i knew i shouldn't have microwaved him

really?

dear walgreens,

what?!?!

fondly,
hf

driving in your car, i never, never want to go home

the post in which i relate a factoid which is going to be shorter than the title i am currently using.

my favorite clash song is "the guns of brixton".

frog tale

i frogged the honeymoon cami. looking at it and measuring it made me suspect it'd be too big. so i put it on waste yarn, and indeed, i'm going to retry it in 2 sizes smaller.

however in the meantime i started a new project. it's in my new obsession for summer - brown sheep cotton fleece.

it's annie modesitt's ribbed corset top in purple and deeper purple. i've just finished the lace edging and am about to start the edging.

tally ho.

and a brief pause...

smitten kitten is AFK for a while.

to the pain

it's too big, it's unbecoming, and i loathed knitting it. and i am so done with it, i took a picture of it on over my jammies.

off to the frog pond, you!

however, i'm loving the honeymoon cami AND the brown sheep cotton fleece i'm using...

so THAT happened

so, i had a date last week.

i never have dates.

and now it's a regular sort of a thing.

holy crap, i think i got a boyfriend.

hi, i'm alive

graduation and subsequent parties were good!

there's other good stuff, too.

and then there's the moving stuff - as in back in with mom. i moved out 11 years ago. and i'm moving back in. which is awesome because of the $$ it will save me. but will be different. not bad, but different.

who wants an ernie to take home?

if the devil don't dance, heaven won't shine

yesterday, i wore a funny hat, polyester dress, and a white hood (really? i had to wear a white hood?) and wandered around the floor of the hockey arena

see me?

i wore shoes that were hurty, i shook hands with a chancellor and some deans, my face was on a jumbotron. i met the family of my friends who have saved my sanity over the past 2 years, i introduced my family to them. i went out to dinner with my mom, my sister and aunt.

i am truly blessed by wonderful friends, by amazing family. and my mom remembers everything. for instance, she remembers that when i was little i said i wanted musical instruments for major life occasions - specifically that i wanted a piano for a wedding gift. i am not engaged.

but i finished grad school yesterday. so my mom stepped absolutely outside of her comfort zone, and had been working with some people at the denver folklore center to give me the instrument i'd been quietly wanting for 6-7 years.

highlights for children

i actually cried when i opened it. not a lot, just a little. and played it in the fancy pants restaurant where we were dining. which seemed fitting - it has strings, we were at strings. it's so instinctive for me to play it. it sounds frighteningly like bagpipes when you play "amazing grace" with the slide.

i came home and fidgeted with it for a long time... i love it. it's exactly the one i wanted - cherry back and top, linked a few months ago with little fanfare. my momma rocks...

today i wish i lived in north carolina.

edit: it's a mountain dulcimer. :)

so, that happened.

about 21 months ago, i fell down the stairs at school.

today, i hope not to fall on my face in front of friends, families and strangers.

either on the stairs or on the stage at magness arena.

my mom and sister flew in on wednesday night. last night was the first time i had slept in 3 nights. i am a much happier monkey with sleep. i am a happy monkey in general.

we went to bodyworlds 2 last night, which i could have LOVED, but it was so hot and i was so tired that i barely noticed i was there. except the exploded man was pretty darn awesome. we were looking at the articulation of the joints and contractures of the muscles of man mid-kick of a soccer ball when my mom noticed his, er, anatomical structures and immediately started singing "do your ears hang low?" i ran into my friend becca there. she's smart and funny.

last night i slept, this morning i'm going to yoga.

my update is boring but there will be pictures soon!

we're gonna need a larger trophy

my lifetime record as undefeated at trivial pursuit remains intact. to be fair, i thought my opponent would win, but as when he had all 6 of his pieces and was trying to get to the middle of the board, i staged an amazing comeback, and got my last 4 pieces, made it to the center, and answered the game winning question in a single turn.

[bows]

who's next?

Hey! I'm a finger puppet!

