A Litany

What a month. You wonder why I haven't posted? Let's see:

• Took in the car: estimated $1800 worth of work needed. Car is worth $1200 (max). Decide to do some of the work ourselves.
• My Hero and his brother spend 10 hours one Saturday replacing the radiator.
• The next day, we go downstairs to do laundry and discover a half inch of water standing in our basement. It's been there at least 18 hours. On the plus side, it's just kitchen water - a little food in it, but no raw sewage. There's a block in our drainpipe. We won't discuss the fact that it's probably due to a sweater trying to escape its felting bag in the washing machine. On my watch.
• The next day, the Doodle begins cutting three molars at once.
• The next day, My Hero stays home to address the basement with more force - pulling out carpet, flooring, etc. to get rid of the pervasive musty smell. Did I mention that the Doodle usually sleeps downstairs? She's sleeping all over the house at this point.
• The next day, I get a cold. Which I still have, a month later (yes, I've been to the doctor, twice).

Needless to say, blogging has not been on the top of my priority list. These days, I'm lucky if I get to put on clean underwear. But we're coming out of the fog (although I think My Hero may be coming down with my cold - poor guy). We've painted the basement floor with Kilz and are in the process of moving everything back to where it belongs before my folks show up in two weeks.

There has been knitting, but very little picture-taking.

Me Meme

Rachel tagged me for my first meme; I went to her blog and read the rules, and decided to blow most of them off, except the obvious one: tell seven random things about myself. All that "post the rules" and "tag seven other people" crap is right out the window as far as I'm concerned. So...seven random things.

1. I am terrified to the point of phobia of ascending spiral staircases. I had a taste of this in York going up the cathedral tower six years ago, but I'd forgotten about it until this trip to Oregon and the Yaquina Head Lighthouse tour. Oy. Oddly, I have no problem going down; it has something to do (I suspect) with the implied centrifugal leaning - in toward that really long drop on the way up, and out toward the stable wall on the way down.

2. I used to dye my hair red on a regular basis. Not Orphan Annie red, but I was often compared to Clare Danes during her redhead phase, and I was runner-up in the "Most Irish-looking" contest at our church's annual meeting one year. Not bad for a German.

3. My maiden name is Funkhouser. The best thing about a last name like Funkhouser is that there's not a ton you can do with it to make it any more interesting. I was sad to see it go when I got married - no way I was going to hyphenate that sucker.

4. I haven't had a full-time job since July 2002 (more than four years before the Doodle made part-time a necessity). I negotiated with my temp assignment that I'd stay on with them longer if they'd let me work four 8's, and I've never looked back. Why work more than I have to? There are naps to be had!

5. Even though I'm on the lazy side (see #4), I have a deep streak of farming/gardening/tending in me - wheat and cattle farmers on both sides of the gene pool have contributed to this. A life thus far of apartment and townhouse dwelling has not encouraged it. However, it's probably for the best, since I think I probably like the idea of a huge garden more than I would really like the reality. I'll pore over Burpee seed catalogs and estimate how many alpacas we could buy with our savings (answer: one-third), but really when it comes down to it, I like sleeping. A lot.

6. I ran cross-country one season in high school. To this day, I am mystified by my decision to run cross-country (again, see #4). I do not enjoy running in the least. I've started running recently because I need to do something to get in shape and it works fast, but all I can think about while I'm out at 6:30 a.m. is, "Oh, look how pretty the sky is - how much longer do I have to this???"

7. Almost every day, something I do, see or think about reminds me of something that happened during college - and I graduated almost ten years ago. Simply put, college was the best experience of my life (although marriage is beginning to edge it out occasionally) and if I could figure out a way to go back and do it all again, I totally would. Not grad school, not continuing ed, but the whole undergrad shebang - dorm life, staying up until 4 a.m. debating the existence of original sin (love ya, Bible majors!), staying up until 8 a.m. bitching about the administration (love ya, Record staff!), doing homework in the cafeteria in between breakfast and lunch - the whole thing was fabulous, and I have four more majors and a whole slew of extracurricular activities that I didn't get to take care of the first time around.

Whew!

Knitting content posted sometime in the next week, hopefully.

