The worst is over

I've just finished the yoke and will be starting the neckband and button bands tonight. Oh the bliss of knitting from a single ball of yarn!

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Filed Under: Rambling Rose

Friday is for Felines

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Filed Under: Cats

Thursday is for Favorite Places

I like visiting cemeteries.

From top: Lafayette Cemetery, New Orleans | Old Burial Hill, Marblehead, Mass | Cemetery in Les Arcs, France

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Filed Under: Thursday is for Favorite Places

Wednesday is for Where I Live

I live in Boston. For almost the last 10 years I lived in various suburbs of, none of them more than 5 miles away, but this past summer we moved downtown and what a lifestyle change it's been! All for the better.

We donated our car sometime in November, just in time to avoid the pains of the season's first major snowstorm. It is not fun having a car in the city with only on-street parking available which is impossible to find as it is. Since I work from home mostly and Duck takes the subway to work, keeping it no longer made sense. Now we just use zipcar (a very cool urban service) when we need a vehicle.

The side effect to not having a car anymore, besides the reduction in bills from not having to pay for insurance or gas, is that we are totally jacked! Two or three times a week we walk to the grocery store with our backpacks, and are not afraid to fill them with a large cantaloupe, a gallon of milk, a bag of apples, a roast chicken and a couple of bottles of wine, give or take several other items, and haul all that stuff home. We're walking everywhere, patronizing local shops and with a mall and two major bookstores nearby, I've find that we're shopping online less and less. Which means no need for shipping.

We support our local stores, we get our exercise, we reduce our monthly bills, we reduce our carbon footprint.

It's a nice win-win-win-win.

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Filed Under: Life | Wednesday is for Where I Live

Chugging along...and a new game which I hope to follow through on

Miniscule progress on Rambling Rose. I lopped off all the yarn balls and am dealing with several yards of yarn at a time instead. Better. But still messy.

I tried on a sleeve and boy. it is tight. I really hope this turns out because if it doesn't I just might have to hurl myself off the roof. I just might.

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OK. So. In an effort to get myself back on this blogging horse I have devised a scheme in which every day (heh) I will post about a topic which will differ day-to-day but remain consistent week-to-week. ie I will post under the same topic every Tuesday. Topics are to be determined by myself and rules may change at anytime.

So for today, Tuesday, I bring you...My Favorite Things. Besides Knitting.

These are candles from Diptyque, a perfumerie based in Paris that also sells soaps and house sprays at - I will not lie - kind of exorbitant prices. Except I think it's worth it, and who doesn't deserve to splurge on themselves every now and then?

I love this place. Unlike walking into say, YankeeCandleCo. and having your little body pillaged with a freight train of a million headache-inducing scents, walking into Diptyque is a subtle, tranquil, zen experience. And if you're lucky the lady working there will actually be FRENCH who speaks perfect English with that wonderful French lilt, and if you're really lucky, she also distributes wine on the side, so when she's describing to you a scent, it doesn't simply smell "good" or even "fruity," but has a base note of "bananas" or reminds one of "ghosts in the closet." Hee hee!

My favorite one included Feu de Bois (Firewood). It was like Santa Fe on chilly nights, but I came away with wanting Paris a little bit more. Myrrh. It smells like a 600 year-old French cathedral, dusty, damp and cavernous. So while it's burning, you have to talk in hushed tones.

Cathedral in Aix-en-Provence, France. Taken August 2007

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Filed Under: Rambling Rose | Tuesday is for Favorite Things

Tangled Up in Blue (Moon Fiber Arts)

I've stalled big time on my knitting because I've reached the yoke for the Rambling Rose cardigan and now it's much less knitting and much more wrangling. And crying.

The right front panel is joined with the right sleeve is joined to the back is joined to the left sleeve is joined to the left front panel. That's what, about one trillion some-odd stitches squished on a needle with 9 strands of yarn - kept wound in small balls - jangling and twisting like windchimes in a hurricane and it SUCKS. I suppose I could/should make the balls of yarn smaller but I feel it wouldn't make the process any more manageable. The whole yoking was a bad idea. Fine so you don't have to seam later, but seaming is a small, TINY price to pay for not having to knit back and forth - no yoking in the round, this is a cardigan! - and deal with the all that yarn getting all insane all over your lap. Nightmare.

Here is a shot of Veeb's humungous backside to make everyone feel better.

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Filed Under: Cats | Rambling Rose

But it matches my nose, he said

Bunny found a pink ribbon today.

He demanded that I tie it into a pretty little bow around his neck.

Then he made me take a million photos of him with the bow, even though I told him that the one I just took was good enough.

But he got angry so I could not but comply.

What a little diva.

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Filed Under: Cats

Carnivore

Well it's been quite the work month for me, quite stressful and pressureful. As a reward for conducting myself with all that grace under all that fire (except for that one night on Valentine's when we were out with friends drinking and I started crying when talking about work) (not my most shining-est moment), I bought a little present for me on Friday - a Le Creuset grill pan that is super petite (enough to grill two steaks or 4 small burgers or 4 links of sweet Italian sausages), super heavy, and super cherry red. It's a piece of cookware that's super not shitting around.

Then I went around the corner to our local butcher to buy some steaks. I love having a local butcher! They don't shit around either when it comes to their produce or their meats. I asked one day if they had any duck - I'd like to try roasting a duck sometime - and they told me to order it on Tuesday so that it could be slaughtered on Wednesday at a farm nearby to be delivered fresh to the store by Thursday. How cute! So cute that I wonder why I keep putting off ordering that duck! Huh!

Everything is seasonal, from local sustainable farms. I'll be honest and tell you right now that I don't know 100% what "sustainable" means, except that it can be very expensive, but since it's all the rage with all the liberals, sustainable must be something worthwhile, right?

So we bought a pound of hanger steak from a grass-fed cow and grilled it up on my new grill pan.

While our tastebuds rejoiced, our jaws were very tired by the end of the meal. We were left to wonder how FAR this particular cow had to travel away from the barn to get to its patch of grass. You normally don't think about it but cows tend to get rather muscular when allowed to roam so freely.

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Filed Under: Life