News You Can Use

Few things please me more than unfortunate or stupid headlines in news stories.  One of my favorites that I no longer have in a form I could show you was a story from our local paper when I was growing up.  There was a photo of a heavyset woman who had just been named head of a local organization, but instead of that news story right next to the photo, it was below it.  And the headline of the story directly next to the photo was, "Blimp Visits Wheeling," since it was a big deal that the Goodyear blimp was going to be flying over our city on its way to Pittsburgh. 

Anyway, I thought some of these might make you laugh, and who doesn't enjoy that on a Friday?

Who knew?

Ahem.

Oh my.

Easier said than done.

Why have there not been more stories about this????

I find this one hard to believe.

Wow I hope Mike Pence was in charge of this study, too.

Owe deer!

Overachiever.

And then there is this, where it's not the caption, but the image that is, 

to quote my friend Lisa, "fried gold."

I hope your weekend gives you plenty of reasons to laugh, and that you enjoy Leap Day enough to last you the next four years.  :-)

Nope, Meh, and Yes

OK, last night we actually attended a concert and though it was lovely and amazing, it meant that I was up a lot later than usual, and so today other than being upright, well ...

To quote The Tim when we left the house: "We seldom go out during the week in the evenings.  The animals are gonna be confused."  They were, and so was my body clock.  ;-)

Today at work I have two meetings back to back before I return to moving stuff, so hopefully I will be busy enough to not realize how tired I am!

In any case, today I have decided to participate in Three on Thursday by sharing three things:  Nope, Meh, and Yes, as discussed/illustrated below.

NOPE

I refuse to allow any images of this person to be on my blog, but look at this if you want to know what I am talking about.  From the get-go, it has made me sick to see this person pretending to need a walker to get around.  And after the verdict was announced, he was shown walking without said walker.  I guess the effort of moving on his own is what gave him the "chest pains" that sent him to the hospital instead of directly to jail.

Mostly, though, this is a NOPE because there are plenty of people who actually need to use a walker to get around, if nothing else to help with their balance and to help them feel secure.  But you know there will now be those who think anyone using a walker is somehow just faking it to "take advantage."  Gah.

MEH

I got a lot of e-mails last week, lambasting me for my post where I griped about spelling, punctuation, and grammar.  I would like to point out that a) none of them were from people for whom English was a second language, and b) some were really rude.  At first I thought I should feel bad, but I re-read the post, and it was clear - at least to me - that I was owning it all as something that really bothered me, not saying people who have issues with any of the above were evil or should be imprisoned.  One person pointed out that she does it "because she is busy thinking, and so can't take the time to check what/how she writing things."  You know what?  I find that to be a lame excuse.  You know what else?  In the end, I really don't care.

YES

I follow a woman on Twitter who is a minister, and a week or so ago, she said that it had been a tough year for her, and:

"So this year for Lent, I'm giving up criticism and self-loathing. 
I'm fasting from hopelessness and fear.
Not because anything right now warrants it, but because hope is an act of resistance.

Maybe instead of ashes, this year we need confetti.
Maybe instead of thorns, this year we need flowers.

Not because everything is sunshine and roses, but because those things persist even still."  

She offered to send out a post every day during Lent to anyone who was interested, and created a project called Lent-ish.  I signed up, and yesterday was the first day.  The initial post was great, but this especially spoke to me.

Definitely a YES for me.  :-)

Not Much to Report from Here

That's the truth.  Last weekend was fine - nothing much to report, except that I did dedicate part of my Sunday afternoon to another cooking/baking session that was successful.  I made a big pot of creamy potato soup with roasted brussels sprouts, and some applescotch crisp.  We ate the soup on Monday night for dinner and I had some leftover for lunch yesterday and now sadly it's gone - but it was pretty yummy, let me tell you.  And we finished the crisp last night, so that's it for this round of cooking ahead.

I did make a swatch for my sweater project on a set of smaller needles as I had planned, and the good news is that using smaller needles, I was able to get the proper gauge, which was pleasing.  However, that's as far as I made it at the moment.  I also have my yarn and pattern ready for this coming Sunday, when my friend Andrea and I are starting a sock KAL for March.  I spent a little bit of time on Sunday doing another square on my Cozy Squares of Memory blanket, and I did lengthen a pair of socks for The Tim over the weekend, but have otherwise not knit a stitch since then.  I haven't even really done that much reading over the past few days.

