the wind is ruthless, the trees shake angry fingers at the sky

how i've missed these giant winds. the kind that makes relatively young palm trees uproot themselves and commit hara kiri in front of your car, the kind that finds the tumbleweeds that were exiled from the western sets at paramount studios (the ones big enough to completely engulf a european car if so inclined). the kind that makes you lean forward with all of your strength to walk into them.

however, pants is driving up here in his fairly lightweight car through canyons and at the base of the mountain passes. where the 65 mph gusts are channelled as high as 100+. the kind to tear up your fence and whisk away your little dog too.

i'm checking the CHP logs and i haven't seen any accidents, but i'm still a teensy bit worried. i'll be glad when he gets here, and loathe to let him leave. but that's also 'cause i dig him.

it's only like work because you work at it

there are so many times when it's easier to fall asleep. to fall into that deep, velvety pit that opens a gateway to the world of surreality, comedy, tragedy, terror and tears that are covered in a faint haze of memory the next day. it's escape. it's living who you aren't quite. it's like living in a movie.

i don't want to fall asleep for this. it's been scary, it's been sad, it's been harder than almost anything i've ever done. but i wouldn't trade it for sleep. i think and think and think and think; sometimes my brain hurts, often the hurt is lower down. somewhere closer to my thoracic-abdominal line. a little line i like to call my diaphragm. sometimes it aches with the memory of the pain. sometimes it doesn't hurt even a little bit and it's like a scientist examining a foreign object, holding it with forceps and squinting a little at the unusualness of it all.

it's also been better than anything i had imagined. it's been fun, it's been exciting, it's been steeped in that quiet sort of peace that i call joy and that everyone else calls contentment. joy is a quiet, delicate little creature that will scatter at the smallest flutter of sheaves of paper. i go through periods where i tingle from top to toe for just long enough that i almost forget that i'm tingling. then i stop just long enough to remind me again.

when i was ten i hurt all the time. my legs made me cry at night because they hurt. we shout "grow up!" to childrenpeople like it's an easy thing to do, but time made us forget that it aches and pulls and makes you long for advil and heating pads, and especially for your dad's spaghetti. when i was ten and a half i decided that i liked the pain. not in a sick and twisty way, but because it was actual proof that i was growing. pencil lines on the wall don't change day-to-day, hour-to-hour. i liked it in the way that it sort of feels good when a molar is growing in and you prod it with your tongue and your fingertips and you bite on the end of your pen to feel it more. because when you feel it, you're know you're growing. and if you're growing you've got to be alive.

that's the same reason i like the hurt now. it's not constant, and the source of it changes from day-to-day, hour-to-hour. usually it's from the same vicinity. but you sit down at the end of the day, take account of your aches and pains, and think of all that you've fought for and lost, all that you've fought for and won.

at the end of the day, i can't help but notice that everything i've lost makes everything i've won that much more precious. in fact, i realize that i've had to lose it in order to win. some might call it collateral damage. but i really know it's part of the balance. and it's all about balance. it's not music without the silence between the notes.

so i'll wrap it in yellow silk, drop it in my pocket, and fight to the death for it again tomorrow.

there's nothing wrong with working a long day, every day, for what you know is important.

and this is important.

stupid syndication...

so, sometimes my rss feed isn't updating. and i've seen a lot of people on blogger having that problem.

(like how i attribute the lack of posting to the rss feed instead of me not posting?)

and i'm also seeing people say that changing the feed url to one ending in rss.xml instead of atom.xml takes care of that.

but if you do that for my blog, the most recent post is from august 25. so i don't know what to say other than what i always say:

stupid blogger.

i must be doing something wrong

at the end of yoga today, there was blood on my mat. a lot of blood. not like i severed an artery, but more than a speck.

that must be a new asana with which i am unfamiliar.

in good news though, i almost fell asleep in savasana - it's rare i actually take that time to really relax.

so much gratitude

yesterday was a good day. there was so much to be thankful for, and in so many ways i never saw coming. we were even able to discuss religion and politics without anyone being offended! i made the pants a pumpkin pie, he made us mashed potatoes - the food economy of family.

also, my sister googled pretty ways to fold napkins for our thanksgiving china. she did this cool thing:

if you'd like to see the jacquard pattern on the napkin and tablecloth, here's a shot with a blinding amount of flash:

i hope your thanksgivings were as lovely as mine. may you remember to be thankful every day.

internets, i know you can do it!

it's time to send your collective good thoughts and healing vibes to my college roommate, callous lily.

