keyhole scarf

Okay, so I like to share my knitting accomplishments - I made this scarf (here's the free pattern from ChicKnits) on Saturday while I was watching a stupid movie on StarzTicket:

It's got a hole so that one end of the scarf can be stuck through it to create a more secure tie around the neck - here it is, in action:

It's one of the quickest things I've ever knitted, and it's very easy. Plus, it takes only one skein of yarn and looks pretty good. I'll have to see what people think of them...perhaps they will become Christmas presents for some of my friends...! Or at least presents - I like making things for my loved ones. :)

Anyway, I want to go read a bit more, but maybe I'll add more later on today. xoxo

Currently Reading:
	TITLE: Dark Tide AUTHOR: Stephen Puleo

first snowfall!

Just got back from an anti-war rally in the Boston Common...it was freezing, but fun. The CodePinkers I was supposed to meet up with never showed up (or at least I never saw them), but I stuck around for a while, anyway. There was a great atmosphere of gaiety surrounding the whole thing, despite the somber anti-war message - whenever groups of like-minded people gather, I think, there is a special cameraderie that really makes everyone feel good. Like that there are other people out there who share their ideals and want to fight for them.

In any case, there was a pretty good band playing on the gazebo when I arrived, and then there were a few speakers. The first guy who spoke was someone who had been arrested at a college recently (I didn't hear which one, because I was too busy scanning the crowd for CodePink girls), and who turned to the dozen anti-anti-war protestors (hehe I should say the counter-protestors, but I like my term much better) and told them to all go march over to the recruitment center across the street and sign themselves up for the military. Everyone (save for the counter-protestors) cheered, and then the guy went on to talk about his arrest and how he was maced at a peaceful demonstration to protest (I think it was) racist policies at the school. After he spoke, a woman who said she normally spoke for the poor came up and had some good words to say; she mentioned that her mother (age 85) had commented to her recently that she had lived through too many wars in her lifetime. The woman responded to her mother that at least she had missed the Civil & Revolutionary ones, heh.

As another folk singer geared up to play, I turned around to head home, pretty disappointed. I would have stayed longer by myself, but I was *freezing* in only a t-shirt and sweater; had there been other pink women to stand with as there should have been, I would have stuck around despite the cold! But as I was all alone and not making much difference, I figured I should get out of the cold before I lost my feet. On the walk back, the snow that had been lightly drifting down all morning got a little bit heavier, and although it's way too early (!), it was pleasant to walk back in the light swirls. I'll definitely enjoy the first few snowfalls, I always do. It's when there have been 80 and the ground snow is all brown and slushy, when it gets bad. Bleh.

Oh, and I also finally got to try Finagle's pumpkin-raisin bagels. Mmm.

All right, I'm gonna watch a movie & knit some, and then I have some baking to do this afternoon (pumpkin pie, blueberry muffins, and apple cake) before we get all dressed up to go to Mike's party this evening (in Salem! ooo!).

So, for now - ciao! xoxo

Currently Reading:
	TITLE: Dark Tide AUTHOR: Stephen Puleo

stamps

So, I've heard the very earliest stirrings of rumors that USPS stamp prices are going to be going up to 41 cents somewhere in 2006. And that makes me so angry. Not only is it a pain in the ass to have to add all those extra stamps during the rollover, but they have got to stop discouraging people more & more from using snail mail!! It's gotten bad enough already - and I understand that email is probably really bad for business, but those of us who are still diehard letter-writers are really starting to suffer, and it sucks. I'm probably single-handedly supporting at least one postal worker in the US with the amount of mail I post each year, and yet I'm still the one being punished. =\ Don't worry; unless they start charging $8 per stamp or something, I'll stick around. But, definitely under duress. I mean, I've already entirely stopped using paper bills, and pay everything online...dammit, maybe I'm helping cause that raise in prices. Oops, but still. They're just slowly gnawing off the damn hand that feeds them.

Meanwhile, though, on a much better note, the USPS has been coming out with some great new stamps recently! They've had good Disney ones for a while, but have recently added a commemorative Greta Garbo stamp, as well as the truly fantastic Jim Henson collection! Check 'em out.

