Knitting Night Wednesday

It's Wednesday and I've spent most of the evening out knitting. That means I'm energized but it's way to late to do a decent post. So instead I'm putting up a picture or two. I thought I'd share a couple from my recent trip to the Iowa State Fair. I know you'll be surprised but most of these will be animal focused.

I love the fair and I particularly like walking through the animal barns. This year the animal production industry opened their new educational facility. It's an attempt by the industry to fight against the stereotypes that we animal activists are creating. I'm not buying it but the animals there were pretty cute.

Like a baby ostrich. Yeah that's an ostrich! He was about a foot tall.

Or the baby turkeys. These were tough to watch. They kept pecking at each other.

There were quite a few miniature horses this year. And I mean miniature.

And on the other end there was the biggest boar. This sucker was huge.

Lastly, there was a pretty fish. Well okay a knitted fish. I want to make one.

Cthulhu-less

When we were at Gen Con I walked past a man wearing a knitted Cthulhu hat and thought about stopping him to ask for a picture. Now I wish I had. It was one of the best ones I've seen and I would have loved to try to find a pattern for it. And honestly I was just so excited that it wasn't a Jayne hat (we saw plenty of those). I LOVE Firefly but seriously, those hats were everywhere.

Since we've been home I have been looking for a good knitting pattern for a similar hat. In a fit of insanity I went out and bought the perfect dark green yarn to make it out of. And that's when I got stumped. All of the patterns I've found so far are either for sale (I was hoping for free), crochet, or not the style I'm looking for. I've been to hundreds of sites looking at them. Years ago I found one where the tentacles rolled up into the brim. I'd love to find that again.

And to make things worse, I'm not excited about starting anything else until I can do my Cthulhu hat. I'm obsessed. The one pattern that was close, turned out to be crochet even though it was listed as knit. So I'm stumped. But I think I'll just start on that sweater I've been meaning to knit. By the time I finish that I'll either have found the perfect pattern, or forgot that there is such a thing as a Cthulhu hat.

This one is the closest I've found

Legi, intellexi

My mother had a pithy saying book that had poems and phrases to put into people's yearbooks. I remember reading it as a kid and laughing at the archaic wordings. I've forgotten most of them by now except one. I'm not sure when you would put this in someone's yearbook but I like the poem.

"Latin is a dead language,

it's plain enough to see.

It killed off all the Romans

and now it's killing me."

I found it funny then. But truth be told I wanted to learn Latin. It would have been my first choice for a language in high school (that and French) but my high school didn't offer either. And I wasn't about to attend the local Catholic high school just to get a Latin lesson. So here I am, almost 20 years after high school, finally learning my language of choice.

My parent's both took Latin in high school (were forced to take it, that is) and still can remember quite a bit. They also have first year Latin primer that they were willing to lend me. That, along with a borrowed stack of books from a friend who was a Latin minor, and I have quite the impressive collection of resources. I've started going through the first year book and was excited to see that I could not just read but understand some basic dialogue. My vocab still has a long way to go and the grammar keeps stumping me. I think I've asked my friend dozens of times why the language has both cases and declensions (he explains it, I understand, and then forget the explanation 20 minutes later). I'm hoping the grammar will come as I read more.

Learning the language though has taught me how little I know of English grammar. As an English major I should be well versed in tenses, voice, syntax, and cases. What I've learned by learning Latin is that I have really no idea how English even works. I know when a sentence sounds right. So in addition to learning Latin, I'm learning English grammar. And it's actually helping (note the irregular sentence. Strunk and White would not be pleased).

Latin is the root of so many languages in the world, plus it's a fascinating language on it's own. I'm only starting to delve into it but I love the way sentences can be structured in many different ways. I love the words themselves. I'm enjoying the challenge of learning a new language while having the familiarity of recognizing roots of English words. Latin isn't a dead language yet. And it's certainly not killing me.

Socks!!!

At long last I've finally finished my first pair of socks. They aren't real socks (no heels) but comfy tube socks that I plan to spend the entire winter in. These are the perfect around the house socks. They are by far the warmest socks I've ever worn. Acrylic apparently wins out over wool, at least in this case. They are soft and comfy and warm and mine. My first homemade socks and I made them. Can you tell I'm a bit excited?

A close-up on the pattern. It's actually really simple. And boring.

White Knight Syndrome

I've been falling prey to white knight syndrome lately. You know the syndrome. The princess locked in her high tower waits for the white knight to ride up on his horse and save her. What she does while locked in the tower is anyone's guess. The stories don't cover that part. I imagine her twiddling her thumbs. Lately I've been feeling like that princess, locked in my tower of a job, waiting for Jeff to finish school and come save me.

