Category: Urban Family


With the summer’s second official heat wave, we have reached the point where it’s too hot for Julie to want to do much of anything. I spent Saturday and Sunday entombed in my house, where the a/c was on energy saver at 82*. It was that high (1) because Con Ed owns my soul and (2) because there were power outages in every neighborhood around mine, and I wasn’t sure that mine was going to be the exception forever. I resent Con Ed very much these days. I have a geriatric kitteh, Con Ed, so the a/c stays on. And you bill me more every month for unreliable service. NOT COOL.

I promised you a post about Boston, but I can’t keep my mind on any one thing long enough to write coherently about it. So you will get snippets of Boston. I like it very much – I could totally picture myself living there. And the fact that I got to hang out with Aimee and Sloth all the time while I was there? Made it even better. We packed a fair amount of stuff into the five days that I was there, and there was so much more that we didn’t get a chance to do. I’ll definitely be going back. I do have some great memories of the trip, though: eating chowder with Aimee at Quincy Market, the Benjamin Franklin walking tour I took, walking past the Green Dragon Tavern (where the Sons of Liberty met and planned revolution), seeing Craig Ferguson recite the Pledge of Allegiance on the 4th of July, the party in Dorchester where I discovered that champagne goes with everything, dinner at Sloth’s house…the list goes on and on. I was going to put pictures into the post, but apparently my happy Flickr plugin isn’t playing nicely with the blog today. So instead, I will give you the entire Boston Photoset. Have fun.

Coming soon, fiber progress. Because there has been a fair amount of it despite the heat. You all can thank Plurk for that – since I hang out (virtually) with knitters all day, I knit and spin and stuff now. :)

And if you get that reference, baby let your geek flag fly!

Is it possible to be too connected to the ether? I wonder about this lately. In the past, I’ve had a habit of being very passionately interested in something on the internet, and then move on after a few months. IRC, Victor Garber (there was a website at one point…it is gone now), MySpace…the list could go on, but it would embarrass us both, so I’ll leave it. This blog is the one thing that has stood the test of time – it has been…holy crap, has it really been four years now? My blog is in pre-K? But of late I have let the blog lapse a little bit, because work has been too chaotic to come up with a single coherent thought, let alone blog about it, and the evenings…well, there are distractions in the evenings as well. My mind these days moves in short phrases, more suited to Facebook status messages than even Ravelry forum messages. Twitter would be good, but Twitter is often a little bitch and tells me I’m refreshing too much when clearly I am *not*. That annoys me. But Plurk, Plurk is cool. Plurk has a lot of knitters on it, so it resembles a cross between the beloved Facebook status message and IM, where we talk about socks and spinning a lot. That does it for me, I dunno about you.

And so I think in short bursts of third person thoughts, like “Evil Julie wants a jelly donut” and “Evil Julie is going on a ten-minute spin break, anyone in?”. Those do not make good blog posts, by the way, so my pre-K blog is probably being abused by the people running its daycare. My verbal skills are probably suffering, and looking back on that last sentence, it becomes quite obvious that my ability to come up with a decent metaphor has been compromised as well. And my attention span is not long enough to update Twitter (little bitch), Facebook, Ravelry, Plurk, and the blog. Sometimes, being this connected to the internets reminds me of the hive mind of the Borg…I haven’t lost the ability for independent thought, but I am always, always wondering “Has anyone written anything cool? What are these people up to? Have I blogged this week? No? Damn. Oooh, has anyone written anything in the past five seconds?” It is something I am going to have to work through. But I’m still taking my laptop with me when I hang out with Aimee and Sloth this weekend. So there.

(That last sentence totally caught your attention, didn’t it? Blog post when I get back. Promise.)

I have talked about my friend Eugene off and on here, mostly to describe why we call him Shady Gene – he disappears on trips for weeks at a time without telling us, and then comes back and says “Oh, I just got back from Geneva,” among other reasons. I mean, wtf? Who does that? Especially when they’re not independently wealthy? We think Gene has a sugarmama in Europe. Or he’s with the CIA. We’re not sure which.

Aaaanyway, several years back, he had a pet squirrel. And by pet, I mean, squirrel he trained to come into his house off the street. A New York City squirrel in his house. And in the course of time, Rocky disappeared and we all figured he’d gotten run down by a car or eaten some rat poison, or some other hideous fate that city squirrels can avoid for only so long.

