Egg, meet face

Earlier this morning, I was responding to a comment from yesterday and noticed that the 'to' field was something like noreply-comment@...

'Huh,' I thought, 'that's weird.' And as I typed, I got to wondering if the program was protecting the commenter's identity but would pass the message along or if my response — and ZOMG all of the comments EVER — were just being shunted off to the virtual equivalent of a dead-letter office. Since the commenter is a real-life friend, I gchatted her and asked her to let me know when my response showed up. And it never did.

So, since it seems possible that no one who has commented here in the past has ever gotten my responses, please accept my heartfelt apologies. I love your comments! I love responding to your comments! I never thought it was weird that no one ever responded to my responses!

I'm going to go poke around the settings and the help section and see if I can figure out a way to fix this, but in the meantime I'm terribly sorry for my inadvertently appalling blog manners. And if anyone ever *did* get a response from my on a comment here, would you let me know? Thanks!

Argh. Just...argh.

This morning, I picked up Kilronan to do a few rows while I had my coffee and found this rassin' frassin' miscrossed cable:
Then I looked at the matching cable on the other side of the center panel and that one was screwed up too — and differently, to boot.
Dagnabbit.

Catching up

I spent the week before Thanksgiving (Wednesday-Wednesday) housesitting for a friend, licking my wounds (within the space of a week or two, I had had a moderately significant family blow-up, was asked by my roommate to move out after I told her I wasn't okay with her boyfriend living there rent-free,* and had a relationship that meant a tremendous amount to me careen off the rails, possibly beyond the point of redemption), and gradually untangling the stress knots in my back. I brought over groceries and knitting, several books, my wheel and fiber, the last couple dvds of season 5 of The Wire and a couple of audiobooks and spent all of my non-work time being a hermit or going for long, hermit-ish walks (where the route is determined primarily by which direction has fewer people). It helped.

And I got a lot done.
Subtle stripe sweater, past the point where the sleeves and yoke were joined. I think I have enough of the contrast yarn to do two stripes on the yoke, which should bring it up to a point where it won't look strange if the rest of it is in the main color.

Whatever this Starmore is called. Kilronan? Past the waist ribbing on the back here and well into the waist ribbing on the front. I lurve it.

North Sea shawl from the Oberle book, rejiggered to avoid grafting great swathes of silk/merino because I thought that the tension might be tricky to control in such a slippery yarn. So, crest of the wave on one end, whatever that arrow-y bit is in the middle, and a feather and fan-ish pattern on the other. I want to get this done by Christmas so I can block it on my mother's clean carpeting. And also wear it. I should have enough yarn left over for at least a hat, if not a pair of fingerless mittens as well.

I'm spun up more than half of this big batch of fiber from Rhinebeck, including two full bobbins while I was camping out last week. I'm pretty sure I want to three-ply it, then use it for a big, cozy turtleneck-type sweater, possibly this one.

I also started a scarf using this pattern in some handspun wool/angora I won as a prize in one of Claudia's MS fundraisers several years ago. That photo was taken in Penn Station while I waited to see how long my train was delayed. (an hour and a half, as it turned out)

I washed and blocked the raglan wrap while I was at my mom's, though I still don't have a finished photo. My mother sewed big snaps to the placket for me while I was scraping pith out of 24 orange halves with a spoon (as one does), but you can see them through the fabric and I need to get or find some buttons to sew over them. I like to safety-pin along all seams and openings when I'm blocking; it does a fantastic job of keeping everything aligned when the piece is wet, especially since I don't usually have access to a washing machine with a spin cycle I can control and so am typically wrestling heavy, soaking-wet garments in my kitchen sink.

I made marmalade! It's cranberry-orange, it's delicious, and civilizations have risen and fallen in less time than it took me to prep all of those oranges by hand. That pith scraping was just one step. Still, worth it. My mom used to make a lot of jam and jelly when I was growing up — it's entirely possible that I was in college before I tasted storebought jam — and I'd been wanting her to walk me through all of the sterilization procedures for a while. I used Elise's recipe here, using plain old juice oranges, the juice from two regular lemons, and a bag of cranberries. Seeing her note about sterilizing clean jars in a low oven quite literally may have changed my life, since that's something I can do in my current or whatever apartment I end up in next.

*She holds the lease and is well within her rights, though I'm pretty sure there's a sizable karmic smackdown coming her way soon, especially since she was very understanding to my face and then emailed me my walking papers the next day. Any leads on somewhere I can go live in January or February would be much appreciated. Prefer Brooklyn, open to other suggestions.

Peep show

That right there is the first project completed by my friend EP, a two-color mistake-stitch rib scarf for her dad's 60th birthday. BOOYEAH. She practiced on some swatches first, then wanted to dive into a project that had a lot going on. Now, for her second project, she's rocking short rows. I do love a fearless spirit. I mean, it's yarn. What's the worst that could happen?

Speaking of a fearless spirit, the night I showed her how to bind off, we made some sad, sad homemade peeps. I had had such good luck making marshmallows over Christmas that I may have been a little cocky. "Marshmallows are easy!," I may have said. "And we are awesome at doing stuff!," EP may have responded.* How could that magical combination of circumstances produce anything less than fantastic? But I think the proportions were off in the recipe we used and it definitely didn't have us beat the mixture long enough. So the marshmallows were very dense and not fluffy and much, much stickier than I remembered, except on the outside where we needed them to be.

