This post is brought to you by the letter "B"

This game/meme/call it what you will looked like fun on Pocklock's blog, so I asked if I could play.

The rules: You leave a comment on this post, and I’ll assign you a letter (only if you want to play! you're allowed to comment and not want to play yourself, just say so). Write about ten things you love that begin with your assigned letter, and post it on your blog. When people comment on your list, you give them a letter, and so on.

So, Pocklock assigned me the letter B, and here we have, in no particular order, ten things I love that start with the letter B:

Beaches. Especially the one by my parents.


Books. My books, all books. Books.


Bruins. They're my team, hockey is my sport, I love it. That they're playing so well this year is a bonus, but I've been a Bruins fan as long as I can remember (and how long is that? Well, I was alive when they last won the Cup, in 72, but I don't remember it), through ups and downs.


Browsing. I like to shop, but sometimes not looking for a something specific is fun. Just looking. (Caveat: when you can't afford to buy anything, no matter how cheap, it isn't as much fun.)

Babies. I simply love babies.


Best friends. You know who you are. You know what you mean to me.

Bare feet. I wear shoes, sure, and socks, but weather permitting, I love bare feet. (Though I have wimpy feet, in terms of walking on shells and stuff. Ouch. But on sand, I love it.)


Bunnies (aka my cats, who have always been "bunny baby bear" and "hunny bunny" and so on; it started with my first cat, Honey, who went down stairs in a way that, viewed from behind, gave her a "bunny bottom".) Some bunny noses:


Boston. It's old and new and (despite the winters) where I belong.


Bargains. I went shopping yesterday--yes! for nonessentials! I am employed again!--and bought two sweaters. The hunting was fun (see browsing, above), and I really like them both.


It's not the greatest picture, I know. (Better light would have helped, but with weather, you take what you get. At least it stopped snowing. It's going to be a long winter, I'm afraid.) We have a black sweater with white patterning, and a blue-black-heather rib with a turtleneck that didn't strangle me! They're both soft, and I like them.

That was easy! And somewhat mood-raising, too. Want to play?

Me-me-me-me-me

I've seen this meme all over, and thought it would be fun to play along.

1. What were you doing 10 years ago?
June of 1998, eh? I was living in Charlotte, NC, sharing a house with a friend, working at Barnes & Noble. And later in June, I brought home two wee kittens from the Humane Society.

2. 5 things on my to-do list today.
Laundry (not getting done). Dishes, check. Clear off the random piles of whatever on the kitchen table, in progress. Make scalloped potatoes and ham, check. Quality time with cats, check.

3. Snacks I enjoy.
Pretzels. Chocolate. Ice cream. So many things...

4. If I were a billionaire instantly, I would
Not have to worry about money (sounds obvious, but still).
Not have to work on a regular schedule.
Buy any and every book that I wanted.

5. Places I have lived:
Montclair, NJ
São Paulo, Brazil
Guyana
Boston, MA
suburbs of Boston
Charlotte, NC
small-town Pennsylvania
suburbs of Boston

Name That Movie

I saw something on another blog a while ago (I know, how vague) that made me think of doing this. The entry was something about movie quotes, which got me thinking about what lines I know by heart from certain movies.

These are ones that I don't even have to look up, I'm so sure I have them right (famous last words!). Well, they're close, anyway!

If you know one or more, or want to guess, by all means comment, and if you decide to do it on your own blog, let me know, 'k?

1. The time to make up your mind about people is never.
2. So it's sort of social. Demented and sad, but social.
3. "Fine, I'll take your test." "I want to see the kid in net who wouldn't take the test."
4. Go! Win! And call me when you get back. I enjoy our chats.
5. Sometimes I just think funny thoughts.
6. Blue flower, red thorns, blue flower, red thorns. This would be so much easier if I wasn't colorblind!
7. Honey, you slide in and they carry you out.
8. "People are smart. They can handle it." "A person is smart. People are dumb."
9. Bring me that horizon.

Have at it!

My Seven Things

Thanks for the comments on yesterday's post. I'm doing better today; obviously, ostriches have the right idea. (BTW, Leslie, so sorry to hear about your husband's condition, but how wonderful that he's doing all right.) I just find the phrase "congestive heart failure" so intrinsically scary that I was warping out over that as much as anything, I think. Who names these things?

