(A Very Belated) Rail Trail Tuesday

Today is Tuesday, and while these pictures aren’t from today, they are still beautiful. A few weeks ago the temperature inexplicably shot into the upper 70s, and I went on a leisurely ride into town.

The leaves on the trees were just beginning to emerge.

The cows were out in their field.

And the river was winding along its way, waiting to replenish the bare, wintery ground.

In the intervening weeks, the horses have returned to their pastures, the flowers are blooming, and the bugs (unfortunately) have returned in full force. Insects aside, I am thrilled that I can once again go out for rides without feeling like my nose is going to freeze off of my face at any moment.

In other news, I’m going to start running in addition to cycling. My friend and I are planning to do a half marathon on her birthday. Don’t worry, it’s still a good six months out, and we’re going to be intelligent about this. Rather than just going out running willy nilly, we’re doing a “couch to half marathon” plan that slowly works up to a 13 mile run from a very gentle 6 miles a week. I’m looking forward to spending more time on the trail!

Snowflake Knits

There are certain things I enjoy doing in the winter. Throwing snowballs. Drinking hot beverages (tea or cocoa only, please, no coffee for me). Making food that requires a hot oven or long cooking time. Competing with myself to see how long I can go without turning on the heat (which sort of explains why I like baking bread and cooking stews). Wearing brightly-colored socks. And, perhaps most importantly, knitting things that feel like winter.

You may remember the snowflake illusion scarf I knit a while back. That got started during the middle of the snowstorm that slammed the East coast in October. Since finishing it I’ve been wondering what to knit with the rest of the yarn. All I knew is that whatever I ended up making, I wanted it to have snowflakes on it. I settled on “awesome snowflake mittens,” because I already have a really cool hat and my current mittens aren’t quite wind-proof enough for my taste. After a few failed attempts at designing my own mitten (the cuff was too tight, then it was too loose, then the colorwork pattern I’d planned out turned out to be crap), I found these gloves on Ravelry. Except for being gloves, they’re exactly what I want – stranded colorwork, snowflakes, and very pretty.

So I started knitting.

I really like how the colorwork is turning out.

But I’m not completely sold on them yet. The pattern is written for smaller yarn than I am using, and it’s written for hands that are a good one and a half inches wider than my hands are. I altered the pattern to remove ten stitches from the chart (which was no simple task – the chart is unique on every row, and it’s hard to take out stitches anywhere but the edges) and to knit the cuff and thumb gusset narrower as well. I managed to get the cuff just the way I wanted it, but now the rest of the mitten feels way too large, both compared to my hand and to the cuff. Looking at the project photos, I think that’s just how they are, but it doesn’t sit too well with me. I feel like I either need to knit a wider cuff or I need to cut out another six or ten stitches from the chart.

It’s a shame, because these really are beautiful gloves. Maybe I should just try again with thinner yarn.

Party Pieces

When I’m going to a family gathering, an extended stay with friends, or a “bring something to share with the group” party, I like to bring things that are easy to cook and that I know are going to be smash hits. For a while, my go-to was guacamole. You’d be surprised how many people aren’t confident enough to make guacamole, despite loving it whenever they eat it. Just mash up some avocadoes, add in enough diced tomato and onion to make the color ratios look good, squeeze in the juice from one lime, and add a dash of spice (I use garlic powder). Voila! Guacamole can’t be prepared too far in advance, though, as it doesn’t keep very well, so I moved on.

My next party piece was baked doughnuts. I bought a BabyCakes Doughnut Maker, and every time I use it I feel like I just made a miracle happen in my kitchen.

Every recipe included in that manual that comes with the maker is a gem.

I’ve made four of their doughnuts, two glazes, and two powdery/sugary coatings.

Every time, people go nuts. It helps that the doughnut maker itself is adorable, of course, but really, it could be a big black box with no logo printed on it and people would still go nuts over the dougnuts. They’re just that good. But (there’s always a but!) it’s a bit of a chore to make the doughnuts. Every step in the process is easy, I just find it tedious to do the same motions over and over again. So I’m reserving the doughnut maker for special occasions.

Enter the newest addition to my “instant hit” lineup: candied nuts.

