Think pink

This is the view from the front porch of my engineer's parents' home in NJ. They built their cozy house there when they first got married 53 years ago. I can understand why his dad missed it so while he was stuck in a hospital bed for 2 months this summer.

Okay, I was going to write a more detailed post about the last few days, but I just have too much bad news to cope with right now, so this is going to be blunt, and I will revisit the fun parts later (and there are fun bits, really).

So my brother-in-law was found wandering in the street at 1am this weekend, not a phone call you ever want to get about your spouse, much less from the police in the middle of the night. I decided this was not a good weekend to visit for my annual birthday cake.

My biopsy results came back, and they were not good: early stage invasive cancer. I will be meeting a specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering for a lumpectomy and sentinel lymph node biopsy (don't do a google search -- trust me on this) as soon as my doctor can push through the paperwork, so hopefully within 2 weeks.

At least they caught it early and the original sonogram (after the mammography) of the nearest lymph node looked clear, so everything should turn out okay, but I am still shocked and weepy.

Okay. That's it. Waiting for my engineer to come over so I can curl into a little ball.

Girl Stuff

The ever popular and amusing apple hat makes an appearance since I am way, WAY behind in my baby gift knitting. Between the 2 hours in the hospital waiting room (more on that later) and the hours in front of the TV at my engineer's parents' home on Xmas Day, it was a breeze.

In fact, it was such an amusing F.O. that my sweetheart plonked it on his normally serious dad's head, and we all cracked up, providing the perfect photo op moment. Imagine tiny apple hat (see the wine glass below it here?) perched on top of the head of a dignified senior citizen. ;-)

And the plethora of sock yarn skeins was the result of my friend Ellen's bonding with my ballwinder all day as she held my hand (metaphorically speaking) after a follow up visit to the hospital (more details shortly, really) since my engineer had to be at work today (yes, there is a Scrooge, and he is headquartered in Omaha).

Speaking of the engineer's family, the picture to the left shows the various stages of the spiced peanut butter cookies [which used pureed chick peas!) that I made for my engineer's dad (yes, he of the apple hat). It tasted a wee bit spicy fresh off the cooling racks, due to the red pepper flakes but settled into a nicely nutty, not too sweet flavor (I used all natural peanut butter and not Skippy or Jif, thereby vastly lessening the sugar content) the next day.

As it turns out, it shouldn't have been his dad's approval I worried about, but his sister's: apparently she is allergic to something in the recipe -- no one knows what, since she usually only finds out the hard way. I was mortified and felt badly.

Speaking of trauma & drama, upon my annual visit to the "woman 's doctor" this month, she said the words no woman ever wants to hear: "I found a lump." It turns out to be early stage and relatively small (0.6 mm)

So yes, I have been becoming acquainted with the wonderful facilities (and they are indeed wonderful) of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital: X-rays (less painful pancake moment than expected, since the technician was excellent), ultrasound machines, and ultrasound needle biopsy. I find out the results on Tuesday or Wednesday (not quite the birthday present I would have liked) but regardless of the outcome, the doctor says, "Out it comes."

The doctor I was lucky enough to be assigned was fabulous and had a great bedside manner (she gave me her cellphone number, -- not the answering service number, and came in to check on me and hold my hand during the biopsy, which was performed by another doctor) and made me crack up the other day when she met me, "Oh you're the knitter!" since she had chatted with me in the inner waiting room (there is a more private, women-only waiting room after the patients change into the double "breasted" exam gowns -- why can't other places use this version which gives patients a little dignity?!) and seen me at work on the apple hat.

Regardless of the (mercifully arriving soon) results, I will soon get to meet another new doctor (a breast surgeon) who my very nice doctor recommended... well, once everyone comes back from the holidays. And I thought I would be mostly okay with everything today, especially since my sister and mother both had have cysts removed so this was not totally unexpected, but apparently I was a little more shaky than I thought.

