Dog Days

Today feels like the summer before my third year of university.  I remember it being a crazy hot summer.  I was subletting at The Partington House with friends and working at Wendy's, riding my bike pretty much wherever I needed to go in Windsor.  I was 20, it was my first summer away from home, and I was enjoying myself like crazy.  It was the summer I discovered They Might Be Giants, and "I Can See Clearly Now" by Holly Cole was my personal anthem.

But it was hot!  So hot!  I'd finish my shift at Wendy's and some nights go over and sit in Tim Horton's because it was just too hot to go home right away.  Other nights I would bike home and sit on the front porch with my housemates, smoking, and talking in the dark because it was too hot to even put a porch light on.

There were news stories about cows dying in the fields.  I would watch the neighbourhood kids in their sprinklers and want to go join them.

When the weather finally broke, I was out on my bike with one of my housemates.  If memory serves, we were out looking at places to live for September.  The rain came down in sheets, and it was glorious, with great booming cracks of thunder and lightning you could see even though it was day time.   We rode home, whooping and laughing, and then went and danced in the street in the rain with the neighborhood kids.

Goals

I was just reading Crazy Aunt Purl's end of July update, where she talks about her goals for this year, and how she's doing with meeting them. She talks about defining success, and how everyone does that differently. For her, success is defined more by working towards her goal, than about saying "ok, that's done, what's next?".

Reading her post got me to thinking about my own goals, and my definition of success. If I go by the "that's done" mentality, I'm a pretty pitiful failure, as I've been working on having a clean house, a healthy body, a stable bank account and a career for years now, and I'm not very much closer to crossing any of those things off my list than I was 10 years ago. In some areas I've even managed to go backwards.

I don't often feel like a failure though, so I'm guessing that while I do get satisfaction from crossing stuff off my lists at work, I don't have the same drivers at home.

I do know that I work better when I set small goals. I joined a gym in February, and my goal for my first year of membership was to still be going at least once a week, and enjoying it, at the end of that first year. So far, so good. I'm actually at a point where I want to expand my fitness goal to say that I want to move mindfully every day. Whether that's going to the gym, or going for a walk, or doing some stretching, whatever it winds up looking like, I want to take some time every day to move, and not just walking from the car to my desk.

I also want to get back to eating food that I've prepared mindfully. I've slipped out of it, but with the recent start up of the summer crop share at Everdale, I've been reminded of how much I enjoy eating freshly prepared, locally produced food. So that's another goal: take the time to prepare and eat good food, and take coffee with me instead of buying it.

So, that covers my body. What about my mind?

I have fallen out of the practice of daily meditation, due to lots and lots of spirituality related stuff that needs it's own post. I know I feel better when I take time, even just 5 minutes, to breathe and connect and pray.

I am also very affected by my surroundings. Our house is...well, let's just say that it causes me anxiety to have people in my house. I get overwhelmed by the fur, and the stuff, and the fur, and the stuff, and then throw up my hands in defeat while the fur and the stuff continues to pile up around us. So, 10 minutes a day, as soon as I walk in the door for the evenings, I'm going to pick stuff (and fur) up, and put it where it belongs.

So, goals for August:
1. Move mindfully every day.
2. Eat mindfully every day.
3. Meditate every day.
4. Spend 10 minutes every day picking up stuff.

I also intend to update every day to keep myself honest. And if I don't cross those things off, that's ok. Because I'm going to measure my success instead of my failure.

The finer things

I just took a break from doing homework to have an amazing dinner - almost all of which came from vendors at my local farmer's market.

Mixed greens (purchased earlier this week from a local butcher shop/small grocer) with some red bell pepper, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, dilled goat cheese and grilled salmon, all topped with fresh strawberries and a splash of raspberry balsamic vinegar (the only thing that came from a supermarket). To drink, organic 1% milk from an Ontario dairy.

I am blessed to have the wherewithal to feed myself this well.

So blessed.

In which I undertake a project

Last winter a friend suggested I check out Janel Laidman's book "The Enchanted Sole", since I like to knit socks and I have a love of myth and fairy tales. I took both that book, and the first one Ms. Laidman published called "The Eclectic Sole" out of the Kitchener-Waterloo Knitters Guild Library, and I instantly fell in love.

There are 34 patterns between the two books, and only two that didn't immediately knock my socks off (pun intended). I asked my lovely yarn store owner at All Strung Out to order the books for me, and started planning. Did I want to leave out the two patterns that didn't grab me? Did I want to knit all of them, just to say that I had? What order did I want to do it in?

