mostly pics because I'm mostly lame

I still don't have much besides photos for show & tell. So here goes...

The other day was Tami's birthday, so I made her a gluten-free chocolate nut cake and even busted out the fancy spoons (from the 1920's at the latest; I think my grandmother got them for her wedding):



Amanda brought me the bestest ever little salt and pepper shakers. They perfectly match my dishes:



When I was researching wheat-free cooking I realized that wheat might actually be behind a lot of life-long problems I've had, so I'm experimenting with gluten-free food for at least a month. Baking has been fun:

German plum cake and blueberry-fig-walnut muffins

Gluten-free bread (delicious)

Banana-walnut muffins

I finally got my butt in gear and made some robot-themed baby items for Casey's brand new nephew Matteo. I have been promising Casey for months that I'd do this!

Here's my friend Steph's sweet little girl Gwen wearing a stripey dress I made for her:





And finally, here's a sweater I recently made for myself--just in time for San Francisco's one month of warm weather.

kitties in vegas

The MEOW kitties (a.k.a. my internet knitting posse) decided we'd have our semi-annual retreat in Las Vegas this time, so a bunch of us rented a vacation home for the long weekend and we're enjoying the lovely weather as well as the drinking and the gossiping. And the knitting, of course.

Technically we are in Henderson, NV, which I'm told is a popular location for finding dumped bodies on C.S.I.

Speaking of knitting, I would like to present to you young Diego modeling the 'aviator helmet' I made for him a while ago. Wow that is a cute kid.

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.

sux et veritas

Back in early July I wrote a little about the naming of Lynx, the project we're wrapping up right now. Our engagement director Dan and his wife conveniently scheduled the arrival of their baby (and Dan's consequent paternity leave) to coincide with only the last couple days of the project, but Baby Diego had other plans and decided to show up about 10 days early. I wanted to get a lynx-themed baby card to send to them from the team, but Hallmark inexplicably has not yet taken advantage of this potentially lucrative niche market, and so I had to make a card myself, third-grader style, with felt tipped pens and card stock. Please note that it is a baby lynx peeking out of the bundle:



Speaking of little bobcats, James and I hiked at Tomales Point on Saturday and get a load of what we saw there:





We also saw lots of Tule Elk, but those are totally par for the course in the Point Reyes area so those weren't as exciting somehow. Plus they don't have fangs or claws, and Dan and I don't have a running joke about them.

The excitement continued on Saturday night when I realized about $1500 had evaporated from my checking account via fraudulent PayPal transfers. As is typical, James came to the rescue and applied his mad Internet forensics skillz to ascertain that the breach had occurred not via my home machine (which is a Mac behind two firewalls, so that was unlikely anyway), and not via PayPal per se, but via the "junior high school level" (no, James, tell us how you really feel) security protocols in place at my grad school alumni association--whose forwarding email alias I have long used and which unfortunately was also my PayPal login ID. The details are not terribly interesting and I should be getting all my money back within a few days, but this all just goes to show that if you are such a pretentious tool that you want to have a fancypants Ivy League school in your email address, you should probably just go for YaleTool at gmail dot com or some such--because while the Elis are great at winning squash tournaments and coming up with clever Latin slogans to shout at football games, apparently they know fuckall about web security.

Before all that went down, however, we stopped at Pizzeria Picco in Larkspur and had a fabulous meal after our long hike among the elk. Picco had recently been written up in the New York Times for its soft serve ice cream, and their pizza is nothing to complain about either. My favorite was the Marin, which is a white pie with paper-thin baby red potato slices and rosemary. Picco is only about 10 miles north of the city, so if you're a San Franciscan and have a car you should totally get your ass up there ASAP. I have five words for you: Scharffen Berger chocolate soft serve.

purse lane

More home dec pics! My personal engineer helped me put up some glass shelves in my bedroom. (We all remember the definition of "my personal engineer helped me," right, boys and girls? It means he did it and I watched...part of the time. And sometimes handed him stuff.)

