A Dissipated Mind

The Fiber Diet

2007-07-06T09:29:00.001-04:00

After some consideration and picking at the skeins, I think 4 more of the skeins I washed on the 4th are a loss. 16oz of potluck roving in a really interesting coral sort of color, probably gone. Sigh. That's nearly 2 pounds of fiber I spun and cannot use. I found that Paradise Fibers still has the shetland in the same color, and some similar silk and merino blends. Nothing quite like the potluck, but there were a couple of things on there that might be a good replacement, plus they have gotland at a really good price (that's the fiber they used for the Lord of Rings movies), and the LYM would probably love to have a Frodo scarf made out of that.

I speak of replacement fibers for one very good reason...all of these skeins were destined for Christmas gifts, except the shetland, and I'm supposed to be on a fiber diet for the year. After going through my (thankfully diminished) fiber stash last night, I don't have suitable replacements for the potluck or the silk and merino blend, and nothing I can approximate the shetland with. Yes, I have plenty of actual yarn, but again not in the right colors or weights for the people I had in mind. So what to do? Is this little washing machine disaster a good enough reason to break my no-fiber vow, at least to the extent that I would be replacing fibers, not actually buying new ones to add to the stash?

Fiber disaster!

2007-07-05T17:32:00.001-04:00

It's amazing really, I've been spinning for years and yesterday was the first major spinnig related disaster to strike. And given that I'm a huge klutz, this is kind of a miracle.

Anyway...I coulnd't sleep yesterday so I got up at 5 in the morning and decided to wind off all the yarn I had sitting on bobbins. 16 skeins of yarn, all spun up since the start of the year. Then I decided to wash the yarn to set the twist. I put everything in wash bugs, dropped in the landry machine to soak, and walk away, only to discover 10 minutes later that we have the only washing machine on the planet with a soak setting that....agitates.

WTF?!

In what reality does the soak setting agitate?! Really?

So now I have 16 skeins of felt. Well...actually...only 3 skeins are totally hopeless. Tragically, two of them are/were beautiful laceweight shetland I had planned to make a Faroese shawl out of. Four of skeins may be salvagae if I can pick the strands apaart. The rest of them had just enough alpaca or whatever else blended in that while they did felt, it's still useable yarn.

Suprisinly, I wasn't all that upset about the whole sad situation. Disappointed, yes, but remarkably calm all things considered.

My gardening didn't actually go a whole lot better. I got the stupid box hedges out, then we tackeld the awful 8 foot phalluc holly bush. The stump is still in the hole and the flower bed looks like a minuature mine fleid. You know, like gnomes had a trench war or something. Hopefully I can get the rootball hacked up enough that we can get the damn thing out of the hole. I have a bunch of realy lovely plants to put in, and I want to get to the fun part!

Pantyhose rant

2007-07-03T09:25:00.000-04:00

This is random but I hate, I mean HATE pantyhose. Especially the cheap-ass pathetic excuse for pantyhose sold at Target. Seriously. $6 and you can maybe get two wearings out of them before they shred. Not run. Shred. I know I'm not exactly Kate Moss but really, there's not that much friction going on that these things would shred the second or third time out.

If only I could really be a hippie lawyer like the LYM says I am and stop shaving my legs and wear Birks to work...and maybe also get in around 9:30 instead of 8...

Oh so lazy!

2007-07-03T08:35:00.001-04:00

So I have been quiet for way too long. At least the last 4 weeks (ack) of that was not entirely my fault, stupid Cox locked out my web account right after I moved and won't unlock the user name so I had to move to blogspot. Which is probably easier anyway and has prompted me to change my template and all, but still, it's annoying. Having to remember which webrings I was in and find the code for them in a huge pain. At least I think I have that all saved on my machine at home.

Anyway, things are going pretty well. The LYM and I seen to have gotten pretty well adjusted to the cohabitation thing, the animals are mostly ok with each other, and the house is starting to look pretty well pulled together with all of our stuff in it.

I've even been knitting away on my UFO's! I've got about half a sleeve and a roll down collar left on the brown cabled sweater I started last summer and about 3 inches of cuff left on the first of my Liberty socks (Liberty because I got the yarn on sale at Liberty of London when I was there in 1997). In going through the pile of UFO's I did discover that the cat had chewed on a lace bed jacket I'd been working on. Unfortunately the chew holes were all over the place and too numerous to patch, so I scraped the 4 inches I had done. It was only 4 inches of knitting so I think there's enough yarn still to start over with the same project, especially since once I pulled the needles out I discovered the thing was WAAAY too big. We'll see, I might end up using a whole different pattern, there was a really cute kimono jacket in the spring KnitScnene I'd like to make and I think this yarn will work. It'll be a little lighter and more open that would be nice for a light spring/summer wrap.

I promise pictures will be forthcoming! I'm spending tomorrow knitting and gardening and grilling tri-tip (apparently a CA phenomenon that can only be found at Trader Joe's out here)and hopefully starting my first real bonsai project.

News updates

2007-05-22T16:08:00.000-04:00

The latest news is that I am currently moving in with the LYM and will be starting a *paid* internship at an actual law firm tomorrow morning. Hurray!

Trying to get the dog and cat to live together in something approaching peace has been no picnic. The cat is still hissing at the dog when he gets too close to her, and the dog is still eating the cat's food, which pisses the cat off to no end, but mostly I think I'm more stressed about the whole situation then they are at this point. Once the cat stops crying in the morning we should have some measure of peace in the house and all will be well.

Aside from moving and trying to keep the cat and dog in line, I've not been up to a whole lot since school got finished. There's been quite a bit of spinning, some knitting, and generally loafing around and relaxing, which I desperately needed. Between than and aikido, kendo and iaido I've been keeping myself pretty busy. All in all, things are looking up and going well, and I am remarkably calm all things considered.

Now I must get back to unpacking. I brought over all my bathroom stuff and I have no idea where to put it all. The master bath is tiny (like a postage stamp tiny, smallest bathroom I have ever seen in all my life. I think the potty closet in my old apartment in San Francisco was bigger than this whole stupid "master" bath), and there isn't much storage space in the other bathroom either so my collection of bath products looks even more absurd than it really is. I'll figure it out. Creative storage is always fun.

What can you do?

2007-05-09T10:57:00.000-04:00

Well...I'm two hours away from my 3rd exam and for some reason all I really want to do is knit. Or at least play with yarn. I started a washcloth last night and I really just want to finish it. I'm using Crystal Palace chenille and the star shaped dishcloth pattern from Mason-Dixon Knitting (which you can get here). So far so good, I did have to frog back the first couple of inches when I realized my gauge was waaaaay off and I needed to use size 6 needles instead of 8. The smaller needles made the chenille much easier to deal with too, so it's going pretty fast now. It might also help that I went from using Addi's to bamboo. I'm the only person I know who slows down with Addi's. They hurt my hands for some reason. I'll stick with my nice bamboo, wood and Denise needles thanks.

Anyway, no luck so far on the job search. All career services had to suggest was calling around to public defenders and judges and offering to work for free. Which isn't really going to work, I have to pay rent and eat somehow. I've pretty accepted that I will be losing my apartment and putting most of my stuff in storage. Where I go from there is anyone's guess. I guess it depends on where/if I can find some sort of work, what it pays, and whether or not the LYM decides shacking up is a good plan or not. We both want to live together, we practically do anyway, but neither of us wants me to move in because I have no choice. Hopefully we can work something out, and I won't have to pack my cat up in the car and drive back to CA for the summer to crash with the 'rents.

Edited to add a link to this amazing site where you can get hand-blown glass drop spindles and some really amazing glass knitting needles. *lust*

A sick joke?

2007-05-01T15:14:00.000-04:00

Nope, just my life. My first final is Thursday. This morning I found out my summer job plans have fallen through. Yesterday I found out my car needs about $800 worth of work to pass state inspection.

No job, no car (well, ok, the car will be back sooner or later but still), and impending brokeness. Great.

Why do these things always seem to happen around finals?

How am I supposed to find a job now, when everyone who wanted to hire pretty much did that two months ago, and I have exams to deal with? Please. Enough already!!

Now I shall return to my outlines in the hope that I can salvage my sad GPA and thereby my career...

I'm ok!

2007-04-25T08:14:00.001-04:00

Just that time of year...

Aside from finals starting next week (the first is on Thursday, a week from today, arrggg!!), life is good. Stuff is going really insanely well with the LYM, I got promoted again in aikido, the weather is getting nice, and I got to re-landscape a whole flowerbed last weekend at the LYM's house. Digging up over a ton of rocks was way too much work (someone had put down landscaping rocks as a ground cover, then covered the rocks with a 3 inch layer of mulch. WTF?!), but it was good to get outside and do something other than read for part of the weekend. I needed that. And for some reason I find digging in the earth very relaxing and comforting. I love the feel of well-tilled (and relatively rock free) soil in my hands as I plant things.

I did manage to re-injure my thumb last week, which made the gardening slow and somewhat painful, and has slowed me down a lot. Stupid thumb. I'm back in a splint for the next two weeks at least, which is annoying to say the least. At least all I have to do is study, so that's something. It just gets hot with this thing stuck to my hand and wrist all day long.

I'll post more when I can, for now it's off to my internship and then class, then aikido. Crazy days.

Finally, fiber!

2007-03-08T10:37:00.000-05:00

My dad is in town to visit for a few days and brought me the best present ever! A shiny new Ashford skein winder! I was able to assemble the thing and wind off 4 bobbins full of yarn in the time it took to wind two bobbins with the niddy-noddy. This thing is a life saver for big projects, I had so many bobbins full of finished yarn after winter break, I was avoiding the task of winding them off so I could set the yarn. That much niddy-noddy action kills my arms.

He also brought me a McMoran yarn balance, which is a fun and geeky little spinning tool. It's a small plastic balance that allows you to estimate how many yards per pound you are getting. The yardage estimates seem to be pretty accurate too. For larger spinning projects this thing will be very useful. I think if you need a fairly small and precise amount of yarn for a project, counting yardage on the skein winder or niddy-noddy would be better, but for anything else this is the clear way to go.

Now if only my thumb was better and I had less reading to do, I could finish spinning the Shetland over spiring break. Oh well, there should be a few slow evenings for spinning before summer.

Thumb update

2007-03-06T16:03:00.000-05:00

I went back to stupid health "services" today, missing two classes in the process, but it was a good thing. The doctor was actually nice about things, looked the thumb, stuck me a huge splint, and sent me (predictably) to the hospital to rule out a break of the joint. Which would be a Very Bad Thing indeed, and require trips to an orthopedist. I got lucky though, it's not broken, just very badly bruised. I have to keep it splinted for 10 days, then "wean off the splint" for awhile and if anything gets worse and fails to get better I have to go back. So really it's all good, and should be fine, even if the process of finding this out was hideously annoying and inconvenient.

At least this week is not so busy as last week. Aikido is on spring break, so I don't have as much training, and since spring break is next week most things have kind of slowed down a little. Which is good, since I have an extra assignment all the sudden I have to get done and Daddy is coming in to town on Wednesday. I'm calm about it all though, after last week just about anything seems sane.

As for knitting, probably won't be doing any of that for awhile because of the thumb, but the scarf I knit for the LYM while I was sick got used for the first time this morning and he seemed very happy with it. Seeing him wearing it and having fun playing with it was rather wonderful. He was absurdly cute for one thing, and having the satisfaction of knowing that I was keeping someone I cared about warm and comfortable on a cold morning is always a nice thing.

Oooo like I need another reason...

2007-03-05T16:36:00.001-05:00

...to hate being a student. Add Student Heath "Services." Yesterday, being Sunday, I did something terrible(tm) to my thumb in kendo. It feels worse today and is swollen and tender and I cannot move the bottom joint at all, and there's a red patch which hurts really bad when I poke it.

So I went to the alleged Student Health "Services" office, and they said, well, sorry but we have no doctors you should go to urgent care and pay $100 for what we should be to do as part of the absurd amount of money you have already paid to have access to our stellar "care." To which I say, feh, and demand to see someone, anyone, who can tell me if this might be broken. Which someone turned out be a clueless nurse who told me nothing I didn't already know and put a splint on the WRONG KNUCKLE, and then informed me that I need to come back tomorrow to see the real doctor, who will send me to urgent care for x-rays I will have to pay for anyway. WTF? I have class all day tomorrow, and no money, and now you want me to run all over stupid town to get x-rays you really should be able to do on site? gah. What is the point of you people?!

So now I am in pain and frustrated to the point of tears and no closer to a functional thumb than I would be if I sat on it for an hour rather than wasting my time at Health "Services."

Don't even get me started on the brilliant people we have "helping" us over at the Financial Aid office.

Hmmm

2007-03-01T09:52:00.000-05:00

So I've been sick as a dog, again, still, who can tell anymore, but I'm finally starting to feel better. I'm over a week behind in reading, but what are you gonna do? Really, I'm weirdly calm about this. No sense in freaking out about the amount of work I have to catch up on, that will hardly help anything.

Anyway, stuff is going ok in spite of the Flu of Doom and reading backlog. The LYM took fabulously good care of me while I was sick, I'm cooking dinner for his family this weekend, I got promoted in aikido, and for the first time ever I realized I'm actually glad to be out here doing this whole law school thing. It's not been easy, but I wouldn't change anything if I had it all to do over again.

I just wish I could sleep for about a week. I was out of school sick all last week, and came back into one of the busiest weeks of the semester. On top of everything else, we have a compressed ethics course for the next two weeks, so I have an extra hour and a half class, plus all the reading, every day this week and next. All to learn really complex things like it's a bad plan to take your client's money to Thailand to buy under age prostitutes. Very useful stuff. At least spring break is only a week away, then I can sleep a little and get caught up on the reading.

Blargh

2007-02-15T10:31:00.000-05:00

Ok I am a little cranky today. Yesterday was weird, maybe in a good way but I don't know. I'm not sure the LYM gets the whole V-Day concept really, but he was really very sweet and nice even though nothing particularly special happened. We'll see how the weekend goes I suppose.

Anyhow, I want to go home and spin and finish this Shetland I've been working on. But instead I have class all day, then aikido with the group I am less than enthused about, and I'll be lucky if I get home before 9. This semester is just brutal, but at least it's almost spring break. And I should have a reasonably relaxing weekend, even though I have iaido and kendo on Sunday.

The brown sweater of doom is getting there, the first sleeve is done and I have at least started the second one. Maybe I'll get it done over break, I can only hope.

Trial, feh

2007-02-10T11:04:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note about the trial...

We did really well, made good arguments, the prosecution offered no real evidence. Our instructor said we did great, the other sides instructor said it was ok they lost since we didn't call the defendant and they had no evidence anyway.

The judge came out.

The judge ruled for the prosecution.

