Lick My Sticks

So much to post about!

OK, first…MY SECRET PAL RULES. I got my final “reveal” package yesterday. Here she is! Annie sent me a great final package, I love everything! She knit and felted me this AWESOME little skully bag (like a mini version of the one my SIL made me) and I’m totally using it today.

She gave me a circ holder (which I needed!), a bag of necessities (which I also needed, I’ve lost all my holders and stitch markers!), two balls of Debbie Bliss love, and of course the rockin felted bag. Thank you SO much Annie, you were a GREAT pal!!!

This past week we’ve been trying to get out and do fun stuff. Last weekend, Zoe danced in full regalia in the Mashpee Wampanoag PowWow (DH’s family is native) and she couldn’t possibly have looked more perfect. Zoe herself is Narragansett and MicMac between her dad and I, which I believe explains why she tans so beautifully. My nephews were also all decked out in native pride with their breech cloths, handwoven belts, moccasins, and mohawks. Behold the cute:

We’ve also been bummin’ around the beach. Apparently we picked a day when the UV index was likened to the surface of the sun and me and the DH are burned all over. BUT it was fun.

As for the Craftster Craft Challenge? I won! Yay!

I also thought I’d show off my awesome I Love My Yippie Little Dog Swap stuff!! My partner ruled, LOOK at this!

It’s a freakin’ dog teepee…or at least it was…

In closing, I was up until 5:30 am setting up my Ravelry. For those who are waiting, it is SO worth the wait. And my advice: sit down, take pics and catalog your stash, wip’s, and FO’s. Get all the pics on a Flickr account. This takes FOREVER and had I done it ahead of time I could have gotten to the fun playing around faster!

And since I have lovely pictures of my WIP’s now, here’s an update:

Adrianna’s Sweater:

Central Park Hoodie:

Hooded Scarf:

Branching Out v2:

And the languishing…

Jaywalker:

Damn Sock 2, victim of SSS:

Well, that’s it for me for today. Off to shower and get outside for a while and knit. I will leave you with my beautiful Zoe after her dance recital last month:

Yesterday, Zoe and I walked to our neighborhood main library branch to sign Zoe up for her very fir…very second library card. She signed up for the summer reading program that consists of fun activities three days a week and me convincing Zoe that reading every day is going to be fun. So far, it’s working.

This challenge of getting Zoe to read and enjoy chapter books left me looking for a good reading list for kids going into the third grade. A few Google searches later and I was squealing to my husband over familiar titles I had long forgotten about. She is currently reading Beezus and Ramona…a great place to start on chapter books, I think!
SO, in an attempt to solicit your beloved childhood reading memories, I give you the titles now scribbled into my library notebook for Zoe’s potential summer reading.

• Mr. Popper’s Penguins – Richard Atwater
• Superfudge – Judy Blume
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roahl Dahl
• Indian in the Cupboard – Lynne Reid Banks
• Sarah, Plain and Tall – Patricia Maclachlan
• Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing – Judy Blume
• Encyclopedia Brown (all of them) – Donald J Sobol
• Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
• Ramona The Pest, Age 8, etc – Beverly Cleary
• Freckle Juice – Judy Blume
• Amelia Bedelia (all) – Peggy Parish

And perhaps a little later in life I will give her my treasured, worn, well-loved copy of Harriet The Spy. Just not yet.

www.icanhascheezburger.com

You’re welcome.

First and foremost…I have been panicking over getting this blog back online. See I don’t have plastic at the moment making online payment damn impossible. The days waiting for Jon’s new card have dragged by while I hyperventilated. Then today I looked at my email from POE Web Hosting to see if there was anything about the site getting deleted and THERE WAS. I almost cried. I emailed them back in desperation to find out if my site had been deleted. Not only did they email me back right away, they told me everything was fine and put the blog back up and told me to pay them when I get the new card. Can you believe that? What other webhost would do that? Patrick and POE Hosting, I am forever your slave!

So if ANY of you are considering doing a pay blog (fed up with the free ones?) I can’t recommend these guys enough! Their Wordpress hosting is only $5.00 a month. You can pay by the month or ahead of time and they give you wordpress and ftp included. It’s fucking awesome and dirt cheap. They do all kinds of hosting and even domain names for cheap.

www.poehosting.com

OK, onto the blog! I’ve actually been spinning again. And I took my first stab at Kool-Aid dying. I was laying around watching TV one night and got the overwhelming urge to spin. So I grabbed my drop-spindle and started back on my wool/alpaca blend. I’m spinning it thin so I can try plying it.

