26 Days

26 days 'til my due date. I can't wait. Every week I feel noticeably huger than the previous week. Today as I was sitting at work, my back was tired the whole day. I know lots of women have bad back pain during pregnancy, and I should count my blessings that I haven't had any up until now, but boy, was it exhausting. It's 8:10 right now, and I really, really want to go to bed.

I think I am going to top 200 lbs by the end of this. I can't even express how much this depresses me. After everything I did a few years ago to lose weight I had carried around my whole life, here I am bigger than I ever imagined I could ever be. The thought of having to do it again, eat salad for lunch every damned day for a year again, makes me want to cry.

Anyway, I went to the doctor today. Since I am now in my 37th week, she checked my cervix. Apparently it is softening, is halfway thinned, and 1 cm dilated. When I asked what this meant, she said it reduces the chance that I will be late, but does not by any means eliminate that chance. She says most first babies are late, so I should plan for that, and that way if he comes early, I will be pleasantly surprised. SIGH.

Our kid is going to be a math whiz

So, we have been watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? which is currently running again in prime time, with Regis as the host. Every night they use the last five minutes for some celebrity to come on, answer one question, and win $50,000 for their charity. Two nights ago, the celebrity was Patricia Heaton, and her question was this:

If one Euro equals $1.50, how much does 5 Euros equal:

a) 30 quarters
b) 70 nickels
c) 50 dimes
d) 90 pennies

Patricia Heaton freaked out. She moaned "I'm no good at math!" She whined and cried. She didn't even try, before deciding to use a lifeline to call her husband so that he could answer the question. They called, he had 30 seconds to hear her read the question and to answer it. Look at the question again: are you surprised that after she got through reading it, he asked her to read it again? He didn't answer in time. She was on her own. She moaned and moaned some more. Finally, grabbing her head like it was killing her, she managed to figure out that at $1.50 each, the 5 Euros would equal $7.50. That was as far as she could go. She moaned and cried some more. Finally Regis couldn't stand it any more, and said, "Look, how much is 90 pennies?" She wailed, "I don't know!" "How many pennies in a dollar?" "100!" "OK. So, how much is 50 dimes? How many dimes in a dollar?" "That's five dollars." "OK, 70 nickels; how many nickels in a dollar?" "That's $3.50." "OK, so the answer is....?"

When she finally got the answer right, the audience cheered.

Last night, the celebrity was Wynonna Judd. Here's her question:

If you have three shirts and four pairs of pants, how many combinations of one shirt and one pair of pants could you make?

a) 6
b) 9
c) 12
d) 16

OK, never mind that math is apparently so obscure a subject that a math question qualifies as a trivia question not once but twice in two days. What was Wynonna's response? "Oh, I'm so bad at math"! At least she didn't cry and moan like she was being killed. Regis, having been through Patricia Heaton the previous night, went straight to the coaching: "OK, you've got one shirt and four pairs of pants. Then you have another shirt, and four pairs of pants...?" Wynonna was having none of it; she called Aunt Margaret. Aunt Margaret, thank goodness, got it right in 30 seconds. Sheesh.

Watching this made me so angry. Seriously, what is wrong with these people? Shall I say, what is wrong with these women? I remember the uproar over the Barbie that said, "I hate math!" but this is just as bad. These were not difficult math questions, and they didn't even try. Wynonna even said, "This is why I became a musician, so other people could do the math."

I was an English major. I didn't like math. I didn't like math because it was boring, not because it was hard. But I already want our kid to be really good at math (I'd want this even if he were a girl). Math is important! And yeah, it does piss me off that people are illiterate (if I hear another person on TV use the egregious construction, "him and I", I might have to go on a Strunk & White-throwing rampage), but honestly, collapsing at the mere thought of doing math? Infuriates me.

Progress

This weekend we started serious work on the nursery:


We put together the crib.

Doesn't Histrionic Dog look comfortable?
(Yes, for those of you who don't know him, Histrionic Dog is aptly named)

We also put together the changing table:

This was a nightmare: a surprisingly large number of holes were misaligned, and so we were doing a lot of forcing things together. It's funny: it's pretty decent quality in terms of materials--mostly solid wood, not particle board--but cheapie IKEA furniture goes together a lot easier. I guess they really know what they are doing, those Swedes.

We also had our Childbirth Prep class on Sunday, so we know a little bit more of what to expect. They showed film of some births, and I have to admit, I was checking out how quickly the women's stomachs went down after birth. Pretty quickly, I'm happy to say :-).

