This is more fun than I have had in at least twenty minutes. Go, try it. I'll wait.
See? Wasn't that fun? Here is what I made yesterday.
If that isn't obvious enough for you, how about this? Talk about beating the subject to death...
Although I am about as far from a fashionista as it is possible for a human to be -- I mean, I buy most of my clothes at Wal-Mart and Fleet Farm, with an occasional foray to Tarzhay -- I have The Sartorialist in my Bloglines because I like to know what I am missing. And occasionally when I gaze at the Beautiful[ly Dressed] People he photographs I find myself saying, Huh?
Like these two, featured on different days, the first in Milan, the second in Paris. What exactly is going on with their ankles?
Clearly, this is a fashion trend that has not yet made its appearance in rural Wisconsin.
* * * * *
One of the unexpected joys of blogging is meeting other bloggers. (Yeah, there are actual real people behind those blogs you read.) Today I met up with Angie of Purling Oaks, who was in my corner of Wisconsin on business.
The little town of Cumberland is a very pretty 30 - 40 minute drive from my house. We tried to meet here:
but they had the bad manners to close at 5, which was when we planned to meet. Instead we found a sports bar with a sort-of lake view, ordered beers, and pulled out our knitting. That's what Wisconsinites do -- order a beer and [fill in the blank].
Our waitress obliged us by snapping a photo. Angie is the pretty blonde; I am the gray-haired laugher.
In case you were wondering, Angie is a delightful person and I immediately felt like I had known her for years. We talked knitting and blogs and bloggers and jobs and remodeling and cats and plurking* and college. Turns out we both started our college careers in the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota, she in industrial engineering and me in math. No wonder we are both knitters ;-)
* Angie's cell phone had Internet access so she showed me how it works, and now I am plurking myself. Just what we all need -- another time sink...
Copyright: Kevin Harris 1995 (may be freely distributed with this acknowledgement)
"I tell my sons, 'When you bring a
girl home, I don't care about her family background. I don't care what
colour she is, or what she wants to be... just don't bring me a girl
who peers warily at her plate and says, "What's in this?".' "
-- from passage des perles.blogspot
* * * * *
One of the duties of being a mother of a kid who lives faraway is the packing/repacking and shipping of stuff.
This duty also includes removing any hazmat from the shipment.
* * * * *
My newest wallpaper, featuring a hanging basket from my deck.
* * * * *
"You might very well think that. I could not possibly comment."
-- from House of Cards / To Play the King / The Final Cut.
Awhile back I included that quote in a blog post and it got me to remembering the source, this BBC miniseries. A quick trip to the library's online catalog and the 3-CD set was on its way to my house. I watched it last week whilst recuperating from that little bout of food poisoning.
It was every bit as good as I remembered. Ian Richardson plays the most deliciously scheming, malevolent, downright evil politician one can imagine in 20th century politics. Hitler could have taken lessons from this guy. I recommend it highly to anyone looking for something to watch this summer while the TV plays reruns and other assorted crappe.
* * * * *
This business of quoting from stuff I have watched or read can have unanticipated consequences. When I said, Winter is coming, I of course had to go check my reference to be sure I had the title right. Lo and behold, I find that book 5 of the series comes out in September! Can I get a w00t?!
I am speaking of the epic The Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. It is a fantasy series, but unlike many books of that genre, these have engaging, fully-developed characters. The series is great. I listened to the audio books of #1 through #4 a couple-three years ago and was completely captivated. After browsing the plotlines again at Amazon I find I need to refresh my memory before I listen/read #5. Whee! My summer listening has just been decided!
* * * * *
After knitting six pairs of woolly socks since the end of tax season, I think I am ready to move on. I still have 1-1/2 socks to finish before I can truthfully say I knit six full pairs, but still. When those little details are cleaned up I am on to other game. Summer has finally arrived here in the Great North, complete with 80° temps, humidity, and swarms of mosquitoes so thick in the evening that it is problematic to open one's mouth to inhale. The onset of those all-too-brief weeks of balmy weather has inspired me to attempt my worsted-weight bamboo version of the Summer Raglan from More Big Girl Knits.
Wish me luck.
