On Impulse

This’ll be a quickie because I have to go in ten minutes.

First, happy new year to everyone!

Second, I was inspired about five minutes ago by Dee to give Project 365 a whirl this year and decided to post said intention here to make it harder to chicken out. I’m not sure if it’ll fall apart in three days or last a couple months before I forget once and feel compelled to bash my head repeatedly against a wall, but it should be an interesting ride.

No, I don’t have today’s picture yet. ;)

Okay, now I’m off to do the New Year’s 7.5 mile run thingie in this snowstorm. Pray that my toes will still be with us when I return!

Yay! Loot!

Sorry it’s been so long – I’m finally resurfacing from finals. I have one left, but it’s no big deal. I’m basically done! Gloriosity!

So.

We biked. Around Lake Tahoe. It was intense. I don’t have any pictures from the ride yet, because we used disposable cameras and I haven’t finished it yet. But it was breathtaking. It SO made the 7-mile climb starting at mile 80 worth it when you came around a corner and saw this incredible view of this gorgeous lake. Here’s my helmet:

And here was me:

And then after we finished, I ran into a parked car. We had these giant buffalo on our helmets (because the rest of our chapter is from Buffalo…) and I was trying to copy our coach and duck under a rope hanging maybe five feet high while on my bike, and I veered to the side. Only there was no space to veer. So I crashed and left a big scratch down the side of a black SUV. The people were standing right behind it loading the trunk, too – and they didn’t notice until I called to them!

Me, lying on ground beneath bike, trying not to sob: Excuse me – I’m really sorry, I just ran into your car!

Them: Oh, it’s a rental – we won’t tell if you won’t. Are you okay?

Me: *sigh of relief and pain*

I was rather scraped up. But my bike computer still only said 99.75 miles when we got back to the hotel, so I rode in circles on the sidewalk until it said 100. You can’t work all day not to get that satisfaction! Here was my bike shoe after:

Yeah.

Oh, and another story from that. One guy on our team is a pastor, probably about 60 years old. His wife has lymphoma, and she actually had a relapse during our training. During the ride, he crashed going downhill at twentysomething miles per hour. The medical team had to pick him up – he even cracked his helmet. But after they fixed him up, he got back on the course and finished – 7-mile climb and all! He had been talking earlier about how he talked to teens and was disappointed to find that when he asked them who their heroes were, they were inevitably some actor or athlete – someone who makes a lot of money and lives glamorously. I told him after the ride (and I usually don’t say stuff like this out loud, so it took a bit of courage, mind you) that he was more of a hero than any of those people. Because it’s so true.

Oh yeah, and my birthday is tomorrow! But my dad is out of town, so we did the ‘family celebration’ yesterday. We went out for hibachi, which was fun – but it was a bad day for it. It’s obscenely hot. So we pretty much sweltered in front of towers of flame wondering when we could return to the air-conditioned car…but the food was good! And then we went home – my mom had made me strawberry shortcake! – and I got the family presents. Got some sweet loot:

• iTunes card
• an iPod shuffle! (for running and such) And a ‘puck’ case for it.
• three shirts – a biking one and two T-shirts, one biking-related (this one if anybody’s curious)
• A Life is Good keyring – to which I promptly transferred my (lonely – I hopefully get car copies when I pass my road test!) key and other paraphernalia
• A book of short stories about time travel
• KnitPicks interchangeable needles!!! As well as stitch markers and a new set of cable needles – the two knitting artifacts I never fail to lose.
• that reference thingie that tells you how much yarn of various gauges you need for stuff
• a book of Japanese knitting patterns…I’m going to need some help reading those…but they’re pretty neat.

And then tomorrow – on my birthday, when it’s supposed to be over 90 degrees – we’re biking 40 miles. We signed up awhile ago – we knew we’d be in shape from the century ride. But I’ve done basically nothing athletic all week because of finals. And we just got our bikes back (they had to ride back cross-country in a truck) today…so that should be interesting…

And finally, I’ve resumed the lace scarf I started on the NYC trip, and I’m almost done with the Prom Socks. Pictures will come…at some point.

