Thanks everyone for all your words of support.  And for being totally rude about Evil Kevin, or as my mother now refers to him as, “Asshole”. 

So, before I finally move on and never mention him again, I thought I’d tell one story about him.

Asshole had food issues.   As in, he was the pickiest eater I ever, ever knew.  He would only eat beef, bacon and selected vegetables.   No fish.  No poultry in any form.  No shellfish.  No pork beyond bacon.  He pushed 300  pounds on a fairly regular basis, as you’d expect for someone who only ate red meat and carbohydrates.  Now, his weight never bugged me - I like my men beefy.   The new guy is nice and beefy.  Especially since it means I get to feel all small and delicate while wearing their t-shirts.   Speaking of which, new guy is always having me wear his t-shirts, including totally cool ones with cats and corporate logos.   Asshole only let me wear TWO of his oldest, rattiest, ugliest t-shirts.  I did steal his old style US Customs t-shirt (which I still wear), but I only managed it because it was way, way, way too small for him.  I still walk around the apartment going “Respect mah Authoritah!”

But, that’s not the point.   Now, I love to cook, and I love trying new foods and recipes.   This was pretty challenging, given his dietary limitations, especially since he was also often doing Atkins.  So, I’d resort to using recipes that had one of the “banned substances” in them, but hiding it.

My favorite ingredient that flew under the radar for 4.5 years?   Chicken Broth.  That’s right.   Chicken Broth was in TONS of stuff.  Stuff he actually really liked.   He’d ask what I put in the couscous or rice, and I’d be like “Oh, water and some spices”.   He’d recoil in horror at the thought of the evil chicken broth, but hah, he ate it.  Muahahaha.

Yes, I was very evil and at the time I felt vaguely bad about it, but you try cooking for someone like that.  Plus, now I can evilly cackle about it.  And I’d never do it to a vegetarian or to someone with a real dietary issue, of course.

Now, on to better subjects!   Monica visited two weekends ago, and she brought me these socks!

If the picture looks familiar, its because Monica sneakily posted them on her blog, and I never did figure out that they were all for me!  The pattern is Whitby from Knitting on the Road, and she used Mountain Colors Weavers Wool in Wilderness.   They fit perfectly.   She said they were thanks for test knitting her sock patterns.  So, not only do I currently have a pair and a half of awesome sockness I knit on my own, now I have a full pair of Special Monica Socks!

This post will be a total picture dump. And I’m going to do it in under 6 minutes.

First up - these awesome shoes that Christine was wearing when we met at Knitche a few weeks back. They rock! Monica took the picture.

How cute are those?

Second, I present these excessively cute itsy bitsy sweaters that Monica has been knitting up. She’s promising me a pattern to post on The Island of Misfit Patterns. People, submit more!

They are from leftover Vesper Sock yarn.

Then, we have ugly to balance out the cute. I finished the rotting zombie socks. I actually ran out of my Cherry Tree Hill Sock yarn towards the end, thanks to excessive swatching. So I said screw it, and used a bit of some left over Lorna’s Laces. No, I couldn’t find my swatches.

Back in cute terrority, I finished my poisonous flower pillow. I went with a 14 inch pillow form which was a bit snug. You can’t see the white so much in real life, though.

Finally, here is a picture I took on Laurel’s and I Trip to Go Pick Apples in Rockford that I found on the camera. I was going for a faux “posing with sock” thing. Honestly, I believe that only the Yarn Harlot can do the “Pose with Sock” thing. Everyone else is just being a big old copy cat.

Okay, its 5, and I’m outta here. I’ll go back later and add helpful links. Or not . You never know with me.

I keep trying to blog, but I just don’t have the energy lately. And I need to get back to all of you who left me such wonderful comments. It really made me feel a lot better.

