Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing whatsoever about motorcycles. I’m happy for people who enjoy riding them even though I have absolutely no interest in riding one myself. It isn’t people who ride motorcycles in general I have problems with.

The ones who are troublesome are the ones who think they own the road. Just like anyone in a car who thinks that they’re more important than everyone else on the road, the people on bikes are creating dangerous situations as I try to safely drive to work. Last week, I saw someone on a bike with no helmet or any other protective gear that I could spot. This isn’t too unusual, and I wouldn’t really make a big deal of it if he had been riding safely and respectfully of the other people on the highway. He wasn’t, though. He decided he didn’t want to deal with the traffic which had slowed to about 5 mph below the speed limit (really slow, right?). He zoomed into the emergency lane and drove down it for a good half mile, then wove in and out of the cars until I couldn’t see him anymore. I presume his behavior continued as he drove down. I saw him drive in between two cars who were driving in their own lanes. Nobody in this scenario was doing anything out of the ordinary – just this guy on a motorcycle decided he had more important places to be and used his bike to his advantage.

That’s just one example of the crap that I’ve seen driving to work. (Interestingly, it mostly happens when I’m on my way to work, between 7 and 7:40AM on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday every week – I rarely see it on my way home.) I see this all the time and as I’m mentally calling these people jerks, or worse depending on my mood that day, I have to wonder what it is that motivates them to do things like that. If I were on a vehicle such as a motorcycle, full well knowing that there are other vehicles on the road which weigh thousands of pounds and won’t be able to stop as quickly as my bike could, I don’t think I would want to be swerving in front of vehicles or going in between the lanes to get farther up in the lane.  I guess I’m also a little more safety minded, too. I’d be wearing a helmet, for sure, and at least long pants and sleeves. I mean, one more layer between me and the pavement, right?

I imagine most people with motorcycles understand the risks and know that there are options out there to keep them safe. Why, then, wouldn’t they employ these things? In a collision, the car has the advantage. It’s bigger and has a ton of safety features built in – airbags, seat belts, crumple zones, etc. I can’t imagine many situations in which a motorcycle would survive intact, and the rider is also likely to suffer some high levels of injury from such a collision. The fact is that there are a lot more cars on the road, and they are bigger, heavier, and are a direct enemy of the motorcycle when it comes to collision.

Seeing these people act so recklessly irritates me. It’s disrespectful to the people using the roads as they’re supposed to, following traffic laws and giving reasonable distance to their fellow drivers. When these people blatantly disregard the law in this manner, they’re putting themselves at risk and spitting in the face of those who do abide by the law and try (mostly) to follow speed limits and don’t do things like driving around other cars in the emergency lanes to get places sooner. I am not wishing for someone to get hurt. I want people to be safe. I just really wish that some of these people riding these motorcycles wanted the same thing.

Later, news articles started to show up stating that the epicenter was in Ontario. Or else it was Quebec. Nobody was really sure yet. But they were pretty sure it was either a 5.0 or a 5.5. Really specific, right? Still later, they finally narrowed it down to the Ottowa area on the Ontario/Quebec border. The consensus seems to be that it was a 5.5. It is amazing to me how far away the quake reached. Down to Cincinnati! That’s quite a distance.

Earthquakes aren’t totally new to me. We got a couple in Oregon when I lived there. It was, of course, nothing like what is experienced in California, but we got a few. I remember one that was strong enough to merit evacuating our school until they could assess whether there had been any damage that could endanger our precious teenage lives.  It was otherwise unremarkable. We stood on the football field, whining and bored until they deemed the school safe for us to re-enter. This one wasn’t even that remarkable. Being on the third floor, we experienced some swaying, but people who were on the ground floors of buildings sometimes felt nothing. Johnathan was driving at the time and didn’t feel it at all.

The little earthquake was kind of a fun diversion. There was no real damage to speak of, even, apparently, closer to the epicenter, and nobody died as a result of the shake. We did get a little excitement with people texting friends and relatives to find out whether they felt it or not, and scouring twitter and google for results that would tell us the epicenter and more about how far-reaching it was. Nobody was scared; we all got excited instead. It was kind of like a birthday distraction from the average humdrum of everyday working.

