the everyday adventures of sabrina

So, I had this trunk.

I wanted to store yarn in it, but I didn’t want the yarn to catch on any of its particle board walls (which were a little rough).

My first plan was to line it with cedar closet paneling from Home Depot, but when I got to the store, I discovered that the paneling was not, as the web site had implied, actual cedar, but was just a sheet of hardboard veneered with a cedar print. So much for that plan.

So I decided I would hit my remnants at home, and line it with fabric. I knew I had fleece, which I planned to use for batting — both to make it nice and soft on the inside, but also to ensure that any splinters from the particle board wouldn’t work their way through the lining. Then I figured, I had some blue fabric I could use to line it.

I got home and raided my fabric stash, and discovered, to my pleasure, that (in addition to the plain blue cotton I had been thinking of using) I had in there a yard of purple velveteen I’d picked up sometime. I eyeballed it a little and decided to use that to line the trunk.

First, I started by gluing the fleece to the trunk with ordinary white glue. I used about a whole bottle of Elmer’s school glue. (I was going to staple it in, but the staples didn’t want to go in, so I gave up and went to glue instead.)

Yeah, that’s safety orange fleece. It was left over from a project I never completed, which was some sort of vague idea of a warm and cosy, yet bright and obvious, jacket for cold-weather biking. It was really the most obnoxious shade of orange you can imagine. But, it was going to be hidden beneath other fabric so I didn’t care.

Then I started gluing the velveteen in. I cut pieces for the ends first and glued them in place, planning to have a single long strip the width of the trunk for both the long sides and the bottom (and the same on the top), which would overlap and hide untrimmed edges.

I had been trying to keep the edges neatly lined up with the brass edging on the trunk, using hot glue instead of white glue to ensure a good adhesion, but even so, sometimes there were little gaps. So I decided to edge it with some lace I got in a grab bag (and frankly had had No Fucking Clue what I would do with a whole spool of royal purple scalloped lace, so that worked out well for me), again using the hot glue gun.

Burned the crap out of my fingers a couple of times because the glue would come through the lace when I was tamping it down, but it all worked out well in the end. For now I have a swanky purple velveteen trunk! Just the thing for storing fuzzy yarns in:

But that was not nearly enough of a project for me, today. Despite the fact that I really only finished with the trunk at about 8 PM, I decided that what I really needed to do was to continue with my game plan for dinner: homemade spanakotiropita. In case you’re not familiar, that’s spinach cheese pie — layers of phillo dough, each individually brushed with butter, then cooked spinach with eggs, feta cheese, and sautéed onion, then more phillo. Phillo is a right pain in the ass to deal with. It’s paper-thin, and the sort of paper it’s thin like is the onionskin they print Bibles on. It dries out incredibly quickly — like, between the pile of dough and the pan 16 inches away — so you have to keep it covered at all times with a damp towel. And it’s so thin you have to be careful not to tear it with your pastry brush. Still: it’s delicious, and worth the bother. (Probably.)

One thing I noticed while chopping up my spinach:

Oh, excellent, because I was worried I accidentally got the really high-fat spinach.

Then, there was more spinach that would fit in my pot. There was so much spinach I had to cook some of it down and then add more. There was spinach everywhere, especially when I was trying to stir it and accidentally flung bits of it on the floor. There was a ginormous pot of spinach on my stove! No one could ever eat this much spinach!

(Well, until it’s surrounded by delicious feta cheese and enveloped in delicately browned, flaky, buttery phillo, anyways.)

And since I know everyone was dying to know how my little wool dyeing experiment — oh, hey, forgot to blog about that, didn’t I? So I handpainted some rovings:

And then I steamed them and let them dry and they looked like so:

From there, I went first to the very tediously, very carefully split and predrafted pencil roving:

And then I spun some up (just a little bit to see how it looked and felt; I was spending most of my time on MS3 this week):

And hey, speaking of MS3 — hey, look, ma, I finally made it past Clue 1:

Before I had my little mission to Mars to go out shopping in search of trunk modification supplies today, I had thought I might actually get finished with Clue 2, but then, you know… craft happened. Still, I think I might have a fighting chance to get to Clue 3 by this weekend. When, you know, Clue 5 comes out. Oh well, all’s fair in war and knitting.

