kenmore mini ultra: you suck it. sears: you rock it.

So I finally summoned the strength to call it quits with my adorable but dysfunctional Kenmore Mini Ultra. I took it back to Sears, who took it back with no receipt (because the purchase was in their computer anyway) and got me a slightly better model. I brought it home and couldn't bring myself to open the box. In the wake of all that frustration, I didn't want to risk more heartbreak... so I procrastinated a while. But when I eventually decided it was time, I plugged that puppy in, wound me a bobbin, threaded the needle, and it sewed a beautiful, perfect straight seam that actually functions as a seam (i.e. the stitches are real stitches, they don't just appear to be stitches until you get to the end of the seam and pick it up and the two pieces of fabric fall apart and you realize it was all a facade). I am so delighted. I'm not going to bed until I finish my first skirt. Yay!

ETA: One a.m. and the skirt is finished! Yeah! Except that I measured wrong and it's like four inches too big. I'm just going to overlap it. It won't show much. That's the beauty of a circle skirt. Damn, I'm totally knitting something to match. I'm thinking a Loop d Loop ballet top in Blue Sky Cotton (held doubled)?

clap your hands say yeah!

I finished Clapotis! Well, finished the knitting anyway. I have like ten skeins' worth of ends to weave in, and then I'll probably have a block party next week after I've finished Kate's Skully sweater. You know, the sweater that was supposed to be her Christmas present? Like, Christmas 2005. The one that already happened. That one, yeah. So as an extra-special "sorry I'm a spaz" gift, and since she can't exactly wear Skully for several months now, I'm knitting her a Headline News newsboy cap. She liked my non-cabled one, so I didn't cable hers. Instead I gave it an eyelet pattern, both for visual interest and for ventilation, since she wants it to be a hat for all seasons. Blogger is freaking out right now, so I'm going to post a pic and call it a day. Sorry about the weird lighting situation. I was racing the sun--bind-off vs. twilight--and the sun won, so the hedge around my porch is in shadow but the sidewalk is still bright.

speaking of proportion

Proportion is a correspondence among the measures of the members of an entire work, and of the whole to a certain part selected as standard. From this result the principles of symmetry. Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members as in the case of those of a well shaped man. -- Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture (III, Ch. 1)

I got a new tattoo today. It's this:
I'll post real pics eventually, but it's very angry right now and not so pretty. In case you're wondering what the heck it means, it's a graphic representation of the Golden Section (golden mean, divine proportion, etc.) which you can read about here, here, or here, or if you don't feel like clicking around I can tell you that it's a visually pleasing mathematical ratio found in many natural forms as well as in art and architecture. The Pythagoreans discovered it and ye olde Greek architects as well as Renaissance types like da Vinci (Vitruvian Man for example) were fond of it. When I mentioned this tattoo idea to my sister Katie she said, "like the Pythagoreans, the secret mystical math society? That's awesome! I want one too!" which, if our mother found out and was angry about it, we could always point out is in her honor, since she is a mathematician and exposed us to way too much Donald in Mathmagicland.

Speaking of my mother finding out, my friend Amy said of my last post, "So, I was going to post the following to your blog, but wasn't sure if your parents read it: Don't worry, I'm sure you'll make it to the Beard and Moustache Riding Championships." So do my parents read my blog? Let's find out, shall we? Hey Mom! I've got three tattoos now and my friends make dirty jokes! And I love it that you, like Pythagoras, believe that numbers constitute the true nature of things, so much that I tattooed it on my arm! Holla if you hear me!

proportion

Good things about today:
1. I wore my newly-handpainted homage-to-exploding dog shoes today. White fake Vans from Target + fabric paint + a Sharpie = happy feet. (The color of the kitchen floor is awfully green in this pic--it's actually plain ol' off-white--but the color of the shoes is right on.)

2. I got a notice that I had a package waiting for me in the management office of my building, which must be my package from knitpicks with another skein of Andean Silk so that I can finally finish my Clapotis!

