I feel the Earth move under my feet

Do you know like we were saying, about the earth revolving? It’s like when you’re a kid, the first time they tell you that the world is turning and you just can’t quite believe it ’cause everything looks like it’s standing still. I can feel it – the turn of the earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour. The entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty seven thousand miles an hour. And I can feel it. We’re falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world. And, if we let go… That’s who I am.

These days I barely realize how fast time flies by, until another week has gone by and I’m going square dancing and barbecuing and doing yarny stuff over at Annelie’s and taking guided tours around my neighborhood and having business lunch with my friends and climbing up church towers and saving our little grill from the sudden downpour. My Ravelry project page certainly reflects that – I just updated it with a shawl I finished on April 4th, but other than that I just have a ton of half-finished projects flying around. I did finish the socks I started when I needed something to knit for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I back in, uh, November, and I’m almost done with a precious little baby set in red and yellow – it’s funny how Elizabeth Zimmerman’s patterns totally work if you actually follow them.

Also, this week Annelie and I finally got around to dyeing some yarn, with easter egg dyes, Kool-Aid and onion skins. There was a whole rainbow of little skeins of wool that she’d inherited from her great-grandmother, and then five big skeins that we met up to untangle and wind into balls just yesterday.

(from top to bottom: kool-aid, easter egg dye, onion skins first skein, onion skins second skein. yes, I am aware of the fact that these are only four skeins; Annelie had already started winding one)

I love winding yarn into balls, or in my case flat yarn cakes that don’t roll around quite so absurdly. It’s a very social thing, absolute teamwork, with one holding the skein and the other one winding the ball, and while you’re connected to thousands of years of history, you have tons and tons of time on your hands to just talk. And with five 130 g skeins of fingering-weight yarn, that’s quite a lot of time. Good times. We split the onion skeins fraternally (or sororically) and are planning on a glove KAL; the blue-and-green skein is mine and mine alone, yes yes my precioussss, and Annelie promptly cast on another Baby Surprise Jacket with the Kool-Aid skein.

I cannot stress how heartbreakingly gorgeous the first onion yarn is. The second, paler one is still quite pretty, but the first one… It’s like spun gold. Which quite frankly I hadn’t expected from onions. Of all things, really.

And so, life goes on and on. Down from the road where it began. (speaking of which, today is the first day of Sherlock shooting in Cardiff. I can’t wait for the second season!) There are two weeks left until the Wollefest, two months minus one day until I have to hand in my Bachelor’s thesis. And before I’ll know it, summer will be over and done with, and the leaves will turn to gold, and nothing gold can stay. I feel the earth move under my feet…

Hey Ashurbanipal, I’m a Mesopotamian!

Entirely expectedly, I got a lot of knitting done in the crunch phase of my finals, with the whole refusing more than an absolute minimum for Spanish (I passed the oral! Abysmally, but I passed! Yesss.) and general procrastination.

(The day before my oral, Saskia and I went down to the canal and sat in the sun for an hour. What a perfect day.)

Incredibly, I’m down to one project. Well, three. Well, technically four, but the Dalek vest has been hibernating for so long and it looks like that’s not gonna change anytime soon, so. (well, four things and a lizard.)

Anyway: the Thermal sweater is finished! Done! All sewn up pretty and with buttons and a little ‘handmade’ tag in the back of the neck. I’ve already worn it to choir, literally fifteen minutes after cutting the last thread, and I’m pretty enchanted by the whole thing.

(Thermal by Laura Chau, 3mm needles, just shy of 600 g of Zitron Trekking XXL)

I’m proud to report that the sleeves are NOT too long, for once. It seems I’ve finally learned my lesson? Or maybe it was just a fluke. Who knows.

Re: the sleeves though, I don’t know if it was the fact that I had to fudge the sleeve cap a little (I increased to 106 instead of 112), or that my sweater is generally a tad less fitted than the one on the model, but the tops of the sleeve caps were VERY boxy. Very angular. To the point where they stuck out and just looked stupid. I fixed that by sewing the seam in a diagonal line over the last 16 rows or so. The downside of that is that now there’s four little triangles inside the sweater, but they’re not noticeable from the outside, and they haven’t been a problem yet.

