just be.

wolverine attack

last night, i was mysteriously attacked in my bed. twice. 

the first attack was while i was sitting on the bed, next to the nightstand, taking my nightly dose of ambien and applying my breathe-right strip. as i reached into the drawer for those things, i felt a bite on my upper arm. not enough to break the skin, but deliberate and painful. i yelled and felt for chloe, our tuxedo cat, in her usual spot. every night, she hops up on a specific spot on the bed right beside where i was sitting, and she snuggles me while i play a little logic game on my ipad before i fall asleep. i felt a furry body and pushed it angrily away from me. how dare she sit there complacently after attacking me, right? i managed to flick on the bedside light, and chloe was looking at me from the other end of the bed, confused. i shuffled the covers to make her jump off (still angry, i was).

this was baffling to me. chloe is a very, very docile, compliant cat. aside from the fact that she hates to be picked up, constantly trolls for food, and occasionally pees outside the litter box, she is a perfect cat. she never bites or shows any aggression, ever, even if you're touching her feet or trying to pick her up or whatever. just purrs and snuggles. and follows me everywhere.

but back to last night. i turned off the light and started to settle down into bed with my ipad, when i felt another bite. but this one was extremely painful and forceful, on my hand. the bones of my hand were actually crushed together. i screamed. and screamed. and swore. and held my hand. i managed to turn the light back on. my screaming had broken through andrew's noise-canceling headphones downstairs, and he came upstairs to see what had happened. the dogs came to investigate. chloe was nowhere to be seen, but jack-jack, our black cat, was meowing loudly on the floor beside the bed. my hand also had two bleeding, inflamed, red holes and a couple of scratches on it.

jack-jack is a wonderful cat in ways that chloe isn't. he LOVES to be picked up and carried around. he is perfect in his litter-box habits. and he is curious about food but is much more obedient if you shoo him away. he is very purry, and he is independent but can be very snuggly when he wants to be (read: if you have a particular blanket over you). but he does bite and scratch sometimes.

my internet friends (because naturally i posted a rant about the incident on LSG immediately after it happened, as you do) urged me to go to the emergency room because cat bites are awful. and the internet itself told me the same. get antibiotics! within eight hours! cat bites are deeper than they appear! your hand will fall off! you will never knit again! you will not be able to type any more and you'll have to quit your job, which you love so much and want to have for the next 20 years! arm-ageddon!

so i went downstairs, but i couldn't find any betadine or peroxide (somewhere in this house is an awesome box of first-aid stuff, but i have no idea where it is now, after rounds and rounds of renovations, a fact that i will be remedying today with a giant order from drugstore.com). so i washed it well with soap and water and went back to bed. as you do.

so. my original theory when all this happened was that chloe issued the first attack and jack-jack issued the second.

then, considering the personalities involved, i thought that maybe chloe and jack-jack were fighting, as they sometimes do (well, really it's jack-jack trying to remove chloe from someplace he wants to be, because he's an asshole like that to her sometimes), and i got caught in the crossfire. (but twice?)

or maybe it was jack-jack both times, and poor chloe just hadn't had the sense to leave the scene of the first crime (she is not the smartest cat i've ever met, dear though she is).

but these are all scenarios that make me sad and mad. my kitties? attacking me? unprovoked? i wasn't trying to clip anyone's nails. i didn't even know anyone was there. how dare they!

so. i have decided on an alternative narrative. a wolverine broke into my room last night and hid under the bed until the lights were out. then it attacked me. TWICE. the bastard. and the cats were just there trying to defend me.

that's what happened. right? 

it's more than 12 hours later. the redness and inflammation from the bite wounds are pretty much gone, though the holes are still obvious. and the bones still hurt, like a sprain, and i have limited range of motion in that hand. typing this hurts. fucking wolverines.

i got my own brain bleach!

the narcolepsy neurologist is starting me on ambien tonight. stimulant therapies we tried before for the narcolepsy aggravated my migraines, so the next thought is to try consolidating my sleep, and ambien is the first thing we're trying.

