Socks on a train!

Curiously, people don't like to sit next to me on the train when I'm knitting with DPNs...go figure!

This is the second sock, so I'm on the way to having a pair. Yay! Because guess what? I have TWO feet! Which makes socks coming in pairs rather HANDY, ya know what I mean?

Hellish week so far. Looking forward to it being over. Also looking forward to the paaycheck! Hooray for overtime!!!

(sent from my Treo)

At long last, the Stitches report!

We’ll start with the frugal-ly stuff: A whack of, get this, “generic superwash Merino Nylon.”

That’s right. Generic superwash.

And loads of it.



This is, of course, from Newton’s Yarn Country. I always make one of my very first stops their booth, because of their super-steep discount prices on things like this (and tendency to sell out of the “good” colors early on in the day).

It’s decent sock yarn, but not super-sexy. The colors tend to be basic. The variety is limited. The packaging can be a little bare-bones.

But the value is undeniable. For example, the one variegated brown skein? That would be roughly 1,600 yards of sock-weight yarn…for $17. The average pair of socks takes between 400 and 450 yards, so this skein represents up to four pairs of socks, for $17.

Awesome.

So I gobbled up the brown, and the bright purple, and then I saw the black and went, That could come in handy! and snatched three fat skeins off the table. (All the rest of those colors were gone not three hours later. Woot!)

Then I stopped by Purrfectly Catchy Designs for these:



Aaaaand these:



Yes. Those are pirate-themed stitch markers. Arrrrrrrr!

Now, this vendor was new to me: Miss Babs. She had a beautiful booth with so.many.colors. Everything, though, was pretty much laceweight or sock yarn, two things that all kidding aside…I’ve got plenty of already in the stash.

But then she had this green.



…and even though I had just gotten through saying, “You have enough sock yarn. For Pete’s sake, no more sock yarn!”…I bought more sock yarn.

Eh, whaddya gonna do…?

Of course I stopped by Lisa Souza’s booth. I needed a bunch of Better Than Basic brown sock yarn (yes, I know I already had lots of sock yarn, but this is a specific project that needs, like, four massive skeins of the stuff), so I got that (it’s called Chocolate)…



…and then got attacked by a skein of Joseph’s Coat.



It looks disheveled because I keep petting it. Nice sock yarn…niiiiiice sock yarn…who’s a pretty skein? YOU ARE! Yes you ARE!

Ahem. Sorry. Lost hold of my dignity for a second there. Yes. Moving on.

I knew Rabbitch was coming to Stitches…but darned if I could find her. I even got a market guide and looked, but couldn’t find her.

I wondered if I was crazy.

But I was sure she’d totally said she was coming this year.

I worried that maybe there had been a horrible mistake at the airport. That she’d been stopped by customs and was being held without her knitting in some miserable dank cell with only the American version of Olympic coverage to entertain her.

OhmyGAWD, the horror!!!

But then I found her, and the Toe Jam.

And lo, it was good.



Naturally, I got more sock yarn. Even though I already had, what, 600,000 yards of it in my bag. My camera is making these much more blue than they really are; “revenge” is a lovely rich red-dominated bunch of passion, and SF3 is actually more black than blue.

Oh, and that stuff in the background? That’s the laceweight I wasn’t going to buy because I am already drowning in laceweight but then there was this lovely subtly-shifting blue called Cornflower and I said oh, what the heck! and bought it.



The other thing I never thought I would buy I also bought here, from the lady Rabbitch was sharing the booth with – a darning egg.



All these years later, I am still a sucker for knotwork. I’ve never thought I’d actually buy a darning egg, because usually I just…well.

You know how kids are always acquiring balls? Little ones, big ones, medium ones?

Yeah. They, uh, they work pretty darned well as darning eggs.

So do plastic Easter egg shells – you know, the ones that will soon be dotting the landscape all across the world?

And with four kids, I never have a shortage of these things. Hand me a sock that needs repairs, and I can probably reach under whatever I’m sitting on at that exact moment and find something that works just fine for darning it.

But this was just so stinkin’ adorable that I bought it.

And that was about it. Unfortunately, the stuff I was actually looking for, nobody had (Baby Ull, again for a specific project); or, didn’t have in the altogether too narrow range of my desired price-to-awesomeness ratio.

If the yarn was right, the price was way wrong; if the price was right, the yarn was wrong.

Someday, I’d love to be the kind of knitter who can walk in and drop three hundred clams on the yarn for one (1) project…but that day is certainly not today.

Tomorrow doesn’t look good, either.

Every year, the market seems to have a ‘theme’ of some sort. One year, it seemed everything was sport weight; another, everything was worsted.

This year, it seemed like the keyword was “superwash.” Sock and lace weights were all the rage; and the sport-and-up offerings just really didn’t do a whole lot for me.

