I Wrote a Poem on a Dog Biscuit

This is way overdue, but I have pictures of the Fourth of July. Which comes four days after Canada Day, which in true Canadian style we celebrated with $8 pitchers of Molson. At an Irish bar, no less.

Okay, so the Charlestown Fourth. Not as crazy as the ones in Philadelphia but still taken pretty seriously.

We walked up to the monument, which is only a few blocks away:


There were lots of tourists. Boo tourists.


Across the street from the monument is the old Charlestown High school. I'm not sure what it is now but I'm betting its condos, like everything else.


There was reenacting going on. That guy totally fired his musket.


On the way home, we found a parish garden attached to a convent.


And this, which I found totally heartbreaking:


Then we went home and made yummy blender drinks. The whole way home I made jokes at the expense of the JC's heritage, as befits a dirty Loyalist pig. He's lucky he didn't get tarred and feathered in the spirit of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

New Englandy

Well, since I've last posted, I've moved to Boston. Charlestown, more specifically. I've always had a soft spot for Massachusetts and now I live here!

Charlestown is all historic. It is, in fact, where the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought (though the actual battle wasn't on Bunker Hill at all, but rather Breed's Hill) and where the USS Constitution is Docked. Part of the Freedom Trail runs through it, about a block from our house, so every time we're downtown or in the North End, we joke that at least we can find our way home if we get really really drunk just by following the red line. And hordes of goddamn tourists.

Here are some pictures of things:
There are jellyfish in the Harbor - at first I couldn't believe it and thought they were all dead, but there are a zillion and they're actually alive, so I guess the harbor isn't as polluted as I always imagined it would be.


These are boats, taken from the ferry. I think it is way awesome that I could conceivably commute via ferry (if I were to have a job, that is).


Hopefully I will find some sort of enjoyable source of income by the end of the summer, though for now I'm really enjoying sitting on my ass and knitting and watching lots of cable. The JC insists on things like cable and having one's own internet connection and having a real bed and not some crap futon you've had since college. Which is nice. But it is very strange to be living like a grownup.

Frogging Makes Me Cry

So I'd been working on a shawl (kiri) that I started last fall, worked on in CA, and then put down in November for reasons I no longer recall. I somehow decided that it would be a good project to work on on the bus from Philly to NY, where I was going to spend Passover with my mom's side of the family (because they're always SO MUCH FUN and NOT STRESS-INDUCING AT ALL, especially when all the rest of my life was dissolving into a flaming pile of sulfur). Anyway, I hadn't touched the shawl in nearly 6 months, but I had my trusty lifeline, so it would all be fine, right?

Well, somehow I managed to err in such a way that my stitch count stayed right despite messing up the pattern. Except I didn't know I'd made a mistake, and thought everything was fine (because the stitch count was okay) and yanked the lifeline. You can see where this is going.

The kiri shawl is supposed to have a row of eyelets straight up the center. You can see how they started doing just that on my shawl here:


However, upon closer inspection:


Sigh. I tried to save it, but I was not capable of picking up a row under the error properly. So I had the JC our me a glass of wine for fortification and I frogged the whole thing. It was traumatic. I can usually fudge my way through a mistake but "misaligned center row of eyelets" is the kind of glaring and unfixable mistake I can't make better.

So here's the yarn again:

It's not the yarn's fault, the yarn is lovely. The yarn is experiencing new life as the start of an Icarus.
I'm not sure if I'll try Kiri again - it's not a difficult pattern at all, I'm just an idiot.

Let this be a lesson: do not pick up a lace project after a six-month hiatus on the Greyhound to a family even that you are dreading when you're also stressed about everything else in your life and think you can take out the old lifelines. That's just asking for a tearful wine-laden frog event.


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Now playing: Great Lake Swimmers - Your Rocky Spine
via FoxyTunes

Two Things I Will Miss

My neighborhood:


Outside Solomon:




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Now playing: The Smiths - Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before
via FoxyTunes

FO Fest

I hereby present my backlog of finished projects that I have been too overwhelmed by grad school badness to post of late:

First off, I finished the Fetchings that were my emergency Thanksgiving project:

please pardon the craptacular lab lighting. Though it is apropos as they live in the always-freezing microscope room, wherein I spend altogether too much time.

Next up, my sister requested a hat for Hanukkah. Two days before the holiday ended. Ahem. She got it mid-January, which I find to be a perfectly acceptable time frame.

Pattern can be found here. Really easy and pretty fast to knit.

I also finished my first sweater. Which technically is my fourth sweater, but the first I actually managed to finish. Thanks to Gerald for taking the picture, that's the D floor conference room across the hall from lab and our closest source of actual natural light.


