On the eve of a blizzard in New York City, I am so happy I live in Houston, where the high today was 65 degrees and I went to yoga in just a tank top and pants. The winters here are fantastic, and the beautiful weather puts me in a good mood on so many days. But...a tiny part of me wishes I was in New York this week. The foot of snow we got the winter I lived there was beautiful (for a day), and there is something fun about preparing for bad weather and slogging through it (again: for a day).  You can walk to the grocery store and to a friend's house and even to Central Park if you want. And bad weather is an excuse to curl up in bed with a movie once you've braved the world. In New York you think you are at the center of the universe, and in a way you are. Seeing photos online of snowing falling on the streets of New York made me a little nostalgic. I had a great year there. 

But on day two of a blizzard - day three? It's not one bit fun anymore. So tomorrow I will miss New York. On Wednesday I'll be so glad my home is in Texas. 

“To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

a photo a day

My morning: kitty checking out the world while I bake bread (I tried to make the loaves the same size. I failed. Ha. Good thing they will taste amazing anyway).

Duke plays in an hour, and an excellent discovery (that I would not have made had I not cancelled cable and started asking friends if they want to watch a game at a bar with me): three friends from school are such big basketball fans that they will almost always say yes, even though Duke isn't their team. Life is good. Potluck lunch with fun beers at one friend's house today!

Happy Sunday, all!

59 degrees and sunny = walking to brunch. Happy girl. 

a Ruby a day

I missed my Ruby cat this weekend - and judging from the amount of purring she's done since I got home, I think she missed me, too. Sweet girl.

a Ruby a day

"How do you expect to fit me in your bag? Those boots are taking up way too much room."

Nashville, here we come!

what i'm listening to right now

another "welcome to night vale" weather report that i enjoyed (the podcast might be worth it just for the music).

"this too shall pass," by danny schmidt:

newest knitting project: fish mobile!

fish mobile for my cousin nate's coming baby!

i love these little fishies and i'm so pleased about how they turned out.

ruby will nap anywhere, apparently...even on a knitting book, surrounded by her fishies and other knitting supplies.

dad made the wood structure for the mobile while i was home over christmas break.  we decided on a slight curve instead of just straight lines.

two doggies guard the door of the shop.

i had only completed one fish when i was home, so we used the weight of that fish to balance the mobile.  turns out, the four fish weigh slightly different amounts (don't ask why - it is a mystery), so when i assembled the mobile there was a great deal of hemming and hawing about how to rebalance it.  in the end, i added some dry beans to two of the fish to make it balance perfectly.  whew!  i'm so pleased with how it turned out!

fish mobile in action:

preach it, mark bittman: let them eat foie gras

(vegetarian rant over.)

love this! a dad is hilariously illustrating the things his 3-year-old says

fascinating - 150 people is it! forget facebook, abandon instagram, move to a village

vegetarian confessions

i'm sure all vegetarians crave some sort of meat, and for me the biggest temptation is shrimp cocktail.  when i became a vegetarian i didn't really like most meat, so giving it up wasn't hard (in fact, it was the goal).  but i did like seafood, and today, eighteen (yes, eighteen) years after giving up meat, i sometimes think about eating a bite of shrimp cocktail at parties (it looks so good!)…but then i imagine crunching my teeth through the body of a shrimp and the temptation goes away.

the #2 thing i crave?  tuna salad sandwiches.  perhaps this is weird, but i really liked tuna when i ate meat.  and people: i have now fixed that craving!  chickpea of the sea is tuna salad with chopped up chickpeas instead of tuna.  i made it for dinner last night and it was SO GOOD!  it doesn't taste like tuna, but it has the perfect consistency and is delicious in its own right.  plus, lots of protein.  win-win.

my year in books

a recap:
2010: i read 15 books
2011: i started my book challenge with the goal of reading 25 books; i read 38.
2012: year two of the challenge; i read 34 books.
2013: year three of the challenge. i read 34 books again.
2014: year four of the challenge; i'm down a smidge to 32 books.

2014 broken down:
12 books written by women
20 by men

(surprising to me…i wouldn't have expected this statistic to be that skewed.)

21 fiction books
11 nonfiction

(not surprising to me…nonfiction often feels like work and isn't good falling asleep reading, so i know that i gravitate towards fiction more frequently.)

my favorite books of 2014? unbroken (nonfiction) and all the light i cannot see (i debated whether i had enough distance from this one to say it was my favorite fiction book this year, since i read it at the end of december.  but people - i think it's safe to say it's the fiction winner).  read these books!

on to 2015!  a few books that i know i want to read this year: the book thief, the other wes moore, serena, the second outlander book, and seabiscuit.

sick/rainy weekend

on thursday my throat started to hurt.  sign #1 that i'm getting a cold.  on friday i had a headache.  friday night i spent entirely in bed from 5pm until i fell asleep.  tv in bed.  knitting in bed.  dinner in bed.  cough, sneeze, sniffle.

