kmkat and her kneedles

Sam Sparro on Sunday.

Meme. As in, me me me me me.

Dale-Harriet* tagged me, and what's not to like about blathering on about oneself?

What's the last book you read that you thought was really super, inspiring, you'd recommend it to most anyone?

How about if I tell you of my favorite book of all time? That would be Winterdance : The Fine Magic of Running the Iditarod by Gary Paulsen. It is non-fiction, written by the author of dozens of young adult novels like Hatchet and a handful of adult novels. (No, not ADULT novels, just novels that you would find in the fiction section at the library.) Paulsen lived in northern MN and decided to get some sled dogs and run the Iditarod, the 1,500-mile Anchorage to Nome dog sled race. The book recounts his adventures and misadventures -- the latter outnumber the former by a considerable margin -- along the way. The book is both spiritual and hilarious; the first time I read it I kept chasing down members of my family: "Sit down and listen. You have to hear this!"

My favorite anecdote from the book is this one. At one point during his first running of the Iditarod, Paulsen and his team were following the track across a wide flat valley when they came upon an empty sled with team just sitting in the track. Thinking that the driver might be in trouble, Paulsen stopped and looked for the driver, eventually spotting him (or it might have been a her, I don't remember) lying on a very slight rise about a quarter mile away. He hiked over to see if s/he was okay, and the other driver motioned him to lie down and be quiet, too.

On the other side of the rise was a small frozen lake, blown clear of snow by the ever-present wind. There were two buffalo at the shore. They would take turns running onto the lake, then stopping, stiff-legged, and sliding across the ice, all the while bellowing at the top of their lungs. They were playing! iirc, it was at that point in his life that Paulsen became a vegetarian.

Tattoos: yes or no? Do you have any? Tell us! Do you think they're gross? TELL US!

No tats on me, thankyouverymuch. I'm not a big fan, although I find the artistic and colorful ones intriguing as body art.

Where have you lived?

On a farm in southern MN until age 14, rural northern MN for the 3 years of high school, Minneapolis -- mostly south Mpls -- for the next 32 years, on a lake in n.w. WI for the past 9. Yah, I'm a Midwesterner, fer sure.

But I have traveled a bit. I have hit 48 of the 50 states -- somehow  missed Delaware and Louisiana (so far) -- and 8 countries on 4 of the 7 continents: Canada, US, Mexico, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain, England/Scotland.

Do you listen to the radio? What are your favorite programs, & on what station?

Radio only in the car and only when I don't have my iPod. Then it is Minnesota Public Radio, either The Current or classical, occasionally the news channel. The only programs that I try to catch are A Prairie Home Companion and Car Talk, although I also like This American Life and Whaddya Know? and especially Science Friday. Very occasionally KQ (KQRS, 92.5, classic rock), The Cities 97 (KTCZ, 97.1), or Cool 108 (KQQL 107.9, oldies). Oh, and in my cube during tax season I generally have on JackFM, a station which for some inexplicable reason feels that we all need to hear Smoking in the Boys' Room at least once a week. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Is there a movie that makes you cry no matter how many times you see it?

Nope, sorry, don't generally cry at movies.

What snacks do you enjoy?

Ah, that is the question I have been waiting for. Let's talk food.

Bleu cheese, whole wheat saltines, and merlot, occasionally supplemented by pecans and/or grapes; that is my favorite bedtime snack ever. White tortilla chips with grated cojack cheese melted over them, topped with lots of Chi-Chi's mild salsa and accompanied by a beer, preferably Dos Equis or Leinie's Creamy Dark. Jarlsberg and pecans and hard cider. Funny how all my favorite snacks involve alcohol of some kind. I guess I only snack in the evening...

* You must follow that link and read her post for today, June 5. Eloquent and wonderful.

My little holiday gift to you.

This is Pandora, custom streaming internet radio. I shall forgive y'all for not telling me about this long ago. You were all probably too busy filing your nails and winning the lottery and listening to your own particular idiom of musical grooviness to remember that The Kat™ might like to know about Pandora.

That's okay, I can manage.

Thank FSM for a certain Wisconsin blogger, though. She doesn't forget about The Kat™. She mentions Pandora and is even so unbelievably thoughtful as to post a link to it. Alls I can say is some lovely person who shall not be named here but whose initials are Dale-Harriet shall not be forgotten in my will, such as it is. I'm sure she will cherish the semi-petrified bars of lavender soap that will come her way at some unspecified future time when I shall cease to inhabit this mortal coil. The rest of you can just go suck rocks. So there.

Oh, wait, I said this was my holiday present to you. [rewind.]