3. I tried several new furniture configurations in the living room to accommodate my new pink microsuede butterfly chair! (Aka the Jane Jetson chair)

4. The cat I rescued (and promptly handed off to my animal-loving rescue-expert friend Shamsi, who deserves megaprops for swooping in with her humane trap when my coworkers were talking about poisoning it) is doing better in terms of socialization, appears still to be a kitten, and may be able to be adopted out sooner rather than later. S/he let Shamsi pet him/her today. Sorry to compete with Carole in the please-take-my-kitty Olympics, but isn't he/she cute? We call him/her Chester, but you could rename. (Okay, we really have to find out its sex if only so my grammar is more clear.)

5. I finally got to watch my Grey's Anatomy season finale tape. Um, three times. Had to catch all the nuance, ya know.

Bad things about today:
1. I found out about the New York City Beard and Mustache Championships too late. (I live too far away to go anyway. Maybe someday.)

2. There was no package waiting for me in the management office! I don't know why I got that notice. I'm going to lie in wait for the mailman tomorrow and pounce. I was so disappointed. I wanted to finish my pretty clappy.

3. I didn't find a furniture constellation that actually worked, and worse, the only reason I have the Jane Jetson chair is because Bev gave it to me because she moved back to Connecticut BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

4. While checking my email this morning, I shook my Nouriche without firmly screwing on the cap and sprayed the stuff all over the place--face, hair, silk pajamas (three cheers for Tarzhay!), and (gasp) computer. I managed to wipe off the monitor pretty well but had to buy a new keyboard. (One more for the "good things column--I got to break it in with an extended instant message Grey's rehash with Amy, whose visit last weekend was awesome but too short.) One of the keyboards was "spill-resistant" so naturally I gravitated toward it but Office Depot guy said, "well, if you pour coffee on it, it's going to be ruined anyway." I resisted the urge to say, "actually it was liquid yogurt," and went with the cheaper one.

Now off to watch more taped season finales with animal-rescuer and general rock star Shamsi.

living in a whirl of gaiety

...that being a quote from one of the greatest books ever! The Ingalls' whirl of gaiety dominated the winter after the Long Winter, when everybody in town enjoyed the Literary Society meetings with such zest that Laura didn't get much studying done and feared she would never qualify as a teacher and Mary might have to leave the college for the blind. Not that I've memorized it or anything. My own personal whirl of gaiety (hee! dirty!) is dominating May: I just got back from a weekend at home in Pennsylvania, and this weekend Amy's coming to visit! (Another noteworthy event that I'm not looking forward to is Bev's going-away party. BOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Not thinking about it, except to ponder what to cook. Artichoke dip, anyone?) And to put the icing on the cake (or perhaps the frosting, since after taking that "How Dixie are you?" internet quiz and thinking way too much about it I no longer know which I naturally say), I'm almost finished with Clapotis! Yay! I'm on the last repeat before the decreases, a little panicky about running out of yarn and the fact that my clappy looks kinda short, compared to the lovely larger-than-life (literally, it's longer than she is tall) version done by Noelle, but hoping that fudging and blocking will cure those things. And frankly not caring all that much since it's pretty. Yay for soft dove gray.
And now for the traditional crappy-camera-phone pics: my nephew Ian discovers dirt roads really are made of dirt. Except when they're made of rocks. Fascinating, huh?

Aaaaaaand... supercool rockstars or giggly dorks embarrasing their mom in a department store? You be the judge.

p.s. if finishing the clap and the fact that my Grey's Anatomy season 1 DVD arrived from Netflix while I was gone is, in fact, a whirl of gaiety in my life, then "rock star" is probably not the option you want to go with when you're tested on this information later. Although Amy's visit should be pretty rockin'.

p.p.s. in case you're wondering, I'm not Dixie at all. I scored "pure Yankee." Damn right.

guess where I'm going!

...home to PA for a whirlwind weekend! I just got home from work. I am not packed, I have not eaten since breakfast, and I really need a shower. And what am I doing?

Reading blogs.

I'm bringing Clapotis and another newsboy cap on the plane with me. I don't even have a book, because I plan to either sleep or knit the whole way (right now, it's looking like sleep). Anyway. To the shower now.

fear the broccoli monster!

So I saw this childhood meme over at Bev's and decided to do it. Consider yourself tagged if you're reading.

