KnittnLissa

Who, Meme?

Someone has posted an actually interesting meme. I thought I'd join the fun.

What was the scariest thing (or one of them if you’ve had many adventures) you ever experienced?

So many to choose from. Would have to be a tie: Being 10 years old, huddled in the basement with my 5-year-old brother (parents were at work) as a tornado screamed overhead, and being at home upstairs with my father when he had his third heart attack.

Do you plan to retire where you are right now or move somewhere else?

Retire? Don't I wish. In my rich fantasy life, I'd retire to Hawaii.

Three little gifts you’re always glad to get:

Anything that makes it obvious that the person really thought about who I am when s/he bought/made it

Gift certificate to a spinning/yarn store.

Chocolate. The darker, the better.

4 careers you might have enjoyed:

Actor
Musician
Artist (I know, you have to have at least a LITTLE talent first...)
Multimillion dollar lottery winner

A book you loved as a child but found disappointing as an adult:

Valley of the Dolls. Seriously. What was I thinking?

"Somebody ought to do (invent, make, write) that!

Eyeglasses whose lenses change prescription depending on what you're looking at, instead of those progressives I can't wear.

Also, Star Trek-style transporter.

Where or on what could you easily drop $100? - up to 5

Yarn
Spinning fiber
Clothes
Chocolate
Addi Turbos

Name an adult, not a parent, who really had an impact on you before you were 18 and what made such an impression.

Mrs. Biagolli, the elderly lady next door, who decided when I was 7 that all of the little neighborhood girls should learn to knit.

Okay, Jinnan and Amy and Jayme and Elizabeth and Jane and Teyani and Donna and anyone else I forgot. Your turn!

Yow

Haven't posted in a coon's age. How long does a coon live, anyway?

Have been having major TypePad issues, which now seem to  be resolved.

Let's see. What's new?

1. Have completed a two-month contract doing communications managment for Sprint/Nextel. 2 miles from my house. Ahhhhh.

2. Start a new job in Rosslyn on Monday. Wish me luck?

3. Finally got to see Deb's new house when the Sprint job ended two weeks ahead of schedule. CUTENESS!

4. Had a fabulous time at the CKG summer retreat. Deb was supposed to come, but first the mommaleh broke her foot. Then, her bother's brother-in-law died, bringing the LV contingent to MI for the funeral. Even without Deb, it was a great weekend.

5. A $50 repair in a bad floorboard has turned into a $500+ major repair. Yesterday, V literally took most of the back of my house off, to find water-rotted flooring and joists. Yes, the things that hold up my house. Rotted away. VERY scary. He had to remove the door-wall (sliding glass door to you southerners), pull out the rotted joist, piggyback a workaround, and replace an 8 x 4 foot piece of subfloor. My house is the new Hyatt for every species of biting bug in three states. At 11 pm last night, the SGD went back in, but there are still open spaces near the bottom of the walls where wood has just rotted away. V will fix the rest of that on Tuesday. Sheesh.

6. The gorgeous-but-unfinished Wild Berry Jacket is still stalled. Finally bought the dpns for the triple icord edging. Plan was to spend all day today working on it. I've been entirely avoiding the issue of cleaning up the debris in my living room by plunking around on this-here computer gizmo, so guess how much knitting has been accomplished today. That's right. Zip.Zero. Nada. Zilch. Tomorrow is KnitKnutz. I'm counting on my friends to hold my feet to the fire.

6. Oh - my identity was stolen last month. The miscreant hacked my PayPal account, stole every nickel I had in the bank, hijacked my email account (which I will never get back...), stole thousands of dollars in merchandise through my ebay account, and generally has made the last 6 weeks a living hell for me. I finally got my $$ back, but some things, like my email account, are irretrievable.

7. Helped CT dye the 5 pounds (!) of alpaca roving she bought from me. We had a blast.  Pics to come.

Genug for now. It's good to be back.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

• Bush won't rule out nuclear strike on Iran

  
  

March 31

I am no longer in my 40s.

How the hell did THAT happen????

This isn't a culture...

In Afghanistan, a man is about to be put to death by the government for converting to Christianity. Outraged at internatonal pressure to stop this insanity, Muslim clerics have declared that if the government doesn't execute the man, they will.

...this is a pestilence.

Necessity is the mother...

I have determined that I left my digital camera at Deb's in December. Here's where our remarkable similarities are less than desireable:

She remembers finding it.

She remembers thinking, "I didn't know I had a camera."

She thinks she remembers putting puting placing in a drawer in my (guest)room.

Having ransacked the room, the camera is nowhere to be seen. ADD isn't pretty, my friends!

And now, since she's packing to move this week, I expect that the camera will remain inside something inside something else inside a box for time immemorial.

