Monthly Archives: September 2010

You are browsing the site archives by month.

Expat Baby Shower

September 27, 2010 2:41 pm ,

*Whew* What a weekend. As I get more and more run down things get harder and harder to manage. After I finish this doozy of a blog entry I’m going to go back to doing nothing but reading for a few days, I think. I’ve overdone it again.

365.142: Taking Over Cafe Nero

Yesterday was the monthly knitting group meeting in Salisbury and it was also a surprise baby shower for my fellow American expat, Emily. (She’s from Ohio, originally.) Libby, Stephanie and I arranged games and we brought gifts. Much fun was had by all but I know I didn’t get much knitting done.

Cashmere Still Light

That may be because I was knitting a dress in laceweight yarn. I’m going to keep pointing out the insanity of this for awhile. Somehow it isn’t making me feel crazy (it’s actually heavy laceweight) but I’m pretty sure it should.

365.141: Preparation

I spent the evening before prepping the flowers. I haven’t made up a bouquet since my wedding. I’d forgotten how fun yet time consuming it is.

Acorn Baby Sweater

Also time consuming? The secret knitting. A tiny baby sweater was my gift. This little thing took me a month and four seasons of Gilmore Girls to complete. I wouldn’t say it was a difficult pattern, just quite complex. (Ravelry link.)

And now, a parade of pictures:

Emily's Baby Shower

The gift table. We played the baby picture game as well.

Emily's Baby Shower

The guest of honor and the cutest pregnant woman ever, Emily.

Emily's Baby Shower

A baby bank from Sharon. (That’s Alice smiling in the background.)

Emily's Baby Shower

The secret knitting makes it’s appearance.

Emily's Baby Shower

Alice’s adorable little owls vest.

Emily's Baby Shower

Libby‘s baby tag blanket.

Emily's Baby Shower
Emily's Baby Shower

Stephanie’s plethora of gifts.

Emily's Baby Shower

There you go, a brilliant afternoon. Now to go recover for a day or three.

Posted in: knitting, photography, random bit of fun

For A Friday

September 24, 2010 2:30 pm ,

Well, why not wrap up the week the old way, just for kicks?

Knitting:

I Do Not Love This

This crazy blanket is no more. The idea of knitting one more square made me want to stab something. So I frogged it.

365.138: Flickr Wisdom

And started knitting a totally different crazy blanket instead. Quick and interesting squares = good. All that sewing up = I’m trying not to think about it yet.

365.136: Secret Knitting

I finished this secret knitting.

And started a knitted dress in laceweight cashmere. Hi, yes, I am crazy. But dude, laceweight hand dyed 100% cashmere. That kind of crazy I can live with.

There are about 15 other things I want to start (and actually have the yarn for) but I don’t have the patterns for. It’s always something, isn’t it?

Reading: I’m in a reading funk. The last book I read all the way through was The Girl Who Chased The Moon by Sarah Addison Allen. (I *love* her books.) Since then I have started and discarded about 10 P.G. Wodehouse books (he gets old very, very fast) and Kenilworth. In three days I managed 20 pages. And since it was mostly in Elizabethan English I didn’t retain much of those 20 pages.

Listening To: Chill, mainly. Right now it’s Muse though.

Watching: Lots of tv shows on dvd at the moment: Gilmore Girls Season 5 (Luke with his shirt off makes suffering through the whole 4th season worth it), Buffy Season 2 (J’s new to Buffy; I am putting up with it until Angel goes away, he annoys me), Buck Rogers Season 1 (brilliantly daft – I love 1970s/1980s tv shows).

365.139: A Good Evening

Lots of hot chocolate is being consumed lately. It almost entirely makes up for not being allowed to drink coffee anymore.

I don’t expect to fall back into this as a habit, I tend to consider it lazy blogging. You all come here to read something interesting and I give you… lists. Unless lists are interesting. Which they might be.

Things here are rough but a little less so. I’m not trying to put on a happy face nor do I want to dwell on the negative. But right now I’m moving through a transition of some sort. I may not know which way is up for awhile.

Happy Friday.

Posted in: knitting, photography, weekly thing

A Saturday At The Beach

September 20, 2010 3:29 pm ,

Oh, the beach. As a Californian I can wax lyrical about beaches for days. And as a Californian I have a favorite beach. The idea of the favorite beach is one that is prevalent. Everyone back home has a beach. Their beach. The one they go to without fail and elevate above all others. My brother likes Venice for all the skateboarders. My mother tried to switch my beach allegiance to Corona del Mar and Crystal Cove. She failed. I’ve spent time at beach houses in Carlsbad. And there I got stung by a jellyfish. So ick.