So Ellen, who had offered to go to the hospital with me for the biopsy, came over with lunch and we knit and ate, and watched some of my TiVo backlog, and then eventually ordered dinner, unlike the chicken thighs braised in sherry-balsamic sauce (bonus: used some of the sherry I bought during my ill-fated trip to Spain a few years ago -- still can't face chorizo without grimacing) which I made for knitting night at my place on Tuesday night (the same night I was nervously baking cookies for B's dad) including Ellen, Marci, and Jackie.

Girlfriends rock.

Monster mugs

Mea culpa -
I realized some of my measurement math was off, so I corrected it, and then tweaked a few other things here... and there... so, um, there have been some edits below, after the original posting. Oops.

Remember the gigantic mug I made a while ago? (My hand is there for scale, not presentation, a la voila!)

Well, I discovered that the reason it's so capacious (besides my being thirsty like a camel) is that it holds over 3-1/2 cups of liquid, a/k/a 28 oz.! (Here, the pen is for scale, without any foreshortening.) The only drawback is that the damn thing is HEAVY when it's full (a/k/a 1lb.+12 oz.+mug= probably over 2 lbs.).

My engineer liked my gigantic mug enough to request a monster mug of his very own. I wound up making 2 mondo mugs, both of which are a nice deep blue color, which you can't see very well in the photo. (The teeny 1/2-cup size Tupperware container is there for scale in this shot. Heh.) These are the same mugs I mentioned earlier where I re-did the handle after painstakingly attaching it in the first place.

Being an engineer, he measured out precisely the capacity of each much, which was 2 cups apiece (i.e., 16 oz. ea.) which is where I got the idea for measuring out how much "Monster Mug - The Original could hold."

And remember the baby sweater sweater I knit this spring for my (alas) now former co-worker's son in Hong Kong? She sent me a photo before she left.

Okay, lunchtime is almost over. Time to go back and be depressed watching my coworker Dennis pack up his stuff. Since he is on vacation the first week of January, he's boxing up all of his stuff in case we get laid off while he's on vacation.

Which reminds me: we all went out for drinks last Friday (oddly enough, no one is in the mood for a holiday party -- funny, that) and are all going out for booze again this Friday. As The New York Times recently pointed out, when the economy crashes, bar tabs rise.

Oh, and the apricot oat muffins were pretty tasty, even according to my co-worker Mike who is a total Guy (in a nice way) and avoids all things diet or WW.

Stewing in my juices

Backlog of food porn, part 2:

Sausage & cranberry stew a la Shirl, based on a UK WW recipe, where I also threw in a bag of mixed frozen veggies. (Those stir-fry mixes are quite handy!) Made this for a knitting night, and unlike the Brits, decided I wanted more in my stew than meat + fruit.


EatingWell Magazine's Sweet & Savory Beef Stew (w/ dried cherries & butternut squash) was the dish that got me hankering to make stews. (Wish I had a food stylist, so it looks like the magazine photo, but hey, it tastes good.)


My engineer's roast _____ which I diced lots of stuff for: oodles of carrots and celery. For the life of me, I cannot remember the meat involved (sausage? brats? I forget) but the end result was tasty!

And now, for some sleep!

Backlog

One of my buddies at work has (happily for him, sadly for me) gotten a new job... in Switzerland! I will be sad to see Ryo-san leave, but as they say during funerals, it is a far, far better place that he goes to... In honor of which, we went to our last sushi-fest lunch, where we had: miso-glazed bass, udon soup, assorted sushi, and 3 enormous fried oysters with tartar sauce. Yum! (Hey, at least there were only 3 -- the other supersecret Japanese menu special had katsu, which I once figured out had something like 12 WW points per cutlet. My daily budget = 18.)

And tonight, I had the urge to make -- and almost all of the ingredients for -- apricot oat bran muffins. Since I lacked the bran, I swapped out the 2 cups for 1 cup wheat germ, and 1 cup wheat flour. There is absolutely no fat/milk-based shortening, relying instead on applesauce, molasses, and egg whites for binding (?) power. WW pts = 2 per muffin! Yippee! Hopefully, it will actually taste as good as it looks.
And yesterday was my sister's birthday. Indeed, the cappuccino angel food cake was a disaster. It tasted like cappuccino sponge. No, not sponge CAKE -- but sponge. Or as my friend Jackie put it, something not for company, but which would be fine for in front of the TV at home, or great for a bread pudding.

