speak/blog of the devil...

just got an email from axelle telling me my yarn is on the way!!! YAY!!! she even gave me some tips on working with cashmere yarn on on how to get the most out of it, which, as a newbie, i definitely appreciate. what more could you ask for? i am still just DYING to see it in person!

hanker for a hunk of yarn

yarn: estelle, color: orion

i ordered 3 skeins of this wondersful sport weight cashmere from axelle over at two pointy sticks at the end of last week, and i am DYING for it to get here!!! and it's not like i don't have other things going on. it's not like i don't have 10,000 things on my needles and in the queue. but still. this is new. this is my first cashmere. i want THIS! i can't wait can't wait can't wait till it gets here! i am going to make myself a clapotis out of it, like about a million other people on the internet have already done. (just do a little google on it--you will see what i mean...) but it really does look like just the best of the scarf and wrap and shawl worlds all rolled into one. very excited.

in other knitting news, the hippie is knitting. he's really good at it, too! he's getting set to whip up a cashmere scarf of his own (the men's cashmere scarf from last minute knitted gifts, which looks like this). he's already stolen my rosewood knitting needles for it. he's an even worse snob than I am about his supplies! perhaps i have created a monster...

crumpets moving into final stages

i posted a crumpets update over on the knit-along site if you are interested. that thing has taken me an eon! i am still working on a more substantial knitting update. it's coming--i swear!

the birthday haul

birthday presents!

tuesday was my birthday. i don't really think that much about my birthday--this year for some reason getting older has bothered me a little more than usual--i think it's that biological clock thing bringin' me down. but the celebration this year was good--very satisfying. as was the haul--just look at all this stuff! between getting some lantern moon knitting needles as an early present from the hippie, going to beaufort for the weekend, then getting a whole slew of antique teacups from alyce, countless cards, joelle hoverson's last minute knitted gifts book, the extended version of the fellowship of the ring, practical magic, a B-52s CD, a cure CD, a copy of intercourses, a leatherman micra, my FABULOUS new set of illustrated jabberwocky prints from angi shearstone, and a beautiful pair of silver and mother-of-pearl earrings--i would say i did pretty damned well this year. the hippie bought all the things i needed to make a fabulous birthday dinner for mself over at harry and jenn's house. i WANTED to cook, so no feeling sorry for me for having to cook my own birthday dinner! we had bacon-wrapped scallops, grilled asparagus, garlic yukon gold mashed potatoes, and some petit filets with a very rich demi-glace. combined with some fabulous red wine and some chocolate cake for dessert, it was just perfect. laid back birthdays are the best kind.

a little less lead

update on our little friend ella. you will remember that i mentioned before that, through a series of acts of dumbassery, our friends' 9-month-old daughter ended up with some nastily high lead levels. well--some GREAT news: her lead levels as of the 22nd are down to 10.4µg/dL. this is phenomenally good. here's hoping that she will establish a new baseline that is well below 10. thanks to all of you who have offered helpful advice, contact info for toxicologists, and well wishes for her so far! continued prayers and good thoughts for the leadlet and her parents (who are still living in a tiny hotel room) and kitties (who are still living in the nasty lead dust) are appreciated.

farewell to stardust...

last week i got an email that made me awfully sad--the subject line was, "farewell to stardust." as i have talked about before, stardust is easily our favorite restaurant in the state, and one of our favorites, period. the hippie and i have gone there as often as we could, and they have always remembered us. plus, it's been a beach trip tradition since we started going to emerald isle instead of the outer banks. between ashley and ralph, the owners, ahsley's mother who has often greeted us at the hostess stand, molly, one of the greatest bartenders ont he planet, and darla, the best waitress ever, it has just always been an amazing dining experience. we have felt like part of their extended family. so--to celebrate our birthdays, we planned a spontaneous weekend trip to beaufort to go to stardust one last time. and what a time it was! honestly it felt a bit like a wake. we ate too much, talked too much, drank too much, and basically went down with the ship. FABULOUS evening. check out the photos, which i think capture the spirit of the evening in spite of the poor photo quality.

