... it's very odd reading that article, for me, and realizing that for most of my life I've gone by the "innate characteristics" model. And when I make a big mistake, I would abandon the whole endeavor because I got convinced that I sucked at whatever it was I was doing. One of the reasons why I changed jobs every two or three years and took the excuse that all the career things say that in order to get raises, that that was what worked.

Xilinx was different. I stuck with them for eight years, and it's the longest I've stayed in one place for that kind of time.

And I'm finally in a situation where I can't just abandon things. And it's with things that I actually believed, for a while, that I had no innate ability at. Spinning and knitting have been my love for so long just because I wasn't expected to do them, and I learned everything through the doing it the hard way and making mistakes on my own without having to present a face to anyone about it. I did it mostly for fun and for myself.

Maybe that's why it was so depressing to be at the guild show, and suddenly worry about how I came across... rather than just enjoying what I was doing and where I was. Maybe I need to go back and figure something out...

( Read more... )

Lately, we've been looking at things that we normally don't look at. In my case, sometimes things I didn't really want to look at. I haven't really wanted to look, in depth, at the Bible, as there are so many terrible things in there, but there's supposed to be good in there, too. So I finally signed up for a class where I get to read the majority of both the Old and New Testament. The other thing I haven't really looked seriously at was just how much energy we're using and where.

( Read more... )

It snowed last night. Nearly six inches and another four to come today...

... and I wasn't up to driving less than a mile in a still cold car, and sliding around a neighborhood that doesn't usually plow the streets until the snow is mostly going to melt anyway...

... so I borrowed a page out of ross_teneyck's journal and got on my Big REI Boots, my down jacket, my fur hat, and my Big wool scarf and stole John's fleece gloves and walked into work in the middle of the snow storm.

It's less than a mile, and with the scarf and sunglasses I could cut the wind and blown snow. It's also supposed to stop this afternoon, so that's good, too. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be, though the boots are pretty heavy and it was a good work out. It helped, a lot, that they'd plowed most of the sidewalks and the whole of the path from the street to the plant. So the walkway on the company property was clear as a whistle. That was cool.

Colorado drivers, mostly, are pretty good about driving around here. Plus it's pretty much as flat as the rest of the mid-West once you're on this side of the mountains, so no real hills to deal with on the most part. Until you get the obvious transplant who thinks the white stuff is just pretty and tries to shoot a gap or doesn't seem to figure out that tailgating on ICE IS A BAD IDEA. Ahem. So I thought it's cool to just avoid all that. Plus, it is actually warm enough that I got hot in my coat and undid my ear flaps for part of the walk. That was fun.

I'm tired.

Spent the whole morning learning how to do silk painting and then trying to figure out a common vision of what it was we wanted to do. With six creators, it gets interesting trying to create something common but not too regulated.

The process involved mostly using acrylic paints for resist affects on the silk. Just painted, stamped, and dabbled on. Our common structure had some big, angled 'windows' painted onto it. They asked me to put the first strokes on each piece. The big, angled lines. It was scary to always be first on every silk, but so it was.

When all the detailed bits were put on, then we did a pretty structured painting job on top. Just deep blues at the bottom, shading to medium and light blues and teal. The light blue went up the sides and at the top, and then in the middle we used a fairly wild combination of red, green, purple, and apricot to just splash in color. Washed it with a pale blue wash to get it to bleed into the rest of the cloth, and then topped it off with salt. The salt leaves spots and the kosher salt leaves little comets. It's kind of cool.

The painting after the resist part is wild. There is no real way to 'control' where the color goes if you do 'too much'. It's like water colors on rice paper. Sploosh, woosh, and it's better to just reliquish control and let it Go. It's weird and stressful and also familiar for me, given that I try my test to control those affects when I do calligraphy or Chinese brush painting. You use those strokes to form the picture. It's odd to just give up completely on the control aspect and just try to get an overall Effect.

It was fun. It was a lot of work. And I'm feeling pretty empty now that it's done. Depressed a little. Tired, very.

There were five of us, and six banners to do and then we each got to do our own scarf. Mine was very regimented by that point because I was so tired... But so it is. What I am comes out. I like my neat bands of color that shade nicely between them, it was easy to do and easy to think of when I was tired. And I loved the colors. I liked the stenciled smiling, leaping frog and the rippled gold of a tiger. So it is. I should like me for what I am, but I couldn't help but envy the mad scarf that had red and teal in big swirls with enough green and red between to make a nice brown that calmed parts of it down, but then swirled into fractals along each of the bright parts. *sigh* I'll have to try that next time, I think. I loved how that worked.

I am not sure I liked how the banners turned out. Everyone else loves them, but I'm kind of bemused by that. They seem so... chaotic... so it is.

