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Yeah, I live on the web and I love my fishies (oh cuttlefish, I love you so... I promise to visit when I'm on vacation). I do a lot to get my fishie fun time!
The gallery is an art installation about our impact on the aquatic environment, and I almost wish I was in Indiana (my only experience with Indiana is the Kentuckiana portion of the state. I didn't really see much more than the Waffle House).
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I don't have a lot of brain right now, but I can make a list so this week's 10 for Tuesday is right up my alley.
What is in my fridge right now?
1. Cookie dough. Compost cookies to be exact. Reese's Pieces, mini chocolate chips and pretzels. Yum.
2. Roasted Squash for butternut squash soup. ETA: Whoops! This turned out to be a dead vegetable, so I am glad that I had another squash for making soup!
3. Cauliflower and buttercup squash potatoes for cumin-heavy Indian inspired dish.
4. Dead vegetables. Every fridge has these right? Ours included some squash and some cucumbers, because I had a glut of them!
5. A tiny amount of milk. I had finished up the milk before deciding I wanted to make homemade old-fashioned hot cocoa. So, off to the store for a quart of emergency backup milk.
6. Homemade yogurt stored in a Fage container.
7. Cheese. It isn't our fridge if there isn't some cheese in it. Currently we have cheddar, some goat cheese, and some parmesan. Any additional cheese is probably dead.
8. Blood. My honey bought be Blood for my birthday (I think) and it has been sitting in the fridge ever sense. Kind of afraid to try it.
9. Mustards. Both store bought and homemade mustard. Unfortunately, we are out of my scary yellow mustard. It is perfect for pickle and cheese sandwiches.
10. Sad tupperwares. A couple of weeks ago some of the old tupperware was divested of its contents and cleaned, but there are more that need to be tossed. Yuck.
Really, I spend a lot of time out of the house, and we do eat most of the leftovers, but we are only really good about eating the leftovers that need to be reheated. Leftovers that are best used in another dish tend to fall into the cracks. I will probably clean out the fridge either during my next free weekend or during vacation and then fix foods for cold storage (I love my upright freezer, it saves me a lot of grief) for when I'm too wiped to do any more cooking.
(And I did finish something else! So, pictures soon.)
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I was a grumpy mess for much of the weekend. It came in strange cyclical waves. The first 20 minutes of Victor's super-long walk on Saturday were right out of the Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby minus the pea soup shooting out of my mouth. I slipped his leash through my belt loop, knotted it and within 10 minutes all was right with the world again.
Sunday morning was more of the same. Victor acts out at the coffee shop, because they think he is cute and on a non-busy day being cute gets him a treat. So, he didn't stay seated even though he is trained for it (and retrained on a relatively frequent basis to wait calmly for food and treats), and then ate some mystery object off the patio. None of these were earth shattering, but I was pissy. Not his fault. All something to do with my faulty brain chemistry.
So, I went to the grocery store to get the ingredients for a second batch of compost cookies. The first batch were overly huge by my standards and tried to become one cookie during storage. While these could be taken as flaws, they were so strangely addictive that I wanted to do it again! The latest batch will have Reese's pieces, pretzels and mini-chocolate chips. It promises to be almost as addictive as chopped Rolos, Fritos and pretzel M&Ms.
However, I was still grumpy when I got home, so I put away the groceries, started the laundry in the dryer, and proceeded to clean one of my craft dumping grounds. I'd call it a stash closet, but really it is where the bags and projects in progress go to die. I had numerous skeins of yarn (I did this because I was looking for a pattern, which I will just reprint), paper cruft, and 2 scarves, 2 hats and a sweater from the dark ages in bags and pieces. There was also at least one sock (where is its friend, did I ever start you?) and tons of stuff that I could easily clean up and move on, including this piece.
Whoops, this is the back. Not too bad!
This is the welcome banner from the 9902 Welcome Home pamphlet from Ginger & Spice. I don't know exactly when I bought this pattern, but I have made it at least three times. This pattern has been gifted to friends for house warmings, and I know we had a version of this when I was still roommating in Somerville. I had a faulty version of this that I started for our condo, but the silks were blending into the background too many times so the design was very hard to read. Then Saru-chan (I always want to just write "the cat" when she's done something bad) got into the project and snagged hours worth of stitching.
