I haven’t been feeling very write-y lately.  I’d like to say that it’s because there hasn’t been much to say, but it’s mostly just me not feeling like saying it.  I think my attention span is more suited to Twitter than it is to blogging these days, and I can’t be bothered to Twitter. I think it’s probably more fun if you have a mobile device anyway.

Heh heh… I said “mobile device.”

It also doesn’t help that if I sit down for more than thirty seconds at my computer, I have a small and insistent peanut gallery pulling on my pant leg and saying “go go go!!” (BTW, Cherry says hi.)

We’re watching Sesame Street these days. So far it’s the only tv I let her watch… well, that and The Daily Show.  She’s very into Elmo and the Count. Cherry has a Tickle Me Elmo that my mother bought her who gets a lot of action. Elmo has to be hidden away at night because Lemony the Labrador is also enamored of him and will pick him up like he’s a puppy and carry him around in her mouth, which sets off his giggler and makes him talk. Being woken up at three in the morning by a high pitched voice from the living room going “Oooh… that tickles!” is disorienting to say the least, plus it gave me college flashbacks. I also had to open up Elmo’s back and reposition his giggle box so that he would giggle when you tickled his belly. For a while there he would start laughing and shaking and yelling “oh boy!” when you poked him in the ass, which was just creepy, and also gave me college flashbacks.

I prefer the Count.  Whatever his moral perversions are, he keeps them to himself.

Cherry is starting to talk a lot more. She calls Elmo “Momo” and she calls the Count “Ah.”  That one took me a little while to figure out. She’d point at him and say “Ah!” and I’d say “that’s the Count” and she’d point at him again and say “Ah!” and I’d say “that’s the Count” (and did I mention we have a LOT of repetition around here these days? a LOT of repetition around here these days?) and then she pointed at him again and said “AH AH AH!”

Get it?

I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes.

On an unrelated Sesame Street note, there are a ton of new characters since I was a kid. I guess some of the old ones died… what’s the life span of a Muppet anyway? It’s been thirty years, and frankly I’m amazed that the Cookie Monster isn’t diabetic by now. Anyway, there’s this monster named Murray who goes around with a Spanish sheep named Ovejita and she teaches him Spanish words. It’s called “Murray Has A Little Lamb” (ba dum bum!). I looked up “ovejita” on the interweb to see if it meant something in Spanish… I figured if it meant anything, it was probably “sheep.”

Or not.

It did not help that after I read that, we saw a sketch with Elmo and a bunch of horses singing “Jingle Bells” only instead of the real words they were singing “horse-horse-horse! horse-horse-horse! horse-horse-horse-horse-hoooooorse!” but all I could hear was “whores-whores-whores! whores-whores-whores!“

I am starting to think maybe we should just stick to The Daily Show.

After successfully managing for resist its yarny seduction for years (No! More! Half! Finished! Projects!), I am afraid I’ve finally given in and started to knit. I’ve been flirting with it for years - when I was in high school, I had a study hall job in the front office and one of the secretaries coached me through a scarf that suffered from a great number of dropped stitches and also from being a truly unfortunate shade of flourescent periwinkle. Also, it was nine feet long.

To give you an idea of how long ago that was, my job regularly involved a ditto machine. (Speaking of periwinkle - remember that ink? That smell of a freshly printed test? No? I bet you never rode around eating Pixie Sticks in the back of a Chevy Nova that had an 8-track player either, did you? Without seat belts? Good times.)

Anyway, every now and then I’d pick up some needles and try again, but it never really stuck (Stunk, yes… my practice “squares” looked like New Jersey. Stuck, not so much.). But since the baby has gotten mobile, I’ve found myself needing a craft project that was easy to pick up and put down, didn’t require much concentration, and more importantly, did not involve a lot of small parts that she could pick up and either eat or wander off with. And knitting fit the bill. So I started making some dishrags. You can’t get much easier than dishrags, and when you have a one year old you can never really have too many cleaning cloths, right? So I churned out a few of those.

