I LOVE to knit but I am so sloooow at it that, when I do finish a project a year after starting it, I generally have a recipient in mind and they'd better be grateful or Katr will add them to her shitlist of people I'm not longer allowed to knit for.
But I know that there are many of you knitters out there who are both fast AND community-minded and you like to donate your time and yarn to a cause. And for you, there's an opportunity to snag (haha) some free yarn for your next charity project!
If you like to knit hats for preemies in the NICU or scarves for folks who've found themselves homeless or if you're part of a knitting cabal who knit or crochet items to benefit others, this is for you!
I don't know if knitting sweaters for penguins counts but it's worth a shot.
As for me, I recently finished the ONE THING I knit this year but it's a holiday gift, so photos at this time. I know, it's disappointing, but you'll live. And maybe by the time I post those photos, I'll have finished a WHOLE OTHER THING! Shut up, it could happen!
(again, this was last year, she's 51 this year, which is still cool)
One of the hardest things in the world to do is surprise Katr. There are a few reasons for this:
1. While Katr enjoys little surprises, she is not into BIG surprises. Like, for example, if you told her to expect a quiet evening at home and then threw her a surprise party, she would still love you and appreciate the effort you went to but please don't do that ever again.
2. We work together - from home - in the same room. So it is challenging to have clandestine phone conversations or even email or text conversations because we are both in each other's business constantly.
3. I am bad at keeping secrets.
The last time I tried to surprise Katr was several years ago when she REALLY wanted a new iPad for Christmas. I told her that I thought it was a bit too pricey and maybe a little unnecessary and she sadly agreed with my practical statements. But OF COURSE I was going to surprise her with the iPad.
So I ordered it online WHEN SHE WAS IN THE SHOWER, so she wouldn't see what I was doing. I diverted all email from Apple to a folder in my email that I didn't open if she was in the room. I was so stealth about this thing that I thought about adding "stealth" to my list of skillz on LinkedIn.
As the delivery date approached, we were getting a lot of other Christmas present-style packages in the mail, so I was confident I could hide the iPad in the shuffle of other boxes from other places. And when the UPS truck pulled up and Katr came to the door with me because she was ALSO expecting a package from UPS, I wasn't concerned.
The UPS guy came to the door with two boxes and saw us both waiting there.
"I've got packages for Roro and for Katr," he said, "who should I start with?"
"Me! Roro!" I said, matching his jocular tone.
"Okay, Roro!" he said "LET'S START WITH THE IPAD."
Why???? Why would he DO that? Katr's face filled with delight which then quickly turned to concern as I had a FULL AND VERY REAL MELTDOWN at having my carefully planned surprise ruined by UPS.
I'm still angry about it.
For Katr's 50th, I took her 50 year old Snoopy plush toy to a local bear hospital to be refurbished, a gift she CLAIMED was a huge surprise but which she actually inspired by saying "I should get Snoopy fixed!" a few months earlier. I wanted to do something totally unexpected. So when she mentioned that she wanted to have a guy come and do a video trivia night at her party, I thought it would be fun to sneak in a couple of trivia questions from...people she loves from the internet.
Katr loves board games and she is a huge fan grrrrl of board game walk-through duo, Anthony and Frances of Ant Lab Games. I am also a huge fan of them, ever since the infamous Anachrony incident of 2017 - it was their 3 hour walk-through that made the game possible. I messaged them on Facebook and asked if they would record themselves doing a trivia question. They could NOT have been nicer or more enthusiastic about it and this is what they sent:
Katr is also a huge fan of musician Christine Parker, partly thanks to her sweet music video Where You Are. She got my family hooked on Christine's music as well - and Christine had a Facebook page. You can guess what happened next:
Brian from Vancouver Trivia Party was SUPER into making this surprise happen and sneaked the questions into his trivia set. And when they came up on the screen, KATR WAS SURPRISED!!!!! And also pretty moved, as a fangrrrl should be. She is adorable. Also, she knew the answers to the trivia questions, which gave her a leg up in the game. HA ha!
Anyway, thanks, a year later, to Anthony and Frances and Christine Parker, for taking the time to make my 50th birthday surprise dreams come true. You are good, kind people. And happy 51st birthday, Katr!!! I am so happy you were born!!
