There is stashbusting project number 1. It's a large garter stitch scarf done on size 13 needles. The yarn is Bernat Galaxy held together with a strand of red Sisik yarn. I think it took me 2 hours total to make. Chris calls it the lint-scarf because the Bernat Galaxy looks like lint. Yum.

I also did something that I think is a bit unusual. I returned yarn. I returned many skeins of Lion Brand woolease that was to become a top-down raglan. I realized I didn't like the colors that much. I also returned many skeins of would-be baby blanket yarn, as I've come to realize that I am never going to make that baby blanket and also some misguided lionbrand homespun. I have no idea what I thought I'd make out of that.

The good news is that leaves me guilt free to spend the store credits I got on yarn that I WILL actually make something out of!

Stashbusting project 2 is a drop stitch wrap made out of some hand dyed mohair I bought ages ago. It's shedding everywhere. After that - I have 10 50g skeins of Debbie Bliss Aran Tweed. What the heck am I gonna make out of it? It's a pretty purple color and I thought I'd make a tank top - but it's 100% wool so that doesn't really lend itself to being next to the skin. Any ideas?

Posted by jen at 09:29 PM |Comments (4)

I missed Secret Pal 3 by weeks. And I missed Secret Pal 4 by days! I was so disappointed both times. But I've managed to make it to Secret Pal 5! Yay! So here's my SP5 questionaire if you care to learn more about my knitting personality!

Continue reading "Secret Pal Five - Questionaire"

Posted by jen at 12:48 PM |Comments (0)

I just saw Episode Three tonight and there is only one conclusion I can come to - George Lucas was overwhelmed by his need for power and his greed. He couldn't give up control to someone who could write dialogue or believable characters. He's crossed over. His directing skills have been twisted by the darkside.

What the HECK WAS THAT? It did tie up the lose ends/answer questions neatlly, but the writing! The acting! The love story. Ugh. In a split second Skywalker turns over to the darkside. His turn was so fast it was if he said "I'm really hungry. I would totally turn to the dark side if someone had some taco bell." And then there ws the Chancellor holding a Chalupa. And then Luke just gives in. It was that fast and that non-sensical.

I know some people really liked it. So I hope my ranting isn't offensive. And mostly I thought it was OK, but certain things about it bug me so much that I can't get past it. I almost threw up at the part when they were arguing about why he thought Pad Mei was so beautiful. Blech! Barf! Ew! Poor Natalie Portman. I usually like her so much. At least there's always Empire to watch...

Posted by jen at 11:54 PM |Comments (5)

I wrote in a recent entry that I just saw I (heart) Huckabees. And so little things from this movie keep popping into my head. Like the whole blanket theory thing. If you haven't seen the movie - it's basically a metaphor for the fact that everything is the same and there's no difference between you and someone sitting next to you or your stapler, or whatever. I don't quite understand it, but I think I get the gist.

So yesterday at work I was talking to a coworker and the thought popped into my head - where does this person stop and I begin? Just like in the movie when Jason Schwartzman is holding up the picture of Jude Law and asking him "Is this you or me?" It's a little out there, I know...but a lot of the time when someone annoys me I end up seeing myself or parts of my own personality in them. And I guess that's part of what annoys me - that they remind me of a part of me that I might not like so much. Whether that's being overly ambitious to the point of obnoxious - or being lazy, or whatever. Anyway - that's really way out there, but that's what I was thinking about this morning.

I had a dream last night that Chris was super mad at me. Then when I woke up this morning, I couldn't shake the feeling! I hate it when that happens. I think I had the dream because right before I fell asleep I finished reading I'm Not the New Me by Wendy McClure who is a blogger and a columnist for Bust. I really recommend it. She writes about the weirdness of relationships between online people and mostly about her weight loss adventures.

I went to knitting last night. We had a good time and I should've brought my camera b/c there were so many of us there! I'm glad our knitting group is growing and that there's a good amount of younger, fun knitters in the area.

Posted by jen at 09:08 AM |Comments (1)

I'm working on some stash busting projects right now, trying to work through some of the yarn that was slated to become Christmas '04 presents - but ended up in the closet because I ran out of time. In the works is a Bernat Galaxy scarf on big size 19 needles. Who will get this lovely scarf? I have no FREAKING idea, but I'm sure I'll think of someone. I've recently been reassured by two knitting friends that my stash really isn't that bad but I have a feeling they're just being polite.

