there is no 'karen' in 'team'

Today my company is having a work outing involving a scavenger hunt that winds up at whatever mystery restaurant it is where they will then provide lunch. Now, I enjoy a scavenger hunt as much as the next person...wait a minute, NO I DON'T. At least not unless the next person hates them with the heat of a thousand flaming effigies of whoever came up with the idea of sending a hundred or so full-grown professional e-discovery specialists on a scavenger hunt. There were going to be teams, people...TEAMS. Sweet peanut butter jesus, I would rather spend the day participating in role-playing skits and trust exercises with a herd of evangelical Christians. Luckily that wasn't the company-sanctioned alternative option; the alternative option was to take a mandatory PTO day, which is what I did. So I've been spending a relaxing morning knitting Latvian-style mittens,


baking vegan banana-cranberry-pecan bread,


watching old episodes of The L-Word on Netflix, and talking on the phone with my mother.

OK, that last part was not so relaxing, particularly once I discovered that she (and presumably my father also) is planning to vote yes on California Proposition 8, because she is "old-fashioned." I mean, OK...I guess homophobia is old-fashioned. Mom also thinks Sarah Palin is "spunky," expressed with an enthusiasm that indicates she believes spunkiness is a necessary and sufficient condition for running the third-largest country in the world. I can't believe I am related to these people. And they wonder why I rarely call or visit.

Moving right along so I don't start screaming again, last week I finally checked out the first two seasons of 30 Rock, and oh. my. freaking. god. it is so excellent. I was laughing out loud alone in my apartment at numerous points. Then on one episode there was a scene where I thought to myself, wow, that looks exactly like the street where my friend/fellow MEOWkitty Lori lives. I dismissed it as a hillbilly perception that all residential streets in Manhattan look the same, but then I remembered that about 18 months ago I was visiting Lori and there were signs on her street restricting parking the next day...because of filming for some show I'd never heard of called 30 Rock. Then in a later scene I figured out that the Tina Fey character "lives" around the corner from Lori.

Since I'm talking about the MEOWkitty knitters...the other day I realized that among the 14 people in the group, we have five people with published designs in books, magazines, or both; the host of an HGTV knitting show; two people (besides the host) who've appeared on the show; and the assistant pattern editor of a major knitting magazine. Seriously, the MEOWkitty knitting mojo is off the charts. Even the people who prefer not to design or to work in the industry have insane skills, and plus they're all crazy smart and funny. I [HEART] YOU, MEOWERS!

out of the closet

It's been a while since I've bored you with photos of my apartment decor. Today my personal engineer installed a curtain line so that I could transform one wall of the craft room/office into a knitted item display area:



I spent most of today unraveling two sweaters I made this year that I never wore because they made me look extremely not attractiver than usual. Which means that my yarn stash reduction efforts just backtracked by two sweaters' worth. Plus today I bought yarn online to finally make James a Dylan Goes Electric sweater, so that's three.

Oh, well. Screw it. I like yarn, OK? Some days I think I might even like it better than heroin...but then I come to my senses.

wool-gathering

Yesterday Casey said he wasn't going to run my corpus test for me until I posted to the blog, so you may hold him responsible for the following installment.

I mentioned that last weekend I was in upstate New York for a big sheep and wool festival, but mainly it was just an excuse to gather together as many of my MEOW kitties as possible (we managed to get seven, including me, which is exactly half) and sit around and drink wine, gossip, knit, and also drink wine.

Two of those MEOWers currently have infants, so they came along too. (Disclaimer: No children were harmed by drunken knitters during this event.) Henry and Alex are quite the little charmers.




I am a bit afraid of the terror they will start to wreak once they become mobile, however. Alex is already the size of a mini-fridge and clearly on his way to a successful career with the New England Patriots (much to his father's delight). Not that I know anything about baseball.

The thing about fun, hard-drinkin', hard-knittin' chicks after they have babies is...well, see for yourself:


(Update for certain mentally challenged readers anonymous trolls who need to be slapped: the kids were asleep. This thingamajig happened to serve well as a temporary side table. No one was leaving any kids with glasses of wine in front of them. No one was drunk. There's this thing, called hyperbole for comic effect? Look into it.)

The wool festival was beautiful in that it was crisp, cold, clear, and surrounded by fall-colored foliage, as you can see in the previous post's photos. What wasn't so beautiful was the sheer volume of knitters (and spinners and crocheters and felters and weavers and their spouses and their children) who descended on the Dutchess County Fairgrounds in search of lanolin-infused fiber crack. We were clever enough to arrive a little before it officially opened, and to head directly to the booth where they were selling Blue Moon Fiber Arts yarns, in particular their immensely popular hand painted "Socks That Rock" line.

