Long Overdue

I’m finally pulling myself out of an extremely busy time at work, which kind of resulted in a tepid reaction to considering writing a blog post.  That being said, Stitches was weeks ago, but here is my recap.

I took Friday February 27 off because that’s how I roll.  I have plenty of vacation time saved up (I’m finally on the higher vacation accrual rate – to date I have over 60 hours, yay!) so taking a day to carouse at the Santa Clara convention center is easy.  Last year, I even took it unpaid, that’s how worth it it is.

Anyway, so my mom, aunt Melissa, and I headed out there first thing and this year the parking was not a total nightmare like it was last year, and we headed inside, only to be stuck in line buying tickets for an HOUR. I don’t know if it was the Stitches people or the convention center people who were responsible for the absolutely ridiculous wait, but I want it noted that it was terribly unorganized, and really quite appalling.

But, we finally made it inside and immediately headed over to the far end of the hall and started looking around.  I made my first purchase of the day fairly soon, a ball of bamboo-blend self-striping sock yarn, a brand that I’d never heard of before. 

From there on, it was pretty much all downhill. Well, in terms of not buying pink or green sock yarn, that is! I had two specific goals for this year’s Stitches, which were 1) find some worsted weight yarn in a periwinkle color and 2) stay away from pink and green sock yarns, since I have the most of those colors already stashed away.

I succeeded on the periwinkle front almost right away at the Imagiknit booth.  Imagiknit is a yarn store in San Francisco that I have never gone to because I hate both parking in San Francisco and San Francisco itself and it’s located in an area that is hard to park in.  Yes, I am biased against the great city by the bay, whatevs. I drive a stick! Not exactly conducive to easy driving on all those hills.  Plus, Imagiknit is not near Bart – you’d have to walk like a mile through the Mission, which is kind of a dodgy neighborhood, IMO.

But again, biased against SF so take whatever I say with a grain of salt. 

Back to Imagiknit – so, I’ve never been to the store, but I do enjoy their booth.  Last year I got some Colinette Jitterbug from them; that was the first time I’d even seen Jitterbug. And this year they were the only place at Stitches that had reasonable periwinkle yarn – not the easiest color to come by, plus it was Malabrigo, and we all know I heart the Malabrigo.  (I am not a periwinkle girl myself – it’s too close to lavender, my least favorite color ever – but this is a nice color, plus it’s for a co-worker who commissioned a hat from me.  She LOVED the color when I showed it to her, so mission accomplished.)

I was then taken by the Miss Babs booth, which was pretty much all delightful sock yarn dyed in the most delicious of colors.  I promptly broke the pink/green rule.

Webs had off-color lots of Araucania Multy, which I really like, for only $9, so I scored some of that. 

While in the interminable line to get in, we decided to get 2-day passes and so my mom and I went back on Saturday.  The very first booth we stopped at (where I was breaking my sock-yarn-skein-not-to-exceed-$25 rule) I ran into Jennifer! So that was pretty cool. 

ANYWAY, here is what I bought:

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Basically, I talked to a lot of really cool people and got some great yarn, and some great patterns (two Cookie A patterns I didn’t have, a Knitspot pattern, and another other pattern I scored directly from the designer at the Verb for Keeping Warm booth).

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After Stitches on Saturday, my mom and I went to the San Jose Kinokinuya bookstore where I wasn’t going to get anything BUT they totally had two Japanese stitch dictionaries that I don’t have!

Jerks.

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And that is Stitches.

Next up, current projects status and my trip to the Filoli Gardens.
 

Ireland Girls, Revisited

A bunch of you asked about the Ireland Girls.  So I shall recount that story for your amusement.

I moved to Texas in 2001 to attend college at the University of Texas at San Antonio, chosen primarily for its distance from California and its close proximity to a major airport.

I was placed my first year in campus housing with Tara, Cindy, and Julie, and we remain great friends.  The second year, Julie had gotten married, so Tara, Cindy, and I went through a couple of extra roommates, and then Tara and Cindy graduated and moved out.  I was planning on staying one more year in campus housing before looking for my own place to live.

That first semester in 2003 I was gifted with one roommate, a girl named Shannon from the East Coast who was on an exchange program.  She was okay at first.  We were curious about our other roommates who were listed as being from Belfast, Northern Ireland, but hadn’t arrived yet.  About a month into the school year Jayne and Jill finally got everything sorted out with their student visas and arrived in San Antonio.  They were both on medical research tracks at their school back in Ireland and would be working at UTSA’s Health Science Center.

At first, because they didn’t know anybody, they were okay.  Kind of a novel experience – they had the accents, they didn’t know much about America or Texas or whatever.  We actually went to a few movies and I remember distinctly going to see 28 Days Later at the dollar movie theatre with them.

And then they started to make friends.

Because they were younger than me (they were 20) they obviously befriended younger folks, and it was then that I realized they were partiers, and Shannon too. And so the endless evenings of parties at the apartment began.  Drinking, smoking, music, television, hanging around, you name it, it happened.  There wasn’t much I could do except tell them not to smoke because I have a nicotine allergy.  Of course, they weren’t smoking cigarettes…

Anyway, so over Christmas Jill turned 21.  I’d never been so happy as to go home that Christmas – a month reprieve from their shenanigans.

After Jill turned 21, the drinking and amount of alcohol consumption shot up.  Shannon had decided that she wanted to go home after the one semester, so we would be getting a new roommate, and shortly after we got back from break in January, Angela arrived.

At the time, Angela was 30, and probably the most beautiful black woman I had ever met.  She seemed to click with the Ireland Girls, and I was peeved because I could really use an ally, you know?  They would hang out and the parties resumed.

