Cookie Countdown

Liam and I have made 200-ish cookies since last Saturday, for Christmas presents for his teachers at Kindergarten, for a contribution to my office party this afternoon, and just because hanging-around-the-house-type vacations are better with a big box of cookies on the kitchen counter. We've made three types so far, and we might just have to make some more while he's out of school.

• First, we made chocolate-vanilla swirl butter cookies, with a recipe out of an old Cook's Illustrated (it doesn't seem to be online). They came out pretty well, and Liam really enjoyed rolling out the dough and seeing the swirl pattern.
  
• Second, we made gingerbread, following this recipe from Bon Appetit. It's way too mild and needs a lot more ginger: 1 tablespoon of ground ginger, plus a half cup of chopped candied ginger, is nowhere near enough for 6 cups of flour. I should have seen this coming. Liam loved rolling out the dough and using the cookie cutters, and he's also distributing the cookies very seriously. A star for him, a tree for C, and a heart for me? Perfect.
  
• Lastly, I made these peanut butter cookies last night, and they're really good. I think I'll just have one more before I head off to run errands.
  

Giant fluffy sweater, day 1/2

I almost never knit large projects - I'm more at home with hats, mittens, scarves, and baby clothes. I think it's a problem of limited time to commit to a single project, since my days involve being (and staying) employed, and my evenings involve cooking, playing with Liam, putting Liam to bed, cleaning up, and working more, and then knitting if I have the time. I'm also insanely picky about projects for myself, so I wouldn't make most things I see patterns for, and I change every pattern I use. I found a sweater pattern that I wanted to make for myself, though: this one is straightforward, functional, and cute, and it's done in very big yarn, so it ought to go pretty quickly.

I cast on yesterday, and between the yarn, which is huge (it's like pencil roving), and my giganto needles (which feel like I'm knitting with tree branches or something), I'd used up an entire ball of yarn in five and a half rows. That second ball got me through to the end of row 13. At this point, I started wondering whether I have enough yarn to make this sweater. The lady at the yarn store ordered me a bag of eight balls of yarn in the same dye lot, which was the number that the pattern called for, but if I'm only going to get 8-ish rows per ball of yarn, this might be tight. Back to the pattern to check, and...oh. 8 100-gram balls of yarn, according to the pattern, and I have 8 50-gram balls of yarn. That's...huh. It's totally a matter of perception, but I probably wouldn't have started this pattern if I'd known I would need 15 or 16 balls of yarn. That seems like way too much.

I'm up to row 24 now, and I will get to about row 54 before it's time to add stitches for the sleeves, which will just about take all of the yarn that I have. The sweater is going to be very cute, with the big puffy stitches and the garter-stitch border and the great buttons my friend S gave me for by birthday. I sure hope the lady at the yarn store can order another bag in the same dye lot.

Complaint, interrupted

This morning, I was all ready to write a complaint as a post here. I've been kind of bothered about this issue for a while, and have never found the right platform for talking about it (plus, Chris is tired of hearing about it). The problem? The (sometimes) terrible music in a knitting podcast I listen to regularly. Sometimes it's great (Jonathan Coulton), and sometimes it's all obvious lyrics and overdone vocals. The injustice! I listened to the two most recent episodes this morning, and had the angry wind knocked right out of me: the music wasn't bad. It wasn't the best thing ever (and one of the bands, though apparently comprised entirely of women, was called "Girly Man", which...no.), but it was a nice mix of fun and poignant and bouncy. Darn you, podcast author with musical tastes that differ from mine, and also impeccable timing!

This doesn't get you out of a complaint, though. The podcast has rubbed me the wrong way before - the theme of the episodes for a while was "alchemy", which is fine as a metaphor, but (and I'll keep saying this through gritted teeth until the rest of you give up and go along with me) magical thinking is not science. People who made themselves crazy with mercury fumes while trying to transform lead into gold are not a model for informed inquiry or the scientific method.

I...get a little defensive about this. Needless to say, I never wrote this to the podcast author (no constructive point), but it bothered me every episode until she switched the theme to "Make Do and Mend", which was lovely and thoughtful. I liked that a lot.

Poof!

There are a lot of birthdays this time of year (including mine), and I've always thought it was fun to have a bunch in a row. When I was a kid, my friend R's birthday was not too far from mine, and my second cousin (my mom's mom's brother's son) and a baby at church had the same birthday as me. My friend K and I had back-to-back birthdays all through grad school, and four of us in my current research group have birthdays within a couple of weeks.