Last night I had a conversation with a friend that turned odd. And got me thinking. I continued the coversation long after we had signed off (I'm a writer. Having conversations with people who aren't there is par for the course) and I came to some conclusions. There aren't any white knights and honestly, saving myself will feel far more satisfying anyway. I'm waiting on the wrong thing. Or more to the point, waiting is the wrong thing. I'm the kind of girl who's never liked towers and waiting. So last night I decided to break out of this passivity.

It's odd. I've never been a particularly passive person. I'm quiet and bookish and deliberate. But not passive. After all, my anthem in college was "Not a Pretty Girl" by Ani Defranco. In the last couple years I've noticed that I've been feeling more and more trapped. And that stems from my increasing passivity. Last night I decided to stop waiting. No I'm not doing anything drastic. Jeff will still have the option to finish school. But I'm going to apply for the jobs I want. I'm going to write the books I want. I'm going to do what I need to do to be happy (something Jeff is constantly reminded me to do). That way, when Jeff is finished with school, I won't need saving. I'll already be happy and smiling and saved.

Epic Mickey

Jeff and I were in Target this past week and noticed as we walked in that they had a couple video games listed for relatively cheap (half price actually). I was shocked to see that one of the games was Epic Mickey, which I've been drooling over for months now. Ever since I saw the graphics on this game I've been lusting after it. Even at half price (Half!!!), we hesitated. Our budget doesn't have a ton of wiggle room. In the end though, we asked the clerk for assistance and dropped the coveted game into the cart. We were going to buy.

Jeff and I had played Kingdom Hearts when it first came out and had been instantly hooked on it. I'm a huge Disney fan (we both are) and the mix of Disney characters, puzzles, and fighting had hooked us. We played almost non-stop for the entire first weekend. We only left the couch for bathroom and sleep breaks. So we knew that another Disney game would suck us in just as much. And it did.


Epic Mickey is not just a fighting game and not just a character game. It has dimensions to it. Your character, Mickey, has to fight his way through the Wasteland (a deranged version of Disneyland) to set about making things right. He had originally tipped an entire container of thinner into the world, creating the great Thinner Incident. Now Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (Mickey's real-life predicessor) has taken over the world. Mickey must turn things back to the way they were before. He is equipped only with a paint brush which can wield either paint or thinner. Thinner makes things go away, Paint makes them appear. It's that simple...mostly. There are things you need to uncover to move forward, there are gears that need to be painted before they can turn. We just recently learned that you can remove sections of the floor and trap creatures beneath it by thinning and then repainting.


I love the fact that the game is set in Disneyland (albeit an odd looking one). We've already had to face the clocktower from the "It's a Small World Ride." We're currently wandering our way through Tomorrowland trying to get the People Mover to work. Many of the parks rides are there, in some form or another. Main Street is a twisted place called Mean Street with buildings so accurate I could recognize them from their real-life counterparts even without signs. "Hey look the ice cream shop." The graphics are downright stunning. The first time I saw Mean Street (with the tilted off kilter castle in the background) I gasped. It was amazing looking. Ostown (a take on Mickey's Toon Town) is just as colorful and interesting look as the land is in Disneyland.


The characters are fun. The puzzles are challenging. The only complaints I can think of about the game are the same ones that I had with Kingdom Hearts. Disney lays out the path a little too easily sometimes (it is a kids game after all) and that there are often too many hints, which hinder smooth play. There is a lot of dialogued hints which must be passed before you can get to game play. In Kingdom Hearts they were from Goofy and Donald. In Epic Mickey they come from The Gremlins (characters created by Roald Dahl incidentally) that are helping Mickey through the land.


Jeff and I have no idea how far we have progressed through the game at this point. We might be half, we might have just scraped the surface. All of the Disney games we've played are like that. I enjoy the complexity though. My feeling is that we have a long way to go. And I'm not upset about that. I'm excited to figure out the puzzles. I'm excited to see the way the rides have been corrupted. And more than anything I'm excited to see what the world looks like whole. I love Disney's story-based video games. This one is now at the top of my list.

Follow the Red Brick Road

I live on Grand Avenue on the west side of Des Moines. I work on Grand Avenue on the east side of the city. So everyday I drive Grand the entire 15 miles (yeah I'm spoiled) that it takes me to cross the city and get from home to office. Des Moines is a small city, in both population and size.

