It's my duty to make that bootie

I'm in the middle of working on a cardigan for myself and it is taking a long, looooong time. This is because it's knit in a smaller gauge than I've ever knitted before - I'm using sock yarn which is very thin. Sock yarn is also known as fingering weight (gross) or 4 ply (sounds like toilet paper).

To keep myself from going crazy, I'm trying to start smaller projects that can be finished in a few hours just to remind myself that I actually am capable of finishing things. The smallest projects of all, of course, are things for babies. To clarify: these are items FOR OTHER PEOPLE'S BABIES thankyouverymuch.

I'm also trying to increase the skillz in my knitting repertoire, which is how I arrived at the great idea to make the Felted Baby Booties previously mentioned. Last night, I got home from a long day at work, brought up Easy A on Netflix on Demand (I give it an easy B in terms of entertainment value) and started the pattern. I was so pleased at how fast and easy it was to work on something for a tiny foot. It was looking like I was going to have a whole bootie done before heading to bed! But then...

Oh, what's that? I mis-read the pattern and didn't build the other half of the cuff? Greeeeat.

Reading is my strong suit, it's counting that does me in!

Aw, well. I've had to re-do many a project due to a careless errors like this. I'm even thinking about ripping back the sleeve on my cardigan that's taken me a week to build because I did some of the stitch decreases in the wrong order. But I'm going to table that and just start the booties over again. It will be faster this time now that I've done the pattern 90% properly, right?

Then the real fun begins - felting in my lil' washing machine! Hoooboy.

In conclusion - Booties: Can I Kick 'em?

The best... around!

I think we all need a little Karate Kid theme music to get us through this week. Seeing the sun this morning made me feel like spring will eventually come and I'll just need to do a couple of high kicks to sail on into the weekend.

In other news, I'm going a little over-board in the arts and farts and crafts department. I'm in the middle of the aforementioned cardigan project and it's taking freaking forever. Therefore, I'm picking out a few quick hits so I can actually finish something for once. What's the fastest thing over? Baby booties, of course. Tiny feet, little work. I can deal with that. The inspiration for the next project came from the site Ravelry.com, which is basically Facebook for knit and crocheters. SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE.

Mmmbut seriously, folks. Just look at these. Look at them:

Via a fellow Ravelry member's (northpoll) photo stream

Wooden apple button. I don't care who you are, that's fucking adorable. A. dorable. The fuzziness comes from a process called "felting" which will be a new skill for me if all goes well. If not, no harm done, for it will be a minimal loss of resources.

Uh-oh

I'm super swamped at work... which can only mean one thing: I MISS BLOGGING.

Hey, it's cheaper than buying yarn and sundresses on e-Bay. Whatever, ya'll know ya'lls JEALOUS. 

What's new with me? Quick hits:

More knitting:

This will be a cardigan. Just in time for summer!

For a very tiny person or stuffed animal of some sort

It's a 'cowl'. For warming your neck. Only it just kind of lays there and is not warm. Oh, well.

New Relationship:

His name's Brian. He's a nice young man.

Same dog, same job, same house.

There. I think we're all caught up. Want to see what's on the docket for impulse online shopping?

The swimsuit I've always wanted:

Mod Cloth FTW

Shoes that remind you to call your mother:

Rangs:

I'll never own this, but a girl can dream

Knitting a version of this:




More to come, because I miss my two readers on the five blogs I've started in the past five years.

It's Fun to Judge a Book by It's Cover

You Should Judge A Book By Its Cover Interstitial Video #1 from pborelli on Vimeo.

Via Mr. Hodgman, whom I adore

The Tough Questions

Google has your back

Off the top of my head...

#1) Because all fetuses are female until the XY chromosome develops
#2) Refracted light
#3) Green Jello or it is the day after St. Patrick's Day
#4) Because racists have ultra-sensitive hearing from decades of inbreeding
#5) Tyler Perry will let you know when he's good an ready, sir
#6) The Treaty of Saskatchewan, 1775
#7) Because they are animals and you fed him table scraps, dumbass
#8) BRAS, grandma.
#9) The better to guard the gates of hell with
#10) Clever. You're too funny for words! GO OUTSIDE.


