The hands I love

This, believe it or not, is the man I fell in love with:

We met in the spring of 2004, on the steps of the only original 19th century building at The Historic Site Which Shall Not Be Named's Sister Site (a 19th century British naval and military base, in case you're wondering). A mutual friend introduced us. We were fast friends. I had actually been dating someone else for almost two years when we met, and that relationship was in the process of dying.¹ My near-instant feelings for Mat complicated things enormously.

(Small "awwww!" and/or nausea-inducing sidebar: A few weeks after we met, we went out for coffee with the friend who introduced us and his girlfriend. After dropping me off at home that night, Mat went back to his house and told his mom he was going to marry me.)

A trip to PEI with my family in 2005. It's amazing we stayed together, especially considering that a) his hair looked that stupid for the whole summer, and b) he had *no idea* who Anne of Green Gables was.

This first year of marriage has been surprising. I had no huge drive to get married--I certainly wasn't against it, but if Mat hadn't been so gung ho on it, it wouldn't have bothered me to stay common-law. That said, I love *being* married; it has brought me an inner peace that I didn't realize I was missing.



Our relationship isn't perfect; we fight, we squabble, we hog the bedclothes, we nitpick at each other. But we are still invested in and committed to each other, and I hope that we can maintain that commitment as we go forth from here.

Happy anniversary, love.

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¹ For a variety of reasons, including the fact that my ex thought grad school was a dumb idea and that I shouldn't go.

On the back burner

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately.

Mostly about my future.

When I finished my M.A. year, I was burnt out. Personal and academic stress wore me out that summer. I earned my B.Ed. to please my parents and because I didn't know what else to do with myself. I taught high school after that because I needed a job and I didn't know what else to do with myself. I was then both burnt out and miserable. Somehow, through a series of coincidences and some incredible luck, I came to apply for the job that I have now. This is my fifth year at this job.

Over the years, I've had a lot of questions about my plans for school and when I would be going back to do my Ph.D. For a long time, I couldn't face the idea of returning to school, but eventually I began to soften as I realized that I miss my intellectual pursuits. When I got this job, I thought to myself, "This is the universe speaking. You are meant to go back to school." Some of my friends and colleagues put forth compelling arguments about the experience of graduate school. It all seems so exciting.

But I can't do it.

I love the idea of pursuing a PhD, but I can't commit to the reality of it.

A PhD gets me nothing but the glory of the intellectual pursuit. In my current job, where I am hired at the Instructor level, I don't need a PhD. If I got one, it would make no difference to my employment situation: no raise, no change in responsibilities. If I wanted to pursue a job with a higher status, I would have to give up what I have now--and what I have now is pretty good. I make more than most adjuncts do, with pension and benefits to boot, and I have a decent amount of job security. I've gotten used to making money, to paying back my student loans, to eating decent food, to owning a house. I also have other things to think about: the possibility of having children, for one; travelling, for another.

I would love to do it some day, for its own sake. In the meantime, I have a life to live.

A Pair of Ragged Claws

When I was about 11, I was at a Toronto Blue Jays game with my dad and my grandmother, and noticed a weird set of bubbles under the skin of my hands. Over the next few days, I noticed that the tiny blisters would swell whenever I washed my hands with warm water, and that when I showered, they would often burst, leaving me with scaly hands afterwards.

When I showed them to my mother, she promised to ask around at work for me.¹ One of the doctors told her that it was an eczema commonly caused by too-frequent hand washing of dishes. "Don't worry, though," she told me sarcastically. "I told him that wasn't possible for you." Our family doctor proscribed a cortisone cream for me, which never made a difference to the eczema, which would appear, burst open, and slowly heal off and on.

Many years later, the internet was kind enough to give me a real name for it: Dyshidrotic Eczema, so called because it was once thought to be associated with excess sweat. I learned that cortisone treatments were largely useless for this, and that not much could be done for it other than to care for the scaly skin after. I learned that mine is atypical, because mine is worse in the winter² than in the summer, and I also learned that mine is relatively mild compared to what some other people have.³

Over the last month, I have had two or three large flare ups of my dyshidrosis,⁴ which is unusual for me because it's usually much calmer in the summer. Today I woke up with blisters across the tips of a few of my fingers, as the blisters had spread up from the sides of my fingers. A few rounds of dishes and the cracks began to show.