Grand Avenue though is picturesque. It's one of the prettier streets in the city, passing by some fantastic historical mansions, gorgeous churches, a college, and even the Governor's mansion. I pass some beautiful architecture on my commute.

The street is being resurfaced right now though. For about fifteen to twenty blocks it is what the city calls "rough road". That means that all the smooth asphalt has been stripped away and the road has been graded. It's a bouncy couple of blocks. But when I was driving in this morning I noticed something that I hadn't before. Under all the asphalt is brick. Grand was once a brick road.

I'm not sure why that surprises me. It's one of the oldest streets in the city. And brick paving was the only paving for nearly a century. But I'd never seen the bricks. I never thought about how beautiful the street would have looked paved with those even square red bricks. The masonry work is very good, very even (at least of what I can see). All this got me thinking though about all the history that is buried right under my feet. Not just on Grand but in general. I'm standing on centuries of history every moment. Each piece of land has a story to tell. I'm not sure why I never noticed.

All these years of driving down Grand, twice a day, and I never thought about how it had been paved before. I wish I had seen it totally brick paved. It would have been stunning. But I'm glad I got to see those bits of bricks. They made the rough road worth it.

Regina Spektor

The first time I heard Regina Spektor, I was listening to Pandora. The song On the Radio came on and I was at first unsure of what to make of the lyrics. She does talk about driving hearses through screaming crowds. But then I was fascinated. Even with the sometimes gothic themes, the upbeat melody, odd lyrics, and sweet voice made me fall in love with the song. I went home and bought it that day. And listened to it over and over and over until I'm sure Jeff was sick of it.

The next day I set up a Regina Spektor Pandora station. And found myself in love with every song of hers that they played. The Russian born artist writes some of the most interesting lyrics I've ever heard but it's her voice that really pulls me in. The first time we watched Prince Caspian (the second Chronicles of Narnia film) and her song played at the end, I knew her voice right away. It is such a beautiful voice. It's delicate and pure. And more than anything, it is unique. I bought The Call shortly after.

But I still can't get away from the lyrics. I wish I had written the words to The Calculation. They are offbeat in the best possible way. The song and video for Fidelity makes me laugh and smile every time I see it. It's an odd video (not as strange as Nine Crimes by Damien Rice but close), but I love the ending. A feel good video. I just recently watched the video for Better, a song I've loved since I first heard it, and was just as enchanted with the video.

It's not often that I find a songwriter who produces song after song that I love. Most of the time I find one or two songs from other artists that are just okay. I haven't heard a single Regina Spektor song that I haven't adored. Now I'm just waiting for her to come to town so I can see her live. Until then I'll have to make due with my always growing iTunes collection of her work and the videos she puts up on YouTube. Take a listen. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

[All video links are to the official videos with the exception of The Calculation.]

My Type of Bling

I love necklaces. Other than my wedding ring they are the only jewelry I'm willing to wear. We've bought a couple nice necklaces over the years but most of the ones I wear on a regular basis are thrift store buys or odd pieces that I've found in art stores. I love a single pendent with some character. So when Jeff took me over to a little bead store in Valley Junction called Fish Lips, I went a little crazy.

I only bought one chain but above are all the pendents that I bought. The ones on the chain are what I'm currently wearing. I switch them out every couple of days. I wore courageous journey to work on Wednesday but for the rest of the week it's been this three pendent combination. I'm excited to try out Find next. I know they aren't all that shiny or lovely but they really mean a lot to me. Of course now I have a new shop to avoid. Well...only if I want to have money at the end of the week.

Poetry Friday

I know I posted already today but I've been wanting to post this poem for a long time now. This is a poem that I read years ago when I was in college and the first two lines have stuck in my head for well over a decade. I was young and inexperienced and this poem impacted me in ways I couldn't understand at the time. It is not for small children or the prudish.

Sex Without Love
by Sharon Olds

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

New Books!!!

I walked away from the convention quite a bit poorer and a majority of that money was spent on...can you guess?...books. Shocked, aren't you? I have a bit of a book addiction. But there were tons of books that I wanted to buy and almost all of them were at a fantastic price. So I splurged. And came home with a couple new reads.

First up was a beautiful Art of Bone book done by Jeff Smith. If you don't remember, I mentioned my love for the comic series in this post. I read the Bone series nearly addictively, moving from book to book. I even made two library trips, the same day so that I could keep on reading. So this book was a great find and for a very decent price. I love art-of books.