By the time I was making cable knit dishrags, it was suggested that I should maybe branch out a little bit before I ended up making cashmere washcloths for everyone for Christmas. My friend Jessica directed me to a pattern for this:

Apple hat!  Modeled by our own Carmen Miranda.

In case you’re interested, this is the pattern I used, and it’s super easy. The brim rolls itself so you don’t have to do anything fancy in the way of edging, and it’s all done in knit stitch. The original hat has two leaves, but I only made one. It’s supposed to be for a one year old, but my since my particular one year old has a big ol’ head, I’m going to make her a bigger one for next winter. Luckily I have no shortage of friends that are Great With Child right now, so this one will get begifted unto one of them.

I might try making a peach, too. That would be more geographically appropriate. And I bet you could sew little black beads on it, add some more leaves and make it into a strawberry. Or do it in orange yarn with a little curly thing and make it into a pumpkin. You know, just in case you find yourself in need of an entire crisper drawer full of fruit hats.

Things are pretty much back to normal around here. We’ve still got loads of snow on the ground (SO. WEIRD.) that is becoming less attractive by the day, and our power is even more erratic than usual. Which is really saying something. See previous entry, re: the electric company and funnel cake. But at least we can get out of our driveway and we didn’t run out of toilet paper, so I consider the whole thing to be a smashing success.

Last night around 9:30 there was a big ol’ “kaboom!” and the lights went out again. I thought at first that a transformer had blown up, (which if you have never seen it is a very exciting thing to see and you might want to have some clean pants on hand if you’re planning to stand close to it)  but it came back on ten minutes later. So as far as I can tell, the big ol’ “kaboom!” was just a sound effect to make sure the baby didn’t sleep through the power outage. Sneaky Pete was at one end of the house, I was at the other, Cherry was howling in the middle, the dogs were running around crashing into things because they were terrified, either of the“kaboom!” or of the dark, or our latest 401K earnings summary. Who can tell?

Anyway, it went something like:

“KABOOM!”

(I told you it was big.)

*pause*

*blackness*

“SHIT!” (I didn’t save.)

“WAAAAAAAAAAH!!!”

And then a lot of…

bump

bump

“OW!”

bump

“&%$#!!”

bump

“WAAAAAAAAAAH!!!”

bump

bump

“OW!”

bump

“&%$#,  @!%$&-ing,  $&#@-smoker !!!  OW!”

bump

“WAAAH!”

bump

bump

“Can you get to the baby?”

bump

“Woof-woof-whine”

“OW!”

bump

“WAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

“Stay still, I’m getting a flashlight!”

bump

bump

& etc.

We did eventually get everyone sorted out and the baby calmed down and back to sleep, and I’m sure the dogs will be totally fine after some therapy. And I have a new appreciation for our street lights, cause dude, when everything goes out? It is BLACK. Like, you can’t see your own hand in front of your face black. Licorice jellybeans in a jar of india ink black. It was as black as…

Well anyway, it was very dark indeed.

Holy cow, you guys would not believe how much snow we got yesterday!!  For real. I mean, we got genuine, honest-to-god, no-shit SNOW, which I have not seen since I moved to Georgia ten years ago. Actually, I think it was more like twelve years ago. Anyway, it was a long time ago, back when I was young and cute and I could remember things, and anyway my point is that I did not get to go see “Twilight” at the two dollar movie theater yesterday afternoon because it started snowing. No fluffy headed vampires for me, apparently.

So, just to give you a frame of reference, usually when the weather forecast calls for snow around here, this is what we usually end up with:

Georgia blizzard.  Very scary!  Quick, go buy three gallons of milk!

Yesterday, it looked like this:

That is a bona fide snowstorm. Not a blizzard or anything, but definitely a respectably proper fall of snow worth buying a loaf or two of bread for. By the time it stopped we had about five inches of snow, covered by a crunchy topping of ice from around about 7:00 last night when it turned into sleet for a few minutes. Or maybe it was wintry mix, I always get those two mixed up.