in honor of my special night tonight, i give you ambien walrus:

 

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what could possibly go wrong?

so many things, so little time.

well. there is lots to say and i have little energy to write, but i need to get it all down tonight.

i'll start by saying that andrew and i celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary on saturday, and it was terrific. we dropped the dogs off at the cozy inn (warning: stupid music plays, but you can turn it off at the "music off" link beneath the changing pictures) and headed down to berryville, virginia, for the shenandoah valley fiber festival. it was my first time going to this one, and it was really nice. calm, friendly, spacious, a little warm but not too, and lots of vendors. and most indoors, making weather a minimal concern even if it had been bad. i was not very spendy and bought just two skeins: dragonfly fibers dragon sock in the titania colorway, which is a beautiful tone-on-tone emerald green and a nice sproingy tight twist,

and lizard toes isobel, which is a fingering blend of merino, cashmere, and nylon in a variegated grey and brown.

the dragon sock is earmarked for the tour de sock; my team is the team that rocks (slowly), made up of five members of the rockin sock club, and socks that rock is by far my largest stash, but dragonfly fibers is one of the sponsors and we get double points for using its yarn, so. i am competitive. what?

the isobel was just calling to me from the aisle and i waltzed into the booth and grabbed it, felt the cashmere and knew i had to have it, and THEN realized that it was a yarn by someone i'd met on lazy, stupid, and godless just a couple of days earlier. it will make beautiful weaving. on which more later.

after the festival, we checked into our hotel. we stayed at the aloft winchester, and let me sum up right here, unambiguously so that there is no confusion: DO NOT STAY AT THIS HOTEL. it is pretty. it has a snack bar. that's about all the good i can say about it. oh, and i guess it wasn't too expensive ($116 including taxes for one night). why did we hate it so much? here we go, chronologically: i was too stupid to check where it was located and should have booked something in the old town. my bad. not the fault of the hotel. but a bummer. whatever. so we walk in, and the young woman behind the desk is angrily flipping through a binder. chin on her hand, scowling, nearly ripping the pages out as she turns the pages, looking for something she's not finding. she doesn't acknowledge us (we are in her line of sight peripherally and the lobby was small--we know she saw and heard us) for literally about five minutes. when she finally does, she makes sure to tell us how crappy her day is going and that it's just beginning. this line of conversation continues throughout our (fortunately relatively brief) interaction. at the end of said interaction, she pushes a couple of card keys at me and starts to turn back to her computer problems (also a topic of complaint during our time providing hotel-desk-clerk therapy). so i ask, "what's the room number? is this it?" and i find it written in tiny letters on the card-key envelope. "what's the best way to get to that?" (any other time i've checked into a hotel, the checker-in has made sure to show and tell me my room number and then give explicit directions to the room. not this one. she had Things to Do.) so she tells us and then returns to her work. we head to room 226. it's cool. it's modern. sleek. we settle in for a little nap before dinner.

we walked around the pedestrian area for a little while before dinner, then headed to the restaurant. here's me on our walk. i was a hand-knits fool: february lady sweater, kalajoki socks, and earth and sky shawl.

 

dinner was AMAZING. i'd found (thanks, google!) and reserved a table for two at one block west. again, unambiguously, i'll offer this: DO EAT AT THIS RESTAURANT. so good! i started with this fabulous composed salad:

(oops, sideways; i'll figure out how to fix that). it's a mixture of asian pears, butternut squash, and spiced pecans with an apple-cider reduction. omg so good. also excellent french bread. very frenchy. i had a hanger steak with dragon-something (a theme!) wax beans and black kale. i love hanger steak. :) and then we shared a flourless chocolate cake called le bete noir. it was warmer and had a different texture from other flourless cakes i've had--almost like a flan, except that i don't like flan. not custardy, just soft and warm like that. omnomnom.

