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There goes my baby, she knows how to rock and roll

June 4, 2008 by

Mom and I were talking about "our" words a while back.  It’s something Elizabeth Gilbert talks about in Eat Pray Love – if I recall correctly, she has a friend who believes that every city and every person has a word that describes them or sums them up.  It’s "their" word.  Mom asked me what my word was, and it just popped out:

"Okay."

Now, that may seem like a pretty lame word to be one’s all-encompassing, but anyone who’s ever heard me talk has heard this word many, many times out of me.  And it’s not because I’m overly accommodating (stop laughing, Ma, John, everyone else).  It just happens to be a word that I find infinitely flexible.  A lot has to do with intonation.

Bridging: "Hey Jill – here’s something you absolutely disagree with!"  "Um… okay.  So let’s think about this…"

Happiness: "Jill – something fun!"  "Okay!"

Processing:  "Jill – bad news."  "…Oh-kay …"

etc.

But it’s that last example I am talking about here.  I’m unemployed.  I’ve been unemployed for about a month now (I wanted to take some time before I talked about it here).  I was unemployed when I started this blog , back in 2004.  So we’ve come full circle, and not in a way I would have wanted.

Oh-kay .

However, so far so good – at least emotionally.  I’ve kept up with my running.  I’ve kept up with Tosh’s training.  I’ve kept going with the job search and the networking and the stuff that goes along with it.  I haven’t gotten too freaked out.  In fact, coming back from my run today, I was shuffling and dancing down the forest path near our house (yes positively jitterbugging – jazz hands may have been involved, I’m just saying).  Hey – you try to stay still when "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" comes onto your iPod.  Let me know how that works out for you.

I don’t think anyone saw me (except poor Tosh, who clearly knew in his doggy way that Mommy had completely lost her marbles).  And you know what?  If someone did, I don’t care.

OKAY!

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Blogging the Blob

May 26, 2008 by

I promised Robynn photos of the blob, so here they be:

Blob – wide-shot:

Bee shawl - final phase

Blob – closeup of final motif:

Bee shawl - closeup of final motif

Extra bonus knitting content – a sock for John, cobbled together with ideas from Cat Bordhi’s latest fever-dream, er, book :

John's raven socks - well, sock

(I really like that heel, and this was my first foray into linen stitch, which is a bit of a pain, but the effect is nice).

Extra bonus holiday weekend cute – LoLo the lounger:

The Yoga of Cute

(Yes, that’s Milo. I have a slightly wacky habit of nipping a nickname off the back of our pets’ names. So MacIntosh becomes Tosh or Toshie, Simon becomes MonMon or Mon-ster, and Milo has become Lo, Little Lo, or LoLo.  Those with single-syllable names don’t have this indignity visited upon them, so Dash is safe.)

Robynn also tagged me , and while I’m not generally memealicious, I decided to go along…

What was I doing ten years ago?

Hmm…. May of 1998.  I had just moved to the DC area for the first time.  I purchased my first house in Arlington, VA (everyone told me I was out of my mind for buying, the market would tank any minute, everything was overpriced… um… yah.  Not so much.)  I had one cat (Mon, MonMon, Monster).  I wasn’t in a relationship, and for the first time in my adult life, I was pretty cool with that.

Five things on my to-do list for today:

  1. Write this post
  2. Work more on the blob bee shawl
  3. Clean up the kitchen
  4. Relax
  5. Relax some more (holiday, don’cha know)

Snacks I enjoy:

Mostly things with salt – potato chips, corn chips and salsa, and the like, but I also really like pickles… mmm.  Pickles.  Salt and chocolate together are also favorites, like chocolate-covered pretzels, and while it’s not salty, chocolate-covered ginger is a dangerous new discovery.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Um… wow.  The world kind of explodes when you think that way, doesn’t it?  My mom and I used to play a game called "dream house" – we would talk about various aspects of what home would look like if money was no object: location, features, what sort of special rooms we might have.  This is kind of like that, except there’s a personal and a public side to it.  Clearly there would be a lovely home (well, homes – favorite places like Colorado and Paris spring immediately to mind), and there would be travel to places I want to visit but wouldn’t necessarily want to live (India, the rest of Europe, New Zealand), but there would also be the "doing good" part of having that much money, and knowing me, it would be about education and independence.  I suppose I would either fund a foundation and work with people who are committed to enable independence through education, or find a foundation that’s already doing that sort of work and work with them.

Places I have lived:

It’s a pretty short list: New Hampshire (Hollis and Manchester); Portland, Maine; Minneapolis, Minnesota; the DC suburbs of Maryland and Virginia; Somerville, Massachusetts (I’m only including places where I’ve had an address on my driver’s license – there are other places I have spent considerable time – like London, England, or Menlo Park, California).

Tag?

Umm…. well – let’s see.  How ’bout Marie , Lianne , and Daisy ?