They also have a holidy cookies collection, too - how very odd. But fun.

Currently Reading:
	TITLE: Dark Tide AUTHOR: Stephen Puleo

Bush is back!

The Gavin Rossdale flavor, not the presidential one(s).

Well, kind of.

I know this is somewhat old news, but Gavin's new band, Institute, released an album in mid-September. I was just picking up some old newspapers to throw them in the recycling bin, and my eye was caught by a picture in the Boston Globe, captioned with the news about Institute (although they mistakenly called the band "Institution" - I wonder if there was a correction made on a later date, although I've no way of finding out).

I've been listening to their album (available for your aural pleasure on their website), and I'm kinda digging it! So far I've heard only one or two songs, but it's not bad. Especially, I'd say, for fans of Bush. I can't say I was a huge one, but I did have a soft spot for Glycerine, I'll admit. :)

More later. xoxo

Currently Reading:
	TITLE: Dark Tide AUTHOR: Stephen Puleo
	TITLE: One Hundred Years of Solitude AUTHOR: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

famous people

This is an interesting website. With photos, like the one below, of many different celebrities. Not quite sure of the purpose, exactly, but it's fun to look through. I think.

(this one's here for Danny)

clips

I really, really want Gmail Clips to happen so I can read RSS feeds. SOON.

Please hurry up, Google!

xoxo

just testing

I'm playing around a bit with my book stuff in hopes of making it take up a little less room with each post. Please ignore this, it's just a test.

Currently Reading:
	TITLE: Dark Tide AUTHOR: Stephen Puleo
	TITLE: One Hundred Years of Solitude AUTHOR: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

slow again

Hi...okay, I know I am gonna be doing a ton of catch-up today, so I might end up writing this in installments. I've got a lot of writing to do about the weekend! But, I'll try to keep it short & sweet. (Or however short is possible, for me.)

Friday night, Dan & I planned to spend a quiet night at home, but as he is wont to do, he got all excited about fixing a laptop of his, so we ended up bundling up and trekking all the way out to Central Square in Cambridge to shop at MicroCenter for a part that he needed. It's a pretty cool place, though, and I had fun there. I ended up finally finding a copy of Game Developer magazine (which was much smaller than I had anticipated), as well as a much-needed CD folder-type-thingy (the majority of my latest CDs have been just hanging out on empty spindles, but I'd much prefer not to have to pull them all off the spindle to find a specific one each time!). We stopped at the Trader Joe's next door to buy a few edibles, and then headed home to continue the (briefly interrupted) quiet night at home. :)

Saturday morning I woke up pretty early to get some chores & reading done, but didn't get through much of that (I'm too easily distracted). Karen called me from the JFK/UMass T stop at around noon, and we met up in a damp & chilly Harvard Square to eat yummy wraps and delicious Jimmy Carter smoothies, mmm! That and Karen's fun company was definitely worth the trek out in the dreary weather. We had some fantastic conversation over lunch, mostly about our new "adult" lives and goals. Karen is awesome - I'm so glad I've gotten the chance to get to know her! And, hopefully, we'll get to hang out lots more when she & Josh move to Boston, yay!

We spent an hour-ish wandering around Urban Outfitters, where I bought a few gifts for various people (I love that store, it's so much fun). Then we parted ways, and I headed back home. Dan and I had some lunch and hung around the house until early that evening, when we had to once again bundle up (this time in waterproof gear!) to head out to Christine & Paolo's new place for a housewarming/birthday party. Their apartment, while unfortunately rather far from the Malden Center T stop, is really nice - very old-fashioned, but of course adorable when you mix that with Christine's fantastic decorating sensibilities! The party was fun - I got to catch up with a few Vassarites (Anna, Casie, and Julia), but I am looking forward to getting a chance to visit Christine's place again and possibly have a nice little dinner double-date. :) (Surprising as it sounds considering my past record, parties can just be a little too much for me these days...I much favor the one-on-one experience, now.) Anyway, we'll see!

