Month: December 2008

Craigslist

At this point we have a semi-long list of furniture for the house that we’re keeping an eye out for. We still have money from wedding gifts that we would like to spend on it, but the problem has been finding furniture we like in the proper dimensions. I cruise the local furniture stores pretty regularly, but keep not finding the perfect kitchen table, cabinet to store games and puzzles for the family room, side table for the family room, DVD shelf for the hallway, or cabinet/dresser for our closet.

In a change of fate, we found two Craigslist items off the list in under two weeks. First of all, a cabinet for our bedroom:

I was having a hard time envisioning what could go in the space. A dresser would be more traditional but we don’t need dresser-style storage. The combination of one drawer and then the adjustable shelf inside seems ideal for storing sweaters, blankets, pillows, etc or things in baskets. Nice and flexible and while the color isn’t necessarily what I was picturing initially, it fits perfectly with the shelves in the closet and looks surprisingly coordinated.

Our second find was a kitchen table. We were pretty set on white legs and a blond top, with matching white and blond Windsor chairs. I’ve been just missing perfect examples on Craigslist for months. This table was a little bit smaller that we were hoping for (38” vs. 42”), and it has folding sides, but it only cost $30 and we’re quite pleased with it.

That big window is one of the brightest spots in the house in the afternoon, and it’s nice to have a spot to sit and work and soak in whatever light is out there. The stools and side table were already there, and we’ll leave them for now.

Seasonal

View of the Christmas lights from my computer desk.

I’ve been leaving my curtains open in the evenings so that I can see them glowing away as I work. It’s a small but happy bit of consolation for the short, short December days.

(We were both rather impressed how very blue the LED lights are once they were strung up again. They’d kind of whitened in my mind over the course of the year. It’s interesting to walk around the neighbourhood, since you can really see the difference between last year’s LEDs and this year’s. Perhaps we’ll wait a little bit longer and then upgrade ourselves…)

Potential

We finally had the guys come out to grind up the four stumps. Here’s a last photo of one of them from our bedroom window.

Now we just have big piles of sawdust. 🙂 The guys were great and also ground the tiny stump from the tree I cut down myself last fall.

We’re considering what to do with that side yard. It feels so much bigger without those trees, and it actually gets morning and afternoon sun now – probably the only place on our property where that’s the case. There’s no easy way to get water over there, but part of my brain has been chanting away about a real herb garden and a veggie garden…

Look what I made at work today

At work, we are building collages. (A long blog post in itself.) My group already had plenty of cooks making layout decisions, so I decided to make a mosaic of our logo out of chopped-up clippings from magazines.

It’s fiddly (each of those blocks are about 4″x4″, and the paper bits are usually less than a quarter inch per side) and wonderfully colorful. Still have the blue panel to go!

I made a hat!

I finished the first pair of skeins of Noro just after we got back from Philadelphia, and so I took a break mid-scarf to make a matching hat with the beginnings of the second pair of skeins.

A good picture was hopeless, since the silk in the yarn is so reflective and we have zero natural light here (two weeks from today the daylight will start to return!!). I’ll have to remember to get a good photo later in the winter.

The hat was top-down. I knit the body on #7 needles, increasing as described for the Thorpe hat, and then kept going until I had 110 stitches. I knit until it was almost long enough, then switched to #6s for six rows of 2×2 rib and a castoff row. It fits nicely. Now back to the scarf!

(But first, a closeup of all of that shiny, multihued silk: )

Shaking up the clowns’ world

I was blowing off the rocks with the turkey baster (a common fishtank chore – it stirs up the detritus so that our skimmer and filters can remove it) when I got a little bit too close to the leather and sucked at some of its arms. It was not pleased and promptly retreated, leaving the clowns very confused.

It’s an amazing coral, since it can pull in those long (over an inch) arms in completely, leaving only a dimpled top. I love the texture, especially when it leave a few arms out for grizzle around the edges.

(You can also see the pretty patterns on the trunk – click for big – so delicate and lovely.)

After a few minutes, the clowns started nuzzling in. This did not seem to improve the leather’s mood.

(You can also see the shrimp dancing away. Clack recently started letting it clean him, and the shrimp has been paying him lots of attention.)

About a half hour later, the water started to clear and the leather, grudgingly, came partway out again. It curled its top into a funnel shape. Amusing to me because it still looks outraged.

The clowns were being very protective when I came near with the camera, and whenever the tang swam by to investigate. Cute. 🙂

Reaching the end of the internet

Between work and evenings, I probably spend a good 6-15 hours in front of a computer (and sometimes more than that) on any given work day. On weekends I make a concious effort to abandon the computer, frequently turning my desktop off and solely relying on my work laptop, which cuts things down to a blissful hour or two online per day. (All bets are off when I sew on the weekends, since I listen to npr online or watch TV online while I work.)

Obviously, most of this is not productive — you get some work done, and you spend an awful lot of time zoning out and combing the internet. I feel like there are huge sinkholes (youtube, many blogs and news sites, etc) that I ignore, but every now and then I stumble across things that I think are so neat. The Obama “yes we can” video was one example. I generally don’t post them on my blog, but I think this dancing guy is neat. (The story, as far as I can ascertain, is that he is sort of a drifter, started videotaping himself dancing in all sorts of different spots, posted it all over the web, and then people became enthused and joined him.) If group events (national politics, sports, etc) move you, it’s a fun four and a half minutes.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1]

I won’t make this regular fare, but can you imagine seeing some of these places in person? How cool. And the Seattle moment was filmed in Gas Works Park. 🙂
The world is so wide. Yay, internet.