And the bargain bins were, on the whole, disappointing for me. It wasn’t that there wasn’t good quality stuff in there, or that the prices weren’t good – it was mostly a matter of colors.

Bright oranges and yellows make me look like I was bitten by a zombie and am well on my way to joining the Unsavory Undead.

Because naturally, I don’t look like one of the cool undead. No sparkly vampire over here, oooooh no, when I start looking like something that has passed back from beyond the grave, I’ve got that gray-tinged ‘something you found under a rock’ look. Nice.

And it seemed like every color in those discount bins was some kind of awful for me. Feh.

And then I got tired. Really, really tired. I even started getting cranky! So, I did end up coming home with a bit over a hundred bucks of my Stitches budget still safely tucked in my wallet.

Which felt really weird but, you know, hey. I’m not going to spend it just to spend it. It was hard to save up, I don’t want to blow it on something I don’t really want just because I could.

I think doing that would bring me out in hives.

Undead looking ones, to boot.

HAIL?!

Oh. Emm. Gee.

Twenty minutes ago: Partially sunny.

Now: Hail blanketing the yard. Fat rain drops. Thunder. Lightning.

What the hey, Mama Nature? Did somebody take Your name in vain? Diss on your mad powers?

..weird, weird, weird...

(sent from my Treo)

The morning after the night before

Well, we did it. The data has safely left out hands (for the moment) and is currently somebody else’s problem.

For a few hours, anyway.

Last night, I “slept” exactly the same way a fireman would “sleep” in a halfway house for unrepentant pyromaniacs. I had not exactly forgotten but perhaps neglected to fully grok the implications of the following facts:

1. My husband also works for MegaBank
b. and is in the same department,
iii. and is furthermore a developer.

My responsibilities as an analyst are pretty much limited to checking results, which means that I’m one of the people with long gaps between frantic activities. I was done with my part by 11:00 last night, and not expected to log back in to check things until 2:00 a.m. 3:00 a.m. 4:00 a.m., when the load would definitely should probably could possibly be finished.

Himself, on the other hand, was the guy to call if things simply stopped working altogether. He is the master of the server that automates the testing. It would not be acceptable for him to sort of sleep through an alert, because it would mean that the whole entire mess would grind to an unseemly halt and then bad things would happen and, who knows, the entire global banking system might grind to a halt because he has Super Sleeping Powers.

Which he totally does. I got up at 3:30 this morning so I could start watching for The Email. I turned on my desk light. I was typing on the keyboard, softly at first but then as I realized that honestly I could have been installing new tile in there and he wouldn’t have noticed, I went ahead and started whacking away like I usually do, 100 words a minute right on the tips of my fingernails.

To which he went, “…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…”

Then I flipped on the main light, because my desk light was giving me a headache.

“…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…”

And then it was 5:30 and his cell phone was having seizures and nearly vibrating off the side table, so I started going, “TIM! GET UP! YOU’VE GOT MAIL! DUDE! WAKE…UP!!!!!!”

“…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…”

Honestly. Where can I get some of those Super Sleeping Powers? Because all night long, his Blackberry was going, “Duh-dun-dun-duh, brrrrring!!!” to announce that yet another email had been received. Combined with my laptop sitting quietly in the corner going, “:bing-bong!:” every time I got a new email (because one of them would ostensibly be my team’s developer telling me that the data was loaded and to please start chucking numbers around like a crazy person), well.

Yeah.

I doubt I got two hours of contiguous sleep last night.

But after our last “checking in” meeting at 9:00 this morning, things got almost relaxing. I cleaned out my corporate inbox, which had gotten backed up with almost two hundred messages over the last 48 hours. Tidied up my code, putting in those comments about what is where and why that I know I’ll appreciate in a few months when somebody asks me to run this thing again. Did a little more in-depth analysis on our results, isolating the things that made me go, “hmmm…” but not “OHMYGAH, STOP THE PRESSES, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!”

Got some breakfast. Made more coffee. Took some cold medicine. Argued with the cat about who actually owns the alpaca shawl.

She won.



Temporarily.

Eventually, she’ll need to use the litter box or something and then bwahahahahaha, it will be mine once more.

And now, I’m breaking off for “lunch,” by which I mean “cleaning up my bedroom, which looks like the unrepentant pyromaniacs invited their rabid rioter friends over for a party.”

Because that’s my life, people: One never-ending rollercoaster of constant excitement…

It’s an awesome kind of awful

Tonight we’re doing a Very Large Data Migration Thingee. It’s a gazillion-step process, much of it manual, with long periods of computers managing things very nicely all on their own interspersed with frantic activity on the part of humans to make sure those things were, in fact, handled correctly.

Several team members will literally be up all night, checking the progress on things, sending emails to people, occasionally perhaps calling someone at Wicked O’Clock to say, “Hate to say this, dude, BUT…your house is on fire. Just kidding. But your database is totally hosed. Just thought you’d like to know…”

It’s exciting stuff. And nerve-wracking stuff, too. Basically, tonight is The Night…when my team finds out whether everything they’ve been diligently working on for the last two years works…or doesn’t.