I wound up deciding that I would knit all 34 pairs of socks, starting with the first pattern in "The Eclectic Sole" and knitting them in order all the way through to the end of the second book. Every pair will be for me, and I'm not setting myself a time limit, but I want to knit them all.

I try to keep only 4 projects on the go at a time (or at least 4 that aren't hibernating; the ones in time-out don't count): two pairs of socks and two larger projects. My larger projects are currently a baby sweater and a grown-up sweater, and I have a sock on the go for a friend, so last night I cast on the first of my Janel Laidman Project socks.

It's called "Simplicity" and is one of the ones that I was originally on the fence about. I'm glad I left it in though, as even in the first 18 round of sock 1, I'm liking the way it looks.

I smell like pool!

I was rudely awoken this morning an hour before my alarm was set to go off by a stinky cat bum in my face. I got up and cleaned her up and realized that I was not going to get back to sleep. So, what do you do at 5 am on a Friday morning? My usual choices would have been
1. to climb back into bed, steal the covers back from my husband and lay there for an hour, perhaps falling back to sleep 15 minutes before the alarm would go off
2. to head into work, getting there almost 2 hours early
3. to fall back asleep on the sofa in front of the tv and wind up running late, panicked and grumpy.

Now I have a new choice to add to that list: go to the gym. A little over a month ago I joined a fancy schmancy gym. The point of joining this particular one, the most expensive in my city was to do exactly what I did this morning. They are open pretty much 24/7 and there is a women's only pool there that is open from 4 am to midnight every day but Sunday. I was in the pool this morning by ten to six and swam lengths for a half an hour, before relaxing in the hot tub for a few minutes. I was showered and on the road to work with a breakfast smoothy from the gym's coffee bar by 7 am.

Once upon a time, even if I had had this option, I wouldn't have taken it. Now I'm finding that movement, whether it's a Monday night Zumba class, a lunchtime walk with a co-worker, or an early morning swim, is becoming a necessity for me. It's a really great feeling, and is a reawakening of how I used to feel many years ago when I danced fifteen hours a week. What's really neat to realize (as I did in the pool this morning - swimming is also a great time for thinking) is that I am also not restricting myself to one moving thing a day. I didn't think "Well, I could go for a swim, but I'm planning to go to belly dancing tonight, so I don't really need to." So today, I swam, and I'll go for a walk at lunch, and I'll go to belly dancing tonight. Tomorrow I'll go to a Pilates class. I may not get to the gym on Sunday, but I may wake up feeling the need to move, and if I do I will, but if I don't, I won't beat myself up over it (which is also a new thing - giving myself permission to do exactly what I need to do for me).

I am really enjoying the discovery of me, and my body, and what it is still capable of, even after all the years of struggle and neglect and pain.

I don't want to miss a thing

Which is a mediocre Aerosmith song, but that doesn't make it not my truth.

I'm working full time, married to someone who works an opposite shift leaving us just one or two days a week to be married in. I start my first class towards a Project Management Certificate at a local college this coming Wednesday. I have just joined a local gym, and love it, and also have committed to giving them money for at least a year. I have a very active social life - I'm out minimum three nights a week having tea, knitting, watching movies/tv with friends. I am responsible for the well being of 5 cats and a very old dog, and doing stuff like making sure we have clean underwear and dishes. I also have a brazillion ideas for things I want to make - fibre, jewellery, food, clothing, children.

One would think that this would be more than enough to keep me busy. And it is. There are days when I feel overwhelmed and don't want to get out of bed (but I do).

And yet....

Today I sent off an email to the director of a new-to-me local theatre company asking if they are going to be holding a second round of auditions for their summer festival.

Because although it will run me ragged, I don't want to miss a thing. I want to grab all of life by the tail and ride it until it shakes me off, or I bring it down under me.

Guenivere

Just now, sitting at my desk, working on vacation reconcilitaion and listening to "Guenivere" by Shaye, I had a major revelation.

There was someone I was so angry with for so long. I just realized where part of that came from.

I was mad at her for being like me, with my storied sexual history, and her hiding affairs, and both of us being cheaters. She was meant to be the one who was stable and stuff, and she wasn't. I was mad that she lied to me, yes, and that she used me to further her agenda in her relationships, but I just realized that it was really that I was mad at me, and mad at her for being like me.

You see, until my current relationship, my current marriage, I have never had a relationship in which I was completely faithful. Even in my first marriage, which was an open one, I managed to go outside the rules of engagement, as it were.