After that little bit of trauma, we went out yesterday and had a picnic. My sweetie decided to get in some kid practice....

Knitting for baby

There hasn't been a lot of knitting content (or, honestly, any content) on this blog recently. For the first several months of the pregnancy I completely lost interest in knitting. Maybe I figured I was creating a baby, what more did I need to do? :-)

Then, about June, I started getting the itch again. The first thing I knit was a baby blanket:


This is Oat Couture's "Auntie's Afghan" pattern. I fell in love with this pattern years ago, long before I even imagined I'd be having a kid of my own. At the time I thought, "Too bad I don't have someone to knit this for." Well, then.

I knit it in Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece, one of my favorite cotton-based yarns (it is 20% merino). I got a deal on "unevenly dyed" skeins on eBay--you might be able to see that the color is slightly variegated, especially towards the edges. I actually like this, because a totally solid color can be a bit overbearing. Cotton Fleece is machine washable, and the merino gives it just a smidge of fuzzy spring that keeps the knitting pleasant (I find pure cotton to be a bit tough on my hands) and makes the finished product a little cuddlier.


The only modification I made was to make it smaller than the pattern calls for; I started the border when each side was 95 stitches instead of 111. I did this for a few reasons: I was mighty sick of the acres of stockinette; I thought the blanket was already big enough (I ended up at 32" square, which I think is a perfect size); and I was a little concerned about running out of yarn (as it turned out, this fear was completely unfounded). I ended up using a little less than four skeins.

After finishing this (in three weeks, which has to be some sort of record), I immediately cast on yet another Baby Surprise Jacket, which I have finished knitting but haven't bound off or sewn up--I became irritated by the yarn in the last two rows, so I threw it down in disgust. Seriously, after getting through the whole thing without any knots, it threw up a knot in the last row, and I think I have to tink back, cut out the knot, and refinish it, and that has me so disgusted I've put it down. So, no pictures just yet.

After I threw down the Baby Surprise Jacket, I cast on the for the previously mentioned Stella Pixie Hat. The knitting on this is finished, I just have to sew the neckband onto the hat. I hate seaming, so I've put this one down, too. I have a real problem with finishing things :-). That one should be done this weekend, though.

What next? I'm thinking of a sweater for myself, even though I have no idea what size I am going to be (I measured myself this morning: my boobs are 4" bigger than they were when I got pregnant. So are my hips. Let's not talk about my waist). I've got a big, messy project in mind, where I am going to mash together a bunch of ideas and patterns. This should keep me occupied until I actually give birth. Six weeks to go (though my sweetie is convinced it will be only five weeks, since that would kind of inconvenient for him, work-wise)!

The fruits of our labor

My sweetie and I planted a small garden this year. Naturally, the hottest, driest year Seattle has had ever. SIGH. Still, we're pretty happy with our results: we didn't exactly devote a lot of attention to the plants (watering them was about all we did) and we have vegetables! See?


So we have Anaheim peppers, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes and Cherokee Purple tomatoes. The Cherokee Purples are an heirloom variety that's really sweet--I really like them. Unfortunately the plants set one bunch of tomatoes, then the tops of the plants shriveled and refused to grow any further, so we won't get a lot of tomatoes from them. But after all, there are only two of us, so how many tomatoes do we really need?

Of course, once I took the above photo (styled by my sweetie), he informed me that my picture was not sufficiently arty. So, he took over the camera. I present Still Lifes with Vegetables:

(All pictures are better with coffee in them)

What is the use of a blog without pictures or conversations?

So a couple weeks ago, during the hottest heat wave on record in Seattle and all over the Pacific Northwest, my sweetie and I went to Mount St Helens.

It wasn't too bad: we had an air-conditioned car and an air-conditioned hotel room. And, as someone who finds volcanoes endlessly fascinating, I was not about to let 90-degree heat stop me from doing a little hiking.

Although the 361 steps up to Windy Ridge did almost defeat me....


Believe it or not, Mt St Helens erupted 29 years ago. Yes, you're that old. The devastation is still pretty impressive to behold (click on the pictures for a better view of the matchsticks formerly known as trees). Forest does take a heck of a long time to grow back.


Check out the dead trees still floating on the surface of Spirit Lake. Which, by the way, is 200 feet higher than it was before the eruption: the debris from the volcano raised the floor of the valley and the lake by that much. See how the hills seem to end kind of abruptly in the lake, no shore or anything? Yeah: the shore is 200 feet down. It's crazy.

