Ms. Payton's Lion

Months and months ago, our good friends Andy and Jennie "Carpet Angels" Paulsen decided they were going to have a baby. I, being a good friend and a good knitter, naturally wanted to make a Birth Day gift for the little one. I heard that Jennie wanted a lion. Cool, right? But of course! One lion, coming up! I bet I'd even have my choice of a very natural, lifelike pose, or more of a fun cartoony option, right? Patterns galore for something as awesome as a lion!

Aw, hells no. There are no lion patterns on all of the intarwebs. Okay, there was one vintage one, but it had the all-too-common disease of Ugly Vintage Knitting Pattern. I don't know what they were thinking back then, other than that knitted clothes may have been more of a necessity than now, so toys were low on the priority list.

At any rate, I found an adorable pattern for a kitty, and decided it couldn't be all that hard to make a kitty into a lion. It even came with a dress pattern! Which in the interest of Gender Equality and Better Gift Giving, I decided to do regardless of the eventual boy/girl situation.

The Paulsen's baby girl, Payton, was born while we were in Ecuador, and when we got back, I finished up the lion and his dress (yeah, a boy lion, and his dress -- grow up and let him be) and sent him off to the verdant fields of Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Jennie reports that Payton loves little Lionel (named by Andy) and his beautiful blue tunic (also named by Andy). Huzzah for every baby getting one toy that's life-size at birth!

Easter chicks

I made these for my niece and nephew for Easter, and am mighty pleased with how the showcase photos came out. I wonder how long these tiny eggs lasted before being lost forever under my sister-in-law's refrigerator.

Happy 5th Birthday, Funundrum!

Five years ago today, I was wedged into a tiny couch in TinyHouse(tm) by the beach in San Diego. I thought it would be fun to have a blog to write all the ridiculous things that popped into my head during my day job, which was to write ridiculous websites for plastic surgeons and lawyers. It was fun. It was fun all the way through:

5 adventures in Latin America

2 interstate moves

2 new jobs

1 engagement

1 wedding

some guy's entire MBA program

2 wedding anniversaries

at least 4 new hobbies, 2 of which have stuck

1 crazy HypnoDog

1 evil squirrel

more bad copy than you can shake a stick at

And it's still fun. I may go through periods where it feels like a chore, but all I really want is to write something that makes me giggle when I read it back. I hope I've made you giggle a couple times too, because I'm going to keep doing it the best I can. Five years is a long time in Internet Years. I'm kind of proud of that.

Funundrum -- the circus gets on the crazy train.

Wow, so five years (!) down the line, the world is finally starting to sit up and take notice of the finest non-word ever created. I was googling "funundrum" one day (who doesn't?), and...

...this came up. What. The hell. Here's what I get for not copyrighting the Finest Non-Word Ever Created (tm). <-- Maybe it's not too late to start. So, yeah. The biggest circus in America, not counting Congress, has up and usurped my blog name for the purposes of shilling their little dog-and-pony-and-sweaty-clown show*. My favorite part is how my browser shows two tabs, both alike in dignity, with the same name but incredibly different outcomes.

I'm putting this out there, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Wait, no. First of all, you win today's Bad Copy of the Day award. Who gets off using "and" and "&" in the same name? Shame on you. Okay, so now I'm putting this out there. I loved the circus as a kid. I loved just about all of it, including the motorcycle guy inside the big steel cage, which doesn't make much sense, looking back on it. I'd still like to love the circus. I'm just finding it a little hard, on account of y'all taking off with the Funundrum thing without so much as a howd'yedo. So maybe someone in marketing is reading this, as they undoubtedly first did when they did the initial search on Funundrum. If you are, marketing people, the circus is coming to Chicago in November. I'd love to be there if you could arrange it. I'd review it for the blog and everything. I bet, if you've got a decent PR guy, you could even get some sort of media exposure out of it. Just putting it out there, with this link: Funundrum does Funundrum.

Update upon re-reading this post: Holy crap, that tiger is actually riding the crazy train.

