my feet

Check it out, my feet went to the Grand Canyon and made friends with a raven:

inauguration pics

We stood right in front of the Washington Monument. It's a good spot - it's on a hill, so you can see the Capitol.


Our view while waiting for the festivities to get underway:
(The Capitol is the building in the middle, a mile away. Those trees are blocking the dome.) Our view at 12:05 p.m.:


So many tacky t-shirts, so little cash:

after!

Look, it's my new office! It's not totally finished - it's probably going to get kind of a wall-like thing on the left side (maybe going up as high as the big shelf that is there) with some more shelves on it. Also, I'm getting a laptop, so the computer situation will change. Also, I will put stuff on the shelves. Oh, and the desk making the "L" is just my old desk - it's going to be a new one that matches the other new one and may also be on wheels, so I can get it out of the way when people come over. Anyway, isn't my dad awesome?

you'll wind up in some factory

Yesterday I had lunch with J.Chu in a town immortalized in an R.E.M. song. After lunch we wandered over to the public library, which took us past the new temporary ice skating rink she'd mentioned.

I was watching people clump around on it and thought, there's something wrong with that ice.

See that plastic with the crenellated edge? That's the ice. So, it's not so much "ice" as it is "plastic." People were skating on it with real skates and everything. Totally weird. I think this supports the arguments for not going back to Rockville, at least not if you're interested in skating on ice.

hit by an office tsunami

Here's a "during" picture of my home office corner:

Wait, that picture makes it look way too orderly. Let's go stand behind the desk and check out the rest of the room:

Ok, that's more like it.

testing again

This time, with an attachment!

This is a good "before" picture of my desk corner.

UPDATE: Hey! It totally worked! That's good to know.

books, books, books, books, books

Tonight I stopped by Borders to see if there was anything I wanted to use a coupon on. Conclusion: no. I am all about libraries these days. But I also needed to do some book research, so I poked through the science and history sections for a while.

My goal: to find a wildly successful book of recent years that is similar to my book idea, so I can mention it in the proposal and editors will say, "What?!? *We* could have the Seabiscuit of hot air ballooning? Why, that's fantastic news! Give this woman a giant advance today!" I found a number of books that seemed a little bit similar in different ways, but mostly I had fun using my cell phone to take pictures of book covers. I have a lot of pictures like this:

I've been meaning to read Cod for ages. (No, really! I blogged about it!)

cake

Tonight I went to E.Be's and N.Hu's for dinner. It was a lovely meal and was followed by this German chocolate cake:


Bold statement by Safeway, huh? I mean, they're really throwing down.

I'm not going to swear it was the most moist cake I've ever had, but it was pretty moist. And it was tasty. Sure, a Safeway cake has a lot of ingredients that aren't found in nature, but the food engineers know what they're doing. The final product tastes good.

I would not recommend eating this

The week between the shows we don't have rehearsal - we're just supposed to, you know, not totally forget the show. On the Wednesday night some of the 20- and 30-somethings (the "aging teens") got together to make:


...a gingerbread model of the set. I made the base out of Rice Krispie treat (which I'd never made before, but let me tell you, not difficult), then we piled pieces of gingerbread from a bunch of gingerbread-house-making kits, then had way too much fun adding people. This is the "Chasse-Galerie" sequence, which included multiple flying canoes (here represented by tootsie rolls).

We made it for display at the cast party, where it was a big hit. You can see a much better picture of the final product on facebook, complete with tags.

cross-stitch scarf

Here's another knitting project:


A few weeks ago I was admiring a cool sample scarf in a stitch I'd never seen before at a store in the neighborhood. The woman who had knitted it wandered by and told me what book she'd gotten it out of. I considered buying the book, but it was $18 and I'd just been laid off, and, well, it seemed like a dumb way to use my savings. So imagine how clever I felt when I checked the local library catalogs and found out that D.C. and Montgomery County each had dozens of copies! This is the book, if you want to try it yourself. You knit it by crossing stitches over - you reach around the first stitch on the needle, knit the second stitch, knit the first stitch, then pull them both off. It makes more sense in the book.

I was really very pleased with myself for thinking of the library thing. I normally don't get library books, because I find they lead inexorably to fines. Now that I have lots of free time and can actually make it to libraries during their opening hours, I'm giving the library another try.

I gave this scarf to my older stage kid and made another one out of the same yarn for his stage little brother. So as not to incite inter-kid jealousy, we're supposed to sneak presents to the parents, not give them directly to the kids. I did that, being a good rule-follower, but it does kind of take away the fun part of the gift-giving, you know?

kitties: photographic evidence

This is the post-surgery cat I'm checking on this week:


She's all, why did you pick me up? I'm tired. The staples are fine. Put me back in the tent. Of course, since she's saying all this while purring madly, I didn't take it personally.

My pictures of the other cat mostly look like this:


Everyone else may hate crocs, but Sisyphus the cat lurrrrves them. They are but a blank canvas on which he can spread his cat hair and dander.

not the emerald city

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend who works here:


Look how shiny the lobby is!

