goblinbox

In which there are two things! Two exciting things! Two!

The first exciting thing is that last night, while watching an episode of Torchwood, I completed the Big Brown Sweater. (You may cheer; I will hear you even over the Internet.) It spent a year and ten months on the needles, but it’s finally finished and it rules.

(The pattern is Abigail, the yarn is Decadence in chocolate, and both were from Knit Picks. Teh BF was forced at gun point by my pointing my coffee cup at him to photograph it this morning so I could put it on the intarwebz.)

It fits, it’s soft, it’s brown, I made it myself, and I intend to wear it every. single. day. from now until summer returns next year! Yay!

The other cool thing is that yesterday I decided to become obsessed with bento. (I believe it was this page that finally decided me, but I’ve had bento boxes on my wishlists for quite awhile now.)

Today I ordered the! cutest! bento box set! ever! and a few other necessary bento accoutrements (vegetable shapers, mini sauce bottles, a boiled egg shaper, resuable silicone food cups for separating wet from dry foods, and an onigiri mold) from jbox.com. They should be here late next week, and from then on I shall spend a little time after dinner every night cleverly packing leftovers for the next day’s lunch.

This new hobby will not only satisfy my cooking creativity to a certain extent (I hardly ever cook any more!), but will stop me eating at the Mexican restaurant across the street from work like twice a week. It will help me control my caloric intake, something I desperately need to do because I’m forty and built just like a brick these days, and it will have the added benefit of being way totally HELLA COOL!

In which it is all about the joy that was my local post office today.

This awesome woman (who blogs here) sent me a box (because she is hella awesome) containing:

Yarn, with Sci-fi!

I happened to be at the post office because I was sending a RAOK package myself, to Vuboq, containing needles and stitch markers and manga that needs a home. When I checked my PO box to collect my dentist bill and the occasional bit of junk mail that I usually find, there was a ticket in it that said, “Parcel too large for box.”

So I was all, “OMG! A package! For meeeee!” And yea verily, it was yarnz!

Long story short: the Internet just plain rocks, because on it you meet people you can send stuff to, and people who send you stuff too. And it’s all just freakin’ bitchin’.

In which Teh BF totally comes through with the goods!

Yesterday I got a belated b-day present from Kaje. And it’s not even electronic, but it still utterly RULEZ. It’s needles! Circular knitting needles! Awesome cute kick ass knitting needles that have been on my wishlist for, like, two years!

And not just any needles, but the Options Interchangeable Harmony Wood Circular Knitting Needle set, in actual fact. These needles freakin’ rule, bitches. They’re all multi-colored laminated birch and I totally *heart* them.

I might even feel compelled to finally finish the Big Brown Sweater, which is well over a year old now and only a sleeve and a half away from total wearability!

Does my boyfriend kick ass or what. KNITTING NEEDLES! Holy cow. I am totally teh winnar.

In which I bore my non-knitting readers half to death.

I’ve been knitting myself a hat. This is the third hat that I’ve started for myself; the other two I gave away because when they were finished they weren’t my hat.

This hat is brown and pink, which are totally my colors. It’s not fuzzy, but it’s not acrylic either — it’s wool. I think I might get to keep this one! It looks great in broad daylight, but the colorway kinda falls apart in indoor lighting and ends up looking weird… Of course, if you know me in person, you know I often put clothes on over my pajamas and go out in public, and that I’ve been known to wear brown shoes with black purses. So it’s not like I’m a paragon of style.

In other news, I had an interesting talk with a couple of friends last night and the end result is that I’m going to go apply here on Monday before I drive up to Iowa City to register at Kelly Services. They’re not actively hiring, but from what I heard omgwtfbbq do they ever need me.

In which there’s a parcel! Yay!

The mailman came back this afternoon and left a box on the porch. This box contains the items I got with the Patternworks gift certificate my mom sent me for Christmas:

I’ve been waiting for this box for over a week! I got a felted clog pattern, 2 skeins of Meredith Bay yarn, 2 skeins of sock yarn, 4 skeins of Lamb’s Pride worsted, a bottle of wool wash, a free scarf pattern I’ll never use, and 1 skein of Lopi (to round out the order).

Yarn! I’ll make socks. Slippers. A new hat. It’s super extra exciting cool!

In which NLW cracks me all the fuck the way up.

