winged orange

It’s going to snow forever, I’m convinced. It’s been snowing since roughly 7 pm yesterday with absolutely no sign of slowing down. We have probably close to 2 feet on the ground so far, but it’s hard to tell because it’s been windy and it drifts. There’s at least a foot, foot and a half for SURE. Part of me is seriously chagrined. The last time we had this much snow on a Saturday, we had two days off school, which is not good. Two more days off will put us in school during my Disney trip, which is stressful, because I’m getting on a plane on June 24, school or no school. I hate to leave my co-teachers in the lurch like that, but they all know (and my bosses both know) that I’ve had this trip planned for a year. There’s no way I’m NOT going.

But part of me is still all, “Ohmygod, SNOW!” inside. I love snow, when I can sit inside and watch it. I love the way everything is quieter in the snow, and how when it snows (especially at night), I feel kind of insulated and isolated from the world. When it’s really snowing like this, it’s not safe to go anywhere, so I feel like I’m off the hook for everything in my life that needs to be done. Gotta run errands? Pfffft, can’t! It’s snowing! I should go to the gym, but look! So much snow!

All I can really do is sit inside and watch movies and listen to music and knit and read. Last night was a movie watching and reading night. Today is a music-listening and knitting day. I think I’m going to try to bang out the other half of those flip-top mittens I started. I’ll need mittens on Monday; it’s going to be all cold and snowy.

I have these grand delusions that I’m going to bang out the entirety of my Moonwalker scarf while I’m sitting inside watching the snow, and that is completely not happening. I have a good amount done, though – I’m considering 8 inches “a good amount” because it’s knit on size 2s and I have to pay attention to every stitch I knit because it’s lacy. I have been working on it, though! See?

Clearly my brain is a black hole, because I totally though it’d only been a week since I last posted, but apparently it’s been two and that missing week is somewhere in the recesses of my brain. In the last week,  have:

• been driven crazy by my students
• knit a mitten
• watched the entirety of Season 1 of Mad Men
• been entertained by the Golden Globes
• got invited to interview at my top choice grad school

See that there? That last one? That sort of made my week. I’m amazingly excited, and I’m a little on the edge of my seat waiting for Feb. 19 so I can go knock the interviewer’s socks off with my charm and pizazz. ;) It’s a really good sign in terms of acceptance (and usually funding) to be invited for an in-person interview, so I was happy-dancing around the house like nobody’s business. Even if I don’t hear anything from any of my other schools, if I get into this school with funding, my life will be a place of gloriousness and joy. I went shopping today with a friend to find some interview clothes, and was modestly successful – I found a great skirt and some adorable shoes, but struck out on the top half because my Boobs of DOOM combined with my shortness makes it difficult to find things that fit. I did, however, discover that I dropped a size when I was buying my skirt. I’m officially a 12 again. :)

I was also pretty pleased with the finishing of the mitten. I really should be knitting other things, like my Moonwalker scarf, but I used up stash yarn and I really love the mittens. They’re Bella’s Mittens, but I found some modifications on Ravelry to make them flip-top mittens. I finished one this week, and hopefully will finish the other next week so I can still wear them while it’s cold out.

I sort of love this mitten. I need to knit a second one, and for once, I’m not having “second [insert item] syndrome”. Hopefully I’ll have new mittens before February rolls in. :)

(Or, how much yarn do I have to “Shut Up and Knit,” exactly?)

I have a lot of yarn. One of my New Year’s goals was to shut up and knit a good portion of my damn yarn. Problem is, I don’t know exactly how much I have. I have a lot of it cataloged on Ravelry, but all that does is show me pretty pictures. I can see a lot of it in my Rubbermaid drawer tower, but I’m kind of like a relapsing alcoholic. I hide yarn everywhere – in shelves in my closet, in bags under my bed, in my car, in shoe boxes. It’s everywhere. I kind of like it that way.

Recently, Amanda-Lloyd took pictures of her stash for me, and after showing them to Scott, he asked me to do the same. He’s been telling me for a while now that I really don’t need any more yarn for a few months. I’ve been telling him to leave me alone; I don’t have a problem. (I’m clean, narc!) But when I pulled out my stash to photograph it, I had to concede that maybe – just maybe – I do have a problem. Click on the thumbnails to see all of it. It’s kind of scary.

There it is. That’s just about everything, except Moonwalker, which was drying in the shower when these photos were taken. Even the unspun fiber. I have a queen-size bed, for what it’s worth. That is a TON of yarn, guys. In the interest of full disclosure, I have 16,514.5 yards of yarn. Really, it’s more than that, because I didn’t add all the partial skeins of Simply Soft and stuff in there. I can only estimate the fiber, and I’m gonna say at least four or five pounds.