Two weeks ago, Eugene emails me at work to tell me he has a new squirrel. Rocky II. And Rocky II has a girlfriend, and he brings the girlfriend to Gene’s window, but she won’t come in the apartment, only Rocky II, and…well, you see that this is another reason why we call him Shady Gene. I think he was one of those kids that just brought home every stray animal he found and he’s never outgrown it.

So without further ado, I present you with Rocky II (Eugene made these titles up, I had nothing to do with them. He’s twisted.)

Rocky II, the Sequel 

Rocky II Goes for the Nuts 

They’ve implemented a new phone system here at Some College that includes an integrated computer program. Basically, Big Brother is at my work place. I have to tell the computer every time I’m leaving my desk, even if it’s just to pee. All the stress that I felt leaving my body over the past five days that I had off? Back. Also, Maynard The World’s Oldest Cat (the 25 year old cat Rick inherited when his brother Jeffrey died last spring) has gone to meet his maker. We’re not sure exactly when, since we left Pittsfield on Monday afternoon and Rick just got back an hour ago, but I prefer to think of him as the last casualty of 2007 rather than the first of 2008. I just can’t deal with another clusterfuck of a year like 2007 was.

So to try to recapture some holiday zen, I will show you pictures. (Behind the cut, and there are a lot of them. Sorry, dial-up friends!) View full article »

How I know it’s crunch time for all knitters – I get a call from Aimee:

Aimee: Hey, did you knit the (some pattern) with (some number of stitches)? Because I’m doing it, and it doesn’t look right. Too small.

Julie: Yeah, I did that. I added 10 stitches to make it bigger. And you have to knit it longer than the pattern says or it won’t fit.

Aimee: Cool.

Yeah, then later, I realize that the number of  stitches Aimee had mentioned (protected here because the recipient of (some pattern) reads the blog occasionally) didn’t sound right. So I texted her and told her maybe I fucked up and cast on too many stitches, so don’t listen to me and just cast on however many the pattern calls for plus an increment of stitches. And then I got back from lunch and looked at my project page on Ravelry and realized that I had not in fact knit (some pattern). I had knit (some other pattern). So I just texted her that.

Since when does staying up until 12:30 and wrapping and packing Christmas gifts like a mad dervish screw with my mind like this and make me into a space cadet? I must be getting old…

It is a good day to be a member of the Red Sox nation, especially in New York City, surrounded by disgruntled Yankees fans. I’m celebrating by wearing my beat-up Sox cap, bought right after they won the 2004 World Series (do not slight me as a bandwagon fan, if you live in NYC you know that they were impossible to find here before then). I think it may be time to buy another one in celebration.

Also, my man Terry Francona? Vindicated. And yes, he is my man. We grew up in the same hometown and I went to school with his nephew.

And just when you think the day can’t get any better? Cute baby pictures! We took Samang on her first carousel ride this weekend at Prospect Park’s Halloween celebration (thus the costume).

If the child had only been looking at the camera, this would have been a Christmas card. Family photo

With Grandmama:

Samang and Grandmama

Still teething. Horsies apparently teethe on their hooves.

Horsies teethe using their hooves

Tonight I get to be a mime on stage. I’ve never been on stage, with good reason. I cannot tell you how happy I will be when this is over…

I finally got my act together this morning and uploaded the Rhinebeck pictures! So, without further ado… (pictures behind the cut, clicky for bigger)

View full article »

I had a doctor’s appointment this morning to draw blood and test for high cholesterol and check out this thing I have going on with my left eye where it’s always dry and a wee bit crusty. (I like to save up my ailments until there are quite a few of them before I visit Dr. Jed – that way I get more of a bang for my buck.)

So I’m sitting in the waiting room, knitting on a sock that I am determined will be finished by Friday so I can wear it to Rhinebeck on Saturday, and I hear “Hey, I know this lady!” I look up, and there are Jordana and Samang. Jordana, Thabs, and I all have the same doctor so the chances that we would meet up there are not astronomical, but they’re pretty freakin’ high all the same. We had absolutely no idea that we had appointments at the same time, and since I haven’t seen Jordana or the baby since my birthday, it was a very happy surprise. So while Jordana got her blood drawn, I got to play with my goddaughter – much more enjoyable than knitting a sock. And this chance meeting means I get to see J four days in a row – tomorrow we have a meeting to work on our performance, Friday night we’re driving up to Rick’s to crash (it’s much closer to the festival, and free!), and Saturday we’ll be doing Rhinebeck.

