the thing itself and not the myth

With all that time off & no bus service, what’s a girl to do but knit? On our first quite chilly day I decided that seriously, I needed mittens that actually covered my fingers. Crazy business. I had two skeins of Shibui Sock in my stash & a copy of Not Just More Socks, which resulted in these Snowpocalypse Mitts:

More, including another sweater, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

This has been a really odd December. I have succeeded in not working a single Wednesday all month. The first two fell to a death cold, the next two to snow days (yes, really, more on that later), and the 31st I’ll be in Canada, as is my New Year’s tradition.

Christmas is frequently weird anyway. I don’t really celebrate it anymore since my family moved away, plus my job is very holiday-intensive. My office, eaten by the holidays (and many more photos after the jump): Read the rest of this entry »

Now, some randomness.

A pendant I bought from Wyrding Studios, art by Erin McCauley, with a bonus set of earrings:

I know absolutely nothing about tarot, so if anyone can suggest a reason why I was so compelled to buy the Chariot, please do.

After the jump, a whole whack of Seattle stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

In mid-November, friends came out & we drove down to Portland for WFTDA Nationals, which was basically awesome. We got to see scads of fantastic roller derby (even if my hometown ladies got creamed right out of the gate), and a bit of Portland as well (including Powell’s & yarn shops) all after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am at knitting and no one else is here, so I am going to blog. Here comes a few entries of stuff I keep forgetting to post about.

First, in late October I went up to BC for a roller derby Halloween party. I went as Kaylee. (From Firefly. Obviously.) The most exciting part of my costume was my trousers. I got a pair of cargo pants on clearance & painted the sides of the legs. Clearly I prefer ‘evocative’ costumes to ‘effective’. Heh.

While I was up, we went to White Rock. Amazingly, I had never been in all the ten bazillion times I’ve been up to the Vancouver-Abbotsford-etc area. It was very pretty, a fact which I will prove after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

As we all know, I vote absentee, but I find it comforting to take my ballot to the closest poll to my office and slide it into the secure box.

If I can get a sticker, so much the better.

Today at lunch, after spending a bit of the morning figuring out the last few items, I took it on over to the local community center. There was no line, though things were a little busier than they have been in prior elections.

I slipped my ballot into the box, asked the lovely poll worker for my sticker, and headed off to get lunch. On my way out I was stopped by a gentleman, likely a newer citizen. He wanted to make sure he knew which people on the ballot were Democrats, so I showed him in the pamphlet, and found an endorsement sheet for this district.

It was kind of awesome.

My sticker says “farewell to polls” because this is the last election in King County before it switches over to 100% vote by mail. I’m kind of sad about that.

Go Obama! Go Gregoire! Go Mass Transit! And NO NO NO on Prop 8.

…am wearing these shoes

…am already this far on my February Lady sweater

…cast this vote for President

…and am on my way to Ballard, where I saw this last week on the new release whiteboard at Sonic Boom

Have I really not posted knitting pictures here since March? That is flat-out ridiculous.

Since then I’ve finished three (nearly four) sweaters that I haven’t managed to photograph, but there is still plenty of knitting spam after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been carting my wee little queer issues soapbox all over Ravelry lately, so I might as well haul it over here too. There’s an educational meme going around the web this week which I love. It’s a response to one of the questions in Katie Couric’s Vice Presidential Questions series, and it got kind of long and full of sex, so I am sticking it all after a jump. Click through for it, community organizers, and Yet Another Admonition To Vote.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last night my bank, teetering on the edge, was eaten by JP Morgan.

It’s weird, though, because I’ve been banking there since I was a kid. I think I opened my account with money I got for 8th grade graduation. They gave me a debit card with a Visa logo when I was in high school.

I’m glad this part is over. I think I can stop worrying for now. I trust that the transfer will be seamless, and if it’s not, I have a safety net in the credit union. It’ll be a pain, but okay.

WaMu was a local bank that exploded. But they were a good place to work for, and a good place to bank with. I had three strange things happen to my account in the 15+ years that I banked with them. Checks were stolen, and they noticed the inconsistency and called me before letting anything hit my account. A weird charge showed up from an online gambling site, and they reversed it immediately. And when a major purchase I made wasn’t delivered before that division of Sears went bankrupt, they reversed that charge as well. They seemed psychic about what was an accurate transaction and what wasn’t. I never had my account frozen during international travel, for example, or had to argue that no, really, I did intend to buy that MacBook.

I’ll be the first to admit that I know nothing about finance. But I know that the customer service in the retail centers was ace, and I thank all those folks on the ground for over fifteen years of worry-free banking. I kick all the executives in the shins for making me do all fifteen years worth of worrying in the past month instead.

Please, enjoy your multi-billion dollar signing bonuses while your underpaid tellers and I fret about if we’ll have access to our rent money or not. No problem. Friends of the family indeed.