From your mouth to Legolas' ears kiddo, and I am an asshole

Ironman left yesterday to go to the UK for a few days, so I'm playing the single mom thing. Last night, Devil insisted that she didn't want to take bath. But she did come and sit on the bathroom floor while Boo flung water all over the place. And that's when I found out that Devil has Hollywood connections.

D: Mama, I saw that man at the race this morning (pointing to the Pirates of the Caribbean Kleenex box that I bought without realizing I was exposing my children to Marketing).
P: Did you sweetie? (grabbing bar of soap out of Boo's mouth)
D: Yeah. He was walking down the street.

I look up and realize that Devil is pointing directly to Orlando Bloom's head shot.

D: He was very old and kind.
P: Was he? (Old? Crap, what does that make me?)
D: Yeah (with a knowing nod). He's having a party.
P: He is? (having ideas about exactly what kind of party Orlando Bloom would throw)
D: I'm going.
P: Really?
D: Yeah. You can come too.
P: Yippee!

So I'm going to hang with the Elf Guy. Cool. Now if only I can figure out how to stay up later then oh say 10:30 pm, it should be a good time!

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Now for the second part of tonight's title:

Before I had children, I'd hear all sorts of anecdotal evidence that babies make you dumb. And I have to admit that I had a few Absent Minded Professor tendencies before Devil and Boo made their appearance. But tonight takes the cake. In the midst of arriving home (unloading car, getting two grumpy kids into the house, extracting soggy Cheerios from car seats), my phone rings. It's someone I've been meaning to/trying to talk to for several weeks now. We had a brief chat since I was in the midst of swirling chaos, but we agreed to talk later this evening. All well and good. Except...

I can't find my phone. It's gone. Kaput. Vanished. Like it never existed. I put it down somewhere and it has decided that it would be a fun game to go invisible. So S, if you're reading this, apparantly I'm a complete idiot, and I still really suck. I will try to get a hold of you tomorrow sometime, and a million apologies. I owe you!

The triumphant return

Which means that I have returned from my travels to the Great White North and have accomplished the following fiber-related goals:

1) Finishing Brambler ran out of yarn, must spin more
2) Working on the Gathered Pullover - I think I got 4 rows done
3) Starting Koi hunh?
4) Spinning some lovely superwash merino/alpaca on my new drop spindle double hunh?

What I did manage to do however, is buy a new sock book, cast on for a pair of socks from said sock book in a new-to-me yarn, spend umpteen bucks at Windsor Button, get a tour of the Green Mountain Spinnery while they were actually running the spinning equipment, eat loads of fresh picked Vermont strawberries, run a Fourth of July 5k race with my sister-in-law, lie on a hammock, and relax. It was a lovely vacation.

But now, back to the salt mines - I've got more grants to write and lots of work to get going. But I'm aiming to get new yarns photographed and posted sometime this week, so there will be a yarn-filled post soonish.

A long weekend in pictures

Devil and Dora hit the Zoo.

Boo enjoys some quality gardening time

Uncle makes a surprise, last minute trip to Houston to fill up the Dora-void in his life

There was fingerpainting,

And game attempts at coloring

All in all, a lovely weekend.

The Turkish Walrus pdf is ready - I'm working on getting it up on Ravelry as a free download, but if you need a copy soonest, email me at the contact address listed in the sidebar, and I'll send one along.

Signs of spring, part II

When I was younger, spring meant crocuses, and blooming forsythia in front of my building, and playing outside.

When I was a little older, and spending my days here, spring meant putting the docks in really cold water, and spending Spring Break with 80 of my nearest and dearest as the crew team went south to train, and not drinking* for many moons until the spring season was over.

But then I went off to grad school just at the end of Ivey's tenure, and spring began meaning this. And then I went to Arizona, and landed in a lab containing a number of gambling-obessesed college sports fans (so obsessed that at one point we were having pools on Irish horse racing. Not to mention the 2000 Presidential election). Now that we have scattered to many places of academic biomedical research, we do our NCAA pool online. My record in this pool has been characterized by winning the 2000 electoral college pool (I was the only one who had Gore for the win), and eking out wins in March Madness two years in a row (although I had to put in two separate brackets each year to manage that). Ironman greatly enjoys this time of year, because he gets a big kick out of hearing me say "Dude, my bracket is fucked!" every evening for two weeks.

So far (after one day) I'm in last place. Hunh. Guess I'll have to make some sacrifices to the appropriate gods to pull out the win this year.

* Not that I drank alcohol in college...

Snow!

Well, theoretical snow at least. I just heard a weather report about the next cold front that's coming through southeast Texas in the next 36 hours, and they actually mentioned the dreaded "S" word.

Now I have lived in a number of places where snow was something of an anomaly, at least in any real amount, and it's been pretty entertaining to someone who did not get a snow day from sixth grade through high school graduation (and that's not because it didn't snow). Flashback to January 1996, driving from Boston back to grad school in DC one day after a blizzard dumped almost two feet of snow all the way down the eastern seaboard. Roads were dry and perfect until the Mason-Dixon line, at which point a sudden salt famine set in, and pinko commies apparently had stolen every snow plow in a 500 mile radius because Rt. 95 was glare ice and my street in Arlington, VA didn't get plowed for two weeks. Ehem.

Or the lovely afternoon I got to ride my bike to the pool at U of AZ through the wet slushy snowflakes the size of quarters. It didn't stick mind you, but it snowed in Tucson. Very exciting (the mountains around Tucson get plenty of snow in the winter, but it doesn't happen in town very often).

But Houston kind of takes the cake. It has "snowed" here once in the five years we've lived here - Christmas Eve 2004. Ironman and I went outside and danced around in the small white pellets falling from the sky. I took pictures of snow piled up in the cups of the philodendron leaves, and tried for arty shots of "snowflakes" falling. It was pretty neat, but like Tucson, not around for the duration (although Victoria, TX, southwest of Houston, got almost a foot, and the paper the next day had a front page picture of a snowman someone built on the beach in Galveston). It was pretty entertaining, but more so was the fact that the "snowstorm" was all anyone talked about for days afterwards.

And now, in March for god's sake, they're saying it might snow. All I know is that I'm going to be eagerly watching to see what kind of precautions my neighbors take. Stocking up on firewood*, clearing out the milk and bread at the grocery store^? In preparation for the imminent freeze, here is (finally) a picture of some warm, cozy, size 11.5 Trekking XXL socks to keep us from succumbing to the elements.

Dad's Christmas socks, actually on Dad

* for "firewood", read "gas" for the gas fires that most people have. Hell, even we have a gas log in our fireplace - it gives Ironman (who grew up in a house that was at least, in part, heated by firewood) a huge kick to say "Well, I guess it's time to turn off the fire" on one of the five days a year we use it.
^ because, you know, we might get snowed in! (Note: this is my pet peeve held over from living in the DC metro area for 5+ years. Every time snow was forecast, I could guarantee that the grocery stores would be a) packed to the gills and b) cleaned out of staples within four hours of the forecast.)