The one thing we had tremendous success at though was making colored sugar (mix a few drops of food coloring into some sugar):

And we were pretty successful at making a mess:

I actually still have marshmallow bits stuck to my watch.

But our peeps sort of ended up looking ... diseased. (Compare with this. Sigh.)

And you thought leprosy had been eradicated in the candy-animal population.

Happy Easter!

*I'm pretty sure that conversation never actually took place.

Out and about

1. On the Smith-9th-bound platform of the Greenpoint Ave. G train station.

2. Marriage equality window boxes on Henry Street.

3. And a story: Last week, I was on the train in the early evening, say, 8ish. I didn't bother sitting down because I was only going a few stops and was standing in front of a teenage couple. I wouldn't have paid them any attention — they looked exactly like dozens of other kids I see every day — except that the girl spent most of the ride scribbling furiously on a hot pink post-it and guarding it jealously, though she did show it to the guy, who offered whispered commentary I didn't catch. When the train pulled into my stop, the guy stuck the post-it to the other side of the pole I was holding before they ran off giggling. I leaned around to take a look before I got off, more out of idle curiosity about the kinds of perversions Kids Today are getting up to than in expectation of anything interesting, and read, in carefully drawn and decorated letters, "You shall fall in love easily." I remain charmed.

More things loved by me

I was planning to get back to my regular what-I'm-making blogging today, but I've noticed myself dwelling a bit on things that I hate (other people's hair touching me on the subway! roommates who don't do their dishes for so long they forget that they were the ones who used them!), plus I had a comment from Heather about making these love lists a Thanksgiving week tradition, which is an awesome idea. I much the prefer the way I feel when I'm thinking about the good stuff. So, one more installment today.

151. cranberry and popcorn garlands
152. carriage houses
153. the phrase "take it under advisement"
154. big, fluffy towels
155. thrift stores and flea markets
156. my favorite sandwich in the whole entire world: sausage, mushroom, broccoli raab and tallegio panini with pickled cauliflower and fennel on the side from Bocca Lupo
157. cobblestone streets
158. mittens connected by a string
159. poking around Metalliferous
160. finding different ways people are connected to each other, like when I randomly ran into Zoe's boyfriend Graham on the street today and he introduced me to his friend-from-home Neal who looked at me for a second, asked if I was a knitter and then said that I had come over to his house once to see chickens. (Neal is Martha's husband.)

On the whole, her majesty is displeased.

Things that have pleased me in the last, say, 18 hours:
-The post-punk station on Pandora.

-Trader Joe's Belgian Chocolate pudding.
I love it so much that I was going to give it a dedicated post, but I'm putting it here instead. Trust me on this one.

-Last night, I had the first hot whiskey of the season: an inch of whiskey in a mug, the juice from half a lemon, a big spoonful of honey, filled to the brim with boiling water. Heaven in a glass and the perfect libation for cool nights in drafty apartments. It also pinkens my cheeks most fetchingly.

-I slept the sleep of the innocents, most likely because of the hot whiskey, and woke up early, alert and refreshed.

-I'm really liking the book I'm reading: In the Woods by Tana French.

Some of the things that have displeased me:
-I tried on the spinster sweater (so named because it's all handspun yarn, and because it seems like a sweater for living alone in a cottage somewhere) and it looks pretty awful, the most unflattering garment this side of high-waisted jeans. It's almost done though, so I'm going to finish it and wash and block it and see if it looks any better. It doesn't really matter, since it'll be warm regardless, but STILL. And it didn't help much with yarn using-upedness, since I still have a lot leftover. WOE.

-There was some weird juju in the apartment last night that led to my roommate's girlfriend starting a grease fire in the kitchen (luckily, it was contained to the pan and eventually burned itself out, but I had a couple of scary moments where I was trying to remember whether you're supposed to throw baking powder or baking soda on a grease fire and then realizing that all of my baking supplies were in the cabinet over the stove and I'd have to reach over the inferno to get either one and kicking myself for continuing to put off getting renters' insurance; the correct answer is baking soda, btw), my roommate knocking over and shattering a large mirror in the living room that we think was left by a previous roommate, and our internet service going down completely this morning, rendering me incapable of making the pictures go from my computer to ALL of the computers.

-Bad Co-worker #3 took home all of the (awesome) leftovers from an office party yesterday that everyone had agreed to split for lunch today. The main thing I was looking forward to was the roast chicken that our Puerto Rican office manager's mother's boyfriend had made, complete with a TOP-SECRET blend of spices. BCW3 didn't even ask, just walked out with the whole trayful last night. Inconsiderate bastard.

-I made an almond butter and jam sandwich this morning to bring to work as a snack and, when I was putting the bread away, realized that all four of the remaining slices were moldy. I looked at my sandwich: no mold. I ate it for lunch anyway (since the lunch I was counting on wasn't there, NOT THAT I AM SUPER PISSED OFF ABOUT THAT OR ANYTHING), hoping that any loose spores would either be benign or beneficial, like taking penicillin in its raw form, and would maybe protect me from the creeping crud that everyone in New York seems to have right now. I don't usually worry about this kind of thing, since I tend to assume that stomach acid will kill off pretty much anything that needs killing, but still. Did I really need to spend a couple of idle moments today wondering if tiny mold creatures were going to multiply and colonize my body, wreaking havoc on any defenseless humans in their path? No. No, I did not.