It's a girl!

Of course it is. Last time, I really wanted a girl, and so I had a boy. Which turned out to be exactly what I didn't know I really wanted, because he is great and sweet and adorable and perfect in every way. This time, I thought that the only thing better than a boy would be TWO of them... but I had a feeling that the same rule of opposites would be in effect, and sure enough, as we found out yesterday, I am at least right about the existence of said rule. Girl. I know I won't be sorry for a second. I have no idea where I read it, but somewhere, someone said that we get what we need, not what we want. Oprah, maybe? I don't know, but it's looking pretty true to me.

So, now, of course, the name already settled... the question is: what color Blue Sky Cotton do I want to use to make this Argosy blanket for the new one? I am so torn. Anyone, feel free to step in anytime and make the decision for me. I am pretty sure I want to do the optional-but-cute embroidered flowers in a contrasting color. Tulip with shrimp flowers, or the other way around? Honeydew with shrimp flowers? Shell with shrimp flowers? Noticing a trend in medium pink flowers, but I am otherwise indecisive.

Though, I am, as always, jumping the gun, because I did settle on something new to make my little boy first: the Mitered Square Blanket in Mason-Dixon Knitting. I ignored this pattern until now, thinking that it was way too many colors (which meant way too much $$) and way too much work... and then I saw all the fun Cara is having, and resistance became futile. I just happened to have two skeins of Tahki Cotton Classic that I had bought for an iPod cozy and then later decided I didn't need... and so I tried out a square to see if I could handle making EIGHTY of them (or maybe only forty; I might just make it half the size since my little one is, well, half the size):
The colors in this picture aren't exactly right; it's navy blue and light blue, not black and slightly green as it looks here. I love it. Now I'm just waiting for more yarn in the mail so that I can make more. I was originally planning on flying by the seat of my pants in terms of colors, and just putting together fun combinations that I thought my son would like. I thought that maybe I would never repeat the same colors twice, no logic involved... easy (my mother doesn't like this idea and thinks that I should make the whole thing in shades of blue so that my son will not later want to hide it in a closet and think it too embarrassing to put on his bed when he goes to college. My argument is that it's a BABY blanket - well, toddler blanket - and it should be fun and colorful. I won't mind if he doesn't want it on display when he's eighteen; it will probably be pretty shabby by then, and ... did I mention, it's a BABY blanket? Not a college blanket. That one will be in every hideous shade of puce I can find, to chase girls away. ha).

Now, however, I think I might have a PLAN. A plan stolen adapted from Cara's work. Each block of four miters should have a dominant color, and four different background colors. Half of the blocks should have a bright / dark / bold dominant color (A) with a soft / light contrasting color (B), and the other half of the blocks should be the reverse of this scheme. If this doesn't work out, I will go back to racking up the frequent flyer miles on my pants.

If you're happy and you know it, Clap...

Far be it from me to make a post without a silly title.

Quick close up of the start of Clapotis (Lorna's Laces Lion and Lamb, Bittersweet colorway) with the beauteous Entrelac markers. Sorry if the photo is a bit fuzzy.

Leprechaun earrings?

Nope, but Happy Green Day to you. :) These are danglefree stitch markers from Entrelac Stitch Markers & Yarn on Etsy. Aren't they purty? I caught a thread on knittyboard about these just as I was starting my Clapotis and feeling very disgruntled about the crappy plastic rings with points I was using, and which somehow caused me to have to start over 3 or 4 times (lost count). These came in the mail lickety split, and Ms. Entrelac is a very pleasant seller. She has many, many color choices, and the markers work so nicely - no snags, no issues with sliding beads since they are glued in place... go buy some!

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FO: Wino Scarf

(Otherwise known as sheep in the city's My So Called Scarf)

I finished this sometime in January. Thereabouts. Maybe December? Well, fairly recently, at any rate.

Yarn: 2 skeins Manos Del Uruguay in Colorway #118, or Mulled Wine

Needles: Lantern Moon, size 11

Finished Dimensions: 77" long, 4-5" wide (the ends are wider - seems to be a common occurrence with this pattern)

My one modification came from the suggestion here at knit one chic too, which gives a tip for cleaner edges.

Need help with the pattern stitch? Great tutorial here at Serenity Garden.

I would definitely make this one again. It's a fun pattern, and it's not endless rows of knit stitch in a circle - and, it's not burgundy and gold (yes, I am going to bitch about that damn scarf forever. *&$%&!! My blog, cry if I want to and all that.). I love the look of the herringbone stitch (close-up photo in this post), and the yarn is warm and soft. And wino colors - my favorite! Which explains my prosaic choice of wine bottles as props in the pictures. The cat butt - not my choice; apparently, he thinks he's one hot piece of tail and deserving of a photo shoot. Whatever.

Tangents Riding in on Parenthetical Horses

Is that not the most horrible title ever? It's so bad it makes me cringe, and I don't know how I managed to think of anything so ridiculous without also being able to say "I couldn't help it, I was drunk"... which is why I'm leaving it. It amuses me. I read the most horrible query letter on Miss Snark, the literary agent's blog (discovered by way of a link on Chappysmom's blog - not that you needed to know that, but the teacher in me feels the need to cite my sources. ha), and it seems to have given me super ultra bad writing powers. Pray that it only lasts me this night.