Since becoming a knitter, I've become extra aware of my hands and how I treat them. Rough, cracked skin can snag delicate yarn as it slips through my fingers. Conversely, minimally treated yarns often retain their own lanolin, which gives moisture back to my hands. I've been knitting primarily with fine yarns (fingering/sock weight) for the last few months, and I'm yearning to move up to a worsted or aran yarn now that the weather is cooling off.

How do you take care of your hands?

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¹ One side effect of having a mother who was a nurse in one of Ontario's vastly overused hospital emergency rooms during the 1990s is that you are totally paranoid about seeking medical attention because you continually suspect that you are "not sick enough" to warrant taking up time and space at the ER.

² Likely because it's so flippin' dry up here in NBRC.

³ Seriously. Check out the pics at the link above--knowing how painful mine can be for how minor it is, I can only imagine how these people feel.

⁴ Yep, mine is stress-related.

As I approach my 30th birthday in the next few months, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what it means to get older. I never felt my age until a few years ago: in adolescence, I always felt older than (read: superior to) everyone else; in my twenties, I often felt very young (I'm the youngest person in my department by a good 15 years). Now I feel 29, whatever that means.

My grandfather is dying.

He has been really sick for about 18 months now. Things took a sharp turn for the worse about two weeks ago. Grandpa had been falling a lot, and one morning he was found on the floor of his bathroom in his nursing home. At the hospital, they determined that he'd been having a series of strokes, and that he'd sustained a number of lumbar compression fractures. After about a week or so, it became apparent that the waiting game had begun. We are now at the point of days, maybe hours.

My mother, grandmother, and the sister-aunts met yesterday to start to put together plans for how we could proceed when he finally passes. My mom has asked me to do a reading at the not-funeral (my grandparents had a very bad falling out with their church in the late 70s, so there won't be a formal church funeral service), and to think of stories to tell afterwards, when we go to my grandparents' farm for drinks.

Nothing has ever made me feel as old as this.

Why bother?

As always, Karie over at Fourth Edition shares some interesting thoughts about why she blogs, which naturally makes me think about why I blog.

When I started blogging, I was in my final year of high school. I wrote a lot in high school. There were literal boxes full of things I'd written in my parents' basement until recently, notebooks upon notebooks of poetry, short stories, screenplays, etc. I wrote letters to friends. I wrote mini-essays when I was bored in class. I had a direction and a discipline at that time that seems breathtaking in retrospect.

I wrote a lot in university as well: essays, mostly, although I still made an effort to write creatively when I could. In the summertime, when I would work at THSWSNBN, I would carry a notebook and pen in my costume's pouch so that I could write in idle moments, or at least jot down any interesting ideas I had. Working there was very good for me in so many ways, not least of which was the sheer number of creative people that I worked with: there was always something to inspire me.

Now that I'm a grown up, though, I don't have the same drive to write that I did when I was younger. Writing takes both time and discipline, neither of which are abundant in my life. It also takes drive, and I think that is the bigger issue here. I actually blame my job for this: I spend so much time reading bad writing that it has affected my ability to be objective about my own writing, and it has lead to a terrifying fear that my writing might actually be terrible and no one has ever told me. Everything that I write sounds hackneyed and cliched at worst; at best, it sounds profoundly uninteresting.

So I write here because it keeps me writing--no matter how bad I am afraid that I am, I still can't quite bring myself to give it up. I've made a concerted effort to refocus my energy into this blog in the last year and a half, and I think it's been (mostly) working. One of the things that I preach at my students is that practice makes perfect (or at least better) for writing, so I'd best follow my own advice.

I'm unlikely to be a blogger who acquires Fame and Fortune through what I write here. (Heck, I'm unlikely to be a blogger who amasses more than thirty regular followers.) But I am a blogger who has found a voice that allows her to write as often as she chooses, about the things that she chooses, and who is able to use that to push her writing forward. I don't post everything I write, and I don't write in as much details as I sometimes think I might. So why bother? I bother because it keeps me writing. As long as I'm writing, I haven't given up hope.

Cats are most helpful

Sweet Charity

If you're a frequent reader around here, or someone who is (un)fortunate enough to experience my company in real life, you'll know that I'm often ambivalent about the role religion plays in my life. I don't want to sidetrack this entry by pontificating on what I believe or how I practice, but a small reference to religion is sort of necessary for a thorough consideration of today's topic, charity.