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Memorial Day Weekend Niecelet

May 25, 2008 by

John and I really enjoy being "Uncle John and Auntie Jill," and we’re pretty lucky with the kidlets we have in our lives.

We got to spend today with little miss Amelia Sophia, who was very happy to be strolled around a Memorial Day street fair with Mama and Daddy and Uncle and Auntie. She continues to be most cute:

The modern baby, captured in its natural habitat

…and John has many very interesting conversations with her:

Uncle John and Amelia

(trust me, she may look as if she was ignoring him, but she was really listening intently).

More posting tomorrow, including answering Robynn ‘s tag, and also answering her plaintive cry for in-progress knitting photos. Big piles of blobby lace shawl in progress – excitement!

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Zoo!

May 22, 2008 by

A long time ago, I wrote about how John goes to his "kid-place" at the zoo .  Well, I can report that all the kid-place buttons are "go," and we’re ready for liftoff:

John, tickled by the animals

We had a fantastic day at the zoo.

One of the highlights? The hungry tiger:

LOLTiger

If you want to see the (edited) photoset, it’s here:

…after all, there’s no need to subject you to 200 photos.

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Race report!

May 19, 2008 by

Hello all.

I had meant to write a race report yesterday, but, well – I was pretty tired.  So tired, in fact, that we returned from the race, I showered, we had lunch, and we ended up napping for at least 2 hours.  Wiped.  Out.  I have a recurrent cramp or spasm in my calf, so that made the run a bit more of a shuffle for me for most of it (especially on the hills – which were humungous, may I add), but I did it!

See?

Finished!

Portrait of tired but proud woman.

Anyway, I had promised a Very Special Thank-You to all who contributed, and here it is.  As you may know, I would not probably be running at all without my trusty nano and its tunes.  So here is my final training playlist, which also got me through yesterday as I chugged up all those endless hills, dedicated to my lovely supporters.

1. "Bitch" – Meredith Brooks:  Okay, as tacky as it is right out of the gate – this one’s really for me.  You know I can’t get going without my angry grrl music.

2. "Steve McQueen" – Cheryl Crow: To my former colleagues.  A sincere thank you for your generosity and caring.

3. "The Night Pat Murphy Died" – Great Big Sea: For Lianne – dark, bouncy, silly, and Canadian.  Here’s to ya, girl.

4. "Have Fun Go Mad" – Blair (they don’t have that version on iTunes, so I replaced it with Trondheim Storband’s version for the iTunes mix): For Robynn .  She may not quite "set sail from just around the corner of the Portobello Road," but she’s certainly closer than any of my other supporters.  Take a turn around Osterly Park for me, my dear…

5. "Don’t Cry No More" – Boz Scaggs: For Marilee, because it just seems like the kind of tune she would like

(trust me – some of these titles bear no resemblance to their mood – this is a pretty happy, bouncy mix for the most part)

6. "Virtual Insanity" – Jamiroquai: For Kathy , as we seem to live in a virtual insanity rather than a real insanity, despite living only minutes from one another!

7. "I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’" – Scissor Sisters: For Barbara, because she’s just that great, she deserves the Sisters.

8. "Born to Fly" – Sara Evans: For my darling husband, who hiked out onto the trail to cheer me on and told me he was really proud of me.  When we were dating, I listened to this song a lot, and I knew he was the "brown-eyed boy in my future."

9. "I Was a Little Too Lonely (You Were a Little Too Late)" – Erin McKeown: For Anabel, not for the sense of the tune, but for its intrepid silliness.

10. (Power Tune) "Some Days You Gotta Dance" – Dixie Chicks: For Mom.  Because she’s the one who first taught me that some days you gotta dance.  In our case, in the living room to Carol King.

If you like this mix, you can get it here:

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Wednesday weekend woundup

May 7, 2008 by

Eddie Izzard and sheep.

Eddie Izzard: oh, dear lord but he was funny.  I mean, well – DUH, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this tour may eclipse all others.*  I’ve compared notes with others who have seen it in different venues as he has gone around the East Coast, and it’s clearly much more fluid than his earlier work.  Extended jokes that had us on the floor in Washington were only tiny bits in Boston.  Philly got something new and different… who knows how it will be by the time it gets to the West Coast.  I am only hoping that they’re filming most of them for a DVD spectacular.

I won’t go on and on about it, because (as John can attest) there are few things more tedious than someone repeating bits from a comedy show you haven’t been to.  Suffice it to say, if you get a chance to see him, go.  If you don’t, be on the lookout for the DVD from this tour.

Sheep:

This year was less about yarn than last year and more about spindles. My friend Rachel came up from Virginia with her beau Dan and since Rachel’s an experienced spindler, I took the opportunity to pick her brain and learn how to drop-spindle without so much of the dropping part. We ogled a lot of spindles until we came to Goldings, and there we pretty much stopped dead and said, “I want” in two-part harmony:

Goldings Spindles

Could you blame us?

