As I think I blogged a few weeks ago, they got rid of my direct superior boss, the one in my office. She had stopped talking to me, really, about the time I became a real employee, which was weird. Anyway, that is not what is important. My new direct superior works remotely and lives in Las Vegas. She seems like one of the saner people in the organization, and I like her, and don't mind having a relationship with a boss that is mostly over the phone or by email with a few visits when she shows up in Boston. She is competant and nice and is good at thinking in organized ways, and never winds up trying to translate tech-speak into normal English, with English being a second language.

However, she is due to pop out a baby on Monday, and apparently she has a doctor's appointment on Tuesday to induce if there is no baby yet. So she will then be out until the end of September. I have received rather haphazard training, and there's new software to do important stuff that they are working hard to get me using this summer, and I have to learn how to use it before Friday. It's more than a little intimidating. We have consultants who are totally happy to assist me as necessary, but it has been decided that 1 hour of their time is worth 5 hours of mine. We spent this afternoon with me remotely watching her do things on her computer teaching me how to do it. She was actually remotely accessing a computer in my office, while I was remotely watching her computer in Las Vegas, which we both found to be amusing.

Talking to our DOO today, she was like "well, you won't have Devra after Monday." And I said "well, yes, I knew that, but it was going to happen anyway, because I am out next week too." She sort of shuddered, and said she might have to come up with a reason to not come into work herself. It's going to be mad.

Whoa, I guess I just broke my "don't blog about work" rule again. Whoops.

Also, unrelated to my boss living in Las Vegas, I was able to get out of doing a telethon yesterday, but said I'd enter all the updates people learned about on the phone. So a few people wrote down lists to hand me aftewards, but most people sent me every change as they got them. I learned at the end of the day that they had been sending them to everyone. Actually, when I say everyone, I'm not counting the admin assistants, because they are sane and normal and not computer phobic and made the changes as they got them, because they figured it would be more work to send me an email. _

Yesterday, I saw people with "Impeach the British Puppet" signs with Obama's face on them. They were handing out flyers. I...looked the other way and turned my iPod up louder. I don't know which side the people who want to impeach Obama because of the BP thing are on. They seem like they are probably environmental people, and my default is to assume that I am on the same side as environmental activists. On the other hand, I like Obama and I don't think it's his fault the oil rig exploded. Considering they were activists with signs, they probably feel very strongly (possibly irrationally) about this, and I feel kind of incoherant about it, so despite feeling cowardly about it, not engaging was probably best for me. _

Because I inspired this to be posted elsewhere, and it is my new favorite strange street art, I am posting it here. If this works, I have never done this before.

_

Bill Nighy seems to be in just about everything these days, and I'm sure I've never seen him young. Has he just made it in America in the past tennish years? _

So, my crazy boss, who was always incapable of communicating effectively with anyone is no longer with my organization. I know report to her boss, in Las Vegas, for database stuff, and my boss in the office is the DOO. The woman in Las Vegas is also due to have a baby in like two weeks, and is planning a three month maternity leave, so I am getting sort of crash database courses, as well as being introduced to our database consultant who knows what is going on. So, um...yes? _

Yesterday, I boiled water and vinegar in my electric kettle to try to generally clean the residue up off the bottom. It worked wonders. The vinegar steam was quite a lot to handle aftewards, the steam would open my sinuses and help clear them (smoke, dust, pollen, no wonder I woke up with a sinus infection after a day like yesterday), and then the vinegar would hit my nostrils. But, my kettle is clean. I hope I have sufficiently rinsed out the vinegar. _

I am on such a ridiculous edge. My room looks like a tornado hit it, it's covered in boxes and and piles of trash dirty clothes and and books and things like the giant plastic crate of yarn that lives under my bed has been pulled back out so I can put stuff back in it. I haven't had any packing tape. I have been promised use of the moving truck to get my bed and what boxes I have ready into storage tonight, before it gets loaded with all of my parents' stuff and sent off to Vermont. At which point, I guess, I will rent a Zip Car to get my remaining boxes to my storage unit. I find this all so totally overwhelming that I just keep bursting into tears. My mom thought she'd be unable to do any boxes of stuff to storage tonight and I just burst into hysterical tears when she told me. I cried again this morning, just looking at this disaster of a room -- I had boxes all over the place so that it was almost impossible to get to my clean clothes (they were just boxes, I moved them out of the way. Easy peasy, but still a reminder of my disaster room.)

I have sorted through two ridiculous boxes of soaps and shampoos and lotions and things. I have gotten rid of a lot. The box of soaps and shampoos and things got absurd, and so rather than looking through it, I would just buy more (great solution! or not...). When I have a new place, I'm going to get neat little boxes and label them and keep them in a closet and have them organized and not buy anymore lotion for a very long time.

I should also stop buying yarn. Maybe instead of trying to make unrealistic goals like "I will stop buying yarn until I have knit up every nice yarn that I have been hoarding" I should make slightly more realistic goals like "For every new purchased project, make something out of stash yarn" or even "don't cast on anything new until you have finished something." (There are things in my head that I really want to make, that I have yarn picked out for I just don't own it yet.) _

Vanilla extract update: while trying to find my Sigg water bottle, I was going through the liquor cabinet and encountered what had once been a vodka bottle full of vanilla extract. I guess I can hold off another few months be _

We used up my first batch of vanilla extract, and now I am left with some of the second, not as strong batch. I'm going to make more, and this time rather than just using a handle of vodka (seriously, I made a lot of vanilla extract) and all the same kind of beans, I think I am going to mix it up. Mexican and Tahitian and Madagascar, in different jars, to see how different they taste. Maybe I will try doing some with bourbon instead of vodka (although I think you're really supposed to just use vodka).

But there is probably something seriously wrong with me that while packing last night I looked at a half full large former Aboslut bottle and thought "should start making more vanilla, I guess." _

Decades ago (I don't even know how long ago), my grandmother designed some godawful chairs. She went to a wrought iron gate maker and had him make them for her. Neither of them had ever done furniture, and it shows (the matching tabel is nice and pretty, though). The chairs are at stiff right angels, impossible to lean in, but what makes them particularly bad is rather than being flat along the bottom (remember, stiff right angels, all the lines are straight), there is a lip around the seat part, which jabs uncomfortably into your legs whenever you sit. My mom has had these chairs for as long as I can remember (probably not when we lived in Texas, but I only have a very few memories from before we moved to PA, which was just before I turned three (also a funny story, apparently I went up to my dad and said "day-edee, ah'm fixin' to turn <i>thray!</i>" And my mom turned to him and said "No child of mine is going to talk like that. We're moving.")), they were probably in my grandparents farm house before we moved in anyway. Today, my stepdad threw them away. Wrought iron, remember. We have gone through other chairs, but these horrid things never broke or anything, except I think for the time one of my stepbrother's threw a party like he was in a teenage comedy and someone threw one off the porch. He got 35 cents from the junk metal place.

I think it's probably best that we got rid of them while my grandmother was still alive; it probably would be too hard to do after she passes away. (I had always assumed we would get rid of them after she passed away, because she is the sort of person who would ask about them.) _

Also, we threw rice. I've never thrown rice at a wedding before; I've blown bubbles, and lit sparklers. The rice was actually the next morning as they left brunch at her parents' house. _

I am now back from my trip to Florida. I was there for the wedding of my oldest friend; I have a few memories from before I met Lyndsay, but it was all before either of us turned three. She and her sister were our almost-sisters, Jamie and I both half joke that we always wished that we wanted to make a permanent trade. I met her husband for the first time the day before the wedding, they met while living in London, and now live in Brighton, and I haven't been able to afford to go to the UK in years. The wedding was lovely, with a short intensely personal non-religious ceremony officiated by her older half brother. We ate so much food all weekend, I am still a little stuffed and sick (although that could have been the Burger King breakfast sandwich I had for breakfast).

And now, since I wasn't entirely sure when the plane would get in and when we would get out of the airport and whatnot and took a full day off work instead of the half day that it turns out was all I needed, I am going to really start packing for my upcoming move. Which terrifies me beyond belief. _

Things I Have Made

At some point, I lost the charger to my digital camera. I tried buying a new one online for very little money, and it didn't work, but they also didn't seem to take returns, so...This afternoon I went over to Best Buy to get a new one, and was assured that if it didn't work, they would take it back. I was really not looking forward to replacing my camera, which works fine, and 7.2 megapixels really is plenty for me. Also, going to a wedding in Florida this weekend, so having a functional camera is a plus. (Yay Florida! Yay beach!) And I have also decided that it is necessary to show off things I have made.

From Knitted Objects

This is not actually made, it is still a Work in Progress. This is my Morningstar, which has caused great headaches and I had to rip out to the beginning twice, which means I've cast on three times, and I had a hole that I stupidly thought "maybe if I keep knitting I won't notice" and then I sat there and tinked back like 20 rows. Of nubb-y lace.

From Knitted Objects

I do love this, and I'm looking forward to being able to wear it for real. The goal is that it will have sleeves and that it will be a full length cardigan. I am halfway through my first skein of yarn of two. I think I should be able to do it. If I can't, um...not quite sure what I will do, because I bought two of five hand painted skeins from the talented Posh Yarn people in Wales.

From Knitted Objects

Also, I love the buttons I am going to use with it. I think they are awesome. So shiny and pretty. You can also admire the insane detail. Why did I think this was a good idea?
It's being knit top down (obviously) in one piece (again), the top is actually loose, so I can join it together easily. It's a rather severely modified version of the Laminaria, modified so much I basically used two of her stitch things (the 3 to 3 star and the 1 to 3 increase). Beyond that, I have no notes. Someone asked me how many stitches I have in a row last night, and I actually have no idea. I don't want to know either, it is so many I'm sure I would go crazy knowing.
Also, jewelry. I wear these earrings all the time. They are so pretty and shiny. They are fairly mono-chromatic/Christmas, but I have purple crystals that I'll be turning into earrings very soon (yay!).

From Jewelery

And necklaces, with matching earrings.

From Jewelery

From Jewelery

So, beyond things like cookies, and experimental things like pineapple upside down cake and pear cardamom sorbet (both delicious), this is what I have made in the past few months. _

I move in two weeks. Our dog Ellie spent the first 11 months at this house refusing to go into the back yard to do her business. And now, this morning, she's happy to go into the back yard. Idiot dog. (She is going to love her new house in Vermont.) (I just wish I knew where I will be living.) _

Things I am counting down to:

Lyndsay's wedding next Saturday. Yay! They wouldn't let anyone non-family come to their beta-wedding (she lost her job in London, and her fiancee is a British Citizen, so they went to City Hall in New York and got married), which disappointed me, but their real wedding is in Florida, and I am going. Lyndsay has been my best friend since before I was 3; she and her sister are more like my second sisters than just best friends.

Beach in a little more than a month! Yay beach! We have rented again what we are thinking of as "our" beach house for a week, not our typical last week of June leading up to the 4th of July, because it was booked, but the week before (21-27). I love the warm water and sand and the private beach access. I love the week of no responsibilities besides sunscreen and food. _

I think I just like food that you wrap up, fresh rolls (dinner tonight), burritos, crepes. Yum.

Fresh rolls are awesome. _

We have decided what desserts all our dogs would be. This means little to people outside the family, I'm sure, but it amused me.

Ben: delicate, precious, and exotic, but more solid than he seems, is a Baked Alaska
Ellie: sweet and bitter, hard to take in large doses, Boca Negra, the nearly flourless deeply chocolate bourbon cake from Julia Child
Nattie: Ellie's sweet best friend, loving and easy to be around, the white chocolate bourbon cream that goes with the Boca Negra
Madeliene: so sweet it's a little unbelievable, and super small and dense, deep fried oreos
Sam: sweet and soft, less dense and small than his sister, deep fried cheesecake

(Mmm. Deep fried oreos.) _

What is wrong with me that I hate most of the recent Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners? (I say most because I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I'm enjoying Middlesex more than most others.) Seriously. I have now read like like the last ten, and for the most part I have hated them all, for about the same reason of feeling like they are trying to hard to be deep and important and old fashioned, when they come off as pretentious modern garbage.

Also, I am so over the Civil War. I was over it with the first book on the Civil War. I don't think Tinkers is about the Civil War, but the author did apparently decide that sticking periods at the end of nouns is poetic or a good way to add emphasis. Bad book bad. (Hey, I did it, too, but it's less annoying and weird in a blog than it is in a published novel.) _

Knitting ideas are swarming in my head, but I have come up with an idea for a lacy cardigan of peacock feathers (The Scarlet Peacock, says the girl who recently listened to Francis McDormand read Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), with Mata Hari (scroll down, or search).

Probably immensely complicated, not the least of which is actually getting the two skeins of Mata Hari that I will probably need.

Ideas, ideas. Red is Engels color. She wasn't going to get a sweater, but the yarn is so pretty.

  _

Boston Groupon today is for a Whale Watch. Anyone in the Boston area want to go whale watching this summer? _