you see, she kicks major booty. she's a roller derby girl. she is one tough mama. and last week, she took a clean hit that sent her ass-over-teakettle, with her landing on her shoulder then her face.

and broke her shoulder. but not her face.

so she's in a hurty and immobilized way.

but what a freakin' awesome reason to have a broken shoulder.

in which i try to do a blog post, but wherein i'm simply posting to give the pants' best friend the opportunity to mock him because i call him pants

pants and i went on a date on friday night. it was clearly time, since we hadn't had one in quite a while and we were respectively planning our own dates with one another.

but we settled on pants' date: indian food and the new james bond flick. is it just me? i find daniel craig to be ridiculously unattractive. he looks like a monkey to me. but that's neither here nor there - it was a decent flick. i liked that it wasn't so much about the gadgetry as about the development of bond into bond... seeing the development of the gadgetry, the callous philandering, the ability to be beguiling and scheming (although that may be innate in some anyway) at the same time.

i also realized that somewhere along the line, i developed a fear of heights. i was having major issues with the first fight scene where they're fighting on construction cranes hundreds of feet over the ocean.

the indian food was good too - we went to haandi. now, it's no maharaja's ravi's in colton but it was pretty freakin' good. and we split an india special reserve beer which was quite tasty. the hoppiness of beers is growing on me... i'm no longer all about the malt, baby.

i have officially become a blogger who sucks.

and hi pants' best friend! mock him all you like - this post was for you.

call for geekdom

if anyone has a good hex color code for my tagline and my postings (because i'm just not geeky enough to figure out how to change one without the other), leave it in the comments and i'll give it a shot.

please?

i'll even apologize for using the term geeky instead of savvy the first time.

tidying up the place

i went chicklike with the design. i spent 2 hours fidgeting with the template (if you see any major bugs lemme know - other than the permalinks having the old templates... i just like keeping my taglines throughout the ages, so i just republished the index). i made the posts wider so that i could post images up to 500 pixels wide without wonkying up the sidebar situation.

there's pink incorporated into the design. clearly, i'm losing my mind.

or i just need a job.

it's softer than the belly of a puppy

good heavens, i have felt the softness and will never be able to rid the memory from my mind.

i've heard about it in legend, but it's softer than i ever thought possible for a merino.

i'm talking about malabrigo merino. i was at the yarn deli in redlands looking for sweater yarn for my momma, and they had a wall of it.

a wall of silky squashy softness that was kettle-dyed by uruguayans.

it makes me think that i'd like to buy enough to make a new and totally different hot lava cardigan since i don't really like the one i made in new york last summer (it's got crazy row gauge, making it baggy across the back, and i got bored of knitting the bolero and made it too small. so it's both too big and too small all in one fell swoop).

either that, or roll around naked in a huge mountain of it.

stuff i stole from steve

thanks steve!

Your Vocabulary Score: A+

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

Your Inner European is Russian!

Mysterious and exotic. You've got a great balance of danger and allure.

Who's Your Inner European?

2 unrelated thingies (or, i am unmotivated to make a proper post)

search terms people have used to join us in this lovely abode:

• "knitting with drumsticks" my advice? don't try it, they have those little bulbs at the tips and it will be tricky to get the stitches off and over them.
  
• "caribou frother" the heck? that gives us interesting and gross visual images.
  
• "unusually placed tattoos" i don't have any, but thanks for checking.
  
• "colored stockings love making" go about your business people - this ain't that sort of site. x-rated knitting pictures indeed...
  
• "schneeglocken" it's a flower and an annoying song i sang in college for my voice juries.
  
• "julynn simmons" don't know her. sorry.
  

and there are a ton of people every day who come here by doing a google image search for "heather" and wind up clicking through on an entirely unflattering picture of me wearing the honeymoon cami which i am frogging someday to either remake or reinvent as another tank.

______________

when i started this post - and titled it - i had 2 things i wanted to post about: incoming search terms and.... i've totally forgotten the second. i'm a dingbat. there ya go.

there is something very wrong with me

how do i know?

i'm getting ready to apply for a job which has the following requirement:

• ability to work under pressure, on occasion in a highly stressful environment (e.g. civil strife, natural disasters and human misery).

and i'm excited about it.*


*not the human misery, but the job.

but you think that's okay while you're sleeping

we gots ants. they're all over a bookcase and my knitting spot.

i have no idea how they're getting in, and that's unnerving. when i was little, we moved into a new house, i got a brand new bed, and one night when i wouldn't sleep and i kept crying, my mom came in and found a colony of ants in our new house had decided to welcome me by crawling all over me in my bed and snacking on my 3 year old self.