and then we were completely stuffed and drove back to the hotel. we were surprised (and, i confess, unimpressed) to see the desk clerk cozily adjusting the shirt of a young man who was enjoying the attention quite a bit, both enjoying pounding music and a lively party going on around them in the lobby bar. we were grateful to be headed to the peace of our room.

we thought. but we could hear EVERYthing from our room. we were annoyed. but we watched some tv and went about our business and tried to ignore them. this was doable until we tried to go to sleep. at 10:15 (yes, i am old), i phoned the front desk and asked about how late we should expect the music to be going on. "about 12:30, maybe a little later," came the answer. no apology, no concern. so i hung up. what could i do? 

then andrew suggested that we request a different room, so i called back. she had one more room, on a higher floor and at the other end of the hotel. why the hell hadn't we been given that one in the first place? i do not know. so we moved and had a decent night after that. but never any note of concern or apology from the desk clerk.

the morning-shift guy was a whole different kind of employee. genuinely aksed how our night was, just a general air of here-to-serve. too bad he hdn't been on the night shift.

we headed back to town for breakfast before hitting the road: the amherst diner. another good choice. not speedy, particularly, and not any prettier than any other old diner, but a good diner. i'd go again.

and that was our weekend. i'd spent a lot of it stressed and worried, despite the beautiful scenery and wonderful company, because i am having endometrial ablation tomorrow morning and had received a call friday afternoon saying that they couldn't clear me for anesthesia because of an abnormality on my ekg. so i'd worried all weekend about how i was going to chase down doctors and tests to get cleared by wednesday morning, given that i have a rush project at work right now that really needed to get to the author by COB today. (it didn't. sorry.) but monday morning i was able to get all the paperwork faxed and signatures transmitted, so i'm all cleared for tomorrow. i'm very nervous still, mostly about the IV needle (i HATE needles, serious phobia, like the only thing i'm actually phobic about), but also about the anesthesia not working and going through what i went through five years ago in the colonoscopy. but i remind myself that needles are not (generally) fatal and that i have survived being raped and the rape-like colonoscopy and that i shall therefore survive this thing tomorrow. i will be grateful to be under anesthesia finally and not worrying about this any more.

so. weaving: i start an eight-week course on weaving at the pittsburgh center for the arts on saturday, and i am SO excite. i learned to weave this summer at woven art in lansing but haven't had anyone here to help me learn more, and there are a few more things i'm ready to learn. the classes are three hours every saturday, and i am so excited to learn and make some more fun stuff.

and of course nerd wars and tour de sock both start on saturday, so those will be good for keeping me busy. 

oh! and i almost forgot: we brought nova flooring out today to have a look at our dr. seuss-ity house, and it looks like they might be the answer for us. we hope to have an estimate in a couple of days. now to choose actual flooring! i'm SO looking forward to entertaining at home again. :squeezesigh:

cats and their neuroses

we did have some regression in the litter-box department for about a week. it was tearfully frustrating for me, thinking that we really *were* going to have to surrender jack-jack and chloe to a shelter and declare ourselves true failures in this effort. we had a perfect week and then a perfectly awful (pee outside the boxes every damned day) week. i was discouraged.

but we seem to be back on track now. i'd moved the boxes away from the wall to create a few inches of space on all four sides of each box. this was on someone's advice, though i can't remember whose for sure. i think it was the behaviorist, but i was collecting advice from so many sources that it's hard now to remember. anyway, i did that, and every single day i would find pee behind one or more of the boxes, between the box and the wall. it was always on top of one of the pee pads, which made it easier to clean up (yay chux!), but still. frustrating.

but i decided, screw the advice, i'm pushing the boxes back against the wall again. all four boxes, flush against the wall. still several inches of space between the boxes for sweeping and such, and still room in front of the boxes, and still nothing above the boxes, baby gate still keeping the dogs out of the room, and full visibility to and from the boxes. just pushed them back against the wall. and not one accident since then. all the elimination has been in those four boxes all week. yay jack-jack and chloe! 

