Hey all! Happy Friday! I finished my big project so hopefully things will get back on schedule next week. I’m sure you don’t want to see another picture of my CPH – at least not until I get to the point where I split for the fronts and the back, so I thought I’d put up some random links for you all!

First off – did you see this trailer? Watch it. Now. I’m not a fan of horror movies, but I am a fan of sheep and this looks too good to be true! Fingers crossed it goes international! Via JenLa – Thanks Jen!

The Bookish Girl herself sent me this link: A sequel to The Westing Game?!?! As reported in Publisher’s Weekly, Ellen Raskin’s estate has made a deal to release five of her books – and one of them is The Westing Quest, a sequel to The Westing Game. I have to admit, this makes me very nervous. It could be fantastic, but why mess with perfection?

Did you see what Colleen did? She invented the perfecT mitten – for riding the T in Boston – the Charlie Card Mitten. And now? She’s FAMOUS! She’s also raising money for a great cause, Rosie’s Place, a sanctuary for poor and homeless women in Boston. You can donate through the paypal button in her blog sidebar, and you can win a pair of your own Charlie Card Mittens. Dude. She takes the subway knitting seriously! Go Colleen!

Jan blogged yesterday about the Lovely Hearts show being presented by the Artstream Gallery. From the Artstream website:

This exhibit is open to all artists within all media from anywhere in the world.

The theme is lovely hearts – love in all its forms
The charity we will donate artstream’s proceeds to is near and dear to our hearts: The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
The theme may be interpreted any way around the theme of love.
We are looking for diversity, both student and professional work in traditional media such as

painting, printing, paper arts, and sculpture (we have some space for a few pieces for our pedestals)
as well as work in less traditional fine art media such as:

textiles of any sort, quilting, needlework, etc.
felting, knitting, crochet
mixed media
jewelry
recycled art
photographic work
digital media
book arts

The pieces are small – no bigger than 8″x10″x4″ and you can enter up to three pieces per artist. The pieces will be sold at the gallery and at least 50% of the profits from each piece will go to fight Breast Cancer. I’ve already submitted a piece and it’s been accepted! 100% of the profits from the sale of my photograph will be given to charity. The piece I’ll be sending in is called Bleeding Heart:

The deadline for submissions has been extended to January 31st, so get creative and have a heart!

Have a great weekend!
L, C

Can anyone tell me why my stylesheet has gone wonky in IE? Today when I was on the laptop, I noticed that my font is too large and the borders around my pictures have dropped off. Everything else seems okay. The site looks perfectly fine in Firefox and Netscape. I usually view it in Firefox, so I have no idea when things stopped working – although Ann asked me the other day if I changed the font size. So maybe for a couple of days?

Any and all thoughts are appreciated! THANK YOU!

Via Ann and Vicki. Hey Ann? Where’s YOUR picture?

Fill in the blanks about your senior year. The longer ago it was the better.

1. Who was your best friend? Beth and Steve, that is until Steve got a girlfriend and she wouldn’t let him hang out with me. From what I understand, Steve eventually married her and they had at least one kid who was born on 01/01/01. I always found that CRAZY amusing.

2. What sports did you play? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

3. What kind of car did you drive? I was at the mercy of my parents on this one. Usually I drove my dad’s car which was a Pontiac Sunbird. White. I didn’t mind that car. My sister and brother and I drove that thing into the ground. I learned to drive on a Chevy Impala Station Wagon, but they got rid of that sometime my senior year and my mom drove a Buick something or other which was totaled by the neighbor across the street right after I left home. Did NOT like the Buick, but because of the Chevy, I can parallel park anything.

4. It’s Friday night, where were you at? Somebody’s basement, but most likely Dave Goodman’s. We would listen to the Grateful Dead or Led Zeppelin or some other classic rock (I don’t remember any Bruce, to be honest – not with this crowd) and we would drink and get high.

5. Were you a party animal? Not really. I had a midnight curfew, which I was usually very good about unless I arranged to sleep out. I never really liked getting drunk or high and when I drove there were RULES about my car – no alcohol, no drugs. I kicked somebody out of my car for drinking. I guess I was more scared of my father than peer pressure.