The Ever-Handsome Mr J was out of town last night, so NLW called me and took me out to dinner at Pizza Hut. I love that about her. We talked about me, then we talked about her. Then we bought cranberry juice and chocolate sandwich cookies and went to her house and talked about knitting.

We’ve designed the hardest knitting pattern ever, to wit: a nine-foot long Entrelac scarf, knit in the round on size 0 needles, with steeks! Hah! (“If you knit that, your knitting cock would be so huge that all future knitting would be optional! OPTIONAL!!!”)

Then we surfed Flickr for “entrelac” and decided that Noro Silk Garden (a brand of yarn) really is pretty much made for Entrelac. Then we sighed, “Noro” a few times. Then we decided we need to find some software with which to lay down a thumpin’ house track, and layer recordings of knitters squealing/sighing/screaming various yarn names: “Oooh, Noro!” and “Koigu! Koigu!” and then a few forceful interjections of a Ron Jeremy sound-byte something along the lines of, “UUUUHHHnnnnnnnnggggghhhhh!!!”

Knitting house. It’s funny. It’d get mad play, bitches. MAD play.

In which I accentuate the positive! (Yes, I’m feeling much better today.)

It’s so nice outside today that I can barely stand myself. I’ve been sitting on the porch in the sun, reading. It’s so lovely!

I’ve finished the back of my sweater, and I am in the process of finishing the front. I’ve used half the yarn I bought for the project, so I think it’s safe to assume that I’m halfway done. Sweaters take an awfully long time to knit, people.

I want to highlight my hair. Someone should come over with a box of highlight RIGHT NOW. It’d be so fun!

Or, since my friends are hosting a lovely Bloody Mary Sunday, I might motivate myself to get dressed and go on over there instead.

In other news, I just randomly double-clicked on an MP3 file on my computer, and instead of booting iTunes it booted Winamp… which began playing a porno clip of a skinny girl wearing panties with cherries printed on them. It’s so interesting, sharing a computer with two other users!

And, just for the hell of it, because I used the words in the title of this post, here’s a remix of Filthy/Gorgeous for you.

Update: I have a follow-up interview here on Tuesday morning; the HR woman just emailed me. OMG, if the CEO likes me they just might hire me. A full-time job I actually think I want! Holy broken condoms, Batman!

In which the weather outside is frightful.

No one has called (or emailed) to offer me a job today. This makes me sad.

It’s been snowing since yesterday. We have a winter storm watch in effect until six o’clock. I swept off the porch and it’s cold and shitty out. My friend Snow needs a ride to the Amtrak station in Ottumwa, but we’ve got near blizzard conditions out there and I think I don’t want to be driving around in the dark in that shit. I’ve been texting with him since nine this morning.

In other news, my mom gave me a gift certificate for Patternworks for Xmas and I’m trying to figure out what to buy with it, but their site is broken. Bah.

In which I enjoyed the Superbowl more than I ever have before. (Well, except for that one time years ago when I watched it on coke, that is.)

NLW called me up last week to invite herself over for Superbowl Sunday, because her house was going to be invaded by penis people. I discussed the idea with AmmZon, who was totally into it, and so yesterday we had a little gyno gathering.

AmmZon, NLW, Baby Girl, Raybo, La-la and I gathered in the late afternoon for football (read: Prince and commercials), cocktails (vodka & lemonade), and food: tuna ‘n’ noodle casserole, vegetarian chili, frozen pizza, a variety of munchies, and salad.

And cocktails. Did I mention the delicious cocktails? Cocktails!

It was so wonderful to have a living room fulla bitches, knitting and chatting and drinking and munching and making snide comments about all that spandexed ass on the telly. I had so much fun! I knitted AmmZon some mittens, and had two bowls of chili.

Prince was good. The mix sounded like shit on our television, and I wondered if it was being broadcast in surround sound or if they’d blown some equipment in the rain. I loved the reflective stripes on the dancing marching band people as they boogied around in the dark and the rain. Those annoying, black-clad dancing bitches occluding half the shots of Prince pissed me off, though. Their outfits! What the fuck!

In which I cook Indian, freak the fuck OUT — omg! you have no idea! DUDES! — on a virtual world, and talk about the perils of knitting. In the process I manage to put a rather astonishing number of links into a single entry. (Mouse over ‘em for snap-ups!)

This morning (and I use ‘morning’ loosely here; you should cleverly interpret it to mean ‘early afternoonish’), I got up and immediately cooked a feast!

