I know I’ve been lax about posting eye candy on Fridays of late, but today I have a good reason — I’m a bit in shock.

Enterprise is a blip on the map of Alabama.

It’s the home of the Boll Weevil Monument.

And it’s where I spent a good portion of my childhood while my father was stationed at Fort Rucker. I went to Rucker Boulevard Elementary on Regency Dr., and we lived not a block down the street on Antler Dr.

I don’t always look fondly on the time we lived there. There was blantent bigotry. There were too many peanuts. And my elementary school still had corporal punishment… the one black kid in my class was spanked at least once a week.

Yesterday, the town where I learned my fear of tornados has been ripped open by one.

I don’t know if there’s anyone still living there that I may have known as a child. But the town and the people are in my thoughts.

This year at Stitches West I’m actaully taking a few classes:

Friday:
Aran Knitting with Beth Walker-O’Brian
Celtic Cables with Melissa Leapman

Saturday:
Spinning for Knitting with Merike Saarniit

Sunday:
Short Rowed Bust Darts with Lily Chin

I’ve gotten all my homework swatches done. Each class’ swatch was done in a different color and placed in gallon sized ziplock bags so I can keep them straight. I still need to get some graph paper this afternoon, but otherwise I think I’m set. The only thing left to do is drag my butt out of bed way too early tomorrow morning so I can get to the conference center before 8:30 am.

Anyone out there use Movable Type for their blog? What do you think of it?

I’m not terribly enthused by the idea of switching to Blogger beta at the moment. The Web host I use for my private email account already has Movable Type installed, and they maintain it. So, I’m considering the idea of shifting my blog to my personal domain. Just want some comments/opinions by people who have experience with MT before making my final decision.

Thanks! 🙂

First off, Happy Valentine’s Day!

Okay, good. Now that that’s out of the way, I can say thanks to everyone who sent their well wishes while I was sick and specials thanks to those of you who reminded me that February is a short month and will be over sooner rather than later. 🙂

Onward to knitting… I had mentioned before that I was trying my hand at a simple st st vee neck sweater using the instructions in Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top. But, I didn’t really saying anything else about it even after prodding by blog readers. So, today’s the day. It’s a plain st st cause I used to have some basic store bought sweaters that I loved so much the elbows disintegrated. I couldn’t patch them, cause there was nothing left to patch. I decided to go with a vee neck to be different from the last couple sweaters I’ve done, which were all crewnecks. I’m knitting it out of Heirloom Yarns Heatherwood in a sage green color.

I cast on the back shoulders with great trepidation and porceeded into the short rows. As I got to the armpits of the back, I tried to figure out what to do next (I didn’t have the book with me) and did a sort of reverse engineering from a bottom up sweater. After reading the directions in the book I realized I was completely wrong and ended up tearing my armpits out and doing it Barbara’s way. Then, I picked up the front and did the short rows, knitting ever downward, working in the neckline increases.

Then, I joined the front and the back. I was making progress. I could begin to admire my handy work. I love the short row shoulders! It was beginning to look like a sweater. This is, of course, when it got extremely boring. All knit, all the time. So, I did what any knitter in my place would do, I cast on a sock.

I think January should be a write-off. It sucked all sorts of balls. The husband had the stomach flu that’s been going around so much it made the news (not the norovirus, but the other one). I had a head cold that I’m still trying to shake the reminants of.

I’m not sure how February’s going to go. There were definitely some birthing pains right from the start. The 1st marked the official first day of officially being a part of the big tech company that ate the smaller tech company I worked for. I’m not really getting into the school thing, and my first assignment is due in a week, and there’s this whole thesis proposal thing I’m supposed to be working on. And we can’t forget the warning a girl I met at a party last month gave me… “oh, you’re a snake. This Chinese New Year’s is for the boar. This year’s going to be hard for you cause the snake and the boar are opposite signs.” Definitely doesn’t sound promising, does it?

I think my throat is trying to kill me from the inside out. *ow*

At least there are good things like lotion tissues, hot tea, and hot soup.

I’m sure there’s someone (at least I hope there’s someone) out there that has been wondering where in the hell I’ve gotten to.

