The Dream or the Story

“I had a dream that I was Batgirl!” my five year old told my three year old. As the younger one marveled, I opened my mouth to inform my eldest child that she did not need to claim that she dreamed something in order to entertain her sister. I was going to say something like, “You may tell her a nice story if you want to; you don’t have to dream about it first (or say you dreamed it).”

But then my own voice echoed down to me from the past: “And then you jumped on the motorcycles, and zoomed away!” I could see the bemused look on my mother’s face, and hear my brothers’ excited cheers.

I was probably ten years old when I had the dream. I did actually have one, it wasn’t just something I pulled out of thin air. It was an action/adventure dream, starring myself and my brothers, but, like most dreams, there were strange parts and parts that didn’t make sense, and parts that wouldn’t have fit easily into the feature film pitch my brothers heard. I started telling them my real dream when we woke up, but by the time we were dressed and downstairs for breakfast, I’d begun to fill in the slow parts and invent new interesting scenes, purely for their amusement.

“I think your sister may just be telling you a story,” said my mother. I rushed to make sure my brothers knew that the tale really did have sleep-induced inspiration, but they were already off, pretending a scene from my “dream.”

I smiled while I watched my children play together. The story, whether it was dreamed or invented, was entertaining them, and they were having a great time.

Shake it Off

I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s. One thing I will never forget from my childhood (along with our telephone, rented from the phone company, and my pink bicycle with its huge banana seat) is exercise videos, and watching my mom jump, kick, and punch along with them. I never thought she was silly for wanting to exercise, but I couldn’t help but find amusement in the videos: the silly outfits, the ridiculous music, and the exercisers themselves—some videos seemed to be made for no other reason than to employ out of work dancers. I often wondered how anyone could keep up with the videos; the exercises seemed to be more for people in perfect shape than normal folks hoping to lose a few pounds. How could anyone hope to follow along?

This video has been floating around the last couple of days, and though I can tell it’s sped up to keep up with the song (I’m not a huge Taylor Swift fan, but it’s a catchy tune), I think the most hilarious thing about it (aside from the memories it brings to my mind) is the fact that in 1988 there was an Aerobics Championship.

Okay, so in the time it took me to write this, TS’ label yanked the video from youtube, but it’s still amusing. Here’s Buzzfeed’s solution to the big bad label ruining all our fun. Haters gonna hate.

Birthday List

It’s my birthday. Today I will:

Hang out with my kids

Play video games

High five my mom

Go out to dinner with my husband

Read

Crochet

Be amused by the number of people leaving birthday messages on my facebook wall who have not communicated with me since the last time they left a birthday message on my facebook wall

Be awesome (as usual)

The Great Pattern Search

“Hon, come here and look at this,” my mother said as we shopped at a children’s consignment sale last weekend. “What kind of stitch is this?” I looked at the blanket she was holding. There was no way I was going to pay the price they were asking for, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t try to figure out how it had been made.

“I don’t know,” I replied, poking at the pretty swooping shell shape of the pattern. It wasn’t like any pattern I’d seen before. Usually, crocheting shells means that there are tons of holes and your blanket is more a pretty thing to look at than an object that will keep you warm. But this pattern looked like it would actually be worth snuggling under. Warm and pretty? I looked at the price tag again.

Then I shrugged, thinking, If I wanted this, I could make it myself. Then we walked away from it, agreeing that we couldn’t identify the pattern, but that it was nice.

Later on in the week, I began to think about what kind of a pattern I will eventually use to finish the tiny owl blanket, and started to kick myself. “Why didn’t we take a picture of that blanket at the sale?” I asked my mom. I asked my Yarn Genius sister-in-law if she’d ever seen anything like it, explaining the pattern poorly and again lamenting that I hadn’t captured it on film to show her, or at least to compare it to other patterns when I went looking for it on the internet.

To the internet I went. I looked at several different shell-type patterns, and hiding in the middle of those was that cute cupcake pattern. That got me to wondering whether anyone had yet invented an owl pattern, but all I found were hats and adorable amigurumi owls and flat in-the-round type owls that I’ve already been making. One pattern was for a kid’s snuggly comfort item, with an amigurumi owl attached to a little blanket made with a granny stitch, its rows alternating blue and yellow.

Since the tiny owls are granny squares, I thought the blanket was pretty cute, and tried to follow the pattern. My only problem with it was that you can’t leave a loop of one color at the beginning of a row and pick it up at the other end. In the sample I made, I carried the yarn through each row, but if I actually decide to make it this way, I think I’ll use all one color, or cut the yarn, or have two skeins of the same color to use (one per side). Unless there’s something I’m missing on this pattern.

The reason I like it is that it’s got a little bit of room to see through, but not so much that you’re going to be losing warmth, just like the tiny owls. Not that I expect that this blanket will be the primary source of heat for anyone in the future, but if it needs to be used for that, it should be able to be something other than just a pretty thing laying around.

Mist in the Morning

My husband drives the same drive every day, back and forth to work: once in the morning, and once in the evening. It’s a lovely drive, but he doesn’t see it anymore. To him, it’s just the commute. Yeah, there are lovely rolling hills and beautiful river views, but he’s become immune to their breathtakingness.

I think we all get that way, sometimes.

This morning I rode along with my husband to work. We discussed normal, everyday things: future plans, what we were planning to give our children for Christmas. Except for when I interrupted everything with remarks about how gorgeous the scenery was. Mist was clinging to the ground, refusing to be chased away by the light of the rising sun. At one point we went down a hill and under a cloud lying low in the valley of a field. It was awesome. “Is it always like this?” I asked my husband as we pushed through a bank of cloud that obliterated the trees, clouds, and river. He shrugged. “Sometimes... A lot of the time, I guess.”

I wondered how often that sort of thing happens to me. Not that I’m often oblivious to lovely scenery, but it made me think about how often I might be failing to recognize and appreciate wonderful things in my life. I’m not the type of person who overexaggerates every disappointing moment that I experience, but I do have those times when I feel like stomping off to shout, “EVERYTHING IS THE WORST.”

But someone else “riding along” with me might be able to more easily point out the wonderful things in my life: my adorable children, my supportive parents, my awesome brothers (and their families), and my hilarious, hardworking husband. When I’m annoyed or stressed or frustrated, it’s easy for me to miss noticing that not every moment, not everything in my life is annoying or stress-inducing or frustrating. When I feel that way, I need to stop, look around, and notice the wonderful things that are always there, things that I might be too distracted or too used to having that I don’t actually see them.

My life will always have its hills and valleys, its good times and bad. But I hope that I never forget the beautiful things about it: the family I have been blessed with, friends who love me, and breathtaking views of mist in the morning.

Pottermore!

When I was a kid, we had a computer. You’d turn it on, and the black and green screen would light up, waiting to be commanded with a MS-DOS prompt. The only thing my brothers and I would use it for was to play Snake, the classic game which everyone has played, and Gorilla, which was an early version of Worms (a game you can still get on the PSN and play on your brand new PS4), only instead of different weapons all you had was an exploding banana―and you had to enter coordinates to make the projectile land as close to your opponent as possible.

We moved on to bigger and better things later, such as Windows 3.1, and later, Windows 95. But all this amazing technology came with the alarming (to my mother, anyway) idea of better graphics and better games. I don’t know what kind of games other kids had, but we had some totally awesome math games (“tessellate; tessellate”), a Mother Goose game where you had to reunite items you found with the nursery rhyme they matched, a totally awesome spelling game that required you to navigate a dangerous arctic scene to collect the letters to a word (in the correct order!) followed by a quick spelling test.

But some of the coolest “games” we had were the interactive story books. We only had a couple of them: The Tortoise and the Hare and a few Arthur books (that I was really too old for). It was just like sitting down to read a regular book, except that no matter how you manhandled the pages of a book, the pictures wouldn’t move or make noises. Clicking on certain things in a Living Book made them move, or squeak, or run away. It was always fun to poke around at the pictures to see what would happen, and if you got bored doing that, the words of the story were on every page, and you could click every single one. Even though I already knew how to read and thought the stories were kind of silly, discovering all the silly things you could do was really fun.

The Pottermore logo, which I found on the wiki.