And for those of you inexplicably clamoring for pictures of "the bump" (god knows why).....

Yeah, there it is. Now stop asking me!

Weird dream

Supposedly being pregnant give you weird, vivid dreams. Last night I had a rather hilarious one.

I used to work in publishing, and even though it's been a year and a half (that long?) since I quit, I still miss it sometimes. My job involved a little traveling and a lot of books, and even though I eventually became tired of books, I still kind of miss books. (This make no sense, I know. It's hard to explain.)

Anyway, my job was selling foreign rights to our books, and this sometimes included selling UK rights. This can be tricky, especially as the world economy becomes more and more borderless, because selling the rights to a UK publisher to publish our books means that somewhere in Asia both copies of the book will one day be on sale, and we will be in direct competition with our own book, if you see what I mean.

So, in my dream, I was back working in publishing. But the office was nothing like the corporate offices I knew; it was in an old building with lots of wood and a garret, like you see in movies about academics in New England, and somehow we were a scrappy little company instead of a giant conglomerate. We had a success, a book about John F Kennedy, to which I sold UK rights before we knew it would be such a big success. Since in my dream we were a scrappy company, this was our first big success, and it was really important that we not let anything kill it. Then--horrors!--the UK publisher informed us that they were planning to publish a cheap hardcover version for the international market. Visions of lost sales in Asia were causing a panic. A young man in a sweater vest and glasses (who was either the editor, the publisher, or the legal dept, or possibly all three, since we were a scrappy little company) and I were frantically figuring out what we could do about it, if there was any way we could stop them, when suddenly, it hit me. I didn't think I had sold them the right to publish in hardcover.

(I know this realization doesn't mean much to non-publishing types, but bear with me)

The young man began frantically looking for our contract with the UK house. It was not neatly in a file, it was in a scattering of papers on the floor. He was on his knees, rifling through the papers; the contract was not stapled, so he kept whipping out individual pages, none of which were the right one. The suspense was unbearable. Finally he pulls out a page, and I know the information we need is on the other side of the page. I yell, "Turn it over! Turn it over!"

He does, and lo and behold: the line for hardcover rights is crossed out.

Relief is instantaneous. We start dancing around our garret office, and I yell,

"In your face, Random House! In your face!"

OK, maybe you had to be there :-).

Bitch 'n' Moan

It is HOT.  Seattle is in the midst of a heat wave.  Today it is supposed to hit 101 degrees, which will make it the hottest day ever.  Last night the low was 70 degrees, which, believe it or not, was the hottest night ever.  That's right, there had never previously been a single night since they started recording these things that it did not fall below 70 degrees.  By the end of the week, we may well have broken the record of five consecutive days of 90+ degree heat.  (Yes, Seattle has never had six days in a row of 90+ heat.)  To top it all off, it is unusually humid.  Not as bad as NYC in August, to be sure, but it's bad.

Since Seattle's usual July average temperature is 75 or so, very few houses have air conditioning.  This includes our house.  Yesterday when I came home from work, it was 88 degrees in the house.  It was also 88 degrees outside (evening temp, down from 97).  Yesterday at work the air conditioning was not working well, and downstairs there is never any air conditioning at all.  The woman whose office contains the computer servers measured her office temp at 98 degrees.  The servers actually sent her a warning message saying they were too hot and she'd better damned well do something about it.

I am off today, and I spent the morning running errands, then  spent the better part of the afternoon shopping for no reason other than that stores are cool.  Last night I slept on the recliner in the basement.  I have never been great with the heat, but being pregnant and hot is just about as bad as it gets, really.  Oh yeah: I've had a headache for the last week, too, probably from the heat.

All I have to say is that, when I moved here, people told me it did not get hot in the summer, and that it did not snow in the winter.  Seattlites are really big fat liars.

One of the errands I had to run this morning was a visit to the lab to have a Glucola three-hour test.  I had to have blood drawn four times, once when  I arrived, then once every hour for three hours.  My veins are notoriously hard to find: every time I have blood drawn, the person doing it comments on it.  Techs frequently have trouble, but oddly enough, doctors never miss (I don't know why this should seem odd, since they're doctors, but I guess I imagine they do not draw blood as often as techs and so might be less practiced).  My favorite was the guy at Student Health when I was in grad school who asked, "Would you mind if I missed?"  Um, yeah, dude.  I'd mind.  He called in a nurse, who called in a doctor, who asked, "Did you bring your veins today?"  He didn't miss, though.

