No news on the baby front. I’ll post if anything happens.

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I bet you don’t even remember that I was spinning up a pygora/silk blend. I stopped spinning this after August because I was just sick and exhausted all the time, but the project beckoned again a couple months ago. I finally, FINALLY finished the singles last week!

Everything is on storage bobbins.

This project moves slowly because of the guard hair. The original prep was not dehaired well, and although I picked out as much hair as I could while spinning, I am still finding lots more during the plying stage. It is diminishing my pleasure in the project, but the final yarn still looks fab. Yeah. I’ll probably post about this sometime next year when I finish plying.

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Attention Twin Cities knitters and spinners - the local sheep and wool festival is THIS WEEKEND. I am planning to go - probably on Saturday, if the weather cooperates. (Shelley? Kerry? Will I see you there?) Matt might come, too. He doesn’t really enjoy fiber festivals, but he’s afraid I’m going to go into labor amidst the piles of wool. Heh. Wouldn’t that make a helluva story?

I am getting as big as a moose.

My skin hurts from stretching, although a wide swath down the center of my belly is completely insensate. I could probably pierce my navel and not feel a darn thing. I’m still having a lot of crotch pain while sitting or walking - it’s due to ligament stretching (feels as though I’ve bicycled for a long time on a very hard seat) and is well within the range of normal pregnancy-related symptoms. I’m having contractions (about a dozen or so daily), some hard, some barely noticeable. My eyes have been dry, and I switched to wearing eyeglasses full time. But I’m doing OK. If it weren’t for the pain, I could probably put up with being pregnant for another half year or so. (Ha ha ha…)

We saw a midwife on Monday. Baby is head down and seems ready to go. It was kind of funny - orientation is determined by palpation, and Baby really did not like having its face squeezed by the midwife. There was much kicking. (Ow.) The midwife said I’ve already begun dilating (TMI? Sorry), and she urged me to pack my hospital bag in the next few days. The baby is full term now, so I guess it really can come at any time.

I finished Baby’s tiny sweater last week. I had a helluva time seaming it, but it finally came together. My obligation as an knitting expectant mother is fulfilled - now I can go back to more interesting fiber projects. :b

Think it’ll fit?

Some old friends drove up from Madison this past weekend to hang out and to gift us with a veritable mountain of baby gear from when their kids were small. I didn’t take a lot of pictures (I blame camnesia), but we did manage to capture a unique homecooked meal - tigelle!

I’d never heard of tigelle before - turns out it’s a yeast-raised, pan-fried Italian bread. The dough is kneaded, left to rise, and is shaped into small rounds that are cooked on a 2-sided griddle (sort of like a waffle iron or a hobo pie iron).

They were sort of like English muffins but not as holey. I thought they were prettier!

We ate it with cured meat, soft cheese, baby arugula, or plain (with butter and salt).

Seems like everyone enjoyed it. (Even Matt ate a couple rounds!)

With the price of gas going up, I’ve been thinking about simple ways to improve gas mileage. I stumbled across this page from the guv’mint that consolidates all of the fuel-saving tips that I’ve heard over the years. I found this bit of data particularly striking:

I wasn’t able to find the original paper that details how this graph was put together (West, B.H., R.N. McGill, J.W. Hodgson, S.S. Sluder, and D.E. Smith, Development and Verification of Light-Duty Modal Emissions and Fuel Consumption Values for Traffic Models, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, March 1999). Nevertheless, other pages showing this graph and citing this study indicate that it is supposed to represent mileage from an idealized mid-size sedan.

I’m not a particularly speedy driver to begin with and have never had a traffic ticket (well, except for when I totaled a 1979 Impala 5 blocks from my parents’ home when I was 16, but no tickets since I began driving again at age 23). However, this graph has done more to curtail my driving speed than anything else previously. I wonder why the thought of saving 25 cents here and there inspires me to slow down more than the threat of a $150 ticket?

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Last December, my sister forwarded an e-mail with this animation:

Does the girl turn to clockwise or counterclockwise as you watch? Or does she switch directions randomly?

The text of the e-mail forward had the usual psychobabble about right brain vs left brain and what that said about the kind of person you are (were you a genius?), so I was convinced that it was a hoax of some kind - that the image cycled in some way such that the girl actually was turning one way for a while and then being flipped to turn the other way.

The funny thing about it - it really is an optical illusion. (A full explanation is here.) So much for my cynicism.

For my third work anniversary (now a couple weeks ago), I baked a lemon cake to share with my colleagues. This isn’t the first lemon anniversary cake that I’ve made, and it seems like a good tradition. (I don’t remember what I brought in last year, and I don’t seem to have ‘blogged about it, so it must have been rather unremarkable.)

I used the recipe here, doubling it to fill a Bundt pan.

I followed the recipe very closely but made a couple of minor changes - full-size blueberries instead of miniature (hey, I had them in the freezer), vanilla yogurt instead of plain, and Meyer lemons (2 of ‘em, and I didn’t measure how much juice or zest they yielded).

As before, no one wanted to take the last slice…

…which means Matt got to try a little bit at the end of the day.

We intended to plant some tiny tree saplings today. Matt picked them up for free on Friday as part of the local Earth Week celebration. But this is how the backyard looked at 7:30 AM:

Springtime in Minnesota!

The saplings are hardly more than twigs with roots, I’m not sure how they will fare being out of the ground for a couple days while we wait for the weather to warm up.

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I’ve been making some freeze-ahead foods in anticipation of my probable postpartum unwillingness to cook. It takes a bit of effort, but I prefer it to throwing myself at the mercy of the local takeout scene (*shudder*). So far, I’ve put away spaghetti sauce (with ground buffalo!), cabbage rolls stuffed with beef and rice, chicken curry, and potato/cheddar varenyky.