More photos (and close-ups of the uber-cute little buttons) when I come back from Berlin next weekend or so, in the hope that I’ll catch some good natural light at some point. It’s been overcast, and that always screws with red colors.

Also, guess what became of the handspun?

A Hitchhiker! It knit up really quickly on 4 mm needles, and I’m still very charmed by the construction. Alas, I did not get 42 spikes, but the fact that they’re much more pronounced and dramatic than in the sock-weight version more than makes up for it.

The best thing is that it worked out perfectly. I finished on the last row of a spike without a single yard left over; there were two 2-inch pieces that I cut after weaving in the ends, but that was it. A very, very gratifying knit. Calmed me down immensely in the last couple of minutes before my Spanish oral.

Also, I’ve figured out what’s wrong with my Spanish Armada – I’m missing three stitches on each side. Very, very strange. Rather worrying, actually, but I think I’ll just fudge it with another row and a sneaky increase somewhere in the middle. I’m so confused though why 3 and not 2 or 4. Those I could have explained, but three is indeed very bemusing.

Book rec for this week: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”! I’d never read it before, but I’d resolved to include as many classics I’ve always wanted to read but never got around to buying in my 52 in 52 project as I could. And in the case of Jekyll and Hyde, it was definitely worth the, oh, €2.50 I splurged on the Dover Thrift Edition. And, uh, it’s much better than that just sounded. It reminded me a lot of Dorian Gray, actually, which isn’t all that surprising, considering they’re both Victorian novels dealing with the strange rift in their society, between virtue and vice, between public and private. It was terribly captivating, a gripping read that had some places where I literally recoiled in horror – perfect, really, for a nice rainy afternoon. It’s under 50 pages too, but it’s packed with mystery and thrill. I loved it.

It’s also narrated from an outside perspective, which surprised me: I’d always assumed it was going to be following Jekyll rather closely, but it didn’t at all until the very last chapter, which of course elevates the mystery a good deal more. You literally don’t know what the hell is going on until the last couple of pages. It must have been so endlessly shocking to Victorians reading it as a fresh story, a fresh idea, without any kind of foreknowledge. All in all, a book definitely worth reading. I might tackle Treasure Island too this year, I really liked Stevenson’s style.

❧

Next week I’ll spend four days in Berlin with Saskia. We’ll be visiting at least two yarn shops, one button shop and four museums, and I hope we’ll not be too tired to see a silent movie on Wednesday evening. I’ve already cast on a sock to drag everywhere and photograph; also I’ve been saving the new Thursday Next novel for the train ride. I can’t wait!

Short and stout

I like tea.

And I’m not even British. I like tea, I drink copious amounts of it, and I have since I was twelve or thirteen. Most of the time, I’ll just throw a tea bag in a big ol’ mug and curl up around it, and since I have many big mugs, I somehow never got around to using the nifty little teapot my mother gave me for my birthday one year, which separates into a pot and a matching tea cup.

Somehow, sitting at my desk, doing Spanish exercises and pouring myself tea, it somehow elevated the commodity, the necessity that tea has become in my life to something more. It slowed me down, from unnecessarily hectic to calm. There’s something magical about a steaming cup of tea.

I haven’t really been taking my time with things recently. I’ve been increasingly impatient, I’ve thrown knitting away in disgust much more than usual. When I do sit down to knit, I only want to get it done and over with. It’s not even that I’m that much under pressure, because uni is easy this semester and I’m way early with presents this year, but somehow I’m cracking. I haven’t been taking my time.

Maybe I need some medium-size projects. All I have at the moment are sweaters and teeny things like camera cozies or single socks in thick yarn, and no grey area in between at all.

But maybe what I need is more tea. More sitting down with a tea pot and a small cup. (Small, in this household, is anything under 350 ml. We have mugs going up to 750 ml here.) More enjoying in small quantities. Less flitting from one project to another. Maybe even less composing hateful monologues to my Spanish teacher in my head.

More clearing my head, and breathing in the fragrant steam from the tea cup cradled in my hands.

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life

Today, for the first time in my life, I’ve applied something I learned in 5th grade that I found, up until this day, to be remarkably useless. This may be due to the fact that the novelty of winter and being shut indoors all day is slowly but steadily starting to wear off, or that I’m procrastinating, or that I’m afraid I’ll make a total prat out of myself today.

