Okay, so it’s 7:15 am where my body (and blog) lives. I’ve been up for a good hour and a half — because that’s what time my body gets up — and have been trying to decide whether or no to actually wake up yet, because where my family lives, it’s only 6:15. That’s right: I’ve been up since 4:45 am local time. After making fun of the notion of getting up for the holiday sales that start at 5:00 am, I totally was up in time for the holiday sales that start at 5:00 am. Of course I didn’t go to any of them: there isn’t anything I want badly enough to make negotiating all of the madness worthwhile. It just seems a little pointless to be up this early (while the rest of my family is still asleep, mind you) with nothing specific to do.

(This will also be a liability this evening when my morning-person body wants to go to bed before 9:00 pm its time. That’ll be 7:45 or so local time. Hmm.)

Have I ranted here yet about well-written TV? No? Okay, well, I love well-written TV. Even though the shows I love most seem to get canceled before their times (see Firefly and Sports Night), I can’t help it — I’m a pushover for well-written TV.

One of the shows I love at the moment is How I Met Your Mother (CBS Mondays, 8:00 pm EST). It has a laugh track, which is usually a little annoying, but the laughs are rather understated, and I rarely see the punchline coming, a nice feature in a sitcom. This last week’s episode was particularly funny, with special kudos going to Robin’s Canadian teen pop star music video, “Let’s Go To The Mall” (which we watched several times this evening and which I now can’t get out of my head).

I may have mentioned that I have my own room at our house. It’s a luxury of which, as an oldest child of four, I am deeply appreciative. A couple weeks ago we made a stop at Ikea, and I finally bought some bookshelves for my room — I’ve had boxes of books piled up in a corner since we moved in a year and a half ago. After filling the larger of the two units, I realized I had room to unpack all the yarn in my closet and make it all pretty:

The top holds an artfully arranged pitcher of knitting needles, and the bottom has my books and project notebook (I still need to post about this) on it. Then there’s the yarn.

The gray shelf. On the bottom left is enough Jo Sharp Desert Garden in Oyster to make a short sleeved sweater. On top of that is some fabulous alpaca I bought at Johnny Appleseed Festival this fall. I think it’s going to be the favorite black sweater I’ve been trying to replace lo these many years, but I bought all the spinner had and I still need to get in touch with her to get a couple more skeins. The middle has a bunch more of that dark gray yarn I made Basil’s cat bed out of — there’s still a lot of it there, and I have no idea what I’m going to do with it. The red on top of that is the latest shipment from Sundara’s Petals Collection — it’s as gorgeous, if not more so, than it looks. On the right is enough Knit 1, Crochet 2 Angora Soft to make the drop stitch hoodie from the Spring ‘06 IK, but after swatching the pattern, I’m not happy with it, so I have no idea what I’m going to do with it now.

Back in the back is a whole slew of Knit Picks Color Your Own fingering-weight merino. I was going to use it to make the Union Square Market Pullover from last fall’s IK, but I’m not quite so enthused on using it for that purpose anymore. In front of that are four balls each of the two colors I snagged in closeout Rowan Yorkshire Tweed 4-Ply. I intended the blue color to be for Mike and the purple for me, but now I’m thinking the blue might be that Market Pullover instead. Sorry, Mike. Next to that are a random ball of Crystal Palace Kid Merino, a random ball of Koigu PPPM, and then a couple skeins of blue Art Yarns Supermerino, out of which I plan to make another hat for my brother.

The pink shelf. The left is enough Classic Elite Bam Boo to make a short sleeved sweater. In the middle are the pink and white Art Yarns Ultramerino 4 I’ve been saving to make myself a very special pair of socks (yet to be picked out), and some sale Knit Picks Sock Memories. On the right is some Rowan Luxury Cotton DK on sale at my LYS, irresistibly colored and priced. It’ll be yet another short sleeved sweater.

The green shelf. These are all the random skeins of green yarn I’ve been saving up and buying with the intention of someday making a whole bunch of knitted leaves I can then assemble into a holiday wreath. They are, from the top left going clockwise, a couple colors of Cascade 220 Superwash leftover from Chaucer’s sweater, Art Yarns Supermerino leftover from Matt’s first hat, a couple balls of Rowan Yorkshire Tween 4-Ply, some leftover Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, a ball of Mission Falls 1824 wool, some Jo Sharp Merino DK, Rowan Yorkshire Tweed DK (it’s much more chartreuse than this picture implies), Rowan Yorkshire Tweed Aran, and another ball of Mission Falls.

It’s a lot of yarn. I’m so excited to be finally getting some projects into the finished objects pile, because then I can “shop” from my own shelf.

Right. Knitting. I’ve been finishing like crazy, so much like crazy that I don’t have pictures of some of it and you’ll have to take my word for it.

I finished Michelle’s black cabled scarf and hat, and brought them to her on vacation.

Before leaving for vacation, I finished the red thick-and-thin sweater commissioned by my friend, Sarai. It had a couple of false starts, so I was really glad to be done with it, and I think it turned out nicely.

