song about a river, and how she wishes she were a river, although I’m not clear on why because I change the station as soon as I hear it. I’m really not sure what it has to do with Christmas, either, but I only hear it on the holiday station.

So there’s the bad Christmas music, and there is a lot of it, and unfortunately it’s mostly what gets played in malls and such, I think because they’re trying to minimize the Jesus content and focus on the Santa side of things. Which is really a shame, because the Jesus music is clearly superior. I say that as a totally non-religious agnostic who doesn’t really care about the whole “true meaning of Christmas” crap, because in my house Christmas is about hanging out with your family and eating a lot of turkey and wearing Christmas cracker hats even though Dad bitches about it every year. (I do go to church on Christmas Eve, but that’s only because of Jamie, and I really only go because I like the midnight candlelight service with all the carols, because I get to sing descant parts.) Anyway, despite the complete lack of religion in my family’s holiday celebrations, we are all (with the exception of my Grinchy dad who only pretends not to like it) big Christmas music fans, and we all like the Jesusy stuff best. And it’s always the obscure stuff that my mother and I like best, too. My favourite Christmas carol? Jesus Christ the Apple Tree. I got a great blank look from someone on that last week, but it’s a glorious song that also has the major advantage of not being overplayed, a rarity with Christmas music these days. I’m also very fond of Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day. That one reminds me of The Children of Green Knowe, one of my favourite books as a kid that got turned into a highly excellent BBC mini series. (As did many of my favourite childhood books.)

This year is a bit of an unusual one for me because I’m not in any sort of musical group. This is probably the first time in, well, ever, that I haven’t had any Christmas concerts. Even my playschool used to have them when I was little, so I’ve been in Christmas concerts from age three or so. So for the first time that I can remember, I haven’t been singing or playing or practicing Christmas music for three months already. It’s kind of nice not to be sick of it already, but I do miss it, particularly singing it. Fortunately, there’s the Christmas Bureau singalong on the 22nd, where people from choirs all over Edmonton come and rehearse for an hour and then have a live broadcast to radio in the Winspear, and people come and watch and give donations to the Christmas Bureau. Even though I’m not in a choir anymore I tag along, and try to bring friends. (I figure I’m an alum of various choirs, and my husband conducts one so I get all the information.) It’s great, because it’s all standards since there isn’t any rehearsal time. Very festive without weeks of endless rehearsals – my kind of concert!

Anyway, this morning’s commute featured two Christmas songs: It’s Christmastime by the Barenaked Ladies (my all time favourite band, and although their God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen with Sarah McLachlan is my favourite of their Christmas music, this one is good too), and The Christmas Song by Nat King Cole. I conveniently got out of the car just as something cheesey was starting up. Well timed commute indeed.

Can you even call it a commute when it’s only five minutes? Probably not. (And if you’re wondering why I drive instead of walking, it’s so I can go home for lunch, which rules.)

Sock update: Past the heel on the sock I started on Saturday night, and well into the gusset decreases. Given that I actually have a weekday off this week (and the whole weekend! It’s a Christmas miracle!), I’m optimistic about the speed with which I will finish it. However, I’m still expecting karma to kick my ass, although I’m hoping the enormous yarn tangle yesterday was my comeuppance. (If it wasn’t, though, the likely comeuppance is running out of yarn, since I didn’t get every last yard untangled. Gah.)

Like Summer Camp in November

2006-12-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

The problem with updating daily is that my knitting accomplishments sound much less impressive. "Since my last update, I've knit FIVE PAIRS OF SOCKS AND TWO SWEATERS!" is very impressive, even if it is only because it's been two and a half months since the last update. But since it's only been about 28 hours since my last update, the fact that I knit half a sock still seems quite impressive to me. Especially since I went to an eight hour party last night. (Mind you, I am so cool that I knit at the party. But I was running the karaoke machine, which is kind of boring, so knitting passed the time.)

There was also a major yarn tangle emergency that took up a large part of my afternoon. I was reduced to recruiting Jamie to help - he HATES untangling yarn but I pointed out that my knitting meant he had to buy far fewer presents this year so he stopped complaining.

Great party, though! The Thank God It's Over Party is always what makes me think it's actually Christmas. Up until then, my brain is in NaNo mode, so this is the event that switches me over into the holiday spirit. Fortunately, it's a good party, so it's worth waiting for to start feeling festive.

I was feeling plenty festive last night, let me tell you. There was a hearty consuming of celebratory alcohol. (Mostly pink alcohol, which seemed appropriate given that there was a lengthy scene in my novel featuring pink alcohol.) My excerpt was a big hit, which is always satisfying - I like having to pause for laughter.

And now it is done for another year. It's always such a weird feeling - I've known some of these people for five years now, but with very few exceptions, I only have contact with them for about two months of the year. When things are all done and we all go our separate ways, it is exactly and hilariously like the end of summer camp. Everyone is secretly sort of glad to be going back to their regular lives, but there's all this hugging and yelling "see you next year!" and promising to keep in touch and exchanging email addresses and stuff. (Although it was only in my last year of summer camp that we did that, and it was a very newfangled thing. I still shared my mother's email address because she got one through the university!) And then we all go home and bore our families with stories about things that only we find hilarious, and conveniently forget all the very shitty parts of the whole experience (whether it is uncomfortable camp beds or horrible writer's block) and complain about how boring life is now that it's over even though all we wanted when we were there was for it to be over. There's no pleasing us.

Someone on one of the forums summed up the sentiment quite well: Thank god THAT'S over...is it October yet? Although, while I am sad to see another November come and go, I am happy to have my time back. I spent the entire afternoon today knitting and watching TV on DVD, and it was quite glorious.

3.5 socks and one lace scarf to go, 22 days to Christmas. Will I make it? Stay tuned.

Best Christmas Shopping Ever!

2006-12-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

I have this love hate relationship with Christmas shopping. I don't mind shopping, and I like buying presents for people, and I like to think I'm pretty decent at it. But I hate the crowds, and finding a stupid parking spot (it is definitely one of those times when it's good to have a teeny little car, though - I fit in a lot of spots other people wouldn't.), and listening to bad mall Christmas music.

Fortunately, working a lot of Saturdays means I get weekdays off fairly regularly, so for the past few years I've been able to do my Christmas shopping in the middle of the day on, like, a Tuesday, so it's not so bad. This year, a lot of my presents are being knit (more on that in a minute), so my list was quite manageable.

And yesterday was officially the best Christmas shopping ever.

Last year, my sister moved to Vancouver, which meant our usual Christmas shopping together habits had to change. Which was too bad, because much though my sister and I frequently bicker about stupid crap, we actually get along very well when we go Christmas shopping, because we're shopping for mostly the same people and have similar taste in these things. Plus we like the same kinds of Christmas music and can make fun of the stupid stuff. There was one year when we were driving around on Christmas Eve (I don't remember why it was so last minute) and CBC was playing this lengthy Christmas story on the radio and we stayed in the car an extra 15 minutes or so to listen to it.

Anyway, this is the second Christmas that she's lived elsewhere, so we had to coordinate a little more to get things organized. She and her boyfriend aren't coming until Boxing Day, so Christmas with my family is on the 27th this year. Last year, I did a lot of the shopping after making a list with her (the four of us tend to just go in on all my parents' presents - much easier that way and we can get nicer stuff), since there's no PST here and she'd just have to haul all the presents here anyway.

This year, we were even more organized, and had most of our list under control by earlier this week. So last night we met up online and went on a virtual shopping spree. It was awesome! We price compared between various places, juggled for availability, and had more than half our Christmas shopping done without even getting up out of our chairs. Woo! So now I just have to go to two places for in-store pickups (saves shipping that way), and wait for the Amazon and Chapters orders to arrive. It was the most civilised Christmas shopping ever. I bought fifteen presents!

In other present but not shopping news, I have finished two socks in the last 18 hours! This is so ridiculously satisfying I'm a little embarrassed. But now my finish-by-Christmas list is suddenly FOUR socks, and that just seems so much more manageable. Here's hoping.

And with that, I must away to the NaNoWriMo Thank GOD it's Over party, sure to be a good time featuring lots of drinking, if I have my way.

There's that deadline whooshing again

2006-12-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

It’s always very tempting to just copy and paste my first Holidailies entry every year. I never say anything new, because let’s face it, this is my fifth year of it (!) and there are only so many ways to introduce yourself in such a fashion that might make someone want to read your blog.

These days, Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity (a name I took from Buffy and am very fond of) is less of a general interest blog (not that it was ever very interesting) and more of a knitting blog. But I’m going to attempt to keep things a little more broad through December so as to appeal to a wider audience. Or something. There will still be knitting content, don’t worry, but since I haven’t knit anything except a Christmas present in about four months, there’s not that much knitting to talk about. (After Christmas, however, will be a picture-palooza.)

I have this weird obsession with arbitrary goals. My self-motivation is absolutely atrocious about 9/10ths of the time, but when it comes to externally imposed deadlines, I’m golden. Of course, they have to be meaningless externally imposed deadlines – I’m less good when things are actually important.

Take, for example, NaNoWriMo, which I just won for the fifth straight year. Getting to 50,000 is no longer even much of a challenge. (Excuse me as I duck the flying tomatoes.) But I like the deadline, artificial though it is, and it’s the only time of year I get a damn thing written.

Holidailies is the same way. Despite my good intentions, this blog languishes a bit during the year, but put me on a portal and suddenly I’m obsessed. My holiday knitting has been much the same way – I’m knitting with a level of obsessiveness not usually seen in my general vicinity.

So what I need is some sort of house cleaning, getting in shape, life organizing contest with an arbitrary deadline and a completely meaningless competition. I’m not sure what form it would take, but maybe there could be a portal involved somehow. That’s pretty much the only way I’m anticipating anything getting done.

Although I have knit Christmas presents before, this year marks a rather extreme version of the holiday knitting list. This year marked the tipping point in my knitting, where I went from an enthusiastic hobbyist to a compulsive maniac (uh, that sounds worse than it is. Although my husband probably wouldn’t argue with that assessment), and so I’ve knit more this year than in all previous years combined.

