The best camera...

...is the one you have with you. Apparently I'm not alone in the fact that my Casio camera's battery has given up the ghost. I inadvertently let it run down, and it now refuses to charge. Thankfully, Amazon has a zillion in stock (although I'm going to stay far away from the Casio brand one).

We were in the Abbey Gardens just before dusk, so my iPhone had the luxury of taking this picture.

Cross-genre protagonists

I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a few weeks ago. I was a bit wary - there's been so much hype. It took me about 100 pages to get into it, but once I sorted out who the characters were, I was hooked. It's a little more violent than books I usually read, but it had a great sense of the "whodunnit".

I'm almost finished with Graceling, recommended by C (as part of the awesomeness that is Recommendation Sunday), and I was startled by how similar the protagonists are. Both are very strong young women (who don't think of themselves as strong), who have been ostracised because of they way they are. Neither of them are inclined to trust men (or anyone, really).

Anyway, both books are really good. I'm trying to ration Graceling because I'm almost done and I love it. I've just checked the author's website (linked from the title above) and there's a prequel already published and a sequel in the works. WOOT.

The picture is a gratuitous bell-ringing picture (Cotton, last February)...just because. It's cold and wintry.

We had Stowmarket Thanksgiving last weekend. It was a definite success - the turkey from the butcher (pre-ordered in August, of course) was v. tasty, and all of the sides were both yummy and hot! I was inspired by the NYT stuffing "muffin" suggestion: I made my mom's (NYT circa 1970s) stuffing recipe, John used the blender to mix it together, then we mashed it into a muffin tin and baked it with the rest of the sides after the turkey came out. They were really tasty - crispy on the outside and mushy in the middle.

Because it's cold outside, the knitting has taken hold. I went to Wibbling Wools yesterday and impulse-bought some Rico Pompon yarn. It's a synthetic yarn: cording puncutated by little nuggets of fleece. And when you follow the pattern on the inside of the ball band, makes a scarf like this:

It's kind of fiddly at first, but the result is SO soft. I'm psyched for the end result.

I also had picked out a pattern a few weeks ago for another sweater, and I decided on some yarn. The original pattern is for a now-discontinued mohair yarn. According to the knitting/pattern guru at the store, I can substitute an aran. So I did. It's kind of hard to tell, but it's a charcoal-grey alpaca cotton blend with little flecks of light grey in it. Going to be v. warm and lovely. Once I finish the fleece-nugget scarf, that is.

Inconspicuous

I sang in the Bach Choir concert in Bury last night. (Come to our next one! Saturday 19th December, Christmas Music, Lavenham)

Because we live 20 minutes away (not including parking the car in Bury), the logistics of coming home between the afternoon rehearsal and the evening concert tend to be sort of complicated. We stayed in Bury and went out to supper with some friends. FWIW, it's the third time I've been to La Tasca, which is inevitably empty, and the service and food were just as bad as last time (and the time before). Consider yourselves warned.

Anyway, because we didn't go home after the rehearsal, I needed to change into my concert outfit between dinner and the performance. Mostly it involved taking my jeans off and putting a dress on - not too complicated. There's not really anywhere good to change in the Cathedral, so I decided to get dressed in the car. Which was parked in the Angel Hill parking lot in the center of town. It was dark and rainy, so there weren't too many people around, and the back windows of our car are tinted. Totally cool.

Except that right after I'd taken my jeans off, as I was wrestling with the dress to put it on, I sat on the car keys. And somehow hit the "panic" button. Which made the alarm go off. Flashing lights, honking horn, the whole thing. Oops.

Finally, Owls!

It's now officially cold enough to start wearing wool again. It was freezing at bells on Tuesday. I'd forgotten how cold it gets in churches when you're just standing around.

I wanted to wear my Owls sweater last weekend, but when I tried it on, John and I agreed that it smelled a little...er...sheep-y. It's untreated wool, so it's not really surprising. I soaked and blocked it, and it's ready to go. Thanks to John for the pictures (and Andrew for the camera).

It's strange - I was looking for the tag when I was putting it on, and then remembered that there isn't one. Mostly because I started out with some wool and ended up with a sweater. WOOT.

It was one of the fastest projects I've done, considering how cool the outcome is. I'm tempted to make the same sweater again in a different color, possibly without the owls. There are some others on Ravelry that are pretty tempting, though.

Now we just have to figure out how to get me to STOP wearing it - it's warm and cosy and I'm obsessed with it.

Other things I'm obsessed with at the moment:

- Cooking with apples. Going to try this recipe with the sm. boy for the inlaws (coming for coffee tomorrow)
- Eragon. I'm on the third one and am gutted that there aren't any more (yet).
- Trying to find a tv cabinet that I don't hate. They're all either ugly, too big, too expensive, or just plain wrong. I've come close with this one, though. I think it might still be a bit big. One day I'll find it.

Lost again

I know it's a busy week when I get behind on my rss feeds. And when it took me nearly a full day to notice that the Yankees had won the World Series.

We rented Lost (season 5) last Sunday, and have been watching it in our spare time, which has been surprisingly infrequent. It's definitely a good way to decompress from work, though. You can't think about the Lost plot and have room in your brain for anything else!

I think it's quite entertaining that when I took an improv class in college, one of the first rules they taught us was "Never put yourself on a desert island. You immediately eliminate most of your dialogue and prop options." Apparently not, if you're JJ Abrams.


-- Posted from my iPhone

New Scarf

I can't remember who pointed me to the link, but I'm really psyched to have started in on the Palindrome scarf by Kristin at Silver's Place. I'm knitting it using the leftover skeins of Berroco Ultra Alpaca that I bought in Rhode Island two years ago. (I finished the sweater and decided it was too big for me, so my mom has it as a dog-walking sweater.)

I'm still trying to pick a pattern for my next sweater project, and there are a few on Ravelry that are strong contenders, but in the meantime, it's knitting season! I think this is going to be really good on the chilly days at work - it'll look great with a white shirt.

I started it while watching Coraline with the boys last night - it was spooky, a little trippy, and quite close to the book. We all really liked it.

Oink?

Um, yeah. Since I wasn't busy at work or anything, I caught Swine Flu. Too much time spent licking pigs?

I've never had flu before - it was exceedingly unpleasant. The only upside is that I didn't eat for nearly a week, so my skinny jeans fit. Back to eating now, though, and still feeling pretty tired. I'm thrilled not to have a fever anymore, too.

A few weeks ago, John's brother gave us a new digital camera (Christmas/Birthday presents for the next...um...forever? Thanks, Andrew!) This is from the inaugural photo shoot, the night before I got sick. John thinks I look great, I think I look...tired. Nice camera, though! And lots more pictures to come once I leave the house, at some point in the next few days.

Aaand she's back!

Work has been a zoo. All I've wanted to do after getting home every day is collapse in a heap on the couch with a cup if tea and a book.

As a result, I've been doing quite a bit of reading. I finished Wuthering Heights, and while I didn't enjoy it, I'm glad to have read it.

I struggled through The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, a pseudo-biography of a slave boy in revolutionary Boston. It was interesting and well-written, but not my cup of tea.

Next up, The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's latest caper. It was a birthday present from my brother, and I enjoyed every breathless minute of it. All very silly, though. I think the NYTimes reviewer had it when the said it was hackneyed, mellodramatic, and overwrought, but that she loved every minute.

In other birthday news, John and I have new couches, from SofaSofa. We've had them for about 3 weeks and sofa-sogood. They are beige, which makes the whole living room seem a hundred times lighter. But they were crying out for some color.

As my super awesome parents gave me a new sewing machine for my birthday, I had to get sewing.

Result:


Woot!