WoolGatherer

A low key Eve

It seems like nearly everyone I've talked to about their plans for tonight has said the same thing, that they're staying home and watching movies.

That's the plan for us, too. I just want to snuggle with my boys, order a delcious Carbone's pizza, and veg out.

However you ring in 2009, I wish you a safe and very happy New Year! As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll keep coming back in the new year!

The words are back

This past Sunday, my brother-in-law commented to me that it seemed my blog had moved to an all-pictures-all-the-time format.

He did allow that I had given you all a heads-up that I was going to be running a skeleton crew around WoolGatherer during the holidays, and I'm probably going to continue doing so through the rest of the week. I'm still not all quite here. (If I ever really was.)

But lest you fear that I have forever vanished, leaving behind nothing but a cloud of not-quite-nude-enough hotties, I'm back to offer you bit more insight into my profoundly disordered yet still fairly mundane psyche.

Twenty (more) things about me

1. The first movie I ever saw in the theater was the musical Oliver. I was three years old, and I clearly recall asking my parents "Where's the stage?" Gay.
2. As much as I love to knit, I can't stand to wear wool garments. (Not even caps.) Wearing a wool sweater is almost as unbearable to me as the thought of sporting a sweater made of newsprint.
3. I cut 75 days of school in seventh grade rather than be tormented and called a faggot every day by eight grade bullies (some of whom I found really hunky).
4. I got straight A's in seventh grade anyway, despite missing half the year.
5. If you're ever with me in a situation where you think "I'm surprised that Sean doesn't seem more nervous right now," I'm probably having a massive, silent panic attack.
6. I have watched The Godfather at least forty times, and I'm watching it right now.
7. The first time I was even mildly buzzed from alcohol, I was 21 years old. I was drinking Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler while helping my parents prepare for a party.
8. When I got my ear pierced on May 20, 1988 in a jewelry shop in Vienna, Austria, I made sure to have the LEFT ear pierced, because everyone knew that if you got your right ear pierced, it meant you were gay. (See no. 1 above.)
9. I always struggle with mild depression at this time of year. The month leading up to Christmas Day is a joyous upward climb followed by a precipitous crash in spirits on December 26.
10. I've had sex with a total of six people. (Yes, just guys.)
11. I've only ever kissed three people.
    
12. The first CD I ever owned was Sheila E in Romance 1600. My mom gave it to me for Christmas in 1985, along with the first generation Sony Discman. I quickly grew tired of my one CD. (Seriously, there are only three good songs on it, and A Love Bizarre is thirteen minutes long.)
13. I haven't been in a movie theater in over two years.
    
14. Even though I was already fluent in German the first moment I set foot in Germany on January 2, 1988, panic and culture shock kept me from from speaking more than an occasional word for nearly two days. Yeah, that's normal.
15. During those two days, I survived on candy bars from vending machines rather than enter a restaurant and be forced to speak German.
16. Prince once lied to my face in the front entry of First Avenue. It was March, 1987. (Side note: he stood as high as my shoulder, and I'm 5'8''.)
17. I have never been to the UK, but Darren and I will spend nine days in England this March.
18. I've found Tom Cruise insufferable since the the closing credits of Risky Business. He should have been launched into deep space or thrown into an active volcano the moment that film wrapped.
19. I'm going to have my first-ever massage in January.
20. I thought this list would take me far less time to write than it did. Damn.

 

After five days off of work, I really need my coffee today...

Good day to you.

Happy Boxing Day!

If you're stopping in today, I figure you deserve a treat...

 

Or several treats...

Giving the people what they want since 2006,

Neighborhood watch

Our neighbor, John, keeps an ice rink cleared and maintained all winter long. This afternoon there was a spirited hockey game just outside our window.

Hudson watched with great interest and the occasional fit of barking.

 

 

Vigilance, thy name is terrier...

Merry Christmas!

Ceci n'est pas une blog post

One day of work this week, and then I'm on vacation. Maybe I'll write a real post then, if I not feeling too bloated. (However, I'm already feeling quite bloated...)

Go finish your shopping or something.

I'm sure the bathroom floor is flooding, but since I don't live with this fellow, I don't much care that he doesn't have the sense to close the shower curtain...

This one seem like someone you could actually meet. If you were super lucky.

Sure, he'd be taken, but you could meet him. Hypothetically, anyway.

Merry Sithmas!