But then Angela started to get serious about school, since she was returning to get her degree, and she started to get really pissed off at the amount of people hanging around all the time, and would ask the girls to hang out other places but they completely ignored her and finally, there had been two straight weeks of parties and people being over, and Angela had had enough.

And here is the post I wrote on Diaryland on April 17, 2004, recounting the incident:

I was so tired last night that I conked out around 12:30 or thereabouts. As many of you may know (or not, whichever) I used to have a strange sleep schedule, and not go to bed until two or three o’clock. However, I have returned to the land of the semi-living, and tend to go to bed around midnight or a little after.

Anyway, I had to preface the following with that, as my point is that I was completely unconscious through the dramatic events that unfolded within my apartment late last night. Therefore, my story is from pieces of information that Angela filled me in on when I got up this morning.

Jayne and Jill (aka The Ireland Girls) were arrested last night for providing alcohol to minors.

A Class A Misdemeanor.

Apparently, Angela was in her room minding her own business when the girls came home with a bunch of their friends and were being loud and drunk. Angela and I have been discussing, as of late, how best to deal with this problem, as they have had people over every day for the last two or so weeks. I realize that they are “scientists” (HAHAH I totally typed that scientits) and we are but mere “students” but their attitude has been extraordinarily presumptous lately. No regard to the fact that we have to study or work on projects or anything.

Last night Angela and I stayed in after going to a poetry reading up at school, and we were going to make dinner and watch 20/20. However, shortly before the show started the girls showed up with their friends, and they were going to go to a movie later on in the evening. And their dumb friends sat down on the couch and infringed on our evening. Needless to say, there were more of them than us. After they left ages later, Angela and I were talking about how best to handle the problem, meaning, we couldn’t get through to the girls by just talking to them, so we thought to get a mediator from the housing office.

However, I then went to sleep and apparently they all came back to the apartment, and Angela asked them to be quiet (drunk people are loud) and Jayne got all snotty and said they could stay there until three, which is the agreement from LAST semester when Angela didn’t even live here, so that’s totally invalid now. (And I never liked that agreement anyway, but I got ganged up on.)

Anyway, so Angela got mad, and went back into her room, and called the police, as a noise complaint.

The cops came, but seeing all the alcohol, asked them if they’d been drinking, and they were, apparently, totally plastered, but told them no, and all their friends are underage.

So they got arrested.

Angela then spoke with an RA, and told him that she didn’t want them living here anymore, and he said he would talk to one of the bosses over at the housing office. So they might be moving out. And since Jayne already had a citation for underage drinking (a couple months ago before she turned 21) it could be grounds for her to get kicked out entirely.

!!!!

HOW IS IT THAT I SLEPT THROUGH THAT????!

The girls moved out a few days after that and were shortly gone for good after that, having violated their student visas.  The incident even made the school paper.

GOOD TIMES!

Heh.

They brought it upon themselves, so it is hard to feel sympathetic, especially after the hell they put me through, since I am NOT a partier in any way shape or form.  But I do wonder what happened to them and I hope that they’ve had okay lives.

I salute you, Jill and Jayne! At least things were never boring!

Mini Socks, Red Scarf Project

Las Palmas

This weekend I went on an impromptu yarn crawl with my mom. We headed down to San Jose, where our main objective was to stop at Kinokinuya, the Japanese bookstore chain. They have one in San Francisco, too, but it’s easier to get to the one in San Jose and easier to park.

(Aside: my family has a history of watching Japanese and other Asian television. Living on the west coast, they pipe in a lot of it – last year on my mom’s recommendation, Jason and I highly enjoyed the historical Korean epic Dae Jang Geum. Oh, the hats! Anyway.)

So, I picked up a couple of Japanese books – one about knitted and crocheted purses and the other one was a beading book. For imports, these books had reasonable prices, which was nice. Sometimes they are crazy expensive. I wish they would bring in more stitch dictionaries but so far they only have one (albeit excellent).

After that we got lost and wound up in San Mateo, turned around, got to The Alameda, where we went to Commuknity and I bought some sock yarn (surprise), and then onto Los Gatos, where the signage is suckalicious and stopped at Yarndogs, which was nice, though a little overpriced I thought. However they had those little sock blocker keychains, and I got one of those and a ball of Berroco Comfort, with which to make Sam’s replacement skull hat (with glow in the dark embellishments – he better not lose this one!).

Stuff I got

We were pretty tired after that, and then headed back up to the east bay, stopping at our personal LYS, the Yarn Boutique in Lafayette, where they totally have new colors of Shibui and Mirasol Hacho. And copies of the Interweave Holiday Knits.

Then my mom dropped me off and I made little mini socks for my keychain:

Mini Socks

These were pretty fun to make! I used leftover sock yarn. Rosie from work snagged the orange one. (“It’s cute! Go Giants!” she said. “Can I have it?”) Currently my keys are sporting the green one, which is Dream in Color Smooshy. They’d make cute Christmas ornaments.

***

I was flattered this weekend to be the recipient of the “I love your blog” award from Jennifer, which I think is the first time anyone has linked to me with a blog award, so that was nice and many thanks! 😀

Rather than link a few blogs I read per the award rules (you can see my blogroll for that on the right of my page), I’d like to step up on a soapbox for a second and point you all towards the Red Scarf Project, which is part of the Orphan Foundation and benefits foster children who have aged out the system and are now attending college.

I’m sure as knitters many of us have already heard of the Red Scarf Project, but I think it would be great for everyone to participate if they can.  The Red Scarf project sends a care package to these kids for Valentine’s Day. I think showing these kids that someone, somewhere, cares about them, is awesome.

The deadline has been extended to December 15th as they don’t have enough scarves yet, so help a kid out if you can! They deserve it. 🙂