He did this because it's Legal Skills, and he thought we had to appeal to case. My instructor and I talked to him afterwards and he said in real life, it would have been tossed out on the motion to strike if not sooner. Yet we lost because it's skills, a class meant to teach up how things work in the real world. Feh.

I hate legal skills. It's the single most useless program at school. If it's supposed to work like the real world, the judges should rule like it's real world and not make mistakes on purpose so we can have an appeal (an appeal, I might ad, no one in our group needs to make for the purposes of the class).

It was very demoralizing and I felt really bad after, but god bless the LYM, he managed to make a fairly convincing argument that we won in every way that really mattered so that's something. And thank god legal skills is nothing like real life. I'm just so tired of everything about law school being set up so that you fail. No achievement seems to come without some absurd reminder of how inept you really are. We did good, we won, just let us have it already.

Anyway, I'm cranky now and have pretty well decided that I'm going to relax as much as I can this weekend. So while I wait for the LYM to get up (he's been sick, he needs to sleep) I shall knit and watch Heros instead of read Admin Law or something else. Maybe I will even finish this sleeve, that would be nice. I'm getting tired of looking at it.

Nerves!

2007-02-09T08:39:00.001-05:00

So today I have to argue a case in court for the first time ever. Not real court mind you, they won't let me at real clients like that quite yet, but Legal Skills court. Legal Skills is our practicum course at school, it's really pretty silly in many ways, not least of which is that it's a pass/fail class that takes up a huge percentage of your time, but there it is. Anyway, the point is, this afternoon I have my trial and I am really nervous.

Really really super nervous.

It should be ok. We are the defense in a criminal case, and there is no real evidence of any useful of conclusive kind, so all we have to do is not f* it up too badly and we should be ok, but holy crap I am still nervous. My head hurts and I don't wanna go. I have to go cross examination and closing arguments, both of which I seem to be better at than direct and opening, I think because you have to think on the fly and respond to what the other side has done more, but that's not saying a whole lot really. I know in my head this is all good practice and it will be good to have my "first" court appearance over with before I get out into practice, but the whole skills program is so contrived and so poorly executed that I don't think it really has the desired effect. Seriously, they give us dreadful cases and no evidence to work with and it's all quite absurd and in real life the cases would never get to court. But we have to argue it anyway. blegh.

It's a stressful start to a rather long weekend. Today is my trial, then I am off to the LYM's. Tomorrow we are going to my neighbors 30th birthday party, then Sunday there's an all day self-defense clinic. Somewhere in there I have to read for next week. Gah. Good luck with that. I am sorely tempted to just say to hell with it and really take the weekend off, but I sort of feel like I've been slacking as it is. Of course, I am a little behind, but only in one class, and once this trial is over my schedule will go back to something passably normal, so probably I am due a little bit of a break. We'll see I guess. Right now I just want to crawl under a rock and hide until this is over.

Hmm. Just realized, tonight will be the first time the LYM has seen me in full lawyer-drag. It's been nearly a year that we've been doing whatever it is we're doing and in all that time he's never seen me in a suit. Funny.

Yay me!

2007-02-06T10:59:00.000-05:00

So it's 19 degrees outside, and the school has the A/C on in the lecture rooms. WTF?! The run the heat all summer and the A/C all winter? Sick bastards.

Aside from freezing, things are going ok. I got offered a job for the summer with the firm I'm interning with, things with the LYM are lovely and moving in a positive direction, and my overall outlook has improved quite a bit. Ok, yes, I did get my class rank, and it was not good, but I didn't have a minor break down about it and it's really not bothering me in the least. It helps that I got offered the job before I read the rank email, but still, I'm pretty proud of myself for not bursting into tears or something.

Anyhow, things are insanely busy but classes are going ok, they are mostly interesting, my stupid mock trial thing will be over Friday, and while financial aid is being slow as hell about getting me money to live on for the rest of the semester (seriously people, when I say I have no food money, does that sound to you like going even slower with things is a good response?) I'm ok. Stressed, yes. Hysterical, not so much. And this is good.

I have sadly little knitting or spinning progress to report. I have so much reading to do that I don't seem to have much time to knit at all. Hopefully that will change some after my trial is done, maybe spring break. I really want to finish the brown sweater I've been working on forever so I can do some baby gift for a classmate who is having a little boy over the summer. I think I know what I want to knit for him, I just need to get something off the needles before I will let myself start something new. Tonight the LYM and I are going to go have dinner to celebrate my job offer, maybe I can knit some this afternoon. We'll see. The weekend is going to be insane so it might be better to try to get ahead on the reading.

busybusybusy

2007-01-29T17:54:00.000-05:00

Sooooooo busy. Seriously, all four of my lecture classes seem to average between 20 and 50 pages a class. It looks like most weeks I'll be reading somewhere in the 330-400 page range. Not to mention the work I'm doing for my externship, legal skills, or aikido and kendo stuff. It's nutty but it's interesting stuff (except for administrative law, which still makes me want to eat my own head).

I'm really loving my externship. It's time consuming, but so totally worth it. Right now, I'm working on personal injury cases, a criminal case, and some trademark stuff. And it's all really interesting, plus I get to see how all the crap I've been learning actually works out in the real world, which makes it so very much easier to care about classes. I might actually get to *use* this stuff! And it might actually made a difference in someones life! Who knew?

I've been getting a tiny amount of knitting done. One sleeve of the Sweater That Will Not End is almost done. Once that's done, I have one more sleeves, the turtleneck collar, and finish work to do. The end is in sight! The other active project I have is the Liberty Sale Socks, made from yarn I got in 1997 when I was in London. I'm most of the way done with the first foot. Really, I could finish those in a day if only I had day to sit and do it. I don't mind so much though, they are for me so there's no pressure. It's hard to resist planning the next project though, especially with so many UFO's and WIP's laying all over the place.

Spring semeter, the first week

2007-01-20T22:08:00.000-05:00

I have survived the first week of the semester. Seeing as I lived through The Cold of Doom, a disastrous hakama related accident leaving me unable to move my right arm for nearly 2 days, and getting my grades (I don't want to talk about it), I think I'm doing ok. Still achy and a little stuffy, and my confidence has taking a pretty nasty beating, but really I'm ok with it.

So, here's the report so far:
1. Administrative law. The most boring. class. ever. Just looking at the book makes me to poke my eye out with a highlighter. Seriously. I may eat my own arm. And we're graded on class participation. Crap. Isn't staying awake enough? Now I have to contribute? gah.
2. Trademark Law. Yay! This is fun! I love the prof, but I think my unfortunate lack of knowledge relating to popular culture might be an issue here. The LYM teases me that I'm Dr. Brennan (from Bones). He's not wrong. This should be fun.
3. Intellectual Property. I had forgotten how much fun this prof was! Good class, interesting subject, should be lots of fun.
4. Employment Discrimination. For a class I singed up for at the last second and took only because it was the only open class that fit into my schedule, this turned out great. The subject is far more interesting than I thought it would be and the prof is interesting and engaging.
5. Legal Skills and Ethics. I have a trial and an ethics exam this semester. Like pulling teeth this one is, but oh well. Not much to be done.
6. Externship. Yay me I got one! This is my last best hope for ever scoring a job. But I think it'll work out well. I start really working on Monday, but so far I like everyone at the office. If nothing else, I will find out if actually practicing law is something I can deal with.

Really, any semester that starts out with 2 class discussions involving Elvis as a focal point can't be all bad. I'm starting to get in to classes where I can actually see how I might use what I am learning, and that feels pretty good. Hopefully my job search will go well too, my grades are going to be a problem but thanks to the LYM and his mother, I'm starting to get somewhere with the whole networking approach to job searching, so I have hope. I still seem to in a place where every accomplishment comes with a blow, but the blows are getting to be less or maybe I am just dealing with them better. Either way, I'll take it.

Still alive

2007-01-14T14:34:00.000-05:00

...barely. I have contracted whatever the most recent plague happens to be, which I find interesting seeing as I have not seen a living person since Wednesday, and then it was only because I had aikido. Seriously. You would think my hermit-like lifestyle would nicely preclude getting contagious diseases but there it is.

It's been a rather not so good last week or so, but I have some hope that things may be on a bit of an up-swing. Maybe. Who knows. Class starts on Tuesday, so as least I won't be so bored.

I've got very little knitting and fiber progress to report. I got some work done on my crazy quilt, and have the thing planned out now so at least I know how many squares I need to make (30). That helps. I've got more than half of them done, after that I can sew them together and make the border (a 9 inch band of crazy style piecing) and then finish it off. I have no idea how I am going to mange the actual quilting, the thing won't fit under the arm of my sewing machine. At the moment, I may just tie it. Not my favorite method of finishing but better than hand-quilting the whole thing. I could also do it in sections, piecing it together as I go, but we shall see.

Now I must take cold pills and go to kendo. Which might be scary, but at least it will get me out of the house and around other people for a little while.

Stupid cat

2007-01-04T09:13:00.000-05:00

I think my cat has a death wish today. She woke me up at 6:30 this morning and would. not. stop. meowing. until I manged to drag myself out of a bed to take a shower around 8. (I know, some of you have to get up much earlier than that, but this is my winter break after all) She then decided to station herself on the bathroom rug so I would trip over her when I got out of the shower, and has been putting herself right in the middle of wherever I need to walk all morning. Stupid cat. Between that and the leg clawing (I have some really nice little holes in my thigh from that, thank you very much), it really is amazing I haven't locked her out of the house yet. But, as the LYM reminds me, I am a submissive masochist, so it all makes perfect sense I guess.

Aside from cat related domestic strife, things have been fairly calm the last few days. New Years day was the best day I've had in recent memory, Tuesday was mellow and yesterday I spent most of the day in fiber-y pursuits, spinning, weaving, knitting and scouring a babydoll southdown fleece with a rather sad story behind it.

I'd always thought that if I were to get married, I would make my husband-to-be a sweater from a fleece I had processed and spun totally on my own. Last September, I bought the fleece. Things didn't work out, in a rather grand fashion, but there is still the fleece. For a long time, I sort of forgot about it, mostly out of self-preservation than any distaste for the fleece. It's a lovely fleece actually, very soft and springy, there's some discoloration but it should dye nicely once I've spun it and decided on a color. Since Thanksgiving, I've had the guy in question on my mind a lot for some reason, but he made it clear he has no desire to see me or talk to me anymore, even as friends, which hurt a lot more than I was expecting it to. It's probably all for the good, but there was still this fleece, sitting there, the last reminder of hopes and dreams now finally and totally destroyed.

So I washed it. And it was ok. I wasn't sad, it didn't hurt, and I didn't think about him and what the fleece was meant for except in a very cursory sort of way. He may be gone, but the fleece is still full possibility, ready to become whatever I chose to make from it. He broke my heart, but there is still life, and as battered and bruised as he left me, I can still make whatever I wish of it. There might be a bit more dirt and VM to get out, but the raw material is full of endless possibility.

Resolutions

2007-01-02T11:16:00.000-05:00

1. I shall buy no new fiber. No yarn, no spinning fiber, and only such fabric as I need to finish project I already the main fabric for. Bess says it can be done, so I shall try. It should help my pocket book too, being in school and tyring to buy yarn is a bad plan.
2. I will get to my goal weight this year, damn it all. I'm sick of being on WW. I am sick of losing the same 10 pounds over and over. This will stop. Today.
3. I will stop fighting against things I cannot change. Aikido is all about flow and blending, if I cannot flow with my own life, how can I expect to do it well on the mat?
4. I will find an OES chapter locally and start going to meetings again.
5. I will carry on my good work with martial arts.

I think 3 is going to be the hardest. 2006, and really 2005, was all about fighting against the immovable. I'm tired of fighting. If I don't do something about this, I will exhaust myself. I've come so close to giving up all together in the last year, I don't think I can survive that again. I simply have to accept that there are some things I cannot control, and let them be what they will. Reading the Tao helps with that, so that will be my guide.

Edited to add:
The socks were a great success. He liked them! yay! And I know I hate sock knitting, but have 125 grams of koigu left over from something, anyone know if that's enough for a pair of socks? I would think it would be, but I have no idea how long to make the cuffs. I want to do a heal-flap so these will end up being top-down instead of toe-up like I usually try to do.

New year, new things

2007-01-01T17:07:00.000-05:00

I did two totally new things in the last day. First, I saw the ball drop in Times Square live, instead of on a 3 hour tape delay. Which was interesting, same thing really but the realization that it was live was kind of...well...interesting? Can you tell I'm a little sleep? The other thing I did was watch the sun *rise* over the ocean. I've never seen that, it was pretty amazing. Trying to do kendo while watching the sun rise and on maybe 4 hours of not so great sleep was also interesting, but I'm glad I did it.

I just can't believe I'm this tired...makes no sense really not having done jack shit for the last 3 days other than sleep, spin, and bake bread, alone and hermit like in my house. Really, hermit like is fine, but only if you are living that way by choice. When that's all you get, it really sucks. At least I'm not stuck in the house alone today, not the best way to start the year, pacing around your house like a rat stuck in a cage...

ARGG! I had nice thing to say about my current spinning and stupid blogger ate it. Grr. Ok, to sum up...I've been spinning a whole lot the last couple days, I've done nearly 2 pounds of fiber. Yay! Most all of it is things I have 4 or 8 ounces of, so it's been fun to experiment. Right now I'm working on about 13 ounces of chocolate llama and merino pencil roving, which I love working with. It's got some neps, which I don't love, that should add some nice textural interest to the finished yarn. I think it may end up being a hat, mitten and scarf set when I am done, but who knows. It all depends on the yardage I end up. Next up it 8 ounces of morrit colored Shetland wool I want to make a faroese shawl out of. We'll see how that turns out, I'm doing ok with super fine spinning at the moment, it just seems to depends on how well the fiber has been prepared to begin with. After that, since I should have another 2 weeks of break left at the rate I'm going, I'm going to start drum carding one of the several fleeces I have stashed away. There's a story with one of them...but that will have to wait until I actually start on the carding.

So that's an A...

2006-12-19T12:34:00.000-05:00

So, I'm insane, and decided to check and see if any of my grades for the semester had been posted yet.

I got an A in my seminar class, for the crazy privacy paper I was working on. Which is a good thing, I was getting a little worried about that towards the end. If I managed to avoid any C's or B-'s my GPA will be in much better shape.

Why am I not excited about this?

On the knitting front, the socks are almost done. Thank god. I hate knitting socks. I have no idea what possessed me to knit socks. As a gift. So not only am I knitting socks, which is bad enough by itself, but I am giving them to someone who may or may not like them, and may or may not appreciate them. We shall see I suppose. I hope he likes them. That would be nice. I've not quite 4 inches of cuff left (knitting from the toe up) and they are done. Hurray!