Eddie Izzard is hysterically, riotously, manically funny. And smart and well-educated and does NOT talk down to his audience. If you are not familiar with him, search for his videos on YouTube. No, wait! I've done it for you!
#1 son introduced me to him several years ago by giving me for Christmas the DVD of his Dressed to Kill HBO special. I didn't watch it right away -- had never heard of Eddie Izzard -- so I didn't know what I was missing. But once I watched it I was hooked.
Way back in March I saw that he was coming to Minneapolis in May. Checked with Andrew, still in Mexico, yes, he wanted to go if he were here at the time; his internship application with Partners in Health in Boston was still pending so he didn't know where he would be in May. Checked with Matthew, yes, he wanted to go, absolutely. Checked with Smokey, no, Eddie Izzard was too edgy for him. A quick online trip to Ticketmaster, a virtual swipe of the credit card, and wham!bam! I had three tickets.
A short rant: Ticketmaster, while convenient, yada yada, certainly tacks on a lot of fees -- facilities fee, ticket fee, convenience fee, printing fee, boat payment fee, kickback fee, college tuition fee. Sheesh. All those fees increased the cost of the tickets by something like a third, and those tickets were not cheap to begin with. [/rant]
When the actual day came Andrew was out of town, having gone to a music festival in Illinois that weekend. Smokey still didn't want to go. So Maggie, Matthew's girlfriend -- who had never heard of Eddie Izzard -- got ticket #3. We met up downtown, had dinner, and hit the historic State theater.
Once again I failed to take pictures, but let me paint a word picture of the theater. It opened in 1921 and was considered a technological marvel of the time. Until 1958 it had the largest movie screen west of the Mississippi. It hasn't been a movie theater since the late 1970s, but miraculously, through all its varied uses -- vaudeville house, movie theater, church -- the elaborate murals and wall sculptures have remained intact. There are cupids, there is gold leaf, there are crystal chandeliers. It is BIG, seating around 2,000 people. In other words, it is a special place and one that is fun to go to.
No, wait! I found a couple photos online.
I cannot tell you much about Mr. Izzard's performance except that he touched on many subjects -- Hannibal coming over the Alps, Minneapolis and local humor, Alexander the Great, language, Michelangelo, school, grades -- and that it was all very, very funny. He referred to himself as an off-duty transvestite, so he was dressed more or less normally -- blue jeans, white dress shirt, and a black tail coat, possibly denim, with red lining under the swallowtail. No elaborate makeup, no 4" heels, no sparkly sequined dress, more's the pity. But he was so funny we loved him anyway.
* * * * *
I would like to solicit your ideas on a knitting project. Here is the sweater I am thinking of, a short-sleeved summer number from More Big Girl Knits by Amy Singer (of Knitty.com fame) and Jillian Moreno:
The yarn I am planning to use is at the left in the photo: Madil Eden and Eden print (Ravelry links), 100% bamboo, worsted weight, and 22 st per 4"/10 cm. The pattern calls for Rowan Summer Tweed, 70% silk/30% cotton, 14 st per 4"/10 cm. Obviously, my gauge will be significantly different than that called for in the pattern.
I know that a pattern can be rewritten for a different gauge; it seems to me that this one will be easier than many because of the diagonal construction. The garment is knit top-down in one piece, and the diagonal texture of the front and back is formed by increasing 2 stitches every other row at the top of the sleeves and at center front and back, 8 stitches increased each time.
(This next paragraph is complicated. These word pictures can be tough sometimes.) The center front and back reach the desired length at the same time that the upper yoke reaches armhole depth. (You can see that by following the last narrow stripe from the center front up to the armhole.) At that point the knitter puts the sleeve cap stitches on holders, casts on a few more stitches for the underarm, then works back and forth on one entire side, say, left front and back, at a time, doing double decreases along the side "seam" and short row shaping at the bottom front and back of that side. The short row shaping achieves the straight-across-the-bottom edge. When one entire side is done, the knitter does the same thing on the other entire side. The whole garment is knit in one piece, using double increases at center front and back and double decreases at the sides, plus short-row shaping along the bottom edge, to achieve the tubular shape of the body.
It seems to me that once I recalculate the number of stitches I need to cast on, the rest of the body can be knit according to the pattern. In other words, as long as my row gauge is proportional to the original row gauge in the same ratio as my stitch gauge is to the original stitch gauge, it will all work itself out. I will be knitting on more stitches and will need to knit more rows, but as long as I knit each section to be the desired number of inches long, all will be well.