let me also say that the rest of the weekend was awesome as well. there was a full moon on friday, so we actually got to go on a moonlight sail--divine. and we did a whole lot of nothing. sat in our favorite of the local coffee shops and read and knitted. poked in shops, had lunches at the beaufort grocery company, hung out on the porches of our B&B... it was the Right Thing^®.

jealous of howard stern

howard stern: not my fave

and i hate howard stern!!! what does this say about me? I am actually JEALOUS of howard stern's hair. i got a haircut a couple of weeks ago--i was going for something like uma thurman's hair in the movie be cool--and the girl who did my hair cut it about 4 inches shorter than she should have for it to fall where we had discussed it falling. this is a risk when your hair is curly--people fuck it right up. they cut it like it's straight hair, and then it shrinks up to your scalp in little annoying flyaway ringlets. can you tell i am unhappy with this haircut??? then randomly today, i come across this picture of howard stern of all people, sporting the hair i wanted. what is THAT all about??? add in that my favorite restaurant is closing, my car is about to cost me another zillion dollars to take car of, and my favorite yarn brand is not only being discontinued, but the whole yarn company that produced it is has been dissolved, and well--i am not having a good week here people. *sigh*

apparently i am clever

i'm a ravenclaw! at least, according to the sorting hat, i am. my friend emily is reading the harry potter books for the first time, and she found this great link to a little quiz to submit yourself to the sorting hat. i could not be more pleased with my results! i know, i know--some people would think that gryffindor is the only good choice, since that's where harry lives. but i'm sorry--he's way more impetuous and somewhat foolishly brave than i will ever be. i am slightly cautious--i admit it. and i like smart people--i admit that, too. so yeah--ravenclaw is the right choice for me. as you know, the sorting hat is never wrong. go ahead--sort yourself!

running for charles

charles cox, one of the nicest people i have ever met, has worked for my company almost since its inception. he is a good man, one of the best, with a bright smile, a big heart, 5 gorgeous boys and a loving wife. kodak once literally stole a picture of his red-headed boys, who are like a bunch of stair steps, for a commercial--they are that beautiful. and in the unfair way life has of kicking people who seem to good to deserve it, charles was diagnosed a few months ago with pancreatic cancer. i am sharing this with you because another person i work with, rich lemert, is preparing to run in a marathon to raise money for pancreatic cancer research, in honor of charles and his family. as i am sure you have figured out by now, i am not huge on the idea of solicitation, so there is NO PRESSURE meant by sharing this. however, i know that many pf the people who read this blog know charles personally, and will be interested in this.

so--disclaimers aside, check out rich's page about his marathon preparation. it you feel inclined, you can donate to this most worthy of causes. and if you don't want to, that is totally cool. either way, please keep charles's family in your thoughts.

butterfly moment

butterfly

i can't just whine about feeling like ass today--i feel i should add something a little more positive on here to avoid depressing the crap out of you, dear reader. yesterday, i was waiting outside in the sunshine for the hippie to pick me up to go out to lunch, and this butterfly landed on the lantana bush right beside me. isn't it gorgeous? thank goodness i had my phone with me so i could capture the tiny beautiful moment when everything was quiet and i got to watch it slowly flapping its velvety wings.

sick. ick.

i had grand plans to post a big old knitting update today, but now i am sick and can't care about long blog posts and pictures of knitting and stuff like that. i am having trouble concentrating at all, and think i may have to go home from work and take a nap very very soon. blah. is there anything worse than a cold in august? and where did i even GET this cold??? yuck. it's storming like a mofo outside, and i have to say, it suits my mood just fine.

knitting update including the many things i have finished in the last couple of weeks as well as my fabulous new needles, to follow when i stop feeling assy.

honeysuckle time

while driving into work this morning, i came across some DJs playing run DMC's old school hip hop song, peter piper. very amusing--totally takes me back to the days when kimmie and i used to write raps in class, long long ago in high school. i turned it up loud and cruised toward the job with a smile on my face.

