Taster Spoon

Knitting Project Number Two

Number One is a secret because it's a present that has yet to be gifted, although if you looked at it you would be forgiven for calling it Number Two.  (It's the thought, right?  They'll appreciate being My First, right?)

Number Two, then, is the mittens and hat and scarf to which I alluded back in December - my belated Christmas/early New Year's present to PomWonderful!  I cannot adequately describe how pleased I was with myself for actually completing a craft project for once.  Or how burned out they left me (don't tell Ace; he already knows I spent an unseemly amount on the yarn that's multiplying above the washer and dryer). 

I made the moebius scarf on the planes to and from Chicago over Thanksgiving, I made the hat over Christmas in Idaho, and I made (and remade) the mittens in between.  I assume she's got them by now.  Oh!  Another excuse to call!

She looks better in green than I do.

For knitters only:

As a person new to this field of endeavor, I find myself super interested in the details of projects on other people's knitting blogs.  Therefore, if it helps you:

For all three things, I used Sensations Angel Hair in the color that's not bright lime green, but a little softer.  It feels delicious.  Apparently you can only get it at JoAnn's, that boutique of exclusivity.  It's 22% wool and 88% fake.  I haven't heard whether it's warm but will try to get a RealFeel review.

The scarf is wicked easy, the pattern was on the wrapper of a Wool-Ease skein.  I can't believe they're selling the pattern when it was free on a wrapper!!  (As I was looking for the link, well, tell me if this one makes you laugh.)  Anyway, it's all garter stitch.  You just knit back and forth as wide as you want and as long as you want, and then sew the ends together - giving one end a twist before you do so.  I reckon it took me somewhere between 3 and 5 hours over the course of a week, and maybe two thirds of the skein.  It's pretty floppy.

The mittens, as mentioned previously, were from the Stitch n Bitch book.  It's unfortunate the title includes a word I hate saying out loud, it's otherwise a very friendly book.  As also mentioned previously, the first one I made according to the pattern turned out huge.  I thought my gauge was correct, but who knows.  It turned out it was really easy to just approximate the pattern, fitting it to my hand as I went.  The pair (not including the misfit one) took me two or three weeks' worth of odd moments (six hours? more?) and nearly a whole skein.

The hat used this Vogue pattern.  It took a while, but the satisfaction of figuring out three different types of cables made it well worth it.  It took maybe six to eight hours of knitting, and 3/4 to close to a whole skein of yarn.  It turned out too small at first- that is, it wasn't long enough to pull down securely over my ears.  I don't think I have a huge head.  You knit from the bottom up, so I had to unravel nearly half the hat to add more length (I added about an inch) to the wide part before re-doing the part that slopes in.   Our plane back from Idaho was delayed for a couple of hours, though, so this didn't bother me too much.  Especially in combination with the $3 shot of Disaronno.

RAW IS WAR

What do you do when all your girlfriends are on the verge of delightful motherhood?

You console yourself by doing all the things pregnant girls can't do!  Go wild!

Like, buy raw milk at the farmer's market.

Hippie? 

Even lowest-common-denominator RealAge published an article suggesting that if you are going to drink milk at all, at least some of its nutritional benefits are destroyed through pasteurization.  It may help with allergies.  On the flip side, the New York Times depicts devotees as death wishing crazies.  But I'm young, I'm single, I have life insurance!

A quart of skim and a quart of whole were both $4.25.  A pint of cream was $10.  Naturally I got the whole.  I figured I could separate my own cream, thanks anyway, nice try. 

I was kind of excited by the prospect of un-homogenized milk, ever since I went to the San Mateo country fair last summer.  I prefer skim anyway, but was completely converted when I looked at a homemade sign made by a little girl for a 4-H project, explaining how milk is obtained and prepared.  She described the milking process and the pasteurization process, and then, just as straightforwardly, explained the homogenization process, which distributes the cream and remaining white blood cells throughout the fluid.  White blood cells?  You mean pus?