Now I have a place to display some of my vintage and handmade and/or otherwise display-worthy purses:




There are three more such shelves on the large wall, but you get the idea. I will confess that I got near the bottom of one of the boxes with purses and had to exclaim, "Whoa, MORE shoes?!" I surprise even myself sometimes. I would tell you that I have over 100 pairs of shoes, but then you'd make fun of me, so I will keep that information to myself.

James just came back from looking at the purse display and said, "That's an awfully girly bedroom." And I said "Uh huh. What's your point?"

I would also like to digress and take this opportunity to welcome Gwendolen Clare into the world! Can you guess which national holiday she was born on?



And finally, woot! I thought it would be fun to do at least one half marathon before the Portland marathon in early October, and I went online and discovered the San Francisco marathon on August 3 includes not one but TWO half marathons to choose from (either the first or the second half of the course...isn't that clever?). I registered for the 2nd half because (a) it was $5 cheaper, (2) it starts 2 hours later, and (iii) it starts closer to my house. I think the 1st half is considered more desirable because it starts downtown and goes along the Embarcadero and over the Golden Gate bridge and through the Presidio into Golden Gate park and all sorts of scenic touristy crap like that, whereas the second half starts in the park and proceeds down through the Mission and along other less conventionally pretty bits of the city. But I can (and do) exercise along the scenic route whenever I want, so why get up at the crack of ass just to do it along with thousands of other people?

it's a boy!

One of the reasons I chose not have children is that I knew I would feel so very, very guilty when pillaging their college funds to buy items like this:


This is the Illy Francis Francis X5, the latest in a string of luxurious purchases that I justify to myself by pointing out, "Self? Did you know that you will be 40 in six weeks?" and/or "Self? Don't you think that you deserve something special as a reward for living in a godforsaken developing country for months on end?" And so on. And there's nothing like being half a gazillion dollars in debt (please refer to Exhibit A: New Apartment) to make the purchase of a state-of-the-art Italian espresso machine feel positively trivial. (A year from now, when you find me living on the sidewalk outside my erstwhile apartment, please take pity on me.)

Incidentally, I am planning to paint my kitchen the color of a clementine, or perhaps a cantaloupe (um, the inside of a cantaloupe), so the machine should look fan-effing-tastic in there after that. Note the little indicator lights are orange, and look so very pretty against the pale blue.

Here is another interesting tidbit. Alright, another tidbit. Recently there was a piece in the NY Times about Francis Ford Coppola and his love for the soon-to-be-released Illy Francis Francis X7 espresso machine (which is not named after him, nor him after it). Now prepare to be freaked out. The Francis Francis X5 (see above) was designed by someone named Luca Trazzi. And who sleeps with the fishes? Luca Brasi. And who directed the Godfather movies? Uh huh. That's right, my friends: Francis Ford Coppola killed the guy who designed my new espresso machine.

P.S. Today's post title serves double duty as a salute to my littlest new buddy, Alex Michael, who decided to come out and join the world a few days ago. Go Alex!

more (different) home

I flew down to San Diego (my home town) for the day yesterday to visit my parents and brother. And I got to see my lovely friend Steph and her equally gorgeous son, Henry.



It wasn't all that long ago that Henry was a wee tiny preemie:



It is cuckoo crazy how brilliantly/quickly he has caught up to and (in Auntie Karen's humble opinion) far surpassed his age cohort.

After visiting Steph and Henry (and Steph's most excellent mom, Beth), my mom and I went to church:



I recently swapped some Visa card points for Macy's gift cards, so, really, we had to go. It was our duty to go. And I got a cute brown and cream retro-ish jacket.

On the plane back to the bay area I had everything a girl could want while hurtling through the air in a steel tube at 500 mph: Tom Waits on the iPod, some sock knitting action, and free vodka.



All in all, an excellent day off.