Thank God It’s Friday

Posted on August 28, 2009
Filed Under Blather, Red Sox, das kiddo, dining, family, knitting, music | 2 Comments

I’m tired. It’s been a long day. Rainey’s been fine, but today has been one of those days when he fights a nap. It makes me tired just thinking about it. He would only sleep on my lap, which, while kind of nice, made it hard to do much.

So what HAVE I been able to do? Well, I made my little gift to the Jimmy Fund. I imagine they’ll be hard-pressed to make their 5 million dollar goal for this year’s telethon. I started Rainer’s Christmas stocking. I’m using the same kind of yarn I used for Ezra’s stocking–probably 10 years ago. I’m listening to The Kinks. One of my many ideas for calming Rainey (this is after exhausting all of the usual techniques) was to put on a CD he’s never heard before. I’m not sure the CD helped at all, but I’m enjoying it.

I’m also waiting on pizza and salad delivery. Ah… it’s here. Excuse me.

…

That was good.

The Sox are playing the Blue Jays in the rain. Tomorrow I am getting my eyebrows waxed. I’m excited. I still feel pretty dumpy since having Rainey, and this is one of my first steps toward feeling a bit more myself again physically. I’m also hoping to go to the gym this weekend for the first time in an embarrassingly long time.

I love the weekend now even more than I did before.

Pretty days in Somerville

Posted on April 30, 2009
Filed Under Blather, art, das kiddo, family, knitting, the 'hood, this old house | 3 Comments

Except for Tuesday, which was super hot, it has been really lovely recently. Each day has been filled with clear sunshine and the temps have been in the upper 50s-upper 60s. I’ve been enjoying my little walks (mostly to True Grounds, my current favorite coffee shop/work spot).

This week our nursery furniture arrived. The crib and dresser came on Tuesday. They both require assembly, so they’re in pieces at the moment, but last night we did open up the crib box just to make sure everything looks okay. It does. Yesterday the comfy glider arrived. Looking at the measurements online I was a little worried that the chair would be too big to fit through the doorway to the nursery, but Ez got it through with no trouble. I like it! We’ll have to be vigilant about de-linting it… microfiber, you know.

chair

This week I also finished the second knit hat for our little muncher. It’s the same as the first, but in a different yarn and color. I liked working with the wool yarn a bit better–I think that’s a general preference of mine. In my experience, wool just tends to be softer and to produce better stitch definition. I think both of the hats are super cute, though. He’ll have one for summer/fall and one for fall/winter! Oh, and I finally (after–what is it now–13 years of knitting?) got some little double pointed needles to finish the top of the hat instead of improvising and probably stretching out the yarn. I’m not sure what I was nervous about–that I’d drop stitches or lose the little needles, I guess.

nursery paint tests
Last night Ez tried out two paint colors in the nursery, so I’ll be periodically wandering in there today to scrutinize. It’s a sort of drab green at the moment, so the effect of the new (light, slightly greenish blue) paint is going to be very different. We’ve been pondering leaving our Miro poster where it is in the nursery–all those bright colors and interesting shapes!–challenging and exciting!–perfect for our kid, right? But we’re thinking maybe not. It’s not Miro’s “friendliest” work. It’s open to interpretation, but it might be a bit angry-looking, even war-like, for a fresh-hatched type. I can see just the spot where we can move it in the living room, in fact. He can worry about war and anger later.

A Visual Montage

Posted on April 22, 2009
Filed Under Blather, craft, daytripping, friends, knitting, photography | 3 Comments

I promised a picture of the little hat I knit over the weekend, so here it is!

Knit hat

And while I’m at it, here are a few others to catch you up on the last several months.

Union Square, New York January in New York’s Union Square

doorway, Portsmouth
A Doorway in Portsmouth, NH

And the obligatory picture of a cute baby, Lydia, who we finally met over the weekend.

Lydia and JohnLydia and John

A Monday in New England, or an excuse to catch up on the ol’ blog

Posted on April 20, 2009
Filed Under Blather, craft, das kiddo, daytripping, family, friends, knitting, sports in general, this old house | Leave a Comment

So it’s Patriot’s Day, which I didn’t even know existed before I moved to the Boston area. And it’s Marathon Monday–this year it’s the 113th running of the Boston marathon. A guy Ezra works with has already finished. He came in 60th overall. Yeah, that’s right, 60th out of 26,331. One of Ezra’s other co-workers and our friend Randolph are still hoofing along and seem to be doing quite well. Whoop whoop!

Suki is at my shoulder as I write this, accepting kisses and purring.

Some New Englanders have today off; Ezra is working from home.