I have a sinking feeling making a prat out of myself will be kind of unavoidable today. Not that I don’t do this on a regular basis, and usually voluntarily too. I’m a person who’s not in the least afraid to burst into song while walking through crowded streets, especially not around Christmas, when I can’t seem to step outside my door without starting to hum some carol.

And yet, personal interaction with semi-strangers continues to terrify me. Which is why I cannot for the life of me figure out what I was thinking when I contacted a girl from my Spanish class asking whether we could meet up, speak some Spanish, to cure me of my crippling inability to formulate a coherent Spanish sentence when I have to do so in front of my class.

The problem is a) my crippling inability to formulate a coherent Spanish sentence in front of strangers, b) that the first time I saw her, I wanted to grab her and furiously make out with her, and c) that I’ve been procrastinating all day, so my room looks like my stash exploded and my muffins are nowhere near existing, and d) I have no idea what to talk about with a stranger. I’m terrible at small talk in German, okay at it in English, and have never attempted it in Spanish, which makes me assume I’m terrible at it.

(I don’t know where my Spanish-related pessimism stems from. I think it might be in part from the fact that I went from upper third of the class to lowest of the low, due to this course mostly being taken by students who’ve spent time abroad. The other thing might be that I’m supposed to be on the level I officially had in English after I finished high school. The problem is that my English was vastly better than B2 even before I went to the US (in 11th grade), and I keep forgetting this, so I feel like my Spanish has to be as good as my English after this semester. Which, to put it mildly, is a slightly insurmountable feat. Also I keep forgetting that I’ve been studying English for 11 years.)

So I made a mind map. Which, for the record, I don’t think I’ve done since 6th grade, and never voluntarily.

So, basically… I might resort to orchestrating the inevitable ‘my… you sure have a lot of yarn’ moment earlier than the natural progression.

I might not know when to utilize the subjuntivo, or how to conjugate many of the irregular verbs especially in subjuntivo – but I can tell you, without any subjuntivo-inducing uncertainty, that I can totally monologue on knitting for a while.

And if all else fails, I’ll just get her drunk on mulled wine and make out with her.

… and it’s gonna be totally awesome

I haven’t been posting; I think it’s mostly due to the fact that I got a new paper journal that I love writing in – yet another Moleskine. The third over a relatively short time. Used to be that I thought they were pretentious, now I appreciate their simplistic design and rounded corners.

Speaking of rounded corners. Last night, my old laptop broke, which was a kind of a shame and kind of a relief. I liked Graham, I really did, but I’d had nothing but trouble with him in the last months – freezing, especially, and overheating, and freezing some more, and more random shit that was just annoying. Then last night, he wouldn’t recognize the fact that he was plugged in. I tried the usual – pull the plug out, stick it back in, thump it on the back – nothing.

So I rather hysterically backed everything important up onto my external harddrive, transferred some money, and bought a Macbook today. The Macbook I’ve been planning on for… a while. Ever since summer, I guess, since Graham started acting up more and more.

I was a bit afraid of the Big Bad Apple, but so far I’m loving it. It’s friendly, it’s streamlined, it’s simplistic. I’m sure I’ll encounter some problems at some point, but right now, I’m very much charmed. Oscar (i.e. the Macbook) isn’t quite as big as Graham, which might put a damper on watching movies, but seriously… if that’s all I have to complain about, I’ll take that any day.

Status updates on the Frantic Christmas Knitting: 30 days to go, Girl Friday halfway done, Henry around 60 %. I’d post pictures but it’s at a point where it just looks… more of the same, basically. Which isn’t very exciting as photos go. (Also I don’t have anything on this computer yet.)

Cute knitting-related anecdote: One of my classmates was wearing this stylish beret, so I asked here where she got it. Her answer? Ravelry! So Saskia and I squeed a bit, and started chatting about knitting, and the pattern (Meret/Mystery Beret by Wooly Wormhead, by the way), and yarn, and the whole shebang. It was nice, having a little outpost of normality in the ‘real world’. The Bunter November yarn market (the little brother of the Wollefest each May) was, of course, right on the mainland of the Wondrous Land of Knitting, and I spent a couple of hours deliriously petting yarn, knitting and chatting with people I knew from Ravelry or the Strickcafé or didn’t know at all, at least not their faces (hallo, Jana!).

