Sunday 03-01-10

No list for Saturday. Alas, the list for today wouldn't be incredibly exciting. I did at least look up recipes for black bread. Also, Herring under a Fur Coat, which is this incredibly delicious layered Russian salad. Well, incredibly delicious if you like beets. Which you should.

Today, really, the only interesting thing I did was watch Beauty and the Beast. I was probably less than 10 years old the last time I saw it.

Instead of giving you a list, I will tell you, in reverse chronological order, five things I've been thinking about recently that relate to sound.
1. Every time Ms. Potts spoke/sang during Beauty and the Beast, I was reminded of how much I like Angela Lansbury.
2. Some earworms (by certain folk-pop bands) are more than welcome during normal daily functioning. (And, unfortunately, they same cannot be said during bouts of insomnia.)
3. I really want to learn to play slide guitar.
4. I do kind of wish my bass was in Chicago.
5. The Cure, when not bashing around about how Friday is the best day of the week, is fantastic music for falling asleep to.

That being said, I really do have interesting plans for the next few days. I shall, in fact, succeed at doing cool stuff in January. It will happen; I promise.

SB09 Day 7 - A Short Day and a Long Night

14:11 - Wake up, bum around for a while.
15:00 - Knitting circle at Smith's. Worked on Laminaria. Knit one row, I think.
17:00 - Happy hour/Foxy-Feve-Guy-watching at the Feve with Cory, Linden, Alex, Kelsey, & Segroves & someone else that I recognize but don't actually know the name of. (Sorry!)
20:00 - The Big Lebowski.
23:00 - Cigars & whiskey (& nachos & taste of nirvana) on Alex's porch. Followed by 'the Invasion of the Body Snatchers'.

I need to figure out how to wake up before noon again.

I started the second 'Knotty or Knice' sock during 'the Big Lebowski' and was quite pleased with the couple of inches I got done.

I have no photo for you today.

SB09 Day 6 - It's Thursday Already

How is it almost the weekend again? I have things I should really be doing...

Here's what I've been doing instead.

!. 11:00: Phone interview with Lutheran Volunteer Corps.
2. 15:30: Much sock progress is made while watching the Lion King with Cory.
3. 18:00: Preparing and eating of...
mustard green fried rice!

4. 21:30: Visited the hedgehog and was introduced (via YouTube) to Devandra Banhart. Was less than totally impressed, to be frank.
5. 23:00:Short margarita tour of Oberlin. Margaritas while watching Foxy Feve Guy play at Agave's open mic night, and then mojitos at the Feve. If we'd been on top of things, we would have gone to Lupita's (the restaurant formerly known as Casa Fiesta) first, but we'll hit that next time.
The Feve gets really empty during spring break...



С днём рождения, мама!

Today also included the formation of a list matching the sock yarn that I already have with sock patterns I would like to knit. I find the creation of this kind of list is endlessly enjoyable.

SB09 Days 2 & 3 - Eat, Knit, Sleep

Александр Панайотов: le Russian pop singer du jour, of the duo that brought you the hit, 'Balabalabalabalalaika'.

Pretty typical, uneventful last couple of days.

1. Knit some lace.
2. Ate some food and watched 'Pleasantville' with Anna.
3. Ushered at church.
4. Knit some lace with Jenny and Nicole.
5. Watched 'Cold Feet' (a 1989 movie with Tom Waits in it, which apparently belongs to someone in my house) and knit some lace.

Hey blog. It's been a while since we've talked.

Just for Ss & Gs, lets make this a list, kay?

1. A recap of the last two months: Russia was awesome! I have a few more pictures to go up, but I'll get those up in the next couple of days.

2. I have a Kodak coupon, so I can totally get 10 cent prints. Photo party!

3. Here's one more photo to tide you over, though my intent is more Ravelry-related, rather than providing you with information. It involved a leftover tomato that I carried home with me on the metro and made into a (heavily) tomato sandwich. Check out the vertical ratio on this baby:




Enough of Russia (for the time being). Now let's break it down domestic-style:

4. I'm 21. Which is all right. It feels kind of like 20, to be honest.

5. My new license photo doesn't suck!

6. Upon arrival in MN (three hours later than intended don't fly Sun Country out of JFK), I spent four days home with my family in our new house, which I love.

7. Remember the non-Russian non-pie Choco-Pies? Guess who's mother thought it would be funny to buy her daughter two boxes of them for her birthday. It's a good thing she found them at a Korean grocery store. She was going to order them online, if she had to.

8. The Dark Knight, if you haven't seen it, is a really good movie. I biked about 16 miles (round trip) to Amherst to see it this afternoon.

9. I made more vareniki! (= Ukrainian dumplings!) This time, I was smart and didn't stack them on top of each other, so they didn't stick together, and I won't have to cook fistfuls of dumpling matter instead of actual dumplings. Everybody wins! Everybody who eats them anyway. I guess the dumplings don't win.

10. Some friends and I watched 'I Know What You Did Last Summer'. Next summer, you will be able to say that, because you will know that I watched this movie, and then we can listen to Guess Who?, the Who, and Yes, and talk about it.

11. World of knitting: Ravelympics project is a little late. I could be finishing it right now, but I'm blogging instead. I could have finished it earlier, but I made dumplings instead. I only have some ends to weave in, the gathering at the neckline to do, and the single crochet around the neck and armholes. But to be fair, I didn't have the needles with me to start this project in Russia, so I couldn't start until the 11th. And then I was so exhausted/busy I didn't start until the 13th. So I'm not that behind. I joined the race a little late. It's still Sunday in California!