This, of course, led to slightly ridiculous expectations of my output, and as a result my list of things to knit for Christmas is a little out of control. Ever since learning to make socks during the Knitting Olympics back in February (which, hey, another example of a totally arbitrary deadline that allowed me to accomplish something I otherwise never would have done!), I have become totally sock obsessed. To the point where my husband is starting to mutter things about my sock yarn stash. (I try to show him pictures of other people’s far more impressive stashes, but that doesn’t seem to help.)

Anyway, it seemed only natural that I should knit socks for many of my nearest and dearest this year. (Note I am not saying all, as I don’t want to offend any nearest and dearest who might not be getting socks.) By the time I came up with a list, there were eight pairs on the plan. That’s 16 socks. Never mind the two sweaters and a lace scarf I had vague intentions for. Did I mention that I made this list in July? I figured I had tons of time.

Well, naturally, other knitting interfered here and there, and I finished a couple of other pairs of socks even while knowing about this hovering cloud of sock doom. There were also a few baby blankets that needed knitting (god, don’t even ask me about all the pregnant people I know right now), and between one thing and another I didn’t really start Christmas knitting until the end of August.

Fine. No problem. That’s still four months! Two pairs of socks a month, plus a couple of sweaters and a scarf (did I mention lace?) thrown in there somewhere, no problem. You know how it is – summer just isn’t prime knitting time. Still, I’d finished a couple of pairs of socks (including the previously featured on this blog Gryffindor socks, one of my favourite knitted items. I’m going to make a pair for myself after Christmas since my sister was the lucky recipient of the first pair.) and those two baby blankets, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t knitting at all, right?

Amazingly, the two sweaters were done quite quickly, and it was only October! Two and a half months to go! Two pairs of socks already finished! No problem. But I kind of forgot about the fact that NaNoWriMo doesn’t just take over my life in November, but also pretty much poaches October. I finished about three socks in October. Ugh. November was equally bad – finished another three socks or so.

So now it’s December, and I still have five socks to knit before Christmas and another one to finish by shortly after Christmas. And yet, here I am, updating my blog every day.

Good thing I thrive on deadlines, right? If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my chair. Knitting. I don’t need to sleep, right?

…Right?

(The title of this post, by the way, comes from one of my all time favourite quotes. It's Douglas Adams. "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.")

Tempting fate.

2006-11-13T02:30:00.000-07:00

In a weird cosmic miracle that I was really not expecting (and hesitate to write about for fear of jinxing both), my knitting and my novel are both going very well today.

This was not the case yesterday. Or two days ago. Or really, at any point this month before today. The first week of November, my novel was kicking my ass but my knitting was pretty much non existent. I got a little bit done here and there on one sock but it was not going well. I hated the sock I was making and it was taking FOREVER. But my word count was going really well, so I was surviving. But then I started panicking about the knitting situation a little bit. I finished the annoying pair, and that helped somewhat. Now I've got 3 and a half of my eight pairs done and ready to go. Fine. So I started to cast on another pair, and it sucked. Sucked hard. I'm doing something a little weird with this pair, but I really needed it to work out because this is going to be my absolute favourite pair when it's done. (It is so cool that even though I'm sure the eventual owner does not read this blog, I'm not going to risk it because most of the coolness is in the surprise.) I frogged it at least four times and had a huge pile of frogged yarn sitting next to my chair. Argh! But whatever, I'll ignore the knitting and work on the novel.

Then, around Wednesday, I hit an enormous block. Huge, gigantic blocky thing. My novel was sucking. I didn't care. My knitting was sucking. I did care about that. (At this point, I wasn't worried about hitting the 50K, because I was already at about 41K, but I'd lost all motivation to write. However, I was getting very concerned about the highly impending Christmas and the long list of things still to knit!) So I ditched the novel and cast on a Jaywalker.

I love that pattern. It is so fast once you get going on it, and by Friday night I had a big chunk of it done. I didn't write a word on Friday, but I got a lot knit!

Yesterday rolled around, and we had a write-in. Great! Write-ins are usually super productive for me. Neville and I (Neville is my laptop. Have I mentioned that before? Poor beloved Giles died a tragic death a few months ago. I'm not quite over it yet and I still miss him.) So I get to SUB where everyone is meeting, and settle into one of their surprisingly comfy chairs, and I proceed to have the least productive write-in EVER. Seriously. EVER. There came a point in the day when Patrick and I actually went and rode up the elevator to see if RATT was open since we figured alcohol might help with the writer's block. It SUCKED.

But I did get some knitting done! Clearly there was some kind of cosmic balance at play here.

Until today! I got home from the waterpark last night (Ben and Jana were in town so we went to the waterpark, which was very fun although there are too many damn stairs in that place!), and had a PM waiting for me from Patrick, who basically bribed me with booze to get writing again. (Which was very kind of him. Since we're technically competing, it's in his best interest for me to be sucking, but he took pity on me because he is nicer than I am.) So today, once Ben and Jana dragged themselves away from Sims (shortly after SimBen and SimJana had SimTwins) and went bak to Calgary, I sat down and started writing.

And lo and behold, I got over the block. Weirdly, it was 900 words of bra shopping that got me over it, but hey, whatever works, right? And then, suddenly, I kept going, and before I knew it I'd written 4500 words and was less than 2000 from 50K. So I wrote like the dickens for a few more word wars, and just like that, there was 50K. It wasn't even painful getting there! (Well, today. Yesterday and the few days before it were definitely painful.)

So I figured my knitting was totally screwed, and I did have another false start on this super neat sock that required yet more frogging. But I took a deep breath, cast on AGAIN, and just kept on going. And now, it's done! Well, the hard part, not the sock itself. But I got the weird section done and now it's just straight stockinette and suddenly, this list doesn't seem so impossible.

Now that I've tempted the fates I'm going to go back up my novel and double check all my knitting. I'm sure my cosmic ass-kicking is impending. You'd think I'd learn my lesson from my novel, given that the first line of it is "I've heard of tempting fate, but this is ridiculous."

Apparently I'm a slow learner.

Report from the frantic noveling front

2006-11-07T00:49:00.000-07:00

So it’s NaNoWriMo season once again, and I’m tearing myself away from my novel for a few minutes to write here instead. This year, for the first time, I’m writing in first person, and as a result I’ve found myself much more attached to my main character than usual. Normally I just get the hots for the main guy, but I don’t really have one yet. Well, I guess I do, but she just dumped him because my GOD, he was a jerk. Man. Total dink. I wrote a scene that featured a random guy in a bar and he was all cute and charming and now I sort of want him to come back. But that wouldn’t really fit with where things are going, so he will just have to be a glorious moment of cuteness among the angst.

It’s interesting, actually, because my actual plot that I had in mind has only just started. Considering I’m now more than 37,000 words in (yes, I know it’s the 6th, yes, I’m insane, but I’m not even first in Edmonton! Clearly I’ve created a monster around here), you’d think I’d be a bit more concerned about getting into the actual meat of things, but I seem to have come to terms with the fact that this might actually be a full length novel. Last year, I had a really solid structure, and everything was totally well planned out in advance. 24 hours, one hour per chapter, done. It was great. I finished in about 65,000 words, and for the first time, I actually finished a damn story. It wasn’t bad, either.

Anyway, having finished one (and I intentionally gave it that really rigid structure for the express purpose of actually finishing the freaking thing), it doesn’t seem so impossible now, so I’ll keep trucking along and hope to get through the rest of the story. We’ll see if it goes where I expect it to – will she hook up with the guy who’s only been mentioned in passing in a letter from ten years ago? We’ll see.

MLing this year is going really well so far. I recruited Karen to be my co-ML, which has been excellent since I hang out with her all the time anyway. Edmonton is officially insane, though. We had about 60 people at our kick-off and we’ve been getting 25-30 people at our write-ins! What the hell? Where are all these people coming from? It is neat to see people from previous years, though. It’s like a reunion!

Knitting-wise, things are not quite as rosy. I got three socks finished in Socktoberfest. Yeah. Well, four, I suppose, but still. Not nearly as many as I’d hoped. I’m adjusting my plans slightly, so please don’t be offended if you get one sock and an IOU for Christmas. I’m going to try to get the out of towner socks done first, so if you live here you might have to wait a few weeks after Christmas to get your sock’s friend. But it just extends the holiday season! Right?

…right?

So, life ticks along. The weather sucks. It’s cold and snowy and windy and bleah. For someone who knits as much as I do, you’d think I’d be a little better prepared for these things, but stuff I’ve made myself is in pretty short supply. All that glorious Malabrigo is TAUNTING me but I have held out so far and stuck to the Christmas knitting. I may freeze to death, but dammit, I will have Christmas presents!

There. This is six hundred words that could have gone in my novel, and now I’ve probably fallen behind Patrick (three freaking people challenged me to one-on-one duels this year, and two of them are right on my tail or slightly ahead of me, so it’s all very exciting and dramatic), but at least my blog isn’t looking so sad. Sorry, blog. (And what the hell, Microsoft? Blog is a word! Get with the freaking times!)

I sock.

2006-10-07T21:13:00.000-06:00

As I may or may not have mentioned, it's Socktoberfest! As created by Lolly, it's a whole month where knitters knit socks and think about socks and talk about socks. You know, like the rest of the year but with logos! And prizes! This, of course, works out great for me because, hi, ridiculous list of socks to knit for Christmas which is OH MY GOD only 12 weeks and two days away ACK!

Anyway, the downside here is that all these socks are Christmas presents and I still don't really want to post pictures of them here because all you nosey friends will see. Yes, I'm talking about you. (Incidentally, if this entry is really disjointed it's because I'm watching the hockey and writing this in commercial breaks, and the 5-on-3 is stressing me out. Didn't hockey just end? My blood pressure hasn't recovered yet.)

So despite the sock action that is happening over here (pay no attention to that pile of frogged yarn on the arm of my chair), no pictures of new things today. Sorry. But there is a picture of my first pair! I might try to figure out a stealthy way to post the other ones at a later date. But I will answer Lolly's sock questionnaire! I know, it's thrilling. Look, it's either socks or hockey, and the hockey is pissing me off so socks it is!

When did you start making socks?