I signed all the banners with a tiny, smudged print of the Chinese character for 'courage' and that was good enough.

This is the picture that a friend of ours took of Jet while he was up on the wall. He was there with his two kids and happened to see Jet do his thing while his kids were in line for the wall.

It's pretty dark. :-)

The interesting thing is that Jet could be on nearly any cliff in the picture. Still, it shows the bell right above Jet's head, and the harness is doing a good job of holding him up there. Whew.

Last Friday Longmont had a City Party where they blocked off a chunk of Main street and they had lots of folks out on the street in booths. There were a dozen different Bouncy Castles, lots of food vendors, and right in the middle they had a huge art area with boxes of chalk out for anyone to draw with. They also had a huge Bubble Tower that would shower cascades of bubbles on everyone, an area with dozens of pairs of stilts for anyone to try, and a bunch of buckets with ropes attached to do an easier version of stilt walking. People were all over that and all over the chalk. That was cool.

All of the bouncy castles were free. There was also a climbing wall. I think it was a good thirty feet tall, with three automatic winches that they attached to full butt harnesses that were wrapped around the kid that wanted to climb. The line was HUGE, though the line for getting a bag of chips was half the size of that, and it took me a good half hour to just get Jet a bag of BBQ chips, but that's a different story.

When Jet got to the front, he got his harness on, and then got hooked up and away he went. About a third of the way up, he lost both right foot and hand holds and swung out like a door. He was above my head at that point, but that didn't faze him at all. He just frowned, and swung himself back a couple of times and then latched back on. He wasn't scared at all by that, and just kept going up. After that, though, he seemed to do more testing of his foot holds before the next hand hold. So I was glad of that.

At the very top, there was a cow bell for each of the faces of the wall. It was out of Jet's arm reach when he was at the top, as it was made for adults, I guess. He didn't hesitate. He just gathered his arms and legs and *LEAPT AWAY FROM THE WALL* at the bell. My heart stopped, I think, but he trusted that harness and belt completely and couldn't think of any other way to reach the bell.

The operator at the bottom shook his head and said, "Man, he's fearless!" He also caught Jet on the way down. The winch was made for much, much heavier people, and Jet came down very, very slowly when he let himself dangle on it. Then the operator praised Jet a lot for climbing the way he did and gave him a High 5. The interesting thing is that in all the time we'd been waiting in line, I hadn't actually seen the operator say much more than two words to any of the other kids, though he had smiled at a few of them and helped them expertly with their gear.

It was Jet's first time up a climbing wall. He loved it. He was sad about not actually hitting the bell; but we all waxed amazed at him getting all the way to the top on his first try. We'll have to do it again at the Rec. Center.

Jet was so excited about going to the big school and Kindergarten and getting to Ride the Bus! Hee. It was good and I tried to keep all my anxiety about things out of everything, and I think it worked okay. We walked Jet to the bus this morning, and I walked my bike so I could get to work at 9 instead of trying to walk back to home and get a car or something, it was faster on the bike.

Jet happily put his pack with all the other kid's packs and then tried to climb all the trees the other kids were climbing and he introduced himself quite happily to everyone that introduced themselves. Chris, who is a neighbor of ours and now in first grade, was there as well. He was riding the bus for the second time, as he'd gone on the bus yesterday. So he buddied up with Jet and they got on the bus together when it came. I loved the scramble of all the kids grabbing their packs and getting on in a row.

I got a few shots and John asked for the camera as I started to go to work. HE had plans. And he did chase the bus, maybe on his bike for all I know, and got pictures of Jet walking from where the bus actually stops, which is in front of the middle school, not in front of the elementary school. But Chris knew the way and both boys could see their school, so they made their own way that way. Jet went right to the waiting wall and got swallowed by the crowd of kids and twice as many parents. John kept out of sight, just to let him do it on his own and took a few paparazzi-style shots of Jet. Hee. The crowd around the kindergarten wall was so thick, though, Jet got hidden pretty quickly.

So my big boy is now bigger. He seems very outgoing, completely unafraid, and eager to see this new stuff. So that was very, very heartening to me. He has confidence and I'm so happy about that.

( Cut for the bigger picture to actually see Jet arriving. )

---

Last night I started knitting slower and slower on my hat, and was getting crankier and crankier about it and finally I realized what the feelings meant and I got out a ruler.

Sure enough, the gauge at the start of the hat was nearly almost less than 5 stitches per inch. Arrrgghhh... The LARGE hat was supposed to have at least 6 stitches to the inch (which, near the end of it I was starting to get, but it was still just barely 6, not six neatly within the inch marker of my tape). And I'd been going for a good quarter of the pattern already... so, as usual, the knitter in me won out and I ripped it ALL OUT.