Somehow I've repressed all memory of this Christmas special, though I'm sure I must have watched it when it originally aired.

Wow, did that suck bantha pudu.

A pause just because

Look, it's just a few days until Christmas. You're busy. I'm busy. There are cookies to bake, gifts to buy, naps to take. 

Go shop online.

Or take a walk down Better Than Coffee Memory Lane.

I'll have something new here soon.

Tired and true

Back a year or two ago, in the dark ages of the blogosphere, people often had a page on their blogs where they posted a list called 100 Things about Me.

Clearly, in the two plus years I've been writing this blog I have shared more than 100 pieces of information about myself. It would be ludicrous for me to list more than, oh say--20 things about myself without some interpretive framework.

So twenty it is. Because I don't do interpretive frameworks anymore, dammit.

Please then, humor me me as I engage in a bit of self-indulgent parataxis.

1. I can't stand to touch newsprint. I shudder to even think of it.
2. I still remember the first dialog I learned in German class in 10th grade. "Katrina, Freitag Abend ist ein Tanz. Hast du Lust, mitzukommen?"
   
3. I have clear memories of being attracted to other boys by the age of five.
4. The best Christmas gift I ever received was a sewing machine when I was six years old.
5. I'm completely unable to sew today.
6. My adenoids have been surgically removed three times. I suspect they're right back where they've always been.
7. I once broke my leg while walking.
8. It was 9:00 AM on Palm Sunday when it happened, so the upside was that I got to skip church.
9. Christmas is my favorite time of year, yet it makes me very melancholy, too. I've always felt this way, but since my mom died, the melancholy has been winning out.
10. I once had had a dent repaired on my car, and when I picked it up, there was a bra in the glove compartment. It was NOT there when left the car at the shop.
11. I think it's kind of cool that Hudson's paws smell like Fritos, but now I don't thing Fritos are very appetizing.
12. I once called a fox fur-wearing Austrian woman a "sow" in a Vienna elevator, and I don't regret it. (My comment had nothing to do with the fox head and tail dangling from her shoulders, either.)
13. If I ever come to your house and you feed me shrimp, squid, or octopus, expect me to spend the rest of the night in your bathroom having a violent allergic reaction of a gastric-intestinal nature.
14. I almost certainly have body-dysmorphic disorder.
15. The last thing I ever said to my mom was "See you in the morning!"
16. I should never have switched from a two-handed topspin back-hand to one-hander. That choice has haunted me for over thirty years. All because I wanted to play with more dash and flare. At age 10.
17. I've never smoked anything in my life. Never even once tried a cigarette--nor anything else. And with my crazy level of anxiety, "anything else" would have probably done me a lot of good.
18. I went without sex from 1985 to 1995. That was a drag. But hey, my German kicks ASS. (Had to direct that energy somewhere!)
19. I've had every line of The Empire Strikes Back memorized since 1980.
20. On my second and final heterosexual date, I went with a high school classmate to see the first Terminator film. We both had a crush on the hero, Kyle Reese. I had the young lady home by 9:15. There was no kiss good-night.

21. (And one to grow on.) I totally picked that graphic because "YOU'RE" is spelled wrong.

NSFW and damn funny

I'm on serious Christmas knitting deadline, and I'm feeling rather fried, mentally speaking. Blog posts may be a bit thin here this week. I ask your indulgence at this festive time of year.

Perhaps you have yet to see this most amusing clip. If you know it already, I'm sure you agree that it bears watching several more times. (Plus, seeing Justin T. in his little cameo makes it that much nicer.)

Uh-oh--I just ate a grape and I...

 

So do you think if I knit that cap, a similar young man will appear at my doorstep?

As they say in the restaurant biz, GBD--golden brown delicious...

The first results are in

Early polling indicates strong support for Chirstmas card writing, and no love for the printed up Christmas letter.

 

I'll leave the poll up bit longer to see if the numbers shift, so you if you haven't taken it yet, there's still time.

I'm off to work on my Christmas cards...

I'm not sure what age I was when I realized that people my own age mailed out Christmas cards each year, but I suspect I might have been in grad school. Until that age, I rode the coattails of the cards my mother mailed out from "The Dilleys." 

Now I do my best to send out a couple dozen Christmas greetings each year, and as I do, I think back to tall stacks of Christmas cards that my mother used to write when I was a kid. She actually wrote a little letter in each one, too, though she clearly felt the process to be tedious.

