This is not an original idea, I know, but I was inspired by Amy to check knitting books out of the library. I've had a university library card for years, but it's been over a decade since I've had a public library card. For someone as cheapskatey and booklovey as me, that's a little weird, I know. But I had no clue what a huge selection of knitting books are available from the library! Eeee! Here's what I've checked out so far: Debbie Bliss Home: Why so many patterns for non-home items? Only about half of the 30 patterns are for non-wearables. This makes me confused. And sad, because I really needed a new blender. Also, I'm irritated that Debbie only gives yarn requirements in Debbie Bliss brand yarn, without providing the yardage. Please, Deb. Do you think that's going to stop me from substituting KnitPicks yarn? I'll still substitute, but I'll substitute crabby because I'll have to look up the Debbie Bliss yarn specs. Gar. (Ooops, I have to edit this - Debbie does provide the yardages for her namesake yarns in the very beginning of the book. That's what I get for judging a book by its.... uh... patterns? Whatever.) The Knitting Experience 3 - Color: Pinch me, I'm dreaming and it's 1984. Wow, there are some fugly patterns in this book. Maybe not fugly, but dated. So, so dated. Back to the Future III dated. But, I have Sally Melville's other 2 Knitting Experience books, which I've always found to be a good general resource. So maybe there are some good intarsia and fair isle techniques lurking in here. Knitting Around: This is the first Elizabeth Zimmermann book I've read, and I love it! Talk about a creative approach to knitting. I especially love the idea of duet knitting, where two knitters sit opposite each other and simultaneously work in the round on a single piece. Of course, you've got to be on real intimate terms with your co-knitter, because you're close enough to practically taste each other's putrid coffee breath. Oh, don't pretend your breath smells like lilacs after drinking a triple vanilla breve. Maybe this technique should be reserved for knitting elephant sweaters. Folk Bags: Frankly, the pattern I like best (the Monk's Satchel) was printed in an old issue of Interweave Kints, so I don't have any further use for this book, really. Weekend Knitting: I've heard so much about this book from the ladies of LFP knits. Yeah, ladies! It's cool! There are a lot of good potential projects in here, it's kind of similar to Last Minute Knitted Gifts. I might consider buying this one for my permanent collection. A Treasury of Rowan Knits: Blagh! Ugly! Horrid! Did I say blagh yet? Interweave's Compendium of Finishing Techniques: Oh, yes I can see how this would be useful. I really appreciate the fact that it's spiral bound, and there are some really awesome edgings, cords, and braids. I was expecting it to be all about seaming (and there is a chapter on seams and joins), but it's much closer to Knitting on the Edge. Very nice, though.

... plus a stick of butter and a cup of heavy cream keeps the doctor in business. I made something tasty this weekend for the 12th annual St. Patrick's Day feast chez Pensive Frog. In my opinion, you have to have something really tasty for dessert to make up for the corned beef. This caramelized apple cake fits the bill. Everything about this recipe is really good, from the soft tart apples, to the mouthwatering caramel sauce, to the moist spicy cake. The best part is that you can do 95% of the work ahead of time, then mix the ingredients together right before dinner and pop it in the oven. A little over an hour later, and the cake it done, all warm, gooey, and ready to gobble down. That's why I don't have any pictures :)

Whee! I've made more progress on the purple bunny! The most important news may be the fact that I've named the bunny. He is Mr. Fluffybottom, and he is most decidedly British. While watching American Inventor last night (gawd, the tears on that show), I finished Mr Fluffybottom's ears and body, and sewed them all to his head. The seams look like crap, so I'm very seriously considering throwing Mr. Fluffybottom in the washing machine with a load of jeans, just to see what develops. I say, that sounds extreme. OK, in case it's not clear, Mr. Fluffybottom speaks in italics. So here's what Mr. Fluffybottom looks like now: Not bad, not bad. Except that when I looked back at the exemplar bunny on the Jess Hutch website, I realized that my bunny's face is not only upside-down, but all the features are in the wrong place! Dear me, this is like a bad Emergency Vets/Dr. 90210 crossover. Luckily, the magic of Photoshop makes it possible to see what Mr. Fluffybottom should look like: Step aside, Ace, America's got a new popinjay to idolize! Unfortunately, I simply don't have the cash to pay for reconstructive surgery, and until I knit Mr. Fluffybottom's arms, there's not much hope that he could earn enough money doing odd jobs to pay for the surgery either. There are no odd jobs, only odd people, er, bunnies! Anyway, we'll just see how everything turns out. Oh, and in case you were wondering what that weird brown thing is in the background of Mr. Fluffybottom's before-and-after pics, it's my ceramic ET lamp wearing a skein of Bernat Disco as a wig. Speaking of odd bunnies...

