spaazlicious

Actual Knit Contentholy guacamole!
I swung over to Lakeside Knits after work the other day because I couldn't remember if the owner Clarese stocked Lamb's Pride Bulky for this felted bag project I'm futzing with and while she didn't, I lucked into some skeins of Elsbeth Lavold's Angora (which is really only 20% angora, but let's be honest here, that's a good thing) at 50% off (from 7.95, she doesn't mark up the yarns past suggested retail as far as I've seen).

I got "peacock blue," because if it's got cock in it, I'm all over it. Here's how far one skein will take you in the Child's hooded pullover pattern of Sirdar #283:



It's amazing how much yarn ribbing and cabling eat up compared to straight stockinette. I'm flying along on the second ball, here's a closeup of the yarn so you can see that the Angora isn't too disgustingly fuzzy. It will fuzz up more with wear and handling, so the cabling isn't going to go POP!POW!WHIZZ!BANG! but I don't care. The yarn is soft and fun to work with like the now discontinued CE Lana d'Oro but not as stretchy.



I am loving knitting this and it's a pattern I've had since we lived in Oakland and I fell in love with the handknit sample at Skein Lane in El Cerrito. It was just waiting for the perfect yarn.

++++Random Road Luck++++

Tuesday, Nick and I were driving on Interstate 8 West to pick up a friend for dinner (and fava beans and a nice chianti...) and off in the distance I saw this black bit go spinning across three lanes of traffic. I was driving about the speed of traffic (in San Diego, roughly ninety miles an hour, seriously) but I slowed the fu¢k down like a good defensive driver, then quickly realised that I was going to have to pretty much stop, which is definitely not a good thing to have to do in the fast lane in San Diego. Because that black thing was somebody's tire and it had come from the number one lane, bounced and hit a Saturn Vue which somehow bounced it sixty feet into the air to land back into the number one lane. My lane. The fu¢ker bounced in the lane three times before vaulting into eastbound traffic.

I suppose, if I had never seen it I could have gone driving blithely on and had it bounce in front of me, bounce up, then land behind me, because I am very lucky, but then I would have missed out on the mesmerising sight of roughly fourty pounds of large rubber projectile gallivanting across the freeway and that gut-clenching feeling of horrified anticipation of the worst.

Okay, and I'll admit: a sort of macabre voyeurism watching the other motorists react to the rogue tire, checking back and forth between the rearview mirror and the tire to make sure we weren't going to get hit from either direction.


¡Yo México!

Nick just went back to work on Wednesday night; he had a stretch of ten days off that went by way too fast and I loved every minute of it. My brother babysat Tuesday night lastweek while we stole away to Baja California, Méjico. (If you're a local who grew up listening to 91X you too may hear that woman's lyrical voice when you read that)and stayed at the Hotel Calafia, a historical landmark on the coast and not more than a half hour south of the border. We were probably the only guests of the hotel that night and the ocean was right outside our room. It's not on a swimming beach, but it was wonderful to fall asleep together listening to it.

I had some cockroach of the sea. Nick is right, it does look disgusting, yes?



The food wasn't great, but the view and the company was fantastic. We saw porpoises and what appeared to be otters (although are there otters this far south?) from where we sat.

This is a tiny slice of the view we had from our room.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever,ever,ever, EVER title a post "I feel lucky" because that guarantees that you will piss away two hours writing a post which will just be eaten by cyberspace. Sucker.

Yes, I will be switching to typepad or some other home soon.

Everybody has a website.

Even Jasper.

"‘Slimy and mobile’ creature difficult to remove"..
Leech threat or no, I will defend this case 'til I die.
Plus, I know it gives people a secret superior thrill when I do it at traffic lights.

I saw a preview for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie for the first time tonight. I cried.

Stupid, stupid. But to write what that series meant to me, sequestered at an all girls boarding school (the same one Patti Hearst went to) would be impossible. And boring.

I just miss Douglas Adams so much.

April 29, 2005.

[Later edited to add after Mandy sent me an e-mail with a comment since Haloscan was freakin' out mentioning that DA "changed the story for each incarnation" & my response was kind of a clarification of the melodramatic tone of the previous part of the post and perhaps a more accurate reflection of how I really feel on the whole thing--since I'll be there on opening day, but I won't camp out to get tickets. Anyway:

He was definitely a writer who was very conscious of the different media he worked with--I have Salmon of Doubt on audio and in it he goes on and on about creating a CD-ROM, the joys and the tedious bits, the limitations and the advantages. He was so into emerging technologies and so interested in the universe, life, and everything ;) that it probably distracted him from leaving a larger written legacy of the quality of HGttG since so much of his later stuff was written during crunch time, literally locked in a hotel room by his editor and only allowed out for walks. My way of operating ;), but not exactly conducive to the best quality (although who's to say it didn't inspire some genius riffs?).

Anyway, I feel like a total dork for posting [this] entry. Not like I really KNEW him, I'm just one of his millions of fans who feel ripped off by fate--especially when there are heart-attack-heavy hacks out there roaming free-range and filling the world with OpCenter crap.
Eh, life is cruel and then you turn into a pot of petunias.]

