Came across this awesome pic while wasting more times on the innernets 
February 28, 2009. knitting, yarn. .
To do:
- get up (which happened far too early, btw)
- usual weekend morning interweb surfing (time wasting)
- eat breakfast
- make tea
- get back on web for a few more minutes while tea steeps
- cue up VCR for mister random’s football match (that’s EPL soccer, fyi)
- re: Sockdown! January –> finish sock #2 for my ‘I like Hip’Pomatomus’ socks before midnight PST Feb 28/09 (just need to knit the foot…oh so close)
- re: Sockdown! February –> cast on sock #1 for my ‘Fawkes socks’, take photo and post to group page (again, by midnight PST Feb 28/09)
- gather & organize 2008 income tax papers
- re-stock shelves & fridge with things other than the condiments that are currently present
- what’s for dinner?
- finish watching the last 45 minutes of W.
- assemble dining room seat chairs…still! Good lord, we just need to screw on the dang seat cushions. Why have we procrastinated so long???
- more zzz’s
February 28, 2009. life or something like it. .
Thanks be to alterknit for posting this on her blog…
Type in the following (to google) and choose the first choice. Make sure you use parenthesis.
1. Type in “[your name] needs”
Melanie B needs to accept that no one is self-sufficient all the time, and to be gentler with her “childish” emotional needs and wants. (Apparently now I’m a Spice Girl?)
2. Type in “[your name] looks like”
“Melanie” looks like in Japanese:
(Neat!)
3. Type in “[your name] does”
Melanie does the twist. (Sure I do.)
4. Type in “[your name] hates”
Melanie hates Janay because she is pregnant with her fiance’s baby, she is angry and she needs someone to blame and Janay is the scapegoat even though Derwin is just as responsible but she wouldn’t hate him I mean he is her man… (Okay…??? Appears to be some chatter from a CW tv show, lolz.)
5. Type in “[your name] goes to”
Melanie goes to vote. (Don’t even talk to me about the last election. Bastards.)
6. Type in “[your name] loves”
Melanie loves Sage. (As in the herb? Why is it capitalized? WTF is “Buried Alive”?)
7. Type in “[your name] eats”
Melanie eats A CRICKETT!! (And evidently there is video to prove it.)
8. Type in “[your name] has”
Melanie has been awarded two gold albums (and a gold single for “Brand New Key”) and three of her compositions were hits for The New Seekers. (Really? Cool.)
9. Type in “[your name] died”
Melanie died in childbirth, pale and saintly. (Highly unlikely.)
10. Type in “[your name] will”
Melanie will be showcasing her new album “Complicated Sweetheart” at this years Big Sound Conference, Brisbane. (Clearly I was a rock star in a former life.)
Funny, you can tell this little exercise is making it’s way through the blogosphere. I encountered a few other “Melanie” bloggers who did the same searches in the results. By doing this we must be skewing Google’s search data, lolz.
February 28, 2009. meme. .
The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Copy the list into a Note and put an ‘x‘ after those you have read, count ‘em up, compare tallies. This should be easy. Strutting and preening is optional.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings (x times 3)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (x times 7)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (I think I read this in High School…)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (not yet, but soon!)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (x)
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (x)
38 Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (x)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (x)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (not yet, but soon!)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (x)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (x)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (x)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (x)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (x)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Now I’m not sure where on the interweb that the BBC actually made this generalization, but it was fun to go through the list nonetheless. There’s so many more on this list that I’d like to read someday.
February 26, 2009. meme. .
Move along. There’s nothing to see here.
Seriously. I have nothing to show you today. What I should be doing is knitting. Instead I’m here to tell you about the lack of knitting that’s been happening.
Deadlines:
Sockdown! January – my I Like Hip-Pomatomus’ socks are due by next Saturday. Will be starting the second sock today. Highly unlikely that I will meet this deadline.
Baby Chalice Blanket – due by March 16th. Haven’t even finished the first pattern repeat… Not feeling the pressure so much on this one though. It may be a few days late.
Sockdown! February (1) - the heart-shaped socks which I had intended on finishing for Feb 14th (what was I smoking when I gave myself that deadline!?) are now on the back burner. They will not be done before the Sockdown! finish date of March 31st. I will not even attempt this.
Sockdown! February (2) - have not been cast on yet. Making Fawkes socks; these must be cast on by Feb 28th and finished before Mar 31st. I will do this. I will. I’m probably crazy to, but I will.
And that’s it for time-sensitive knitting. There’s still my Seascape Stole and Lace Ribbon Scarf to work on too, but clearly I’m in no rush. They’ll get done…eventually 
Is it bad that I’m already planning out my entry for the March Sockdown challenge? Probably.