12. I've been seeing lots of people I know in town. Especially today at the Feve! This is always fun.

Well! A dozen things about my life. How is yours?

The Least Productive Spring Break Ever

All around, it wasn't so bad. That does not mean much got done.

Five cool things
1. (Most importantly) I found out I got accepted into the Смольный summer langauge intensive. Two months of my summer will be spent studying Russian in St. Petersburg! Ура!
2. I saw a concert by the St. Petersburg String Quartet last weekend. It was wonderful; it made me feel really sleepy.
3. On the knitting front, I made significant progress on my dad's scarf. It totally might be in the mail tomorrow.
4. I did a little work on my felted dragon. She's got eyes and upper teeth now.
5. Aaand I had a good time in Elyria. I got some craft supplies for various endeavors (thanks for the gift card, Grandma!), and had lunch at Fazoli's. That's right, all you kids in Minnesota. It's not in Coon Rapids anymore, but they've got them in Ohio. What do you get for not leaving the five state area? LESS ITALIAN FOOD.

Eight movies viewed
- High Fidelity
- I Heart Huckabees
- Rock 'n Roll High School
- The Talented Mr. Ripley
- The Incredibles
- Hairspray
- Purple Rain
- the Rocky Horror Picture Show

One weird occurrence
I was planning on watching RHPS earlier in the week, and got it from the library. However, several hours after I left the library (of the Oberlin Public sort), I realized they had not given me RHPS, but Beauty and the Beast: Belle's Magical World. If it had been the original, I might have actually watched it. But no. It was some lousy sequel.

Things I said I'd do but didn't
- reread the 7th Harry Potter book (I got through three chapters)
- finish Lamb, by Christopher Moore
- do some work
- swatch for Blaze (sweater by Jenna Adorno)

The break with tradition
I did NOT sleep through church this morning, as I have done the last two years. (Yes, I was quite a bit late, but that's because I was eating breakfast and returning movies to the library.)

So, putting it all together like that, I guess I did do quite a bit. Maybe not. But I had a good time.

Birthday, etc.

I can't remember what I was going to write about, so I'll tell you about a couple of other things and hope it comes back to me.

So I turned 20 yesterday, and it was a great day. What made it so fabulous, you ask? Why, several things.
1. My dad and I cowrote this song about Micah 6:8 (What does the Lord require of you? Do justice, show kindness, walk humbly with God) and played it in church. The pickup for my acoustic guitar had a broken connector, so I ended up playing it on my Telecaster, which doesn't get much attention from me. (If it were a child, it would have been removed from my custody years ago.) We sounded awesome. I'll post an mp3 of it when I get the chance.
2. I cleaned my room. Though the process isn't a pile of giggles, the end result sure is neat. (Pun intended. I'm sorry.)
3. I had a party with my family. My family usually gets Dairy Queen cakes for birthdays, and I had one with dinosaurs on it! When we ordered it, the employee, upon hearing our choice of design, thought it was a cake for a small boy. My mother is probably still shaking her head at me wanting dinos on my cake, since that was the theme of my birthday party when I turned five. (I remember decorating t-shirts with dinosaur sponges dipped in paint. We probably played pin the tail on the brontosaurus, too. My mom is brilliant when it comes to throwing birthday parties for kids.)
4. My dad and I finished the NY Times Sunday crossword.
5. Among the gifts I received were 3 Barnes & Noble giftcards (the gift of textbooks! They will make the end of August much less financially painful) and the soundtrack to the movie 'Music and Lyrics'. This movie is so awesome, I must tell you about it, which I will do momentarily.

First, I must add this short blurb to indicate the end of the Awesome Things About Yesterday List, to clarify that I'm changing the subject.

So Music and Lyrics is a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. Hugh Grant plays Alex Fletcher, who is a washed up 80s pop star, who was in a band called Pop!. (Basically he's the guy from Wham! that isn't George Michael.) He's picked to work on a song for a modern Britney/Christina-like pop star, but he was the half of a broken up songwriting pair that wrote the music, and can't write lyrics to save his life, most of the time. (I feel like Paul McCartney may have gone through phases like that.) He hires a lyricist who is very like Jack Black, but less funny, and ends up finding out that Barrymore, who's filling in for his plant-waterer, is really good a writing lyrics. Humor, awkwardness, romance and foolish mistakes ensue. The music in this movie is FANTASTIC. The Pop! song and video are spot-on with 80s style, and three of the other songs were written by Adam Schlesinger, the genius behind Fountains of Wayne (if you haven't yet heard 'Traffic and Weather', the album FoW released this spring, your summer has been lacking). It's awesome.

In less joyous news, the concert I was planning to attend tomorrow (Wilco was playing somewhere in Duluth) has been postponed. Most unfortunately, it has been rescheduled for September 4th. I'll have been in Ohio for a week and a half at that point. So for me, it's not so much postponed as canceled. I was feeling for a while this afternoon that this summer was becoming the Summer of Things Not Panning Out. But out of concern for my happiness and the fact that this post is already incredibly long, I shouldn't dwell on that long enough to make another list.

Happy Monday the 13th!

Oh, I was going to mention a dream I had this morning. My dad and I were robbed, along with several other patrons of a convenience store. It was kind of lame. But I was kind of glad I hadn't replaced my dead iPod yet. I woke up halfway through it, so the police might have ended up getting involved. I did notice that the two young criminals didn't really have their hearts in it. They seemed kind of bored, like they were doing something mundane.