Although my knitting really isn’t influenced by outside temperatures like some people’s, it’s still feels like a crying shame to finish a project these days because temperatures are in the triple digits (above 37.7 ° C). I’ve never spent a summer in Austin and I’m not going to lie: They’re kind of brutal. Today’s high, for example, depending on where you look, is supposed to be 106 degrees (41° C). A friend pointed out that it’s a dry heat (or drier, anyway, than the coast) but seriously? 106? That’s blistering hot anyway you cut it.
Whatever the case, here’s my latest finished object. I liked the My-So-Called Scarf pattern so much I barreled through with a third version of it, this one with red and gold (Gryffindor colors!) stripes.
My So-Called Scarf
Size 10 needles
Dimensions: 4 feet 6-1/2 inches by 6-1/2 inches, unblocked
Yarn: two-thirds a skein each of Caron Simply Soft in Autumn Red and Bone
Having gotten introduced to pick-your-own farms while in Nashville, I decided to venture out of Austin this morning and check out Sweet Berry Farm in Marble Falls for some blackberry-picking. It’s located about an hour east of town, deep in the Hill Country, which was nice because I haven’t driven through Hill Country in several years.
At Sweet Berry Farm, you buy a cardboard box for 50 cents and get to pick strawberries and blackberries to your heart’s content. I spent about an hour picking at a leisurely pace and ended up with 2-1/2 pounds of blackberries. That, plus the strawberries popsicle I tried, and the box, came up to about $13. The popsicle wasn’t bad but after having tasted Las Paletas‘ gourmet fruit popsicles, it’s hard to compare.
The blackberry bushes got a little beat-down from the hailstorm that hit Central Texas on Thursday night. They looked, at first glance, more or less picked-over. But once you got in close, you could still spot some hangers-on that were ripe. What was most gratifying was crouching down, about gradeschooler-level, and looking up into the heart of the blackberry bushes and finding a fair number that had gotten overlooked by other pickers because they weren’t apparent from adult eye-level.
When I got home, I divided the pile in half, freezing half of my booty for baking (most likely blackberry muffins) and the rest of it for snacking the rest of the week.
My cousin Dung got married at the end of last month and my family and I went to Dallas for the wedding reception. Dung and her husband got their picture taken with all the guests as we filed into the restaurant. Dung, my sisters and I all went to UT, so we flashed some horns.
I haven’t been to a Vietnamese wedding reception since I was a kid, but the format hasn’t changed any: 10-course meal, bride and groom visiting each table, band, emcee, dancing. I remember filling up pretty quickly by Course 3 as a kid. I came prepared this time around and managed to pretty much sample every dish that came our way except one (the fried rice, which I figured wasn’t missing much). I’d meant to save a menu to detail what it is we ate but I forgot, so forgive the terrible food labeling. If you know me, you know I’m not much for identifying foods and ingredients.
After five months of intermittently working on and cursing this thing, I’ve finally finished my first sweater, Poppy from Lisa Shobhana Mason’s Yarnplay, a book I got for Christmas 2007. The sleeves are a little long but other than that, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I made it purple with silver stripes because that was yarn I had leftover from past projects, a farrow rib scarf and Slytherin scarf.
As you can see from the book cover, which shows the author’s version of Poppy, my interpretation looked hardly anything at all what the book had in mind. Part of the reason it took so long to finish is that I’m kind of incapable of following a pattern. I use it more as a guide and hardly ever bother with a swatch, which is why I’m constantly undoing and re-doing my stitches. {sigh} I also frequently set the sweater aside to tackle other, less challenging projects, and ended up generating three scarves, a baby blanket and dog sweater in the interim.
But the overall experience was extremely helpful in teaching me and making me practicelots of different skills, like increasing, decreasing, seaming together the different parts of the sweater and crochet edging. I’m excited to see what other projects these skills will spawn.
Is it just me, or does the New Moon trailer really not start to pick up until 1:09?