ants aren't my favorite.

this sucks.

i use two hands, biznatches

it has begun. we've gotten to the root of my sock love-hate relationship.

you sees, i fell in love with some stockings. norwegian stockings from nancy bush's folk socks. i saw them on jess' blog, i saw them on eunny's blog, i done seen them on flickr. and i was secretly a little mad at jess for making them in the precise color scheme that i would have chosen if i had to pick from scratch. but whatever, i'm over it.

so, to get ready for my first REAL stranded knitting experience (although, i did a one-handed stranded - rhymes! - hat that wound up too small for adult heads) , i've been practicing my english knitting skillz. i can do it backwards, but i even screwed up a cable on the gull-stitch cardie trying to learn english. and i've got knitting down basically with that - it's the purling that's trickier. luckily, english purling doesn't occur much with fair isle.

the thing that will be tricky with these socks is tension, and winding up with floats that are of a good tension but that are loose enough to fit over my giant calves.

so yesterday, in a fit of frustration with the gull stitch cardie (with a sleeve and the tiny right front to go!), i set it aside, and started the norwegian stockings.

hey! accurate color?! what's up with that?

the tension's a little wonky, it doesn't fit over my calves. well, it does, but the first motif gets eaten by the grey yarn because of the undue tension on the floats. here's a closer shot of the first motif:

this is what i think - i need to loosen my floats more. i need to get rid of the purple, and sub white or pale, pale baby blue. either that, or change the background color from dark grey to white, keep the purple snowflake motif, and keep the green for the primary leg motif color.

thoughts?

on taking wool for granted

i've finished the back, left front, and one sleeve of the gull stitch cardigan from winter 2005 IK. and i decided to go ahead and block the back and the left front.

however, i set the washer (gentle cycle, in a lingerie bag) for a little too long. and it felted. not a ton, not disastrously, but it did felt. i've not lost too much - luckily. the back lost 3/4" width, 2" length, which is okay, because i chose the size with almost 5" of ease, and it would have been 27" from shoulder to bottom hem. but still...

the color isn't great - it's actually a much softer, warmer brown in person

i did, however, lose some of the definition in the cables... here's the gull stitch panel on the semi-felted back:

and the same motif on the unwashed, unblocked sleeve:

so now, the trick will be getting the right front and the sleeves to semi-felt the exact same amount.

i hate that i did this to my own knitting, because i feel like a giant dolt.

i knew i didn't have one

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Midland

"You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.

What American accent do you have?
Take More Quizzes

the two ways in which i am screwed

1. they're opening an anthropologie in victoria gardens.
2. they have thrifty ice cream (um, hello? chocolate malted crunch?) at the rite aid that's 2 blocks from here.

luckily the two negate each other - if i eat the ice cream, i won't be able to wear clothes from anthropologie. if i spend all my money at anthropologie, i won't be able to afford (ridiculously cheap) ice cream.

if you give a mouse a cookie...

my mom's car has been in and out of the shop for the past few months. it's gotten older, it's got a fair share of miles on it. but it shouldn't have been in as bad shape as it has been. so finally, we got a call that it'd need several hundred dollars of repair work.

because a mouse had been eating it.

before, a mouse had eaten the wiring to the left front turn signal lamp. now it at the heater hose, ignition wires, and something else that i can't think of anymore.

think about that for a second. a mouse. eating a car.

my mom came home from a trip to hawaii at 7 am a few weeks ago, and i was up. she was bleary-eyed and tired from a red-eye flight, but had heard the diagnosis on her car. half asleep, she wondered aloud, "why would a mouse want to eat a car? it seems like a daunting task for a mouse."

anyhow, that doesn't have anything really to do with the point of this post. the point of this post is for me to say, happy birthday mom!

this neither bothers nor excites me

thanks p-man. (i'm not nerdy, but definitely not hip. however i'm hipper than you.)

i had a sticker that said "i voted electronically"!

there was a picture to prove it, and it was posted here to inspire you to vote, but election day is over, so it's gone now.

they didn't give me a choice if i wanted hi-tech or lo-tech. but they sure wanted you to know i voted electronically.

the best part is, the massive onslaught of local political commercials and unsolicited phone calls will stop. oh yeah, and the continued success of our political system, blah blah blah.

makes me slippery like a fish*

i've decided to go back to the gym on a regular basis again. i'd like it to stick this time. i tried running outdoors, and honestly, that was not so much working for me.