Delirium

It finally got up past 60 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, and I had an epiphany – I’ve had cabin fever since about November. Seriously, when you’re used to feeling a certain way, you take it to be the norm. But then the Sun comes out and I feel like a plant – just soaking up endless energy! I feel so great, and just need to be outside. So yesterday, despite the gusting wind, I went rollerblading for about an hour. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the greatest workout since I’m not very good at it and couldn’t go so fast.

But remember the Ripstik I blogged about getting for Chanukkah? Well, today I took it out – at first, I could do approximately nothing. I couldn’t even stand up without clutching someone’s shoulders. But after a bit, I could start myself and coast down the slight incline of our street. It’s pretty nifty, and I think I’ll be playing with it more, hopefully eventually being able to keep myself going on a flat surface…

Oh  yeah, and Friday, I leave for Providence, RI for 2+ days – my music school is sending ten kids to do an improvisation demonstration. I’m really excited – I get to ride a huge bus with only 15ish other people for six hours with my friends!

Seriously. Euphoric delirium. Despite the still-bruised legs and butt and a 5-7 page history paper due next week…

P.S. I started the collar on the sweater…it’s chugging. Slowly. And not helped by my knitting ADD at the moment…

There are different kinds of cold.

For cross training, today we did a local St. Patty’s Day (which, incidentally, is my parents’ anniversary…I should get them something…)-themed race. It was five miles, and I surprised myself by meeting my goal of finishing under an hour – 56:something! :D It was also really fun, because tons of people got really dressed up. I wish I had pictures to show…Ah well.

Anyway, whilst showering after said race, I got to pondering – the cold you feel after running in the cold (sweat + wind) is very different from the cold you feel after a shower or when you have a fever or after skiing. But, for me, anyways, if I’m hot, I’m just hot. There’s not much distinction. Just thought that was interesting.

If you’re a fan of puzzles, check out Killer Sudoku Online. You can play Killer Sudoku (a way cooler variety of the classic, in my opinion) daily, or peruse their archives, all also playable online or printable. It’s pretty sweet.

Anyways, just a quick post. I’ve got to go teach later!

Brrr!

The windchill this morning (they tell us – I haven’t been outside) was -25! Yes, Fahrenheit. They cancelled school! My alarm had already gone off, and I couldn’t get back to sleep after my mom came in and told me to – I was too excited! So I got up, browsed Ravelry, etc. for awhile, practiced violin, and exercised in the basement for half an hour. I was done with my duties! Now we’re chilling out – playing games, listening to music…we’re going to cook some apple muffins later. What a sweet day. And there are only 4 days of school until February break, during which we’re going to Gore Mountain! I’m reallyreallyreally psyched.

And now some WIP’s for you:

The nashua raglan continues…this picture is actually a bit out of date – the left sleeve is almost done now. And the picture also kinda sucks. But there you have it anyway:

I was very impressed with the yardage on this stuff – I finished the whole torso and hadn’t yet finished the first balls of any of my three colors. I wasn’t so impressed with the packaging – they look like center pull balls, but upon pulling from the center, pretty much completely disintegrate into a tangled mess, which is irritating to say the least. So I’ve had to wind all of it into normal balls.

Here’s a weird WIP(ish) from yesterday – I found this cute pattern through Ravelry (here it is there), and after finishing my HAT ATTACK weapon (see below), decided to try it with the leftover yarn from that, since it seemed feltable. But I got carried away and ended up doing one each out of nine different yarns. That’s eighteen little hearts! They came out lovely, though, even though I haven’t sewn any of them together yet due to a lack of polyfill and a hatred of sewing. Unfortunately, the cat (or perhaps the dog) found the fuzzy alpaca ones delicious, as those two had disappeared from the table by morning. So now there are sixteen…here’s a pre-felting picture of the pile:

…and post-felting (but not all of them):

Aren’t they cute? I have no idea what I’m going to do with them, I just felt compelled to make them by the cuteness.

