Lace

I remember many years ago telling my MIL that I'd inherited a few of my great-grandmother's super tiny crochet hooks. MIL explained that they were for tatting lace, something she enjoyed, and which sounded terribly tedious to me.

Now, I haven't totally lost my mind on this (as I have with chocolate and fried meat, apparently!), but lace-weight yarn (that's really, really thin yarn to you non-knitter/crocheters) has been appealing to me lately. And I even have a project in my Ravelry queue where I could use lace weight yarn and probably not go insane. So tempting...

But then, what kind of lace weight yarn? My automatic preference would be Malabrigo, but handpaintedyarn.com has some lovely colors and is half the price. 100purewool.com also has some lovely colors and great prices, and, I'm told, is owned by the Malabrigo guy's brother. But when I put together a cart with a little lace weight and some worsted for a sweater- Oh Snap! Guess What I Saw?? $32.50 in shipping charges! I don't hold this against them- they are located in Uruguay and I'm sure that's exactly or close to exactly how much it would cost to mail the yarn to me. But still. I suppose the upside is that with shipping like that the yarn is about the same price as buying Malabrigo here in the States!

Truth

Happy Halloween! The kids and I are going trick or treating tonight, so I'll try to post some costume pics after bedtime :)

It's been a busy day so far, in large part because we forgot to get Zion most of his Halloween costume. Long story, but he kept changing his mind about what he wanted to be, so we waited and then...forgot. He finally settled (I hope) on cat, and I made him cat ears as you saw, but there was nothing else for the costume! For Liel we got black pants and a black turtleneck to go with her ears. Anyway, we realized this about 1045pm last night, too late to do anything. So this morning after my classes I came home, picked up Liel so that Robert could work while we were gone, and went to Target to get Zion's costume bits. Apparently boys don't wear black (WTF??), cause I couldn't find a single black shirt (other than Spiderman) or black pants anywhere. So I bought a pair of black sweats from the girl's side and a white turtleneck and he can be a black and white cat. Right? Here's hoping...

Then we swung by Zion's school to drop of the supplies we bought for them yesterday, came back home and helped Robert get his face paint on (he's dressed up as a Pict, with a kilt and blue face paint), and Robert dropped Liel and I off at the preschool to get Zion and walk home while he headed off to work.

As we were leaving the school I pulled Zion off the driveway to let a car pass and he asked who it was. I told him it was Jack and his mama, and Liel, who was on my back in the mei tai, put her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder and said, "My mama loves me!".

Ain't that the truth???

Robots and Waffles

Today was an Exciting Excursion day. First we headed to Harlem for some chicken and waffles at Amy Ruth's. It was, in a word, outfuckingstanding (that's called infixing, or tmesis, by the way. In English we do it almost exclusively when swearing. Cool, huh?). Robert and I both got the Al Sharpton (mine was fried and smothered, his just fried). Serious, serious goodness. Robert told me later that he wished he'd gotten smothered, but I assured him that he could next time. I hear they make a mean sweet tea and Red Velvet Cake there, too, but we didn't have room to try them. I know you probably won't believe this, but we actually didn't finish our meals. I must be gettin' old, cause there's only so much sweet starch and fried meat goodness I can take in a single sitting these days. Man, never thought I'd see the day I'd put that in print...

After our yummy lunch we headed to the Upper West Side to go to Robot Village so that Robert could at last buy his Birthday Robot (it hadn't been released yet at his birthday), and Zion could buy his Thunder Robot (a robot figure he's been lusting after since his last trip there in July). Liel got a little robot, too, and everyone left happy.

The weather was gorgeous, and to top it all off, I got to wear my latest knitting project, completed last night. It's a super cropped, bulky, V-neck sweater. I don't have any pictures yet, but we'll be carving pumpkins this afternoon, so hopefully it can all work out.

Quantity

Yesterday I made Liel a sock cat (you know, a cat made out of a sock). She loves it. In fact, she loved it before it was anything other than a sock with some polyfil stuffing in it that she carried around for a day calling it "Kitty". I had to cajole her into giving it up to me so I could make it resemble a cat. Here it is.



Anyway, Liel took Kitty to nap with her yesterday. When I went to get her after she woke up she picked up Kitty and said, "I have Kitty!" I agreed and she pointed at her other cat toy (named Kitty-Kitty. She's apparently taking a page from Balinese naming traditions. I guess this is what that might look like if the namers had kind of sketchy counting skills) and said "I have two kitties! Zion only has one kitty."

Sucks to your asthma and other rants

It appears that Liel may be asthmatic. This wouldn't be a huge shock since both Robert and I are, but of course no one wants that for their kids, so yeah. She's got a cold and woke up totally freaked last night. Her breathing was shallow and raspy and uneven and she was shaking and crying...it sucked. My poor baby! She was pretty cheerful today, though quite hoarse and snotty.

In other rants, a skincare company I used to love and rave about has pretty much just doubled their prices on everything. I'm irritated on my behalf, and doubly so on behalf of those to whom I'd recommended these products. Yes, costs go up. But seriously, doubling prices on nearly everything in your product line? Um, thanks for the ride, this looks like my stop....


I hate to leave on a down note, so I'll pimp some other products instead, shall I? I bought this lovely facial serum from Nicole at littleflowers and I love it! My skin is pleased, I'm pleased, and Nicole is a total doll. Check her out!

Kamasutrababy

Today's class topic was Religion and Sex, and we talked about norms, ethics, injunctions etc in Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. As part of my class prep last night I actually went and read some of the Kama Sutra for the first time. Contrary to popular belief, the Kama Sutra isn't just some crazed sex manual. There are 7 sections, one of which deals with sex. It's probably not as thrilling as you've been lead to believe, but you can check it out for yourself.

My favorite part was a list of 64 arts in which a woman should be competent. They include:

-Playing on musical glasses filled with water
-Art of knowing the character of a man from his features
-Knowledge of mines and quarries
-Making artificial flowers
-Knowledge of the art of war, of arms, of armies, etc.
-The art of making beds, and spreading out carpets and cushions for reclining
-Storing and accumulating water in aqueducts, cisterns and reservoirs
-Knowledge of dictionaries and vocabularies
-Various ways of gambling
and of course:
-Art of teaching parrots and starlings to speak

Good ol' Kama Sutra.

Sushi

Zion has had a virtually life-long love affair with sushi. On his first birthday we took him out for sushi, cause it was already his favorite food. At this age he was just eating cooked stuff, and was particularly fond of tobiko and miso.





When he was 21 months old we let him try the raw stuff, and that was a huge hit, too. He just sat on my brother's lap and gorged himself, pointing at all the new yummies he wanted to try.

So given that we are a family of sushi lovers it was surprising to us to realize, tonight, that we hadn't had sushi in months. Zion's been asking for it, too, so we picked up some take-out from our favorite local sushi joint. It'd been so long since we'd been in that the place appears to have new owners. Our order wasn't done yet when Robert and Zion arrived to pick it up, so they hung out and watched the chef preparing it. Robert pointed out the rainbow roll that was been made, and Zion said, "Oh, I like rainbow roll!" The chef gave a small smile and continued his work. "Look!" said Zion, "Salmon! That is my favorite". The chef smiled. Zion pointed. "And there is the sushi mat!" Bigger smile.

The sushi was quite good, and we had an excellent Chilean Cabernet with crazy cherry/blackberry/vanilla flavors. Sooooo good.