It’s a one, or a zero. Work, or fail.

Do…or do not…there is no ‘try’…

Coming so late to the party, I don’t have nearly the level of nerves the rest of my team is experiencing tonight. (Being a contractor helps, too – my career isn’t exactly on the line, here…nor is my bonus check, or my annual raise, or whether or not I end up on BBC 2 doing the news in Welsh for the rest of my life…) (which would be some trick, seeing as how my command of the Welsh language is what might be considered extremely limited...where ‘extremely’ means ‘completely’ and ‘limited’ means ‘as in none at all’)

I also don’t have the duty of actually sitting up all night staring at the screen hitting “refresh” every so often to see where the process is now…how about now…aaaaand now?…I see, I see…OK…um…NOW?

Mine are more along the lines of “go to bed for a few hours until things are finished and someone calls to say, ‘Hey, Tama, check this, will ya?’ – and then spend an hour or so frantically running tests to see if New(x) = Old(x), how many counts are in what buckets and fire off a whack of emails.

The fun and excitement, it never ends!

The last time I had to do something like this, though, I had to do it in the office. I was literally in the office all night long – arrived at 5:30 on a Wednesday morning, stayed clear through until 4:00 Thursday afternoon.

And then had to drive my sleep-deprived, grouchy backside (and the rest of me, too) up to Walnut Creek to take a final exam because oh yeah, I was still finishing my stupid bachelor’s program.

This time, I can do my geek-thing right here from the comfort of my Den. I can jump into bed when I’ve got those long blocks of ‘do nothing.’ Take a shower, or watch TV for a while. Read, knit, blog…all things that weren’t possible in Migration Thingee times of yore.

The pups in the office are whining and yelping about having to stay up late or getting up early tomorrow; me, I’m just grateful that when I have to get up at Even Wickeder Than Usual O’Clock tomorrow morning, it isn’t two hours earlier than that because I have to drive into the office before I can get my job done.

I just have to waddle to my Command Center, four feet from my bed.

My gawd, but do we ever have it good in these modern times of ours.

Because yessir, back in the day? We had to do these migrations by hand. Barefoot. In the snow. Uphill both ways, to boot.

Heh.

Makes me wonder, though: What will the pups of today be grateful for when they’re my age – which isn’t that old in human terms, mind you, but in Computer Years I’m, like, a dinosaur?

Will the old timers (you know, the thirty-somethings) of tomorrow be all, We only had DSL, too, none of this insta-optics stuff you kids have now…?

And will the pups of Then will look at them, maybe roll their eyes and say, What’s DSL? and then the oldster will have to try to explain the concept of a wired system of communications…?

I can’t even imagine what the Pups of Then will be telling their tailgating generation, when whatever irritation has developed in the computing world by then comes up.

…but I have to imagine it will be something mind-numbingly awesome…why, sonny, when I was your age, we didn’t HAVE site-to-site teleportation, nossir! We had to DRIVE to get places…

Money Monday: March 1, 2010

I’ve been hearing two words uttered an awful lot these last few weeks: Frugal fatigue.

People (I hear) are getting awful darned tired of this whole “frugal” thing.

Small wonder, really. For one thing, most people didn’t wake up one morning and suddenly say to themselves, Gracious, you know what I want to do? I want to start living within my means! I want to start watching all my pennies! I want to start living frugally!

Most of the folks driven into the loving arms of the frugal lifestyle in the last couple years were whipped into it by the scourges of unemployment, slashed credit lines and, if and when they were fortunate enough to find work again, reduced pay.

Not many of us want to be forced to do anything; I certainly know that whenever I’m forced to do something, I’m pretty pissy about it – and resent it, and drag my feet on it, and whine and occasionally plant my feet firmly and flat-out refuse to do it.

Even if it’s good for me. Even if I know it’s good for me.

When we first started living below our means all those years ago, we weren’t too happy about it. We spent a lot of time thinking about what we’d buy as soon as this pesky debt-thing was over. Before we got serious about our issues, we were pretty into the instant gratification thing – it was really hard to see something cool and walk away from it. It was hard to eat at home when there was a party always happening at the pub; especially considering that I could burn water back in those days.

But, we had a very tight budget, because we were very serious about making the shortest work possible of our debt reduction. It was, in fact, a complete unsustainable budget – something I didn’t understand in those days, because as is typical for me I completely forgot that we are human beings.

With, you know, emotions and some junk like that.

The budget we had contained precisely zero in mad money. No allowance for movies, or a drive through the country, let alone a weekend getaway. It was all business, all the time.

Aaaaaand it didn’t work out too very well.