But long before that, we went out for a little while to investigate and break in Cherry’s snow suit…

Unfortunately, we have quite a number of pine trees in our neighborhood, and they are not used to this kind of weather and it does bad things to them. So around about mid-afternoon, we started hearing a lot of…

“CREAK!”

“CRACK!”

“BUMPETY BUMPETY BUMP!”

“THUD!”

… and branches started coming down, in some cases bringing the trees they were growing on with them.

Beware of Trees.

We were out in the middle of the backyard and we saw one twenty-something foot long branch fall on one side of us, and not thirty seconds later another twenty-something foot long branch came down on the other side of us, so we decided to enjoy the rest of the snowstorm from a slightly safer location.

That picture is a little dark because our power was out for most of the day, which was not really a big surprise. If you fart too enthusiastically in this town, the power goes out. Seriously, it does not take much. I think our power lines are made of funnel cake.

It flickered on once or twice… the first time it came back, it was on for about fifteen minutes. I put on a pot of coffee, heated up some soup, and grilled half a cheese before it went out again. About three hours later it came back on again, and we heated up some curry for dinner, scrounged up flashlights and blankets and lit loads of candles. That time it was on for about ten minutes, and when it went out, it stayed out, and that was that. We spent the rest of the evening sitting around the fire and looking out the windows and saying “Wow, I can’t believe how much snow we’re getting,” and various other equally brilliant things, and trying to decide which of the dogs we’d eat first if it came down to it.

It was a nice day to be inside, although we did see several people out braving the elements. I saw three joggers running through the ice and slush and downed tree limbs and power lines. Now, I admit to having a somewhat cavalier attitude about exercise, but I would think running into a live wire lying in a puddle and zapping yourself into the middle of next Tuesday would somewhat negate the health benefits of running. But what do I know?

Napoleon Dynamite & Friend Go Sledding.

Once you got used to the creaking and crashing from the trees and branches falling down, it was kind of relaxing watching the snow fall. We had a (sort of) fire going in the fireplace… we weren’t planning to need a fire, so most of our firewood was damp… and the house stayed pretty warm. All we needed was a Snuggie.

We were very lucky. I think we’ve maybe got twenty five or thirty branches down in our yard that will need to be chain sawed and dragged up to the leaf and limb pile. And we lost two trees. One was a dogwood, and one was a big old pine tree out in the back of the yard that snapped right in half and fell on our shed. But some of our neighbors had three or four trees come down, and our friends a few houses down from us had to run out of the house in the middle of the storm and go stay with their neighbors when a tree fell on their house. They’re at the Holiday Inn tonight with their two dogs, and they still don’t have power. And any time you have a pine tree in your living room and you’re not expecting Santa, that’s a bad thing.

Our whole neighborhood kinda looks like a Bruce Willis movie.

We decided to leave off the chain sawing until the snow melted, because dude, we hardly ever get snow like this and it’s not like the tree was going to get up and walk away if we left it alone for a day. (I know. I asked it.) Also, our chain saw is broken from the last time half a tree fell in our yard. This house is rough on chain saws.
Since school was closed today, Sneaky Pete had the day off, so we took Cherry outside to introduce her to all the proper snow day activities.  We made snow angels and threw snowballs and pointed out yellow snow and made icky faces at it. Also, we attempted to go sledding on several things which were Not Sleds.

Laundry basket

Grade: A+

On Top of Pop Riding A Garbage Bag

Grade: B-
(Would have been a B, except that this picture was taken from the TOP of the hill. She’s facing forward, he’s going down headfirst and backwards, and he knocked a brick loose from the retaining wall at the bottom of the hill with his behind. Oopsie.)

And of course you can’t have a proper snow day without one of these:

That weird little curly thing on the ground in front of him is his nose that fell off.

No really, it is.

That is a totally G-rated snowman who was a victim of circumstance.