I am shocked and RuPauled.

I declare a yarn embargo. Nothing comes in until at least two thousand yards of that yarn and maybe two pounds of that fiber vanishes. This is getting a little ridiculous.

Gotta go. Apparently I need to knit forever. ;)

I was up late last night. Way late. Later than I’ve been up since I graduated college. I was working on something, and I really wanted to have it finished last night so I have a prayer of using it on Sunday. I was finishing up the spinning on Moonwalker. When I bought it in October, it looked like this:

And after only five days of spinning this week, it now looks like this:

If I were any more in love with this stuff, it would probably be criminal. The fiber in the batt is Corriedale, dyed by Grafton Fibers (colorway 502, striped batt, if anyone wants one ;). I spun it up to a heavy laceweight/light fingering weight singles yarn. I haven’t checked the wpi yet because it’s still drying, but there’s about 400 yards there.

This was a learning experience for me. First of all, I love Corriedale wool, which shouldn’t surprise me, because Corriedale is half of cormo (the other half is merino), and cormo is one of my favorite fibers. I don’t like dyed black wool; those parts were such a bitch to spin because the dye just bleaches all the softness right out of the fiber. The rest of it, though, the purples and the blues, were wonderful! They spun themselves, I swear. This was my first project spinning just for singles, rather than splitting the fiber in half or more to ply. I also used my high-speed whorl for the first time, which was different, but nice. I loved not having to kill myself treadling to get enough twist in the yarn, but I definitely went overboard and overspun parts of it. When I took the skein off the niddy noddy, it twisted up on its own from the excess twist. I ran it through the wheel again in the opposite direction (to mimic the plying I’m not doing) to take some of the twist out. I also wasn’t very nice to the yarn when I finished it. I wanted to full it a little, to both soften and strengthen it, so I did two shock cycles: quick dunk in boiling water, then a quick dunk in ice water. Then back in the boil, back in the ice. After that, I squeezed the excess water out, took it outside, and beat the daylights out of it. I estimated 40 thwacks, but really, it was probably closer to 80. My neighbors were probably wondering why I was outside in my pajamas beating something around at 9:30 in the morning on a 24-degree day. Worth it, though – all that roughhousing, and the skein drying in my bathroom only twists about a quarter-turn at the very, very bottom. And it’s so soft. I win! At least, I win the spinning round. After my last hot mess, I will not get cocky.

I’m going to use it to make a Rivolo scarf, so I actually have more than it says I need, but for the sake of the color sequence, I’m going to knit until I run out of yarn. I’m going to buy the pattern tonight, and since I was productive and stayed up late last night finishing the spinning and removing twist, the yarn can have all day today to dry so I can start my scarf tomorrow!

In other news, I was cruising some of the forums on Ravelry, and one person is planning on making four of these cute beaded clutch purses for herself and her three bridesmaids for her wedding in June. I can’t see things like that, because then I start getting ideas. I’m trying not get too excited about any wedding-related activities yet because we aren’t officially engaged (within the next six months, I hope, but not yet), but…I love these purses. I know we’re all getting fedoras – the boys are all going to get black ones, and the girls are all going to get white ones with silver ribbons (except mine; mine will have a blue ribbon), but how cute would it be for all of us to have purses, too? The girls’ could be white with blue beads and mine could be blue with white beads. Only problem is, we’re planning on seven attendants on each side (I know, I know. We have a lot of good friends, and Scott has two sisters), so that’d be eight clutches I’d have to make and I might lose my mind.

I need to think that one over, especially since I can’t sew. But…man. How pretty would that be?! I feel a grand plan coming on. This is not good.

I do not have a good track record with pants. So naturally, this morning, I was a little alarmed when I had a pants dream. I woke up at 5:00 because I drink entirely too much water during the night, but I still had an hour and a half to sleep, so I tried to go back to bed. In that hour and a half, I had a really bizarre dream in which I was really, irrevocably late for work because I could not find any pants. No pants at all. My boss was there, telling me just to get on the bus (which was a school bus, even though I am 25 and drive myself to work), and I was going, “But…I DON’T HAVE ANY PANTS!” Really, Mr. Bossman was completely uncaring about my pantsless state, and I was mortified at the thought of having to teach 7th grade boys with no pants. But in the end, I boarded the bus, which had changed to a white pony, and went to work.