I'm curious what your practice is at this time of year. Do you work your way through a long list of friends and family, or do you skip the whole card thing all together? Go ahead and let me know.

Online Surveys & Market Research

The Closing of the Year

The Robin Williams movie Toys sucked. And in a big, non-fun way.

Well, apart from three glorious minutes.

You could have knocked me over with a feather when the movie opened with Wendy Melvoin singing onscreen.

The song At the Closing of the Year is a bit schlocky (child chorus, etc.), but I've loved it since the day time heard it, back in 1992 when I was home from Vienna for Christmas.

I've always been a sucker for a melancholy Christmas song, so it warms my heart that this little tune has survived and can sometimes be heard playing on the radio or in stores.

Wendy fixed up real pretty back, then, too. (And look, Lisa doesn't even have a ciggie hanging out of her mouth!)

Jimbo, a Christmas tune for you.

Settling into a quiet Christmas season

This past Saturday, Darren and I entertained about sixty people at our tenth Christmas brunch. (If "brunch" can be said to stretch from 10:30 AM to 7:30 PM.)

We had a lovely day with our friends, many of whom we see far too rarely. The only major bummer was that family and friends from southern Minnesota were kept home by icy roads and snow.

Darren and I have spent the last few weeks getting the house ready for our big event, and I took off last Thursday and Friday to shop, do some last decorating, bake pies, and prepare egg casseroles. (Three 9x13 pans of the stuff vanished by 1:00 PM. No leftovers for us on Sunday morning this year.)

As much as I love having the house full of dozens of fabulous friends, it's always a relief when we have another successful (yet exhausting) brunch behind us. We moved the party up a week earlier this year, so now I have what feels like a luxuriously long time before Christmas arrives.

Here's what I plan to do with that time.

• Bake two batches of cookies. No more.
• Knit two Fair Isle hats. And maybe a scarf. Perhaps more
• Finish my Christmas shopping. (All online.)
• Write Christmas cards.
• Take at least one vacation day a week between now and Christmas.
• Visit friends and hold small cocktail gathering by the tree.
• Watch every version of A Christmas Carol that TiVo can find. (Well, okay, just the good ones.)

That may sound like a lot, but if you look closely, most of those bullet points require little more than sitting on my couch under the cheery glow of my Christmas tree and listening to my various Christmas playlists.

It sounds pretty great to me.

 

Just the thing for a cold Minnesota morning...

No ifs ands or...

Watch this.

No time for words. BRUNCH PREP is the order of the day.

Here's a little clip for you. Watch out you subversive fiber-handlers!

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Nailed 'Em - Radical Knitting

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

Happy Friday!

I feel so damn BUTCH

Last night I attended my first professional hockey game. (Come to think of it, it was the first hockey game I've ever attended.)

Due to the largesse of my employer, I and three friends were lucky enough to enjoy OTG seating at the game.

OTG = On The Glass--first row. My pals and I sat just behind the goalie. It was fun for many reasons--$225 tickets for two (free), free beer, and hot men treating each other roughly on the ice.

A few pics for you...

 

 

Sitting so close to the action was rather thrilling (as strange as that may sound from a girly-man like me.)

Two especially memorable moments:

1. A puck hitting the glass in front of my face so hard that my teeth ached from the concussive retort.
2. Getting doused with a half-full glass of beer that my otherwise sweet and polite friend Jay had left sitting on the ledge next to the glass. (Darren was home sick with a nasty cold, so Jay squired me around the Xcel Energy Center.) When five burly men smashed into the glass, the beer cascaded down on me in most dramatic fashion. Hoppy and wet it was.

Darren was kind enough to TiVo the game, and my friends and I, seated just behind the goal, were often on TV. Here I am chewing my thumbnail as the big strong men came rushing toward us.

I'm attending another game in January, but I'll be in a suite for that one.

What is this strange life I'm living?

Sith Knits

I'm ever so annoyed with myself for forgetting to take a picture of this hat when I finished it (and before I sent it off to its new home in Florida), but you get the idea.

Fair Isle Star Wars Storm Troopers Cap

You may now applaud.

B to the R to the U to the N to the etc.

My week is about one thing. Brunch for 60 at my house this Saturday. Expect little writing here as I scurry about preparing to make rather merry.

The tree is half trimmed. I ran out of steam about 9:00 last night.

Love it, praise it, crave it.

More from me (but not much more) anon.

Um... What'cha lookin' at?