An Italian-American weekend

     This weekend we went out to the Coachella Valley to attend the Frank Sinatra Black Tie Gala. We were invited by my cousin who helps produce the event. It's a whole weekend benefitting the Barabara Sinatra Center for Abused Children, which is a really wonderful charity. There was a star-studded pro-am golf tournament on Friday, but we came for the gala, which was quite a shindig and included a full-on concert by Burt Bacharach. Wow. It's really the end of an era. There were women wearing fur coats, which you don't see a whole lot of anymore. We got to hobnob a bit with the stars.

The fun and music continued at the after party. I’ve never been much for nightclubs but I’m a sucker for these things - galas, auctions, events, they’re so much fun.

     Between packing, driving and doing it again 2 days later, that was the weekend. We got back to LA with a minute to spare for my son's last meditation class. The parents got to sit in for the end of it which was nice. I'm not sure what he got from it but it's a start. He's really primed to take yoga now because at least then he'll get to move. A lot of the stuff about boredom is coming up in A Life Worth Breathing, with practical ways of getting past it. I also like what he says about happiness. We always want specific things because we think they're going to make us happy, so why not just seek happiness, what ever form that might take? It turns out that we might not always know what’s best for us.

   







On Tuesday I took a class with Tias Little at YogaGlo. He runs Prajna Yoga in Santa Fe, which is pretty cool since I’ll be out there next month. I remember taking his class at least once before, but this one is memorable because it had some very intense flexion/extension of the lower back and my lumbar area is incredible sore today.

Dwi Hasta Bhujasana

This is different than being in pain, strangely enough. I know the things I can’t do if I want to avoid pain. This soreness is clearly from working muscles that I’m not accustomed to working and taking them to their limit. The class was filled with a lot of asanas with low back flexion like the one above, and the counter balance was some supported bridges

Supported bridge

This is actually a more intense stretch than it looks. I usually prefer doing it with the bolster along my spine, and keeping my feet in as much as I need to avoid over-extending.

     Here are my Aegean Sea Mitts modeled on my hand. So elegant. Here is the back side with the increases.

The increases were done facing away from the row marker, so M1R before the marker and M1L after. I think it’s a nice feature.

I am 2 rows away from finishing the sleeve portion of Hitofude! It’s only taken 3 months. Since it’s going to be joined the round, I have to soak and block it while it’s still on the needles. That’s getting done tonight, and then I’m plowing through the second mitt. I finished reading Knitting Without Tears. 

While it’s definitely a reference book, it’s a really fun read. Most of it is not applicable to my life as I live in LA and don’t have much need for ski sweaters and warm hats, but I love how she lays out recipes for pretty much all the basics. All you have to do is plug in your measurements and go, leaving plenty of room for creativity. 

Half way there

     I finally finished my first Aegean Sea Mitt.

I had almost gotten finished and decided I could do 10 more rows, so took out the eyelet band and redid it. I was thinking of living dangerously and seeing how high I could get, but figured this was the safer bet. The original pattern stopped at 8.5 inches, so all of the rest I calculated myself, the details of which are in the notes on the Ravelry page. I’m going to cleanse my palette with Hitofude for a day or so before I plow into the second one. This glove goes right up to the elbow and used 35 grams of fingering weight yarn.

     My iPhone 5 is refusing to start up, which is horrible. It’s everything to me, including my camera. I’m able to model and photograph at the same time, which doesn’t work so well with the iPad. It ran out of juice last night and that was that. When I press the top button I get an Apple for a few seconds and then nada. It was showing up on the computer today when I tried to sync, but not anymore, so I can't even reset it. We've been waiting till our AT&T contracts were up because they are the worst, so now I decided to go with T-Mobile. If we go tomorrow I think I can avoid a trip to the Genius Bar. This phone was really on its last legs for a long time. iPhone 6, here we come!