This part of the song was something I believed about myself for so long:

"Sorry but I can't help myself
So I can't help you
I'm always searching
For something new
It's in my nature to be untrue"

It's something I still struggle against, and while I know that I wouldn't cross that line again (because trust me if it were going to happen , it would have happened this year), it's something I'm aware of. I get crushes, I flirt with people, but I work very hard at keeping that arm's-length engaged.

I wonder where this comes from in me. It's quite likely that at least one of my grandfathers philandered, and I know that another family member flirted with the idea but didn't follow through. Is it nature? Does it have something to do with experiences I had as a teenager and my resulting lack of self-care? I think the answer is a little of both.

Ultimately, I think I was chasing a fairy tale. People talk about how you don't want to settle, you should wait for the perfect...whatever. I don't think I have settled, although my life is not a fairy tale. That's just as well, since I would get pretty bored up in a tower all day.

"It wasn't just you, it wasn't just this
Maybe I'm looking for something that just don't exist
It wasn't just you, it wasn't just here
I'm not lady, I am Guenivere"

Camera challenged

I knit a lovely green chunky moebius cowl for my boss over the weekend, and I want to take a photo of it before I pass it on, but it just looks like a lump unless it's on a person. I tried to take a photo of me in it, and that also went badly (not enough light without the flash, WAY TOO MUCH light with the flash).

Any suggestions?

It was a joyful noise

Last night I prayed.

I stood in a baseball stadium with 55 000 other people while Bono sang, The Edge and Adam Clayton played guitar, and Larry Mullin Jr. kept time on the drums. They showed us images of Iranian women and children; protesters bathed in green stage lights while the band played "Sunday, Bloody Sunday". We were gifted with a message from the International Space Station by Frank de Winne during one song, and a message from Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the lead in to "One". During "Walk On", we were introduced to the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi while the volunteers who helped mount the concert filed across the front of the stage and were thanked for their work.

The roof of the Rogers Centre was open so in addition to the phenomenal light show inside, we were treated to the sight of the CN Tower's nightly light show, which at times seemed to have been programmed to enhance U2's performance. Better than that was the energy, the wind on my face as I raised my hands, and sang, and clapped, and laughed until I cried from the sheer joy of it all.

There is nothing quite like the sound of so many voices being raised together in joy.

"...beauty's religion
And its Christened me with wonder"
-If Venice is Sinking - Spirit of the West

Failure

Yesterday I stood and watched while my friend went home with her abusive partner and their son.

She had called a cab to go to a shelter. The cab arrived at the same time he did, and although I locked the door, she said to let him in. He took the baby out of her arms, and neither of us could get the baby back without hurting him (the baby, not the father). Once he had the baby, she said she had to leave with him. I hugged her and told her I was sorry. I can't even imagine how she was feeling.

This all transpired at a friend's house - not even at my own. I was there to care for the homeowners 7-yr-old daughter while she ran an errand. My responsibility wasn't just to my abused friend, but also to my other friends' daughter, to keep her safe.

When the homeowner got back, she called the police and explained the situation: that our friend had spoken to a shelter intake worker that day, who had said that she shouldn't be going home again. That he has a prior history of violence against objects near her (doors, walls, windows). They took us seriously. They said they'd send a car. They got a lot of information from us, and said that they'd let us know the outcome.

We were having tea, a group of women who have known each other for years, friends, and some not-exactly-friends-but-we-can-all-spend-time-together, but all people who know and love the woman I let go home yesterday. We waited until 10:30 for news, but no one called, so we don't know what happened.

I don't know what I should have done differently, what I would do differently if I had to do it over again. I only know that I feel like I failed when it was most important that I succeed.

BBC Book Meme

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of these.


[ ] 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
[x] 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
[x] 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
[x] 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
[x] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
[x] 6 The Bible - God Yes, even all those bleeding begats at the beginning of it
[x] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[x] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[x] 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I''ve read two and a half - couldn't get through the last one.
[ ] 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Total: 8

[x] 11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
[x] 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
[x] 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller I keep meaning to
[x] 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare There are one or two that I haven't read such as "Troilus and Cressida" and "The Rape of Lucrece" but that's about it
[ ] 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier Half
[x] 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
[ ] 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
[x] 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
[ ] 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[x] 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 7

[ ] 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
[x] 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
[ ] 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
[ ] 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
[x] 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
[ ] 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[ ] 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[x] 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll Also, "Through the Looking Glass"
[ ] 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total: 3