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.

by hand

So I love this handwriting meme that I've seen going around. I have a thing for handwriting. It shows so much personality. Once an old roommate and I got packages from our moms on the same day. After we ripped them open and squealed over all the awesome mom-stuff--handknit socks for her, homemade jam and a book for me--as we sat in a sea of bubble-wrap my roommate looked at the outside of her package and said, "Don't you just love your mom's handwriting?" And you know what? I really do. My dad's too. My mom's script is very even, all the letters properly proportioned (as you'd expect from a mathematician), perfectly clear, slanted and slightly angular but obviously feminine. My dad's script has huge, dramatic, sweeping capitals and a bunch of little scribbles in between--exactly what you'd expect from a writer, and a person of wide interests--a generalist, not a specialist.

My handwriting, as Amy once said of her own, is somewhere between engineer and psycho-killer.

I also have this thing about drawing squares and windows. I used to cover the margin of my notebooks with them.







In other news, I've got the clap. Yep, I jumped on the Clapotis bandwagon, after seeing the beautiful results that Noelle and Laurie got, as well as prolonged ogling of the thread on Craftster. I got some Andean Silk, color slate, and cast on yesterday. I'm already halfway through section 2 (the increases) because I sat for an hour at work yesterday (on what was supposed to be my day off, but whatevs, I didn't have to work on Easter) waiting for a computer problem to be resolved, with nothing else to do and nobody around... I'm a stealth knitter. WIP photos soon.

kelly kelly kelly kelly kelly kelly kellyyyyyy

I think I'm becoming a yarn snob, because I used acrylic for this Headline News Cabled Newsboy Cap from SNBN, and I feel sort of naughty, like I'm an uptown girl dating a downtown guy. Like Kelly and Woody on "Cheers," this hat and I are now inseparable. I used acrylic because a) I wanted some instant gratification, and nothing's more instant than standing in the aisle of Michael's deciding which is the least hideous-feeling yarn, unlike the hours I could spend at Village Wools deciding which is the most luscious, and b) it's practically summer now and wool is HOT! And all the cotton I saw was either soft, twee, dainty-English-rosebud colors or that heinous Sugar n' Cream, kitchen-yarn texture. You'll note, though, that I didn't cable it. I had a little trouble with the pattern. It says to cable every four rows, which with a 6-stitch-wide cable seemed too tight to me, so I changed it to every six rows. It also says to start decreasing after 3 cable repeats, which seemed too short to me, so I went an extra half-repeat. And the thing was still too small. Comically small. It was a red cabled yamulke. I swear. Fortunately, I am persistent in my quest for instant gratification (ha), so after emerging from the pit of despair, I dropped the newsboy yamulke into my stuff-for-Goodwill pile and cast on again, this time without cables so that it would be quicker to knit and because I saw this girl's newsboy on Craftster and liked the way it looked sans cable. (Also, someone in that thread mentions seeing Debbie Stoller on Craft Corner Deathmatch, which I have never heard of, probably because I don't have cable--hee--but am very interested in seeing. "My glue gun's hotter than your glue gun!") I didn't put plastic mesh in the brim, either, because I thought it was firm enough as it was, and I couldn't find the stuff at the store anyway. So here it is, in all its Caron SimplySoft glory. I've promised one to my sister Katie and want another one for myself, in a less-bold color... and perhaps a nicer yarn?

Nah.

fun with wikipedia.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes, guys! My friends took me to Graze, Ramona's restaurant, and we looooved it. I noticed a birthday meme going around--coincidence? I think not--at Pomo Golightly, January One, and Saving Nine, among others. The idea is to search for your birthdate, sans year, at Wikipedia and see what you come up with, then list three events, three births, and three deaths. (I'm not always really strict about following meme rules, so if I list more than three, just chalk it up to my being a supercool lawbreakin' badass and not to my inability to count.)

Events
1742 - George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah makes its world-premiere in Dublin, Ireland.

1861 - American Civil War: Fort Sumter surrenders to rebel forces.

1970 - An oxygen tank aboard Apollo 13 explodes, putting the crew into deadly peril. The explosion occurred on April 14th in several time zones.