Now for something completely different. Last week, Annalea tagged me with the seven things meme, so I've been trying to think of 7 things about me that haven't already been revealed. Let's see how it goes.

1. I never got over my first love. It was a '69 Cadillac convertible, red with a white top and red leather seats ... I loved that car! I'll have to dig up a picture and teach myself how to use the scanner, but if I get into that tonight this meme will never be finished.

2. I'm not just a Bruins fan, I'm a life-long Bruins fan. Proof?


According to the date on the back (where I added names as I heard them during broadcasts), I was 6 years and 4 months old when I started to document my love of all things Bruins.

I wish I knew if this idea came out of my mind or was prompted! I do love that after leading with the obvious (Bobby Orr), I went on to Gilles Gilbert (though I spelled it wrong). Speaking of spelling, though, on the back I spelled Bucyk correct, right after spelling John as "Jhon". Hmmm.

3. I spent a year in England between high school and college, at an all-girls boarding school. It was a very interesting experience, and I'm still in touch with my two closest friends from that year (although with one, it's more an e-mail every year or two than close touch).

4. I have traveled outside the US many times, including before I can even remember (Brazil, Grenada, Guyana). The countries I remember are:

• Austria
  
• Barbados
• Canada (though only in the Maritimes)
• England
• France
• Israel
• Italy
• Norway
• Spain
  

Looking at a map of Europe, I can see that since I took a bus to Austria, we must have gone through either Switzerland or Germany to get there. However, I don't remember which (it was 21 years ago, in my defense) so I won't put it on the list. Probably whichever one it was, was the border crossing we made in the middle of the night, where they came on the bus and woke us and told everyone to hold their passport over their head. Then someone took mine, and only mine, and walked off with it, while I struggled to wake up and figure out what was going on. (Everyone else had a British passport, except for one Malaysian diplomatic passport.) Of course they brought it back in a few minutes, but I did come close to panicking.

5. I am almost absurdly oversensitive to noises, smells, and other such phenomena. I almost went mad when a vent near my desk was rattling perpetually. I have headphones at work for when I just can't take the noises made by people thoughtlessly working around me :) and I could never work in trash collection. If you walk by me and took a cigarette break 10 minutes ago, I know. I know if the driver of the car in front of me is smoking. I've never smoked pot because the first time I smelled the smoke, I almost threw up.

6. I enjoy reading comic strips, cartoons, graphic novels, and so on. The comics are one of the reasons I get the daily paper. My brother and I used to read the Doonesbury collections when we were kids and enjoyed them greatly, despite how much meaning we had to be missing. We can still crack each other up with cryptic statements like, "I'm a reasonable man, MacArthur, so I know that this isn't snow." Or, "Actually, I spent the whole week watching TV, but he thinks I'm a genius." And I can tell you in excruciating detail why I say, "Oh, wow, look at the moon" whenever I notice it.

Calvin and Hobbes, For Better or For Worse, Baby Blues, The Far Side, Bloom County ... One of my new favorites is Little Dee, which is a comic strip of the familiar in-the-newspaper format, just your basic story of a little girl who got lost in the woods, being cared for by a bear, a dog, and a vulture. Oh, and they talk but she doesn't.

What?

There's a button on the right side of the page. Go on. You won't be sorry. The vulture, Vachel, knits. During an extended sea shanty, he's knitting straight from the sheep. Don't you have to see that? (He put it to music, even, and it's wonderful. To get to that, go here and scroll down to 11/07/07, or search for mp3.)

Even more recently, I've found* an online graphic-novel type comic called Girl Genius, which I just love, though it couldn't be more different from Little Dee. Why are the Jaegers my favorites, and their accents? For that matter, why Vachel, and not sweet Ted? My mind is a mystery even to me.

*Google Reader will make suggestions of other blogs I might enjoy, based on the ones I already subscribe to. Sometimes this means that they're recommending things I totally don't want (other Boston sports, or Boston news in general, or gluten-free interests since one blog I subscribe to is such). Most of them I turn down (the button actually says "No, thanks", so I get to be polite about it), but sometimes I quite like them, and Girl Genius I love!