We’d do really well for a few weeks, or even a couple months – and then we would do something so extravagantly stupid that we’d undo all the hard work of those preceding weeks.

Then we’d beat up on ourselves and make anti-doing-that-again vows and blame each other and start all over.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finally, one morning after the weekend before, while I was banging my head on my desk wondering why, why, why are we such a pair of loser-nitwit-moron-idiots, it dawned on me what was happening: The severe austerity of the lifestyle inflicted on us by the All Important Budget was too much for us. We just couldn’t go that long without getting a little something for ourselves. The pressure would build and build and build until suddenly, BANG!

It got released, usually in a single spasm of absolute irresponsibility…because I never allowed for the fact that humans need more than food, water and shelter.

When you’re talking about a day in, day out, week after week, month after month, continual process…human needs start to expand. We have creative needs, emotional needs, needs for beauty and entertainment and community.

Many of those things can be gotten without spending money. It doesn’t cost anything to sit on a park bench and talk to a friend. The library can feed my story-habit for no cash outlay on my part, and a brisk walk in the sunshine does more for my black moods than a fistful of pills.

But when it comes to the things that tend to rouse our passions and engage our emotions, well, they frequently have price tags dangling from them. My knitting involves tools, from patterns to yarns, that are going to cost cash money. My husband’s love of music results in a constant stream of envelopes containing sheet music. A quilter is going to need fabric; a painter will need brushes and canvas and paint.

Money is a numbers game, sure, and is therefore subject to rather logical rules that make few allowances for mushy stuff like “feelings.” I may feel that 2 + 2 ought to equal something other than four for my convenience just this once, but math is kind of inflexible on these things.

When it comes to finances, it’s all about math…except that finances are what enable our very human, and therefore very emotional and feelings-laden, lives.

When we’re settling in for a long financial haul, I really feel it’s important to remember that we are not machines. We are not able to just go and go and go, endlessly, without a pause to refresh. There comes a point where a want does become a need…even if it isn’t something that is physically required to keep our body alive.

It’s a good idea, therefore, is to anticipate those emotionally-charged moments, to plan for them…and to then be able to enjoy them joyfully when they arrive.

And to head off major disasters by letting off a little steam at regular intervals along the way. A date night once a month, or a new book, or a new outfit.

Note the ‘or’ statement there. Not “all of the above.” Not “every little thing my heart desires.”

Choose wisely, and carefully, with a keen eye for value and always keeping in mind what the reality of your financial situation is. You don’t want to throw away your future or wreck your chances at success; that would lead to happy feeling gone, which is the exact opposite of what we’re trying to get to here.

But do set aside some money each month in your budget for “fun,” and then ask yourself what things make you feel the most alive, what captures your heart and mind, what makes you sit up straight and go, “Ooooooh!”?

That’s where this money should go, to that one thing that makes you feel really, really good.

Extreme budgets are all well and good for short-term fixes, to maybe clamp down on arterial bleeds and get yourself back in the black again after disaster has struck. And obviously, I’m big on controlling your spending whenever you can.

But when it comes to the longer haul, when you settle in to chip away at a mountain of debt or stockpile a nest egg to get you through a long retirement, I truly feel that by giving yourself the gift of carefully feeding your emotional / creative passions along the way, without letting them run away with you and drag you down into a morass of regret by putting those rational limits on them, you can help yourself meet your long-term goals.

You can overcome frugal fatigue, without having to fall back into spendthrift ways.

Reporting live from the sitting-down area...

This is my Sock In Progress - back on the road with me again. Austermann Step "mit Aloe Vera und Jojoba Ol."

There will be no livin' with me, now that I've figured out how to post these crap-tastic pictures from my Treo.

Only three hours in, and I am already sitting feet-up in the relative calm of the hallway, wimpering over an extra large triple-shot mocha.

But no whipped cream, please - I'm on a diet.

Photography is forbidden on the market floor, so you'll have to just envision a crush of knitters, crocheters, spinners and weavers swarming booths jammed to overflowing with pure Awesome.

It's worth getting over any fear/dislike you may have around crowds.

I got some beautiful stuff, and some cost-effective stuff, and some whimsical stuff. Since nobody has the Baby Ull that was on my shopping list (or anything comparable at a reasonable 'gift for coworker's Impending Arrival' price-point) (if the price is right, the yarn is wrong; if the yarn is right, the price is GAH!!!!), I think I might be about ready to wrap it up and head home.

Except...I still have $100. (I'm not sure how. It certainly wasn't because I was being particularly cautious, goodness knows.)

I think there might be a law about leaving it in my wallet. After all, when I entered the withdrawal in Quicken, I clearly categorized it as Yarn:Personal.

I think Quicken automatically reports that to the IRS.

Yeah. Better get back in there and keep things honest.