I'm having a hard time deciding how many of my UFO's I should pack. I have the back of a really pretty brown sweater almost done, so that's coming with me. Hopefully I can get that done before the semester starts. And maybe knock off one or two other smallish UFOs I have lying around. I think my resolution for the new year needs to be to finish all the UFOs. We'll see how long that lasts! I've made some good progress though, these socks are a UFO, the lace collar for my Dickens's dress has been sitting on needles for years, and with luck I should be able to knock a few other things out before going nuts so I have hope. It would be nice to know exactly how many needles I have though, which I can't seem to figure out with all the smallish projects I have laying all over the place.

Now I must get back to the socks so I can pack tomorrow...

The dress...is done?!

2006-12-16T17:18:00.000-05:00

I did this one in record time. All I have left to do is the hem. I've even sewn in all the hooks and eyes. Go me!

Finally, dress progress!

2006-12-15T15:38:00.000-05:00

I have been so lazy today it's amazing I got anything done at all. But, I did manage to cut and fit the muslin for my Dickens dress bodice. Hurray! If you read my earlier post about this, there's 9 inches of ease (WTF?!) in the bust of this dress. So, I cut out a size 8 front and a size 12 back, and low and behold, it fit! Quite well actually. The darts needed a little fiddling, but that's always the case, especially if you are wearing a corset and your boobs don't sit in a perfectly straight line under your chin. There's a little ripping in the shoulders, but I think once I have it done out of the right fabric and have the neck trimmed down, it'll be fine and nice and smooth. I certainly can't get it to be much better on my own.

So a part from the freakish amount of ease in the bust, this is a pretty easy to deal with pattern. The pieces all fit together well, the instructions make sense, and it fits nicely. The trick is to look at the finished measurements on the pattern. For me, it worked out to pick the front with the right bust measurement and the back with the right waist measurement. The other pieces are all very straight forward, so it should all go together nice and quick. Hurray!

The plan for the rest of the day is to loaf around, knit the socks, watch some girlie movies, and maybe cut out the dress pieces if I can get up enough energy to vacuum the floor first. I can't believe how tired I am. Getting through exams took the last little bits of energy I had. Thanksgiving feels like it was a hundred years ago.

Anyway, I'll post pictures when I have something worthwhile to show off. In the mean time, if anyone has suggestions about a hoop or petticoat that I can fit into a suitcase along with a weeks worth of cloths, Christmas gifts, and the dress, do let me know. Can you get inflatable hoops? A small petticoat should smoosh into my bag ok...we'll see how the ones I have with me work. I think the one that would be best under the dress is at my parents house back in CA for some reason which surely made sense to me at the time...

Half way there!

2006-12-14T13:33:00.000-05:00

Well, as of noon I am officially half way done with law school. My exams are all done, paper is turned in (whether it's done or not is really not relevant at this point), and I'm still upright. For the moment anyway.

I feel like I've got nothing left, I'm tapped out. As long as I can hold it together for another few hours, just enough to get through this interview this afternoon, and maybe aikido tonight, I'll be fine. Then I can finish falling apart.

Really, I'll be doing good if I can figure out which suit to wear this afternoon. gah. This should not be this hard. Will I look less worn and haggard in the black, the brown, or the plum?

Not dead yet!

2006-12-12T10:33:00.000-05:00

(bonus points if you get the reference...)

Two exams down, one paper turned in (whether it's done or not is another question entierely), and one exam to go. Thursday by noon this should all be over, for another semester anyway. I was so tired after my exam yesterday (1st Amendment, it sucked) I thought I was gonna die. It was a major victory to get food in me at all.

I did knit some. I finished a silly potato chip scarf I'd started over the weekend out of desperate need to get my mind off the studying for a little bit, and have been working away on a pair of socks which will be a gift for someone. Hopefully I will get them done, I'm terrible about finishing socks, but I have hope. Both are started. I had been doing 2 socks on 2 circs, from the toe up, and got done with the toe before I got totally fed up with the whole 2 sock concept, and equally fed up with the 2 circs concept. So now I'm doing one sock on one circ, and it's working much better in my exam addled state. Really though, the whole 2 circ concept has never worked for me. I get all tangled up in the extra set of needles and crazy cables all over the place, and it's just annoying. I guess it works for some people, presumably who are more coordinate than I am, I just find it highly annoying. Give me a set of DPNs any day over that mess.

Must get back to the evidence...if I just make sense of hearsay I should be in good shape.

Torture!

2006-12-09T12:51:00.000-05:00

I have an evidence outline to finish and 115 first amendment cases to memorize and my spinning wheel is sitting in the corner, calling to me like a Siren. So unfair. The wheel and the lovely wool I have stashed all over the living room and the cold just make me want to sit down and spin. But I know if I give in for even a moment, I'll lose the whole day in the whirr of the wheel and the feel of the fibers in my hands.

sigh.

five more days...

One down!

2006-12-07T23:11:00.000-05:00

I survived the first exam! Two tests left and one paper to wrap up and I'm officially half way done with law school. woot. 7 days from now, it'll be all over and I can enjoy my break.

I have till Monday to learn 1st Amendment law, and till Thursday to learn all about evidence and technically can turn this paper in next Friday but I really want to get it done and out of the way tomorrow if at all possible. I'm just sick of working on it. My prof wants to submit it for publication. Which is great, but really, I can tweak it around and do more clean up edit work over break for that. I just want it done for the class so I can not worry about it.

And now...I must rest. Aikido tonight was pretty intense. I did something awful to the big toe on my right foot last week, and we had a pretty serious workout, so I'm a little beat up and my toe is all swollen and hot. I don't think it's broken anyway, but it really hurt today. Stupid toe. My falls are getting better though, and even the bad ones don't really hurt, so that's good.

Just think....7 days and I can knit and sew and do whatever I want for weeks and weeks! Hurray! I can't wait to really get going on my dress for Dickens. And maybe finish the sweater I've been knitting for the whole semester. Yay for that!

Yay me!

2006-12-06T09:26:00.000-05:00

I got promoted in aikido last night! Yay!

This has been a good week. Between doing well in Kendo, getting my trophy, my spotted dick, and now this, exams really don't seem that bad.

Now back to my review session. I heart electronic discovery.

(and look ma it's my 300th post!)

Just what I needed!

2006-12-03T19:56:00.000-05:00

Just what I needed
This weekend has been exactly what I needed to start the exam period with. After some minor disappointment on Friday, it all worked out beautifully. I got lots of work done, hung out with a couple of girlfriends from the dojo at school, ended up racing down to VB to see the LYM and had a lovely, lovely evening with him. I spent most of today at his place studying. God willing the meat of my paper is done and it's just a matter of fiddling with things and plugging a few holes, then fixing the citations, and I am finished. A day tops. I got a very nice phone call from C back in CA, she's taken it upon herself to see that I get those pep-talks I need so much, which I am eternally greatful for. I can't wait to see her and everyone else over break!

Then I went to kendo. The workout was kind of miserable actually, we ended up doing some capture the flag thing all over the high school, which I was not that excited about, but after class our head instructor presented some awards which had messed up at the big clinic a few weeks back. And she called *my* name. Me. Heidi. For a rather big-deal sort of award with Sensei, who has seen me a total of 3 times, hand-picked *me* to get. Only two of these went to anyone in kendo. Wow. I'm still too tired to fully appreciate this, but...yeah. Sensei scares the living daylights out of me, and yet he noticed me, and thinks I am doing well, and that means more than any exam grade ever good.

Now I'm back at the LYM's, studying 1st Amendment law, waiting for him to get home from a family dinner, and so looking forward to showing him this trophy.

From the Tao Te Ching

2006-11-30T21:40:00.000-05:00

20 - Wandering

What is the difference between assent and denial?
What is the difference between beautiful and ugly?
What is the difference between fearsome and afraid?

The people are merry as if at a magnificent party
Or playing in the park at springtime,
But I am tranquil and wandering,
Like a newborn before it learns to smile,
Alone, with no true home.

The people have enough and to spare,
Where I have nothing,
And my heart is foolish,
Muddled and cloudy.

The people are bright and certain,
Where I am dim and confused;
The people are clever and wise,
Where I am dull and ignorant;
Aimless as a wave drifting over the sea,
Attached to nothing.

The people are busy with purpose,
Where I am impractical and rough;
I do not share the peoples' cares
But I am fed at nature's breast.

Arrgggg!!

2006-11-29T05:42:00.000-05:00

Exam stress descended upon me yesterday with a vengeance. I am going to die. Or at least fail all my exams and be forced to live under an overpass, begging for change so can feed the cat and take aikido lessons. Or something like that.

I hate the end of the semester. As if stressing out about the exams isn't bad enough by itself, this is when you run out of money, start flipping out about jobs (again), have to make travel plans, and do a hundred other little things that would ordinarily not cause you to sob uncontrollably but because you also have to learn 4 months worth of law so you can spend 4 hours in a sweaty room trying to make sense of it all knowing you will be graded on a curve so how you do is really only half of it, coping just goes right out the door.

And people who are not law students keep telling me I need a break. Feh. That may be true, but the types of breaks I need are very specific. You know, breaks involving food, hugs, a pep talk, and then being gently ushered back to the pile of books with a nice cup or tea and a few kind words. Or the break that comes in knowing you are not actually totally alone, laboring in a vacuum, and that someone will come check on you in an hour or so. Not the break involving some wild tear at a bar or nightclub, or similar.

Oh joy! Oh Rapture!

2006-11-27T14:29:00.000-05:00

The chiropractor has given me permission to train again! Hurray! I've never been so excited about anything in my life.

Happiness is being allowed to do breakfalls!

Now if only I could get excited about the establishment clause, we'd really be getting somewhere.

I really had not realized how much pain I've been in for the last 6 months at least. Now that's going away, my mood is so much better. I've had some other realizations or awakenings or something these last couple of weeks too, and my mood is so much lighter. Of course, the hamster in my head still seems to be on crack, and last night was the first night in a week I've slept normally, but somehow even with all of the stress and overwhelmingness of everything, I feel so much steadier now that the pain is getting taken care of. Hurray for getting better!

Things on my dressing table

2006-11-22T14:59:00.000-05:00

Because I have a ton of work to do and am in a nervous tizzy over some other things (which I will post about eventually), I've been cleaning. Seriously, hamsters on speed are calmer than I am right now. It's amazing I'm not causing power surges.

Anyway, I was cleaning off my dressing table and found the following items mixed in amongst jewelry boxes and make up bits you'd expect to find there:

1. A pair of rather lovely pliers
2. A tire pressure gauge
3. My shinai
4. An extending roach clip thing I got from a PG&E guy once for lighting hard to reach pilot lights
5. An etch-a-sketch
6. A calculator

Huh.

Oooo Lace!

2006-11-22T08:21:00.000-05:00

Before I run off to my chiropractor, here is the lace collar that I plan to use with the dress for Dickens. I got the pattern out of a crazy Norweigan lace book and had to translate and resize it (it was sized for a baby).

Here come the nerves...

2006-11-21T12:36:00.000-05:00

Wow but am I nervous. And jumpy. I hate the weeks leading up to exams. Everything goes all nutty and I can't eat. Somehow this year it's the fragments of life surrounding the exams that are making me more nervous. I have no idea if this is good or bad, it just feels like so many things are in flux, there's nothing solid to anchor myself to while I try to deal with tests and papers. Blegh. I must learn to flow like the stream and not be the rock, or whatever it is you are supposed to do.

I think even the professors are getting nutty. My Evidence class was supposed to be cancelled today, but last night I got some random email about a web cast. WTF? As usual, I have no idea what in the hell my first amendment prof is talking about, but that's normal. Yesterday somehow he got round to Saint Christopher having been taken off the calendar of saints. Beats me, but that's the Socratic method for you. Oh, and my privacy prof thinks I should go in to teaching. Which is an interesting idea, but I think I still need some kind of actual job first.

I want to go to aikido and train until nothing else matters. Stupid back.

The dress

2006-11-20T18:41:00.000-05:00

This is the dress I plan to make for Dickens.

I'm doing the view with the more fitted sleeves and buttons down the front, in a black and red waffle weave cotton. I'll use my hand knit lace collar, simple undersleeves (probaly just cuffs), a crochet bonnet I made ages ago from a period pattern, and one of my knit shawls. It should work out rather well and not take much more than a weekend.

I did pull out the pieces today, and I ask you, in what crazy insane world does one need 9 inches of ease around the bust?! What the hell? NINE inches? I know this is a gathered front bodice, but the under bodice has 9 inches of ease. I suspect they want you to pad out the bust as they do in some of the other Civil War patterns but still, this seems insane. I think it'll work out without too much altering if a cut out the front that fit my bust reasonably and a back that fits my waist reasonably, then I can fiddle.

Nine inches of ease. WTF?

Becasue I'm just that kind of crazy

2006-11-20T13:52:00.000-05:00

The thing that has the most worried about my chiropractic care regimen is kendo and aikido training, and wearing a corset. Can I wear a corset for Dickens? This is actually a big issue. If I can't, what on earth will I wear? How I will even hold it up? The idea of being in a Victorian day dress all day without the support of a corset sounds pretty miserable, but I suppose I just wear it on the loose side? I'm almost afraid to ask the doctor.

A few updates

2006-11-18T13:08:00.000-05:00

I finally went to see the chiropractor about my back. It's no wonder I've been having a hard this semester, I've been in pain since July and now I have proof I'm not nuts. Along with many other fun alignment issues, I have degenerative disk disease. Great. At least he thinks he thinks he can help.

The end of the semester is looming. I'm freaking out. But in a calm sort of way.

Nearly out of money again, with no one to call for help.

Lonely. Scared. Broke. Hurting. But nothing much can be done about any of these things. I just wish knew where the light at the end of this was.

Martial Arts rambling

2006-11-13T17:36:00.001-05:00

This weekend the martial arts organization I belong to had a huge event in Norfolk. People came from all over the place and did all kinds of demonstrations and we trained, and it was pretty amazing. I wouldn't say it was "fun," intense is a better word for it. I still haven't sorted out my thoughts and impressions of the whole thing, parts of it were really uplifting, parts totally demoralizing, and I have no idea what the net effect was, but something very cool did happen.

I got promoted to a green belt in kendo. This probably requires some explanation. I was at the 9th kyu, and went to 6th. That's skipping over a the whole range of yellow belts. It's a big promotion. I have no idea how this happened, but there it is. The most I had hoped to accomplish was a yellow belt, which would be the 8th kyu. Again, I still have not really processed this, but I did notice a huge shift in my training on Sunday. Wow but are the expectations ever different! Kendo is intense as it is, but there's a whole other level that I wasn't quite expecting (though should have been). I think I just wasn't expecting things to feel so dramatically different. And I don't know if it's the expectations I have of myself now or those that my instructors have, probably it's some of each, but in either case I'm surprised to find that I'm so excited about this. I actually was glad that I was getting called on small things I was doing wrong, that I was expected to handle things I didn't think I could, and that when we were sparring (which I really dislike, mostly because I have no idea what to do) the crazy 14 year old yudansha I was working with refused to let up for a second.