Time Warner, I was going to write a letter to you detailing how much trouble we’ve had over the last month and a half trying to get our service to work consistently. However, having worked for the company, I know that any information I could get regarding where to send letters would go off to some possibly mythical person whose address, if I recall correctly, is somewhere in North Carolina, and who never actually makes return correspondence. Even when I worked for your company, I was pretty sure that he wasn’t a real person. I felt that I shouldn’t have to deal with that, and that leaves me with a few options. I can try to call up the food chain, but I know for a fact that will do absolutely no good. It’s easier to contract Creutzfeld-Jakob disease than it is to get a supervisor on the phone. I know that sending a letter to the walk-in centers would do no good. They can’t do anything but hand the letter to their own supervisors who will probably not do anything about it, and to be honest – what we want is someone who can do something about this to be able to fix some of these problems. And they can’t. It’s just not in their job scope to do so.

So where does that leave me? The internet. So, here is my little letter to you, detailing our frustration with all of the brick walls we’ve run smack into while trying to rectify the issues with our internet service.

Very early in May, we started having recurring issues with our internet service. It started to go down for long periods of time, and modem reboots most certainly did not help bring it back. At first, it was happening between 9 and 9:30PM on an almost nightly basis. That was pretty annoying, but it did eventually come back. We called once while it was down and the person on the phone sent a hit to the modem and was ready to call it good. Of course, I know that didn’t really do anything since by the time she sent the hit, our service had already popped back in. But, since it did come back, we were willing to say “okay” and let it go. Then it continued to happen. A few days later, we called back. We were able to get a trouble calls for a few days later in a late enough window that we would both be home for it. The tech checked our signal levels (because of course it wasn’t down while he was there), and took a filter off of our line that had been put on when we got our cable in September 2008. He said we were all better.

Everything was fine for a couple of days, so we thought maybe he was right. I wish. It started happening again. We called in to customer service and this time we were able to “escalate” our issue to tier 2. Tier 2 did some looking around and couldn’t find anything wrong. Go figure. So we scheduled another tech call. Our second call was about the same as the first. He monitored our lines and determined that as far as he could tell, everything was fine. He checked the lines outside and declared that they were a little loose. He said that was probably the issue and that we were all better! We were, understandably I think, skeptical, but we took him at his word. He was very polite so that helped his case.

Within days, the issue began again. We called and managed to get up to tier 3 this time. Once again, nobody could find any problems with our service, but a ticket was opened anyway after we explained what happened. It took Johnathan showing his technical savvy to get them to take us seriously, which is an entirely different issue. We were getting pretty frustrated by now, and since the next tech call would be our third, we wanted to ensure we would get a senior technician. The first problem with this was that we were given an up to three-day window for a supervisor call-back to schedule the call. So not only would we have to wait up to three days for the tech supervisor to call, but we would also then have to wait until whenever s/he could schedule our service call. We were willing to wait, because we just wanted the issue resolved, but also requested a service call in the meantime so that the tech could replace the modem.

The tech showed up on time, although didn’t call (none of them ever did call ahead of time), and we figured it would be quick. Little did we know that this call would be the biggest disaster yet. First of all, he wanted to crawl into the closet where our line came in. That was fine. He decided that a splitter that was put in at our installation was probably at fault, so he took it out. Whatever, as long as it works in the end. He checked our signal and declared it fine (which was never in doubt, as when the internet was working it was at normal speed, but the issue was that it would not always work). He decided he wanted to pull up some diagnostics. So he asked to use Johnathan’s computer. I thought that was strange, but Johnathan acquiesced. Then there was a moment of horror for us – he was unable to use the keyboard because some of the letters had rubbed off. And since I was booted into Linux and in a game that I would not be exiting out of, he was forced to have Johnathan type things in for him. So … he gave Johnathan the URL, ID and password to a tech diagnostic tool that the area techs used on calls. It seems strange that he was so willing to give this information out to customers, not least to put it into their personal computers. Then, he was prepared to leave after “proving” that there was nothing wrong with our service. We insisted that he replace the modem, which was the whole reason for the call in the first place. We like to cover our bases, so wanted that done – just in case. He did so, but begrudgingly and it was very clear that he did not think it was necessary and was only doing it because we insisted. Then he proceeded to condescendingly explain how to plug things in and in what  order they should be plugged in. We explained to him that not only do we know what we’re doing, but he was being rude and we asked him to leave. It was that or do something more drastic, and nobody needed that.