But now: my delicious baked spanakotiropita should be cool enough to cut myself a chunk of it, and a glass of delicious Rheinhessen Auslese awaits it, and me. Hooray!

Sandy and Tiger, ca. Dec 1991/Jan 1992

Originally uploaded by sldownard.

Scott Merkin:

Friday’s trade of Tadahito Iguchi to Philadelphia will be viewed by many as difficult to understand, with a valuable starting second baseman being moved out in exchange for a Minor League hurler whose current biggest claim to fame is being the son of the Phillies’ pitching coach.

…you think?

i was stuck with MS3, where i couldn’t complete rows in the 60s without error and I had to fall back to my lifeline on row 61 so many times… then I finally got past that roadblock on Wednesday, made it all the way up to 79 before getting distracted by something shiny, then today I picked it up again and made it to 85, whereupon I stopped to admire my work, spread it out and admired the pretty pattern and how all the nice yarnovers made such neat… lines… hey… wait a second… dammit!

i don’t know what i was doing in the second half of row 75, but it was NOT the pattern as written. it was not just, like, one missed yarnover. it was, as michael suggests, a freestyle jazz interpretation of the patterns, with yarnovers and decreases sprinkled wherever I had felt they might like to go. Or something. At any rate, it was completely, utterly, and egregiously wrong. The only way it could have been more wrong would have been if I had randomly picked up another ball of yarn and started knitting from it instead.

Maybe I should have continued knitting after drinking. I would really feel better about frogging 15 rows if it was because of drunkknitting instead of some sort of random dumbassery.

So depressing. At the rate I’ve been making progress on this project, that’s about 3 hours of work I just wiped out. I’m never going to make it to Clue 2. :( Meanwhile, everyone else is up at row 300-whatever and can’t wait for the next clue to come out. I could seriously just cry.

It occurs to me, belatedly, that after 2/3 of a bottle of Australian Shiraz is probably not an ideal time to get more rows done on my Mystery Stole 3.

dammit.

OTOH, it does make both (a) shopping on Peapod and (b) cleaning out my closet much more entertaining.

finished HP7 a half hour or so ago. only one non-spoilery comment for now: less traumatic than SK’s Dark Tower book 7. probably good, considering it’s a children’s book rather than an adult novel. :P

found this when walking in to the living room this morning: a cat napping using a bump of my new fiber for a pillow. obviously my failure to put it away last night paid off in cute photo opportunities — at least, until i accidentally woke him up:

and speaking of that fiber, it’s spinning up nicely, on the lovely new Louët:

but spinning more of it shall have to wait, as the post lady just rang my bell and brought me a little pressie from across the pond:

So yeah. Today was pretty sweet.

Yesterday evening I was scanning Craigslist listings for garage sales, as I really want to get an old (huge) enamel canning pot for dyeing yarn. I didn’t find one of those, but I did find two garage sales advertising yarn. So I got up early today and left the house about 8:30 AM. Hit the first one, in Lincoln Square; found a couple of shirts, but the yarn was basically a large pile of funfur. Alas. Still, I bought a funfur blob, since I want to make another kitty pi, and I’m unwilling to spend more than $0.50 for novelty yarn.

Travelled to the second garage sale, which had bin after bin after bin of acrylic yarn, some really ancient stuff, some newer and in decent condition. I bought an afghan’s worth of rose pink Red Heart Super Saver for a buck, so that’s something to keep me busy once I finish my ripple. But! They had other stuff. GOOD other stuff. I’m fiercely envious of the woman who got the Kitchenaid stand mixer for $35 right before I got to that table. I got two LPs, and a rubbermaid thingie I intend to use for storing cat food, and a nice big flour sifter for a quarter, and a potato ricer also for a quarter, and an older, kinda beat copy of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (which I keep meaning to buy a copy of) for a buck. Several knitting and crocheting books, which I’ll list later. And: a big-ish blue speckled enameled pot, with a pasta/steamer insert, for $1.25!! I was psyched about the pot. (Actually, I was kind of psyched about the flour sifter too. Now I can actually sift the ingredients in recipes that call for sifted things! And it has this adorable little crank… I mentioned it was a quarter, right?) The pot is destined to be used for dyeing yarn and roving, so I am very pleased about that.

