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.

=====
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.

Frakking cold

I would estimate that, in my lifetime, I have owned approximately 20 000 yarn needles. That's probably a conservative estimate, even, to say only 20 000. I own a lot of those things. Do you think I can find one right now? The answer to that question is obviously "no."

There are usually at least two or three floating around the computer desk, whether it's on the shelves or in the drawer, but I am currently coming up short. The drawer has an interesting assortment of other stuff (all of the American candy my parents gave us for Christmas, a small book of Oscar Wilde quotations, a diaper pin from when I was a child) but no yarn needles.

It is cold here, gentle reader. Yesterday it "warmed up" to -27 degrees Celsius; today things are currently sitting around the same temperature, although it should actually warm up this afternoon. The only good thing about the cold like that is that it doesn't snow here when it gets really cold because it is just too dry. We had a small incident in which the little cat decided to make a break for freedom and the great outdoors, only to come running right back in to the house before he made it off the front porch.

For the last few months, a few of my friends from the guild and I have been going out for "Fancy Ladies Night", which essentially means that we get dressed up and go out for dinner. One of the Asian fusion restaurants in town does a seasonal feast menu every few months where you are served a variety of dishes family-style, so we started there and are intending to make our way through the finer dining establishments of NBRC. This month, however, we decided to try "Fancy Ladies Stay In," where we stayed in and had fondue. It was a delectable feast.

We made pizza for dinner last night, which turned out really well. We used a dough recipe from one of the cookbooks I gave to Mat for Christmas, and it was pretty darn tasty.

Our house is a very very very fine house....

It has, as they say, been a hell of a week.

We have adopted a new cat. His shelter name was Jean-Luc, which I loved and Mat disdained (apparently only because it wasn't a name that we gave him). After spending a few days being referred to as "The Little Cat" (an apt moniker given that he is literally less than a third of Dorian's size), he is now Hob, after Hob Gadling from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman:

The adjustment has been interesting. It's gone better than I would have imagine in some respects, but Dorian is definitely a little sad about the whole thing. He has hardly snuggled and has not purred at all since Hob came. They have been wrestling each other and chasing each other around, but all of those moments are punctuated by moments like this:

The weekend was particularly stressful. The old roommates were in town to celebrate Ian's birthday. We wound up moving the festivities back here, and I was very excited to try out the ice cream maker attachment for my standmixer in making strawberry daiquiries (amazing, in case you were wondering). As we were standing around in the kitchen, I could hear something in the basement that sounded like a tap running. Assuming Mat had left the laundry room tap running for some reason, I went down to shut it off...only to discover that it was not the laundry room tap at all, but the bottom of our hot water heater, leaking water all over the basement.

This is not the sort of thing that's good to discover at 11:30 at night when you've been drinking socially with friends.

We couldn't get the intake valve on the tank to shut off, which meant that the tank kept trying to refill itself, and we wound up having to shut the water for the whole house off for the night to get it to stop. Thankfully, the tank was a rental, and the company came the next day and replaced it with a newer and more efficient model.

Then our washer broke on Monday. Like I said, a hell of a week.

Bingeing and Purging Part I

Over the last few weeks, Mat and I have undertaken a serious effort to re-organize our house. We've noticed, when we visit other people, that other people's houses are not cluttered like ours is: we simply have a lot of stuff. (I also think that the fact that we have wall-to-wall carpeting in our house contributes to this appearance, as does the total lack of storage space.) Thus, our co-resolution for the new year has been to try to make some sense out of our living space.


Mat will be the first to tell you that I am the problem here. He thinks (mostly correctly) that I am the source of all the clutter, what with my books and my knitting and my grading. While this is true, he's not totally blameless, since he does tend to leave Magic cards and video game paraphernalia lying around.

As a wedding present, we were given a dining room table, and we have just recently finally purchased the matching chairs. Yes, that's right: I am now sufficiently grown up and classy that I have a matching dining room table and chairs. Not a moment too soon, either, as two of our mismatched chairs had quite literally fallen to pieces the week before. Now that our living room looks classy, we're working on reorganizing the rest of the main floor. We've moved the computer upstairs into our spare bedroom, moving my computer desk out of the craft room to do so. The old computer desk is going to a second handstore, and we are going move the couches around and perhaps move the bookshelves into the living room, which will leave the dining room as open as it can possibly be.