As very poorly documented on this site, it was during the Knitting Olympics. And man, it was a fast moving obsession. I spent years wishing I could knit socks. Seriously. In grade 10 or so, a friend's mum made me a pair of socks and I LOVED them. Although my mother always knit me sweaters and various other fabulous things as a kid, she didn't knit socks. These socks were the coolest, and ever sicne then I wanted to learn how to knit socks. And now I have! It only took...oh, ten years or so.

Did you teach yourself or were you taught by a friend or relative? or in a class?

For the most part, I taught myself. I got some very wise advice to just blindly follow the pattern and trust that it would work out, and I did and it totally did. So now I pass that advice on to other people who are afraid of socks. Don't try to understand it ahead of time. Just do what it tells you and magically a sock will appear!

What was your first pair? How have they "held up" over time?

This is my first pair!

Kroy Krazy Stripes yarn. I don't really wear them because they're a little bit big. I've since discovered that I knit loosely (no comments from the peanut gallery about me being loose, thank you) so I started using smaller needles. I think these were made on size 3 DPNs. Bryspun Flex, which I like as DPNs go but never use any more.

What would you have done differently?

Smaller needles, for sure. And I'd have made them about four years sooner, because they were not hard at all and I'm annoyed that I wasted all that potential sock knitting time.

What yarns have you particularly enjoyed?

I'm using some Socks that Rock in Ruby Slippers right now, and it both looks and feels great. My favourite, though, has to be the awesome Sunshine Yarns Gryffindor Socks.

Do you like to crochet your socks? or knit them on DPNs, 2 circulars, or using the Magic Loop method?

I now exclusively knit magic loop for socks. I love it and am WAY faster and more coordinated with it than with DPNs. I haven't tried two circs but frankly, can't be bothered. I have two Addi Turbos, in size 0 and 1, 40 inches. Mostly these days I use the Knit Picks circulars, sizes 0, 1, and occasionally 2, in 32 inches. I love them although they make my hands a little bit itchy. They are so pointy, though! I'm using my Addis right now (because having three pairs on the needles means a needle shortage) and I am really noticing how blunt they are. I can't crochet a straight line so we won't even go there.

Which kind of heel do you prefer? (flap? or short-row?)

I've only made heel flaps, toe-down. I'm trying to branch out my sock knitting a little bit with, you know, actual patterns and stuff. But I do like the toe down construction quite a lot and toe-up kind of baffles me. I know, I know, I should take my own advice and just follow the pattern and see what happens. But I hate to mess with a good thing!

How many pairs have you made?

Right now on the needles are pairs nine, ten, and eleven. Pair nine is almost finished the gusset decreases on sock number 2. Pair ten is about 7 rows away from the heel flap on the first sock. And pair 11 is just getting its first cuff right now after aforementioned frogging.

Eight completed pairs in eight months. Pretty good! And I'm aiming for another seven in the next three months. Erk. The good news is, there are no babies due until at least April of next year, and I have almost nothing but sweaters left to knit for Christmas. It's all socks, all the time! How fitting for Socktoberfest.

It's a good thing I took up knitting...

2006-09-28T01:56:00.000-06:00

...because holy CRAP have I started watching a lot of tv. Fortunately, knitting means that I don't really feel guilty when I watch tv for hours on end, because hey! I'm being productive at the same time! Especially right now, when I have a metric crap-ton of knitting to get done, I am quite happy to watch tv at length.

Now, I should clarify. It's not like I used to be this anti-tv zealot or anything. I've always watched a fair amount, but generally it was mostly tv on DVD or reruns or whatever. But now I watch all this stuff that's actually on the air! Fortunately, thanks to our handy dandy Windows Media Centre (aka we don't have Tivo yet in Canada, bastards), I can at least record stuff and zip through commercials.

But seriously, here's my list of stuff I watch: Sundays, Amazing Race, Simpsons, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Extreme Home Makeover. Tuesdays, Dancing with the Stars, and soon to be Veronica Mars. (If we can figure it out. Fucking Canadian networks! Pick up the damn show!) Wednesday, more Dancing with the Stars. Thursday, ER, (those bastards sucked me back in! I was almost out!) Survivor (I know, I'm so ashamed), and CSI (who also sucked me back in).

That's like, ten shows! That's insane.

Anyway, enough about my bad tv habits. The good news is that the combination of chaperoning band camp, which involves a lot of sitting around, and catching up on all the tv that I missed while at band camp, meant that I finished my first pair of holiday socks today. Woo hoo! And now I'm down to the far more managable number of seven pairs to make. One sock is about two inches away from the toe, another is about two inches into the leg. Slow but steady. I can definitely finish the almost-done sock this weekend, and hopefully make a good start on its mate. The just-started sock is going much faster than I expected, which is a pleasant surprise. (It's harder than my usual sock.) I'm going to cast on a stockinette sock (I have several pairs to make) so I have something mindless for the movies and such. I have an elaborate system involving having several socks on the needles depending on who I'm going to be seeing while I'm knitting. Fortunately, several pairs are for out of town people. (Oooh, a clue! My out of town friends can now all get excited, until they realise that I have, like, five in town friends these days and everyone else has abandoned me.)

Anyway, this first pair is looking good and given that I cast them on during the flight home from Britain on JULY FREAKING SECOND I'm very happy to have them done. (In my defense, I've finished two pairs of other socks, two sweaters, and two baby blankets since then.)

The marathon continues. Is my holiday knitting list totally unrealistic? Who knows. Stay tuned to find out.

The Gryffindor Socks go to Britain

2006-09-22T15:50:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned lo those many months ago, I did a series of pictures with my Gryffindor socks while I was in Britain. My socks got quite a thorough cultural tour of London, but didn't see much of anywhere else because I was frantically working on the baby blanket until the last week or so of the trip. (There were two reasons I stopped. One, my parents left and we started taking the train instead of the van they rented, and the blanket was very cumbersome for train trips, and two, I brought the wrong ball of yarn for the last section of the blanket.) So, with apologies for the delay, I present to you the Gryffindor Socks' Cultural Tour of Britain! You can click on the photos for larger versions.

Their first appearance was in Edinburgh. I'd had them with me for the previous few days in York, but Jamie was too busy taking pictures of the train museum to take any of the sock. However, a lot of sock got knit in the train museum, as I do not care about trains three hours worth. I met several nice people who came to ask me what I was knitting, though.

Anyway, Edinburgh was the first day that I remembered that I wanted to do this, so the sock got to admire the cannon at Edinburgh Castle, which was a super cool place. Excellent audio guide, which I am enjoying in this picture.

Also in Edinburgh was the excellent yarn department at John Lewis. It was quite a struggle to find any yarn - all these yarn stores in the phone book didn't exist any more! Very traumatic. An emergency post to the knitty boards at an internet cafe saved me at the last minute, and here I am perusing the yarn. The sock is in my purse so it doesn't get jealous.

When we got back to England, we headed for London for several days. One of our first stops was Kings Cross Station. I can't BELIEVE I don't have my freaking Gryffindor socks in this picture! But I will post it anyway, as it is tangentially related and also cool.

The next day, the sock got to go on an exciting tube ride! I look like a moron in this picture. I think it was almost our stop and Jamie wasn't taking the picture because he wanted to wait for a tube sign in the background, which clearly (a) didn't work, and (b) didn't matter anyway. But I did do quite a lot of knitting as we rode around town on the tube.

Later that day, the sock had an exciting trip to Big Ben. Complete with a policeman with a proper hat on! Excellent. (I'm sure he wondered what the hell we were doing.) This is another bad picture of me. Most of the non-sock ones look fine. For some reason, taking a picture of myself with a sock makes me look stupid.

Conveniently nearby to Big Ben, of course, is Westminster Abbey. It is huge and beautiful. We went to an Evensong service there, which was really cool. You can barely see the sock because this is about three photos stitched together. It gives you a great sense of the scale, though.

Then we took the Tube home again. The sock wanted to stop at the Tube sign, as it is such a nice complement to its colours.

What you should really note about these pictures is how incredibly busy everywhere we went would have been. I'm sure there are now hundreds, if not thousands, of Londoners and tourists who are wondering why the hell I was taking all these pictures of socks. (I wonder who they thought was weirder? Me, for being in them, or Jamie for taking them?)

The next day, we went to the Tower of London, which was freaking expensive. The audio guide was also sub-par. Still, it was cool. I didn't take any pictures with the sock inside the tower. I think I felt a little weird being all "here is the place were people were executed, and here is my sock." Didn't stop me with the cannons, I realise.

Anyway, there was this statue across the street that made an excellent sock holder. I have no idea who he is, which is rather embarrassing, but he looks great with the sock!

Then we went along the water to the Tower Bridge. Nice, isn't it?

Apparently a lot of people think it's London Bridge, but it isn't. That's down the other end of the river.

Now, you may be noticing at this point that the sock is almost done. You are not wrong. Which is why the rest of the pictures feature the second sock, because I finished the first one on the train home after we went to the Tower. (We stayed about an hour out of London, which meant lots of knitting time!)

You can't really see it in the picture, but here's me and the second sock at the Globe.

And, finally, here is the second sock at the lesser known side of St. Paul's Cathedral. They were unfortunately doing construction over by its famous dome, so it wasn't as impressive looking as usual. Still, this part of it is super cool. We didn't go inside because we were too cheap. (I know, lame. But we'd spent a fortune on getting into large old churches at that point, and there's only so many you can take!)

Someone was getting ordained that day, so the bells were ringing for several hours. Which was supremely cool - felt very authentic. Gorgeous bells, too.

So after their whirlwind adventures in Britain, the socks probably found coming back to Edmonton pretty dull. But once they finally got finished, they were sent to live in Vancouver with my sister. They turned out really well, and once I finish my holiday knitting I have enough yarn for a pair for myself. Mmm, nerdy. They look like they're two different sizes in this picture, but my sister is just standing funny.

Here they are! The world-travelled Gryffindor socks, on their owner's feet. This is, of course, Sunshine Yarn's famous Gryffindor yarn, nearly impossible to get. I love it! Thanks, Dani. It's just straight stockinette with a bit of ribbing, knit top down with a heel flap on size 0s for the legs, and size 1s for the foot. Addi turbos, magic loop. These were my first magic loop socks and I'll never go back.

