Snow, stitches, and stew

What a perfect weekend for a snowstorm! The only things I had planned were knitting and watching the olympics. I very much enjoyed the opening cermonies, but I'm a sucker for things like that.
Favorite parts:

dozens of people moving together to make up a gigantic skier
acrobats hanging from vertical ropes and ending up as a dove
skaters with the flaming helmets

Least favorite part:

some American snowboarder chic marching to the stage with the US team while talking on her cell phone!!

The snow's been coming down here for about 2 hours, but its not sticking yet.
And now for the good stuff: I started seaming the sweater last night!! It just seemed like a good project to busy myself with during the 4 or 5 hours that the olympic cermony went on. Well, first I had to finish my first mitten, but after THAT I consulted Stitch-n-Bitch and a Debbie Bliss How to Knit book to get some seaming directions. Sadly, neither book (nor any website I could find) discussed how to do raglan seams. They desribed side seaming with stockinette, or garter. Also top seaming and a couple other options. So in the end I kind of had to wing it, which obviously scared the crap out of me given the magnitude of this project. Because of my timidness, it took me quite a while to do that first seam (left front) but I have to admit, I kind of enjoyed it. It's really satisfying to give that yarn a little tug after a few inches and see both sides kind of zip up together. Debbie Stoller was right about that. The rest of the night was spent weaving in ends from mitten #1 and casting on for mitten #2. I did about 3 inches on that before I realized that I was doing 2 x 2 rib instead of the 1 x 1 rib that mitten #1 had. Obviously that's not cool so I had to undo it. I'm now back up to 3 inches on mitten #2. Did I mention that I decided to let the Kureyon colors do whatever they wish and not try to match anything up? So mitten one starts with orange, then yellow, green, brownish, reddish, magenta/purple, and then the thumb is magenta. Now, mitten #2 is blue, turquoise, purple, green, yellow....haha. it's great. Maybe its my homage to Punky Brewster.
Today I finished the remaining raglan seams and began the crew neck. I still can't believe that all of those sweater pieces are now connected!! It's like a real piece of clothing..sort of. I've done about 1 inch of the ribbing at the neck so I have a ways to go before I can cast off FOR THE LAST TIME.

I also felt like cooking today. But not necessarily like going grocery shopping. So, I made up something that's a mix between a stew, chili, and soup. I basically needed to use up the frozen chicken thighs that I HATE because they have fat all over them and are a pain to prepare. Gram suggested a soup. But I don't really know how to just wing that - plus the kind of soup she meant has celery and carrots which I don't have on hand. So I challenged myself to use up a bunch of ingredients: chicken thighs, black beans, stewed tomatoes, and chicken stock. There are a bunch of spices in there too. I may add rice toward the end. Or not. ha! It doesn't really matter cuz I made it up! Of course, I'm an imbecile and thought the crock pot was plugged in and essentially let everything sit in the pot for over an hour NOT cooking. At this rate, it won't really be ready for dinner.


Final note: I've discovered the best song for working out at the gym: Cowgirl by Underworld. I recently rediscovered this song when it ended up on our mp3 player and started playing while I was on the ellyptical the other day. Amazing! It was briliant - I really went into this zen state and just felt like grinning. I once had Underworld's album Second Toughest in the Infants, but I might have sold it back to Newbury Comics more than 4 years ago. I had a techno phase once - before the ska phase. Plus an Underworld song was on the Hackers soundtrack which held a lot of sway with me. Warning: don't listen the song unless you're actually working out, or like, running outside. Its very repetitive...as good techno always was. Now I'm wondering how much of my former techno collection I actually still own. Oh, and I should admit something rather embarassing about my music collection from high school. Many of the purchases I made were simply because of an ex-boyfriend. Whoever he was into, I went out and bought. I don't think I did that for more than a few months, but it was long enough for me to look back on those CDs later and laugh at myself. Consequently, I have an oddly diverse music collection, even if I can't remember a thing about 30% of the artists.


This final pic is of the hottie I live with modeling a cabled hat (my first hat!) that was supposed to be for my brother, but ended up going to charity.