We continued to have problems with our service and called customer service several times to update customer service of this fact. Our most recent call was on Thursday, June 3, after our internet went down the night before and still was not back as of 7AM. I was scheduled to work from home that day and it was the first time I needed the internet to work since we’d started having that problem. Johnathan called because I was so angry that I would have said mean things to people who don’t deserve it, and after assuring the girl on the phone that we did not need any troubleshooting, that no, a hit would not fix it and neither would restarting our modem, and would she please just schedule a trouble call for us, he left for work and I wandered up to Caribou Coffee to do some work for there. Our call was to be that day between 2 and 4PM, so I planned to work from the coffee shop until I was able to wander back to the apartment. Thankfully, the internet came back at about 11AM so I was able to work from home for the rest of the day, but I knew my afternoon could be interrupted at any time, so I tried not to get too involved in anything. 2PM rolled around and I started pulling back on the number of things I was involved in. 2:30, 3PM, 3:30, still no tech. I know the window means that the tech can arrive anywhere between 2 and 4, and that it does not mean that he has to be done by 4. Prepared with this knowledge, I waited until 4PM until I got angry. No tech showed up. I checked our door – no tag. There was no van on the street and no van in the parking lot, so I surmised that I would not be seeing a tech.

Later that night, owing to the still inconsistent service and lack of tech during our trouble call, Johnathan called Time Warner, this time to cancel. We’d had enough. He called AT&T, our only other option (unless we’re willing to deal with dial-up), and scheduled service to start. To our dismay, we got an incredibly helpful rep on the phone this time. Her name was Kim and she was easily the best representative we spoke to during this whole fiasco (the online support via Twitter being second-best, only because they had no way to get us in touch with anyone locally). She was able to assess the problem and discover that there was an ongoing problem with our node dropping people between – you guessed it – 9 and 9:30PM on a regular basis. Well. Color me shocked. We asked her to disconnect our service effective June 10th, at which point we would have new service installed and our DSL modem would have arrived. We also asked her to tell us the details of the trouble call that never was. This was the best part of the call, I think. She told us that the call had been canceled at 2:20PM. Right during our window! The reason listed was “outage”. We were given no notification whatsoever of this cancellation, and as a result, I was fairly unproductive for two hours of work. If I had taken the time off, I would be even angrier, since it meant waiting around for that whole window, only to have the tech not show up. I also know that had I called any time during that window, I would have been told that I had to wait until after the window had passed because the tech had the whole window to show up. So there was no way for me to find out.

Our internet went out shortly after we got off of the phone with Kim, but at that point we had just resigned ourselves to not having consistent service and consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we would be getting service from another provider shortly thereafter. We had very little connectivity on Friday (a minute now and then, but nothing lasting), none on Saturday, Sunday or Monday. Tuesday, we’d had enough. What was the point of paying for service if you had none? So we called Time Warner. Only to find out, as it were, that our service had apparently been end-dated as of Thursday the 3rd, which meant we’d really not had any service that whole time. I’m not sure how to explain the small pockets of uptime that we had, but I’m taking the person on the phone at her word. We’ll be returning the modem this weekend and finally be done dealing with Time Warner Cable.

I have tried to be nice about this. I used to work for the company, and while it was a major relief to me when I no longer had to deal with the red tape and bureaucracy, I have been a major defender of the cable company. I know how things work and which things are under their control and which are not. I know what to expect from customer service and what to expect from the techs. I won’t claim that our issue was routine – obviously it was not an easy fix or it would have been fixed, I have full faith in that. But the ability for so many people to drop the ball and continually accuse the same things (our router – which was not and is not the issue) of causing the problem, including a tech supervisor, is unacceptable. On Wednesday, we received a call from a tech supervisor who claimed to have monitored our signal for thirteen days and saw no issues. He defended the technician who we asked politely to leave our apartment, and implied that the tech who canceled our call was that selfsame person. Somehow this was justification for why he canceled our call with absolutely no notification. I’m not sure. He also let us know that the problem had to be something that was outside of Time Warner’s control (implying, once again, that our router was at fault – or worse, that we, who work in IT and are up front about that, would not have verified that our computers were functioning properly).

