Damn

You'd think this would be a day where I'd be giddy with happiness, skipping down the street, singing ditties and indulging in other nauseating displays of joy since I finally finished this:
Instead I'm feeling incredibly pissy since the damn thing doesn't fit. Somehow when planning to make this sweater for myself I forgot that I have really broad shoulders. I picked my size based on my (modest) bust measurement, added a few inches on the sleeves since I have long arms but entirely forgot that my shoulders would need more room than, say, a normally proportioned woman. (Too bad the pattern didn't have a subset of how to alter it for your own freakity freak figure flaws. Say that four times fast.)

So now I present to you:

My sister's Christmas Present!

Sigh.

My sister has a much finer bone structure than I do and she's thinner too so I'm guessing this will fit perfectly. And it'll go great with all the size 8 pre-pregnancy pants I finally admitted will never fit me again and gave her. Of course, they all fit her flawlessly.

However to truly suit my sister, I think I should make this sweater a little more feminine. (This is the sweater I made her last year for Christmas. Note the purpley- pink crochet edging and mother of pearl flower-shaped buttons.) I'm a little on the utilitarian/scruffy side when it comes to clothing, but my sister can pull off stuff that is a bit more decorative. As I haven't yet put in the zipper I bought for it, I'm wondering if anyone has ideas on a different, more feminine fastening. I'm thinking maybe some tiny hooks and eyes running all the way up it might look nice, unless they proved to be a pain in the ass. Or I could cover the seed stitch plackets with some sort of ribbon and attach snaps up the front.

Ideas, anyone?

And meanwhile, to comfort myself on this cold grey day (a perfect day for wearing above cardigan I might note) I'm opening up thebox of dark chocolate covered glaceed apricots that I found at Trader Joe's the other day. (If I eat the whole box, then my sister will most likely get my current size 10 pants too and I'll just wander around pants-less, sweater-less and crazy as a loon.)

Free to a good home

I did some cleaning out of the limited book shelf space in the house and am offering the following books, free to a good home:
The pile on the left is fiction and contains:
The Far Euphrates by Aryeh Lev Stollman
Unless by Carol Shields
The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier
Around Again by Suzanne Strempek Shea
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kid
Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier
Eva Moves the Furniture by Margot Livesey

The pile on the right is non-fiction and contains:
The Mother's Almanac
Your Baby and Child
What to Expect the Toddler Years

and one book that didn't make it into the picture:
Food For Little Fingers by Victoria Jenest

Of the above, the only two I can really recommend are Unless and Eva Moves the Furniture (though I did read the latter when highly hormonal, and thus possibly more whacked out than usual, after Fiona's birth). I didn't read The Far Euphrates or Around Again though, so they may be perfectly decent books that I just didn't warm up to in the first few pages. Food for Little Fingers might be ok for people with toddlers though the recipes didn't work with my kids. Right now I'm fed up with parenting books though I'd say Your Baby and Child could be fine for a new parent who wants a basic reference.

If you are a writer, I think that reading the two Chevalier books and The Secret Life of Bees can be an interesting exercise. I think all three are seriously flawed novels which made it into print, and Bees has been incredibly popular with book groups (for all the wrong reasons, in my humble opinion). As a writer who someday would like to publish some of my fiction work, I learned a lot about what I don't want a book of mine to do by reading these three books.

If you are local and want any of these I can leave them on your doorstep or you can pick them up from mine. If you are far away and want to pay the postage, I'll be heading to the post office to mail x-mas gifts in the next week or so and could shlep it off to you.

Educational Eating

My son has been introduced to educational eating at Kindergarten. No nutritional value, mind you, but his teacher used food as a tool for understanding science subjects, in this case geology.

I present to you,
Jello Sedimentary Rock!

His class has been studying geology in his class (Geology! In kindergarten! They spent 2 months on it and just moved on to studying Kenya) and to get the kids to understand how sedimentary rock is made in layers over time, his teacher made Jello sedimentary rock (the above photo is of our version--the one they did in school had a different top layer). It took a whole week for them to make it which, in Kindergarten terms, is a hell of a long time, though Heidi explained that real sedimentary rock takes a lot longer to make.

On the first day they made the bottom layer--red magma; the second day they put down the middle layer--yellow with chunks of fruit in it to mimic a composite layer (or maybe a granite intrusion with the peaches being feldspar and the pears being the quartzite?); the third day they put down a layer of graham cracker crumbs (sand or sand stone); the fourth day they put down a layer of blue Jello mixed up with Kool Whip to imitate a glacier. And on the fifth day they ate it!

The kids even got to experiment with fault lines (mostly strike-slip type faults) as Jello rock is not terribly stable.

Ian was so excited by this whole project that we had to make it at home too. We couldn't find blue Jello so we mixed up our graham cracker crumbs with green Jello and made a dirt and grass top layer.

It tasted pretty disgusting, but Ian was proud as punch explaining the concept to all of us after dinner so we choked it down.