MarQ1

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.

Since all of the spammers seem to like this title, I thought I’d repeat it. I never said I wasn’t perverse.

Knitting. F&F has been sitting idle for a while while I get the holiday knitting out of the way. Yes, technically the holidays are beyond us, but we’re going to Big D later in January for Mom’s BD, and I owe her another whippet sweater—which is coming along swimmingly, thank you—and why is everyone searching the web for knitted whippet coat patterns? Could it be that whippets are the Kate Moss of dogs—w/o the personal issues, of course—and could stand to put on weight as easily as the rest of us do? Poor things: they’re cold and can’t shop for themselves.

I’m usually cold and if I had to wait for me to finish a sweater, I’d freeze to death. Good thing I can shop. Not that I like to.

Apparently my niece liked her hat. Mom said so. She even said so.

Kudos to my sister. My nieces are absolutely frighteningly rapid with the thank you notes. Postmarked the day after Χmas. I’m such a slug.

I worked the “Week of the Dead”, i.e., the week btwn Χmas and New Year’s, with no visible signs of aging, save those I came in with, and got some lovely database work done and, thanks to 4 to 5 hours of conference calls, considerable progress on the second sock (see below). It was what I imagine working in Europe in August must be like: no interruptions, no phone calls, less than 20 e-mails a day, a chance to think and ponder how nice it would be if no one else ever came back to work.

We’re headed back out to PA tomorrow to stay with friends for New Year’s weekend. Should be fun. Some drinking. Some eating. Some good conversation. Some knitting in the down time. I might finish a sock.

Happy New Year, everyone. Good fortune, good health, good food, good drink, good friends for all.

I’ve been playing around with PHP, the programming code that runs underneath WordPress, which is what this blog runs on, and at the top of my sidebar (to the left) you see my first bit of live PHP coding. Everytime you enter or refresh this page, that counter will update (until Mom asks me to remove it.)

Counting down until my sister turns fifty just seems more fun than counting down until I do.

My brother Matthew would have been 44 today. It’s been a long time.