Something that has really bothered me through this whole process is that no matter how polite, no matter how calm we remained on the phone, we were often met with surliness and defenses of varying sorts. The people on the phone are apparently so often harassed that even those who are not irate are dealt with as if they are about to say something completely inappropriate. And continually, the third-party router was blamed as the problem. Even when we were getting no signal to the modem, even after unplugging the router and plugging directly into the modem and the signal did not return, the router was blamed. Third-party routers are the scapegoats of all internet issues with Time Warner Cable. I knew that when I worked there, but I did not know the scale of this fact. We will be connecting our third-party router to our DSL modem, and I guarantee that it will work without consistently dropping our signal at the same time nightly. I’m genuinely shocked, given this behavior, that our browser of choice (Firefox and sometimes Chrome) and our operating systems of choice (Linux) weren’t called into question as well.

All in all, Time Warner, you can see that we have been dealt with very badly. We were treated like idiots and it was implied at one point that the problem was essentially imaginary. I have realistic expectations of the level of service that we would receive. We don’t expect perfect customer service on the phone, but we do expect a reasonable level of uptime with our internet. I do not expect 100% uptime – that would be unreasonable. I don’t expect for Time Warner to credit me for power outages or because I go out of town and don’t use my service. I do expect the service that I am paying for to work, especially at $40/month. AT&T costs a little bit more and the max speed is a little bit slower, but so far our interactions with them have been pleasant.

I am disappointed that my relationship with Time Warner Cable ended the way that it did, both as an employee and as a customer. There were a lot of problems with the customer service and tech support that we received and we do, in fact, blame the corporation for all of it. There is no excuse for the attitude of the people on the phone, of the technicians and certainly of the tech supervisor, whose behavior I find the most reprehensible.

We have terminated our relationship with your company and plan to do everything we can to avoid getting your service again. This is a shame, because you have some interesting ideas and some good services. But if they don’t even work then what’s the point?

Your company could do with a major customer service overhaul. I won’t hold my breath.

Sincerely, and with the hopes that you will take this seriously,

Laura, who really just wants working internet service

Finals were last week. I finished them all with a bit of a whimper. I was really ready to be done with classes. I questioned the point. I asked myself if grades really matter to anyone but me. (Do they, honestly? Is anyone going to care what grade I got in a random class in community college? I really doubt it.) I wondered why I was putting myself through all of this. I talked about school at the beginning of the semester, before things had started to overwhelm me. Reading it again, I seemed so positive, so hopeful! At some point, I lost that. Possibly it was when I realized that my theater teacher was making the class very difficult for working students. (A weekday, daytime meeting requirement, really? Isn’t that the point of online classes? That they’re flexible for working students? Meh.) Maybe it was when I realized that most of the students in my classes were basically incapable of analyzing anything, and that I was doing way too much work to get the same grades as they would get. Maybe it was just because I lost the plot somewhere after the midterms. I still got my stuff done. I managed ultimately to get, I’m pretty sure, three As (in history and my two music survey classes) and a C (in theater – I could say a lot of mean things, but I’ll just say this: if you want a paper that’s 5-6 pages, tell me that; if you say you want the paper to be 4-5 pages, and I hit 4.5 pages, do not say it is on the short side! No! It is not! It is right in the middle. So there). I’m pretty satisfied with that. The perfectionist side of me is kicking myself for every point that I lost in that theater class that would have given me a C. Despite the fact that I lost 100 points (of 1100) because I couldn’t justify taking four or five hours off of work to go and watch a video of a play I’d already read (and he offered no alternative other than trying for extra credit in the discussion boards), I still blame myself. Surely I could have done something else to make up the points, right? Yeah, whatever. I vacillate between kicking myself and being overwhelmed by apathy about it. Either way, it’s over. So, this semester is done.

