Jennifer -- [adjective]: Extremely extreme! 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

How long has it been since I've posted anything meme-esque? Well, there ya go.

So I woke up this morning with swollen cords--from a combination of eating weird and acidic foods yesterday, my multivitamin and the fluoride rinse I used last night. Hooray for uneven onset! Anyway, I'm home from work today, on a diet of milk, toast and apples. And it kind of throws my schedule off, because I was supposed to have tomorrow off to practice but now I'm not going to do any actual singing for the next few days. Grrrrr...

I have learned a few things today, though:

1. Did you know that Mischa Barton and Lindsay Lohan have the same publicist? (Apparently she's a busy lady today.) And I don't know what to do with this awful knowledge, except to share it with you all.

2. I should not watch DIY Network on my days off. Suddenly I want to make my own greeting cards with stamps and pretty paper. And make tiny vases out of old silver-plated knife handles. Seriously, it is a bad thing for me. I have enough trouble staying on task without being tempted to make lamps out of melted Mardi Gras beads... At least I can rest easy knowing I will never be interested in scrapbooking. Well, at least not until I have kids.

But speaking of craftiness, look what Grandmama made me!


It came in the mail on Saturday, unheralded (!), with a note saying she'd been working on it since FEBRUARY (!!) and that it was for our queen-sized bed (!!!). The woman is a crochet dynamo! Here's a closeup of one of the roses:


It's really lovely. She did make it with a very scratchy Red Heart-ish acrylic, but putting it through the wash (with many dryer sheets) has helped. I need to introduce the lady to Caron Simply Soft! :)


And there's one sleeve done on the tank. It's a basic feather-and-fan pattern--I sewed the side seam and picked up the armhole stitches, but am working it as if flat so it'll be open on the top. (With dpns, since they were on hand--which is not very fun since there are forty-ish stitches on each one. It's not portable, either--so I started a WW2 scarf over the weekend.) I doubled the picked-up stitches with YO's (except in the underarm, where nobody will see it anyway), so each sleeve is nearly 200 stitches around. It took me several days to finish that first sleeve--but I tried it on once I finished it and I'm pretty pleased with the results! Before I did the side seams it seemed like it had turned out too high-cut, but I think it's going to be just perfect (fingers crossed).

The weekend was relatively uneventful--save a phone call from Helen (!!!!) and an X-rated conversation with R. about various marital aids. Also, Mark and I saw The Waitress, which was really good. We discussed how Jeremy Sisto may be getting typecast into playing psychopaths...but then I looked him up on IMDB. Yeah, we'd forgotten about that little TV movie he made with Debra Messing where he plays Jesus...

The neighbors probably think I'm insane now--I literally howled through this video.



My high esteem for Weird Al is well-established, but this one is just golden. I came to grips with the Kirk v. Picard quandary myself some time ago...I have to choose Picard as a better captain, because Kirk was always such a hothead. (Riker being his equivalent in ST:TNG.) But they're both dead sexy...if it came down to it, I'd have them battle Rochambeau style. Best of three. :)


Still plugging away on yon Shapely Tank...I had more left on the back than I thought. But there's really only a few rows left. Patience, young padawan. (Incidentally, that is the actual color of the yarn. I still haven't gotten the hang of this camera thing yet. The stuffed dog is Buddha, my spirit animal. And the orange book behind the knitting? My Messiah score, from which I'm learning the three popular alto arias. The low-tessitura coloratura is really challenging me... Anyway, this is what I should be doing instead of blogging or knitting, or blogging about knitting.)

But wait...what's that?!


Dude, we have achieved tomatoes. (Though these may be the only ones we see--every year we struggle to keep the tomatoes watered, but it's kind of a losing battle when it stays over 95 degrees for six weeks every summer...)

Happy Memorial Day! Make a scarf for a little old man who fought in The Big One, why don'tcha?