By the time we arrived at their booth you already had to wait your turn a little to access the Wall of Yarn, and by the time we'd chosen our skeins there was not only a long line to shell out a week's hard-earned salary purchase, but also an even longer line just to get to the merchandise.

My friend Tiffany regarded this spectacle with an expression of mild disbelief and said, "It's like the Beatles, but with yarn."

The truth is, you can easily buy Socks That Rock online, but what you can't get online is their special edition "rare gems" colors and their discounted mill ends, of which the MEOW kitties picked up quite a few examples (mixed in with some standard colors):


By noon we were well ready to escape and head back to our lodgings, roll around in our new yarn, and declare that it was 5:00 p.m. somewhere. And so we did.

rhinebeck!

I'm in Rhinebeck/Rhinecliff NY for the weekend to hang out with half a dozen of my knitting posse and to go to the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival. We're having a blast.

i do not think that word means what you think it means

The other day I got an offer from one of my forgotten frequent flier programs that allowed me to subscribe to various magazines in order to use up my otherwise essentially worthless mileage balance, and so I did so.

Does anyone else think it's odd that Out magazine comes in an opaque mylar wrapper?

oh deer

This weekend James and I had dinner at the Saturn Cafe in Santa Cruz, where the tables are sort of like shadow boxes--they've got all kinds of little scraps of paper and photos and trinkets and other stuff underneath the glass, and the space is ample enough to fit some interesting larger items. We sat at a table that had an old credit card verification machine in it, opened up so that you could see the guts of the printed circuit board assembly. James went into full-on Asperger mode and started naming all the different components complete with their technical designations. Since I personally fall way outside the autism spectrum I can't recall exactly what any of these were, but the (one-way) conversation sounded something like "That's the JFET-623, wow I haven't seen one of those in a long time, and that one is a MOSFET 2279R...interesting...and over there is the blah blah blah letters numbers blah blah blah" and so on. This continued for a couple of minutes and I finally said, "Oh my god, you're an attention whore! You're trying to get on the blog again, aren't you?" And as you can see, he succeeded.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the midwest, a friend of mine spent much of her weekend listening to her 3-year-old daughter's angst-ridden proclamations about deer: she did not like them, they were scary, they jumped through windows, etc. Naturally my friend and her husband tried to console their daughter by telling her that deer were in fact gentle and nice and kept their activities confined to the great outdoors, having no inclination whatsoever toward the comforts of, say, a foyer or sun room. "A deer jumped through the window at my SCHOOL!" the tyke insisted, only to be gently but just as insistently rebuffed with the assertion that surely that was just pretend. And then my friend arrived at the school Monday morning to find:

Dear Parents,

In case you are not aware on Friday afternoon about 4:15 a female deer
decided to jump through a window in room 117 and after a very short
visit turned around and jumped back out through another window in the
same room. The deer never left room 117 and there were no children in
the classroom at the time. I would like to say that we had a plan of
action, but realistically we never thought about writing one for a
deer jumping through the window.

(etc.)

And now my friend feels like the worst mother on the planet. However, another friend wisely pointed out that being the worst mother on the planet would probably involve something like noisily bursting into the child's room in the middle of the night wearing a deer costume.

dylan goes electric

Since I don't actually have time to design anything these days (and by "these days" I mean "for the past two years"), it's always nice when one of my older designs gets a fresh shout-out:

Dylan Goes Electric on the Lime & Violet blog

::go me:: ::go me:: (cabbage patching)

turns out I *was* dreaming

I was clicking around the New York Times site just now and came across a short piece discussing Sarah Palin's accent and speaking style, and it pointed out that pronouncing 'nuclear' as 'nucular' is an instance of a phenomenon (called metathesis) common among the world's languages and that it's no different than when someone pronounces 'iron' as 'eye-ern' rather than 'eye-ren.' And I got all excited because OMG! A layperson in the mainstream media who actually did some linguistics homework instead of spouting untenable prescriptivist crap!

And then I scrolled up to see who the writer was, and it was Steven Pinker. As in, the MIT linguist Steven Pinker.

Doh.

unhappy

One of my favorite teachers has died:

New York Times obituary for Ed Klima

I still talk about his Linguistics and Poetics class that I took over 15 years ago. I definitely learned some new ways of thinking from him.