*Let me tell you my Sweaty Clown story. When I was about four, my parents took me to the circus, which I always loved, so thanks mom and dad. But that time, they decided it would be fun and cool and a great childhood memory if they volunteered me to go out there and sit on the clown fire truck as it drove around under those hot lights in the third ring. I was pretty excited until I actually got up there. Once I was squinting up into the face of the clown sitting next to me, I realized he was sweaty from jumping over barrels in the cowboy clown skit, further overheated inside his polyester costume due to the clown car incident, and probably already well looking forward to his first post-show beer of the evening. I'm not saying that I wasn't treated with kindness and respect, because I was, but I just want to go on record that Sweaty Clown Fire Truck is by far the best method for terrifying an otherwise laid-back four-year-old.

Mystery Envelope Thrilling Conclusion! AAAAHHH REALLY THIS TIME

But first, the thrilling conclusion of my butter-intensive German chocolate cake.

Now, on to the letter:

Hello Elizabeth! Thank you so much for returning the notecard you found in Knitting without Tears. I checked the book out a few months ago (January maybe?). The card was a thank you note to my aunt for the Christmas gift she sent to my young son. And you're right...at the time I was racking my brain trying to remember where I put that card. After about a week of searching high and low, I just wrote another one. Still don't remember, but I think I must have put it in the book intending to look up my aunt's address while I was at work.

Mystery solved! And what a great story to tell.

BTW - I am a knitter, still consider myself a beginner. I love Elizabeth Zimmerman's writing. I think she is so funny and has been so helpful with little tips here and there. I'm on Ravelry (do you know about this website?) and have a couple of finished projects posted if you are interested in looking. [username]. If you don't know about Ravelry.com, you should check it out. It's an online knitting community, very addictive and so inspiring to see others' work.

Thank you again.

Best,
[awesome mystery knitter's name that starts with G]

So, yeah! Very, very cool. And oh my god! I just looked her up on Ravelry (of which I am, of course, already a devoted member), and her favorite color is green and she seems cool. But then again, all knitters are cool. Have you ever met a mean knitter? I mean, aside from people who are mean because they're old which really means that they've been mean all their lives but feel like they can show it more now that they're old. They probably didn't knit when they were younger anyway, they probably learned just to spite someone.

What do I do? I haven't written her back or anything, because it seems weird. Yay for the city!

Seen in the city

We were downtown yesterday, outside the historical and ridiculously sumptuous Palmer House hotel, when we stumbled upon a group of musicians setting the scene for this resplendent groom, waiting to ride up to the front on his horse. In my mind, he took that thing right into the main lobby. Not sure how a horse gets through revolving doors, but they can train them pretty well these days.

There's a fire-gutted building on my street that's (finally) getting rebuilt. I guess the Chicago Iron Workers Local 1 got burned somehow in the process, because they're out picketing today. Complete with a huge inflated rat rearing out of a pickup truck. Where did they get such a thing? Union supply shop, or a regular inflated-stuff store? If the latter, who else might need a huge rat? It's not exactly gonna sell a lot of used cars, you know? Maybe an exterminator. . . My point is this: that's a damn robust union you've got there, with some good organization to boot. Good luck lads, I hope you're able to squeeze triple time out of the general contractor, or whatever it is you're angry about.

I was on the train this morning, watching a woman learn the hard way not to read the end of "The Great Gatsby" in public.

Mystery Envelope Thrilling Conclusion! AAAAHHH

Oh my god oh my god oh my god! My mystery envelope owner WROTE ME BACK! This is quite possibly the most Only Happens In A Movie thing that has ever happened to me. Now if I find out that this person is living in the past, or in another dimension, or whatever the setup was in that shitty Sandra Bullock movie, I'll be equal parts amazed and disappointed in the pedestrian nature of the cosmos. I mean, come on, email from the past? Stay out of it, Keanu Reeves.*

As I am in the middle of making a labor-intensive butter sauce for a German chocolate cake, I will tell you what it said in another post.

*If you watch The Soup (on E! at 9pm Fridays), you just got done saying, "Stay out of it, Nick Lachey!" If you don't watch The Soup, you should.