I suppose I've been able to dodge the bullet for too long...but now my brother has inadvertently put my mother into Grandma Overdrive. He and his girlfriend went to Dave and Buster's and got a composite picture showing what their baby would look like. The result was surprisingly un-creepy, and looked a whole lot like one of Jeff's baby pictures. When my mother saw it, it was as if a switch flipped in her brain. She's even starting to worry about the six hundred miles between her and her future grandchildren, should my brothers stay in New York. (And Mark and I obviously won't be a two-hour drive from her forever, either.) Blech. She did say that there wasn't any pressure on me--and she knows about my lady issues, and that it won't be easy for us--but still, blech.

So tomorrow is the day I would've debuted as Madama Butterfly... My friend S. is singing it, and she's awesome, so I have no sour grapes about it or anything. But I wasn't exactly looking forward to seeing the show, knowing what could have been if I hadn't changed voice types. I think I'm finally at the point where I can see the show without being upset about it it. (Just in time!)

This Week in Knitting: I'm almost done with the back of the tank top--just have to do the straps. There'll be a few rows in garter stitch for the edging...and then I need to start thinking about these alleged flutter sleeves. I have the Vogue Stitchionary with all the lace patterns, so it'll be a matter of trying out different things. I may do something with drop stitches and increases--so it'll bell out while still being sheer-ish. Still have to work that out...

In case you didn't notice, I'm making a few formatting changes around here. I had been using the blog as a sort of homepage, with links to the blogs I read and stuff--but sometimes my tastes change, you know? So I'm using Bloglines now. (And you can subscribe to my blog now! Why I didn't do that before, I don't know. Not that I have some wide fanbase, but it's good to know when a blog is updated, right?)

Back to our regularly scheduled blog...

I finally met Sandra's little girl the other day--and she is just gorgeous! I wasn't sure if Mommy would want me to post the baby's picture, but at least I can post one of her dog...



His name is Gustav--a Boxer who's about seventy pounds of mush. Apparently he's a little down about all the attention the baby gets. (Wuv meeee!) Poor guy!



Grrr... I was so excited to have gotten up to the short rows...but despite the fact that I did indeed do the math correctly per the formula in the pattern, I really don't need so many short rows! Don't hold me to it, but I think it'll be 28 instead of 72 (which adds four extra inches instead of ten...no wonder it wasn't working! I mean I'm curvy, but I'm not a pituitary freak!) So I had to frog fifty-ish short rows, plus a few extra since I knit the body too long, and here we are at eight short rows. Yay stockinette. On size 5s.

Obligatory health update: Three shots down, three to go. I think the cycle has finally stopped--and luckily the weight gain really has stopped as well, at twelve pounds. Still--who gains twelve pounds in a month?! I know it's not my fault, obviously, but I feel like I need to wear a sandwich board that says, "I'm not lazy--I have reproductive issues!". Hmm. Like an "Excuse our mess!" sign, only for my body. I mean, it's bad enough that having these problems made me gain 50 pounds...that the ostensible cure of one of these problems makes me gain even more weight is just adding insult to injury. Bleck. That and my face is like an oilfield, and I think the hot flashes and dehydration/contact lens discomfort have started as well--though they're thankfully not as bad as I thought they'd be. But my last shot is in August, and if all goes well, by Labor Day I should be back on the Pill. (Will I immediately lose the twelve pounds? That sure would be nice. Stay tuned.)

By the way, my brother Jeff's college graduation is tomorrow. It took him a little long to decide on a career (he's almost 29), but his starting salary with an engineering degree is commensurate with my husband's newspaper job--with fifteen years' experience. Kinda makes it all worth it, hmm? So shout out to Jeff! (If only my other brother could learn from his example, and move out of my grandmother's former sewing room. Grandma needs her crafting space back!)

One last note: Helen, if you're out there, EMAIL ME!