I still think kendo is harder than aikido. You need a different degree and kind of physical and mental endurance. You need control and presence of mind, and those things are difficult to cultivate. But once you start to realize what it is you are trying to cultivate, the results are pretty astonishing. We don't talk about flow so much in kendo, that's more of an aiki thing, but it's not because kendo doesn't flow. It's that the flowing is harder to conceptualize, and somehow I think it's more complete. It starts when you pick up the shinai, and doesn't stop until you take the armor off.

What's the matter with my head?

2006-11-09T12:56:00.000-05:00

So I have this bra. Every time I wear it, my right boob tries to escape and pops out every few minutes. It's no good, and yet, for some reason, I keep attempting to wear this bra as though somehow, maybe this time, the boob won't try to escape.

Why do I do this? How insane am I? The rational thing to do here would be throw the damn thing out, but no, every single time i wear it I think the exact same thing "Gee, last time I wore this one my boob kept popping out, but that must be because of X reason, so today it will be fine, it fit in the store after all." The day goes on, the boob escapes, and I think to myself "yeah, so this is hopeless. I should throw it out." And yet I never do, out of some misplaced bra-related optimism or some other major physiological dysfunction.

gah.

My new favorite shirt

2006-11-07T17:05:00.000-05:00

"William and Mary School of Law...where your best just hasn't been good enough since 1779"

That about sums it up. Although, I'm starting to get interested in things again, and this is good. My privacy paper is coming along and the prof is really excited about it. David Nimmer, the God of Copyright Law, came and spoke yesterday and that was really interesting, and if things go well I should have an interesting externship next semester. So yay! Plus I've been looking into stuff for actual real people with actual problems (without giving any sort of advice of course), and it's nice to see that all of this can really apply to real life and make a positive difference for people.

Law School as Junior High

2006-10-31T09:26:00.000-05:00

One of the running "jokes" around here (the law school) is that law school has more in common with high school than anything else. Feh. try Junior High. The latest example, which for a change actually involves me...

Against all my best efforts, one of the goofier first year students seems to have developed a crush on me. Ick. I have done everything I can to avoid this. I avoid campus like the plague, refuse to come to the 'Burg unless I have class, and have made it very clear that I do not wish to date anyone who is younger than my brother or older than my father, effectively ruling out anyone single I am likely to encounter on campus, with exception of actual lawyers here to interview better students than I. So now this goofy first year student has asked me out and, since this is not a large campus and the library is unusable (the latest drama has to do with a boiler which has gone on a rampage and will not shut off, you can fry an egg in there), there is no where to hide. Ick.

Anyway, nothing much else to report. I've been doing a bit of knitting on my latest sweater in between casebooks, kendo and aikido carry on, work is still work. I did register for classes for this morning, which went ok except that I didn't get in to the one class I was really excited about taking, but I am wait-listed, so we'll see what happens. Later today I need to go talk to career services about getting an externship, that would be good too. And might give me some contacts so I can find a real job, or at least some usable experience.

Kids these days...

2006-10-27T15:44:00.000-04:00

I have officially become the off-campus events coordinator for my martial arts group at school. This is actually an undergraduate club, affiliated with a much larger dojo based in Norfolk (where I practice kendo). We have a very large, important event coming up on the 11th, for which we must all register by the 1st. Because the club is subsidizing the cost of this event, we have to turn in all of our registration materials together. I will be in Norfolk, taking kendo from the person who I have to send all of these forms too on Sunday, which means I need for everyone to get the their part of the registration fee and the clinic application form before Sunday so I can take everything all at once to the people who need it. Two of the new members who seem to want to go can't seem to get it through their thick heads that when I say I need the forms after practice on Thursday, that means I need the forms after practice on Thursday. If I decide to be nice and offer to meet them someplace on Friday, they really had better call me and follow through. It's not like either of these people live far away from campus. they are in the dorms. I know they don't work out on Thursday (both of them do karate, which does not practice on Thursday), but really, no one else has a problem running over to the gym to drop off a piece of paper. It takes 5 minutes. Get a life.

So now, I am sitting around campus waiting for one or both of these goobs to call me so I can pick up their forms. I have to work at 6. they have just over 2 hours to get it together, then they get to stay home. I am sorry if this sounds bitchy, for for crap sake this is a martial art. It's all about discipline and respect. A rule is established, we follow the rules, we do not ignore it or argue for really absurd exceptions that show no respect for the people doing the actual work. I guess this is normal 18 year old freshman behavior, I have no idea really, but it's kind of annoying. We are giving these dorks money, I am hand delivering the forms, you would think the least amount of respect they could show it to get off their asses and hand in the damned paperwork without making me drive 20 miles out of my way first. But no. At this point, I really hope they don't get it together and we get to leave them here. If they haven't got enough respect and dedication to get the form in on time, how can they have enough respect and dedication to really appreciate the training they will be offered at this event?

What can I say? I'm just a cranky old lady.

P.S. One of the actual grad students in the club is also bitching because she is going to have to drive people. Not because she doesn't have a car, but just because she doesn't feel like it and seems to think it's perfectly reasonable for me to drive an extra 2 hours out of my way to pick her up at 8 on a Saturday morning, along with these other goof-balls. Good luck with that one honey.

What's left?

2006-10-24T12:17:00.000-04:00

I think the last bit of romantic, foolish hope left in me died on my 30th birthday. It's just as well really, it's high time I put away such childish dreams, of a prince charming, of someone coming to the door to surprise me and hold me close. Since then, when no one came, I've been in a strange sort of mourning. It's taken over a year for all that hope to finally die, but it finally has.

Law school, moving out here, has cost me everything. Money is the least of it. The personal and emotional toll, well...there's nothing left. There's no reason to go back, that's been clear to me for some time, and I have nothing here. So what's left? A career path I don't want? More loans? What kind of life is that?

I suppose all that I can do is set aside those childish things I clung to, those hopes and dreams of belonging, and find something else to work for.

No one is coming for me. The sooner I learn to live with that, learn to live truly and utterly alone, the better.

In other news...I finally finished the knit lace collar I've been working on for years. I adapted the pattern from a Norwegian knitting book, and it came out pretty well. If I had it to do again, I would have left out a repeat or two but it will work fine as it is. It will look lovely on my new dress for Dickens.

We had out big Kendo clinic this weekend, which went really well. I still hurt. We did the whole 5 hour clinic using the heavy oak bokuto (or bokken) instead of regular shinai. After the first hour I thought my arm was going to fall off, somehow it didn't though. Talk about pushing past a limit. I did get some sort of ki award, which was nice. It's good to know that Sensei notices how hard people are working. And we got to do some battojutsu, which was very cool. The sword work is a lot of fun. Very intense, but fun too.

Fading Away

2006-10-20T10:28:00.000-04:00

Do you ever have days when you feel you are absolutely no consequence? The song from Chicago, Mr. Cellophane, comes to mind. I feel like this is what I am becoming. Just background fluff no one really notices.

School is disastrous but oh well. I don't want to be a lawyer anyway. At least not the kind of lawyer you see on TV and everyone assumes I want to be. There are plenty of other things I could do with a JD, but I have absolutely no motivation to get one right now. I have nothing to work for, no inspiration, no motivation. I cannot do this alone, and the more I try the more I realize that I simply cannot.

In other news, I finally recovered my big ugly vintage chair. It was never ugly, just suffering from sad, old and abused upholstery. It looks much better now, and someday when I have an actual job and money again (hah, more fairy stories, like Santa Clause and Unicorns and Gentlemen) I will pay someone to do it right but this will do quite nicely for now.

I've also decided to make a dress for Dickens. Right now, it looks like I will be able to go for the very last day. Hurray! The dress I wore last time around is really heavy wool and won't fit in my suitcase, so I need something portable. I've decided to do one of the Simplicty patterns, both for the sake of reviewing the pattern and also expediency. It's the gathered front day dress, I forget which pattern number. I found a really neat red and black woven checked fabric to do it with which I think will look really nice. It's a simple dress, but I'll wear some of my hand-knit lace cuffs and hopefully the lace collar I've been knitting for ever and that should dress it up nicely.

The only real problem is that knitting and sewing has become far more difficult to make my body do. It's not exactly painful, just really hard to force my hands and arms to do. A lot of things are starting to feel that way, and it scares me. A lot.

I guess we'll see what happens once the semester is over and I can get some actual rest (another thing that belongs in the same class as Unicorns and Gentlemen).

Want?

2006-10-12T13:01:00.000-04:00

If one more person asks me what I "want" to do when I get out of school, I am going to scream. Since when does what I "want" inform any of my options? I don't even bother with what I might "want" for lunch anymore. The things I might conceivably "want" are so far away from the list of viable options it's not even funny.

No more wanting. There are things that might be nice, but none of it gets to rise to level of actually "wanting" something. Wanting leads to nothing but disappointment, and lord knows I've had enough of that to last several lifetimes. Can't take any more.

A bit low...

2006-10-10T10:04:00.000-04:00

My mid-semester panic attack/breakdown seems to have hit with a vengeance. Deciding to move when I did probably didn't help much with all of this, but crap. I can't seem to stay asleep at night or stay awake during the day, and the actual bouts of panic are getting absurd. At least I know what I'm dealing with this time around, that helps a little, but still.

The longer I am out here the more alone and isolated I feel. I really don't have any friends out here, there's no one to call if I need help. And I don't think that's going to really change much any time soon. I mean, how can it, when I will probably be moving away again in a year and a half?

Anyway, the new apartment is very good. The space is really well laid out, and it's easily the nicest apartment I've lived in (which, I admit, isn't saying much, but it is really quite nice). The cat seems to have adjusted and I've got myself almost all unpacked. With any luck I will have some time over fall break to get things settled the rest of the way so I launch into the last half of the semester in fairly good shape, at least as far as my living space is concerned.

The job search has reached a new level of demoralizing, but there's not much point in getting in to that. Suffice it to say, my life is all about rejection and denial right now. I try to find good things...they are just getting to be pretty few and far between. I don't even have the engery to knit.

High Comedy!

2006-09-29T16:28:00.000-04:00

I had a post card once that something to the effect of "It is possible that the whole purpose of my life is to server as an example to others." If today is any indication, this might be true.

First, I was driving home from VA Beach and I stopped at a Starbucks in Newport News. I know, I know, Starbucks. But whatever. I ran into the curb on the way out of the parking lot. It made a terrible noise, but I run over the curb a lot so whatever. I drive 2 miles down the road and stop to get gas. Some guy at the station points out that my rear tire is low on air.

Low. Hah. Try totally flat.

So I put my 50 cents in to the air machine (WTF? I have to pay for air now?!). I put air in, and out the air comes from a little tear in my tire. Crap.

So I drive 2 miles back up the road to CostCo where I can get a new tire. I stand in line for 45 minutes. I then go out to figure out what kind of tire I need and there is a fist sized hole where the little tear once was.

Nice.

2 hours and $430 later, I have 4 new tires and have missed class.

Then I go a local discount furniture store. I look around, find a couple tings, and am approach by a salesman who proceeds to hit on my non stop for the next 45 minutes while trying to sell me $400 sleeper loveseats. I finally pick out a nice little sage green loveseat that's only $187. I pay. Creepy clerk asks me out. Ick.

I deflect. I agree to call him once I have settled in. Like that's going to happen.

Then I make my way up the road to my new apartment complex to sign the lease. This goes much better. I get all the paper work done, get my keys, and start chatting with another woman about my age who is also signing a lease to move in tomorrow. Turns out, we went to high school together. (!!!) I did not go to a very large high school. And I went to high school 3000 miles away from here. What are the odds?

I then have to try out 5 different keys to find one that works on the storage room.

At 3:45 I finally get lunch.

Ugh. I've called in sick to work tonight. Too much excitement for one day, and I am still not home.

Considering that I am moving in the morning with an indeterminate amount of loading and unloading help, my tire exploded, and I am afraid to go pick up my new loveseat for fear of being hit on by creepy sales guy again, I am freakishly calm. I love my new apartment. It's small, but it's cute, and I think I will be happy there. Plus, I already know one of my neighbors!

Is Kendo hard?

2006-09-21T08:42:00.000-04:00

I was asked in the comments from my last post if kendo is hard, and I figured this was worthy of a whole post, not just a reply to the comment...so here goes.

There are different kinds of Kendo. There is sports Kendo, which works a lot like western style fencing with touches and points and so on, and then there is a more traditional, non-sport Kendo. I practice this later, martial arts style Kendo. We spend a lot of time in class talking about zhan-shin and the spirit of the sword and our ki energy. About being good Samurai, warriors, and defending something we care about. We've had a very accomplished sports Kendo black belt from Japan visiting us the last month or so, and from watching her, ours is a pretty grueling practice.

Each practice, you reach a physical limit and keep going. You get blisters on your feet and hands, then the blisters get blisters. You sweat like a pig, you are dead on your feet, and you keep going. You stand up straight when Sensei or one of our Sempai is talking, you do not twitch or mess with your gi (which is hanging all over the place by this point), you do not wipe the sweat from your eyes and only push your glasses back up your nose if it's dire.

And yet you are never expected to do something that you physically cannot handle. We have a number of students with different physical limitations, and they all practice and push and sweat and yell and keep going when they feel like they are about to collapse. You just modify the techniques a little if you cannot sit in a crouch because of a knee or hip or back injury or whatever else.

Kendo is hard. It's not like Aikido, where you are throwing yourself at the ground and getting bruises to show off later, it's not physically hard in that way. The techniques are relatively simple, but the mental and physical focus you have to maintain is a huge challenge. But that's what makes it all worthwhile. I know I can survive anything after a particularly good (i.e. challenging) Kendo workout.

So can you do it? Yes. Would it be too hard? Not physically (though it is very physically challenging), but you must be prepared for a mental and, later on, spiritual, challenge. This is a martial art after all, we are training ourselves to fight, kill and die if we must.

And yes, there will be pictures. Eventually, once I've figured out how to get into hakama without tying my feet together and unpack my camera anyway. :)

Nice...

2006-09-19T09:59:00.000-04:00

5 and a half rejections last night, and that's just from employers.

I can't even seem to conclusively dumped.

sigh.

In somewhat better news, I get to wear hakama now in Kendo. This is a kind of significant thing. Now I just have to figure how to put this thing on in an organized manner, and not trip over it.

A new record!

2006-09-12T10:05:00.000-04:00

I got 5 rejection letters yesterday. The old record was 3 in one day.

