October 2007 Archives
I've been having more weird, vivid dreams again lately. I try not to write about my dreams too much because I don't think people really care (I don't even care, when I go back and reread things I've written). But sometimes my dreams distill into some interesting essence that's worth thinking about. Last night, the gist of my dream (which was, I think, inspired by the show Heroes), was that there are two types of people in the world: healers and teachers.
The healer types believe there's something wrong with the world or with certain people. They want to fix things and restore them to what they consider healthy. They look for disease and try to eradicate it. Where there isn't a cure, they try to contain the disease or destroy that which they believe is contagious. They believe it takes a certain kind of person with certain skills and knowledge in order to heal someone/something else.
The teacher types believe that knowledge is the most important thing and that with knowledge, people will be able to take care of themselves and do the right thing. They see ignorance as the enemy and believe the best way for them to do good is to disseminate information, skills and knowledge. They believe in free will rather than control, and therefore their world is a little more unpredictable.
Both types believe they are trying to do good in the world and that the other type has it all wrong. Some believe the other type is evil because the other way of thinking is so alien to them.
I don't know if there's any validity whatsoever to this theory, but I woke up with it swirling in my head this morning.
St. Mawes, originally uploaded by AMK.
Well, Brad's surprise Christmas gift from 2006 is about half finished. Some changes have been made to the original plan.
1. It's no longer a surprise. How on Earth I thought I could knit a massive piece of fabric without him ever finding out is beyond me. I was making this thing at a snail's pace during times when he wasn't around. Besides, how could I have hoped to make it fit him without having him available to try it on at key junctions in the knitting process?
2. It's no longer a gift for Christmas of '06. Clearly, that was a naively ambitious goal. He'll get it for Christmas this year (if he's lucky).
Other than that, things are going well. This is St. Mawes, a pattern by Rowan, using Rowan All-Seasons Cotton (a lovely, lovely yarn to work with). I'm making it with a V-neck instead of a round neck, at Brad's request. I'm also (quite generously, I have to admit) not forcing Brad to wear the ridiculous accessories.
I've got the front and back pieces done now, and will be starting the sleeves next. This is the worst part of sweater-knitting for me. After finishing two big pieces of fabric, sleeves seem totally doable. Sleeves don't seem that huge when you're wearing a sweater, but they take deceptively long to knit and look surprisingly large when they're a flat piece of fabric unattached to the rest of the sweater.
This is pretty much all I've been doing in my spare time lately now that biking season seems to be over and it's rainy most of the time and far too fall-like.
I'm having mixed feelings right now about owning a home. On the one hand, it's fun to be able to paint walls and make improvements. On the other hand, you get things like leaky roofs and moldy walls.
This weekend was all house all the time. My mom came over to help me paint the bedroom and it was really nice to have the help, since Brad is still dealing with his broken collarbone and wasn't going to be able to do much to help. We got the painting done on Saturday and then on Sunday, Brad and I went shopping and picked up other items for the bedroom redecorating and I spent the rest of the day fixing up the room.
Continue reading "The good, the bad, and the fuzzy white mold" »
Tomorrow is Brad's birthday. It hasn't been the best few weeks in his life, lately, but I'd like to think that things are looking up. To celebrate, we're both taking the day off tomorrow to not be at work or think about anything stressful.
I wanted to make him a cake, but this is the cake I would be making him: Cafe Latte's famous chocolate cake. The recipe is actually for the turtle cake, but we prefer it just chocolate, without all the caramel and pecans. In the end we thought, why spend all that time making this cake when we could just go to Cafe Latte and order a couple of slices of it?
The reason I mention all this is because if you don't happen to live in the Twin Cities, and therefore aren't able to go to Cafe Latte and enjoy this delicious cake creation, you should really save that PDF and make it next time you want to make the perfect chocolate cake. Or the perfect chocolate frosting.
The best thing about taking a day off on a Wednesday is that Thursday feels like Monday. Wait, how can that be a good thing? Because tomorrow isn't Tuesday, it's Friday. It's like suddenly having a two-day week.
I've never really taken a Wednesday off because I always thought it would better to take a three-day weekend. But I haven't felt this chipper and refreshed on a Thursday ... ever. In my ideal world, I'd always have Wednesdays off. I mean, assuming I actually had to work in my ideal world, which is a pretty big assumption.
Lately, all I want to do is work on renovating the house or knit. I painted our bedroom and got new furniture and put up shelves and framed artwork and painted a mirror all in one week. That amount of work on our house would usually take me a matter of months (who am I kidding? That amount of work on our house would usually take me years). Not only did I do all that in a week, but I've almost finished the first sleeve of Brad's sweater in that same timeframe.