I now have a 6' tall pantry cupboard in the craftroom to hold my crafting things, and I am in the process of sorting things out in there...very slowly. The thing that I need to deal with most is actually *not* my yarn stash; it's my fabric stash. I own an awful lot of fabric for someone who doesn't sew very much, and I think that now is the time to start looking for ways to weed out what I will use and what I won't use. I think that is an excellent job...for tomorrow.

I found four sweater quantities of yarn in a pale grey heather: a DK alpaca/merino/silk, an organic merino worsted weight wool, boring old Patons Classic Wool (also worsted) and an unknown fingering weight wool that my mom bought me in Scotland. Apparently I have a need for sedate, conservatively coloured garments?

The Handmade Christmas

I love the idea of the Handmade Pledge: giving handmade gifts is such a noble (and cool!) idea. I don't follow the pledge to the letter, since there are some people who would rather not get something made by a person instead of a machine, and sometimes a non-handmade gift can be more practical. I've also amended the pledge to include books and tools as acceptable gifts; I figure that if it can help you make something on your own, then I can't really ask for anything else.

I also don't do the second half of the pledge. I don't ask people to give me handmade gifts because it's a request that would (mostly) fall on deaf ears, and I don't want to put people under that kind of pressure. (Plus, I also like non-handmade things sometimes, like my awesome Scrabble pyjamas that my mom got me this year.) Thus, it was a big surprise for me this year to receive several gifts that were made by the givers. I have some very talented friends and family.

My sister-in-law made a bench for our entryway for us. She made the bench and then worked a mosaic design on the top in glass:



My friend Jamie made me a case for my interchangeable knitting needles:



My friend Steph made me a scrapbook page in a shadowbox:


And Youngest Sister made a bag. Actually, that's not true. She made me The Bag. The Bag To End All Bags. It's gorgeous:


The cat loves it too:


I am very, very lucky to have people who care for me enough to make me a gift of their time like this.

Broadcasting live from the house of my parents

To be honest, I kind of hate New Year's Eve: to me, it is the prom night of holidays, with tonnes of build up and little-to-no pay off. I've had some pretty crummy New Year's Eves in my life, or least ones that didn't meet up with whatever expectations were put on them. Thankfully, last night was not one of these nights: it actually went quite well. We joined friends for dinner at the Explorer's Cafe, which had a prix fixé menu for the evening. I had tuna tartare as an appetizer, with a rib-eye steak with a blue cheese and green peppercorn cream sauce as the main. Dessert was tiny portions of peanut butter and chocolate cheesecake, dulce de leche cheesecake, and a raspberry tart with minted cream.

We rung in the New Year at the new home of friends of ours amidst much food, and music, and merriment. I really couldn't ask for anything more.

Even though I don't like New Year's Eve, I am actually a big fan of the idea of the New Year. Starting over/turning over a new leaf/wiping the slate clean/whatever you like to call it appeals to me in a big way: it invites list making (a personal favourite pastime) and goal setting. I don't usually put too much stock in New Year's resolutions, per se, but there are a lot of things that I want to figure out for this coming year.

1. Be healthier - it's as simple as "eat less, do more," which is to say that it's not simple at all. That said, I've been far too sedentary lately, and I've eaten absolutely terribly at work this year, and that has to stop. With my new schedule this term, I have no excuse not to do more. I'm contemplating doing Weight Watchers again (because, two years later, I'm back to where I started).
2. Knit more; buy less. I haven't yet committed myself to any "11 in 11" memes like the rest of the knitaverse, because I can't quite settle on which I'd like. 11 pairs of socks? 11 sweaters? 11 shawls? 11 hats? More socks this year for sure, but I'm going to think about using more sport weight yarns so that they knit up faster. Lots of stash busting this year for sure.
3. Do more things around the house. Big renovation-prep type things, and smaller, let's-just-keep-this-place-cleaner things.
4. Travel more. Honeymoon planning is in action, but I also want to do more travelling within Ontario, and maybe even actually go to Stratford.
5. Spin more. I really like spinning yarn, and I'd like to actually be good at it.
6. Become a better photographer. I have an amazing camera, and I need to learn to use it to its full potential.