 

     Tuesday night I went to see a staged reading of The Latest Mrs. Schiller at The Track 16 Gallery Loading Dock Stage. This was in an industrial section of Culver City I'd never been to, right near the Tennis Channel offices (I have a dream of working there). A loading dock is actually a pretty cool, industrial theatre stage. I took mercy on the boys and let them stay home, which was smart. A staged reading in a loading dock is for die-hard theatre fans. The actors were on book but the performances were full-on and they were a joy to watch. The writing was sharp and funny, in the end the plot didn't make much sense, but all in all I was glad I dragged myself out of the house. They're doing a series of   these readings on Tuesdays, so they're worth checking out, and free.

     I watched a movie on Netflix called Tabloid. It was a documentary about a young woman who fell in love with a young Mormon man in the late 70s who was pressured to leave before their wedding to go out on his mission. She was convinced he had been kidnapped, so put together this hare-brained scheme to go to England with a bunch of hired guns to rescue him. There is a question of whether she kidnapped him or he went willingly, but they ended up spending days together engaging in B&D before he fled back to his mission with second thoughts. She was arrested and it became a tabloid sensation  in the UK. I cannot resist anything about Mormons, so this was right up my alley. It was really more about her though, a loopy, crazy character who never got over this guy.

   Our Favorite new TV show is Better Call Saul. If you're a fan of Breaking Bad, this is a prequel, and shot in the same style and with the same sensibility. We weren't expecting a lot because the reviews were just okay, but we were pleasantly surprised and are looking forward to it every week.
It's a fun little puzzle when new characters pop up, and you try to figure out how they fit into the BB narrative in the future. I actually just booked the flights for our Spring break trip to New Mexico. We'll be staying in Santa Fe most of the time, but I think we may have to take a detour to Albuquerque for one of those location tours. Another thing we are definitely doing is one of the NM Fiber Arts Trails. This was the concession I got from letting them skip the play, and they better not complain. I definitely want to hit Victory Ranch. I just bought some dryer balls from them and they have a large retail store. The rest of the time we plan to do plenty of hiking and hot springs. Our son is turing 13 on the trip and we promised him a spa day. We also want to take in the art and cuisine that Santa Fe is famous for.

Love

     I hope everyone had a nice Valentine's Day. I received way too much See's Candy These are absolutely my favorite chocolates and there are stores all over CA in in some other states. If you don't have one around you and have never seen them in the airport, they have an online store. My favorites are the dark chocolate caramels.

     At this point my husband knows what I like, and throws a few other things in just for fun. He also knows that cut flowers make me sad, but orchids are forever.

     These are Cymbidiums in a lovely planter. I have another Cymbidium that I bought a few years ago and leave outside. I almost never water it, never feed it, and it is bursting out of its pot but gives me gorgeous blooms season after season. Orchids are pretty much the only plants I can be trusted with because they're murder-proof.

     Our son was on a sleepover, so we had an actual Valentine's date night. We had an early dinner at The Penthouse at the Huntley Hotel. It was sunset and the views were spectacular all around.

     It was a prix fixe with 4 courses, plus I had a really nice wine pairing. I had the oysters, a lemony risotto and a branzino to die for. The wine pairing was perfect - 3 (generous) ounces per course, and 1 oz. of dessert wine. We were stuffed. Thinking we had plenty of time, we had to make our way to the Edgarmar Center a few miles away for a 7:30 curtain. I know I've bitched about the rampant development around here before, but between getting to this restaurant and then to the theatre, you would have thought we were going into midtown Manhattan from Jersey, and it's all just a few miles from our house. It was a perfect storm - Saturday, Valentine's, and a rather glorious and unseasonable beach day made for gridlock in downtown Santa Monica.
   
     I have to give my husband credit for taking me to the theatre - that's pretty advanced masculinity. We had been here years before to see a friend in a play, and I used to know the theatre's director as our kids went to school together. Train to Zakopane, written by indie film director Henry Jaglom is set in 1928 in the border region of Poland near the Soviet Union, and deals with war, shifting borders and the history and realities of pervasive anti-Semitism that were giving rise to the Third Reich at the time. The play was based on the author's father's recollections of events at that time. My husband, whose parents were from this region found the subject matter fascinating. Also, after 15 years of attending almost nothing but City Garage plays, he appreciated it's straight-forward, linear quality. I was focusing more on the production and of course the acting, which I found ranged from mostly fine to distractingly bad. It's also a love story, but in the end, it didn't bring the feels, and with subject matter like this it really should have.

