I have been contemplating the Fleece Artist Celtic Cardigan. The only thing that's stopping me is the desire to see the yarn in person before committing. Unless I can track down a kit locally, that means either going to Canada or waiting until next year's Madrona Knitting Retreat. I'm planning to start Arwen instead, now that I've managed to find the yarn again after losing it in the stash for a couple of months.
The sudden urge to knit a sweater comes out of several sources: I'm sick of fiddling with little tiny yarn, it's cold, and I've never finished a grownup sweater, although I've started two. Both of them were miles of unrelieved garter stitch and thus doomed from the start. The one that involved splitty yarn was more doomed; my only excuse for not finishing the other sweater is that I reknit the beginning so many times that it wasn't fun anymore.
It has been a loooooong week. I ended up working most of the 4th of July weekend, coaxing a production system into behaving itself because I was the only person in the escalation chain to answer the phone. Perhaps because of this, I have been reacting particularly poorly to the various bits of work-related idiocy floating around the past week. This reached its apex when my boss caught me in a major snit and remarked, "I know that asking you not to get upset about this is like asking water not to be wet, but try to do it anyway."
I'm curious to know whether this happens to other men in the West Seattle B&N, or if it's just him. Could one of the male people who reads this try hanging out there and report back?
Other people to whom I've told this story have come up with various theories. One is that she's hitting on him. It's possible, although I have to say that I'm boggled at the idea that any woman in her right mind would think that suggesting romance novels to a guy would be a way to start a conversation. I think he'd be more likely to go and barricade himself behind a wall of Tom Clancy, but who knows. Another is that she thinks, for whatever reason, he could use some help. Once again, the mind reels--if men are going to start learning about women by reading romance novels, I don't want to know about it. (Ask me sometime why I loathe romantic suspense, and I will give you my 10 cent lecture on how genre reinforces essentialist ideas about gender and why this makes me twitch.) I don't really have a theory, because I have no idea what she's recommending. I'd love to know.
I've been on call this past week, which is never exactly fun, but is usually not this painful. The pain is due to an unholy combination of a service that started going up and down a lot, hence sending a lot of pages, and the unfortunate discovery that the other on-call person makes me twitch even more than the the pager does. The best part was when zie started sending out mail that repeated in English what the pager message and email alerts already said, e.g. "Service X is up," or "Service X is down." (Dude, we KNOW.) I am selfishly hoping that this behavior was situational, because the thought of another Miss Farlow makes me shudder in my shoes.
Off to deal with the Pile of Shame a bit, before it composts.
- When we were in Vancouver this past weekend, I noticed an ad on a bus kiosk that said "Because getting hit by a bus while jaywalking is the kind of thing that happens to someone else." The ad campaign is sponsored by The Community Against Preventable Injuries, which also runs http://preventable.ca. This seems very Canadian to me somehow, in the combination of sardonic humor and commonsense.
- I noticed that MEC sells black cycling jackets. Only in a place where there are enough bicycle lanes and streets closed to non-bike traffic would someone sell cycling gear that was tasteful rather than what one could call either "visible" or "garish," depending on whether one is thinking of safety or fashion.
- On the way back to Seattle, we stopped at the Richmond Public Market for lunch after the other Chinese place we tried turned out to be closed for the afternoon. I randomly picked a food court stall called Xin Jiang Delicious Food because I know nothing about the food of Xinjiang province. I did remember reading that wheat noodles are a regional specialty, so that's what I ordered. I didn't realize that they were going to make the noodles by hand, but they did. A woman took a pan of dough out of the refrigerator, warmed it up a bit, then started turning out long, perfect noodles right in front of my eyes. The noodles were amazing--very soft and a little bit chewy. Nathan had cumin lamb on skewers, which was also very good, but familiar enough that it didn't knock our socks off the way those noodles did.
- I get to be on-call this week. I am making it my mission to bug the monitors that flap unnecessarily and to nag the people who own those monitors and systems until they fix the damned things. Because some people have been accepting weak excuses ("It was the salmon," indeed.) for too long, and enough is enough.
