Victory is Mine!

Lots of great news to report so let's just dive right in shall we? First off, I got a job this morning with the Wiscasset Newspaper as a part-time reporter writing about such fascinating things as town meetings, school news, and transposing the police blotter! Although the pay is an astounding 7.50 per hour. Which I THINK is minimum wage, I will need to drag my reporter ass onto the website of some sort of state agency, I am so happy to have this job. This is the job that you have to learn how to be a reporter and write interesting things so that you can move on to bigger and better things. Also, I can totally do most of it from home or in the evenings with little disturbance to my schedule of watching Maggie! Yahoo!

Moving on to next sweet thing, I totally won the first round of Yarn Smackdown! Woot! It really came right down to the wire, my opponent and I were both mailing our hats literally within minutes of each other, she in Tennessee and me in Maine. Surprisingly the Maine USPS was faster! Actually, I might have won because our dinky little PO closes at noon on Saturdays so afternoon deliveries have to wait until Monday. As you can see, I sent her a pretty sweet hat! Actually you probably can't tell the sweetness just from the pic. but it has 6 inches of k2 p2 ribbing, which believe me is a pain to do simply because it's boring and 6 inches is a lot longer than you think. Er, that sounds kind of dirty. It also has cables and a sweet pattern on the top achieved by decreasing a certain way. I wish I had taken a better picture of it now. Oh well. Cest La Vie. So now I just wait to see who the other winners are, and the pattern will be released for round 2. Just so you know, I got the pattern for this hat at 5pm on Weds. and it was in the mail at 4pm on Thursday. That is ridiculously fast knitting.

I watched two movies this past week, and was surprised by both. I saw Notes on a Scandal which was totally creepy, and not in a good scary way but in a Judy Dench trying to seduce Cate Blanchette sort of way, to which I respond to by gagging and giving it a big old poop sandwich. From other reviews I thought I would really like this movie but no, no I did not. The second movie I watched was Match Point, a Woody Allen film starring Scarlett Johansen and a bunch of British people. This movie was fantastic, not Woody Allenish at all. You know how some Woody Allen movies are so obviously his that it just seems like all the parts are played by Woody Allen wearing costumes that look like other people? This was not like that at all and I give it a Woot!

I finished Dark Tort, a really light murder mystery by Diane Mott Davidson, which is part of a series of books which outline the adventures of a mystery solving caterer. They are about as heavy as Nancy Drew, so it was a nice touch after Kavalier and Clay. I also listened to an audio book by Stephen King, "The Man in the Black Suit" was pretty light for SK, a collection of kind of old timey stories. I just started another collection by him "Blood and Smoke" which is not light and quite gory. SK the man himself reads both of these collections and for some reason I find it to be a zillion times scarier. Probably because he reads it exactly the way he intended it to sound. I am "regular" as in not audio, reading Running With Scissors which is also really good and I can already tell will probably get a good review from me. Oh yeah, the ratings - Dark Tort gets a woot, and SK gets a Double Woot.

And last but not least, our bird feeder has been going crazy and I identified a bunch of new birds out here - Mourning Doves, Some sort of WoodPecker, I think a Cedar Waxwing and day before yesterday Mike and I saw 3 huge Turkey Vultures fly over so I'm counting them too. That's long enough for one post. Cya.

Yay! Finally!

Got some pictures for you finally! Without further adieu:

Knitting Project #2 Cable Brim Hat Knitting Project. #3 Slipper Socks, and Turkeys!














As you can see, it's all very exciting. The knitting projects are 2 and 3 because I forgot to take a picture of 1 and gave it away. Hopefully in the next few days I will have a better picture of the turkeys so that you can see better how huge and prehistoric they are.

Moving on. As you may know from some of my bloggings last year, I am very intrigued with the idea of Lent. Which is the tradition of giving something up for 40 dayss after Ash Wednesday. I like this idea of an annual giving up of something. Except instead of 40 days I like the idea of giving it up permanently.
So, yesterday I decided to give up my afternoon nap. I got a lot of stuff done while Mags was napping, and felt pretty good about it. But later on I got thinking about what I should REALLY give up. And that thing is....drum roll please....celebrity gossip. I have no idea how I became one of *those* people. I imagine it's how a cocaine addiction starts, hey this is harmless and kind of fun every once in awhile, and then it just snowballs to an every day thing. Is a celebrity gossip addiction as detrimental as a coke addiction? I dunno, but it was definately taking time from me doing healthier activities, and though it wouldn't kill me, I really feel that too much Britney will kill your soul. So today, I got rid of all my links on my home page and replaced them with good stuff. I deleted - get ready - E!, People, Perez Hilton AND TMZ from my homepage. Shit Kate, that's a lot of useless information you were packing into your skull each day. In their place I added, word of the day (English AND Spanish) Buddhist thought of the day, Salon, and pictures of the day from National Geographic and Nasa. All much better than reading about what the Hollywood skanks are up to now.