We caught the last train back into Boston around midnight, and were very grateful to come home to a warm, dry house. Ugh, this weather is killing me. (In more ways than one - I've been getting some pretty bad shooting hip pains - arthritis? - these past few days, and I'm not enjoying that one bit. Stupid weather - isn't good for my hip, my doc says.)

Sunday morning, I woke up a bit late, but managed to make it all the way out to Mind's Eye Yarns in Porter Square only a few minutes after 1 o'clock, for my scheduled private spinning class! I wasn't sure what to expect, as I had never done any yarn-spinning whatsoever before, but I really enjoyed learning & had a lot of fun. Lucy, the store's proprietor, taught me drop-spindle spinning, and I now have to practice for about 20 minutes every night - I want to get good at this! It'd be so fun to knit things from my own yarn! Sheep-to-sweater, as I say. :)

I plan to go back on Thursday night for the group classes - we'll see!

Sunday was another one of those let's-avoid-going-out-in-the-crappy-weather days, otherwise. But, Dan convinced me to hike all the way out to the Loew's on the Boston Common to see Doom, featuring the Rock! It was all right, considering the cast - I liked the story, and it was neat how they spent a little time doing some first-person-shooting, just like in the actual game. And, they did have a BFG and a spinning, hovering gun, so Dan & I were pleased! :) The ending did seem rather quickly abandoned, I think. Otherwise, it was pretty fun, though. For a silly-distraction movie.

Well, the awful weather continues! We'll see how long I can hold out before I have to pop a Vicodin. My hip was being pretty terrible to me last night, but since around 8 this morning, it's been doing all right. Cross your fingers for me that the shooting pains don't return! xoxo

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Lies My Teacher Told Me
AUTHOR: James W. Loewen


TITLE: Dark Tide
AUTHOR: Stephen Puleo

deaf & blind, but not dumb

I came across this quote in Lies My Teacher Told me, and thought it was important to share:

"I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate -- that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased...I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life's struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about.... I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone."
- Helen Keller

Very few people know much if anything about Helen Keller's later life, post-Anne Sullivan. Keller went on to graduate from Radcliffe and became a voracious writer and radical social advocate.

Loewen tells this about her:

"Keller's commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps. She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realize that to deal solely with blindness was the treat symptom, not cause. Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people's opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see. Keller's research was not just book-learning: 'I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it.'"

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Lies My Teacher Told Me
AUTHOR: James W. Loewen

our new shelves

I have more to write about later on, but I just wanted to post a (really blurry) photo of our new shelves - I'm so proud (I put them together with a bit of Danny's help) and so happy with them - so far, they've stood the test of time. Granted, it's only been 8 hours...heehee...

Already populated with plenty of books! I love Dan, I love books, and I love Dan's mutual love of books. :)

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Lies My Teacher Told Me
AUTHOR: James W. Loewen

some good things

Yesterday night, Dan and I went to see Greta Garbo on the big screen, which was so great! We saw Flesh and the Devil, which was fabulous - The Brattle is showing several of Garbo's films during the month of October, as a Centennial Tribute. It was definitely one of the best silent films I've ever seen. And it was exciting to get to see it in a real theater!

This morning, I got some good news from Vonage - I had kind of given up on hearing back from them regarding the refund they had promised me for returning their system hardware, but this morning I got an email from one of the customer service reps who told me that as of July 2005, they had officially ceased to give refunds to people who mail the stuff back...but, since I was misinformed, I would be cut a check. Woot!

I'll definitely have to return to Vonage if I ever decide to go landline again. I probably won't, but hey, who knows what the future holds in terms of phone service...

And, in other fun news, the bookshelves that Dan & I ordered from IKEA arrived this morning, too! Yay! Now I can finally clear up all of those cartons and stacks of books that are cluttering up our living room. Yay, organization... :) (I really do believe I have a mild-ish form of OCD - ask Dan, he'll back me up on that one, I'm sure! haha) Anyway, hopefully we'll get to set those up tonight, after I get back from my seaming workshop at Circles.

