come here ibook that my brother is giving me because he’s awesome.

go away car door handle that broke off in my hand today. i had to leave my dignity in the glove box and climb out of the car on the passenger side. and will have to tomorrow. and every day until i can afford to get it fixed.

come here panang curry. you are so yummy.

go away panang curry. the cat just barfed and it looks much too much like dinner.

come here maggie and bill’s awesome wedding. it’s wednesday and we’re still recovering from a sunday night wedding. well, and the three nights of family gatherings and parties that preceded it. hopefully there will be photos to post soon. congrats to maggie and bill. yay, love!

come here summer thunderstorms. you make the midwest’s weather seem almost bearable.

per kidchamp, per tomato nation:

come here, beautiful spring weather

go away, new co-worker who started a conversation with, “so what do you really want to do [with your career because this can’t possibly be it]?”

come here/go away, old friend who called me up yesterday and offered me an amazing job, lots more money and time off than i have here, challenging, interesting work, good co-workers, the stage management jackpot. the catch? (there’s always a catch, this one’s a biggie). the job’s in utah. what would i do in utah? what would andy do in utah?

go away, netflix bait and switch. last weekend, netflix’s splash page was advertising a $5.99/month plan, but when you reload the page, or signed up through an affiliate site, the lowest price plan became $9.99. to get even, here’s the link for the cheapie deal: http://www.netflix.com/Default?mqso=80006887. no promises how long that link’ll work.

go away, king kong. we rented it this weekend, and yuck. kudos to peter jackson, it was beautifully styled and all that, but really, the cgi-monster-eating-other-cgi-monster scenes could all have been cut by two thirds. i found myself simultaneously grossed out and unable to really care which fake creature won. after what seemed like the fourth hour I got bored and told andy to tell me let me know if they ever made it to new york.

come here, memoirs of a geisha. you are pretty.

come here, pasta primavera with cream sauce experiments in the kitchen. there are very few dishes that i can improvise sans recipe, based on the ingredients in the fridge or inspiration in the produce department, but pasta with yummy sauce is one. take some combination of the following (whatever you have at hand): fresh tomatoes, mushrooms, bag o’ frozen mixed veggies, garlic, onion, cream, veggie broth, white wine, butter, olive oil, parmesan cheese, fresh lemon, parsley, or basil. boil whole wheat linguini in well-salted water, add liberal amounts of fresh-ground pepper to whatever sauce you’ve created, and you’re good to go. now, turn me loose in the kitchen with 16 staples of indian cooking, or thai, or anything middle eastern, and i’d be completely lost.

go away, html bug that causes my margins to be all wonky in firefox browsers.

go away, car stereo thief. you took my parking quarters, too.

go away, short sleeve sweaters. i do not like you.

spiky yellow tulips striped with red

pale pink magnolia blossoms, lovely for a day

gerber daisies in bold colors

violets nestled into the grass

fragile white orchid blooms

edible orange nasturtium on the plate

every year i try to pinpoint the exact day when spring begins. i do recognize the actual futility of this exercise, the seasons being a cycle, a gradual blending of hues, without a finite beginning or end. but nonetheless i always find myself mentally marking the days when certain events occur. it’s like i wait and wait and wait for some sign of spring, through the cold dreary days of february and march, and sometimes april, and then it happens all at once, and i can’t watch closely enough to see all the changes, things seem to spring out of the earth and bloom while you have your back turned. in chicago this year, the trees began to come out late on monday. by tuesday they had developed a green haze, a softening of the stark lines winter branches make against the sky. the tulips came out on wednesday afternoon, bent low and ruffled under an afternoon breeze. other signs slip past me and only register later. i didn’t notice when the grass started turning green again, until suddenly last week, the world had a slightly emerald hue to it. and the daffodils, which are in full bloom right now, they snuck past me too, i don’t recall what day they first arrived, but suddenly there are fields of yellow on either side of south lake shore drive.

but my favorite sign of spring is one that i can mark on my calendar, when daylight savings time switches over and we are graced with long, golden evenings that seem much more than just one hour longer. maybe someday i’ll have to become one of those nomadic retirees who follows the warm weather around, bouncing between hemispheres to always stay within the bounds of summer.

