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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays everyone! The end of this year has certainly been a stressful one, but I hope for more relaxing times in the coming year.

I'll be without email and internet until January 2nd, so if you happen to have a question about a pattern during that time, I'll get back to you then!

See you next year!

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Office Update

Well, meet my temporary home office. Do you like the swift? Adds a nice touch, right? This will be my work space until I can go back to the office on Monday.

Temporary office

Don't mind all the monitors, the big dinosaur on the right blew out a few weeks ago and needs to be carried down to be recycled. The new shiny one is now jealously hiding behind the mac.

As you can see, the mac was fine. Luckily, the water damage was confined to the floor and the sprinklers didn't go off overhead. There was a bunch of sweaters that were on my floor that got wet, but most of it wasn't too bad. Thank goodness for imac with no cpu towers!

It was still quite a mess when I got into work on Tuesday and wasn't much better yesterday. They had the fans and dehumidifiers out in full force. It smelled like beer. Probably not a good sign.

Wednesday was our holiday party and we still couldn't turn anything on. They kept us busy making birthday cards for our Nov/Dec/Jan b-day babies. Glue, jewels and markers. Designers are very easily entertained. After lunch we got out the scrabble board and played until it was time to go party.

Our holiday parties are always a surprise and always tons of fun. One year was a scavenger hunt, one year bowling and karaoke, next year party bus and salsa lessons. This year our only clue was it was going to be more mature, but fun. More mature doesn't usually sound very fun, so we were skeptical.

So gathered at 5pm and were given aprons. Hmm, are we cooking? Sure were! We went around the corner to Rustico Cooking, learned some cooking skills and made our own dinner. I chose the red snapper table (with a chef that will be on the next Top Chef!) and caught the tail end of the demonstration on the hazelnut chocolate cake. We also had shrimp and asparagus lasagna, garlic mashed potatoes, fillet mignon, the red snapper and the hazelnut chocolate cake with chocolate sauce and vanilla bean ice cream. The cake was absolutely heavenly. Favorite dish of the night by a mile. Everything else was pretty good too.

Monday, December 08, 2008

All Dry!

Meret was all dry this morning after spending a night on the radiator. There was no way I wasn't going to be wearing it today and I was going to make sure it was dry. The office is usually a bit nippy on Monday mornings and when I saw the temperature at 30 degrees, I knew it wouldn't be an exception.

Meret

Meret Back

I really liked the way it turned out and it has just the perfect amount of slouch. Too little slouch and it sticks up off your head. Too much slouch and it would look like it's going to swallow me whole.

And speaking of the office, apparently very soon after I left tonight, there was a fire where our server is kept and then the office flooded. The sprinklers were also activated and everything was covered in water. Hopefully not stinky, been sitting in the pipes for 10 years water.

Samples, printers, scanners, computers. Everything was apparently wet. One one hand, I'd love to get an updated mac, but loosing all of those sweater files would not be cool. I have a back up external hard drive that was hidden behind the computer and under a shelf, only loosing recent work not backed up is better than loosing everything I suppose. Here's hoping that when I show up at 9am tomorrow to help clean up, it's not as bad as I think.

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Stolen Moments

For the past few weeks, somehow I've been free of deadline knitting and have very much welcomed the little moments of knitting something for myself.

alligator scarf #2

In between all of the selfish projects, I've also completed another Alligator scarf for my sister's boss to give as a gift. This scarf is really a fun project and definitely wasn't any less fun the second time around. It's fun to see each section quickly become a complete alligator. I hope she wears it well!

Desert Sun shawl

I've been steadily working on Desert Sun, but it's had it's moments of frustration. A few weeks back I had dropped 4 stitches - 15 rows down. Argh! After a bit of breathing room, I picked it up last week and corrected the stitches. I then proceeded to drop 4 more stitches, but luckily saw them before they had the chance to go more than 3 rows down.

meret

After working on the shawl all day yesterday, I was inspired by another knitters finished Meret on Ravelry to start one of my own. I had some leftover Lanas Puras Melosa Worsted from the Urban wrap and cast on right away at 10:30pm. I lost total track of time and was surprised to see that several hours had gone by and it was 1am. I haven't gotten lost in my knitting like that in quite some time. It felt really good.

Today I finished it up and it's blocking as I write. I hope it will be dry by tomorrow, it's gotten pretty cold here again so I'd love to be able to take it out on the town.

I always used to shy away from quick projects. If it wasn't a sweater, I wasn't interested. But I have found that there is a certain sense of accomplishment in being able to complete something in a day or two. While I will probably never fall into the category of an instant gratification knitter, now I know it never hurts to change things up every once in awhile and you get a finished object instantly wearable out of the deal. Not bad!