Okay, it's *definitely* either the colors or the kids.

Yesterday, I spent no money. Partially as penance for forgetting about Buy Nothing Day (forgetting, that is, until I put down the steaming hot coffee I'd just bought from Panera (along with breakfast for Other & me) and flipped on the radio to hear Kalle (sp?) Lasen (sp?) being interviewed on NPR, and was like, shit.) and partially because I didn't need anything and didn't want to buy anything I didn't need. I'm working on this.

So, yesterday was spent knitting and reading the internets, where I'd stumbled upon the Who Wouldn't Love a Hand Knitted Gift? Blog and felt guilty because all these people were cranking out spectacular gifts for friends and loved ones, and here I was making myself a scarf out of cashmerino*.

Chastened, I hastened (well, today) to Hobby Lobby, where I was hoping to find several skeins of Kool Wool with which to knit a hat for my brother. I found it in Camel Heather, Light Denim heather, and nothing else, and I needed Tomato, Black, and Ivory. Hobby Lobby is the only place in a 20 mile radius that carries Kool Wool, and they have a yarn section that is two and a half aisles, plus these weird displays with tons of piles of eyelash yarn.

Camel Heather and Light Denim heather are not my brother's school colors.

So I hastened, in the at this point driving rain, to the yarn store, where I found no suitable substitute (well, for less than $8.50/skein), and some beautiful Noro Silk Garden yarn, which I quickly convinced myself would be great for a bag. Then with amazing willpower, I put it down and bought some circular needles that will come in handy for the multitude of baby hats I'll need to knit sometime soon, as the cousins, they are reproducing.

Which brings me to my point: if we're going to destroy the environment in the name of consumption, shouldn't I at least be able to find what I want? For crying out loud? How is it that in this most hedonistic and spendthrift of ages, I cannot find a goddamn thing that I'm looking for?

Here is a list of things I wanted today but for a multitude of reasons was unable to get:

Kool Wool
Polarspun yarn
Papa John's breadsticks
Smuckers Boysenberry syrup
Some regular freaking white bread
Ben & Jerry's Brownie Batter ice cream
Digiorno's PLAIN DAMN small pizza not for the microwave
more Debbie Bliss cashmerino (not for me this time).

Okay, that's kind of embarassing, and I've forgotten about half the list. I have a lot of impulses.

And, just now, when I went to watch Related (I can't believe I watch Related, but I do, I love it) they were putting cute but dorky guy (Joel?) in a cop car and needless to say, I am very confused, because I didn't realize that secretly being in love with Rose Sorelli was a crime, and was wondering what the hell I missed in the first 20 seconds of the show, but then I realized: This is not Related, this is Seventh Heaven.

Out of all the realizations I've had today, this one sucked the most. Fuckaroo.


*Which is not to say that I don't need a scarf, because I do, desperately. I finished my hat over the weekend and if the temperature had been remotely seasonal, it would have kept my head nice and warm.

I remember the way that you smiled - when the gravity shackles went wild

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

I'm thankful for a lot of things, but I was thinking yesterday specifically about how important the blogs I read are to me. They help me feel connected to humanity when my friends in real life move or fall away. Here are some of the ones that I especially like, and have been meaning to link forever.

Que Sera Sera
Laid Off Dad
Finslippy
Fussy
Sheets and Blankets
Briantology
Midwestgrrl
Out of Character
Loobylu
Mimi Smartypants (every time I see there's been a commuter train wreck in Chicago, I worry about her)
So the Fish Said
Fluid Pudding

I will put links up when I get back to my computer at home.

this was going somewhere else...

Here are some bad things that I'm doing:

Eating waaaaay too many Caramel Hershey's Kisses.

Premeditating a _Related_ viewing tonight.

Coveting.

Here are some good things that I'm doing:

Not blogging from work

Knitting this hat

Wearing more rather than turning the heat up.

Checking my gauge

The hat is part of a two-pronged plan to combat the hair situation and combat the our-office-is-freezing-but-no-one-thinks-so-but-me problem. I knitted the beehive hat from Stitch 'N Bitch Nation in a nice blue Cascade wool as the first step in Operation Hat, but it was so big that all I could do was pull it all the way down my head and go downstairs and say to the very Gen X other, "hey hey hey." I have been meaning to rip it out and start over, but ouch. So I started on this nice cable-headband one and am cabling like a nut.

I am the nutty cabler.

