Geekery

Last night, I played Scrabble with my neighbor, Matt, and won, due to a lucky 7 letter Scrabble word, “rations”, which also made the word “darts” and which also covered the coveted “triple word score”.  After you play Scrabble, do you go through the play-by-play and figure out exactly which word clinched the victory?  I do.  In Matt’s defense, I did put down the word “retuft”, which, if my spell checker is correct, is not actually a word.  But there was no challenge due to my Balderdash definition, so the win stands. 

 
Here’s the final board.  In addition to identifying the winning word, I like to take a moment at the end of the game to admire the way the words covered the board and to congratulate the players on making such good use of it.

For dinner last night I purchased a baguette, a few lumpy heirloom tomatoes and some mozzarella cheese and made myself a caprese sandwich with my “garden” basil and a little balsamic vinaigrette.  David didn’t make it home for dinner, so I ended up eating the whole thing. I felt quite disgusted with myself, but all that bread made me a very happy girl. 

On an unrelated note, I have been thinking a lot about how much my new bike reminds me of that scene in The Sound of Music where they are singing the do re mi song and riding bikes down a lovely Austrian street.  That Brigitta really sings the ti note with a lot of passion. Good for her.  

 

This morning, Maxwell was moving a bit slowly.  In his defense, being awake for 2 hours every single day can be exhausting.  Very stressful, indeed.

I will not be a slave to Christmas this year!

Since last Christmas was such a headache due to my own procrastination and over extending, I’m starting on gift making now. Actually, I started on gift making last week and already have a finished object to show off. To preserve the surprise, I’m withholding information about specific recipients, but do you know what I will not withhold? Artful Pictures of me trying on the awesome presents.

 

These are Susan’s Reading Mitts (free pattern on Ravelry) in Malabrigo Merino Worsted. This is my most favorite yarn in the entire galaxy and beyond. I love the colors (this is in the Vetiver colorway, which is greens and grays that lean toward pink in a very subtle, but warm and cozy, way). It is also so very soft and smushy. I want the whole world to be knitted from Malabrigo Merino Worsted yarn.

What was I talking about? Oh yes, the mitts. So these fingerless gloves (a concept to which I was whole-heartedly opposed until very recently, for reasons which I cannot recall) also feature a picot edge, which is freakin’ adorable. I was unsure of it while I was knitting because it looks sloppy until you hem it down, and then it looks neat as a pin, very old-timey and charming. So these are a huge success and really only took about 2/3 of the skein, so I have quite a bit left over to play around with (you can refer to the previous paragraph if you’re not sure about how that makes me feel).

I have also been dipping my pinky toe into bike riding. David and I have been going on short bike rides around the block fairly frequently lately, but last weekend, I rode my bike to the pool, which is a couple miles away, and also to the yarn shop to pick up the Malabrigo. I felt really good about myself for these accomplishments and David very helpfully and encouragingly told me he was impressed and that I did a great job. I am now in need of my own bike, as I have been borrowing a friend’s for awhile now. Luckily, my neighbor, Matt, works at Pedal Power in Lexington and is hooking me up with one of their old frames, all souped up a la Greased Lightning.

In a couple weeks, I will be the proud owner of an orange schwinn bicycle with a working headlight that runs from power generated from the wheels. I am not sure if I’m excited about the whole bike, or just the headlight, but either way, maybe I’ll get in better shape (although I already feel extremely healthy) and also help to save the Earth (which is not extremely healthy).

David went over to the bike shop to help Matt get started and took pictures of their progress for me, since I was far away on a business trip to Baltimore that I’m purposely avoiding writing about due to how tired I STILL AM, even though I got back on Friday *going to my happy place*. So here is my orange beauty, all shiny and with an awesome light:

I just love it! 

More Christmas gifts are in the works (I am sort of lying…I haven’t actually started anything else, but I do have the patterns queued up in Ravelry and I just need to buy the yarn) and I will post pics as they come.

Spring

How many ways can we eat asparagus? So far we have had it raw, roasted, sautéed, in scrambled eggs, in pasta, on pizza, with rice, with garlic, with onions, with goat cheese… the list goes on, and yet we get a fresh bundle with every CSA box. I have to say, though, that every spring, we eat ourselves silly on asparagus, which is just as well, since we don’t have it out of season very often. We need to be sick of it when it stops coming-to be able to breath a sigh of relief that the madness is finally over-so that we don’t miss it all year long. We’ll be ready for it when it comes back next spring.

On Saturday night, David sautéed onions, asparagus and garlic, made a buttery alfredo sauce, and poured it over fettuccini.

We are not quite sick of it yet!

Yesterday, we went over to Ashland (Henry Clay’s Estate), sat on a blanket and enjoyed the beautiful day. I’m taking a break from the never-ending stockinette stitch of the buttercup sweater on the advice of the owner of Stone’s Throw. She told me that if I started something new, I’d be able to go back to buttercup when I got tired of the new thing. Good thinking, so I bought two hanks of Araucania Ranco sock yarn and started a shawl, which is interesting knitting and going pretty fast. I’m not sure if I’m really a shawl kind of girl-I may feel like an old lady with it-but we shall see.

I’ve never really used variegated yarns before, but I am digging the way the little stitches look on the needles.

It’s like a spectrum or like of those things in chemistry where they find out what a chemical is by its color…hang on, let me google…ah, chromatography. Yes, it looks just like that.

Between looking down at that and looking up at this, it was pretty much a perfect afternoon.

Summer Reading

This summer, I plan to read more.  Lately, instead of reading, I’ve been knitting while listening to Selected Shorts, episodes of This American Life, and Librivox audio book recordings.  That will be changing soon, though, because the new house is very close to a small library branch that I plan to ride my bike to throughout the summer.  However, my life is a series of broken commitments, so in the spirit of this lazy season, I accept that I may not actually make it to the library until August.  Or not at all. But wouldn’t that be a waste?  So hopefully, I’ll get there this weekend or something. 

So here are the books I’m planning to read, one at a time, with a generous smattering of knitting breaks so that David doesn’t worry that I’ve lost the ability to speak aloud.

I’ve recently discovered a love for Latin American novels.  There’s this magical element that is incorporated without warning and in a totally normal way, as if it happens all the time.  My first experience with this was on a trip to Boston, where I read Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (now one of my all time favorite books) and I thought that the mystical events in that book were specific to her particular style of writing.  A few years later, I read 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, both by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and realized that the flowery and romantic magic of Like Water for Chocolate was not just one author’s trait, but an entire genre!  Score! I’m excited to read more from other Latin American authors this summer–my top three picks are:

 

 

The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

 

 

 

 

 

And one Indian author to round out my list: The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

 

 

 

 

 

 

Currently, I’m reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the first time and am pretty much enthralled.  I borrowed it from Raven and she told me I’d like it.  She was right. 

So that’s my summer reading list!