Before the semester ended, I made a few decisions. I was not going to take full time classes through the end of the year. This was my original plan. I’d have an Associate of Arts by the end of the year if I did. It would look really great to achieve that much! But that’s for students who have part time jobs or even no jobs at all. I can’t justify the sacrifice of life and sanity to get a degree that doesn’t actually achieve anything for me. I won’t get a raise or promotion because I have an associate’s degree, particularly in arts! That’s just not what IT departments are looking for, I’m pretty sure. So I dropped three of my classes for summer term and registered only for two classes in the fall. I’ll probably need to do classes next spring and summer, too, just to make sure I get all the classes I need for my degree, but with every semester, I’ll be getting a little closer. And, since I wouldn’t be pushing myself so hard, I’ll retain my sanity. That’s always a positive, I think.

In the last week, I decided to read one of the books that I go to when I want some comfort. It took me about one day to read through it, so then I picked up one of the books I brought in and sat up on the shelf on my desk before the semester started, when I thought I would still have time to read now and then. (That didn’t so much happen. They’re all a little dusty at this point.) I finished that one the next day. That night, we went to Barnes & Noble, just because. I bought two books. I started that one the next day and finished it last night. Then I started on the other book I bought. I’m reading it today at work (Friday! Whoo!) with every intention of finishing it today, unless things get crazy and busy. I have two books on my shelf here at work and at least two at home that I haven’t read before. I’m predicting that I’m going to run out of new books to read before the new semester starts up.

What I’ve really discovered is that it’s amazing what you miss out on when you have to sacrifice self in a busy schedule like I was living. I lost track of myself, and I really bottled everything up, because I didn’t want anyone else to see how hard it was on me. Earlier this week, as I was driving home from work, I basically lost it on the way home. I started sobbing, and I couldn’t stop. I cried halfway home, then came home and cuddled Beethoven for as long as he would let me hold him. Then he deserted me. My kitties, for once, couldn’t seem to tell that I needed them. So I took a nap. And when I woke up, I still felt off, but better. We went to the bookstore that night, and I started to feel more alive than I’ve felt in four months. I was reliving interests that I’ve had to put aside, not only for lack of time but also for lack of money. (We’ve been pretty ruthless with ourselves, and there just wasn’t money to buy books or many other fun things in past months.) We got coffee and meandered through the bookstore. I remembered what it feels like to find so many books that are begging to be taken home and to have to practice the self-denial which usually still involves buying two or three books. (I only got two! I was so proud of myself!) It felt like a piece of myself came back to me.

Now I’m reading voraciously, and thinking about imaginary characters in imaginary places and disappearing into their worlds for a little while. And then when I come back to real life,  I feel more alive again, like it’s easier to handle again. I’ve missed books. I didn’t realize how much I missed being able to read because I wanted to read, not because I needed to for a class. And it feels like, with the re-introduction of reading to my daily schedule, I have regained a piece of myself that has been dormant for months. It feels wonderful. I’m hopeful that I can avoid a repeat of this mania at the end of every semester to follow.

Hello, me! I missed you!

Once I found a job, things got a little better. Things weren’t so tight and we could breathe again, but I wouldn’t say we were financially stable. I wasn’t making a lot of money, and Johnathan was underpaid and overworked. But we were both employed, and making plans to get out of debt as soon as we stabilized. We got stable financially (well, enough, anyway) around the time we got married in September 2008, so we set up a “snowball” structure for our debts and began working toward paying that off.

I won’t say we haven’t had setbacks along the way. That would be a bald-faced lie. Some months, our debt went up instead of down, but for every single one of them, we can identify the cause (couch, new TV, vacation, etc), and since our debt graph was still going down, it wasn’t something to worry about. We’re now over a year and a half into the process and we’ve paid off all credit card debt, and I sent off the last payment for my student loan last week. That leaves our cars and my loan for the current school term. Three quarters of our debt is gone, and all of our truly harmful debt is gone.

After going through our bills the other day, it was interesting to realize that we’re… fine. We’re fine! If something were to happen, we would float. In fact, we’re talking about funneling all of my paychecks into savings as soon as the debt is gone, because there won’t be any other draw for it. This means that we’ll be able to put aside money for big things like a down payment for a house, like big vacations, college… anything, really! It’s already very freeing to be out from under so much debt, and heading toward true financial freedom. Realizing that we’d only have a few recurring bills left after we’re done paying down debt, and some of them may be able to be reduced in frequency.