cleaning the boxes has become part of my daily routine. i usually do it as soon as i've done my own potty business in the morning, before go downstairs for breakfast. the boxes stay clean, and it's really not a big deal at all, it turns out, because all the boxes are in one room, so it's just one fell swoop of scooping into one trash bag and it's done. i straighten out the chux (which get bunched up with the paw sweeping) as i go. takes maybe a minute, and everybody is happy.

we'd kept the painters out of there last week, which means that it's the least-finished room in the house now (we'd painted the walls years ago, in a lovely color of--surprise!--blue, but andrew had stripped the trim). i don't have any idea how we're going to make way for the flooring to go in and still give the cats a place to potty all day (god, i HOPE it's just a one-day project in that room), but we are officially okay putting new floors in there. (again: yay chux!) molyneaux has sent someone out with a few samples and to take preliminary measurements; she'll phone tomorrow to set up a time to bring out more samples, and we should have new floors very soon. we're thinking medium-toned medium- to wide-plank hardwood; i like the finer grain of maple and cherry more than oak, but we'll see what she brings. this is not something that seems easy to shop for online, even just window-shopping.

a raveler turned me onto the blog the way of cats last week, and today's post is relevant, so i thought i'd share it.

all six of us are in one room today, which makes me very happy. the furry four are sleeping, and andrew and i are (duh) on our respective laptops. i have black-and-gold knitting to do during the game, which we hope hope hope is better than last week's debacle. go steelers!

why i wish urban active provided wifi to its clients

my gym locks down its wifi (i know, wtf). pisses me off not to have free wifi when i'm there just on principle, but here's a real reason i wish i could get wifi at the gym: pandora now offers (some awesome!) workout stations. urban active, you listening??

color my world!

i never thought i'd see the day. we are actually finally getting paint on these walls.

we bought this house in april 2004 and lived in the first-floor apartment for two years while we rented the upstairs (two stories) apartment to another couple. we kicked them out in october 2006 and started renovating. tore down the wall separating the apartments, ripped out carpeting (hallelujah), and tore down loose plaster. i lurved demolition.

that round of renovation lasted about a year, maybe a year and a half. i've kind of blocked it out. they tore down dropped ceilings, sistered joists, tore down the decrepit, and polished up the old. but we've had barebarebare walls and ceilings since then in about two-thirds of the house, just waiting to soak up some paint and meanwhile dusting us with bright white plaster every time we brushed up against them. the visible joints and peeping-through previously textured walls mock us almost as much as the c. 1957 cracking linoleum tile that was splattered with plaster, paint, joint compound, and god knows what else; the frighteningly bendy wood floors; and the mismatched, partially torn-out vinyl flooring. the place is, in short, a mess. and not just because we're lousy housekeepers.

so a few months ago, angie's list offered one of its big deals on painting services. the contractor had excellent reports from angie's list members and was rated highly by the better business bureau, so we bought up the deal and brought the guys out for an estimate and walk-through. fast-forward a few months (the soonest we could get on their schedule), and they're suddenly here. (they were supposed to start the last week of this month, but they called andrew yesterday and were like, "we're coming tomorrow morning at 8!" we are not turning them away.) of course, this is all while i'm physically feeling like shite and having a slew of medical tests and procedures to try to make that better; it's not awesome having workers in the house amid all that. but it's totally awesome having the work done, so suck it up, right? right.

anyway. so today i needed to choose colors. i knew just what i wanted (brace yourself, because this is a big shocker):

 
it's woad (via). it is the color i would want to be the only color i could see if i could see only one color. i love it. it makes me happy.

so don (the painter) handed me the sherwin-williams color deck and told me to have at it. i looked first for the closest match i could find for the woad, and i chose distance. (weird to have that as the color name in our bedroom, but there it is.)

 
all the rest of the colors pretty much work up the lightness scale on the same card. the hallway and stairwell outside the bedroom will be bracing blue:

 
and the second-floor rooms will continue up the scale. here are some crudely colored-in floor plans:

 

 
 
all the ceilings will be bright white, and all the trim will be semigloss white. i'm very excited. next week, the floor guys come, and it's going to be like a regular house finally. our house will be a very, very fine house.