The next title on the list was the second book of the Mouse Guard series. I'm not sure how I missed that it had come out already. I read Fall many years ago and have been eagerly awaiting Winter to see what happens. When I was walking through the convention hall on the last day I spotted a copy and promptly bought it. And then moved it to the top of my stack of books to read.

The Mouse Guard stall was doing a "buy one get one free" deal so I also got to pick up a second book. I looked through their interesting titles but decided on a Field Guide for a graphic novel series called Berona's War. The salesman described it to me as Spy Versus Spy meets Looney Tunes. With that kind of description, how could I possibly pass it up? After I finally get to read the field guide I'm sure I'll be tracking down the original series as well.

But my last and most exciting purchase was two books from the Looking for Group webcomic. I've been reading Looking for Group for a while now and love it (I posted on that one here). I also read the author and illustrator's other comic Least I Could Do. So when I found out that they would be having a booth at Gen Con I knew I had to stop by. Jeff went a little fanboy standing in front of Ryan Sohmer and Lar DeSouza and I have to admit that I was a bit excited. It was a bit of a thrill to meet the creators of not one but two of your favorite comics. We bought Books 1 and 3 (I already have 2) and also picked up a stuffed Richard and Bunny (yes he's supposed to be riding the bunny. If you read the comic you understand). It didn't hurt that the guys were incredibly nice. Both of the editions were signed and I walked away a very happy fan.

Costumes

Inspired by all the amazing Victorian and steampunk costumes I saw this week (like the beauty above) I picked up a sewing pattern for an outfit. We won't be going back to Gen Con for another two years most likely, so I should have time to brush up on my stitches. I haven't done a ton of sewing and my preference is for hand-sewing, so this should be a bit of a challenge. But I have to try. Isn't that red one just lovely? Now imagine it with a pair of goggles and a steampunked pistol.

The Best Week in Gaming

I got back in town last night after spending the week in Indianapolis, IN for Gen Con, "the best four days in gaming". It's a convention for games and gamers. There are video games, role playing games, miniatures games, board games, and any other type of game you could imagine. It's a weekend filled with geek t-shirts, cool costumes, and the sound of dice. For me, Gen Con lasted a week. And it lived up to its name. This week has been a fantastic week of gaming and geekery.

Some well-known characters

The trip really started last Tuesday, when our friend Jon and my brother John and his family arrived in town (we had three Johns/Jons in attendance, which was a tad confusing sometimes). After dinner we headed home to start the gaming right. Our friend Jon had brought down a ton of board games which we made good use of. We spent the entire week playing board games, playing role playing games (D&D, Shadowrun), and walking around the convention hall. Oh yeah and a lot of eating (if you're ever in Indy stop by Palamino for fantastic meal).

The group at dinner at the beautiful Old Spaghetti Factory.

Games conventions are fun because of all the great people. Almost everyone is friendly and most are doing something interesting. We demoed games, checked out some great costumes, and just spent time soaking up the energy. There were people everywhere in the convention hall, sitting down to game, talking games. Everywhere you looked were unique t-shirts and fun. And the party never seemed to stop. We stayed at the Embassy Suites which was connected to the convention center. At three in the morning there were still gamers playing down in the lobby. One of my favorite comments was Wednesday night at 2 in the morning when my friend Jon looked out the window of the room and said, "there are people still down there playing. These are my people." I'll second that, these are my people. I've come back energized and excited.

Life-sized Robo Rally, a game Jon brought but we never got a chance to play.

We spent all our time with my family and most of that was playing game after game. We wandered around the city a bit, walked a lot, attended a live action dungeon, but the rest of the time was spent sitting at a table rolling dice and laughing. My mother even joined us for a D&D run (something she's never done before). Two of Jon's games, Pandemic and Betrayal at the House on the Hill, became instant favorites with my nephew (and the rest of us). We played a great Shadowrun adventure that had most of us on the edge of our seats at the end. And no matter what we played we laughed and had a fantastic time. One of the best weeks I've had in a long time.

Packing and Planning

I'm in the mad rush to get everything done before we leave on vacation tomorrow. I'm heading out to Indianapolis for GenCon and I'm a bit excited. In an odd move for me, I've left packing until the very end. I'm normally one of those people who starts packing the week before a vacation. I'm a bit of a planner if you couldn't tell.

So with company arriving in the next couple hours and getting ready to be gone for a week, these last two days I haven't really thought about blogging. I'll be back with plenty of pictures. There will be fun costumes everywhere. I'll also be back with some good stories. This will be a weekend to let my inner geek out to play. Embrace your geekiness is the family motto. So I'll be back next week with pure geek wonderfulness. Until then, have a fantastic week.