Although I remain in the Team Edward camp, I have to say that Jacob certainly makes an argument for himself in Book 2 of Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight saga (not to mention the last scene of this trailer). New Moon is arguably the weakest of the four books in the series because Edward’s absence from the majority of it; I’ve read that Stephenie Meyer was frustrated because fans would flip straight to the end to find out the story’s fate. I know I certainly was tempted; Bella’s constant grieving is really pretty emotionally exhausting on the reader.
Also, I was pleasantly surprised by the shift in point of view in Book 4 (Breaking Dawn) from Bella’s to Jacob’s. Actually, I loved it. Jacob brought much-needed humor and irreverence to the series’ final installment. And the scene in which his strings are cut — weird was it was — was a revelation and fabulously written.
This past week, my sister and I roadtripped it up to Evanston, Ill., where she’s moving to now that she’s graduated vet school. Because it was the last time I’ll be seeing Pepper in a long while, I ended up taking an inordinate number of pictures of her, too.
Austin > Hot Springs, Ark. (Sunday, May 17)
An and I set off from Austin late Sunday morning after a quick breakfast of donut holes and kolaches. I had grossly underestimated how long it would take us to get to Hot Springs, but it wasn’t too big a deal because that was the only thing on the agenda that day.
Hot Springs is known for its thermal baths and has a series of bathhouses on its main downtown drag called Bathhouse Row, although only one remains open. (Online comments about it were very amusing: “They expect you to get naked to take a bath!”) I simply wanted a soak, onsen-style, but the bathhouse’s $25 base-rate fee involved lots of other things that didn’t strike my fancy so I declined. Instead, we toured the very pleasant downtown, including Bathhouse Row, and then took a drive through Hot Springs National Park.
The water is so hot you can see the steam rising from it. I tripped at one point and nearly fell in. Good job, V. Good job.
Nashville, Tenn. (Tuesday, May 19)
My brief time in Nashville was chock-full: First, we drove by my old house. I was kind of shocked how steep the slope on which it sits is! How quickly we forget. We hit the post office, the pet store and the grocery store. Then I went to The Tennessean (which, I have to say, really pulled off a cute video on handgun legislation) to visit my old co-workers; it was so wonderful to see them again.
An and I brought Pepper to Edwin Warner Parks for a hike and then treated ourselves to Gigi’s Cupcakes and Las Paletas. Hung out by the pool, and then I went to kung fu, where I worked out with my old classmates. It felt good to be back, even if was just for the evening. The night came to an end afterward, when a few of us grabbed some bubble tea at China Dragon on West End.
The drive on to Evanston, Ill., was relatively uneventful save for the hellacious traffic that we hit Wednesday afternoon in Chicago and again Friday just after lunch time. In between, we hung out at An’s boyfriend’s apartment, had some Chicago-style pizza, toured the Northwestern campus, walked along Lake Michigan, visited the Evanston dog beach, grabbed bubble tea at Joy Yee’s Noodles, explored the Evanston Public Library (how could we not?) and ate brunch at Le Peep.
My sister graduated from Texas A&M University this past week. After four hard years of work, with stints in South African, Peru, Nashville and West Virginia, she now has a DVM after her name.
First of all, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE.
Spoilers ahead. You have been duly warned.
So I got a chance to watch the new Wolverine movie today. Superhero movies are hard to grade because they come from such rich source material. But you inevitably can’t compare the movie version against the comic book version because it’s apples to oranges. I think that’s perhaps one of the reasons why I like Iron Man so much: I don’t know much about Tony Stark to begin with, so I don’t have a sense of how good a job the movie did at portraying the character.
Wolverine is a different story, though; I grew up with X-Men and still keep a small pile of X-Men comic books. I’m by no means a Wolverine expert, but I know enough about his crazy past. I also knew going into the movie that it was being kind of shredded by critics. I find myself kind of agreeing with them. If I were to put an adjective to the movie, I would have to say it was serviceable. I think it’s because Wolverine is such a serious character. At least Tony Stark had a sense of humor and was capable of laughing at himself. With Wolverine, it’s all drama-drama-drama interspersed with bouts of homocidal rage.