I got to work on time and with my pants this morning, and everything was business as usual until about 7th period. I had my two kids on the computer doing a project for social skills, and while I was watching them work, I noticed a thread on my Riders black khakis, so I did what I always do when I find a thread: I pulled it. It was a long thread too, boy, and midway through my pull, it occurred to me that this might not be smart and maybe I should go get scissors and snip the thread? Then the rest of my brain said, “Nope! Gone too far!” and I kept pulling. I was really satisfied when I heard the little snap that meant I’d hit the end.

A few minutes later, my hip itched a little, so I went to scratch it and was horrified when I felt skin instead of pants. I took a feel around and realized that the waistband of my pants had separated. My first thought was, “Oh, shit! Tell me that was the thread I pulled.” Don’t you know…I tug on ONE friggin’ thread, and the entire waistband of my pants, except for the belt loops, separated. You don’t believe me, do you? I barely believed me. I took a picture because I was pretty sure no one would believe me. You can click it for the full craziness.

I was just thankful that it was almost the end of the day and that the kids didn’t notice because I kept tugging my shirt down to cover the…erm…draft zone. I was really thankful for those belt loops, though! They were seriously the only things holding my pants on.

The best part? When I told some of my fellow teachers, one of them said to me, “Well, you did have that pants dream this morning…”

Dear god. I foreshadowed my own almost-pantsless-ness in a dream. What does that mean?!

I’ve always been kind of an anxious person. I always called it being a worry-wart, though, not being anxious, per se. It’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older; there’s always something to worry about, and Scott and several of my friends have told me regularly that I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t worried or stressed out about something. They’re not wrong. Sometimes I swear I create things to worry about. I am just an anxious person.

More often than not, I spend my Sundays really anxious about work on Monday. I wake up on Sunday morning feeling a weight I didn’t feel on Saturday. My students this year are rough; not brutally, constantly rough like they were last year, for the most part, but challenging in a different way. And I do have one student that I swear is out for my blood, literally. He kind of scares me a little. So all of that anxiety plays into my not wanting to go to work at all on Monday. I’m usually pretty good the rest of the week, but Mondays are a bear.

Today I realized that, as much as I wanted to be all, “Well, now the applications are done, so grad school stuff is out of my hands!” …I’m nervous. I’m really starting to get antsy about hearing from schools for interviews and things, and I didn’t think I’d be that way. As much as I hate to admit it, there’s a lot riding on this for me. I like my job, but I’m tired of making no money, I’m tired of living at home, and I’m tired of constantly feeling like I’m just waiting for something else so my life can actually start. There’s no mobility at my job, unless you’re willing to pay for the special ed certification (which I can’t afford right now), and even then, it’s iffy, because who knows if a lead position will open up? I know I’ll be making no money as a student, but at least I’ll be doing something for my future. More often than not, I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels at work. I like teaching, but after three years, I know it’s not where I need to be for the rest of my life. It just isn’t.

I can tell my anxiety is up by how much music I listen to. I have music on almost constantly lately, something I haven’t done since I was probably in high school. I was anxious a lot in middle school and my freshman and sophomore years of high school – please, I was the fat nerdy kid. Of course I was anxious! So I lived and died by my CD player back then. Really and truly, Bette Midler and Stevie Nicks got me through life until my junior year I turned into the all-American teenager who had a group of good friends and always had a boyfriend and a date to every dance. It was really nice just to put on a song and melt into it; nobody bothered me, I could kind of be alone with my thoughts, it was relaxing, and it was safe. It was comfort food for my ears.

I still listened to music in college, to relax and to study, but not like I did when I was a kid. I didn’t need it the way I did back then – it had turned into something I enjoyed. Once I graduated and started to work, more often than not, if I was on the computer or knitting, the TV was on as background noise where the music had been. I didn’t have a CD player anymore, and my laptop made the music sound tinny. I don’t like headphones if I don’t have to use them because they block out everything, so I just didn’t listen to music as much.