Tonight Chris and I worked on some wedding invitation prototypes that involve many scrapbooking tools. I love punching holes in card stock. Muahaha. I'm going to start punching cute leaf shaped holes in my business cards. Nothing says "professional" like scrapbooking details on your business cards.

"Please! Do business with me. I will embellish your training materials with glitter and raffia! I will deliver timelines on their own themed page complete with brads and miniature versions of business suits made out of paper."

I'm off to bed now to continue reading this woman's book, So far I really like it. I felt a little twinge of inspiration that this woman started out as a blogger and parlayed her writing skills into a novel. Now there's an idea.

Posted by jen at 10:58 PM |Comments (6)

Yay my shrug is done.

Here's the details:

Pattern: Interweave Knits Summer '05 Staff Shrugs - Ribbed Shrug
Yarn: Cascade Yarns 220 superwash in color #843
Needles: Size 9 circulars

Posted by jen at 10:06 PM |Comments (9)

Monday - the sad end of a good weekend or the happy beginning of a week that promises to kick you in the ass? I'm not sure! (I'm trying to be positive!)

Onto the weekend recap...

On Saturday we went out for Indian food for Chris' birthday. There is an amazing restaurant in Trenton that we frequen so I made reservations for us and some of our friends. We had five orders at the table of Chicken Tikki Marsala (sp??) which is my absolute favorite and I had tandoori shrimp which was de-lish-ous. Dinner was tasty and we ended the night at the bar. It's a sign that we're getting older that the night ended at 1 AM, but what can you do?

Here's Kate and Alex who are scheduled to move to the mid-west at the end of the summer. We will go visit them and I can finally see the middle of the country!

Chris and I are splitting a share in a local organic farm with Mark and Heather. This should keep us in fresh produce all summer long. This is a good thing and a bad thing because I tend to buy veggies with every good intention of eating them and then I end up throwing them out. But hopefully I'll actually consume them this year. Yesterday was the opening day so we got to pick up some lettuce and picked our own Strawberries. I loved picking berries. I can't wait to pick more fruit! Yay farms.

I also watched I (heart) Huckabees on Saturday in an effort to make more use of my Netflix account. I liked it a lot. I think Jason Schwartzman is great (I think his band did the theme song to the OC. Really. I just saw it on IMDB). Next on the Netflix list is Finding Neverland, which I've been afraid to watch b/c everyone says it's sad and I don't feel like getting sad ever after work!

I have to do some affirmations or something to get through today because "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me."

Posted by jen at 08:06 AM |Comments (7)

On this day in 1977, Chris was born.

Happy Birthday! Remember it's your last birthday without a wife!!

Posted by jen at 08:18 AM |Comments (2)

Last night's knitting was fun. I forgot to take pictures. A lot of the girls couldn't come over so it was just me, Kristina. Chris (on the right) and Heather.

We had some snacks and knit away. I made some progress on my shrug and will probably be done next weekend. I made these antipastick things I saw on Food TV (giant olvies, mozzarella balls, and a grape tomato on a stick. Yum). And they were fan-tastic. I'm gonna make them for parties from now on. Oh Rachel Ray you are my food tv hero. I like watching her b/c she's absolutely dorky and so am I.

So I have a question for you folks and I'd like you to answer me in the comments if you don't mind. What do you do for a living (or if you're in school what are you planning on doing) and do you like it? I'm just curious because I've been contemplating what I'm going to do next in my "career" and I'm having trouble deciding. I keep thinking - what job can I have that I'd enjoy, but that's practical? Yeah, zippo. Too bad I can't get a job as a professional luncher. I don't like to talk about work on here too much, but I've kind of wandered into the "career" I have and I wonder if I had chosen a career instead if I'd be doing what I'm doing. And if not, what would that be?

Posted by jen at 07:43 AM |Comments (7)

I saw this on Kiddo's Blog and thought I'd do it too...

Posted by jen at 01:32 PM |Comments (2)

My Tivo cut out tonight right at the end of the Gilmore Girls season finale. Luke was telling Lorelai that she could talk anyone into anything and BLOOP - The tivo's taping Deadliest Catch on the discovery channel. I'll have to wait until my local station writes up their ghetto recap to find out what happened. Did you know that local stations did that? Who writes these? Can I get a job writing them?

