a photo a day

i knitted a hat!

is this hat a little weird in places?  yes, yes it is.  but it's a hat!  and i'm sure the next one will be even better.  i am learning that knitting a hat is a very rewarding project because you finish up quickly - this one only took 2 days.

miss claire is now taking hat requests for the winter season!  seriously.  if you want a hat you just tell me the color and poof!  i will make one appear by december.

a sushi place near my apartment has a sign advertising "texas ramen - every thursday."  WHAT DO YOU THINK TEXAS RAMEN IS?!  i am so intrigued.  guesses requested/required in the comments.

a photo a day

It is possible that I am a crazy woman; I want to knit a hat, so I bought a set of double pointed needles and got to work juggling them all and knitting in the round. Thanks again to YouTube for teaching me how to do this, and Abby for inspiring me when I visited her this weekend! So far, so good...

i had such a great visit to atlanta this weekend!  i miss these fantastic people (and many more) already:

SO interesting: "in climbing income ladder, location matters" - not only is this an incredibly interesting article, but it comes with a bad ass map.  thank you, new york times.

baby blankets

two couples in atlanta - very good friends - are having babies in august - and their due dates are a week apart!  babies everywhere!  it's so fun to think of these little ones growing up at the same time and being friends like their moms and dads are.  it makes me sad that i'm not in atlanta to see my friends get more and more pregnant, and then to see these babies get bigger and bigger.  but that's the way things are...and it's one more fantastic reason to visit.

a woman at my new job was knitting a baby blanket for her grandchild-to-be, and i got inspired to try to knit baby blankets for these little ones.  things i have knitted in the past: scarves.  end of list.  but a baby blanket can just be a square scarf - right?!  off to michael's i went to buy some yarn and a circular knitting needle.

thomas and lindsey's baby girl gets a light green blanket, just knit knit knit row after row.  pros: i can do other things while knitting (tv, audiobooks, conversations) because the motion is repetitive and i can look up sometimes; blanket is reversible!  cons: just knitting gets boring; blanket is awesome (i messed up one stitch, but that is just proof that it is a miss claire original), but a little plain.  my first ever baby blanket is 28 inches square, and the same color as my favorite baby blanket from my childhood.  baby girl will be so snuggly in it!  it took about three weeks to make.

after making one blanket using just the knit stitch thousands of times, i got bored/crazy and went on youtube to learn how to purl.  people, purling is easy.  i mean, i guess i should have known that - it's just a backwards knit stitch.  i then googled a simple knit/purl baby blanket pattern and voila!  one false start (had to watch another youtube video to learn how to correctly switch from the knit to purl stitch and then redo the first three (tragic) rows), and i was off for real.  mike and kelly's baby boy gets a light blue blanket that also took about three weeks to make.  pros: i think it's prettier because there's a pattern, and it's more interesting for me to knit, but not too complicated: the majority of the blanket is just repeating these four rows, and i used a chip clip to remind myself which row i was knitting.  i'm so classy.  (the full pattern is here.)

close up of the fanciness:

cons: i made this one a little smaller than the first one, and perhaps it's too small - it's 20 inches wide and 27 inches long.  it will fit nicely over a car seat or a small baby, but if i had it to do over again i'd make it larger and thus more versatile.  it's also not reversible because of the fanciness on the "good" side.

it was so FUN to make these blankets, especially because they're made for babies i already love because their mamas and dads are so awesome.  yay for homemade presents!

(does this officially make me an old lady?  my grandma and i were knitting at the same time when i was in florida...haha...)

will someone crafty please make this for me?  please and thank you.

love,
miss claire

songs i have shazamed recently

i made "shazam" into a verb.  deal with it.  i don't use shazam often, but when i do it makes me SO happy.  no more googling the random lyric i remember and trying to find the song.  and before that people had to...what?  wait for the radio DJ to tell them what the song's title was?  HORRORS.  2013 is a pretty great time to be alive.