Anyway, for four blood samples this morning, I got stuck seven times.  I thought she was going for the full eight, but on the last one she finally managed to hit the vein on the first try.  Both arms have multiple marks.  I feel like a junkie.

Anyway, I am going to go hide n the basement now.  If I can stand to move (because I still sweat in the basement, even though it is much cooler down there), I will continue knitting the Stella Pixie Hat which I began during my three-hour wait in the lab this morning.  If I can't move, I will sleep.  Ugh.

Random blog post

I'm awake when I want to be asleep. Must learn to control rage.

This is not what I am angry about, but I thought I'd ask: does anyone think those Prius commercials, the ones where people take the place of nature, are kind of disturbing? They remind me of that old Star Trek episode where Kirk is trapped on a model of the Enterprise with a woman who wants to catch germs from him so she can infect her planet and let some people die. At some point you get a glimpse out the window and the people, dressed in tight bodysuits, are packed in cheek by jowl with this kind of soulless misery on their faces. That's what I think of when I see the Prius commercials: not harmony between man, machine and nature, or whatever it is they're spouting, but nature so completely overrun by people that there is no nature left.

Not exactly the message a commercial for a hybrid car is supposed to be giving me, I suspect.

I'm not so sure about this parenting thing

So, after a long silence, I’m back. I have been feeling much better, although I am now getting to the point where I feel huge, so the period of comfort was fleeting.

I have come through my company’s busy season in one piece. We do overnight high school graduation parties, so June is crazy busy. Last year I worked the parties themselves; this year, because I didn’t think I could be on my feet all night, instead I stayed in the office overnight and manned the phones—a sort of nerve center of operations for nights when we had multiple parties going on. I worked 11 overnight shifts in a row, and boy, was my sleep schedule messed up!

Prior to the graduation season, it loomed like a huge monolith on the horizon and I could not see past it. Now that I am on the other side, I am thinking about September, when the baby is due. As I start to have trouble getting out of bed each morning (both literally—who knew sitting up was such a chore?—and figuratively—I could sleep all day if I didn’t have to get to work) the baby is making his presence known at every moment.

Oh yes, “his.” It’s a boy. I was surprised, I think because I was assuming the baby was a girl because I’m a girl. Duh.

Anyway, with the graduation season just past, I’ve been thinking about kids and what makes a successful parent. These parties are celebrations of an achievement, yes, but I don’t know that graduating from high school is the landmark it once was. Are these kids really adults now, and are their parents’ jobs really finished? Somehow, I doubt it.

We ask a few of the kids at each party to fill out evaluation forms to let us know what they thought of the party. Reading through them, I’ve been rather appalled at how few high school graduates can spell well, and how few can form complete and coherent sentences. Our boss’s 17-year-old daughter has been working in our office the past few weeks, and when she was asked to file a series of documents alphabetically in boxes, she asked for 24 separate boxes, one for each letter in the alphabet (yes, 24. Don’t ask). She had to have it explained to her several times that when you alphabetize things, each letter doesn’t need to have its own box; you can start with A and keep going though B and C until you run out of room in the first box, then start a new box. And it is not the first time I’ve heard of a teenager being unaware that one continues alphabetizing beyond the first letter of a word. That is, Aaron comes before Abel, and it’s not enough to just throw all the A’s in one spot willy-nilly.

All of this had me very down. I came home and said to my sweetie that I expected our son to be able to write whole sentences without spelling errors, and that he had better know how to alphabetize by the time he hits junior high, much less by the time he’s graduating from high school. I fretted, “What if our kid is stupid and I don’t like him because of that?” It’s one of my faults that I have a very low tolerance for stupidity, and though I’ve worked on it, I don’t know how I’d react if my kid were stupid.

My sweetie looked at me like I was nuts (he often does) and suggested that perhaps, at least on the subject of spelling and alphabetizing, we as parents might have a little bit of influence in the matter. Which I would take comfort in, except that I seriously doubt that any of these kids’ parents set out to make sure their kids didn’t know there are 26 letters in the alphabet.

So, what happened? I mean, I don’t know how much my parents taught me about these things. I know they emphasized the importance of school, and that I should get good grades. But other than trying to teach me the multiplication tables a grade early at home, I don’t recall them really actively helping me with school work or teaching me anything in particular. I definitely learned to alphabetize at school—I can remember it. I assume my boss’s daughter did, too: why didn’t she retain it?

On the other hand, my parents, who both learned English in their teens, never say “lay down” when they mean “lie down,” never say “he and I” (or, worse, “him and I”) when it should be “him and me,” write in complete sentences with good spelling and never confuse “it’s” and “its.” So maybe there’s something to leading by example.

