Rachael

I got a ukulele!

    My orange Mahalo Ukulele (chihuahua for scale)

I am SO excited. I didn’t even know I really wanted one. I mean, I saw Celia’s bass uke, and thought it was the coolest, but didn’t want to shell out the money for one right off the bat. I have a track record with instruments — I can pick out melodies badly on the fiddle. I can read music slowly and badly on the piano. I have played the same six or seven chords on the guitar my whole life and have never improved.

But the ukulele! It’s so not-intimidating! Only four strings, and it’s just so nice to me. Even if you hit a wrong chord, it’s pretty forgiving. I am having trouble with being able to play and sing at the same time, especially in a song with triplets like Crazy. The whole strumming thing is hard for me. But that will get better with practice, right?

I like how it just sits on my little desk next to my computer, so when the internets are being slow, I can just pick it up and play a little.

LOVING it.

In other news, I mopped. For some reason I always think the best time to do that is when it’s raining, which it is, and then I wait for an hour for the floors to dry.

And we went to the beach (before the mopping, thankfully), and I brought home a Harriet and a Sand Monster.

Imagine. Her whole body. Every, single time. Thank god for the Dyson.

The cats are good, for those of you send nice emails about them — Adah is still the neighborhood sweetheart, and Digit is still grumpy. He’s been grumpy since birth. But they’ve both finally recovered from the move (a year ago this week! Can you IMAGINE?) and they ignore the dogs as much as possible. Digit still gets in bed and sucks on the sheets. My big, grumpy boycat. Cat of my heart. I should go see if he wants in from this rain…..

UKE! Whee!

First things first: The Whoreshoes are playing in Santa Cruz this weekend! You should come! I’ll be sitting on the godkid somewhere in the audience, so I won’t be knitting that much, but me and my knitting will be there, and if you’re in the area, you should be, too!

Second: I’m seeing Merle Haggard and Neko Case at the Paramount tomorrow night. I am very excited. However, I’m not as excited as Lala, who stuttered last night, "It’s one of those things that I just can’t think about — what if it’s not real? I keep trying to forget it’s going to happen. Can’t think about it. Can’t think about it."

Third: You should go listen to the cutest new podcast, StashAndBurn. Nicole and Jenny do a bang-up job, and they made me giggle. Also, I was mentioned in the first episode, and OHMYGOD did Nicole make me blush. She also made the valid point that really, I hardly ever blog about knitting.

So fourth: Knitting. Sigh. I wish I had pics, but I’m at work, so nothing for you today. But I’ve ALMOST finished a lavender gansey. I’ve ripped the neck once, and redone it and I’m still not happy. I knit it bottom up in the round, attached the sleeves, and started a raglan decrease, thinking I’d just bind off when it felt right. Welp, it felt right too early. I put it on, and I practically had an off-the-shoulder gansey. While some might call that sexy, the folks that do also think belting an oversized sweater is sexy, and therefore they’re not invited to the sexy-knitting drink-up (which doesn’t exist, but SHOULD).

(Also, belting your knitting? Unless you’re 22 and sprig-like, it’s NOT okay. Even if you are, you’re only getting away with it because you could wear lycra overalls and get away with it. And more power to you. But I’m ready for this alarming trend to be over.)

Where was I? Oh, yes, the gansey. So I ripped, picked up, and started over, guessing I needed three more inches before ribbing the new collar. Did it, tried it on (I suppose I should have done that earlier), and it’s now too high. So it’s stuffed in my to-do box.

I also made a cute baby sweater and some booties for a coworker who’s meeting her baby for the first time today.

And I’m making socks, as usual. Also, after listening to that podcast yesterday, I had to dive in the stash and pull out some Kyoto from Artfibers, and I cast on for Stephanie’s one-row scarf, which looks FANTASTIC with this yarn. I hate knitting scarves, for the record. Don’t even wear them that much. But this, this is just knitting for knitting’s sake. Mmmmm.

And fifth: Enjoy your day.

There’s a guy at work who calls me that. That’s my name, to him. "SockKnitter!" he’ll yell when I enter the room. I like it.

And now I’m going to teach a class on sock knitting! There’s this great new-ish knitting studio called Knit-One-One in Emeryville, and I’m a teacher! You wanna learn how to throw a little lace panel in a pair of two-circular toe-up socks? Using your own yarn, any gauge, any size needle? You should come! (Plus there’s finger food and it’s the BEST atmosphere…. you’ll love it.)

Details here.

In other news, I am fighting the grumps. Or the gurmps, as I like to type. I really am more gurmpy than grumpy, actually. (And that thought cheers me, so it’s a light gurmp.) The stupid HOA asshat at our condo is being stupid, that’s all. I’m doing rather well with compartmentalizing my angst about him — I just wrote a long ole email addressing his concerns and I saved it as a draft. I’m at work (working my second 12 hour midnight shift of my weekend, sigh) , and I will mail it at 6am when I go home. This will prevent me from obsessively checking my email all night for his rambly 3am drunken return email. See? Good idea, huh?