7. I hate to tag people, in case anyone doesn't want to do the thing and is irritated or whatever by the tag. Though I have done it a few times, for some reason I'm not feeling up to it tonight, so I'm going to do the cop-out tag: if you're reading this, and you're interested enough to start thinking about what your seven things would be (and you have a blog), then do go blog about it, won't you? And comment here that you have? I love seeing inside people's heads (only metaphorically, though, uck). The rules are:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

*******************************************

Finally, about the weather (more snow today), I really, really agree with this guy, whoever he is/was:

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.
--Patrick Young

That's it in a nutshell.

color me many things tonight

There's the color of my yarn, and then the color of my skepticism with Wikipedia as well. Let's start with the latter.

Annalea has tagged me with a meme (my first!), to "go into Wikipedia and find things that happened on your birthday. You're supposed to list three events, two births, and one holiday". Sounds kind of fun, actually. I've looked at things on Wikipedia before, but never poked around the site in depth. I know that there's some level of question about it as a source, since anyone can edit it, but as long as you're willing to allow for that, it works for me.

I went looking for October 9th, and one of the first things I noticed was this:

1000 - Leif Ericson discovers Vinland and becomes the first known European to walk in North America.

Now, I'm sorry to sound all spoilsporty, but who was taking notes as to what exact day Leif stepped off the boat? Do we really know for sure it was October 9? For the purposes of the meme, it counts, but color me skeptical.

Anyway, that's one, and I choose it because of my Scandinavian ancestors.

A lot of historical events are negative in a bad way: battles, deaths, and so on. For my second event, I chose one that is negative in a different way. I just like this one:

1582 - Due to the implementation of the Gregorian calendar this day does not exist in this year in Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain.

There's something about the fact that for the people of these countries, there is no October 9, 1582. I like that. (I'm just funny that way.)

And in case I get back to England any time soon, let me celebrate this event from more recent history:

2005 - Smoking is fully banned on the UK rail network.

There's something I can get behind! Smoking: ugh.

Two births next. John Lennon is the easy choice, I already knew he was an October 9 (so is Sean Lennon for that matter). But guess who else is? Oh, let me do this right.

1940 - John Lennon, British musician and songwriter (The Beatles) (d. 1980)

Like everyone doesn't know who he is. But I did not know I shared a birthday with an actor I quite like in the Shakespearean-classical-"you know, those types of movies" field:

1936 - Brian Blessed, English actor

He was in Branagh's Hamlet, in Much Ado About Nothing, in Hal V ... wonderful man. And we share October 9! How about that?

(I would have picked one of the hockey players, but I've barely even heard of them, so what fun is that?)

There are, I must say, some rather dubious-looking "holidays" to choose from for October 9. It's not explaining to me, for example, why the 9th is Sarrasin (Buckwheat) Day on the French Republican Calendar, it's just trying to talk to me about buckwheat. Still, it's rather in keeping with the flower theme I've had going of late, and it's a lot less scary than some of the others. Go look if you want to see for yourself.

So there's the meme done. Now the other part, I'm supposed to "tag" five other bloggers with the same meme. It's kind of like a benign virus that way. So, let's see. If you want to, if you have time, if you're interested, etc., consider yourself tagged, you wonderful bloggers, you:

• Monica
• KnottyKitty
  
• Korinthe
• Ducktastic
• Tammy
  

And of course, there's no obligation. Plus, if you're not on the list and want to participate, please do. It was fun.

Now, want to see some knitting?

You know you do...

Of course, at this stage of a blanket, imagination is required. It's like Kali one year putting her excess zucchini in the lunchroom at work with a sign saying "Free zucchini bread: some assembly required." Right, Kali?

First, the blanket with cast-on and one row:


Then you have it at half a dozen rows. With flash, in focus but glare and too bright:


No flash, truer to color but slight out of focus. It's hard to get it right some days, you know?


This is the stitch pattern I'm trying. It's too soon to tell if I'm going to, a, like doing it, and b, like it in this yarn, but so far so good.


The final thing to color me tonight? Tired. I shall report in, hopefully, this weekend, on a birthday party I have been invited to which features a dunk tank (a first for me, that), and on the baby shower on Sunday. But now, to bed. May your dreams be peaceful and yarny.