I generally prefer tops to come just past my hips rather than be as short as this one. To lengthen this top I would continue to knit in the round (after putting the sleeve caps on waste yarn and casting on additional stitches for the underarm) and maintain the tubular shape of the body by double increases front and back and double decreases at each side. On the other hand, many garments are too long waisted for me, plus few summer tops are hip length; if I want mine to be shorter than the pattern is written, I would commence the short-row shaping/filling in each side sooner.
The reason I like this pattern is that, because of the use of different colors of yarns, it seemed to fit my vision for my yarn. I had been picturing my bamboo yarn in some kind of summer t-shirt-like thing using the print for the sleeves and solid brown for the body. This pattern uses three shades of the Rowan, shading top to bottom from lightest to darkest, and creating a deep V yoke effect to echo the neckline. That seems to me to be a far more flattering design than my t-shirt idea. I plan to cast on with the solid brown, switch to the variegated yarn for as long as it lasts and probably no farther than the lightest color yarn is used in the original, do a couple of narrow stripes as the color transition, then switch back to the solid brown for the rest.
I have never used Rowan Summer Tweed so I don't know how it behaves in a knit fabric. My bamboo yarn makes a very soft fabric that drapes well but does not have a lot of body. I had originally cast on the printed yarn for a narrow Clapoutis, but it curled too much and I was not happy with it.
So, my questions are these:
What say y'all? I know there is a lot of knitting expertise out there, so any and all advice/opinions are welcomed. Thank you for your support.
| HowManyOfMe.com | ||
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I love tote bags. If I could travel easily with just tote bags, I'd do it. In fact, whenever I go somewhere, whether for an hour or a week, the endeavor always involves one or more tote bags. There are tote bags everywhere in my life. Here is just one pile.
There are library-themed tote bags:
That last one is adorned with this button, which I love:
I have knitting-themed tote bags:
The button on the Knitty bag (this is my favorite bag because it is deeper that any of the others, plus it has handles long enough for it to work as a shoulder bag):
It is not really such a great button, but I was so delighted to find a knitting button at an anarchist book store that I had to buy it plus the little one next to it, in commemoration of Andrew being arrested at the Republic national convention in New York in 2004. Yep, that's my boy.
Some bags are travel souvenirs. I bought the one on the left, below, in Chinatown in New York City when I accompanied Matthew's high school drama group on their 2004 trip to see Lion King and Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, and the sock bag on the right at Purl Soho when we went to NYC for Andrew's graduation last spring.
The Chinatown bag works best as a bag for smallish projects because the handles are probably not sturdy enough for hard wear. It is currently transporting a pair of socks and a pair of fingerless gloves, both WIPs coming soon to a blog near you.
This messenger bag came home with me from the Madrid airport on the way home from South Africa.
It also caused me to be the target of some very pointed questions from Homeland Security at JFK. "Why does this bag test positive for explosive materials, ma'm?" "I have no idea, sir."
Then Customs started in on me about all the biltong I had in my suitcase. But that is a story for another day. Today we are discussing tote bags.
Some commemorate places and events gone by.
Clockwise from upper left, a bag from the Minneapolis public school my kids went to and loved; a Marshall Field bag I inherited from my MIL, who lived in Chicago most of her life; a Macy's bag I have no remembrance of acquiring; and three souvenirs from past tax conferences, aka knitting retreats with CPE credit.
Arghhh! The electricity just flickered -- it happens frequently in the *summer* -- and I lost about half this post because I had forgotten to click on Save for rather a long time. Crap. Retyping...
I try very hard to remember to keep these in my car to avoid having to use plastic or paper grocery bags:
Just last week the mail carrier brought me these to help in that endeavor:
But why am I boring you all with an exhaustive recount
of my vast inventory of tote bags? I told you all that so I could show you this, my latest treasure-toter:
It was handmade in Guatemala and is my belated Christmas present from Andrew. The flowered section is hand-embroidered:
Beautiful. Now, what to carry in it?