So instead, I made a classic white cake, using a recipe from the Light & Easy Baking book I bought recently, and another recipe for chocolate whipped cream, I made a sheet cake for my sister and our ever multiplying family. My poor engineer had to wait for me while I frantically finished frosting it yesterday morning before we left to meet everyone in CT for an early brunch (11:15, not 2:15).

Happily, that turned out well, and was mostly demolished after brunch. Also, my giganto cupcake carrier also converts into a sheet cake carrier. Hooray for travelling by car!
And speaking of my cute chauffeur, here is the post-frogging, re-knit London beanie for him, which he has been happily wearing. So happily, in fact, that I am now 2/3 of the way through (after once again frogging the last third!) another one in Brown Sheep -- midnight green with old sage stripes.
Backlog of food porn: cheese flights at Caselulla from last Wednesday (or was it a week earlier?) with my long-suffering engineer. (He is learning that I have many fine qualities, but time management is not one of them, see: cake frosting, above. He has been patiently listening to my bitching about our recent and upcoming layoffs; latest estimate: January for round 2.)
The dish above was actually pate, topped with ...um, was it sour cream? ... and there is a pepper relish under the bread.

Double Ginger Cookies

I have discovered the wonderful world of crystallized ginger, courtesy of FreshDirect and MyRecipes.com.

Before:


After:


Using the Cooking Light recipe for double ginger cookies, which makes insanely large cookies -- the size of a flattened golf ball! -- I have made a giant stack of these babies.

Although the WW points value for THEIR size is 2/cookie, I:
(a) skipped the sugar coating -- they are already very sweet from the crystallized ginger and other sugar
(b) bet I could get it down to 1 pt/cookie -- if I skip rolling it in sugar AND scale it down to human-sized portions.

But I fear the cappuccino angel food cake from WW which I attempted to make (as a trial run for my sister's birthday on Sunday) will not turn out so well. I am letting it cool now and will see in the morning...but that egg white thing, challenging without a stand mixer. Oy.

I sense it will be back to a nice simple white cake recipe for me, for the actual birthday...except maybe with some chocolate whip cream. Ah, the wonders of unsweetened cocoa powder...

OK, time to go **THUD!**

Disclaimers

I put up my little eBay tree this weekend, even though I don't feel very festive (layoffs and the knowledge of additional layoffs will do that to you).


But regardless of my holiday sentiment (or lack thereof) I do find the little guy cheerful -- and a testament to the power of 99 cent stores.


Every year he/it comes out of my closet and I do the pipe cleaner thing and twist it into fluffiness and then hang my various ornaments and doodads on it.



On the bright side, I made 3 dozen oatmeal almond cookies (1 WW point each!) which both my engineer, and my coworker Mike pronounced yummy. My knitting buddies also seem to like it. Best of all: they have all left my house. Ha!


Next up: finding a nice, light cake recipe for my sister's birthday next weekend. Unlike my brother-in-law, she prefers light & fluffy (strawberry shortcake) vs. rich & dense (ex: German chocolate cake).


Since I bought 2 well-reviewed baking cookbooks from The Strand last week, I am hopeful: Perfect Light Desserts: Fabulous Cakes, Cookies, Pies, and More Made with Real Butter, Sugar, Flour, and Eggs, All Under 300 Calories Per Generous Serving, which uses natural ingredients and not Splenda, or fat-free anything, and also Light and Easy Baking, which also has non-chemical ingredients.



And finally, a ceramics colleague made this beautiful vase, which I had absolutely nothing to do with -- I just thought it was pretty.

Opa!

I will be sad to say good-bye to what I think of as my "cossack coat" since it always made me think of a Russian princess, complete with Russian fur hat and fur muff. I bought one summer, many years ago, while visiting my friend Jane while she was a veterinary resident up at Cornell (before she became a vet-I-Dr. and was merely a fabulous but not fabulously wealthy "GP" vet).