Well, my parents’ gift to us for Christmas was to treat the family to a Mexican Riviera cruise. So, I spent Christmas on a ship with far too many people. The food was okay. The shore excursions the husband and I went on were fun — there was tequilla tasting in Puerta Vallerta, Walking tour in Historic Mazatlan, and horseback riding on the beach in Cabo San Lucas. And now I have a small cache of photos to last me for more than a few Eye Candy Fridays. 🙂

By far, the best tacos were found in Puerta Vallerta. One good place was at the tequilla ranchero our tour went to. We watched them press and grill the tortillas and grill the meat… simple, tasty. My sister also got the best tasting lobster tacos I have ever tasted at dinner at Si, Senor… again hand pressed tortillas. Now, the husband is talking about learning to make tortillas himself.

We got back from our week at sea in time to drive up from LA and go to bed before the new year was rung in. It’s an 8-9 hour drive and we were wiped. Thankfully, I had the 1st off and was able to take the 2nd off as well in order to have a vacation from my vacation.

I managed to get myself through the first, short week back at work. But, the next week sucked. I was feeling depressed (probably a combination of post-vacation blues, and the fact that I had severely cut back on my sugar intake… sugar releases serentonin in your brain, which makes you feel happy… less sugar, less seretonin), I had to get my resume out to places in my internship hunt, and try to get back on my exercise routine. Thankfully, the depressive apathy had begun to pass by the end of the week, just in time for me to be silly and join Runagogo.

MLK, Jr. Day was a day of laundry so that I could have something to wear to my internship interview at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) archives the next day. Which brings me to the good news of the month… I’m going to be doing 12 hours a week at the SLAC archives for my internship. *happy dance*

My internship starts tomorrow. Classes start on Wednesday. My sanity is going to be greatly pressed as I have to work 40 hours this week and I have a professor who may have taken it upon himself to throw the dept’s published schedule for the class out the window. Somehow a class that was listed as hybrid (online and onsite) with onsite meetings 4/14 and 4/15 will now have several virtual class meetings and 3 onsite class meetings in the middle of the semester. Um, yeah. This semester may see the return of the eye twitch somewhere between internship and thesis proposal writting. Hopefully, I’ll still be able to find sometime to fit in the knitting since it can help.

Today’s eye candy was taken with my camera phone, so the resolution is a bit off.

I was on my way back to my cube yesterday after getting breakfast at my work campus’s cafe, and I saw this is the grass amongst all the frost. There’s a small dip in the lawn there, so some water must have gathered, then froze over during the night. The ice looked sort of latice-like. It was really pretty. I only wish I had had my good camera with me to get a better picture of it before it melted.

If you click on the pics to go to their flickr pages, they look a little better over there.

So, I’ve decided to try my hand at making a basic v-neck st st pullover following the directions in Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top. All my basic store bought sweaters, which kept me suitably warm for quite some time, all gave up the ghost. Mostly they were done in by huge gaping holes in the elbows. There was nothing there to attempt fixing — the elbows were simply gone, and I’m not a leather elbow kind of gal.

In other knitting relatedness, I don’t think I’m going to re-up for the Blue Moon Fiber Arts Rockin’Sock Club. They raised the price by a good $40, and I wasn’t sufficiently wowed this year to pay more for next year.

Meanwhile, I’m trying not to lose what’s left of my sanity to the last week and a half of 2006.

Today’s Eye Candy comes to you from Napa County, California. The husband’s company decided to take everyone on the Wine Train. The vineyards were fun to watch go by since harvest happened a couple months ago, and now the vines have turned fall colors and are losing their leaves. The food was okay. The wine was good, but then we had brought our own. 😀 We shared a table with one of the husband’s coworkers and her husband. Apparently, after talking to me for 3 hours, the husband’s coworker thought I was from somewhere other than America. The next day at work she asked him where I was from, and expressed doubt and surprise to learn that I grew up in America. (Of course, I’ve got enough of a Canadian accent that I’ve been asked what part of Canada I was from by Canadians.)

I’m afraid they’re a tad blurry, but they were taken with my camera phone on a moving train.