The State of the Monkey Pants

2006-09-21T17:51:00.000-06:00

I'm feeling both guilty and conflicted about my blog at the moment. Guilty, because holy crap, am I bad at updating. I know that in this day and age you're all probably reading through bloglines so it's not like you're checking every day and weeping that I haven't updated, but...still. (Anyway, not many of you are reading through bloglines because I'm subscribed to my own feed (how lame am I? So lame.) and there aren't that many of you.)

And I'm conflicted, because I don't really know what this blog is going to be. The problem I'm having, you see, is that while I'm knitting up a storm at the moment and actually have several FOs right now (finished objects for all of you who don't care about knitting and are just here for the Nathan Fillion pictures, of which I am unfortunately all out. Sorry.), but all of them are Christmas presents for people that I'm fairly sure read my blog. So I don't really want to post pictures of them and then have the surprise ruined for all my delightful friends. (Or possibly just some of them, depending on how much I get done.) I don't have to say who they're for, I realise, but still. Some of the suspense will be gone. What do the rest of you knittyblog people do when you're knitting gifts? Post pictures anyway? Concoct long and elaborate lies about who they're for? Make sure none of your friends know where your blog is? That one won't work because the cat's already out of the bag. (I'm not actually all that convinced that many people I don't know in real life read this thing any more, because of the aforementioned total lack of updates.)

So. Here's what I'm thinking right now. Socktoberfest is in October, and I'll be knitting a pile of Christmas socks. I'm not going to post pictures here, but I will post about the general sock knitting. I'm creating a new flickr account just for holiday knitting, and I am going to TRUST THAT MY FRIENDS WHO MIGHT RECEIVE A KNITTED GIFT FROM ME WILL NOT LOOK AT IT. That way, if you do, you're only ruining it for yourselves. That's right. Looking at the pictures will only RUIN CHRISTMAS. If you want that on your head, not my problem. Just in case you peek, I won't put names of recepients up even there, so you can snoop and guess what might be for you. (And if I find out you peeked, the answer might be NOTHING.)

November, of course, is National Novel Writing Month, and we all know my updates go to hell around then anyway. I'm hoping to actually write more about the whole process this year, because I think it's kind of hilariously insane and would probably be fun to look back on. For me, anyway. The rest of you might be bored stiff.

I haven't decided about Holidailies yet. We'll see how my Christmas knitting is looking. Come the New Year, I should be able to go back to more frequent blogging. (Do you like how I said go BACK to as if I had ever been regularly blogging? I thought that was a nice piece of delusion on my part.) But I am hoping to be a little more frequent. It's not like life is suddenly so exciting that I'm going to have an action-packed blog full of thrills and incredible knitting. But I can probably run to a little more than this. I do actually have some pictures of various knitted things that I have already given, so those will be along shortly. Featuring my sister's most excellent Gryffindor socks!

There you go. There's the predictions for the future of Monkey Pants and Hippo Dignity. Because dammit, I love my blog name too much to abandon it.

September already? Good grief.

2006-09-07T16:18:00.000-06:00

I can't freaking believe it's September already. Where has my life gone? I don't know.

Anyway, it's September, which means several things around here. Firstly, Jamie is back at work which means he's never home and I actually have to cook and stuff. Curses. Still, I made a very tasty macaroni and cheese last night, and tonight we're having roast chicken and roast potatoes. And we're having guests! Sort of. I suppose technically, it isn't a guest, because she lives downstairs. That's right! Erin, my former hooligan roommate, is now living in our basement suite. This is super fabulous in my opinion, possibly less so in Jamie's since there is an excess of giggling. But he's always out anyway. (She's out a lot too, but that just gives me nice peaceful knitting time during the day on my days off.)

Let's see, what else. I met Nathan Fillion! That was pretty freaking cool. And I have proof, in the form of the world's dorkiest photo. There was a whole thing where he grabbed the camera from Karen and I didn't realise he'd done so and he took the picture before I even knew he had the camera, and so I'm clearly not paying attention. But I managed to have a conversation using complete sentences and absolutely no squealing, so I figure I came out on top. Anyway, here it is. Don't look at how dorky I look, just look at how cute he is!

You can click on that if you need a larger view. I understand.

I got a new laptop! It's an HP and it's very shiny. Poor, beloved Giles crashed entirely last week - couldn't boot except in safe mode. I miss him, weirdly. My new computer (his name is Neville, as suggested by Karen, which is an awesome name) is totally kick-ass, but I was very attached to Giles. I keep thinking about all the things I had on him that I don't have on Neville. Still, Neville has a space bar and, you know, a functional operating system so I'm mostly getting over it. It'll be nice for NaNo, although the wireless might be the death of me. (mmm, wireless. Man, it's so easy!)

Speaking of Nano, it's fast approaching. (That's National Novel Writing Month for those of you who haven't been around for previous years, and it's the one thing that I'm even geekier about than knitting. Yeah, I know, that's pretty geeky.) I know November seems like it's far away, but October is when things really get rolling and that's, like, three weeks away. Although part of me doesn't even want to think about it yet, the nerdy part of my brain is starting to get geared up. I'm going to try to reduce my workload this year as Municipal Liaison (ie Cat Herder, which will forever make me laugh and think of Die-Nasty and Mark Meer's classic line: "Trying to have a conversation with you two is like herding retarded cats!"), because it got a little much last year. We'll see. I have the bare bones of an idea and I'll have to sit down and flesh it out at some point.

And if November isn't far off, Christmas is fast approaching as well. Fifteen and a half weeks! While you non-knitters probably think it's insane to know that, knitters reading this just suddenly went into a big time panic. Given that I pretty much lose a month to NaNo, I am seriously trying to get through the Christmas to-knit list. My plans right now are: two sweaters, eight pairs of socks, and a lace scarf. Yeah. I know. But hey! I'm making great progress. I finished all but the very tail end of one sweater, and another is making supremely fast progress. (Take that, SnB who didn't think I could do it!) I finished my first Christmas sock last night and the second is making quick progress. (Sort of. This pattern is slow, for some reason.) My first Jaywalker is well under way, and is looking great after a frog and restart. I've got all my yarn, and I'm feeling good. October is, of course, Socktoberfest, so I'm aiming to finish my sweater by then and spend all of October ripping through socks. I'm hoping to finish four pairs in October and this pair I'm working on now in September, which leaves a very manageable three for November and December.

I've been pretty productive with my knitting lately, and have finished all my WIPs (works in progress) that aren't Christmas presents. Baby blanket number two is out the door ready to go to the newly arrived baby. Baby blanket number one is with its baby, and was very well received. Look, I even have a picture of that one!

I have pictures of the other one too, I just haven't taken them off the camera yet. Sock Garden socks and Gryffindor socks have gone out to their new homes. I have some lovely pictures of my sister's feet in the Gryffindor socks but they're on my parents camera and I haven't sent them to myself yet. They fit great and look super cute, and I can't wait to finish all these other socks so I can make myself a pair.

I already have a to-knit list consisting of several items for the new year. I guess I'd better get back to this Christmas knitting, then. Turn on the podcast (knitting podcasts rule! Why didn't I know this?), pick up the needles, and back to work I go.

Yarn Crawl

2006-08-18T13:45:00.000-06:00

So last week, after my brother-in-law's wedding was over (went very well, thanks, and everyone was happy. I should totally be a wedding planner.), I went down to Calgary for a few days. I had multiple intentions for my trip - one of my online message boards was having a meet-up, my best friend had a day off work, and most importantly...(ok, not most importantly, since I haven't seen Jana in months, but most importantly for this entry) I went on a yarn crawl.

Calgary has quite the mythic reputation in Edmonton. They have more yarn stores than us, and the general opinion is that they are vastly superior. Now, I wondered how much of that was just that whole grass-is-greener approach. And then I went.

Holy shit, Calgary has nice yarn stores. I spent some time with Google Maps before I left Edmonton, and had my route all planned out. I was planning to hit four stores: Make One Yarn Studio, the Beehive, Gina Brown's, and Knit One Chat Too. I bought yarn in all of them. Is anyone surprised? No.

My first stop was Make One Yarn Studio. I figured after all the hype I'd heard from my Stitch and Bitch, online people, and the freaking yarn store people in Edmonton, there was no way it was going to live up to the hype. Yeah. It totally did. The first thing they did was offer me a pot of tea! So I wandered around and drank an entire pot of fresh brewed loose Earl Grey tea. Now that is service!

The major feature of this store was the Lorna's Laces, which I had previously never clapped eyes on. Oh my god, it is glorious. If I ever become fabulously rich, I will have a bathtub full of Lion and Lamb Lorna's Laces. That quickly shot up to the top of my I Want This list. It's kind of out of my price range, though. Alas. I fondled yarn for a good half hour before making my first selection.

Manos! I've bought Manos before, but not for myself. It is an absolutely gorgeous colour, see?

(sorry about the blur, but it gives you a pretty good sense of the colours) that I think will look fabulous with my hair. (I'm modest like that.) I'm hoping it's going to be a particularly awesome hat for me.

I then started poking through the sock yarn. No small undertaking at Make One. As I was browsing, the delightful yarn store employee pointed out their new sock yarn from Sweet Georgia Yarns, a teeny little yarn company that I think is just one person dying yarn. So I bought two skeins of the lovely Saffron.

I later discovered that this person totally dies yarn in freaking BUFFYVERSE colours. Talk about combining my two greatest obsessions! Needless to say, I will be ordering more. Possibly in "Slayer" or "Angel" or "Willow" or "Firefly." I'm secretly choosing to believe that Saffron is in fact named for the infamous YoSafBridge. (A character from Firefly.) Here's the label info for those of you who care about these things.

It's probably just as well I didn't know about the Joss connection on that yarn, because I was excited enough about the Piratey yarn that came next! My final choice for Lorna's Laces (and oh, it was hard - I could have bought all of it!) was Shephard Sock in the awesomely named Black Purl colourway. Hee hee.

While I could have easily bought out the whole store, I'd already been there for about an hour and was quickly losing all sense of perspective on what a reasonable yarn price was. Since I wanted to hit three more stores without my credit card going on strike, I moved on reluctantly.

My next stop was the Beehive. After Make One, it looked pretty mundane, but they did have a great selection of inexpensive sock yarn. So I picked up some of this new washable Bernat stuff for someone who does not want high maintenance socks.

