Turns out Sasha likes the snow. I got off work today, so I spent the day watching too much TV and hanging out with my cat.

Perhaps you’ve seen the previews for an upcoming kid’s movie called Race to Witch Mountain. There was a book I loved as a kid. It was called Escape to Witch Mountain and there were some campy Disney movies and all was well. Now, thanks to Hollywood magic, I didn’t even recognize what I was seeing on the TV screen until they got to the end of the preview. Apparently they got caught, because now it’s a “modern re-imagining” set 30 years after the first book. Even if they hadn’t told me that, I would have figured it out pretty quickly and here’s why:

Book: The boy can talk normally, but the girl can’t. (Apparently she uses the power of her mind! Spooky! And weird!)
Movie: Girl can talk. It’s hard to say if the boy can or not. He is all like “this is my serious face, yarrr.”

Book: Boy and girl are aliens, but (and this is the important part) they don’t know this when the book starts. I mean, they eventually figure it out (their weird powers are a big red flag that something is up), but it’s like a mystery that they have to unravel.
Movie: Not only do boy and girl know they are aliens, if they don’t get to Witch Mountain, there will be an alien invasion! It will be terrible!

Book: The children are on the run from an orphanage and the forces of evil/adoptive parents with the help of a kindly priest, Father O’Day. (This also leads into an important life lesson: if you live in an orphanage and have freaky powers, and if a millionaire wants to adopt you, it is because he wants to use your powers for evil.)
Movie: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is giving the kids a ride to Witch Mountain. He’s apparently a taxi driver, stuck with the passengers from hell whiny alien orphans. I really hope we’re not supposed to believe that he’s a kindly Irish priest too. IT’S JUST WRONG.

So, yeah, thanks, but I managed to figure out that Race to Witch Mountain and Escape to Witch Mountain had nothing to do with each other and I did it all on my own. It wasn’t hard.

Butcherings of the Recent Past:

The Seeker: The Dark is Rising is a great story. The movie added more “action,” an unnecessary love interest, changed the character’s nationality, condensed multiple books into one, and removed one of the major characters. According to Wikipedia, “Susan Cooper was reportedly not happy with the adaptation of her book.” No kidding. Leave my childhood alone!

Inkheart: Wow, they totally miscast this one. Brendan Frasier is way too well nourished to ever be Mo. More plot smooshing, as usual, and Meggie gets kind of sidelined as a character. Maybe this movie just needs less Brendan Frasier. Anyhoo, despite the fact that this movie stars Brendan Frasier, no mummies appeared. Which is a shame, because it might have actually improved things. Particularly if they ate him and let Meggie do all the work like she did in the books.

Bothersome:

The ads for Bridge to Terabithia: The ads for this movie were so bad that I never brought myself to actually watching the movie. All I could think was, OK, so the book had a depressing ending, but postponing the inevitable and distracting from their sweet and simple friendship with CGI monsters and fairies? WTF? I’ve since heard that the movie was quite good, but since I’d already read the book, I knew how it was going to end and really didn’t want to compound that memory with, well, more depressing memories.

Here’s to my mum! Thanks to her, I now have 101 (I counted) gently used scifi and fantasy books. Apparently her library is cutting down on their scifi section and replacing it with an expanded large print section. Their loss is my gain. Some of the authors include classics like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, William Gibson, Frank Herbert, Alan Dean Foster, Harlan Ellison, and Greg Bear. Some of the other authors (whom I’ve never heard of, though perhaps that makes me the scifi version of a hermit) include C. J. Cherryh, Poul Anderson, and too many others for me to track down. Some fantasy books snuck in there too, so I now have a few more Marion Zimmer Bradley books, some Tanith Lee, and a volume of stories by Peter S. Beagle. Apparently I was right to procrastinate buying my own copy of The Last Unicorn. Go me. I’ll post some pictures later, just to get a sense of the scale.