My beach is Laguna Beach. Has been since childhood and the beach house weekend my Girl Scout troop spent there. Nevermind the band of seaweed that comes in every evening that you have to make your way through to get to the beach. If you are smart you will know the band is coming and make sure you have a boogie board to ride into the beach. Enjoy the cliffs and the rocks you can sit on at sunset to watch the backlit surfers. Enjoy the long walks down from Main Beach. Know that there’s always parking at Bank of America and that there’s a Baskin Robbins down the street for when you get too hot. I loved living in Orange County because it meant I was 20 minutes from that wonderful place.

Hengistbury Head

Beyond Laguna, the ocean calls to me. It’s in my blood. My mother taught me how to jump waves, how to read the timing so you don’t get blindsided. And how to get up and get back in the water when you inevitably misjudge the timing and get a lungful of seawater. The whole family just love water. And of course the Call of the Pacific gets into the blood early. Maybe all Californians are born with it. I can hear it calling from halfway across the world. It’s blueness, it’s power and might. How I stand with my toes in the water with nothing between me but water until you reach Japan. A dear friend lives in Japan, I used to stand there with her on that beach and we’d marvel that she came from all the way over *there*.

Hengistbury Head

The Atlantic has a call but it is the call of oceans. And I need to answer that call no matter if the ocean at my feet is Arctic or Irish or Atlantic. Sometimes you just have to walk in the sand, get your feet wet and think of where next the water you’re standing in hits. Which makes living on an island pretty darn nifty. And which makes living in Hampshire pretty darn unnifty. The beaches in Hampshire are eroding. The lovely sand is now a dumping ground of shingle. We’re within 20 miles of the ocean from here. But it’s fronted by one of the busiest docks in the world. The English Channel looks idyllic but it’s one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. If you want proper, rugged, sandy beaches you can find a bunch in Cornwall. Or Wales. Not so much in this tried and settled area.

Hengistbury Head

On Saturday we went to a sandy beach about an hour and a half away, Hengistbury Head in Dorset. And for the first time since my last morning in California, I took off my shoes and walked in the sand.

52-39: Breathe In

I dabbled my toes and thought about France on the other side of the water.

365.133: Hengistbury Head

It was lovely. And J. and I both discovered that we really miss the ocean. It’s calming. And we have needed calming lately.

(Photography by both me and J.)

Posted in: day tripping, photography, stories we are

In Short

September 17, 2010 3:10 pm ,

So the weather has finally turned. I am glad it has, there is no call for wearing shorts in the middle of September because you’re too hot to wear anything longer. But it’s taking me awhile to regulate my temperature. Dysautonomia (try saying that three times fast) causes a whole heap o’ problems. One of which is that it causes my body’s thermostat to be broken. I have to externally regulate my body temperature. And since it’s been a very warm summer here I’ve been focusing mainly on staying cool and dressing in light cottons and linens to do so. Now I’m having to remember what you do in transition weather. I’ll probably get the hang of it by the time winter rolls around.

I’m homesick at the moment. This time of year always makes me homesick for things like hayrides and pumpkin patches, hot apple cider and autumn leaves skidding across the ground in blustery winds. I find myself still missing that beginning-of-the-school-year excitement. I told J. I wanted to move back to America yesterday. The room went silent for a good minute. He knows it’s just homesickness but sometimes we do discuss where else we’d like to live. I’m torn between the Boston area and Seattle in America. Vancouver is the winner hands down in Canada. Then there’s Tuscany or Paris but those both have language considerations. I think a vacation would solve a lot of the wanderlust. We’re trying to work out when the best time to go to Norway is. We don’t want to freeze or have to buy a lot of cold weather gear that we’ll never wear in England. But J’s never seen the Northern Lights. And I think everyone should see them at least once. They’re amazing. Plus, three words: fjords, glaciers and yarn. Hello, siren call.

Other than that I keep irritating the pinched nerve in my neck by doing stupid things I know will irritate the pinched nerve in my neck. Either I am masochistic or I am simply so out of it that I keep forgetting all about it. I’m guessing it’s the latter. Typing bypasses the idiocy. But believe me, walking into walls, dropping things and falling over are all par for the course right now.

Dusk Cowl

I think I’ll go knit.

Posted in: health, knitting, photography

Read This

September 15, 2010 1:47 pm ,

Having an autoimmune disease is like speaking another language. The idea of chronic and incurable is so much deeper and prevalent than perhaps the words sound. I can speak the well language, you see. I know the lifestyle of the well, the abilities and limits. But now I speak a new language. The language of the chronically ill. It took J. awhile to understand this new language. It took my parents even longer. Now my mom’s learning the language too. And I am beginning to understand why it’s so hard to understand this new language. There’s a part of you that just doesn’t want to. Even now, coming up for seven years of diagnosed illness I still don’t want to.

Posted in: health, stories we are