(I had to leave one of the 2 big boxes containing part of our bookshelves downstairs in the building's foyer, because I couldn't carry it upstairs by myself...I hope the rest of the building doesn't tar & feather me for it!! Shhhh...maybe they won't notice the huge carton in their way when they come home...)

All right, more work needs to get done today, pronto. Ciao! xoxo

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Lies My Teacher Told Me
AUTHOR: James W. Loewen

long weekend

Let's see...I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do, but not much time to do it in! Nothing too exciting to relate, really, though - so if you just feel like skipping this entry, I won't really feel all that hurt. Really. :)

Friday around noon, I got to meet up with my friend Christine for lunch - that girl just clean rocks my socks. She was "The OTHER Female Computer Science Major" with me at Vassar, and ever since we got over our sophomore-year rivalry (tied for the two highest grades on the CS102 midterm! who did that bitch think she was?), we've pretty much been inseperable ever since. Well, except for the fact that, until September 1, we never lived anywhere near each other! Haha. But really, I couldn't have survived Computer Science (nor any of my other college dramas) without that girl. But, I digress: so, we got to meet up for lunch because she now works down the street from me (new job)! We raced through the rain to meet each other at Quincy Market (our halfway point), then decided we didn't want to stick around, elbow-to-elbow with tourists, so we ended up eating at the Finagle down the street, which was really yum. I had the tuna melt with avocado, but on a wrap this time, which I thought was the best choice - last time the roll I chose wasn't very easy to eat!

Anyway, then Friday night I got to eat out again...this time at my sister's, though. We were very-belatedly celebrating our old housemate's birthday, which was back in mid-September! But it was really nice to see Tara again, and for the 3 of us to get a chance to catch up on everything. Bethany (with a bit of my help) cooked some amazing raspberry chicken, and I had brought over Bova cupcakes (which we lit candles in) for dessert! Mmmm...what with the bread, salad, squash, and vanilla Tootsie Rolls (my favorite! special edition!), we were quite stuffed, needless to say...

Saturday morning I woke up early and tried to clean (or at least tidy up a bit), since Dan's sister and my parents were going to be visiting our apartment that day! Dan & I headed out to pick Barb up from the bus station around 10 o'clock, and then we came back to the apartment to hang out for a bit. I got to see some pictures from Dan's mom's wedding, which really turned out great! Everyone looked so good. :)

As loath as we all were to leave the apartment because of the pouring rain, we did go out a few times, to pick up my new AG jeans (belated birthday present from Danny!) from the mall, and to meet my parents where they had parked, so I could grab all the things they had brought up from CT for me (mostly clothes I had failed to pack in August). My mom & dad got to see my place for the first time (we even showed them the roof deck, although it was hardly impressive when everything - including us - was soaking wet!), and I think they liked it. It was nice to see them again - it'd been a month, although I barely noticed the time flying by, to be honest!

Dan, Barb, and I spent the afternoon cooking a really delicious meat sauce (which included running around the North End buying the needed ingredients, which is always fun). Then that evening we went to see Domino, which was all right, I guess. Nothing to write home about, and towards the end I was just itching for it to be over (not sure why - guess I wasn't waiting to find anything else out?), but it was a good time. But we were all exhausted by the time we got home, so we went to bed pretty early.

Sunday morning, Dan and I had made plans to go get dim sum with the people from our self-defense dojo, but Barb was feeling really sick (turns out she has strep throat - eep!), so she wanted to get on the early bus home. This unfortunately meant we wouldn't be able to make it to dim sum, so I saw Barb off and then came home to find Danny baking the eggplant parm that we were supposed to have made the night before - so we had a nice, quiet lunch together. Topped off with gummy worms & candy raspberries. Yum!

Our shower is still broken (long story, but it's been broken since Friday, I think), so we had to shower at my sister's house, which was annoying, but not terribly inconvenient, since thankfully she lives so nearby! And, she wasn't home, so we could go over whenever we needed to. Still, I can't wait for our shower to be fixed, gah! I keep calling the manager, and nothing is getting done...I want to be able to shower in my own apartment, goddammit!