Friends tell me that my sweetie and I will be good parents. But I don’t think anyone plans to be a bad parent, so I want to know: how can you tell? I don’t think my parents were great parents, but they weren’t bad parents. I think they muddled through. I think a lot of parents muddle through. They do the best they can. And school stuff is relatively easy to measure; if I wanted to be obsessive, I could play my son music in the womb, teach him sign language at age one, grill him with flash cards at age three, enroll him in five hundred programs by age six that will teach him three languages, how to do geometry proofs and the basic principles of chemistry by age ten. I am fairly sure that with a little effort I could sit at his high school graduation confident that he knows how to alphabetize.

But: will he know how to think? Will he know how to be compassionate? Will he know how to work hard? Will he know the world doesn't owe him anything?

Hah. Let me fret for now about what I will do if he's stupid. We'll worry next week about what I will do if he's lazy, narcissistic, mean, or downright evil.

In hiding

OK, so, I have been in hiding. I haven't felt much like blogging, or emailing anyone, or talking on the phone, or being a generally socially bearable person. It's hard to go to work. I suspect I am a little depressed.

Why, you might ask?

I'm pregnant.

With that intro, it might be a surprise to hear that this was planned, and I really wanted it. Heck, I still want it--we always knew we wanted kids, and I'm grateful, given how old I am, that it was relatively easy to get pregnant. And so far, things seem to be progressing well.

What I wasn't prepared for was the feeling lousy. For about six to eight weeks there, I felt lousy 24 hours a day, every single day. For the last two or three weeks (I just finished my 16th week), I've been feeling better, but it's precarious: if I eat the wrong thing, or, worse, fail to eat something, I'm back to feeling terrible.

Of course I've heard women complain about feeling lousy during pregnancy. I thought I was prepared for that. But what I wasn't prepared for was the mental and emotional strain of feeling lousy. I don't enjoy being sick--I'm very impatient with it--and feeling lousy every minute of every day for weeks on end tried my patience pretty much to the breaking point. I'm amazed by how little I care to do anything: I don't want to cook or eat (eating doesn't make me nauseated, I just don't feel like eating), I'm not interested in blogging or knitting or working. I just want to sleep all the time, because when I'm sleeping, I don't feel lousy. I am a total wimp.

On top of it, I feel guilty: after all, I'm not barfing fifty times a day, like some women I hear about. I'm not in pain. I just...don't feel 100%. Big, fat, hairy deal. I'm disgusted and embarrassed by how much this has bothered me. I have friends who are struggling with cancer and parents dying, and I'm whining about a little intestinal trouble. I have a sweet, wonderful husband who has made so many accommodations for me and has barely complained that I hardly ever cook any more, I never clean, and I just lie about and don't want to do anything. In fact, a couple weeks ago he actually thanked me for just being quiet and low-energy, and not turning into a demanding unreasonable bitch from hell, which friends of his have said pregnant women generally do. I felt awful that I get points for not being nasty, when actually I think I've been pretty pathetic and letting him/making him do all the work of our marriage.

I commented to people at work that I feel cranky all the time, and they claim that they haven't noticed. In fact, compared to the *last* pregnant woman they had here, I am apparently keeping up my efficiency quite well, even though I feel like I'm working in a fog and taking bathroom breaks every five minutes.

So, maybe the patheticness has been all in my head. I'm not sure how to get out of it, but it's not especially fun. Hopefully if the weather starts to improve I will feel better: last week there were actually some sunny, warmish days, and I was amazed at how much better I felt.

I am in hiding, or maybe it's hibernation. But hopefully I'll be coming out soon.

Playing Catchup

Sooo, I've been very lax updating the blog.  Lots has been going on!

For one thing, we bought a new car:

Well, new to us, anyway.  It's actually a 2000 Mazda MPV, with 110,000 miles on it.  Hey: it was cheap.  It also smells very, very strongly of some sort of nasty aggressive air "freshener".  It smells terrible, but fortunately it's the car my sweetie is driving, and it doesn't bother him as much as it bothers me.  That hasn't stopped him from naming it Stinky, however :-)

Some knitting catchup:

The finished Amused.  I've already worn it several times.  The Cash Iroha doesn't seem like it will wear terribly well, but I still think it's beautiful, and the color just sings.