What is my Jeopardy! audition?
(/nerd)

It was pretty painless, honestly. There were 15 people in my group--half of whom were lawyers or in law school, unsurprisingly. I did do some studying for the 50-question test, but nothing I studied actually came up--it really wasn't bad. I think I got 44 or 45 out of 50 correct. They did talk to us about the buzzer--there's a person offstage who activates the buzzers once Alex has finished reading the question, and a light comes on alerting you about the activation. (And you get locked out for a short time if you buzz in early.) We got to do a mock game in groups of three, where we played a few categories with the buzzers and had an interview. As Mark predicted, they asked me to sing a little. (I sang the beginning of "Voi lo sapete".) I have to say, the producer-types running the auditions were totally my kind of people. Fast-talking, funny, snarky but not mean... a lot like the costume and makeup people I've worked with.

They've selected 2500 people from the online tests, and 400 of those will be called to be on the show. So I may or may not hear back sometime within the next 18 months. The funny thing about all this is, I'm not doing this for the money (though it would pay for a few coachings, hmm?). I'm doing it because it's the Nerd Olympics. Bragging rights for the rest of my effing life. Seriously. That, and it's been my dream since elementary school.

There was a bit of travel drama (maintenance on the Metro track that almost made me late), but otherwise the rest of the trip went well. We had dinner with Mark's friends in Maryland (their four-year-old son is adorable and precocious), and had brunch Sunday with my aunt and her boyfriend. We visited the National Cathedral before we left--among the four of us only my aunt had been there before, and it was really incredible. (They just finished a parking garage under the cathedral...it's really an engineering marvel.) A quick trip to IKEA (oxymoron)--where we bought matching nightstands, since Mark was fed up with my tossing my expensive eyeglasses onto the floor every night--and we headed home.

On the way home we had a pretty intense discussion (read: I cried and stuff)--Mark's feeling kind of down about his career, and wants to make a really big change. He's not sure yet whether that involves going back to school for something or another... But honestly, I'm getting really tired of living in flux. I've backed out of several commitments over the last eight months because I thought we would be moving. And I have a possible teaching opportunity--which would pay significantly more than my office job--that would involve being available locally at least until the end of the year, and I can't commit to that, even though Mark might end up going to law school or something. This is very frustrating. And I know it's difficult to change careers--and that rejection sucks--but I deal with this stuff ALL THE TIME with my singing. So maybe I'm just used to it, and I need to cut Mark some slack because he doesn't have my thick skin. (Seriously, he was rejected for one job, and he was all upset about it. Sorry boo, you'd never cut it as an opera singer...) Anyway, I'll do my best to help him find his new calling--and whatever he decides, we'll work on it all together.

Sweater news: slow but steady progress. I'm finally up to those 72 short rows, in any case...

Embarrassing Confession Time! (Fun for the entire family.) I just saw a commercial for Buzz Ballads...and I liked almost all of the songs. (In my defense, they do include Tori Amos's cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit".) I believe it was Dr. Evil who said, "There's nothing worse than an aging hipster." What kind of monster have I become?!

In calmer news, Reduce Reuse Recycle is finished!



It is very sturdy, considering there's a can of salmon and a box of pasta and a bunch of bananas in there.



And there's the beginning of the next project. (The color is kind of off...in real life it's average baby blue.) I got a great deal on some lot-end sport weight yarn the other day, and I already had a pattern in mind for it: the Shapely Tank Top from White Lies Designs. I've been thinking about designing fluttery sleeves, and this pattern could benefit from it so it can be more work-appropriate. But it'll take a while before I get to sleeves. Sport weight yarn on size 5 needles (yes, it calls for size 6 but I knit loose)--and count 'em thirty-six wrapped stitches on each side for the bust short rows. On the bright side, by the time I finish this it'll be the Fourth of July--and I'll have two months of ninety degree-plus weather during which this sweater will come in extremely handy.

Jeopardy! audition is tomorrow! Wish me luck. Does watching The Tudors count as studying British royal history? Where else would I learn about Saint Thomas More? (Though he was not nearly as yummy in real life as he is portrayed by Jeremy Northam...)