So Owl wrote . . . and this is what he wrote:

HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA
BTHUTHDY.

Pooh looked on admiringly.

“I’m just saying ‘A Happy Birthday’,” said Owl carelessly.
“It’s a nice long one,” said Pooh, very much impressed by it.
“Well, actually, of course, I’m saying ‘A Very Happy Birthday with
love from Pooh.’ Naturally it takes a good deal of pencil to say a
long thing like that.”
“Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

i win! see, here’s my gold metal for completing my knitting olympics project before the flame went out.

the going got kind of rough around thursday night, when i spent maybe 3 hours making and ripping out and repairing mistakes, gaining no actual ground, till suddenly it was 2am, the only thing left on tv was infomercials, and my arms were cramped from wrist to elbow. the next morning i woke up with some sort of knitter’s-elbow tendonitis/carpal tunnel thing that made typing (and knitting) unbearable.

but i persevered. 88 inches of lace, knit on teeny-tiny size three needles.

the knitting olympics also sort of skewed my approach to knitting – it’s supposed to be a hobby, but with an imposing deadline it became another thing on my daily to-do list. also, i’ve decided that knitting lace is a hateful, hateful activity. i do like the results, and they are going to make lovely pillowcases (pictures to follow), but give me a fair isle project on size 10 needles any day.

by about day three i’d mastered the yarn-splitting problem, and my hands stopped cramping up holding the narrow-gauge needles.

day five i started to figure out how to find and repair mistakes without having to unknit rows and rows at a time.

by day six or seven the mechanics of the pattern started to finally make sense.

according to my calculations i need 84″ of lace to finish the project. each iteration of the pattern measures just under 3″, which means that i need to complete two repetitions of the pattern per day to complete the project by the time the olympic flame goes out next sunday. (since i’m working two strands of lace side-by-side it really means i only have to do the pattern once, but i knit each row twice. it’s faster and less tedious this way).

working on a deadline like this is making me a little obsessive. i’m starting to find myself plotting when i can grab an extra few minutes to knit throughout the day. i knit in the booth during the show every night, making mistakes in the dim light and having to rip it out later, i knit feverishly in front of late night sitcoms when i get home from work until each day’s quota has been met. all other projects and most chores have been put off until the beginning of march.

fact checking is fun. i end up having a web browser full of bookmarked links like the names of animal congregations. have you ever noticed how the name of the congregation is a little (or a lot) bit descriptive of the animal itself?

An Ostentation of Peacocks
An Intrusion of Cockroaches
A Parliament of Owls
A Streak of Tigers
A Shrewdness of Apes
An Intrigue of Kittens
A Tower of Giraffes
A Crash of Rhinoceroses
An Unkindness of Ravens
A Business of Ferrets

if i were cool like the spamusment.com guy, i would sketch a little picture of each congregation. the ferrets would be busy with ferrety (wedding) business, the cockroaches would be pushing some guy out of his arm chair and hogging the remote, the tiger cartoon would just be a big orange and black blurry stripe. wait, this sounds like a good idea for a children’s book. someone’s probably already done it. if not — you saw it first here.

— reveals that this project is much more challenging than i thought it was going to be. the needles are tiny, the yarn even thinner, and, being cotton, is prone to splitting. also, the lace pattern makes it virtually impossible to recover after a dropped stitch. after four hours invested, i have almost 2″ of lace. on the other hand, it was snowing out and my first saturday off in ages, and spending the afternoon curled up with a cup of coffee, knitting and half watching the olympics wasn’t so bad.

so i didn’t find out about the knitting olympics until after the registration deadline, but i put in a submission anyway, and my name turned up on the website this afternoon (along with more than 4000 others), so now i’m committed. the gimmick is that one has to complete an entire project in the 16 days that the olympics take place. (watching figure skating has always been a guilty pleasure of mine; what better excuse than this?) no casting on before the flame has been lit, and the project has to be complete before the flame goes out. well, i’m already behind, because the flame was lit about five hours ago and i can’t get to the knitting shop to get the yarn i need until at least tomorrrow. i’m also deeply mired in my fair isle sweater project, so it might be hard to stay committed to the olympic task.

and speaking of olympics, what’s up with the pack of pyrotechnic ninja turtles?