Don't try these at home

Uttanasana

Paschimottanasana

I finally felt ready to take my first yoga class of the year, which was at YogaGlo with Darren Rhodes

of Yoga Oasis in Tuscon. I had never taken class with Darren, but it was just what I needed. It was only a one hour class but was core intensive because of some innovative adjustments to plank, like doing it with the tops of your feet on the floor. You have to hold your core especially tight to prevent your lower back from sagging. It's clear that he is of the therapuetic mindset and/or is used to giving lots of adjustments. His default instruction for uttanasana is with bent knees, which is how I have to do any forward stretch. I have the flexibility, but the stretch itself is murder on my lower back symptoms. Most people with low back issues should tend to avoid these intense stretches. This is especially true for me in paschimottanasana, which I usually avoid like the plague. I had never seen an adequate adjustment for this, but he had everyone start curving over bent legs with soles of feet on the floor, and then extending out from there if it felt right. At this point I really trusted whatever he was doing. He did some great happy baby variations and quad stretches and thread the needle, showing how to go deeper in a safe way. Like most of the wonderful teachers who come through there, I wish I could study with him all the time. My strongest endorsement is that since class on Thursday I've hardly taken any Advil, and I usually eat them like candy.

     An interesting thing happens when I'm in that studio and it's getting kind of freaky. I go to the mat before class starts, sometimes never having studied with the teacher, and get into an asana that my body needs that day. It could be anything, sometimes it's something unusual and specific, and it almost always comes up in the class, sometimes as the theme of the class. Before Darren's class I was just sitting in Virasana, which I never do, just watching and listen to other students. Sure enough, we end up sitting in Virasana. In Amy Ipolitti's class I started doing these wide circular stretches, and that was what the whole class was about - circles instead of lines. It only seems to happen there so it must be the vibe of the studio - lots of energy bouncing around that loft.

     After yoga I made my first smoothie of the year. It was my first because I finally fixed the blade mechanism on my bar blender. Along with the TV, it's part of our trying our best to repair what we have instead of just replacing things. This is my go-to smoothie. I have a freaky ability to eyeball everything and have it come out to the exact top of the glass, maybe left over from some long-ago bartending days. Here's the recipe - the amounts are guesstimates:

1 cup non-fat plain yogurt
1/4 cup orange juice, or amount needed for blending
Sweetener of choice - Truvia, honey, agave nectar, etc
1/2 cup frozen mango
1/4 cup frozen raspberries
1 tsp coconut flakes (optional)
3 ice cubes

Place yogurt, juice, sweetener and coconut in blender. Gradually add in frozen fruit and ice. Add more juice if needed.

I use whatever fruit I have, but it's usually a mix of 2, with a basis of mango, peaches or pineapple with some berries in smaller amounts. A lot of people like bananas in smoothies, so try that too. It's super simple, healthy, clean and organic if you wish.

     Finally there's knitting. I have not done a lot of it this weekend, but am almost done with my first Aegean Sea Mitt. There was a lot of futsing with the increases and how long to make it. I really want to use all the yarn and I could do it if I wore them slouchy, but I do want to have the option to pull them up. I don't think there's enough to round the elbow (plus that means more measuring and math). I did a decrease on the last knit row from 68 down to 60, then did the eyelet edging. The edging was still a bit too wide for me, so I have to decide it I want to live with it or tink the last 4 rows and try again, decreasing to 56. Maybe a decision for tomorrow.

Math

   

     I came to a conundrum with what I am now calling my Aegean Sea Mitts. I requested the larger skein of yarn because I thought I would need it and wanted the option of long gloves. The gloves are now almost 10 inches long, 1.5 inches longer than the pattern, and I still have quite a bit of yarn. Since I started with the dark color, it's also the lightest and prettiest part. In order to use up every last bit I realized that I would have to do some increases. Now, I'm not math-adverse in the least. I love solving equations, but coming up with your own equations to solve, that's a different story. I put them aside for a day, but that didn't solve anything. Finally I sat down with a pencil and paper and a ruler and tape measure, measuring the mitt and my arm in various places and figuring out how many stitches I would need to increase, and when. I also had to carefully wiggle the mitt on and off of my arm without dropping any stitches of a 9" circular, needle, my preferred method of working mitts and socks. I'm doing paired M1 increases facing each other on either side of the stitch marker every 7 rows. This will get me a 20 stitch increase by the time I estimate the yarn running out. We'll see how it goes!
   