Births
1519 - Catherine de Medici, wife of Henry II of France%

1743 - Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States (d. 1826) [The weird thing about this is, my parents (who have the same birthday) were born on Lincoln's birthday, my older sister was born on Patrick Henry's birthday, and my younger sister missed Washington's birthday by one day.]

1866 - Butch Cassidy, American outlaw (d. 1908)

1946 - Al Green, American singer and pastor

1949 - Christopher Hitchens, English-born journalist, critic, and author

Deaths--not a lot of people were listed as dying on my birthday, and very few that I'd actually heard of, so I picked the ones with the coolest names. Imagine if they all got group-married and hyphenated!

814 - Krum, khan of Bulgaria

1941 - Annie Jump Cannon, American astronomer (b. 1863)

1997 - Dorothy Frooks, American author, publisher, military figure, and actress (b. 1896)

2002 - Desmond Titterington, Northern Irish racecar driver (b. 1928)

"Hello, I'm Mrs. Jump Cannon-Krum-Frooks-Titterington. Call me Annie."

and the award goes to...

Noelle! Officially the world's most thoughtful person. Not only did she get me Knitorama for my birthday (from which I'm thinking I'll jump on the grenade purse--get it, jump on the grenade? hee! woo ha ha!--and the dropstitch nightgown), and lend me her Upstairs Downstairs DVD boxset, she also found this awesome snake scarf pattern and sent it to me, remembering that I had mentioned several months ago that I'd like to make a snake scarf for my nephew but had been discouraged by the thought of trying to alter the alligator-mitten pattern in SNBN to make it more snakey (and also a scarf). I liked the look of the yarn, so I went and bought the kit. Yay for a snake to wrapped around my neck! (Well, his neck.) And double yay for people who lend you awesome period-drama DVDs and send you just the pattern you've been looking for! Thank you Noelle!!!!

I finished my hourglass sweater, and one of these days I'll have to get someone to take a picture of me in it. The boatneck is a little wide, but since it's wool and I live in the sunbelt, it's not like I'm going to be able to layer it over anything but a tank top anyway. I've already started another one (at Crafty Friday--good times!) in bright green cotton. Still working on my second "circus freak" jaywalker, which one of my coworkers refers to as his (his? as if!) "pride" socks. I'm knitting a rainbow of understanding in the break room.

beautimus maximus

(Like my faux Latin?)
It's here! It's here! My beautiful, beautiful C*Eye*ber Fiber sock yarn from Mama-E arrived today, and look--isn't is luscious? Isn't it just delicious and candy-like? Don't you sort of want to bite into it? Well, don't, or I'll have to kill you, because I can't wait to knit with it. (I have a weird thing about wanting to eat things that I think are cute. Ask my sister Katie about our mutual obsession with eating babies. No, really.) The thing is, I have so many projects I'm contemplating right now, I don't know when I'm going to be able to start more socks... and I'm kind of afraid of getting something on it. It's so lovely! That's supergirl on the left and mermaids on the right.

i'm a moron

Holy crap, I completely forgot that I signed up for Stash Your Flash! Apologies to those who showed up looking for some yarnography. My stash is pathetically small, mostly because of my budget--I try not to buy yarn unless I have a project planned for it. Subtract gift WIPs, and the fact that FOs don't count, and I barely have enough stash to warrant a photo. I really only joined because I liked this button:

So instead of flashing my stash, I'm going to flash my new sewing machine! Yeah! Thanks to Noelle's hot tip re: this month's Bust and the good folks at Sears, I now own a Kenmore Mini Ultra. Here's my own hot tip: only the blue ones are on sale! The pink and the green are going to cost you like $30 more. I'm off to Hancock now, hoping they haven't closed yet, because I've heard they're having a $1 sale on McCalls (or was it Butterick? whatevs) patterns and my idea of a big bad Saturday night out involves pattern shopping. Woooo!

