Knit Night

What I am thankful for today:

I'm thankful that Laura came over with her knitting and her (finished) chemistry homework, and held my hand while I worked on my chemistry homework, but not literally, because then she wouldn't have been able to knit! She kept me going until all of the homework was finished, even the optional parts!

What I am learning from knitting night at the new shop:

I am learning to knit quietly and let other people talk, something I am usually not very good at. I am learning, but not fast enough, that if someone else's project is ugly or dumb, it is not necessary for me to point it out. I am learning to be tolerant even when people are going on about stupid things like sports - just because I am not interested, doesn't mean that other people shouldn't be. Even if I think they shouldn't be.

What I am cooking today:

Nothing, because it was Knit Night! Yesterday I made Tater Tot Casserole, however, and it was so good! I had some leftover casserole today.

How many times Maddy and I went up and down the stairs at my house today:

I couldn't even tell you, but it was a lot. She went into all of the bedrooms to look around, and when the cat sees Maddy coming, that cat shoots out of there. A cat who is peacefully sleeping on your bed can go from zero to sixty in no time at all when a baby comes toddling in, saying, "Cat!"

What I am reading today:

Charmed Life by Diana Wynn Jones. I think that is my favorite book ever. I have given so many copies to people, because I want everyone to enjoy it. When Jenna came to live with us, she told me about a book she read when she was younger and it was her favorite book, but she loaned it to someone and never go it back. I asked her what it was about, because I thought I could help her find it in the library or a bookstore, but she couldn't remember enough about it. Then one day she came to me, and she was so excited because she had been reading a book she found on a shelf in our house, and it was the book! It was the amazing book that she had loved! And it was Charmed Life. You should read it.

What I am knitting today:

1. A shawl. It's the Brandywine shawl. I saw a photo of a finished shawl on someone's Ravelry page (Pynnski), and it was so beautiful, I had to have one! I had a big hank of handpainted yarn from the Fiber Festival, and I started it, with hope and doubt. Hope that I could knit it, and doubt that I could follow lace instructions without messing them all up, because I am terrible at knitting lace! It's moving right along, though, and I'm very excited about it!

2. A Jayne Hat. I made one for Scott three years ago, and now a friend of Kim wants one. It's kind of a joke, and if you walk down the street wearing that hat, everybody knows you aren't afraid of anything.

3. Socks for Paula. The socks are pretty but a pain to work with. She brought me some yarn made of microfiber, and it's pleasantly cotton-y, but the thing about cotton is that it has no give, so my hands get tired of working on it.

4. A Chicknits classic cardigan for Kim. I'm making it with mauve Galway yarn, and it's coming along slowly.

5. Still working on the classic cardi for Kelly, too.

That's all the news for now.

In which there was knitting. Also, cookies!

So there is much rejoicing tonight as a new yarn store opens! In my town! I've been keeping an eye on the place since I noticed it a few weeks ago - there was a sign that said it was opening soon, and then on Friday I was downtown and saw a woman sitting in a chair inside the store, knitting!

I waved at her and she beckoned me inside! There wasn't a lot in the store, but she said she was waiting for a delivery, and she let me look around. She said they would be opening on Monday, and there would eventually be classes offered, and it all sounded very exciting!

Then yesterday I was gone all day, so the store opened without me, but this afternoon Rachel and I took Maddy to her first yarn store! Maddy thought it was just great! There was lots of open floor space for toddling around, and there were yarn balls to pull off of shelves while Rachel and I ran along behind her, putting the yarn back on the shelves!

I texted Laura to come see the store, and she was there in just a few minutes, and by then we were having to distract Maddy by letting her pull everything out of my purse, and she was sitting on the floor wearing a necklace I had put in my purse just for her to play with, and on the floor around her were my wallet, some random receipts and lists, and she had pulled one of the needles out of my current sock project.

