Reading The Tea

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Notes taken during my last meeting at The Job at the beginning of this month:

As you can probably tell, I had just seen the Simpsons movie.

This one was quick, and lots of fun. I’d do something in it again. Maybe fingerless gloves. But then, I think that most of these squares would make a good base for fingerless gloves. Here’s a detail shot:

A few nights ago I had a dream that rather than moving to Portland, I moved to Eugene. They had declared a state of emergency there, and were advising everyone to get into one of the UO campus buildings so that they could lock them down. “Because the Yankees are amassing in the streets,” someone explained to me. “They haven’t declared their intentions yet, so who knows what they could do?” [Yankees as in the baseball team.] I decided that the library would be the best place, as at least I’d have plenty to do there if we ended up being there for a long time. I was trying to figure out how much food would be stored in the cafe when I woke up.

This Thursday a relocube will take up residence in front of our apt. building for four hours, while D & I scramble to get all of the boxes and furniture down and play real-life Tetris to get everything to fit. The past couple of weeks I’ve been packing and sleeping intermittently, but mostly sleeping. Transitions do that to me — I get the urge to hibernate. Unfortunately that doesn’t inspire the boxes to pack themselves. However, the past two days, much to the cat’s chagrin, we’ve been on task putting everything into boxes. So far I’ve sold the Huffy bike, the black dresser, and put a bunch of stuff out on the street for free. In the next couple of days people are coming to look at the couch and the kitchen wood block, and someone’s coming tonight for the kitchen table. Did I mention that I really don’t like this process? When I start to feel grumpy about it though, or the urge to take a nap, I just remember that I’m not at work…
In any case, we’re off to Portland on Sept. 1. I bought one-way tickets today, so it’s really happening.

More weave, this time with seed stitch. It needs to be blocked. Especially after being squished in my drawer.

Here’s a detail:

And here’s the back, because I think that it looks interesting.

Since we’ll only be in NY for another month, Dustin and I approached buying things at the liquor store with caution. Alcohol is hardly something that we want to lug across the country. We have quite a ingredients left (especially blackberry schnapps, etc.) but very few we’d want to drink as a main ingredient. What would be interesting to mix with the most, but still be good? We decided on a good gin and a good tequila. So far we’ve done a few drinks that I think were quite successful.

The Salad Drink

2 oz Gin
Fresh Basil
Just short of 1/2 oz. Lemon Juice
Tonic
Ice
3-5 Cucumber Slices
Muddle the basil, and shake with the gin, lemon juice and ice. Pour into a glass. Drop in the cucumber slices, keeping one out for garnish. Top off with tonic.
It went quite well with a dinner of fresh past with pesto, heirloom tomatoes, goat cheese and pine nuts. I’d like to play around with adding other things — maybe ginger?

We also made an excellent Margarita — not too sweet.

Our Margarita (proportions for a double)

3 oz Tequila
1 oz Triple Sec
1 1/2 oz Lime Juice
Dash of Simple Syrup
Fresh Lime
Course Sea Salt
Ice
When we made this last night we added ingredients gradually, trying to get a lime proportion that we liked. In the end we liked the above, with just a bit of simple syrup. Instead of on the rocks, we served it straight-up, in a glass with a salted rim (of course!), with a pinch of salt added to the drink.

The Basketweave in square three is still nice and simple (good for knitting while watching a movie or engaging in an intense conversation) but quite attractive.

Here are the other two colors, in Stockinette Stitch. Uncontrollable curling makes me almost (almost) dislike working in Stockinette.

After many, many months I finally pulled out my camera to photograph the squares completed thus far. For those of you who’ve been waiting with bated breath, here’s square one:

For those of you wondering, it is not a Gryffindor scarf — the color combination is purely coincidental. As you can see, this first square is knit, knit, knit, knit, in stripes.