 

happy again

you might have been following our saga chez bee, in which the cats' constant (almost daily) peeing outside their litter boxes (not on clothes or furniture, thankfully, just within a few-foot radius of the litter boxes) was bringing me, my marriage, and our household to our knees. we were pretty sure that we were going to have to surrender the cats to the shelter, which would be a death sentence for two cats that were known to have bad litter-box habits. they just don't get adopted.

this had been going on for about three years (since shortly after we adopted them) and was so much worse than just "i hate cleaning up after them" or "i hate that smell." the smell, first of all, permeates everything, every part of the house, and really dominates one's brain in its presence. but it also stains and can ruin flooring, and this was happening in the dining room (so, no company almost ever, for someone who used to entertain regularly and have monthly dinner parties, and a terrible welcome-home greeting because it is situated smack dab between the two entryways to our house) and in my craft room (talk about saddening and frustrating, having my precious craft room, with its beautiful light and wonderful storage and my favorite color on the wall, become a place that i was loath to enter, let alone spend time in). it was virtually the only topic about which mr. bee and i ever fought, and we didn't fight nicely and healthily about it. it really was dominating my life and my psyche in terrible ways.

once we agreed that rehoming or surrendering was likely to be the solution, i became despondent. i cried constantly, couldn't sleep, couldn't think about anything else.

finally, i found a behavioral consultant who would work with us, despite the fact that she is more than a four-hour drive from us. i found only three consultants through the international association of animal behavior consultants who were within 200 miles of us, one in central pennsylvania and another in virginia. the one in central pennsylvania pretty much dismissed the idea (of working with us) out of hand; the one in virginia took forever to get back to us and still wasn't especially useful (thankfully, by then, we'd been working with debbie via phone and email and were on a path to a plan). i posted in three groups on ravelry and got lots of help, support, and advice from folks there. i read a ton of books. and i took the cats to the vet AGAIN.

this time, i really laid it out for dr. ben, explaining that this was really the end of our rope and that we were serious about rehoming or surrendering the cats if we couldn't make this stop. we are finally at the point that we are ready to paint and refloor the whole house, and we simply couldn't do that if the cats were going to ruin walls and floors. and we couldn't keep living in this shithole that the fixer-upper continues to be after more than seven years of living in this uneven, unfinished crapshack. not even for these wonderful, sweet, funny cats.

so dr. ben's advice (combined with some of the advice i'd received from other sources) was this: get four boxes (one for each cat for each function because some cats like to use a different box for peeing than for pooping) and put them all in one room. allow a few inches of space around each box, and put pee pads on the floor all around and underneath them. the pee pads would make detecting spots easier and make cleanup easier as well. and they would stop further damage to the floors and walls. in each box, try a different substrate (because cats). see what they like (use) and don't like (use) and keep working until we find what works.

so i implemented operation clusterbox the next morning. i threw out the cabinet in which the craft-room cats' room box had been, moved my work table to the other side of the room (so that the boxes were completely open because cats), and used get serious to scrub the floors [spoiler alert: WAY better than simple solution or nature's miracle, imo], using a blacklight to make sure that i had cleaned all the spots. i laid down pee pads (i've since been advised to use pads made for handling human incontinence instead, both because they're cheaper and because they're not treated with pheromones to attract puppies; those are on order but haven't arrived yet) across the whole area where the boxes would go, overlapping the edges a little for complete coverage. then i arranged the boxes:

• box 1 is a shallow sterilite bin containing seven pounds of world's best multiple-cat litter
• box 2 is a deep sterilite bin containing the same amount of the same litter
• box 3 is a scoop-free box
• box 4 is another shallow sterilite bin; we originally had it empty but, after it went untouched when the others were getting used, we added another litter we've used before, swheat scoop.