As I've discussed many times here before, I get obsessed with things fairly easily and find myself going down various rabbit holes in pursuit of said obsession, which is why I'm watching Nurse Jackie right now, because after Godless and Unbelievable, I've become obsessed with Merritt Wever.
BTW, if anyone knows of a supercut of Merritt Wever's Godless scenes set to Sarah McLachlan music, please send it my way; otherwise I might have to make it myself and I'm terrible at editing.
Also, BTW, Godless is very violent and upsetting and Unbelievable was EXCELLENT but very hard to watch, so I'm advising my parents not to watch them.
Anyway, back to dogs. I became interested in sled dogs watching the documentary Ice Town: Life on the Edge, which you may remember from the time I got obsessed with Svalbard. And when I say "interested" I mean "that seems like an interesting thing to do that I will never do, one dog is plenty for me".
But I got full on obsessed earlier this year when musher Blair Braverman posted the cutest Twitter thread of all time about which of her dogs might be taking on the Iditarod this year. Click on the tweet and real the WHOLE THREAD and look at ALL THE PICTURES, I WILL WAIT.
Right now, we have 20 dogs in training for the Iditarod—and 14 pups will enter the actual race. Allow me to introduce you to the BraverMountain Varsity Team.
I'm not going to lie. I am INTO these #UglyDogs and whenever Blair (or "Bler", as the dogs call her) posts about them, I am rapt. My favourites are Helli and Grinch, who can only run south.
And I am still laughing about the thread entitled Surprise Bitch! It's Boudica!
On our long run the other day, Boudica got tired after 30 miles and rode in the barkbox the rest of the way. The next morning, when I went out to the dog yard, she wouldn’t come out of her house. What’s up? I asked her. pic.twitter.com/JwEwV0TalQ
That's all for now, if you like dogs and progressive politics, you would do well to give Ms. Braverman a follow. And if you're looking for a quick start to your own obsession, someone more obsessed than I has created a page with links to all of Blair Braverman and her husband Quince Mountain's best Twitter threads, YOU'RE WELCOME.
Back when we bought our place, we were very excited to have a second bedroom to use as our home office, because we work from home and in our old place, the office was the dining room, which made it hard to host dinners. This place was advertised as a "two bedroom plus den" but the "den" is the size of a walk-in closet. We affectionately refer to it as The Nook, or, during the holidays when I put up Christmas decorations in there, The Elf Nook.
We had dreams of turning The Nook into a craft room or a reading room as well as a guest room. But we get a lot of deliveries due to Katr's game obsession various reasons and this house has minimal storage and no garage, so it was handy to store empty boxes in The Nook until we got around to taking them to the recycling depot.
Back when Drtr lived with us, The Nook was his room, so we went to the recycle depot a LOT more often. But we haven't had a guest in the room for a few months and this time of year, a lot of boxes arrive and today we realized that Drtr is coming back for a holiday visit soon and the room looks like this:
It's like a hoarder's dream, you guys. Little boxes. Big boxes. Random sheets of paper. Take out bags from various Skip The Dishes orders. Some medical supplies I'm holding for a friend. 500 little padded envelopes. Bags of shredded paper.
My favourite is the cable boxes in the hutch at the back. We just upgraded to Shaw Blue Curve but didn't want to get rid of the old school PVR just in case and it's smart we didn't because Blue Curve sucks VERY HARD and we might have to switch back. Don't talk to Katr about this, she is ready to lose her shit.
Anyway, if you're like me, there's little that's more satisfying than a before and after shot, so today, Katr and I got the shitty scissors and broke down all the boxes and took them to the recycle depot. Here's the "after" shot of the Elf Nook - eat your heart out, Marie Kondo!
After the recycle depot, we went to the Home Depot, where I took a shot of Santa checking out some hot unicorn ass.
As I've gotten older, I've become an increasingly delicate flower and let me tell you, it's a drag.
My latest physical complaint is that I have a repetitive stress injury in my right shoulder, presumably from using my right shoulder repetitively, and it BLOWS.
I've had it for so long now that I actually taught myself to use my computer mouse with my left hand and now at least once a quarter, Katr has to listen to my story about my grandfather and how he was ambidextrous and how clearly I have inherited his gift but only for mousing and using a knife at the dinner table.
