Another One Bites The Dust

Best Quote I Heard All Day
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, I'm gonna get you too
Another one bites the dust
--John Deacon (Queen)

You know me--no fucking resolutions for the New Year. If I'm gonna do something, I do it. Whenever I decide to do it.

What I prefer to do is look back over what I've done the past year, analyze it, and see what I can do to make my life better. It's been yet another tumultuous year, albeit one that saw a few milestones:

• Went back to Telargo in August (this bears review, for sure)
• Had two articles published in Interweave Knits
• Half-assed moved to East Stroudsburg next door to Neal
• Drew Carey takes over as host of The Price Is Right--but wait! there's more!
  

It's still not completed, the move. I'm living in the apartment but the furniture won't be moved until next Saturday, after a couple of delays. I live like the gypsy I am.


You can see that the important crap has been moved already. This is the living room taken from the bedroom hallway.

And then, there was Christmas. With die ganze Familie, below.
Well, almost the whole family. Scrappy the Sister (Ted calls her Scrappy and I think that's more apropos than the Scrap Curmudgeon) and family show up for dessert.

Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters. Yes, her necklace did light up. You can get cool stuff if you work for Party City.

And now for the obligatory cute grandchildren pictures. Ian Skywalker, whose Force is something to be reckoned with, and the Punk Princess, who had to have her picture taken three times before I got her to stop mugging it up for the camera.


It was a nice Christmas. And probably the last one I'll cook. In a way, I'll miss it. But then, it will be nice to be the feedee instead of the feeder.

Obligatory Knitting Shit
As it is with Joe, right now I simply feel like knitting small projects. I finished a pair of socks for Neal while in Tampa, plus another diagonal scarf. And then, I picked up the latest issue of Spin-Off, an outstanding issue filled with lots of good stuff. The gloves made from fingering weight handspun intrigued me. I knew I had a ball of the Starry Night in my spinning basket, which had 376 yards, just enough for the gloves. I can use these, too.

Knitter's Shit
Oh. My. God. Did any of you catch the incredibly awful picture of DragonBoy in the latest issue of Knitter's? It took my breath away. And caused small amounts of puke to disgorge themselves.

The issue itself was a stone bore. Who the fuck is still reading this? Other than last spring's issue, which was half decent, it's back on track with its trajectory to the recycling bin.

I realize that I am tremendously biased towards Interweave publications. There's a reason for this, besides the fact that I write for them (next, an article on Ravelry). I will not write for some rag that deserves my contempt. I can afford to be picky because I don't depend on this income. I have always appreciated Interweave's efforts to be the best they could, although they've stumbled here and there. That's not a big deal. No magazine can be perfect every issue. I do hope that the next issue's photography is improved. The last one was terrible.

2008
I hope this coming year brings a bit more stability. I think it will. And I would like to thank all of my readers for showing up for the extravaganza. This month has been a bugger and I couldn't write as much as I would have liked. With things settling down now, I'll be back to my regularly scheduled entries.

Open Mic Thursday will begin again on January 3. This will give me some time to think of a good topic. Of course, Neal did come up with one that has absolutely nothing to do with knitting and everything to do with sex. If you'd like, I'll do his topic. I know he'd get cheap thrills from reading your responses. Such a rare and handy man. With friends like that, one can go far in life. Sorta.

Happy New Year, skanks!

Merry Christmas, Baby

Best Quote I Heard All Day
The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live--George Carlin

I know, I used this quote before, on a Christmas entry past. But it's particularly apropos this year. I've been a very bad girl. In a very good way. Use your imagination.

Long time, no post. I've been insane with work...and Neal. A week in Tampa too, stuck there an extra two days because of the storm that hit the Northeast last week and canceled my flight.


Not that I was really complaining with a view like this from the hotel terrace where I had my morning coffee and got done what little knitting I could manage. The ubiquitous socks.

Welcome to my real work world. My ecstatic trainees, waiting for me to put the camera down and start training them in the fabulousness of our mobile asset management system.