Religious ambivalence aside, I do believe very strongly in the concept of charity and good works, which is something that (however loosely) has trickled down from the long line of Scottish Presbyterians from whom I am descended. I do some volunteer work (though not as much as I ought to) in the community, and I donate money to charity when I can. Most of my money goes to scholarship funds at the university, but I also donate to the AIDS Committee of North Bay and Area, the OSPCA, the MS Society of Canada, the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, and the Terry Fox Foundation. I try to keep my support to secular charities where possible, because I've yet to find a religious charity with a mandate to which I can reconcile my belief structure. I also try to support charities that are Canadian when I can, because I believe that we often forget that there are a lot of people in our own country that need help. That said, however, I will donate to international aid organizations when I can.

Which is how, in January of 2010 (some full 18 months ago, for those of you keeping track at home), I came to donate some money to Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders after the earthquake in Haiti. It wasn't even a lot of money--maybe $25? However, since then, I have been bombarded with emails and paper newsletters from the organization. (In fact, according to my gMail account, I've received 30 emails since that donation; I would guess that I receive at least one paper mailing from them per month as well.) I would be willing to bet that by now, they have spent at least the cost of my donation on trying to convince me to donate more.

I might well have donated more at some point in the future, I think, were it not for the telephone call I received from them last night. I should've just ignored the phone, but I didn't. When I picked up, I got a five minute spiel from the caller, who outlined all of the "like, amazing" work MSF has been doing with my donation.¹ She then asked me to consider a monthly gift of $25.² When I told the caller that I had just been laid off from my job, and thus could not afford to lay out a monthly sum, she didn't even pause before saying, "Well, look around your house and see if you can round up some loose change to donate."

At that point, I did hang up.

Part of me wishes that I'd given her a piece of my mind--as much as I try not to be rude to people who are just doing their jobs, I think that courtesy should end when those people stop being polite to me. I find it completely galling that after I've just told someone that I no longer had gainful employment, that person would turn around and ask me for money. Yup, stuff is bad in other countries, and MSF largely does work that I support, but if I can't pay my own bills, if I can't feed my husband or my cats, then things are pretty bad in this country for me, and going into debt to make charitable donations is just plain stupid. In soliciting from me this aggressively, MSF has ruined any chance that they have of receiving money from me in the future.

Any tips on charities who treat their donors like people, rather than endless money bags?

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¹ I have a personal policy of not hanging up on telemarketers; I listen, I refuse politely, and then I ask to be taken off the calling list.
² Given that I gave them $25 18 months ago, this seems unlikely.

Graduation Day

Yesterday, I attended my first convocation ceremony at the university. Just as I had completed my fourth year at my "new" job, the students I taught in my first year had just completed the fourth year of their degrees.

They came to me as teenagers, some as young as seventeen. I was their teacher, but they were my school: I had just come out of one of the worst years of my life to date, and I didn't know my ass from my elbow. I wasn't convinced that I should be teaching, or even if I could teach any more. You'll notice that 2007 was this blog's worst year in terms of posts, as well, which I think speaks to my frame of mind--I just don't write when I don't feel well.

As usual, though, time and experience are the best teachers. I learned so much in that first year, far more than I think the students got out of it. I learned the pleasure of teaching people who actually want to learn, and I learned the aggravation of teaching those who are only there because someone else has paid for them to be. I learned how to grade, how to explain grades in a way that seems clear and fair. I learned how to find plagiarists, which instincts to trust. I learned how to break out of my shell, how to see myself as an authority in the classroom, and how to get others to see me as an authority as well.

It is so much easier to see your own mortality through the aging and experiences of others. When I look at my students four years later, I can hardly believe the changes that some of them have gone through. Their faces are so much more mature; they are so much more confident than the little kids who came through my classroom, who were nervous about speaking in front of others and so eager to make friends. I couldn't be prouder of them, but the pleasure in their success is tinged with some sadness on my part. And so it goes...

Jasper

We adopted Jasper in the summer of 1999. He wasn't supposed to come home with us; we were actually getting a kitten for Youngest Sister following the death of our latest cat. Every time we went to the SPCA, though, there was this one adult cat who kept sticking in our minds. When Youngest finally picked out a kitten, a little calico baby, my mom said, spontaneously, "Let's get the tabby, too; your dad really likes him."