After I finish my coffee. And maybe the heel flap of the Sock In Progress. And my Super-Sized Prescription Motrin kicks in...dudes...the walking,the crouching over discount bins, the beating other knitters away from the 60%-offf cashmere with a New York phonebook-sized book titled something like "The Loving Craft of Knitting"...really hard on my achy old hip joints...

Nailed the landing!

I finished seaming up the sweater tonight.

Then I tried to take a picture of myself wearing it.

Then I gave up and took a picture of it all by itself.

Because the bedspread doesn’t reflect stuff behind it, like, say, the result of the primary housekeeper not keeping house for two weeks because she was busy with something else.

Like the knitting Olympics, for example.

Ahem. ANYWAY! Ta da!!




This was a pleasant knit with a nice result; no errors in the pattern. I went for the small size, because it seemed to me that the medium was going to be too big on me – I think I was right. The small is a touch snug, especially for something that is so form fitting; but if I hadn’t messed with the measurements, it would have been way too long in the sleeve and the overall length. This hits right above mid-thigh on me, and the sleeves are long enough to be doing that flare-thing as shown in the pattern, but not so long that I’m constantly having to twitch at them.

I’ll just have to remember to stand up straight and suck in my gut a bit. That ‘silhouette’ shaping on it is pretty unforgiving to those of us who slouch.

Now, my husband doesn’t think it goes with jeans, though. Humph. What does he know, everything has to go with jeans, they’re about all I own goes with jeans.

The yarn (Rowan Cashsoft) is nice and soft, moderate in warmth (which is nice for California)… but I have a sinking feeling it’s going to pill like the very devil. I’m hoping I’m wrong, but I’ve already had to shave a few little jewels off of it, before it was even finished or washed – shoot, before I’d even soaked it for the blocking! BUT, according to the label, it can be machine washed…which, mind you, I do with just about all my hand knits including the ‘hand wash only’ ones, trusting my fancy front loader’s ‘hand wash / silk’ setting for even my alpaca lace shawls.

Hasn’t failed me yet (she said confidently, thus ensuing that the next thing she tries to wash that way comes out feeling like an Army surplus blanket).

Well, I’d better get to bed. Thanks to the rain, I’m heading to Stitches market tomorrow; can’t pull weeds, might as well go fishing for wool!

Rainy days are perfect for wool-fishery. I hear they really bite when the rain is coming down good and hard. Probably have five, six big old skeins jump right into my market bag, you wait and see…

Logic like Vulcan, cute like kitty

This is Eldest, eating ACTUAL FOOD.

She talked me into this tonight. The middle school was having a Baja Fresh / Coldstone fundraiser tonight.

I had diced the remains of last night's chicken, ready to become a casserole. And it was going to be CROWDED, and EXPENSIVE, and NOISY...

"But mommy," Eldest said, in her best 'I am about to use your own words against you' voice. "You SAID you would do the next fundraiser onceyou had a paycheck..."

Sigh. She runs rings around me logically.

As usual.

Also pretty darned cute. The way she wrinkles her nose and giggles when her victory is complete?

ADORABLE.

(The second sleeve is done! just need to block it and assemble! WOOT!!!)
(sent from my Treo)

Day 15

Stayed up way too late. House looks like bomb went off in a dump. Children going feral. NEARLY OUT OF BEER!!!!

But, am shaping sleeve cap and should finish second sleeve on the train home tonight! Olympic blog button, you are MINE...

(sent from my Treo)

Day Twelve

Well. Today has been one of those fun kind of days. To make a long story short…the main freeway (“main” being pronounced “only”) between my house and the East Bay was shut down by an accident involving a crane and some power lines.

I had planned to take ACE but missed my train…due to knitting needles.

The good news is, I noticed I had misplaced the #6s I’m using for the sweater before I was on the train and it was too late and I’d lost my entire four hour block of knitting time. I think I might have cried, right there in front of God and everybody. And/or screamed, and/or cussed, and/or required medication.

The bad news, of course, is that I noticed I had misplaced the #6s I’m using for the sweater before I was on the train and it was too late…and therefore spent too much time looking for them and missed the blasted thing.

They were under my knitting chair; obviously, I only thought I put them safely away in my knitting bag last night before bearing the first sleeve triumphantly to my bedroom only to realize that I couldn’t block it right then and there because I use my bed for blocking (the pins go through the blocking pad into my comforter, which I find to be perfectly acceptable but which makes The Lady My Mother look at me with that pained expression that clearly asks, Where did I go wrong?) and I kinda needed it fairly soon.

So, obviously, I found them...and then learned about the freeway closure and, since the freeway being closed makes driving a tad on the challenging side (just a tad), I decided to work from home today.

Now, you would think that working from home would mean more knitting time, because that would mean that you are a rational, thinking person who believes that if one is working from home, one would work one’s “normal” working hours and leave things at that.