And here’s my HAT ATTACK weapon, which was mailed this morning:


The first picture is more color-accurate. Unfortunately, I also happen to know that my assassin mailed her (my, actually) hat out today, so I’ll probably be dead before getting the WIP back from my target. Ah well. It was quite an enjoyable knit, and I’m definitely looking forward to future similar things!

Blah, Blah, Blah…

So on Monday (MLK day), my friend Saedi and I went snowboarding before the swim meet. We were soooo sore afterwards, and I could barely lift my legs afterwards.

So what did I do, you ask?

I bought a snowboard today! We had a blast, and I was using my mom’s snowboard (which is significantly better than my foam piece of crap) and I made a ton of progress (I only fell 5ish times on our last run, as compared to at least a dozen the first time we left the bunny hill). And my mom offered to pay for half of it – plus the store was having a sale! So I’m only going to have to pay $125 or so, which is pretty good for half a snowboard. I’m pretty excited to try this thing out, and irritated that I have to miss the next two ski clubs because of swim meets (and I missed the last one – darn close meets!). I can’t WAIT until swimming ends…

Anyway, here’s a pretty close-up picture of the board. By the way, the main part is really a dark navy blue sort of color, not black like it came out.

Aaaand…*drumroll, please*…An FO! I finished my Manos sweater, and only used about half of the KILO of yarn! I hear that stuff felts really well, so I shall be playing with that. Anyways, here are some pictures for you all:

As you can see, the variegated yarn pooled a bit on the sleeves, but not enough to bother me. Originally, I thought the whole sweater had come out too small because the sleeves were tight, but I realized that if I wore a thinner shirt underneath, it was perfectly comfy. I wore it all day today. :)

And finally, my WIP! Another raglan, this time out of some fuzzywuzzy Nashua alpaca. I’m hoping for it to be a close-fitting sort of thing that you’d wear over a cami – anticipating it getting nice and soft and cushy when washed. So we’ll see. But here are a few pics. The bluish one is actually more of a sage green, but it changed a lot in the photo…

a wordy post

I. Introduction – I have so much to say in this post that I decided to organize it 7^th grade English-style. This is how they used to make us organize our essays. Anyway, I’ll try to include lots of pictures to make it interesting, and thereby keep resolution IV-b-ii.

II. Regarding Knitting

a. FO: Camera sock

That’s my speedy cute little newish camera.

I knitted it a sock. Because that’s what I do. You can’t see it, but I even grafted the ‘toe’ with Kitchener stitch.

b. WIP: Manos Raglan

I got a kilogram of gorgeous Manos del Uruguay at Stitches, and I finally started the sweater. That’s just a sneak peek. And I think I’m going to have at least a third of the yarn left over, so I can play with felting it! I’ve seen amazing felted stuff out of Manos.

c. Bobby’s – I got nominated for a Bobby on Ravelry for Most Unusual Project. The voting starts on January 14^th, so please vote for me! There’s a lot of other cool stuff, and you can vote more than once!

d. I have a new idea for a design. I haven’t even started knitting one yet, though, so it’ll be awhile before a pattern emerges. If it works out, though, I do hope to write it up.

III. Regarding Life

a. Animals now outnumber people in our house – that’s right, our family now consists of five people (mom, dad, brother, sister, me), a dog (Erie), a cat (Pixel), a hamster (Java), two fish (Dimaggio and The Babe), and two birds. They’re zebra finches, called Tweedledee and Tweedledum, after the Lewis Carroll poem, and they’re cute. Addie calls them the Beeperbirds.

Erie. She does this when she thinks we’re not looking.

Pixie, doing what she does best – looking down on people.

This is Java. It’s really hard to take pictures of twitchy animals.

This is Tweedledee.

