ahhhhh, glorious time off. I'm ejoying being lazy right now, because shortly I'll be getting up, eating lunch, and probably baking cookies. More of the spritz kind. I don't know, I might not. Then I go to work at seven. Yay.

Work yesterday was not fun. It was barely even tolerable. Due to someone scratching hours off the schedule, our PM animal care had issues. One of the assistant managers left early. Really early. Think three hours early. And then, if I had left when I was done, my manager who wasn't even supposed to be in and should have been at home resting because she's sick would have been alone for several hours, possibly without animal care at night. So I was nice and stayed a good two hours late to feed the puppies for her. She'd have to close the store to do it on her own. It's a hassle. And, because the asst. manager left early, I got stuck doing a good part of his customer-assistance job which used up so much of my time that I ended up being an hour late leaving anyway. We were flooded with people. It was crazy.

Last night was spent knitting the hat for my coworker, which is nearly finished. I also worked on Danny's (my cousin, he's two) dragon puppet. This yarn that I'm using is acrylic, Caron brand. It's in these wonderful, bright, crayola primary colors and it looks absolutely cute. I hope he'll like it. I had to mess with the stitch count and length because Danny is, as I said, two. Eleven and a half inches of puppet would cover his arm and fold down some. But it's adorable and I hope he'll love it.
I've cast on for a wrap I'm making for myself which is little more than a large, long rectangle meant to be thrown over my shoulders. I was originally going to just rib the edges and knit through, but I think I'll rib and then do a simple cable. Hm. I'm using a (pair of?) circular needle (s) that I borrowed from my mom. It's my first experience with them, and I have to say I'm ambivalent. Most people seem to favor either circulars or dpns, but I can't really say much. It's different, but not unpleasant. The cable has been wound for so long, though, that it naturally does that loop thing when I knit with it. That's annoying, but as my knitting gets heavier that will stop. I'm using a Patons brand 100% wool yarn in these nice tan, brown, blue, dark teal colors and I really like it. The yarn leapt off the shelf into my basket while I was at the store shopping around for hat yarn. I swear. I have a witness. It pleaded with me to buy it and take it home and knit something delicious and warm with it. I just couldn't turn that down.

I hope everyone's having a cool, easy pre-holiday week. I certainly am, though I keep procrastinating my present-wrapping. At this rate I 'll be wrapping Christmas Eve after I get home from work. I'll get to it. I just don't feel like going out into the garage and pulling down the boxes of wrapping paper and other accoutrements.

I'm not looking forward to this weekend, I am sad to say, because I work 7-2 at the pet store and then 2-7 at the book store. It'll be, uh, busy. I'm probably going to go in really early to the pet store and then be a little late to the book store. My manager there knows the scheduling issue, so she's okay with me being a little late. But we'll be so busy at the pet store I think I might just have to ignore the customers to get my work done on time. 'Cause, you know, I'm not in sales so I don't get a commission for convincing someone to buy a puppy. Which is really fair to me. Totally.
Dudes.

Mmm...spaghetti time!

"Imperfection is beauty. Madness is genius. And it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring."
-Marilyn Monroe

Holiday update

Well, it's 7:00 am, and I'm passing a short amount of spare time blogging. I have work at 8:00, and my father, who is kind when he wants to be, has offered to give me a ride to work so I don't have to walk. My bike is busted, so until I get it fixed, I'm hoofin' it. Which means leaving over half an hour early to get to work. It sucks, yeah, but I've done it before, I'll live. I don't quite have the cash to fork out for a new back rim until I've got all my paychecks in order and deposited. Christmas usually ends up partially bankrupting me.

Speaking of Christmas, all my presents but two are in order and waiting to be wrapped. Em's going to love her ________, El's got a great ______, and I think my mom might just giggle hysterically at the ________. I got Holly a ________, and my dad is getting __________. I think he'll love it. Colleen's scarf is just past the halfway point, which is good because I think I might run out of yarn soon and I don't think I have any ball bands left. I have a pollyana at Borders, but I don't know what to get for the woman I picked. I went out and got the yarn to knit her a hat, but I don't have time to work on it between my jobs and my other knitting. Oh, and sleep.

All right, I must go. It's a short post, but I should let you know that I am not dead yet. Only slightly. I'd tell you in a longer, more verbose manner, but breakfast calls. Mmm oatmeal and hot chocolate.