For those of you who don't remeber, as of last count I have sent out more than 169 resumes in one form or another. We're up to 6 interviews. 2 of which have told me to go away so far, 3 I have not heard back from, and 1 will take place on Friday.

p.s. I think I got the RSS feed thing fixed. Leave a comment if it's still not working.

p.p.s I like this quote. It works well for today.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
- Voltaire

So this is 30

2006-09-06T21:05:00.000-04:00

I've spent the entire day alone. Except for a couple of hours when I was getting a massage. The only people I have had any real interaction with, I've had to pay.

Somehow, part of me still hopes for more, but I know I'm not going to get it.

Bitching

2006-08-30T14:00:00.000-04:00

1. My back hurts. A lot. Like I can't sit or stand or lie down it hurts so bad.

2. I've now mailed out a total of 96 paper resumes, 13 job fair resumes, and submitted 60 resumes on line through career services.

3. I have a total of 4 interviews out of 169 resumes so far.

4. That 4 does not include the phone call I just got from one of the more interesting firms. It was bad. Very very bad. For catching me off guard and unprepared and hopped up on pain medications, it was still bad.

5. I have to work tonight.

6. In one week I will be 30.

Can I go crawl under something and cry now please?

busybusybusy

2006-08-28T21:39:00.000-04:00

Slow day on the resume front...I've only got 13 more to send out. All for a job fair in October.

Think happy interview thoughts tomorrow at 11:00 AM EST. This one is for a research assisting job for the fall, but still, it'll look good on the resume.

Other than that, I am feeling oddly overwhelmed. Tomorrow is gong to be a long day. I've got classes, an interview, and an Aikido demonstration. Ugh. Trying to figure out what I need to bring with me on top of doing reading, preparing resumes, and starting research for my paper has got me pretty well maxed out.

I think this semester is going to be pretty ok. I like my classes, even though First Amendment kind of scares me. This whole job search thing is kind of iffy, but for some reason having aikido and kendo as a release seems to be really helping. I know I can push past my limits, and for all that the whole job search thing can be really demoralizing, I know I can push through this and come out with what I want on the other end.

Resume hell

2006-08-26T18:50:00.000-04:00

I have spent half the day researching employers and preparing 53 resumes, cover letters and transcripts to mail out. Ooof. I have, in the process, learned the following:

1 - I need more stamps
2 - it's wrong somehow that toner and printer ink cost more than buying a new printer
3 - glue mouth is a serious problem
4 - the ink jet printer is way too slow. Way. Too. Slow.
5 - paper cuts on the tongue suck

I did make a trip over to the outlet mall this morning though and got a new suit from Ann Taylor. Yay me! I don't exactly have 5 interviews a day or anything, but I have enough coming up that I feel justified in not wanting to wear the same suit all the time. And I'll need it this summer. I'm actually starting to like the whole suit concept. I still need a brown suit and a grey one, and then I should be set for the whole suit wardrobe thing for a while.

Half way there

2006-08-24T09:31:00.000-04:00

Half way through the first week anyway...and oddly enough I still have not been to two of my classes. They both meet only once a week, on Thursday and Friday. I find this odd, but there it is.

I already feel like I have slightly more work than I can handle, figuring in job searching, actual work, and my lingering need for a life outside law school. I can't imagine how I would be holding up if I had completed the journal competition and been selected for one of the journals. Not well is my best guess, and based on what I see my classmates enduring I'm pretty sure I'm right. Even so, I feel kind of left out. I'm not a journal. I've only got one interview scheduled so far out of the first two rounds of on campus interviewing, and I'm finding it difficult to be pleased with what I have accomplished. My one interview and few spots as an alternate, whatever that means, compare rather poorly with six or eight interviews I see my classmates going on. But I suppose this is how the other half of the class lives, the half of the class no one ever talks about or prepares you to be a part of, the half of the class that feel left behind yet still must find some way through the maze of summer job hunting.

The odd thing about all this is that I seem to have a sense of calm about it all. After my legal skills class on Tuesday night, where I was inflicted with a large number of time consuming and pointless writing assignments, I drove down to VA Beach, and somewhere on that drive I found a calm place. Yes, this is a huge amount of work and I am stressed about some of it, but it is what it is, I've accepted that, and I am weirdly calm in the chaos that is the second year of law school. They scared me to death last year, but I think I've overcome that fear, or at least taken some pretty major steps in overcoming it.

Things are still relatively calm, so this weekend I plan to focus on my job search, pack, and do some knitting. Not a bad plan really, and it will leave me a few cycles free to think about a paper topic for privacy seminar.

Speaking of which, if anyone has a technology related privacy question or issue that you find particularly interesting or troublesome, please leave a comment. I'm trying to find ideas that are relevant to a wider audience than legal professionals, and hopefully that take advantage of my work experience.

Year 2, Day 1

2006-08-21T11:27:00.000-04:00

Ok so I haven't actually been to class yet, but I have been on campus with other students long enough now to feel like none of us ever left. Weird. Except that I don't have 150 pages of reading to catch up on, it's the same as last year. Well, that and everyone I know is not in the exact same set of classes, but still.

So far, so good I guess. I did the reading for my first class (First Amendment), which is this afternoon, and per usual, understood almost none of it. I gave up when the book started trying to define the word "the." Ugh. With any luck, I will be spared getting called on this first week, that should be long enough for me to figure out what in the hell the professor wants us to be getting out of the reading.

I already have one job interview lined up for summer work next year too. This makes me very happy, especially since I am on the wrong side of the curve. At least I know a few firms are looking at more than my grades, that's encouraging. The firms in Maine, but it sounds like a really good work environment so a move might not be so bad. We'll see, at least it's an interview.

Last night I did my first kendo belt test, and got promoted! Yay me! It was a pretty intense workout, but not nearly as scary as my aikido test. Of course, it helped that I wasn't coming off a Con Law exam, and had some idea of what to expect from a belt test. In some ways, I think the actual test is more about pushing past your limits and working through physical exhaustion. I certainly did that, I managed to push myself to the next level and it's nice to have some recognition for having done that.

Overall, this is a pretty good way to start the year off. I have an interview, so I have hope for my career. I have a new belt, so I know I can push through anything and win the battle in the end. The strength is there, I just need to stay focused on the feeling I have right now, and that I had last night, and I'll be fine.

Oh! And I got my apartment in Newport News! Hurray! My parents have to co-sign the lease, which is sad seeing as I'm almost 30, but understandable since I'm living off student loans and appear to have no income of any kind. If all goes as planned, I'll be moving at the end of next month.

I hate waiting

2006-08-16T14:10:00.000-04:00

Today, we are waiting for the mechanic to call and let me know when my poor little Accord will be better. The check engine light flipped on last week, and it turns out that both O2 sensors are shot, and need to be replaced. I'm not looking forward to having to pay for this, but oh well. The mechanic seemed to think it'd be somewhere around $450. Ouch. At least I get my loan refund checks this week, that's something. With any luck, he'll get the parts today and I take Toto home tonight and not be carless for another day but we'll see.

I'm also waiting to find out for sure if my apartment application got approved at the complex I'm trying to move in to. I'm hoping they are just being slow about it because my move in date is not till the end of September, but I am paranoid. And really, I faxed over all my financial paperwork on Friday, so that's Wednesday it really no big deal I guess. But still.

Not a whole lot is going on with fiber just now. I've been spinning away at 8 ounces of CVM I had in my stash. It's got a lot of noils in it, which I find vaguely annoying, but I think it will make a nice lightly felted something, should have a interesting tweedy effect once it's done and plyed. I'm almost done with the backgammon board. I pretty much memorized the short row pattern so it's going pretty fast, perfect for the little chunks of time I have to knit, before passing out.

Aside from car problems, residential uncertainty, and not much else, classes start on Monday and I am very sad to say I do not get any sort of time off. I'm pissed. I have to work Friday all day at both jobs, then do stupid tours, and I have to work again on Sunday before going to Kendo and doing my best to survive a belt test. Ugh. I suspect the belt test won't be so bad as my aikido test was, especially since I won't be coming off a Con Law exam, but still. It's just more stick and there's no carrot in sight. I really need something to look forward to in the way of a pleasant and relaxing evening at least.

Thought for the day

2006-08-14T14:54:00.000-04:00

"All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone."

- Jane Austen (Persuasion)

The Tower and The Star (and also a sheep)

2006-08-10T20:02:00.001-04:00

I've been out here in Virginia for over a year. In a few weeks, I will be 30. Needless to say, I've been doing a lot of thinking and evaluating of my life so far. Right now, it seems as though it all happened to someone else and I was just watching it all. Nothing seems quite real, and I do not know what is a dream and what is real. I am sick in body and soul, but this is all there is and I must carry on tyring to make the best of it.

Before I left, I had a tarot reading. That reading has stayed with me this last year, and has proved to eerily prophetic. The cards said I would find a place here, that someone would be waiting for me here, but that I would suffer (The Tower figured large) and that I would be alone and isolated. It's strange how card after card from that reading has come in to my life over the last year. Nothing has gone as I had hoped, half of what I touch turns to dust, and I find myself being in some critical way incompatible with much of my life, or at the very least removed from it. But The Star was there too, there is a light at the end of this. Between where I stand today and that small light, there are many obstructions, but I have to hold on to the hope it represents, and I have to trust that I will see it again soon.

For now, classes start again on the 21st, I am looking to move into a smaller but nicer place further away from campus, and I am trying to cling to what hope and what light I can. And I am trying to be content with what I have and find stillness again.

There's been enough stick, I am ready for a little of that carrot now, please.

The Rockstar Sweater is totally done and made it back to California, where it was very well received. The final sweater looked very sad and lumpy until I got it blocked and tired it on (sorry E, how I could I resist?) when it turned into a very nice, shapely and lovely little thing I am almost inspired to knit for myself. Almost. Maybe. If I do it in the round.

Right now, I am working on a backgammon board from KnitWhits, which is turning out to be a lot of fun to knit. This will be my brothers Christmas gift I think. I'm going to try to (finally) finish the Orenburg shawl I started from my SIL last year in time for that to be her Christmas gift, leaving me with just a pair of socks to knit for dad and a couple of washcloths until I am done with holiday knitting. Yay for that! And double yay for being close to having time to knit myself a cozy new sweater from the latest IK for fall!

And she knits!

2006-08-01T08:11:00.000-04:00

The Rockstar sweater is finally almost done! Hurray! I just have to do the sleeve cap, then sew the whole thing together, and its finished and can get sent off to it's owner. I'm very glad to have this project almost done. It's taken forever. Or at least it feels like it has. The design is nice, but the pattern is kind of hard to follow. Once I got the hang of the lace, which took the whole back, a front section, and most of the second front section, it went faster but I still have to look at the chart to keep track of where I am.

I'm starting to plan out my next projects. I have a few UFO's I want to get knocked out, a couple more holiday gifts to do, then I am going to make at least one of the sweaters from the fall issue of IK. There are at least a half dozen sweaters in the issue I want. Good job IK! This is easily my favorite issue in recent memory. For some reason, they just seem to be getting better. I'm finding more things I want to make in each issue.

School starts in just 3 weeks, so I am trying to get as much knitting and goofing off in as I can. Not having a lot of luck with the goofing off part, working 2 jobs will do that, but I'm thinking about taking a day and heading down to the Outerbanks for a brewery tour or something sometime before school starts up. We'll see if that ends up working out.

Must stop thinking

2006-07-20T09:32:00.000-04:00

Thinking never did anyone any good.

But first, knitting updates. I have finally finished the KnitWhits socks for the shop owner sample. This too far too long, but the pattern turned out to be much more difficult than I thought. 3 color fair-isle is tricky, I kept getting all tangled up. Plus I made a few mistakes, totally my own fault for knitting when sleepy, but it slowed me up. The end result was good though, sadly I mailed them off before taking pictures. Oh well. You can see what they looked like here.

I was feeling like utter crap yesterday so I took the day off and rested and knitted and did stuff around the house. And I thought. A lot. Which was a bad plan.

I realized a couple of things. First, no one has ever told me they needed me. No one. Ever. That was pretty depressing.

Second, it is pointless to figure out what one wants if attaining those things is dependant on the decision making process of other people. Why waste time deciding what jobs I want if my ability to actually get said job is in someone else's hands? Why let myself long for companionship if that companionship is ultimately up to the decision making of another person?

I am not ok with being alone. But what other choice do I really have?

Stunned

2006-07-17T07:41:00.000-04:00

He left. It seemed to be a kind of a mutual leaving, I needed more than he could give. Things like for him to pick up the phone when I called, return my messages, come to my house once in awhile. Small things like that. I needed to not be making all the effort for the both of us.

I think the thing I fear the most is being alone, that there is no one out there for me, no one who will love me back, no one who will think I am worth even some small amount of effort. I am all alone again, and I am very afraid.

Other than that one thing, things seem to be mostly ok. My weight-in this morning was a good one, my kendo work out last night was grueling but I think I did ok, and I survived the weekend working. With any luck, my next actual day off will be next Sunday. That's 15 days in a row working, not something I am happy about or coping well with but what can you do?

My two paid knitting projects are finally picking up some steam. I got the little bit of yarn I needed to finish the socks, and should be able to power through the last bit of that project tonight. I think I finally have got the hang of the lace for the Rockstar cardigan, so that's starting to go faster too. I have finished the back and one of the front sections. Sleeves tend to go fast for me for whatever reason so that should be done soon, and then I can start thinking about projects for myself. Hurray! And also Christmas presents.

I just wish I wasn't so awfully alone...

Updates

2006-07-14T09:14:00.000-04:00

Well, I have finally finished my ghost tour training. Hurray! Of course, it seems that I do not speak English, because my boss keeps scheduling me for days I have told him I cannot work. Is it too much to ask for one weekend day off? Really, working 15 days in a row (at best) is not good for me. Call me lazy, but I just can't do it. I also can't get from a kendo class in Norfolk which wraps up around 6:30 to my job in Williamsburg by 6:30. Teleportation does not work out well for me, it's about an hour drive, besides which I can barely walk after kendo half the time, and no one wants to smell me at that stage anyway.

Aside from being the Cassandra at all my various jobs and the accompanying stress and irritation, things are going ok. I'd like more days off, and a vacation, and to sleep in, and stuff like that, but in a way things seem to have settled down into something more or less predictable and I'm managing to relax just a little bit. It feels like some things are taking longer than they should, but it being the summer in the south, I hardly care. You just have to slow down, otherwise you'll die.

I haven't got much to say about the knitting, I'm plugging away on the various projects and getting slightly annoyed with the pattern for the Rockstar cardigan. The charts do actually work, but figuring out where to start them at various points in the instructions is painful at best, and nearly impossible if you are not a more advanced knitter. Add that to the fact that they are nearly impossible to read (red paper, stupid non-standard symbols) and the whole things is rather purgatorial at times. At least it looks good so far, I think E. will be happy with it.