He had been at the shelter so long (over a year)¹ that we didn't have to pay any adoption fees for him; they were just happy that he was going to a home. Later, we would remark that we couldn't understand how he'd gone unnoticed for so long: while he wasn't the most beautiful cat, his personality more than made up for it. He loved all of us (excepting, perhaps, Youngest) devotedly. Even though he and Padme² were not litter-mates or even related, they were best friends³, often snuggling up together:

Of all of us, though, Jazz was most devoted to my mother. He would stay up at night when she was working nights at the hospital, and he would wait for her to come home in the morning. If she didn't arrive home at 7:30, he would start to prowl around the house to look for her. He would then sleep on the bed with her for the day. He would sit on the computer desk when she was using the computer, and he would come up behind her and poke her in the back if he thought she wasn't paying enough attention to him.

He was an exceptionally friendly cat. My dad nicknamed him, "The WalMart Greeter" because he would forget about everything as soon as he heard someone on the doorstep, and run to the front door to say hello.

Unlike most cats, Jasper loved having his tail pulled. If you put your hand on his tail, he'd lean away from you so that you were pulling on it. We always had a hard time explaining this to people, who thought that we were making it up--until they saw him in action, and how loudly it would make him purr.

You may have noticed that this post is mostly written in the past tense. Jasper got sick about two weeks ago. Youngest took him to the vet's after he failed to get up for breakfast one morning. His bladder was enlarged, and he was unable to pee. After a few days of being catheterized, he peed on his own and came home, only to wind up back at the vet's for the same reason the next day. He spent a few more days with a catheter in, peed successfully, and came home again...and went back to the vet again two days later. My parents made the decision to euthanize him, and they buried him in our backyard on Thursday evening.

It was very strange to be home for Easter. Between missing him and wondering if she'd made the right decision, my poor mum was so sad. For me, the hard parts weren't the big things--I knew he wouldn't be there to greet us, and I knew that he wouldn't be begging for food around dinnertime. It was the small things: coming around a corner and expecting to see him on a chair; finding his fur on the bedspread in my bedroom; listening for him in the morning.

I'll miss him for a long, long time.
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¹ Thank heaven we lived in an area that could afford to have a no-kill shelter.
² Yes, 1999 was the year that The Phantom Menace came out. Why do you ask?
³ Except when he would forget about the time he had the Big Operation and force himself upon her.

Bingeing and Purging II

Since my first post about trying to take control of our stuff and our house, Mat and I have managed to take seven large boxes of stuff to the local Value Village. We have also filled about the same number of large garbage bags. It's kind of awesome.¹

I come from a long line of people who should probably be on Hoarders pack rats.² Mat and I dated for several years before he was allowed into the basement of my parents' house, which is a repository for all manner of stuff (and possibly still contains some unpacked boxes from when we moved into that house 25 years ago). My mom has been making a concerted effort to clean up the basement³ over the last few years

Sentiment is my biggest problem--I am a nostalgia junkie. If you have sent me anything in the last ten years, I probably still have it, be it letters, cards, bookmarks, yarn, etc. No matter how much I don't like, need, or want something, if it was a gift from someone else, I will keep it. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing; I like to think that it demonstrates how grateful I am when people give me gifts. That said, there comes a point at which I simply don't need (or, sometimes, want) the things that I am given. For example, in the big purge, I gave away 3 different dip bowl with spreader sets; I kept one.

I have been reading a few different sites about managing space and clutter over the last few months, and I've come across a basic principle that has been enormously helpful to me in terms of making me feel okay about letting go of things that I've been given. It's called the Six Months Rule, and it essentially states that if you haven't used it in the last six months and aren't going to use it in the next six, gift it, donate it, or toss it. (There are some exceptions, obviously, for special items, like my collection of beaded evening bags, or Mat's collection of Scotch.) It's such a simple thing, but it's amazing to me how much of a difference it has made in relieving my guilty conscience about getting rid of gifts.

Now, if only someone could make come up with a rule that would make it okay for me to get rid of books, I'd be all set.