We’re so close to being finished with debt payment – it feels absolutely wonderful. We should have both of our cars paid off totally within a couple of months, and I expect to see our total debt fall under $5,000 on Tuesday when I get paid. We’re saving for two vacations and have plenty set aside for the one in September, and are instead looking toward the one we’ve planned for May of next year. With any luck, we’ll be able to contribute the maximum to our IRA next year and start accumulating significant savings. Our financial outlook is beautiful!

January and February were uneventful for me. I was working for the Evil Cable Empire, not really loving it but managing nevertheless. There was snow, it was cold, and generally the status quo stayed the same. Our year in snippets:

• We bought a new couch (which is pretty great).
• We saw Spring Awakening (which I loved).
• I joined my very first D&D campaign.
• We saw The Drowsy Chaperone again (to much less satisfaction than the first time).
• The Cleveland International Film Festival started again (and we loved it from start to finish).
• We saw Spamalot (and it was only okay).
• We saw The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee again (and it was exactly as expected).
• We went to Knoebel’s opening weekend.
• We saw Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin live in concert (it was pretty great).
• I lost my job at the Evil Cable Empire.
• I started knitting again.
• Johnathan started working for the hospital again.
• I finally got my wisdom teeth out.
• We went to Walt Disney World for two long, long weeks (it was really, really hot! but fun).
• We saw They Might Be Giants in concert (it was a Flood show – pretty fun!).
• We saw Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm in concert again (last year’s concert was better).
• I got the flu twice – the “regular” flu and H1N1. It was a “fun” month.
• I got a job at the hospital working at the new help desk.
• We saw Mamma Mia! (it was enjoyable).
• We saw Wicked (still a great show).
• We quit our D&D campaign.
• We visited Allison in Bloomington for a few days. (She visited us in Cleveland a few times, too.)

In other news, I watched 361 movies this year. It’s not quite one movie per day on average, but just about. I’ve seen a lot of good ones, a lot of bad ones, and a lot of mediocre, unmemorable movies this year. I really loved doing this, though. It was nice to have something to work toward this year, particularly after I became unexpectedly unemployed.

In addition to my 361 movies, I read 26 books. I seemed to let my “50 Book Challenge” fall by the wayside this year in favor of films, and that is okay with me. I completed 24 projects: 4 scarves (none for me), 10 hats (about half of them for me), 3 headbands, 2 coffee cozies, 1 pair of mittens, 2 market bag (very stretchy and wonderful), and 1 tank top (not my favorite project). I partially completed one set of fingerless gloves for myself, I made one flip-top mitten for Johnathan (the other is still in queue), one more market bag, two hats for me, half of a sock, part of a scarf for my brother (for which I have once again changed patterns), half of a second tank top (which I loved, but didn’t have the patience to finish), and another try at flip-top mittens for Johnathan which ended up not working as well as planned. Not to mention, one of those 10 hats had to be ripped out and started over again because I made it far too big for a normal-sized woman’s head.

As far as “big things” go, this year has been nothing compared to last year. I’m okay with that. A job loss was bad enough, I think!

2009 hasn’t been bad to us. I hope that 2010 will be better.

1. It’s not as hard as I had it worked up to be in my head. I made a scarf to learn cables, and quickly learned to love them. I made a neck warmer to learn how to do herringbone stitch and did a practice swatch of what appears to be daisy stitch (according to some – elsewhere called a diagonal knot stitch). I’ve learned how to cast on in the middle of a project, create stitches where once there weren’t any, do a gusset for the thumb of a mitten… I know there are a lot of techniques that I have yet to explore, and I look forward to learning them as I go. No beginner projects for me – I’m learning new techniques by doing them.
2. Hobbies can get expensive, and knitting is no exception. There are some really gorgeous colorways out there, some handspun, some themed to interesting things (like Harry Potter themed yarns among other things), and lots of them incredibly expensive. I’ve found a happy spot where I get good yardage for my dollar, but yarns that aren’t scratchy and inflexible (like the Red Heart Superwash tends to be in my still limited experience). I do have to keep reminding myself that while it’s nice that some knitters can afford to spend upwards of $50 on one hank of yarn, I just can’t do that and I don’t know if I’ll ever get to the point where I will.
3. Elitism is everywhere. It’s there in all aspects of life and especially in each and every hobby or interest I’ve pursued. I haven’t found anything yet that was free of it. There are some knitters who refuse to use anything but natural fibers, or even better, handspun natural fibers (which can get very expensive) and are fairly vocal about those who use anything man-made. Others swing the other direction and are fairly judgmental of those who don’t use man-made fibers. It’s inevitable that this would happen. It’s not a very nice thing to witness, but I think I’m getting better at blocking out the elitism.