It was stiflingly hot, and so we escaped to the Carousel Mall in Syracuse for some free air-conditioning. As it was JULY, this coat was 70% off (don't remember the price, just the discount -- living up to my gender stereotype, I suppose) and I fell in love with it.


It is now way, WAY too big for me, despite being taken in along the back seams by a seamstress (no, not my mom -- I actually paid the lady at the dry cleaners downstairs). And since our company is partnering with the annual NY Cares Coat Drive, (yes, we donated big wads of [probably taxpayer] money -- blow me), I am bringing it in tomorrow to drop off in the donation box in our lobby.


And while I am sad to see it go, I am not regretful, if you see what I mean, since I am determined to maintain my lifetime member standing @ WW.


And thankfully, WW has also channelled my stress into baking (low-fat/whole grain treats, like the oatmeal cherry, cranberry cookies this weekend), and not eating, say, [a] all of the cookies, or [b] KFC (mmmm...wings ...oh! *ahem* sorry about that).


It has also encouraged me to find other, non-caloric ways of venting. Like tonight, I was finally able to indulge in some nice, enthusiastic, throwing of plates against the wall. A helpfully solid BRICK wall.


Why would I want to do this, you may ask? Well, my company finally made the first round of layoffs in my department yesterday (Monday) and handled it in a spectacularly POOR, SUCKY, AND CLASSLESS fashion. I mean, they KNEW they'd have to do this for MONTHS, and the best they could come up with was to call in the 42% (yes, FORTY-TWO PERCENT) of the people to be cut, and tell them en masse in a conference room? And THEN not prepare themselves for the inevitable questions such as "when does my healthcare coverage run out?" Frakkin' gutless idiots.


If they pay you the big bucks, part of that involves sucking it up and doing the hard stuff, like telling people they've lost their jobs privately, or -- at a minimum -- doing it in a respectful group setting and sparing THEM (yes, the newly "right-sized" former employees) the task of telling their now-former coworkers that they were just laid off. Classy, eh?


Having unfortunately been through this mass-layoff process before, I can say that there are much, MUCH better ways of doing this. Jerks. Just thinking about it for any length of time still makes me furious. (Actually, maybe I will e-mail my former Managing Director and thank him for the considerate manner in which he handled it 4 years ago. He's a nice guy and I still keep in sporadic touch with him.)


Oh, and no, this does not mean I am safe: there are further rounds to go... with of course, no actual timeframe of any sort.


So tonight, when I discovered the discard pile at the ceramics studio -- bisqueware (pottery which has been fired once but not yet glazed) destined for the dumpster -- well...! The Studio Manager encouraged me to go outside and do my best Zorba the Greek imitation, using the brick facade of the building. Opa!


Since there was someone waiting in a car in front of the building while this was happening, they must have thought it odd when I went out, flung a dish against the wall, smiled and rubbed my hands with glee, went back inside and then returned with a broom and dustpan. (My engineer says that they'll just think I'm angry but tidy.)


One way or another, I will be revisiting the discard box, oh yes.

Cookie madness

Oatmeal cranberry cherry cookies... I had the urge to bake and my engineer's best buddy's son was suffering from new baby sibling fatigue, so I made a batch (sneaking in some whole wheat flour -- what he doesn't know...) and labelled it "For James Only!"

Oddly, despite being a WW recipe, it (a) did not suggest adding in some whole wheat flour (I subbed 1/4 c. of the 3/4 c. of flour) and (b) advocated a sugar glaze on top of the already sweet flavor (I skipped that altogether).

My engineer pronounced his portion of the batch tasty (yay!) and I kept only 1/3 of the very smallest cookies of the batch at home.

I have the urge to bake more stuff, perhaps because the icky, wet, dreary weather -- perhaps because I have no work to do at the office since everyone seemed to have taken the last week off, maybe to try out some new recipes for the upcoming cookie week(s) at work, and oh yeah, possibly to work off some stress while I'm waiting to get laid off. Feh.