Then we came inside and had hot chocolate with cinnamon, cause you can’t have a real snow day without hot chocolate.  By the way, did you know that you can make hot chocolate without using the little silver packets that say “HOT CHOCOLATE” on them? I did not. I didn’t grow up with one of those mothers who makes hot chocolate out of ingredients. My mom made hot chocolate out of the Swiss Miss box. My husband taught me how to make hot chocolate a few months ago, so I was all excited about making Cherry her first post-sledding cup of hot sort-of-warmish chocolate. She took one sip and wanted nothing more to do with it, but at least I tried.

Do y’all know what this child of mine did the other day?

I was making dinner. Nothing exciting, I can’t even remember what it was… probably something about some chicken… and Cherry was wandering around the kitchen like she does, chitchatting with herself and the linoleum and the cats about whatever goes on in the mind of a one-year-old (Did you know she had a birthday? I meant to tell you about it, but we all got rotavirus last week, which is a Terrible Thing, although I did lose ten pounds so it wasn’t all bad.) and all of a sudden I noticed that the chitchatting had stopped and she was being very, very quiet.

I am starting to figure out that quiet is very rarely a Good Thing.

So I stuck my head into the living room to check on her and there she was, sitting under the end table happy as you please, surrounded by lemon-stuffed green olives and broken glass, soaked in brine and stuffing her cheeks full of olives as fast as she could cram them into her mouth.

After I finished having a heart attack and checking her over for signs of massive blood loss, I picked up the pieces of glass to make sure I could find them all without the help of an x-ray machine. Y’all, that jar looked like somebody had taken a glass cutter to it. It had one single circular break that went all the way around and neatly separated the bottom from the rest of the jar. There was not one solitary sliver of missing glass… the two pieces fitted right back together as snug as anything. I can only conclude that the child shoots glass-cutting laser beams out of her eyeballs, because I was about ten feet away from her the whole time and I am pretty sure I would have noticed the sound of glass breaking.

Then again, I only had the baby gate down for about a minute, and I didn’t notice her going in there and snagging a jar of olives and running off with them, so perhaps my powers of observation are not as sharp as they used to be.  My wits have been dulled by lack of sleep. We keep a baby gate up in the pantry doorway because she has a fascination with canned goods and it is damned inconvenient to have to grope around under the couch for your diced tomatoes. So that means in the minute or so that I had the baby gate down and was getting out ingredients, she snuck in, grabbed the olives, and hustled out of the kitchen before I saw her. Which is pretty impressive for somebody who took her first step about seven weeks ago.

Anyway, I was just incredibly glad and grateful that there weren’t any missing pieces of glass. The only thing that was missing was about half of the olives, which showed up the next morning in ways upon which I shall not elaborate except to say that lemon-stuffed green olives have a lot more fiber than you think they do. Also, pew.

Now, if you’d asked me, I would not have thought that lemon-stuffed green olives would be something that one-year-olds would particularly like. Goes to show you how much I know.  I think this is what happens when you spend a lot of sleepless nights watching the Food Network while you’re pregnant. You end up with a little bitty Anthony Bourdain. I’ll tell you one thing, we are totally getting rid of those soft-soled leather baby shoes. That kid is going to be wearing tap dancing shoes until she gets to high school.

Still life with anchovies.

In honor of today’s inaugural festivities, here is a nifty little thingamabob from Paste magazine that will let you turn yourself (or the hapless infant of your choice) into your very own Shepard Fairey poster. I’ve been a fan of his work since college but never knew it… we used to have Andre the Giant stickers all over my neighborhood in Philly, but I only found out who he was when he did the Obama posters.

Anyway, this is mine:

I think I’m going to hang it over the changing table in Cherry’s room.

I tried to take a nice “before” picture of the chair.

Nothing fancy. Just a plain old boring picture of a chair.

All by itself.

Alone.

Without anything distracting.

Or destructive.

Or, not to put too fine a point on it… furry.