I’m not saying Hugh Jackman isn’t easy on the eyes. The movie just felt lacking heart. It hurts me to say this, but Wolverine’s character felt like the weak link; I felt its strongest moments were when he was interacting with other mutants. Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool deservingly should have its own spin-off; the few moments when he was on-screen, there was this crackle of energy I really enjoyed. Kevin Duran’s Blob cracked me up and the actor playing Agent Zero, Daniel Henney, is a hot discovery (okay, I meant that in the objectifying sense). I even didn’t mind will.i.am as Wraith.
And then there was my longtime favorite mutant rapscallion, the one whose portrayal I was fretting about: Gambit. I have to say, Taylor Kitsch didn’t do a half-bad job. Remy’s charm certainly came through, although the accent wavered. But the fact that Gambit kinda got owned by Wolverine is rather wince-incuding. I’m not saying he can’t deal with the loss of face, I’m just saying there’s an adoring fandom out there who’d rather see him play his cool, sly self rather than get a fist slammed in his face or his staff sawed to pieces the way he did here. It could have been better but I suspect Gambit’s role is kind of as thankless as that of Edward Cullen’s — no actor can possibly do him justice if he tries to compete with what fans have in their heads.
My take on Kitsch as Gambit: Could have been better, but also could have been much worse. Kitsch has expressed interest in continuing the role. I am, at the least, curious what direction he’d take it (he’s mentioned exploring Remy’s role with the Thieves’ Guild) and how he would fare doing so.
Finally, this was my first thought when you learn what Stryker’s goal is (for the benefit of anyone who’s still reading but hasn’t seen the movie, I’ll leave what exactly the goal is out): Just find Rogue, and be done with it. No need for all these kidnappings and pseudoscience.
My second semester of graduate school is wrapping up, and so is the mentorship program that I’m a part of as a mentee. As a thank-you to my mentor, I made her this scarf in scarlet and cream, inspired by a similar choice of colors she wore when I first met her; I thought the color combo complimented her fabulous scarlet frames. The pattern is the same as the one I made for Sally last year, only this one isn’t a skinny scarf.
Two-color brioche stitch scarf
Size 7 needles
Dimensions: 5 ¾ inches by 5 feet 10 inches blocked
Yarn: two-thirds a skein each of Caron Simply Soft in Autumn Red and Bone
I went to my last class as well today, my oral history course. We all read excerpts from the oral history interviews we’d done during the course of the semester. My professor read one from a past student’s oral history interview with a 38-year-old black man who’d had a heart transplant and gotten the rare opportunity to meet the family of his donor.
I totally don’t do the story justice but the gist of it was that he and the family met for the first time at the dedication of a ceremonial garden sponsored by a statewide transplant organization. A van pulled up and this big Hispanic family got out; it was the family of the man whose heart he had received; the donor had died as a result of a car accident. The narrator immediately went to them and he was engulfed by their welcome, everyone hugging him, a baby placed into his arms.
The family grew quiet and parted to allow a wizened, petite old woman to approach him. It was the mother of the man who had died. She looked at him and said, “Mijo,” Spanish for “my son.” She put his hand over his heart. Then she said something to him. Another of her sons explained, “She wants to listen to your heart.” And so the narrator, a big man, enveloped her and let her listen to the beating of her son’s heart.
Listening to that story, I seriously had to concentrate hard on not bawling. Class had just started and I had three more hours to get through! I took this class because I’d grown interested in oral histories the last year or two but didn’t really understand their formal methodology. This class taught me that and far, far more. The professor was amazing and led us in examining issues of race, class and gender while teaching us how to properly carry out oral history interviews.
The work was more than I’ve ever had to do for any class — rare was the week that I actually managed to complete all the interview work, readings and listening exercises that she had on the syllabus. I’m not gonna lie; it’s kind of a badge of honor to have survived the course. But it was the rare class in which you were willing to do the mountains of because you knew it was worth it.