On to more cheerful topics, like the almost finished London Beanie hat I am knitting for my sweetie. He picked the colors (black and grey -- the black is from the leftover part of the pound of yarn I used for the harf) and Spot, a friend's hat, models the result.

I used 2 strands of the black, so there would be no irritating wind gaps once it's worn. However, although it fits in circumference (I increased the number of stitches in the pinhead-sized pattern) it turned out to be too long. DOH!

So I frogged the damn thing down to a few rows above the top grey stripe, have rethreaded the yearn (onto 16" size 8s) and now contemplate more supertight knitting with the Caron black. Ugh. I like the tightness of the results fabric, but it's a pain to knit. Oh well. I will be happy when he wears it all winter. :-)

We also spent Thanksgiving at his parents' friends house: their friends, the friends' 3 adult children, with 2 spouses, and 5 grandchildren. Oh my. All 4 of us -- my engineer, moi, and his parents -- were very excited by the blessed silence at his parents house afterward. The other family was very nice, but 16 people, 5 of whom are young children, in a small house = lots of noise.

Happy news: I managed not to gain any weight (miraculous! thank you, WW strategies!) and hit the exercise room today at my engineer's condo... where I discovered that my PDA had run out of batteries. DOH! 30 minutes on the elliptical with no music = booooooring. And now, my sweetheart is curled up, sick in bed with a bug of some kind, sporadically napping.

Along with a rousing round of Tiger Woods Wii golf last night (where I sucked massively) such has been the exciting tale of my Turkey Day holoday weekend.

Food frenzy

I never understood viscerally why oysters were considered so... sexy... until tonight. Oh my.

My engineer, his best friend, and I had dinner at a super yummy place in Jersey City tonight, Edward's Steakhouse, where the guys ordered from the raw bar. I forget the type of oyster THIS one was, but oh my... putting aside the, um, shape of the contents, the sheer SIZE of the oyster was, well, gargantuan. I mean, look at the fork next to it. Jeez.

Jimmy, my engineer's buddy, was similarly impressed. So much so that he took a photo of it with his iPhone.

I'm still sighing over my "Flat Iron Steak, cocoa and coffee dusted, with wild mushroom mashed potatoes" garnished with julienned (flash?) fried sweet potatoes [like the potatoes in this photo] -- the meat was delicious, and the 'taters had an entire creamery's worth of butter and milk/cream in there, but it was all: Oh. So. Good.

And the other stuff...! Like the homemade potato chips (which my sweetheart mercifully moved down the bar, out of reach) which you can see in the lower left corner of this photo.

I guess the gazillion points I had tonight are just getting me used to the foodfest coming up tomorrow, where I am informed there will be such things as pineapple upside down cake made by my sweetie's mom (yum!!!) and sweet potato casserole w/ marshmallows (umm...ick, and not made by his mom).

Since I don't want to step on anyone's toes by bringing something that is their specialty (it is an extended gathering, with many family friends of my engineer's parents), I settled for 2 dozen roses.

In preparation for tomorrow's festivities (and tonight's decadence), I spent part of this afternoon in the exercise room here at my engineer's condo complex. Since it's frequently deserted, I was also unafraid to sing along with my mp3 player. Heh.

And now, I am going to crawl under the covers (it's freezing in the NYC area tonight) and wait for my fella to return from hanging out with his buddies during an impromptu atop at the Man Cave: since I used his keys to come home, I need to buzz him in.

Brilliant

Which is what the trees in Central Park are at the moment, particularly these golden-colored trees in the fall.


Being an utter city girl, I have NO IDEA what kind of trees they actually are. I only know that they are beautiful and I spend each fall trying to capture the precise shade of golden-orange-yellow the leaves turn, right before they fall.

Brilliant. Not what you might call my boss. She's a perfectly nice woman, but I don't really think it's a bright move to have a staff meeting to tell people that management doesn't have any news and has no idea when they might.



Or my newest favorite move: to call me at home yesterday morning on my day off (oddly enough, I seem to want to take all of my remaining vacation days for the year ASAP) to tell me that they will start announcing cuts on Monday, but they have NO IDEA who, or how many, or how long the process will take. WTF?!