* The spring peepers woke up today. Smokey said he listened for them yesterday, and they weren't peeping. But tonight, as we drove to the barbecue place in the next town north, we heard them. And stopped to roll down our windows and listen. Such a glorious sound. Ahhhhh. It was nice of them to wait to come out of hibernation until I truly had a day off.
* Monday was my last day at work. I left at 5:05, stopped at Best Buy to compare cameras, and headed for the Great North. Home by 9pm, in bed by 10. Ahhhhh. Life is good.
* Tuesday was the all-day organizational meeting of the new county board, of which I am 1/23rd. Good meeting, got acquainted with some of the supervisors whom I didn't know, and got myself elected to the finance committee, which was what I wanted. I won't be writing much, if at all, about the board here. It is not appropriate. But I'm thinking I might start a second blog for that topic; time will tell.
* I did knit during the meeting, although not all the time. The project of choice was a sock, but, less than optimally, I was at the turning of the heel. It is a short-row heel, which I have never managed to pull off correctly before, so why I thought I could do it while in a meeting that demanded some attention is a mystery for the universe. I knit half the heel, frogged it, knit it halfway again, frogged it, tried one more time. It wasn't too bad that time so I kept going. After finishing it and knitting a few more rows I inspected it at the end of the meeting and decided that I shall frog it one last time and reknit it, this time when there are absolutely no distractions. And it shall be perfecto. It is a gift for another, after all.
* Wednesday, my first real day off: got up at 8:30, made coffee, caught up (sort of) on e-mail and online stuff, then got sleepy again. Back to bed for a... six-hour nap! I hope to cut back on the nap time a little tomorrow.
* I just flipped a hornet off my hand. Where did he come from? No idea, but he ain't gonna live to see the sunrise.
* My house is a total disaster. Every horizontal surface, including most of the floors, is covered with stuff, and there is a suspicious odor of dog and/or cat *accident*. Must attack all of that, one area at a time.
* The Mason-Dixon dog blanket (scroll down for a photo) is suddenly three-quarters done. How did that happen? I never knit on it for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and not very often at that. Oh, yeah, now I remember: we knitters are taking over the world, one stitch at a time.
WTF?
It's April, for cryin' out loud, people! It rained all day yesterday, just like it is supposed to in April. Then today, I woke up to this crap.
I say again, WTF?!
One of the best people in the world died last week. His funeral was today. (At that link there are links to a number of obituaries, from newspapers in Brainerd, MN, to the New York Times.)
He was the 12th grade English teacher in my high school but departed to teach at Brainerd Junior College before I got to his class. Everyone loved him, as is evidenced by the comments from former students at the guest book linked from the site linked about.
His books are wonderful, in the same vein as those by Richard Russo -- small-town life, with all its quirks and humor and occasional darkness. Staggerford, his first novel, featured a couple things straight out of my high school: a cafeteria situated in the basement and a forbidding librarian*.
* I started to type, "Mary Kropp, where are you now?" But instead I decided to google her, just out of curiosity. Amazingly, I found her. She died in 2001 at the age of 93. I guess the mean ones live longest.
She may have been a wonderful person to her friends and family and colleagues, but among the students she was feared mightily. Unlike Mr. Hassler.
F is also for famous, which is how I am feeling right now. Check out my picture, right next to Dale-Harriet's, over at Franklin's post about his Yellow Dog photo shoot.
* * * * *
We got some snow yesterday. This is around the corner and up the block from my house.
It was several inches of heavy, wet snow that made all the trees and bushes very pretty.
Some people are just too darned conscientious for their own good. These folks had already shoveled their sidewalk by 8 a.m. Don't they know it's gonna melt almost immediately? Or at least by June?
Across the street, Linus was looking a little... bedraggled.
Downtown, we have people to take care of these things. Wouldn't want anyone to get their Ferragamos wet.
Don't you love how I take pictures through the windshield? While driving. Not to worry; I didn't hit anything. Yet.
* * * * *
Observed at the office:
* * * * *
Last week I bought some daffodils from the the Cancer Society to brighten up my cube.
Knowing how fast they open, I thought it would be fun to photograph them every hour and make a blog post about it.
Hmm. It's a slow game.
Not a lot happening.
Okay, I guess they are opening. A little.
Ya wanna see the high-tech tripod I devised so I'd always get the same angle on the shot?