I get to smell all the dogs I want.
(seriously, I can't get enough of that happy dog smell)

Of course, it goes the other way as well.

For the record this is actually a close-up of a pic of Breakway and I playing on the slab and her running up behind me to punch me in the butt with the snout. She's a naughty little monkey that one--it's a breed trait whether the greyhounds like to admit it or not.

Hey. In going to Ande's, I see that I am blatantly ripping her off*--anybody want to start a meme? Those bloggers who post about their jobs anyway...what do you love about your job? I tag the ladies of JenLa perversely because they bitch about their jobs so much, but there must be at least one thing to love, yes?

I also tag Stella, and the fastest knitter I know: Lauren;)and LoriO.

*The duplication was totally subconscious I swear!

It annoys me when someone wins an eBay auction and then doesn't submit funds to PayPal or e-mail to say why they have not yet submitted funds to PayPal. Meanwhile, other narrowly outbid knitters might be satisfying themselves elsewhere. Horrors.

It seriously annoys me when an eight month old overhyped piece of my techno-craptic lifestyle gives up the ghost right in the middle of a Tom Waits song ("Jitterbug Boy?" I hadn't even listened to the whole album yet). Now all it does is give a horrendous whirring and clicking inside its metal and plastic shell.

Should I buy a $925 casket for my $400 paperweight?



I am being melodramatic, of course. I'm not throwing it out the window in frustration just yet; I have to read through Apple's three page repair contract and agree to their terms to schedule a repair service appt by mail.

So this should all be resolved rather quickly since e-mail tech support and the postal service are two entities well known for speed and efficiency.

Y'know, if it miraculously heals itself [and I know I'm not the only one to have a tech thing do that], or if they decide that the problem isn't their fault, they can charge me up to $100?

Maybe I should have bought one of these.

Rare knitting content: I'll be casting on a new supersecret project tonight.
Wow. Knitblogs are thrillin'. (yeah, okay, I know I should probably remove my blog from any knitting categories, but someday, some glorious day, I will have an FO to show. Someday.) It will involve felting, which I've never done before. And fun fur, which I've never used before. sounds doomed already, doesn't it?

Mandy's portrait of kids has arrived and has been hung on the wall in our bedroom. Her beautiful, incredible work is very hard to photograph because the layers of oil pencil (?) are created upon layers of shellac. Not sure what the tech term of exactly what this clear hard gloss is, but I like to say "shellac."

Please pardon my poor photography. This portrait is based on this picture, a photo I snapped two weeks after Belu had come to live with us. It documents Tahoe's dawning realisation that Belu wasn't just another foster dog and wasn't going to be moving on. Quite a moment, now writ extra large.



The lines are just wonderful, and I think this piece really highlights the striking difference between the rounder puppy-lines of Belu's face and the more angular graceful lines of the adult whippet form of Tahoe. And of course he is a gorgeous specimen of the form, if the proud mommy does say so.



Pardon the glare from the center of his forehead, I think that's just the light of his blesséd nature shinin' through.



Here is a detail of his eyes, looking at Belu.



Something I love about Mandy's work are those aforementioned layers. I invite you all to come to my house and stand on our computer desk to tilt your head back and forth to see them...it is a very subtle almost 3-D effect. This is a close-up of his brow. The damn camera flattens them all out to one layer, but the lines, I tell you, I love the lines.



Here's an example of the rich muddle of colour shading which is darker at the bottom and lightens moving up the portrait, still overlaid with Moore's signature calligraphic-style scribbles in a (dare I say?) "spaazlicious orange," a motif which continues the width and length of the portrait. It looks reddish-pink in the pics, but orangey in front of me. And of course, the sig of the great artist herself.



Again, there's that pesky glare of glory. ;)

It's enough to make a girl change her mind about how she wants her body disposed of--check this out!



"The Lady of Guadalupe" in 18 Gauge Steel! Oh yeah! How often do you think those words are juxtaposed..? Outside of the Castro district, por supuesto.

Ooooh, a casket from Costco...I just burn with kitschy alliterative glee!

Me: "You asshole!!!"

Nick: [reading a book on the bed] "What?"

Me: [waving a flip-flop freshly snatched from Jasper's jaws] "Look what he did!"




Nick: "Oh... Jasper!"

Me: "And you must have just let him!"

Nick: "Well, I knew he had something he was playing with, I didn't know it was your shoe."

Me: "Well...actually... I guess a foam flip-flop probably didn't make that much noise being destroyed."

[At this point I waggle the flip-flop in a vaguely threatening manner, and Jasper looks concerned and perhaps a bit contrite.]

Me: "These flip-flops cost twenty bucks!"

[Jasper and Nick gaze at me in utter disbelief that foam and webbing could cost twenty bucks and that anyone would be daft enough to pay it. Nick is the only one who says anything though.]

Nick: "Twenty bucks!?"

Me [abashed]: "Well, yeah, it's good foam. Look, I've had them a year and it's hardly compressed at all!"

[I wave the chewed flip-flop again and Jasper joins Nick on the bed in a show of male solidarity when faced with an irritated woman.
They both look at me like they are waiting for an apology.
I sigh and go get the camera, and Jasper laughs: the clear winner.]