Now I ask you: do you think I might have been HAPPIER not knowing this?!?!


Going to go use my engineer's exercise room now to go work off some stress.



And then tonight, he and I and his best friend as going to have an exciting night of ordering in & playing Tiger Woods Golf on his buddy's Wii. I am addicted to that game, although I have never actually played golf in real life (heh), probably because I am guaranteed to hit the ball (unlike in real life). My Mii (Wii avatar) looks like an ethnic Lara Croft (*snicker*).

Do Over

Today's post is in honor of the timeless principle of "do overs".

One of the things I like best about pottery is that nothing is irreversible ... until it gets fired (think: Mesopotamian shards found by archeologists) ... and sometimes even then: shards can become mosaic tabletops or picture frames, a la craft shows.

Witness the "oopsie" demonstrated above. My engineer was quite bummed when he accidentally shattered my little jar by knocking it over on my nighttable ... my folding iron bookcase used as a nighttable, that is.

But a little craft glue (sometimes it's quite handy being a crafty girl) and voila! Good as new, since stoneware is quite forgiving. (Porcelain would have been more likely to shatter into a Humpty Dumpty number of pieces.)

Witness also the unfired coffee mugs I made this month. I was pleased with the one on the left, but one of the ceramics gurus at the studio pointed out that the handle on the other mug was perhaps a wee bit thin.

Aside from the aesthetic considerations (his work is just beautiful*) consider what might happen once monster mug is filled with liquid. As any of you who have hauled around gallon jugs of milk or water knows, it's damn heavy.

(* Side note: the link above is to the holiday sale on Dec. 12-14 at the studio where I take my classes. The works are really reasonably priced, and Mr. Neil [see blue plate in center photo] also teaches the glazing class.)

So after painstakingly joining the handle to the body of the mug (you have NO IDEA how long that can take, even aside from drying time) I proceeded to rip it off and start all over.

Starting alll over includes making a whole new set of 6 handles (drat -- I thought I had taken photos of thos, but apparently not) from which I eventually selected one which I slowly attached to the mug body ... again. (see the one on the left in the lower photo) The water bottle is shown for scale since I like my cups BIG.

Although I'm now quite satisfied with the width of the handle, I'm still not sure that I like the curve, now that I see it in the photo.

Luckily, it is still wrapped and awaiting bisque firing, so I can probably (not definitely, only possibly) alter the curvature. The one on the right has gone off to meet the kiln, after which it will be staring-at-the-sample-tiles-wall, decision time re: glazing. (There is a final firing after the glaze is applied.)

The tea set on the right was made by someone else at the pottery studio. Just THINK about the number of steps it took to get to the final result. Her stuff is fabulous and I have promptly forgotten the mixture of glazes she used to get this lovely finish. I will have to ask her again. (Hi Diana!)

It worked!

There were three of these Zipcars parked @ the corner of Broadway and Wall Street tonight, covered in LEDs, and attracting many photos, including my cellphone. And CNN just called the election! Yippee!

Inactive

That was my voter status since I have been shamefully slack. I mean, normally, there is no chance Manhattan would ever go Republican, but I cannot stand That Other Guy so much that I made it a point to go vote early.

But apparently not early enough.

This was the line @ 7:50am, and it was despite the fact that our polling station was prepared and had set up another room in a second building as well, to handle the turnout. (My engineer voted in Jersey City at 6:30am...and was already #61 in line.)

Luckily, the electoral workers were all very well organized and came out to get people from the different districts who needed to go on different lines, etc. Unfortunately, that still didn't make my wait shrink to less than 90 minutes, so I was quite late for work. Oops. Oh well. (Since everyone in my department votes, and since I sent them THIS photo @ 8am, they were blase.)

In any case, I had checked on my voter registration status online yesterday & came prepared with the various proofs of ID needed, and voted the old fashioned way: by paper ballot. Hooray! I am now officially "active"...and likely to get summoned for jury duty. Heh.