     While I was mulling this over I worked a few rows on Hitofude. It's such a treat to go to the relatively large size 5s after working on toothpicks for so long. I'm looking forward to finishing that sleeve section (finally) and grafting the ends together.
   
     Look what came in the mail today!

6 luscious balls of Aunt Lydia's size 3 crochet thread. I was perusing the Crochet Today from 2008 I got at a yard sale. Not much that interested me, until I saw the Sunburst Bowl. It was a technique I had never heard of called tapestry crochet, where the colors are floated across the top of the work and trapped there by the working yarn. It looked fascinating and I knew I had to try it. I figured I could pick up this stuff at Joann's, but they mostly had size 10. After searching around the internets I found some at Knitting Warehouse for $2.04, which is quite a bargain. I came up with my own palette which differs a lot from the original.

In reading the project notes on Rav, yarn management does seems to be a pretty big problem with this technique, especially when working with 6 colors. I have to try and constrain my self from starting this until the mitts are done, because there is a deadline there. This will definitely be an at-home only project.

     The whole family seems to be in a Mindfulness Meditation phase. Besides taking my son to UnPlug, I listened to Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief which was a nice introduction but rather short at just 2 hours. Through Unplug I learned about the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. While I have little formal training in meditation per se, my 20+ years of yoga practice has exposed to me to various forms of meditation and mindfulness. My husband was aware of this as an established part of medicine and can receive CME credits for it. We decided to take the Mindful Awareness practices class together this Spring. Now if I could only get him into the yoga studio...

     In this same vein, I'm taking a break from dystopia and crime and reading A Life Worth Breathing by Max Strom. I've never had the pleasure of taking a class with Max but I know that he's quite a rockstar in the yoga world. I also started listening to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. This book is getting a lot of buzz for it's power to transform your behaviors and your life. Change and transformation seems to be in the air all around me these days. The key seems to be going with whatever is manifesting itself for you. These things do seems to arrive on their own timeline and in their own way.

Everything takes forever

     Back in January I made a list of some things that I intended to do this year, and of them was to finally put the blackout liner on the shade in the bedroom. For the last year or so I had 3 yards of fabric clipped onto it - I had enough for the 3 shades in the room. Finally I just got sick of looking at it, unclipped it, and unscrewed the shade from the sill.

     This is some kind of rattan roman shade that was here when we moved in. The sun really only is a problem on this one window, so it's the only one I'm doing. It's such a simple thing but it took, like, 4 hours. I had to cut the shade precisely with a rotary cutter, press and tack down the seams with tape, thread everything under the rings, staple it to the frame, and then take all the rings out and reposition them through both layers. Finally I had to put it back up by myself which was awkward. This is why when I look around this house I think "do I really want to get into this now"? But it's done and it looks great. The same thing happened a few days ago when I decided to finally reframe some watercolor paintings I've had for, I don't know, 10 years? This was another all-afternoon project.

Just some of the mess

I framed up a bunch of my son's artwork about 2 years ago which I was very happy to get done, but they've been sitting just like that on the floor of the dining room ever since. Just like in our old house, I'm sure we'll get it just the way we like it, then we'll move. 

     Yesterday was actually a great day for this project because it was one of those rare, wonderful, drizzly days in LA. Here's the view of my jungly front yard. 

     I absolutely love it. I probably wouldn't love it all the time, but more than we've been getting for sure.