Now, I don't do that much cross-stitching anymore my recent resurgence aside. Partly it was that knitting was my new-refound love, and partly it was the logistics of knitting with a kitty and stitching with a kitty. Every project had the same likelihood of kitty death, but a knitting project was 10 hours of work and 1-2 hours of repairs most of the time. Cross-stitch was easily 50 hours of work and a lot of the time it was virtually impossible to pick out the small sections of damage and replace them.
I am great friends with the closet, closed bags, and latches at the top of the door frame. Those are the only things that protect a project from curious kitty paws or an even more curious doggie mouth. Of course, having my projects often out of sight leaves them much more likely to be forgotten, sometimes resulting in bonuses like this project that was almost near completion. More often it results in having more projects started than I realize as each episode of grumpiness or sadness is met with starting something new as an immediate boost to the spirits. Now just to find the hardware (which I thought I had bought) for the banner and a backing fabric and it will go from blocked to functional.
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Me. New hair. A catalog (I think it was Patternworks). A massive dislike for pictures of myself.
We went through a number of photos to get a picture I deemed acceptable. I either smiled weird, had hair wet enough that it looked almost black, or otherwise was not useful. Also, never have photographs taken on a "I feel fat day." Don't look at them then either. They don't come out well because I spend the entire time thinking about how badly I feel.
I think it was 80 or 90 degrees that day (Wednesday or Thursday), but it didn't matter because I'm cold almost all of the time and an air conditioned office building means I need sweaters all of the time.
It's the weekend, so I'm hoping for some good crafting time, fun cooking, and a better fantasy football result than last week where I lost by a lot!
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Umm, I mean, a change of seasons.
The last week or so has been full of change. Our dog walker got the boot, because she is just not dominant enough over Victor to give him a good walk. Instead, I'm making sure that his morning and evening walks are at least 2 miles long. In the land of TMI, he didn't poo on our 2.5 mile walk this morning, so I am hoping I don't come home to a mess tonight. Yesterday was fine, so I'm hoping that this change works for him. It will certainly work with the budget.
I've been working on cross-stitch. Before work and over lunch, lots of little exes and even more backstitch. While I have a pair of socks to work on and a couple of sweaters that is now cold enough to want to wear, instead I'm working on a little decorative project because I'm in that final stretch. You know, that time in a project when it is almost done, close enough that you can feel it, and so you want to work on that project to the exclusion of all others just so it will be done, done, done. Yeah, I'm there.
I'm still playing Dragon Quest IX. More importantly, I'm ignoring plot in favor of level grinding, and I'm ignoring level grinding in favor of collecting all of the pieces to make a gold bar, so I can make a second goddess ring. In the land of boring people out of their mind, this comes almost as high on the list as Rimmer's blow by blow recounts of his Risk games. Yup, that boring.
Soon we will be repainting rooms that have asked for repainting since last November. It will be a few weeks of spackling and scraping wallpaper trim off of the walls.
Sooner than that we will be going to a friend's wedding in Las Vegas.
And even sooner than that (aka, already done) my hair is only 2 short shades away from bright frickin' purple.
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This is the first weekend where I do not either have game or weddings or other major outside the house commitments. It's a pretty nice feeling. Instead I have a dog to walk, cookies to bake, knitting to finish, and cross-stitch to do. Oh, and football players to move around. Some of which I should have done yesterday.
I hope your weekend plans are all you could hope for.
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Look at the video (yes, blame my friends for this one). You are getting sleepy. You are getting weird.
Yeah, I am knitting, but I am only knitting over part of my commute every third day or so and at night while we are watching anime. It is taking me 15-20 minutes to do a row of the lace pattern, so I figure I will have something worth showing in about 2 weeks. More quickly if I decide that I no longer love the Dragon Quest IX and instead want nothing more to do than knit, knit, knit.
My lunch breaks are spent on cross-stitch and thinking about dessert and seeing if I can cause earworms, because I am evil. Cross-stitch takes longer than knitting, so there is really nothing to show there either!
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Well, actually it is football season! Football is the season where I do number crunching, extra knitting and baking.