I finally finished my first Waving Lace sock, and was much chagrined to discover that it's about an inch too long. I don't have dainty little feet, but even so, the foot of the sock shouldn't be longer than the leg, if the leg goes to mid-calf. Sorry, no pics. This is a blog, not a freakshow. I'd have to charge you all a quarter to see the freakish sock, and I'm not sure how to set up PayPal to deal with that. Anyway, the helpful ladies of LFP knits quickly came up with a solution for me at our last knit night - simply undo the toe, take out a repeat, and finish 'er up all over again. Sigh. But I was finished. But they're right. I'm still a little peeved at the sock, so I set it aside in favor of something fun, and seasonal! A bunny! Oh, I've been wanting to make this cutie for ages, and since Easter is quickly hopping towards us, I figured the time was finally right. I didn't have any pink yarn, but I figured purple was close enough. So, I cast on for my purple bunny on Tuesday, under the watchful eye of the LFP knitters. This pattern is kind of fun, and very mysterious, because it's unclear what you're making until it's made. It didn't take too long to finish the head. And then it was time to sew on the face. Let's talk about the face. Regular readers of this blog and those of you who attended Tuesday's meeting of LFP knits will not be surprised to learn that I sewed the bunny's face on upside-down. That's starting to be my thing. Since you have to sew on the face before actually completing the head, it's not quite clear which end is up. I sort of assumed that it wouldn't matter. But ultimately, it matters very much. This is clearly the bottom, the scraggly, holey, warty neck that needs to be hidden by sewing it firmly to the body. It's even got a gooey trailing spinal cord! While this is clearly the top, with even decreases and smooth spiralling stitches shining brightly towards the heavens. Luckily, because I forgot to sew the eyes on, I was able to just turn the head upside down and sew the eyes on the chin, as it were. But now the bunny is frowning. It's an evil bunny. But darn it, I was NOT going to start over and re-sew the face. So it's a bad bunny, so what?

So y'all remember the gummy bears, right? The gummy bears I volunteered to eat for science (and yarn money)? Well, I was actually interviewed by a TV crew doing a story on xylitol, and I just got a link to some video of my appearance. The result? A little disappointing, I think. I answered lots of questions on camera, but the only footage that made the cut was three seconds of me chewing a gummy bear. They didn't show me spitting it out a minute later - a glistening green gob still entirely recognizable as a bear. I'm telling you, those things were stale. If you look closely, you can tell I'm about to bust up laughing. That's because the cameraman was muttering, "Keep chewing.... keep chewing...." The full glamorous video can be found here. I know, keep my day job.

Today has been a little crappy at work - so crappy, in fact, that I looked up "Ides of March" on Wikipedia to see if today was metaphysically preordained to be tough. Nope, the Ides are March 15, so it's all downhill until Wednesday. The point of all this is that if you are having a crappy day at work too, get thee to Spamusement, to read some comics based on genuine spam subject lines. I've seen this site before, but today it made me laugh for reals. I've been a little enamored of comics in the past few weeks for some reason. I think drawing and writing comics might be a viable outlet for my pent-up creativity, if not for the sobering fact that I can't draw.

Maybe you should try IPCO Creamy Snuff, available in India. This tobacco toothpaste guarantees that "before long you cannot avoid experiencing that ethereal feeling of freshness and calmness like you have never felt before" Did I mention that it's black? Move over, Aquafresh.