     I decided to take a break from the DVR and watched Silver Linings Playbook on Netflix. I know, I'm 2 years behind. It was really a cute movie, but I'm a little perplexed why Jennifer Lawrence won the Oscar. I really like her but okay, no better than Bradley Cooper who was really quite good. I'm never one of those people who catches up on all the nominees before the ceremony and I'm even less likely to do that now that there's some insanely good stuff on TV. Beside the return of John Oliver and The Walking Dead, there's Better Call Saul and a new docuseries on HBO called The Jinx. It's a true crime story in the vein of Serial and The Staircase. The Staircase is about the trail of author Michael Peterson for his wife's murder. You can watch it online or download from iTunes. You are watching a trial as it unfolds and it's riveting and very binge-able.

     I finally finished Apple Tree Yard. I'll be putting up a review on Goodreads which I'll link to, because I'm dead-set against spoilers. I gave it 3 stars. While it was diverting it was also upsetting, but more than anything, it didn't bring the feels. This was the same problem I had with Life After Life and On Such a Full Sea and quite a few others lately. If I don't get an emotional wallop then it just doesn't make it into 4 star territory.

     I look my son to Unplug Meditation for a 3 week series for kids. It was a nice space and there was another knitting mom there so we got to share projects. It was hard to tell how he liked it because he's  12 and anything without electronics is boring, but I know that just the act of taking the time to clear your mind can have powerful effects. There was a lot of press on the walls, and it was being described as the Drybar of meditation, as in come in when you want, get it done and be on your way. I thought that was pretty funny, but it's very appealing for today's lifestyle. There were tons of kids there so the demand is definitely there.

     Finally I was going through my bookmarks today and came across a website that I'd joined a while back called Flight Memory. It lets you track all the flights you've ever taken and it calculates how many miles you've flown. It's one of those wonderful time-wasters for travel nerds, like Gogobot, which lets you track everyplace you've been and post pictures. You would think it would be impossible to track all your flights and you might be right, but for some reason I've kept a record of every one I've taken going back 20+ years, and I remember all the ones before that. Nerd me up.

Home stretch

     The thumb on my mitts is finally finished! From what I can tell so far, it's pretty good and fits pretty well. Here's a few angles

    

     I wanted to put the images all together but Blogger is not cooperating. I am actually really awesome at layout so this is quite distressing. Here's more

 

     Not too shabby and they fit pretty well, but perhaps not quite too a T. I haven't blogged for 3 days because I wanted to have this figured out. While still reading Apple Tree Yard, I needed a little breaky because of the rather heavy subject matter, so I finally started reading Knitting Without Tears. I realized that maybe EZ had something to say about thumbs, and indeed she did, describing the very thumb I was doing. Well, if it's good enough for her. There was a difference, however. In the pattern and in most knitting that we do, when it says pick up it means pick up and knit. EZ says to pick up the stitches that were on the waste yarn and a stitch on each side (mine was 3) and then knit them on the next round, knitting the picked up stitches through the back loop to eliminate those pesky holes. Even though I had to do some tinking, I thought it was worth a try on an academic level. The stitches look pretty smooth, but we'll see what we have when the ends are woven in. I managed to get a pretty smooth transition with the gradient, even with having to break the yarn 5 rows after the thumb then rejoining. This is what I have after the decreases, so now it's just knitting straight till I run out of yarn. 

     As I've mentioned, my hands are rather large. The challenges of fitting are why I don't own a dozen of these, because they are my favorite things and so appropriate for LA. It occurs to me that I may want to invest the time in creating the perfect plain vanilla mitts for myself in each weight of yarn, so that I have easy adjustments for any pattern, and also a blank canvas for creating my own designs. It's probably a good idea to do this for socks as well, although there seem to be so many different ways you can do a plain sock. Once you've knit them every way you can figure out your preferred heel and toe and whatnot and go from there.

     

     It's Friday (yay) and so I get to enjoy some Pinot a little earlier than usual (my own rules). I was in the mood for something sweet to go along with it, but a particular kind of sweet thing, you know how that is? I try to be good and healthy and not go overboard, and then it came to me: maple walnuts like the kind you get at Whole Foods at $10.00 a pound. Turns out I had the ingredients and it couldn't be easier

     2 cups walnuts, 1/3 cup maple syrup and some salt in a non-stick pan, and 3 minutes later you are in heaven. Warning - these are very addictive. Also, don't put them on wax paper because they stick. I added extra salt and could have even added more. Yum.