From there, I went home, carried my swag inside, and then hopped in the car, and headed up to Crystal Lake for the first annual Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair, which is a boring drive out into the country (“There’s corn here!” I exclaimed on the phone with Kim.). Got there around noonish and wandered through the Fine Art Show first. They had a number of things on display, knitted items, felted items, quilts, and mixed media. I was particularly impressed with a couple of the quilts, actually — one was an odd interpretation of tiny, off-kilter log cabin squares and I really liked it; only $2200! — and another had diagonally-placed star squares but was overstitched with these great spiral swirls. And a third — I honestly can’t remember what the main pattern was now, but what impressed me was that the wide border of the quilt had very elaborate embossed patterns. I didn’t notice them at first, but then they popped out at me and I was just really surprised by how interesting they were. Anyways, that was the Fine Art Show.

Then it was on to the vendors. Four large tents worth of vendors. So much stuff for sale. Fiber (for spinning and felting) and yarn completely dominated the first two tents.

I was excited when I found the booth for Wool, Warp, and Wheel, because they are a local vendor for Kromski wheels (with whose Mazurka wheel I have been mildly infatuated lately, in that “maybe someday…” way). I had wanted to check out the wheels if they had them, or talk to them. So I wandered through the booth, ogling the pretties — they did indeed have Kromski wheels at the Fair, and even a Mazurka! I was feeling pretty good, which was when the saleslady approached me. We exchanged greetings, and I said I was pleased to see them there since I had wanted to look at Kromski wheels and I knew they sold them. She asked me if I spun, and I said yes; and I mentioned that while I was not in the market today, I was thinking about getting a Mazurka.

She corrected my pronounciation. Evidently, it’s “ma-ZUR-ka.” Not “ma-ZHUR-ka,” as I had been saying. Alas. Perhaps if I was a real spinner I would know these things.

Then she asked me if I had a wheel. Yes, I said, and smiled. Yes, I have a Babe production wheel. Then, in the most patronizing tone imaginable:

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

…

That pretty much ended the conversation. She lost interest in me almost as quickly as I lost interest in her.

Hey, snotty saleslady? Congratulations — I won’t be spending $600 on a wheel, plus more in accessories, with your company! I’ll mail order it and pay shipping rather than give you a dime! I’m a little offended that you dissed my wheel. Even if you thought it was cheesy or low-rent, or whatever the hell your problem was with it, it’s not really cool to talk down to customers. Especially customers who’ve just said they were contemplating giving you a thousand dollars or so in the near future. Besides, I like my Babe wheel, so bite me.

Thus endeth niqui’s patronage of Wool, Warp, and Wheel. I’ll give my money to someone nice, instead. Like, say, Nels at Babe’s Fiber Garden, who asked me — when I wandered into his booth while I was still stinging from the Wool, Warp, and Wheel woman, and told him I really loved my Babe wheel — what I was using it for, and I said “well, pretty much just wool, I’m afraid of hard to spin things like cotton,” actually set me up with one of his charka wheels and taught me how to spin cotton.

Anyways, I continued through the fair, accumulating a few goodies along the way. (Oh, it was very dangerous there. Very, very dangerous. Apparently there are a lot of alpaca farmers in this region, and they ALL wanted me to take home some of their fiber. I resisted, but it was a close thing.) My booty — minus a couple of things which are definitely destined to be gifted, and including a couple of things I haven’t decided if they’re gifts or not yet :) –

Clockwise from upper right:

• 8 oz. 80/20 Border leicester/mohair top in Cherry Blossom, from Maple Row Stock Farm
• 4 oz. handpainted Illinois-farmed Montadale top in raspberry/sherbet, from Esther’s Place/Illinois Green Pastures Cooperative
• 4 oz. handpainted English Wensleydale in jewel tones, also from Maple Row Stock Farm
• I swore I was going to stay away from yarns (which was really, really hard, especially when I found the “everything half off” booth with Noro and Cascade 220 and lots more), but I couldn’t resist a little bit, from a really nice vendor who talked socks with me and had really nice yarns — 1 skein handpainted Pair of Sox sock yarn in variegated pink, from Sandy’s Palette
• 0.7 oz of handpainted silk hankies in ocean blue shades, also from Sandy’s Palette
• A set of five stainless steel 6″ double pointed size 00/1.75mm sock needles by HiyaHiya, from Yarns by Design, because wood and bamboo size 00 needles break if I look at them
• A bump of handpainted superwash merino in multicolors, from My Small Wonders
• Four Country Classics acid dyes, in Cornflower, Blueberry, Wild Iris, and Raspberry, from Susan’s Fiber Shop, which has both a really fantastic selection of stuff and one of the most cheerful and gregarious vendors at the whole fair
• And finally, two lace sock patterns (1, 2), because Garnprinzessin started me down a path from which there is no return!, also from Yarns by Design

But, although I am really impressed with the fabulousness of what I took home from the fair, the real prize was not bought from a booth at all.

While scoping out Craigslist for garage sales, I had noticed that someone had posted that she was looking to get rid of a couple of her wheels. I got in touch with her and found out that they were both still available, so we arranged to meet up at the fair so I could try them out. Neither of us could get her second wheel to spin for us today (sub-optimal spinning conditions, in fairness: standing in a parking lot, leaning on one leg, treadling with the other, and trying to draft in the breeze), but the Louët picked up my test bit of roving and ran with it, producing a fine, neat single with basically no effort at all on my part. So,… it came home with me. Total budget buster, I admit, and I probably should have abstained. But! These wheels sell for $400 new. I got this one for $200 (plus two extra bobbins I bought at the fair — though, apparently one of them is a high-speed/laceweight bobbin, which I didn’t notice at the time. Still, it had one, so I can still Navajo ply with only two bobbins.) And it was such a breeze to use. And it’s no larger than my Babe wheel! I’m really pleased with it.

Then I left the fair, Crystal Lake attacked my car, I effected repairs without having to break out the sock yarn, as I threatened (in jest; I would have called roadside assistance before using handpainted sock yarn to tie my car back together), and my continuing experiment in “slowpokedom in pursuit of mileage” netted me 33 mpg at ~ 60 mph on the tollway. I had planned to spin some of my lovely new roving on my lovely new wheel when I got home, but then I got sidetracked by writing this stupid blog entry, because I am an idiot.

Anyways, I will close this entry with a photo of the roving I got the other day on my trip out to The Fold — which I was trying and failing, repeatedly, to spin on Thursday night, to my frustration. I don’t know what it was, but yarn was not in the cards for me that night. I resorted to looking at the roving and going “oooh, pretty. ooooh, soft.” I may give it a shot on the swanky pretty lovely shiny new Louët tomorrow. Wish me yarn!

A mechanic is niqui!

Originally uploaded by sldownard.

Shoelace!

–

So. On my way out of the parking lot at the fiber fair — and by “parking lot” I mean “grass” — there was a bump which caused me to scrape the underside of my front bumper, pulling out onto the street. I thought little of it beyond “damn, you guys could fill in the craters once in a while.”

Five miles down the road — in some suburb between Crystal Lake and Elgin — there was a mild bump in the pavement, after which my car started making an unpleasant scraping noise. I was on the phone with Kim at the time, and pulled off into the nearest handy parking lot, which happened to be a (plant) nursery which was closed for the day, which at least kept me from getting funny looks from anyone except a couple of employees leaving for the day, one of whom eventually walked over and stared at me without saying anything — I assume he was planning to ask if I needed help but couldn’t quite find the courage to actually speak, and/or overheard me talking on the phone with Kim and figured I was crazy for babbling about yarn while messing around the underbody of my car. Anyways, I got out and looked under the car, and what had happened was that the skid plate — which is a plastic sheet that covers under the oil pan, etc, between the two front wheels, from the front lower valance all the way back to behind the axle — had lost its front bolt and fallen, and was scraping along the pavement.