I made a few mods, the most bizarre of which was making the left sleeve about half and inch longer than the right.  I carry my left shoulder higher, and that made the sleeve look shorter.  The weirdest thing about it is that I don't really notice it in other clothes; maybe it was because I was making this one--I got picky!

Tuesday was out first anniversary--we made it!  We spent the weekend in Vancouver; pics to come.

Serious knitting

So, here are some boring knitting details.  Non-knitters can skip to the end of the entry :-).

I'm almost done with Amused--just one sleeve to go!  I still love the pattern, although I discovered a problem with the collar as written in the pattern, and it caused me considerable agita for a while there.  I fixed it, though, and am rather proud of myself: this is my first real cable project, so having to fix a problem with the cable pattern was not easy, in particular because this is a two-sided cable (ie, it needs to look good from both sides of the fabric).  It involved a fair bit of frogging, which didn't make the yarn very happy, but it was worth it.

I still love the yarn, which is really lovely deep purple (the pics are not really accurate).  I am looking forward to being able to wear this one--when I try it on (the advantage of a top-down construction), it looks really nice.  I'm pretty happy about this, too, because to be honest, I don't wear a lot of my handknits, because I usually make something where I love the pattern, but the finished project is a little too wild or uncomfortable or sleeveless for me to wear often.  I think this one is a winner, though.

Knitting content over now; feel free to turn up the volume :-).

So, I haven't mentioned it on the blog, but my sweetie has landed a new job.  He managed this feat just two weeks after he received his notice at WaMu, before Christmas.  It was a huge load off our minds, let me tell you!  We were especially amused by my parents' reaction: you see, I've only known my sweetie for three years, and my dad only met him after we got engaged (my mom had met him a few months prior, when she came to NY for a visit), so they don't know him well.  My parents *like* him, but I think they were not sure of the content of his character, as they say, and so when they heard he had been laid off from WaMu, after he had had me quit my job, uproot my life, and move all the way across the country for him, they were worried.  The lousy economy did not help--it would be tough for anyone to find a job right now.

Not that they said any of this to us, mind you: they're not *that* tactless!  But in their joyful reaction to the news he has found a new job, it became apparent.  By finding a job so fast, in the middle of the holiday season, before the end of his notice at WaMu, even, so that he did not have a single day unemployed, he has proven himself to be a Worthy Provider for their daughter.  They were extremely impressed.  He is clearly the Best Son-in-Law ever.  My dad emailed, "Now M----- can stay home and have babies."

Knitting

It's snowing again.  We've already got two inches.  Bleah.  Time for some knitting pics:

This is the Cobblestone pullover I started knitting for my sweetie last year.  I had to stop because of my shoulder injury, but picked it up again in time for this Christmas.  Actually, looking back at that post, I am very proud to say that I completed all three of those projects :-).

Right now I am working on Amused:

I am knitting this out of some Noro Cash Iroha I've had lying about for a couple of years, waiting for the perfect project.  I am loving it, frankly.  The gauge is not what's called for in the pattern, so I am making a larger size, and I've made some modifications, but I'm staying pretty true to the pattern.  I love the yarn, and so far I love the pattern.  It's my second top-down sweater (well, third, if you count a WIP I haven't finished), and I do like the top-down construction.  No seaming!  I hate seaming.  It also used a crochet provisional cast-on, which was so easy it may become my favorite provisional cast-on.  We'll see what I think once I unravel the crochet chain and pick up the stitches.

The cable border on the placket is really appealing to me, which is kind of interesting: I haven't much liked doing cables in the past.  But this is a pretty easy cable, and it's so pretty in the Cash Iroha I'm totally charmed.  Cash Iroha is probably not the best yarn for doing cables--the thick-and-thin quality of the yarn is kind of at odds with even, regular cables.  But since it's not an all-over cable, and the yarn has such a pretty glow from the silk content, I'm not caring.  Can't wait to get this done so I can wear it!

Last hurrah

It's supposed to warm up this week.  Of course, you couldn't tell when we woke up: it was snowing again.  And it's supposed to snow again tonight.  But in the middle of the afternoon, it crept up over freezing, and it's supposed to each day this week.  So, before the snow is gone forever, I decided to take advantage of it:

What's this giant pile of snow in my front yard?

Yes, I built an igloo.

When I was a kid growing up in Illinois, I always wanted to build an igloo, but I never did.  Maybe the snow was never right.  Maybe I got tired.  Maybe I just didn't have enough understanding of how to build things.  I don't remember why, but I never managed it.  Then a few days ago we drove by another block in our neighborhood, and one of the houses has a huge igloo, at least eight feet tall.  You could stand up in it.  I got jealous.