Christmas Wrap Up

It has been a miserable couple of days around here: Mat and I have both been violently ill for the last 48 hours, which is not good at the best of times, much less when you are coming off the complete and total circus of Christmas.

All things considered, Christmas wasn't actually as crazy this year as I had been afraid that it would be; we managed the family gambit as well as could be expected: Christmas Eve at Mat's parents' place, Christmas morning at my parents, Christmas dinner at my aunt's in Toronto, and Boxing Day at Mat's uncle's in Sudbury. We were exhausted by the time that we got back to our house...and then the plague hit.

I managed to finish all of my knitting but one in time for Christmas. The Fornicating Deer hat went over quite well, as did Youngest Sister's cowl (she hardly took it off the whole time we were home). Youngest Sister also created the most wonderful thing for me--a Yellow Submarine/Beatles bag. I'll have to get some pictures of it soon...just as soon as I get my brand new Nikon D3100 DSLR camera. It should be here on Friday. I am thrilled. I have had a devil of a time trying to track one down in person, but managed to find an online retailer who not only had it in stock, but had a slightly lower price on it. I've spent the last couple of months trying to re-train myself to look at the world with a photographer's eye, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what I can do with something more than a point and shoot camera.

Countdown to Giftmas

The last week or so has been a frantic exercise in grading on a deadline whilst attempting to prepare for the holidays. Some parts of it went quite well. (Grading finished 24 hours before it needed to be, yay!) Some parts of it didn't. (No tree or lights or other Christmas decorations at the house, boo!) In good news, I have almost all of my Christmas business figured out, and have only a few small gifts left to pick up. Heck, I've even got stuff wrapped already, which is quite unusual. All I have left to knit is a pair of mittens for my cousin (made from some soft semi-local baby alpaca--yum), which likely won't take more than a day or so. Actually, now that I think about it, I need to finish the hat I'm working on for Mat, but that should be easy enough to finish up today.

The handmade piece de resistance for this year, though, is the hat I made for my father-in-law:

A storm front moved westward through NBRC yesterday, gifting us with about 40 cm of the white stuff. Today, we've got a different storm front moving east from Montreal, but this one is only bringing 10ish cm and a great deal of wind. The schoolbuses are cancelled throughout the city; my sister's office has closed for the day. The university is still open because the city buses are still running. (Those jerks would keep driving through the apocalypse, I think.) Fortunately, I had no plans to go to the school today. Classes finished on Friday, and my exam isn't until next Monday, so it's all grading from here on out. I can't think of a better day to spend holed up with some essays, the cat, some knitting, tea, apple cider, and some knitting.

The knitting guild's holiday party is tonight. I'm making pulled pork in the slow cooker, and serving it with tiny slider buns. We're also doing a blind stash exchange, where people will wrap up things from their stashes and we'll pull numbers for them, so I need to figure out what I can bring.

I grafted the hood on mom's sweater last night. I am quite proud of this--grafting in pattern is not an easy challenge, but somehow I managed to get it right on the first try. Unfortunately, I am now about 90% sure I don't have enough yarn to make the sleeves, and I am freaking out. I think that I need to step away from the project for a while so that I can figure out what I want to do about it. There are a few people on Rav who have yarn from the same dyelot, but I feel strange about PMing someone and saying, "Hey, want to sell me some of your yarn that you obviously have earmarked for other projects?" Currently I'm kind of leaning towards just buying more from Knit Picks and alternating skeins if the colour shift is too dramatic.

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.

=====
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.