6. Were you considered a flirt? Yeah. Probably. I liked to fuck with the boys. I was smart and had a fairly voluptuous body, but I was way too honest for my own good. ETA: I should clarify this – when I say I liked to fuck with the boys I meant tease them or mess with their minds or whatever. Not necessarily get down and dirty. Also, when I say I was too honest for my own good – I mean very free with my opinions, of which I had many, which maybe didn’t go over so well. I think I was a little bit scary.

7. Ever skip school? All the time. There was a two month period when I missed 7th period English almost every day.

8. Ever smoke? Yes.

9. Were you a nerd? Yes and no. I was known, at times, to eat lunch in the M.G. room (the place where the mentally gifted mentors and students hung out – about as nerdy as nerdy can get.)

10. Did you get suspended/expelled? No.

11. Can you sing the Alma Mater? Maybe, but somehow it mixes with the UMich fight song. So no.

12. Who was your favorite teacher? In high school? No one really comes to mind.

13. Favorite class? None. I really couldn’t stand high school. I was bored and restless and probably thought I was better and smarter than everyone. I couldn’t WAIT to get out of there.

14. What was your school’s full name? George Washington High School

15. School mascot? Eagle

16. Did you go to Prom? Yes I went to the prom – both my Junior and Senior and they both sucked for various reasons. Although I did wear great dresses for both.

17. If you could go back and do it over, would you? Not if you paid me millions of dollars and threatened the lives of small animals.

18. What do you remember most about graduation? After it was over, I remember finding a friend – an old friend – we hadn’t talked in a LONG time after a particularly nasty blow up in tenth grade where she called me a bitch and I told her she taught me everything I knew. When we “broke up” I lost my base, if you will, and never really solidly belonged to any one group again. I was kind of friends with everyone and friends with no one, you know. Anyway, at graduation we some how met up on the football field and had a huggy/weepy moment. Otherwise it’s all a blur.

19. Favorite memory of your senior year? We had a class trip to NYC. I already knew I wanted to live here and I remember leaving the class and hopping in a cab over to the Hard Rock Café where I bought a t-shirt. A very risky thing for me to do. I also remember English Class with Mr. Lynch – we were reading The Portrait of An Artist as A Young Man and I said I didn’t believe in God. Mr. Lynch, I’m assuming he was a Catholic, put me on “trial” at the front of the class and the two of us argued theology for the rest of the class.

20. Were you ever posted up on the senior wall? I don’t know what this means.

21. Did you have a job your senior year? Absolutely. I worked, if you count babysitting, from when I was 12. My senior year I worked at Casual Male at Welsh & the Boulevard. I was an Assistant Manager.

22. Who did you date? I had a steady boyfriend for a couple of years from 9-11th grade and in 11th grade I dated a guy that was bad news and totally fucked me up and in 12th grade I didn’t really have a boyfriend. I did sleep around a bit. Just a bit though.

23. Where did you go most often for lunch? Probably Aldo’s Pizzeria if I left school – otherwise we just hung out on the back steps and smoked.

24. Have you gained weight since then? Yep.

25. What did you do after graduation? The summer after graduation I was a counselor at an overnight camp. I had signed up for it because I didn’t know if I could leave home to go to college, so this was a test run. Needless to say, that September I started at NYU and I never lived in Philadelphia again.

26. When did you graduate? 1987.

PS – The picture. I didn’t have some kind of weird skin disease back then, it’s the scan and oh my god I wish you could see the tan lines and FROSTED hair! I was a looker, that’s for sure! 😉

You can do your part to help the police! How well do you know the alleged perpetrator? Take this quiz* to find out!! CATCH THAT THIEF!

*The quiz is a NEW MEME found over at Marnie’s. Tag you’re it! And the newspaper thing – well if you haven’t seen that one yet then get out from under your rock.
THANKS FOR READING!

