My goal is

to finish my second sock today. I have to. Because I slipped and landed in a pile of sock yarn at the LYS this morning. Only one skein demanded to come home with me, but it's soooooooooooo pretty (It's Lorna's Laces Girly Stripe Sock) and I keep hearing it call my name...

We won't mention the 10 year old girl that keeps petting it and giving me puppy dog looks, since this pair is for her ;)

Quiet day to myself

I took today off, since it's our anniversary and lately I've been working close shifts on Mondays. I just didn't want to do that tonight!

So the kiddo is at school, the hubby is sleeping and I am enjoying the quiet. In a little bit I will go get showered and dressed and head out to Sam's and the grocery store. I need to pick up some things to make hubby a birthday cake. As usual he gets a chocolate raspberry cake with chocolate ganache topping instead of frosting. Yum! And soooo easy to make, if a bit messy because of the ganache, lol.

I guess I have dawdled long enough, since the coffee is gone and I've just spent the last 30 minutes surfing the web, lol. Chocolate cake lead to a search for the recipe to link to, that lead to the library, which went to Amazon next, then from there to the Signature needle site, lol.

Valentines

Monday is a BIG day in our house. Valentine's Day always is around here. But this year is especially big, because it is our 20th wedding anniversary. (And hubby's birthday too, but who's counting those anymore, lol).

We don't have any big plans. Neither one of us cares for crowds and long waits on the day, so we go out on another night to celebrate. But we both arranged to have the day/night off work, so at least we can spend the time together :)

I love you, honey :)

Socks! (Again, lol)

I am about to the toe decreases on Sock 1. Sock 2 has been cast on and the cuff will begin soon :) Yay!

Disappointment

I think one of my favourite chain restaurants has changed their recipes whilst I wasn't looking. One night after we had just moved here I decided the restaurant was close and I wanted Italian Nachos. So I brought some home and settled down happily to eat them. Hmmm. They just weren't as good as I remembered them being.

And recently I decided I really, really wanted their Spicy Shrimp & Chicken and I didn't want to cook it (We got the recipe a few years ago from the guy who created it!). It's one of my favourite meals EVAH! And again I was disappointed. It didn't have the kick I remembered, and it was almost dry, way too little alfredo sauce.

Now maybe it's because we make our own, and we probably add a bit more spice than they do. Maybe I am just used to our version now. But I honestly think they changed their alfredo, and they certainly aren't as generous with it now as they used to be. I will give them this, there was quite a bit of shrimp and chicken in the meal, BUT we used to buy their family platter and have meals for two days. Like everyone else, they have cut back on their portions. That was a bit disappointing as well, because I had hoped to have leftovers for lunch the next day.

Ah well. Now I know. Just buy the ingredients and make it myself ;)

In happier news, I bought my mom a new HP printer yesterday. After the $50 trade in I got for my old printer, the $50 instant savings and the $83 Rewards check I had, it cost me the big $17 and I got free shipping directly to my mother. But the bestest thing: thanks to training with HP I'm going to get $100 rebate! So my mom is happy, and I am even happier, lol.

Anyhoo, better get moving and get ready for work. Ciao!

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

They canceled school today due to dangerously cold temps. It's -8 F by my thermometer with windchills down to about -20 to -30!

Can we cancel work too? Please? ;)

Ladies

Do you wash your bras every time you wear them? Or do you wear them once or twice first? And how many bras do you own? My daughter just came to me and informed me she needs new bras.

First, she's 10, so she can get away with an undershirt, of which I know she has plenty. Second, she just got two bras for Christmas. Third, she's a couch potato when she's at home right now (though during the summer she's more active.)

I have 2 bras that are really comfy, and two others that I will wear if need be. In the summer I tend to wash them after every wearing, purely because it's summer, I work around machines that put out a lot of heat and I sweat. Yuck. But when it's cooler and I'm not as sweaty, I don't wash my bras every time I wear them. And I have heard so many different things about bra care. Some places say not to wash them every time you wear them (but never wear the same bra twice in a row, let it "relax" between wearings, lol) other places say wash every time. And they all say hand washing is best.

I say who the hell has time to hand wash undergarments every bloody day?? My two good bras go in the wash and hang dry. The other two go in the washer and dryer.

