Thursday, February 19, 2009

Isn't a little early for startitis?

According to the Yarn Harlot, spring is supposed to be the time when startitis runs rampant. (I can't tell you what book that essay is in off the top of my head.) Either I am a little ahead of schedule or there really is no seasonal aspect to it.

I haven't had much knitting time this month but I keep wanting to start new projects. It isn't that I don't want to work on things I have going, I just am suffering some delusion that I can keep 25 things on my needle and get them all done.

Like I said, the knitting time has decreased lately, but I'm still a happy person. I'm really enjoying living in a small town again. I park a block or so from my office so every day I get to walk down the main commercial street in town. I love looking in the shop windows (I walk by a bridal shop that changes the prom dress display every couple days) and being friendly to people going in and out of the post office. I love that I can look out a window in my office and see things happening outside. It really does make me happy.

Top 25 Albums

I totally sat down with the intention to blog, but for the last twenty minutes I got sucked into a Facebook meme, because sometimes they are kind of fun to do. I'm cross-posting it here, because that seems kind of fun too:

Think of 25 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. When you finish, tag 25 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good.

***This is not about being cool. Which albums have you actually listened to thousands of times?***

I tried to order these not so much as most listened too (although they have all had a lot of play) but as most influential or most strongly associated with a particular event in my life. Of course I added some honorable mentions too because I have to play with the rules a little bit. I should also say that these are really the albums, not just individual songs, that I am ranking. I like to listen to full albums and appreciate them as a body of work.


1. Oasis - Be Here Now
2. Marcy Playground - MP3
3. Fastball - Harsh Light of Day
4. Oasis - What's the Story Morning Glory
5. Counting Crows - This Desert Life
6. Coldplay - Parachutes
7. Simon and Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water
8. Third Eye Blind - Blue
9. Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head
10. The White Stripes - White Blood Cells
11. 311 - Evolver
12. Our Lady Peace - Healthy in Paranoid Times
13. Barenaked Ladies - Stunt
14. U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind
15. Tarkio - Omnibus
16. Oasis - The Masterplan
17. Counting Crows - Hard Candy
18. The Strokes - Is This It?
19. Smashmouth - Astrolounge
20. Everclear - Sparkle and Fade
21. Barenaked Ladies - Maroon
22. Semisonic - Feeling Strangely Fine
23. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
24. Train - Drops of Jupiter
25. The White Stripes - Elephant

Honorable Mentions:
Wallflowers - Breach
Matchbox Twenty - Mad Season
Fastball - All the Pain Money Can Buy
Dixie Chicks - Fly

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Birthday Gifts!

Here it is the second week in February and I haven't made an entry this month. I have a good excuse. I was out of town for a conference for a few days and before that I was getting ready for the conference.

My stashbusting is not going so well this month. My dishcloth got stalled after a couple days because I just didn't feel like knitting on it, and the yarn is coming off a cone so there was no way I was taking that with me to the conference so I was going to get behind anyway.

Then this morning I received two skeins of Malabrigo and the new Yarn Harlot book. Take a good look at that picture, I can see grass, it is sunny, and although you can't tell from the picture the temperature was at least 10 degrees above freezing! I haven't had a birthday like this in years.


The brighter red is colorway is Garnet and it is specifically to replace my beloved Foliage hat that fell out of my pocket and was lost at the mall while Christmas shopping. I can only hope is that somehow that hat made it to someone who could really use it. I was sad, but consoled myself with the fact that I could replace it. Mark made sure that would happen for me, plus I got a bonus skein in a shade of red I wear a lot, so I will probably use it for another hat down the road.

While this hasn't been an incredibly productive week of knitting I did finish a pair of socks. This was another case of getting two pairs of socks out of one skein of sock yarn. The first pair I made for my mom so these are for me. I have also finished knitting the pieces of my Kai baby sweater, so now I need to sew it together and knit the collar and then that will be done too.