Canadian monkeys!

I think I just invented a diet. Today after lunch I bought a Snickers bar (for an exorbitant $0.79) (not a king size, either) and have had it in the pocket of my coat since then. But I read about someone's experience with a bot-fly and now I would rather vomit than consume a Snickers bar, or anything else.

It will be a reading diet.

isosceles boot

Methinks no good can come of this.

Also, Salon today explained to me why I'm wrong about Arnold. Thank God, because I was about to rethink my whole worldview there.

Thanks for the Calendar

Like many a subscriber to the MoveOn.org listserv, I felt gleeful upon hearing that the Democrats did well in yesterday's mid-midterm election. However, upon hearing the outcome of California's special election, I felt a strange sensation last night and throughout the day today that I was finally able to identify as sympathy-------for Arnold Schwarzenegger. This puzzled me.

But nobody has really said this in all of the (admittedly scanty) coverage I've read, so I feel compelled to ask the voters of Califoria: What the fuck did you expect? I haven't seen the numbers or broken them down at all, but there had to be some people out there who voted to put Arnold in office and yesterday voted against all of the issues he proposed. What logic lies behind this? It's not like you had no idea what he wanted until you read all these ballot issues. They're pretty much what he campaigned on. So instead of sharing the left's he-he-he attitude toward what happened in California yesterday, I'm thinking more like, what a bunch of jerks.

Maybe a bunch of yahoos who voted him into office didn't bother to vote yesterday, and the people who did turn out were against him in the first place. Or (I don't remember which percentage he won with) maybe he can't gather a majority at all. It just seems very strange.

It would be really nice if our system worked on the momentum of yes-but-this-person-could-be-better, rather than God-this-is-getting-worse-quick-let's-get-someone-else-in-here. Instead it just seems like each side takes a 20-year turn and ends up scaring the piss out of everyone.

Actually, I do not care who got the freshy fresh

I spent all day (and I mean ALL DAY) yesterday researching sea otters and river otters and small-clawed Asian otters and all manner of otter*, and then I found this, which made me want to cry, and then I found this a couple articles down, which made me cry. Everyone's heard of the Exxon Valdez oil spill (which killed an estimated 90% of the sea otters in the West Prince William Sound, because crude oil ruins an otter's ability to regulate its temperature and it freezes to death) but what people don't know is that there are about 540 smaller oil spills in our oceans per year. So the obvious choice here is to start drilling in Alaska to fuel our Hummers, otters be damned.

The drilling wouldn't produce usable oil until 2025, but that doesn't matter. GAS EXPENSIVE NOW. DRILL OIL FUCK OTTERS.

I am utterly confounded by this... It's so obvious *what* we could do, how we could do better than we are, and we just don't. It simply doesn't happen.

The idea that someone could hear what I'm about to say and think me lunatic fringe is bothersome, but more and more I'm finding that when I see people driving Hummers, I hate them. If I have seen you behind the wheel of a Hummer, I've felt a visceral, hateful reaction to you. It might be the equivalent of a Christian seeing someone wearing a devil-worshipping t-shirt or something, I don't know. The point of the comparison is that it, the Hummer, flies boldly in the face of my value system. A Hummer seems like a big fat "fuck you" to the planet, and really to everyone outside the Hummer. If you've got the money and whatever serious need for attention it requires, you can pollute as much as you want, presumably run over anything daring to stand in your way, and use up as much of the remaining resources as you please. Because, really, who's going to stop you? Me? The auto lobb- I mean, the government?

You know that really annoying way that a snobby girl will say, "oh, honey--" to a younger, more impressionable snobby girl who has made the wrong choice with regard to eyeliner? That's how I feel when I see Hummers. And when I see the American flag waving proudly over the vile-smelling and gargantuan garbage dump in the nearby city. Oh, honey. No.


*Otters are fucking fascinating, by the way. They have, unlike polar bears or many other animals that survive in very cold places, only a thin layer of body fat and instead stay warm with a super spiffy coat, consisting of two layers, the bottom of which is covered in water-repellent otter-skin oil, which traps an insulating layer of air next to their skin, and a top layer of guard hairs that repel water by kind of fitting into one another and forming a mat (I have seen the electron micrograph photos of these, and believe me, are they interlocking). They are the largest member of the weasel family, and are the only non-primate mammal to use tools.

Temptation is not worth it.

Six peanut M&Ms is not what I call "fun" size.