(Side note: a replacement skid plate is $160. I say again, Crystal Lake, you couldn’t fill in those craters once in a while?)

But I am a girl of no small amount of ingenuity, and I fixed my busted skid plate, right there in the parking lot of the Platt Hill Nursery: I tied it up with a shoelace from my ice skates. Laced it up nice and tight right through the bolt holes – the ones other than the one in the front which was ripped, presumably from the force of a bolt being pushed through it. I even tucked the ends of the laces away neatly so they wouldn’t drag on the asphalt.

Hey, it worked. Shut up!

• Road tripped to Marengo, Illinois to visit The Fold, a spinning shop far enough out it’s on the whole other side of suburbia, the scary side with agriculture and stuff. My, they have a lot of fiber. I got to ogle lots of fibers I will never spin — like buffalo fiber, only $32/oz! (For non-spinners: a sweater might take two pounds of fiber or so. Therefore, $32/oz is rather expensive.) They had several different sorts of dyes, and loads of handdyed and specialty yarns. And about a dozen wheels, mostly Schacht and Louet. I had hoped they carried Kromski wheels as well but alas, they did not. They did, however, have several used wheels for sale, which might come in handy if your pal niqui decides to buy a “real” wheel someday.
• Discovered that driving to The Fold takes you directly past the Illinois Railway Museum — which sort of bummed me out, because I made the trip out there in the afternoon, with no time to fit both trips in. So I stuck to the original plan and hit The Fold, saving the IRM for another day. I may go up on a Saturday or Sunday, since they run all the trains on the weekends, and weekdays only electrics (and if I go back, I will actually have my camera with me).
• I successfully reminded myself why I loathe laundromats, by putting all my rugs in my granny grocery cart, along with my unfelted Kitty Pi which I finished knitting last weekend, and hauling them over to the laundromat on Tuesday, where I suffered in a sweltering room full of small screeching children. The stupid Kitty Pi took 3 times through the washer to felt, at $2 a pop. The rugs only took one washing (at $5 for the gigantic jumbo supermatic washer thingie, but at least drying was free, which was good because it took over an hour in two dryers to get them mostly dry). I admit, laundering the rugs was not the most exciting vacation task ever, but, I’m ridiculously pleased that my rugs are no longer cat-fur-colored anymore, so there it is.
• Took my car to the mechanic’s, since last week while taking Tiger to the vet, my turn signal controller thingy shorted out and melted. !! So, there went $294, but it beats opening the window and using hand signals in the rain. (Yeah, I know, I know nobody noticed I wasn’t signalling and nobody recognized the hand signals for what they were. It doesn’t matter. This is the sort of guilty conscience I have to live with. You have no idea.) I swear that the replaced signal thingy clicker sounds different — the clicks are higher pitched, or something. Nonetheless, the blinkers blink once more, so it’s all good.
• Locked myself out of my house for the first time ever! (Um, in this apartment.) I was carrying a box out to the car and the gate clicked shut behind me and… “Shit, my keys are upstairs!” I tried upending a planter and standing on it to reach down behind the gate and open the doorknob, but I wasn’t tall enough. Fortunately, a neighbor girl saw me trying to get in, and volunteered to jump the fence for me — which she did. And while I was upstairs fetching my %^&(*&* keys, she and her dad actually got a broom and dustpan and cleaned up the potting soil I’d dumped on the sidewalk while upending the planter. How’s that for neighborly? I never saw that one coming. Nonetheless, I was extremely grateful, and not just because I’d left my front door standing wide open.
• Dragged my old PowerMac G4 and display out to Evergreen Park and sold them for $50. Minus the gas money and the stop at 7-11 for a soda to get me through the traffic on the way home, I came out $40 ahead. Woot.
• Drove way the hell out to Downers Grove to drop off my Denon stereo receiver for repairs — you know, the one that got fried last summer and I swore I was going to have repaired someday? Someday came! In 7 to 10 working days I shall have an estimate for how much it would cost to repair it. Here’s hoping the answer is “twenty bucks!”
• On the way back from Downers Grove, stopped in Oak Park to take my comics collection to a shop to sell it off, then went to a used record store to sell a bunch of CDs and DVDs I culled from my collection (this is the first time ever that I’ve removed anything from my record collection, with the sole exception of one CD, Staind’s Break the Cycle, which I bought on my lunch hour and had sent out email to all of the staff at FastWeb asking if anyone wanted it before I even listened to it all the way through. It was so crap, it was too crap for me to bear, and I own a CD called “Silly Songs” which has “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini on it.” That should tell you something about how crap that album was.), then off to a second used record store to see if they were interested in any of the CDs the first record shop was not (they weren’t, which means those are going into the Giant and Growing Pile of Stuff To Haul Off to The Brown Elephant — a pile which threatens to take over the whole entryway to my apartment if I don’t do something with it soon).