I also bought several batches of yarn, after a long dry spell. From Dizzy Sheep (it’s like Woot, but for yarn lovers), I’m getting some Soft Linen, probably for a tee shirt of some sort (the Victoria Yoke Pullover, perhaps?). I already got some Happy Feet sock yarn from them about a month back in two different colors. Thanks to Emily (I tested those Skyline Mittens for her), I got a gift certificate to The Loopy Ewe, which boasts one of the largest collections of sock yarn I’ve ever seen (and some of the prettiest…it’s like a Mecca for sock knitters and hand dyed yarn enthusiasts). After some careful consideration, I decided to splurge on some Kypria sock yarn (from The Sanguine Gryphon, SanguineGryphon on Ravelry) and some Crystal Palace Panda Cotton (in case the wool socks I plan to make are too itchy). There were some cashmere blends that nearly got me, but I held firm. I can get those later. When I’ve used up my current stash.

Whew…that was a lot of links. And if you’re not on Ravelry, they probably don’t make a lot of sense. Oh well. If you’re not on Ravelry and you do anything with yarn, go and sign up now. There are 300,000 of us now. Embrace the peer pressure!

I know I’ve mentioned Ravelry before. I know quite a few of you are already there (and if you’re not on Ravelry and you knit or crochet, perhaps it’s worth a visit? Yes?). What you might not know is that Ravelry offers all kinds of interesting opportunities. Such as test knitting.

Why? What’s this here? Could this be…a mitten?

I’m a member of the Testing Pool on Ravelry. It’s an enthusiastic group of knitters and crocheters who are willing and able to test new patterns, looking for mistakes, or to create display samples. Most recently, I had the opportunity to test these lovely mittens for Emily:

In case you can’t tell, those are skyscrapers.

The pattern, called Skyline Mittens, calls for the most delicious merino you’ve ever felt, Malabrigo Worsted, in a deep purple and a bright and cheery yellow-orange. The subtle variations in the colors (particularly with the yellow) make for a really marvelous contrast. Can you tell I have some Malabrigo love? Sadly, the very qualities that make Malabrigo so wonderful for mittens make it difficult to use for larger items, like sweaters. Over time, the strands inside will felt together, creating a second layer that will help keep hands toasty. Now imagine that felting process as it happens on the outside of your next pullover. Tears and heartache, my friends. Tears and heartache.

Here’s a closeup of the guts of the mitten, so to speak. In a few short weeks of use, I pretty much guarantee this will be a lot more matted:

And here’s a closeup of the braided cast on and the first inch or so of the corrugated ribbing:

In case anyone’s curious, it only took me a week to make both mittens. Actually, technically I made two and a half of ‘em. The first attempt served as a gauge swatch. I was curious to see what it would look like on the recommended needles. Since I’m such a tight knitter, it really was no surprise that I had to go up a needle size. Now, it is possible to frog Malabrigo, but it must be done soon after making the object and done with care. The texture is not very smooth, so it tends to get sticky.

As usual, you can find more details on my Ravelry project page. Enjoy!

Every once in a while, the woman that stocks our soda fund at work will pick something new for us all to try. This week, it was Izze, a sparkling fruit beverage (and at 70% juice, not that scary). I picked up the Sparkling Clementine flavor, expecting to be drinking clementine juice.

Wrong!

Ingredients: Pure juice made from white grape, apple, lemon and orange juice concentrates, sparkling water, natural flavor, citric acid, sodium citrate, gum arabic, beta carotene (color), ester gum

Well, at least it’s really made from juice. And at least the juice is the first ingredient. No added sugar or high fructose corn syrup is a nice touch, too (though the juice contains plenty all by itself, going by the nutritional information). It’s definitely citrus-y, just not clementines.

*sigh*

In other news, four very nice things happened all on top of each other.

First, I got a new washing machine. Yay! My old one was leaking and they were running some very good sales and rebate promotions. To all my crafting buddies, yes, it’s a top loader. While I don’t do a lot of felting, I like to leave my options open. Also, front loaders suck.

Anyway, this leads into my second nice thing, which is that I actually got a cash award at work for a project I was working on ages ago. So the washing machine was almost free! An unexpected bonus. I also used it as a justification to buy some of Knitpick’s interchangeable needles (but not the full set, because there are sizes in there I’d never use). So far, the needles are OK. The join where the needles screw in on the first ones I tried juts out ever so slightly and could snag. Actual use will tell me if this is so. The cable is as flexible as I could wish for, though a little thicker than the fixed length circulars. Oh, and I really really wish they’d print the size on the needle tips like Inox does—If Inox ever makes a similar set, I am all over that. But now I finally have a circular set of size 4’s again. Huzzah!