While I was spinning I thought “I should try dying something”. Mind you it was 11:30 at night…this didn’t stop me. I used some purple and red Kool-Aid (probably a bad idea) and went to town.

 The color came out a rusty red, which would be fine if it covered all the yarn and was brighter. I wound it into a ball last night and noticed white spots, so I’m going to use about 6 packages of Cherry on it this weekend, I think that will make it come out great. I’ll post pictures!I haven’t done too much knitting in the last few weeks, I’ve been busy with school and my increasing beer/show habit. I did however finish a new dishcloth. I haven’t used them yet…babysteps…We had a nice Halloween week, I threw my friends a free keg party Saturday and my house has yet to recover. I’ve washed my floors laboriously and they’re still sticky and smell of beer. Things (including a friend’s head) were broken, and we had a LOT of crashers. (No drunk driving deaths, thankyou!) You can see the photos here. I’d say the best costumes we had were my sister in law Allison dressed as our friend George:
TJ’s…woodsman bum or whatever…(he had an electrical cord belt and a squirrel on his shoulder…hilarious.)
Tom’s terrorist:

And I didn’t get a picture of it, but Sean attached hair to his palms, wore big sunglasses and had a rag in his back pocket. If you don’t get it…well, you probably have a classier sense of humor.

Monday night I went to my favorite scumbag metal bar (O’Briens in Allston) for the Pre-Halloween Massacre. The night was a blur of drunken mayhem. Local bands did full sets of covers (it’s an annual event). This year there were The Misfits, Motorhead, Impetigo, Carnivore, Mercyful Fate…

For the photo album, click here.

The Kids on Halloween night:

There’s the Zoecorn, Superman Stevie, Woody David, and Timmy Lightyear. Too cute. Jon and I drove down to Quincy, Zoe’s dad met us at my parent’s place to take Zoe out trick or treating. Jon and I snagged my little brother and went to see Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby at the dirt theater in Quincy center.I hope everyone had a great Halloween!I’ve got a lot of knitting projects in mind, and I’m getting the “itch” back so expect some more of that soon!

I thought that today I would post my own 9/11 story, what I was doing that day, how it felt. But, I’m not really sure that it would matter, because you all felt the same way. You all went through it.

What most sticks out in my mind from that day are these two things.

1- My mom flew out that morning to Washington DC. She couldn’t call out of her hotel room or use her cellphone. She watched the fire at the pentagon from her hotel window. The hours between waking up to find my father staring with a pale face at the television and the moment we heard from her that she was alright were an excersize in control. I knew she had flown out before the ill-fated plane or whatever it was, so I had at least that piece of mind, but in the back of my and my father’s head…we were scared.

2. It was my boyfriend Glenn’s birthday that day. I was making him a cake while I watched the towers fall. He was working in Boston and left when he heard we had been attacked. He had band practice that night, and after a long day of watching the news and talking about what would happen next, we left for Hanson, MA. It was a back-road route to the music complex, and as we moved into side streets I saw the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

There were people, families, neighbors, friends…all lining the sidewalk with candles, flags and signs. I don’t think one of us spoke, we honked and waved. I brushed tears from my face while I watched these people do the same. I cried for a week after that in front of the television. It wasn’t really until I saw those people all together like that, that I realized the gravity of the situation.

5 years later, we’re arguabley no safer than we were before. We’ve been kept in constant fear by our leader and our media to shove us behind a war in Iraq that was UNjustifiable and we still have not caught the man who orchestrated the murder of so much innocent life. Our president had an amazing opportunity to finally unite our uniformly divided nation and bring this country, this amazing country, together. He blew it. He called critics of the Iraq war unpatriotic and threw up fences between the right and left. He used 9/11 to push every single agenda and kept.us.afraid.

I am not afraid. I read, I was there when you said Saddam was involved with 9/11, then when you said “we never said that”. I was there when you ignored decorated army generals when they begged you for more troops and told you the real battle would come AFTER Saddam’s empire fell and you told us “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”. And I’m here now when you say you’re “spreading democracy” by appointing YOUR hand-selected officials and allowing torture to be used in prisons. I am still here, and eventually this country won’t go on with their index fingers in their ears. Come 2008, things are going to change. We owe it to the people that fell 5 years ago today, to change.