Upside-down glass on top of a pile of notepads, camera on top of the glass. Yeah, I know. I'm a genius.
Jumping ahead...
Did you notice how I put the digital clock in there now, so you can tell that an hour has elapsed? Genius, I tell you.
Yeah, I was getting bored, too. They seemed to be going pretty much directly from barely open to... dead.
* * * * *
Matthew's joke. (You have to imagine him saying these things)
"So, what's happenin'? Where's the action tonight?"
(scuffle, scuffle, whisper, whisper)
"Police! You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say..." etc.
Commuting is not the favorite sport of The Kat™. Driving is okay; I like to drive. Riding is better, of course, because it allows for the knitting, but one cannot always ride. Sometimes one is forced to be pilot, navigator, and Occupant In Charge Of The Radio And Heater, all rolled into one. Oftentimes the occasion for being forced into such an arduous role is the necessity of getting oneself to the place where, glory be to FSM, one is paid just for showing up and twiddling numbers for a few hours.
In other words, I have been driving myself to work for the past week and a half.
Others may rail against the accursed and demented drivers they encounter on their daily commute. Still others may glorify that concept called Work From Home Wednesday. Not for me the cursing nor the working in pjs; no, The Kat™ serenely navigates the traffic and courageously weathers the elements in order that people who live in various attractive venues around the world and have way more money than might be good for them can rest assured that their tax returns will be correct, elegant, and done on time.
Last week was my first week back at work, and so it involved a certain amount of settling in: moving the box of office stuff from home back to my cube, unpacking and installing all the accoutrements of cube life -- pictures, back massager, fan, Ikea vases, radio, handy snacks, various mugs and insulated tumblers. One of the necessities was to purchase a bus pass so that I might consider myself honorable and righteous and Green, but for some reason I didn't accomplish this until Thursday. Since I leave directly from the office on Friday afternoon to drive back home to WI, taking the bus the next day was right out.
But I was looking forward to beginning my bus commutes this week. The morning ride, on the express bus, is almost too short to bother getting out my knitting (although I always do it anyway). But after work the last express bus leaves at 5:10, and no tax accountant in the known universe can leave work every day during tax season at 5 p.m. (Right, Carrie?) I shall take the local bus home -- that's about 45 minutes of excellent knitting time, w00t.
And then fate intervened.
I told you last year about all the little things they do at work to keep us entertained and racing happily on our little treadmills: dinner brought in on Wednesday nights, happy hour every Friday afternoon, contests, a multitude of drawings for little and not-so-little prizes. Last year I won a firm-logo-adorned brush to clean my monitor (again, w00t), a snazzy highlighter with integrated post-its (Be still my heart!), and a $50 gift certificate good anywhere Visa is accepted (Yes!! Now we're talkin'!).
My luck continues to hold. Last Friday I won free parking in our [downtown Minneapolis] building for this week. Hee hee! Valet parking! For a week!! I feel just like... a partner in the firm. They all park there.
Frankly, though, I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. First, I was gonna start my bussing-to-be-green-and-knit campaign this week; now, I continue to burn gas and clog the freeway. Second, when I do drive I park in the ramp next door to our building, so valet parking in the basement doesn't really save me any time (although it certainly is cheaper than the $11/day I'd pay next door!) -- in fact, it probably takes me longer to leave at night because the exit dumps me on a one-lane, one-way street that is permanently backed up with traffic and that goes the wrong way and so takes me way out of my way through downtown. Third, and worst of all, it eliminated that 45-minute bus ride at the end of the day when I was going to knit ::pout::
Stop grumbling, Kat™, it's unseemly.
But something happened this morning that made me smile. I handed my keys to the valet and he handed me this:
* * * * *
But that lovely rose has gone to a better place -- the desk of a co-worker who just stopped in my cube to show me the first ultrasound of her baby-in-waiting. She's been worried since her first prenatal appointment three weeks ago when the midwife couldn't hear the baby's heartbeat, so worried she hadn't revealed her pregnancy to anyone else at work except me. Today she is just... glowing. So I gave her the rose. She deserved it. And she got the best Valentine's Day present one could hope for.