     I've been struggling with some chronic pain issues in my lower back for many years. It's the kind of thing that I've managed to control quite well through yoga, but sometimes things get aggravated to the point where certain exercises can be counter-productive. This unfortunately puts you in a spiral of   inactivity, which aggravates the condition, you see where I'm going. I decided to take a proactive approach and listen to Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I layed out on a Pilates mat with a bolster under my legs and a pillow, but since the first part was explaining the program, I eventually felt good enough to move into some pretty aggressive stretches which I haven't been in for a few months. It seems like something really worth exploring in depth, with the end result for me being a return to a full and regular yoga practice. His focus in the introduction was being in the present moment and using it to see what it can teach us, either good or bad. For whatever reason, I feel that I'm now in a place of opening, pushing past resistance, and embracing the now in everything.

     On a lighter note, I started listening to a hilarious audiobook called People I Want to Punch in the Throat by Jen Mann. I just love the light-hearted and irreverent tone of this book. The narrator is fantastic. I've been on such a podcast kick and it's been too long since I've listened to a good audiobook. Last year I listened to Where'd You Go, Bernadette and I just loved it. It's a novel, but in the same vein. I checked out Jen Mann's blog, too. She's been at it for a few years and has a very informative blogging FAQ which I skimmed but seems very helpful. I need all the help I can get at this point.

     The hubs was off for a few days so we got to do some intensive and collaborative TV viewing. On the DVR: The Middle (one of the few we all watch as a family), Cougar Town (I love it, he's over it), and we finally watched the series finale of The Killing on Netflix. We loved all 3 seasons of it and don't know why it had such a hard time. BTW, Mariel Enos is gorgeous.

She's always cast in these very unglamorous roles, like the fundamentalist wife in Big Love, but as you can see she's stunning.

     

     I've been on a real Tom Waits kick lately. He is one of my favorites of all time, and I mean for the last 30 years, but weirdly, I haven't listened to his whole oeuvre, even the ones I own. It's totally weird. I'm the same way with Haruki Murakami, but it's more understandable because he writes rather long books and we've only been together 15 years or so. When I read a Murakami, it takes about 3 years for it to sink in till I'm ready for the next one. Also, I'm saving them so that I will never run out. Last year I read 1Q84 which is really 3 books and as long as War and Peace, so I'm good for a while. But with music, there's no such time constraint. Again, I think I'm just spacing it out because it blows my mind so hard. This week I listened to Orphans which is a 3 CD set, but there were things on disc 2 and 3 I'd never heard before. This came out when my son was a toddler, so it explains why I wasn't able to spend long, luxurious hours absorbing it. So I'm doing it now. It even makes scouring the bathroom seem like a cool thing to be doing.

Peasant thumb it is

     I decided to try out the peasant thumb before I went much further into the project. In the pattern it says that after taking out 8 stitches I should have 15 on the needles. Not sure why this should be. I wasn’t about to just unzip the waste yarn, so I carefully picked up the right leg of the stitches above and below it and ended up with 17. This was just as well because I needed to increase to 21 anyway. I used the inside of the ball, which is the lightest part of the gradient because I didn’t want to cut the yarn just yet, and I also wanted to see how it looked. I picked up 4 stitches on each side, and proceeded to get to almost the end of the thumb before trying it on. It’s much better than I thought it would be, although a gusset works better for my hand. It’s a little hard to tell because the rest of the glove isn’t finished yet, but I decided to forge ahead with the peasant thumb in the interest of expediency, perhaps picking up and extra stitch or 2. What I’ve already done is cut the yarn so that the whole hand will be the dark color. I have to do the thumb before going much further so that I can make that work. After that it’s smooth sailing. Can’t wait to see the color changes, they should really be pretty, and this way I can just keep going till the ball runs out. I’ve very excited to wear these mitts. My only other pair of fingerless mitts are the Maine Morning Mitts done in a thick, tweedy yarn and while cozy, are a little less than fashionable.