Yet to be accomplished:

• Saturday or Sunday, I dunno which, I’ll go up north to the Midwest Fiber & Folk Art Show in Crystal Lake, where I will ogle the goodies and see if there’s anything I can’t live without that I can pay for with the money from selling off my (unwanted) worldly possessions
• Next Monday, I plan to take whatever cash I have left over and hit the Unique Thrift Store on Half-Price Monday, which I am assured is both a spectacle and an event (and, more inportantly, Half Price), for both (a) anything I find interesting and decide I cannot live without (like some glasses, since I am inexplicably down to one pint glass left in the house, and I’m tired of drinking out of United Center and Sox Park souvenir plastic cups if I want more than a juice glass’ worth of water), and (b) sweaters to disassemble for yummy and dirt-cheap yarn.
• Then, last on the big to-do list that involves leaving the house, next week some time will be my massive trip to the Brown Elephant, to rid myself of the Giant and Growing Pile of Stuff et cetera, et cetera. Lots of clothes are getting dumped, along with some candle holders, books, an old inkjet printer that doesn’t work with OS X 10.4, etc.

POTTERWATCH 2007: My book shipped today! Of course, I’m a snob and bought it from the UK, so it has to ship internationally before I can read it. So I’m pretty much just sticking my fingers in my ears and chanting LA LA LA LA I’M NOT LISTENING to the entirety of mass media for the next few days. It seems the NYT saw fit to spoil the story in their advance reviews, which is very lame, so I’m taking that as a harbinger and assuming that the whole story will be out by, say, Wednesday. I shall have to be very stealthy to avoid being spoiled.

I have gotten way less knitting done that I had thought I would have done by now! It didn’t help that I had to rip back my Baudelaire sock, last Saturday, a good five inches or so — I started too late to do the heel increases, and so it wound up being way too long, which I naturally discovered after I was ready to start the short rows, so I had to rip it alllll the way back. I actually spent our entire waiting period before Order of the Phoenix began ripping my sock back and then putting it back on the needles and sorting the stitches so they weren’t twisted. Sigh. I resented the sock for the rest of the day, and defiantly worked on my afghan instead the rest of the day, watching Doctor Who at A.’s. So, my Baudelaire is sitting in my sock bag, where it might just stay until it’s time to resume Transit Sock Commuting, week after next, when I go back to work. My MS3 is coming along okay, if you don’t mind that I can’t seem to get past Row 63, and have fallen back to my Row 61 lifeline like three times already. (I also put it down in order to punish it, two days ago. Yesterday, I spun instead. Take that, you naughty, ill-mannered lace!) I might pick it up again today, and put it on some total bargain 9″ bamboo needles I picked up at The Fold for !! $2.50 !!, since my 14″ aluminum needles were bugging me (mostly due to the length).

And now? Now I think I shall go figure out what I’m going to do about dinner, since it seems to have gotten to be about that time.

Talk to you all after HP7. :)

as of about 1900 yesterday when I finally left the office…

I AM ON VAAAAAAAAAAAA
CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
TIONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!

I was talking to the cleaning lady when she came by our office yesterday, and I realized, I’ve never taken two full weeks off work before. which is pretty fucking stupid of me, actually, especially considering I used to get 3 weeks at the university.