Shuttlecraft to Enterprise...

Today's post title is a very strange one, I'll admit, even for me. It was brought on by my pondering my ability to ride my bike to work tonight in the snow, in the dark. I then thought about how a hovercraft would be really awesome to take to work. And hovercraft sounds like shuttlecraft...
We have an ornament of the Enterprise's shuttlecraft that lights up. When you press a button, Spock's voice says "Shuttlecraft to Enterprise, shuttlecraft to Enterprise. Spock here. Happy holidays. Live long, and prosper." It's a favorite of mine and my sisters' since we were kids. And, now that we're older and have much more refined senses of humor, we have the shuttlecraft rap. This consists of pressing the button repeatedly with no discernable pattern. What comes out is something like this, "Shuttle craft-shuttle-shuttle craft to Enterprise-shu-sh-sh-shut-" and so on.

It's almost as traditional as my dad plugging in the tree lights, throwing them in a tangled mess on the tree and declaring them done.

Well, it's snowing out. Actually snowing, not just flurrying like it was earlier.

I looked outside around ten this morning and discovered that some snowflakes were falling, but not enough to be excited over. At about 12:15 I went outside and got some shots of my back yard. I don't think you can really see the snow falling very well, but the ground is getting a dusting. It's not sticking to any road surfaces, so I think if I have to ride my bike in to work tonight it won't be so bad, provided the snow lets up enough for me to see clearly. I've had offers from Em's boyfriend and my friend Corey for rides, but I feel bad taking advantage of their cars. And then I'd have to ask my mom to come pick me up at nine, and I always feel bad asking her to come out and get me.

I could get a license if I tried harder, but everytime I ask mom to take me, she forgets, and then when I remind her on the weekends, the only days she can take me, she's tired from cleaning or something. It's just the way my luck goes. Em's moving up to PA, El doesn't drive, and there's no way I'm letting my dad take me. Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy, but my dad was not cut out to be a teacher. Of anything. He loses his patience to easily sometimes. Oh well. I'm sure I'll get driving soon enough. After the license I just have to get a car! Heck, if I get that far, I'll settle for anything with four wheels that runs.

"Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."

~Martin Luther King jr.

A Picture Post

Knitting update:

I finally finished the toe of my pointsettia sock this morning after putting if off for weeks. One sock down, one to go. If I keep going at this pace, I may have the other one done by June! And yes, that is my foot modeling it, and my desk really is that messy. I'm a clutter kind of person. I lost Colleen's Slytherin Fibonacci One-Row Sequence House scarf. Yes, I lost it. Needles and all. I found the yarn I was using for it, but the scarf has magically disappeared. So I started a new Slytherin One-Row House scarf, minus the Fibonacci sequence. It was cool, but way too confusing to do all that math. If you didn't know, I hate math with a passion. I hate math the way Harry hated Snape up until the last minute. Yeah. Anyway. All the pictures I took of it are blurry and discolored. When it stops raining I'll take a picture outside.

I've finished Gio's gift, a cute ------. He's got a link to my blog, though I don't know how often he reads it, so I have to block out anything that might give his gift away. No pictures of the ------, sorry. I'll post some after Christmas, though, I promise!

We got out the decorations yesterday, my mom and I. This is just about all of them unpacked on the floor and waiting to be put out. We've got six boxes of decorations, and one and a half of them hold my dad's collection of penguins. My dad likes penguins, kind of, and my Aunt Joan, wonderful woman that she is, loves to find the strangest ones every year. We get at least two every Christmas. We started to run out of places to put penguins this year. We've got a bunch in the bathroom and a bunch on the entertainment center, and a whole lot of stuffed ones floating around.

We have stockings and garland with lights (sorry about the sideways picture)...

An incredibly helpful cat...

And a vodka/condom star! Well, I think it's a snowflake? I don't know. We found it a few years ago in an Absolut ad, and it's made, if you look closely, out of vodka bottles of varying sizes. It's actually rather pretty. Someone pointed out once that they looked like condoms. They kind of do, actually, which is only slightly disturbing.

And, now that the Christmas music is unpacked, rousing choruses from my mom and I of The Chieftans' version of The Saint Stephen's Day Murders, a favorite of ours if for no other reason than because it is so strange. I need to copy a whole bunch of our CDs to my mp3 player so that I can listen to something other than the usual tinny, overplayed music that the mall broadcasts. I'm really tired of it.