Counting down the days

We went away for the weekend for the first time in more than a month, and we did it for fun for the first time in more than a year. It was very exciting to get out of the city. We visited old friends of Mat's, who are becoming my friends too. We ate Thai food (mmm summer rolls) and went shopping for crafts and books. Michaels, which is about the only big box craft store we have in Canada, does a line of $1.50 accessories that are colour and pattern co-ordinated, and the pre-holiday set this year was knitting themed. My favourite part? The best wrapping paper ever:

There are matching cards, notebooks, pencils, pencil cases, etc. I also have a roll of blue cabled paper, but I haven't broken into it yet.

We are in the final week of school, at long last. My students will hand in their final papers today, and I'll be grading well into infinity. There are about eight inches of snow outside, and I have yet to solve my winter boot dilemma. (I have a gorgeous pair of Hush Puppies, which are knee high and lined, but they also have a three inch block heel, which I feel is a bit dubious in times like these.)

I finished three hats in the car this weekend, but the hood on my mom's Rogue is continuing to kick my butt.

Decemberween

Happy December. My sore throat has come back full throttle, along with some sinus pain. Seriously, can I not be done being sick now? The area between my nose and my throat feels bruised, almost. Ugh.

This is the last week of the calm before the storm: on Monday, my students will begin to hand in their final papers, and then it will be a mad dash to get everything marked for the exam on December 20th, and then it will be a mad dash to get the bloody exam marked quickly so it doesn't hang over me for the whole holiday as per last year. At least this year we have a late start in January, which should afford me some breathing room.

I may have bitten off more than I can chew with Christmas knitting this year, but I guess I'll need to have something to break up the monotony of all that grading. I really want to CO stuff for myself, like some nice warm socks, and maybe a pretty shrug, but I can't. I need to finish my mom's sweater (still plugging away on the hood; it looks gorgeous with all of cabling but I just want it to be done), a fornicating reindeer hat for Mat's dad, a long cowl for Youngest (why-oh-why didn't I just buy her the one at American Eagle that she wants me to remake for her?), mittens for my cousin, assorted hats...at least hats are quick, right?

There's no time to blog--if I'm gonna get this done before Christmas, I better get cracking. Back to the hood!

Strange Days Have Come

On Mondays, I only have one hour of class, and it's a class that I don't even teach in, and it's a class at 3:30 in the afternoon. At the beginning of the term, when I found out my schedule for the year, I was thrilled--how could I not be? Unfortunately, my peaceful, easy Mondays began to fill up quickly, and now most of my Mondays involve 7+ hours at the school or in meetings.

Today was no exception, and it was made all the more frustrating by the quality of the meetings. The first was derailed by an unfortunate discussion of the merits of social media (and a refusal on one party's part to acknowledge that not wanting to join Facebook is a legitimate position) that took up the first 50 minutes of the meeting. The second was with a former student, whom I normally quite like, who was exhibiting some decidedly snowflake-like behaviour. It was a very uncomfortable situation: I'm torn between my desire to help my former student and my desire to point out that she has been hoisted entirely by her own petard here, and that now is the time to quit making excuses, to quit complaining, and to start doing instead.

I'm twenty rows in to the hood on mum's sweater and it looks pretty cool.

The Big Sneezy

The cold rages on, and I am so flipping happy that it's the weekend. Winter arrived quite suddenly today in the form of about 10 cm. of snow. Naturally, I had taken the car in for an oil change just yesterday, and I had contemplated bringing the snow tires along to get them put on, but Mat talked me out of it: "I figure we've got at least another couple of weeks before we'll need them," he said to me. Foolish boy.

But then, I'm the one who listened to him, so I'm actually the bigger fool there.

The annual downtown Christmas walk happened tonight. I didn't make it through the whole walk because it was cold and windy, but I enjoyed the little bit I saw: a Salvation Army brass quartet, later joined by a piper; a guy roasting chestnuts on an open (propane) fire; 20% off at the yarn store...I was good, though, and only bought one skein of yarn. (Dream in Colour Classy in Wisterious.) The chestnut--my first--was very good, though.

