A Few Things That Came In

I've had a few things come in the mail lately that I thought I'd show you.

First, a few Bruins things, a shirt and water bottle and a rally towel that they threw in:

That's a new shirt (and please god they don't get eliminated tonight, tainting my feelings toward this shirt*), with the nicknames of all the players on the front, and this on the back.

*If they do, I will have to try to reframe it in my head as commemorating the excellent overall season--but that will be hard. Please, please, please win tonight.

If you're curious about the water bottle, because I know I'm interested in such details, I'll say that first off, I was confident in its quality because it's a Tervis, and they do solid work. 

• This one is vacuum insulated, which should mean water stays colder longer, and the bottle doesn't get condensation on the outside. We have a lot of Tervis tumblers and they are good, but in the heat and humidity of Florida, ice melts pretty fast, and they do get slippery on the outside.
• The carrying handle on the top is also very helpful. It's wide enough for three fingers, which spreads the weight to carry it, much better than the single-finger kind (again, arthritis in my hands).
• The surface of the bottle is slightly textured, which I like because it's not at all slippery to hold, and the base has a rubber layer, so there's no clinking when I put it down. (You may laugh, but that does bug me.)

The top works well for my hands, which is important to me, considering that I got rid of my Corkcicle water bottles, which I had bought in various sizes, because once you put ice and water in, it sort of vacuum-sealed the top, and I had an awful time getting them open again.

With this one, you unscrew the top bit:

And then the top opens easily and snaps in place out of the way, revealing the drinking spout. And the spout isn't metal, which is good as I don't like drinking from those.

The whole top also unscrews, for easier filling. It doesn't quite work with my ice maker, because the ice comes out of that in a slightly wider space, but filling a glass with ice and then pouring the ice in the bottle works fine (and again, easier than the Corkcicle was [which I'm not trying to run down, just explaining why it didn't work as well for me, despite its great insulating properties]).

Now I suppose you would like to know how it does with keeping ice cold (and do note, it's not for hot drinks, and it doesn't go in the dishwasher either, though I doubt it would fit in any case). It arrived midday Friday, and I filled it with ice and water. When I drank the water that night, it was very cold, but there were only a few small bits of ice floating to the top, and I thought it had all melted. It was only on Saturday morning that I looked inside and saw a block of fused-together ice cubes that probably filled it two-thirds of the way up! All day Saturday I put more water in, and drank it, and only by late Saturday night did all the ice finally melt, wow!

The only flaw to it, and it's totally my fault, is that I didn't actually realize how big a 40-ounce bottle is. Duh, ccr! The thing is big! And thus heavy when filled (edited to add: 1.32 pounds, according to Tervis). Can't blame them for that. (I already ordered a 24-ounce one, which is 1.05 pounds.) Still, very, very happy with it overall.

A completely unrelated purchase was a project bag from Stitched by Jessalu, her April limited edition. I'm a little cautious of buying sight unseen, but her bags are always good quality, and when she said "lilacs" I couldn't resist.

Tulip shipping bag! Very pretty.

Nicely packaged, and with some (safely wrapped) candy thrown in (I'm noting that because once I got something where the person had thrown in a few Hershey Kisses, and good luck getting the chocolate off the fabric, there).

I do love it!

Because look how pretty!

Pretty inside, too.

No buyer's remorse with that one, happily.

Have you had any fun things come in lately?

The Same Two Things

I know that most of my posts recently have either been photos of Maggie, or talking about the sweater I'm knitting. Today, you get both!

Sweater first. It's coming along really well; I've gotten a lot done in a month, no wonder I have to keep stopping before I want to, to rest my hands and arms. Today I put it on a longer cord to try on, and just as I hoped it would, it fits!

Trying to get a shot of the back in the mirror: my spatial skills (or lack thereof) had a lot of trouble with the angles!

But it seem to fit well, so onward.

Meanwhile, Miss Maggie discovered the little boxes I left on the floor to see if she wanted them (I ordered cat food from Chewy, and the trays of Fancy Feast come with these over the top).

So cozy. Two paws up.

Something, on a Lost Weekend

I spent the weekend somewhat under the weather, headache and cramps and backache, just not feeling great. Not feeling like getting much of anything done, you know? But one thing I did manage to do was knit.

I got the Comodo sweater to the point where the sleeves get put on waste yarn:

And look at that!

I'm so tickled with how this is coming along.

Of Garages and Doors

We were told recently that some of the garages in our building, including ours, were going to get new garage doors that were more hurricane-resistant. Fine, sounds good. Last week, we were told it would be done Friday, but even before I moved my car out of the garage on Thursday, they said no, it would be Saturday.

On Sunday, I noticed that it hadn't happened, and we asked and they said yes, sorry, now Monday. I went out on Monday and they were there, working on another one of the garages.

But Monday night, we still had the old doors. And it turned out that oops, they ordered the wrong size door! So they would let us know when it would happen.

Thursday morning, I heard that it would be that day, sorry for the late notice, and I went down and moved my car out again. But last night, I was in the garage for something and saw that the old door was still there (it clearly didn't look new, but also they had stuck pieces of painters tape on the fronts of the ones that had to be done, and ours still had it, while the two others on our side of the building didn't. I emailed to ask if that would be done on Friday.

