i don’t care about clever September 18, 2009

I know, I’m so behind on posting. I’ve had such a week at work that I just haven’t felt like doing much when I get home. Also, I finished my sweater this weekend, and spent free time weaving ends in and last night attempting to block it. (I say attempt, because I think blocking is primarily helpful when the garment you’re blocking is too small, while mine has the unfortunate design flaw currently of looking like it was knitted for a hunchback. I think that while I loved the pattern, her short rows were a design flaw, or perhaps just too short to be effective. Haven’t decided.)  I will post a picture when I get a chance, or when I get someone to take the picture of me in it.

I also have finished the novel/doorstop The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb. Buffy, I swear I’ll post about it. I really am trying, I’m just really writer’s blocked on it. I liked it, but with some caveats, and every time I write something about it, it turns into either an accolade or a condemnation. I’m trying for that middle ground.

I did finish The Hard Truth About Soft Skills,  by Peggy Klaus for work, however. Meh. It had some good things to say about self-branding and remembering to be your own cheerleading squad, but it was mostly just fluffy feel-good-about-these-concepts stories and not a lot of real meat. Every point could have been broadened, given more examples and some practical application. Not bad, just not stunning either. A lot of common sense. (Think before you date your boss. The way your peers see you will trickle up to your boss. Self-presentation isn’t just for the day of your review.)  Stuff that hopefully I have already figured out. (My boss seems to think I have, so that’s good, right?)

will be on every magazine… September 13, 2009

Asher and Elekk hold court. In plaid shorts.

This kid is like a mini-Brock. Plaid shorts and all. ;-)

dripping off my fingertips… September 12, 2009

Hehe. I like that lyric for this post. Guess what I’m finally going to post about? My sweater!

I got the sleeves and body together!

I’m really glad I didn’t try to attach the sleeves and body together on the train from Memphis. I was tempted to, but given the fact that I panicked halfway through and frantically counted stitches, worried I didn’t have enough, I’m really glad I didn’t. (I did have enough stitches. Naturally.) The first two rounds were a little wonky, loose stitches, hard to work with. But it’s gotten much better.

Emerging owls

This is the cablework on the top, soon to be owls like Ember’s cellphone cozy:

OWLS!!

The cozy really helped me see the owls, understand the cable pattern and test out the tension of the pattern before I had 41 owls in a row to work with. It was good practice, and reminded me that there are only actually 3 cable rows in the whole pattern. I really love the color of the yarn, too, which I don’t think the pictures do justice to. I mean, it’s a really deep blackberry color and while not supersoft wool, is a nice texture and stretch. :-) Yay! I’m going to end up with an addiction to sweater knitting. I have a new pattern in background already…

it’s been minutes, it’s been days September 10, 2009

I finished Catching Fire this morning before work. I only had about fifty pages to go, so I just got up a little early. (I know, how did I manage to fall asleep at that point in the book, right? But you underestimate the bone-weariness of a weekend trip with two overnight train rides. Flat surface to sleep on = some form of heavenly gift.)

It would be hard for any book to live in the shadow created by Hunger Games, at least for me. Like most trilogies, this is not as strong as the first, but it convinces me that Collins has a spectacular finish in her. Nonetheless, Catching Fire  holds its own. The aftermath of the stunning, rebellious finish of the Games for Katniss and Peeta grabs hold and doesn’t disappoint. President Snow (a creepy villian if ever there was one) wastes no time letting Katniss know what he thinks of her charade with Peeta and leaves Katniss examining her options and her motivations while hurtling herself and her loved ones towards destruction.

It’s much more complex than that, naturally, and there is a bunch of stuff that I would love to discuss but I can’t, because Emy and Mel haven’t read it yet and I refuse to wreck it. Just know that when you finish it, you will be scouring the interwebs for any prospective publication date for the third book. (Fall 2010, in case you’re wondering, then they’re planning to ruin it with a movie in 2011. Just say no now. )

Alright. Back to the stunning world of software patch testing and fun with billing systems.

smoky clouds of laughter September 9, 2009

I was gone, I know. I was in Memphis, with my sister and brother (in-law) and barbeque and really old cemeteries (a word I learned to spell while there) with fire ants. We cooked, we watched a lot of Hell’s Kitchen (a weakness for English chefs with anger management problems and over-produced cooking shows runs in the family, apparently), we went to the zoo, and we took lots of walks.

