Citrus Festival

My mother sent me an e-mail filled with pictures of things created with lemons, oranges, and grapefruits in a small town in Italy. This one cracked me up.

Could this be truer???

Carla -- [noun]: A hermit living in the big city 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Where's my black arm band?

I was feeling kind of sorry for myself last night. I knew that I was about to finish the book I've been reading for pleasure - A Breath of Snow and Ashes - the last in the Outlander series. I started reading Outlander over Thanksgiving break and loved it so much that I bought the rest and have been racing through them. They're not the greatest books, but I love the characters so much that I had to find out what happened to them. Please tell me I'm not the only one who mourns at the end of a good book!

So I get home to finish the book with a heavy heart and find Hub and Little Big Man with this in the living room.
Hub said, "Well, I'm 40 now and there are things that I want to do and I can't if I'm fat." Cool! We all tried it out and Sassy thinks it's the coolest thing. Hub even got up early this morning and watched bird hunting shows while he was elipting away.

I got into work this morning and there was an envelope in my mailbox and a message on my voice mail. I'm cranky, I'm in mourning - and there's work to do. The envelope was from a friend I haven't seen in a very long time with a note and a picture of this.
The note said, "Saw this and thought of you ... give me a call when you get a minute." Talking to her was the coolest thing. We made plans to meet for lunch when it gets warm and my day is starting to look up.

The voice mail message was Jillian. I'm on spring break next week and wanted to go play. We're going to do lunch and a movie. Woohoo! I'm starting to pull out of my funk a little more.

Then I go online and find Diana Gabaldon's official website. There is at least 1 more book in the series and possibly 2. Some days it does pay to get out of bed.

Dang

Highlights

So, I've been a little busy lately. Even though I dropped microceconomics {spitting over right shoulder} I'm still dealing with statistics. Send me any good number-crunching vibes you have lying around. Would you mind if I just hit the highlights of the last couple of months?

This lovely stuff comes curtesy of the Ann Arbor Knit In. It's a group of knitters who meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays for social knitting and good coffee drinking. We had a gathering at Freddyknits' house back before Christmas, ate good food, and traded gifts. It's Koigu - in my most favoritest color.

This was my Christmas gift from Hub. Lest you think he's that in tune with my hobbies, I opened several websites and told him to pick something off one of them. He chose the Zuni Medicine Woman basket spindle from Gabe Jaramillo. I saw the interview in Spindlicity and then went to his website. It's impossible to tell in the picture how big the spindle is. I guess I should have known because he lists all the weights on the site, but when I opened the box and pulled it out, I realized how big a 4.5 oz spindle is. It is great for plying!

I called Gabe to order it and he couldn't have been nicer. He apologized over and over that he didn't have any spindles in stock at that moment because they bought all the spindles he took to SOAR a couple of weeks before. He seemed a little shocked at that. I laughed and told him that it wouldn't have mattered how many he brought - they would have bought them all!

Lastly, this is my haul from the Fleece Fair:



I wish I had taken my camera to show you how much stuff was in one place. It was almost impossible to choose and I found myself touching, picking up, and putting things back down on tables because I didn't want to go over my budget. I actually came in under my budget - for once!! Here's the run down moving clockwise from that giant green/blue blob in the upper right. The green/blue is 8 oz of a Corriedale/Mohair blend. My friend Edie did this and named the color Midnight Forest - she has the most gorgeous colors!

Next is a 2 oz ball of white Rambouillet combed top. It was so soft and smelled so good, I had to have some. Pauline also had some brown (that Kim picked up) and I wanted some of that too, but decided to spin this up first and then buy some brown.

Then comes 4 oz of wool and angora in that lovely 2-toned green. I have lots of green, but the softness of this cannot be beat. And speaking of softness, that tomato-y red is 4 oz. of alpaca. Jillian practically shoved this in my bag. I didn't resist.

Next is 4 more oz of wool and angora dyed by Jane Purcell - who also did the 2-tone green from above. I can't wait to spin this and may break with the studying to do just that. I'm moving into a blue phase with my spinning and I'm dying to see how this turns out as yarn.

The lovely orange/red/yellow is also from Edie. She had larger balls of this, but I do have lots of red and orange and thought this might make a nice accent yarn for something. It's Corriedale and mohair as well.

Lastly, the first ball that Jillian thrust into my hands when I met her at the tables is alpaca and wool. I don't know that the colors show up well, but they're a lovely black/purple swirl. It's another ball that's so soft I can't wait to spin it.

I have lots of projects lined up for when classes finish (on April 18). I can't wait to finish the schooling and get back to my life. There are too many more interesting things to do!

Hey! I was tagged!

4 Jobs I've had in my life:

* editor
* book store manager
* car crash researcher
* Girl Scout Cookie Mom

4 Movies I can watch over and over:

* Godfather I
* Godfather II
* Pride and Prejudice - the BBC miniseries
* Kindergarten Cop (shut up)

4 TV Shows I love to watch:

* Law and Order - Criminal Intent
* West Wing
* Crossing Jordan
* House


4 Places I have lived:

* Michigan
* Sunny for about 10 minutes Michigan
* Cold Michigan
* Cold, wet, gray Michigan


4 Places I have been on holiday (this was hard to only pick 4!):

* Antarctica
* Moscow and St. Petersburg
* Portugal
* Colorado


4 of my favorite dishes:

* Soup (I could talk about soup forever)
* Delmonico steak
* mashed potatoes
* that spongy Ethiopian bread and some spicy beef or goat


4 Websites I visit daily:

* Pesky Apostrophe
* Snowball in Hell
* Fresh Pepper
* D-listed
* Post Secret (I added this one in because they only post once a week - on Sunday - so I figured I could sneak it in)

4 Places I would rather be right now:

* Antarctica
* Colorado
* Morocco
* my toasty warm bed reading a book for fun


4 Bloggers I am tagging:

* Is there anyone left? Anyone? Bueller?

What's this??

Lance and Sheryl have called it quits.

Oh noooooo!