Hey! I'm a finger puppet!

i don't care if it only has 25 cents on it.

it's a monkey finger puppet.

the war of the garbage cans

i am axl rose. my unknown nemesis is tommy hilfiger. my backyard is rosario dawson's birthday party.

when i moved in 2 years ago, i bought an outdoor garbage can to put in the alley on trash day.

my first trash day with my garbage can, i put it out, full of moving in trash. i came home, and my garbage, as well as my garbage can, was gone. but my next door neighbor has about 15 garbage cans resembling the one that i had (seriously, they throw away like a couch a week and a boatload of garbage. there are 4 people - 2 of whom are children - living there. what do they do!?).

no biggie, i usually don't take my trash out more than once a week - i don't make that much on an average week. my upstairs neighbors (who were later evicted) bought like 4 trash cans, and they said i could use them. when they were evicted, they took the trash cans with them (but left the free-standing porch swing in the backyard. of the two, i'm glad they took the trash cans).

a new family moved in and bought 3 trash cans like the one i had lost, and offered to share them with me since i don't make much garbage. within 3 weeks, they were all gone. no one knew for sure where they went.

when they moved out, they had a lot of garbage. one day, about a week after they moved out, my backyard had 5 (FIVE) empty garbage cans tossed in it from the alley. one was broken, so i carted it to the dumpster behind the mexican restaurant, and have used one or more for weeds and garbage. this morning, i came out with my garbage, prepared to weed, and only one of my 4 garbage cans were left.

this is annoying. stop trying to start a garbage can feud. i ain't even hitting back.

step away from the goats, people

i'm not getting married. although i'm working on the honeymoon cami in cotton fleece, it's not for my honeymoon.

it's also in sedona red which i'm either going to love because i have nothing else like it or never wear because i have nothing else like it.

random aside 1: i was looking for addresses to send grad announcements to a few weeks ago and emailed a bunch of my aunts and uncles. one of my uncles on my dad's side, sent me his address and said:

A month ago a friend asked for my mailing address too, a couple of days later I received an invitation, she is getting married in a couple of months.

yeah, no. that's not why i was looking for it.

random aside 2: i need to start sleeping at night. this week my sleep schedule got all wonked out and last night i was wide awake until 4. it wasn't for lack of trying to sleep.

it's also hot in my apartment which may have something to do with it. it's not riduculously how (but hot enough at 81 deg)

lions of injustice

i've been meaning to post this link for a while, but for whatever reason have not gotten around to it.

this story is about a woman named patsy with whom i had a class last fall. several years ago, she and her husband were teaching in indonesia. on the way back from a picnic, their three cars were ambushed by gunmen who killed 3 of the 13 people in her group - including patsy's husband rick. patsy herself was severely injured.

patsy's an amazing woman with a story that would make most of us shrivel up and blow away, but it has made her stronger.

more information available
here
here
and here

the miracles of blocking

i had some serious tension issues with my t twist tee (designed by jenifer!)

see my issues?

then i washed and blocked and was very loving to it when drying (i.e. tugging the stitches into a somewhat more even fashion). and it got much better!

here's the whole thing, complete with sunglasses because i'm just cool like that.

there's a shot of me wearing it preblocking here.

calla is also done, finished, washed, and blocked. and it's too big. and i didn't think about how the back, sans cables would be several inches bigger than the front. so i'm going to reknit it in a smaller size and fix the back so it's not saggy. someday.

unrelated, i love target and isaac mizrahi! look at my fun shirt!

oh that silly blogger...

blogger sorta freaked out that i was adding a WWKIP button to my sidebar and ate my template.

i've copied the whole thing in code numerous times but it's only saving some of it.

so i've pasted it in a Word.doc and will try again tomorrow when i'm less hating it and thinking of creative ways to kill it. blogger, that is.

holy crow!

i didn't know finishing grad school and having a birthday within a week would make everyone i know want to pour alcohol down my throat.

take it easy people, i almost never drink!

i'll go sip my gatorade now, thank you very much.

wake up with the king

not THAT king (he's scary)

but breakfast king. the waitresses wear orange versions of the waitresses in alice minus the hats, there are kids there at 2 am (which reminds me of a funny story in georgia involving a bunch of kids at waffle house in the middle of the night mixed amongst the truckers and the whole joint breaking into song when "she thinks my tractor's sexy" came on the jukebox).

they have homemade hash browns, which aren't home fries and are quite yummers. it's cheap, the pancakes are as big as your head.

be forewarned, the menu fits easily 14 pages of information in a denny's menu into 2, so it's a little overwhelming.

but oh boy is it good.

and jenny is funny.

so..... now what?

i finished my last class in grad school about 3.5 hours ago. then i went to the stadium with some friends, followed by midnight dinner at village inn.

when i was in undergrad, i thought, i'll work for a little and then go to grad school.

when i was working after college, i thought, i'll go to grad school next.

then i went to grad school.

now it's done. and i don't have a job lined up.

what's next?