I had a lovely visit with some friends last night, and ate way too much good food. I also made baklava for the first time, and it was quite delicious if I do say so myself. Oh! and I love coincidences that actually seem very uncoincidental - oddly enough as I was reading the Baklava recipe I learned that it is a traditional dessert served at Lent with the different layers representing the 40 days, and I hadn't even planned that! So that was pretty cool.

Another development is that the other night when I was adding my bird list over here ---> I learned that next week there is an event taking place called the Great Back Yard Bird Count a joint project between Audubon and The Cornell School of Ornithology. I'm definately signing up. A cool way volunteer, and do some good without actually much effort on my part :) I encourage you to count your birds as well! Oh, also in bird news, I am striking the birds I saw at my moms house, and am only going to go by the ones at my own feeder. This will also encourage me to vary my seeds etc. As you can see, I already have identified quite a few!

Got to start a new knitting project today. I feel odd without something "on the needles" I'm out.

Superbad is well....superbad

Another movie down. I watched Superbad last night, and it was super boring. In fact while I was watching it I schemed up a new Kate rating system for movies. A movie can receive one of four ratings - A Double Woot! (like V for Vendetta) - A single Woot! (Knocked Up) - 1/2 a poop sandwich (Superbad) - or a whole poop sandwich (luckily have yet to see one yet for the list, but an example would be Lost In Translation.Don't e-mail me about this movie. It sucked. You're not going to change my mind.) Superbad receives 1/2 a poop sandwich because it sucked, yet I did not turn it off, fall asleep, OR end up pissed off for wasting my time watching it. Plus I would say it had about 15 minutes of actually funny material. I have a special place in my heart for the coming of age high school movie. Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Breakfast Club, Clueless, Mean Girls, and of course Dazed and Confused all are in my top favorite movies. These movies kind of get it right, they have a realness and are actually funny. This movie was just a bunch of kids swearing and saying very bad words. OOOOOO. They said Vagina like 90 times. I'm shocked! Look, I have a two year old that has said worse words than vagina. I myself descend from a family of pirates that - especially my dad - have made up some of the most fantastic swearwords of all times. I'm trying to keep this blog "clean" but if you e-mail me I will treat you to my favorites. Anyhow, this movie was trying too hard to be funny and gross. OOO Teens drinking and having sex - wow controversial! In an effort to counteract this negative review (I'm trying to be more positive) I highly recommend The Point. It gets a Double Woot! of the highest order. Yeah, it's a kids movie, but probably one of the best ones ever made. You all need to watch it. First off, it's narrated by Ringo. Secondly, you will probably cry because it's about finding "The Point." anyway just take my word for it. SO to sum up - Superbad - 1/2 a poop sandwich. The Point = Double Woot!

I identified 2 more bird species - Cedar Waxwing and Grossbeak. I identified these at my parent's house. I have given up on the illusion that I will identify 30 different species at my feeder. I'm gonna make a list on this site with all my birdies. Can I just say that Grossbeaks are so cool - it's the closest thing Maine has to a parrot. They are either bright red or bright yellow and green, and they have those cute parrot beaks.

I tried a new thing yesterday but, I don't really want to say what it is because it's kind of embarrassing. No it doesn't involve sex. Anyway take my word for it.

I'm in the middle of a series of books, but they are really long so I think I'm going to take a break and read Trading Up by Candace Bushnell, because it's basically the mental equivalent of cotton candy.

Mittens are kind of at a standstill, mostly because I'm at that point where I'm too far along to rip it out and start over, but not super excited about the pattern, mostly because they are knit back and forth on two needles instead of in the round on dbl points. Now if you don't knit this is probably a lot of blah blahing to you, but you should know because in my opinion everyone should knit, the world would be a better place if we were all marching around sporting our own hand knit hats. There's a certain satisfaction in knowing that knitting is so simple - tying knots with sticks, and there are only two stitches in different combinations - knitting and purling - and either adding or subtracting either that make such cool patterns. Anyhow, I have been intimidated for a long time by knitting on double pointed needles, which is basically splitting your stitches between 3 or 4 needles and knitting in the round. It takes a while to get used to all the needles, I usually use circular needles which also makes things in the round, but you are limited to how small you can go. Long story long, it's much easier to knit mittens in the round on dbl pts. in one nice tube than it is to knit them flat and stitch them up. That's the other thing about knitting, you really are just knitting tubes all the time because really, our bodies are just a series of long skinny pieces that are covered up by tubes . Ok, after all this I think I might rip them out anyway....

And Finally, I have a bunch of new words I've learned - Thank you Scrabble! That I will be posting later. I'm out.