So my dear Beverly started a "favorite paintings" meme, and in the fine tradition of Implosion Explosion, I am posting two favorites, which are total opposites. One is an oil painting, the other was created on a computer; one is full of tension and even hostility, the other is wistful and even sad. The first is a portrait, "Therese Louise de Sureda," by Goya, c. 1803/04. According to The Story of Painting by Sister Wendy Beckett--I used to love her show in high school--her husband was a drinking buddy of Goya's, and Sister Wendy and I think that she and the painter hated each other. Sister Wendy says, "There can be no comparable portrayal of a woman at once so attractive and so hostile." And I agree.

The second is from explodingdog, which I love. You can send in a title for a picture, and he'll draw it. I love the simplicity and I think the message is always perfectly clear. If you like this one, my other exploding dog favorites are "i am building a world for you," "it is okay because i don't really mean it," and "oh god what have i done," which used to be the screensaver on my computer. (I have thought about painting them as murals in my apartment.) This one is called "you will never know what i saw." Click the link to go full-screen.

Chuck Norris fears no man! Only women.

So I got to the top of the yoke of my hourglass sweater last night, counted the raglan-sleeve stitches, and realized that one sleeve has like 16 stitches and the other has 23. I tried it on. It doesn't look bad. I am torn between ripping back and spending more hours (and more tears! WHY, GOD?) on it, and completing it and attempting to forget that I've got an uneven sweater. I'm leaning toward completing it.

In other news, my sister Katie directed me to a page that has raised my awareness of a serious problem facing America's youth today: admiration of Chuck Norris. This admiration is harmful and corrosive to the spirit, even if intended ironically. I found the following anti-Chuck Norris facts so convincing that I've renounced the watching of the occasional Conan O'Brien "Walker Texas Ranger" clip, however humorous I may previously have found them.

Chuck Norris fears the Care Bears, especially No Heart.

Chuck Norris listens to Fall Out Boy and cries.

Uncle Jesse's mullet once won a knife fight against Chuck Norris. Uncle Jesse's mullet didn't have a knife.

Stephen Hawking once beat Chuck Norris in a foot race.

Many stuntmen who have worked with Chuck Norris complain on set that Chuck Norris makes far too many so-called jokes about "exchanging blows."

Chuck Norris was once invited back to his high school to speak at a graduation. Upon his arrival, Screech, Slater, Kelly, Lisa, and Jesse said, "That's not Zack Morris, that's Chuck Norris!" Mr. Belding broke the bad news to the class that Zack would not be attending the graduation, then delivered a roundhouse kick to Chuck Norris and sent him to detention.

thank you for bein' a friend

All right, I have something more to say... Reading all the various "Jaime's birthday" posts of my fellow SNBers has made me quite mushy. I'm really grateful to have met so many awesome women. I look forward to it every week, not only because I have enough geeky solitary hobbies and it's good to have a more sociable one (knitting: it's good for you!), or because it's nice to have a cheering section for a project that you think you can't handle (like, say, jaywalkers), but also because I have such a good time. I always laugh so much I feel a little drunk when I leave. I was so bummed when I started working on Tuesday nights, and so excited to hear I can have a two-hour lunch break if I want! So thank you guys, for being awesome.

needle in a haystack, har, har

So I was working on the second circus-freak jaywalker while waiting in line at the bank drive-thru earlier today, and when I drove away I just put my knitting on the passenger seat. When I went to go knit on my break later, my head exploded with rage and frustration when I couldn't find the fifth needle. I went and got a cup of coffee, picked up the shattered remains of my head, re-assembled them, and did a thorough search of my car, which is not what you might call "neat" or "clean" or "organized" if you were the kind of person who, you know, has eyes. I finally found it and managed to get a few rounds done. Now that I'm home it's time for good ol' hourglass sweater.
p.s. so those of you who've met me know I'm about as white as it gets without being a Nelson, right? Today at work I was asked (by someone who knows I'm not married, and thus have my own name) if my last name is "a white person name." Heee!

I'm going to make like a xerox and copy: the Four-themed Meme! via Noelle.