It's Chrismas time now, and I think shopping will start soon. I'm not sure anyone has gifts started yet, short of me with Gio's and El's on the way ( I had to order it online, it was the only place to find it). Ah well. Gio got snapped at earlier in the week for walking into my bedroom after I called three times for him not to come in because a) it was a complete mess and b) his gift was sitting there in plain sight. It's getting to be the time of year when you can't walk into someone's room without knocking. Whee!

"There are no small parts, only small actors."

-Mr. Patrick, my English teacher, my Drama teacher/director, a really awesome guy

Little-known 8

Well, my mom got tagged, and I'm bored, so here goes. Eight little-known things about myself. I'm a pretty simple person...can I come up with 8?

1. I escape into books because I can't take my own adventures. My friends are all amazed that I read so fast. I always say that I read a lot, and practice makes perfect. They then ask why I read so much. The answer is because I can't go off on my own adventures. My favorite kind of books are fantasy. Redwall is especially a favorite, the whole series. Despite the main characters being animals, they have spectacular travels and epic battles and even a small bit of romance here and there. I'm jealous of the characters.

2. I'm a 'collector.' It's true. I hate throwing or giving things away. I get so attached to my things that I feel bad getting rid of them. That's why I have half a book shelf of manga that I don't follow any more, and bottles of a sort of novelty japanese soda. This is also why I have so many stuffed animals.

3. I write myself into my own stories. Even if the main protagonists are nothing like me, or seem to be my total opposites, There is always a bit of me in there. Whether it's a snappy retort that I would have come up with, or a small habit or characteristic of mine.

4. I can't grow plants to save my life. If the fate of the world rested upon my ability to keep a plant alive for more than three months, I'm really sorry but we should maybe start preparing for death. I just can't keep them alive. The plant I currently have has had a record life span here of about six months and I'm greatly confused. Asparagus ferns really like warm, humid climates so why it's managing to hold on in my cold, dry room is really a mystery to me.

5. I'm a sucker for a good romance. I can't help it. Sappy stuff gets to me.

6. I have to repeat myself a lot for my friends. I manage to speak above their level sometimes. I have to go back and explain what I was saying. Oops.

7. I rarely match my socks. Unless I can find the match within five minutes, I grab whichever one is closest and wear them. Red with a frog or white and striped, doesn't matter.

8. I had a really hard time coming up with this. I said I was a simple person. There's not much about me that people don't know. I'm very open.


Well, that's all I can think of. It was a stretch for 8.

A tale of adventure, exploration, and rain

Well, that book that I mentioned in my last post has made quite a day for my dad and I. It talks about several places in the barrens to explore, most of them by car (unfortunately). However, one of the few places that mention a possibility for bikes is called the Chatsworth to Carranza Loop. This route takes you out into the middle of nowhere to Apple Pie Hill--don't ask, I can't explain the name--which is the highest point in south Jersey at 208 feet above sea level. Considering that the majority of this area was at one point under water, that's pretty high.



This is the view from the top of the hill. As you can see, we are just about above most of the trees. I was thoroughly awed at the view. My mom would have been scared witless at the next part of the hill...




...the fire tower.




Atop this hill is, as I say, a fire tower. For those not in the know, these are used by the state forest people to watch for forest fires during the dry seasons. You can climb the stairs, and my dad says you used to be able to get into the watch box at the top, but from all the vandalism on the tower itself, we figure the trapdoor up was locked for a good reason. People had visited the tower recently as evidenced by the smashed pumpkins that had been dropped from the top. There was also a computer monitor and a radio. It made me kind of mad. The pumkins aren't so bad, since they'll rot away and provide some nutrients into the soil (and possibly make some pumpkins next year...?), but the electronics will be there for a very long time.



This is my dad's trusty little Rav from about the middle level of the fire tower's steps. I don't have any pictures from the top because it was damp and quite cold. My hands were wet and frozen from holding onto the steel railings on the way up. The orange and white bit on the left is one of the corners of the tower. They really are just long bars of steel welded together in a flexible sort of manner. They have to be able to bend a little and sway with the wind, which can get very strong up there. I don't mind going up when it's steady, but once it started to shake, I think I'd be down those stairs in record time.

