Domestically Challenged

Spoiled

Last week, I came home to find a package waiting for me. I was really excited because I had ordered something for my husband from Reporters Sans Frontiers and couldn't wait to see it. But the package wasn't from Paris...It was from NYC. It was from S!

I am truly a fan of the belated birthday gift. Giving a gift late pretty much ensure that yours is the only gift that person will receive that day. Plus, there's the surprise factor.

I tore open the brown paper to find a lovely Strand Bookstore tote bag. I brought it on its first road trip this past weekend. It seemed to really enjoy Toronto. There were also TWO balls of Artyarns Ultramerino 4 in the package. I've always coveted Artyarns yarn. After Lellean knit an adorable poncho out of the Ultramerino 8, I've made sure to fondle it whenever I find it in a yarn store.

I am so spoiled. Thanks, S!

Full Disclosure

The cleanse officially ended on Friday, but in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I did not exactly finish the cleanse. B was much more successful than me and should be posting about surviving the 12 days of bland food torture in the next couple of days. I'm curious to see how much weight she's lost because she looks good. I only really completed two and a half days of strict cleansing. By the first Wednesday, after a particularly grueling training run, I starting to feel dizzy. After lunch, I couldn't string together a sentence and all I wanted to do was nap. After a long lecture from my husband about the nutrition required to sustain my upcoming athletic feat I started carb loading in secret. As soon as Bree left to go to Bootcamp, I would put some water on to boil for a huge bowl of pasta. I called this cleanse+; I adhered to all of the other rules of the cleanse with the addition of pasta and yogurt. Who goes on a cleanse the week before a half-marathon, anyway? The following Friday, I stopped taking the herbal laxative. I have enough bathroom related problems during races without worrying about BEs. And, if I am going to be completely honest, I should admit to gorging on Topper's pizza and bread sticks that night, a fact I withheld from Bree as not to weaken her resolve to finish the cleanse. I reasoned that I needed the carbs.

The race was really fun. My sister and I synced our ipods and it was more of a dance party than a serious race. Around 18K, though, my thighs ran out of juice. I guess 4 days of carb loading wasn't quite enough, something I will remember for the National Capital half-marathon at the end of the month. I have continued with the cleanse+ despite a desperate craving for chocolate, chips and beer. This past weekend in Toronto, I discovered that virgin mojitos are quite tasty and look enough like the alcoholic version to discourage any pregnancy rumours. De-lish! They were also only $2 each, something I'm still trying to wrap my mind around.

For those who came here for knitting content, I cast these on last Friday on the bus ride to Toronto using some left-over Trekking and some random black sock yarn. I love the gradual colour change in the Trekking.

Putting the Clean Back in Cleanse

When I first started the cleanse, I'm not sure I really understood what I was getting into. I thought about how healthy and squeaky clean my bubblegum pink digestive tract my digestive tract would be. But never once, did I give any thought as to how my GI tract would get this way. Not even when I read that one of the herbal supplements was a natural laxative did I clue in to what I was in store for.

In the last four days, B and I have gone through 7 rolls of toilet paper. Some of which was used after a most urgent rush to the washroom. We have begun to talk in code about this “situations”, referring to the bathroom emergencies as BEs and using analogies to music to describe them. Once, while experiencing a BE at the office, a member of the male cleaning crew tried to enter the woman’s washroom only to be treated to a particularly moving cadenza of my BE symphony. Needless to say, I was very embarrassed. The BE has now become a big part of my day and to take my mind off of all things brown, I have stopped working on the brown, cabled, magic shawl.

Instead, I started these cute little booties on the plane to Sudbury this morning. My sister and I are running a half-marathon on Sunday. If you are running it too, drop me a line or if you are living in Sudbury and don’t have anything to do, come out and cheer the runners on. Who knows, you may even get to experience one of my BEs first hand.

(Note on the cleanse: While on this cleanse, one can eat as much as they like so long as the food is not processed, does not contain wheat, sugar, yeast or dairy, and is completely void of any and all flavour. Don’t worry, I’m not starving. I just really miss chocolate.)

Plain Brown Rice

Last week when my roommate, B, asked me to do a cleanse with her, I thought, “Sure. How hard could it be to diet and take herbal extracts for12 days?” Besides I needed a reason to curb my chip addiction. We decided to start on Monday and toasted our commitment on Sunday night with the remaining dregs of alcohol in our apartment. We didn’t want any lingering temptations.