Four jobs I've had:
1. salesgirl, Totes/Sunglass World factory outlet (once the lights behind the "Totes/Sungl" part of the sign went out and my coworkers and I screamed with laughter over the thought of working at "ass World"), Tannersville, PA
2. archaeological field/lab technician (and occasional crew chief), multiple companies, multiple states
3. teaching assistant, UNM anthropology dept
4. Sunday School teacher (no, really. My mom made me), Cherry Lane UMC, Tannersville, PA

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. The Muppet Movie
2. Elizabeth
3. A League of Their Own
4. SuperTroopers

Four places I've lived:
1. Reisterstown, MD
2. Tannersville, PA
3. Erie, PA
4. Albuquerque, New Mexico

Four TV shows I love:
1. the Simpsons
2. America's Next Top Model
3. Seinfeld
4. PBS Mystery!

Four places I've vacationed:
*I've never really "vacationed" since I've been an adult. (Unless you count those four years of college.) So:
1. Nag's Head, North Carolina (repeated family vacations of my youth)
2. Jackson Hole, Wyoming (my one and only spring break trip)
3. San Diego, California (weekend, to see my grandmother)
4. Tempe, Arizona (weekend, to see Amy)

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. strawberry shortcake, chocolate cake, or anything involving both strawberries and chocolate
2. real pizza
3. my mom's Chinese chicken. Well, okay, anything my mom makes, including
4. blackberry cobbler, with blackberries my sisters and I picked ourselves

Four sites I visit daily:
1. the powderroom
2. Overheard in New York
3. Manolo!
4. Myspace

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. on my snowboard
2. with my sister katie, at our parents'
3. DFW, to visit Jessa!
4. in my sleeping bag, under the stars

knit, sleep, or take another personality test?

Heh. I never thought I was particularly authoritarian, open, or trusting. Whatevs.

Edit: what the hey? Where'd the picture and the link go? Oh well. In any case, personality test, blah blah confidence, blah blah spontaneous, blah blah I scored higher than average in both masculinity and femininity. How does that work, I ask you? Also, I scored as slightly more functional than aesthetic, or as the test put it, "slightly functional." Yep, that's me.

i can see paradise by the dashboard light

Er... something like that. Tonight I got to third base with this sweater! But I'm not going to make my self-imposed deadline of Tuesday, so I can't wear it to SNB, which is actually okay since I always get pretty warm at the Rio Grande Flying Star (although I'm always freezing at the one on Central. Go figure). I'm on the even row after the ninth (of 24) raglan decrease, and after that I still have to kitchener the armpits and sew down the hems and probably block it since it's rolling pretty badly at the bottom hem. (Otherwise I'd totally just skip blocking it. Ooh, I'm so ghetto.) I took the photo standing on an apparently highly light-reflective table at work, which is why my foot is in it. I was a) on the clock b) keeping one hand on the ceiling to avoid swaying from vertigo and early-lunch-related lightheadedness and c) keeping one eye on the door and muttering prayers to Whatever There May Be that no one should walk through the door and say, "What the hell are you doing, crazy woman?" because they've all already caught me talking to myself, out loud, with hand gestures, and some of them also think I'm a pervert because I snicker at certain sexually-suggestive product names. (I mean, come on. Hot Pickles? Fun Sacks?) I really don't need to earn any more eccentricity points at work.

Here's a question for my knittas: can I do a three-needle bindoff for the underarms instead of kitchener? I hate kitchener, I don't even really get it, and I always (always! Yeah, I've done THREE socks) do a three-needle bindoff instead of kitchener at the toe of a sock. I don't see why not, but I thought I'd ask in case somebody tried it and it was the most gawdawful mistake of his/her life.

good things come in small paper cups

I spent my Friday night raiding Target and baking cupcakes with my girls Shamsi (who complains she never gets mentioned on her friends' blogs, although she doesn't have one herself, so never mentions us) and Wendy (who may not even know that I have a blog). Yeah, I am wild. Here they are in all their glory. Usual apologies for crap quality of photos etc.--the cupcakes are devil's food and the icing is cherry. The photo on the left more accurately captures its Pepto-Bismolesque color. Thanks and kudos to Shamsi (holy crap, two mentions in one post, are you totally sobbing with joy and gratitude or what?) for figuring out how to get those damn little rainbow dots to stick. (The key is to disturb the icing. Don't let it settle first.) This post was inspired by All Cupcakes, All the Time and sponsored by the letters M and S.