On Adjectives

So this is about a Christmas gift I received from My Hero. I'll say right here that this is the first year anyone has taken my knitting seriously enough to buy me presents that have to do with yarn, or the storage/maintenance/knitting thereof, so I would like to publicly thank those individuals (My Hero and my mom and mother-in-law) who have supported/enabled me during the holiday and birthday season. Finally! :)


Anyways. My Hero bravely went to a yarn store all by himself and bought a swift, which, after I received a bigger, wooden version from my mom, I returned for a ball winder:


Behold, the Almighty Handy Reeling Machine. There is really very little that I enjoy more than English translations performed by those who have 85% fluency in the language. I once had a balsa wood airplane kit that bragged that it could "be circular three times in the air!" While I'm somewhat bemused at how they arrive at the vocabulary they choose, you have to hand it to these translators for infusing their English with a certain enthusiasm that is missing from the usage of us jaded native speakers. I don't think it would ever occur to me to pair Almighty and Handy as descriptors for the same object. Unless, I suppose, I was describing the accessibility of God?

I'm a Fibertarian

The Panopticon has come up with a political party that I just might be able to fully support.

Knitters, unite!

Doodle Update

The Doodle is growing by leaps and bounds. We are constantly amazed at the things she has figured out regarding her surroundings. Lately, her big thing is to bring us trash - little pieces of lint, scraps of paper, receipts - to be thrown away. "Shash", she says in her little voice, and hands it to us, or toddles over to the cabinet where the trash can lives and tries to get in around the child lock to throw it away herself. We have no idea where she learned what constitutes trash or what needs to be done with it. Or, for that matter, how much more frequently we need to vacuum.

A couple of days ago, she figured out shoes - up until now she's pretty much just been wearing Robeez knockoffs, those little leather-soled, elastic-backed abuse-takers that won't come off no matter how hard she tries (I love them, and am already mourning her outgrowing them). My Hero bought her a pair of big-kid shoes (size 6 or 8, I think - about eight inches long) for fun for her birthday, because she was always fascinated with our grown-up shoes by the door. Now she wants to wear them.


She's a thing of wonder and joy!

Birthdays

This month, My Hero turned 32 and I turned 31. After spending Christmas with my family in Illinois and enduring 19 hours to and from on a train with a one-year-old, we were suffering from an overdose of partying, not to mention post-traumatic stress syndrome (NEVER. AGAIN. with the train thing). We laid low for our birthdays, which are a little over a week apart. Nevertheless, I think I won on the "most effort" competition - to wit, my made from scratch yellow cake with chocolate frosting. You may be impressed, but I just didn't want to go to the store to buy the mixes, and we didn't want a whole 13x9 cake.

This was also my first run-in (after living here for six years) with high-altitude issues. You can't see it because of the frosting, but my cake ended up with a rather sinky middle. Tasted good, though - not as light as the Doughboy's, but excellent nonetheless.

For my birthday, I told him I just wanted ice cream:

Hey, works for me.

Back to life

Funny how being out of work drastically decreases my motivation to blog, even though I have yet to discuss my work in my blog. It's probably the combination of ennui resulting from having nothing to do all day and guilt from being on the computer and not using it for job-hunting. But all is restored, my friends - tomorrow I begin gainful part-time employment once again, this time for a general contractor about 30 minutes from my house. I'm looking forward to the change in venue (I've worked in a hospital - administratively - for the past five years) and the challenge of learning some new systems and terms and whatnot. And also the casual dress code - can anyone say "steeltoed boots" with me? Oh yeah.

Being unemployed doesn't mean I've been sitting around doing nothing. Or, in addition to doing nothing, I've been knitting (which, depending on who you talk to, is the same thing). Behold, the baby gifts.





The top is a hat and socks for my newest nephew, born the day before the Doodle's first birthday (I'm a little behind on the posting - these got to him for Christmas); the second is the Elizabeth Zimmerman February Baby Sweater from Knitter's Almanac, knitted for a friend's baby who was born on New Year's Eve (more timely on this one), and the third is Trellis 2.0, a sweater I've had in pieces for months that finally got seamed and is for another friend whose baby was born on the 11th. More details will be posted on Ravelry, for those on the inside.