It does take a lot of effort to break the “but I’m not done with project X” / “but if system S blows up, nobody else can fix it!” / generalized angsting over what might happen and omigod they cannot survive without me! This was especially a problem at the U of C, and, e.g., the PureMessage junkmail systems that I could never talk anyone into freaking helping me out with. I had heard Tom Limoncelli opine on this at LISA one time, and he made a remark that was just something I’d never even considered before — he said something like “the company doesn’t give you vacation days because they’re nice. The company gives you vacation days because taking time off makes you a better employee, because you are less stressed out. So taking vacation isn’t imposing something inconvenient on the company, it’s something you do to get better.” And I’ve sort of parroted that to others since then, but I never quite bought into it myself — I couldn’t make myself take more than a few days off unless I was doing something critical, like moving into a new apartment (and even then I’d only take one week).

Anyways, this time, I was actually a little bit disappointed that I had to leave on vacation because I had just gotten really rolling on a particular project I’m super excited about doing — automated configuration and package management; I set up a new yum repository for all of our locally-compiled packages, which can be added to our YaST sources at install time, so Support can manage the packages that we build, and also we can deploy a bootstrap config management, um, config at install time, that can go out and fetch the instructions for completing the post-install customizations. It’s gonna be sweet. Oddly, as soon as I dumped bcfg2 for cfengine (my original choice, but I talked myself out of it because Narayan’s so good at writing marketing copy), I was up and running in two days. :P But I digress. I had just started to really make serious progress there and so it was sort of a bummer to have to disengage (two whole weeks!) but at least this way I have something cool to come back to, rather than something sucky (another fine reason I never took a vacation at the University — fear of what would be horribly, horribly broken when I got back).

I think it helps that I’m not in a completely dysfunctional environment anymore; I think things will be pretty stable even if I am not there to put the fear of god into the systems. And if not, I trust someone will either take care of it, or call me. But I am not going to worry about it. And I’m not going to read my work email, either! Because that way madness lies. I cleaned out my inbox and my sent-mail before leaving the office yesterday, and I’m calling that good enough until I get back.

People keep asking me what my plans are. Initially I’d planned to take a long weekend next weekend, and drive out east. But then Tiger got sick, so now I am not going to do that. (Can I get a giant WOOHOO for Tiger getting sick now, and not a week and a half later when I was out of town? thank god!) So my plans are pretty pedestrian, actually. I’m planning to clean out my closet, pull out a bunch of clothes I never wear, and take them all to the Brown Elephant, along with some books, a bunch of CDs and DVDs I never listen to/watch, and my old G4 and inkjet printer. (This will be a nice tax writeoff!) Actually, I plan to donate basically an entire carload of shit. It’s going to be an enormous pain in the ass hauling it all downstairs to the car, but, y’know, whatever. There will be less junk in my house thereafter! I’m going to take a bunch of old dead batteries to the battery recycling place. I’m going to then rearrange my yarn stash, since there will be room for it in the bedroom closet (instead of out on the back porch, where I worry about moths getting into the wool). I’m going to clean my office some more (since the yarn will be off the desk). I’m going to clean the kitchen a little (once the G4, display, and inkjet printer boxes are out of there, since they take up a HUGE amount of space), and paint some more trim in there. I’m mybe going to touch up the paint in my bathroom, kitchen, and office where it’s gotten dinged up a little bit. I’m going to get a bunch of knitting in — hopefully, I’ll make some progress on MS3, with the lovely KnitPicks yarn that fibre enabler Kim sent (in response to my woeful “I want to do MS3, but I cut my yarn budget for the month! Curse my stupid stupidity!”). i want to knit some more on my clapotis, and maybe I’ll even get my Baudelaire socks done. I might make some progress on my crocheted afghan. I’m going to catch up on personal email (I know, I know!). I might go to the Museum of the Art Institute on free day. I’m totally going to hit this one local thrift store on Half-Price Monday and see if I can find something I can’t live without, for cheeeeeeeeeeeeeap (and that includes sweaters for disassembly/yarn recycling, since that totally doesn’t count in the budget. ;) I might drive out to Ohio for a couple of days, if I can kennel Tiger. I might do a lot of things! I don’t really know! All I really know is I’m going to sleep in, and I’ll probably watch Ellen at least once or twice.