So, with the weather over freezing and the snow nice and wet, I put my mind to it.  My sweetie dug snow, and I built.  The neighbor's kids "helped" by throwing snowballs at both of us during construction :-).

It's pretty big inside.  You can't stand up in it, but there's lots of room for sprawling.

When we dug into the snow in the front yard, I'd have to say it was at least twelve inches deep.  Amazing.  I built the igloo from the sides up; it probably would have been easier to make a giant pile of snow and dig into it, since we certainly had enough snow, but I didn't want to take the easy way.  It'll probably be all melted tomorrow, and my back is pretty sore after all that digging and packing, but hey: one of my life's ambitions is fulfilled!

Real football

Well, we did it:

I pulled out my long down coat, my sweetie put on long johns, and we went.

It snowed the entire game.  I loved it!  In my opinion, real football is played in the snow.  Football played in air conditioned domed stadiums in hot states is pansy football.  If we were only going to see one game this season (and we are), I am glad it was a real game.

Alas, the Jets lost.  Oh well, you can't have everything.  We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly nonetheless, and were glad we braved the elements and this stubbornly plow-free city to go.

OK, this is ridiculous

OK, I love snow, but this is kind of ridiculous.

It snowed again on Thursday morning, and then again last night.  And each time, it snowed a lot.  Thursday morning I attempted to go to work, in the pouring snow.  My sweetie came with me, because we were nervous about the driving.  And rightfully so: when we turned the corner to go down the hill, we sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid out of control to the bottom.  Very slowly, but still: I was scared.  It didn't help that there was a kid sledding on the hill.  In the street.  When we got to bottom, I turned to my sweetie, and said, "I'm not going to work."  We returned home and had a two-hour snowball fight with the neighborhood kids (and their parents).  (Embarrassingly, my throwing arm and all down my right side were really sore on Friday and Saturday.  Sheesh.)

Then last night, this:

Can you tell we had a huge snowball fight in our backyard on Thursday?  The snow was all torn up.  There were snow angels.  Really, there were.

See the arrow pointing out the walkway in front of house?  This walkway was totally cleared yesterday morning.  We are responsible homeowners!  We shoveled the walk!  Sigh.

For Christmas, I got my sweetie tickets to the Jets game.  People around here keep calling it the Seahawks game, but what do they know?  Anyway, the game is today.  I don't know how we're going to get there.  Seattle is totally unprepared for snow.  They never plowed after Thursday, so all this new snow is on top of packed three-day-old ice.  People are trapped in their homes.  As someone who grew up with snow and snow plows that start going even before the snow has started accumulating, I am finding this a little maddening.  My sweetie saw the city official in charge of streets clearing on the news, and they asked him how he planned to deal with this.  His answer was essentially, "Hopefully it will get warmer."

We're thinking if we go to the game we will start early.  Maybe we will walk.

More suburbia

It's very, very cold in Seattle right now.  Below freezing, which is unusual.  And last night it snowed quite a bit, also unusual:

I was very excited to see the snow.  I love snow, and I didn't get enough of it in NYC (I think the city was just too hot for snow).  Last night it started snowing early in the evening,  light snow that was collecting on grass but not on pavement.  But around 10:30 or 11:00 it started snowing heavily, so that it started collecting on the streets and sidewalks.  I insisted on going for a walk in the snow.

As we walked down the block, I scooped some snow off a nearby parked car and discovered it was the perfect packing consistency.  I started rolling the ball along the street.  My sweetie said, "Why don't you do it on the grass?  The snow is deeper."  So I did.  We left a 12-inch diameter ball on the lawn of one of our neighbors and went on our way.

By the time we came back, about 45 minutes later (we stopped for a drink in a neighborhood bar which was surprisingly crowded), the ball was still there, the snow was still falling, and I decided I'd better make a snowman while the making was still good.  I picked the ball up, took it to our house, and made some additions:

I love it :-).  The next morning it was still there.  We went out to sweep the snow off our car and started talking with various neighbors who were out playing with their kids (the kids were excited: snow is rare).  My sweetie and I got into quite a snowball fight with a couple of the kids.  At least three people asked us how we had made the snowman, because by the time the sun came out this morning, the snow was too cold and icy to pack well.  Thus proving that when the snow is perfect, you must seize your opportunity.  I was out there at midnight, and I have my snowman to show for it :-).