But you can’t take out a camera around this place without attracting a lot of attention, and even when I thought I had the shot I wanted….
… I didn’t.

Luckily for the after photo, there’s one thing the Chairman dislikes more than she likes getting into mischief, and that’s the baby. At the age of almost-but-not-quite-one, the child has begun to exceed the speed of light.

(186,000 miles per second. Give or take.)

I did eventually get a perfectly nice photograph. And I thought it turned out pretty well, all things considered.

And the cushion is much less funny and lumpy now than it was the first time.

Just don’t turn it over.

Let’s just get this out in the open: I am not a sewer.

(By which I mean that I am not so good at the sewing, not that I am not a waste pipe that carries away sewage and surface water.)

I can sew a little. A teeny bit. I have a sewing machine… a very plain old Kenmore something-or-other that my grandmother (who is even less of a sewer than I am) bought me twenty years ago… and I can sew a straight line. I can hem pants. I can make curtains.  I got all feisty once and made a quilt.  But mostly, I make funny, lumpy things. I don’t set out to make funny, lumpy things, that’s just how they turn out. I think I get overexcited and I don’t read the directions all the way through. Or maybe I skip steps or use the wrong edge of the fabric. Whatever it is, I tend to run high on excitement and low on quality finished projects. But still I have high hopes. Ya gotta believe, right? I get all overconfident and think that I can sew myself up a masterpiece, and hilarity usually ensues.

That’s how I decided to make a cushion for Cherry’s chair. My aunt Pam found an awesome little kid-sized wicker chair for Cherry at a yard sale. It’s really cute, it just needed a little TLC. And y’all, when it comes to cute little furniture, my initials are TLC. It looked just like the sort of chair that you would sit in to read a Stephanie Plum novel on the porch of a bed and breakfast in Charleston while you are drinking an afternoon brandy. (Trust me. I have done extensive research on this topic.)  So I cleaned it all up and painted it and now it looks like something out of Southern Midget Living. I’ll post some before and after pictures tomorrow… right now it is in her bedroom and she is asleep and I may be dumb enough to try to sew a cushion but I am not dumb enough to try to sneak into a sleeping baby’s bedroom to take a picture of a chair.

Anyway. So I painted it, and then I decided that what it really needed was a cushion.

Now, I have never sewn a cushion before. After this, I am not sure I will ever sew a cushion again. But it’s done now and I only had to rip out all the seams and sew it back together one time because it was funny and lumpy. Now it is actually halfway kinda flat if you don’t look too closely at it, and I even got all the bunnies facing the right direction. Personal triumph, yo.

But that is not what I wanted to tell you about. What I wanted to tell you about is how I decided that I was going to do it up right, so I went to the fabric store and got myself one of those fabric markers. I’ve always just used Sharpie or pencils or something before, but I thought maybe that was contributing to the humor and lumpiness of my sewn creations. So I went and bought an official Fabric Marking Pen™. I made a template of the seat and cut out the cushion foam so that it fit just right. And then I traced it with some tracing paper and made a pattern. And then I laid out the tracing paper onto my nice bunny fabric and I traced out all the pieces and then I went to bed because all that creativity had worn me right out.

The next night when I went back to it, I couldn’t find my pattern markings.  I thought maybe I was looking at the wrong end of the fabric, so I looked at the other end. Nothing there. So I flipped it over, thinking maybe I had been more tired than I’d realized and had marked up the printed side of the material.

It was totally not there. That bunny fabric was as clean as a whistle.

Y’all, I seriously thought I had maybe just finally gone ahead and lost my mind. I’ve been threatening to do it for years, and maybe Tuesday night was my time to go. I mean, I was sure I had drawn out all the pieces.. I used a purple pen, for pete’s sake… but there was not a trace of them.

So I went back and got the paper pattern and the pen to do it over, and that’s when I actually looked at the pen.