on saturday i had to proctor a standardized test at school (ugh), so i was up at 7:15, and that was actually kind of good because it got me going for the day.  it rained all day saturday, so i decided to make baguettes and from-scratch black bean soup, the kind that cooks for four hours on top of the stove.  i'd never made black beans from scratch before, and had kind of poo-pooed the idea (sure, the bag of black beans is $1, but the same amount of canned black beans would be just a few dollars more - why waste all day cooking them?).  but man - this soup is GOOD.  i omitted the ham, obviously, and served it with a big dollop of sour cream and it was creamy and delicious.  it made a ton of soup, so i froze some for another rainy weekend.

today i slept until 10:30 (thank you, nyquil), but i'm back in bed again.  more knitting/reading/tv watching from under the covers, hoping to take care of myself this weekend and store up energy for the week of work ahead.  ruby's in bed - how could i say no to snuggling with her?

go away, rain.  you're not making this any better.

december: 30, 31, & 32

to finish out 2014, i read three books, bringing this year's total to 32.  in the last three years i have read exactly 100 books…but there are so. many. more. books. to. read.  my amazon wishlist has 126 books on it and somehow that number never seems to go down.  how will one lifetime be enough?

in december i read:

transatlantic, by colum mccann (i loved his first book [let the great world spin], and bought this book with a gift certificate that a student gave me.  and it did not disappoint.  mccann uses words beautifully and weaves story lines together in a fantastic way.  he seems to like taking real events and telling them from the perspective of a fictional person who experienced them, and i'm intrigued by this.  this book is three transatlantic stories (first transatlantic flight between newfoundland and ireland; frederick douglass coming to ireland to promote his book; george mitchell coming to ireland to work on the northern irish peace process) that he tells, then goes back and tells about the life of a person in the background of each story.  interesting, right?  i really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it!)

speak, by laurie false anderson (my school is considering this book as an all-upper-school read for the summer, and i'm on the summer reading selection committee, so i read this as homework for the committee.  it's a young adult book about a girl who is sexually assaulted, though the assault takes up only a few pages of the book - the majority is about how her life changes.  a really compelling read…we'll see what the rest of the committee thinks.)

all the light we cannot see, by anthony doerr (joey was talking about reading this and then it was on some lists of best books of the year and then my book club wanted to read it - so all signs pointed to me needing to pick this book up.  i LOVED it.  it's the story of a blind french girl and the story of a german boy who is conscripted during world war two…their lives intersect in france near the end of the war.  i found both stories fascinating - sometimes when a book switches between a few narrators i find one less compelling and only want to hear from the others, but that wasn't the case at all here.  when i like a book i can't stop telling people that they must read it…i'm a book prosthelytizer.  and it's happening a lot right now with this one.)

what i'm listening to right now

recently i started listening to a totally weird podcast called "welcome to night vale," which is radio broadcasts from the fictional town of night vale.  after one episode, i did not like it.  i listened to two more and now i am oddly charmed by it.  the "weather" segment on each episode is just one song that the producers presumably liked.  this is one of those weather segments that i particularly liked.

"bill & annie," by chuck brodsky:

   

this guy's voice was just a little too familiar, and i am now confident, based on some internet perusing, that dad made me listen to this song at some point.  another good listen.

i'm so proud of my friend jennifer!  (we went to high school and college together.)  check out her TEDx talk and learn about her amazing project!

red spinach update

It takes just fine, but turned the whole curry blood red. HA. So if you're okay with that, it's an a-okay substitution. 

Now it's time to watch TV with Ruby and pretend I don't have to go back to work tomorrow. 

a photo a day

Trader Joe's was out of regular spinach (cold weather in California killed a bunch of plants, they said), so I bought this. I am skeptical but hopeful that it will work in my spinach dal recipe. Stay tuned!

what i'm listening to right now

this song is ridiculous.  i heard it on the radio around christmas and obviously had to youtube it.  please enjoy this 1953 holiday "classic."

"i want a hippopotamus for christmas," by gayla peevey:

knitting projects update

i'm in the midst of a new knitting project that shall remain secret until it is delivered to its new owner, but i realized while thinking about it than i haven't updated my blog with all my knitting projects recently!  often i get all excited when i finish a project, but can't blog about it immediately because it will spoil the surprise for the recipient…and then i lose the momentum to post.  so here you go: some knitting projects from 2014!

whale:

elephant for ryan's first birthday:

bunny for emma's first birthday:

fox for mikey's birth:

three friends, all together.  the elephant and the bunny get cold, so they have to wear sweaters.  the bunny had yarn eyes, which was a nice change from the tiny black buttons i normally use.  the fox i'm particularly proud of - his snout required a new technique that i think turned out great.  i'm kind of obsessed with how cute these guys are!  they are from this book, which has been a huge inspiration to my knitting this year.

ready to be shipped off to their new friends!

mikey and fox on mikey's 4 month birthday (p.s. if you send me a picture with your child and the thing i have knit him, i will die of happiness):

nico's mama is using his blanket - hooray!  (this is an update from a project in an earlier post.)

baby hat made from gorgeous color changing yarn (i finally checked out the knitting store in my neighborhood instead of going to the chain craft store in town - the yarn there is awesome!):

that's it for now - more to come in 2015!