I've got myself back on the WW wagon, this time doing it online since I still can't stand the meetings at my local center. So far, so good. I'm making decent, more or less steady progress and I am feeling a lot better which is really the main point. I've even inspired the LYM to make some dietary changes, which is all for the good in the long run (but trying to convince him that I did not go on a "diet" because I thought he needed to go one is a little difficult). I'm having to deal with other people's reactions to me in a different way this time, and I think part of the difference is that I don't have much weight to lose so some of them can't quite get their head around my motivation to do this in the first place. I didn't have so many people around me who took my weight loss efforts personally before. Mostly it's people at work, one of them gets really defensive about it if I ask for dressing on the side or request that we have lunch someplace that serves salad. Clearly, this woman has unresolved weight and food issues, but I feel sort of bad that I'm bringing it to the surface for her. But then part of me doesn't care, and thinks that if I can inspire to her make one change for the better that's actually a good thing.

Queen of the Klutz People

2006-07-05T17:07:00.001-04:00

I fell down the stairs. On my ass. On Monday. I'm ok, I didn't go through the large window at the bottom of the stairs, but I have a huge bruise on my ass and I hurt in very odd ways.

Aside from that and about a hundred bug bites, it was an ok weekend. I've been trying to get caught up with the knitting projects. Here is the current list:

1. KnitWhits sock kit for a shop owner
2. Rockstar cardigan for A.
3. Pink Frosting pull over from Interweave Crochet
4. Reproduction 18th cen. sampler

Ok, the sampler is embroidery, not knitting, but it is needlework. It's going to be a Christmas gift for my impossible to impress or please grandmother. The stitches are very small, which makes it a little tricky to work on in the eavenings. I think I need a task light or something in my living room.

It's official

2006-06-30T12:23:00.000-04:00

I am now officially a Southerner. Scary. At least that means I get to pay less tuition next semester, so yay for that! Fewer loans is a good thing.

Of course, the flip side to this is that now I think I have some kind of legal obligation to consume mass amounts of pork. Dissected pork at that. I'm sorry, but eating meat I have to rehydrate before it is safe to ingest is just not going to work for me.

Anyway, things are going. I have to yet to draft my TNNA report, I've been fairly buried by my various jobs and exhaustion and a fair amount of self-doubt and emotional turmoil. Hopefully I'm starting to feel a little better. I've found a couple of professors at school who I feel comfortable talking to and who seem willing to offer career and life advice, one in particular who always makes me feel like I'm not hopeless and am doing the right thing. So that's something. The LYM is still lovely, though I don't get to see as much of him as I'd like right now. We've got to work on that, but between our work schedules and everything it's rough right now. I never thought I would say it but I'll have more free time, even with a job, once the school year starts so that should make things easier.

I'll write more later and hopefully post pictures of some knitting, now that I have new digital camera (thanks to my daddy and his employer).

So cranky!

2006-06-16T08:40:00.000-04:00

Ok...so I am back from TNNA and will be writing up some kind of report soon. For now, I am totally overwhelmed by crap and am seriously stressed out. Working 2 jobs all summer is likely to kill me, but such is life. I had hoped things would get easier, or at least less stressful and demoralizing, this summer but that seems not to be. Oh well.

The research project I am currently working has a very tight deadline, and I do not have the necessary background knowledge to do it well, so I am kind of freaking out. Oh well. I am learning things, and it is interesting, I just wish that I had more time to deal with it. I wish I'd been able to work on it over the weekend, but that just didn't work out while at TNNA. They seem to be in a hurry to get my training going at CW too, so I've been trying to juggle that this week as well as this project, and I am tired and not doing a good job at either thing.

None of this is helped by the state of affairs on campus. The library is a mess (they are moving into a new, temporary building), so there is no where quiet to work. Nice. This morning I am stuck in the student lounge, where people are yapping and being annoying, because the office I should be in is locked. Nice.

Enough cranky bitching, I must get back this damned memo so I can get out of here for my CW training I am not prepared for this afternoon, and can then present the memo to the professor it's being prepared for.

And all I have to look forward to this weekend is more work, more stress, and kendo. Nice.

No other life

2006-06-06T10:43:00.000-04:00

Well, I got the CW job. I will soon be leading tourists around telling them ghost stories several times a week. Not in a costume. The no costume part still makes me sad, but I'm getting more excited about the job in general. It should be fun, and it will be a good break from the studying once classes start up again.

Still working away on the Rockstar Sweater and the never-ending angora/silk/merino blend on the wheel. I think I've finally found the logic and rhythm of the lace pattern in the sweater, it's starting to go faster, which is a good thing. I've got about 12 inches of the roving left hanging off the wheel, and it seems to not ever want to end. I'm getting sick of spinning this stuff, I want to ply and get on to the next thing, which will either be some CVM or an alpaca and bluefaced leicester blend from the stash.

What with not having classes and homework and my few school friends being gone for the summer, there hasn't been much to do. Not that there was ever much to do, but I seem to spending far more time alone, in my own head, than is strictly good for me. I'm lonely here, and I don't understand life here. I feel totally out of place and somehow separated from everything, and it's wearing on me. Maybe getting out of town for TNNA this weekend will help, I hope it does anyway.

Why?!

2006-06-02T10:56:00.000-04:00

Why oh why did I wake up at 3:30 AM? Why? The damned birds outside my window who wake me up every morning weren't even up. I hate those birds. They chirp all loud starting at about 5 in the morning, and wake me up. Not today though. 3:30 AM, still dark, and wide awake. Very sad.

The good news is that I think I got the job at CW. I have one more interview, with the potential boss's boss, which sounds like more of a formality than a real interview, so I think it's in the bag. Hurray! Knowing I'll have some income during the next year is a very nice thing.

Other that, nothing much to report. I'm dealing with kendo blisters, adjusting to the awful swamp weather, and looking forward to leaving work early so I can take myself to a much needed reward lunch and go home for a nap. The rest of my grades finally came in, and I am not exactly happy, but I suppose it could be worse. I'm not in great shape for the fall interview season though, and there's a huge amount riding on my grades next semester. This is a bad thing. I have never responded well to that kind of performance pressure. We'll see though, my professor for the summer seems to have some ideas for career goals that are attainable, even with my GPA being as lack-luster as it is, so there's some hope.

An eerie calm

2006-05-31T09:42:00.000-04:00

After all the chaos and craziness of the last few months, things seem to settling down into an uncertain sort of calm. I don't quite trust it yet, but nothing terrible has happened since I got the whole poverty thing figured out, and the quiet, peaceful moments are coming closer together and lasting longer than they have in a long time.

Of course, now I am bored. Without 782 things to get done and worry about, I don't quite know what to do with myself. That's resulted in a fair amount of domestic productivity. I sewed a dress and a skirt over the weekend, baked cookies, did some knitting on the Rockstar Cardigan, laundry, and of course Kendo. Plus dinner and a movie with the LYM and some house work, interview suit shopping and lunch with H. Maybe I am less bored and more lonely. Having a quiet moment or evening is great and all, but I think I'm getting to the point where I'd rather share it with someone. Even if we're both doing our own quiet thing, doing it with someone else in the room feels better for some reason.

I had a pretty good interview at CW for a tour guide job, which, sadly, would not involve the wearing of costumes, but might be fun anyway. I met with the guy on Friday, and had to go back Monday for an audition sort of thing, which I think went ok. We'll see. He should call back in the next day or two.

Oh hallelujah!

2006-05-26T10:13:00.000-04:00

My boss saved me! And saved me in a far more comfortable manner than I expected. I do not actually have to work 70 hour weeks all summer if I don't want to. That being said, I got a call back from CW about a tour guide job, which would fit perfectly in to my summer and fall schedule, and would pay enough to make life quite comfortable, at least by my current standards, for the next academic year. I interview this afternoon.

I got a new used car, the donation people finally called me back about the old car (after more than 2 weeks, what gives with that?), so I will soon have my plates back, work is going ok, my Contracts grade was tons better than my Con Law grade, so the bad grade can easily be chalked up to the broke car/broken CD-RW/broken SIL situation and not to my ineptitude as a lawyer, and I am starting to get some ideas about what I want to do when I get out of school. So yay!

Life is gonna be ok. It's been a hellish year, and sometimes it's felt like everything I've touched has turned to ash, but I've got this far and there's no use in turning back now. I can breath again, I can eat and pay rent and put gas in the car, giving me the spare cycles to focus on me and recover from everything I've put myself through.

Because I am the queen of technical difficulties, my digital camera seems to have broken. I went to take pictures of several things this only to find that the camera will turn on but the screen remains blank. Nice. Hopefully this is fixable, but I'm not overly worried about it.

So, there are no pictures of FO's today, but I can report on my latest (paying!!) knitting project. I'm making the Rockstar cardigan from Alchemy Yarns for a friend back home, using an alpaca and silk yarn from KnitPicks. I had a hell of a time with it last night, starting and ripping back several times before I got the gauge issues worked out. Because I am substituting yarn and my tension always does wired and unpredictable things when I knit lace, this was annoying but I've got the problem worked out, enough knit to know the back is the right size for the body it will go on, and I'm ready to go nuts with it. My only comment about the pattern so far is that the graphs for the lace are really hard to read, particularly since they printed them on red paper, but it's not that bad once you get going and can see the logic of the pattern. It's actually an easy lace pattern, the graph is just miserable.

The Prairie Tunic from IK turned out quite well, but way too big. Again with the whole yarn substituting/lace stitch/tension problem. Although my tension seems to be right, the tunic is just too big. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do about this, it looks ok over jeans, and I think I can block it out once I wash it so it's longer but narrower. We'll see. Right now it feels like a floppy sack but that might not really be a bad thing. Just not so good for work and not my usual style.

Now if I could just stop obsessively checking to see if the rest of my grades have been posted yet...they are all due today, but I only have 2 left that aren't reported (Criminal Law and Property), neither of which I have any idea about. Gah. Hurry up people!

Perspective?

2006-05-23T19:44:00.000-04:00

It's been a rough few weeks. Since I got my Con Law grade last week, early I might add, it's been worse. I had thought, I had pinned so much on, things getting better once exams ended. But somehow getting my grade in that class has thrown me big time. All of the stress and anxiety and pain just isn't worth it if I give it my all and this is all I get.

On the other hand, the stress and pain and anxiety probably had more than a little to do with my less than ideal performance. I can think of a hundred reasons why I have not been performing like I should be, like I expect myself to. But somehow I've lost perspective and I'm having a hard time finding anything that helps. It's just too much. I can't take anymore. I'm broken down and tired and worn out and I can't take anymore.

That being said, my boss found out what's been going on today and seems to think he may be able to find a solution. Which would not involve working for 70 hours a week or debt I cannot hope to repay. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, and trying to let it go and trust in the universe at the same time. I have to learn to let people help me and not let my misplaced sense of pride get in the way. And I have to learn to trust people.

Work is starting to get interesting. I helping design the curriculum for an electronic discovery class. I know nothing about discovery (see how much good my civil procedure class did me last semester?), but I'm excited about this. I should be able to learn a lot. I should also probably enroll in the class, seeing as if I can't get an A in a class I did the materials for...well...that would just be sad.

My other work assignment is figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. This is the far more daunting of the two tasks, especially given that I have a near total lack of confidence in my abilities as a legal professional at this point, but certainly the more important. I just have no idea. I keep thinking of things and then thinking "no, that won't work. My grades are such rubbish, I'll never get a job in that field." Clearly, that must stop. I need a goal, a plan, something, so I can stay on the path.

I have been getting a good amount of knitting done. I finished the Prairie Tunic from the spring IK, and have picked up a lace bed jacket thing I've had on needles for months. I had a bunch of cotton yarn left over from the tunic, so I knitted and crocheted a string bag for myself out of the left over. I love hippie-assed string bags. They are kind of ridiculous, but being out here so far from my hippie-assed roots, I feel a little more at home carying my lunch of my dogi around in one. Plus they make good eco-friendly grocery bags, so yay for me. I have a new commission that I'll be starting on as soon as the yarn gets here too, so there's plenty to keep me busy and out of the cookie jar in the evenings.

Speaking of cookies jars...I've been really trying to focus on my diet and getting back on the WW track. I want to be at my goal when I turn 30 in September. It's pretty easy to not over-eat when you can't go out and grab a burger or whatever junk you want, and I've been making a progress in that area if nothing else. Once I have money again and buy vegetables, it should be ok. I've done this before, I know I have to tools to do it again, I just have to stick to it, believe in myself, and stay focused. All 3 things I've been having a hard time with in other areas of my life, but maybe success in this will help me in other things.

What in the hell am I doing?

2006-05-20T17:17:00.000-04:00

So, I got my Con Law grade yesterday. It's...well...very demoralizing. I tried. I tried so hard...and it just wasn't enough.

Maybe I just don't want this enough. Maybe I don't have what it takes. I don't know. But whatever it is, it's just not enough. I am tired, I am lonely, and I did my best and it wasn't enough.

I don't know how much more I can give. I don't have anything much left, I can't pay rent or buy groceries, I left everything I knew and my life behind, and for what?

Fiber and Martial Arts

2006-05-17T13:38:00.000-04:00

The mad spinning on the merino/angora/silk stuff carries on. I love working this fiber blend, but the angora gets all over the place and I really want to be plying so I can start on something new. Something with some color maybe. I have more of the same blend but dyed a really lovely sky blue, that might be a fun one to try next. Now that I think of it, it might be fun to ply that with the white and have a sort of tweedy looking yarn when I'm done...I shall have to think about this. I had sort of thought I might try doing some natural dying with the white but the tweedy look might be nice. Too many options!

Aikido is still on hiatus, so I've started taking kendo through the same group that runs the aikido class at school. I have to drive 45 minutes away to get to class once a week, but it's totally worth it. Who knew I'd be this excited about martial arts? I think part of it is that it's a really good stress reducer to hit things with bamboo swords and punch walls and toss people all over the place, plus the physical activity is good relief, but it's more than that too. This is the one thing that I do where I am not being measured against my classmates every step of the way and where I get constructive and instant feedback on my understanding of whatever we are doing. Cultivating my ki and general awareness is also hugely helpful. I feel more able to cope when I am practicing regularly, partly because I'm more able to get myself focused.

This research assisting job I have for the summer is interesting. Right now I'm working on editing page proofs for a book on court-martial procedure, which is very tedious work, and the fact that I have yet to find a clean page should tell you something, seeing as I can't edit anything for crap in general. The only problem with this job is that is 1 - does not pay enough to cover food and rent at the same time and 2 - I won't get paid until June 16th at best, which makes it difficult to pay rent for June and put gas in the car and feed myself. So I am looking for another job on the side, and having very little luck with it. I have a couple of leads which look promising, so think happy thoughts for me!