When Michael Jackson died in June, I started listening to music again, all the time. Right about that time was when shit started to get real for me in terms of grad school and GREs and stuff, and as sorry as I was (and am) that Michael had died, something not so awful came out of it: it showed me that I needed music again. For the last six months, there’s rarely a time I don’t have music on. I look forward to my drives to and from work, and to my time at the gym, because everything around me is silent except for my iPod. I got a new iPod speaker-dock for Christmas, and it’s the best present ever. I’m really excited about music again; not just Michael and my old favorites (Bon Jovi and KISS and Bette and Stevie and everyone else that I grew up with and have loved for years), but new stuff too. I’ve recently discovered that I love Lady Gaga (thanks, Krissy!) and Orianthi is amazing too. I get actively excited – complete with audible squee! and happy dance – when I hear “Bad Romance” or “According to You” on the radio. I heard “Man in the Mirror” on the radio the other day on the way home from the gym and lost my mind. That hasn’t happened in years. It makes me want to see who else is out there, to discover who else I can start a torrid music love affair with. ;)

I sit a lot these days and knit or spin and rock out to whatever’s on my iPod, although it’s usually MJ or Lady Gaga or Orianthi, at the moment (really, we won’t discuss my play count on songs like Man in the Mirror over the last six months. We’ll just say that according to iTunes, it’s more than it – or any other song I own – has been played. EVER). I didn’t realize until today, as it dawned on me that grad school stuff was stressing me out, that I’ve been knitting a lot more lately, too. I’ve finished like four things in December, which is usually a whole year’s output for me because that’s just how I am. The last two times I was really prolific with knitting, I was going through stuff: the first time it was my first (and hopefully last) breakup, and the second time, it was through my unemployment. Both high-stress times. It seems like knitting and music are my ultimate security blanket.

I really have no idea what my point was with all this. I started with one, I swear…

I knew 2010 was going to be a good year, because I started it off with friends, a couple of dogs, a win at Apples to Apples, some mojitos, a blue moon, and I was wearing my fierce tie-dye slouch socks and my Moonwalker shirt. Really, you can’t set a year up in a better way.

Today, I decided 2010 is going to be awesome, because I both started and finished a knitting project.

A few weeks ago, before the holidays, I had gone for dinner and shopping in the mall with a couple of my friends from work. We had ducked into New York & Co. to check out the sales. Their sales on pants are phenomenal, and the pants fit really nice. While I was busy looking at quilted vests (one of which I totally should have bought), my friends were looking at the knit hats. All of a sudden, I heard my friend Kate say, “This is such a cute hat! I want this hat.”

“Oooh! Lemme see!” I went over to inspect said hat. This was not a special hat, despite being my favorite shade of electric blue. It was just a ribbed hat with a stockinette crown. Just an ordinary hat. I picked the hat up, turned it over, and put it on the shelf. “Kate. Tell me how much that hat is. Betcha it’s twenty bucks.”

“Close. It’s seventeen.”

I seriously think I became apoplectic at that point. “SEVENTEEN DOLLARS?! You are kidding me. Put the hat down.”

“But–”

“Put. the. hat. DOWN. Back away. I can make you a hat just like that for about three bucks.”

“You can not.”

“If I can’t, I will come back here myself and buy you the damn seventeen dollar hat. Drop it.”

Today I sat down to make the hat. I looked at online, studied it, and told everyone who would listen that it was $17 and isn’t that CRAZY for a hat? I put on my Netflixed Mad Men disc, and got busy. Four hours and three episodes of Mad Men later (oh, that Don Draper. He is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and packaged in a pretty box, I tell you), I had a hat. I winged (wang? wung? What IS the conjugation of “to wing”?) the decreases, but it looks fine, and damn close to the original hat.

To make this even better, I learned something new while I was knitting this bad boy, too. I magic looped the whole hat, after thinking for forever that I couldn’t. The whole thing went off without a hitch, the “designing” and the magic looping. Not gonna lie, I’m kind of impressed with myself.

I also found the knitting project(s) I lost, so that’s exciting. We won’t discuss where I found them, because I will wind up looking like a moron (said the girl with the fishface picture of her in a hat), but they are safe and locked up and now I know their whereabouts. All in all, it was a productive day. :)

It’s the Eve of New Year’s Eve, and since I’ll be at Scott’s tomorrow, I figured I’d do my year-end/year-start report now. I’ll start by reviewing my “goals” from last year.

Resolution #1 – Find a New Job
INCOMPLETE. I tried, really, really hard. I mailed out well over a hundred applications, resumes, and letters of inquiry. I even had mild success; I interviewed for a behaviorist job I really wanted to get, but sadly, was not chosen for the position. But, when presented with adversity, I did what I always do: I reassess and re-plan. In this case, that meant taking the GREs and applying to grad school (again). I did the best I could on that one, but ultimately, the results were/are out of my control. This remains on the list for 2010.