If you’re unfamiliar with varenyky, it is one variant of the Eastern European boiled-and-then-pan-fried dumpling that is filled with meat or potatoes. I had particularly enjoyed the potato/cheese ones at Kramaczuk’s deli when Matt and I checked them out a few months ago, and I looked online for a suitable recipe.

I ended up using the one here. The recipe is long, but it is well detailed and has a lot of photos. I didn’t alter a thing and thought it was very easy to follow. These are fairly zaftig dumplings - 2 of them about cover the area of my palm. Six would make a hearty main course.

The dough was the most forgiving dumpling dough that I’ve ever worked with - I didn’t lose a single one to the boiling water. If you’ve never made dumplings before, you may not know that they can leak or even burst while boiling because the air trapped inside the pocket expands with heat and compromises the dough. However, this dough was so elastic, it expanded without tearing and then shrank back to size.

I made about 3 dozen dumplings one Sunday night (approximate time spent, 3 hrs). I froze them in single layers after boiling and draining. I’m not sure that I’ll fry them up when I prepare them “for real” - they were damn tasty straight out of the boiling water. (I think I can get away with just steaming them, provided they don’t merge into ONE GIANT DUMPLING.) Looking at the bags of frozen varenyky, I feel very wealthy.

A fairly trustworthy mechanic has just uttered the fateful words about my 1995 Volvo wagon: “This may not be safe to drive unless you do [$2,000+ of repair work]. Maybe it’s time you thought about getting another car.”

Zoiks. As if we didn’t have enough on our plates already.

OK, so I seemed to have confused many/most of you with the post title about the “world without shrimp.” It’s a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference. Anya mentions it in several episodes (the world without shrimp) when giving examples of alternate universes - eg, a world without Buffy - or in my case, a world without fiber hobbies. That is all.

[As it turned out, last week was mostly a bomb, as far as home improvement was concerned. I got most of the home office fixed up over the weekend, but I was surprised with 2 deadlines at work. I ended up doing nothing but editing all week long, from 6:30 AM to 9:00 PM with a 30- to 45-minute break for dinner. So. Oh well. I tried.]

And for the folks who sent reassuring notes about how the baby won’t mind if we don’t have a beautifully painted and decorated nursery - I had a good laugh every time I saw one of those e-mails. People! We have LOW standards around here, c’mon! :D A House Beautiful designer I am not. I wiped down the (plain, undecorated) walls with disinfectant (we used to have the litter boxes in this room - this was the lockdown area when our cats were fighting). I put up funny animal print curtains and bought green fitted sheets for the crib, and I’m delighted.

Yesterday, we finally purchased a car seat. We’ve got our breasfeeding class lined up, and I’m going to meet with the local La Leche League leader (also a good knitbud pal) to go over any last-minute preBaby questions. Now we are ready. Baby can come any time now. (EDD - a little over a month.)

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In the meantime, I’ve been working on a lace stole. Actually, it’s been in the works since February (I began knitting it on the way to Rome), but somehow, I never mentioned it before. The yarn is Merino/tencel (50/50) - ‘blogged here and here. The project is from the ever-so-lovely Victorian Lace Today, and the pattern is called “Scarf with French Trellis Border,” or something similar to that. I reworked the pattern to make it wider, and I’m using far smaller needles (US2).

I realized shortly into it that I would need more than 2 oz of yarn for a decent size stole. I ordered more fiber from Amy and have been spinning and plying it up.

The fun, it never stops.

OK, I rarely watch videos on the Internet (except sometimes on Cute Overload), and I’m sorry if video links annoy you as much as they typically annoy me. However, Matt insisted I see this one, and I was glad he did.

I love this video for 2 reasons: 1) it’s funny; 2) I OWN THE SAME HP-28S CALCULATOR THAT THE DUDE ON THE RIGHT IS HOLDING UP AT 0:19!!!

(I was the lamest member of the math team in high school, what can I say, but I did have one of the coolest calculators - mine was purchased in 1990. The best feature of that calculator - reverse Polish notation. Seriously.)

We set up Baby’s new crib on Wednesday.

Charlie in the corner, James (blurry) in the foreground

It’s a “convertible” crib - this will turn into a toddler bed by removing the front, and it eventually will be used as a headboard/footboard for a full size bed. It’s made of pine, which is not my first choice for nice furniture, but what the heck, the price was right, and it seems sturdily built. The mattress is some crazy, waterproof, antimicrobial, 2-sided (toddler side and infant side - huh?) piece of modern technology. (I have no idea. The retailer said it was their bestselling model.) Anyway, Baby officially has a place to sleep now. Whee! This is a gift from my parents. Thanks, parents!

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Things have been not going well on a physical level for me for a while. Before you worry, let me assure you that Baby appears completely fine. However, I’m exhausted every day by 2 PM, I cannot find a comfortable position for my body (walking, standing, sitting, reclining, laying down, it all sucks), and I’m in kind of a lot of pain on most days (doc says everything is normal/healthy, but ow). I’m also starting to feel very verklempt because the house is unkempt (does that count as a rhyme?), we’re unprepared for the baby (nursery, what nursery), and my craft-room-turned-home-office still needs window shades, bookshelves, a desk, etc. (Heartfelt thanks, btw, to all who left encouraging comments on Friday. I have taken down that post, but I really appreciate your support.)

Anyway, I’m trying an experiment. I’m giving up all fiber-related hobbies for 1 week - I’ll still be circling the ‘blogs and all that, but I will be doing no knitting, spinning, or sewing during this time. I hope this means I get more sleep, get the nursery and office closer to completion, and decrease the stress. I’ll let you know how it goes.

PS. I do have some backlogged projects to tell you about, so I’ll still be posting here. See you in a few days.

PPS. Bonus points if you know what the title is about!