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To all of the disappointed costumers:
You do know that the word you are groping for is customers, right? I'm a little tired of reading reviews or comments or other things where all of these costumers are disappointed with their shopping experience, product, etc. The latest of these was a product review on the Apple site.
Grrr!
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Tomorrow over lunch I'm going to the fabric store. There is something dangerous about working in the heart of downtown Boston. Lunch breaks if you are willing to bolt your food can be an adventure. Fabric at Winmill, buttons and yarn at Windsor Buttons, coffee everywhere, books at Borders, and then there are all of the boring clothing shops too.
I love the idea of fabric, which is why I have a huge stash of it in the closet. Of course, that fabric is not a fleece. My tastes and that of my friends were always a little eclectic. I have velveteen I used for houppelande1 (and yes, I'm way too lazy to look it up), scraps of panne velvet from a monstrosity of hand sewing, leftover bits from a handmade kimono for a costume I made a few years ago, etc. I need something soft and hopefully stretchy that is black. You'd think I would have this, but no. I apparently don't need black fabric.
1Yeah. I was a nearly card carrying member of the SCA. My first event was an object example of why you need a period name before you attend. Or need super wallflower power. Unsurprisingly I earned myself a reputation by eating.
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It's raining outside, which put a damper (I'm unrepentant) on my walk around the corner for my weekend lemon stick. Instead, I had cold homemade pizza and coffee for breakfast. Deliciousness, especially as a second cup of coffee awaits me.
Today is that kind of hazy not quite blah that leaves you wondering what you want to do with yourself. I could go back to reading my out from the library smu, or A Civil Campaign. I could finish a couple of my knitting projects or I could cook. I obviously want to cook, because when I got up at 4 a.m. the first thing I did was pull out the cookbook of vegetarian slow cooker recipes. A new slow cooker requires breaking in, but I need to pick what I'm making based on how much space I can pull together for leftovers. I have ingredients for a garlicky polenta with mushrooms, but I'm not sure I want to make that.
Really, I want to bake. A very sensible thing for day 35 of too many sweets in the house, but my cooking desires never make any sense. Maybe the baking urge will go away if I eat a cookie.
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Yesterday was a great day. We had presents (including my new computer, yippee!), I made cookies, and we joined our friends and their children for dinner. Much bridge was played, and we were obviously not with the bathtub, because our hands were horrible!
I am really enjoying my new computer, and better yet being able to chat with my husband instead of being sequestered in a room on the desktop (which has about 800 megs of space after I deleted stuff earlier this week).
I made Mushroom Marsala for dinner tonight with peas instead of artichokes (and boy marsala was surprisingly difficult to find). Very tasty, and already I need to only make dinners that serve two people. We have over 12 servings of leftovers from the past two days of cooking in the fridge. All set for lunches all week long.
Now I'm going to knit, read, or make myself some more coffee. A nice lazy day at home.
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By some fluke, this morning there were seats available on the train. I sat down and plopped my bag in my lap, trying to decide if I was going to knit or read when my hubby whispered that I had an ally.
The woman next to me was knitting.
So, I pulled out my knitting and we companionably knit on a pair of scarves till she got off at JFK UMass. A nice start to the morning.
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It's time for holiday treat bliss. My husband is picking up ingredients for biscotti, cuccidati (or cuccidatti... I've seen both spellings), and pate de fruit. I'm collating recipes, cleaning the kitchen and putting the stove to work. I'm also making a couple of sauces that can be stored in little canning jars.
One of the recipes is from the Green and Black chocolate cookbook. I signed up for a random giveaway from G&B a gazillion years ago when I still lived in Braintree. I was a bit surprised when I got a cookbook in the mail and it took me awhile to remember why I had gotten it. Sadly, I looked through it and it went onto my cookbook bookshelf1. I wanted to make a couple of the dishes, but there was that critical confluence of time and money and desire for chocolatey goodness that never quite came together. The recipe I remember coming to my attention was a pear and chocolate sauce.
