• I’d most like to feed a double bacon steakburger and shake to: #10, Alexei Ramirez
• I’d most like to go sing bad drunken karaoke with: #32, Brian Anderson and #45, Bobby Jenks
• I’d most like to go work on a Habitat for Humanity house with: #25, Jim Thome
• I’d most like to get to bring me homemade venison jerky: #56, Mark Buehrle
• I’d most like to just go get a beer (or six) and hang out with: #12, AJ Pierzynski
• I’d most like to get in a batting cage so he could help me with my swing: #20, Carlos Quentin
• I’d most like to go to a nice sit-down restaurant with: #14, Paul Konerko
• I’d most like to go to a Kanye show with: #23, Jermaine Dye (dude has had Kanye songs as his intro music two seasons running now, I think it’s a sign we’d both have fun)
• I’d most like to take Spanish lessons from: #13, Ozzie Guillén

eeeee! <3 my guys! t-minus 125 minutes! soon i will get to see this year’s jumbotron montage in person!

People ask me what I do in the winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.
—Rogers Hornsby

i am still convinced that kenny williams is going to wait until i am out of town and distracted, and then dump half the roster and, like, hire kansas city’s entire bullpen (again) now that he’s gotten rid of boone logan and needs to backfill more talent-free relievers.

DON’T DO THAT TO ME, KENNY. DON’T YOU DO THAT!

Just wanted to let you know — a multitude of regular-season sins can be forgiven through the skillfull execution of October appearances. FYI.

love,
–sabrina.

Knock it off, you weenies. I am not amused by your continuing to lose like losing losers. Especially to the damn TWINKIES.

Argh. Minnesota! ARGH!!!

no love,
–sabrina

WHAT THE FUCK.

i am not happy.

no love,
–sabrina.

stupid january. you are the longest month.

Although I did fetch my Baudelaires up out of the Naughty WIPs Basket again — I had to rip out what I had (about half) of the heel because I’d obviously lost my place a couple times running, and I couldn’t fudge it enough to make sense, so I just ripped it, but … I SWEAR I am going to find the author of this pattern and punish her somehow. I just tried on the second sock, I should take a picture… OK:

So yesterday I had just finished the heel and started up again with the pattern to come up the ankle, and I was feeling pretty good about it, except then I noticed it looked like the foot was maybe a little long. So I’m glad I decided to try it on just now. Which is good. I would have been pretty irritated if I had had to rip out the heel (AGAIN) plus several inches of ankle.

Honestly. The pattern says to start the heel 4″ from the back of the foot. I just got my ruler and measured this. It’s 4-3/4 inches long from the start of the increases! Nobody’s foot is this big! Bigfoot’s foot isn’t this big. I’ve got like an extra 1-1/2 inches hanging off my toe in that photo, and that’s not even stretched at all. And I’ve got gauge. So I’m going to rip out the whole heel plus, like, five pattern repeats. Maybe I should just rip out both socks and use this yarn in another pattern, just to avoid the resentment. Oh my god.

If I ever write a sock pattern, I’m writing down how damn many rows to knit. None of this “four inches before you think where it should go” nonsense. Jeeeez.

Garnprinzessin: I don’t know why I can’t knit this! Apparently I am just broken. The lace pattern is the easy part. The, like, actual SOCK is the hard part.

I think I am going to call it a day, and rip these babies out. I haven’t knitted on another pair of socks since I started them, and that was in, like, June — I remember I was knitting on one of them when we tailgated for the Sox/Orioles game, which was early July, IIRC. These socks went to quite a few Sox games this year, by virtue of having to get constantly ripped back and reknitted. Maybe the problem here is that not only did the Sox bullpen blow every opportunity they got, but my socks blew it too. Oh, bad puns. That’s a sign I have to call this blog post done… Anyways. Maybe I’ll rip them out tonight after French class, and wind up some new yarn after that. I’ve been collecting piles of sock yarn that I haven’t touched (since I’m a one-sock-at-a-time kind of girl) and my orange sherbet colored stuff has been calling my name since I bought it, at Nina, months and months and months ago. I bought it before I cast on the haunted Baudelaires, actually. Maybe it can be official consolation prize sock yarn…

it’s good to be in french class again. i keep having weird mini-epiphanies as some bit of vocabulary that i’d forgotten pops back into my head. on the down side, i’ve lost command of what the tenses of verbs (beyond présent and passé composé) are called and what they’re used for. i can still use them if i don’t think about it, but hell if i can tell you what the imparfait is for or how to form it. okay, okay, i know what conditionnel is for, but only because the name makes it pretty obvious. still, it’s a little bit strange sometimes, dredging through my head like this.