Anyhoo, I was cruising around in my list of 1,482,697 bookmarked blogs, weeding some out that update even less than I do (which is saying a whole lot), perusing old favorites (well, yeah, it's spring break! the house will still be dirty when the week is over, who cares, but the internet might suddenly disappear tomorrow so I'd better get to surfing and blog-reading NOWWWWW. In other words, I'm procrastinating.)... and underneath some pictures of a very pretty, completed Swallowtail Shawl with probably a very scary number of stitches in laceweight yarn, I found this meme on Chewy Spaghetti's blog (there's nothing short about my wind tonight. And I dare anyone to use more parentheses than I.). It basically says "use at will," and since I've never done a meme, and I do like to read, and I have nothing else to say - well, I DO, but I need to take pictures first - I figured, WTH.

Look at the list of books below:
* Bold the ones you’ve read,*
Italicize the ones you want to read*
Leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.

1. The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien) (this one's half bold because I read 1/2!)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) (yup, 1/2 again.)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. The Bible (entirely? nope)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According to Garp (John Irving) (well, in process anyway, but I intend to finish this one!)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Apologies, or How Many Times Can One Fall Off the Planet Before She Is Permanently Exiled?

(But FIRST - Heeyyyyyy, Cheryl!!!! *muah* miss you!)

To all those who have left comments on my blog since, I don't know... November?... thank you, and I am so sorry that they all went unacknowledged. They went unacknowledged because they went unseen. I just switched to the new Blogger today, whereupon I discovered that I had some comments! Somebody is reading this! A few somebodies, in fact. I don't know why they wouldn't show up on the old Blogger, but it brightened my day to read the happy notes and weed them out from the other fifty comments, which were ads for car insurance, home foreclosures, secret shopping (which, I think, should remain a secret, whatever it is), the ubiquitous Viagra, and, my personal favorite, a 4-page long spam that began thusly: "You have a riveting web log and undoubtedly must have atypical & quiescent potential for your intended readership. May I suggest that you do everything in your power to honor your encyclopedic/omniscient/Designer/Architect as well as your revering audience." From Professor someone or other. I would like to publicly implore this person to 1. get a dictionary and 2. lay off the thesaurus and the crack rocks. I would also like to publicly thank you, Dear Audience, for revering me. *snort*

Thankfully, I can at least say that there is rhyme and reason to my long absences / flakiness, and that I am not just an overbaked (half baked?) pot pie. Also, I have come to believe that high school drama is contagious; as a high school teacher, I have caught a healthy helping of the (non-work related) drama virus. Oh, how I wish I could get rid of it. I will spare everyone the details - and spare myself the embarrassment of divulging those aspects of my personal life - and simply say that my life is looking like a very shuffled domino boneyard just now. Who knows what f*cking numbers will come up next. And, in the midst of all this madness, I find myself 15 weeks pregnant. Yeah, baby. Literally.


So, knitting. What knitting? I still need to post pictures of the Wino Scarf, so here is a moderately crappy close-up of the stitches to keep this from being an entirely pictureless post in the meantime. At least you can see the colors, if nothing else worth looking at (God, why do I sound like Eeyore?! I'm even annoying myself today.). I also haven't been reading, fountain pen ogling, or shopping (much) lately, but I am slowly trying to morph back into myself. I finally managed to get to the 100-page mark in a book - the first time I've managed to get that far in any book in months, which is saying a whole lot about my recent state of mind. A few days ago, it occurred to me that if John Irving couldn't cure me of my reading anorexia, nobody could, so I picked up a copy of The World According to Garp. Why, WHY didn't I think of him sooner? BIG duh. Irving is like chicken soup to me, and just what I needed. If you've never read him, may I suggest Cider House Rules or - my favorite! - A Prayer for Owen Meany.

As for shopping, knitting related anyway, I am waiting for the Sushi Wallet kit from Pick Up Sticks, along with a couple of hat patterns for bambino-on-the-way. Non-knitting related, a T-shirt I have wanted for MONTHS: wasabi, anyone? Hee hee. I will still be able to fit into it for at least another month. Also, more books to fill my already glutted shelves: Bitter is the New Black, The Book of Answers (because I need some and this looks more elegant than a Magic 8 Ball), and Guards! Guards!.

Have barely touched the ill-fated Jaywalker with the ominous hole that I need to SEW UP ALREADY. Today, the plan is to start a Clapotis, finally! I'm on spring break, so the most logical thing to do is to start more projects rather than finish the old ones... also, I think I might start a toy from Jess Hutch's (discontinued) book for my son (speaking of that book, I read on the knittyboard last night that it sold on ebay for $122.50! D@mn. And it's never leaving my greedy, hot little hands.). All this, of course, is if I can put down both Garp and the Sudoku game that I have been addicted to for the last four days. It was a Christmas present. Thank God I left it in a dark corner of the office, unopened, until now, because it effortlessly sucks up time in its not-getting-anything-worthwhile-accomplished black hole universe. Had I opened it in December, who knows how many hours (days!) I would have lost by now! But I. Can't. Stop. My best time so far for finishing a puzzle (Advanced, Level 1) has been 4 minutes, 51 seconds, which, so far, has secured my spot as the undefeated Sudoku champion in my house. Yessssss.