Resolution #2 – Move Out
INCOMPLETE. I noted last year that this was largely dependent on goal #1. Part of me doesn’t even want to discuss this goal, because this is the only one that kind of stings that I couldn’t make good on. In some ways it’s good – Scott got a great new job and actually just got a promotion yesterday, and it makes going back to school easier because I don’t have to worry about leases or anything just yet. But in others…dear god, I need to be out of this house for a variety of reasons and it appears that I am stuck here until I either get into school or I get a new job. Sigh.

Resolution #3 – Be More Organized
BIG, HONKING, SHAMEFULLY INCOMPLETE. This one makes me laugh, because it was really setting myself up for failure to even put it on the list. Honestly, the most progress I’ve made towards this is regularly “tossing” the stash and reorganizing the yarn storage, but I can’t even mark this as a partially complete goal because I totally lost a knitting project. Remember that shawl I started over the summer? I lost it. Lost the whole thing, the bag with the yarn and pattern, and the size 6 KP Options needles (which is the part that really bums me out). The last time I saw it was when I packed it to take to Ohio over the summer, but my dad was just there for my grandma’s funeral, and both of my aunts say I didn’t leave it behind. I knew I hadn’t left it; the project never left my bag because for the entire five days we were out there, I was either in a car (and I can’t knit lace in a car – or at all, really), eating something in a restaurant, or watching the Michael Jackson news coverage because I left for Ohio two days after he died. Also, I may have lost my Bellatrix socks, as well, because I haven’t seen those in quite some time either, now I think about it…

So yeah. Organization = 1, me = 0. Fail.

Resolution #4 – Stop Making Excuses/Do More!
AS COMPLETE AS IT CAN BE. For a goal with no concrete “completion” criteria, I think I did pretty well with this one. For starters, I joined the gym, and have been going three days a week, most weeks, and the weeks that I don’t do three days, I do at least two. I can’t say I’ve lost a ton of weight, but I definitely have built some muscle and I do look better in my clothes. I’ve actually gone out with my coworkers for several work-related occasions and have been seeing quite a few of them socially just for fun. I still cop out of some things – who doesn’t? – but I’m not as isolated as I used to be socially, and even though I haven’t been doing anything extreme like traveling the world or climbing mountains, I feel better about myself and my ability to make friends and just generally be a person.

Despite the tally here, I still feel like 2009 has been a more successful year. I did as much as I could to progress on the two resolutions that were beyond my control, and I made more progress than I expected on #4, which I expected would have been my most difficult goal, because it required me to change some pretty ingrained aspects of my personality. For 2010, I would like to leave #s 1, 2, and 4 on the table. I’m taking #3 off, because, really, who am I kidding, and am adding some new ones:

Resolution #5 – Shut up and knit my damn yarn/spin my damn fiber.
Guys. I can’t even tell you how much yarn and fiber I have. I know there are people with more, but this is kind of an issue because apparently my stash is beginning to eat itself, if my missing project(s) are any indication. I have a large four-drawer Rubbermaid chest full of yarn, three queen-sized mattress bags stuffed under my bed full of yarn, yarn in random places in my room because they wouldn’t fit in the chest or the bags, and…wait for it…a 20-gallon Rubbermaid tub of unspun fiber in my closet. My stash may actually exceed my life expectancy, and I really need to shut up and quit being all, “I need new yarn!” because I totally don’t. However, I do still want to go to Rhinebeck in October and buy yarn, so I’m setting myself a goal of at least 8 completed projects for 2010, not counting the ones that are currently on the needles. I know, it doesn’t sound like much, but I’m not a particularly prolific knitter. (Also, a “completed project” also includes spinning, plying, and setting a batch of fiber.)

Resolution #6 – Give back.
I always say that I want to volunteer and be more charitable, and I never do. I’d like to change that this year. I have enough yarn for at least five Snuggles in my stash; I’d like to knit and donate those this year. I’m also thinking about volunteering at the local animal rescue, too. So I need to take that first step and contact the rescue to see if they have a spot for me.

There you have it. The State of the Orange.

South Jersey got an inordinate amount of snow today. It’s been snowing since before 7 AM and is STILL snowing. We have probably close to two feet, if not more, on the ground. What do you when it snows out?

Well. I (foolishly) ran a few errands this morning, but I needed to grab the essentials…

(Yes, I went out in the snow to grab this shirt. I also bought The Santa Clause on DVD.)

We played with the dogs in the snow…

I did some baking…

And I took my little brother sledding on our mom’s 45-year-old Radio Flyer sled…

…Even if it was less sledding and more sinking and falling off. It was still fun.

Did you get snow? If you did, what do you do for YOUR snow day?