I’m finally blocking the Eris cardigan, the knitting for which has been finished for months now. Look at the pretty cables!

And I’m also finally finishing Mike’s Mountain Colors sweater. One sleeve got finished on vacation, and I just got done with other one. All that’s left is blocking and putting together the pieces.

Somehow I’d forgotten. I don’t quite know how, but it took some recent BNL goodness to remind me how much they make me happy.

Goodness #1: Michelle made me a CD of some fan club tracks that have Steve and Ed talking about the band and their music, and reintroduced me to songs I’ve been listening to for the last 12 years or so. “Crazy” from Gordon? Totally forgot what an awesome song it is.

Goodness #2: Michelle went to their show in Omaha last Tuesday night, and not only did Ed recognize her from the stage, but he got her backstage after the show for a chat. I tell ya, he’s one of the nicest people you will ever meet in your entire life. He asked about how her career is going, about how I am (remembered my name even), gave her a big happy hug and re-gave her a working email address. Ed is the bomb. How could I forget?

Goodness #3: I bought the deluxe edition of their new album, Barenaked Ladies Are Me, on iTunes before vacation and am only just now listening to it. Damn, it’s awesome. The first track, “Adrift,” is so pretty, as are a bunch of the other songs with mandolin and banjo and other bluegrassy flavors. And they’ve put themselves right out there in their criticism of the current climate in America — “Take It Back” is a pointed snipe at the whole TSA security checkpoint pantomime. I forgot how much fun it is to listen to new BNL.

I haven’t listened to music these last several years as much as I did in my teens and twenties. It’s partly because of Mike — we have similar musical taste, but not exactly the same, so some of the music I would have otherwise listened to sits on the shelf. It’s partly because of TiVo, which I love, but it means I don’t default to MTV2 or VH1 just to have something on. It’s partly because I’m just now emerging from format limbo, getting more comfortable with owning digital music instead of buying CDs at the store. The thing is, I work better with music playing. It distracts that second track that’s always going in my brain, and keeps it from interfering with whatever it is I’m doing. And I wonder, too, how much not listening to music so much lately has to do with any depression slippage that’s gone on in the last few years. In any case, long live the BNL and their ability to remind me why good music makes me so happy.

Since vacation, my sister, Michelle, has been knitting. I taught her while we were in Orlando, and she took off like a shot. For the longest time, though, there wasn’t any kind of a yarn shop near where my parents live, and so any thoughts I had of bringing her on a yarn shopping expedition when I’m home for Thanksgiving were totally put on the back burner. There is, however, a relatively new store in Davenport, IL — The Yarn Shoppe. The owner, Laurel, has been there about a year, and she’s going to be open the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving, so perhaps we’ll be able to make a trip down there after all. Michelle’s going to be needing a new project, especially after she cruised through the Dalegarn Ara scarf kit she bought at Epcot, and has moved on to cotton dishcloths for lack of a better project. I’ll post pictures, for sure.

I have no excuse, of course. And why I even feel like apologizing, I don’t know. Saturday was a Day of Nothing at our house, a blank day I found several weeks ago and wrote in on the calendar so that we wouldn’t commit ourselves to anything at all. And so I did nothing — sit on the couch, watch TV, finish the sleeves on Mike’s sweater. I didn’t turn on the computer or check email or anything, much less blog.

Sunday was just a day of running out of time, between laundry (finally!) and blocking and hospital visiting and grocery shopping. I took some pictures to go with the two draft posts I have sitting and waiting for them, but didn’t get them uploaded, and the posts really need illustration. So here we are. Two days without posts. Argh.

Check out this typing game — it’s definitely more fun than anything I ever used for learning how to type, and maybe I’ll finally get the whole c-v-b row straightened out in my fingers.

You think job interviews are hard when you’re trying to get a job? Try doing the interviews! We’ve got an open position that I’m responsible for and I’ve been interviewing candidates all week for it. With some good and some tiresome candidates under my belt, here are some helpful hints, should you happen to be interviewing for me anytime soon:

• It’s okay to have a conversation in which not every sentence sells you as a potential employee. It’s akin to the old “Show, don’t tell” dictum from creative writing class.
• When it comes time for you to ask questions at the end of the interview, it’s intended to allow you to get any further necessary information that didn’t come out in the course of the discussion. It isn’t intended for you to show off your intelligence by asking “tough” questions.
• Offer visual aids or supplemental documents only if you can’t communicate the information in them as part of the interview. Don’t demonstrate how well-read you are by bringing reading for your interviewers.
• You can be as prepared as is humanly possible — know your prospective employer, read up on the community, anticipate likely interview questions, research trends in your field — but that doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t answer the question. Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear; tell me the answer.

I want to crawl under a rock.

No, I didn’t post yesterday. So much for the 30-day stretch. I have an excuse, though — I was sick, and a different sick that I was last week. It seems that at a D&D gathering over the weekend, a whole slew of us either ate something bad or got exposed to the same virus, and spent the better part of Monday night in our respective bathrooms. I slept pretty much all day yesterday; hence, no blog post.

Maybe I’ll post twice today to make up for it…