They take about the same time to complete as the doughnuts do (half an hour for a batch), but there is less to do. Make some sugar-water, mix in the nuts, spread on a tray, pop in the oven, and give the tray a stir every so often.

They make your house smell incredible, can be made well in advance and stored in jars/tupperware/old Chinese food containers, and then whipped out at a party to the delight and amazement of all. My only issue with them is that the local grocery store has a dismal selection of nuts – half are peanuts, most of the rest are cashews and almonds. But that’s my problem, not an inherent flaw in the recipe.

Oh, I do have a second problem with the recipe. It’s hard not to snack on the nuts before actually bringing them to their final destination. I’ve hidden mine away inside opaque jars tucked into a paper bag underneath a loaf of bread, and I’m still not sure I’ll be able to resist.

Rail Trail Tuesday

Now that I think about it, Rail Trail Tuesday makes way more sense than Rail Trail Monday. I enjoy alliterative phrases, and the double T in Trail Tuesday pleases me in a way that TM in Trail Monday does not. But moving on.

I haven’t been out on the rail trail in… oh… about a month. Most days it is too cold for me to want to be outside, and because the sun sets so early now it is hard for me to go out in the afternoon (at around 3 PM) like I want. These pictures are a little old, but I want to share them because they illustrate a very important point about where I currently live. When I say things like “I know it’s time to turn when I see a cow,” I really mean it.

Hello, cows. This part of my ride always stinks. You know, because of all the cow poop that sits around in that field.

There are also a couple of sheep pastures on the trail.

Did I mention that I also live within walking distance of at least two horse riding places, and that my neighbors across the street raise chickens? Yeah. This town is rural in a way I absolutely did not expect.

Sunshine in December

My mom loves my hand-knit socks, and I don’t think I could ever knit her so many that she’d get sick of them. Unfortunately, her feet are even bigger than mine are, and she likes very dark, sedate colors, so I get bored fairly quickly when knitting her socks. Case in point: I just finished knitting Sunshine from Cookie A‘s book Sock Innovation for my mom’s birthday… which was last spring.

Ok, it wasn’t completely my fault for being a lazy knitter. I had to knit three complete socks to get the pair. Yeah, that’s right. Three for the pair. Actually, more like three and a half for the pair. I started the first sock on my standard size sock needle – US 1.5 – and when I hit the heel I realized that while the sock fit my foot, it wouldn’t fit my mom’s. So I ripped out and started again with US 2 needles. After that, I knit a full sock and realized I had used up more than half the ball. I bought a ball of black sock yarn and started the next sock, which went off without a hitch. And then… Well. All I can say is that I got distracted. I would knit a repeat of the next sock and then go make a pair of mittens. Knit another repeat, start a sweater. It continued on that way until about a week ago, when I realized it’s almost Hanukkah/Christmas and I still was at the heel of the third sock. The winter holidays are usually my deadline for belated gifts, and this year my mom is getting double presents. I plowed through and raced to finish.

The end result? Beautiful.

Not bright and vibrant like the name would imply (if I made these for myself I’d have to use a yellow yarn), but still beautiful.

Happy belated birthday, mom!

Winter knitting

I love how no sooner than I make a promise about the blog like “I will post a picture of the rail trail every week, to force myself to update on a schedule!” I break it. It’s not that I don’t like blogging, it’s that I work from home, and I try to keep my work computer and my fun computer separate. It’s not a 100% perfect system – sometimes (oftentimes) I’ll put an episode of How I Met Your Mother on and give it the upper left-hand corner of the screen, while the right-hand side alternates between Eclipse and a browser for testing, and the lower left-hand corner has an instance of Terminal showing me a constantly updating view of the Apache log file. But for things like picture editing and blogging, I have firm boundaries.

Also, I’m lazy. That plays a big part in it too.

Too lazy to blog, but not too lazy to knit. I’ve made a whole bunch of stuff in the past couple of months. So much that now that I’m looking at all the pictures and Ravelry entries, I’m surprised I actually manage to do other things like “cook awesome food” and “get work done during the day.”

I made a sweater, the Darmstadt Pullover.