So how many bras do you have, and how do you care for them?

Socks!

I put aside the mitten today, purely because the sock is much more portable. But the sock has changed. I abandoned the Monkey Sock and I'm now knitting a simple p1, k3 rib. When I get done with the leg I'll do the Harlot's heel and foot. The simple rib gives me a little more interest but it's easy enough it doesn't take all of my concentration ;) And honestly, if I stick with Monkey right now I will never finish another pair of socks, lol.

I'll have to get back to the mittens, but I'm just not up to dragging 5 balls of yarn around with me.

The kiddo took part in the local spelling bee today. Hence the need for something to knit, while waiting for her to do the written test. I started my own little knitting corner in the school library! One lady was knitting a teddy bear, another a scarf. While I was working on my sock two guys behind me were chatting. After a while one guys says to me, "After seeing you, I now have more appreciation for my socks." Lol. And as we filed out of the library to go find our kids and wait for them to check their written tests, a lady asks what I was knitting. I told her and she smiled and said, "That's so cool!" So I was cool for a little bit today, hahahaha.

The kiddo didn't make it to the oral round, but I'm pretty darned proud of her anyway!

Um....

Yay, it's Wednesday! Only two more days to go 'til the weekend! Even if I have to get up super early Friday to take the kiddo to school so she can go on her class ski trip. I don't actually have to be to work 'til noon, so I think I will go home and go back to bed.

So. The mittens. Umm. Still pretty much part of one cuff, although I am almost to the end of the cuff. I just haven't been knitting much. Maybe I will knit on the mittens tonight, the cold just came back with a vengeance today and it was snowing again. I need some pretty mittens to keep my hands warm, lol.

I haven't let myself become distracted by a Baby Jiffy Knit Sweater yet though. Mostly because I am distracted by everything else. I have the attention span of a gnat these days...

Same old stuff,

different year!

My goal this year is to actually finish my mittens. Preferably while I can still wear them.

But I keep getting distracted. The last several nights I've played WoW with the hubby, and now I am contemplating trying the Jiffy Knit Sweater again, and just adding some stitches and length so it will fit the not so Baby Tess :) Her daddy is a weasel and her momma is going through a rough time right now (thanks to said weasel) so she needs something new and pretty and hand knitted :)

Book-wise I am in a drought. There just isn't a lot that is on my wishlist right now. Apparently all of my favorite authors publish at the same time of the year! I do have a few books waiting at the library, a second series by a regular author that I've never read (still working my way through his first series!) and I am re-reading all of the In Death books by JD Robb (Nora Roberts).

Worst December in ages!

Please don't let this be a precursor to the rest of this winter. I've already had two stomach bugs and a horrible cold that kicked my butt for nearly a week. Frankly, the last 24 hours have been utterly dismal, as I woke up around 2 AM yesterday, sick as a dog. I would start to feel a bit better after some sleep and then it would come roaring back. I called in sick yesterday, and until about 2 AM this morning I was thinking I might have to call in again. I absolutely HATE being physically sick like that.

Still feeling a bit off, but the worst of the symptoms have passed, so I had better go get in the shower and ready for work.

The goal

Short term goals are good, lol. Maybe I can stick to this one... So the goal for this evening is to actually knit on my mitten for a bit. At least to finish the cuff.

And I really need to wrap some Christmas presents. The kiddo was sick yesterday with a tummy bug so she spent most of the day sleeping instead of the wrapping extravaganza we had planned. I also have cookie dough in the fridge that needs to be rolled, cut out and baked. But not tonight. Maybe Tuesday, since I have it as my extra day off and there was no way in hell I was volunteering to work the extra day. Working 5 days and getting paid for 6 is all well and good, but not this week, lol.

It's... Wednesday?

I'm so lost. Being sick has absolutely messed with my head, in more ways than one! I worked a half day Monday, took yesterday off as a last ditch effort to feel better. It seems to have worked, as by the end of the day yesterday I was feeling waaaaaaaaaaaay better. And this morning I hardly coughed at all, yay!