I’m really enjoying knitting things up. I stayed up late on Saturday night to finish the mitten, and it was absolutely amazing to see how it ended up shaped like a mitten, without any truly complicated techniques. As far as finished objects go, here’s what I have:

• Sharfik for Allison: Nine feet and one inch of scarf pre-fringe. -faint- It took me just under three weeks to actually finish the scarf, mostly because I think I was losing motivation for it. Scarves take a long time. There’s no real sense of reward when it’s done becasue it takes so darn long to finish. I still need to attach the fringe, but I was waiting for it to dry after washing it. I should do that soon since she’s visiting this weekend. [Pattern]
  
• Coffee Cozies [1] [2]: Johnathan got coffee pretty much every day at his old job (he started his new (old?) one today, yay!), and I figured that since he wasn’t taking his own mug to get the coffee, it was ending up being pretty unfriendly to the environment. I had about half a skein (give or take) of yarn left over from the scarf that I made for his mom’s birthday, so I figured, why not make a coffee cozy? Can’t be hard, right? I made the first one in the same woven cable pattern that the scarf I made his mom used. I seamed it up very badly, and put a pretty button on it. Where the seam is, the cozy gets pretty bulky, so I’m a little disappointed with how it came out. The second one was much better. It was a herringbone stitch pattern (which I had just made a neckwarmer out of – more on that to come), and it knitted up just as quickly as the first one, but because the edges were more straight I had an easier time seaming it. I seamed it up while watching an episode of chopped, left off any buttons and called it done. It is less loose than the first one because I made it just a little bit undersized, to let it stretch. So, all in all, #2 was much better than #1. I still have probably a quarter or more of a skein of that blue yarn, so I figure I’ll make some more, unless I can figure out something else to make with it. Any ideas? It was nice making these, though, because I didn’t use any patterns for them, so I felt kind of original in doing it. (Even if both stitch patterns came from another pattern that I originally followed.)
  
• Herringbone Neckwarmer: I’ve had this pattern bookmarked for a long time. It was one of those “someday…” projects that I had no idea when I’d be able to actually make it. I bought yarn with my birthday money from Johnathan’s mom, and had no reason, at that point, not to make it. I started it on Tuesday night, and by Thursday night, it was totally finished, including buttons and buttonholes. The buttonholes were an interesting part for me. The pattern calls for binding off, then picking up and knitting fifteen stitches with doubled yarn. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make it work the way the pattern called for it to work, so ultimately I ignored the instructions. I looked up how to make a one-row buttonhole, and worked it into the pattern instead. It turned out pretty well! The buttonholes were a little bit big, so the buttons don’t like to stay put, but I figure I’d rather sew them smaller than have to un-knit and redo the buttonholes because the buttons won’t fit through. I really like how the neckwarmer turned out. Now I just have to wait four more months until it’s cool enough outside to actually require it! Aw, man… [Pattern]
  
• Mary Sue’s Bella’s Mittens: I am not a Twilight fan. I read the book last year and more than once wanted to throw the book through a window. It’s horrible. However, when I saw a picture of a pair of look-alike mittens that a friend on LJ made, I couldn’t help myself. I was in love! These mittens are great. They’re long, which I like, and have a neat horseshoe cable going up the top side. I started the first one on Friday night, after acquiring a longer cable needle so that I could do the magic loop to make the mitten. It took me a few hours on Friday night to make most of the cuff, then a few hours spent on Saturday got me the rest of the way finished with the mitten. Unfortunately, I stayed up until 3:30AM to finish it, because I just wanted to see it completed. As such, I didn’t get much sleep, so didn’t knit at all yesterday. As of this moment, I have exactly twenty of the requisite forty-three stitches cast on for the second mitten, so today’s looking like a knitting bust, too. Maybe this is second sock syndrom, but for mittens? I’m not sure. Either way, I’m really happy with how it turned out. I just need to finish the second one now. [Pattern]
  