It is yet another brioche project, from the same book as the hats I made, Knitting Brioche by Nancy Marchant. According to my project page on Ravelry, I’m the only person to have made the sweater other than the designer. It’s a shame, the sweater is gorgeous! I have this problem where I try to knit a big, cozy, warm sweater and end up with something a little more form-fitting than I was hoping for. Maybe I’m not blocking the sweaters well enough, or maybe I have some delusions about what size I actually am. I know this will stretch out a little after I wear it some more, and eventually it will be the sweater I want it to be.

I knit an illusion scarf with snowflakes on it.

Made with some unknown yarn I picked up at Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool. There was a booth selling wool for a penny a yard – how could I say no to a deal like that? I have enough for the scarf (which is finished, but I haven’t taken an action shot of it) and either a hat or a pair of mittens, possibly both. What say you, internet? Which should I go for next?

I made a few items for Occupy Wall Street.

That’s two pairs of fingerless gloves and a scarf, all made out of leftover wool from other projects. The scarf is the yarn from my Starsky, the green from the Darmstadt Pullover, and the blue from a hat I planned but never made. I sent these off about a month ago, and hopefully they’re keeping somebody warm now.

I made two Pretty Things.

One is for me, the other for my mom. They’re both made by a company called the Oasis Farm Fiber Mill, which specializes in yarn made from rabbits. The green is a line called “Classic Bunny,” which is a Merino/Angora mix, and the purple is a line called “Glamour Bunny” which adds in a little silk to the mix. I found both yarns difficult to work with due to loose plying, but once the yarn was off the needle all the issues I had with it disappeared – the plies somehow got back together and behaved like a cohesive piece of yarn again. And the loose plying does have its benefits – mainly that the finished cowls are incredibly soft. The pictures don’t really do the colors justice – again, problems with me being lazy. I don’t usually wake up early enough to get pictures of yarn in natural light, so you’re seeing most of these things in the harsh glare of the overhead kitchen light.

I’ve made some other stuff too, but it’s all in stages of half-completion. I finished a pair of socks for myself, but need to kitchener the toes together, I made a felted bag for my bike but haven’t felted it or sewn on the straps and closures, I made a hat but need to embellish it, et cetera, et cetera. The freak snowstorm in October really lit a fire under my proverbial ass, and I’ve been knitting like a madwoman ever since. Living in a cold place really does wonders for being able to finish things!

Weekend of Win

This weekend, I…

1. Made some completely kick-ass chocolate donuts with chocolate glaze and sprinkles.
2. Ate at Pizza Hut for the first time in… oh… fifteen years or so. Bonus: I survived to tell the tale.
3. Was decently social with a group of people I did not really know.
4. JUMPED OUT OF A PLANE. Bonus: I survived to tell the tale.

A picture, let me show you it:

I was unable to take notes or post about the experience while it was happening (obviously – except for the camera man [because they take videos and pictures of everybody as they are falling through the sky]), but this is more or less what was running through my mind before, during, and just after skydiving:

• Putting on the jumpsuits: “We’re rocking the ‘blue man group meets prison’ look right now.”
• Meeting my co-jumper: “So, your name is Crash? That’s… reassuring.”
• In the plane: “Oh, what a peaceful ride. This is totally, completely safe fuckit who am I kidding I’m freaking out”
• Freefall: 60 seconds of “AHHHHHHHHHH WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME AHHHHHHHH JAOGTFUHAOTUAEHTOHET MY FACE IS FALLING OFF”
• After pulling the parachute: “This is quite nice. We’re going through a cloud! I see a rainbow! There’s my house!”
• Landing: “I AM SO SHAKY RIGHT NOW WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO ME. Power through, you still have to bike home.”

The closest thing I can describe this to is that scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. You know, the one at the end where Charlie and his grandfather and Willy Wonka are in the Wonkavator, and it breaks through the glass ceiling. Breaking through the ceiling was a little scary and intense while it was happening, but after there was a long time of quiet and calm and peace. Freefall is breaking through the glass ceiling, and the parachute is the fun, swirly ride over town.

I now know what I am going to make all of my out-of-town friends do when they visit me. Skydiving baby, skydiving!

Rail Trail Monday

As an experiment in regular posting, as well as an excuse to get me out of my apartment and moving on a regular basis, every Monday I am going to go on the rail trail near my house and take a picture while on the ride. Maybe an interesting animal, or a slow sort of time lapse of the bridge as fall continues and winter approaches, or even just things that make me smile as I ride.