Scout tagged me for this new meme: Post your favorite paintings. I’m going with two, although there are a million others I really, really love. Starry Night by Van Gogh at MOMA is always a treat. I’ve recently fallen in LOVE with Whistler’s watercolors and his non-figure paintings – many of which can be seen at the Frick, my favorite museum. Goya’s “Black Paintings” that we saw at the Prado in Spain are wonderfully evocative. El Greco’s View of Toledo is one of my all time favorites, and when we went to Toledo I got to see the actual landscape and it was like it had jumped out of the picture.

The first painting I’m going with is Ruben’s Prometheus Bound.

It’s part of the Permanent Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the museum I grew up in. When we would go as a family when I was young I HAD to see this painting. I remember you walk through the old church room (I guess pre-Renaissance works) and then you come into the European Master’s Room and there was my painting. I loved this painting so much I had a poster of it that I hung in my room. My sister didn’t like that too much, but tough. I’m the oldest. It’s kind of gruesome, but what are you going to do? It’s what I liked at the time.

The second painting I’m going with is Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights that resides in the Prado in Madrid.

That’s the center panel of the tryptich. There’s a good story behind my love of this painting. Maybe I’ve told parts of this before, but you’ll hear it again and you’ll love it! Anyway, I was a senior in college and I still had to take my Art or Music requirement to graduate. I had been waiting four years to take Modern Art, which was only offered once a year in the Spring and it filled up ridiculously early and you basically had to be a senior to get in (seniors had first priority when registering.) So I’ve been waiting four years to take this class and it ends up being at the same time as a seminar on Philosophy of Religion (I was a double major Religious Studies and Philosophy) taught by one of my favorite professors and there ain’t no way I’m missing that. So I still have to take an Arts requirement. I look over the schedule and figure I can’t take music – too hard – so I take Renaissance Art instead. BEST.CLASS.EVER! Seriously. Without a doubt one of the best classes I’ve ever taken in any discipline. The professor was funny as shit – he was weirdly obsessed with the sex lives of these artists and the art was even better. Having been a Modern Art person (Post-Impressionists more than Post-Modern) I didn’t know anything about Renaissance Art besides you know, Leonardo and Michaelangelo and stuff. I FELL IN LOVE! The Van Dycks! The Breugels! The El Grecos! The Titians! The Frans Hals! The Boschs! I was in HEAVEN. I started hanging out at the Frick on a daily basis. I skipped over the Modern room at the Met. I shunned MOMA and the Guggenheim. Instead I dragged G around Italy on a long weekend – getting lost in Venice – searching desperately for a Tintoretto! Then G had a big dinner to plan in Madrid. He was flying back and forth and they were using a Velazquez painting and he had all these private tours of the Prado. He comes home telling me about El Bosco! And this amazing painting he saw! The Garden of Earthly Delights! Did I know it? DID I KNOW IT!!!! It’s the most amazing painting EVER! I mean the weirdness that comes out of the mind of El Bosco puts my twisted imagination to shame. This man was really, really sick. In the best possible way.

One weekend G whisked me off to Madrid. He wanted to take me to the Prado to see my favorite El Bosco in person. We walked into the hallowed halls of that beautiful old museum, the ugly Americans. We passed the Velazquezs. We passed the Goyas. The El Grecos. And finally we asked a guard, “Where’s the El Bosco? The Garden painting?” After much pantomime and speaking loud slow English, he got it and led us to another room. With a wonderfully large empty space on the wall. The Garden of Earthly Delights. The Genius Painting of Hieronymous Bosch. The WHOLE reason for a wonderful weekend in Madrid. The fucking painting was out being cleaned. Can you believe it?!?! We laughed so hard we cried. All was not a loss though. I did buy a couple of posters.

This painting is filled with the most physical, psychic and spiritual depravity ever imagined! I LOVE IT! You could stare at it for hours. In the last year we had some problems with the heat/AC unit in the room where these posters hang and the repair guy would bring his apprentice – maybe this kid was nineteen at the oldest. He would stand there and stare at the pictures – like he was in a trance or something. Then he’d look at me funny and I’d just stand in the doorway, my hands folded over my chest, with a cheshire cat smile on my face. So much fun.