- Jennifer Uglow's biography of George Eliot is excellent.
I had lots of questions I wanted to ask, but they were mostly literary and philosophical, and this didn't seem like the right format. The audience was...very Seattle. Bless their hearts. The two women behind me were arguing about whether to go to the rally at the start of Tyler's cross-country bike tour or one of the anti-Phelps protests. The first question, from an older gentleman, was "Was your father in the military, and was that why you decided to become a warmonger?" Once Tyler very graciously swatted that one down, the woman in front of me said, "My background is in psychology and I just think issues of PTSD are so important and do you talk at all about PTSD in your book? Because I just think it's so important and the government isn't doing enough, and (that's when I stopped listening)." To respond to her question, he read the section of the book about the blowup at the end of a conference on PTSD. Another woman talked about the need to heal in community, and how those of us in civilian life were as complicit in the war as those who fought in it and those who ordered it. I was impressed by the way Tyler managed to disagree with this point of view while acknowledging the intention behind it.
I has a sweet potato.
Ali Davis's True Porn Clerk Stories. NSFW, duh. Although I did find out that the merest mention of Aqua lyrics is enough to give my boss an earworm. I can't think of any way in which this power can be used for good, but I nonetheless hold it in reserve.
Hotel Soap. I don't care if it's not true.
James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times.
Cat vs. Monkey.
- Nathan and I biked to the Arboretum yesterday, which is the longest ride I've done in a while. I love the Moots (her name is Virginia), but I am intensely grateful for Advil.
- Humming Eye of the Hurricane drives up my cadence.
- Started swimming again. I am so slow in the water right now that there is no speed penalty for practicing bilateral breathing.
- Mike the massage therapist worked on my abs for the first time in a couple of months. Owwwww. I am sitting up much straighter, though.
- I should start running, but I can't say that I've ever loved running. I very much want to train with Team Transplant starting in August, though, and I would like to have a decent fitness base starting out.
This is a silly story about Nathan.
I made dinner tonight, which was fish in parchment and a noodle salad thing inspired by the spicy pesto soba recipe in Asian Noodles. The recipe calls for making the pesto, tossing it with the noodles, then either serving the dressing on the side on sprinkling it on the noodles and tossing the whole thing. I never serve the dressing on the side because I think it's messy, hence the following conversation:
Me: Dinner's ready! There's fish, and noodles, and dressing for the noodles. The dressing is really dressing and pesto together. I don't get the point of making the dressing and the pesto separately if you're just going to blend it all together anyway, so I mixed it all together in the food processor.
Nathan: (starts laughing)
Me: What?
Nathan: Why didn't you put the fish in the food processor too?
Me: Because the dressing isn't for the fish, it's for the noodles.
Nathan: (laughs harder)
Me: Cats, would any of you like a fish dinner?
Maybe you had to be there.
(*) The only other time my boss's personal life came up in conversation, I said something incredibly tactful like, "Why on earth do you keep dating women with negative-to-you trait X? Can't you see them a mile away?" Decades of providing acerbic commentary on other people's not-you-eithers: 1, withneedle behaving like a grownup: 0. He was perfectly nice about it, but I felt like an idiot.
ETA: Nathan claims that I left out the funniest and most characteristic part, which is
Me: Why are you laughing? This is a very efficient way of making the dressing.
This reminds me of one of Rita Mae Brown's characters arguing with someone who tells her that she is bossy. Her response is something like, "I am not bossy, I'm more efficient than other people, so they should do things my way."
