Thursday…really?

This week has been the fasted moving in the history of the world. I cannot keep up. My reading is behind, my knitting is behind, my housework…hmmm, actually it’s exactly where it always is. Much to my mom’s chagrin I’m just not that tidy of a person. I’m what’s called a stacker. I have wee piles of things, everywhere! When I was younger and still lived at home the only time I ever cleaned my room was if I a.) angry and b.) grounded and not allowed out. If these two things occured simultaneously I would rip my room apart with a vengeance. There was a fair bit of snorting and muttering while I did it. But when I was done, that room sparkled. I think mom used to get me angry on purpose so that I would clean up once in awhile! Hey mom, want to come over and make fun of my clothes until I start vacuuming? Bahahahahahaha! Love you mom!

I was tagged to do a poem last week the by the inimitable Plae. I’m afraid I couldn’t do anything as fabulous as hers, but I did whip up a little haiku on the bus on the way home:

all cold and sleepy

i make my way home slowly

meatpies for dinner

Extra bonus? Those are turkey meatpies and there are French fries to go with them. Going to steam a side of broccoli so that I don’t completely fail at the all four food groups thing.

Oh! I also bought these incredible tiny little circular needles last Sunday at Three Bags Full. They are from Hiya Hiya and are only 9 inches long. I’m working a sock all on one circular needle and it is great! I’ll try to get a pici and post it later. They are so cute, almost look like part of someone’s braces!

Okay, it’s guilty pleasure tv night. Survivor, CSI, and ER. I know, I know, I should be catching up on my reading. Not going to happen tonight. Besides, I got 95% on my first paper and I’m just cruising on that little high for at least another day. Happy Thursday all!

Bit of a mish mash

Lot’s to see, lot’s to see!  I’ve been trying to make February about finishing stuff.  To that end, we have a hat:

Knit and Tonic’s Last Minute Purled Beret (.pdf).  Super fast and I’m rather liking it.  I usually look like a dork in a hat but this one is okay.  Plus, it’s wicked warm and that’s a good thing when waiting for the morning bus.  I used Noro Kochoran and for the life of me I cannot find the tag so I do not know what colour.  Sorry.  I still have about 1/4 of a skeing left too.

Hey, you like that vase?  Oh yeah, romance was in the air for Mr & Mrs beentsy this Valentine’s day.    I asked for an easter cream egg to celebrate this overblown holiday and what did I get?  FOUR easter cream eggs and a rose.  Spoiled!  Of course I’m not the kind of gal who has a bud vase though so that’s a Growers Extra Dry Apple cider bottle.  Class?  We haz it!  Oh, and hey, look at that.  Another shot of me in my pj’s.  Oozing class I am I am!

Oh, and a sweater:

That little number?  On the needles for almost a year.  Embarrassing as all get out.  Fun knit though and now that it’s done and soaked and blocked I’m quite smitten with it.  It feels nice on and contrary to my fears, it’s not all nasty/bulky under the arms.  I’m giving it an A-.  Why the minus?  I kind of wish I’d picked a slightly different colourway.  That’s my fault and not the pattern though.  This is the size large and I ended up needed a little bit more than the 10 skeins called for.  My fault again though, I gave it long sleeves instead of 3/4.  I would have had at least 1.5 skeins left if I’d gone with the original sleeve as written.  I’ll try to get a pici of it in action tomorrow.  I’m meeting up with the knitters and will have them take some fun Sears action shots.    The pattern is the Round Trip (Ravelry link) by Kay Dalquist and it’s from Knitter’s 72, waaaaay back in 2003.  Yikes.

I also did a bit of book shopping and I’ve committed my self to fixing this whole, ‘I haven’t read any Dickens’ thing.  Ta da:

The Dracula/Frankenstein/Jekyll and Hyde were just a yummy addition that I couldn’t resist.  I haven’t reread them in years.

Then I sort of lost my mind and got these too:

So, what have you been up to?

I hate these drive by posts but it’s all I’ve got right now.

With thanks to Kat.  Sorry I’ve been MIA lately.  Not huge reasons, just that whole life getting in the way of the fun stuff.  You know!  Anyway, go do this.  I’m curious as to the results.

Bold the books you have already read

Italicize the books you intend to read

Notes in parentheses next to note-worthy titles.

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien – tried a billion times, just can’t do .
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
11. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare- most but I can’t take credit for all yet. 
15. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch by George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams  - God I miss Douglas Adams!
    
26. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
34. Emma by Jane Austen
35. Persuasion by Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
39. Memories of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
41. Animal Farm by George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown – hated every moment.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
45. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
50. Atonement by Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
62. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold – twice, right in a row.  I was gobsmacked.
65. Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
72. Dracula by Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson – one of the funniest men on the planet.  In a Sunburned Country is amazing!
75. Ulysses by James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal by Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession by AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web by EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
94. Watership Down by Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Honestly, I’ve never read any Charles Dickens.  I really need to remedy that situation.

In case you think that all I ever do is ride transit…

Not true!  Sometimes I get some other stuff done too.  Last week I actually wrote my first paper of the semester with a minimum of gnashing of teeth.  We’ll see how that affects my mark. Gnashing of teeth might be what’s needed for me to get a good grade.

I also ordered Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  Can not wait!  I totally blame Heather for this one.  I was just thinking of pre-ordering it but she had already done so and then we were emailing about what other classics would be good with zombies and boom.  I’d pressed the checkout button and it’ll be here soon.  Oh, the other classics?  She’s leaning towards The Great Gatsby and Zombies.  Me?  I’d like to see Hamlet and Zombies or a Midsommer Night’s Dream and Zombies.  Snork!

I also got some spinning done.  Remember this fibre that I got last year at the Gibsons Landing Fibre Arts Festival?

I finally got going on it.  I had two huge hanks of it, 83% IGOR (Island Grown Organic Romney), 17% silk, 250 gms per hank.  I’ve finished spinning up the first hank and it looks a little bit like this:

And now the obligatory photos with the small dog in them:

Now I just have another 250 grams to spin and ply.  No problem!  I’m really happy with it though.  It’s got that shine from the silk.  I ended up with about 422 yards and I must have been doing better at moving the slider on one bobbin than the other because I have almost 1/4 of a bobbin left unplied.  The only thing that sort of bummed me out was there are sections where the indigo barber poled with the gold and it reminds me just a little bit of my grade 7 soccer uniforms.  I can live with it though. 

Not quite SQOD*…but pretty close

I’m going to assume that this bit o’ graffiti does not stand for file transfer protocol?  Yeah, I didn’t think so.

*SQOD – Skytrain quote of the day

Silent Poetry

It’s that time again.  For this year’s festivities I hopped into the way back machine and traveled to grade 10 and found my favourite poem from lit class.  I was such a pretentious snot that I memorized it and used to wander the halls at school reciting it.  Be thankful you know me now, not then! 

Kubla Khan –

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves:
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘t would win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

It still ‘sounds’ so pretty to my internal ear.  I should memorize it again and start reciting it in the hall at work.  That would totally make me cool!