I am writing too much, so I'll make the rest of it as short as I can: Sunday afternoon we got an out-of-the-blue call from Amber, saying she, Danica, and a few others were going to be in town to go to Tealuxe for her friend's birthday!! Yay! So we all met up and enjoyed some great food & drinks - I had the caramel creme brulee (I need accents there, I know) tea, which was amazing.

Then they all had to head home, and Dan & I headed over to the Paradise Lounge to meet up with Hrithik & Kirsten and see a duo called Ryanhood play (I had never heard of them, but Hrithik liked them). Dan really dug the Julian Velard set that followed them. We bought his CD, and got a free one from Ryanhood. So, all in all, a successful night! :)

And a pretty good, if very long (and yet way too short), weekend.

All right, I really have to get back to work - it's time to test the install program I created this morning (ack)! Wish me luck that! xoxo

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Lies My Teacher Told Me
AUTHOR: James W. Loewen

tank top

Hurrah! I finally, finally finished the tank top that I started knitting very early in September...I had to take a break there to knit a few scarves for the Boston Knit Out, and so it took me a while to pick it up again...I tend to get this unreasonable fear that I'll pick up the knitting & have no idea where I left off, and have to restart the entire thing. Thankfully, that didn't happen this time! :)

Instead, I continued working and finally finished sewing the seams (one of my least favorite parts of any project) late last night. I am rather disappointed with how it turned out - from the picture where I got the pattern (at White Lies Designs online, I had hoped it would be much more, well, "shapely". I wanted a closer, more svelte fit, but it feels loose and rather frumpy on me. Oh, well. Maybe I can give it away as a present or donate it. For me, I like having a finished product, but it's more about the process of the project itself than it is about whether or not I hold onto the piece when I'm done.

Well, I wanted a few pictures last night (I still haven't finished weaving all the loose ends in, but I just couldn't wait to try it on!), so I had Dan take one:

and I took one:

Not fantastic (sorry for the armpit shot in there, and the blurriness!), but, they give you the idea. And I'm proud of my tank top! Even if it is a bit dowdy...

All right, must go do work now, though! xoxo

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Evasion
AUTHOR:

hey, nice package

The most interesting piece of reading I've happened across in a long time...I could spend hours with this:

http://pe.usps.gov/text/imm/immctry.html

It's a list of all of the things that cannot be mailed to certain countries...apparently you can't send any merchandise whatsoever to North Korea (what a surprise). Italy won't allow any haberdashery whatsoever - that means NO clothes of any kind. Nor will it allow live bees, or bells. Russia prohibits color copiers and any printed matter that "could be detrimental to State security", while Kiribati bans "Dyestuffs obtained from coal tar" from entering through the postal service (what??).

Ah, the list could go on & on...but, I'll let you check things out for yourself, if you are interested. It's funny that I've never looked at those lists before - I do a lot of mailing - but I guess since the only places I've posted to outside of the U.S. are France, England, Namibia, and Japan, I wouldn't have had much occasion to. Ah, well. I've been sufficiently amused for the evening.

Which would have been good, as I was planning on going to the DMV tonight to get my MA license, but I'm bailing out - I'm not up for dealing with lines & bureaucracy at the moment. Maybe next Thursday. xoxo

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Evasion
AUTHOR:

go tell Aunt Rhody

I suppose only those who have studied the violin using the Suzuki books would really recognize that obscure reference in the title of my post, but oh well. Maybe I'll catch some of you nostalgiac violinists, like me...

Watching Music of the Heart on StarzTicket last night (wouldn't have been what I would have selected from a video store, but it was available there, and I wanted something light that I could watch while knitting) made me want to pick up the violin again, which tends to happen when I see someone really good playing - it's both the naturalness of it (I can still pretty accurately air-violin most of the songs I learned from 2nd through 8th grade) and the gorgeousness of the sound - I wish I could create that same music, and please people the way it pleases me (hence also why I've always wanted to play the piano). However, after the wave of nostalgia passed over me, I realized that, for me, it's more about listening to & enjoying other people's music than it is about creating my own. Perhaps part of the reason I never continued my violin education was because I could never enjoy the music that I was making as much as I could just listening to the rest of the orchestra around me. Maybe that's attributed to a lack of enough skill, I don't know. Either way, I have resigned myself pretty much to the fact that I will never be a music-maker (thought I'll always be a dreamer of dreams - if you catch that reference, I'm impressed!). And I don't mind. Music produced by other people moves me in amazing ways. I appreciate it, and I live because of it (at least partly). And that's what is important to me. I'm okay with that.