[ ] 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
[x] 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
[ ] 34 Emma - Jane Austen
[ ] 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
[x] 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis Shouldn't this be included as part of the "Chronicles of Narnia"?
[ ] 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
[ ] 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
[ ] 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden It's on the bookshelf, but I haven't gotten to it yet.
[x] 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Total: 3

[x] 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
[x] 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown I
[ ] 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ ] 44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
[ ] 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[x] 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
[ ] 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[x] 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[x] 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
[ ] 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

Total: 5

[ ] 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
[ ] 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
[ ] 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[x] 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
[ ] 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
[ ] 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[ ] 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
[x] 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
[ ] 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
[ ] 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total: 2

[ ] 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
[ ] 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
[ ] 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
[ ] 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[ ] 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[ ] 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[ ] 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[x] 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
[ ] 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
[ ] 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total: 1

[ ] 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
[x] 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
[x] 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
[ ] 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
[ ] 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
[ ] 76 The Inferno - Dante
[ ] 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome Great kidlit
[ ] 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
[ ] 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[ ] 80 Possession - AS Byatt

Total: 2

[ ] 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
[ ] 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
[ ] 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[ ] 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
[ ] 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
[ ] 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mxistry
[x] 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
[ ] 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
[x] 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I have read some of the stories, but not all of them.
[ ] 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 2

[ ] 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
[x] 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
[ ] 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
[x] 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
[ ] 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[ ] 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
[ ] 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[x] 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare Again, shouldn't this be included in the Complete Works?
[x] 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
[x] 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total: 5

For a grand total of 38.

Calefaction

There is something about baking that does good things for me.

I am not a good enough baker that I can bake without following a recipe. I enjoy the process of looking through my books, or searching for a recipe online. I choose cookies, or muffins or a cake, based mostly on how good the picture looks, and what I already have in my pantry. I will substitute if I don't like or have one of the ingredients. You will never find a raisin, current or any candied fruit in anything I bake, and I am against maraschino cherries on principle. Next I assemble all the ingredients and tools that I will need. It took me years to remember to turn on the oven at this point - baking has finally taught me to think ahead a bit. I enjoy the measuring, the stirring, the kneading. I love the chemistry that makes three separate things (butter, sugar and flour) in to one (cookies). The part I enjoy the least is the cleaning up, but my husband has taught me to do that as I go, which really does make the whole process much simpler. Finally, I love the anticipation of the final product. The smell as it bakes, getting to poke it with a stick to find out if it's done, trusting that even if it looks a little funky, it will taste good anyway.

Three things

1. Fred got his EI payment today so I went and bought cream (among other things) and I have enjoyed coffee for the first time in three days. Nectar of the gods.

2. I finished knitting mom's silk socks, while watching some of Season 5 of Buffy. I had forgotten just how annoying Dawn was.

3. We are finally using up gift cards tonight. We're going to the Keg to celebrate our 2nd anniversary (a couple of days late). Snails and steak and lobster, here I come!

3a. Hooray for awesome bosses who give recognition in gift card form, or our anniversary dinner would have been the pork chops we had for dinner on Monday.

3b. Fred's anniversary gift from me was a copy of Hit Parade magazine detailing the Top 100 Hard Rock bands of all time. I figured he'd get more enjoyment from it than from a card, which was only three dollars less.

4. I'm really crap at sticking to my own guidelines...

Jumble

This has been a very tiring week. Work , personal finances, lack of sleep, emotional stuff...yeah, I'm pretty tired.

I could write about it all: new babies and old friends and my health worries, trying to keep afloat without feeling resentful, animals that think 5:30 am is a normal time of day to wake up...each of those could be a blog post, but I just don't have the energy.

Knitting hasn't been going well either. I took a course in toe-up socks at All Strung Out, taught by JohannaB that was awesome...but I didn't measure properly and my socks are too big for my feet. I have been working on the February Lady sweater since November. I picked up the stitches for the last sleeve on Saturday, and knit it inside out for an inch and a half. I bound off the wrong edge of a baby sweater. Lots of knitting fail.

So here are good things:

I passed my Canadian Firearms Safety Course (Unrestricted) last weekend with 100% on both the written and practical tests, and the new knowledge took something I was doing to make other people happy and turned it into something I'm actually excited about.

We can pay some major bills this week, since the severance pay finally came in. Also, I can get a hair cut, and hopefully squirrel away a little walking around cash for the Knitter's Frolic at the end of the month.