Between that and the fire drill my building is going to have in ten minutes, this is a red letter day.

I blame the baby. She has a cold, and after spending several days around her this past weekend, I think I have a cold. Which resulted in hardcore post-nasal drip, which resulted in…well, in me puking in the wee sma’s this morning. Yuck. So I am home today, recovering. Recovery involves drinking a lot of EmergenC and watching America’s Next Top Model. Hey, whatever works.

But hey, guess what? There’s a picture of me over on Mason-Dixon Knitting. (If you’re a knitter, you’re jealous.) Top picture, left hand side. That’s me in the Steelers cap and aqua hoodie, concentrating very hard on my spinning. The Spin-Out was a lovely way to spend Saturday – I walked up the hill to the fountain, and suddenly, there was a crowd of my people! Even better? There were a bunch of people spinning on Lendrums! We’re a cult! (Check the Ravelry groups if you’re on, we really are a cult now.) I spun for about five hours with a few trips to the bathroom and to get food, made a bunch of new friends, and got a few lessons (and a lovely birthday present) from my friend Jenny. (She is a miracle worker. The superfine merino top that I was spinning up as crap last week? Now looks like real live yarn! Even Rick couldn’t believe the difference!) Kids were spinning, guys were spinning, girls were spinning, and we became quite the tourist attraction. Really…the rickshaws were stopping beside us and pointing us out to tourists. Same with the carriages. I made some wonderful new (look at the picture of me, it makes me laugh) friends who I will see again at Rhinebeck later this month, and I just really enjoyed myself.

Afterwards, Rick and I met up with J and Thabs and Samang for dinner at a German restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. We ended up sitting right next to another table that was celebrating a birthday (Librans are everywhere, I must have run into about twelve people with birthdays on or near mine this year), and so there was a lot of talk back and forth, and a lot of beer.

The next morning, I woke up to…well, continuing proof that Rick is the best boyfriend ever. When I woke up there was a handmade card and a small wrapped package. I unwrapped it and found a memory card that didn’t fit anything I own. I thanked him for it, but said “What do I use this for?” He said “Well, you can always use more memory. Especially if you have this.” and pulled out a Nikon D-40. There will be a steep learning curve, especially as I find myself reaching for the non-existent zoom button, but I love my first SLR very very much.

We then  went over to Prospect Park for a little birthday party with some friends. Jordana, Thabiso, and Samang were there of course, and the girls took some time out of their schedules to come out, and Jessie, Andre, and Zula joined us as well, but the person who gets the biggest amount of points for showing up? The Retropolitan, who not only came from his distant Bat Cave, but came out to help celebrate my birthday when the only person he knew there was me. No pictures were taken of Retro, because he is so mysterious that he cannot be captured on camera, but now you are all jealous of me, knitters or not. It was an amazing birthday weekend, and I am just thrilled to have all these wonderful people in my life.

30? It ain’t so bad. Pictures here to prove it.

Jordana and Samang came over to my place last night, which means that the cats got to see their first baby. They were fascinated, Freddie especially. He looked her over, startled at the noises she made, and did not seem to understand that she was in fact a human. To be fair, he’s never seen a human the same size as he is, so I can understand the confusion. He seemed to like the way she smelled, though, and in the end tried to get her to pet him by headbutting her hand. He also licked her, perhaps to find out if she was edible. The best part of the night was when we had put her down on the bed for a nap, and Freddie (forgettting she was around because she was quiet) jumped up on the bed to get to his window perch, saw the baby kick and jumped a foot into the air. Because “Holy shit what the hell is that!!! Why is it on the bed??? Oh, wait. It’s that thing. The thing that makes noises and doesn’t pet me.”

Joe, in typical Joe fashion, took longer to warm up to her. (I think he’s also seen a baby or two in his long life, so he knew to be wary.) Late in the evening though, when the baby was still napping, I put him up on the bed to see her. She had gotten an arm out of her swaddle by this time, and when he got close to sniff her she whacked him upside the head. He looked at me to verify that I had seen this abuse, and then lay down at her feet to keep guard over her and protect her from that other miscreant, Freddie. Or maybe he just reasoned that the feet were still swaddled and less likely to make contact with him. But when I asked him if he liked the baby, he meowed. I take that as a good sign.

Baby-2, cats-0.

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