There's a well-developed birthday ritual here: you bring cake, everyone else in the group surprises you with a present, everybody wins. We gave K a periodic-table shower curtain, K a toaster, and S enough limes and other things to keep her in caipirinhas for a while. They gave me a huge ball of this hilarious pompom yarn that's meant to be made into a garter-stitch scarf. I started it yesterday (and actually, S went out and got herself a ball and already made a scarf), and it is so poofy and fluffy and funny. I would not have bought novelty yarn for myself, so this is really fun.

International Thanksgiving!

That's right, I did a low-effort non-post and then skipped the next day. This is why I'm a terrible diarist: I get caught up in living my life and don't want to detach and write about it. That, and I'm tired at the end of the day.

I figured out what it was I was going to write about Thursday: private space in public transportation. I have opinions! I guard my personal space jealously! I'll pick this back up later this week.

What I could have written yesterday goes something like this:

For several years now, ever since we moved 2 states away from our families, C and I have done Thanksgiving with a group of friends. Everybody brings something that's special to them from their family's get-togethers, hosting rotates so nobody gets stuck hosting 25 people every year, and everyone rolls home with leftovers afterward. A word of advice: invite someone from New Mexico to Thanksgiving this year. Our friend KT's green-chile cornbread is great, and is a big reason I'm wishing we could be "home" this week.

We're keeping up with the theme this year, extending our family to people near us, though the ingredients will be different: some of C's classmates will be coming over Saturday. They're bringing foods that are typical from their families, but their families are in Japan, Taiwan, and Serbia (and maybe Brazil).

Today I made cranberry sauce (I found cranberries at the grocery store last month, at the grocery store I almost never go to, and I was so excited I bought three bags), and tonight we're making apple pie and pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie is a sticky point with non-Americans: if they haven't tried it, they tend to look at you like you're crazy for suggesting it. C's classmate whose spouse works for the US military here (and who therefore has PX access) surprised him with a can of pumpkin last week, so here's hoping the pie goes over well.

Local customs

I wasn't sure whether people did Halloween here, so I wasn't really sure what we should do - get Liam all excited, only to discover that none of our neighbors is expecting trick-or-treaters? Keep it quiet, and then feel like the boringest parents ever when all the other kids at Kindergarten have costumes? There weren't a lot of pumpkins in the grocery stores, so when we saw a good-looking one we grabbed it. Liam did not want to help scoop out the inside, but he was pretty excited to draw a face on the pumpkin and pop out the little pieces after I cut them.


We've dressed Liam up for Halloween before, first in a little pirate costume we bought (and then used as pajamas for months - arr, sleepy pirate), and the next year I made him a hooded sweater with ears and a tail and called it a puppy costume, and he wore that for a long time too. In early October I was trying to think of something I could make in time, and I had a short list together: we have doctor dress-up stuff, or I could buy a black hoodie and fuzzy white fabric and make a skunk costume, or maybe I could make a spider costume? On a whim, I asked Liam what he wanted to dress up as, and he immediately said "a Christmas tree!" It's a great idea, easy to make from stuff we have, visually clear, and potentially confusing for the kids at Kindergarten who weren't expecting Christmas to start for a while yet.



We put our pumpkin outside with a candle in it, opened our front gate, set out a few more candles (since we can't figure out how to make our porch light stay on), and lo and behold, we got trick-or-treaters! They were mostly groups of little kids with a couple of adults, and they'd crowd up our steps and shout "Suesses, sonst gib'ts Saures" (basically "treat or trick"), then happily bounce off with their candy to the next house. Once I knew there were kids going around our neighborhood in costumes, I took Liam out, and it turned out that we'd done exactly the right thing in putting our pumpkin and candles outside: every other house in our neighborhood was either buttoned up tight or had put out a pumpkin and candles as an invitation. People were really nice, and though Liam was initially a little shy about knocking on people's doors and then talking to them, once he got the idea that they would give him candy, he was all for it.

Even though we've been here a full year, there are always new surprises, things we expect but don't happen, or things that are so obvious to the locals that they aren't mentioned, and then we're left to scramble. We've been surprised by Reunification Day (at the beginning of October) two years in a row now, because everyone knows about that (so nobody needs to remind you it's coming up). We've gotten better at improvising on unexpected holidays (when every shop in town is closed), but I still feel the American calendar more strongly than the German calendar. Anyone want to come over for Thanksgiving?