     Today I was on the Ravelry boards and was looking under local events and discovered something at The Urban Homestead. Intrigued, I went to their website. All I can say is, wow. I had never heard of this place, but it’s a family in Pasadena that has turned their house on 1/4 acre into a model of sustainability and urban farming, growing 6 tons of food a year. They’ve been doing this for 30 years and have wonderful website and blog. They have a monthly craft circle, as well as other classes, workshop and get-togethers. Getting over to Pasadena during the week is pretty much impossible for me, but hopefully sometime on a weekend I can make my way over there. They have an occasional Hootenanny, so maybe I’ll drag my son and his fiddle too.

     Over on TV, we’ve been enjoying the return of Parks and Recreation. So sorry to see this one go after this season. We’re almost done with this season of American Horror Story - Freak Show. This season is not one of my favorites, I think that would be Asylum, though my husband really loves it. It’s fun seeing how the seasons are interconnected.  This is going to be picked up for another season, but without Jessica Lange. As an actor, I think about how great it must be to work on a show like this, like a repertory company but on TV. I think it’s kind of unprecedented.

     Finally, it’s time to announce the winner for the Manos del Uruguay giveaway. I used a random number generator and the winner is Marilyn, or wahoomerry on Ravelry. Congratulations Marilyn, I’ll be messaging you. Thank you to everyone for visiting and leaving comments, I really appreciate it.

Tennis spoilers ahead

     Today was another sick day. My Fitbit tells me that last night I slept 2 hours and 16 minutes, was awake 19 times and restless 32 times. Now, I've had some bad nights in the past but I thought last night was pretty good. I did have one of those endless scratches in my throat and could not stop coughing, so maybe that explains it. Aside from a brief trip to Whole Foods, the day was given over to sports, and by that I mean the Kitten Bowl

and the Australian Open Mens's Final

     As you can tell, I don't give a fig about football, but with action like this, who cares. First off, the Kitten Bowl is freaking adorable. Last year I actually watched some of what my mom calls "the stupid bowl", and the kittens were way more exciting to watch. This year did not disappoint. I especially loved the appearance of the "FFL Commissioner" and the smack-meowing cat video put out by the eventual winners before the game. And Mary Carillo. It occurred to me that MC is my favorite. My favorite what, you might ask? My favorite person, place or thing of all time, that's what. She could do color commentary on the phone book and I would watch it. I wish she were my best friend. Watching her and her co-hosts trying to keep a straight face was priceless. Lest we forget, it's all for a good cause - getting people to spay and neuter and to adopt, don't shop.

     The players I was rooting for in the Aussie finals - Sharapova and Murray - didn't come through in the end, but it was amazing to see Serena make history yesterday and Djokovic play such a great match today. And he named his son Stefan, like mine! I was thrilled to find that out. He said the name has great symbolism to Serbs, which I knew about, but I also love the name because how auspicious and ancient it is. Now time to head over to SI.com for Jon Wertheim's indispensable 50 Parting Thoughts which he does after every slam.


     On the way home tonight my husband picked up some Indian food from our stand-by take out place Hurry Curry. We've been going here for 20 years. It was the first Indian I ever had and to this day I still offer Saag Paneer wherever I go. To me, it's a litmus test for Indian food. It's like spaghetti and meatballs at an Italian place for my husband. If they do those things well, the rest of the menu's probably good, too. Last night I was clearing out some email and came across a video on America's Test Kitchen for Saag Paneer. I listen to their podcast but haven't spent much time on the site, mainly because there's a paywall for a lot of the content. This recipe was not exception, but the video was free to watch and detailed all the ingredients and techniques, including making homemade cheese. It actually looks pretty easy. Making Indian or Chinese at home can seem pretty intimidating, but someone's making it somewhere, so why not you, right? It reminds me of when we went to our favorite local Sushi place Sushi Hanashi recently. They had a Korean dish I've seen often called Bibimbap which I'd never tried.  Looking at it I realized there was no reason I couldn't make it, I just needed the recipe for the sauce. This led me to the adorable Korean food blogger Maangchi. I followed her recipe, and now this is go-to staple in our house. So easy! I even took a picture.

     This was sashimi bibimbap with salmon and brown rice. You really can put whatever vegetables you want in it. The secret is the spicy sauce which you can find on her site or any number of other places. Here's to a year of homemade, exotic noms!