Exhibit B: A couple of days ago, I was eating lunch with two coworkers when one of them mentioned that at a previous job, they'd occasionally had Scotch tastings on Fridays. I say something about having a small collection of single malts that I hadn't visited in a while and how maybe I should bring them in to work and donate them to the greater good. Coworker #2 stares at me in disbelief. "What?" Coworker #2 shakes his head slowly and says that he'd really like to see me get through Pioneer Square with a collection of single malts. Coworker #1 says that he doesn't think anyone would get stopped for anything short of Everclear. I just stare, because I'm not sure who he thinks is going to stop me. I suppose the homeless people might, if I were stupid enough to carry loose bottles openly. I was sort of amazed that the man who keeps a clipboard around in case he needs to get in someplace where he's not supposed to be (because no one ever stops the purposeful-looking guy with the clipboard) didn't get that nondescript, respectably-dressed women in their late thirties tend not to draw the eyes of people in authority. Unless they think we need protecting, that is. I mean, if I couldn't find an inconspicuous way to carry the Scotch, I'd go the other direction and stick it in a liquor store box with a big froofy bow and a bunch of "Happy Birthday!!!" balloons on it; if I looked frazzled and helpless enough, I'd probably get help carrying the box from my car to the office door.
I spent a lot of time weeding the boulevard strip. There are plenty more weeds to go, but at least I've cleared enough space for the non-weeds to make their presence felt. The calendula I planted as a cover crop is coming back, so that will help.
We made competing brownie recipes this weekend for no particular reason except that we had good chocolate that needed to be used. My recipe is Pierre Hermé's, and it turns out to contain twice the amount of eggs and butter that Nathan's does. For the first time in ages, I followed the recipe and made them with the full amount of sugar. In retrospect, this was a mistake; I've been much happier with the results when I cut back on the sugar, but I like very dense, fudgy brownies that aren't too sweet.
I seem to be rereading a lot these days. It's probably a comfort thing. Solitaire was my bus reading last week, when I wasn't reading about visible ops or trying not to sing along with Matt Nathanson on my ipod. This weekend's book was Sunshine, which is comforting in the opposite direction from Solitaire. None of McKinley's heroines quite know how they do what they do, they just do it, through sheer will and stubbornness and love. For me, Solitaire is very much a book about learning and integrating, which is very different.
Couldn't have happened to a more appropriate person.
- Music:Dar Williams, "As Cool As I Am"
Because, thanks to This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn, I've resurrected my fascination with the Heian period in general and Sei Shonagon in particular, here's a list:
- The Aerilistas totally rock. I saw their halftime show at roller derby last Saturday and was inspired to research aerial classes.
-
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
jane_dark took me to see Simon Armitage read on Monday. I was not fond of the poem with the long refrain about Venus and Mars, which seems to be the thing of his that gets quoted a lot, but everything else I liked every much indeed. - Nathan overheard a woman criticizing the garden in our parking strip. I agree it needs work, but she couldn't tell the difference between vegetables and weeds. I am considering the addition of pink plastic flamingoes and petunias planted in tires.
- Lately I've been obsessed with visible ops, but I'm planning to put my thinking aloud about that someplace other than here. Who knows if it will ever happen.
- Because I am feeling like I don't do enough, I seem to be especially sensitive to people who are convinced that everything they do is perfect. I am ready to be off this particular karmic seesaw.
- a visit to the Seattle Edible Books Festival with Nathan and jane_dark
- spicy broccoli at Thai Tom
- meeting someone else who can quote most of Bull Durham from memory, and the look of horror on the face of the person sitting between us.
- a copy of Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, which jane_dark was kind enough to bring back from the U.K. for me
adjustments:
- In the post-layoff reorg, I have officially become an ops guy. Person. Being. Whatever. I'm looking forward to the chance to learn everything I can, but I feel sorry for my poor boss, who lost two experienced sysadmins and got me instead. Because he takes management and leadership very, very seriously, he is acting a bit like a mama duck whose own ducklings have been replaced with a single duckling looking for someone on whom to imprint.
- Trying to find a gender-neutral yet casual way to describe my current group. The standard locution at my workplace for a group of people who do technical work is "guys," as in "the client guys" or "the system guys." There are people at my job who are unhappy referring to groups that contain women as "the X guys," but they haven't quite consciously thought about it enough to come to a sensible phrasing, leading to abominations like "the X guys and FemalePerson1, ..., FemalePersonN." This wasn't a problem when I was a team of one, because I was always "and WithNeedle." I can see, though, that people are stretching a bit to find a term that encompasses my boss and me. It's not just gender; we do very different things, and the work that I do is very different from what his group used to do. My personal solution is "beings" as in "Someday, when we finally get around to hiring a build being, we can make them fix it," or "Have you asked the data beings if this fits into their schedule?" or "If you're asking my opinion as an ops being, I think it's a very, very bad idea."