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¹ I mean awesome in the sense that we got it done, not awesome in the sense that we had that much crap to throw out.
² On both sides, even.
³ I'm sure it helps enormously that most of my stuff came here when we bought the house, though I'm pretty sure there are still a few boxes of books at my parents'.

An exciting development

I had my eyes checked yesterday.

I am, gentle reader, blind as a bat. My glasses are coke bottle thick (or were, before the advent of featherweight lenses). When people ask me if I am near-sighted or far-sighted, I can't tell them, because I can't see anything beyond approximately 5 inches from my face.

I ran out of contact lenses about two months ago, and I've been waiting to order new ones until after getting my eyes checked, since I could tell from my glasses that my prescription wasn't right any more. Truth be told, I've never actually gone to the eye doctor and had the same prescription as the previous time. Bit depressing, really. (Actually, from the time I was about 9 until I was 14, I would go to the eye doctor every 6 months and get a new pair of glasses each time. Thank goodness my dad's health care benefits were pretty kick ass, as I have no idea how my parents would've afforded that.)

So, to come back to the point, I went to the eye doctor, and miracle of miracles, my eyes have actually gotten better since the last time they were checked. I've improved a full half-step. (Granted, this is a -8.25 instead of a -8.75, but I will take what I can get.)

Now all I need to do is get some new glasses.

Touring History

Mat and I are beginning to put togethr our plans for our honeymmon, which we will take in February during my reading break. The honeymoon itself has been the source of some vexation for both of us, as we have very different ideas about where such a thing might take us. He would like to go to a resort and bake in the sun for a week; I would much prefer to do something more cultural.¹

Obviously, I want to go to Scotland. I'm not so sure I want to go to Scotland in February, per se, but that's where I want to go again, and soon.

However, we have arranged a compromise: New Orleans. It has food, history, culture, music, and a nightlife. The flights for the week we want to go are relatively inexpensive, and there is just so much to do there. The historian in me is thrilled by the idea of haunted tours, cemetary tours, Garden District tours, French Quarter tours, walking tours, swamp tours, etc.

The humanist in me (and perhaps, dare I say it, the pinko Commie in me), though, has mixed feelings about two of the possible tour offerings: Plantation tours and Hurricane Katrina tours. The relationship between history and tourism is always an uncomfortable one, as it has to preclude learning at some point and move towards spectacle: "Come see where the levees were breached! Marvel at the hard working people of the Ninth Word as they attempt to rebuild thier lives!" or "Come see where B'rer Rabbit was written! Eat lunch in honest-to-goodness slave quarters!"

Which is not to say that these things are not interesting to me, nor that there isn't value in seeing them--it's more just the way that they are marketed that disturbs me. When history becomes spectacle, there is substantial danger in losing the significance of the events. Eating a meal in slave quarters, to me, validates a particular period and a particular lifestyle in a way that I'm not comfortable with.

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¹ I can spend approximately 30 minutes baking in the sun on a beach before I am bored out of my mind, and I can't imagine doing it for a whole week. Yes, you're right--"relax" is not in my vocabulary.

The Tenth Doctor

The first of Mat's Hallowe'en costumes:

I Would Be Happy Just To Hold The Hands I Love

It's been eleven days now since I got married, and I think that I have finally decompressed enough to actually give a proper write up. The weeks leading up to the event were pretty stressful, as a lot of stuff needed to get done (including my bloody fascinator *and* all of the jewelry for the girls). At the same time, work started to get busier (a trend that has, unfortunately, continued up until the present). Mat made the mistake of saying, about five days before the wedding, that he didn't think planning a wedding was really "all that much work." Let me simply say, for the record, that he's quite lucky that he said that in a public place in front of other people, because if we'd been alone I don't know what I would have done to him.

The day itself was sunny but cold. We had been really worried that it was going to rain, and prevent us from having the ceremony outside. It was grey and overcast early in the morning, but the sun did come out and the rain held off. I was much calmer than I had thought I would be, and everyone kept commenting on that. One of the few advantages to getting married far away from here was that I had to have everything ready before we left on the Thursday, so by the time I arrived at my parents' place, there wasn't anything left to worry about.

Once we arrived at the museum where the ceremony was to take place, we went upstairs to hide out. It was then that the first (of two) almost-bad thing happened: my poor mother fell down the stairs, ass over tea kettle. She tore the skin off of one of her knees and one of her elbows, and she now has a bruise the size of a grapefruit on her arm.¹ My poor mum. Her Haruni shawl was beautiful, though.