Mystery envelope update

I've just packaged up the card I found at the library last Saturday. I included the unopened envelope, as well as a hand-written letter:

Dear G.,

I was in the downtown branch of the public library this weekend browsing the knitting books, and this card fell out of "Knitting Without Tears." I don't know how long it's been in there, but if you're anything like me (and you must be a little like me, if you're a knitter), it drove you crazy that you lost that card to Mary before you got to mail it. Now you know where it went! Thanks for letting me carry around a little bit of a mystery for a few days.

[my name and email address]
(in case you want to let me know what was in there... or not. Just in case.)

That last bit felt so much like writing to a pen-pal for the first time, all sweaty palms and "please write me back, I'll be ever so glad! Please tell me about where you live and whether you have any pets!" Kind of goobery. Can't help it. This is fun. Updates as they come. If they ever do. This may very well be the last I see of my mystery card.

Today on the train: how is it that I was home sick all day yesterday, and it's only just now, on a massively crowded train, that I have an eye-watering urge to cough? Doesn't this cold know that the key to getting spread around is flying under the radar, rather than alerting all the meatbags around me what's up?

I might be a stalker!

On Saturday, Chris and I went to the massive main library in Chicago, downtown in the Loop. We had to pay some fines give back to our community, then found ourselves browsing for more books to take home. Chris was lost somewhere in the music section, which is conveniently on the same floor as the knitting books. As I was leafing through "Knitting Without Tears," a small sealed envelope fell out.

*DAH DAH DAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!* <-- That there is supposed to be thrilling denouement music. MYSTERY ENVELOPE!

It's got a full return address on it, along with the name "G. Van Moer," and is addressed to a "Mary Chesebro." It's a small card, perhaps of the thank-you variety, and I can't tell much through the envelope other than it's got an illustration of some leaves on the front. Clearly, Ms. G. (I think it's a woman based on the writing) wrote the card and put it in this book, intending to carry it with her until she got Mary's address. Unfortunately for both G. and Mary, due dates are a bitch.

I will find far more enjoyment in sending it back to G. Van Moer than in opening it, so I'm going to mail it in a larger envelope, along with the story of how I found it. I think I'll even include my email address, in case G. has anything interesting to communicate back to me.

Stay tuned, 1.5 readers.

Horto in Urbs (in Horto)

Chicago's official motto, in Latin, is Urbs in Horto, or "City in a Garden." One of its unofficial mottoes, of course, is Daniel Burnham's "Make No Little Plans." I would further like to submit for consideration "Don't Make Any Plans If You're Waiting for an El Train Outside of Rush Hour" and "Make Plans Only if You've Paid Mayor Daley's Plan-Making Tax of 12%."

Anyway, we started our own little city garden here in the Sky Palace today. We planted bell peppers, roma tomatoes, chives, cilantro, and sweet basil -- all from seeds. I'd really like to do hops, as well, but I don't think they're suited for our enclosed deck because 1) I think they need deep soil, rather than containers and 2) they kind of grow really really tall. But I can dream, can't I?

Against better judgement,

I've signed up for a 5k. I know, I was surprised too. I haven't run since high school, and I did so sullenly even back then. But I found an awesome podcast training regimen online that trains you up gradually over several weeks, so I have hope.

I'm still not sure what I've gotten myself into. I know it's just over 3 miles, but still. I think it's something they put into the water here in Chicago. This is the most runningest city I've ever seen. Every spring, right about early March, the signs go up all over for 5k's, 10k's, and half and full marathons. And here I am, being part of the problem.

I'm told there's beer at the end, so there's that.

Bad Copy of the Day Award: Verbal Edition

I generally hate "businessisms" such as "I'll ping you later on that" or "at the end of the day." I hate them a lot. Just use normal words, and stop talking like an asshat. Usually, the same tired phrases are recycled for years, mostly because salespeople have very little imagination. So my ears always perk up when I hear a new one. In this situation, a business deal had stagnated, and my coworker was discussing the need to allay her client's anxiety regarding lack of progress:

"We just want to show him some movement in the water."