things are SO MUCH BETTER here i can't even believe it. we are at almost exactly three days (72 hours) since beginning operation clusterbox, and we have had exactly one accident that i know of (there could have been one in the first 48 hours in the dining room and i wouldn't have known it because the carpeting was still down and i didn't get down there touching actual fibers), and even that one was JUST behind one of the litter boxes so was probably just bad aim. they are consistently using the two shallow boxes.

the cats' room hardly smells at all and is very easy to clean both accidents and the litter boxes themselves. the dining room smells MUCH better; i tore up everything stained that i could yesterday, down to the floorboards, then used the get serious on the floors, but i couldn't get the last of the stained carpet out. my husband is home from his trip now and will take care of that, and then i can do one more pass with the get serious (which is AMAZING stuff that i cannot believe is not in every home in the world) and the blacklight to make sure that all the odor is out.

my stress, anxiety, frustration, and sadness levels, all of which were through the roof and really dominating every corner of my heart and mind for...well, for months or and parts of even *years*, are pretty much zero now, which is a feeling i haven't had in i can't remember how long. definitely years. i have great hope that we have seen the last of these problems and that the cats will live out their long and (i hope!) healthy lives with us.

i am smug.

and you know how i love to be smug.

a few days ago, someone on ravelry shared a url that was new to me: what the fuck should i make for dinner? smitten by the humor of the site, i checked it a couple of times for dinner ideas, but i finally decided last night that i would shop today and cook tonight. so i clicked until i saw something appealing, and BOY is it ever: stewed apples with macaroni and cheese. i know: stewed apples? wtf is that? but the ingredients sounded yummy, and i've been jonesing for some mac and cheese lately. so smug 1 = finding an awesome-looking dinner idea for a weeknight.

so i went to whole foods after the gym (well, after the yoga place, which was after the yarn shop, which was after the gym—i have been working a ton and decided that i could stand a long lunch today) (smug items 2, 3, 4, and 5 = going to the gym and having an excellent workout that did NOT result in a migraine—hooray—stopping for a few minutes at my favorite yarn shop and catching up with some friends—also hooray—stopping at the yoga place and not only getting the information i wanted about starting some classes but also troubleshooting some printing issues for the owner, and then getting to go to whole foods because whole foods). i picked up the ingredients, plus a few other things (because whole foods). i asked the cheesemonger (i love that there's a cheesemonger in my universe) for some advice on the gruyere, and he recommended a wonderful-looking one, and i asked him to shred it and he DID. so: smug items 6, 7, and 8 were getting cheese shredded and thereby not having to pull out a shredder or food processor to shred a bunch of cheese, finding ginger-something apples that are YUMMY and so my new favorite apples for cooking, and finding some fig jam to use for smug item 9, which will be grilled cheese, apple, and fig-jam sandwiches for lunch this week. i will even have leftover caramelized onions from tonight's dinner to add to said sandwiches. so that would be smug item 10.

smug item 11 = snacking on other delicious cheese while cooking. smug item 12 = finishing the cooking in like 40 minutes. and smug item 13 = eating this delicious delicious dinner. i am going to have to insist that you try this recipe because fabulous. pay no heed to the stick of butter and 10 oz. of cheese. you will love yourself for making this. and making yourself fat just gives you more of yourself to love when that happens.

pwned by yoga

had a frustrating first attempt at taking a yoga class today. i haven't taken any kind of group exercise class since i was maybe 11 years old, but i've wanted forever to take a yoga class, and today there was one at my gym right after my trainer appointment. i'd looked forward to it all week.

got into class, got my little spot—what an exercise in human behavior this was. everyone else seemed to know exactly what to do, to position their mats just so, to put their sticky mats on top of the gym-provided whatever-they're-called mats, to sit in the center of the mat just so while waiting for class to start. i did my best to just do whatever everyone else was doing. 

the beginning of class was super cool. the instructor was friendly and seemed approachable, soothing yet somehow also energetic, full of encouragement to smile and be happy while we were doing this. but. then the hard stuff started.