In other news…
-Yesterday my fiance and I hauled a few large bags of old clothes down to the VV boutique (that’s Value Village to those who don’t know). Cleared up a nice chunk of space in our bedroom. That felt good.
-Had to buy a new winter jacket, since the old one decided to commit zipper suicide the other day.
-Dad had a minor surgery last week in preparation of his upcoming battle. (He has cancer; I don’t think I’ve ever come right out and said that to you.) He is now armed and ready. To quote a dear friend: “It’ll be a rough road, but your dad’s driving a truck“. We will conquer! Wish him luck.
-I still have a beautiful new (and yet unused!) table in my dining room. Are the seat cushions on? Nope. Do we have access to a drill? Yep. Will it get done today? I sure as heck hope so. (Sorry we’re taking so long ND!!!)
-Thinking ’bout Rusty. We still have a lot of his stuff sitting out in our bedroom. Went to move some of it around (now that the large bags of unused clothes are gone!) and I thought ‘why is this litter pan so heavy?’. Yeah, that’s because there’s still litter in it (clean litter! I was a good momma and cleaned it after every use). It’s been just over one year since we lost our furbaby. So today, after my sunday chores, it’s time to deal with that task.
February 22, 2009. Rusty, in other news, knitting, what have i got myself into?. .
*nom nom nom*
Newest additions from my most recent Stash.Enrichment.eXpedition.
February 15, 2009. yarn. .
“Sweetheart, I’m sorry to abandon you so suddenly. We just aren’t seeing eye to eye. I’m going back to the Hip-Pomatomus. Maybe our paths will cross again in the future. It’s not you, it’s me.”
February 12, 2009. knitting. .
Good lord, what was I thinking?
There is no way the heart-shaped socks will be done in time.
That is all.
*waves white flag*
February 10, 2009. what have i got myself into?. .
Please excuse my absence this week – I’d thought about blogging at least once or twice, but just couldn’t bring myself to actually sit down and start banging out words on the ol’ keyboard.
Too many projects on the go. Not enough progress being made.
On top of the Lace Ribbon Scarf & Seascape Stole (which have remained untouched for days & days now) and in addition to the Sockdown! January Pomatomus socks, I’ve cast on for the first of two planned February Sockdown! challenges — a pair of Sweetheart Socks. And I sincerely hope these will be finished by next Saturday. *insert copius amounts of laughter here*
The yarn is one I’ve never tried before: Diamond Yarns Foot Loose (90% fine superwash merino, 10% nylon). So far it’s been great to work with. And totally affordable to boot!
Since taking the above picture, I’ve had to frog and restart using smaller needles. The ones in the picture are my 3mm bamboo dpns – the resulting cuff was HUGE!!! I had to dig deep into my notions box, but I found just what I needed: 2mm aluminum dpns; they were amongst numerous other dpns, circs & straight needles which were passed on to me by the marvelous McAllister girls. (Thank you Granny Fran.) 2mm is by far the smallest needle I’ve ever knit with – they’re so tiny!
Found some suitable yarn for a baby blanket that I’ll need to have done by early to mid March. Am trying very hard to resist castonitis with that blanket. It’s easy and right now I crave easy. Maybe you’ve seen it? I found it on Ravelry: Baby Chalice Blanket. It’s gorgeous and in fact I could see myself knitting an adult sized blankie using the same pattern. I was hoping to locally locate some Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted like the pattern calls for, but no such luck…yet!
Managed to walk away from many beautiful yarns at the LYS this weekend. Most notably my beloved Malabrigo – that took strength! Although it’s been calling to me ever since. I sense that a return trip will be in store next week and some new Malabrigo (worsted & sock) WILL be coming home with me…
This past week I ventured out to Stitch ‘n Bitch after a 6 week hiatus. SIX WEEKS! Needless to say I didn’t get much knitting done. It was so good to re-connect with everyone there! And was just the right cure for my generally bummed out state of mind these days.
Three songs I’m loving right now:
1 – Lost? by Coldplay
2 – My Same by Adele
3 – Paranoid by Kanye West feat. Mr. Hudson
February 8, 2009. Stitch 'n Bitch, knitting, life or something like it, yarn. .
Question for all those who have knit socks using the Magic Loop method:
I would like to knit this pattern, which was written for dpns.
How difficult do you think it will be to convert into Magic Loop language?
Did you use any online tutorials? Which ones?
I have never tried Magic Loop before…
Am I biting off more than I’ll be able to chew using ML with this pattern?
February 1, 2009. knitting. .