Why I never posted about this? Well, of course I’d forgotten my camera (figures), and I just haven’t felt like posting yarn porn. Shocking, I know. I’ll post ’em one of these days, when I’ve figured out whether Oscar is compatible with Bobby the External Harddrive. But first, Glee.

If I go crazy then would you still call me Superman?

As always, I can count on my desk to be a pretty accurate snapshot of my life. Mostly because I just pile stuff on there, pull things that I need from the bottom to the top, until everything’s arranged in a kind of organized chaos.

My life seems to be a pretty even split between knitting and Spanish right now. Which… is kind of what it’s been for the last year, to be honest. Except now it’s more fun and less fun at the same time – more fun because I read books in Spanish now, even if my dictionary is never particularly far – less fun because my Spanish course kind of sucks, for several reasons I won’t go into.

But those rather vague lumps in the picture, that’s top to bottom: Henry scarf (for Adam), Vespergyle Mitts (for me), Watson sweater (tan-colored lump, for me), Girl Friday (grey, for my sister). Featured in the background: Thermal sweater, for me, which I haven’t touched in a while due to, well, the big pile in the middle.

I’ve tried rotating working on them by day, which was a veritable shipwreck due to my project ADD, so I mostly work on each of them every day. Which sounds like I’m getting a lot more done than is actually the case.

Which is weird, because I’m actually more lazy recently than in a while. I love knitting, but with Christmas at the door it’s mostly a low-level stress factor, along with something that kind of feels like a chore. Plus I have Smallville and Psych to supplement my usual shows, so more knitting time there. Plus I ordered a webcam the other day and it should get here this week, which means I can knit while webcamming with Adam.

And gosh, doesn’t that sound naughty.

Take a look ahead

It’s not like I’m not stressed, with Christmas only 53 days away – especially since I kind of randomly decided to knit a Henry for Adam. On the plus side, I’m almost done with the backside of the Girl Friday for my sister, despite my incredible slackerdom when it comes to that thing.

I’d much rather work on Watson (also only about 15cm to go on that back), or the Thermal (started a sleeve, back done, half the front also), or my Vespergyle mittens (halfway up the thumb on the second mitt), or Saskia’s Super Secret Christmas Present (finished, booyeah! but I’m considering making matching mittens). I’m also done with the Brambles beret and scarf, even if I haven’t gotten around to wearing them. I have a feeling I’ll have to run some kind of elastic through the brim of the beret, since it’s pretty loose, but I’ll wait till after I’ve actually worn it.

In conclusion: I feel like I’m getting somewhere. Making progress. Which is important for my sanity, since uni doesn’t exactly evoke the same feeling at the moment.

Also, it’s kind of hard to get really stressed out if the foot of my bed looks like this most evenings.

Yes, I also got my other roomie to join us on the dark side. She’s making a hat. Which she was half done with, then discovered a mistake two rows down from where she was, and subsequently… frogged the whole thing. And started over. I’m still kind of flabbergasted.

Speaking of flabbergasted. I’m making good on my resolution to go to the knitting café more, and lo and behold. I was just hanging out there on Saturday, very content indeed about just having bought truly luscious yarn for Henry,

(Bremont Camino Alpaca, fingering weight, 60% merino, 20% alpaca, 20% nylon)

… and then Christine plunked an armful of yarn on the table in front of me. Not just any yarn. Wollmeise.

I tried, for about three hours, to discourage myself from buying one. I failed. Mostly because I didn’t really have any good arguments except for how it was kind of expensive (€17.50 for 150g, which… isn’t that bad, but not that cheap either), but then I had that exact amount in my wallet and that must’ve been a sign.

It was kind of hard to decide, because all the colors were gorgeous. No kidding. Even the ones I usually can’t stand. ALL. GORGEOUS. But I settled on this beautiful green, Grashüpfer, and my photo doesn’t do it justice.

Also, it’s so tightly twisted that the 150g look like 100g, and you could probably bludgeon someone to death with the skein. Death by Wollmeise. There’s worse ways to go.

Roadhouse Blues

This week isn’t particularly better than the last one. Some things have improved from last week; however, other things have emerged that make me want to bang my head against the nearest available surface.

At least Andi has the early shift at Starbucks this week, so there’s a friendly face and a free extra espresso shot in the morning. I love Andi. He is my coffee god.