Rachel had to go home to get ready for work, anyway, so she took Maddy, and left me there with Laura, who then picked out yarn for a hat and started making a swatch to find the right size needles. I sat with her, and fixed the knitting that Maddy pulled out.

Tuesday is going to be Knitting Night at the shop, so I called another friend (Paula, a friend from work), and told her to come and check it out, and bring her knitting! The official start time for the group knitting was 7, so we had time to go to my house to start some dinner for Rich first.

When we got to my house, Rich was already gone, but I threw together some Curried Chicken and left it for him to eat when he got home, and we went back to the yarn shop to knit!

It was so nice to sit with other knitters and just knit! There was just a small group tonight (Paula, Laura and me! Who needs any more than that?), but I think it's going to grow, and I'm very excited about it. It's so great to have a yarn shop in town again!

In which someone got fingerprinted.

What is the world coming to when Diana is shaming me by writing in her journal more often than I am?? I just don't have anything going on, just the same old thing, blah blah laundry blah blah walked the dog blah blah made/didn't make dinner blah blah knitting. Now you know that's not very interesting!

Today I actually left town and did something, so I have something to write about! Wooo!

What I did today:

Laura Chem (all of my friends from Chemistry are listed in my phone contacts by their first name, with Chem as their last name. Diane Chem, Joann Chem, Nick Chem, Kim Chem... Kim Chem. Heh.) So where was I? Oh right, so Laura is applying for her Illinois license for massage therapy so she can get a job in Illinois instead of commuting to Wisconsin all the time, but part of that process is to be digitally fingerprinted, and apparently the closest place to do that is in Rockford.

Rockford is a longish drive, so she asked if I wanted to ride along to keep her company, and you know me, I will ride from Hell to Israel if I have my knitting and a pop to drink, so I said I would go along.

We left at two in the afternoon, but first we had to stop and get a pop and a hamburger for me because I had just gotten out of bed, and then Laura needed to put a couple of things in the mail, so we stopped by the post office, but after that we were on our way.

The drive to Rockford was uneventful, and I did several rows on my knitting (the yellow sock for RA). To my delighted surprise, our destination turned out to be not a police station, but a detective agency! We were greeted by a tall thin woman with big blonde hair, wearing a leopard-print scarf to accessorize her sweater and pencil skirt. She was wearing heels, too, and the overall impression was that she looked quite a bit like a Barbie doll.

Detective Barbie allowed us to use the bathroom, and I noted the collection of hair products in the glass-fronted cabinet in there, but then she got a bit pissy with me when I asked about the pink camera on her desk. She told me I could wait in the lobby while she did Laura's fingerprints, so I wandered out and read a book on my Kindle, and knitted on the yellow sock while I waited.

There was a table display in the lobby of gift cards you could purchase - in case your friend has been wondering if her husband is cheating on her? I think those would make pretty hilarious Christmas gifts!

When we left there, we kind of felt like we had come all that way, and that we should do something in town while we were there. We headed over to the main drag of strip malls, and went to see what we could find at Borders. We each bought a couple of books and I looked at a stuffed rabbit for Maddy ("Cat!"), but I didn't buy it.

We stopped to get a turkey sandwich on the way home, and it was a really great sandwich. Too bad the restaurant is called Beefaroo, I'm embarrassed to tell anyone where we ate.

We stopped at Laura's house when we got back to town, and there was cake, and her 'girls", including my new girlfriend, Mazey, were so happy to see us! All the girls jumped in the car for the ride to my house!

By the time I got home, it was really time for my evening nap, and I was ready for it. I slept for a couple of hours and when I woke up, Rich and Sonny were ready for bed! I got out of the bed and they got in it!

So there you go, that was my day. If anything else happens, I'll let you know.

And the heroine always has red hair.

It's been a busy weekend, and I'm trying to remember what we did. For one thing, Kim was here this weekend, and she went back to school this afternoon. She got here Thursday night, and before she came home, we had made plans for cooking her favorite things, and letting her rest and relax, but things didn't work out quite like that.

