Frowny Face

Attention, all ye who may be reading this blog: this post will be full of bellyaching and devoid of craftiness.

There has been a certain amount of suck lately, and the gist of things is that I am starting to feel old.

Oh, my eyes. Knitting + reading + inadequate lighting (+ age) is putting much strain on my eyes. My sense of vision has never failed me or caused any distress until recently. The world is slowly starting to blur. I should plan a visit to the ophthalmologist, but if the nice doctor were to say I need glasses, well..... my insurance doesn't cover glasses so I'd have to do without because there already exists the problem of imminent dental work.

Oh, my teeth. Cavities. Yes, cavities for the first time in my life. Not painful yet, but generous in number and cringe-inducing in cost of repair. And not only does the dentist want to fill holes in my teeth, but he also wants to remove whole teeth altogether. Geeeez now I understand people's fear of dental work, because the thought of needles and drills and pliers and scalpels and blood in my mouth is frightening the crap out of me.

Oh, my knees. They've been feeling warm and tingling for hours after I sit for a while with my legs folded in. Wtf?? At least they're not in pain. Yet.

And Oh My God, my uterus. My effing uterus. For 4 weeks I have been patiently waiting for this month's cycle to occur so that I can start taking the pill. But my uterus mocked me and stubbornly refused to follow its normal course and timeline of activity, leading to a highly stressful pregnancy scare this weekend. Things are righting themselves now, though. My body finally decided to start cooperating this morning, four days later than scheduled. Hmm, maybe this was due to the stress of everything else mentioned above.

Sigh.

And then there's the job hunt. The one thing that makes me stand out is that I've been accepted to medical school. This fact does more harm than good because in less than a year I'll be going back to Arkansas. So the entry-level science jobs don't want me because I can't commit to a career. Other jobs require more experience than what I have. Since getting a job in my field hasn't worked out, I turned to retail/hospitality jobs. No luck there yet either, probably because I request day shifts and minimal/no weekend hours in order to have time to spend with my husband. But the sad fact is that I'll probably have to take a job that will work me on evenings and weekends, just as if I were still in school. Damn it all.

Good Things

Well it's time for another FO. The Hemlock Ring Blanket I made for my mother's Christmas gift was cast off and blocked yesterday. In truth, I would like it to be a smidge bigger. But I was really itching to get it off the needles and see it all finished. There was probably only enough yarn for one more repeat, anyway. I cast off after row 111 and did the crochet edge suggested by The Rainey Sisters. It's a light & airy throw made with just over 3 skeins of Patons Classic Wool Merino. Next time I would buy the Cascade Eco Wool called for in the pattern in order to have a heftier, warmer blanket. Also I would shorten the crochet chain that makes up the scalloped edge.

In other news, the past week was filled with the pleasure of company. My aunt and cousin spent a week here with us and we got to show them around San Diego a bit. Too bad they had to leave California to go back to hurricane weather. Anyhow, one day while they were here we hopped a bus down to a trendy block on 5th Avenue filled with all varieties of boutiques, bistros, and used book stores. Oh, how I love used book stores :) I have always been the kind of person to browse non-fiction and or medical science sections first, but this time I made a bee-line for the craft books. What I found was a 25 year old knitting guide chock-full of great information: size conversion tables, how to take proper garment measurements, a stain removal guide, a stitch dictionary, and how to alter patterns based on gauge. Love it. A person like me needs these things carefully written out in order to make any sense of it.

The book wasn't the only recent find that pleased the hell out of me. A couple of days ago Cameron and I walked into a thrift store across the street from where we live and somehow I found the only two skeins of yarn in the whole place: Bernat Softee Chunky in Heather Gray. I was hoping to have found some cool vintage needles, but no such luck. A lady at the counter told me $1 would get me both skeins, but my pockets were empty, so I found Cameron looking at leather jackets and asked him to buy them. Well, there turned out to be a $5 minimum card purchase and neither of us had any cash whatsoever. All I had was a single quarter in my pocket. It was my lucky day, though, because the clerk was in a good mood and accepted my one measely quarter :) So it's not fancy-pants yarn or anything, but how often can a person get 2 skeins for twenty-five freaking cents, right?

