Welcome to the World!

Well, the newest member of our family was born yesterday and is doing very well. I can't wait until next month when Chris and I get to meet both Baby Grace and Baby Cole! Until then Grammie promises me that she'll give the babies extra snuggles from their Aunt Katie.

Just in Time for Summer to Come . . .

the sweater's done!

Pictures will follow. But I just wanted to share. I've also finished the bag I'm working on (which means I need to start some new stuff--what to do next?)--it just needs to be felted and it'll be ready to use. The felting process will require the use of hot water.

Which I did not have over the weekend since my water heater broke and flooded the floor of my closet. I found out about it when I got home and found a note on my door from the maintenance guy. Unless maintenance guys have their own form of ESP so that they just know when stuff breaks, I'm assuming that it leaked through the ceiling onto my downstairs neighbor. So with the water flooding my closet floor where all my shoes live and the water leaking onto the downstairs folks' closet where I imagine their clothes live--there's at least a few people in our apartment complex who didn't have a great day.















Do not be concerned. No yarn was harmed in the flooding of this closet.


However, all but two pairs of the shoes survived as well as all but two purses, a pair of gloves that I'm sure I won't miss, and some random papers that I really hope aren't important. Not bad at all. But, silly as it sounds, I was kind of sad to lay to rest one of those pairs of shoes.

Bye-bye cute shoes.

Seems a Bit Familiar

Last night Chris and I watched the movie American Splendor. It was a great, quirky, true-story film starring Paul Giamatti as Harvey Pekar, a guy working as a file clerk who makes a name (though little money) for himself as a comic-book writer. Throughout the film, you see scenes of Harvey’s life played out by the actors and then commented on by this guy, the real Harvey Pekar.




In the late 70s this man turned his little daily-life moments into a comic book, much like many of us now turn our little daily lives into blogs. (So in the spirit of Harvey and a daily-ness kind of moment . . . ) I was amused and caught by surprise at how much the real Harvey’s appearance closely resembles that of my neighbor, who sits outside his apartment door in a green plastic lawnchair approximately sixteen times a day to smoke a cigarette while conducting some combination of the following actions: hacking, coughing, commenting and/or complaining about life to whoever walks by, dragging his chair back and forth from the railing, sliding his slippered feet along the crack in the floor, and muttering and/or yelling at his girlfriend through the closed door. Being right across the hall from him, I am lucky enough to hear this strange little montage on a regular basis. Sometimes it really annoys me, sometimes I don’t even notice it, sometimes it sends me into a tailspin of wonderment about the human condition and the psychology of our actions, and sometimes it just leaves me bemused at this strange little place where I live.

Upon a Spring Day

I love that it's starting to feel like spring, that I see just a little more of that daylight stuff each afternoon, that I can go out walking after work without having to bundle up at all. Because of this new ability to work out more easily, I've begun the annualish decision to start working out again. I know that this feeling comes in starts and stops, but if it doesn't at least start then it'll never stick. I don't have a lot of extra money so I'm going the simple route, but sometimes if I don't put any money into something I feel less motivation to continue with it. Silly, I know, but there's definitely some psychology working there. So I bought some resistance bands at Target today to do some home-workout toning. And of course I'm planning to keep up the walking/jogging.

I've still been knitting my Olympic sweater, but once the olympics finished and I didn't have a definite goal in mind--I developed knitting ADD, wherein I have about four different knit projects going at once. This is good in that I don't get bored and whatever I'm in the mood for is at the ready, but it also takes much longer to get any of them finished. But, as Johnny pointed out, if you're only working on what you really want to be doing then the quality will be that much better. I like this outlook and sincerely wish I could apply it to all things in life in general and at work in specific. Alas . . .

I'll leave you with a funny for the week. I found this on my door a few nights ago, left by one of my neighbor friends: