Knitting for Baby

Not my baby. My DH's cousin is having a baby. I knit a baby blanket for him/her (the parents aren't finding out whether it's a girl or a boy in advance), and my MIL convinced me to knit these booties. Super cute. The blanket is the Big Bad Baby Blanket from Stitch N Bitch by Debbie Stoller, and the booties are from Knitting for Baby by Melanie Falick and someone else. The blanket is in double-stranded KnitPicks Shine Sport, and the booties are in Koigu. I think I can squeeze another pair of modified booties out of the rest of the skein of Koigu. Not bad for a $12 skein.





The kleenex box is for scale. The double stranded Shine shrank up a good bit. I was expecting some shrinkage, but it did shrink up a lot. That's okay- it's a good size for a blanket, I think.

I have a bunch of baby knitting on the horizon- my friend is having a baby in November, and I'm knitting the little kid sweater from Last Minute Knitted Gifts, plus maybe another pair of booties if I can manage it with the rest of the Koigu. Another friend is having her third baby in April- I knit Baby#2 a Big Bad Baby Blanket, so I don't want to knit the exact same blanket again- I will probably modify the inside bit to be more of a basket weave. I am going to measure the gauge of the washed/shrunk blanket to see what it is, and try to make it more square. I will wait until they know what the baby's gender is before picking the color. I am tired of yellow and red!

R&R

My DH got a revise & resubmit from his field's top journal this week. We are VERY excited. This means that he is pretty much set for first-round university interviews. Yay!

Counting my blessings!

I found a wedding picture of an ex-boyfriend of mine from high school. I looked at it, and thanked my lucky stars that it wasn't me in that picture! For more reasons than one. Dude, he's not even cute.

Memories of 9/11

Five years ago, I was working in DC, at a government agency, just down the road from the Pentagon. I had driven to work that day instead of taking the metro, because I was going to go look at an apartment, since I was planning on moving at the end of the month.

We didn't have internet in my office, but I had on NPR, and they announced that a plane hit the World Trade Center in New York. My initial thought was that it was some drunk pilot in a Cessna. Then, not that long afterwards, they announced that a second plane hit the other tower. We still didn't know what was going on. A second plane was suspicious. Some people will say that they knew right away when they heard that a second plane hit that it was terrorism. I didn't know that at all. We were confused; we didn't know how serious it was. Then, the guy down the hall came out and said that his daughter had called him and said that a plane hit the Pentagon. We had no idea what to believe- at that point, it wasn't on NPR yet, and there were so many rumors and so much speculation. I thought about leaving work, just b/c it seemed like a good excuse, not because I thought I wasn't safe.

Then my mom called me at work, crying, because she had heard that the Pentagon had been hit, and begging me to go home. I distinctly remember saying "Will it make you feel better if I go home?" and she said yes, while sobbing. I told her that if it would make her feel better, I would go home.

I tried to call DH (who was just a boyfriend at the time), but he hadn't gotten to work downtown yet. At that point, we started realizing how serious it was, so I started getting scared. I couldn't get hold of DH, so I decided to just leave without getting hold of him. I was scared, because I was in a government building, and we had no idea what would happen next.

I refused to take the highway home; we seriously had no idea what would happen next. DH called me on my cell when I was in the car, so I drove to the closest metro station and waited for him until he got there.

Sept. 11, 2001 was about five weeks after my best friend died, and I was still really raw emotionally. My DH remembered reactions that I had to the attacks that I don't remember at all, that sound really crazy now, but were a result of just not thinking straight. The two events are always pretty closely associated in my mind, and it seemed unimaginable that my best friend wasn't around to see the world changed so much for the worse. In a way, I was glad that he didn't have to see it.