Monday morning I regretted all of the previous night's toasts, but still popped out of bed, ready to cleanse. B and I broke open our cleanse kits to find three bottles of pills and one bottle of liquid. We were instructed to take two of each kind of pill and 30 drops of the liquid. 30 drops? These people need to manufacture a bigger dropper.

The pills had a funny herbal smell, but the liquid was downright disgusting. It tastes kind of like what I imagine Jagermeister would taste like if you had left the opened bottle under the porch at the cottage all summer and took a swig after finding it when you were closing up for the winter. Bleh! To read what B thought it tasted like, click here.

I was surprised by how much not eating dairy, wheat or fruit and not drinking coffee could give me a raging headache. I was also surly after a torrential downpour soaked me to the bone during my lunchtime run. I was so cold that I had to wrap my hair up in my pashmina to get it to dry faster. To add insult to injury, there was chocolate mousse cake I couldn't eat in the boardroom for a coworker's birthday. As if.

By the end of the day, I was completely irritable. The only thing keeping me sane was my latest attempt to knit up the Brown Sheep Burly Spun yarn. I frogged the Best Friend Cardigan on Friday and washed all of the yarn. I'm hoping that the Magic Shawl will finally get this yarn to commit to something.

Spring in Baltimore

(yarn: malabrigo lace picked up at Lovelyarns in Baltimore)

Capital City

Yesterday I went to DC to visit my friend O who is there finishing her last semester of law school at American University. Spring is exam season for law students, so O could only meet up with me for dinner. Luckily, I had never been to DC and I love exploring new cities. I downloaded some knitting podcasts and headed down to Penn Station (this was the first time I had ever listened to a knitting podcast and the ones I downloaded were a bit hit and miss. Any recommendations?) I got there around 9 and took the metro from Union Station to the Woodley Zoo (free admission). I really enjoyed their invertebrate exhibit, which probably means I should go to the aquarium before I leave Baltimore, and was  enamoured with the Amazonian Pavilion. I wonder if it would be unethical to have a pet stingray. As usual, the large animal exhibits freaked me out, although I was impressed by an exhibit called the O Line which allows the orangutans to move between their two exhibits on plastic-coated cables 50 feet in the air.

By the time I had completed a tour of the zoo, it was getting to be prime burning time and I had to get my rice paper skin out of the sun. I walked through Adams Morgan to 18^th and had lunch at Meskerem, an Ethiopian place that was recommended in the Bust travel guide. I had never eaten Ethiopian food before so I ordered the vegetarian messob which was a sampler platter of their most popular vegetarian dishes arranged on a spongy, pancake-type bread called injera.

This was accompanied by a sidedish of injera that had been carefully folded and rolled into tubes. It must have been the rubbery consistency or the fleshy colour, but they really looked like two flaccid penises lying side by side. And I thought I had ordered the vegetarian plate! I was all ready to dig in when I realized that I didn’t have any utensils. I did a quick scan of the restaurant just to make sure that no one had utensils but the place was fairly empty. The only other people in place were still waiting for their food, so they were no help at all. I figured this was probably an eat-with-your-hands type of situation, so I ripped off a piece of the penis injera, pinched some stew into it and popped it in my mouth. I’m not sure if this was the proper way of doing things, but it was fairly effective.

After lunch, it was time to take advantage of all of the free museums and galleries. I started at the portrait gallery. The Stephen Colbert portrait was gone but there was an exhibit about hip hop, Recognize, that was really good. I then went to the Smithsonian Museum which was very cool but kind of creepy back to back with the zoo since the animals I had seen walking around earlier in the day were on display stuffed. It’s probably better to do the visit in reverse. I walked around the National Mall, which isn’t a mall at all but a huge park. There was an outdoor sculpture museum which made me think of Japan; not just the Hakone Open Air Museum, but Roppongi Hills where there is one of these spiders.

There was also this gem. I almost burst out laughing when the woman next to me turned to her friend and in all seriousness said, “I never know what this is”. I’m not sure what the bird imagery is about, but seriously? Of course, that wasn't the only sexual sculpture in town. I wonder if that woman also had trouble figuring out what this reminded her of.