when the song was over, the DJs were so into it, they played it again, this time with themselves as accompaniment--they were yelling louder than run DMC. again--very amused. but the best part was after that, when they were trying to do the weather report, and the girl was laughing so hard you could barely understand that it might rain this afternoon. then the guy came on to do the traffic, and he sounded just like the great barry white, all low, and slow, and growly, and he said,

"on the road right now, it's honeysuckle time...
there's nothing in your way on the raod today..."

i ask you--what could be better than that?

getting the lead out

our friends' daughter ella has lead poisoning. the severity of her case is still a bit of a mystery to me, although from what i have read so far, her blood lead level (BLL), while alarmingly high, is not high enough to warrant invasive and somewhat dangerous chelation therapy unless she is exposed for a long period of time or her BLL goes up to 45µg/dL (hers is at 24.3 µg/dL right now, a week after the fire). still--i am so worried about her and her parents!!! and even more than that, i am angry for them.

their landlord hired painters to remove lead paint from the outside of their house. the painters put up plastic on the insides and outsides of the windows to protect the interior from dust. so far so good, right? the big cock-up was when they decided to remove the paint from the exterior with a BLOWTORCH (illegal, by the way--i wonder why?), and set the fucking house on fire! then the fire department continued the spiral of moronic behavior by chopping a hole from the exterior of the house through to the interior (into the baby's room), ripping the protective plastic off the windows in the process, and filling the apartment with smoke and lead-based paint dust. so yeah. shitty scary situation.

please think good thoughts for our friends and their baby daughter, as they try to get the lead out of her blood.

it's a small, small (blogging) world

the way i got into reading and writing blogs was starting with one blog, clicking on it's links to another blog, clicking on that blog's links to still other blogs, and so on. isn't this how most people get started? but recently, some things have happened that showed me that even in blogger-land, it's a small world. really small. potentially uncomfortably small.

about a month ago, the sam was alerting me to the fact that sarah brown had pictures up from a party she had been to on a rooftop in brooklyn, and that in these pictures was a photograph containing a beer samantha had once had and had been trying to remember for ages with little success. note: sarah's blog was one of the first blogs i ever started reading on a regular basis, and i still read it from time to time when i want to be reminded of what it was like when i was young and living in new york. plus, she's damned funny. but anyway--i immediately rushed over to flickr to check it out. and lo and behold! the rooftop was the very same one that alyce and i once went to a party on back in the dark ages of like 1995 or something. we sang all of bohemian rhapsody on that roof with a guy named fireman mike who was from maine and whose girlfriend nastia (her real name) was shooting daggers at us with her evil eyes all night. we got drunk and i barely managed to save alyce from the lecherous grasp of the skeezy roommate of the guy whose party it was. so what are the odds that the same rooftop, on which i stood for a single night, would re-appear in this manner? strange, non?

and then--even weirder: late last week, i was reading this fish, yet another blog of a young new york-dwelling lass, and i started clicking links. the fish, she has quite a few of these, and i was feeling rather random. so i clicked and read, clicked and read, until i ended up here, on the blog of a girl who just moved into my neighborhood, onto my very street. her blog even had a picture of the house at the end of the street. of COURSE i left a comment! how could i NOT??!?! i am still kind of amazed at the randomness of it all. she emailed me back, and we now have plans to be all neighborly and meet for a glass of the sweet^* red vino on thursday--whoo hoo.

but wait--it gets even weirder. further investigation reveals that this woman is friends with the local friends of the hippie's ex. this i also know because of blogs--this time because of the ex's blog. i don't think that the new girl has any personal ties to the ex, but man, what a coincidence!

life--it's all just one big set-up.
*and when i use sweet here, i do not mean sweet as in sugar on my tongue. i mean divine--dry with more than a hint of sassiness. the full roundness of plums and cherries on the palate. perhaps a peppery finish. ahhhhh...the vino...