We had quite a busy weekend. Saturday we met up with friends John, Sonya, and their wee spunkmeister Lydia. Pictures of Lydia eating and generally checking out the world are coming soon. After a nice little visit with the pals, we decided to go to IKEA. Our goal this trip out was to get some lamps for the nursery, but of course we ended up finding a lot of other things that we genuinely need as well–a new bathroom rug, some little pads to prevent our furniture from scratching the floor, that sort of thing. Then yesterday we rented a U-Haul van and moved some assorted furniture out of the home office and into the studio. I’m not yet totally useless for such things, though anyone watching me push my wheeled cabinet up the ramp at the studio enjoyed quite a little comedy routine, and I did wake up this morning with an assortment of aches. We moved the larger part of the desk through our (open) front window… we’re just a couple of engineering geniuses is all.

Last Friday we had a doctor’s appointment, and afterward I wandered over to Windsor Button, where I found two skeins of Sirdar Sublime yarn–one a washable merino and one a washable cotton. They’re in such nice colors–I had to get them to make hats for our mini muncher. I finished the first one last night–they’re so easy! Pictures to come.

Delinquent blogger tells all

Posted on March 26, 2009
Filed Under Blather, Literary, das kiddo, family, films, knitting, me and my brain, this old house | 3 Comments

So I’ve been very bad about blogging.  Some blame facebook.  I blame life, which has been sort of too busy to report on and somehow at the same time too dull (?).  Maybe it’s just that I haven’t had a lot of time to reflect on things enough to actually write about them.

So.  I don’t think there’s anyone I know who would be reading this who isn’t already aware of the situation, but in case there is–I’m pregnant!  Our little man (doc said it’s a boy, but we couldn’t tell from the ultrasound one way or the other) is due August 3rd.  Makes him sound a little like a library book.  Okay, that’s just me.

That, of course, is our biggest news, but there’s more.

We’ve been contemplating a move to a bigger house.  It’s a complicated time to be considering a move for many reasons–even moreso maybe than it would be at any time.  We’ve seen one place we like, but it needs a lot of work and financing would be complex (if even possible).  We haven’t really seen anything else of interest in the months we’ve been looking, so if this place doesn’t happen, we may take a step back and try again next year.  In preparation for possibly moving, we’ve been taking care of a number of issues with our condo, so if we end up deciding not to move now, we’ll have a nicer place to live in for a while longer.

We’ve both been working our little noses into nubs–Ezra especially.  Things are getting more managable, I think, but for a few weeks there it was high-speed working seemingly 24/7.  We got a little trip to New York out of it, which is always good.  While Ezra slaved away in the Lux New York offices, new and old, I slaved away in our hotel room and in various Starbucks across Hell’s Kitchen. We got to see a few friends for dinner while we were there, and, of course, I made sure to take at least two trips to The Strand (or was it three?).  My haul this time included:

The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits

The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits

Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin

Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin

Rides of the Midway by Lee Durkee

Rides of the Midway by Lee Durkee

Blue Boy by Jean Giono

Blue Boy by Jean Giono

Clockers by Richard Price

Clockers by Richard Price

The Grifters by Jim Thompson

The Grifters by Jim Thompson

The Dark by John McGahern

The Dark by John McGahern

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

While in New York I finished The History of Love by Nicole Krauss–good, easy reading, sentimental but pretty satisfying–and then dug into The Dark.   John McGahern’s writing has been compared to early Joyce.  I’ve never read any Joyce (yes, another hole in my English-major reading), but I liked The Dark pretty well, so maybe one of these days I’ll give Dubliners a try.  Now I’m reading The Dud Avocado.  It’s fun–very different from the last few books I’ve read.  Up until a day or two ago I was feeling pretty stressed, so it’s been good to have a lighter (but far from insipid) book waiting for me at my bedside.

I am knitting a blanket for our little guy.  I started it a while ago, but it’s been kind of slow going.  I sort of made up the pattern–cables, of course!  I’m using Mission Falls 1824 yarn (washable!).  So far I like it, though the yarn has been prone to little pulls.

Last night right before bed I watched the very beginning of The 49th Parallel (1941).


I set Tivo to tape it because it stars Leslie Howard, but I now realize it has a lot more to recommend it.  It gets three and a half out of four stars, so that’s something.  Besides Leslie Howard, it also stars Laurence Olivier–that’s a pretty fancy cast!  It’s about a U-Boat crew stranded in Canada, trying to get to the still-neutral U.S. to avoid internment–seems like a nice bit of propaganda urging the U.S. to enter WWII on Britain’s side.