The lighter-colored one is Tweedledum. Even though I turned the flash off, they both hated the camera, so these pictures are less than marginal…

b. Snow sports

i. Skiing – Ski club starts this coming Friday, and it’s supposed to be 54^o on Tuesday. On the bright side, ski club conflicts with five swim meets, so I almost hope it’ll be cancelled because Coach is going to kill me if I actually miss that many. Ski club was paid for before I even decided to swim, though, so if it comes down to it, ski club wins, except for the League Meet. Also, we’re going to Gore Mountain over February break, which should be AMAZING.

ii. Skating – Yesterday a bunch of friends and I went ice skating. It was really fun and we took some pictures. But I’m not posting any because they all suck.

c. I can SEEEE! That’s right. My glasses are back! Huzzah! And no, I’m not angry at all about this. I just thought that was a really cool picture.

IV. New Year’s Resolutions (overlaps with II a bit)

a. Break out the spinning wheel again. I barely spun at all in 2007, and I have this lovely Lendrum!

And a wonderful stash of fiber. So I want to spin more and actually use the yarn I make. To make cool stuff like this hat, which was the original inspiration for the Mutant Bunny Hat. Ignore the stunned look in my eyes and focus on the handspun hat, please…

b. Use>Buy: I want to use more of my stash than I accumulate. Here’s my stash now.

And to make me feel better about myself, here’s my mom’s:

And there’s actually more than that, I couldn’t back up far enough to fit it all in one frame without falling out the window!

c. Health

i. (continuing from last year) Only eat when I’m hungry. I think this is a good practice for everyone, honestly. It really makes you aware of how much you actually need to eat.

ii. Stay in shape! I love being in shape. I want to keep exercising (running, biking, swimming, whatever, combination) all year and beyond! Buzz Lightyear-style.

d. Blog

i. For myself – it’s like a diary. Both in the sense that barely anyone else reads it, and that it keeps track of my life.

ii. For other people – but, I want to make it interesting! I’m going to try to take more and better pictures, and write coherently about interesting things. Feel free to make suggestions to this effect.

V. Conclusion – This is a concluding conclusion which concludes. It’s quite conclusive. Oh yes, and apologies for the slightly screwed-up formatting. Pasting from Word into Blogger doesn’t quite work perfectly.

Gifts and Such

So I dropped off Alethia’s gloves the other day, and she gave me malabrigo! It wasn’t a total surprise, since I had told her I wanted some, but it was certainly welcome.

*drools*

Our nanny, Renee (REE-nee (short for Lorene), not ri-NAY :P ), has worked for my parents since I was 6 months old, so at this point, she’s more of an adopted grandmother. Every year since I remember, we’ve slept over at her house sometime before Christmas and trimmed her tree. (Yes, even though we’re Jewish.) We went this past Sunday, and, Renee being Renee, she gave us gifts. I got to pick out a watch I wanted (mine’s falling apart), so this one’s on its way:

She also gave me some very cozy socks and a pair of pants.

Apologies for the horrible photo, my camera was dying.

Then, we went skiing on Christmas. Both my siblings forgot sweatshirts (how do you forget a sweatshirt when skiing?!), so we made a pitstop in the shop and my mom got them each one. While they were picking them out, I was trying on a very cozy one just for fun, but then she bought it for me! She said I shouldn’t be penalized for remembering my sweatshirt, but I think she just liked it and wants to steal it sometimes.

It’s very cozy. Quite.

On that same trip, I fell rather hard on my snowboard onto a locked wrist. OUCH. It still hurts today and my mom says I could’ve broken one of the teensy bones in my wrist, even though I can still move it and it only hurts a little when I’m not moving it, so I might get it X-rayed in a few days if it doesn’t stop hurting. At swim practice today, when I tried to explain to the assistant coach about it to imply that I might not be at 100% during practice, she was really obnoxious. She said, “I have no pity for you. You were doing another sport during swim season.” Come ON! If she thinks I’ll give up skiing/boarding for swimming, she’s got another think coming. And she and the head coach will probably both flip out, but if ski club conflicts with any swim meets, ski club comes first. I mean, a) skiing’s WAY more fun, and b) My parents already paid for it! Thanks to reason (b), my parents are on my side and will support me if coach gets really pissy. But gragh. I almost hope something is broken just so I can wave it in the assistant coach’s face!