Chana masala. Egg curry. Long-grain Basmati rice. Papadums. Yogurt, chutney. So good! OMFG, so good. We all ate heartily.

Then I got back on the laptop and booted into Second Life. (I was up until five-thirty this morning wandering around in there.) It’s so, so fun. I want to move to San Francisco and work at Linden Labs, like, toute suite, swear to God. And I don’t even like living in SF!

This world, this Second Life, it’s everything sci-fi ever taught me to want! It’s virtual. It’s wonderful. It’s a/the progenitor of the metaverse, and that’s HOT. Sweden is building an embassy there. You can fly in there! How did I not know about this until now? Has my entire head been up my arse since 2003? It’s practically better than knitting!

Oh, and on the subject of knitting, I’ve divided my sweater for the front and back around the armholes. This means I’m actually lurking up on being halfway done with it! Yay!

The bad news is that the bamboo circulars I bought (from Knit Picks, along with the yarn and pattern), which were supposed to be size 10, are not in fact size 10 at all — they’re more like 9.75s. This means I have to knit the entire sweater with them, including the collar and the arms (which will be a pain in the arse), or my gauge will change noticeably. Luckily the circulars in question are long enough that I can use the magic loop method, but it still kinda pisses me off. I guess it’s taught me to use my needle gauge to check new needles for accuracy of size upon purchase, at least. Pah.

In other news, I submitted a resume to Robert Half Technology last week — for a tech position they’d listed on Monster.com as “Web Administrator’s Dream Job” — and they called me back and left a message Friday night! I’ll be calling them first thing Monday morning.

I suppose moving to Cedar Rapids wouldn’t be too terribly bad; it’s only an hour and a quarter from Fairfield so I could still come see my friends on weekends, and it’s almost practically a city (by Iowa standards, at least) so if I lived there I might could find myself a working band and have access to quasi-decent restaurants!

In which there’s some good news… for once.

We don’t have to move! AmmZon’s mother has offered to sell her the house, and at a remarkably reasonable price. AmmZon is considering it, and in the meanwhile: we’re not evicted! Yay! I can stay here until I get a job and an apartment!

My previous employer — the one that laid me off last June — is hiring again. I sent in my resume today. Maybe they’ll hire me back. (I think I’ll go in tomorrow and sit on the HR person’s desk… for like an hour. Or three. Maybe she’ll hire me just to get me to leave her the hell alone.)

On the knitting front, I finished my first gray gauntlet and have started the second one. The fabric is much firmer made of the superwash wool sock yarn I used, and I really like the way this one fits and feels. The one I made out of the bamboo yarn has in barely twenty minutes of wear lost its shape and is beginning to pill up, so clearly that particular yarn is too delicate for a hard-wearing application like gloves. (I’ll probably make the second bamboo one anyway, and give them away, and use the remaining bamboo yarn for something low-impact, like a scarf.)

In other news, I’m downloading Bee Gees dance remixes from Limewire, because, um — well, for no good reason at all, really — and one thing that drives me utterly, incoherently apeshit is mislabeled tracks! Who are these fucking idiots who can’t tell the Bee Gees from Chicago? Or Rick James from Hot Chocolate? Or Hall & Oates from Player? Or Barry White from Marvin Gaye?! WHAT THE FLYING FUCK, people!

In which I’m all stealth.

It’s That Time Of The Month again, so I’m antisocial. I did not go anywhere yesterday, and I will not go anywhere today. I might go out and rip this town a new one tomorrow, though. We’ll see.

I’m online now to catch up on my email — haven’t checked it in days — and to get my calendar all straightened out — there are weddings and gigs and things I must attend in the next two weeks — and then? I’m going back to bed to read or listen to my iPod.

Speaking of iPods makes me think of iTunes which reminds me I owe Shenry a CD for the swap. Gah! How can someone with as much free time as I have be so behind on her social duties? I haven’t written to my relatives, or shipped the one gift I need to ship, nor even mailed my mom her wool slippers yet.

Bleeding sucks, but at least I no longer get the horrible cramps I was getting last summer. Those REALLY sucked.

I made another sheep:

It’s knitted out of wool and mohair and then felted. I started it about a year and a half ago and decided it was time to get it OFF. MY. NEEDLES.

In other news, a guy from this site asked me if I wanted to maybe contribute blog entries. Could be fun, but I bet they won’t fucking let me use the fucking F-word as much as I normally fucking do.