But I am finding it very hard to put anything in my stomach in the morning right now, which is odd for me. Normally I wake up a tiny bit queasy and have to eat something or at least drink something to settle my tummy. And this will comeback to haunt me later in the day when I am starving at 11 AM! Or worse, have a caffeine headache later because even coffee doesn't sound good. The last time coffee didn't sound good was over 10 years ago and I was pregnant, lol. But we can safely rule that out this time around!

I guess I will make more coffee and... ACK!! I left my travel cup at work last week! I have an extra, but it has no lid!

And OMG! I just looked at my work schedule and realized that Christmas is NEXT WEEK! Ummmm. Crap. So much for getting my mom's calendar done and shipped. I guess I had better take her necklace with me to work today and send it UPS so she will at least have that. Calendar as birthday present in January? Lol.

Sick

I actually called in sick twice last week (the first time in over 10 years!), so you know I felt lousy. I thought I was feeling better and ready to go back to work Monday, but I woke up at 5 AM this morning, coughing my head off. I literally coughed for two hours straight. Finally around 7:30 AM I managed to doze off again, but the annoying tickle is still there and I still feel the need to cough. It's making me absolutely crazy!

I haven't knit a stitch since I got sick, just been snuggled in bed sleeping or reading a book.

Beginning

I've managed the first 4 rows, lol. Now they want me to add a third color and my mind boggled at the thought of yet another strand of yarn to untangle every few minutes. So I put it down for the night. And well, tonight is a World of Warcraft night, since the expansion goes live at midnight tonight ;) Although, it's still early enough, I may just get another 5 rows done.

It's here!

The yarn and needles for the White Witch Mitts is here! I'm going to the grocery store and then I am going to start winding it up :) Yay! So if you hear cursing, it's me, tangling my yarn and screwing up the pattern, lol.

Monday

Blech. The weekend just wasn't long enough.

But I did get the tree and the lights up and discovered that my wreath is battery operated, lol.

And the yarn and needles for the White Witch Mitts is on order. I went with Knitpicks, and got Merino yarn instead of baby alpaca (though I do love baby alpaca!) for a fraction of the cost of the suggested yarn. $25 for yarn, needles and shipping is much better than the $50 the alpaca would have cost at my LYS. Love my LYS but....

Now if I could just figure out why in the hell I wake up every morning with my back hurting like hell, life would be better.

The plan...

I want to put up the Christmas tree today. And the lights outside. And I still need to try and figure out how to light my wreath, since there is no outlet by the front door.

I also want to go to Ft. C. to the library and maybe even hit my LYS. I found an amazing mitten pattern that I really want to knit. It's the White Witch Mitts from Interweave. I've never knit Fair Isle or mittens. But these are soooo pretty, and they don't have that weird pointy thing that a lot of knit mittens do (yeah, I know that's a traditional design element but...).

The main question is whether my hubby can be convinced that $25 mittens are an ok thing...

Happy Thanksgiving!

My hubby nearly got into a fight this morning at work. He was telling one co-worker about our family tradition of spaghetti on Thanksgiving and why (long story short it started one year when I was sick at T-day. And now the kiddo is a picky eater and won't eat turkey, stuffing, etc. Not to mention we all finally admitted we don't really like turkey...). The other co-worker didn't even hear the full story, just stormed up to my hubby (who is from London, England) and announced that since his daughter was an American we should into the full Thanksgiving hoopla.

Well I'm an American too, and damned if I want to spend the entire bloody day in the kitchen making a huge meal on my day off. We do Christmas dinner and that's quite enough. (We have ham, not turkey. This year I am going to make a dish of dressing because that's the one thing I miss about turkey, lol.)

We all enjoy our stress free meal of spaghetti and garlic bread and we get to sit down and eat together (the scene from A Christmas Story where he says, "My mother had not had a hot meal for herself in 15 years," springs to mind when I think of childhood Thanksgivings and Christmases. I don't want that for myself. Is that wrong?)

Anyway, happy Thanksgiving, no matter how you celebrate!

BBC 100 Books List

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety. Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 The Lord of the Flies
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

25 out of 100, 1/4 of the list. Not too shabby. And honestly, I don't ever see myself going back and reading any of the others (many on the list I wish I'd not read, lol). Some were dreadful, some were greatly over-rated *cough*BridgetJonesandTheLovelyBones*cough* some I was forced to read at school and some I read for pleasure.