This is my alternative to knitting gifts for everyone in the family. I'm pretty bad at knitting on deadline, and I have spent a decent portion of this fall doing charity knitting, which for me is a selfish choice. I get to pick the nicest yarns I can afford and knit things I will enjoy. Even with an organization's requirements, there is plenty of space for a wool lovely knitter to pick a new yarn and test it with a hat or a scarf. It's like a chance to swatch without the distraction of wondering how the entire garment will look. It's freeing.
1Yes, and entire 4'x3' bookshelf dedicated to cookbooks. It's where I store my cake decorating supplies as well, so it isn't all cookbooks and cooking magazines, but it is pretty close.
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A quote from Kiss of Fire (Deborah Cooke) that make me go Ack!
"Sara didn't much care. Her heart was galloping as soon as she could see his face fully. He was wearing jeans and a dark T-shirt as well as those black boots, but he'd thrown a Hawaiian shirt over the T-shirt. He wore a straw fedora with a striped band, which was just as incongruous as the vivid print shirt."
Umm, so raise your hand if you recognize this person?
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Over the last week I have finished a fair number of books. It's not fair that I haven't enhanced my read while eating, knitting, sewing, cleaning skills. I would get so much more done!
So, I'm reading (in no particular order):
Uglies / Pretties / Specials. I'm on the third one, and have petered out a bit, but I find that the utopian-distopian feel reminds me a lot of Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun, which I really should reread. After I read these, I believe next on the list is Leviathan. Whale airship, you call to me!
Industrial Magic and Haunted by Kelley Armstrong. Now I will admit that I plowed through Industrial Magic, and didn't enjoy it quite as much as Dime Store Magic. There was a bit of slap the characters around, because the level of miscommunication was pretty high. However, I really liked Haunted. Eve is my kind of people. That probably says something bad about me, but I'm going to ignore that for now.
I'm also reading a series of books about the Pyr. I don't have one with me for reading on my commute right now. Definitely poor planning on my part, because one of these books only takes me about a day to read leaving me with nothing on the way home if the train is too packed to knit. Which it usually is.
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It's that time again. The new Knitty came out and it is full of quite a few interesting patterns. My favorites are Citron, which I am positive I have at least two or three laceweight yarns that would work beautifully, and Spoke. Now I don't need another shawl pattern or another sweater pattern (even if the conversion of this sweater from pullover to cardigan is built in). I haven't finished the last sweater I started with 1.5 sleeves to go and a collar. Pathetic really.
So, I'm just looking at (umm, obsessing really) with Citron, because it is simple enough to showcase a gorgeous yarn, to show a flash of color during the colder, greyer months of the year, and because it is not a difficult knit. I am still working on finishing my 1d4 projects (I have finished 3 of them, but am currently cameraless) plus 1 by the mystery designer. I cannot even think about adding a new project until I finish these two projects. Before the week is out for certain.
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My husband has invited other people over tonight, which is always a little bit of baggage for me even when I'm happy to see them. I always feel like I need to be on. Hostess mode, and I'm not terribly good at it. Of course, tonight I'm also baking. I didn't get enough of it, so I am making the Red Velvet cake from Smitten Kitchen, and hopefully plopping it into layers so all I need to do Saturday is frosting.
Sunday I am doing a 5K. And after and around all of these things I'm going to be knitting.
One of my favorite pattern sites came out with a new pattern earlier this week, and I immediately wanted to get it. It's holiday themed, cute and quick. My husband was determined to keep me on the straight and narrow, and party-poopered right back at me that I had a lot of projects...
I really didn't care. I wanted this pattern (not linked, because I don't want certain people seeing it), and I wanted to take my leftover sock yarn or whatever the pattern called for and dozens of these for my friends and myself. He said I should finish one of my current toy projects and 1d4 WIPs. I said sure.
That night I rolled one of the d4s and plop, tink, plop. It landed on....
4
Now I've got to go through and finish four projects up to justify buying this pattern. I still want it, and I want it now, so I'm trying to figure out which of my WIPs are the closest to done. I think I have a couple of scarves that need their ends woven in. That counts, right?
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