Status report

Things of which I am in the middle:


The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford (p. 181 of 214)



Coraline, by Neil Gaiman (p. 81 of 162)



Women in Comedy Vanity Fair (p. 184 of 254)*



Tangled Yoke Cardigan (Body half done; sleeves and scary cabled yoke still to knit)



The Sisterhood of the Traveling Sock (#2)



Cloth napkins, two sets of four (for undisclosed recipient)



30 Rock spec script (for Disney fellowship)



Scrabulous games (5)**



Dinner.




*Question: "Who Says Women Aren't Funny?"
Answer: VF's own Christopher Hitchens, aka "Doctor Giggles"

**Teri, it's your turn.

Good choice

I almost skipped rowing last night. The drive home from work had been drizzly, and I had half a review of Mutiny on the Bounty to write, and I'd just gotten two new Netflix in the mail, and this Poached Eggs Over Rice recipe called to me, with its long-cooking brown riciness, and I've gotten sucked into Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love and must spend a certain amount of time with it each day. I am nothing if not gifted with the excuses.

I'm so glad I went. In rowing, there are three basic categories of hard workout. There's the "just start rowing and I'll tell you when to stop, unless you keel over first" endurance row, and there are the sets of sprints that leave your lungs seared and your mouth tasting faintly of metal (also known as "Saturday"). And then there's the heavy-lifting row, which is my favorite kind of row: slow and heavy and all about muscle mass. We row by pairs, so that the boat is heavy and sluggish. We row with one arm tucked behind our backs to build our upper-body strength. We practice pushing as hard as we can and using the momentum to creep back up and do it again. It's all about straight backs at the catch and getting that extra bit of pull with the arms at the release, and it can be transformative for a crew: suddenly everybody settles their weight back at the same time, and the THUNK of the oars feathering gets loud and urgent, and the coxswain says he can see the bow rise out of the water with each stroke. It's the kind of row that looks easy from the shore but leaves everyone sore the next day. Sore, but happy.

Which is way better than The Notebook any day.

You knooooow what I like

Sometimes, I love my Tivo. Currently collected in my "Tivo Suggestions" folder:

- Top Ten Hawaiian Beaches

- Lionheart (starring Jean-Claude Van Damme; "A French Foreign Legion deserter enters a U.S. arena of bare-knuckle brawls run by a woman")

- Countdown with Keith Olbermann, which it records every day and which I delete every day, because my attention span only has eyes for Jon Stewart

- Steak Paradise!

It's like it RECORDS my SOUL.

12 of 12: March

Ta-da! 12 of 12. Twelve pictures, every twelfth.


7:30 - Getting up. That shadow wouldn't go away; I like to think of it as the shadow of all the good things getting ready to happen today.


7:57 - All hail the Converse low-top! Cute, comfortable, goes with everything, and makes you feel a little like Tina Fey. In all, the perfect shoe. Unless it rains. (Sorry, but it's true.)



8:25 - The light at Lake Park and Lakeshore, only slightly less likely than the light at Harrison and W. 27th to be voted Most Likely to Make You Late For Everything.



9:10 - Looking for reprint errors on a poster about math in ancient Babylon. Fractions in cuneiform! Yessssss!



9:11 - My mission for today (besides, uh, work): to listen to all the random, basically unfamiliar music on my iTunes, from Age Pryor and the Marvellous Medicine (catchy and cute) to Vampire Weekend (awesome simply for having a song about the Oxford comma, though they're actually kind of snotty about it, but I like to think they'll grow up to see the error of their ways). Check.



2:40 - Out for an afternoon walk. Everyone I know is a little obsessed with these people's garden.



5:50 - Writing at the cafe down the street from my apartment. Iced tea, the White Stripes, and a change of scenery work wonders.



6:55 - In the window of a funny little art gallery on the walk home from Rooz. Look how excited they are! Can you blame them? I love it.



6:56 - Spring is coming, or it's here, or it'll be here soon, depending on the day.



7:02 - In the stairwell of my building. I love this window.



7:35 - Apparently spinach salad is both nutritious and delicious, especially when paired with tomatoes, chickpeas, and (inadvertent) soft-boiled eggs. Who knew? My fake-news boyfriend agrees.



8:40 - Pounding out a quick DVD review of Eagle vs. Shark. Reward: pudding.

Next: April!

Spring cleaning

Ah, spring. That glorious time when a young man's fancy turns to love. Also, less famously, the time when a young blogger's fancy turns to discontent with her layout.

What I've got here--no longer the pink blog!--is the product of a couple of days of tinkering with Blogger's canned layouts, and even a foray into Wordpress, but this whole journey of discovery has led me to a new conclusion: the only way I'm going to get my perfect blog is to design it myself, and the only way to design it myself is to learn CSS. (Also? There must be a lot of ugly blogs on the internets. I'm just saying.)

So I'm going to do it--pick up a library book and maybe an online tutorial or two, and see if I can't get this place looking the way I'd like it to look. In the mean time, please don't mind the mess, and possibly any weird mid-tinker layouts that might surface while I learn. (I'm trying not to, myself.)

It really is a place where dreams come true!

To be filed under "Things I Wish I'd Thought of First" and "People I Want to be Friends With":

The Dairi Burger

GENIUS.

Things I've Enjoyed This Weekend:

- Luke and Dave interrupting my spinsterish ways by coaxing me out of the house for Thai food and a rousing discussion of inventions and million-dollar schemes, a la Perfect Strangers

- Meeting up with long-lost Michigander friend Pei-Lan for sunny Saturday brunch of surprisingly delicious eggs Blackstone (still overcoming a bad poached-egg experience)

- No Country for Old Men, which, believe it or not, really was the best movie of 2007

- Button-down shirts in cute, springy fabrics(!) and proper sizes(!!) at the Gap

- Fake-interviewing Javier Bardem

- East of Eden

- Communion and a Josh McPaul sermon

- The return of cousin James from Bar Exam Land, silly mustache and all

- Church book sale (Added to living-room used-book pile: All the Pretty Horses, My Antonia, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Theft)

Good times. Good times.