I saw a physiotherapist years ago in Toronto, when the issue was more about my neck, and he gave me some helpful exercises to do, which I still occasionally do and my neck is still good. But the shoulder has flared up on and off for years. Generally, if I stretch regularly and don't spend too much time playing games on my devices, I could still write and work and knit and do yoga fatly, so I thought it was okay.
This summer, though, I somehow crossed into a shoulder danger zone that I didn't even know existed and one morning I woke up and was just super fucked. I couldn't raise my right arm above the shoulder. It was like someone had slid a hot knife in there and then left it. And I fuckin' couldn't take an ibuprofen because my stomach is still super special. Naturally, I used my left arm a lot more, to compensate and then THAT shoulder started to betray me too and I felt like I was in that episode of The Tick where some villain removes everyone's arms and it's very hard to accomplish things.
As The Tick says at the end of that episode, "When evil is afoot and you don't have any arms, you've gotta use your head." So I did a lot of gentle stretching and minimal typing and hot packs and after a few days, my basic shoulder functions returned.
"Dang," I thought, "I should probably find a physiotherapist so that I learn some strategies to avoid this happening again!"
And then I waited for four months until things got rilly bad again and today I finally went to see a physiotherapist.
I picked the physiotherapist practice based on two main criteria: I could walk there and they had consistently good reviews on Google. I hadn't seen a lot of pictures of the place, though, and when I got there, I was a little taken aback. The office is just one big room. There was a little reception area. There was a little exercise area where an elderly lady was being coached through some squats. And then there were "treatment rooms", which were just very small curtained off areas with a chair and a massage table in them, like you were going to get a massage in the emergency room.
The receptionist led me into a "treatment room" and handed me a gown. As I sat there, in my sassy open-backed gown, listening to an elderly gentleman moan through his ultrasound treatment through the curtain about a foot away from me, I felt the lack of privacy might be too much for spoiled Roro. My last physiotherapist had a whole office to himself, with doors on it and everything. "Oh shit," I thought, starting to panic, "AM I TOO BOURGEOIS FOR THIS PHYSIOTHERAPIST'S OFFICE?"
And then Gina walked in and everything became okay.
Gina didn't mess around. I told her what the deal was. She poked my shoulder and said "Whoa. Okay. Let's start with...THE MACHINES." I kinda thought we'd chat and come up with a plan but fuck that shit. Gina IMMEDIATELY had a whole series of things happening and I forgot that I was 12 inches away from touching Mr. Morello as I got ultrasounded and lasered and hot packed and vibrated and massaged and instructed in some exercises with an elastic band. It was serious business.
As I was leaving, exhausted and with the back of my head greasy with mineral oil because I didn't think to bring a hair tie, Gina printed out the exercises for me and showed me the one on the last page:
"See how, in the picture, this lady is standing on the band and putting her arms up in a V? Not you. You're going to hold the band and shrug your shoulders up and down."
She looked at me sternly and said: "You're not ready for the V."
She demonstrated the shrugging again, "We call this 'I', okay, so you're going to do 'I,I,I' - it's allll about you."
Apparently I'm not ready for the V, you guys. But Gina said maybe next week.
This year in Rosewood Cross, I decided to visit some of the more residential neighbourhoods. On the upper shelf is Rosecroft Lane, where the rich people live and send their children to private school.
This is Scrooge's nephew Fred's place. Fred is a sweet guy who always invites his jerky uncle to share the holidays and every year Scrooge is like "Fuck that shit" and Fred is secretly relieved, because he's pretty sure his uncle is the one who clogged up Fred's brand new flush toilet the one time he came over.
Outside Howard Row houses, Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds get coffee from a cart because their cook, Sophie, ran off with some ne'er do well a week ago and now they're fucked for hot beverages.
The coffee cart operator seems a little nervous and spills some coffee on the ground.
Mr. Reynolds jokes to Mrs. Reynolds that the coffee cart fellow's hands are shaking at her beauty.
And he's not far off.
Because the coffee cart operator is actually their cook Sophie, who left their house because she'd fallen for Mrs. Reynolds.