But one is not one, if one can follow one. (Can one? Because one is not sure one can…)

What I always end up doing is working when I would have been commuting. Instead of waiting until 8:00 to log in, I log in right after I drop the Denizens off at the sitter’s – this morning, that was at 6:45. And then I worked until 12:00, when the husband got home from his final day of jury duty eager to spill the sordid details – we took an hour’s lunch so he could tell me all about it, and then I was back at work and didn’t stop until 5:55.

Sure enough, at 4:00 I was in another meeting. And building more spreadsheets. And the uploader was running super-slow. And then my laptop got all wiggy, so I had to reboot.

And then it was 5:55 and I was all, CRAP! I GOTTA PICK UP THE KIDS!!

And then it was 7:00 and everybody is standing around staring at me expectantly and I was all, oh yeah, FOOD…

And then it was 8:00 and what have I gotten done today?

About eight rows on a sleeve. Not good…

But, I like to focus on the positive. So, check it out: One sweater front and one sleeve, blocking.



With supervision.



Lots of supervision.



And there will be even more supervision tomorrow, because this bundle of adorableness has been banned from school/daycare tomorrow due to a rotten cough and (more importantly) a nose that is attempting to set a world record for continual running.

That’s right. I’m working from home again tomorrow. With direct and constant supervision.

OY.

Oh well. I shall consider it...extra difficulty points. Yes. That's what it is. I am going for the EXTRA POINTS.

Right. Speaking of which, I'm going to get back to it.

Curling is on, after all...

(HARD! HARD! Whoooooa! Whoa! WHOA! Whoa...HARD! HARD! ONE! HARD! HARD! THREE! ONE! HARD!!!)

Oh, but it looks good on YOU though…

So last week, I glanced into the mirror while washing my hands and noticed a crease on my forehead, right between my eyebrows.

Huhn, I thought. What on earth has been pushing THERE?!

Because obviously, it couldn’t be a wrinkle. Wrinkles don’t just appear like that. Not canyon-style ones, anyway. Fine lines, sure, whatever, but the kind where you can feel them when you run your finger over them, even if you’re making a really silly face trying to smooth the skin?

Nah. They don’t just appear like that. Obviously my glasses were sitting funny on my face or something.

Only it was still there the next day.

I tried to remember if I’d run into something – like, say, the edge of a ruler. Yeah. That might do it. A good direct smack from the edge of a ruler might have put that line there. And…cause memory loss…right? Smacks to the head do that, right?

Suuuuuuure they do…

Eventually, though, I had to face the awful truth: It’s a wrinkle. A real, true, honest, deep wrinkle.

That isn’t what bothers me, though. What bothers me is that it is definitely a frown line.

Which, you know, gah. So not fair. I spend 95% of my time laughing, but do I get a laugh-wrinkle? No. I get a frown line.

Naturally, I turned to my beloved husband, my soul mate, my sensitive partner in all things Life, and went, “WAH, FROWN LINE!!!”

To which he rejoined, “But honey, you’ve had all those wrinkly laugh lines all around your eyes for years! It’s not like the frown one is the first one you’ve gotten or something! And those really cute ones around your mouth, they've been there forever!”

Oh yes, he did. And then proceeded to catalog every fine line and saggy bit of my face for me.

Because he is was helpful that way.

His funeral is Thursday.

In lieu of flowers, please send beer.

And wrinkle cream.

Day 11, PM Edition

I love the ACE train.

Table...coffee...knitting...not stuck in traffic...it works for me.

Almost done with this sleeve! Shaping the cap now. Feeling rather smug and clever.

Smackdownl therefore undoubtedly in the offing...

(sent from my Treo)

Day 11

Hey-hey-hey! I finished the front over the weekend! This is the first sleeve, about 75% done!

I might actually NAIL this thing... (she said, waving a red cape under the nose of the bull...)

(sent from my Treo)

Money Monday: February 22, 2010

The tomatoes are eager to get the party started.



This is over 160 tomato plants, all growing so fast you can practically see them doing it. As you can see, I’m repurposing the Aerogarden for this – last year, just setting a tray along each side worked brilliantly, so I figured hey, why not use ALL SURFACES!

And it’s working really, really well. Every morning, I rotate the trays so that they take turns with the light/shadow thing (the tray in front gets less light, the one directly under the lamps gets arguably too much of it) and which direction they’re leaning – they sprouted in record time and are making alarming progress toward being ready to transplant.

It’s still kind of stormy, cold and lacking in sunlight out there. BUT, this is California – when spring arrives, it won’t be a slow gradual kind of thing. It’ll be all “storm-storm-storm-CONSTANT SUN AND 70-DEGREE-PLUS WEATHER!”

That’s how we roll out here.

These little tiny sprigs of green are roma tomatoes – a determinate, which I learned last year means all plants ready to harvest at the same time. According to the seed company, each of those plants should produce between 3 and 5 pounds of romas, all the same time – which should be around the first of May.