Now it's done and I have some peace. The peace I get in E'burg. The final move will be New Year's weekend. But first, I do my Christmas dinner for the troops. And start a two-week vacation that is needed badly, although most of it will entail buggylugging shit up to the apartment.

However, Neal has made sure that our network is now completely wired. We pulled cable last weekend and I'm ready to go live as soon as the desktop gets moved up. As he says, "I'm the nerd, you're the geek." So true. He's the hardware magician, I'm the apps pro, although you'd be amazed watching me help him pull cables on his job the other Saturday. Untangling cables is very much like yarn messes. I don't know that I would want to do what he does, which is set up complicated multi-media systems. But I get him, completely. And he gets me. So there you have it. That's why you've not heard from me.

But life seems to be returning to normal, whatever the fuck that is.

So, my dears, I will probably have a lot more to post soon. Right now, I'm about to pick up the Lavold sweater that has been languishing in its bag and get it finished. One spinning wheel is in E'burg, the next is about to follow. And the loom is going too. I'm going to keep it.

Have a wonderful Christmas, you skanks. And this song, by my favorite Jersey boy, is for everyone and especially for my nerd, who is one rare and handy man. I'm blessed.

Oh. Hai. Mar, Wur U Bin? Nidding?

Best Quote I Heard All Day
The trouble with cats is that they have no tact--Sir Phillip Sydney

While not strictly an lolcat, this picture is certainly indicative of my vast improvement over the past two days. And possibly indicative of how my brain perceives language. That's fine wid me. Hai. I'm back. Nidding.

Stoopid Scraf 101

I wasn't kidding. This is the best I've been able to do. There's something positively mind-numbing about garter stitch. Garter stitch + Seroquel = karmic bliss. Or some such shit.

In any case, if my whiny sister really wants it, she can have it. Never mind that my mother has already made her two of these. This is actually a very good pattern for Noro Silk Garden. It's free--you can find it here, if you're not already familiar with it. It's been around for a while, designed by Karen Baumer.

I used Silk Garden Lite, 2 balls of 2018, one ball of 2017. Sale shit that I found while trying to gather up all the odds and ends that I've planted around the house. (Have I mentioned that I find pseudo-words like "lite" and "nite" terminally offensive?)

Let's just say that I've been contemplating winding some Morehouse laceweight and working out a lace pattern on KnitVisualizer. Plus, I'm headed up to E'burg later. Camping out for a few days. I need to start acclimating myself. Neal's been on my case for weeks to do this but I didn't feel up to it until now. After having a nice conversation with Mammy yesterday, where she also pushed me to get up to the apartment for some of the coming week, I figured that was a powerful combo--Neal and Ma.

One Week to Tampa

This is the view from my bedroom. Great. Fucking snow. Neal says the roads are clear, so I guess I'll venture out to I80 and hit the road.

Next Sunday, at this time, I'll be airborne and on my way to sunnier climes, even though I'll be working. Nice digs at the Tampa airport Embassy Suites, two days with Susan to get stuff ready for the sales training. Home on Thursday. But I'll have the laptop with me, of course. And now that I have an air card, it's internet all the time.

I do have a love-hate relationship with this shit. On the one hand, there's nothing that thrills me more than opening up a new computer box, trying out a new app and learning it, getting a new gadget (next purchase, a jawbone to replace my Bluetooth earpiece). On the other, I find peace spinning and knitting, and an almost sexual thrill at starting a new project.

While it's true that I'm a geek girl, there are moments when I'd like to throw it all out the window.

Old Friends

That said, if it weren't for the internet, Marcia wouldn't have found me. Two days ago, on Classmates. com, I get an email from her. I have not seen Marcia since June 1968, yet we were good friends in high school. All of a sudden, here she is. My dear friend Peggy Carroll found me through Classmates two years ago.

Through a series of email, I found out that Marcia lives in the Poconos, not far from E'burg. We're going to get together. I still see her as she was at 18. Yikes. That's probably how she sees me, too.

Well, I don't look bad for 57 but it's been a long, hard road since 18. And we have almost 40 years to catch up on. Marcia was always a rare and handy person, and that has not changed.