One of my best friends told me once that the words to the Entertainment Tonight theme song go like this:

“Entertainment tonight… do do do doo dooooo… Entertainment tonight… do do do doo doooOOooo…”

I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I will say that it does get stuck in your head something awful. She told me about it seventeen years ago, and to this day if I so much as see Mary Hart in a magazine, I am all “Entertainment Tonight… do do do do DOOOOO…” for at least the next forty eight hours unless I hear something worse in the meantime.

I’m looking at you, “Girl From Ipanema.”
* * *

I spent most of last week ignoring my blog, most of my email and if anything good happened on the internet I missed it because I had my nose stuck in InDesign. (I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s me.) I had a super enormous overdue project. (Love those!) And I got to have exciting conversations like this:

Me: Okay, so what are those those circles in front of the door on the floorplan?
Client: Bollards.
Me? Bollards?
Client: Bollards.
Me: That’s not a real thing.
Client: Is too. They’re those things that keep crazy people from driving their cars through the front doors of the store.
Me: They’re called bollards? Really?
Client: Yep.
Me: Huh. Who knew?
Client: And they have the logo on them. They’re branded bollards.
Me: Now you’re just messing with me.

Sometimes I think maybe I should have been a dental hygienist.

* * *

Also, today is the first day of the “Love Transforms” market over at Poppytalk Handmade, and I am very excited that hoote+annie is one of their featured artists this month!  Go take a look at it if you get a chance, there are some positively lovely things for sale. I mean everybody else’s, not mine. Not that my stuff isn’t positively lovely, too, I mean, it’s very nice, too, but that’s not what I was talking about.

Gah! Just go have a look, you’ll like it. Really.

Our new year has started off with a bang. Well, two bangs… the first being the bang of Sneaky Pete falling through the attic ladder when the step he was standing on split right out from under him and sent him crashing down through several more steps until he was up to his armpits in broken ladder. And the second being the bang of Cherry discovering that if you lean really really far forward in your high chair the whole thing will tip over and send you face-first into the linoleum. Since bad things always happen in threes, if you need me I will be hiding under the bed until February.

We just got back from Philadelphia, which is a lovely place to visit in December, especially if you like your weather damp and cold with a side order of windy.

No kidding, it was Cold. The first day of our trip we woke up to a balmy eleven degrees, and there was so much wind that it was hard to stand up straight. It hurt your lungs to breathe. Our car thought it had four flat tires because the air compressed and the tires got squishy, which prompted a long discussion about why we hadn’t gone to visit my mother in Florida like sensible people.

The rest of the trip was warmer, but still damp. I wasn’t sure how much Cherry would get out of Christmas at this age, but she had a blast. She loved opening presents, since ripping paper is one of the major joys in her life. She got a lot of board books, which seem to be her favorite thing right now. For a while she was mostly into them as hors d’oeurves, but now that she’s figured out how to open them, she’s discovered that they are more than just a good source of dietary fiber. Also, there were “Brightlings,” which as near as I can tell are the modern equivalent of a Weeble, and those proved to be extremely popular as well.

Sneaky Pete and his mom went hiking on Mount Misery in Valley Forge Park on Christmas afternoon, and I stayed at home (where it was not damp and cold or called anything with the word “misery” in it) and had a nice cup of tea and read a book about Eleanor Roosevelt. You can’t say we don’t know how to party.

And we had the creche that Sneaky Pete and his brother set up when they were kids:

It is not quite historically accurate, and was a little more influenced by King Kong than by King James. I couldn’t remember what that lumpy thing behind the baby Jesus was… I thought it was maybe a gold chili pepper, but Sneaky Pete says it is one of the Three Water Buffaloes from the East. (The other two are off to the left, next to the shepherd and the kangaroo.) I thought it was a very nice creche, but it does suffer from a sad lack of Elvis.

Anyway, whatever holiday you just celebrated, I hope you enjoyed it, and that none of your Christmas presents contained socks or underwear, and that you’ve shooed all the hung over New Year’s guests out of your house.

Happy January!