So, since I'm dying to show you some things, and since necessity is the mother of makedo, I present scans:

This is a pic of part of a sleeve from what I'm calling my Bright Berries Jacket:








This is a rendition of Maureen Mason-Jamison's Blueberry Jam jacket, whose colors I didn't love, so Buffy of Shelridge Farm very patiently spent almost a half-hour with me at last year's MD Sheep and Wool Festival (those of you who have attended this event know how monumental it is that she spent a half-MINUTE with me, let alone a half hour) helping me pick new colors. Give Buffy your money. She deserves it, and her yarns are gorgeous and splendid soft

Isn't it pretty? The colors are pretty true, too. As some of you know, this was a tremendous undertaking for the Stockinette Avenger: Seven colors in several slip-stitch patterns. There are NUMBERS involved, people!

I've completed the sleeves, the back (three times, but we'll talk about that another day...) one front and 1/4 of the other front. Why only 1/4? Because I ran out of the lavendar yarn last night. Talked to Fabulous Buffy today (did I mention give her your money?), who is sending me, free of charge, a new skein. Not only that, she's changed mills since I bought my kit, so she's gonna rummage through her old stock to find it. We LOOOOOOVE Buffy!

Well. There I sat last night. Nothing to knit. Can't have that. So, I swatched up the gorgeous red/pink/with a tiny bit of plum cotton/rayon boucle that the Fabulous Elizabeth gave me at KnitKnutz' yarn swap in December. The plan is to make my 4th Annual Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival Tank Top. Here's the swatch:







The color is off - the red is a true, bright candy-apple red, like this text, not the kinda dull burgundy as it appears. The rayon is as shiny as silk, which makes for a gorgeous fabric.

I'll be 'borrowing' this edging from a commercial pattern (and no, the yarn isn't the same) - sorry for the bad scan.




And, on unrelated note, my dear friend Jayme loves to be linked in others' blogs, so go read her new one, okay?

Serendipity. Doo Dah.

Serendipity, she is a wondrous thing.

So, this morning, I'm standing in the gale-force wind awaiting a very late bus to take me to the Metro. I'm on my way to interview for a job.

The later the bus is, the more pissed off annoyed I get. Renowned (man, that word is spelled wrong...) for holding my tongue (surely you can muster up a better snort than that...), I grumble to the woman freezing standing next to me that I'm going to be late for my interview.

She: Oh, are you looking for a job?
Me: Uh, yeah.
She: In what?
Me: Communications managementwherethehellisthatbus?!?
She: Well, I happen to run a recruiting firm that places people like you.

We have a winnah! Candace graciously invites me to call her after my interview (her office is only one train stop from my interview), and she'll work me in and introduce me to the other recruiters.

So, I now have a great relationship with a good recruiting firm whose executives are very enthusiastic about me.

Sometimes, it pays to get blown around a little.

You MUST do this!

Go to www.google.com. Type in "asshole" (without the quote marks). Hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button.

Amen, bruthah!

Couldn't help "liberating" this from another site...

The Principles of Jewish Buddhism

1. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight, you'll never meet the Buddha with such round shoulders.

2. There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

3.    Wherever you go, there you are.  Your luggage is another story.

4. To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?

5.    If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

6. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Forget to do this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

7. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao is not Jewish.

8.    Drink tea and nourish life.  With the first sip, joy.  With the second, satisfaction.  With the third, danish.

9. The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

10.    Be patient and achieve all things.  Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

11.    Be here now.  Be someplace else later.  Is that so complicated?

12.    Zen is not easy.  It takes effort to attain nothingness.  And then what do you have?  Bupkes!

A Trip in the Way-Back Machine

I still haven't found my camera, but as I am ransacking my house room by room, the list of places it could be is rapidly dwindling. In the ransacking process, however, I did unearth some prints of some of my knitting and pottery. The scanner works. We begin about 5 years ago...

When my neice and nephew were 3 and 1, respectively, I made them each a sweater, to wit:










The Ducky Sweater for Josh. I loved it.










Sophie's sweater. Loved it, too. She never wore it. Sigh.

Since then, I have decided that I will next knit for them when A. they have stopped growing, and B. can pick out exactly what they want.
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I also uncovered some pics of some of my dabbling in clay. I miss clay.

This is the fireplace hearth I designed and made. I handbuilt the tiles for the spiral sun. The black tiles are smashed bathroom tiles. I heart my hearth.








I always aspired to make myself a full set of dinnerware. Above are a couple of plates. I have a dozen more, unglazed, in the basement.






This is a teeny weenie cream and sugar set. The bowl is about 4" wide.








This is a not-very-clear pic of a cute footed box I made. It's about 6" long. There's a texture rolled into the surface of the clay. The glaze came out too brown for my taste - it was supposed to be a dark plum. Ah, well.

And, to reward those of you who have stuck through all of these ordinary pictures, I bring you this:








I knew when I saw this nectarine at the grocery store that it had to be mine. After all, it liked me. Very, very much.