When I left the polling station to go to work (at 9:30...) my cellphone company text messaged me, warning that I was exceeding my usage on my monthly calling plan. I got to the office and called customer service (one of the proofs of ID was a utility bill, and now I KNOW why there's that commercial about insanely confusing wireless billing statements) since I could not imagine adding my mother to my plan would change the usage that much.

Since October 15th, my mother has used 893 minutes! That's 14.8 hours! I feel like I have a teenager on my family plan. She and I had A Little Talk at lunchtime and I also changed my calling plan to 1,400 minutes/month. Ouch.

I'm going to actually go try to do some work now (while I still HAVE a job...so I can pay for the phone bill!) since I have eaten and calmed down from my calling plan calamity. Sheesh.

The Harf - Pt. 2

The harf! It lives! And just in time for Halloween too.

And Al loves it. In fact, it is currently his Facebook profile photo. (heh) I'm glad to see I did a reasonably good job estimating its length to his height (6'5" or 6'6").

Decorations in my engineer's neighborhood are taken seriously (although content is not -- hee!)

And some serious pumpkin-carving skills are in evidence around the 'hood as well.

This family did not stop at one jack o'lantern either.

Let's see...what else? I'm currently still employed (that is subject to change without notice, of course) although my motivation is somewhat in ebb these days -- what do you expect when you're waiting for a pink slip?

Oh yeah, my mom waited a whole month before asking if I was going to marry my engineer. A month. She's definitely mellowing with age.

And as much as she might drive me CRAZY, I am glad that she's still sharp as a tack, since my brother-in-law has just been diagnosed with moderate Alzheimer's Disease (he's well past mild, unfortunately) which mostly affect his language ability and his recent memory.

He occasionally doesn't recognize my sister (they've been married 34 years) or my older niece. As you can imagine, this is extremely upsetting for them, but he is just puzzled as to why these 2 women occasionally show up at his home. He does not seem to have a problem recognizing my nephew or younger niece however.

On good days, he's just the same as always. And sometimes his comprehension changes at different points of the day (e.g., he'll recognize my sister in the evening but not in the morning, or vice versa). The hard part for my family is never knowing which person they'll "meet".

At least his personality has not changed -- he is still generally a sweet and friendly person, just sometimes confused -- and the neurologist (?) has started him on a course of medication which at least is helping his ability to concentrate.

My nephew is taking him to see anopther specialist, however, so the second doctor is thinking of switching to a different med which specifically targets semantically-related AD.

And if anyone spams me with unsolicited advice about meds and treatments, I am going to freaking flame them (you would be surprised at who trolls random blogs) and then delete their posts

Okay, on to a more calming note to end this post: a pretty shot of the block my engineer lives on, taken during today's unseasonably warm afternoon.

Recycling for H-ween

Trying to explain the use of golf club covers to my mom was an entertaining exercise: she thought it was a glove...for your hand, or that you used it to cover the handle before gripping, a la potholders...heh!

My sister asked for some for her 1, 3, 4, and 5 clubs (whatever they do) and since Xmas is coming... On the bright side, it took me only a day to whip this up (i.e., subway time + after dinner) using some of the purple wool yarn I bought in Shanghai 2 years ago, with some of the lavender Valuruguai eBay yarn for contract (the stripes indicate the # of the club inside).

I am trying to decide if I should (a) also sew on the number outside sing the Valuruguai and (b) add a pom-pom, a la the pattern I found on Wirghts.

Four words: bridesmaid dress from 1990. Now all I need are a tiara and a magic wand and I am all set for Halloween! (The good news about this monstrosity: I am now the same size I was 18 years ago!) At least (a) my cousin [the bride] is still happily married, and (b) I no longer have the perm I had in 1990. Yikes!

Yay! Stuff finally came back from the kiln last night! Lots of stuff as you can see, and my teacher's hip/apron area is shown for scalle. (Actually, it wasn't intentional, but that's how it worked out.)

The haul: a jar (for my engineer), a gigantic mug (for me), 2 large tumblers (maybe an Xmas gift for his dad?), 2 coasters (one large enough for a wine bottle), a bowl/mug (which my mom has already snagged: it fit one of her plastic lids - heh), and a slightly warped but superthin bowl.