While it isn't thrilling, it is a lovely shade of blue.

I also grabbed some Fortissima Socki Color, which I thought looked fun.

Then I moved on to Gina Brown's, which was conveniently nearby. (And also incredibly close to where my sister used to live in Calgary. All that time I could have been sending her on yarn errands!)

Well. Gina Brown's was a lovely store, the people were very friendly, and OH MY GOD, the Malabrigo. Kettle Dyed Merino yarn, and I am not kidding when I say I could have HAPPILY bought every single solitary colour they had. It was so freaking nice I nearly died. It took me ages to choose (after wandering around the rest of the store about four times while I contemplated), but I picked out three colours. This is officially my new favourite yarn. (In my possession, anyway. Lion and Lamb may win out for favourite that I don't own.) I got:

Lime Blue

Which certain best friends eyed with some enthusiasm. I can see why, though, isn't it gorgeous?

Velvet Grapes

Which I think would look great with my grey winter coat. Mmm.

And Geranio

Which is both difficult to photograph and difficult to pull off. I actually think it would look great on my sister, but she lives in Vancouver. Does she really need a nice woolly hat? I don't know. So we'll see about that one.

I left the store with a large bagful, and put it in the front seat so I could continue to pet it while I drove out to Knit One Chat Too. They had a lovely store - great layout, but a lot of duplicates of stuff I'd already seen that day. The downside to being the last stop on a yarn crawl, I suppose. They had a ton of beautiful Manos, but after my Malabrigo haul I figured I probably had enough of that weight of yarn to be going on with. There were several things that tempted me, but I ended up with a single purchase: a skein of Fleece Artist Merino Sock Yarn. Mmm, yummy.

For some totally inexplicable reason, I absolutely adore this combination of colours. It's kind of hard to find, though. My Secret Pal sent me some awesome sock yarn in similar shades a few months ago, so I think I'll continue to hoard similar colourways whenever I come across them. Isn't it pretty?

I say I don't like pink, but I think what I really mean is I don't think I look good in pink. I lusted over way too much pink yarn to claim not to like it.

So there you go. My lengthy yarn haul. It was a great crawl, and the day was capped off with a tasty dinner and delightful evening with my best friend, so it was a glorious day indeed. Who can complain about coming home from a trip with this?

(Click on the pictures for a bigger hit of yarny goodness.)

Mystery Knitting

2006-08-01T19:33:00.000-06:00

I have officially moved into holiday knitting. While this is good news in general (I still have nearly five months! I might actually finish without losing my mind!), it isn’t going to make for the world’s most exciting blogging. (In other news, Word needs to get with the times – don’t tell me blogging isn’t a word! Geez.)

This weekend, I did something I virtually never do: I bailed on my best friend. She was in Jasper for about 24 hours and I was supposed to go meet her. While I would have liked to get out of town and also see her, the combined factors of (1) I was really damn tired, (2) that’s a lot of damn driving in 24 hours all by myself, (3) by the time we got there it would be late Friday evening already and we’d have to leave by mid-Saturday afternoon, and while I would totally do that if I wasn’t going to see her again for a while, I’m going to Calgary next week, so…yeah. I totally didn’t go.

Anyway, as a result, a previously busy weekend became quite delightfully free. I went to my future sister-in-law’s stagette on Friday night, and then had the rest of the weekend totally to myself. Jamie was at his brother’s stag all day Saturday, so I got up ridiculously late (ahhhh) and settled in to my chair for a delightful day of knitting secret Christmas project number one. I started it several months ago but haven’t had dedicated time to work on it due to various other deadlines, but I was officially finished with all my non-holiday knitting. Baby blanket – out the door, after several minor disasters. Sock Garden socks – finished except for weaving in the ends, which will only take a minute, and otherwise ready to go to their recipient this weekend. Gryffindor Socks number one – also just need their ends woven in, ready to go for my sister’s visit at the end of the month. July was a productive knitting month.

Anyway, this mega project had one lengthy element to it that required both attention and a spreadsheet to get through it, so I’ve only been working on it when I’m at home and paying some attention. I decided that a free weekend left me no excuse, so I fired up my new Angel DVDs, and settled in for a long day of knitting.

There were, of course, some setbacks. My future-sister-in-law (also my downstairs neighbour)’s sister needed driving to the medi-centre, and so several hours of my afternoon were eaten up with that. (However, good sock progress was made!) The bachelor party needed chauffeuring around for a while, and that took a bit of time. But by the end of Saturday I was halfway through the computer-requiring section of the top-secret project.

Sunday rolled around and I had even less to do. I taught myself something to speed up the process (my god, this is annoying – I’ll have to rewrite all of these entries after Christmas), and three full discs of Angel later, was finished the fiddly section and had moved into the mindless stockinette section.

I took it to my Stitch and Bitch last night, and I was roundly mocked for my ridiculous to-knit list. Naturally, they threw the gauntlet down and challenged me to knit the whole main section before next month’s stitch and bitch. Now, they all totally don’t think I can do it, but I’m pretty sure I can. It’ll take some monogamous knitting (not my strong suit), but I’ve been doing pretty well with that since we got back from our trip, and another month of it should do it.

So! Stay tuned to see if I can finish an random section of a mysterious project in time for a totally arbitrary goal. Thrilling, isn’t it?

Live thrilling sock action!

2006-07-25T02:27:00.000-06:00

So it's 2:22am, and I am up as usual, knitting. I'm knitting a little bit more frantically than usual, though. Why, you ask? A deadline? A baby impending or something else exciting? Surely my reasoning must be thrilling, right?

Yeah. I'm trying to finish this sock so I can have the needle to take a different sock to Klondike Days/Capital Ex/Whatever the hell it is and I wish they'd stop renaming things in this city. (I'm looking at you, Space Science Odyssium Telus World Of Oh my GOD just pick something.) You see, we bought ride-all-day passes to go to the midway tomorrow (whee!) (and also, gack, those bastards are expensive, but buying in advance is $14 cheaper so that makes it a little easier to swallow.), and I'm too far along in this sock to bring it. We are sure to be waiting in a lot of lines and I don't want to run out of sock halfway through the day. However, I also don't want to bring more than one sock - that's just plain silly. (Secretly I wouldn't care but Jamie would mock me plus I am only taking my smallish purse.) But next on my agenda is finishing my long-suffering sister's Gryffindor socks, and those will require the needle that's currently in my Sock Garden socks once I reach the heel.

(Yes, I'm using a different sized needle for the leg and the foot. Because I'm anal.)

Anyway, I'm zipping through the toe decreases and I've only got...oh, lordy. 24 rows to go? And we're heading for the midway at noon and I kind of wanted to get up early enough to try to catch some Sunshine Yarns tomorrow, and now it's 2:28 and I'm not even knitting, I'm updating my blog. And now that I took a break to knit a few rounds, I almost sneezed my stitch marker off my needle. Wouldn't that have been embarrassing? (By the way, it is a delightful stitch marker from my totally fantastic Knitty Secret Pal. Thanks, Pal!)

I would post pictures, but our stupid camera is in the shop. There will be pictures soon, don't worry - I've got a lot of backlog (backblog?) to get through. But the pictures are (say it with me now) on Jamie's computer. Some of you may be wondering why I don't just blog on his computer if he's got the photos. His computer is also significantly newer, faster, nicer, and has a space bar. (Don't ask.) But my computer is a laptop, and it lives by the super cushy comfortable recliner. Reason enough for me, thank you very much. I love this chair. But right now, I really just want to finish these freaking socks. But now I've only got 12 rows to go. That's not so bad, right? It's only 2:59am. I can still get 7 hours of sleep, and I'm sure I'll be hopped up on sugar and caffeine tomorrow anyway. (Mmm, mini donuts.)

And now it's 3:21, and I'm done. Except for the kitchener, which I am really bad for putting off. Still, the one good thing that came from the Great Blanket Disaster of '06 was that having to repair it with over 100 kitchener stitches means that I can now do it without the instructions. And so, knowing that I'll drag myself out of bed at the last possible moment tomorrow morning, I whip through the grafting. My Addis are free, my socks are finished, and I'm ready for the Midway tomorrow.

I'm also ready for bed. 3:32am. I'm totally going to get heckled if Jamie reads this.

The travellers return.

2006-07-21T01:32:00.000-06:00

Oh, blog. You are sadly neglected. I'm sorry. So here's the thing, friends of mine in the real world who still optimistically check this thing once in a while (or possibly use bloglines): it is likely that this blog will be morphing into essentially a knitting blog. I know most of you don't care. But these days most of what I do is knit and talk about knitting, and I haven't been writing because I've only had knitting to really write about. So consider yourselves warned. There will still be occasional non-knitting updates, but I'm hoping to update slightly more regularly and that means knitting.

However, that is not the case today, because hey, I went on a big fancy vacation! It was awesome, and I do not have the time nor energy to write in detail about everything we did. We went to Cambridge, London, various parts of Wales, Bath, York, Edinburgh, and several small towns around England. We had a fantastic time, the weather was ridiculously good (except in Wales, which is traditional for family vacations), and I didn't kill any members of my family, which I feel is a good sign. We were upset by the Oilers loss but soldiered on despite it (having skipped going to Oxford to watch game seven), and the only hockey I missed was the first period of game 4 (or was it 3?), which was because we were on the plane to Calgary.

I will write a longer entry about it another day when Jamie's computer is on, because that's where most of the pictures are, including my sock's cultural tour of London. I got a ton of knitting done while I was there, which was most satisfying. I finished a large chunk of a baby blanket (would have finished the whole thing but stupidly brought one ball of the right colour in the wrong weight - gah), which has since been finished and sent to said baby. Photos to follow. I finished one and a quarter of the Gryffindor socks for Beth, which she got to admire in progress. (They're the ones who got the cultural tour of London.) I knit some of my mother's Christmas present, and also got to the heel on a pair of socks for another Christmas present. (That was my airplane knitting on the way home, because they're on my Bryspun double pointed needles, AKA the most inoffensive needles in the world. Worked like a charm and I got in at least four hours of knitting on the way home.)