No, I'm not sick or anything, or even suffering from a lack of mojo - I'm just really really tired.  I know that I have mentioned in passing that they are "renovating" our space at work (I put that in quotation marks because, well, it's more of a spruce up and not really a nice one, but I digress).  Anyhow, it's close to being finished, and we are moving stuff back in to the space now.  Which is a very slow and tedious process, being that with all of the $$$ they spent, they were too cheap to pay for movers for the bulk of the stuff.  So it's up to us to get it done.  The custodial staff has helped with the truly heavy or extra large things, but the rest is all us.  And it is exhausting, as I'm sure you can imagine.  Yesterday by the time I left work, I realized that I had been on my feet, lifting, shifting, and pushing carts except for the 30 minutes I took for lunch. 

So I do not have the physical or mental energy to do anything other than just sit and stare at the TV.  Fortunately, we have a lot of stuff in our to-be-watched queue! 

The rest of the week will likely be the same, so I probably won't have anything "exciting" to tell you about or projects to show you.  I am hoping that I will be able regroup enough to get started on things this coming weekend.   The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak - so to speak!  :-)

Today is Ash Wednesday, and I have been able to organize my thoughts for Lent and am ready to go as far as that is concerned.  But whatever you are busy with, or not doing, I hope all is well and that here at the middle of the week, you are in a happy and/or content state of mind. 

Friday Funny - A Star Is Born?

As I've mentioned here before, Hamlet and I go for our morning walk very early in the morning - anywhere from 4:45 to 5:00 a.m.  In the wintertime, when it's still dark, we are generally the only ones out.  Sometimes we'll run into a random drunk, and if we walk near any of the markets in the neighborhood, we'll see people making deliveries. But otherwise, it's the two of us and several buses that pass by.

This morning, as we were walking, we came across some security guards who were in place to guard a lot of the equipment for the filming of the M. Night Shyamalan series "Servant," and I think they were just glad to see anyone else.  But one of them - to his credit - made a huge fuss over Hamlet, which of course made him incredibly pleased with himself.  I told The Tim that as we were walking home, Hamlet was prancing along, clearly thinking that he had done such a good job, that he was destined to be "ready for the pictures, Mr. DeMille."

(We decided the movie would be called "Koodles on a Plane," with Hamlet's tag line being, "Somebody get these m'f'in Koodles off this m'f''in plane.")

Anyway, I posted this on Facebook, where one of the people I'm friends with is the woman who owned Hamlet's father, and raised Hamlet as a puppy for the Seeing Eye.  She commented, "He's always been full of himself," and that just made me laugh out loud!

Then I was reminded of the video below, which someone sent me yesterday, and it's ridiculously hilarious, so I thought you might enjoy it too.

In conclusion, dogs are just plain silly, right?

Here's hoping your Friday is filled with opportunities for fame, and no yucky foods ... :-)

Holding Pattern

Hello on a Wednesday - Unraveled Wednesday, to be exact!  In what seems like an amazing development, the sun is actually out today in Philadelphia - no rain in sight, which is just so nice for a change.  It's windy and cool, but it's all good when you have had days and days and days of rain.

I have no actual knitting to show to you today for two reasons - 1) I showed my finished socks in yesterday's post, and 2) I knit a swatch for a sweater, but I failed to take a photo of it.  I realize that knitting a swatch leads to a better result in a sweater, but I'm currently dismayed because I have to knit another swatch on smaller needles to see if I can get gauge.  The already-knit swatch is 1.5 stitches more per inch than it should be, and I am tempted to just go with that, but I want to see if another one on smaller needles works better.  I just hope that regardless what I decide to do, that I'll have enough yarn.  Not that I think having the yarn from the swatches will be absolutely necessary, but I like to feel like I have plenty of yarn as opposed to just enough or worse yet - not enough!  We'll see what happens, I guess.  :-)

I can show you a photo of the yarn I am using from the Quince & Co. website:

This is their Finch (fingering weight) yarn in the colorway Smoke - a dark gray/green that looks different according to the lighting, and most likely what you are wearing with it.  I have had this in my stash for a little more than a year, and am glad to be using it now.

I just started reading this book yesterday at lunchtime:

I'm only about 10 pages in (someone kept interrupting me), but so far it seems like it will be really interesting.  I hadn't really heard of the book, but someone I follow on Instagram posted that they were reading it, and I was intrigued (sorry I don't remember who it was!).

Don't forget to stop by (link at the beginning of the post) to see what others are reading and knitting, and feel free to share either there or in the comments here.