All of it. I should be used to it by now, but man...

And this stuff was harder to rip out than most of the acrylics I've been using lately. Kid wear is often easier in acrylics because moms can just throw 'em into the wash whenever they want and the colors are so bright. But this was wool, unspun, nicely sticky, barbed shafted wool and the black pulled apart a lot more quickly than the white. It's easy to fix, too, in that I just rubbed a few inches of the ends together and they were fixed, which I could never do with an acrylic; but the simple fact that the yarn kept falling apart made me grumpy.

But I undid it ALL. Down to the invisible cast-on, and squinted and thought and realized that I use size US2 needles on socks to get about a 6+ stitches to the inch gauge. Why I thought I could do that with size US4 needles, now, is beyond me. So I found some 3mm needles which are a little bigger than a US2 and a little smaller than a US3, and as I was going through my circulars I realized that I have two 16" Addi turbos in 3mm. Why I'll never know as these puppies are EXPENSIVE, and...

Hey... I could do the two at a time sock pattern with these... ahem.

My knitting mind is rather prolific when it gets going.

So I used one of them, and the gauge at the beginning is now 6 stitches to the inch, and the wool was coming off the pile nicely as it went on in the same pattern I'm now putting back, though there's now some significant slack. But it was good to know that the chaos I'd created by unravelling the two colors together was something I could work with. I ended up tucking the whole mass into that box on the right, just as it was, with no fiddling, so there wouldn't be any tempting chaos for a curious five-year-old in the morning.

Part of the grumpy emotional mood at the beginning was that the instructions said that the wheels should be good enough for TWO hats; but only a quarter of the way through the first hat, it was pretty clear to my yarn-sense that this wasn't even going to be CLOSE to enough for two hats. So the off-gauge explains it pretty well.

Amusingly enough, the yarn and the pattern is so much fun I actually don't mind more knitting time with this stuff at all. It's a joy to do; but the undoing was mildly daunting.

Today was a bit too nuts for me, but rewarding in a few ways.

I knew that Tonya, with, maybe Tanner and Macy, along with Bonnie, with, likely, Ivy and Sage, and maybe Lisa, with Jojo, and maybe Nathan, were all going to go to an Asian grocery store, today.  I learned, this morning from John, that they were also thinking of going to CU to try and get free tickets to a New Years celebration by the Colorady University Chinese Society. 

I knew I was supposed to go to Tonya's at 11, to meet up with folks and head on down.  It was only when I got there that I realized that the plan wasn't to just go sometime after the grocery store, to CU to get the tickets, but that they had a very tight window from 12-12:30 that the tickets would be available, and they didn't know how many were going to get given out.  And I hadn't brought any lunch or snacks for Jet. 

We were ridiculously lucky with parking in the middle of a school day on campus in front of the school bookstore, since Sage was asleep and Bonnie had to carry him.  We all got in line and I could see college kids eyeing all the itty-bitties.  There were nearly 100 people in a line that snaked through the cafeteria, out into the main hall and back into the cafeteria area again.  I could see people backing up when Jet started saying, "I want cheese pizza, Mom.  I'm hungry, Mom." and I was trying to tell him we had to wait in line, "But I don't WANNA wait in line anymore, Mom.  I really want cheese pizza.  I'm starving, Mom!"  The other moms took one look and said, "Go get him some food."

So I did.  The cafeteria had slices readily available, so I bought Jet a slice of cheese pizza and as he waited in line, he ate the WHOLE THING.  Goodness gracious.  He was hungry, I guess.

Then there were Chinese women arguing and haraguing the ticket givers, and before a quarter of the line had gotten theirs, they'd run out of tickets.

Oh, well.  We all then headed back to the cars, and headed South to the Pacific Ocean, where we all wandered up and down the aisles, watched out for each others kids, and bought a lot of random stuff.  I got a lot of questions about things, which was fine. They knew I couldn't explain everything, and I finally let go of the expectation that I be able to say something about everything.  :-)

That was good.

Jet got a Japanese marble bottle lemonaid.  I bought lots of potstickers and a tray of frozen, uncooked scallion pancakes!  Wow.  I love those things, but my family can't eat a whole batch, and they take a lot of time to make, not cook.  So it was great to get five of them, uncooked, so that we could eat them freshly baked. I got an oval noodle for a stir-fry dish at home, comfort food. I also got turnip cake, and ended up by the live crab tanks.  They had lobsters for $9.99 a pound, and Dungeness crabs on sale for $4.99 a pound!  Better than the usual $5.99 a pound.  I wibbled and wobbled, and then Tonya said, "Get them!"

