buriedinfibre.com

The pre-season started up this week and the Canucks are on a roll. They’ve already won their first two games.

It’s pretty bitter sweet though, as I only recognize about a third of the players. I spent a lot of those first two games going, “who’s that?”.

Linden retired and the team retired his jersey. Naslund has gone on to the Rangers. Bwahahahahahahaha! *ahem*

Sorry about that. I find it endlessly amusing that he wound up there and has to be number 91. Har! No retired jersey for him!

Morrison has also gone to another team, not really by choice, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

So we’ve got a very young team. Half of them look about twelve. A number of them will likely be sent down at the end of the pre-season. One guy didn’t even pass the team physical but was still allowed to play. I hope they tighten this sort of thing up before regular season start.

Hard to say how we’ll end up this year. I’d love to say I’d be happy if we just made it to the play-offs, but really? It’s been so damn long. I want the Lord Stanley to live in Vancouver for a while.

That would be nice.

PS: The cardy for third year is shaping up nicely. I kind of love it.

May your day be filled with happiness, love and, of course, hockey!

We’ve taken to calling the house the Tardis. It’s a little over 700 sq ft and from the outside looks very small. Well, because it is very small. And yet, when you come in, it doesn’t seem cramped and wee. Good storage helps, but it seems a little bizarre.

So check out what we’ve done to the Tardis.

The monkey took last week off to help me reno our kitchen (again). It’s been 12 years since we moved into this place and the kitchen was one of the first things we had to renovate. The house didn’t come with appliances, so we had to buy them and it wasn’t easy to do that on top of spending everything we had on the house. So we wound up with, let’s just call them “okay” appliances, which were getting pretty tired after the constant use we put them through. The dishwasher was sounding like a small plane taking off, the fridge wept on a regular basis and the laundry machine kept trying to escape.

We had the counters refinished in a black fleck, I replaced all the cabinet knobs with matte black ones, we put in a cork floor ( which is really tasty according to Satan’s Hand Puppet) AND we bought all new appliances.

Appliances have changed a lot over the last ten years and they haven’t gone up in price very much. The new ones are awesome. I fully admit to full on appliance lust. The dishwasher is quiet and effective, the fridge can make ice in minutes and tells me on it’s exterior display how cold it is. The laundry machine uses so little water that I thought it was broken the first time I ran it.

Yay!!

So there you are. Appliance porn. Aren’t they shiny? Now if we can get the puppy to stop eating the floor and get the trim on, we’ll be all done. In fact, once the deck has it’s bi-yearly coat of finish, the house is done for a while.

Now for some other weirdness.

The monkey dragged me outside one morning recently to see this:

Slugs mating. He’s sooooo romantic. He was actually quite triumphant about this, for one reason. It proved that slugs hang from trees.

There is a story here. When we first met, we went on a walk through a forest. He kept looking up and sort of hunching over every time we went under a low hanging branch. I though it was weird, but he was a flatlander, so you expect a little weirdness. It finally got to me though and I asked him exactly what his damage was. He explained that one of his flatlander friends had told him that these things, he thought they might be called, “slugs”, lived in trees and would drop down on you as you walked under them.

Once I had stopped laughing ( and believe me, it took a while), I helped him see that slugs were more of a ground dwelling creature and he really didn’t have to worry too much about slugs dropping on him from above.

So much for that. Now he has visual proof.

Great.

On the knitting front, year 4 of the Nihon Vogue class has started and I’m trying hard to finish up my year 3 projects. Above are the swatches for my final project. The yarn is Peru from BMFA and it’s a merino, silk and alpaca blend. Very soft with great stitch definition. The sweater is coming along. I may have done before Christmas.

Thanks to everyone for their support for me not doing the book. It was not an easy or lightly made decision, but I think it was the right one.

I spent a good deal of last night thinking about where I am right now and how I want things to go.

It wasn’t pretty.

The short version: I pronounced the book DOA at 6:53am.

The world does not need another designer. My hat’s off to the people who do it. It’s thankless, disheartening, ego smashing, and in the end, it becomes just another job.

I didn’t want it to be a job. It was something I loved. Something I felt passionate about. I was excited. A lot of that is gone now. I don’t want it to be totally gone, so I’m getting out now while the getting’s good.

Call me a quitter. I don’t care. Sometimes you need to know when to call it good.

I’m calling it good.