But this nice thing: I was at the bank this afternoon (money, sigh….. As Janine says, and I paraphrase, if you have a problem that can be fixed with money, you don’t have a very interesting problem….) and there was a lovely fellow talking to the next teller. He was dressed in a long black suit-coat and charcoal pants. He had a tall black afro and a long silver beard. He said to the teller, "I had breakfast in Houston, and now I’m at the bank in Oakland."

She said, "In Houston! Wow!"

He said, "Can you imagine? What a time we live in, that we can move around like this now."

He laughed, and she laughed, and then he said, "I can’t wait to ride in the time machine."

Isn’t that a nice thing to overhear? I thought so.

 

I had the godchild with me last night while the Whoreshoes were off being big, big rockstars in SF last night (huge picture in SF Chronicle yesterday! Yay!).

I’d been at work all day, worrying about taking care of him — I had to get him to sleep quickly, so that I could go to sleep also. Joni would come to pick him up around 1:30am, and I’d get up for work 3 hours later. And dude, it was stressing me out. I mean, I had to go home and take care of a BABY! On a work night! And of course, a coworker told me, "Don’t worry, I think he’s too old to worry about SIDS."

GREAT. I hadn’t thought of that, but now I was worried.

Then we had an 18 month old die in a horrible way (I work fire/medical dispatch, in case you’re just browsin’ here), and I decided I wouldn’t sleep EVER when he was around.

But I couldn’t do that, of course. I would have to suck it up and Be Brave.

Joni brought Dylan over about 7pm when I got home from work. I was going to put him down to sleep about 9, and then follow him to bed about 10pm (getting up at 4:30am to work makes my eyelids droop early). I gave him a bottle, wrapped him in his blankets (she still swaddles him, which he loves), and tucked him in our bed, surrounding him with pillows so he wouldn’t roll off. He was asleep within thirty minutes, minimal fussing, no crying. Then I got in bed a bit later and proceeded to watch him breathe. I watched that child like he was tight-roping in his onesie across Niagara Falls.

But I drifted off and woke up a few minutes later. The HORROR! Was he okay? Touched him, felt his breath. Oh, thank god, he was fine. Lather, rinse, repeat. I did this for a LONG time, sleeping in three or four minute bursts. Then I spent a long time waking up every time he would slither up to the top of the bed which he did every fifteen minutes or so. I’d drag him down and reposition him and go back to sleep until he frog-kicked his way back up again.

That boy got a lot of sleep last night. I did not, and OHMYGOD, how do you people do it?

I did have a stunning moment of clarity at work yesterday, when I realized that the reason that no one was really bowled over with my Big News that I had to watch a BABY after work was that they all HAD kids at home, and some had infants. They were remarkably tolerant of me, actually. They did that each day, every day. It was as if I’d gone up to any regular working person and exclaimed, "Oh, my god, I have to work ALL DAY tomorrow! Can you imagine? All day!"

I remain amazed by mothers. Y’all are crazy, and you’re doing a good job.

No, really!

ATHENS: A group of Greek nuns abandoned their convent and
went into hiding after running up debts of more than 600,000 euros
(396,000 pounds) from a knitting business that went bust, authorities
said on Tuesday.

(Link)

This is not, nor will it EVER be, a food blog, mostly because that would be truly sad for y’all. I consider hard-boiling eggs a particular talent. You get the picture.

But last night, I had a MAJOR triumph. While in Trader Joe’s earlier this week, I picked up a bag of precut yams. Yams. I hate yams, and sweet potatoes, and most squashes, things like that. But I was driven by the desire to actually learn how to cook vegetables, and not just spinach, green beans, or broccoli.

So I bought the yams. Last night I took them out of the bag and got out the How To Cook Everything book. Yeah, nothin’. It basically said that yams suck (and aren’t the same thing as sweet potatoes) and when cooked, are too dry to eat, maybe I should use them in a soup. What?

So I turned to the never-fail Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian. Yams = NOTHING.

I decided to go it alone. This has resulted, in the past, in tears and entire casseroles dumped right into the trash can. But I dropped the yams on a cookie sheet, chopped two cloves of garlic, dumped that on top, added some salt and pepper, poured on a liberal amount of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, tossed it in a 400 degree (F) oven, and baked them for 30 minutes.

They were WONDERFUL. That How To Cook Everything guy has NO idea. I forgot to turn them while cooking, so they were crispy and dark on the bottom, and soft in the middle, sweet and tart from the vinegar.

I was just so PROUD of them, that I made something healthy, out of my own brain. I also made some spinach (sauteed with olive oil and garlic until it wilts, lemon on top) and heated up some lentils and rice (Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe, see above book ref, YUM), and had a perfect dinner.

Good god! I also made muffins (that turned out well) with oat bran and flax seed meal (see last post’s comments for a world of suggestions)! Who am I becoming? What is this?

(yay)