So I did.  Two of them with madly waving feet and claws, they were certainly lively.  So the guy tucked them in a paper sack and then tied up a plastic sack around that and handed that to me.  The crabs were pretty quiet.  I helped Macy find the restroom, and then went myself, and then we washed up and headed back to the posse, who were all taking restroom breaks, and after turns, we all went through the checkout lines and finally got everything and everyone and headed back into the cars.  Bonnie took us into her car.  A few minutes into the drive, and we hear the crabs rustling about, and moving the bags around in the back.  Eek!

They hadn't gotten out at all, they were just getting more comfortable.  So that was fine, and Bonnie dropped us off home.

John got home at 4.  I let him clean the crabs, and set them up in the lower of two levels for the steamer, and we set a tomato can on top to keep them in.  I boiled water.  I also prepped all the veg for the stir-fry noodle dish, and when the water came to a boil for the crabs and for the noodles, I tucked the steamer basket onto the boiling water.  The crabs stopped making any noises just a few minutes into the steam.  I took out the can, and let them cook while I cooked all the other stuff.

The crabs turned out great.  I called my Mom to ask her how long to cook them, and the 25 minutes worked as well up here as down there.  They were tender and delicious and had that steamed-live texture and sweetness that I really love.  I can't eat a frozen crab leg without longing for the "Real Thing". 

Jet asked to have chicken nuggets, so we went and out and got him a Happy Meal, which he chowed down on and ate every nugget of before abandoning the fries to finish the milk and some canned oranges as well.  He was a hungry guy and he went right to sleep when it was bedtime.

So it was worth it.  All the odd feelings about eating something that was just crawling around in the back of the car were finally made okay.  It was a lot of fun being with all the other parents and kids as well.

Now I have to get through tomorrow.  :-)

I'm having some fairly severe knitting accidents, yarn, supplies, and books at amazon and knitpicks. Thank you, writeanya, for your original link. The yarns I bought arrived when I was gone, and they are fabulous and so inexpensive in comparison to so many other places.

Some of it, I think, is having my hands back has finally sunk in. Part of it was not bringing any of my knitting with me on my vacation. But a big chunk of it has been having an ocean view again and realizing that I *really* want to make my "woods to horizon shawl" from the heavier weight lace weight Shetland style yarns I'd bought when we were in the Orkneys. There's a brown (for the land), a tan (for the sand), a white (for the surf), a blue-green grey (for the shallows, from the seaweed eating Orkney sheep), and a black for the deep waters, and I've always wanted to do oak leaf and spiderwebs and a border of leaf and acorns for the land, simple fan and feather for the sand, crest of the wave for the surf, offset waves for the shallows, and something rockier for the deeps with a border of shells for the dark edge of it... I'll have to write up a pattern when I'm done.

It got pushed when someone saw one of my lace shawls and said, "That's not craft, that's art..."

Plus, the radiology department called me to say that they want to take more mammograms, with the radiologist present. Which means nothing in particular, but with three friends in or just out of chemo and an old friend dead of cancer, there's that soft voice of mortality whispering in my ear. Pain is nothing compared to not *really* creating what I was given the strength and skill and love to do.

So don't be too surprised if I explode in a few directions soon.

Part of the class was a 360, where I got feedback on my tendencies with certain behaviors, all good behaviors, which is a nice way to measure it. They just ask how frequent the good behavior is getting exhibited.

It was good, though, for me to really see, in numbers and specifics, what other people see me as being good at. And even the "bad" numbers had, as average, me doing some pretty amazing things on a pretty frequent basis. That is eye-opening to the really critical parts of me. I am good. I am doing good, too.

Wow.

Sometimes I will be having a meal or just doing a hallway talk with some of my co-workers and they'll be talking about how impressed they are that I actually talked with dragon a, b, or c about a pet peeve of theirs, and I'll shrug and say, "Well, I was terrified, but someone had to do it."

They're always surprised that I'm terrified, "But you LOOK completely calm and collected and you handled them really well..."

and I'll say, "But I thought I really lost it with Dragon C. I rose to the bait and argued with him about x, y, and z."

And they'll get all wide-eyed, "But Dragon C was utterly unreasonable and I thought you did great getting what he really needed out of him and following up."

And I'll blink, "But... uhm... oh." Silence for a bit, "Thank you for the feedback, it's good for me to know when I did well."

"You did great."

I'm STILL terrified, but I did great.

Life is weird, sometimes...

Tired and grumpy. My MP is seems to be on track again, cycling through full-bore this time, cramps and everything. Bleh. At least it seems healthily on time and normal again.

( STRESS at work is leaving me limp. I dealt, but argh. )