It won an Oscar for best writing.  I’m not usually big on war films, but I’m looking forward to watching this one.

I’m still here!

Posted on January 15, 2009
Filed Under Blather, cooking, craft, knitting | 6 Comments

So it’s been forever and a day since I last posted anything here.  But I’m still living, breathing, and sometimes doing other things.

Last night we made tofu florentine.  Alas, I did not take a picture, because it really was a pretty sight.  It’s much like eggs florentine, except vegan.  So instead of eggs, you use broiled tofu, and instead of whatever sauce is normally used on eggs florentine (er… not sure… hollandaise?), you use a vegan “cheezy” sauce made of veggie broth, flour, nutritional yeast flakes, and spices.  Ez and I are already pondering other uses for the broiled tofu and cheezy sauce–both were quite tasty and not too hard to make.

I’m knitting a little blanket with Mission Falls 1824 superwash wool.  You can even put this stuff in the dryer, which is pretty unusual for decent handknitting yarn.  So far so good, though I did have to start over.  I’m trying a design that I sort of made up, and after getting through 50 or so rows I decided that I wanted to revise the design a little.  It’s easier to decide this now than it would be after 200+ rows!

It’s supposed to be snowing today, but I’ve seen nary a flake.  I have my doubts.  I feel like I’m the only person in the Greater Boston area who is annoyed that the forecasted snow is not actually falling.

Today for the first time in ages I was actually looking for my 1990 and 1991 high school yearbooks and I can’t find them!  So annoying.  I have a feeling they might be tucked away in the bowels of the hall closet, or even somewhere in the basement.

So you can see why I haven’t been blogging much–not much to report!  I’ll try to be better about it, though.

The First Signs of Fall!

Posted on July 30, 2008
Filed Under Blather, craft, knitting, me and my brain | 5 Comments

Okay, I can almost hear most of you saying, “Fall? Girlfriend, it’s just barely summer.” But then, you all probably also know how I think. So yeah, FALL!!

Vogue Knitting Fall 2008

I have taken up my knitting needles again (now you keep hush if you know what I’m working on), AND I got the fall issue of Vogue Knitting in the mail today. Hip. Hip. Hip. Hoooo-ray!!!

You know you’re a knitter when…

Posted on March 27, 2008
Filed Under Blather, craft, knitting, me and my brain | 3 Comments

You know you’re a knitter when you see a New York Times headline that reads “Supplier Under Scrutiny for Aging Arms for Afghans” and the first thing you think is that it has something to do with yarn companies and knitters’ arms getting tired while knitting blankets… and then you realize.

Funny thing just heard in a coffee shop: “Egg and cheese on everything!” Yes! How about that? Okay, maybe not.

Gettin’ the word out

Posted on February 28, 2008
Filed Under Blather, craft, knitting | Leave a Comment

Okay, I know this is a little silly, but I figure, why not? I am looking for a back issue of Rebecca knitting magazine. This is an old one, so I would need it with the English language insert. (It’s a German magazine and they only started publishing the magazine entirely in English a few years ago.) So, the issue I’m looking for is #8. I think it’s from around 1999. It’s not the kids and babies issue, which for some reason is also numbered 8. It’s this one:


I know it’s out of print. I’ve hunted in all of the obvious places I can think of online. If you happen to come across a copy with the English insert or know where I could get one, please let me know. If you see it in a shop, I’ll pay ya back!

A little knit thing

Posted on February 22, 2008
Filed Under Blather, art, craft, knitting, me and my brain | Leave a Comment

So last night I started imagining up a sweater design.  I don’t know if it’ll ever come to be, but I’m starting to think about all the different pieces of design and patterns that I can put together in different ways.  Maybe…  It’s not like I’m hard up for things to knit!

keep looking »

Song of the Day

The Essex Green-Sorry River 

Photos

My Photos on Flickr


The Knitting Turnip

On My Needles

Rhapsody in Tweed cabled pullover for Ezra! using Tahki Donegal Tweed in Forest, from Fall 2004 Interweave Knits. I've just picked this one up again, so it's moving up in the queue!

Sweater with Cable Patterns pullover using Araucania Nature Wool Chunky in Mauve, from Rebecca Magazine Number 28

Heather Pullover using Classic Elite Wings in Larkspur, from Rowan’s A Season’s Tale... This needs the knit doctor. I'm going to have to frog back a little bit and redo the shoulder area. Long story.

Hush Pullover using Jo Sharp DK wool in Wine, from Rowan’s Calmer Collection

More scoop on my knitting endeavors can be found at my home on Ravelry (clicky here).

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