Go check out Pandora if you happen to be the [only] other person in the universe who hasn't discovered it. Tell it a musical group or song that you like, and it will create a *station* that plays music in the same style as whatever you entered. Their algorithm for selecting music seems quite good. I was joyously surprised by the music that followed my entry of the Rolling Stones -- Tom Petty, Kinks, Creedence, the Velvets, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and The Who, all groups that are well-represented in my iTunes library although not necessarily by the songs that Pandora played. Songs that were new to me. Songs that were fun to listen to. It will even disclose why it picked a particular song. I wondered about one by a guy named Ronnie Earle, somebody I had never heard of but whose song "My Buddy Buddy" I liked when I heard it. Pandora explains, "Based on what you have told us so far, we're playing this track because it features blues rock, qualities, mild rhythmic syncopation [um, is there any other kind of sycopation in music besides rhythmic? asks The Kat™], thru composed melodic style, major key tonality and electric rhythm guitars."  Other songs that I investigated had these and various other features that caused them to be included in this station: electric rock instrumentation, blues influences, subtle use of vocal harmony, extensive vamping, and others.

So far I have the aforementioned Rolling Stone station, a U2 station (unsurprisingly, there is some overlap between those two), a Baroque chamber music station, and a classical Christmas station. Oh, the joy and peacefulness that washes over me as I listen to those last two.

Pandora is free but you must give it your e-mail address. Anybody with a Yahoo premium account knows enough to create a disposable address for the purpose; if Pandora's entire existence is aimed at acquiring a mailing list so they can sell it to entrepreneurs who want me to buy insurance or enroll in nursing school or enhance my penis or get out of debt free, Boy! are they gonna be disappointed. Hah! Spammers! I'm Yahoo is smarter than you! [raspberry]

* * * *

I had a little problem yesterday.

This lovely beast:

plus an attack of cabin fever led to this:

See that mess of pinkness there at center left? That was the skein attached to the pink and blue and green preemie hat, center. Said preemie hat and skein were left carelessly within En's territory, i.e., on the floor.

"Well, that yarn won't be botherin' ya no more, ma'm. I done killed it fer ya."

Gee, thanks, En.

A quick call to #2 son, on his way home from Minneapolis via Eau Claire, and a replacement skein of Cotton Ease, in Berry, was no longer on the shelf at Michael's but instead coming to live with me. The original skein was so badly tangled not only could I not untangle it, I could not even find the single strand emerging from the ball so I could cut away the mess. I can probably salvage some of it. If I can suppress the rage.

Randomness: painfully convoluted sentences, John Mayer, ponderous thoughts, and even a little knitting.

To make amends for my little rant yesterday -- oh, and btw, thanks for all the bah-humbuggery appreciation y'all sent me, did my little heart good to know that humor still rules the world (I wish! It could do a better job than certain White (And Other-Colored) Men are doing at present, but that is a rant for another day) -- and did you see that Wendy commented (be still my heart, a celebrity comment! wOOt! (and did you read when Norma (yay! Norma!) blogged that "wOOt" is Webster's Word of the Year, except that they spelled it wrong, all the Kool Kids know it's spelled "w00t," not "wOOt") Thanks, Wendy!) -- I'm putting up this little YouTube number:*

Highlights to watch for:

• The sweet knit hat -- intarsia? stranded? -- worn by one of the graffiti artists. Yeah, I later realized it is really a ski mask, but still, it is an objet d'knit, and we all loves us some objets d'knit, doncha know?
• The awesomely perfect circles! drawn freehand! by that same artist;
• The skyline of NYC looking like something is missing, and we all know what that is, and it saddens us.

That album -- or "alblum," as my dear MIL used to pronounce it, and so did my husband, who argued with me for an amazingly long time that "alblum" was a perfectly valid alternative to "album" and whom I only convinced otherwise when I dragged him, alblumming all the way, to the dictionary -- came to live in my iTunes a week or two ago and I have been listening to it and smearing the music and lyrics all over myself, it is so good.

[ascends soapbox] As much as I love that song, I keep disagreeing with the underlying sentiment, that his generation is waiting on the world to change. The counter-culturalists of the 1960s and 1970s didn't wait. They stormed the bastions of convention helter-skelter and willy-nilly and Nelly-bar-the-door, and nowadays many of those counter-cultural values are mainstream, although sadly not so much universally practiced as universally proclaimed: ecological awareness, recycling, organic food production, planet-friendly practices, multiculturalism, tolerance, diversity, social justice. One cannot simply wait for the world to change into something that better suits one; one must be the change one wishes to see™. [/descends from soapbox]

On the other hand, the sentiments in "Belief" seem to me to express a profound truth that the world would do well to grasp:

But, hey, I'm not all about the lyrics. Listening to his pre-song comments in this video of "I'm Gonna Find Another You" I realized that, Doh, of course I like that song, it's... blues.