Many thanks to Cursing Mama for this sentiment, which she expressed in an e-mail exchange. I printed it and hung it on the wall of my cubicle. It completely encapsulates the character of so many things -- accounting, computers, knitting, life...
I swept the laundry room today. Half a tablespoon of dirt, half a cup of leaves and fabric trimmings, and ::sigh:: half a gallon of dog hair. (Clog added for scale :-)
Do you need a time waster? Sure you do.
I love jigsaw puzzles. And I really love online jigsaw puzzles.
This one is my favorite.
It has just the right mix of pretty pictures, levels of difficulty, background color options, and conventionally-shaped pieces to suit me.
Sorting the pieces is the button box all over again for The Kat.
There's a satisfying little click! when a piece fits into place.
None of that annoying, Does it fit? Does it really fit? that occurs in real life jigsaws.
And unlike other online jigsaws I have tried, this one gives you a little reward at the end, an intact image with a caption that describes the subject and source.
The only downside -- or maybe it is an upside, in the grand scheme of things -- is that there is only one puzzle per day.
Because there are some days when I would waste far more time than is good for me doing this.
What follows is an insultingly basic photo tutorial on a technique so simple I learned it from a casual 3-line instruction on another blog. But maybe, just maybe, you don't know it yet, in which case I offer it up humbly. Yeah, like I ever do anything humbly.
The sewn bind-off is a good one to use when you want the bound-off edge to match the cast-on edge both in look and, more importantly, in tension. A usual bind-off is rather tighter than the cast-on, something that can spoil the drape of a scarf knitted lengthwise.
This became important to me a couple days ago when I finished a lengthwise-knitted scarf for Norma's Red Scarf Project. I sort of noticed (meaning, I noticed but ignored) that the bound-off edge was tighter than the beginning row; I rationalized I could compensate by binding off more loosely than usual. Yeah, right, that always works.
So I was happily binding off and reading blogs on Friday night when I came upon this:
A standard "chain" cast off does not match the cast on, and on a long edge, the disparity becomes striking. Try the sewn garter stitch cast off from Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac
.
My heart sank. Oh, crap, that's what I should be doing. Every time I held the scarf up to see how the two edges compared it was obvious that my *strategy* wasn't working quite as well as one might have wished. The problem came in the fact that I had already bound off sixty-eight inches of a seventy-two-inch scarf. Roughly two hundred fifty stitches out of two hundred seventy. Was I going to frog that edge and do it right? Hmmmm. Let me think about that one for a minute...
I spent the next eighteen hours with my metaphorical fingers in my metaphorical ears going, La la la, I can't hear you! But eventually good sense prevailed. I frogged and did it right.
If this post can save someone else the [admittedly minor, in the greater scheme of things] trauma of frogging nearly six feet of bound-off alpaca, it will be worth it.
The sewn cast-off.
Begin with yarn at the right side. Break yarn, thread through needle.
*Thread needle through first two stitches as if to purl. Thread needle back through the first stitch as if to knit. Drop off first stitch*
Repeat between the * until you've cast off all the stitches. This has a similar tension and look to a cast on; use it where you want the cast off edge to match the cast on.
Now, the insultingly obvious part wherein I show off my mad photography skillz. And manicure. Don't forget the manicure*.
Thread needle through first two stitches as if to purl:
Pull the yarn through. I told you this was insultingly basic.
Yup, that yarn is pulled through the stitches all right.
Thread the needle back through the first stitch as if to knit:
Pull the yarn through. Omigod, is it through yet? Yes. Whew.
Drop that stitch off the needle.
Pull the yarn through the dropped stitch. Um... yup, she's dropped all right.
The payoff:
Yeah, they still don't look precisely identical, but trust me, they resemble each other a lot more closely than the original bind-off and cast-on edges.
Tomorrow, the finished scarf and its two red scarfy pals. And a lesson in boiling water, should you be interested.
.
* A few words on the manicure: I have the world's softest, weakest fingernails. I have never in my nearly six decades on the planet been able to grow my nails longer than a millimeter or two. Hardening nail polish (Sally Hansen!), gelatin capsules (daily!), healthy hoof cream (seriously!) -- nothing worked well enough to produce the lovely long nails I envisioned on my short little fingers.