This Monday’s picture is a little belated, as I hadn’t yet decided what I was doing with it, but nevertheless, here it is:

One of my favorite spots on the rail trail. It’s an apple orchard about three miles south of New Paltz. Most of the trail goes through wooded areas, and the towering trees can feel a little oppressive, especially on a muggy day. Then suddenly you are in an open area, where the air feels fresher, you can smell the apples on the trees, and off in the distance you can see the Shawangunk mountains. This is also one of the areas on the rail trail where you can see enough of the sky to watch people skydiving – which, for some reason unknown to me, is a big activity in this area.

The Summer of Books

In the past couple of years that I have been a Full-Grown Adult, whose life is full of Paying Bills and Other Such Responsibilities, I’ve found it difficult to sit down and get a bunch of reading done. It took me over a year to finish Nixonland. To be fair, it is a pretty dense book, and political non-fiction really isn’t typically something that interests me, but even so, a year is kind of ridiculous. The past couple of months have really bucked that trend for me, though. What helped was taking a vacation that involved roughly 12 hours traveling to and from the airport (both coming and going) to a country that has an institutionalized nap time. Being young and full of vim, vigor, and energy, I mostly ignored the “nap” part of nap time and took it as “a free two or three hours in which to do whatever I want without my parents being around.” And because I am basically a nerdy librarian, that two or three hours was spent either reading a book or playing backgammon against a computer.

My summer reading list, in brief:

• The Hunger Games trilogy: Ok, actually just the second two books in the series, Catching Fire and Mockingjay. I thoroughly enjoyed these books, and I’m not quite sure why. I’ve seen the “children/teenagers sent to an unknown area and fight for survival” thing done before, and I’ve seen the “vaguely post-Apocalyptic future in which society has been restructured and a group of young people is now fighting against a morally corrupt government” thing done as well. Normally I get tired of seeing the same themes more than a couple of times – it all gets rather samey. Maybe I enjoyed The Hunger Games because at heart I am basically still a teenager who can’t say no to a little sappy romance – which, by the way, is all over these books. I can’t say that there is anything mind-blowing in these books, but I can tell you that they are nice, light reads that are pretty much guaranteed to keep you interested for the amount of time it takes to read them. Two thumbs up!
• Anne of Green Gables: Three of the first four books (the other book is not available on Kindle). Let me just say, I really, really dislike Anne Shirley. The way she acts and talks is pretty much exactly opposite from how I act and talk, and if I knew her in real life, I wouldn’t think she is a bad person but I definitely wouldn’t want to spend more time with her than I absolutely had to. Given that this series is written like a giant, continuous slice-of-life description that makes you feel like you are spending all your time with Anne Shirley, I was in mild mental pain the entire time it took to finish the books. The only explanation I can give for why I kept reading is that I am a glutton for punishment. (I also read the whole Twilight series.) On the other hand, L. M. Montgomery isn’t a bad writer, and the stories flowed pretty nicely, so the experience wasn’t entirely terrible and I can see why some people love this series (as opposed to Twilight, which is pretty much inexcusable). One thumb up.
• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife: A collection of short stories describing the author’s perception of the afterlife. I cannot emphasize this enough: this book is fantastic. Some of the stories are hilarious, such as the one that tells how the afterlife is a replay of your original life, except with all similar events grouped together so you spend three days stuck in traffic all in one go. Some of them are sad, such as the one that tells how the afterlife is a big room where everybody waits until there is nobody left on earth who knows their name before they disappear. Some are philosophical, describing God’s thought process for making the afterlife the way it is, and why certain people are allowed into it or not. All of them are well-written and interesting. Seventy bajillion thumbs up!
• Hint Fiction: A collection of microscopically short stories – they all have 25 or fewer words in them. I would describe few of them here, but the descriptions would be longer than the stories themselves! The stories are all meant to make you think about what came before and what will come after, so the book isn’t as quick to read as you might expect. Many thumbs up.
• Middlesex: This book really struck a chord with me. On one level, it is about a Greek family, and given that my family is also Greek, I felt a certain connection with the narrator. On another level, it focuses on a young girl who grows up into an awkward adolescence and has to figure out her identity. She did that by realizing that she is actually a boy and embracing her genetically-given gender, whereas I did that by realizing that while I may be kind of awkward in the face and in the personality, it isn’t a problem unless other people make it one, and whoever makes it a problem isn’t really worth caring about. Yes, yes, that doesn’t sound very similar at all, but right up until the point that Callie realizes that she is really Cal, that story was pretty much the story of my childhood… plus some lesbianism. The more I try to explain this, the more confused it will become, so I will leave this description at: two thumbs up!
• Jane Eyre: I have always disliked Jane Austen. The first time I tried to read any Austen, I was 11 or 12 years old, and the writing style was completely out of my league. Too flowery, too descriptive, not enough things happening. I tried to read Jane Eyre at the same time, and reached the same conclusion. Ever since then, I’ve held the belief that Austen and the Brontes are all essentially the same – boring and flowery. In a great error of judgment, I took an Austen class in college, and even after reading every single novel she wrote, I still dislike her, and assumed I would dislike the Brontes just as much. As I mentioned above, I am a glutton for punishment, so this summer I decided to give Charlotte Bronte a shot. The conclusion? This book is terrific! Jane Eyre is super spunky and has a wonderfully cutting wit when describing the people she interacts with. Despite the fact that she falls in love with her boss/master for no real good reason, I’m a huge fan of Jane Eyre. Bravo, Charlotte Bronte, bravo! Two thumbs up!