Third, I got to go to Katsucon and visit with Katie. I didn’t get to take very many pictures, seeing as how everyone kept stopping Katie and me to take our pictures (but you can see the ones I did take at Katie’s website as usual). We went as the Ice Climbers from Super Smash Brothers and I have the pictures to prove it:

Why yes, it was rather warm once we got inside. But very, very soft fleece. Mmmm…

And fourth (though no less awesome), I got to diagnose a phone line problem and solve a several month long string of misbehaving phones. I take back anything bad I ever said about FIOS telephone service. I had a bad jack in my kitchen that led to intermittant humming on the line. Not their fault at all…

Basically, on Tuesday night, I came home to that familiar loud buzz, the one I’ve been blaming Verizon for, mostly because it always seemed to go away right after I called them up and complained about it (coincidences can be so cruel). Anyway. So I unplugged the phone cable and plugged it back in, hoping for an easy (though unlikely) fix, only to discover that I went from having a noisy line to no working line at all. It was completely dead, no dial tone at all. I unplugged the phone, went upstairs, tried that phone, no dice. I call up my dad on the cell, he walks me through plugging the phone directly into my ONT, where the phone then proceeds to work. So the problem was with my wiring. Not Verizon’s. Uh oh. We open up some phone outlets and look at the wiring. Nothing was conveniently frayed or obviously corroded, so we were forced to determine that it was probably something in the walls. I call it a night, and go to bed.

But there’s a happy ending! The next morning, as I’m getting ready for work, it dawns on me that I didn’t look in the phone port very carefully from the front, where the plug goes in, not the wiring. Sure enough, in my kitchen, one of the little prongs that connects to the phone cord was bent back so far that it was actually touching one of the other little prongs. I unscrew the plate completely, go back up stairs, and voila, I have phone service again. So all I need to do to fix it is to buy a new phone jack. Yay!

Some of you may know that I spent most of my childhood growing up in a suburb just outside the city of Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Some of you may also have heard about the string of arsons there. Well, last Friday, there was another fire, only this time it happened in East Fallowfield Township, just down the street from my parents’ house. I think that’s reason to be very, very concerned, don’t you? My brother, who still lives at home, has taken to leaving the lights on in an attempt to dissuade any would be arsonists.

Since January of this year, there have been twenty-three cases of arson. Including the cases that happened at the end of last year, that brings the total up to thirty-three in all. The ATF has gotten involved and now some people are saying that it’s gang related. Coatesville has had its share of drug problems and some violent crime, but nothing like this, not at this scale. It’s simply horrible to think about it. Inside the city limits, people are too scared to go to sleep at night. There’s an 8pm curfew for teenagers and residents are being ordered not to leave anything flammable in their backyards, lest it become fuel for the next fire. Sadly, I doubt either precaution will accomplish anything.

Knowing that there are people out there that would do this sort of thing makes me sick.

Huzzah for poor lighting. A woman in our knitting/crochet group took some photos (Thanks Denise!). We meet every Wednesday at Panera Bread Company from 7-9pm. That’s me in both pictures. Of course I’d highlight the ones I was in!

Setsucon was this past weekend. It’s a tiny little anime convention up in State College, Pa, which is pretty much smack dab in the middle of Pennsylvania. It’s also right next door to Pennsylvania State University, which is where I went to college. I went with Katie and her husband and got to spend some time visiting my Penn State buddies. She and her husband just bought their first house down in Virginia, so I drove there from work Friday afternoon and hitched a ride with them up to the snowy mountainous winterlands of Happy Valley. It might seem backwards at first glance, driving the wrong direction and all, but the distance between us was shorter than the distance to State College, and I would have given a lot just to avoid driving in snow. Between the drive to her house and back and the drive to Penn State, I traveled over 1000 miles this weekend. That’s pretty damn impressive, if you ask me.