These days I'm wishing I'd signed up for Ravelry sooner. When I first heard about it, I was doing pretty much no knitting and I figured by the time the thing was finally out of beta, I'd be about ready to check it out. Now I obsess and check my place in line every day (currently there are 9894 people ahead of me in line to get in on the beta). Drat.
I think what's going on is that I'm in full-steam-ahead nesting mode. I blame the impending winter, glaring at me from the next page of the calendar. This happens to me every year at this time. I retreat into my cave, which I try to make as cozy and appealing as possible because I know I'll be stuck in it for far too long. I could mope about it, and I generally do spend a few weeks in September and October moping about it, but I always come around to the conclusion that the better thing to do (for my mental health) is to make myself as busy as possible making things, or making things better. It's bad for my social life and for my reading list (no way I'll make it to 50 books this year, unless I start listening to audio books while I do all these things) but that's the price I have to pay to not be completely nuts.
Is it bad that all I've been looking forward to all day is getting home and eating a piece of this chocolate cake*?
This is indeed the Cafe Latte chocolate cake to which I was referring a few days ago. My family threw a little birthday party for Brad yesterday and I made the cake. We got to take home the leftovers. Yum. I think it will go well with homemade black bean burgers and mashed potato (oh yes, I am a-nesting).
In related news, scientists funded by the chocolate industry have found that some people seem to be metabolically programmed to love chocolate, and that people with this metabolism seem to have some health advantages like low LDL cholesterol. Anything to justify eating chocolate, I say.
* With yesterday's photo of the day being chocolate cake, we temporarily have double chocolate cake goodness to gaze upon right now. Get it while supplies last! Only a few more hours.
I've always been a bit of a pack rat, but in the past few years I've managed to get over a lot of my tendencies to hoard physical things. I've culled and purged and recycled and donated and have learned to love the process.
But the idea of deleting anything digital is horrifying to me. I still have emails in my work Inbox from 2001, when I started my job. Every once in a while IT tells me I need to delete things from my email and here's what I do. I find all the emails with large attachments, save the attachments to my computer, and delete the email. Problem solved, right?
Today my computer told me that I only had 245 MB of free space on my hard drive, out of a 93 GB capacity.
I was hoping Flickr would help me with my hoarding instinct, by letting me feel like I can delete the photos off my computer after posting them. But not only have I not been deleting anything, but it's only exacerbated the problem by encouraging me to take more photos. My 2006 photo folder is 2.05 GB, my 2007 photo folder is 13.4 GB.
I was able to clear a few gigs off my computer, but something tells me this is only a temporary fix. I clearly need help.
I decided to sign up for this year's NaBloPoMo for several reasons. In order of importance: 1) To help me resist the urge to sign up for NaNoWriMo and suffer the inevitable failure and disappointment; and 2) To help me stop over-editing myself and not posting the things I think about/write.
Today I have to add a number three to that list, because I am realizing that I've grown a bit insular in my blog habits these days. I read a lot of blogs and comment on a tiny, itty-bitty minority of them. (And if ever the world could come up with a better word than blog, I would die a happy woman.)
So if you're here because I'm leaving comments on your website and you're wondering who the heck I am, that's just because I'm making an effort to not just live like a voyeur. I am actually going to participate! Fancy that.
With all the cheerless gray weather we're having lately, I had to make a photo set of all my flower photos today to cheer me up.
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
P.S. If anyone can tell me how to get Pictobrowser to recognize my Flickr user name and allow me to make a slide show, I would cry tears of joy. (Click on the "INFO" button on this slideshow to see what I mean)
Female Pheasant, originally uploaded by CaroWallis1.
A bunch of Brad's friends from high school are coming over tomorrow night. We don't see them very often and they haven't been to our place since we moved in two and a half years ago, so I guess it's a bigger deal than your average gathering.
Naturally, I've procrastinated on getting ready for it. There's food to be prepared and some cleaning to be done. But I was sure Friday night and Saturday during the day would be plenty of time for all this.
This is why procrastinating is bad: because you never know what's going to happen at the last minute. Hint: this is probably a good time to be asking yourself why on earth I'm posting a photo of a pheasant.
This magnificent creature ran out in front of my car tonight. I slammed on the brakes, but to no avail. I can't seem to shake the upset feeling. It happened about four hours ago; the stomach pains are just starting to subside, but I still can't stop crying.
We managed to get the grocery shopping done, but I'm so depressed right now I honestly don't know how I'm going to clean and get the food ready before tomorrow evening. I can't make Brad do all of it, not with his broken bone. And as lovely as I think the people are who are coming over, I can't get excited about seeing anyone right now.
These are the kinds of days when I wish I had a thicker skin, like a normal person. Yet I'm not sure I'd want to not be this horrified by killing something, either.