Knitting updates...


There's Reduce Reuse Recycle from this month's MagKnits. I ran out of brown bags, but I got a whole bunch of them from my coworkers today so I should be able to finish, and may even make another. My only complaint: the plastic is a little hard on your hands. But if that's thirty shopping bags that don't hit the landfill, isn't it worth it?



And there's the steering wheel cover, which I have dubbed Super-kawaii (which is "super cute in Japanese!" for the non-Gwen Stefani fans). It's too pink and pastel and fluffy not to remind me of a Sanrio character. I did have to frog the whole thing the first time out (not big enough!), but it only took a few hours to make... If you look closely you will see 1. the huge crack in my windshield; 2. I have 180,000 miles on my car. Wunderbar.

The Jeopardy! audition grows nearer and nearer... I've re-memorized the Constitutional Amendments in order (I guess the 1994 cramming session for Chucky LaRockyalikeahurricane's class didn't stick so well as you'd think) and know my way pretty well around South America, Southeast Asia and Africa, but I do need to work more on British royal history and, well, anything that used to be Soviet or a Soviet satellite. I get especially confused with the former Yugoslavia. Too many tiny countries! I just hope I do well enough to pass the preliminary test--I think the interview section shouldn't be a problem!

I saw this on television, but had completely forgotten about it!

What's A Ho | Send To Friends | Animated Movies at JibJab

The best part is that Ken totally did that on purpose! Did you notice the other two contestants were in the red? I may have to read his book.

This made my day yesterday...



On a related note, I've decided to quit reading PerezHilton--not exactly empowering to women there, hmm? (Versus, say, Go Fug Yourself, which is written by women I think I'd totally bond with in real life.)

By the way, it appears my Lupron-induced weight gain has stalled at around twelve pounds, but I think the hot flashes and dry eyes have started...Blech.

Steering wheel cover is done! It's almost Hello Kitty-cute. I'll post a picture tomorrow. So now I'm cutting strips of plastic bags ad nauseum...

New Magknits! Yay! And they have a plastic bag pattern! (There was one featured on an episode of Knitty Gritty once, but I couldn't get into it. This one is really cute, though. I love how the designer made it striped!) Being more eco-responsible was a New Year's resolution of mine, and so far so good--I've been using reusable bags for some of our grocery shopping (and Costco doesn't have bags, all the better), but we need to do more. We do recycle the shopping bags we do bring home, but that's not enough. (This article opened my eyes a bit.) So I think this will be my next project.

Well, actually, my very next project--which I will start this afternoon--is a steering wheel cover. Dude, it is currently 92 degrees here, which I believe is a record high. (Beating the global-warming dead horse...yes, dearie, we GET it!) And it's a dry heat (did I just say that?), unusual for this area, but that sun is hella hot and my steering wheel is like a frying pan. (Growing up, my parents had a flame red '76 Toyota Celica hatchback--actually a pretty awesome car, even if you don't like Scotchtown-mobiles--that had black vinyl seats that would literally burn your legs in the summer. I recall my parents putting down an afghan across the seat so our chubby little legs wouldn't be burned. See, full circle with the fiber arts!) And reminiscient of the plastic bag, I've tried a few steering wheel cover patterns before, but none have kept my interest. Plus I want to make mine with some leftover fun fur... So there will be some experimentation involved. So today it's fun with fun fur, then the plastic bag project (which will take a while--perhaps I can enlist Mark to help me cut bags), and much 2x2 ribbing on the Cathode in the interim.

Singing notes (nerd!): I had a great coaching yesterday. My coach wants me to learn Fricka's aria (or is it a narrative? whatevs) from Die Walkuere--stressing that I am not too young for Wagner--and she totally agreed with R.'s career advice--and even suggested people to contact. Other than the Wagner, I have a few other things I'm planning to work on, including this amazing aria from Pique Dame--in Russian, of course, not Italian! (But isn't Cossotto friggin' fabulous?!)