I hit two yarn stores - one was actually just a yarn department in a huge store in Edinburgh (actually, two stores, but one was vastly superior), where I bought two skeins of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk in a lovely purpley colour. Oh my, that is glorious yarn. I haven't decided what it's going to be yet, but possibly a lace scarf for me. We also took a complicated tube ride (on the day three lines were down) and a lengthy walk to go to a yarn store in London, and barely made it before they closed. But I picked up two balls of Opal sock yarn that I've never seen here, and was sorely tempted by the cheap Addis before talking myself into sticking to the new Knitpicks needles.

In non-knitting reports, we ate a ton but walked almost as much, saw several excellent Evensongs in Cambridge (Kings College, natch), York Minster:

and Westminster Abbey. (Both Jamie and Dave, Beth's boyfriend, assessed the Kings wafers as being subpar. They being the only two in my heathen family qualified to get Communion.) We rode on the London Eye

(super cool but brutally hot),

saw the Lion King

(I couldn't get over the cubs with British accents. Better when I saw it in California last year, but still good), went to the British Library, which was awesome, and the British Museum, which I continue to be too plebian to enjoy. (Really I was just hot and exhausted and hungry, but the last time I was there I was about six and hated it, so we are not the best of friends.) (Is that even the right use of the word plebian?) We went punting along the Backs in Cambridge

which was super cool.

Drove to Wales, which was as beautiful as ever

if blustery at the seaside.

Post-Wales will have to follow in another entry, because none of those pictures are online. (I could go boot up Jamie's computer and upload them, but it's late and I'm lazy.) Since getting home, we've been lolling around in the heat, occasionally working (well, I have. Some of us in this house are fat-cat teachers who get the summers off.), going to Shakespeare in the Park, and frantically helping with the upcoming wedding of Jamie's brother.

We celebrated our first anniversary last week, which featured flowers for me (the same roses as were in my bouquet - I was impressed!), brunch at the hotel we stayed at post-wedding, which has a revolving restaurant overlooking the city, hanging out, having a barbeque, eating amazingly delicious year old cake, and, best of all, a ball winder and a swift for ME! (I got Jamie a gift certificate to pimp up his camera. I thought it was quite noble that we got gifts for the other's hobby that kind of makes us roll our eyes. I like Jamie's photos, but I have no interest in the actual process. His logic was that now I won't bug him to help me wind yarn. Except now he wants to because it's FUN!)

So that's what we've been doing. Stay tuned for lots of pictures of knitting (I'm actually knitting a few things you can see!), lots more pictures of our trip, and an ongoing log of surviving the really freaking hot weather in a house with lousy circulation. Bleah.

How's by you?

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

2006-06-12T00:25:00.000-06:00

You know what else nobody expects? Having your vacation on JUNE 12TH mean you're missing the freaking Oilers, that's what.

Some time last year (the exact details are lost to the fog of wedding brain), my family all decided that we'd take a trip to Britain in which the six of us (me, my husband, my sister, her boyfriend, and my parents) met up for at least part of it. My parents go back fairly often, and my sister went back about three years ago and met up with my dad for a few days, but I haven't been in almost ten years, my sister's boyfriend has only been in and out for conferences here and there, and Jamie's never been. It was Christmas of 1996 the last time my family was all there together, and we figured that all of us having (a) time at approximately the same time of year, (b) money, even if it isn't tons, and (c) no kids dragging things down was not going to be happening forever, so we figured now was a good time to go. After a great deal of emailing and organizing, we settled on some dates that mostly worked. Sure, it mean Mum had to miss a conference she was interested in and Jamie would miss the last week of subbing, but other than that it was delightfully conflict free.

Who can blame us, in the middle of the lockout, for not taking into consideration the notion of the Oilers in the Stanley Cup Finals? Actually, to be totally accurate, we planned the dates right around the time when the Oilers were seriously sucking this season, so looking into planned Finals dates was the last thing on our mind. If it weren't for those damn Olympics, we'd have been fine.

Now, while I am a pretty fanatical Oilers fan, I am not alone in my family. My sister is of approximately the same level of insanity as me, although she has to work harder to achieve it since she now lives in Vancouver where Oilers fans are not particularly popular. Fortunately she has a hockey buddy to celebrate with, which helps, I'm sure.

My parents are not quite so fanatical in the rabid sort of sense, but they are probably the most dedicated out of all of us, particularly my mother. She watches every single Oilers game, pre-season, regular season, post-season. If she's going to be out, she tapes it and watches when she gets home. She gets the pay-per-view games. (She does not exactly have a lot of expensive hobbies, so nobody heckles her much for this. Hell, Dad has started watching rugby pay-per-view on the computer!) I don't know how closely she reads the stats page, but she manages to rattle off random facts and make intelligent comments about the lineup whenever the game is on, so I suspect she does more than she admits.

I could go into details about the level of obsessiveness we have displayed as a family over the course of the playoffs, but I think some members with upstanding reputations to uphold (ie certainly not me) are a little ashamed of this. Suffice it to say it has involved American sports bars, web cams, text messaging, and a great deal of organizing.

So when you get four hard-core Oilers fans and two fairly enthusiastic significant others who just kind of get swept along in things (my sister's boyfriend is from Saskatchewan, where they only care about football, as far as I can tell, and my dad still finds the whole thing a bit of a weird Canadian habit, I think, although he's more interested than he pretends to be) leaving town in the middle of the first Oilers Stanley Cup Run in 16 years, you have to go to some pretty extreme measures. So when we arrive in England on Tuesday, there will be waiting for us at the other end an elaborate system tested by my parents over the first three games. (They've been there a week already.) We paid for the North American Sports Network on our friends' cable. We paid extra to get the digital recorder so we could tape it. And on our once-in-a-lifetime international family vacation, we will be huddled around the television screaming for the Oilers while the rest of the country watches the World Cup.

The shitty part, of course, is that we won't be in Edmonton any more. We'll miss all the parties, the parades, the hoardes of people screaming for joy simultaneously. While I'm not sorry to be missing the near riots that happened after round three (we left once the fires got taller than the people, which I think was a wise move), the idea of missing out on standing with thirty thousand other people on Whyte Ave singing O Canada does break my heart a little bit. Things have been a little quieter this series so far - the loss of Roli was a hard blow to take and we were all a little bit shell-shocked - but last night's game saw Whyte Ave perk up again. The driving rain kept the streets a little less nuts, but the horns were wailing and the fans were screaming nonetheless. I watched the game in a bar and I'm bummed I won't be able to surround myself with my friends to scream at the ref and get goose bumps at the anthem (and if you don't find that whole anthem thing pretty freaking awesome, you are made of stone, especially once the camera finds Joey Moss). But at least I'll have my fanatical family watching along with me. That's better than nothing, right?

And I guess the vacation will probably be pretty awesome, too. We leave tomorrow at 6:00, but our layover in Calgary should be enough for us to catch the second and third periods. So let's hope for a blowout by the Oilers, because I'm not sure I have the strength to get on a plane in overtime. There are limits, after all.

The mayhem continues

2006-05-18T20:32:00.000-06:00

So, as those of you who care about these things probably already know, the Oilers have made it to the third round of the playoffs for the first time in 14 years. (For those of you who don't care about these things, you've probably stopped reading already, but the NHL playoffs are kind of insanely long - four rounds, each round a best of seven. It makes for a lengthy time commitment when your team doesn't suck, actually. For the first time in a very long time, we had to schedule our mother's day activities around an Oilers game.) As a result of this totally unbelieveable state of affairs, there has been a more frequent than usual amount of whooping it up in our house. Since we live about 10 blocks from the centre of the action after the games, we've been walking over to party it up after some of the big wins.

The first round win led to a rowdy party that went pretty late - that was the first time since 1998 that they'd made it even to the second round. (Welcome to being a small market team fan. Thank you, Collective Bargaining Agreement, for making it suck less to be an Oilers fan!) Then, since the game four win was on a Friday night, another huge party erupted on Whyte Ave, and we headed down. Even bigger party, much rowdier.

Last night, though, was insane. At least double the number of people - the paper today said around 20,000 people descended on Whyte. There were many, many, topless girls. No streakers this time (shucks), but it was just insanity the whole way. Good times, good times. Erin (my former roommate and future housemate) came along with her boyfriend, and aside from the temporary losing of Jamie, we had an awesome time.

This entry is really dull. I am finding that my busted space bar is really inhibiting my ability to think and type simultaneously, because I actually have to pay attention to my typing instead of it being totally unconcious. It is really damn annoying, I'll tell you what. I'm writing about naked girls and I still can't make it interesting? That doesn't bode well. Memo to self: write next update on Jamie's computer.

So life, aside from the Oilers insanity, continues much as usual. I'm looking into volunteering at the Humane Society, as I figure it's the next best thing to the kitten I desperately want but am technically not allowed to have. (Once we get back from our trip to Britain next month, which I probably haven't even mentioned here, uh, we're going to Britain next month, I'm going to start my I want a kitten campaign. Suggestions welcome.)

Knitting continues to be sock-centric. My brother-in-law's mother-in-law (got that?) is sick, so I just finished up a pair of socks for her in KnitPicks Sock Garden, in the discontinued Hydrangea colour. Pictures to follow. I've finished the baby blanket for my sister's boyfriend's sister (I don't only knit for obscure relations, but I am fairly sure other people I'm knitting for are reading this), and will be sending that off fairly soon. I made a super awesome tomato hat for a recent new baby, and Jamie's cousins are having a baby soon so I'll whip up something for them. (It is a sign of my brain these days that when a new baby is mentioned, my reaction is oooh, I'll have to knit something.) I am working away at various Christmas/birthday/other occasion gifts, and once I give some of them away I'll post pictures.

And just to make this a truly dull and generic post, a weather update. It's really damn hot. I thought I lived in Edmonton? I'm telling you, hockey on a 30 degree day is just...weird.

Excuse me while I have a nervous breakdown

2006-04-26T00:13:00.000-06:00

Jesus Mary and Joseph, I think I might have to reknit the toe of this sock due to the EXTREME TENSION. Not the yarn tension, though. The freaking hockey tension. Double overtime and I have a long and storied history of extreme stress, and tonight was no exception. Still, after we recovered from the disallowed goal that Detroit scored in the first overtime period, it was an exciting second overtime.