The path down from the hill we took to get out to our next destination was a little round-about, since the map provided in the book only shows the roads that the author talks about and fails to show the other ones in the area (there are several and most of them end up in the same place). We tried a couple of times to get to something other than Ringler Ave, which is the road to take up to the hill, and after a few tries we (read: my dad) managed to figure out where to go. My sense of direction back there is aweful, since I've never been there. The road we were on, sandy though it was, was very hard-packed for something that deep in the woods. It will be a good place to take bikes on, since the soft sand isn't as common on that road. On the way, we saw something the pine barrens are famous for:

pygmy pines!


These are they. There were two huge fields of them on either side of the road we took. They only get to about three or four feet tall. These are all fully-grown trees. Don't they look like little christmas trees? I thought so, because they're all so short and fat. And everyone knows the fat trees are best for Christmas, because you can fit more presents underneath them--I mean, you can cram on more cheesy m&m ornaments from fifteen years ago. Right, mom?

(For years and years we had about six of those ornaments that come on top of the plastic m&m tubes you find a christmas time. I think we finally got rid of them two years ago.)


After the cute little mini-trees, we found the railroad tracks we had been searching for. They're old, having been abandoned a long time ago. These tracks run through almost the entire strech of the pine barrens and used to be referred to as the "Jersey Central," though now I think that term has been passed on to something a bit more high-tech and speedier than the old steam engines that used to run up and down those tracks from Camden to the coast. After the tracks, we managed to make our way to Speedwell-Friendship Road, completely bypassing Chatsworth and Speedwell itself, which are the suggested first and second stops of the route, respectively.


Going down that road, we were really confused because the way the surface was reflecting the light it looked paved, but it was covered over with sand. So our theory is that it's paved, however poorly, and the sand has been washed over it. On the way to the Carranza Memorial, we ran into what we think is a branch of the Wading River, which was home to some really pretty bog-spots.

If you're wondering about the ripples on the water, yes, it was raining. Not hard, but just enough to be a nuisance on the trip. We spent a good deal of it in the car, though, so that's not so bad. It was very cold, though, and that made me have to pee quite badly. I survived.


My dad and I want to borrow my uncle's canoe and go paddling down here one day, but I'm not entirely sure that's legal. He says we can pleade ignorance, but I don't think that will work. Oh well. We'll take a canoe trip on the Atsion or something during the spring, when it's a little warmer.


Way down Speedwell-Friendship Road is a dirt crossroad supposedly called Washington-Speedwell Road (it has no marker, so I'm not really even sure which crossroad it was) which should supposedly take us to a very old cemetary with only two gravestones left, and the site of a place called Eagle Tavern.


We skipped there, too.


We drove right through Friendship and onto Carranza Road after crossing over the railroad tracks again (remember, this is a looped trail) and made it, after a long drive, to the Carranza Memorial. This is a large stone plinth placed at the site a Mexican pilot named Emilio Carranza crashed his plane on a goodwill flight between Mexico and Washington D.C. in 1928. The children of Mexico saved up all their pennies to pay to have the memorial made and carved. It was then dismantled and sent to the US, where the Mt. Holly American Legion reassembled it and now they hold a service there on the saturday closest to July 12th (the day he crashed). Apparently, each block of the memorial represents a section of Mexico. I have no pictures of it to share that I took, but enjoy one that I pulled from Google.


From there, we took a trail that led us back towards Apple Pie Hill. There are a few sections of it that would make my poor beat up mountain bike weep in horror, but after driving through it, my dad looked at me and said, "Okay, so we walk our bikes through that." Thank goodness. We crossed through one of the Batona Trail campsites, as well. The Batona Trail is some sixty miles long and travels through the pine barrens. It's quite an accomplishment to brag about if you've hiked it. It's hiking and biking, too--you can only drive on certain parts of it. On the way, we ran into an unidentified body of water.
We really aren't sure exactly what this place is, but we stopped, got out, and looked around. I found a sort of grown-over path down so we pushed through the undergrowth and managed to get about four or five yards away from the edge. We stopped there because it got very marshy and we were beginning to sink. My dad and I don't like wet feet very much.

On the way home we stopped at an asian grocery store and picked up some panko bread crumbs for tomorrow's dinner. I got some barbecue pork buns (mmm....love 'em) and pocky, which is 99cents a box there. A far cry from the $3 a box most other retailors sell them for.

