MarQ1

J’s in the kitchen, finishing up the mess I made making dinner. My timing never comes out the way I hoped and there were dishes still everywhere when dinner decided it was ready to be served.

Dinner was asparagus with scallions, (thin-sliced) potato and onion casserole and chicken paillard with a green peppercorn, lemon and sherry sauce. I generally winged it and the paillard was not quite thin enough, but it turned out pretty good.

Rome

We caught up on the Rome episode we missed last week and watched the new one too. It’s darker this season, if that’s possible.

Last night we watched Bedrooms and Hallways, a gay-themed movie with Kevin McKidd and James Purefoy. Mr Purefoy was sexy then, but Mr. McKidd clearly has benefited with age. The ending sucked, though.

Watching the movie last night did lend an odd overtone to the scene in Rome when Antony offers Vorenus redemption.

Short

Ted has a nice exposition on socks— it’s worth review. Funny how he too ran out of yarn before being able to complete a full pair of socks. Hey, yarn manufacturers! Men wear socks too.

I had a delightfully witty post all ready for Wednesday, but hit the back button on the browser and lost it all. That was dumb, because I already knew that I have more flexibility typing it in TextWrangler and pasting it in when I’m finished.

Cool, a bit damp. Nowhere near as cold as Friday and yesterday morning.

Shopping

Yesterday’s shopping trip was the Container Store in Manhattan. I have a new piece of furniture, a console, which has two main functions: to look nicer than the desk it replaces in the living/dining room and to store yarn. It has glass doors and somehow plastic zipper bags of yarn weren’t the most attractive thing to display. So we had to buy something to put the yarn in to put it in the console.

This is full now, but there is no yarn stashed anywhere else in this apartment. At least, not that I can remember. And, yes, some plastic bags are still visible. I need to do some rearranging. The bright flash also makes it more obvious. The room is usually darker.

While there, we ordered stuff to organize the bedroom closet better, and bought trays and boxes to straighten up around here. I’ve even cleaned my desk.

Going Out

J & I went to a new wine bar on Atlantic Ave. yesterday evening, Donna DeVine (I’m not sure of the capitalization). We each had a fight of reds and some cheeses. The wine and the cheese were excellent. It was a little early and the place was not busy, so it was slow and relaxing. The place has a nice atmosphere too.

Backing Up

The witty post was supposed to be about last weekend’s trip to Dallas to see my mom for her birthday. I can’t remember the last time I celebrated her birthday, certainly not without celebrating my younger sister’s, which is on the same day.

We flew down on Saturday. I took knitting on a plane with me for the first time. Airports and airplanes are much less stressful when I’m knitting, or maybe it wasn’t that stressful because for once I wasn’t flying during a holiday season.

I had no problem going through security with Addi Turbos in my carry-on, but it still took us a while to get through: J wore a shirt with steel snaps, under a sweater. The guy scanned him for five minutes.

Our flight attendant on the way back was a newbie knitter, so we talked knitting for awhile.

At Mom’s we ate and played Scrabble, WordThief and Upwords and vainly tried to complete the NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle. I gained another pound I’ll have to work off before spring, but it was fun.

My older sister and my neice want hand-knitted socks, so I’ll have an opportunity to knit some more feminine socks with brighter colors.

Hoping

I’m hoping for a less stressful week at work. Both of my bosses will be out of town and I’ve finished one round of system testing and the next doesn’t hit me for two weeks. I’ll cross my fingers, but I won’t hold my breath.

And I’m picking up Feather & Fan again this week.

I woke up yesterday morning, Saturday, at 6am. Habit. The paper had not been delivered yet, so I turned on the computer and messed around a while. It was cold outside, 26° when I woke up, up from the day before.

I heard a cat meowing. I figured that it was cold and wanted inside. It kept meowing.

I looked outside a couple of times, but couldn’t see the cat anywhere. I saw a woman walking her dog past our building once; the cat quieted.

A little before 9am, J and I headed out to go shopping. While I got the car out, J heard the cat and looked around for it. He found it in a seven-foot deep window well in the front of our building. It had fallen in, couldn’t get out and was freezing to death. It was barely breathing. We couldn’t get down to it and the folks whose window it was were out of town. J went next door, a building renovation, and asked one of the construction guys if they could help.

He got a ladder and I found a box, and he went down into the window well and scooped the cat into the box, in case it might fight back against its rescue. No struggle; it mewed weakly and showed enough life to make me hope. The construction workers took it back to their site, where they had a heater.

When we got back from shopping, J went next door to see how the cat was.

It had died.

I wanted it to live. I didn’t think it would. It was barely breathing when we brought it up from the window well, but I wanted it to recover.

At least, I didn’t want to know otherwise.

Surprisingly cold, but clear. Not that I saw the sky much today.

Let’s just say I could rant about work for hours. Pretend I did.

I was taking tomorrow off to wait for a furniture delivery. Technically, I was working from home since I almost have enough conference calls to fill the day. But now I have to go in to the office after the delivery—whenever that is—because practically nothing I needed to get done today got done because I had to deal with yesterday’s unfinished items, because…

I’ll stop there.

On the bright side, I won’t be rushed in the morning. I should have plenty of time to iron my shirt while waiting for the delivery. I’ll probably even turn the heel on my sock during the conference calls.

Started cloudy; temperature dropped through the day and the sky cleared.

Today I was sailing along nicely, I thought, on my conference call sock, when I found that I had misplaced a decrease more than an inch back. I put the sock aside. I can usually knit while minding my call, but I cannot frog all over my desk; I only frog at home.

I had nothing else to knit. I need to put some spare wool in my desk.

Waiting for the train home, I missed having something to knit. The wait is so unproductive.

Question: What knitting can one take through airport security?

Today: light rain off and on, mild

Well, the new year began, but that’s about the only thing that changed. Once I put something off, I continue putting it off until it’s ridiculously late.

I intended to post last weekend just to say that Saturday was so warm I got to go for a bike ride, but didn’t. I was going to entitle it Love Handles Flapping in the Wind. I’m not as out of shape as I expected, having gone over an hour before I began to feel tired, but the bike suit was a bit tighter than it was when I bought it. Anyway, five minutes into the ride I took the jacket off and tied it around my waist because I was too hot—in January—thus conveniently camouflaging my backside.

These are the socks I finished two weeks ago. I ran out of the green yarn—as I expected to—undid the toe of the first sock, joined the two yarn ends and knit the foot of the second sock while frogging the toe and foot of the first until the two socks were the same length.

It’s odd how hard it was to get a good shot of my feet, given how often I’ve had to crop them out of other photos.

I like the shaping in the sock since my ankles are a bit narrower than my calves. No bagging and the sock stays up.

This photo also shows that my flat feet have resulted in curved ankles. Not pretty.

This is the same yarn, Gems Opal, with the same shaping and a different pattern, a k5p1 rib. This is my current conference call project, though I’ve been taking it on the subway too. Not that I get much done in the ten minutes I’m on the train.

The second whippet coat is vexing me. I have a good acrylic microfiber yarn, Fantasy by Dark Horse Yarns, but have struggled with the shaping and getting the desired fabric density. I’ve started over twice and am now doing cables on #6 Am, though the wrapper calls for #8’s. This will definitely not be finished by the time we visit my Mom (and the whippets) next weekend.

I keep looking at Feather & Fan, wanting to pick it up again, but I need to finish the whippet coat.

That’s it. Nothing else has happened.