Sophie and Mrs. Reynolds used up all the parsnips in the pantry but in her heart, Sophie knew pillow princess Mrs. Reynolds would never leave her rich husband, who supports her jewelry-making business. Heartbroken, but determined, Sophie stole away in the night, borrowed her brother's clothes and started her own small business. What was Sophie thinking bringing the cart to back to this neighbourhood? Hoping to catch a glimpse of her beloved? Or is she just terrible with directions, like her brother Jolly Roger, who's just been discharged from the Navy?
The nuns who run the boarding school step outside for some al fresco singing and a hushed discussion about whether they should tell the Mother Superior about their polyamorous triad.
On the lower shelf is Sweet Street, where the Scrooge's long suffering employee Bob Crachit lives with his family.
In the front window, you can see Mrs. Crachit setting the table for Christmas dinner and yelling at Tiny Tim, who has used up the family's internet plan uploading ASMR videos of him sanding his crutches to YouTube. "How the fuck am I supposed to get that plum pudding recipe off Pinterest now, Tim?"
All kidding aside, this is a new piece in my collection and I am OBSESSED with it. The detail is AMAZING. The Crachits!!
Next door to the Crachits is Lomas Molasses and Treacle, which give Sweet Street its name.
As is her tradition, Mrs. Lomas is outside selling delicious figgy puddings to her neighbours. If you use the password - "Spotted Dick" - Mrs. Lomas will give you a pudding from the back of the booth that has weed in it.
Down the street from Lomas Molasses, for the right price, Billy Marsden will give you a Pickwick Club paper and the password for the weed pudding, so try not to look like a narc. Top hat guy - definitely a narc.
Potter and Yang's Tea Shop is a recent addition to Sweet Street, so you'd think the young lady out front would be giving out tea samples. But she's actually a local parfumier whom Potter and Yang have brought in to raise the tone.
"Oh, Mrs. Cartwright," says Julia the parfumier, "this scent is just heavenly on you."
She leans in.
"But your natural scent might be even more beguiling."
It's that magical time of year again, where I dig through our various cupboards and closets and make my careful selections for this year's vignettes. I wanted to use some buildings I haven't seen in awhile, PLUS I got a new one for Christmas last year that I had totally forgotten about, so in Wintersea (aka the top of the filing cabinet and the windowsill in our office), I decided to go with a nautical theme.
Here is the nautical part - the Queens Port Naval Academy! Established in 1734, this venerable institution has been turning out the finest seamen in the land and also, surprisingly, some of the tenderest lovers in the Royal Navy. Rear Admiral McKay and his "assistant", Sub Lieutenant Barnes, gives lectures and demonstrations on consent and ass play to cadets.
Today the Academy has received a visit from the Queen herself! That's how they refer to First Sea Lord and Admiral Rupert Delares, who wears his hat in a rakish fashion and has a fetish for the thick ropes.
The First Sea Lord, exhausted after letting loose some first sea loads, is also stopping off at the carriage works to see if he can get bouncier springs in his carriage, for when he has Jolly Roger with him.
Wintersea townsfolk are always impressed by a title, so Sir Edward Shaftsbury's out by the carriage works with the Ladies Auxiliary Brass Band, singing his heart out in tribute to the First Sea Lord, whom Sir Edward fancied at school. Will the First Sea Lord recognize him, 30 years later? Will Sir Edward's baritone echo through the village tonight for...other reasons?
Not everyone in Wintersea is a big mo, however, Seamen who prefer the company of women can often be found making time with Mrs. Lemon at the Three Lemons Inn up the road. She provides a friendly port to any wandering ship, with the stipulation that her husband gets to watch.
The place is called the Three Lemons Inn because the family name is Lemon but also because Mr. Lemon, or "Ol' Three Balls", as Mrs. Lemon calls him, has three balls.
Chief petty officers awaiting their visit with Mrs. Lemon can get in the mood over at Leeds' Oyster House, or shop for nautical gifts at the Octant Navigational Device shop upstairs. If you ask nicely, the proprietor, Mrs. Sexton, will show you into a back room where ... other devices are for sale. She'll give you a knowing look, but no judgment.
The Lemon children are often at loose ends when their folks are entertaining. Here they are by the village Christmas tree, just waiting it out, like when you're in first year and your roommate is getting laid and you most certainly are NOT.
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