PBS is in a neighborhood called Crystal City, an area of office-building hell near National Airport. I guess I'd never gotten off the metro there before, because I was quite surprised by the vast underground network of weird shopping areas (discount perfume! ugly clothes! Burger King!) that connects the bottom of all the office buildings. It reminded me of the Warsaw train station, which also has a vast underground network of weird shopping areas. The Warsaw one has way better food, though. (There's good food in Crystal City, but it's above ground.)

bed

This is a hospital bed:


You want to know the best thing about this hospital bed? Nobody's in it. My dad is home now and he's fine. Yayyyy.

bertuccing

One of the great joys of the Christmas show is going out afterward. As if it weren't exhausting enough to spend a couple of hours getting dressed, putting on makeup, warming up, then three more hours performing, we get out of costume and meet up at a nearby chain Italian restaurant that is never quite prepared for us, even though they know we're coming, and we order food and we sing really loud. I kind of blew out my voice last Saturday night. Heh. Anyway, here's a picture:

It's really nice. It's not the best singing you'll ever hear, but it's energetic and everyone has a good time. And comes together through singing. Which is kind of what we're all about.

knit, then, wherever you may be

Like I said, yarn is expensive. A few weeks ago I found a sweater pattern that I wanted to make. Patterns are usually written for a particular yarn. You can substitute, of course, but it happens that the store up the street from me sells the yarn. I checked, and the yarn for this sweater would've cost $64. Uh, I could buy a better sweater for a lot less. Also, I just got laid off.

I asked my facebook friends how to get cheap yarn. One suggested a cheap brand but said, also, it feels cheap and it wears cheap. Then another said: buy thrift store sweaters and unravel them. I'd read about this online before but hadn't actually heard of anyone who'd tried it. So I read some tutorials and hit the thrift store.

Next thing I knew, I had 800-ish yards of baby blue cashmere and Swallowed My Flea had a new baby boy. I found a pattern online and knit for basically a week straight. I used circular needles so it didn't take up much space and carried my work in a little cloth bag so I could hide it in corners backstage during the Christmas show. I took it to the hospital (my dad was in the hospital - he's fine now) and knitted for hours. I knitted at restaurants. I knitted on the metro. And behold:

Totally cute cashmere baby blanket for less than $5 of materials. Aww yeah.

car yarn

Late last month I went shopping (at the yarn store, which I no longer go to so often, 'cause yarn? expensive!) and parked across the street from my car's twin. It's a '93 car, so you don't see them that often. I felt I should commemorate the occasion with a photograph.

It even has the obnoxiously dark tinting my car used to have, until I discovered that DC does not allow such dark tinting.

still obsessed

Don't worry - I may not have mentioned it lately, but be assured that I'm still knitting obsessively.

I made this wacky hat for She Gre:

The yarn comes from this awesome Japanese company. Noro makes really lovely hand-dyed yarn in all kinds of interesting color combinations, and there's a store nearby that carries a bunch of their stuff. She Gre says she gets many compliments.

This hat is for one of my former colleagues:

The gray is alpaca and the blue/yellow is another Noro yarn, doing its color-changing thing. Super annoying, though - so I started at the bottom of the hat, right, and the blue was a nice contrast with the gray alpaca. Then the blue started changing color and I realized it was going to change to gray. Which, uh, not so much with the contrast. I decided to cut it and jump to the next color, and I'm not as into the yellow. But anyway.

That hat took me two days and this scarf:

...took me a month. I think I just got bored with it (do one stitch, repeat for five straight feet of fabric). Anyway, it's done now and can make its way to its rightful owner.

bye-bye, employer

Today was my last day of work. It was kind of uneventful. I basically, like, left. (Well, I stayed until 4:30, but a lot of that time was hanging out and talking to J.Ber and Barkley.) It was sad saying goodbye to people, but on the whole, I'm happy.

Since I feel this should be illustrated with a photograph, here's some of the detritus I tossed last week:

glasses and dirty clothes

I lost my glasses five or six weeks ago. I figured they were somewhere in my apartment, but I hadn't seen them, and my old glasses weren't exactly the right prescription, and I'd never used my vision benefit that's about to run out, so finally this week I ordered a new pair.

Then last night She Gre e-mailed me: "There are some glasses in the laundry room, those aren't yours....are they?"

Yeah, they were. If you're doing the math at home, that means I haven't been to the laundry room in five or six weeks. In my defense, it's been a stressful month. Also, I did wash a load of socks, underwear, and t-shirts at my parents' house once a few weeks ago. And it's the time of year when you wear winter clothes some days and summer clothes other days, so it takes a long time to run out. But...still.

omg puppies

Look what I played with at work today:

There's a woman at work who bought a Chihuahua from a breeder, and every now and then he stops by with a new litter. The ones he brought today are three weeks old and sleep a lot. SO CUTE.

Work: It's not all bad. There are puppies. My last day is Monday.