Why "in the water"? Why do you need that metaphor at all? If she had been talking directly to me, which she wasn't, I would have been terribly distracted by imagining all the things that might create movement in water -- a boat wake? The Loch Ness Monster? Underwater volcano? Corpse floating downstream?

I'm just not cut out for Corporate America, I guess.

Just use smaller words, m'kay?

There is a person, in just about every large office in America, whose sole purpose in life is to make Funundrum's eyes bleed. I haven't met them all yet, and I hope never to get close to doing so, but I know they're there nonetheless. The person I'm talking about is generally female and either doesn't have a college degree or went to one of those progressive schools that encourages you to discuss your feelings, perform an interpretive dance, or go on a peyote-influenced vision quest rather than sit a written math final. Yo, I got news for you -- your glowing coyote spirit guide is not going to help you solve for x.

I'm going to step back a moment here and tell a little story about the Best Teacher Ever, my high school English teacher, Mr. Kopacki. When it came time to teach us how to use "who" vs. "whom," he made us all swear that we would abide by the very simple First Rule of "whom," which is as follows:

If you're not absolutely sure you can use it correctly, don't.

American English has developed in a very democratic, somewhat sloppy, but mostly useful fashion. It's the Snap-On Tools of the linguistic world. It's evolved to not really need the word "whom," to the point that its usage is generally an indication that someone's using it to look smart... which they then fail to do.

Which brings me back to the peyote-using underachievers. At my last job, it was my boss. At this job, it's the head of operations. It may be someone different where you work. But their modus operandi is always the same: they have to send out emails to the whole office, which freaks them out and challenges their self-worth, so they do everything possible to underscore the gravity of their authority on the subject at hand. You will know them by the way they mark every email "urgent." You will know them by their use of animated GIFs in the body text. Most of all, you will know them by the gratuitous and patently incorrect infestation of "whoms."

I've written all this and I don't even have a good example of the ridiculous things this woman sends out. I suppose I'll have to edit in the next couple of days to put something in here. But I thought I'd like to share with you, my two readers, the nearly unshoulderable burden it is being me.

For reals.

I lie awake nights wracked with guilt over not writing on this blog. So, there's that.

Welcome to the inside of my head.

How come, in Star Trek, Data never just plugged into the ship directly so he could do his job way more efficiently? I could see him wanting to do the human thing as much as possible, but for as often as the Enterprise was 3.6 seconds away from losing life support/getting sucked into another dimension/exploding, seems like it would be a prudent course of action.

It just seemed to work so well for R2-D2. Just saying.

Too bad "Jesus" doesn't have an umlaut in it

I was kicking around a free font site for beer logo ideas, and ran into a bunch of fonts by the same woman. They all have that slightly dorky, cheerleader/preschool teacher/cupcake shop look, and have names like "Complete in Him" and "Loved by the King." It's clear that the woman is 1) a Christian and 2) terrible at naming fonts. One of the fonts had 46 comments on it. Now, there's no way that a mediocre font like "Complete in Him" could foster that much constructive font-related discussion, so I had to check it out.

The comments tended to fall into two categories: "I love Jesus and you love Jesus and we rock," and "I have a preschool/cheerleading poster/cupcake shop, can I use your font?" There was only one comment that bridged the two categories, both shamelessly and seamlessly. As always, I've fixed the spelling and punctuation so your eyes don't bleed. You're welcome.

"Hi to my sister in our Lord Jesus Christ! Your fonts are truly a blessing to me. I can see it is made from inspiration from the Heavenly Throne Room of our Father God! May I have the privilege of seeing you one day at the feet of our Lord Jesus... Then you can teach me all your fonts... Blessings, Ulanda"

I just can't get over "Then you can teach me all your fonts." Praise the Lord and pass the italics.

Can't talk, I'm using the backhoe

In addition to the awesome letter from P&G (see below), I also received some pills for my dog from an online pet medication website. According to the warning label, this medicine may impair my dog's ability to drive or operate machinery. She is supposed to refrain from doing so until she knows how it affects her.