Outside, we lined up around the side of the building with my friend (and former THSWSNBN boss) Larry, who graciously agreed to pipe us in.

Just as Larry was gearing up to play Paul McCartney's Mull of Kintyre for us, Youngest Sister suddenly realized that she didn't have Mat's ring anymore: it had been in her purse, which was now with one of our cousins in the audience. We had to call off the start of the ceremony so that she could go find it...and then it began.

We were married by a provincial court judge, who was Mat's Boy Scout leader when he was a child.² We had three readings as part of the ceremony: a Neil Gaiman poem that Mat picked out; a selection from Le Petit Prince, done in both French and English; and a few verses from the Song of Solomon. We wrote our own vows, and Mat either broke down and cried during his or was attacked by a vicious swarm of insects.

Between the ceremony and the reception, we were able to get a few pictures over at THSWSNBN:

The reception went beautifully: the hall looked wonderful, the food was plentiful and delicious, the speeches were funny and brief, and the DJ was excellent. We really could not have asked for anything more.³

Oh, and for those of you who've asked, this was our first dance:

Song for a Winter's Night-Gordon Lightfoot
Uploaded by StonewallStudios. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.
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¹ It has been speculated that she gave herself a mild concussion, but we'll never know--she refused to go to the hospital, saying she would not go to her own ER on the day of her daughter's wedding with a head injury.
² And also the father of the friend who introduced us.
³ Except for my grandfather to have been there, but at least he is in a safe place now

Drinking the Haterade

With four weeks to go, I think I might be finally losing it. The last couple of days have been pretty stressful, between trying to track down RSVPs, another shower, and a friend's sudden announcement of her plans to marry a few weeks after us.

Unfortunately, my attempts to track down some of our non-RSVPers has resulted in the realization that a friend of a friend from the Historic Site Which Shall Not Be Named is getting married the same day we are. There is some overlap in our guestlists, and so far I've had three people tell me that they can't come because they're attending his wedding.

I am taking this far more personally than I'm really comfortable admitting. There are quite a few people not attending our wedding for various reasons: work, school, family obligations, and that doesn't bother me...but for some reason, this does. I'm really hurt that these people are choosing not to come to our wedding. Why not us? Don't we matter?

Thus, my goals for this week are to finish my placecards, start my seating chart, and to try my best to accept that if people choose not to come to my wedding, the only people who will miss out are the people who aren't there. I am going to think nice thoughts. I will not dwell on things that I have no control over. I will not, as Middle Sister puts it, drink the Haterade.

Oh, and I'll knit these.

Wedding Bell Blues

This is a wedding rant, so if you are uninterested in my wedding, you may make your exit now.

Gentle reader, if there is anything that I have learned in the last year that I feel is necessary to pass on to you, it is this one piece of advice: Just elope. ¹

Things have been relatively calm up until this point. There have been a few hiccups along the way, of course, but in the span of about five days, everything got stupid. For example:

• Wedding rings: Did you know that the price of gold is at an all-time high? It is. Which means that my plain, simple band cost almost $250 more than the price we were originally quoted.² It actually would've been cheaper to buy the pre-fab band encrusted with diamonds that we initially vetoed as being too expensive.
• The back up venue for the ceremony, which my father-in-law had assured us that we would be able to get (for free) is in fact booked. Most of the other possible venues? Also booked. Most of them in the last two or three days. Except for the one restaurant, which told my father-in-law that he normally charges about $200 to rent the space, but since it was a wedding he'd have to charge $500.
• Two of the three people that we'd intended to ask to do readings at the wedding are...not coming.
• The RSVP deadline was on Sunday and only 55% of the invitees have responded so far.
• My aunts on Facebook are talking about the black bra of doom.³
• None of the fascinator or jewelry supplies that I've ordered online have arrived yet.

The end result of all this is that I have taken to obsessing about things I cannot change. For example, I have just noticed that one of our floors is a bit slopy. The house is eighty years old, and I've lived here for just over two. I am sure that the floor has been a bit slopy the entire time, and that I've just never noticed before now. But now I cannot not see it or feel it every time I walk on it. There is not a damned thing I can do about it either.⁴

So in the meantime, I am going to breathe deeply, exhale slowly, and tell myself to accept that things are what they are, and that I need to conserve my energy. And then I'm going to go home and have a really kick ass weekend there.

