I do exist! Well, I do exist beyond the boundaries of Monster Cat episodes at least. I know, I know, I haven’t posted anything outside of Monster Cat in ages. Did you miss me? No, I didn’t think so. My cat is pretty darned cute, you don’t need me.
Jon was in town the end of this week and teaching a class in the city. We had dinner with him 3 nights in a row which was great fun even if it involved going into Philly so many times! Last night involved a great deal of silliness and beer as well. Merricke and Siobhan joined us Thursday night and last night which made for additional enjoyment and general spreading of the joy of beer.
My news is that I have remembered to knit. I did some scarves to remember how to follow simple instructions. I’ve been doing little hats for one of the baby charities to remember how to work with double-pointed needles. I am not a fan of metal DPNs but I happen to have a lot of them in very convenient sizes. I asked my mother for a recommendation of a book with lots of little projects in it that could keep me busy and make me try new techniques. There is now an over-stuffed flat rate box in the mail to me. I should have known this would happen, I guess, but I really did just ask expecting a book recommendation! I’m working my way up to bigger projects, I guess, but I really enjoy doing the quick little stuff. Instant gratification is pretty darned awesome.
In other news, I am still a slacker employee of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, otherwise known as unemployed. I have a lead or two but the market is more than a little dismal right now so I’m not stressing about the lack of opportunities. I look at a couple job sites, laugh that employers want people with 10 years of highly specialized and/or technical experience but only want to pay as if the person is fresh out of school, and move on.
I think my writing class this term is going pretty well. It’s a bit small – just 3 students – which is both good and bad. I’ve gone through a phase of “oh no, I can’t actually write anything good at all” and I’m coming out the other side now, which is, as you might imagine, a huge relief. I’m renegotiating my use of adjectives as well as learning a lot about the conscious structure and intermingling of stories and characters. The class is over in 3 weeks and I’m starting to look around for another writing class to take me into the summer. UARTS is great – 3 hour classes, great instructors, credit – but expensive.
I also started twittering recently… it’s rather random and disjointed, but you can now follow me on Twitter if you really want to. It’s more of an experiment… again. I tried Twitter ages ago when it first came out and was not interested enough in it to remember my login/password.
By the way… we saw “Knowing” today. It’s a horrible movie barely worthy of my words. There was some horrible acting, terrible dialogue, a completely pathetic plot and an un-compelling resolution… all crowned with bizarre religious overtones and other crap. There are a lot of forced and illogical jumps not to mention a failed attempt to imbue a sense of urgency by having the characters run around like chicken with their heads cut off. No spoilers here, but there are 2 major aspects of this movie that should have ensured I enjoyed it. Alas, I now add it to the list with The Spirit… the title of that list is “Movies I wish I’d skipped – 2009.”
knitting, knowing, movies, twitter, work, writing
Ever have one of those, “I never should have upgraded” moments? I’m beginning to feel that way about iPhoto ’09. I’ll trouble-shoot when I have more brain but currently I’m getting a lot of images that aren’t rendering when I click the “edit” button. This makes rather difficult to crop them. But here are the necklaces I created yesterday, complete with bad cropping. They’re mostly glass and/or amber with bits of copper or silver, jet and lapis lazuli here and there. I also need to figure out a better way to photograph them. 