* * * * *

Now, as promised, a little knitting.

My first preemie hat for Jeanne:

Go on, knit her a couple. Quick, easy, stash-busters. You know you want to. Deadline is January 15.

Yarn: Lion Brand Cotton Ease (50% cotton/50% acrylic); Lake, Lime, and Berry.
Needles: US#6
Pattern: Basic hat from Ann Budd's A Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, preemie size.

I was a bit unhappy with the size and shape it turned out to be, thinking that it was too wide for its depth, but an emergency e-mail to Jeanne and I was tactfully informed that 1, babies come in all sizes and shapes (well, within limits), and b, even preemie babies grow and often continue to need little hats. Babies grow? Who knew?

The uneven stitches smoothed out nicely after a quick run through the washer and dryer with the other laundry.

Yesterday's knitting scene:

In the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that the New York Public Library mug does not contain coffee, nor even Sleepy Rabbit tea, as it did yesterday. Nope, that is Worcestershire sauce-tinted tap water, concocted to re-create the scene more accurately. Do I have mad food stylist skillz or what?

To remove the taste of the forgoing awfulness, please fondle the virtual cuddliness of the knitting:

#2 son asked me to knit him a pair of socks. Listen! Hear that? Hell freezes over.

He has steadfastly refused any and all of my offers to for him. He's a fashionista in his own way, that boy, and his self-image brooks no mother-produced garments. Oh, except for that Dulaan-destined hat he swiped from me last winter. And that glow-in-the-dark scarf I so laboriously knitted him last year at his request and which he wore about twice. Grrrrr.

But I am A Knitting Mother -- ya know, the ones who want to wrap the world in hand knits? So I immediately agreed to make him a pair of socks.

No wool, he said, Wool is itchy.

Okay, no problem, I said, and showed him a recently-received color card of Knit Picks Shine Worsted (60% Pima cotton/40% Modal®). He picked out the terra cotta and cream shown above. One reason I was able to agree so readily was that I had discovered the extreme speediness with which worsted weight yarn knits up into socks. Wham! Bam! Socks!

He sent me a link to these socks to show how he wanted his to look.

Don't guys have silly-looking legs? Why do they pose like that, so their legs look even sillier than necessary? Why do I care?

* Diagram that (so-called) sentence!

Christmas pipes.

Ignore the glitzy, Hollywood over-the-top production and just listen. Beautiful. Found on blackbird's blog .

Eye candy Friday (bonus, with sound!).

The Blood Brothers and The Kinks.

It would be massive understatement to say I don't care for this Blood Brothers' song, but the lyrics -- especially the bits about xylophone trees and skin-cooking coffins -- are some of the more creative ones I have ever read.

Ambulance X extracts several consultants
from the slow gumming death at the office orifice.
Ambulance Y imprisons the sigh of the recent amputee
and dumps her in the xylophone trees.
Ambulance X scours the tanning complex for repunzels
rotting in their skin-cooking coffins.
Ambulance Y drops the body off at the door step.
Ambulance X pulls you out of the party
and rubs your freckles like a DJ to his records
but Ambulance Y teaches you the word goodbye
and cuts off your hands to show you where you stand,
under the monolith of what is love and what is scam,
what is sun and what is tan.
The Ambulance Angels pull up to your doorstep
the sirens flash emergency,
"you'd better come quick."
The Ambulance Angels chisel a crack in your mouth,
and then they paint a landscape with your regret and shouts.
Roll tape and decode the moans,
ventilate the scandal from these locked up mouth holes.
You'll never see your wife
and children again so tell us what it was going through your head,
when you looked into their eyes
and said "no thanks i'll take the hooker instead"
You'll never see that office again
so when the nurse amputates both of your thighs
come a little bit closer to the mic
and tell us what you miss more your desk or the hungry sky.
The Ambulance Angels pull up to the graveyard,
and leave you there bubbling broken sonnets and shards.
The Ambulance Angels notify your next of kin
and show them the scrap book of your operation:
His head was a faucet leaking love, laughter and lies:
all his secret wishes, all his world famous sighs.
Before you remember, Oh yeah, before you give in,
just remember we're coming back for your children.

And now for the performance. Thanks to Matthew for sharing this song with me. Warning: if you don't care for screaming hard core either, you will want to skip this and go right on to The Kinks.

* * * * *
The Kinks.

Here's what I'm knitting right now.

It's another Noro scarf, this time for a gift and this time actually knitted from Noro Silk Garden. Yeah, I know I talked up the Plymouth Boku a few days ago, but for this particular gift scarf the Boku didn't have the perfect colors. So I bit the bullet and went for the Noro. That yarn is a bit... problematic, though. Look at this.