But now? I am off like an Invisibility Cloak — to go see the new Harry Potter with A. and L.! (Queue standing == excellent sock knitting time. You know it!)

VAAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATIONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!

purple glitter chiffon multi-layer “car wash” pants. i’m sorry, but i’m having trouble imagining in what circumstance anyone would wear these pants anywhere, ever. i almost don’t even have to show you a photo for you to appreciate the true horror … but i’m gonna anyways:

i’m actually having trouble imagining that some fashion designer approved this design, and some buyer somewhere arranged to buy the pants. perhaps this is just sort of a hoax perpetrated by the clothing store purporting to sell them. that’s what i’m going to hope, anyways. because the alternative — that people somewhere are buying and (gak) wearing these things — is just too horrible to contemplate.

so the other day, Tiger started acting strangely. he was being normally social and everything, but he was drinking a lot of water — i mean, a LOT. sunday he drank probably between 2 and 3 cups of water — normal for a cat is 4 oz/day. yesterday while i was at work, he drank another couple of cups.

the unfortunate side effect of drinking a lot is … well, i’m sure you can guess. i have a bad habit of not picking up my dirty laundry and putting it in the hamper (i have one, i just don’t usually actually put stuff in it). … let’s just say i have to do some clothes shopping, now. and, although i hope it won’t be necessary, i’ve researched “cat playpens” to crate him in while i’m not around, if it comes to that. :(

anyways, yesterday since i was worried (it seemed strange for him to suddenly have decided he couldn’t get enough water — he actually woke me up monday morning at about 3AM howling, and wouldn’t stop until i turned on the bathtub tap for him to drink — and since i sat there waiting to turn it back off again, i saw that he drank and drank and drank and drank and drank), i called my vet, and they recommended that i bring him in. so i did, at 8 this morning.

i think i was actually more stressed out than the cat.

anyways, long story short, it turns out that Tiger has developed feline diabetes. it’s apparently relatively common in elderly male cats. and hey, the #1 symptom of its onset is drinking and peeing absurd amounts! apparently what happens is when their blood sugar gets high, their kidneys try to wash it out, so they’re constantly flushing water through their system.

i came home from the vet with a whole bucketload of worry, antibiotics, a prescription for some sort of medicine which i have to get from a people pharmacy, and a bag of prescription food. poor kitty has to go on a diet — 3/4 c. of food daily! i can foresee the kitty drama already, since i’m going to have to feed kiyoshi separately. i bet you ten bucks i’m going to get woken up early every day the rest of this week by an angry cat who wants his kibble and wants it now, goddammit. and i can tell you right now that the multiple pills a day are going to go over well. if i show up to work with a black eye tomorrow, it’s only because my cat smacked me…

it sounds like it’s a manageable condition, even if it does progress to the point where i have to give him insulin injections (and i thought pills were bad). i just worry about him a little, because he’s 16 years old, which is pretty old for a kitty, even a spoiled rotten indoor fluffball who’s never gone hungry (or unpetted) a day in his life. think of it this way, Tiger: you’re about to get a whole lot more attention!

Hot town, summer in the city—
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.
Been down, isn’t it a pity:
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city.

Delicious Ice Cold Lemonade

• Juice of 6 or 7 lemons, approx. 1 c. juice
• 1 c. granulated sugar
• 5 c. water
• 1/4 tsp. pure lemon extract

Make a simple syrup by heating 1 c. water and stirring the sugar in until it’s all dissolved. Add this to the lemon juice in a pitcher with the lemon extract. If you happen to have any handy and are so inclined, throw in a couple of tbsp. of grenadine to turn this concoction into pink lemonade. Add as much ice as is in your freezer, add water until you’re happy (or 4 c. if you’re a stickler for recipes).

And if you’re bored and not too worried about dehydration issues, feel free to adulterate your lemonade with cold vodka.

Summer in a glass.

Mystery litter

Originally uploaded by sldownard.

Paper towel wad inside the elevator shaft

Baudelaire at the ballpark

Originally uploaded by sldownard.

Tailgating and knitting