In which I gush about Steph Dosen and her amazing knitwear...

I don't know what it is about this girl, but she has the most amazing designs. I absolutely fell IN LOVE with her patterns. All the cabled goodness and the beautiful, creamy hues she chooses just makes everything so whimsical and cozy looking. If you're on ravelry and haven't checked her stuff out yet PLEASE do. The Parseltongue Hat and Forest and Frill are my absolute favorites! Here's her ravelry page:

http://www.ravelry.com/people/tinyowlknits

In other news, I'd been suffering a long hiatus between figuring out grad school, fixing up things around my house (minor spider infestation, no big right?) and trying to keep everything in my life straight. I MAY have forgotten about my lovely blog readers (I have readers right?) and my things that I need to be taking care of around ravelry...so without any more interruptions...

FINISHED OBJECTS!

(yes I actually was knitting all this time)

This right here is a not so awesome picture of my Yellow Basic Cable hat (the Basic Cable hat from Stitch and Bitch Nation). It's made out of that ATROCIOUS yarn from Joann Fabrics (I know everyone knows which one I'm talking about) but I couldn't resist the colors. It was a royal pain in the arse to actually knit with it though, It kept twisting back on itself, and GAH! It was just so bad. I can't even begin to explain... It's only redeeming quality was this:

COLORFUL! The colors are so pretty! The yellow didn't bleed like the other colorways tended to (or so I heard) and the binder thread was white so It didn't show through (like the others were supposed to). It wears well, actuall. It was just torturous to knit with.

I also have this little goodie here:
This is my Luxury Cowl from Lion Brand that was comissioned as a present for my mother. You can't really see it, but this yarn has a metallic sparkle to it in some hue of iridescent (spelled that right, right?) pink that she ADORED. It's not my cup of tea, but the shawl pin I had kicking around went perfectly with it, so I gave that to her as well. She saw one of my OLD crocheted cowls that I wear constantly in the winter and wanted one of her own, so I made her one. I actually knit this a while ago after I sliced my hand open at work and couldn't work until I was cleared by the hospital.

Actually...both of these aren't so recent...

Lately I've been really partial to wine and berry colors. Crimsons, blacks, greys, and creams. This makes sense because I realized while yellow is a very cute color, it's not actually a color that I wear often, and thus this hat looks silly with most of my clothing and other accessories. Most everything I've been knitting since the summer started (both of these were finished by June) has been either some kind of neutral, or something maroon-colored.

One last thing, I recently got to feel Rowan Cocoon for the first time...

LOVE!

U-turns, ball pythons, coyotes, cajun spices and a partridge in a pear tree.

Has anyone ever had one of those days where there is just so little going on that you are virtuall bored to tears, you have no hope for the human race, and sleeping seems like a better alternative than actually living trough that waste of a day?

Imagine that day.

Now imagine the exact opposite. That was my day today.

It all started off relatively uneventful, aside from the fact that Danny started his first official day at his new job, his FIRST job out of college, which excited both he and I beyond any and all reasoning. I went for my daily swim, of course, because I can't actually get by without that and that was basially it until 7:00ish.

I went to Danny's house to chill and finish watching Burn After Reading, which was only a mediocre dark comedy about government agencies and how they're so uptight. I was amused for the most part, but some parts got a little bit stupid...like everyone sleeping with everyone else...kind of soap opera-ish.

Then we decided to let the dogs out...
I hear Danny yell and I go outside to see what the problem was. He then told me to call the older dog over and bring him in the house, and fast. He comes running in moments later with his mother's chiuahua. Only after we get everyone (safely) in the house does he tell me that he saw a coyote across the street (we've been overrun with them up in CT lately).

Then while we're watching the movie he decides he's going to finish the dinner his sister made, which was some variation of cajun chicken, or maybe jerk chicken I'm not quite sure (it was good anyway!) and wound up doing the ONE thing you don't do when you cook/eat things with pepper in them: he rubbed his eye. Swelling and tearing ensued. He ran outside to get his eyedrops out of the car and comes running back inside telling me to get dressed and ready to go and he tells me to be quick about it. Freaking out I run outside and sit in the car and he tells me to look on the dashboard...

CUPCAKE IS BACK! Our ball python that has been missing for ALMOST A MONTH was sitting right there over the steering wheel. We thought we lost her in transit about a month back, but my God there she was! Excited, and nervous we brought her to our friend Rob's house for an emergency feeding because she hasn't eaten in almost a month. She took to it very quickly, and is comfortably relaxing in her bowl of water in her lovely little tank. I'm so happy she's home!

Almost an hour after that we're back home and lazing around in bed getting ready to sleep and I hear a loud thud either upstairs or outside. Danny's sister comes into the bedroom and tells us that someone crashed their car outside, so we quickly went to investigate. We were both rather disturbed to find oil leaking on the road, the curb in front of his neighbor across the street destroyed, and the best part, her grass all torn up. We sumised that apparently someone decided they were going the wrong way and U-turned through this poor woman's front lawn, ripping up the grass, almost hitting a tree, and then sped up the other direction on the street. Danny, like the good human being that he is ( I love it when he does things like this, honestly) goes up to the woman's house and alerts her to the situation. She was very greatful and was about to file a complaint with the police, however, the neighbor a few doors down from Danny's house had already done so, and was coming down the street to try and assess the damage for himself. I left around the time the police arrived.

Blogging is so much better when I have stories, Here I was thinking I was going to have to make another to-do list!

next week's to do list.

