Guess who's cutting edge

Well, it had to happen eventually...


I broke down and got a new cell phone today. I had begun to receive threatening postcards from Cingular telling me that the TDMA (?) network that my old phone used was going to be non-functional as of June 1st.

Thus, my big errand today was to pay a visit to my neighborhood Cingular store. I will say that, when I pulled out my ancient Nokia stunner there to show them what I meant by "really old phone", one of them actually said, "Oh my God." So, now I have a cute flip phone, AND it came with stick-on jewels. According to the salesman who was hitting on me, he's only ever seen one older, possibly homosexual guy use the stick-on crystals... I'm not sure that my phone needs to be faaaaabulous, but I have the option.

7 random things

I have been tagged for this. Twice, actually. Once by Coleen, and once by Jody. I hope that doesn't mean that I have to do this twice. :)

Anyway, here are 7 things about me that may or may not be interesting...

1. I used to be fluent in Spanish, and actually used to think in Spanish from time to time without entirely realizing it. I still occasionally do this, but I've forgotten so much vocabulary that I don't get very far.

2. I am allergic to many, many things. You know it's bad when your allergist gives you one of those allergen reaction scratch tests, shakes his head, and says, "I'm not entirely sure how you manage to function without living in a bubble." Yes. Seriously. I'm not sure whether I should be very proud or very scared. Oh, and the thing about my allergies that freaks people out the most? The fact that I have never had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my entire life.

3. I went to a "hypnotherapist" for about 4 sessions right after I was first diagnosed with panic attacks. This ended unceremoniously when I was listening to an audiocassette that he had made of one of the relaxation exercises, and realized that the clip-on microphone had picked up the sound of his stomach growling persistently. Let me tell you, I was just barely taking it seriously before that...

4. A lot of my sense of humor was shaped by watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 in junior high and high school. I still have most of my tapes from the old Turkey Day marathons (which are now anywhere from 11-14 years old), and they're a main reason for me still having a VCR.

5. I am the queen of recognizing guest stars on television shows. At my scariest, it'll be someone who played an alien on TNG 15 years ago, or a demon on Buffy 10 years ago, and never appeared on screen without multiple layers of prosthetics.

6. Give me a violent action movie over a weepy chick flick any day. :)

7. I was a huge nerd in school, but I was a well-liked nerd. Very few people ever gave me any trouble, even though they had a large array of nerdish things that they could have used as ammo: I won a school spelling bee in 5th grade (beating out a 6th grader, which actually made me vaguely cool to my classmates for a little while), I was runner-up in the school's first geography bee in 6th grade, I did both biology league and physics league in high school, and placed 4th statewide in bio league, and I was in marching band.

Not tagging anyone... is there anyone besides me who hadn't already done this? ;)

Baseball

I went up to visit my parents and go to a Phillies game this weekend. The game was actually a lot of fun, despite a) several briefs spurts of rain, b) temperatures in the low 60s, c) horribly behaved kids in our section, d) a complete jerk behind us who seemed to take real joy out of making his wife/girlfriend sound like an idiot, and e) a 13-2 loss. At least it was evident early on that they were going to lose, so we could just sit back and chuckle at how ugly it was. And the hyperactive kids and the jerk behind us left mid-game, which made things MUCH more enjoyable.

Anyway, some pre-game prep:



(You can see them laying the base lines here. They have a narrow box with chalk in it, which they set on the ground and hit with hammers, and it deposits the chalk line. I think it's the coolest thing ever.)

WIPs

I'm at that point where I'm not finishing any projects, so I don't have a lot of knitting news to report. I did finally cast on for Go With The Flow sock #2, however. I needed a break between socks, because the 4-row lace pattern is incredibly repetitive... very easy to memorize, but I was tired of it by the time I finished the first sock.

Here's everything I'm still knitting, having a lovely vacation outside:


I got these all outside next to each other and had to laugh. It's a shame I'm so afraid of color, isn't it? :)

The fifth "in progress" project is one that I'm done knitting, but still have to finish seaming and find a strap for... I'm hoping that the next picture of that will be a "DONE" picture.

My hands smell like wool

You cannot believe how good I was at MDS&W.

A big group from Knit Night went, along with some Friends of Knit Night, and we all gathered at Coleen's for breakfast/coffee/mimosas before heading out. Check out the watermelon that Coleen carved for the breakfast spread. She made us a lovely melon sheep to get everyone in the mood for yarn, yarn, yarn!


(Those are her knitted barnyard animals surrounding it)

Did I almost get left behind at Coleen's? Oh, quite. I blame yarn frenzy.

I think I've reach a point where I'm really quite comfortable with the size of my stash. I didn't get much (I had a nice chunk of my budget left at the end of the day), but I LOVE the couple of purchases I made.

Some Brooks Farm Four Play in whatever colorway this is:

It's all lavender-y purples and burnt oranges and browns, and is GORGEOUS stuff. Soft and scrumptious. I loved the Four Play yarn at Stitches, but was already getting a big skein of Duet and didn't want to go nuts at the first booth I stopped at... so I waited for S&W. It wasn't an "I must have this yarn" thing, but I knew that if I was going to buy anything from their booth, I wanted it to be Four Play in whatever color grabbed me. I got enough for a tank top or a vest.

And there's this Fleece Artist roving from the Peace Weavers booth:

I think this might be my S&W tradition: buying extraordinarily bright roving. I grabbed this while Diane was picking out her Sea Silk. By this point in the day, I had mostly gotten the sunscreen out of my right eye and could actually see properly. :)

I also have one of the official t-shirts--purple for me, natch. Jody's husband was such a good sport and stood in line for all of our t-shirts! Woohoo!

We were very excited to see that Amie's Sock Ness Monster socks nabbed her a first place ribbon, Jolene's yellow socks ALSO got a first place ribbon, and her lace shawl got a fifth place ribbon. Knit Night gals represent! :D And Stacey got stopped by at least one person wanting to take a picture of her Turkish stockings, which are the coolest things ever. We were all excited to get to see them in person.

All in all, a really nice day spent with my friends, surrounded by yarn. :)

Do-over

I tend to wear most of my hand-knitted items fairly frequently. The exception to this has been the orange Cotton Tape shrug that I made last year, which I wore twice right after I finished it... and never again. It was of the "make a rectangle and sew the two ends into sleeves" variety, and if you have one of these, you know the weird poochy roll of fabric that you end up with along the back.

This weekend, I ripped out the old shrug and made a new one. Basic top-down raglan, with some dropped stitches thrown in "just because"... SO MUCH BETTER.



Look, no more poochy roll of fabric! This one actually fits!


This is part of what makes knitting fun, right? "Hey, this doesn't fit so well... so I get to play with the yarn again!"

Chances are excellent that I'll be wearing this one of the two days of Sheep and Wool. :)