You know what happened? Go on, guess. No, you won't guess. It turns out that our door is a different size than the others they were replacing. In fact, it was the size that they had had on Monday, that was the wrong size for the door three down from ours!

How on earth did they build this building and not put the same size doors on every garage? Theories:

1. They got a deal on a mixed lot of garage doors in different sizes and made it work.
2. They had miscalculated somewhere and when they got to the garage at the end, it was a slightly different size than the others*, so they fudged it.
3. What's your theory?

*I wonder if our garage is an inch wider or an inch narrower than the others?

What Got Me Through

We had a work meeting today--unlike some jobs, mine does not include very many meetings, and other than the monthly department one (which is aimed at the sales people and almost never has a thing to do with me doing my job), the only ones I have to do are the CEO's info meetings. These started during the pandemic, I assume because the C suite had time on their hands and decided they might as well bother the peons. They haven't been having those regularly of late, but today my luck ran out.

The meeting itself wasn't bad news, which I note because I had an unexplained feeling of doom beforehand that turned out to be unfounded. But it was the usual levels of boring and awful, and was capped by about 6 people who had to use the "Does anyone have any questions?" section at the end to prove they were there and had been listening, which is more than typical. The good news was that they didn't force us to have our cameras on, so I was able to moan and roll my eyes about it.

Meanwhile, what got me through the meeting overall?

• Knitting
• Chocolate
• Medicine (specifically, headache and heartburn)

So that was fun! Suddenly, going back to edit in powerpoint didn't seem so bad. (I mean, it still sucks, but not as much as the meetings.)

A Different Kind of Knitting Quandry

Last night at knitting, I put the Comodo sweater on a longer cord to see how it's looking. And it's looking more like a sweater!

Front:

Back:

Close-up of back:

Which leads me to this question: do I bring it on a trip next month?

I had been leaning toward no, because it probably makes sense to bring something smaller and more portable. But I'm loving this so much, and so far at least, it's been really good social knitting.

What to do, what to do.

Small Things

Both good and bad, small things.

• I was about to order something I was almost out of, then decided to look one more time to see if I didn't have another one. And I did! (I really have to clean out those drawers in the bathroom, they are full of so much random whateverishness right now, it's out of control. Well, almost out of control, at least.)
• On the other hand, I went for a short walk today, just 20 minutes, and now my back is being all twinge-y and twangy about it.
• Which is separate from the lower-back pain of the period-that-isn't-a-period (I mean, if there's no bleeding, it's not a period, right? Even if you have the cramps and lower-back pain, so different from a regular sore back, that typically come with periods?).
• Let's see, another good one. Oh, I know! The playoffs start tomorrow! Go Bruins!

And there's the not at all small good thing that a friend who had to have emergency surgery came though it. Believe me, my mind was all over the place while I waited to hear. She's in a tough spot, it very much sucks, but she's still here. Phew. Send good healing her way, please.

Ten Months

I last got my period in June of 2022, and of course I've been hoping ever since that that would turn out to be THE last one I got.

Well. No. And it turns out, I didn't miss cramps or backache at all.

Sigh. This frail human body, I tell you. Poor design here.

"Should"

This weekend, I was looking at a book I got out of the library, and while I enjoyed the beginning of it, as I went on, it was less appealing to me. "That's weird," I thought, "It's right up my alley. I should love this!"

Wait. Should?

No. Life is too short. There is no "should" about reading: either you're enjoying it, or you aren't, and if not, move on.

Someone recently asked what advice you would give to your younger self, and I couldn't decide, but I think this is a good one: 

"Don't let 'should' be a factor in your decisions." 

And not just reading decisions.

Getting My Sweater Knitting On

Last week, I started a new knitting project, and yeah, I have a million projects going already, but whatever: knitting is for fun, so I do what I want when I want!

I took the yarn I got last month, and cast on the Comodo cardigan, as I had mentioned considering.

Isn't it amazing to think that this little thing becomes a sweater? If all goes well, that is.

Some of my knitting friends were teasing me that it didn't look like a sweater, but more like a shawl (this group makes a lot of tops and sweaters, and I make a lot of shawls!).

And I agreed that yeah, it kind of does, but it's funny how the size of a sweater is hard to tell from the inch at the back of your neck.

And it quickly grew.

And it grew. The purple markers denote the fronts from the sleeves from the back, and the bronze markers are for the back shaping.

My mother noted that this looks like a pie with a slice cut out of it, and she's not wrong.

As it grows, it becomes a little bunched up, as I can't fully spread it out until I put it on a longer needle.

Maggie isn't a fan of being a knitwear display ("What is that touching my fur?"), but sometimes I do it to her anyway.

I'm mean that way.

Now, here it is on a longer cord, spread out:

And yes, it does look a bit like the Millennium Falcon.

Here it is folded, so you can see the top-of-sweater-ness of it!

This is, for me at least, a lot of knitting to have gotten done in, oh, eight days. I was knitting on Zoom with friends last night and realized that my hands were a bit sore. But did that make me want to stop? No. I can't wait to see how it comes along. 

A Tale of Cat and Crow

Maggie was in the window this morning, and I could hear the bird she was watching swoop around, so I opened my camera to see what I could catch.

Crow on the railing!

I switched to video to see what happened next, and here, if this works, is a 20-second snippet of the show. Sound on!

Same Here

I saw this license plate and thought, yeah, me too. I thawed when I moved to Florida.