We did possibly the nerdiest thing I've ever done tonight, and when you think about all the nerdy things I've done in my lifetime (oh, the list is too long to even think about, but let's see, I think going to the bookstore in my wedding dress to buy Harry Potter VI is probably up there, as is the Gryffindor yarn I bought earlier (which, by the way, WOO!)!), that's saying a lot. My sister and our friend Mel, both obsessive Oilers fans, are living in Vancouver, and apparently it was decided by the people at CBC that nobody in BC would want to watch the Oilers, so they were stuck with the Calgary game. Being that they both bleed blue and copper, this was not a very appealing option. (Although the rivalry has died down with Calgary, particularly since Edmonton got behind Calgary in the finals two years ago, one still chooses an Oilers game over the Flames any day.)

Anyway, it occurred to Mel that perhaps somebody might have a webcam that they could aim at the TV so they could catch the game. And although we don't own one, we had one we could borrow. So borrow it we did, and Jamie went to his mum's house to get the software for it. We got it set up (making Jamie late for his rehearsal in the process) so that Beth and Mel could watch the game over the webcam, using our Media Centre on the computer, which has a tv tuner.

Alas, the radio wasn't synched up with the tv feed, so they would have no sound. Unless...fortunately, my sister has this weird computer phone system thingy that allows her to have a local Edmonton number wherever she goes. So I changed the answering machine message to redirect people t my cell phone, called her up, and left the phone by the speaker. Voila! We have an improvised (and mediocre, but better than nothing!) live CBC feed to Vancouver. They watched all of regulation time that way, and then OT was shown out there as the Calgary game was done.

So now I have one day to recover (which I will spend at what promises to be a dull work seminar and then having a Veronica Mars marathon/Amazing Race viewing with Karen and Paul) before the madness starts again on Thursday. I think I might need some slightly more mindless knitting, though - concentrating on four needles is a bit much for my brain past regulation time.

Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I will go and lie down with a paper bag. And possibly a stiff drink.

Go Oilers Go!

Hockey Rocks My Socks

2006-04-23T17:12:00.000-06:00

God. I seem to forget, in the drought years, just how much playoff hockey makes me hyperventilate. The Oilers are back in the playoffs after a few years out (one of which was due to the lockout, obviously), and my blood pressure has risen accordingly. I spent Friday night at work listening to the game (streaming audio is my new best friend), and then watched overtime at IHOG. (The International House of Girls, where three of my friends live.) Today I was asleep for part of the game (Jamie was obligingly waking me up with updates), since I was out until very uncivilised hours of the night last night. But I caught the third period, which was full of hyperventilating excitement. So now the series is tied 1-1 as it heads back to Edmonton, where I will not be catching any games despite my best efforts to get tickets.

Despite all the hockey trauma, I have successfully finished a pair of socks this weekend and have just finished the gusset on another sock that I just started yesterday. This is partly due to my ever increasing sock speed (this is now my fifth pair since mid-February), but also due to the fact that I made them quite short since I'm not convinced I'll have enough yarn. I'm using the very snazzy Socks that Rock in the Fire on the Mountain colourway, and while it is definitely stunning, it's not quite as fantastic as I had hoped - there's a bit of pooling. But it's growing on me as I knit, which is a good sign.

The socks I finished yesterday (aside from the toes - I'm not going to graft them until I try them on my coworker) were for someone with size six and a half feet, and let me tell you, it made me wish my feet were small and skinny, because the amount of yarn I saved was not insignificant. They were just straightforward stockinette socks in Knit Picks Sock Garden Daffodil, and they turned out to have lovely stripes. Our digital camera is in the shop right now so you'll have to picture it in your heads.

The baby blanket for the August-due baby is sitting on the back of the couch, just waiting for a wash. I'm not sure when I'll send it along to the mother-to-be, but it's nice to have it done. It's a pretty straightforward blanket - garter stitch squares in yellow and white checkerboard - and it's quite big for a baby blanket. Several bags are knit and just waiting for felting (I am super lazy - they've been done for months), and a couple of other projects are in various stages of progress.

So while I have done very little this weekend that didn't involve sitting on my ass, at least I have a lot of knitting to show for it. And I finished my book for book club tonight, and although I was kind of bored by it, it feels like one of those books that will suddenly make a bunch of references make sense. And that was kind of the point of Book Club II: Electric Bookaloo, so I'm happy with that.

That's been my exciting weekend. Now do you see why I haven't been updating much?

Hmpf

2006-04-20T20:33:00.000-06:00

I went to the bookstore today. Now, normally this is a fun and exciting thing that doesn't lead to an update titled "hmpf," but today was not so much with the fun and exciting. Because here's the thing. We're getting ripped off. You see, there's this new book out that I kind of want, called Big Girl Knits, which is, appropriately, a book about knitting if you are not a toothpick. Being both an obsessive knitter and a non-skinny person, this seemed like an obvious choice. The library hasn't ordered it yet and I'm not known for my patience.

Fortunately, I had two gift certificates from Christmas that I hadn't used yet. (I work in a library and get an employee discount at another bookstore, so it's rare for me to buy books at Chapters, which is where the gift cards were from.) Some of it, we agreed, would go towards a travel book for our trip to Britain, which is now coming up in less than two months. (How the HELL is it April 20th already?) But I figured the rest could buy me a knitting book. I've been meaning to get one for reference purposes, so I don't have to keep requesting the same ones from the library. I trundled into the knitting section and found five brand new copies of it, which had obviously just arrived since I checked yesterday and they didn't have any.

I flipped through and admired the patterns - the book has some awesome sweaters. There is a jacket in there that I am definitely going to make myself at some point. (My sister would love it too, I think.) But then I looked at the price. $30US - quite reasonable for a nice hardcover. Canadian? Forty-two freaking dollars! Last time I looked, the Canadian dollar was at about $1.20 US. Thirty dollars times $1.20 is about $36.00. That is a freaking ridiculous mark-up. The book industry is clearly not keeping up with the times - at that point it's cheaper for me to order it from the US and pay the shipping. Sure, at one point, that was an accurate reflection of the state of the dollar, but these days, not so much. But I guess American publishers have just gotten used to screwing over Canadians, and don't see any reason to change.

Needless to say, I didn't buy it or anything else. I had a sneaking suspicion that it would be a lot cheaper to get most of what I wanted online. Which it was - by a lot. Chapters online was selling Big Girl Knits for $28.14 before my member discount. That is a huuuge difference. The other books I wanted were cheaper as well. I eventually decided to wait on Big Girl Knits, but I bought all my other stuff for about 1/3 less than I would have paid in the store.

This is why I shop online, people. I'm ordering yarn from the States that is less than half the cost of yarn in an actual store. I know there's the whole rigmarole about needing to have an actual space to buy things from, but when it's the same store in a bricks and mortar format and online with that much of a difference? Something is fucked up. Remind me not to buy things without comparison shopping online.

Don't get me wrong, there are times when an actual store is totally necessary - last minute baby gifts (like tomato hats!), birthday parties (where my bookstore discount comes in big time handy), and when you just don't want to wait. But I'm really starting to get disgruntled with actual stores. I envy all the Americans who have virtually everything they could get in a mall available online with free or super cheap shipping - online shopping in Canada is not quite as far along. But it's getting there. I have found awesome yarn stores online that have incredibly reasonable shipping-to-Canada policies, and even paying the shipping it's cheaper than buying here, some of the time, with more selection. Sure, you buy yarn untouched, but that's what the yarn reviews are for.

If anyone needs me, I'll be over here in the corner, knitting my online-purchased socks on my online-purchased needles. I will be sitting in my purchased from a store chair, though. There is no replacement for the nap test in a store.

2006-04-19T22:09:00.000-06:00

March 10th? Wow, that's a long time ago. The problem is, you see, life is good but boring. This is not to say that my life has ever been particularly exciting leading to thrilling updates here, but it's in a particular kind of rut lately. And I have to be honest, I'm usually knitting instead of writing here.

Also, I have kind of inexplicably become a tv-fanatic. Sort of. Actually, given that I know some real tv fanatics, I think that is probably a little inaccurate, but I have suddenly started watching kind of a lot of tv. Most of it totally lame. American Idol, I'm looking at you. However, it's fun watching American Idol with Jamie, who pretends not to be interested but totally is. I watch Amazing Race and Survivor with Karen and Paul (except when I suck like tonight and nap instead and don't make it over there), and the heckling and yelling at the tv is totally entertaining. (For some reason, we started out yelling SNAKE! really loud whenever they show snakes on Survivor, which is frequent, and now we yell snake at the tv whenever the show is back from commercials and someone is in the bathroom, or whenever we are moved by the spirit of the snake. We are weird.) I'm halfway through season three of Angel (which is NOT as good as season two, boo), and Karen and Paul and I are working on Veronica Mars season 1, which is so good. Holy crap, that show is the best show I've seen since, well, Firefly, I guess, but the fact that it isn't cancelled already makes it a little more exciting. We're hoping that season two will come out before season three starts so we can catch up and watch it next season. Hoping that there is a next season, of course. I really ought to start watching shows that don't have the ax of cancellation hanging over them at all times. Well, I guess American Idol really covers that. But I don't really care either way about AI. Although I have discovered that a ton of my coworkers watch it, so it's fun to discuss every week. (It's funny who watches that show - a lot of people you don't expect seem to watch it.)

So. Knitting. TV. Work. Jamie. Friends. That's about it. We went to Vancouver and Victoria last month, and had an excellent time hanging out with the various people there. Great weather, too, which is always a crapshoot out there. We also went to a hockey game while we were there courtesy of Mel, who has inexplicable connections to several scalpers. We are probably going to wish we had the same as we're attempting to get tickets for the playoffs next week - wish us luck!

I have become a completely fanatical sock knitter, thanks to the Olympics, which was my first pair. They take me about 8 or 9 days to knock out a pair, usually, and they are portable and cute and just super cool! I love turning the heel and then suddenly having my knitting go in an entirely different direction. I'm on my fourth pair right now, which means I have just finished turning my eighth heel, and I still think it's super cool. Which is a clear indication of just how dorky I am.