If that doesn't turn you off milk, nothing will.  My solution was to stick to skim, in the hopes that nothing was distributed throughout the milk, no pus mixed in with the cream.

It was fun - so olde tymey! - to see the layer of yellowish cream on top of the whiter skim in my glass bottle of milk...only I had no idea how I was supposed to "skim" it off.  I don't have a cream skimmer.  I can't even do the butter churn on the dance floor.  And I've had enough experience pouring things to know that you don't always get the top layer, or the bottom layer, or whatever layer you're trying for.  And then I remembered - my gravy separator!

I poured about half the bottle into the separator, only couldn't see the clearly delineated cream layer anymore.  So I put it in the fridge, and lo, what was left in the bottle sure looked like skim milk.  I had a small glass.  Would it taste strange and funky like that time I got 16 ounces of goat milk yogurt?  Would it taste "ethereal" like the milk in that New York Times article?

I have to be honest with you.  It just tasted like milk.  Skim milk. 

Pregnant ladies can relax.  You're not missing anything over here. 

I think I'll go pour myself a cocktail, light a cigarette, have some sushi and dye my hair.

I love everybody today.

Ace's alarm popped off at 7:00 today, which was 10:00 in Washington, D.C.  To my surprise, it was tuned to NPR.  Usually it's about half a channel off of some loud rock-ish station that makes me want to beat him.

This morning, he rolled over to hit snooze and I shouted, "No!  Don't you want to hear the inauguration?!?"

He pointed out that we still had two hours to wait, but I wanted to hear what the temperature was, who would be on stage, the debate over whether Rick Warren would use the "J" word, what the concert was like the day before, where spectators had come from, how many people had camped out since two in the morning and how many people had been taken to hospitals for hypothermia...

I've been doing a little jig all day.  Everybody seems to be in a good mood.  Even the commute traffic seemed more polite.

At work we had been warned not to stream any coverage over our computers so as not to overload the network, and as consolation they had a blueberry pancake breakfast (and helium balloons!)  in our biggest conference room, where they showed coverage on our big projector screen.  Except, they weren't showing TV, they too were streaming from the Internet and right in the middle of President Obama's inaugural address the connection got completely chopped up (because everybody ELSE in the world was streaming) so everybody took their pancakes into the small break room and watched the little wall TV there instead.

We filtered merrily out to our desks to work, but then after a continuing legal education video at lunch back in the big conference room, somebody switched back to CNN.com and we all stood around for another fifteen minutes, pretending we were still picking at our lunches while we watched the parade.

Maybe it's because people who work in the law are programmed to look for things that can go wrong, but it seems like all day everyone has been biting our nails. 

This morning, Ace said to me, "How many snipers do you think there are?"

I looked at him in horror and said, "DON'T SAY THAT."

He quickly corrected, "No, no, I mean, how many secret service and security snipers do you think there are?"  He gestured towards the humongous throng carpeting the Mall, and my swelling happiness was dampened a little.

After lunch, as I was being impressed by the First Lady's willingness to walk a mile in pumps and pondering whether the Second Lady might have considered a below-the-knee skirt, one of my colleagues murmured, "I can't believe they're just walking along the street like that, out in the open." 

Another guy walked in to grab a brownie, glanced at the screen and said, "Look at all those buildings and windows!  How could they possibly secure all that??"

Our IT person investigated the chicken salad wraps and said, "I hear that limousine is like a tank."

Well, never mind.  If I may quote one of the great orators of my generation, "On this day we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord."

Ooh, just trying to find that quotation, I read his speech and got all teary-eyed. 

I'm glad everyone else in the office seems equally distracted and joyous.  It seems important to take a minute to absorb this - as rare as they are, we don't often get the benefit of time to fully experience moments where ideals and hopes are made real and tangible. 

But only a minute.  There is work to do.