it isn't like i thought i'd be able to do everything everyone else was doing. my lower back still spasms painfully when i try to bend over too quickly or too far. but i had heard for years how group instructors are always really good about giving alternatives ("if this is too difficult, put your knee down" or "just go as far as you can"). 

although she said those kinds of things sometimes, they were never about the things that were hard for me or making my back freak out. so one frustration was in trying to keep up with instructions that i didn't understand or couldn't do as quickly as everyone else before she moved onto the next thing, but a lot of frustration was just feeling pain and not knowing the best adaptation to make to whatever everyone else was doing, so that i could be doing SOMEthing until they were ready to move onto the next thing.

plus, we spent a lot of time in downward-dog pose, which puts all your weight (at least, the way i experienced it) on your wrists, and my wrists are shit from working on a keyboard and mouse all day and knitting needles all evening and weekend. so i ended up cheating those poses into child pose sometimes instead. but the problem was that, if i found the pose sequence difficult or frustrating or painful the first time, repeating it five or six or eight times without giving me adaptations that would help was just making it five or six or eight times more difficult or frustrating or painful. and i wasn't interested in spending the whole hour in child pose (as awesome as child pose feels, it's pretty silly to do it in a room with a bunch of other people doing all kinds of other shit) (especially when those other people are clearly more advanced than me, doing even things that the instructor wasn't mentioning—definitely experienced yoga practitioners).

although i had gone into the class resolved to do my best and stick through the whole hour, i was so frustrated and humiliated and in such physical pain in both wrist and lower back that i finally gave up. i sprayed off my mats as quietly as i could, returned them to their original spots, and left. i kind of want to cry. i'm so angry that i couldn't keep up, but i'm also angry that the class couldn't accommodate a novice.

so. that happened. i'm so sad because i really wanted to incorporate this into my life. and before we got to the fast-moving ratatat business, i remember thinking, "wow! this is great! i should do this every day!"

oh well.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 profile!

i love lists. so, natch: 

one project i'm particularly proud of

the scarf i wove in one day in my first-ever attempt at weaving!

for both warp and weft, i used a skein of brooks farm trio, a double knitting–weight blend of wool, alpaca, and silk, in a colorway that made me swoon from the first time i laid eyes on it at maryland sheep and wool this spring. i adore it.

two mistakes i've made in the past

me? i never make mistakes! 

ha.

okay, srsly. the big decisions that might seem like mistakes all must have worked out okay in the end, because i wouldn't have ended up here with this life i love so much if they hadn't. so that leaves me with smaller mistakes. or mistakes that i don't regret having made, if only because they helped put me here. so one mistake i made that always makes me shake my head when i think about it is deciding to quit grad school just a few weeks shy of the end of the year. this is back in april 1989, when i was just 22 years old and in my first attempt at an advanced degree. i was studying justice, law, and society at the american university in washington, d.c. i'd done amazingly well in my first semester, crazy-good gpa, good friends, living in a tiny studio apartment in upper northwest d.c., and really liking what i was studying. but i was a financial idiot and hadn't planned or saved for living in this very expensive place on a stipend of—wait for it—$5,500 per year (the apartment rent was $497 per month, if that helps put that stipend into perspective). so, in addition to the 20 hours of research and teaching i was doing for two professors (to earn the stipend), i took on a part-time job at a nearby waldenbooks. and my studies began to slip. by april, i was panicked that i was going to get a c or worse in my statistics class (and a c in that program was, effectively, failing, as it required retaking the class). so i withdrew. just like that. i remember that the dean, jim fyfe, even tried personally to convince me not to quit. he had such good logic and was SO right. i wish i had listened to him. but i didn't. i quit my classes, finished out what parts of my assistantship i could, and started working full time at kramerbooks and afterwords. it was a superfun time—i commuted from a bus stop directly in front of my apartment down to dupont circle every weekday morning to open the store at 7 a.m., sold george shultz his daily paper, and got to handle some really interesting stock. and i had lunch at the not-cheap-but-so-delicious cafe that was part of the shop. and on weekends i spent all my time in museums and galleries. seriously. like, what an awesome life was that? i did it for two months, until camp started again, when i returned to my one true love of my pre-andrew life, camp kittamaqund. (okay, "one true love" is overstating it—i love my friends and family—but that place had a serious pull on me for many years. i still miss it.) 

