Also, another Meme

Yes, it's a Monday two-fer. Two posts, to make up fer not posting for the last couple weeks...

I know I probably have a few readers (hello, family members!) who are thinking "What the heck is a meme?" It's just a little blog game where you answer questions about yourself. It's called a meme, because it's all about ME ME ME! :) They usually go by a little game of tag -- some blogger who reads your blog and who knows you also read their blog answers the meme, and then they tag you to answer next. So. I got tagged for this one by Kim.

Instructions: Remove the blog in the top spot from the following list and bump everyone up one place. Then add your blog to the bottom slot.

Woman Obsessed
strange little mama
Chef Messy
Knitter in Progress
Knitter Patter

What were you doing 10 years ago?
Living in Munich, Germany, in the Studentenstadt (Student City), in a dorm called Egon-Weber Haus (I think that's what it was called - we always called it EWH), adjacent to the English Garden. I lived on the fourth floor with a view out to the Gardens, and my dorm actually had a student-run disco in the basement that was open two nights a week. Cool, no? I was on a one-year study abroad program offered annually by my college, Lewis & Clark College, and it was the best thing I did in my entire college career. I studied German and math and drank lots of beer and ate chocolate and at great bakeries and made fantastic friends and generally had a wonderful time. In fact, as I looked through the program web page just now, I got positively homesick for it.

What were you doing 1 year ago?
One year ago I had just gotten engaged (which I no longer am). I had also barely started a new position at work, in a Supplier Relationship Management office (which I have since left when I got promoted to my latest job last October). I also had just barely put my house on the market for sale by owner, and was officially starting to move (which I sold, and then moved yet again in October). I was also running and lifting weights regularly, and was in the best shape of my adult life (which I no longer am, thanks to my knee injury). A lot can change in a year, eh? Wonder where I'll be next year...

What were you doing 1 hour ago?
Blogging.

List five creative things you want to achieve this year:
1. Five sounds like a lot at this point in my life... Finish Rogue finally (yes, Kim, I know...)
2. Finish my cowl.
3. Finish the pillowcase lace.
4. Cook something, anything, for a change.
5. Write more.

List five snacks you enjoy:
1. Rolos
2. Cheese
3. Chocolate chip cookies
4. All-Bran bars (they really are good!)
5. hummus and crackers

List five things you would do if money were no object:
1. Quit my job.
2. Take my dad to every neurological specialist I could until we figured out what causes his chronic pain and how to deal with it.
3. Full-time housekeeper.
4. Travel the world.
5. Hire a chef and personal trainer to get me back into the best shape of my adult life.

List five bad habits:
1. Not cleaning at all.
2. Staying up way too late for no good reason.
3. Chronically eating out, spending way too much money and eating way too much junk.
4. Interrupting people - I'm working on improving it.
5. Being just a little bit late.

List five things you like doing:
1. Knitting (duh)
2. Running (sometimes)
3. Spending time with friends and family
4. Reading
5. Lately, watching escapist TV -- it's probably sad, but true...

List five favorite gadgets:
1. Sidekick II (cell phone, e-mail, PDA, etc, all rolled into one)
2. DVR
3. computer
4. digital camera
5. LCD TV

Name one thing you like about yourself:

my brain

Tagged: Shannon, coz I haven't heard from you in a long time, and Moiraeknits, coz she has a new blog. Of course, feel free to ignore the tagging, if you are so inclined. :) Anybody else wanna be tagged?

Exhaustion

Exhaustion is the main thing that has been keeping me from both knitting and blogging lately. It's a very busy time for me at work, and so things have gotten a bit grim, with long hours and lots of stress. This all seems to have culminated in a nasty cold, which set in last Tuesday night. However, work has just been too busy to take any full days off with sick leave, so I managed half days Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was my bi-weekly day off (I have switched to an extended schedule the rest of the days in order to have one day off per pay period), but I went in to the office for a few hours anyway. And today is a federal holiday, but I think I'll probably go in for a few hours this afternoon as well. Whee! My ray of hope in all this is that the extreme busy-ness should slow down once my several major projects wrap up, with luck by the end of this month. They REALLY need to be done by the end of the month, in fact. (My job is to negotiate, award, and administer multi-million dollar sole-source contracts...no pressure...)

Anyhoo, what all this means for knitting is that Kim's Stashalong has been really easy for me lately -- it's not hard to refrain from buying yarn when you haven't even been doing much knitting or going near yarn shops very often. In fact, I had to leave town to get much knitting in. I was on a business trip to Fort Worth, Texas from January 30th through February 3rd, and you know what that means:


Airplane Knitting!

It's the classic airplane trinity -- knitting, lovely coffee beverage, and iPod Shuffle. I started a pair of Feather and Fan socks from Socks, Socks, Socks out of some gorgeous Apple Laine Apple Butter sock yarn that I had in my stash, which I bought direct from them on their website before they went to selling wholesale only (though I can't seem to find any retailers on the internet from whom you can now buy the yarn). The yarn is quite beautiful, and so I'm happy to have four skeins of it - this one in greens with sort of blues and purplish-browns, which I think is called something like camouflage. No, I just double-checked, and it's called "Army Surplus". It's 60% wool, 25% mohair, and 15% nylon. I also got a skein in a purple variegated colorway, another in a solid chocolate brown, and a fourth in a dark burgundy. It's quite nice to knit with.

Here's another shot, this one also from the plane ride home:


Now with a heel

Oh, yeah, I had The Da Vinci Code on the iPod, which I had never read before, and which makes a pretty good audiobook, I thought. I'm not a huge fan of audiobooks, but I may be converted when it comes to accompaniment for knitting.


Here's a sad sight

My parents gave me some gorgeous china for Christmas, and I purchased accent plates, a teapot, a creamer jug, and a sugar bowl to go along with it. They're all white with platinum accents, except for the accent plates, which are chocolate brown as well. As you can see, two of the accent plates, which were NOT packaged well, arrived in this very sad state. Two replacements are on order, but it was a rather sickening sight to open the box to this. However, I really do love the pattern, here's a closer view that shows it a little better:


This one nearly made it

In other non-knitting news, I did manage to get out for a snowshoeing excursion with some friends at the beginning of the month after I got back from Texas - we hiked up to a frozen waterfall. It really is incredible to have such fantastic access to the mountains literally in our back yards. Here's the only picture of me in which I didn't look completely awful:


I really do have hair, I promise

My friends, on the other hand, looked great:


Rhonda and Francis, with Rhonda's former co-worker whose name I have totally forgotten in the background

And, finally, I leave you with evidence of further knitting - I have been putting in a (very little) bit of work on my Greek Key Afghan, which is made from the oldest yarn in my stash. It looks awfully small here, but it is quite squished on the needles:


There really is a pattern in there somewhere...