Blog Recommendation

Well, I didn't finish the socks in time to put them on the blog, but it wasn't for lack of trying. I'm about an inch from starting the toe of the second sock, which is pretty good progress, considering I had just turned the heel last week and I tend to be a slow knitter.

Since I don't have any finished objects or new projects to share, I'd like to recommend a blog that has lots of those things: The Yarn Harlot.

You probably already know of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee if you're into craft blogs, but just in case, there you go. I just finished reading the entire archives (I know that shows how little of a life I have) and it's great.

Finished socks next week (hopefully)!

Little Bee

This week, I'm going to talk about Chris Cleave's Little Bee. There are mild spoilers after the picture, so if that type of thing bothers you, be warned.

Photo from Goodreads.com

Munchy Monday

I'm going to start posting up the food portion of the blog on Mondays, since we tend to go out for Sunday dinner, and it's hard to blog before hitting the sack for Monday work afterwards.

Unfortunately, this week I don't really have anything to talk about. I went to my parents' house over the weekend, where we just had vegetable soup. Last night, I saved the post, thinking I would make something extra good, and I did, but I had company over and forgot to take a picture of the vegetarian shepherd's pie before we ate it all.

So, instead, I would like to share with you a YouTube channel I found, and point you specifically to this girl's "Nerdy Nummies" playlist: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjwmbv6NE4mOh8Z8VhPUx1Q.

These will be featuring in a future blog, hopefully soon:

Enjoy!

Fiber Friday: Saturday Edition

Lame excuse for not posting on my self-imposed deadline: I hosted a party last night, and between technical difficulties and frantic cleaning...

Anyway, I'm still slugging away on the wedding shawl (and will be for a while), but I also have a pair of socks for Logan on the needles. They're the Escalator Socks that seem to be pretty popular on Ravelry, and for good reason. They're really fun, easy enough for me to handle them as first socks, and have a pattern that is both "manly" (according to Logan) and engaging.

This is the second sock (my second sock ever) and I just finished the best part of them: the short row heel. Turning the heel is so magical, so inspiring, so downright cool that it makes the boring parts of the sock totally worth it (I'm looking at you, ribbing). I just love how blindly following the directions, because I don't really understand the mechanics of the short row heel yet, turns a flap of fabric into a nifty little cup and gets your needles going in a new direction.

I think it might be a form of magic.

Next week, I'm going to try to have a finished pair.

The Bell Jar

"Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones."

My favorite quote from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar just happens to sum up my feelings about the novel quite nicely. I chose The Bell Jar because it just happened to be the title my mouse landed on in my Goodreads "to-read" shelf, and the library had a copy in. A fair warning to those of you who don't want spoilers, this post is full of them.

Fiber Friday/Monday: Wedding Shawl

After much delay, I bring you Fiber Friday on Monday!

I'm getting married in December, and as soon as Logan proposed, I knew I had to make something for the wedding. After a lot of pattern perusal and talks with my knitting friend, I decided on Cheryl Oberle's "Sampler Shawl." If you're on Ravelry, follow this link: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/sampler-shawl.

I decided to knit the shawl in laceweight, so it would be extra delicate and fancy. The wedding colors are black, white, and red, and this skein of Colourmart cashmere/silk in Vina was perfect.

The colorway is more brick and less tomato in person, if that makes any sense.

The yarn is a dream to work with, and has made my first delve into lace a treat. I'm halfway through the third of five different lace panels, and it's finally starting to look more like a shawl and less like a pile of tangles.

I've made lots of mistakes, but that's ok. If I wanted something perfect, I would have gone out and bought something, rather than taking all the time to make it myself. I can hardly wait to block it to unleash it's full beauty, but it's a BIG shawl (400 stitches per row, lots of rows) and that won't be for a while!

Oh well, it's pretty just the same.

Sunday Salivation: Tofu Lo Mein

Logan and I decided that we would turn our apartment into a healthy eating zone, so we've been trying a lot of new recipes lately. Our favorite so far is "Fast and Easy Tofu Lo Mein" from allrecipes.com. (http://allrecipes.com/recipe/fast-and-easy-tofu-lo-mein/detail.aspx)

We like it because it really is fast and easy. The whole process takes about 20 minutes, and it's the best kind of cooking -- just dump already cooked ingredients together and mix. The first time I made it, the whole thing seemed a little too good to be true. All I had to do was make some ramen and fry some tofu?

The end result was beautiful.

And it tasted just as good as it looked. What's even better? The reheated leftovers.

Fiber Friday Postponed

The first Fiber Friday is officially postponed. Pictures of yarn coming soon(ish).

I lost my SD card reader AND camera charger cord during my recent move. If I can't find them by Sunday, I'll go buy a replacement for each.

I am the best blogger ever.

Lolita

Sometimes, I feel like a bad English major. I read far more genre novels than "literary" ones, and my knowledge of classics is, frankly, lacking. Usually, this doesn't bother me very much, but I recently became vice president of my school's Sigma Tau Delta chapter, which means I'm going to be hanging out with lit majors a lot more, and I would like to be able to hold my own in discussions of classics.

I started with Lolita. Honestly, I don't even know if Lolita is considered a classic or not, but I hear it referenced a lot, happened upon it in the library, and decided to go for it.

Usually, when I've finished a book, I have a pretty strong opinion of it and can back that opinion up with specific passages. But Lolita has me torn in a way most books simply don't. I'm not sure if I liked it or not, but I don't think I'm supposed to be sure if I liked it or not.

On the one hand, I enjoyed Nabokov's writing style. On the other hand, the subject was disturbing.

For those of you who don't know, Lolita is about Humbert Humbert (a pseudonym) who is attracted to "nymphets" -- young girls between the ages of 9 and 14. He falls for one nymphet in particular named Dolores Haze, whom he calls Lolita. The novel is structured like a memoir, and serves as Humbert's attempt to confess to his relationship with Lolita and make peace with himself and with her.

What makes the novel so disturbing isn't the sexual content between a young girl and a man old enough to be her father, but the way the reader begins to sympathize and understand Humbert. I wanted to hate Humbert for what he did to Lolita, how he broke her childhood and obviously traumatized her, but I couldn't. His rationalizations made too much twisted sense. I could tell that he really didn't understand how wrong he was, and that gets into some big moral questions, such as, if he really believes he's in the right, is he? And of course the biggest question -- what makes me think I have the authority to say what's right and what's wrong?

Lolita made me feel things that I didn't want to feel, took me down a dark part of myself that could sympathize with an unlikable hero, and that bothers me. I can never un-see that corner of myself, and that makes me kind of hate the book. But I also think it's important to read literature like this because it makes us uncomfortable. It's the only way we'll ever learn.

So, read Lolita at your own risk.

Blog Overhaul (For Real This Time)

I intended this blog to be a craft blog, but (as you can see if you look at the archives) I'm a slow crafter. Lately, I've been taking on really big projects where the change is so tiny it's not worth posting about with any sort of regularity, and that has caused the blog to fizzle out and die.

Well, now I'm moving away from craft blogging, sort of. There will still be crafts featured, but along with two of my other loves: language and food. Here's the plan.

We'll have "Wordy Wednesdays," during which I'll talk about whatever I'm reading at the moment, what my favorite authors are up to, or whatever else happened that week in the realm of words.

"Fiber Fridays" will feature my yarn work. Maybe the weekly posts on progress will drive me to knit/crochet faster!

"Salivation Sundays" will be all about delicious food.

Be on the lookout for the first Wordy Wednesday tomorrow, which will feature talk about a "classic" and sex!