"rebel beat," by the goo goo dolls (who knew they were still making music?):




"bruises," by train (again - this band is still cool?  who knew):




"some nights," by fun. (i'm late to the game on this one, i know):

visitors!

my mom, sister, aunt monica, and cousin sara came to visit me in houston!  hooray!  um, this was three weeks ago and i am just now getting around to posting about it.  oops.

things we did:

ate: we tried new restaurants and liked them all!  a hard thing about hosting when you've only lived somewhere for a month - and don't have many friends yet - is that i haven't had a chance to try many restaurants, but i got recommendations from coworkers and friends and was able to piece together a pretty good list of restaurants for us.  we also went to el bollilo, an awesome mexican bakery where sara picked out all sorts of pastries that were (delicious) mysteries to all of us (no labels - just dozens of shelves of different colors/shapes/sizes of pastries).

mom stayed a day longer than everyone else, and she and i also bought yummy cheese and bread from houston dairymaids, a tiny little fancy cheese shop.

we all went to the butterfly center at the natural science museum, which was steamy hot even though it was indoors...

so that was the thing: it hadn't broken 100 degrees since i'd moved to houston, but there it was, the day everyone was in town, at 104.  sigh.  i guess they got an accurate picture of what texas is like...  since then it has broken 100 a couple times, but mostly hovers around 97.  i hide inside.

we went to the turrell skyspace on the rice university campus, which is this very cool light show at sunset.  you sit in this auditorium thing and look up at a square in the ceiling, through which you can see the sky.  the way the lights shown on the ceiling contrast with the sky makes the sky look BEAUTIFUL and different all the time.  it's hard to explain, but was totally worth seeing.

my apartment is furnished, but i hadn't put anything on the wall when they came to town.  i enlisted their help in deciding what should go where, as well as, you know, physically putting it up for me.  thanks, aunt monica!

there was also scrabble, a game i love.

hoooooooray for a fun girls' weekend!  we're already plotting about getting together again next year...

Texas is treating me well/poorly

We'll start with the poorly...someone cloned (or insert more technical word here) my debit card, checked my balance at an ATM, and then tried to take out $500 and then $300. But they failed...so I guess they were a bad card-cloning thief. I never take out more than $200, and Wells Fargo/their smart computer knew that, freezing my card...bottom line, the bad guys got nothing and I'm getting a new card. Whew. 

Now the good: I had to get a license plate holder installed on the front of my car, since Texas requires front plates. Womp womp. Autozone dude showed me what to buy, and I took it to a mechanic to drill holes in my bumper and install it. He also put the plate itself on. For free!  Texans are nice people. Life is good. 

a photo a day

This is what happens when your Mom declares her love of the song Single Ladies - she gets a mixed CD of other music I think she might like! Stay tuned for her impressions of this CD...

um, hold on

i just realized that i didn't blog for a whole week.  a whole week!  what kind of blogger am i?!  this blog has been hit by a lethal combination of summer (not much going on) plus new city (not many friends to go on adventures with).  i promise to improve, people.  don't abandon me...

public service announcement

i just signed up for the skimm, which aggregates news for you and emails it to you every day.  and it's witty!  right up my alley!  i suggest you check it out.  when you click the above link you can see what a recent email looked like in case you're skeptical.

i just had to use google to find out what county i live in.  these are things that one doesn't know after only 6 weeks in a new city...

the answer is harris, in case you were interested.

what i'm listening to right now

joe purdy, "worn out shoes":


pandora played this for me while i was making dinner tonight.  i hadn't heard it before but immediately loved it.  pandora, you know me so well.

oh boy.  this is happening.

time to get my car registered here...and this is the cover of the "new resident" online booklet that tells me what to do.  texas is really proud of being texas, people.

my first apartment was adorable, but had no windows: only skylights.  it was on the top floor of a dorm when i worked at exeter, and it was so cozy, but in the winter it was DARK.  all i wanted to do when i got home from work was get in bed and go to sleep, and that does not make for a happy and active miss claire.  it was a little underground rabbit warren...just on the top floor of a dorm.