Also, after last week and my embarrassing whiny outburst, I’ve decided to channel my whininess into creative processes. I bet you all have a fairly good idea of what that might be. A hint: It’s not cleaning my desk, although that is long overdue, but that would mean untangling at least three skeins of sock yarn from each other. Do not want.

Instead, because today was a crappy day, I made focaccia. I always try to make some kind of yeast dough when I’m impatient and easily irritated, because it doesn’t work without letting it rest. It’s a valuable lesson. Also, I love that warm, yeasty, herb-y smell that reminds me of summer and the beach.

And then I knit a hat. A whole hat. In a day. I’m three quarters done with my Brambles scarf, so I figured I’d make the hat before finishing it. It’s not that I have project ADD,  (alright, I do have project ADD. In fact I’m two seconds away from starting an experimental Norwegian-inspired, merino-lined Alpaca hat for my father. Or… something.) – point being, I wanted to see how much yarn I’d have left over from the hat, so I could see whether or not I could make tassels for the scarf. The yarn I have is from two different lots, since I bought them almost a year apart, but the lots are reasonably close.

Which, it turns out, was a blessing, because my tassel plan kind of backfired: I actually had to use some of the scarf yarn for the last five rows or so of the hat. Oops.

Still, a cute, warm, orange hat in a day. And no tassels for the scarf.

It’s funny, the color is incredibly hard to photograph. I played around with the settings and the lighting just now, and out of ten different photos, there’s not two that capture the shade of the yarn alike. The closest I’ve come to reality is this photo of the scarf from last week or so:

I have no idea why I never got around to posting this before. Incidentally, it was taken the same day I took the new header photo. (Opinions on that, by the way? Good? Bad? Meh?)

Speaking of things I haven’t gotten around to showing off – the new hair! (Recognize the cardi? I knit that!)

So, yeah. Seeing as there isn’t a demo this week to unhinge the entire public transportation system, there’s a pretty good chance I’m gonna pay the Strickcafé an overdue visit. Then Supernatural and cooking with Christian. Even if this week sucked, there’s still the weekend to look forward to. Nice job I did there on putting together my week.

A díos le pido

Dude.

I don’t know what’s up with the last week being majorly sucktastic, but it looks like the entire semester might follow in its footsteps and that does not make me happy.

My Spanish module is full of people who have spent an extended period of time in Hispanic countries, which is great for them and intimidating for me and the other four or so people (out of 25) who haven’t actually taught Chilean homeless kids proper Spanish or something. Also I seem to have forgotten everything I ever learned over break, so there’s the teensy bit of grammar to deal with until, well, yesterday.

When I got back home from my first Spanish lesson I just poured myself a stiff drink and went to take a hot bath, that’s how bad it was. The only silver lining is that there’s a really cute girl in my class, which is great except that I was so much looking forward to learning Spanish without distraction, and there she is, and my concentration goes to hell. At least this time it’s not a highly inappropriate crush. That’s something, I guess.

Hispanistics is comparatively okay, except the times kind of blow ass; and the module for my major is a) full of my least favorite teachers and b) full of my least favorite people. And the times aren’t that great either.

And usually I’d try and go easy on this semester this early on. Give it a chance, y’know. Try to see the positive sides and knit my troubles away.

Except that Christmas is 70 days from now, I haven’t cast on my sister’s cardigan yet, and the Watson sweater is one catastrophe after the other. I frogged for the third time today – at first it was too small, then way too big, and now I randomly cast on 22 stitches less than I should have. No idea how, since I cast on with markers every 20 stitches, but lo and behold, when I was done with the ribbing and trying to set up the body pattern, everything went to crap. (It’s not that I’m bad at math, either. Saskia’s sweater, for some reason, is working out perfectly.)

What’s more, my wrist is starting to hurt. 70 days before Christmas.

Really, I just want something, anything to go right this week. Square dance is a relatively safe bet – everything we could possibly do on Friday I learned last weekend, so I can pretty much sit back and enjoy. Or, y’know, the dancing-my-ass-off equivalent.

I’m also planning on baking Maple-Walnut bread (what could possibly go wrong, huh) and curling up under a blanket for the weekend.

Seriously. Dear God, please have this week not be an omen for the rest of the semester.