I also read through several of my favorite book series from when I was younger – The Chronicles of Narnia, The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, and a few stand-alones that I blew through so quickly I don’t even remember doing it.

I’m trying to continue the trend of reading now that I am no longer on vacation, and got a couple of books out of the library to supplement what I have available on my Kindle. Wish me luck!

Waking up full of awesome – really?

Somebody on my knitting forums linked to this post the other day. Basically, that post says there was a time that you (assuming that you are a woman) thought you were the best thing since sliced bread, but society has beaten you down into a lifeless pulp, but you should step back and embrace your former five-year-old self and become “full of awesome” again. I saw this same type of idea on Jezebel recently as well (unless it was Feministe – I lost the blog post in Google Reader), except this time it was hearkening back to a time when the author was seven years old, not five.

Quite frankly, I’m sick of this narrative.

I pretty much hated myself when I was five. Pretty much as soon as I gained self-awareness, I became my harshest critic. I would say something and then immediately regret saying it. I would put on my clothes and think “am I going to be dressed enough like the other people I’ll be around that I won’t stand out?” I never wanted anybody to hear me play the piano because I knew I wasn’t good enough to perform yet – my parents would praise me when I played a fumbling scale, and I would think “Really, guys? Why do you think that is good? That was terrible.” I didn’t want people to comment on my appearance, even if it was a compliment, because I was just trying to blend in, not to stand out. If I realized that people expected me to act a certain way, I would continue acting that way long past the point of wanting to. (I had a teacher in nursery school that I used to hug every day, because the other kids did it too. Then she started working at the elementary school, and I hugged her there too, because I thought she’d expect me to, even though I didn’t want to.) If I didn’t know how I should act in a particular situation, I would mimic what other people were doing, and feel terribly out of place the whole time I was doing it.

It wasn’t until eighth or ninth grade that I really started to come into my own. Before then, I was acutely aware of what other people were saying about me, how they reacted to my words, my actions, my appearance. But afterwards? My attitude shifted to an uncaring “I’m going to do what I think is fun, and I’ll dress the way I want to dress, and I don’t have to worry about what you say, because you aren’t worth it.” I had my small group of friends (four people that I cared about deeply, and several friends of those four whose company I enjoyed), I had my activities (I took piano lessons and played trombone in the school bands), I had my interests (mostly books, but also some TV shows and music that nobody else cared about), and I was way happier than I was in elementary school.

This trend persists, even though I still kind of flip out when meeting new people that I’m trying to be friends with, because I actually care about making a good impression on them. But with everybody else? Not a care in the world. I’m just tired of people/blogs/movements that I respect making sweeping generalizations about how I am supposed to feel, and how I should have felt twenty years ago, and how society should have changed me between then and now, and how I can fight back. It is strange, how the smallest things can make you feel excluded.