And now, off to book club to discuss The Tipping Point, which my friend Margaret was kind enough to give me years ago! Ha!

McMom

So Wednesday of next week is my sweetheart's mom's birthday. This post is titled McMom because their surname begins with "Mc" and when I called her Mrs. Mc-------, she asked me to call her by her first name. Being raised old school by my parents, THAT was never going to happen. (Or as my friend Kieran's mom said, "Did you tell her you still call me Mrs. W-------- after 20 years?") So we compromised with Mrs. Mac, or Mom Mac, etc. (And yes, I have called his dad "Mac Daddy" -- hee!)

In any case, I just got back a bowl from the kiln which I really like which will become her birthday present :-)

My engineer's reaction: "That's really pretty. She'll love it. Until she breaks it. There's a reason we have an extremely well-stocked first aid kit in the laundry room"

My mom's reaction: "You're giving her a bowl? Is it an ugly one? You should give her a nice one you know." (Um, yeah, mom -- I know.) When informed that (a) my engineer thought it was pretty, she was mollified, and (b) that his mom will probably break it at some point, "Well you know, us old people aren't as coordinated and have less hand strength."

My classmates' reaction in the pottery studio, regarding the probable fate of the bowl: "Well it's good that people break things. Then we can give them more stuff. Otherwise they'd never need any additional/new pieces."

My reaction: "Well hey, it's made to be used. As long as it has a happy and useful life before its eventual demise, then I'm satisfied."

Hey, it's all in how you look at the world....glass half empty / glass half full / opportunity to sell water / hey, I can make another mug! ...etc.

The Stockinette

So last weekend I went to The Stockinette, the new LYS near my engineer in Jersey City. which I have posted about previously. The selection was small, but the staff and cafe were very pleasant, and I succumbed to this pattern book by Sublime (whose official site, appropriately enough, like The Stockinette, is lame, but where other sites are much more informative).

The pattern book uses Sublime cashmere merino silk dk which is imported by Knitting Fever. The Little Sailor Coat and the Little Swing Coat are both adorable and the reasons why I bought the book. However, I forgot that reading British knitting directions can be FREAKING ANNOYING, a la Debbie Bliss.

I have already knitted (and frogged and reknitted) a sleeve for the Little Sailor Coat, but find myself yearning for something with better stitch definition than the Valuruguai Mimosa Superwash (doubled -- as it is fingering weight: what the hell was I thinking?!) which I have in lavender from a previous eBay moment of insanity. (The photo here is in macro mode, and the sleeve itself is, of course, a whole 6 or so inches long.)

So okay, the stitch definition isn't bad, really, upon review, but I guess I have developed an odd fondness for knitting in cotton, which I know many people hate working with -- go figure.

For example, I have recently finished this kimono for my threading lady, who is due to have a girl next month. It uses Bernat Cottontots, which I inherited from a coworker who decided she didn't like any of a giant sack of yarn that she bought (i.e., windfall for me & my stash!).

And then I preserved what's left of my sanity by finishing the seaming for this baby sweater during the last so-called debate between that cranky, incoherent old fart, and the suave young guy. (My engineer did it by reading a scifi book, and we both imbibed in some tasty merlot he brought over. Between the seaming, drinking, and laundry folding I plowed through, I managed not to scream -- too often -- at the TV, but I digress.)

For some reason, I had the odd urge to knit eyelet a while ago, using Plymouth Encore Colorspun, which is actually lovely. So I finished this up for our sorely missed tech services person who returned from maternity this week. We are having a baby post-shower for her tomorrow, since she preferred no baby gifts prior to her little girl's arrival, even though they are Trinidadean and not Asian. ;-)

The Mogul's scarf that I made for my nephew (who now also has a baby girl! yikes!) a few years ago is also proving possibly inspirational, as my engineer has expressed a desire for a hat (I explained that he was not getting a sweater until I got a rock) and to me, a hat needs a companion scarf. :-)

Jeez, I had better get cracking on my Xmas knitting!