After the most amazingly lazy day, I'm feeling much better, thank you. It feels like the day after Christmas, when we laze around the house all day grazing on leftovers. I've encouraged Brad to watch football all afternoon not because I have any interest in football, but just because it's nice to be ensconced in the living room with my knitting, my husband, and my cats. And a nice variety of beers that our friends brought over last night.
A lazy day at home is extra good when you have extras of these lying around:
Recipe here:
Continue reading "Recipe: Heavenly Pumpkin Cupcakes" »
One of the Apartment Therapy sites posted this picture of my spice rack.
I caught a glimpse of it in my RSS reader this morning, but then I found out I had to run to a press check. When I got back an hour later, twelve million more entries had been posted to all of the Apartment Therapy sites and I couldn't find it anymore.
I got rear-ended on my way to work this morning:
What a crappy way to start the day. And last night we just got the oil changed and tires rotated and car washed and were feeling so good about our little Honda.
This will not mean much to my non-knitting friends, but I wanted to post about the knitting projects I'm working on.
St. Mawes - I've knitted all the pieces and if I laid them all out, they'd take up the entire dining room table (this photo only shows the front and sleeves). Well, I guess now I know I have the stamina to knit a tablecloth if I should ever so desire. Up next is the part I seem to drag the most on - blocking all the pieces and sewing them together. Let's hope we have another rainy weekend, right? Maybe not.
Esprit Chemo Turban - a free pattern from Elann. My mom made a few of these last year and gave me the yarn to make one. A fun alternative to a hat even if you haven't been on chemotherapy, and a mindless knit. I'm trying to finish up some unfinished projects from long ago, and use yarn I already have, versus buying more. Leslie will be so mortified.
This afternoon, Brad and I had an appointment in Bloomington, on the other side of the cities from where we live, and just around the corner from the Mall of America. After the appointment, we found ourselves facing a very long rush-hour drive back to our house, so we decided to spend some time at the Mall of America until traffic died down a little bit.
The first interesting thing we saw was that they were filming what appeared to be an infomercial at the mall.
When we first walked by, the actors/announcers/whatever they are were just getting ready to go on stage. The "doctor" was donning his white coat. Later on, we walked by again and they were actually filming, reading from a teleprompter. I assumed they'd be filming at the Mall of America in order to have an audience, so the strangest thing about this was that there was no audience; they weren't even using speakers. So we could see their mouths moving, but we couldn't hear what they were saying. Very strange. Maybe we were just witnessing some kind of elaborate dress rehearsal?
The second unexpected thing we ran into was at the Barnes & Noble at the mall. We had just gotten coffee and were looking for a place to sit, when I noticed a whole pack of knitters. I thought at first that it was a knitting group, but they were all facing the same direction. That was when I realized they were getting ready for a book reading. Apparently, I've been living in some kind of cave all these years not knowing about the existence of Crazy Aunt Purl. I had, in fact, seen her book, Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split at some point, but that was the extent of it.
Pulled in by the gravitational force of a group of knitters all concentrated in one place together (the lure amplified by the fact that for once I actually had a knitting project with me in public, as I'd been prepared for waiting around in doctor's offices), I convinced Brad that he'd like nothing more than to hang out in Barnes & Noble for a few hours while I basked in the glow of fellow knitters.
So it was that I had the unanticipated pleasure of listening to Laurie Perry's delightful Southern accent. I bought her book, but didn't stick around for the signing because I was so far at the back of the line and we really needed to eat some dinner. And I'm sure I'll now be joining the rest of the knitting world and reading her blog.
Do you ever have one of those days when you reeeally don't want to go to work and you think to yourself that you wouldn't really mind the discomfort of being sick, just so you could legitimately stay home?
Yeah. This is not one of those days. I would so much rather be at work right now than having this stomach flu thing.
Since I've been sitting here not doing anything, I did watch the first few episodes of 30 Rock using Netflix's new (to me, at least) "watch instantly" feature. I had no idea of the existence of this feature when I re-signed up for Netflix this morning, and it's made my sick day much more bearable. Also, I don't know why I resisted watching 30 Rock all this time. It's just as good as they all say it is.
It would be a lovely thing if I could eat even a piece of toast without feeling horribly sick. I'm just saying. This morning I was determined to go to work even if I wasn't feeling better, but then I ate a piece of toast and that was the end of it. Maybe tomorrow I'll just skip breakfast.
Life is so boring when I'm sick that I'm resorting to posting about the contents and status of my stomach. I apologize. NaBloPoMo starts tomorrow and this doesn't bode well. I guess if I'm not better soon I should probably go to the doctor and make sure I don't have stomach cancer or something.
And no, I'm not pregnant.