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¹ My wedding has, in fact, driven me crazy. Mad. Loopy. Barking. 'Round the twist. I am losing it. I can't believe that there are still five weeks to go because I can't imagine living like this for five weeks without resorting to the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol.
² Not really the jeweler's fault--we got a quotation for price back in February, and gold has done nothing but go up since then.
³ It is an absolutely enormous bra that women in our family get to wear at their bridal showers. You are supposed to stuff pieces of wrapping paper from your gifts into it. The last person to wear it was my tiny, tiny cousin. I, unfortunately, pretty much fill out the bra to begin with.
⁴ Which is to say, not a damned thing that doesn't involved ripping up the floors and replacing them, which is not really a feasible solution at this juncture.

Dreaming of Expeditions

To summit or not to summit, that is the question. One of my Rav groups is the midst of organizing a major expedition to Sock Summit 2011, which will take place next summer in Portland, Oregon. They're coordinating hotel rooms etc., and I've been offered a spot if I want one. So I need to decide soonish if this is something I want to do. I want to go so bad.¹ I think that it would be so much fun to take the classes, visit the marketplace, do the Rav-type stuff, and meet some of the people that I've spent just over two years talking to online.

As best I can figure, it would cost me somewhere between $1000-$1500, with the variable being how much money I want to take to the marketplace. And theoretically that might not be too bad--I could sock away² about $100 a month between now and then and that would get me enough money...but can I justify spending that kind of money on what is essentially a frivolity? There are so many other things that I could do with the money.³ To say nothing of the fact that I don't know what my employment situation will be like...

Chipmunks McGee is recovering slowly. He doesn't feel very good day, I don't think, so we'll continue the resting and the Firefly re-watch. Any tips on good, protein rich soft foods?

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¹ Which is kind of funny when you consider that I don't even really like knitting socks that much.
² Pun intended.
¹ Mostly very boring, house-related things, like furnaces and RRSPs.

Chipmunks McGee

Poor Mat had his wisdom teeth out yesterday, and he is now all kinds of puffy and jowly about the cheeks. He had all four out, although only two were impacted. (Hurray for dental insurance from work, I must say; it's rather an expensive operation.) The poor guy--the day before, we had gone grocery shopping to lay in some provisions for his recovery. He had looked up a couple of recipes for vegetable soups on the internet, and bought the stuff to make them. When we got home, I asked if he wanted me to help chop stuff up and get things ready for the soup. "No need," said he. "I'll just make it tomorrow."

I decided that this was one of those moments in our relationship when I could either tell him the truth or just keep quiet. I opted for staying quiet, as sometimes telling the truth causes the other party to accuse you of being a know-it-all or a bossy bessy. Needless to say, he was not up to soup making yesterday, poor guy. He seems to be in much better spirits today, although he hasn't actually made it out of the bed yet so I suppose time will tell.

I am currently working on a little cap sleeve top made from Fleece Artist's Peter Rabbit, which is an 80-10-10 angora/wool/nylon blend. The fabric is pretty much the softest, floatiest dream. I've converted the pattern to be knit in the round, though, so now I am stuck in the endless stockingette circle. I just have to keep in mind that the finished product is so awesome as to be worth it. Besides, today is Day Two of the Great Firefly re-watch, so it will be good to have something relatively mindless to work on while we watch.

I'll be headed to my parents' this weekend, and then down to Toronto for a bridal shower on Sunday. It'll be good to have some time with them and Youngest Sister. It will also be good to get my first paycheque of the year, although that does mean I will have to resist all temptation to visit any of the yarn stores on the way home...