They used to be much worse. They were obviously written by some intern in a room watching the episode then writing their version of what happened. I've checked them out before and they usually were filled with grammatical errors and local slang. If only I had that job when I was an intern at a TV station...maybe I would've stuck to it.

Oh and I found out my spider is a very boring cellar spider. No crazy hybrid for me.

Tomorrow is my first knitting night I'm hosting at my house. It shall be fueled by wine and quesadillas. MMMM. I'll have to post pics..

Posted by jen at 11:14 PM |Comments (7)

There are five of these in our garage right now. They're about the size of a ping pong ball when you include their legs. I googled "Pennsylvania Spiders" and I couldn't find anything that looked like this. Maybe it's like Arachnophobia and a rare spider mated with a common spider and now I have a freaky hybrid in our garage! Mah! I have a pet spider, so this one doesn't freak me out too much, but I still wonder what kind it is. And I still wouldn't want to find one in the house a la that shower scene in arachnaphobia.

I worked out tonight. I'm inspired by JT's effort at training for a marathon. Maybe I'll start running too! I was always the kid that was half jog-walking in the back of the line during the mandatory mile run. So I've always been intrigued by the athletic. I hated it when they introduced the presidential fitness test. Is that crap still around? We had to run a mile, do as many pull ups as we could (zero), do sit ups, and then do this thing where we sat with our legs straight out in front of us and then reached forward past our feet. Oh how I loathed presidential fitness test day!

Posted by jen at 11:26 PM |Comments (5)

Quick weekend update...

Friday we went and dropped off my car at the dealer to get fixed and then headed over to our friend Matt's house for a BBQ. The night went well until we got yelled at by his neighbor for being too loud. That made us all feel the same way you felt as a kid when your friend's mom yelled at them. Kind of uncomfortable and embarassed.

Saturday went well at first. JT came over to hang out and ran some errands with us. We went and bought a ton of paper samples to test out for the invites. We also ate lunch at Cheeburger Cheeburger, which overall was good - but good in a way that won't allow me to ever eat there again. I would be tempted to order the "frings" (fries and onion rings) basket every meal.

Then saturday night we met up with Kate and Alex to and had dinner. This is where the night takes a bad turn. Chris ordered what seemed like an innocent caesar salad. Afterwards we went and met our friends out at the bar. We had to leave b/c Chris felt oogie. Turns out that caesar salad wasn't so innocent - it was most likely laden with some ecoli or something b/c Chris was sick all night. Poor sicky pants. He's better today. What is our world coming to when salad isn't safe?

Sunday was just sitting around and watching Deadwood. I also saw America's Next Top Model for the first time. Those girls are dim bulbs, let me tell you. The episode I saw tested them on how well they could read a teleprompter. Not one of the 9 girls could read the word magenta! MAGENTA folks. That's one of the 98 crayon colors you get in the box with the sharpener.

Posted by jen at 08:50 AM |Comments (3)

Am I the only knitter near my age who isn't in love with the Decemberists? It's not that I don't like them - its that I just discovered them last year. I only own one EP.

[People throw rotten tomatoes at Jen]

Wait! Wait! I do like them and plan to buy their new(ish) album, but I just didn't realize that knitting and the Decemberists go hand in hand. I mean take a look out there, folks. Just about every knitting blog has an entry about the Decemberists right under that entry about Maryland Sheep and Wool!

I thought I'd point out that phenomenon. Other trends in knit bloggers - we mostly all liked Garden State, we mostly all wear glasses, and we are the coolest people ever!

Posted by jen at 08:56 AM |Comments (6)

Okay here's my latest knitting project....It's one of the shrugs from the latest Interweave Knits. The patterns are all available online.

I'm making it with Cascade Yarns 220 Superwash in a lovely magenta. It's basically two sleeves knit together.

Am I the only one in love with the OC? There's tons of ridiculous drama going on in that show this season. I love it!

Kids in my high school were not this good looking. Let me tell you.

Posted by jen at 09:30 PM |Comments (5)

So my trip to Boston has concluded without a trip to Sephora and without a bloggy meetup - but I did get to have a couple of good dinners and I definitely want to come back and see more of the city. We had lots of good seafood last night at Atlantic Fish - including two kinds of raw oysters. Mmmm. Granted, raw oysters are not for everyone and aren't supposed to be eaten in months without an "r" in them, but I risked it and they were tasty!

On the plane home I had an interesting thing happen. I felt like something exploded in my sinus cavity above my left eye. I am not blogging about this for sympathy...it was just a really weird, painful feeling and I wondered if any of you ever got the feeling that someone was stabbing you above the eye with a hot poker when you were flying.