And just for good measure here is a view of the San Diego skyline from the harbor. This city is awesome.

Be a Man About It

I don't have knitting friends. Nor have I ever joined the any of the groups around SD that get together to sit and knit for a few hours each week. Rarely have I seen another person knitting in public. Nope, my knitting world involves my couch, my small designated "craft area", and the vast expanse of the Interwebs. As such, I have never seen a man knitting, although I know many of them do. As normal as knitting might be to those particular men, and no matter how frustrated they might get by people's looks and comments of astonishment...I have to admit that I would stop in my tracks and say something to a man who was knitting. Not anything negative, of course. Actually I'd be pretty happy to chat with a man about yarn crafts without seeing that he is smiling and nodding along with what I say but secretly thinking, "Oh, god, she's rambling about that yarn crap again!?"

Procrastination is My Constant Companion

Uhhhh...I desperately need to clean house. Tomorrow night my cousin, whom I haven't seen in over a year, is coming to visit. She has spent the last 13 months in Germany getting all wordly and seeing Europe (geez..) Ah well, I'm not that jealous. I did leave Arkansas for the excitement of the west coast, after all.

Anyway, I digress. For the past few days I have been making mental notes of everything that needs to be scrubbed, dusted, vacuumed, etc.. and now the time is upon me..but I'm having a hard time getting started. Instead I have spent the morning gawking over FO's and potential future projects on Ravelry.

Well, that's not all that's happened. I did get around to coloring my hair again. My feelings on it are....meh. The box was full of promises of shine and shimmer. Honestly though, my hair looks exactly the same except that the horrid blonde chunks are toned down to a light brown. Good enough for now. As I sit here, the tv is playing TLC on mute and Nick Arrojo is styling some lucky woman's hair. Oh, how I wish that Nick Arrojo would do myyyyy hair. The hair styling segment of What Not To Wear is always my favorite part. And I am always green with envy when I see the final results, especially when the "contributor" on the show doesn't like her new hair cut and complains that too much was cut off. It makes me want to throw things and yell at the tv, "SHORTER HAIR IS BEAUTIFUL TOO!!"

Ohh, now I really digress. Okay, what I need to do is put on a playlist that moves me to get up and dance and then get to gettin'. Maybe I'll use knitting as a reward afterwards. I've been heavily eyeballing Coachella and already have just the right yarn.

A (small) Plethora of Thoughts

There are some things in the world that I can't get enough of. A catchy tune, for example:



More accurately, it's the artist that I can't get enough of. He makes being a musician look so damn easy. There is a very long list of things that I wish I could do, and being a pianist/acoustic guitarist/vocalist is at the very top. But my singing voice is for shame, and if ever there was an appropriate time to purchase an instrument to learn on, well that time is definitely not now. Sigh..

In unrelated news, I have just recently taken my first tip-toed steps into the world of hair color. The best advice on the subject is to not do your own hair at home. Well, I reject that advice on the grounds that I can't afford the salon and that other women seem to be perfectly capable of doing it themselves. So last Friday I attempted to put a few sparse blonde highlights into my hair. The results were certainly eye-catching...much in the same way that a derailed train is eye-catching. A basic summary would say that the back of my hair ended up yellow, the right side streaked, and the left side looked almost untouched. I'm just not a fan of the big chunks of fake blonde "highlights" on dark hair, which is what I got even though it's the very thing I tried to avoid. Now a second box of hair color is sitting on my dresser, waiting for me to grow the gonads to attempt to cover my disasterous highlights with Deep Bronzed Brown. All of my fingers and toes are crossed in hopes that I won't bungle it all up worse.