I also just finished a baby blanket, in yellow and white squares (it's kind of huge, but that's ok - I like blankets that can go past the first year), and a super awesome baby hat that looks like a tomato. That was REALLY cute and very quick to knit up (one evening of Angel was all it took!) so I will definitely be making more of those. It was also my first shot at stranded knitting (is that what it's called? I don't know. Multiple colours, anyway.)

(Are you KIDDING ME? They're doing classical music on AI? Awesome. Oh, love songs. Well, still. Boccelli! Cool!)

Anyway, I intend to branch out into other fruits and vegetables for baby hats, although there aren't too many other babies coming up any time soon. I might have to make some for some of the mid-sized babies I know, because they are just so damn cute.

Socks. Baby stuff. Bad TV. Trip to Vancouver. Hockey. That's what's been going on.

How are you? Is anyone even still reading this any more?

Lucy

2006-03-10T01:02:00.000-07:00

I've been neglecting this lately, and there are several good reasons for it. One of them, though, is the biggie.

My cat died. She was 17 years old and we got her when I was eight. That means that for two-thirds of my life she has been there for me, and it is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to deal with. I realise that this makes me sound like the totally over-privileged snob that I kind of am, but god, this is so hard. I'm not going to write about her at length, at least not yet, because I don't think I can handle it. Almost every night when I turn off the light I find myself crying, because while I can get through the day on faking it, when I'm alone in my bed (well, Jamie is there, but usually asleep), it hits me. It doesn't really seem to be getting any better. It's harder, in some ways, because I didn't live with her any more, and so it's totally surreal that she's gone. Crying, of course, makes it worse, because while I absolutely hate crying in front of other people (weird, given how often I cry in movies and tv and stupid commercials, but I always try to hide it despite the fact that everybody is perfectly aware that I'm crying), I'd always escape to cry with my cat. She never minded. So now I cry, and I wish I had her to cry over, and god, that just makes it so much worse. She was old and blind and getting sort of sick and sad, but she was always happy to see me and I loved her so much.

So I cry in bed, and then I get up and leave so I don't wake up Jamie, partly because I don't want to disturb him and partly because I really do hate crying in front of other people - I'd rather just be left alone to sob and get it out of my system rather than feeling like I need to control myself, because that way I never seem to cry enough.

She almost died once before, and in some ways, I think that helps. We felt like we'd been given a kitty bonus - over a year where she could have easily been gone. The highlight of this year was a silly little monkey I put in Dad's stocking. It wound up and played the cymbals as it walked, and Lucy LOVED it. She was pretty much totally blind, but she could hear the little cymbals and she batted it around for quite a while, much to the delight and amusement of the rest of us. That really made us realise that she was still the same old kitty, the foolish loveable kitty full of personality that we'd had for so long. I wasn't ready for her to go last year - when I remember how terrified I was when we didn't know what was happening, I realise that she got that. The first time, she fought for us, knew we weren't ready to let her go. This time, it was so obvious that she just needed to go. She'd waited for my mum to get back from her trip, chosen a Sunday when none of us had to work or juggle schedules, and did it at a very civilised time of day. She was having seizures that seemed like much more than diabetic ones, and she was having trouble breathing. By the time we got her to the vet, she was almost gone.

But god, it was still hard. I held her while they put her down, and I am so, so glad I did that. I held her, and I told her that we loved her, and I just patted her little ears and her soft little head. I've spent years agonizing over whether I'd do that (which sounds horribly morbid, but Jamie's cat, also a diabetic, died about three and a half years ago, and he took his cat in, so ever since then it's been kind of in the back of my mind.), and when the moment came there was not really any doubt. She was basically asleep already when it happened - barely breathing and practically gone already. So there was no fighting, no horrible moment when I saw the life leave her eyes, no drama. Just a very quiet room, with my mum and the very kind vet, and there was no doubt in my mind that it was the right thing to do, which was what I wanted. I was afraid it would have to be a slightly arbitrary decision on our part, one that I'd inevitably question for the rest of my life. But it wasn't - it was her decision, and I'm glad (as much as I can be) that it was such an obvious one to make.

That doesn't change the fact that I miss her so much I feel like one of my arms has been cut off. Lucy was my oldest friend, my one constant in my often changing life. I was her favourite, and she was mine. We grew up together. I could get away with murder with her - baths, nail clipping, brushing, hair cutting - anything. She trusted me with anything. At the end of it all, she trusted me to make the right choice, and I know that we did. But that doesn't make it any easier. The barest hint of a scratch lingers on my left hand, the last memento of her final hours. I don't even know when it happened - I didn't notice it until I got home. But as it fades into almost nothing, I don't want it to disappear. I run my hand over it and wish that she could be here scratching me again. It is almost impossible to believe that she'll never do that again.

I miss my kitty. She was my beautiful, wonderful cat, and part of me feels like I will never quite feel whole again. I'm still not quite sure what I'll do without her. All I know is I don't think anyone will ever love me quite so much.

A knitter lives here

2006-02-17T02:43:00.000-07:00

It's slowly starting to take over the whole house.

It started out only in my corner. By my chair in the corner of the living room, I've got my own little mess. Jamie is a very tidy guy, generally - he lets things get kind of disastrous, but then he goes on an insane cleaning binge and suddenly the whole house is virtually spotless. (His Valentine's present was to clean the whole house while I was at work.) He leaves my corner alone, though.

You walk in the front door and it's immediately obvious where I sit. My huge enormous rocking chair recliner that I love more than it is reasonable to love a piece of furniture sits next to the couch. Right now, there's a hair elastic on one arm and two hair clips on the other. I hate having things poking into the back of my head when I sit in my delicious enormous chair, so I almost always take my hair down as soon as I sit down. My laptop, when it's not in my lap, sits on the floor in front of my chair, on top of the plaid blanket that I made for Jamie the first year we started dating.

Next to the chair is an old side table of my parents that I decoupaged with gold leaf paper when I moved into my apartment. You can't really see the gold, though, because the table is covered in junk. Periodically I clear it out, but it always seems to add up again in a hurry. Under the table is a basket filled with odds and ends that don't have an obvious elsewhere to live - notebooks, chequebooks, and other odds and ends that seem to end up in my stuff. It lived under the coffee table at our apartment, and whenever Erin and I were doing high-speed cleaning we'd just dump each other's stuff into our respective baskets and it was suddenly out of the way, so I'm sure there is some very random stuff in there. Erin's used to hold her needlepoint so as to be conveniently located right in front of the tv for ease of grabbing during a Buffy marathon.

My knitting, however, is too big for that. It has its own basket, next to my chair. When I first moved into my apartment two years ago, I bought this basket because it fit perfectly next to my old recliner. It's big enough to hold a lot of yarn and several projects on the go. It's stuffed with yarn now - all my current projects live in this basket.

But the knitting hasn't stayed in the basket. It seems to be growing exponentially - taking over the whole house, one spot at a time.

On the side table beside my chair, needles are scattered around, waiting to be organized. A partially completed baby blanket (not for me!) sits waiting for more squares to be made. That's my in-between project, one I work on while I decide what to tackle next.

On the couch next to me, where Jamie usually sits, is my knitting bag. It's jammed with all of my knitting accessories (and it is the most awesome and dorky bag ever - specifically designed for knitting, and I use it for everything.), leftover sock yarn from my brutal re-knit of my first cuff that nearly killed me last night, my knitting journal (as yet unstarted - I just bought it), and probably a ball or two of yarn. Sitting on the floor next to the basket under the table is a collection of needles - one case full of old circulars, my new set of Denise Interchangeables next to it. Various other cases are scattered around, holding the needles I don't need very often.

On the chair across the room where nobody sits unless we have company, a finished project waits for felting. A few errant balls of yarn, projectless, hang around over there for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. The kitchen seems remarkably clear of knitting detrius, but in the back hallway little yarn puffs trail down the stairs from a particularly sheddy project last month.

In the hallway, my old recliner sits forlornly, replaced by a vastly superior but less sentimental chair in the living room. It's mostly storage these days - even its second rate spot in the study has been replaced with an elliptical. But on top of the chair sit two more finished projects, waiting for me to stop being so damn lazy and just felt the damn things already.

The study is yarn central. Two huge rubbermaid tubs sit in the corner with a cardboard box on top, and all three are stuffed with yarn. It's ostensibly organized, but if I'm going to be realistic I'd say it's sorted on the most basic of levels and not much else. The computer desk holds a square for the baby blanket, waiting to be added, and the chair holds a sock-in-progress, left behind after a marathon session with Jamie's computer, which records TV. (That thing is awesome for knitting, let me tell you.) I periodically go in there to wade through yarn and always vow to get rid of some, but I never seem to manage it.

The bathroom, for now, remains fairly knit-free, but I'm sure that's only temporary. Unusually, there aren't any knitting books waiting to be flipped through, but that's probably because they're all piled up beside my bed. It's a telling indication that my entire hold list consisted of knitting books with three exceptions last week. My bedside table holds my current read, Knit Lit, and others wait their turn patiently.

Patterns for things that have caught my eye, projects in progress, or ones that are mere pipe dreams at this point are scattered around the house. I scribble notes on the backs of patterns, as I find it's frequently the only paper I have in my bag. Little clues, here and there - two hand-knitted scarves in the front closet, a sweater folded neatly in Jamie's dresser, a bag in my closet. There are hints everywhere, and it's becoming harder and harder to ignore. The minute you walk into this house, you realise it. It's rare that people don't know it about me before they come over, but even if they didn't, it's impossible to miss.

A knitter lives here.

The Actual Olympics

2006-02-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

God, I love the Olympics. And no, not just because of the knitting. How can you resist when they tell you that, despite the fact that their countries are at war, the Koreans are marching in together?

Ok, the little tidbit about the poor doves who got FRIED in Korea is a little less touching. And Yoko Ono is still sort of insane. But I guarantee that the moment Peter Gabriel starts singing I will suddenly get something in my eye.

Even the commercials get me during the Olympics. I know, I'm a total sucker. But I'm totally the target audience for these things. I am a fairly big sports fan, but I'm also a weepy girl. That's a lethal combination during the Olympics.

Watching all the Canadians with their cameras, singing along, taking pictures, cheering, and just looking so genuinely happy - it's easy to get swept up in the patriotism.

(Ok, Peter Gabriel, I'm not so convinced you're a good choice for this song. We miss you, John Lennon.)