I've been trying to make an honest effort in getting myself more organized and doing the things I should be doing in order to prepare myself for the upcoming semester, as well as get my UFO pile down (believe you me, it's huge at this point). Next week is going to be better than this week was, because for starters, my gym's pool was under maintainence this week, so I couldn't swim, which is the one thing I could have standed to do this week...swimming always reduces my stress level.

I'm going to be posting some of my finished UFOs soon, I have two scarves that are almost ready to come off the needles, and pretty soon I'm going to need to start some mittens, and perhaps a cowl to use up some of my stash yarn. Tomorrow I'm going to designate a project for all of those odd skeins that I have floating around. Here's what I've come up with so far:

1.) Ysolda Teague's garter mitts, two pairs from my leftover skeins of Berocco Ultra Alpaca Light.
2.) The Pale Skies Cowl from Knitscene 2009 in Paton's classic Wool Merino in Aran.
3.) Melissa Lebarre's Garter Yoke Cardigan for ALL of the balack Paton's Classic Wool I have.

Also I'm going to have to start reading all of the aformentioned books. I recently discovered that Amazon has this nifty little device that stores "e-books" on it called a Kindle and I decided that I desperately wanted one today. That would make toting around school books so much easier since they would all fit on one little computer screen. It sounds like a fabulous purchase that I would make great use of, being an English major who reads a lot for pleasure and for school purposes as well.

Also I've come up with a way to set up my savings account so that money comes out of it every month, which will help me with that whole problem of never having any money. I've limited my yarn spending as wll, I'm allowed 50 every two months for yarn purchases, and that means I have to be very careful about what I buy and from where (hello KnitPicks)!

Currently, I'm in the process of engaging in one of my favorite activities: taking the entire contents of my wroom and duming it into a huge garbage bag and taking it to the dump. Pre-semester cleaning is good because it allows me to rid myself of the garbage that I accumulate over the FOUR (yeah, really) months that I'm almost completely useless. as wll as the crap that I used over the last semester, this applies specifically to notebooks.

That being said, I'm pretty confident that next week will be a better week.

books i need to start reading...

1.) Stardust
2.) The Alchemist
3.) Neverender
4.) the rest of the Mortal Instruments Series (I'm currently reading City of Bones for FREE through www.livingsocial.com

hmmmm...

Have you ever been to a party where everything was completely FINE, nothing was going wrong, you weren't angry at any one particular person in general, you weren't worried about some girl macking on your boyfriend, and you were genuinely having a good time?

Well, I did, and then someone had to go and ruin it two days later with drama...

I've never been a jealous person, ever. Generally speaking I don't keep my men (or my man in this case) on a leash becausee that's one way to get them (him) to run away REALLY fast. No one takes well to being held down...

However, some people like to pretend that I have serious problems with his ex-girlfriend (ancient ANCIENT history, also present at party) and THEN tell her about it, make me look like an ass, and start a whole series of rumors that aren't true (obviously) and make this girl feel insecure about it enough to talk to MY BOYFRIEND about it, basically apologizing or wondering why I hate her so much because of ONE PERSON who doesn't have a life...

I really cannot stand it when people feel the need to not only poke their nose in other people's business, but CREATE problems within an otherwise happy home. I mean, excuse me but what part of my relationship was your business anyway? And why is it so imparative that you create problems at a party where there aren't any? Is beer, and swimming, and general good times all around not FUN for you? She should have left if she was bored. Generally speaking I tend not to pay attention when people tell me they don't like me, I was a cheerleader in high school, I made some enemies, but when the drama is BRAND new, and drama I'm TRYING to avoid, which is the adult thing to do, I get pissed. Really, REALLY pissed...

Grow up you asshole.

Sleeping Giant

Yesterday Danny and I took a day trip up Mt.Carmel (aka Sleeping Giant).It was the first time I'd been up that mountain since I was two, and I'm 21 so that my friends was a little while ago!
We decided to stay off the main pathway because it's just so much better when you're dirty! The main objective was to find the castle on top, have a picnic someplace awesome and then come back down in enough time for us to grab dinner later on. We spent some time on the top of the castle because the view was amazing; you could see most of CT from there!

Part of the reason why I wanted to go so badly is because my favorite animals live up there on the cliffsides, so I was hoping I could see them in action...and I DID!

This was the best shot I could manage, because they were all so fast and my camera skills are crap, but there it is, a hawk in flight. There must have been seven or eight of them flying around overhead. They were amazing! I've never seen them that close wild.

The day just got better from there. After we decided we were going to settle down somewhere and eat the lunch I brought, we found this out of the way trail where it lead RIGHT to the cliff face! There was a natrual rock formation jutting out of the side and we HAD to take the opourtunity. It ws the most amazing view of the mountain ever! All you could see for miles was the lush green of the trees, the sky, and of course, more hawks (they live on the face of the mountain). We set up shop and, obviously, took in the view for a good solid hour, resting and sunbathing and enjoying ourselves.

It was definitely one of the best spent days I've had this summer. Eventually we'll hike it again in the fall so we can see all of those amazing trees in the beautiful colors of fall! Maybe I'll bring some knitting then, too, so when we're chillin on the precipice I can have something to do.

I have gift knitting to do...

I'm supposed to be cooking for the trip up Mt Carmel tomorrow...
I'm supposed to be knitting my friend's daughter a Gryffindor scarf...
I'm supposed to be finishing up blocking my OTHER friend's Link hat...
and yet I chose tonight to become interested in making chainmaille jewelry.

Attention Ravelers!: Make sure you guys vote for your sock yarns for sock summit! I just placed my votes five minutes ago.