Blackbird has spoken like the first bird

(my life in a picture)

It’s funny; I’ve had a couple of rather introspective days behind me and I hadn’t realized how much I missed them. With the sudden and unexpected arrival of Glühwein season, another year has passed, and, well. It got me thinking.

Usually, with my roomies around, there’s always some form of entertainment going on. I don’t just mean movies, but also conversations that, despite running deep and on several levels at a time, aren’t introspective by definition. But Saskia was off to some square dance event this weekend and Sassi is still in Ireland, and it’s not that I don’t like them, but it was so nice to have some quality time with myself.

I realized I’d been avoiding introspection for a bit. Not consciously, I’m sure, but there’s just so much going on here even if there isn’t really, with Saskia and I popping over to each other’s rooms to share ideas or thoughts and generally having a more-or-less continuous flow of information going on. I also remember, vividly, the long years of teenage angst, penned down and over-analyzed in 3 diaries per year, sometimes more: the pinnacle of introspection. In retrospect, I’m amazed I got anything done at all between the ages of 13 and 18 to contemplate with all the introspection I did. I have no wish to recreate that time, or that amount of angsting about everything. (It’s funny though, in all that time there was very little sexual-identity-angst except when I was dealing with rumors.)

But I also have a feeling tweeting ever last half-formed impulse has contributed to a certain amount of superficiality that’s snuck into my life without me realizing it. Over 4000 tweets in just over a year – that’s a LOT. That’s about 11 tweets a day, on average. Maybe that’s too much, but cutting down is useless, mostly because if I don’t tweet it, I head over to Saskia’s room and tell her in more than 140 characters. I find it harder to focus now, in any case.

So on Friday, I went to the Leipziger Kreativ- und Strickcafé, which was one of the first places I went when I moved to Leipzig but kind of dropped when uni started. I never picked up going at least semi-regularly mostly out of laziness, except for WWKIP and their Wollefest.

Laziness. Sloth. It seems to be my biggest problem.

It’s true, with my successful conversion of Saskia into a knitter a lot of my wool-related isolation (as in, I didn’t have anyone to talk about knitting with) has dissipated, but we’re still very much in a teacher/student dynamic in that respect. I’d forgotten how amazing it is to sit among equals, learn from and teach each other, and just sit and knit and talk for five hours. My wrists still hurt a bit after an hour or so of knitting,  I think from that evening, but I now know better. They have pattern books over there. Next time I go (probably Saturday), I’ll have a look through Victorian Lace Today and rest my wrists a bit.

I’m also checking out a square dance club in the city this Friday, so that might be my new secondary hobby. I’ve realized I need to get out more, and although I’ve vowed more involvement with The World Outside every semester, I have a good feeling this semester it might stick. I have a good feeling about this year. Overall, I mean.

**

On another, unrelated and less life-affirming note, I started to read all three Hunger Games novels by Suzanne Collins in a row, now that the final part is out. If those books don’t get you thinking about society and television culture and human behavior overall, I’m not sure what will. It’s a dystopia, and from the covers and the age of the protagonist (16), I’d call it young adult. I picked it up because it was rated as YA, and I love YA unashamedly for all that I love Wilde and Tolkien and Ovid too.

But from the premise of the plot and the form of the dystopian society, I’m not sure how well it fits in the 14-21 age bracket. You can read the synopsis on Wikipedia, where I just saw they’re making it into a movie, and what the hell. A book that condemns unreflected TV culture gone mad, and a society where outrageous appearances and capitalism are everything while 90% of the population starve, and the rich 10% love watching innocent children slaughter each other once a year – and they’re making a movie out of it. Of course.

So.  Yeah. Those books. They’re good books, they’re hard to put down, they view modern culture, to put it carefully, somewhat critically. I read part two in the bathtub, and when I looked up because I was done, the 20cm-high cover of bubbles had dissipated because I’d been in there for three hours. They’re that kind of book. And like every dystopian novel there probably is, it takes current society and exaggerates it into something horrifying, and there isn’t a chapter where you don’t realized that everything that’s wrong with that society is what’s wrong with ours, just that we haven’t had the time to get that far. And they’re making it into a movie.

Yesterday we stood at the brink of the abyss. Today we’re one step further.

And on that mood-swingy note, I leave you,  esteemed reader, with the view out of my window a few evenings back, because dudes and dudettes – it’s autumn.