We finally got our lights up, too.  We visited several stores before finding lights: the Lowe's in particular looked like light-eating locusts had descended and devoured every last bulb.  It was creepy.  But if you look closely, you can see what we did manage to buy at the nearby drugstore, standing by the porch.  My sweetie calls him "Snowy."

One advantage of suburbia

OK, I realize that I do not technically live in the suburbs: I am in Seattle.  I don't have a gigantic scary huge grocery store to shop in, I just have a big store.  But seriously, after years in Manhattan, this is plenty suburbian for me!

I noticed this past fall that the changing color of leaves were really stirking me.  I'd turn a corner (in my car) and see a whole avenue of orange or red, and it would lift my spirits.  It made me realize that I didn't get a whole lotta nature in Manhattan, and while I wouldn't say I really missed it (after all, I never sought it out), it's kind of nice to have.

One thing  I did miss in Manhattan was sky.  I like sky.  When the Hale-Bopp comet swung by earth, I had to go out on a boat on the East River to see it.  I visited the Orkneys once, and was completely enchanted by the sky.  When I got home, people were like, "Um, why did you take so many pictures of the sky??"   When I went rafting in Idaho some years ago I was amazed at the night sky.  I don't know much about the sky, but it's sure pretty.

So today, as I left the house at 7:40 am to go to my Saturday morning Pilates class (so worth it, seriously), I was struck by the gorgeous sky.  Normally I don't look up.  It's often overcast here.  It had been dark when I had gotten up.  But this was not ignorable.  I whipped out my camera and took pictures....of the sky.

East:

West:

Same sky.  Cool, hunh?

I'm not sure what to think

So, not unexpectedly, my sweetie was laid off this week.  Most of his coworkers were also laid off.  WaMu is truly no more.

It's got me thinking about a lot of things.  I recently got into a brief discussion in comments on someone else's blog about choices, the economy, and how to fix this whole mess.  Twenty years after I first got on an online message board and learned the meaning of the word "flame," and you'd think I would know better :-).  Anyway, this person told me that we make our choices and have to live by them, and her husband had survived 25 years at his company and countless rounds of layoffs, so "he must be doing something right."  Implying that if my husband got laid off, it would probably be because he was lazy.  She did use the word "lazy". The smug complacency in this statement left me breathless (though no longer speechless) with rage.  I heard on the news that 80% of WaMu's Seattle workforce lost their jobs on Monday.  I suppose you could say that it's no wonder a company with a workforce consisting of 80% lazy people failed.  

I wish I could be as sure that making the right choices is always guaranteed, or even that making the right choices, assuming you can manage it every time, guarantees health, happiness, success, etc.  I wish I could believe that nothing is left to chance.  That there are no flukes, that you cannot be affected by anything that you are not personally responsible for.  I mean, of course, that I wish nothing had ever happened to me to make me think otherwise.

There are a lot of reasons to be down--how about the WalMart employee who was trampled to death on Black Friday by shoppers who continued to shop even when  they knew someone had been killed?  The self-centeredness depresses me.  That's why I think even though the election supposedly changed things, nothing will change, because everyone thinks they're better than everyone else.  Everyone thinks the other guy should suck it up.  We'll be pointing fingers at everyone who is lazier or stupider or more morally bankrupt than we until we're a snivelling footnote in history.

All of this has me thinking, too, about love and marriage, because what makes everything OK is that we're in this together.  I know that sounds smooshy and cliche but...it's kind of true.  However worried I am, being with my sweetie makes me smile.  I can't say we haven't had a few stressed moments during this mess, and or that we won't have more, but I think we are both very happy to have each other.  Though I sometimes miss NYC and my comfortable single life without any real worries, I don't really wish to be back there.  I like it in Seattle.  I love our house.  I like my job, though now more than ever I wish it paid more.  And I love my sweetie.  Life, for all its scariness right now, is better than it was.  So I guess, on balance, we ended up making some good choices after all.  Ask me what I think in a couple months if my sweetie has not found a new job :-).

And, because I am the way I am, this got me thinking about divorce.  You always hear about marriages falling apart during periods of crisis--the loss of a child, or a job, or the aftermath of crime.  How do people get from here to there?  Do they make a choice to give up?  Does the lure of comfortable single life, where there are no decisions to live with but your own, become too strong?  Is it a fluke?  Does it always mean that the choice to get married was a bad one?   Maybe our crisis isn't bad enough yet, or hasn't lasted long enough.  Maybe divorced people were just lazy.

Sigh.  I think I'll go curl up with my sweetie now.  At least until we start blaming each other for everything that's wrong in our lives.