“csi: miami” premiere last night: sincerely very meh. i think we should get more BOOM! in a season premiere, you know? i feel a little let down.

been working a fair amount. breaking the rules because i have to work from home to take care of stuff. oh well. some days are more irritating than others. someday, someday i can stop screwing around with piddly shit (like this pile of scripts i’ve been messing with, lately) and do something useful again. i have hopes, anyways. oh, and also new minion wasy starts next week: muahahahahahahahahahahahaha! minion! fetch me my coffee!!

have reverted to using the blue line to commute. last week i gave it a trial run, as i’d heard they’d completed the slow zone restoration between division and grand. they did! lovely new cement ties holding the tracks in (they look very funny, like they’re coated in whiteout, in the dingy nastiness of the filthy division stop), and not only have i not had to wait long for a train to arrive, i have been able to board easily, and gotten downtown in good time — about 25 minutes door to door. no doubt i am tempting fate by making this post, but still, after all the endless kvetching, i figure the cta deserves a little love when they quit screwing up quite so much. (i feel a little bad now about telling my new downstairs neighbor, who moved in about three weeks ago, that the blue line was unusable. hopefully he decided i was merely cynical due to accumulated years of disgust, and not actually an idiot.)

got some work done on my clapotis this weekend. i had a couple free hours (shock!) and decided that, dammit, it’s been languishing on the needles for far too long and i’m sort of sick of looking at it sitting there in the basket, and besides, i want to wear it, for pete’s sake. so it’s about, i think, halfway done now. maybe a little more. mohair-heavy yarn on addi turbos == mistake. it’s extremely slippery and sort of annoying to knit with, because the loops won’t stay still. but i finally picked up some speed with the pattern, and after zipping along for a couple of hours i got at least a quarter of it done on sunday, and another couple of rows last night as i was sacked out in front of Horatio and Friends’ Mystery Hour, and while i won’t give any guarantees of a date of completion, i think it’s actually possible that i might finish it at some point in recorded history. so that’s nice.

the baudelaires are still sitting in the Naughty Project Punishment Corner, as i have yet to recover from the realisation that i’m going to have to rip out and reknit the whole first sock because i knit it all wonky. i keep thinking that i should just finish them, but then i get sort of bitter about the impending frogging, and all the work i’ve put into them to have netted basically 1/2 a sock now. and of course i can’t start any new socks until i finish them, because i’m a one-pair-at-a-time girl, so … that probably explains the clapotis progress. maybe i’ll finish the clapotis and then go back and finally finish my MS3, and by that time (which will easily be the year 2045) i can finish the baudelaires. :)

hm, what else? oh! i got a fantastic pressie from my SP11 the other day. by “the other day” i actually mean a week and a half ago, but, you know… bizzy. the pictures are up on flickr but i haven’t had time to write a coherent post. i actually started using them on my clapotis, replacing some of my boring stitch markers, and i’m feeling pretty good about myself because i’ve only knitted them into the fabric about three times so far (which is pretty good for me using fancy stitch markers). also: cheese! how can you go wrong? so that’s pretty awesome. perhaps it is actually the stitch markers which are to blame for my clapotis progress this weekend? hmm…

they extended the road construction on my block another few weeks. they have been ripping Le Moyne St. to pieces since june — by which i mean the entire north side of the street was ripped up, dug out, and a water main replaced, and every day they dig it up and then fill it up again with gravel at the end of the day, so it’s been gravel since july. the practical implication of this is of course that there is no parking there during the day, so that’s annoying. i keep violating my personal sartorial restriction against sweatpants in public as i have to go get out of bed and move the car at 6:30AM — on the bright side, at least no one else is awake to see me. they claim that they will be done soon, and in fact today they have huge cement trucks out there doing their little cement truck thing, so that’s sort of interesting, except for the fact that if they fill the holes up with cement, they’ll be huge potholes by may, and if they don’t, they’re going to have to resurface the asphalt, and really, you know, given all that has transpired since then i really feel more than ever that they could honestly have given us more than one day’s notice they were going to be doing this all summer (and autumn) long. stupid water department.

this weekend shall also be very bizzy: saturday is the company’s 25th anniversary party, and i’m very excited: it’s going to be held on the trading floor, in the pits! i’ve never been down to the trading floor. i’ve never even seen it from the viewing gallery, because that’s closed except to tour groups now, so even though i work there i can’t just go strolling in and look. of course it won’t be the same seeing it with, you know, a party going on instead of floor trading, but at least i can see what it looks like. then sunday i’m heading up to the illinois railway museum with a friend to visit it before they stop running trains for the season, and then i have the white sox season closer. then it’s five whole months until baseball again. :( the world series doesn’t count… i mean, go cleveland! and all, but, … meh. i still blame kenny williams, and also the ban on mark buehrle’s tarp sliding in the rain. all the bad luck stems from that ban! rescind the slip ‘n slide ban! save the 2008 season!

oh yes:

okay, that’s it for now. gotta run go get ready for work now. also, i think somewhere in this hubbub i forgot to pay my gas bill. i wonder where i put it…