Having liked cabling my sister's hat so much, I made a cabled hat for me. Somehow all of the hats I had made in the past were not black. Astonishing! So I made one:

It's from SNBN and was really easy.

Finally, I also finished a pair of socks:

They're the Falling Leavessocks from Knitty awhile ago. The best part of having wee size 5 1/2 feet is that it only took one ball of Lorna's Laces to make actual socks!

Knitting makes me so much happier than lab. Obviously.

Tired

So grad school has finally consumed all of my being. I supposed that's what "good" students allow it to do from the beginning. I'm too tired to expound upon it at the moment, except to say that it is very bad and that I am very unhappy and that very, very bad things start happening inside my head when I'm in the lab 75 hours a week. Swirly black abyss bad.

I've managed to keep up my knitting a bit, which I will exhibit in photographic form later.

I am still with the JC. He makes me very happy, plus he's been quite supportive these past two hell-tastic months. Mostly by feeding me and giving me wine.

Over winter break, I went up to Toronto, where I hadn't been since 2000, at which time the Canadian dollar was worth about 60 cents. I very nearly cried in TD when I got less in Canadian that I'd given them in American. I would have thought his family was less intense if he'd told me that he'd never officially brought a girl home to meet them beforehand, but whatever. They're nice. I like meeting people's family, it's like a game of Genetics in Action! I'd met his dad before, but moms are always harder.

They live downtown. Like, right downtown. Here is the view from their apartment:


yes, that's the CN tower in the corner. It was very grey.


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Now playing: The Cure - The Funeral Party
via FoxyTunes

In Which I Talk About Home and Hockey

So I went home for Thanksgiving and I brought the JC with me. And while I'd warned him many times just how small the town is, I don't think he was quite prepared for the actual rural-ness of it. To the point that he compared it to cottage country in northern Ontario.

Anyway, I only brought one knitting project. Which was a bad idea as I got to the airport for my flight home and discovered that my size 0 circular needle that I was knitting my socks on had broken. Now, usually I use metal needles because they don't break but I'd specifically bought long narrow wooden circs because I've been doing so much damn flying lately (knitpicks fixed Harmony circs for those of you who are interested) as the skinny little addis are kinda threatening and quite visible on the airport Xray machines. And yes, I know the TSA allows knitting needles, but must screeners are twits and sometimes it's better just to play it safe. So I had NO knitting. And of course my flight home was delayed. Because I wasn't stressed enough already.

Ouch!

Of course, the small LYS at home didn't have a long size 0 circular needle and as it isn't solely a knitting store, the old lady who worked there looked at me like I was on crack when I asked, so I called the yarn store in Brocton, who also didn't have one but at least had someone working who knew what the hell I was talking about. Not being able to deal with my family and the return flight totally sans knitting, I actually went to the Brocton store and got the supplies for an emergency project, the much-knitted Fetchings.


I've already finished the left one. Anyway, I can't say enough nice things about the Brocton yarn store (Woolgathering) - they have a great selection, long hours, and the owner is really nice and apparently offers spinning lessons too. Having knitting made the flight back far more pleasant, a sentiment the JC agrees with.

Anyway, while home I gave the JC the grand tour of...not much. And I even dragged him to BJ's, where I only saw one person I knew from high school (and one I liked at that) so that was good, plus there were dollar pints! And I made a pie for Thanksgiving that turned out mostly okay, though it was HUGE:
So huge that the lattice didn't really work out. Anyway, it's the pomegranate-pear pie from the NYT last year and it's worth a shot...though don't use the pearl tapioca! It was weird having it with my mom because we've been going to dad's the past few years, but she threw such a fit that we sort of had to not go to dad's, which was too bad.

But we spent all Friday with dad - we went into Buffalo for the art museum and the hockey game. Which we spent in a luxury box, which was awesome. And Jim Kelly was in the box next to us! He's going quite bald. My phone crapped out so I took a very blurry pic of the back of his head with the JC's crackberry, but it's so bad it isn't even worth posting. In the box with me was another kid from high school, who despite having the same last name is not the Retropolitan's cousin. And we even won! While my dad's seats are great, the luxury box wins if only because it has a private bathroom. Stadium bathroom lines are so not okay. And that's one classmate at the bar and one at the game, which isn't bad. Though on a related note, I got the save the date card for my 10-year reunion. Ick.

The JC survived my family and my town, and they survived him. Which I suppose is good. I hadn't been back in nearly a year. It's so odd going back - so different from how I live now. With all my urban amenities, like mass transit and stores other than Wal-Mart and being able to drive for two miles without hitting a farm. Though you can buy beer in the grocery store at home, which is an amenity I sorely miss.

Anyway, I'm mostly glad to be back in Philly. With much knitting to choose from.