Thanks Scout, for tagging me for a great meme. I hope you enjoy the paintings as much as I do. And you are now IT!

I’m tired and I’ve got a lot of work to get done today. Perfect time for a couple of MEMES! The ultimate in procrastination!

From Carole:

Meme instructions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (It’s a principle thing with me now. Greedy bastards with the hardcovers if you ask me. And yes. I know about libraries. I don’t think I have privleges anymore though.)
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (At least two copies on my shelf – one G’s, one mine.)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby – F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (I’m shocked, but I can’t find this in the house.)
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (I’ve read half of it. Hence the bold and the italics.)
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
1984 – George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Atonement – Ian McEwan
(The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Dune – Frank Herbert

You want to do this? CONSIDER YOURSELF TAGGED.

Those Knotty Girls are at it again! They’ve sent us all on a Wild Goose Chase. Have you done it? Here are the rules:

-Your finds must come from knit blogs.
-You may not use a blog for more than one item-all items must come from different sources.
-Finds can come from current entries or archives.
-You must post your answers with the title of the blogs they were found on and a link to the blog/item (permalinks where appropriate) on your blog. If no permalink is available, give us the post date.
-Do not steal anyone’s bandwidth-which means you should not hotlink pictures.
-You need to comment [on their site] and let us know when you have completed this meme.

And here are my finds:

1. A blog which you think people have not discovered.
Kimberly’s blog The Giving Flower – I think she’s very creative.

2. A blog whose author lives close to you physically. Just get as close as you can, it’s all relative.
Jen from Two Purls. A better friend you could not find and she’s like fifteen minutes away. With no traffic. On the other side of the river I’m going with Mason Dixon Kay because I could technically be at her house in like 20 minutes. You know. With no traffic. And Kay is superfantastic cool.

3. An unusual or weird animal picture.
Any picture of my favorite Internet Dog, Petey. He’s always trying on stuff for his hot mama, and sometimes he’s trying to kill her. Or escape. One or the other but either way he’s the best dog on the Internets.

4. An entry that made you laugh and got you strange looks from family or co-workers.
Well, I’m generally reading blogs by myself at home so no one looks at me funny. At least I hope there’s no one looking at me funny. But here are two entries that kicked my funny bone’s ass: A shout out to Jenifleur – STASH WARS was the funniest fucking thing ever. And to my favorite PB Ann for giving us the knitting term Skank. The funniest part of this post for me was that in my mind I could hear Ann tell it – and that made it like a 1000x funnier.

5. An idea you wish you’d thought of.
The ABC-A-Long. One of my favorite things in a long time. It’s been a great challenge for me. Still need to find a kick-ass F.

6. Something you’d like to knit. (Links are to the knits and knitters that have inspired me.)
Am Kamin for sure. The Peacock Shawl. Seraphim. Ingeborg. Pomwhatever Socks.

7. A picture of something you consider beautiful
I think Amanda takes really beautiful photographs, like here and here and here.

8. A blog whose author you’d like to one day meet in person
That’s easy. Margene.

9. A blog of someone you have already met in person.
I’ve been very lucky to have met many, many knitbloggers in person. So hard to choose, but I’m going with Vicki as she’s been on my mind a lot lately. And Bookish Wendy because I love her so and now that she’s famous I hope she remembers me.

JenLa tagged the world. DO NOT DISAPPOINT THEM PEOPLE! Meme on.

HOLY CRAP! You guys really know how to make a girl feel good! I’m glad you like the new stuff. I like it too – although I’m still tweaking. I think things are good for a bit. I wanted to add too that I found my inspiration for my header at Sydney’s. I took out a couple of the lines, but I still like the way they break things up a bit. I think it adds to the abstract nature of many of the photographs.

Thanks again! I’m really touched by all the comments!!!!

Instead of knitting, I played with the blog a bit. Refresh the page a couple of times. 😉 Let me know what you think! Thanks!