I have been meaning to share this project for a while, as I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. A while ago, back when I had borrowed GirlTuesday's spinning wheel, I turned this:

into this:

Like most of my handspun, it looked just fine in the skein and seemed pretty content to stay that way. Then, I was given a beautiful handmade teapot (with matching cream and sugar set) by Grrly as a wedding gift, and all of a sudden, my handspun knew exactly what it was meant to become:

The pattern is Baby it's cold outside, written by my friend Trisha. I had to adapt the pattern because of the Asian-style handle on my pot, but this worked out quite well for me since it meant that I got to knit it in the round. I did a buttonhole for the spout, and used ribbon to lace everything up. It works extremely well--I think I need to make matching cozies for my mugs.

New Patterns

Some days you have to take the good with the bad. Last week, I had a very sore throat and swollen lymphs nodes in my neck for most of the week, which seems to have transitioned into a full blown cold this week. As of last night, my voice is starting to fade. The good, I guess, is that my students are all involved in a peer editing exercise during class this week, which means that they work hard and I don't have to talk much, which is optimal for everyone involved.

I've been making good progress on the sweater - the back is now worked to the shoulders and bound off, and I'm plugging away on the front. The sleeves are what concern me most: I don't have a good track record with set in sleeves, but I figure that as long as I am patient and take my time, I can do this.

The best news from yesterday, though, is that the two patterns that I submitted to Three Irish Girls have been published and are available for sale on their website. Strangely enough, both patterns are mittens--I don't actually make that many mittens but apparently that's all I can write patterns for. The Breakfast at Jessica's mittens are done in a beautiful blue wool-silk blend, with picot edges and white bows reminiscent of a Tiffany box. The Glasgow Cathedral Mittens are modeled after the Millenium Window in Glasgow Cathedral. I had originally envisioned them in brilliant shades of blue, but the green-based handpaint in the sample is quite fetching.

Three Irish Girls released a whole new lookbook for Fall 2010, with 41 patterns and 33 new colourways. The lookbook can be seen here, if you're inclined to go looking for some yarny loveliness. My favourites are Carey, Eavan, and Mairin

When I first started blogging, all those years ago, I assumed that the act of blogging would serve as an outlet for my emotions. I thought there would be a cathartic release from sharing how I felt with anonymous strangers on the Internet. What I have found is actually the opposite--when times get bad, I tend to post less and less.

There are lots of reasons for this: Sometimes, the problems that I have are with people who read this blog. In my first year as a blogger, I wrote something about a friend that criticized how she handled a situation. Months later, she read what I had written, and reacted by cutting me completely out of her life. I was young and foolish, and I had a hard time negotiating those barriers between the public and private, and it cost me a friendship. Now that I am older and supposedly wiser, I try to deal with my problems in person rather than delving into the passive aggression that the internet fosters so easily. It doesn't always work, but at least it doesn't create any more problems.

I also don't write about the bad because committing it to words makes it real. I've owned a house for two and a half years now, and it is easily the most stressful thing that has ever happened to me: we've had carpenter ants, mice, sewage backups, a basement flood, plumbing problems, a roof leak, and lots of much more minor things. Writing about these events and the pure, unadulterated panic they entailed would actually have made things worse for me. (In fact, I can feel my blood pressure rising even now when I'm mentioning them in passing.)

So things have been quiet here lately, as I'm sure you've noticed. I had such a good posting record over the summer, and I completely blew it when I went back to work. I love my job, but it is both intense and stressful, and this year I am involved in a fair amount of extra-curricular stuff that is also intense and stressful: I've been negotiating a new collective agreement as part of my union. It has been practically a part-time job in and of itself since August (consuming 10-15 hours a week of my time). Things have taken a turn for the worse this; the administration has decided to cancel all future meetings, effectively ending negotiations for the time being. We get to file for conciliation soon, which means that my bargaining preparations will now be preparations for other things.

I've also been knitting my mom's sweater. I've promised her it will be finished for Christmas, and I intend to keep that promise. I think I hate the yarn, though.