So as I was watching the Olympics yesterday (yes, I mean yesterday. I've got about 73 hours of coverage backlogged on my TiVo) rooting for Bode Miller to win his first of certainly several gold medals (OK, that was a joke, I'm not that far behind) and it hit me that I just don't find the Olympics as exciting as I used to. When I was about twelve, I LOVED the Olympics. LOVED. I even loved watching ice skaters complete the compulsory figures. Now, I just get a little "eh" feeling. Perhaps it started when coverage of women's slalom was interrupted to bring us 30 minutes of in-depth analysis of Michelle Kwan's groin injury. Maybe I'm a little irritated by atheletes who fancy themselves celebrities (see the aforementioned Mr. Miller). Where's Eddie the Eagle, and the Jamaican bobsled team? How long has it been since we've seen something as spectacular as the Miracle on Ice? OK, I was too young to remember that one, but I saw the movie. Even the sad stories aren't as good anymore - remember Dan Jansen falling on the ice, just hours after learning that his sister had died of leukemia? Those were atheletes you could really root for. And I'm a person who hates organized sports (they're hurting America, people!). Anyway, whenever I start to feel too jaded, I just pull out my own little piece of Olympic history. Brian Boitano, baby.

Even though being in grad school is difficult, and requires a lot of underpaid work, I manage to keep myself pretty darn happy by indulging in hobbies like knitting (duh), cooking, and reading. This little meme is nice because I get to show off how literate I am (hah). OK, at least I get to show off that I've figured out how to italicize things on my blog (props to me). So here goes. Meme instructions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won't, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you've never even heard of. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling Life of Pi - Yann Martel Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon Lord of the Flies - William Golding Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 1984 - George Orwell Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut Angels and Demons - Dan Brown Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk Neuromancer - William Gibson

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

The Secret History - Donna Tartt A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman

Atonement - Ian McEwan

(The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon) The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath Dune - Frank Herbert So this list says a few things about me. First, yes, I am a GIRL, and I've never read anything by someone named Austen or Bronte. I'm not quite sure how that happened, actually! I did finally see the movie Emma last month, so perhaps I'm on my way. I'm currently receiving a lot of pressure to read Catch-22, so that's probably next on my list. I just finished Cloud Atlas earlier this week (GREAT read), and I'm currently into Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. I hardly have any of these books on my bookshelf because I mainly get books from the UW library, and I don't have a lot of space for storing many books at my house. I don't know if it's allowed, but I'd add a few more books to this list if I could: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke someone always has this checked out! The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett And I've seen several other people's responses to this meme, and I can't believe that anyone would designate a book as something they wouldn't read. Now I never jumped on the Harry Potter bandwagon, but never say never, baby. Except maybe War and Peace in the original Russian. But that's what retirement is for, right? And sorry, even though I know how to italicize, I can't seem to get this list formatted correctly. We all have our limitations. And inappropriate line breaks.

Oy, why is it that I'm always missing things? February 28 was Pancake Day, and I forgot all about it. My first pancake day celebration was in February 1996, when I was spending my junior year abroad in England. I had already endured several months of culinary strangeness from my flatmates, and had been witness to myriad crimes against food. (Salad cream is scary enough as it is, do you really have to stub out cigarettes in puddles of the stuff?) Don't get me started on the used teabag collection. Although everyone knew how everyone else took their toast. I liked it "gently brown, no beans". Anyway, I was the only person in my flat who really cooked, so I was surprised to enter the kitchen one afternoon and find all my flatmates in a frenzy of stirring and frying what appeared to be... pancakes. Sure, they were using a mix, but it was still cooking. Pancake day! What a wonderful tradition. If you don't want to read the Wikipedia article linked to above, I'll tell you that Pancake Day is also Shrove Tuesday, the day before the start of Lent, aka Mardi Gras. So, since you're supposed to fast during Lent, all your eggs and milk would spoil unless turned into sweet, sweet pancakes and gobbled right down. Apparently the traditional toppings are powdered sugar and lemon juice, and the pancakes themselves are more crepe-like than American-style pancakes. All the former British colonies celebrate Pancake Day, except the United States! Are we really that jaded that we can't celebrate Pancake Day? We'd rather lift our shirts in exchange for plastic beads than eat a pancake or two. Oy. Can you keep a secret? I'd lift my shirt for pancakes. Girls Gone Wild - Pancake Edition