Favorite special treat food - My mom makes these cookies, Russian tea cakes, only for Christmas. I don't even really like them, they're awfully dry (hence the "tea" suggestion, although we're not tea people and drank milk with them instead; we're also not Russian, but apparently there's no "English, Scottish, and Polish-but-really-French tea cake") and you get white powdery stuff all over your shirt and hands, but we only ate them at Christmas and that made them special.
Favorite real food - Broccoli. Seriously. My parents called me the Broccoli Monster.
Favorite thing to wear - I had a purple corduroy shirt dress, with snaps instead of buttons, when I was in second grade. That year I was in the third-grade reading class (nerd alert!) and you know how older automatically equals cooler when you're a kid? Well, in the midst of all those older, cooler kids, I got yelled at by a substitute teacher for calling out and not raising my hand. So later in the class when my stomach started feeling weird, I raised my hand and waited and waited... and threw up before she ever called on me. All over my awesome purple corduroy dress, in front of the third-graders.
Favorite place to go - the pool! My sisters and I swam competitively, summer and winter. Close runners-up: the duck pond, the library, or Dutch Wonderland.
Favorite person - Aside from my parents and sisters, of course, our next-door neighbors, an older couple from Virginia whom we called Miss Di and Mr. Harold. Miss Di was a retired hairdresser and used to cut my sisters' and my hair for free. We would go over one at a time so we could have special one-on-one time with Miss Di, who made us coffee-milk with marshmallows.
Favorite event/occasion - Christmas Eve. Better than Christmas morning because of the anticipation, the carol-singing, and not having to go to church.
Favorite pet - Heather, the cat. We adopted her when I was seven and she died when I was seventeen. She used to meet me at the bus stop after school, like a dog. She was the best.
Favorite TV show - I was so mad the day they interrupted "Darkwing Duck" to announce that Nelson Mandela had been released from prison. Well, I didn't know who he was. I was nine! I wanted my cartoon to come back on!
Favorite book - all the Little House books. True Geekiness Confessions: My family used to read them out loud around the fire in evening on camping trips. We once won the church Halloween costume pageant with our Ingalls Family costumes. My older sister was Mary, I was Laura (yay!), my little sister was Carrie (after whom, by the way, I'm named), and my mom held a dolly that was Baby Grace. More geekiness: Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's daughter, was also a novelist, among other things. I love her Old Home Town. It's a bit slow to start but the last sentence makes me cry every damn time.
If you've manged to read this far, you deserve some knitty goodness. Clapotis progress: I'm about a third of the way done, I would guess. You can see the dropped-stitch ladders on the left corner in the picture there--the weird lighting is due to the porch roof (stripes on left) and trees (general blotchiness).
I'm also up to the bust increases on my second Hourglass sweater. Speaking of which, here's
the first, still un-woven-ended, still unblocked, in my bathroom mirror. It goes well with my saggy pajama pants, no? I must be crazy to be posting a picture that shows me looking both cross-eyed and mega-hipped (I swear that's the effect of the lower mirror being closer than the upper mirror! All right, no more Mamut cookies...). Also please excuse the cluttered bathroom.