A Conversation With My Father

Blech. My beloved has gone deer hunting for the week, and I am ill and behind on my work. In absence of a real entry, I'd like to share with you a conversation that my dad and I had over Thanksgiving weekend:

Dad: I really like the kilt hose that you made for Mat.
Me: Thank you. I really like them too.
Dad: I like them so much that I want a pair for Christmas. I'm putting in my order now.
Me: As long as you have no illusions about there being a pair of kilt hose under the tree on Christmas Day, I would be happy to make you a pair.
Dad: That's fine.
Me: I'll find some patterns this weekend to show you and you can pick one.
Dad: No, that's okay. You can just make me the same ones in the same colour.
Me: If that's what you want. [silently dies a bit inside]
Dad: Do you know how much kilt hose cost?
Me: Not really...as much as you want to pay for them, I guess.
Dad: The ones your mother bought me cost $40.
Me: That's nice. I like the colour of those ones. [They are a nice forest green.]
Dad: I like the ones you made more. I bet you could easily sell those for $40.
Me: Dad, they have handmade kilthose at Burnetts and Struth. They're made by little old ladies in Scotland.¹ Do you know how much those cost?
Dad: Not $40?
Me: No. More like $100. And the yarn that they're made from is not as nice as the yarn that I used.²
Dad: So I shouldn't tell other people you'll make kilt hose for them?
Me: Probably not.

=====
¹ The name of the person who knit them is on the tag. It's kinda neat.
² If you know anything about yarn, I used Knit Picks Bare in the sportweight. The B&S kilt hose are knit in a worsted weight heritage yarn like Briggs and Little--very heavy and very itchy, I should imagine. There's nothing wrong with this--it's just not as fine as what I used, and results in a very different looking sock.

Sharing Birthdays

The day before I turned 3, my mother went into labour, and produced Middle Sister. I was sorely disappointed: my mother was in the hospital for my birthday, and Middle was not what I had believed her to be. She was not the fully formed playmate I had wanted, and she had failed to materialize in time for Hallowe'en, so we didn't get to go trick-or-treating together. Such is life when you are 3.

We went out last night to celebrate our co-birthdays, and we had a really lovely evening with our friends. I had to give Caitlin an IOU instead of her actual gift--I'm buying us tickets to see Hawksley Workman when he comes to town next April, but the tickets haven't gone on sale yet.

Today has actually been pretty quiet. A few of my students made me a birthday card (on lined paper with highlighters) and Mat made me a cake. The most exciting (questionably so) thing that has happened today is that the computer in my office stopped working halfway through the day. My office computer is an IBM NetVista Pentium 4, complete with original floppy drive, and it has been getting increasingly cantankerous these last few months. It currently takes over half an hour to complete its turning on cycle. I am hoping that I will be able to have it replaced fairly shortly, as it makes it very difficult for me to get anything done at work.

C'est l'Hallowe'en, hey!

(A wee trip down memory lane for those of us educated in Ontario's public school system- Matt Maxwell was a mainstay of our French program.)

We will be attending the annual Hallowe'en party that friends of ours throw tonight. Mat works today, so we are getting off to a late start and jetting down. He is excited to be going to a place where people will recognize his costume. I am excited because I am part of a group costume.

The roommates and I used to do group costumes when we were in school--we did both Star Wars and X-Men themes--but after I moved out, that just sort of...stopped. Last year, I had the best idea for a group theme: we could dress as the characters from Clue. Unfortunately, the H1N1 hit and I had to bail on the party, leaving my poor Miss Scarlet costume to go unworn.

This year, my friend Jessica and I decided to dress as the White and Red Queens from Through the Looking Glass. She had the further idea to make our costumes burlesque themed, and once that happened, the whole thing snowballed: we're being joined by a burlesque Cheshire Cat, as well as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and a straight-thugging White Rabbit. The only thing we lack, funnily enough, is an Alice.

For my costume, I purchased a red and black corset on eBay. I then bought a sewing pattern for a saloon girl costume, and madea bustled skirt in red satin with black lace trimming. (Jess found an online free pattern here but I was unable to wrap my head around how it got put together, so I went with a commercial pattern.) I have stockings, garters, shoes with a t-strap, a lace fan, gloves, and jewelry, as well as a bobbed black wig. It's going to be awesome.

I'm currently working on designing a cloak to wear, since it is flipping SNOWING outside.