They don't call me McGoogle for nothing!

Immaturity Alert

via Anderson Cooper's Twitter feed

Poor Andy! You don't have to struggle any more - just tell already. TELL US!

Don't Watch Lost? Didn't Catch Lost? Don't Read This.

Spoilers?

** I made a pact with a dear friend of mine who promised she would watch The West Wing if I would start watching Lost again. I need to coordinate my thoughts, so I'm using this web space I have let go to the proverbial weeds to regroup. **


What did I learn?
- Locke is not Locke but is a physical manifestation of The Smoke Monster which is the non-corporal form of The Man In Black.

- OMG HIROYUKI SANADA IS NOW IN THE CAST OF LOST. There was an audible squeal of glee up in my house. For those of you didn't see The Last Samurai four times during finals week of your junior year in college in the same movie theater as now-NFL-quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, he played Ujio - right hand man to Samurai Leader Katsumoto and a man who beats the HELL out of Tom Cruise repeatedly (as we are all wont to do). Long story short, Sanada-san is awesome and it made the whole six seasons of craziness worth it.

He'll cut a bitch. (Or a Tom Cruise)

- The Temple has healing water.

- The healing water is broken? Or diluted somehow? When Sanada cut his and and dipped it in the water - it did not magically heal right away. This is probably because Jacob is "dead" (which I still don't buy 100%).

- The Smoke Monster has an ash aversion.

- There are two stories playing out, one where everything is reset and one where they're still stuck on the island in Present Day.

- The issue of fate is coming up again in the "back on O815" story. Things that happened to people on the island are still happening to the passengers. The Marshall still got hit in the same spot on his head - it was just by Kate in the bathroom this time. Jack still can't find his dad's body. Charlie says that Jack "should have let him die". Maybe it is all supposed to happen?

Did you notice?

- The hourglass at the Magic Water had light and dark sand in it?!?

- I bet the hourglass is 1 minute and eight seconds... or not.

- I'm bad at picking up subtle things in this show.

New Questions:

- The Man in the Dark Shirt can only be one dead person at a time, right?

- Since Sayid got up from the mat in his own body, does that mean that the water has to kill you to heal you?

- What is the water? Is it water? What does it do?

- Does Dark Shirt have an army? Or are the Temple People just fighting him as The Smoke Monster?

- Are the temple people a mixture of The Others (who had to hide there on Ben's orders) and other people that already lived there?

- Is the "back on the O815" story happening simultaneously or is it another time travel thing that plays out beforeafter the temple shenanigans?

Old Questions:

- Is there a reason that they buried so many 'stunned people' alive early on in the show? Can they be reanimated somehow?

- What's the name of the Man in the Dark Shirt?

- What is Jacob and the Man in the Dark Shirt?

- Why is is there so much Egyptian iconography? Did the island start out in the Nile?

- What's up with Team Ilana?

- Why does the island kill pregnant women? Is it because of the electromagnetism?

- Why doesn't Richard age?

- How did Richard et. al. get on the island?

- Does Ben have any redeaming qualities? Is he just a pawn?

- What do The Numbers mean?

- Why did Jacob have to touch the certain Losties at different parts of their lives?

- Is Locke perma- dead?

- Is there more significance to Ann Arbor where Dharma seems to have an HQ station?

- CLAIRE WHERE ARE YOU?

Theories at this point:

Paradise Lost plays into this some how. The title "Lost" really doesn't make sense for the show since they really haven't been lost so much as 'brought' to the island. Also the whole Light/Dark thing and the people buried in the caves with the light stone and the dark stone.


Upgrade/Downgrade:

Locke: DOWNGRADE. You're not even Locke - you're possessed with the dark side! o815 Locke was the Locke I knew and loved, but still, you can't recover from being the face of evil at the start of a season.

Hurley: UPGRADE. He's pulling himself together in Back on the Island World. He still gets freaked out, but is able to regroup much faster when visited by a spirit no one else can see.