I do really appreciate that I had the opportunity to learn to read music and play an instrument like I did. Of course while I was mired in lessons and practice, I wasn't so happy with it (I never had the natural talent that some people had, or at least I never thought I did - my violin teachers always wanted to place me in the higher-level groups, but I never practiced enough, I admit now with regret). Reading music seems almost as natural as reading printed words to me, and I realize that, for a lot of people, that's not the case.

I guess I have my older sisters (who I always wanted to emulate) and my parents (who gave us the opportunity to learn an instrument in the first place) to thank. Thank you. xoxo

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Evasion
AUTHOR:

everyone should read

I'm hoping to get involved soon in this program that sends books to prisoners sometime very soon. Education, I believe, is the most important and effective tool for everyone to get ahold of. As we've already seen from my support of Bookcrossing, I'm a big fan of getting books out there for anyone & everyone to get their hands on. To make someone else as curious about the world as I am (and as driven to find out more, and to make effective changes to what I don't like - which I wish I were better at) would make me so happy. xoxo

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Evasion
AUTHOR:

awesome art

Yesterday evening, my sister & I went to see a lecture given at the SMFA by artist Ryan McGinness. His work is amazing! I can't even begin to describe it, except to say that he started off very into iconography, and then deveoped all of those images into a very intricate, delicate, swirling art that he's currently involved in. But he sounded like he is continually evolving, so I'm interested to see what he'll produce in the future!

For the time being, I'll leave you with a few images from his website:




Currently Reading:

TITLE: Evasion
AUTHOR:


TITLE: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
AUTHOR: J.K. Rowling

i'm not sore!

Last night, Dan and I went to our first self-defense class - we've signed up for a month-long, twice-weekly course at the local martial arts school, here in the North End. We did some pretty intense strength training - I mean, we weren't bench-pressing or anything, but for a girl who hasn't been able to do much exercise in the past couple of years, the repeated punches & kicks we were doing in order to learn the technique (and then hone it) were a bit of a strain on some of the muscles I haven't really used in a while. But, I dunno, maybe it's because of the five flights of stairs we have to climb to get to our apartment, combined with the copious amounts of walking that we do while in the city (not that I mind either! I love the "exercise"), but I am really feeling fine this morning, which wasn't quite what I expected. (But, again, I'm hardly complaining!) I am really looking forward to taking some good tips & techniques away from this class - being the weak, little girl that I am, it'd be nice to feel even a little bit more certain of myself when I am walking around alone at night. Not that I tend to do that often, but it happens. And I'm sure there'll be plenty of times when I can't avoid it. So, I'd much rather know where & how to fight back, if need be. Y'all better watch out!! Heehee. xoxo

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Evasion
AUTHOR:


TITLE: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
AUTHOR: J.K. Rowling

it's like TKO, but different

The Boston Knit Out happened yesterday, and set-up went well. We were done well before noon (which is when the event acutally started), so Dan & I went back to our apartment and hung out for a bit. I put the finishing touches on the 2 scarves I had knitted this past week to donate to the hospital (they were sponsoring a scarf-design contest, but all scarves - entries or not - that were handed in would be given to the hospital, so I wanted to help/use up some extra yarn that my mother and I have had lying around for a while). In any case, I was kinda proud of these little misfit scarves (they definitely aren't the best knitting job I've ever done, but they will be cute - if a bit weird - and functional, so that's all that matters to me).

Without further ado, here's the child-sized scarf I knitted:

and the "adult" one:

All right, back to work for now! xoxo

Currently Reading:

TITLE: Evasion
AUTHOR:


TITLE: I Can't Tell You
AUTHOR: Hillary Frank