April Fool

Happy April Fool's Day! I'm happy to report that I have not been "fooled" (yet), despite going into work today. Honestly, I expected a lot of jokes to be played behind the scenes at Panera, but I didn't witness a single one. I'm glad, but also surprised, because not only could we go for "your shoe's untied" we could say that each other's aprons were untied, hats were messed up, we'd spilled stuff on ourselves, or any number of other things.

I'm thinking about playing a joke on Logan, but I really can't think of anything good. Pretty much everything in our apartment is shared, so I don't want to cover anything in tinfoil or saran wrap because that would also inconvenience me, and that defeats the purpose of a good prank. Hiding his stuff wouldn't be funny--just mean--as would telling a lie of some sort to scare him.

I guess I'll just play a time-worn favorite and tell him his shoe is untied.

Panera, Joe, and Feminism

Everyone who works at Panera has a plethora of duties to take care of during each shift. There's a lot that needs to get done and things only run smoothly when everyone pitches in and goes a little bit above and beyond. Because I'm me and I apparently enjoy giving myself a lot of work, I've taken on one more responsibility in addition to all the others.

I'm going to teach one of my coworkers all about feminism.

The other day one of my coworkers, we'll call him Joe, and I were chatting as I ordered food from his register at break. I gave him the number for my MyPanera card and he selected my name when it came on the screen. He looked at it for a second, then asked me what my name was before I got married.

"Shuler. I kept my name when I got married," I answered. He looked confused.

"You can do that?"

I educated him on the practice of keeping one's name and told him why I chose to do so. His interest peaked when I mentioned feminism. He told me he didn't know what that was.

He genuinely  had no idea what feminism was.

Joe is a young guy in the middle of his college career that generally knows what's going on, but he'd never heard of feminism before. I'm disappointed by what this says about our school systems and general public awareness, but selfishly happy that I'm the one who gets to share such a powerful movement with a newbie. We had a good long chat about what feminism means to me and how I got started, and I think our next talk is going to cover why we still need feminism today. 

My conversations with Joe have inspired me to share my thoughts on feminism with you, because you may not know why I feel so strongly about the movement. So soon comes a less off-the-cuff version of what I told Joe feminism means to me.

Location, Location, Location

Today at work I helped three people who had never been to Panera before. This happens all the time, since ours is a new location, but it was odd that all of these people specifically mentioned that they'd never been because they live far away from a Panera and just happened to be in the neighborhood.

It got me thinking about my hometown and how I felt as if I was ages away from everything. It always seemed as if everywhere worth being was at least half an hour away. It's funny because in my hometown with "nothing" in it, we had four fast food restaurants, six or seven sit-down restaurants, two grocery stores, and a super Wal-Mart. Nothing indeed.

Now that I live in the Cincinnati area, I have access to anything I could want within a 15 minute radius. It's amazing, but sometimes I forget just how convenient and special that is. Honestly, I take it for granted. Next time I think to myself I wish I didn't have to go so far for X, I'm going to stop and appreciate just how close that actually is and how lucky I am to live an area with so much, and that I'm fortunate enough that nothing is holding me back from enjoying everything it has to offer.

Work and Celebration

Long time, no see!

Things have been a bit hectic in the Shuler/Smith household lately, but in a happy kind of way. I got a job! A Panera opened up near the apartment, and they hired me on so I can earn some money while searching for a career in my field. Overall, I like working there quite a bit, but my training schedule was frantic and unpredictable, so the blog suffered.

But training week is over, which means I have a stable schedule, and that's good news for Scraps of Yarn. In fact, partly to celebrate and partly to get away from the color gray for a bit, I started a new project. It's Hibernatum, a cute little beanie-style hat I came across on Ravelry. I've shared the one of the project page pictures below.



I'm making my own out of Cascade Yarns' Cherub DK, which I won from my local yarn store a couple months ago when Cascade Yarns had a "yarn tasting" there. I probably never would have picked up this yarn if I were on my own because it's acrylic, and the only acrylic yarn I've had any experience with is Red Heart, which I am not a fan of. But so far I've loved working with Cherub. It's super soft and has a nice spring when worked up, which I didn't expect from an acrylic. I'll share a picture of my progress when it looks less like a shapeless blob and more like a hat.

Until then!