Before I started my mitten, I also threaded beads for and cast on for an Odessa hat (another pattern I’ve had my eye on for quite a while), so that’s “in progress”as well. Coming up, I have plans to make a couple of pairs of socks (my first self-made socks!), a couple of things for my mom for Chirstmas, a couple of things for a friend who is moving to a colder climate at the end of the year, and a pair of Space Invaders socks for Johnathan (don’t worry, he already knows about them!). I should have plenty of projects to keep me busy until I find a new job. (Hopefully longer than that, too!)

My only real wish is that I could subsist on knitting commissions. I have exactly one so far, and that one won’t start until finances are in the right place for her, so I’m not sure when I’ll need to start on that. I’m excited to do it, though! So, uh, want something knitted? I’ll do it for you! If you pay me, of course.

The young man in the striped shirt swears he was traveling at 10 miles per hour.

This is why I bring my camera to work with me.

Every time I go through the process of getting “into” a school, I’m reminded by just how much it sucks. There is no more eloquent way to articulate it: it sucks. First, there’s filling out the FAFSA, which is an adventure all on its own. Mine took me several disjointed times to finally get it all filled out, and even still, I have to wait for my mom to get back from her latest cruise before I can do anything further with it.

FAFSA, actually, is entirely silly. If I were to wait until the spring term, I would be able to file on my own, without needing any parental information. The reason being that I would be nearing 24, and would also be married. Somehow, these things make a huge difference in my independence, despite the fact that my parents will not be able to claim me as a dependent this year and indeed will not be sponsoring, cosigning or otherwise helping me out with my loans in any way. It’s a silly kind of rule, but in order for me to start school in the fall rather than waiting until the spring, I still need information from my mom. I was able to get the appropriate information, and now all I need is an electronic signature, which will just have to wait. It’s nice to know that’s done, though.

The next item on the list of Things To Do is to figure out which community college I’ll attend. We’re in the county for one of them, but it has a difficult website to navigate and I found it very frustrating. I also could find almost no online classes, which is a big problem for me, since I won’t be able to attend on campus unless it’s a once-a-week class. The other is out of county for me, but has ample online classes, including language classes. I know there will be times that I’ll have to go to the campus, for exams and such (at least that’s how it worked for the classes I took online in Oregon), but if there’s a window that includes Wednesday or Thursday (which my days off seem to alternate between), then I’ll be able to get down and take an exam at the college and still be able to work full time like I’m doing.

I’m excited for the prospect of getting back to school, especially now that I have a better idea of what I’d like to do “when I grow up.” I’m getting six or seven architecture books from someone who is studying architecture so I’ll see if maybe architecture would be a good career path for me. I’d like to take some culinary courses to see if perhaps a career in food is for me. Whether I study architecture, music or food, though, I’m bound to find some class or another that will be relevant to my ultimate pursuance of said career.

I guess, to put it bluntly, I’m going back to school, and darn it, I’m excited about it!

So long farewell…
  These are a few of
  my favorite things
    Climb ev’ry mountain
      I’ll be happy to see you
        going on 17
          [Yodel] [Goat noise]

I love my job.

Being at work has started to change my perspective a little about the people in the area. The demographics of the Cleveland area are fairly diverse, and on the one hand, I’m not as used to it – Portland is certainly not that diverse – but on the other, it seems like I’m more tolerant of it than the people I now work with. After each person with an accent (save for the man with the Irish accent), there are disparaging comments about whether there are any Americans left living in America and whether, if Obama is elected as President, we’ll get affirmative action because we’ll be the “minority.” What, really? Suddenly white people will disappear? Apparently so. All the same, they’re nice ladies, profess to be democrats and I have similar interests with both of them as they sit here. It seems incongruous that two people who, theoretically, are for equal rights for everyone and who adhere to the Democratic party ideals are also mildly racist in a way that actually makes me uncomfortable.

Avenue Q really does have it right: “Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes.”