anyway. so. quitting grad school was a decision i'll never think was a good one.

a second mistake. really i don't know. marrying geoffery was a mistake, but if i hadn't married him, i wouldn't have become who i am or ended up in pittsburgh to meet andrew and start the career i have now and love. so a mistake but not a regret? 

three things that make my work unique

what makes my crafting unique is that i have, i think, a knack for choosing colors that i love, so i usually end up loving the *look* of the things i make even if the things don't turn out to fit or work otherwise :) (that's another thing that makes my crafting unique: it frequently comes out terribly, terribly wrong. wrong as in wouldn't fit anyone ever.)

what makes my workwork unique is the speed with which i can finish, usually, though that's changing. it's changing first because my physical ability to do it quickly has been declining; the narcolepsy has kind of taken over in the past few years, and i can't work the strings of 14- and 16-hour days, nights, weekends, and holidays like i used to be able to do. i just can't. it's very frustrating, but i haven't figured out how to change it. (brb forgot to take my ritalin this morning) it's also changing because my managers have made it very clear that i need to slow down. lots of reasons for that, some more understandable to me than others, but, if one wants to keep one's job, as i do, one does what one's managers require. so.

and the third thing that makes my work unique, regardless of what kind of work we're talking about, is that i like variety. i like to have a lot of projects going at once and to switch among them. and i like to start projects. oh, how i like to start projects. and plan projects. i want to make and do all the things.

four tools i love to use

ipad. easy. i adore my ipad.

iphone. also easy. more useful in most ways than the ipad. i can take photos and video with it, of course make and receive phone calls with it (though i loathe talking on the phone), and use my one million apps on it. i use it constantly. never want to be without it.

my signature knitting needles. such a pleasure to use, truly one of the things that makes knitting such a delightfully tactile hobby.

and my hands. i have loved working with my hands since i was a little girl, starting with drawing and painting, moving on to needlepoint and cross-stitch, later piano, and now knitting, weaving, and sometimes even crochet. even cooking. it's all about tactility and adroitness.

five inspirations

ravelry has to be the top name on this list. every day i see projects, patterns, and yarns that give me ideas of things i want to make and use. it's like the iphone of my crafting life.

my body. been cold lately? make a shawl. wish you had that sweater in blue? (surprise) make one. back hurting? try yoga. or massage. or acupuncture. or a different chair. or a different desk. or whatever. whatever my body tells me, i try to listen.

my friends. especially my crafty friends at my local yarn shop, natural stitches. this is my main circle of friends in town here, primarily because they all like to do the crafty things i like to do, but also because, within that, they also like to think about the kinds of things i think about: fit, color, tactile properties. 

goodness. (that's a fourth source of inspiration, not an exclamation.) with workwork especially, my values and principles are right up there in the list of motivating factors, and goodness is primary among them. yes, plenty of my work is dry. but i try to focus on the ways in which my contributions are helping the efforts of my employer (a policy-analysis think tank) make the world better. at least for somebody. maybe i helped shipbuilders be more cost-effective. maybe i helped policymakers understand housing and relocation after katrina or no-fault car insurance. maybe i helped police forces understand how to attract and keep excellent police officers. whatever we're doing, i believe in what we do and try to focus on improving whatever we're contributing.

lately, health. i've been trying to live more healthily, which involves purchasing healthier foods (and, of course, spending more time exercising). i love seeing what's in season at my local farmers' markets and figuring out what to make with what i find. we're eating a lot more produce here, and i love that so much of it is local these days.