In other news, I am officially done at Under the Sun; my last day was Friday. I now work part-time at both the pet store, in the mornings, and borders in the afternoon/evenings. I fear for my sleep and lazy time, which will be drastically lessened by working both of these jobs, but I need the money and if my mom could do it for two years, I can hang on too.

The pet store is hard work, I have to admit, and cleaning up dog poop is no fun, but I love them all (except the new yorkies that bark so loudly and high-pitched I always think they're killing each other when the wrestle). I have fallen in love with our Italian Greyhound puppy, despite all my warnings to myself that I CAN NOT come home with a dog. Mom will kill me. Hobbes would probably attack me in my sleep. Besides that, he's $979. After a month, when I get my discount, he'd be $700-something, but that's still too much. It's a shame, because most people think we have puppy-mill dogs, but they aren't. Well, okay, some of them might be, but most of them we get from breeders who were trying to get a certain characteristic and failed. That's why they cost so much.

Last night was my first night at the book store, and I have to admit it was very easy. I haven't worked a register in a good two years or so, so it took a couple of tries to get going, but it's not so bad. I'll be working mostly in the calendar kiosk (which isn't actually a kiosk right now, but whatever) and hopefully they'll keep me on past the season. I really hope so, because I'd take the book store over the pet store in a heart beat if I didn't need the money.

Ah well. It's 10:30 and I have to get up at 6 tomorrow to open the pet store, so I have to cut this off. It's been a long post, I know. Strange for me, isn't it?

"I'm the regal type. That's not a posture you learn in school, dear, it's the way you look at the world."
-Mae West

I got my November sock yarn last week. It's The Artist's Garden at Giverny. Mine has more green in it than my mom's, and brighter purples. I couldn't decide what to do with it, when my mom and I were looking through a book she got on the basics of making socks. I found a pattern I liked called "twisted rib," which is a sort of mock-cable. It's a simple repeat, and I decided to make myself a pair of socks with the November yarn. Since I've lost the memory card for my camera, I'm loathe to take pictures because I have to hunt my sister's bed to find the cable that goes to my camera. But that's okay. The sock is turning out well; the colors are making vertical zig-zags and I like them I just finished turning the heel just a few minutes ago. I'm so proud of my pattern-less socks.

This past Sunday we (mom, dad, me) took a few seconds to convince ourselves to drop our chores and go enjoy a drive in the woods. I took several pictures, and I actually bothered to find the cable for them when I got back. So here we go, picture time!

The road we normally take is called Quaker Bridge Road, which passes through a decent length of the woods. This was taken at the beginning of it, just as you pass the ranger station. Behind the green mound in the distance is the ruin of a barn that used to belong to the Atsion mansion. Further down the road is the old Atsion school house, which is in relatively good condition considering its age (135 years). Ahaha...I just got a book about the ghost towns of the pine barrens on our stop at Batsto, so I'm learning a lot about some of the places we see on our trips. I love it.

This tree is, I think, a scrub pine. I thought that it was just such a cool shape, I had to get a picture. Many of the pines in the area grow like this, and it makes for some wonderful, natural eye candy. I know it's hard to see in this little picture, but if you enlarge it (click it) it's easier. Pines don't really change color in the fall. They're green, and then they're brown. It's the same with oaks and cedars, the two other main indigenous trees to the pine barrens. If it weren't for ground cover like wild blueberry plants, there wouldn't be a whole lot of color there in the fall. But that's okay, I like it anyway. I saw a shirt at the Batsto visitor center that said "Visiting the woods is like going back home." It reminded me of my family-my mom in specific. We always talk about how driving through the woods is like recharging our batteries, and how we love it so much. I think I might get that shirt next time we go, if it's there. Though, whether I'd get it for myself or my mom is kind of iffy...

This was taken at the visitor center. It's a maple tree planted in the parking lot. My mom has a picture of it on her blog from a different angle. If you can't tell, I took this from right underneath, up against the trunk. This tree was beautiful. Unlike the others, it had most of its leaves still, and the colors were amazing. The bottom was a bright, sunny yellow and the top was a deep russet.

Fall has always been my favorite season because mother nature is dressing up everything in her best. I'm always kind of jealous that I can't change colors like trees can, though I don't think I'd like the shedding my leaves part...what would I lose? My hair? My arms and legs? Hmm...