J.K. Rowling made sure that her Harry Potter website Pottermore would be fun for fans of all ages. The interactive scenes from the books have things to click on and hidden items to collect, but it doesn’t read you the entire book from start to finish. Instead, you are encouraged to read the book while you enjoy Pottermore. It reminds me of those Living Books from when I was a kid, but the interactive scenes aren’t all there is to Pottermore!

As you follow Harry through the story, you get to experience things as he experiences them. Not only does it mean that you get to watch Hagrid knock down the door of the Hut on the Rock, but it also means that you get to visit Ollivander’s, and take a quiz that gets you your own wand. It means that you get to open Chocolate Frog cards with Ron on the Hogwarts Express and nervously wait your turn to get sorted (another quiz).

After that, you can start to earn points for your house. This is done by finding items in teh interactive scenes, brewing potions (which, as a Ravenclaw, I am particularly good at), and duelling (which I am horrible at).

Pottermore is a fan experience, not a social network. Sure, you have a friends list and can add whomever you like to it. But you can’t post pictures or even choose your own screen name. Since many Harry Potter fans are children, Rowling made sure that Pottermore would be a safe and courteous place for everyone. When you sign up, you get to choose from a short list of Potterish screen names; no one on Pottermore is “RudeDude420,” instead we all have names like “QuillSnitch,” “WildMoonstone,” and “BronzeMahogany.” And while there are plenty of places to write comments, anyone who is rude or vulgar is immediately “asked to leave.”

The Ravenclaw crest
(which I also found on the wiki)

I get an email from the website periodically, whenever more scenes are added or a major event is about to take place. Today I got a reminder that the House Cup will soon be awarded. Hufflepuff is leading Ravenclaw by 200,000 points, so I need to get to brewing some potions and finding some items (and avoiding the duelling club, where I would only give away points to my opponents).

Pottermore is just fun (whether or not I can help win the House Cup). It’s a safe, enjoyable environment where I can have a good time with fellow fans. And it reminds me of the awesome games I played as a kid.

If you like Harry Potter, or interactive story books, or both, I highly recommend Pottermore. Come get sorted into Ravenclaw and help us take the House Cup!

Yo

I’m not a huge fan of yogurt. I’ll eat it frozen (Ben & Jerry’s “Liz Lemon” is particularly good), but slurping it down for a snack is not my favorite thing. My daughters love it, and my husband buys it so he has something quick to grab in the morning on the way out the door. But there’s a strange phenomenon in our fridge with the yogurt: certain types seem to be tossed aside in favor of others.

“I don’t understand why he does this,” I told my mother over the phone as I grabbed a cast off flavor to favor my daughters with. “I know it’s probably just because he wants to try the different flavors, but he wants to eat the ones he likes first, but it just seems like he’s buying them all and then only eating the ones he knows are good.”

“Your father does that!” my mother replied. “I have to buy him peach yogurt. Only peach! And he just eats peach yogurt, all the time. I would think that the point of having different flavors is to try all of them; I’d want to.”

“He just knows what he likes,” I said. “It’s fun to try different things, but if you know you like something…” I fished around for a metaphor close to her heart. “It’s not like you make your steak different every time. You’re not like ‘ooh, I’ll cook this well done and see how that is.’”

“Hm, that’s true,” my mother admitted. She is a staunch defender of the rare-steak-or-no-steak agenda.

“if you’re not sure you’ll like it, it’s like you’re wasting your time.” I said. “If it’s gross, then you’re sitting there, wishing you’d eaten the thing you knew you liked.” My daughters chomped down on their Key Lime yogurt. “I win,” I concluded.

“Well, as long as it’s getting eaten,” my mother conceded defeat.

“As long as they like it,” I added. “And as long as I don’t have to eat it.”

Trilogy Bag Count: 30

I called my mother several times on the way home from my grandparents’ Christmas Eve festivities this year. First, it was because we’d forgotten one of the kids’ presents and to mention that there was a guy behind us who wouldn’t turn his brights off. Then, it was because the guy with the brights ended up being a county police officer who pulled us over for allegedly speeding and failing to stop at “several” stop signs. A little later I called my mom again when we got stopped for the second time to let her know why: apparently there had been a domestic dispute nearby and the police just happened to be on the lookout for a car like ours. At the end of the conversation, I added, “oh, I completely forgot my crochet hook! Will you look for it and just stick it in with the other stuff, and I’ll get it tomorrow?”

No crochet hook is exactly like another, even if they’re the same size. Different brands and different styles have different shapes, and if you change hooks halfway through a project, there is a noticeable difference, at least to my eye.

When I walked in to the kitchen at my parents’ house the next day, a green crochet hook was sitting on the table. “That’s not my crochet hook,” I said, pointing at it. “I was hoping she wouldn’t notice,” my mother murmured to my sister-in-law.

I took it home anyway; it’s not like I’m making a delicate shawl. It’s just good ol’ Bag the Bag. And honestly, I haven’t noticed much of a difference. Instead, I’m just glad to be working on it again.

It’s funny to think about how far I haven’t come in six months in this project. But when I consider how many other things I’ve made in that time period: Hufflescarff, an entire Ravenclaw Winter Set, the completion of Bag the Bag Part 2: the Electric Boogaloo, finally being done with that Crochet Cable Stocking, and Piano Scarf! (That looks like only five things, but considering that the Winter Set was four different pieces, I think I can safely state that I’m awesome.)

Ten bags went pretty quickly this time; I finished them off in one evening of crocheting while reading five different books at once. (See? Awesome.) Bag the Bag Part 3: the Sequel to the Sequel is getting taller. Soon I will be far enough along that I’ll be out of the “beginning” phase and well and truly into the “middle.” I’m not looking forward to the “end,” because that means handles. Even though I’m doing it differently this time, I’m still not excited about finishing up. Someday I will have made so many of these bags that I won’t even care about finishing the handles, or I’ll have come up with an awesome way of doing it so that I won’t need to whine or complain anymore.

And maybe someday, in the far distant future, I’ll remember to take them with me to use at the grocery store.

Trilogy Bag Count: 30

Tabletop: Say Anything

Every family has their own brand of humor. I noticed this over the Thanksgiving holiday when we got the chance to play our newly purchased table top game, Say Anything. My husband describes it as “Apples to Apples, only without a handful of useless cards that you just have to waste.”

Say Anything comes with eight whiteboards and pens, sixteen chips for bidding, and question cards that have five question options. The judge picks and asks a question, and the other players write down the answer they think the judge will choose. When everyone is finished writing, the answers are revealed and the judge locks in their vote. Then, the players place their chips on the answer(s) they think that the judge is most likely to pick. When the judge reveals what answer was chosen, the writer gets a point, and any other players who placed chips on the answer get a point as well.

I spent the entire time playing Say Anything in Colorado and New Mexico trailing behind everyone else in points. I think I tied for third place once, but that was only because second place was a three way tie. My husband’s family has their own brand of humor, and while my answers were funny, they weren’t as funny as my brother-in-law’s, at least, not to the other players.

When we got home, my parents brought along my nephew when they came over to hug my children, and my brother and sister-in-law came to pick up my nephew. And since it was dinner time, it turned into an impromptu party, so we got out Say Anything.

I won.

Since I’ve got my family’s style of humor, they were much more appreciative of my answers than my husband’s family was. We wrote a lot of the same answers, actually. For instance, my sister in law was judging the question: “What is an ostrich thinking when it sticks its head in the sand?” My husband won because his answer, “Ooh! Sand!” was the only one that was different: my mom, dad, brother and I all wrote an approximation of “No one can see me/I’m invisible.”

Say Anything is a really fun party game that you can have a good time playing even if you aren’t winning. I know from experience.

Evaporated

Every year, without fail, every coffee establishment ushers in “pumpkin spice” season as soon after “back-to-school” as possible. This doesn’t really make any difference to my family; I don’t drink coffee, and my husband prefers mochas. But the “pumpkin” portion of the season interests us greatly.

My husband loves pumpkin pie. I like it too, but it’s not the same kind of nostalgic “every holiday season since I was a kid” love. Sure, there was pumpkin pie around when I was little, but who wants pumpkin pie when my grandma’s homemade cherry pie was around? (The answer is: hardly anyone.)

As soon as it’s pumpkin pie season, I like to make sure my husband has one. It’s one of the things that I don’t mind him consuming as quickly as possible (the eggnog is another story).

I have a really great recipe that has the normal pumpkin pie spices, plus some Chinese Five Spice, no sugar (just sweetened condensed milk instead), and a TON of eggs. And my sister-in-law told me her pie crust secret, so now I am unstoppable. It’s awesome.

Grocery aisles are tricksy. The sweetened condensed milk is right next to the evaporated milk. And they’re packaged exactly the same way, only one says “sweetened condensed” on it and the other says “evaporated.” When we bought our first round of pumpkin pie ingredients for the year, we were so excited. I left the cans out on the counter for several days to build the anticipation. I didn’t realize the can said “evaporated milk” until I had already started dumping it into the pie filling.

I immediately called my mother (because who looks something up in a book or on the internet when you can get someone with experience in baking do it for you?). She found a recipe that used evaporated milk, and got the sugar measurement for me. I mixed everything together and put it in the oven, whining all the while. My husband had a piece that evening, and said it was good. I reasoned that this was because it was the first pie he’d had in close to a year, so the happiness of having the pie outweighed the possibly-not-so-great taste. He shrugged and cleaned his plate.

Another trip to the grocery store took us past an end cap that was stocked with everything to fulfill your pumpkin pie needs. I grabbed a can and made sure it said “Sweetened condensed” on it before putting it back and grabbing another can of pumpkin. Then I grabbed two cans of the milk, thinking I could make two more pies sometime this season with the stuff I had at home, and that maybe someday I’d use that other can of evaporated milk I’d bought for something else… even though I don’t really know what one uses evaporated milk for.

We returned home and I put away the groceries, folding up the plastic bags and putting them neatly away to be used in future craft projects. I put away the vegetable oil, the tea, and the whipped cream we’d bought to go with the pumpkin pie. Then I toted the cans back to the pantry and put the new can of pumpkin next to the old one, and placed the sweetened condensed milk on top of each of the cans of pumpkin… and then looked harder. The cans in my pantry both said “evaporated milk.”

I’ll get you, sneaky grocery stores… if it’s the last thing I doooo!

Thursday in History: Interesting... Dinner

The third day of October is the anniversary of lots of interesting things.

In 1863, President Lincoln declared that Thanksgiving would be celebrated annually (prior to that, “a Thanksgiving” had been declared by leaders whenever something happened that was worth having a party for, sort of like a Roman triumph but less ego-boosting).

October 3rd is a big day in the history of space exploration.  The first manufactured object to enter space was launched from Germany in 1942. Twenty years later Sigma 7 orbited the earth six times in nine hours, the longest manned flight at the time. The Space Shuttle Atlantis, which was retired from use in July 2011, had its first flight twenty eight years ago today, in 1985.

I can tell you exactly where I was standing on this day in 1995: at school in Elmwood, Nebraska, in the English classroom, watching the verdict of the O.J. Simpson trial. I can still remember Danae jumping off of the desk she’d been sitting on, yelling “WHAT?!” before the rest of the room erupted into a cacophony.

These things are all interesting and historically significant in their own way. But why write about Thanksgiving, space travel, or the criminal actions of former NFL stars when you could research the murky, often challenged world of bar food? Apparently (stories vary), on this day in history in 1964, Buffalo wings were “invented” at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York. Every member of the family who owned the place tells a different version of their creation, and these are all hotly contested by another man from the same city who claims that he is responsible for their creation years earlier.

Whatever their origins, I know one thing: Mom, Dad’s gonna want B-dubs for dinner tonight.

The Buzzards Are Not Chartreuse

I didn’t go to summer camp as a kid. My brothers weren’t Boy Scouts. We didn’t do this sort of thing not because we lived in a tiny town tucked away from civilization, but because our mom is awesome.

Our mom is an early childhood specialist, and because of this, she knows all the awesome camp songs that we would have learned at summer camp, plus has more interesting crafts and games to fill up the hours than we would have ever done at camp. There was never really any need to go.

But everyone has a need for cookies. Specifically, Girl Scout cookies. So one year, we started a local troop. We sold cookies. We ate cookies. Then, we decided that we would round up all the girls and head off to a Girl Scout day camp.

All of us had a really good time. I vaguely remember doing a craft of some kind, and piling into a small cabin and “claiming” beds that we would never sleep in, since we were going home that evening instead of spending the night.

The best thing that happened that day was that my mother and I learned a new camp song, one we had never heard before, about buzzards sitting on a dead tree. We thought it was hilarious, and sang it over and over forever. We still sing it, even though that day at day camp was pretty much the end of my career as a Girl Scout.

My husband was an ultra Boy Scout. He attended all the meetings, knows how to cook anything in a dutch oven over an open fire, and knows all the songs. One afternoon, we were all headed somewhere in the car, and my mom and I were singing silly songs in the back seat. We, of course, busted out our “Buzzards” song from Daisy Day Camp.

Non-chartreuse non-buzzards
from the Disney wiki

“Three. Chartreuse. Buzzards,” we sang, “Sitting!!! Onadeadtree.”

My husband interrupted immediately. “It’s ‘sharp toothed’!!” he insisted.

My mother and I looked at one another and admitted that “Sharp toothed buzzards” does make more sense than “Chartreuse buzzards” which allowed the segue in conversation to discuss why a buzzard would be chartreuse in the first place and exactly what color chartreuse is.

Chartreuse
Go look at how horrible the
color actually is on wikipedia

For years I was convinced that it was a dark green or navy color, based solely on the normal coloring of buzzards. Only, I had never encountered a buzzard before, and had assumed that they were similar to vultures, and my only exposure to vultures was Disney’s The Jungle Book.

My tiny mind would never have been able to process the fact that chartreuse was, in fact, halfway between green and yellow and had been named for a type of alcohol made in France. Crayola’s “green yellow” and “yellow green” were never on my top 10 list of favorite crayons, and even now, I want to look away when I see anything prominently chartreuse colored.

We love our song, and will still sing it the way we originally misheard it, no matter how many times my husband cringes and corrects us, even though the buzzards are not chartreuse.

MEMORIAL Day

Today is a day to stop and remember all those who have gone before us. To remember their lives and how they lived them, and to thank them for the impact they had on us.

It’s also a wonderful day to rest and think about the great things you have in your life. Like family, friends, and a newly varnished dining room floor.

If you work hard every other day of the year, it’s nice to have a break once in a while to enjoy life and maybe have a nap.

Enjoy today. Go for a walk. Take a nap. And remember that there are many people who make sure that you can live the way you do, and be thankful for them.

Bag Count: 86

Bag the Bag is still coming along... slowly. The progress is less easy to see now, since I’ve stopped working on the bag part and am now focusing on the handles.

To make the handles stronger, I had planned on putting one handle on the outside of the bag and one on the inside, and then stitching them together. It’s probably overly complicated, but I hope it will keep the handle from randomly splitting and spilling all the stuff I’ve purchased all over the parking lot.

The reason it’s going so slowly is that I’m out of bags (again). It takes about seven bags to make the handle long enough, so I used up my “breezefall” of last week pretty quickly. I’ve also taken to using any white and blue bag that seems compatible. I already stuck one generic white bag with blue writing in the middle of the bag, and one white Hy Vee bag with blue and black writing on one of the inside handles. The blue writing on the white Culver’s bag we got yesterday at lunch will work okay, and it’s nice and big, so it should hopefully cover some extra ground.

Bag the Bag Part 2: The Electric Boogaloo, on the other hand, is zooming along. Since I’m deficient on materials for Bag the Bag and materials for Part 2: The Electric Boogaloo are abundant, I can work on it as much as I want. And my awesome mother is always looking out for interesting bags for me to use, so I’ll never run out of supplies for it.

Bonus: Bag the Bag Part 2: The Electric Boogaloo Bag Count: 34

Bag Count: 86

Bag the Bag

Bag Count: 9

Bag Count: 17

Bag Count: 30

Bag Count: 35

Bag Count: 44 

Bag Count: 50 

Bag Count: 57 

Bag Count: 63 

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Bag Count: 87 

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Bag Count: 94 

Bag Count: THE END