I took the train down, which was oddly reminiscent of my childhood, and gave me ample time to knit on my sweater. Ember quite kindly asked her friends’ opinions about me knitting a “purple sweater with owls on it” and I was informed that I didn’t even need cats to become a crazy lady with a sweater like that. So as retaliation, I knitted Emy a new cell phone cozy, just like she wanted, but that was purple, with owls. Just like my sweater.

I had a wonderful time. It was super hot there, but their apartment was comfortable, and Emy has decorated it very nicely.

I didn’t read much. Well, I did, but when you’re reading a 700+ page book that’s kind of a downer (The Hour I First Believed – very well written, but like a train wreck you can’t look away from, I’ll post about it when I’m actually finished) and then the book you brought for a up-lift turns out to be it’s own kind of hillbilly train wreck, it gets ugly.

The Quality of Life Report, by Meghan Daum, follows a girl who moves from the big city to the prairie, Prairie City to be exact. Lucinda’s boss at the television studio agrees to let her move there to do a series of reports on life outside the city after Lucinda falls in love with the little town while doing a report on meth addiction. So the first half of the book, we follow along as Lucinda traipses into country life, trying to turn her interactions with the idiosyncratic people around her into seven-minute segments for a New York morning show. Then, just as you are starting to sort of understand the dangerous line she is walking between what she wants to do versus what her boss wants her to do, she finds out that her boyfriend (whom we don’t understand why she’s dating, since he doesn’t shower, has three kids with three different women and whose main characteristic appears to be an easy-going laziness) is a meth addict.

Show stopper. I know. Suddenly my light-hearted read turns dark and depressing. I finished the book, but I’m not sure I recommend it at all. It was supposed to be about how much Lucinda was in love with the farm she and Mason lived on and how conflicted that made her about her relationship with him, but it really was just about how to shut your eyes to someone’s addiction and how to justify the fact that secretly you like him better when he’s scrubbing the house down with all his drug-induced energy. I had hoped for much better.

As for Wally Lamb’s book, I will post about it as soon as I finish Suzanne Collins’ sequel to Hunger Games, which came while I was in Memphis. Catching Fire is being devoured before I crack any other book.

cheaper than ben and jerry’s September 3, 2009

So last night, I bought a half gallon of cheap vanilla ice cream and a big bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups. At home, a scoop of the vanilla ice cream, a generous serving of peanut butter (2 TB, maybe), a splash of milk and 2 peanut butter cups in the food processor = heaven. And enough calories to sink a ship. But I did work out that morning, so that negates it, right?

shivery outside my cocoon. September 2, 2009

So I think we can all tell that I’ve mostly been knitting recently (not particularly conducive to knitting at the same time) but I did finish The English Patient this past week.

Michael Ondaatje has beautiful prose. Really, truly gorgeous prose. Like Divisadero, even when something terrible is going on, reading it is gorgeous and startling. This book is about secrets, both from yourself, and from others. In a Florentine mansion in Italy, four people find their lives intersecting in the years following the second World War. Hana, the nurse, lost in her own life, caring for the burned beyond recognition English patient because she couldn’t care for her own father when he was burned and died. Caraveggio, the maimed thief, wanders unknowingly back into the life of Hana, an old friend’s daughter. And Kip, the Indian sapper who has lost his nearest and dearest to the bombs he has dedicated his life to disabling. Theirs is an awkward dance of connect and disconnect, where they reveal everything but articulate nothing.

The problem with Ondaatje’s “water-like” prose is that there is a distinct lack of continuity. It’s hard to tell what is happening as we watch and what has happened in the past. Without a liberal (or even just a little less stingy) use of names, it is often hard to tell who the she and he and him and her and they is that we are discussing. The result is that when you get to the end of a chapter, you feel compelled to page back through in mild confusion, wondering where you lost the thread. But you didn’t. Most of the time, the thread wasn’t there to begin with.