however, on a treadmill, i can set a more realistic pace and stick to it. even better, on an elliptical trainer, my feet muscles don't cramp up. anyhow, i've also been arsed to get out of bed and go to 5:45 am yoga twice a week.

the nice thing about the 24 hour fitness in my town, is that it has the best yoga instructor i've ever had. she's a yoga teacher full time - she's who i first started studying under 5 years ago. she teaches there, she teaches at fancy yoga studios. she's willing to stand on me to help me push my poses farther. in fact, i was able to do scissors again for the first time in, oh, 3 years?

i love her early morning classes because of their pace, and how it makes me feel during and afterward. she's been known to play cat stevens for the whole hour.

however.

and you knew there'd be one.

today's class blew. why? i mean, i worked hard. i opened my hips. i never fell to my knees during crocodile. i held standing T for longer than i usually do.

but she played Easy Listening Jazz for the whole. hour.


*okay, sickos. that's a line from oingo boingo's "sweat." and it's the concept of sweat that makes you slippery, like a fish.

homefires

today was an enormously lovely day... i knitted some - finished a sleeve on the gull-stitch cardigan in cascade ecological wool in 8087 (yes, i'm picking her up again) and started, frogged, and restarted a jaywalker in jawoll that i got on sale ($3.40!) at closeknit. i also bought yarn for a foolish, pricey project, that i will maybe discuss later.

you know, after i finish the pants' scarf, and all.

then, the pants came over. we talked and dreamed about futures, ate indian food, watched football and the amazing race with my mom and sister. we also watched and talked about bridezillas (the show and the phenomenon).

and then.

then came the homespun. (GAK!)

see, my mom is organizing a trip in december. there will be 30 people there. and the co-leader thought that everyone on the trip should have matching identifiers to put on their luggage. my sister thought maybe homemade pom-poms. and somehow i volunteered to help.

and now we need to make 90 pom-poms by thursday to take to their first organization meeting.

out of homespun in red, white, and blue. (not my choosing, i'd like to note)

that's just a horribly evil yarn. it makes me want to set it in a basket, send it downriver, and shoot flaming arrows at it.

then, i realize it's just cheap yarn, and that'd be a lot of pomp and circumstance and cost for cheap, ugly yarn.

welcome back!

i just had my first earthquake in california in several years.

some things never change.

update at 11:51 am: i may very well have been sitting on the epicenter.

dear great steak and potato co.,

next time, please try to not name sandwiches things like "ham explosion".

thank you.

regards,
heather

what i can't stop listening to

tonight it's kristen hersh's cover of cat stevens' "trouble" and jump little children's "cathedrals".

both of which, i'm embarassed to admit, are on my copy of the everwood soundtrack.

liar, liar, socks on fire

i believe not that long ago, i publicly avowed to not be a sock knitter. i am full of lying, evidently. because i want to love the process. i love the yarn. and i kinda liked making these socks. i would have made them kneesocks if i had enough yarn (most pattern recommendations call for about 500 yards of sock yarn, i had 420ish, and i have calves the size of manhattan, clearly indicating that i did not have enough.)*

i finished my first actual pair of socks. i knit them at the same time, magic loooooooooooop style, in a toe-up (figure-8 cast-on) style, with a reverse dutch heel. (this is the point where chris' head implodes).

i took these pictures in a skirt, wearing maryjanes because this is how i see handknit socks proudly displayed on the internet. being new to the sock phenomenon, i'm doing my best to fit in. i even shaved my legs for you, people.

FO report
pattern: none - toe-up stockinette socks, with a reverse dutch heel.
yarn: cherry tree hill supersock in peacock colorway
needles: US2 addi turbos, 40" circs
started: 10.24.06
finished: 10.31.06

so, the final consensus is that i didn't hate this. i do like tiny needles and tiny yarn, and even the process. part of my strong dislike is that i've had that knitpicks essentials for well over a year and have knit it 4-5 times and always frogged it. so maybe i need new yarn. darn... i have to buy new yarn?

bummer.

*seriously. they're huge. i have 9" ankles. i have 18" calves.

my calves are twice the size of my ankles. TWICE. THE. SIZE. while i like that i have shapely legs (woot!) i need some moderation with my overall dimensions.

i'm also knock-kneed, but that's neither here nor there.

quiet night

it was pretty quiet - not many kiddos came to our door begging for candy.

the worst part about this is the sheer volume of kit kats we have left in the house.

although it may be slightly less worse than the number of reese's peanut butter cups we have, once you compound the fact that my body rebels at the smell of peanut butter, but my brain still loves the memory of them...