According to our local master gardener, it won’t be unusual if they actually produce between 5 and 8 pounds per plant – we have ideal soil and growing conditions for them, apparently, and they tend to take off like gangbusters with very little encouragement.

That’s anywhere from 480 to 1,280 pounds of tomatoes, all ripening up at once and expecting that I’ll, uh, do something with them.

There are moments when the enormity of what you’ve bitten off really sort of comes to you, no?

And when I pause to contemplate that this is nothing compared to what I’d have to do to actually feed this family, 100%, with homestead-grown food…I get a little dizzy.

But of course, it’s also pretty exciting. Just on our slightly-bigger-than-average home lot, we have the capacity to grow half a ton of tomatoes! More, if we wanted to devote more of the yard to them – but we’re not, because at the same time we’re also growing peppers, golden beets, carrots, peas, cucumbers, spinach, lettuce, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, cranberries, artichokes and green beans.

You know, in this first cycle.

There are three more, after this one.

We are growing, in short, an insane amount of food this year. Right here. In a regular old suburban backyard, plus a couple patches up front. And we’re not even using all our yard! We still have room for chickens if we want them, and if I could talk fast enough to get the Denizens on board we could free up another large patch of growing space by donating the play structure they barely use and turning that into another back forty(feet). (They are resistant to the idea. Go figure.) (I am, however, totally going to use the support beams around the sandboxes and hang some of those upside-down strawberry pots there. I figure I can easily get two on each side of the two sandboxes, which will give me up to 240 strawberry plants which…what? why are you looking at me like that? it’s just wasted space, people! NOW WITH STRAWBERRIES!)

Seriously, though, it’s astonishing to think how much is possible for us. Our options are wider than we realize, limited only by the bonds we ourselves choose. Seems like every day, I look at some corner of the house and think, Waitasecond, we could… and some beautiful possibility erupts before my eyes.

In a lot of ways, my homesteading thing is less about money and more about living a life that doesn’t worry about the stuff as much. It’s certainly no less work to attempt to produce at home what you’d normally just buy at a supermarket or mall; in fact, I’d say it’s more work, and dirtier work, and riskier work, too.

Just because I plant it doesn’t mean it’ll grow; even if it grows, it doesn’t mean it will produce food; and even if it produces food, that doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily get any of it.

You’d be amazed how hungry little tiny bugs can be, y’all.

And let’s say I get all my tomatoes in and process them and line up the quart-sized Mason jars and can up a whole whack of sauce – that doesn’t mean I’m home free. If I mess up, get the acids wrong, have a faulty seal or improper storage temperatures, I may well pop open those bad boys a couple months later and be confronted by the unmistakable funk of spoiled tomatoes.

Curses.

But, it’s a start toward self-sufficiency. It’s bound to be full of mistakes and setbacks, and whining, and finding myself with a garage bursting with tomatoes that need to be dealt with NOW!, before they turn into fermented tomato yuck all over the garage floor.

But I keep thinking about what it would be like to be able to have household labors provide for household needs. I imagine what it would be like to not have to use paycheck-money for food and clothing, but to use money we got from selling what we make right here in the Den for it.

I think about how much better our lives could be, if we could do that. Not necessarily financially – we’d be taking away 65% of our net income if I stopped working for a paycheck, far more than we’d be saving because I was homestead .15 an acre for Pete’s sake – but emotionally.

I hate to admit it (because I dislike responsibility – it’s so grown up and some junk), but I’m the center of the household. When I’m here, even if I’m working full time for a paycheck, things have a way of running right along. The kids are happy, they’re doing well in school, we spend less money and have a better lifestyle anyway.

When I’m in an office somewhere else most of the time, things fall apart. Everybody gets cranky, the kids start acting like savages, I get pissy, which naturally leads to yet more feral behavior from everyone and pretty soon it’s like…Lord of the Flies around here.

Weird, huh? You’d think that more money would be like oil on the water, but it’s not. There’s just no substitute for being there for your life, and living it in a way that pleases you.

If you wake up in the morning excited about what lies ahead, life is good even if you have nothing.

If you wake up dreading what you must endure to get through another day, well…life isn’t so good.

As I look forward to paying off these debts and wrestling our monthly needs down to where one income can once again give us enough, plus a little bit extra…I know that making what I do here at home pay or save is going to be more and more important.

After all, we’ve got four kids barreling toward teenage-hood, college…weddings…the demands on that paycheck aren’t going to get any smaller, not for a long, long time.

If I don’t want to spend the next twenty years married to the BART system, I’m going to want to make this thing work.