So while I enjoyed this book, and I really appreciate Ondaatje’s genius, I was disappointed.

Books read so far this year – 63
Numbers of books I should have read by now – 66
Library books that are currently overdue – 1
Trains I will be taking to Memphis this weekend – 1 (Yay, Emy!!)

the one-armed badger August 30, 2009

Seriously, a miracle.

Mission accomplished.

I finished the elephant!! I’m amazed myself. I don’t normally finish projects this quickly. It’s a miracle. Not the same kind of miracle as all of Buffy’s stuff fitting into that storage unit yesterday. :-) Right, Buff? (Yesterday was fun, by the way, and I was super impressed with your preparedness, despite U-haul’s non-preparedness.) I have about 20 other pictures, of the elephant in various stages of completedness, but I didn’t think you all wanted to see a one-armed, no legged blue elephant. You wanted to see the finished product, right?

This wasn’t a hard project, at all. No seaming, at all. I knitted the body right off the head, and the limbs and ears off those. The hardest was the ears, trying to make sure they were even with one another. I used some new (or barely remembered) increases and I kitchenered the ears, which I only use on the rare ends of socks, so it was a good review. Hopefully, this will warm me up for my next project.

Starting my sweater.

rehabilitate my smile August 25, 2009

I am waiting on yarn to knit my first sweater. Because I apparently have caught the bug again, I started another little project last night, just with some of my (monstrous) both-my-grandmothers-left-me-knitting-supplies-and-yarn stash. Blue, sport weight, just plain old acrylic, using my size 5 bamboo double pointeds.  I bought some batting to fill up my project, and went to town.

And I knitted a head.  Not just any head, an elephant head.

Elekk head this morning.

And then, when I got home, I got to knitting again (even though my sweater yarn arrived) and now, it is an elephant head with a body and the start (the THIRD start, which I have yet to get right) of an ear.

With new, improved body!

Hmm. Do I go to sleep, or try, try again with that ear? (Maybe I should have moved on by knitting him a limb or two, since those seem much easier…)

talkin’ full scholarship August 23, 2009

I wanted to really like Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli. Really, I did. In some ways, I did like it. I appreciated a young adult novel that did not center around drugs and sex and alcohol, but on the more mundane struggles of adolescence, of fitting in and what we should do in order to accomplish it. Stargirl Caraway shows up as a sophomore at Mica High and immediately has the halls buzzing with her non-conformist hair and clothes and make-up and approach to friendship. She carries her pet rat to class and sings happy birthday to students in the cafeteria accompanied by her ukulele. Naturally, she is non-conformist because she was home-schooled and doesn’t understand the Borg collective that is her peer group, as understood and explained by her boyfriend Leo. When he asks her why she came to school, she tells him that she wanted friends. *sigh* Really, Spinelli? You couldn’t think of a more realistic reason for a homeschooled kid to go to high school, like a more simple college application process or organized sports? This book was too saccharine, too cliched to be everything it was cut out to be.

I also finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery today. I don’t know what I think about this one. I wanted to really like it, but it was really hyper-intellectual, with discussions of Japanese culture and philosophies of beauty and art.  Twelve-year olds with complex existential theories and concierges with strange complexes about being known to be intelligent seem a little over the top. There are good elements. The writing is strong, with moments of sweet profundity (haha, who’s being snobbish now) that really pull you along, but there’s so much Sophie’s World-like overexplanation of the concepts.  I think the real reason that this book has thus far done well in the States is that people in reviews have claimed that it might be “too French” for Americans, and in a scramble to disprove this, we all have nodded sagely at the Emporer’s nakedness and declared this book to be a stunning masterpiece. It’s okay, don’t get me wrong, but it does not speak to the human condition very well unless you really identify with the misunderstood uber intelligent narrators and see yourself, like them, as standing against a world that misunderstands and maligns you for your brilliance.

Sadly, I don’t.