What we planned to cook this weekend:

Kim told me she wanted salmon for dinner one night, and another thing she wanted was roast beef hash. Neither of those things happened. Salmon was so expensive I couldn't bring myself to buy any, and we ended up with pizza that night, and then I was gone most of the next day, so I didn't cook anything for dinner at all and she and Rich got some takeout.

What we made instead of dinner:

It was Kim's birthday last weekend, and we wanted to make a birthday cake for her while she was home, so I bought a cake mix, and was going to make a Jello cake, but I am not actually sure how to make one! I asked RA about it, because she makes them all the time, and she said if I gave her the cake mix and the Jello, she would make it for me, and that's what happened with the cake. It was delicious!

The other thing that we made, and this I actually did make, well okay, now that I think about it, Rachel made it and I just chased Maddy around the house and kept her out of the way, but anyway, the thing was that Kim said she wanted salt-water taffy. I didn't think we would be able to just buy some, because isn't that something you can only get when you go on vacation, like when you go to Mackinaw Island?

Then I kind of remembered a long time ago, my friend and I wanted to cook something, and her mother helped us make taffy in a pan on the stove, so I thought maybe we could do that and it would be really fun! Didn't pioneers used to make taffy and it was an evening's entertainment? I got a recipe on the internet, and I borrowed a candy theromometer from RA, and Rachel came over with Maddy, and we worked on making candy.

Can I just tell you, that making taffy isn't as easy as you'd think, and what we ended up with was a pile of hard, sticky candy, a lot of dirty dishes and a big blister on Rachel's thumb. I think that pioneers were easily amused.

What I did at the Fiber Festival:

Rachel and I were up early (for us) on Saturday morning, and we were pretty excited to take Maddy and go to the Fiber Festival! They have yarn! We looked at everything, and we saw people that we knew, and we maybe bought a little yarn...

Rachel took Maddy home for a nap, and I went home to fondle my new yarn (and to wake up Kim). RA kind of wanted to go the Fiber Fest, and I was supposed to go back to meet Laura too, which is why I was back there again in the afternoon, but I only bought one circular needle, that's all, and that other bag of yarn I carried home was not purchased by me! RA doesn't knit, but she buys yarn for me, and I knit it into socks for her - do you see how everybody wins?

What I am reading today:

I just finished the new book, City of Fallen Angels, and I am thinking that maybe I need to take a break from Urban Fantasy for a while. I'm feeling a bit sickened by all the melodrama, and the professions of undying love! Can anyone just get a grip on themselves and maybe do something relaxed and ordinary like take a class or eat a hamburger? No, it's got to be all magic and the love that burns like fire and fighting with your last breath and your amazing magical skillz to save the person you brought back to life (magically) because without them you can't even freaking breathe or walk your dog. I might have spent too much time with this book, but I couldn't put it down, even while I was mocking it in my head.

What Kim forgot when she left:

When kids come home from college for the weekend, they always leave something behind - like their glasses, or their retainer, or oh, I don't know, a dryer full of their jeans!?! So Kim was about an hour away from home when she remembered that she never got her jeans out of the dryer. I told her to use her (my) Old Navy card that I gave her for emergencies (and yes, there are emergencies in which a person needs a pair of jeans and this is the perfect example of one), but then later I thought that I will have to mail a package to her this week when the birthday present I ordered arrives, and I can put in a pair or two of her jeans, and anyway it's not like she has nothing to wear, because I know she has clothes down there at school. So I called her back and said I could send her some jeans and also the t-shirts she left drying in the dining room, and she said did that mean she couldn't go shopping?

So that was our weekend, and I'm back at work tonight, knitting socks for RA with some beautiful merino sock yarn that is hand-dyed in pale yellow, and I'm going to look for something else to read on my Kindle, maybe something with no frantically attractive supernatural creatures?

In which I take a test and am kissed by a dachsund.