Another interesting thought...I was reading High Energy Jenny's blog about how some people have been blogging about the high-school nature of knitting blogs. I haven't read any of these posts, and I feel bad if people think knit bloggers are clique-y. I was jealous of all the MD S&W bloggers meeting this weekend, but more than that I just think that it's really cool that there's this community of people who have never met each other, but feel drawn to each other enough to want to meet somewhere. How cool is that? I can't wait for the next S&W (in Rhinebeck??) and hope that people make the trip out so I can meet them there!!

So - sorry there are no good Boston pictures to post. All my pictures have clients in them and I don't post that kind of work info for fear of mixing business with blogging! You can just picture me there looking longingly at Sephora!

Posted by jen at 10:21 PM |Comments (0)

I've been in Boston all week so far for work. It's been okay and I may have even emailed some of you about my adventures while slightly under the influence of a dozen cosmopolitans. I'm not quite sure what posessed me.

I was planning on trying to meet up with Frecklegirl while I was out here, but our schedules did not mesh. I had to be working mostly the entire day.

Ah someday there will be a bloggy meeting of the minds. There should be some sort of conference for us or something. I may have some pics to post when I get back, but most are work related and boring, so you may not care to see them.

Here's an interesting mothers day tidbit. On the Sunday before I left for Boston, I drove to my mom's house and when I went to leave my car would not go out of park. So my sister had to drive me home. Oh you damn VW!!! I usually love my car - but that's just ridiculous!

The bug and I in happier days

Posted by jen at 08:38 AM |Comments (2)

While you are all out driiving to MD S&W or getting drunk with your friends, Chris and I are home having a leisurely evening infront of the boob tube.

Chris can be found playing Burnout 3 coining such memorable phrases as:

"Oooh that's a killer nosegrind."

or

"Look at that Jen, that's over a million points!"

or

"I got the firetruck!"

But I have my beer to entertain me and am generally happy to be sitting on my ass at home and not at work! Yay for Friday, however you celebrate it.

Posted by jen at 10:03 PM |Comments (1)

It was confirmed last night - I have a magazine addiction. We went to the local megabookstore and I perused the magazine section and picked up Pink, a new magazine for "professional women", Health, and:

So much to knit! I love all the stuff in this magazine especially all the shrugs. I am SO making some shrugs. I love magazines. It's really a bad habit. Shouldn't I be reading more books?

The week's been pretty uneventful. I'm getting ready for a three day business trip to Boston next week. Maybe I'll spot some knitters on the street! I'll be holed up in a convention center almost the entire time, but maybe I'll get out for a little bit one day. Ah the luxiourious life of a project manager...

Posted by jen at 08:41 AM |Comments (4)

Here is a baby hat from the Debbie Bliss "Baby Knits for Beginners" done in Plymouth Yarns; Encore Colorspun; Blue and Yellow. This knit up superfast and was done over the weekend.

Here is the star we bought at Peddler's Village this weekend. These stars are all over this area. A short history on them is found here.

We had a work dessert party tonight and I ate way too much, including a DELICIOUS piece of Baklava, so when I got home I had to work out on the elliptical machine. Afterwards in the shower, when I was using the pumice stone on my feet I started thinking about how its almost summer and people's feet are coming out to play. People, people, people, please take a good look at your feet before you stick 'em out there. Please. Take a little "me time" and buff 'em up. Slather some lotion on...Something. Didn't Wilco have an album called "summerfeet?"

My Summer Foot

Posted by jen at 11:21 PM |Comments (6)

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. - Stephen W. Hawking

I saw What the Bleep Do We Know this Friday, continuing the new tradition of Friday night movies at our house. I liked it a lot. Did you see it? Did you like it? You should rent it. Really.

I tried to read about quantum physics before, but it just makes me feel stupid, so I'm glad that they put it in cinema form for my feeble brain to try an grasp.

I feel that I have nothing interesting to post on here today - just working and working and working. This weekend we did go to Peddlers Village (I'd never been) and bought a red star to hang up on our wall. I'll post a picture tonight.

I've mostly been trying to find a rehearsal dinner venue. It's almost as much work as trying to find a reception venue. I also started and finished a baby hat for a woman I work with. Yay superkntting me!

Posted by jen at 04:39 PM |Comments (0)