John enjoyed some of the collateral crafts as usual:

John enjoying a gorgeous rocking chair

There was the usual assortment of adorable fiber-bearing beasties:

More pygmy goats

Rachel photographing sheep

Some were apparently hilarious:

Kid laughing at sheep

Some were arty:

Sheep and shadows

And some were groovy:

Alpacas!

The music tent provided a nice place to sip a root-beer float and rest after a lot of walking:

Rachel and Dan listening to old-timey music

Or play:

Kid peering under music tent

And then it was time to go home, get a quick drop-spindle lesson (thunk!) and say goodbye to Rachel and Dan.

So, that was my weekend – how was yours?

ETA: More photos from this years MDS&W are here.

* Yes, even you die-hard, “He will never be as funny as he was in Dress to Kill ” people.  I prefer Definite Article anway.  Tomayto, tomahto.

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Some things you don’t outgrow

May 6, 2008 by

I used to have a rule: no serious horror movies.  Scary stuff would bubble away in the back of my head until it erupted – usually somewhere around 2 a.m. – and a mostly sleepless night would ensue while evil things scuttled around the corners of my brain.

Because the effects of horror movies were so bad, this has been my rule for years.  Having married The Guy Who Watches Made for Scifi Movies, I have since found out that cheesy, campy, or just plain bad horror doesn’t bother me any.  Which led me to a very bad mistake last night.  John watched "The Grudge " and I watched it with him, thinking that the bad juju from horror was something I had outgrown.

Um.  Right.  Tell that to the insectoid Japanese female with the staring eyes and the death-rattle who stalked me hourly from 2 to about 5 this morning.  Gah.

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We interrupt this blog for…

May 4, 2008 by

Cute cat photos…

Statues

…and also arty cat photos

Dash

Things I have done recently include:

  1. Going to see Eddie Izzard (love you!  Call me!)
  2. Going to MD Sheep and Wool with friends
  3. Purchasing a spindle and managing (with a quick tutorial from my friend Rachel) to actually produce yarn with it (portable spinning!  Brilliant!)

I will (hopefully) talk about these things anon.  However for now, the cute cat images will have to do.

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Overheard at our house number umpty-eleventeenth

May 1, 2008 by

Imagine, if you will, a fat "plokplokplokplokplokplokplokplokplokplokplokplok" sound from the kitchen.

Me: "What are you doing in there?"

John: "I’m filling the olive oil container.  I kind of like the sound it makes."

Me: "Are you going to end up pouring olive oil all over the counter because you like the sound?"

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All hands to the wheel

April 27, 2008 by

So, what would you do if your cute man, the fixer of household brokenness, the chef de cuisine , the guy who cheerfully accompanies you to Maryland Sheep and wool (next weekend! yippee!), the fellow with the big booming laugh you just adore – yeah, that guy – what would you say if he asked you, "So, want to spend three hours on a Saturday stuffing bags for a library conference?"

If you’re me, you say, "Sure."

And you don’t just say yes because you know it scores points with the guy who already asked you to marry him, the one who loves the cats as much as you do despite the fact that they mean he has to take prescription meds just to breathe properly, the one who has never once yet said, "Do you really need more yarn?"  Well, not just because of those things.  You do it because you love tasks that can be finished.  You love to be a cog in that "getting stuff done" machine that tends to whip up around big, intellectually undemanding, multi-volunteer projects.  As far as I’m concerned, these kinds of things are fun.  And in a world where too many tasks are constant, never-ending palavers with too many people having weird turf wars, it’s very cool just to show up and look around, see something that needs doing and just do it.

Yes, I may well be clinically insane.  And yes, once in a while there is a really annoying person who whines or moans or gets bossy and tries to manage everyone else or who decides to monopolize the worst job in the place the better to reach their inevitable martyrhood that much sooner (and more vocally).  But in this particular instance, there was nobody who did any of those things.  There was just a big hotel conference room with long tables and a sort of endlessly evolving assembly line of stuff going into conference bags and people figuring out different ways of getting everything that needed to get into the bag into the bag with as much cheerful efficiency as possible.

The conversations were funny and fractured – I learned little snippets and bits about the people who were working my assembly line (I ended up assembling little packages of advertising cards that put me at a mostly static point, while other volunteers shuttled up and down the rows of tables).  I learned that Len from New York is also an only child, has worked in three Catholic institutions, thinks that his work history is funny because he’s Jewish, and was a chemistry major in college.  I learned that Corey has an autistic child, lives in Michigan, used to travel a lot, and has an outrageous sense of humor and a larger-than-life personality.  The rhythmic to-ing and fro-ing, together with the short bursts of conversation, reminded me strongly of the way conversations during country dances are constructed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OeSKfEY3NE

And best of all?  I got to go home with the cute house-fixer, cat-lover, chef de cuisine and have steak for dinner and watch Battlestar Galactica .  I win.

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