Tonight is knit night. Tomorrow is sleeping in (animals be damned) and Replacement Tea. The BlackBerry is staying at home for both events.

We have a roof, and running water, and food, and I am mostly healthy (my new, awesome doctor is helping with the health part), and my cats and dog love me unconditionally.

I have awesome friends at home, at work, and living in my computer.

Finally, I am running a constant soundtrack of feel-good music between blip.fm and my iPod. Music makes my world go around, yes it does.

Nevermind the groundhog

On my way home from work last night I saw one of my personal notifiers that Spring is on the way.

Buckets.

Specifically, maple syrup buckets.

I have fond memories of going out to the sugar bush on March break and watching the sap get turned into maple syrup. The people doing the demonstration would always drip a bit of the hot maple sugar onto some clean snow so that it would harden. There is nothing quite as awesome as fresh maple sugar candy.

Impromptu Poetry

Leone tagged me to do some impromptu poetry. Her's rhymes. Mine doesn't.


Cat

I fell in love with you after we broke up;
After you decided
(and rightly so)
That you deserved more in a girlfriend
Than a bi-chick who was already
Mostly committed to her boyfriend
And two cats.

I enjoyed our nights while we were a couple.
Our Portishead underscored lovemaking;
Waiting for your roommate and her girlfriend
To slam into or out of your apartment.
I looked forward to making out in our tiny kitchens
While we waited for the tea to brew.
I relished your scent,
(Body Shop, Second Cup and Pope Joan)
But it was none of these things that made me fall for you.

It was later, when we were friends.
It was our Tuesday teas
(What is it with me and Tuesday?)
When we talked in a way we hadn't when we were focused on
Each others bodies.
When you told me about the women you dated after me,
And the ways in which they wronged you,
And I wanted to hurt them, but you said,
"No".

It was later again, after I married, then left the boyfriend,
(But kept the cats)
And you moved across the ocean
That I missed you most;
That I realized your importance to me,
And that you found my phone number in a pile of papers;
That I finally felt settled in my skin.

I'm not big on the whole tagging thing, but I think there should be more poetry in the world, so I'd like tigerleo, semicrunchymom and noirbettie to give this a shot. Also if you like to read poetry, please go check out Natalie Smith's poetry, but bring some tissues, 'cause she's goooood.

That's the book!

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to remember a book in which children run away and live in a museum.

Today, someone posted a clip from Clue on Ravelry, which prompted me to look up Madeline Kahn's filmography, and then follow from there to the entry on Wikipedia about the book:
"From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler".

Must remember to see if the Guelph library has a copy.

Introducing...Sheldon!

No, we didn't get another live animal. In fact, this one won't even be staying at our house; he's a gift for a co-worker.

I knit him out of Briggs and Little wool that I bought at my local yarn store All Strung Out.


He's knit in pieces (8 total by the time you count all the legs), then stuffed and seamed. This was my first time trying an applied i-cord - much thanks to Ashley for the instruction!


The best part about Sheldon is that, much like wee little puppet man Angel, his shell comes off.

Random Thoughts

I get that all those celebrity women do that weird cross-legged standing thing in photos because it's supposed to make them look thinner, but it just makes me think that they all need to use the potty.

Awesome blog: Clonehenge. It's all about replicas of Stonehenge, made in mediums ranging from silver to bacon. Seriously.

Can we just leave Rihanna alone? Please? Yes, I understand that by mentioning her, I am flying in the face of my own request. Still. Please?

See above point for Nadya Suleyman as well.

In fact, can we stop ridiculing and belittleing women for their choices and blaming them for being victimized, and try to be supportive of each other?

I'm re-reading "The Bitch in the House" by Cathi Hanauer. Sometimes it's good to read stuff that feels like it comes from inside my head.

Tonight I will buy this yarn, in order to knit this pattern for myself. Love!

I currently have a pair of socks, a turtle and a sweater on the needles (no photo yet of the sock, since it's not much more than a cuff at this point).

Coworker gave me a bag of Second Cup's blueberry tea. Heaven!

I have updated my Flickr to a Pro account, and added Google Analytics to my blog. This will either galvanize me into posting more, or paralyze me into posting less. I'm aiming for the former.

Even though the word "assistant" appears in my title, that doesn't mean that I am your assistant.

Tazo's Passion tea is also awesome.

This

This poem, this writing, this begins to say for me what I haven't been able to say for myself.

Round

If I write more now, I'll wind up in tears at my desk, but that poem at Ampersand, it's a start.