I met up with O for dinner at Jaloe. After a nice gossip session, O's new Spanish beau joined us and helped us order the best tapas I've had since Barcelona. He was quite embarrassed that we had ordered sangria and refused to be photographed (all jokes of course). We had a great time and could have closed the place down if I didn't have to catch the last train back to Baltimore and if O wasn't entangled in that law school business. Best of luck on your exams, O!

Baltimore

I’ve been in Baltimore since Monday. On the way here, I did two things I’ve never done before. The first was that I didn’t bring any knitting in my carry-on. In my attempt to be a responsible adult, I only brought work. I do not recommend this if you are taking two short flights with a lag in between. I felt like I was constantly being berated by the messages over the intercom. The airport and the plane both seem so much quieter when there is yarn in my hands. On a positive note, I did finish reading a long report. The second thing I did that I have never done before is use the washroom on a Dash8 plane. Now I know what it’s like to pee in a closet. There was a toilet and a large mirror. A bottle of hand sanitizer mounted on the wall replaced the sink. As I hovered over the bowl, I noticed that there was a coat hook mounted on the wall which must have been there for decoration because this space was barely big enough to change your mind, let alone remove an outer layer.

My hostess, R, picked me up at the airport and drove me to her lovely house in Hampden. She actually lives 0.4 miles from a yarn store which she made sure to point out on the tour of the neighbourhood. She also made sure to point out how suggestive the Washington Monument is when viewed from the side. Anyone who lives in Baltimore or who’s seen Pecker will know what I’m talking about. Does George ever appear well endowed!

Right now I am in one of the reading rooms at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Even though I didn’t think it was possible, it makes me miss grad school. The light in this room filters in through a sky light four floors up and it’s so quiet that you can hear a pin drop. This is a much better place to get work done than the plane.

Hobbies

The other day I found myself wishing that I had a hobby. The irony that I may have been knitting at the time is not lost on me. Knitting is just such a big part of my normal life that I don't even consider it an activity anymore. It's become a biological necessity like breathing, eating and sex. This has made me reflect on how much I've been knitting and that maybe I need to mix it up a bit. Thankfully her bf bought her Rockband. Fun now has a new name.

Knorn

My husband cannot get over how much time I spend looking at knitting online. I'm not picky either. I'll spend hours browsing blogs, patterns, online yarn stores, ravelry, you name it. If it's knitting related, I'm there. Lately, I've tried to be more discrete about it and get it under control, but he still claims that every time he comes in the room that he catches a colourful pop of yarn before I have time to click the browser shut and give him a guilty smile. He obviously doesn't get it but I think I've come across a simile that any man will understand. It's like porn. My husband has since dubbed all of the images I drool over on a daily basis, knorn.

Speaking of knorn, Gwennabe just hit my ravelry queue. Definitely hot. (photo from knitting fog)

Growing Up...

I had a wonderful weekend. The weather was gorgeous and there was a lot of cake - it was my birthday on Friday. It was really great to see old friends and get together with my family but the whole birthday seemed surreal. It was the first time I got a nagging feeling that despite how young I feel, I am getting older. On Thursday, a co-worker told me that a telltale sign of aging is whether or not you've started using night cream. Night cream? Is that different from normal moisturizer and should I be worried about "fighting what ages us most"? (I actually love that tag line because I expect the company to unveil a time machine in the ad.) What is slathering this stuff on my face (and on my pillowcase) supposed to achieve, anyway?

Aside from the pressure to maintain a youthful appearance, I've been feeling a sort of professional pressure that I've been trying to reconcile. I'm beginning to feel like I'm not supposed to keep bobbing though life as a pseudo student without a clear career path. Shouldn't I be spending more time thinking about buying a house or a car than how much time I would like to spend on the beach when I move to California or how fresh the produce will taste?

All of this aging is clearly putting other pressure on me, too. After finishing the pomatomus arm warmers, I opted for some plain stockinette and cute baby sweater patterns. I breezed through the Jo Jo sweater from Natural Knits for Babies and Moms (Interweave Press) but have been negligent about putting it together. I also finished the second retro flying bonnet that had been in my WIPs list forever and I cast on the Matinee Coat from Debbie Bliss' Baby Cashmerino book.

I may need to cast on some socks with a complicated cable pattern to get my mind off of "casting on" what will ultimately age me most and maybe pick up some night cream while I'm at it.