Sawyer: DOWNGRADE. So sad now! He's an open wound and it's going to be dangerous. I think he whitened his teeth even more in the Season hiatus.

Kate: UPGRADE. She's doing what she does best: support staff work.

Juliet: UPGRADE - but I'm still really sick of watching you fall down that hole in the ground to your death, but not quite, but to then hit the bomb and then to not quite die, then to be rescued and die. Bye, Juliet. Maybe?

Jin & Sun: PERMAUPGRADE because I love them.

Jack: HOLDING. He's floundering, but at least he's not his overly-sure self that is committed to one course of action that screws everyone over every single time.

Sayid: HOLDING. What are you? Who are you? Are you going to kill us all?

Desmond/Charlie/Boone/Claire: UPGRADE. Hey, you're back - in an alternate universe at least...

Cry Town - Population: You

An elderly veteran + a simple message of decency = can't get a hold of my emotions. Happy Ally Week, friends.

Jordan, Jesse, GO CHANGE YOUR SYNTAX

Sometime in early 2009, I became a full-blown Twitter user. While this is not something that any sane person would ever be proud of, these are the facts and I lay them at your mercy.*

Despite what you might believe, Twitter CAN be useful. It can help you track news event in real time, you get a liiiittle too close to the inner workings of politicians mind and, most importantly, it's a comedy one-liner's dream come true. Most of my favorite semi-famous comedy folks are on Twitter and are excellent aggregates of the work of other people in comedy.

One of my favorite living semi-lebrity/comedy mastermind is Mr. John Hodgman, who sadly most of you only know as "PC" from the Mac ads or possibly from the occasional Daily Show appearance. (There is more, and it would behoove you to check it out.) Being a big Hodgman fan, I always follow his recommendations and have been greatly reward.

One such reward has been the discovery has been the works of Jesse Thorn at www.maximumfun.org. Jesse is the host of the interview program The Sound of Young America, which is taped in his home and then syndicated to various NPR stations around the country. His interview style is relate-able, thoughtful and focused on the things that interest him: hip-hop, rap, comedy and design.

My favorite MaxFun program, however, is Jordan, Jesse, GO! a "freewheeling comedy podcast" co-hosted with Jesse's longtime friend Jordan Morris. It's hard to describe other than to say it's full of anecdotes and general nonsense. It's been so fun to listen through the show's archives (available for free on iTunes) and to look forward to a new installment every week or so.

One of the things that is difficult about being a fan of comedy while not actually being a creative person is that you can remember and repeat jokes without actually being funny. So many of the laughs that I get come from repeating jokes from a TV show, wherein the reference itself is funny but the line isn't. The same goes for my listening of JJGo. It has totally changed the way I speak in an attempt to get laughs out of people, espeically in a "networking"-ish social setting.

Being silly isn't en vouge anymore, which is probably why I love JJGo so much. A recurring joke between Jordan and Jesse is to discuss a topic, then totally derail the conversation by saying words that are related or even just sound like the topic at hand.

A good example of how much this has influced my day-to-day sentence structure is this conversation I had with my pal and fellow JJGo convert Erin via g-chat during lunch today. To wit:

(Context: we were talking about writing a screenplay around the character Bionic Brother, because my brother had a pin put in his pinky finger today)

Erin: I see a blockbuster in your future

me: well, there you go

Erin: you could make tens of dollars!!

me: pennies and pennies!
Erin: tuppence?

me: ha'penny? a guinea?

Erin: chocolate coin

me: oh, that's right. that's what I was thinking.

Pretty ridiculous, right? And yet, it's almost verbatim what you would hear in a typical conversation between Jordan and Jesse during a podcast.

This leaves me conflicted, because on one hand I like to expand my comedy horizons and keep changin' it up. On the other hand, it points out how none of my humor is original and is a mediocre copy of another man's genius (remember that line from the 1994 Little Women?!). All it all, it leads me to being the "funny guy at the office" rather than "that amazingly funny person who we all know and love."

*I've been watching Showtime's The Tudors lately, and it has also affected the general style and rhythm of my speech.

Submitted without comment

Except to remind you of a my past thoughts about Ms. Carly.