I headed back home to Baltimore Sunday night and managed to avoid the snow that hit the next day. It was much more peaceful watching the snow fall while sitting in front of my TV knitting than having to slog through Maryland roads. If there’s one thing that Maryland seems to have trouble with, it’s getting the roads clear in a decent amount of time. Their strategy time and time again seems to be waiting for the snow to stop before doing anything. Bad Maryland! Put the salt down before the snow piles up. Funny how everyone else further north than us figured out how to handle this problem years ago.

I thought it was fitting that we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day yesterday and had the inauguration of our first black president today. All along the highways to Virginia and back, there were traffic signs everywhere warning of the upcoming traffic jams. Right now, everything looks clear, but I’m sure that will change soon either later today or tomorrow as everyone heads back home. Katie should have held onto her apartment for a few more months and rented it out, seeing as how she used to live in Arlington. The prices that people were demanding were crazy.

I’m sorry to admit that I didn’t get to catch the inauguration live, but hopefully I’ll get another chance, either through video on demand (FIOS, don’t let me down!) or through YouTube.

Holidays in my family can be high stress. Mom cries first, then I cry. Then my brother gets annoyed with the lot of us. I think my dad just hopes it all blows over soon. The fights we have are always about the stupid little things that nobody actually cares about. And then it all blows over and we get back up and forget all about it until the next year, when the decorations come out again.

So when I say that this year was actually peaceful, that no tears were shed Christmas Eve while exchanging gifts, you’ll understand why I say that I’m pretty happy that this was one of the least eventful Christmas’s in recent memory.

My brother got another taste of what life as a married man will be like as he was forced to come up with a Christmas sharing schedule so that he could share Christmas with his fiance’s family and us. In previous years, we’ve gotten used to seeing Melissa at all sorts of family functions, Christmas and Thanksgiving included. Perhaps the thought that her daughter would soon be moving out (well, not too soon, since they’re still saving for a house) motivated Melissa’s mother into action. In any case, from here on out, it looks like my brother and his fiance will have to make some decisions. Or do a lot of driving. Either way, that’s one stress I don’t have to worry about anytime soon.

Over the holidays, I got to see Mike and Curtis (and Curtis’s fiance Kiera, of course) for the first time in a while. Which is weird, since Mike actually lives in Maryland. We went out to lunch, hung out, didn’t do much, and parted ways again.

Isaac, my roommate and probably my best friend, spent his last days these last few weeks as a free man. This afternoon, he was whisked away to Navy boot camp up in the frozen wastelands around the Great Lakes. May God have mercy on his soul. As proud of him as I am for making this move, I’ll really miss having him around. I know everyone says, don’t be roommates with friends or you’ll ruin the friendship (I think Katie is still ready to strangle me over my kitchen cleanup sloth from Sophomore year), but it actually worked out pretty well. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to keep in touch.

I’ll post later about the Christmas loot. I need some photos to do it justice and everything’s a little messy just now.

It doesn’t actually contain potatoes. Sorry to let you down Denise! (But I have made the other kind that does contain potatoes in the past!) What they do contain is a lot of sugar, cream cheese, butter, and coconut with a touch of vanilla extract. Then they are rolled in a pile of cinnamon until they look like little lumpy potatoes.

One of my coworkers brought in some pies to work today. I had a slice each of pumpkin and chocolate pie and they were both tasty and delicious. Yes, we actually have snack time at work, and it happens every other Thursday afternoon. We’re grown ups, really. I’m still campaigning for nap time, but so far our glorious leaders have refused to consider it. (The bakery, apparently, is in Baltimore and is called Dangerously Delicious Pies. They have a website and they do deliver by mail in a refridgerated truck, which amuses me to no end.)

The Cookie Countdown Extravaganza continues, but the happy news that I totally neglected to mention is that I finished NaNoWriMo this year! Yay! Unfortunately, I haven’t finished the plot yet, so it’s another month of writing and editing. I think it may sink into a quagmire, unfortunately, and the plot changed somewhere in the middle just to confuse me. Next time, I’ll outline better. I’m posting it over on Ideascrawls.