I move out on July 26th to my fabulous girly girl apartment in Naperville. So, I’ve been packing like crazy. So far, I’ve packed 4 boxes of knitting books, 9 boxes of regular books, and 3 boxes of cookbooks. I probably have another 2 boxes of books left to pack. That just leaves the magazines, which I need to organize. I’ve also got all the everyday dishes packed, my great grandmother’s china, and my crystal. Oh, and the pocket dragons.

So, that leaves other kitchen stuff, the computer, my desks and clothes. Oh, and the bathroom. Plus all the other stuff that randomly appears at 2 am the night before you move. It’s as if random crap from around the neighborhood hears you are moving, and it just all shows up, wanting to be packed.

In happy news, though, I got a kitten! Well, I’ve reserved one. He’s too little to come home, but he’ll be ready by the time I’m moved into my new place.

He’s a total mutt cat, but he managed to inherit the siamese gene that gives kitties blue eyes and their siamese markings. I think he’ll have medium length hair - its hard to tell, since he still has the kitten fuzzies.

Finally, Monica, Lynette, Dee and I were all talking about how we need a web site where people could post designs that we rejected by other magazines. I happen to have the hugest hosting plan ever, so I registered a domain name, and set up a web site - its the Island of Misfit Patterns. Go take a look, and send us your lost, lonely patterns! We’ve already got a few up. They don’t actually need to have been rejected - the scarf pattern of mine was one I just never bothered to send anywhere.

Lucia (who should come to knitting at Barnes and Noble tonight :)) took up an argument with Marilyn at the Knitting Curmudgeon blog about the past quality of knitting magazines. To oversimplify the argument, Marilyn feels like 1980s knitting magazines were chock full of fabulous patterns and that today’s knitting magazines can’t hold a candle to them.

Lucia has been posting extraordinarily scary designs from her own personal stock of 1980s knitting magazines in rebuttal.

I think there are two issues here. One, we tend to remember the good things, and forget the bad things. So, the Vogue Knitting issue from 1994 that we remember so fondly might only have 3 nice designs and 10 designs of complete dreck.

For example, the latest Vogue Knitting. Marilyn says it isn’t worthwhile, and I would agree that there are some highly scary designs in it. But, there are a number of designs I adore. We all know of my lust for this capelet.

But, I think we can all agree that no one will ever knit this coat.

Secondly, what kinds of designs a person knits might not have a lot to do with their personal taste. For example, I’d buy this jacket.

But I’d never knit it. I don’t like intarsia, and the stockinette would put me to sleep. That’s a big reason why I don’t tend to buy magazines like Family Circle Easy Knitting - even the designs I like, I’d never knit.

On the other hand, while I’d knit this lovely scarf/shawl from Vogue Knitting in a minute:

I’m not sure how I’d wear it.

A third issue is personal taste - the cabled cover sweater with set-in sleeves that folks have been drooling over on Marilyn’s blog sends shudders through me. Yes, the cables are lovely and the nipped in waist is nice. I bet its an interesting knit. But the collar! And the shoulder pads!

Finally, I think we can all agree that Knitters Magazine sucks ass these days. That is one magazine that I think you can validly say used to be much better in the good old days.

In other news, I now order so many books from Amazon that they offered me a free four month membership in Amazon Prime. Which means I get free 2-day shipping until February. Rock! I keep losing control and ordering things. Such as Heirloom Knitting - the price on it keeps bouncing around between 50 dollars and 33 dollars. I just ordered it at 33 dollars. I also picked up a book for Kevin. That’s my excuse.

In knitting news, I’m still plugging away on the shawl. I’m almost done with the 3rd repeat in the second half, so I’m not worried about my deadline now. I’ll have lots of time this weekend to do a power knitting job.

I’ll add more to this post later, but I just wanted to post the link to a story about knitting blogs in the current Christian Science Monitor.

It’s nice to see a large publication actually talk about knit bloggers in a way that goes beyond the whole “Aw, aren’t they cute” kind of way. The mainstream media always assumes that blogs are typically written by men, about politics. It’s like they have no clue that there was this huge community of knit bloggers, most of whom are women.