- After a decade and a bit as a software person, it's very strange not to be one. It's a huge relief in most ways.
There were layoffs at my workplace on Friday. I am still gainfully employed (for now. I think everyone who has a job is touching wood and not tempting fate these days). We lost a lot of good people, including two of the ops guys I worked with regularly. I had a couple of good leads for them, so I'm hoping something works out for them soon. Miss Farlow is also gone, along with hir long-lost twin whom I don't think I've mentioned here.
Because I'm thinking along the lines of building the network before I need it, I've started a facebook account under my proper name. If you know my real-life identity, feel free to friend me there. I need to update my resume and my other professional profiles as well, which is a bit difficult since the job I do is irregular enough not to have a standard title.
Aside from a trip to the Tacoma Art Museum to see the David Macaulay exhibit, I've spent the weekend sleeping and mooching around. I loved the Macaulay exhibit. His books about Rome--the one with the little girl in her dirigible and the one with the craftsman and his pigeon--are beautiful. We had breakfast beforehand at the Southern Kitchen. I now understand why people love biscuits and gravy; a bad sausage gravy is library paste with extra fat and sage, but a good one is a perfect balance between the flavor of the sausage and the richness of the cream gravy. Nathan had hot links that were good enough to convince me that I need to find a good local source.
I did manage to vacuum the house and clean the cat boxes, so I wasn't completely useless. Just almost.
Rupert and k.d. believe that it is cold, so they have snuggled into an armchair together. I'll be interested to see if this ends quietly. Usually, their naps together end acrimoniously with Rupert scruffing his sister for reasons best known to himself.
I started reading Little Dorrit on Friday because my theory that I would enjoy The Pickwick Papers as lunchtime reading was wrong. Little Dorrit doesn't quite meet my lunchtime reading standard, in that it was interesting enough that I wanted to keep reading it after lunch was done, but at least it didn't require frequent references to the notes to get the jokes (which, in any case, I didn't find funny). It's a shame, because I wanted to like Pickwick. I suspect that for me, getting through Pickwick is likely to be a question of attaining momentum.
I have a dream. It's not a big dream, it's just a little dream. My dream - and I hope you don't find this too crazy - is that I would like the people of this community to feel that if, God forbid, there were a fire, calling the fire department would actually be a wise thing to do. You can't have people, if their houses are burning down, saying, "Whatever you do, don't call the fire department!" That would be bad.
Gah.
I've only ever encountered one other person who could, by asking for something, provoke people into doing exactly the opposite. It's pretty impressive.
"What are ten lines from poems that stick in your head when you are walking around your day? Or, if you stop a minute and think of some lines of poetry, what comes up? It’s fine if you distort the line as you remember it, if you misremember it."
- "Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
- "Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing."
- "Annihilating all that's made / To a green thought in a green shade."
- "This is my theme for English B."
- "Word-roots blossom in speechless messages."
- "I saw Eternity the other night"
- "All I could see from where I stood / was three long mountains and a wood"
- "There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air."
- "And I am Marie of Roumania."
- "If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you, / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you / But make allowance for their doubting too"
Today went toward food and knitting. We walked down to the farmers' market this morning. I bought vegetables to go into a chicken stew that is more or less osso buco with chicken instead of veal, potatoes for another round of crash hot potatoes, and a couple of odds and ends like tea. After we got home, I gave into a craving for a Noro striped scarf and went to the Fiber Gallery for supplies. This is the first project I've worked on in forever that does not involve little tiny yarn and needles and complicated lace motifs; it was such a relief that I cast on the minute I got home. Not that I've given up on lace knitting, but I was in a rut and longing for a change.
Speaking of knitting, anyone up for the Elsebeth Lavold exhibit this weekend? The Nordic Knitting Conference is going on, so there will also be fiber shopping and opportunities to hang out with knitters.
Profile
- withneedle
- withneedle
Syndicate