The Kinks. All four balls kinked like that right from the skein. Grrrrrr. It is annoying to have to stop and untwist the yarn as I knit. My knitting technique is such that I twist S-twist yarns and untwist Z-twist ones as I knit. The Silk Garden is a Z-twist but my unconscious automatic untwisting doesn't seem to be happening with this yarn. Or, more likely, it is happening but the yarn is so freakin' overtwisted that my untwisting is undetectable.

I can find a lot to complain about in Noro yarns. The overtwisting, the vegetable matter, the extreme irregularities in the thickness, the sometimes weird color combinations, the occasional Blob (that's a technical term) of untwisted, unincorporated fiber. I think it shows an incredible lack of respect for the materials, for spinning technique, and for the knitter.

And yet, I am finding this stuff strangely compelling. After a while I got used to the irregularities, I forgot to notice the VM, and the occasional Blob™ became a charming feature. Oh, look how cute and fuzzy the yarn is there! Isn't that sweet?

All this is to say, last night I found myself over at eBay. Looks what is coming to live  at my house (temporarily; it is intended for another Christmas gift scarf):

times 2, and

times 2.

Oh, how we are tempted, and how easily we, er, I fall. And the falling is such fun.

Stuff, random.

Y'know the sci-fi plot about the person who wakes up one day to discover that about a gazillion years have passed since s/he went to sleep? I had a moment like that on Friday when I opened Bloglines. I had something upwards of 500 unread posts. WTF? After I worked up the courage to start clicking on some of them I found that Bloglines had decided to  pick up random numbers of posts dating back to January. Whew. I'm still working my way through. Down to 95 81 83 at this moment.

* * * * *

My favorite part of the parade yesterday was when an alert parent would spot me in my Shrek getup, nudge the 3-yo kidlet in front of her (it was almost always a mom doing the nudging; I guess the dads were more interested in the beer), and say, "Look, honey! It's Shrek!" And the kidlet would look and his or her little eyes would get big as saucers. Sweet.

Although I soon discovered that I should only go about one step toward the kidlet to wave. Any closer and said kidlet would be overcome with terror at the weird smiling lady in the box who was clearly intent on eating him/her.

* * * * *

 

We had a bit of fun making the books, too.

* * * * *

I took advantage of KnitPick's 40% off all books sale. Three books came to live at my house.

I don't knit lace. I have to intention to knit lace. Why I bought two books on lace knitting is beyond me. Clearly something is at work. Although I have to say that Victorian Lace Today is chock full of patterns, as many as one would normally find in two or three books.

"I don't understand why you did it, either."

* * * * *

Back when I was a sophomore in college in the late 60s (yeah, I'm older than dirt) I discovered Leonard Cohen. Had one album of his and played it to death. Then I got into harder rock and sort of forgot about him. When Closing Time hit the charts circa 1992 I smiled in remembrance but that was all. Ditto Hallelujah.

And then I found this on Scalzi's blog*.

Next thing I knew I was in iTunes downloading The Essential Leonard Cohen, apparently the equivalent of a 2-CD set. I've been listening to it constantly ever since because:

1. I have always been a sucker for a gravelly bass voice. I also happen to love the singing of Leo "Goose Farts on a Foggy Day" Kottke.
2. Cohen's lyrics are so wonderfully poetic  and obscure...
3. ...that the occasional [satirically?] trite song totally cracks me up. Ain't No Cure for Love starts out with a sax riff that would have been happy in 1962, although the 1962 version probably would not have contained the line, "I need to see you naked / In your body and your thoughts."

This YouTube of LC singing Hallelujah is pretty good, too, if you ignore the fact that he looks like a half-dead cross between Jeff Goldblum and Dustin Hoffman. And how the chorus can't quite manage to keep hidden behind the set.

* * * * *

Time to change the litter box.

* * * * *

Also time to shut down the 'puter. It's all fire and brimstone outside, dark as 4 pm on a November afternoon, except for all the, like, green. Thunderstorms a'comin'...

TTFN!

* Erika led me there a while back.

This is where I work.

Not. But I totally could. Not.

Shamelessly stolen lifted borrowed from blackbird. (You really should read her blog. She doesn't knit but is creative and thoughtful and ironic and funny. Plus, she and her husband ("tall gorgeous 6'3"") are writing a cookbook.

* * * * *

We are home. Slept in my own bed last night with big black fluffy kitty whilst stupid fluffy brown tabby kitty wandered around outside like a dope. Gonna take a shower in my own knobs-are-backwards shower right now. Then gonna go to the doctor to have her fix the Bite Of Unknown Origin on my left wrist that has said wrist swollen, hot, red, and very tender. Gonna stow the mountain of camping gear now residing in the middle of the living room. Yay, vacation! Yay, home!