Of Pretzels and Pavlova

When I decided a few months back that I wanted to post more regularly here, I read a couple of articles online about blogging. The best piece of advice that I got was that I should blog in the morning, and that I would be better able to keep myself posting consistently if I did so. I didn't put much stock in it at the time, since I tend to think about posting more in the evening, but I'm starting to think that it might be the better way to go.¹

I've been putting the stand mixer through its paces, and have made both soft pretzels and pavlova this week. The pretzels were okay--it was a very humid day, which made for very dense pretzels. The recipe claimed to make 8 pretzels, but if I made it again I would make 16 smaller pretzels. I would also salt them more. The dough hook is awesome though--it kneaded my dough for me in about 3 minutes. I only used the meringue recipe from the pavlova, and it came out different than I'd anticipated. The recipe uses cornstarch and vinegar instead of cream of tartar, and it made a meringue that was crisp on the outside and marshmallowy on the inside. It was good, but very, very different from what I'd anticipated. (I served it with a raspberry coulis and homemade whipped cream, in case you're wondering.)

Yesterday, I washed and set a skein of alpaca-merino-silk yarn that I spun several months ago. It's drying now. It's so pretty I can hardly believe that I made it myself. I am going to make this pattern from Knitty with it, I think, which will be the first time that I've knit anything with yarn I've spun myself.

I am off to somewhere this evening for round two of Not My Family Reunion, because Mat managed to get tomorrow off, so we're going just for tonight. I was saying to him this morning that I thought I would be better able to deal with it if the two reunions weren't back to back; if we were fully able to attend both we'd have only three days between the two because of the long weekend. "That's too much time with too many people for an introvert," I said. "Dude," he replied. "You were an interpreter on a historic site and gave tours in two languages to huge groups. You've lectured to nearly 200 students. How are you possibly an introvert?"

Being an introvert, I explained, is not about being shy, although I was painfully shy for the first 18 years of my life. Being an introvert is more about finding it difficult to engage in social interaction for extended periods of time, and about valuing your own company as much as (if not, in some circumstances, more) than the company of others. One of the things that I like about Mat's job (aside from the sweet spousal discounts on used books and clothing) is that his schedule does not overlap with mine, which means that I get to spend a reasonable amount of time by myself every week. He is definitely an extrovert, though, so that's part of why he doesn't understand.

I need approximately three more hours in the day. If you could arrange that I'd be eternally grateful.

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¹ I.e., thinking about posting is not the same as actually posting.

Early in the morning

I had to drive Mat to work for 5 a.m. today, which is one of my least favourite things to do. I have discovered, through the course of our two years living common-law, that I don't necessarily sleep well when we sleep together. It's not so bad during the school year when my job does a fair job of exhausting my mind, but I've been a little understimulated this summer¹ and have often found myself quite awake when Mat wants to go to bed. This is especially problematic when he has these 5 a.m. shifts, as they usually necessitate him going to bed between 9:30 and 10 o'clock at night.

Now, I love the man dearly, but he is a very restless sleeper. He talks; he kicks; he chatters his teeth. He also, on occasion, snores. If I go to bed at the same time as him, it usually isn't too bad: once I am asleep, I stay asleep, but if I don't...he'll keep me up.²

All of this is to say that I am quite tired, and that I am skipping out on today's portion of the 50 Days of Tea because I want a cup of tarry black orange pekoe, and by George, I am going to have it. It is also a perfectly balmy 8 degrees here in NBRC, so a hot cup will be marvelous.

We looked after Abigail, the six-month old daughter of one of my old roommates, for a few hours last night. It went well until she started to get a bit fussy, which quickly turned into very fussy and then into full-on screaming. I was trying to make dinner while Mat watched her, and we quickly realized that it was our faces that were upsetting her: every time I came into the room, she'd look for her mom, and realize that I wasn't her, and get even more upset. So we strapped her into her chair, turned her away from us, and were careful to enter and exit the room out of her line of sight. She stopped screaming within five minutes of not being able to see us, and fell asleep within ten.

I'm headed to the in-laws' for a family reunion this weekend. 31 people will be there, which will be quite chaotic; hopefully I'll be able to slip out for a bit to visit my own parents and touch base with a couple of friends. My future mother-in-law has requested that I make some soft pretzels for the occasion. I haven't actually made them in years (as in at least three or four) so it will be interesting to see how that goes. I'm considering making a practice batch before we leave today from an Alton Brown recipe. If I do, I get to try out the dough hook on my stand mixer, which sounds like it could be fun.

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¹ You are shocked, I'm sure, to discover that wedding planning is not rocket silence.
² I also have issues with knowing that an alarm clock will be going off in the future, since I'm paranoid about sleeping in. If I know an alarm has been set, I will wake up periodically throughout the night to make sure that I haven't slept through it.