…and also, it’s a lot more fun…seriously! You should see the dish clothes I make on my rigid heddle loom…OK, actually, you don’t get to see them, they stink. The hand-dyed cotton I’ve made to work with is awesome! But the weaving…eh…not so much awesome…but improving, definitely improving!...sloooooowly, one hard-won moment of free time at a time…(hmm…I wonder if I could weave on the train? It’s only a 32” loom, that’s not too big, right…?) (OK, and now I’m laughing like crazy, imagining myself sitting on BART with my big old loom propped up on the seat across from me, just casually shunting back and forth, “Whaaaaaat? I’m just weaving, people, sheesh, it’s not like you don’t see people doing this ALL THE TIME at home…”)

Day 7...

Finished the cables, on the final decrease for the medallion portion of this front track.

Should NOT have complained about the lost time yesterday...Knitting Goddess responded by having us run out of gas on a long, lonely, gas-station-free stretch of country road this morning...not five minutes after we were high-fiving about our award winning speed getting out the door and ahead of schedule bad-ass-ery.

*sigh*

BUT, got an extra hour of knitting this morning waiting for AAA to bring "free" gas, so, not ALL bad...I guess...

(sent from my Treo)

Oh! And she STUMBLES…!

Stupid work.

I spent the entire train ride tonight doing battle with a Minion of Darkness (a.k.a., my VPN token). First, I thought it was out of sync; then I remembered that my access was supposed to be cut off on February 14, BUT they extended it.

For my LAN access, and my building badge. VPN? {checking…checking…checking…} yah, I’ve got nothing about extending my VPN access.

Sigh.

I got a few rows in on the Viking Turid on the drive home, but the van was jiggling and wriggling and my book was wobbling and I’m on the cable part, so it was slow going.

THEN we skidded into town and promptly got stuck in church traffic. Our local Catholic church just built a MASSIVE! new center just outside of town which hey, guess what? That’s kind of where we live and play and drop kids off at the sitter’s and pick up our cookie order from our Girl Scout troop leader!

Not only did we get stuck in Ash Wednesday traffic, we got stuck in it twice!

Awesome.

So I got home and logged in on the wire, aaaaaand I uploaded the Ever-Lovin’ Report that was so Ever-Lovin’ Important and fired off an email about it, and then we jumped back into the van to pick up the Denizens so we could !!RUSH!! to pick up their Girl Scout cookies because after the day I had today, I NEED me some Thin Mints we promised we would, then we dashed home again so that my husband could meet with his trio for rehearsal and I could make dinner for the kids get right on the phone for my 7:30 – 7:45 call.

Which naturally went until 8:30.

The kids were cycling through this room like it had a revolving door. What’s for dinner? When’s dinner? What when what when what when…

Realizing about twenty minutes to eight that I was sunk on the “making dinner” front, I logged into the Pizza Guys website and ordered a pizza. THAT’S RIGHT, while in a meeting, I was multi-tasking and paying absolutely no attention whatsoever to the conversation for, like, five whole minutes.

Until I heard my boss going, “Tama? Tama? Woooooo, Tama? Did she drop? Did anybody hear her drop?”

“NO! I’m here, ha ha, right here…”

“So how did you gerbleck the fizzlehoffer in column t?”

{blink-blink}

“Tama? Hellloooooooo? The fizzlehoffer, how is it gerblecked?”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhh…”

Why? WHY? You know, I can be in a meeting for two hours solid and nobody will call on me the entire time…until I try to sneak a peek at my personal email on my Treo. Suddenly it’s all about Tama and I mean, really…how do they KNOW?!

I never did answer the fizzlehoffer question exactly.

I’ve lost the lion’s share of this whole day.

I think it’s the equivalent of getting a ski stuck in an unexpected pile of slush.

Only, you know, without that whole “and then my knee was twisted all the way around, twice, and I had to undergo fifteen surgeries and take three years to recuperate” part.

Which is something I can truly embrace about knitting. Sure, you’ve got your carpal tunnel, your tennis elbow, your occasional sore backside from all that sittin’…but in terms of hard-core, blood-spurting injury…

…eh, not so much…

Speaking of which, my personal favorite method of skin-split-but-won’t-stop-knitting-right-now treatment is one thin water-proof band-aid, followed by a flexible fabric one, topped with a standard cheap band-aid with a slick top…the water proof one helps the flexible fabric one stick, the fabric one provides the best cushioning because hoooooooo boy, does it ever smart when the knitting needle continues jabbing at the skin it already broke thank you very much, and the standard one provides a slick surface so that the knitting needle doesn’t stick.

And with that, dudes, seriously…I’m going to bed. I have to get up in less than five hours.

…oy…

Day 6...

Into the cables now...first injury developed yesterday. Thumb skin-split. Wrapped in three layers bandages. Still stings. Small price to pay for Olympic glory. ONWARD!!!

(sent from my Treo)

Day 5 - morning run

Miraculously remembered visor with little lights - scored extra twenty minutes of commute-knitting. Woot!

(sent from my Treo)

Testing...one, two, one, two

..does my tech have it...?

(sent from my Treo)