Oh! The big news is that I get to go to TNNA in Indianapolis with my friend from back home who runs KnitWhits. This should be a lot of fun. I get a free trip out of town, and I get to see all the new products and things coming out in the knitting and needlework world. I'll be working at the KnitWhits table for pretty much the whole weekend, so if you happen to be an industry person who will be there come by and say hi!

It's Alive!

2006-05-15T21:19:00.000-04:00

I survived finals! I have no idea how it went, aside from I lived. I guess I'll know in a few weeks, somehow I don't really care right now. I did my best, and that's just going to have to be enough.

In other school news, I opted to not do the whole journal thing. I just couldn't stand the idea of being stuck doing cite checks for the next two years at the expense of what's left of my social life. Maybe I have screwed up priorities, but I'd rather be shooting myself in the foot professionaly than shooting myself in the head at the end before I even graduate.

I even have actual knitting news! The purple Starburst Sweater of Doom is done! I had to change the back central medallion thing, the length of fronts (so they would match the back, concept!), and I hated the ribbed sleeves (which also weren't long enough) so I frogged them and did plain knit sleeves with ruffled cuffs to match the body of the sweater. It looks much better I think, sort of like a ruffly purple gi top actually. I'll try to get some pictures of it posted soon. Over all, the pattern is a bit of a disaster but the end results are pretty good. I'm still trying to decide if they were worth the pattern confusion, but I am happy with the sweater.

I'm currently working on the Prairie Tunic from the spring issue of Interweave Knits. So far, so good. Of course, I am not using the recommended yarn. I went with Shine from KnitPicks, which I really like. Normally cotton yarn is a misery to me, but this is working up quite nicely without snags or anything. It's all done on tiny assed size 3 needles, so it's a bit tedious, but I'm moving along pretty quickly and it's a small top so it shouldn't be too interminable a project. I've got some other UFO's to work on inbetween, all of which are on tiny needles as well for some reason (what's with that anyway?), but they are good summer projects.

I also finally got my wheel pulled out from the corner and having been diligently working away at the silk/merino/angora blend I've been working on for what feels like a hundred years. I should have just one bobbin left to fill with singles, then I'm going to Navajo ply it I think. It should work out to something around a worsted weight yarn, maybe a little on the heavy side, but it should good for a scarf and hat set for the winter. Or something, we'll see. I'm not really worried about what I'm going to do with this stuff at this point.

The Great Yelp of Freedom

2006-05-04T16:02:00.000-04:00

Hurray!! I am done with my last final. I am no longer a 1L.

Now, I shall lie on the floor and contemplate the ceiling.

Quick update

2006-05-04T08:34:00.000-04:00

My last 1L final is in 4 and a half hours. I am terrified. I couldn't fall asleep last night, woke up at 2, then again at 5:30 and had no luck at all getting back to sleep. So here I am on campus, at 8:30 in the morning, having been here for an hour trying to get some last minute review done and having absolutely no luck. gah. This exam is shaping up to be a huge disaster.

My car is dead. Or at least, that's what the mechanic seemed to think. The transmission apparently is all locked up and needs rebuilding, which he can't do, so I have to take it to the dealer or a transmission shop. I'll call the dealer tomorrow, but given that something is not right with the coolant system and the whole car shakes when you decelerate, I think it's just a lost cause. This is a very bad thing. But there is some hope I can get some help from my grandma and get a new car (new to me anyway). We'll see. Without a car my situation this summer is going to be pretty painful.

At least this last exam will be over at 4. That's something. Then I can pedal my ass back home and crash.

p.s. just got off the phone with the local pontiac dealer...it's going to cost at least $2500 to get this car working and safe again. So much for the pontiac. Anyone know of any high school auto shop classes that need a grand am in the Williamsburg area?

Spring cleaning

2006-05-02T15:43:00.000-04:00

I'm at least trying to clean out my book cases and probably eventually a closet or two. As I find things I don't want or need, I am trying to convert them into much needed cash. I'll be posting books and yarn and others things on Google Base, http://base.google.com/base/a/Duchess.Grace

So far, I have some knitting books and law school study aids posted, but more will be coming over the next week or so I am sure as I sort through things.

In other news...I have one exam left! My contracts final is at 1 on Thursday. I can hardly wait for that to be over. Contracts was my worst class last semester, and I wish I could say I felt ok going in to the exam but no amount of preparation is calming me down. I finished the outline this morning and have to review that and my other materials tonight and tomorrow in between naps and trips to the post office, mechanic, and book store to sell back my text books.

I still have no idea how I am going to pay rent and fix my car, but I'll figure something out. With luck, I'll be able to start my under-paying research job next week, and will at least be able to eat. That would be nice. I really hate being poor. Selling my possessions on line will only get me so far towards rent and a functional car.

Well I survived...

2006-04-26T13:13:00.000-04:00

...my con law final and my first aikido belt test. The exam...well...asking how I feel about it is useless but I lived, and it was exhausting. The belt test was about what you would expect it to be considering I was so exhausted I was fighting back tears, our instructor hasn't been there for the last 2 practices, we found out about the test requirements Monday, and I've only been at this since spring break. Apparently I got a stripe on my white belt, which I am told is a good thing and not totally pathetic, but I feel like crap for some reason. I was too tired and stressed about everything that's going badly right now that I wasn't really as present as I should have been. So much for the whole no mind thing.

I have today to prepare for criminal law and contracts, which are next week, and tomorrow I focus entirely on property, since that test is Friday morning. At 9 am. I hope it doesn't rain, since I have to bike over to campus for the exam.

Things that suck when you have a huge exam in 29 hours

2006-04-24T20:11:00.000-04:00

1 - you wake up nice and on time, decide to test your CD-RW drive just to be sure, and end up spending 5 hours troubleshooting the driver
2 - you find out the problem was a very simple preference setting
3 - your sister in law gets in a bike wreck and ends up having to have surgery on her wrist
4 - you discover one of your print drivers is missing and spend an hour trying to find a driver for a printer which is longer supported by the manufacturer. Then have to troubleshoot that for 20 minutes.
5 - you are flat broke
6 - your car will no longer shift in to any gear at all
7 - see #5. Can't go to the mechanic. Or the study group for the exam which is now 17 hours away.

Oh, and I have a belt test in aikido tomorrow after the final of doom, no way to get there (see about re:car), and my knee is inexplicably swollen.

All I really have the energy left to do right now is sob.

Rough week

2006-04-12T12:17:00.000-04:00

It's been a bad couple of weeks. The closer I get to exams, the less able to cope with life I seem to get. Of course, it hardly helps that I made a gross miscalculation and am now beyond broke. At least I have a couple of leads for an extra part time summer job. Yay for 60 hour weeks all summer, that should be nice and relaxing. It'd be one thing if I'd be making enough to actually save some money, but I have to do that just to subsist. How sad. I hate being poor.

The one thing keeping me sane is the LYM. I'm terribly afraid that he's going to get tired of me and chuck me, but focusing on that just causes me to push him away which means he gets tired of me, and it's a nasty self-fulfilling sort of thing and not good for anyway. So, yeah, stopping that. He seems to have a pretty good understanding of the whole school and money stress situation and the impact that has on me, and is being really supportive and wonderful, so I need to just not worry about it and enjoy it.

I had a really bad night at Aikido last night. My foreword break-falls suck the big one, not for any lack of ability but because of paralytic fear. Which just makes the whole thing hurt more. I think a lot of my life fears are the real problem and not some ingrained fear of falling down. When I get thrown quickly and don't have time to think about it and get all worked up, I'm fine. In fact, I don't even feel it. I don't know what the exact solution is, I guess just keep practicing.

I've found another major problem with the Starburst Sweater. It seems that the collar directions repeat themselves, which will confuse the pants off you if you don't re-read it about 15 times and have a pretty good understanding of how shawl collars are supposed to work in general. I have no idea if the solution I came up with is what they expected, but it seemed to work so I'm going with it. The collar is done, and I'm to the sleeves. So far, no issues with that, but we'll see. I'm looking forward to this being done, hopefully before it warms up and I can't wear it for months.

Throw yourself at the ground and miss?

2006-04-04T09:32:00.000-04:00

Or at least something like that. We learned forward break falls on Sunday and I am still sore. Why in the world anyone thinks it will be a trivial thing to fling myself head long into the floor, putting "more energy" in to it as I go along, I really don't know. At least I seemed to be getting it towards the end. Sempai said my form was good, I just need "more energy," which as far as I can tell means more thrust, as in jump over my head and into the mat harder. Ouch? The whole thing is very counter-intuitive and goes completely against my innate sense of self-preservation but there you go. It does hurt less if you do it right, but it's very hard to get my head to believe this.

I saw a cute little frolicking squirrel get hit by a car yesterday morning, that made me very sad. He was cute and the car didn't even slow down. Poor little guy, he had to drag his poor broken self off the road and I have no idea what happened to him. I felt bad for not picking up and taking him someplace, but I somehow don't think putting a broken squirrel in my car and driving all over Williamsburg in search of a squirrel hospital would have helped much. But still.

Not much else is going on. I ache. The LYM is getting lovelier every day, and the whole thing is getting less scary by the day. I survived a major thunder storm all by myself last night without any major freak outs. And the finals are coming and I just don't care. I've pretty much concluded that I don't care much about an actual career, if I can just get through this year I'll deal with my situation as it is and figure something out for the future. Ugh. If only someone had a hot tub I could soak in.

I got the other front section of the Starburst Sweater done last night during the thunder storm and started on the lower body "ruffle." This alleged ruffle is really just 2x2 ribbing, sort of gathered in at the top with a bunch of extra yarn overs. It looks pretty cool actually and show flare out nicely over my hips once it's done. It just takes forever to knit a row, since it's in ribbing, is ruffly, and goes clear around the sweater which has a cross over front. Gah. At least it does not have to be too deep. If I am good, I should be able to sit down and knit long enough to finish the ruffle this weekend, then it's on to the collar and the sleeves and I am done! Just in time for summer, when it's too hot to put on socks, never mind a sweater.

Rescue me

2006-04-01T08:09:00.000-05:00

This has been a bad week. At least it has been bad in my head, I'm more full of self-doubt and uncertainty than I have been in a long time. I suspect it's just the cumulative effect of the semester, but I feel as though what self confidence I had left has been undercut to the point that just functioning in the most basic sense is a huge victory.

It doesn't really help that I've been thinking about my long term goals. I need goals, I need to know what I am working towards. The goals I had set out for myself at the start of law school are either unattainable because of my less than stellar grades or so uncertain that they hinder more than help. And in some respects I really have no idea what I want. Do I really want a high-flying legal career? I don't think I do. At least not at the expense of the rest of my life. At the moment, I just want to run away from it all and hide someplace dark and safe, but that's not going to get me through exams.

In other news, I've started a crazy quilt. I made a quilt once, when I was about 12, but that's the extent of my quilt making experience, aside from helping ladies pick out fabrics when I was in college and working in a fabric store with a huge selection of quilting fabrics. As a result, I have a nice little collection of quilting cotton. In addition to that I have tons of scraps left over from various projects and swatches and bits and pieces I've collected. Not so many as I had before the move out here, but still enough to put together a respectable collection of random bits to piece together into a crazy quilt. I started last night and already have 4 squares done. Hurray! It's actually a lot of fun, and goes much faster than I had thought it would. I suppose it helps that crazy quilts can be totally random, I don't have to plan out to much other than the size of my blocks. The perfect project for me right now, it's very zen in a way. I just pick up bits and put them together and let the colors and shapes flow. No thinking, just reacting.

Aikido is going well, I think. It's a little hard to say for sure at this point since the instructor has been out for the last few classes, but the bruises are getting to be much less and I'm able to get up from break falls much faster and in a more organized manner. If I just let myself react to whatever is happening it seems to be much easer. Maybe this will help me to deal with my over-thinking problems some too.

Not much to report

2006-03-29T10:55:00.000-05:00

Just a quick update to say I have no real updates. Things are chugging along, I still lack motivation as far as school goes. I really hate school actually, but that's ok. It'll get better, or end, sooner or later. At least I got registered for all the classes I wanted next semester, that helps a bit.

I haven't been doing a great deal of knitting. The first front section of the Starburst sweater is done, and I found another mistake in the pattern, but it was easily fixed. They did not have you knit enough rows to fit the back to the front, but that's no big deal to correct.

For some reason, I'm feeling a bit sad today, but in a really oddly bouncy way. I'm sick of being stressed, and it's wearing on me, but I have other things going on now that I am actually excited about and can look forward to. I still have more doubt and confusion that I am comfortable with but at least there are bright spots.

This is very bad

2006-03-26T09:36:00.000-05:00

I am totally 100% uninterested in law school right now. Completely over it. I got called on twice last week, and I have no motivation whatsoever to do any my homework this weekend. Which is A Very Bad Thing, seeing as it's Sunday morning and I have not cracked a book since Friday's Criminal Law class.

At least the stupid memo from hell is done. I probably sucked on it, and will likely not get the honors mark in skills this semester as a result, which is unfortunate since that was the one and only bright spot to my otherwise lack-luster performance last semester, but oh hell, I just don't care.

With any luck I'll get re-motivated about all this sometime very soon. If I don't, I kind of screwed, but again with the not much caring.

I wonder what this is all about? It's not so much as total lack of focus as it is my focus is on other things. My love life (now that I have one again, so much for eschewing all men) for one thing, Aikido for another, the whole process of really trying to live again really.

Anyway, must get back to fixing my computer. The LYM helped me scrub it this weekend, so it should be running faster, but I'm still missing some apps and iTunes won't run for some reason which confounds us all. blegh. And I still have to do my homework. Damn it.

Battered and bruised

2006-03-22T13:21:00.000-05:00

...but this time in a really good way. I did my first ever Aikido class last night, and man does it ever feel good! I have at least 8 bruises that I've found so far, and I am proud of each and every one of them. I've been running around showing them off like badges of honor. I have another class tomorrow. My arms should be really interesting looking on Friday, although with luck I've worked out how to fall a little better so I'll up with less massive black and blue patches on my forearms. And I've also learned that sports bras with hooks in the back are a Very Bad Idea, so I won't be getting more of the gougey looking marks on my back. At least from that.

Other than Aikido, I have nothing new to report really. School carries on, it's driving me nuts, but hopefully some regular physical activity will help channel the stress someplace else. I've found a Lovely Young Man to keep me company and out of trouble who doesn't mind that I bring my homework and actually work on it when I go visit him for the weekend or make me feel like rubbish about the choices I've made. The cat is doing well. And I woke up this morning, the second day of a spring, to a land covered in snow. Nice. It felt good to go outside after I beating I gave myself last night.