Reasons to Watch Football
1. Playing Fantasy Football. My two teams for the season (plus I will do the Football Outsiders Loser League in the second half) are Vorpal DPNs (the good players, I hope) and Victor's Liquid Crapshoot (the bad players). It is a lot of stats and number crunching, but it makes the game feel more interactive. I don't tend to want to root for indivdual teams, but I find it a lot more fun rooting against players. Especially players who burned me in previous seasons. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Favre.
2. Quality Time. My husband is in the same leagues I am in, so it also helps turn what would be non-interactive television time into an activity we are sharing.
3. Knitting Time. It is amazing how much crafting you can spread into multiple hours of football on a Sunday. I regularly get more done in that regard than at almost any other time of the year.
4. Turnovers. I keep telling myself that this will be the year I will make mini-turnovers to eat during the games. That way I won't have to feel guilty (too guilty) for wanting to eat a turnover each time one happens in game.
5. Tight Ends. My Mom (I wonder if she reads this blog) told me growing up that she liked watching football for the men in their tight pants. I'm sure she watches it as much for the actual sporting nature of it now than the appearance of the players.
6. Napping on the couch. Sunday naps during football games is something I remember from growing up. My dad would lie on the couch and just be closing his eyes. Now that I am an adult (really, it's true!), it is my turn to get to nap on the couch during the Sunday afternoon games.
7. The Superbowl. It's a bit of a look forward, but it's an excuse to run a roadrace. I might even make it this year! I missed it this past year and the year before mis-read the time and showed up almost 30 minutes late for a 5 miler.
8. Fall is here! While the football season technically spans the late summer into mid-winter, I think of fall when I think of football. I am looking forward to the leaves changing, and less looking forward to the few hours of raking we should be doing every day.
I only have 9, but that is because my brain got stuck on the things I dislike about football seasons.
Ads. I dislike television generally, and ads are a decent portion of that. The Fwhatever Series ads and the beer ads (especially Coors) are a huge part of what I hate most on television this time of year. They are juvenile, old, and dated. I only like Superbowl ads if I am in a large group and we can diss/discuss the ads during our ignoring of the halftime show.
Our national anthem. I love our anthem. However, I hate hearing every random star butcher the anthem into a 2.5 minute travesty. People! It should only be that long if you are singing multiple verses!
Announcers. They say such stupid stuff, but if you are watching the game as background, you need them to indicate when it might be useful to look up and see an instant replay or what not. Otherwise, I would watch my football with the sound off. This might be part of why I loved watching hockey on the French station growing up. The announcers excitement helped me know that I wanted to get a closer look at something without needing to know if they were talking about each other's ties the rest of the time.
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So, everybody in Boston knows that Tom Brady (go Pats!) was in a car accident this week. I swear, I found out from one of those elevator news things (you know, the Captivate news in fancy office buildings). I think it was also on the cover of possibly the Herald, the Metro and the Boston Globe.
I figure it must be a slow news week if a fender bender is major news.
Or maybe it is just that it's Tom Brady.
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I have been in yarn acquisition mode for a while now. I am part of a yarn club or two, and I have sweaters lined up in a queue waiting for the time to knit. I have every intention to knit what I have up, and I'm working my way through the stash. However, it is always true that it takes longer to knit a sock than it does to put the sock yarn in your online shopping cart (or in store basket) and ring it up.
Yarn is one of my vices, something that makes me feel better about a life that is sometimes 90% dog walking. I am exaggerating, but only just. Today Victor has had 4.8+ miles of walking (1 walk), and I have had an additional 2.4 going to the grocery store and back. It makes sitting down with the yarn even more of a joy and a temptation than normal.
All of this is to say that I am looking for a specific yarn. One of my planned sweaters is Cityscape from the latest Twist Collective. I haven't gotten a chance to work with this yarn, so I was planning on purchasing the actual yarn. However, I want the sweater to be dark. Not a problem, BMFA has shades - the Raven Clan - which I have wanted to try for a while. But I want the sweater to look like a skyline at dusk or sunset (sunrise). So, I have been on the hunt online mostly for a sport weight yarn that is the colors of sunrise/sunset. Orangy, purplish reds, and light yellow. I could probably do this buy using multiple skeins of yarn in all of the different colors, but I want this to feel natural and be as simple a knit as possible. A sunset sweater...
It is my knitterly dream of the moment.
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