And, after ripping out ears entirely too many times, the mutant 3-eared bunny hat is finally almost done! I’m definitely writing a pattern, but I’m pretty bad at explaining stuff, so I think I’ll include some videos of how the heck I’m doing it…

Ta ta for now!

Many things

I’ll start with the icky news, then if you read it, you get a reward with happy stuff.

To explain the icky news, I need to impart some good news, though. We finally went skiing today! Sort of. For the morning, I snowboarded, which I think I did a total of once last season, so I was pretty rusty. By lunchtime, I was finally getting the hang of turning again. Sorry, no pictures – you think I trust myself not to fall on a camera?! But on the lift up for our last run before lunch, I was fixing my helmet and had taken off my glasses. As I put them back on, one of the lenses popped out and fell down to the ground. We (my mom and I) spent about 15 minutes searching for it – I do have Transitions lenses, so it was dark-colored. But we didn’t find it. I wasn’t really comfortable snowboarding without good vision, but I’m a pretty competent skier, so I figured I would just ski for the afternoon – I had brought my skis as well.
However, when I went to put my skis on, it turned out that the people at the shop had adjusted the bindings entirely incorrectly. They were literally about 3 inches too far apart! And the irritating thing was, I didn’t even get new boots, so they shouldn’t have done anything at all to the bindings! I just left my skis for a tuneup.
Annoyed but not to be defeated after working so hard to convince Mother Dearest to take us, I put on my skiboards and had fun for the rest of the day. On the way home (1.2 hours or so), I could fortunately work on My So Called Scarf, which I don’t need to see too well for.
When I got home, I put on my old pair of glasses. Good news: I can see! Bad news: Old prescription now makes me dizzzzzy. Not so fun.

Anyway, done with my rant. On to cool stuff! With pictures! Which you’re not allowed to comment upon if you don’t prove that you read the above woes and misery. :P

My So Called Scarf goes.

As does the bunny hat! I really like how this is coming out, so I think I’ll write up the pattern. By the way, mine’s out of Blizzard and pink malabrigo (held double to match the gauge of the Blizzard). Here’s an incipient ear (one out of three…). It’s double-sided, so the back of this is the brownyblackgrey color, as you can kinda see in the next picture.

It’s a very soft hat, and I’ve told my sister that she must wear it every day. She looked a little worried…

Fun in the SNOW!

We’re right in the middle of the blizzard that’s still blowing through! So Alethia came over and we sledded yesterday night and this morning. I have a veritable potpourri of pictures thereof, to be followed by some knitting-related schpiel…

Here we see my beloved brother trying to fit into a toddler sled and going over the skateboard jump we set up on the hill next door. This, as you can probably tell, was last night.

And here I am going over the jump as well, with a very strange look on my face. Now for some from today, with actual light…

And Alethia, seeming to defy the laws of physics…

A surreal, but pretty neat picture of me.
And now come some cool pictures of my sister.

She always asks why I randomly take pictures of her…isn’t it obvious? She’s so photogenic! And by the way, she’s wearing a beret I made a few years ago out of a kit from Morehouse Merino.

My multiple WIPs plod along. I’ve nearly finished the heel on the socks made out of that green yarn from Chanukkah. My So Called Scarf is more or less on hold. I’m working on Alethia’s Almost Fingerless Gloves (a birthday present, which was not done by her birthday…), and then I’ll do Addie’s (the sister) mutant bunny hat – a Chanukkah present, which wasn’t done by Chanukah either. It’ll be my first time using malabrigo, and I’m SO excited. I’m pretty much in love with that yarn. It also includes Blizzard, which, even though it contains acrylic, I really like. I promise some pictures of all this knitty goodness…at some point. Ta ta for now!