I wore acrylic nails for a few years in the eighties and silk wraps on and off for the past three. Never the dragon lady style, just reasonable length almond-shaped nails. Loved the look, hated the upkeep, not to mention the health risks -- volatile harsh chemicals, the possibility of nail fungus or infection or the nail separating from the nail bed.
Three weeks ago I was reading before bed and noticed that the current silk wrapped nails really, really, really needed maintenance. To motivate myself to perform this Truly Arduous Task (mañana! always mañana!) I picked off the silk and nail polish whilst I read.
The next day I procrastinated as usual until I had to go somewhere. In an effort to make myself more presentable I slapped a couple coats of Sally Hansen on my (temporarily) naked nails. By a fortuitous something-or-other, my nails happened to have been equally long under the silk, not just one or two long ones and the rest extended with tips.
The oddest thing happened.
I continued to procrastinate on the re-silk-wrapping thing and kept slapping on the Sally Hansen.
And my nails stayed long.
Wait, let me repeat that. And my nails stayed long.
No chipping, no peeling, no breaking. It has been three weeks now and I'm starting to get used to these nails. I admire them roughly eleventybillion times/day. Woot! I am Wendy! The other night, just for fun, I painted the tips white instead of my usual and conventional all-over coat of beige/pink/taupe/reddish polish. Double woot! I Am Fashionable!
Apparently a new moon in the midst of the Neptune/Sun opposition (scroll down to the Leo: August 2007 section, the paragraph that begins, "August 12th") makes my nails stronger. Who knew?
I lived in Minneapolis for 32 years before we moved to Wisconsin. My husband and I have both driven over That Bridge literally thousands of times, as has pretty much everyone else who ever ventured into Minneapolis.
You may have seen the interviews with Ron Engebretsen and his two daughters as they waited and hoped that Sherry, their wife and mother, would be found alive. Here is one from KSTP, the local ABC affiliate; it was on the ABC nightly news tonight, too.
Ron and I worked together for six years at a regional brokerage firm in downtown Minneapolis. He was the manager of EDP auditing, I was the manager of financial and operational auditing. Sherry was also an accountant but worked at a different company. I remember how proud and happy they were when they moved into their new house in Shoreview. We ate dinner there once with others from work. I also remember their joy when they were able to adopt their daughters from Columbia, and how Ron would bring the girls' pictures to the office.
I don't want to give the impression we were intimate friends. Ron was a colleague; I knew Sherry well enough to chat, but none of us were close friends. But she was one of the more alive people I have ever met.
She was one of the four confirmed dead today. Her daughter said that her mom never took 35W home from work but that day for some reason she did.
R, one of Matthew's friends, IMed him today. R and his family live in south Minneapolis not far from where we lived, but we all met when they bought a cabin on our lake. Although their boys were a couple years younger than ours, they all were friends and hung out together every summer for at least the past ten years. R messaged that yesterday he and his dad went to the dentist somewhere north of the river. When they came home, J, the dad, took a different route than usual. Had he gone their normal way, they would probably have been on That Bridge at the crucial time. For some reason he didn't take That Bridge yesterday.
I checked with a friend in my accounting firm in downtown Minneapolis today. The office employs something like 800 people, but she hadn't heard of any that were on That Bridge; definitely no one from the tax department, but the partner we work for had crossed it five minutes before the collapse.
My husband was in Minneapolis working all weekend and had to stay for another workday on Tuesday. He called at about 4:15 on Wednesday and we arranged to meet for dinner at favorite spot that is on his way home to Wisconsin. The logical route from our house in south Minneapolis to the lake in Wisconsin crosses the Mississippi at That Bridge. Because of bridge repairs, traffic was backed up for several miles and he took a different route. Had he taken the logical route, he would have passed over That Bridge a half hour before it collapsed. Perhaps some of the cars that were southbound when he got off I-35 to head into Wisconsin were on That Bridge at 6:05.
The population of the Twin Cities area is something over a million, but it is not so big that there aren't many stories like mine. I suspect that all over the metro area today there were people thinking of others who commute on 35W, recognizing someone they saw interviewed on TV, thinking of the times they have crossed That Bridge.
Life is a dangerous business. We never know what may come next. There are no guarantees. Luck, fate, whatever, it goes both ways. Hug your loved ones and be glad none of you were on That Bridge.