On the knitting front, I resolved the problem with centering on the back of the Starburst Sweater and have started down the first front section. The pattern really does have some problems. I'm trying to keep track of them of all for my final project wrap-up, but at this point, I think if you are not a fairly experienced and fearless sort of knitter, stay far away from this one until they revise it.

My basic philosophy on pattern difficulty is that nothing is insurmountable if approached with courage and confidence. It's not so much as matter of skill as it is a lack of fear. Small children do things well sometimes because they don't know they can't, and knitters can do the same. The best students I ever had approached projects this way, they never asked how hard it was because they chose not to believe they should be intimidated. It's just string and some sticks after all.

However, even the most intrepid knitter is going to have a hard time with this pattern. The comments people have sent me about it only confirm it (two of the most capable and talented knitters I have ever met had a hell of a time figuring it out). It just goes to show the importance of clear instructions and proof-read patterns.

Anyway, enough semi-coherent rambling. I need to go find more ibuprophen and get to Con Law.

Pattern annoyance

2006-03-18T10:23:00.000-05:00

I really hate it when patterns are not right, or maybe they are right but if you follow the directions they don't look like the picture. This happened with the Starburt Sweater I am currently working on last night. Finally, I get to the point where I can divide the back (which is worked in the round, from the center out) for the fronts, only to realize that the last 12 rounds of increases have been set to the wrong point in the central lace panel pattern, which resulted in a very off-center looking start thing in the middle of the back. So first I looked at the pattern so see if I was supposed to knit some extra stitches so everything lined up right...nope, it's just missing that step. How annoying. The problem was easily resolved, but I had rip back to the last round of the star part. grr. I guess it just goes to show that if you think it looks wrong or off somehow the first time, it probably is. Go with your gut.

Aside from the funky off-center star thing, I am warming up to the crazy purple color considerably. Now that there is more of it, it's not so scary and bright looking. Not quite sure how that works, but put next to dark jeans or a black skirt, it's quite a reasonable shade. So yay! My adventure into wild (for me) non-earth tones seem to be paying off.

Quote of the day:

"In one way or another I've always suffered. I didn't know why exactly. But I do know that I'm not so scared of suffering now. I feel more than I've ever felt and I've found someone to feel with. To play with. To love in a way that feels right for me. I hope he knows that I can see that he suffers too. And that I want to love him."

I'll leave it you to guess the source/significance...

A few key points

2006-03-17T13:49:00.000-05:00

1. I have all but resolved to eschew all men. It's just not worth it to keep getting told that I am using law school "as a bull-shit excuse." My heart is just too broken at this point.
2. Criminal law would be quite entertaining were I able to separate the human reality from the cases at hand.
3. I need to get more sleep if I want the hurting to stop.
4. The schedule is working pretty well, for all that I have not managed to stick with it terribly well this week. At least I know what I need to do and when, that helps, even if I've been doing a lot of shuffling of things and feeling generally crappy this week.
5. Whoever wrote my contract case book is a sadist. They seem to take a perverse pleasure in telling you about the exception to the exception before telling you there even is an exception to the rule you may or may not have been able to gather from any one of the several preceding (and unrelated) cases. Gah. And people wonder why I'm stressed. Please.

How sad

2006-03-14T23:26:00.000-05:00

I just got a paper cut...on my NOSE.

that's just sad.

*edited to say it was my contracts casebook that did it. just if you wanted to know.

Schedule for the rest of the semester

2006-03-13T13:33:00.000-05:00

* please note that there is some flexibility to this when classes get canceled. Evening hours will be spend socializing, knitting, sleeping, or catching up as needed.

Monday
7:00-7:30 Get Up, shower
7:30-8:00 - Breakfast of yogurt and a latte
8:00-8:15 - Drive to campus and park
8:15 - 10:00 Read Crim Law
10:00 - 11:15 - Contracts Class
11:30-12:20 - Property Class
12:20 - 1:00 - lunch
1:00 - 2:00 - check email, asses schedules, review Con Law
2:00-3:15 - Constitutional Law Class
3:15 - 6:00 - Library to do read Con Law for Tuesday

Tuesday
7:00-7:30 Get Up, shower
7:30-8:00 - Breakfast of yogurt and a latte
8:00-8:15 - Drive to campus and park
8:15 - 10:00 Read Contracts for Wednesday
10:00 - 11:15 - Criminal law Class
11:30-12:30 - Read for Property
12:30 - 1:00 - lunch
1:00 - 2:00 - check email, asses schedules, review Con Law
2:00-3:15 - Constitutional Law Class
3:15 - 4:00 - Library to do read Con Law for Wednesday
4:00-5:30 - Legal Skills
5:30-7:00- Library to finish Con Law for Wednesday

Wednesday
7:00-7:30 Get Up, shower
7:30-8:00 - Breakfast of yogurt and a latte
8:00-8:15 - Drive to campus and park
8:15 - 10:00 Read Crim Law for Friday
10:00 - 11:15 - Contracts Class
11:30-12:20 - Property Class
12:20 - 1:00 - lunch
1:00 - 2:00 - check email, asses schedules, review Con Law
2:00-3:15 - Constitutional Law Class
3:15 - 6:00 - Library to do read Con Law for Thursday

Thursday:
7:00-7:30 Get Up, shower
7:30-8:00 - Breakfast of yogurt and a latte
8:00-8:15 - Drive to campus and park
8:15 - 12:30 - Read for Contracts
12:30 - 1:00 - lunch
1:00 - 2:00 - check email, asses schedules, review Con Law
2:00-3:15 - Constitutional Law Class
3:15 - 6:00 - Library to do read Property

Friday
7:00-7:30 Get Up, shower
7:30-8:00 - Breakfast of yogurt and a latte
8:00-8:15 - Drive to campus and park
8:15 - 10:00 - Read Con Law for Monday
10:00-11:15 - Criminal Law Class
11:15-1:30 - Break, have a good lunch someplace out
1:30-5:30 - Outline for Contracts

Saturday
8:30-9:00 Get up, shower
9:00-9:45 - Breakfast of yogurt and a latte
9:45-10:00 - Drive to campus, park
10:00-12:30 - Outline for Property
12:30-1:30 - Lunch, walk in CW
1:30 - 5:30 - Outline for Criminal Law

Sunday
8:30-9:00 Get up, shower
9:00-9:45 - Breakfast of yogurt and a latte
9:45-10:00 - Drive to campus, park
10:00-12:30 - Outline for Con Law
12:30-1:30 - Lunch, walk in CW
1:30 - 5:30 - Outline for Con Law

More pictures

2006-03-10T11:10:00.000-05:00

Going along with the picture theme...

I took these the day it snowed. The cat, Maya, was not impressed.

Finished Objects

2006-03-09T14:30:00.000-05:00

Finally, a picture of someting I knit! This is the tweed jacket from KnitScene which I just completed. The sleeves are somewhat short and snug, but I think that is partly becasue I did some significant yarn exchanging and knit them in the round, and directly in to the arm hole. Overall, it's pretty cute, for all that it makes my boobs look massive.

Here is the argyle Christmas sock I did back in December. I am relaly happy with how it came out, but it ended up being too stretchy so I had to felt it a bit. Next time, I will use a much smaller needle. The pattern came from the Interweave Press Christmas socks book, and I knit it with BrownSheep Lambspride.

Can't go home again

2006-03-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

This about sums it up for my state of mind of right now:

On Monsieur's Departure
(Elizabeth I)

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly to prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned.
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

On a happier and woolier note...the back of the Starburst Sweater is coming along nicely and I am less offended by the crazy bright purple of it the larger it gets. I think with dark jeans and either a flesh toned or black top underneath, it will be quite reasonable. The yarn is very soft at any rate, and quite nice to work with. If I really can't stand the purple, I could always try to over-dye it with some grey or something. I think my problem is that I tend to gravitate towards more subdued, dusty shades, and this is definantly not that. Also, it isn't quite what I was expecting but that's ok. The odd surprise now and again isn't a bad thing and I'm starting to warm up to it. Funny how that can work sometimes.

Lots of smug-marrieds

2006-03-07T13:18:00.000-05:00

Spending a whole week with familial smug-marrieds was probably a bad plan in my current state of mind. Oh well. At least I'm getting this rape and homicide stuff figured out, that has to count for something.

I just wish they would stop asking me about the ex and my love life. This is why I don't bring boys home. For any reason. Ever. What was I thinking?

Oh, yeah...I am/was in love. feh.

Anyway, I finished knitting the little tweed jacket. Today I need to block it out, sew on the buttons, and decide which shoes to wear it with for the luncheon thing I am getting dragged to on Saturday. Hurray for a new jacket thing to wear though!

I think I am going to make the Prairie Tunic from the latest Interweave Knits next. I got some nice red cotton and tencel yarn from KnitPicks to do it with, which I think will make a nice spring/summer top. Either that, or Startburst sweater from KnitPicks. KnitPicks seems to be making me happy these days, they have nice yarns at really good prices, and interesting patterns, plus they ship really quickly. Hurray for KnitPicks! The Starburst Sweater would probably be more useful for the early part of the spring. I ordered the yarn in Iris, and it's way more purple than I had thought it would be, bordering on annoying, but I think once it's knit up it'll be ok. It's just a bit brighter than I normally wear. Branching into other colors might be a good idea though, and the purple/lavender will look good with most anything. I'm trying to resist knitting yet another white or cream colors sweater.

Quick update

2006-03-05T18:49:00.000-05:00

I made it back to CA, without any terrible mishaps though I did almost miss my connecting flight in Dallas. For some reason, my flights out of Norfolk are always at least a half hour late, which makes life interesting when you have to make a connecting flight and only had 40 minutes between flights to begin with. But I made it, and the power only went out in the second plane for 5 minutes or so, at we had already landed, so it was ok.

Dad and I spent Saturday with my aunt wandering around SF. I was pretty much half-asleep, but did manage to pick up non-nipple like buttons for my little tweed jacket. Hurray! I love Britex. My button lady (I have a Button Lady, how strange is that?) remembered me and was very helpful and excited about my jacket thing, which was nice.

We ate dinner at my most favorite Italian place in the whole world, and the host was all excited to see me and I think he might have been flirting with me, which is a nice thing actually, he's tall and cute and has a wonderful Italian accent. After that, we went back to my aunts and I passed out at about 7:30, which is just plain sad but probably understandable.

Now I am at home, typing up notes from the reading I did on the plane, and trying not to reflect too much on the life I've left behind. I feel very apart somehow, like I don't really belong here anymore, which would be ok if I felt like I belonged back in Virginia.

Madness!

2006-03-03T09:37:00.000-05:00

Ever since I slept through my boarding call back in September and missed my flight home for my brothers wedding, the very idea of having to go the airport and get on a plane fills me panic and dread. Huge cold knots of fear take over my stomach just thinking about it. Somehow, that might flight leaves at 5:30 tonight is no comfort at the moment. As long as I leave here no later than 3 I will be fine, but still, the panic. And what if the plane is late and I miss my connecting flight? I hate air travel. It should not produce this sort of overwhelming anxiety.

At least I am totally packed. I have 2 new knitting projects, one I've had on needles for awhile, and the last sleeve of my tweed jacket to work on over break. I should be able to get the sleeve done on the drive from San Jose to Santa Barbara without any trouble, which means I can focus on fun knitting and new projects after that. Hurray!

Of course, break is mostly going to be about homework and outlining. If I stay focused I should be able to get totally caught up and my outlines up to date by the end of break, which is a very good thing. I'll be a really good position for the last half the semester. I wish I could just take a break though, go to a spa, something, but that will have to wait for the summer or possibly some time after I take the bar...

Not wasting the pretty

2006-02-28T08:09:00.000-05:00

Now for a mini-update on the sad affair that is my love life...

The short version is that it is no love life. As usual, He's Just Not That Into Me, in that he's not sure if he wants to get back with his ex. A situation somewhere between chapter 9 and chapter 10 of The Book. I hate dating. But, again following the HJNTIY approach, I must brush myself off and not waste the pretty.

For those of you who missed the HJNTIY thing, my mom, bless her, got me an autographed copy of this book last year at an authors luncheon. I am sad to say, it's the only dating advice book I have ever read that made any sense. The capsule summary is that ambiguity and fuckwittage are bad, and if a guy is that into you there will be no ambiguity or fuckwittage. So, yeah. Girls, read it and giggle but take at least one or two notes. Guys, read it, these are the new rules of engagement. And you all know how much I loath self-help books in general.

Resisting the urge to stay at home and wallow with girlie movies while wandering around the house in flannel pants and a sweater shirt is proving to be rather difficult this morning, but I will get up, I will put on pants, and I will go out to class and learn about homicide and substantive due process while being pretty and fabulous. Hurray!

On the knitting front...
I know I need to post pictures. I suck. What can I say? But the current project is a tweed jacket from Knitscene (pattern is available for freehere). My version is done with a reddish brown suri alpaca from knitpicks and the pine forest looking yarn I handspun and used for the last major sweater project. The colors sounds a little weird, but the effect is quite nice and not like anything else I have, so I'm happy. Venturing out of my usual palate is always kind of exciting. I like the design, but I really detest the way the collar shaping is done. It's all jagged and lumpy along the edge if you follow their directions. I should be able to block out the weirdness, but it annoyes me. Really, not a major problem and the jacket is otherwise cute so it's not a major gripe, just use your common sense with the collar shaping if you decide to use the pattern. I'm on the second sleeve, and hope to either have it done by the end of the week or shortly after getting home so I can search for buttons while I'm in the vicinity of good fabric stores with nice button selections.

5 more days

2006-02-27T09:46:00.000-05:00

until I leave for spring break that is. Few things are as attractive to me right now as the idea of getting the hell out of here for a week. Of course, I get to go back to my parents and do homework for an entire week, but still, I won't be doing it here.

I'm still really cranky about the Heffalump-Bitch-Who-Stole-My-Job. I know I need to let this go, but I am really sick of being made to feel as though I am complete rubbish all the time. Law school sucks that way.

Anyhow, I had a tolerable weekend. My neighbor had people over Friday to send up hot air balloons, and we freaked out some of the people in the complex, who were very drunk, and thought our balloon was a UFO. It was pretty funny watching these two dumb girls freak out over a trash bag and some birthday candles. I did a lot of homework, and had some people over for chocolate and crepes on Saturday, which turned into more or less a wake for poor old Hobbs. That was actually kind of fun, but I sort of overdid it on the whole wake concept and spent of Sunday feeling more like rubbish than usual and napping before I met Someone's mother for dinner. Now that was a freak show. Having dinner with your ex's mother and her neighbor is just strange, but it ended up being rather nice for all that.

I'm totally sick of school though. All I want to do at this point is sit at home, drink tea, knit, and wait for it all to end. I just don't see the point in any of this right now, and I really am sick of not having anyone much to talk to it all about. Is it so wrong to need someone to tell me I'm not total rubbish once in awhile?