We had the second big test for our chemistry class tonight. Diane told me a couple of days ago that she dreamed that when she took the test, she marked all of the answers "C" and got a B on the test, so we joked that she would mark all of her answers that she didn't know as Cs and I would mark mine Bs.

Well, before we took the test in class, we talked about it again, and that is pretty much what I ended up doing. I actually knew the answer to one of the questions, and a few more of them I made (sort of) educated guesses on, and the rest? I marked them B. So we'll see how that works out for me. Diane said later that she did the same thing, marking the ones she didn't know with C. I think Nick mixed them up a little more than that, but it was mostly guessing on his part also.

After class people were complaining talking in the parking lot, and when almost everyone was gone, Laura invited me to come walk the dogs with her, and I said I would, but then told her that I was going to leave my phone in the car to charge up while I was gone, because it was almost dead. One of the guys from class was still standing there near her, and when he heard me say that, he offered to give me the battery from his phone and take my dead one! I gladly accepted his charged battery, and felt guilty for mocking him behind his back to my friends earlier!

So Laura and I went to her house and took her "girls" for a walk in her neighborhood. It was fun, and then when she drove me back to get my car at the college, all the girls jumped in the car to ride along. They each have their spot in the car - the poodle sits on the driver's lap, the doxie sits on the front passenger's lap, and the (English Bulldog?) other dog sits in the back seat. That doxie gave me a couple of kisses while we were riding, and slipped me the tongue! I think we might be going steady.

Maddy came over for an hour tonight before class, and it was the first time I've seen her this week, I think! I was going to walk her around the block in the stroller, but when we went outside she started toddling away across the lawn toward my neighbor Judy's house, so I followed along, guiding her away from the street. I coaxed her into Judy's backyard, where there is a wooden bench swing, and we sat on that, which Maddy found delightful, until the dog in the next yard started barking!

There is a high wooden fence all around the dog's yard, so I couldn't show the dog to Maddy, she could only hear the loud barking! It's a friendly dog, but Maddy has no way of knowing that, and I'm not sure she even knows that dogs bark like that, because the only dog she knows is my dog Sonny, who rarely barks at all, and never when Maddy has been around.

Judy came out of the house to say hello, and when Maddy saw her, she started to cry and reached out for Judy, who must look like a comforting grandma-type, because hello? I was holding her! Then Maddy came back to me, and we took her around toward the front of the house and sat on the porch with her, but when I gave her a toy to hold, I saw that her little hands were trembling, and she still looked like she might burst into tears at any moment.

The dog stopped barking when he couldn't hear us talk any more, and we got Maddy to sit in a little chair on Judy's porch and eventually she laughed and forgot about that dog. I hope so! I hope it won't become the dark beast that haunts her baby dreams!

In which Sarah is showing me new ways to waste time.

It's all my sister Sarah's fault that I have spent hours on facebook, looking for entertainment and farming. Now she has discovered Twitter, and I am getting sucked into that along with her.

Actually I've been on Twitter for quite a while, I just don't really twizzle much, because I feel that when I do tweet something, it should be of such astounding wit that people reading it will writhe in envy, but I rarely have anything like that to share.

Also, Rich is all about the Twitter, and has about a million followers, so many, in fact, that the last time I bothered to tweet something he didn't even see it because it was lost in the shuffle of his many twiddles, the avalanche of tweets that he has rolling across the bottom of his screen constantly. Are that many people really interested in his rate of Twinkie consumption or how many ladybugs are crawling on his keyboard? My point is that he is always babbling about Twitter like it is a Big Deal, and I lost interest in it because for me, he was gimpifying* it.

So now Sarah is all Twitterpated and is Tweeting right, left and center, and following people and whatnot, so I updated my profile, and followed some people (no one you've ever heard of), and I may possibly even tweet in the near future! Wait for it, it's going to be legend...

If you want to follow me on Twitter (and who wouldn't?), I'm @oozaroo. Don't expect too much.

*Gimpify (v.) To make a previously cool thing lame.