this apartment is so LIGHT - east and south facing windows, and lots of them.  i love how bright it is, and as a bad/good consequence, i can't sleep late at all any more (being 30 doesn't hurt, either).  most mornings i am AWAKE, ready to get out of bed, by 8:30, my bedroom a little greenhouse of light and heat from the windows getting the morning sun.  this is bad for sleeping in, but great for my mood and for getting me up and moving in the mornings.  i bought a basil plant which is so pleased to be on my living room windowsill.

this morning i didn't get out of bed until almost 10, and i was confused about why...then peeked through the blinds and realized it was raining - no sunny morning here!  i love (the occasional) rainy day, and this one gave me a chance to sleep in, too.  i know that the east coast is getting way more than their fair share of rain (mom sent me photos of the little creek at the farm overflowing its banks), but i'm glad we got a rainy day here in houston, too.

i think this is hilarious - "here comes the sunscreen" - photos of kids being grumpy when their parents put sunscreen on them.  this was totally me and becky!

such a fun 4th of july!  we went to this outdoor amphitheater for what i thought was just fireworks and turned out to be fireworks + houston symphony performance!  for free!  miss claire was in heaven.

tracy's new cooler (full of beer and snacks) was defective.  the wheel fell of approximately 20 times (no exaggeration) between where we got dropped off and the amphitheater.  it was hilarious for the first 5 times and moderately hilarious for the following 15 times.

tracy had gone early to stake out GREAT lawn spots for us.  front and center.  yay!

we drank and snacked and made friends with the people around us, and then we listened to a VERY good symphony performance for over an hour.  i love patriotic music.  no battle hymn of the republic, but i survived.

and then there were fireworks!

people, i will be doing this every year from now until i no longer live in this city.  there were thousands of people there, such a multicultural audience, everyone so friendly, with free music and sing-a-longs (i need to learn when to clap during "deep in the heart of texas" PRONTO).  when they played the medley of hymns from each branch of the service, the conductor encouraged people who had served in each branch to stand for their hymn, and it was such an incredible reminder of how many veterans there are among us.  i am thankful for them and america and friends.

houston continues to treat me well.

4th of july cupcakes!

happy 4th of july!  this is my first 4th of july in the united states since 2008, since i've spent the past four summers in england.  i was a little worried about not having anyone to celebrate with, since i'm so new to houston and don't have many friends yet, but my atlanta friend christy is in town visiting her sister and we're going to hang out.  hooray!

i made cupcakes to bring along to the fireworks watching.  i got the idea that i wanted to make red velvet cupcakes because then you can have cream cheese frosting and that is obviously a good thing.  the smitten kitchen cookbook has a recipe for red wine velvet cake, where you use red wine instead of red food coloring.  woah.  i needed to try this.

using my new kitchenaid mixer - thanks, becky and brandon!  i love it.

cupcakes!  (you can also see my sparkly 4th of july fingernail polish.)

the cupcakes turned out denser than i'd hoped...good flavor, but not the best cupcake of my life.  they're not bad, though...so into tupperwares they go, and off to celebrate the holiday!

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
--John F. Kennedy

what i'm listening to right now

the milk carton kids, "michigan":



dad introduced me to this group - love them!

i just got paid for the first time in 11 months.  it feels amazing!  i'm back in the real world, baby!

june: 18 & 19

one of the first things i did when i got to houston was get a library card at the public library in my neighborhood.  my librarian aunts will be very proud.  it's so nice to get free books after buying oh-so-many books in grad school last year!

oryx and crake, by margaret atwood (a library book, one that was recommended to me by a new york friend and one that i really liked.  it's post-apocolyptic (an excellent genre) and written beautifully - margaret atwood is such a fantastic writer.  confusing for a while...you don't even know what the title means for a very long time (who, or what, are oryx and crake?), but it all comes together by the end.  i'd recommend it!)

life after life, by kate atkinson (this was my book club book this month, and it was the book i nominated - hooray!  the main character has the ability to go back in time and start parts of her life over if the ending doesn't work out the way she wants it to.  it's set in england and germany in the 1910s onward, and hitler is involved.  i was VERY intrigued by this book and liked how the time travel / re-living / whatever worked.  and it was so interesting to watch an author imagine how life could be different with just one moment changed.  this will make an awesome movie, which i'm sure is in the works.  i highly recommend it!)