my first stitch markers ever!

So we went to Michaels and Target last night like I had wanted to and here's what I made when we got back. After I made the first set (which are the clear ones with the red flowers in the center!), I told my fiance that when he came back home today from work and from the movie he's in, all my beads will probably be gone! I wish someone had told me how dangerous of a new hobby this is going to be! I was specifically looking for holiday charms (which I had seen on the website!) but they didn't have them. Oh well. Maybe next time. My fiance apparently is an expert. There was some tutoring going on as he was showing how to do certain things. AR, I was showing him how you twisted the wire on yours and made them look fancy! He did it and I thought..it's gonna be a while before I can do that myself! His mom does beadwork and he can't wait for us to go see her so he can tell her I've learned to make stitch markers! :) In regards to the movie--who knew Hollywood would actually invade my blog one day. He's doing a part in a low budget indie film with a political bent. I'm supposed to be in it as well (as an extra) but I don't want to and I'm actually supposed to meet up with the gal I did my training with last week to go over the stuff we learned but I'm really going to be shopping with my sister! We may get some new goldfish today too. :) Tomorrow, I'm doing more shopping but with my fiance. I don't know how our director really fathomed the idea of the two of us getting together during the holiday crunch. Who wants to do something academic right now?? I can tell you I sure don't! Oh yeah, did you all hear--bloglines is hiring!!!!!!

it's done! :) really, it is!

So I finished the penguin hat. I have to say, it's bigger than my niece's whole head right now! Oh well. She can grow into it. I'm gonna hand wash it and I hope that it softens up. We are gonna try to go to Michael's tonight and Target for some Christmas shopping and I've decided I want to learn how to make my own stitch markers (the reason for the Michael's trip)!

lots of baking, some knitting, and blogger beta anyone?

First I should tackle the comments because some of you I couldn't just email back a response to your comment and not only am I bad with keeping up with blogs I didn't have on bloglines but I'm also bad @ checking back to see if someone commented back to my comment! Liz, I had no idea about over half of the top fencers being left-handed. How do they have an advantage? Can you tell I don't know much about fencing? :( Hilary, I hadn't even noticed that I had a theme going! lol. Thanks for pointing that out to me! :) Windansea, Bloglines is starting to change my life now! I'm normally an organized person so it helped to organize another aspect of my life! Oh wow, two of your girls fence? That's awesome!

Okay, now for some baking. :)

In the muffin tins, I have chocolate pecan tartlets! It was the first time I had made them but I will definitely be making these puppies again! I also made a batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies just cos I knew I'd be using the oven so why not. The last picture is a pic of everything I baked last night. :) I finally sat down to do some knitting late last night-after we made a run to the store to pick up a new shower head. We realized that it needed to be put to rest. We knew something was up and rather than call our landlord and wait for him to get here say tomorrow, we dealt with it ourselves. I have yet to use our new shower head but my fiance says his shower this morning was great. I so wanted to take another shower last night after we put it in but it was already almost midnight! Here's some knitting: It's been a while since I did some late night knitting. I won't even say how late I stayed up! If you remember correctly, when you saw this last, I had only done the brim of the hat and now it's little penguin face is forming! :) I did a bit of work on the 5 hour sweater. I'm to the point where I'm going to be putting in the place markers. I haven't knitted a stitch of the dishcloth though. Now this brings me to blogger beta, anyone? I found out this morning that I can no longer access the dishcloth fun kal because the moderator has switched to blogger beta. How in the hell am I going to get the next few rows for the dishcloth? Since I do not have a blogger beta account, the moderator is supposed to send me another invite and I have to log in using my gmail account. I've emailed her and haven't received a response. hakucho, tammy, and carole do either of you have the next few rows??? Can you tell that I'm annoyed? I feel kind of like I'm being forced to switch over just so I can get the next few rows of a cloth that I haven't even really worked on. Hmm...maybe this is a sign telling me screw the cloth. :) I'm not ready to make the switch to beta yet. It took me long enough to get my blog looking the way I want it to look and now I have to do it all over again? Ay. Plus I figured I'd wait it out till I saw in my dashboard that I could make the switch. In my idealistic mind, I'm thinking by that point, I should be able to just completely transfer and I won't have any problems. I can dream, can't I?? Ohh, I just remembered that starting next week, I won't be on as much as I typically am because my training with the Kelter Center will begin. I'll be out of the blogger loop (@ least during the daytime!) this coming Monday-Thursday and the following week just Monday and Tuesday...but then I'm going home and those of you that have been keeping up with me for a while know that home=dial-up. Sigh....Happy Friday everyone!!!!!!

I heart bloglines and some knitting

hakucho talked about how slow her knitting has been lately in her blog. Anyone else feeling that way? I know that I'm right there with her! Maybe that's why I decided to cast on for three different projects yesterday so I could feel more productive. If you could only see the kitchen table right now! This would be the beginnings of the yoke for my niece's 5 hour sweater. I 'tried it on' last night and I said, "It feels a bit tight." My fiance's response was, "Of course it is, it's not for you!!"I'm not sure what size baby this cardi will fit. I guess I'll find out once I give it to my niece! This would be the very beginnings of her penguin hat. That also is going to be a bit bit as the pattern doesn't say what size baby head it will fit. Oh well. I'm almost to the pattern rows. I've just gotta do 3 more rows of ribbing. :) Here's my cloth for the dishcloth fun kal. lol. I actually was up to row 9 when I realized I casted on too many stitches so I frogged and could only stand to do one row. I think next time, I won't try to cast on three projects at once-particularly ones that all call for knitting the first I dunno, 6 rows before getting down to some real knitting! In case you're wondering what is that big round green thing on my kitchen table amidst all the knitting, patterns, and xmas cards, it's a pommelo. I love them. I'm waiting for them to ripen. They're better than grapefruits because they're actually sweet! Liz posted a link to a song in the comments portion of my left-handed post.I thought it was funny so I wanted to share it with you all in case you didn't click on the link yourself! CPS just commented about how her hubby won't read my blog because he (also left-handed!) tells others that they're handicapped right-handers! Now, I am a lover of right-handed people. Heck, 98% of the people I know are right-handed! But when I find out that someone is left-handed like me, I think..someone like me!! Someone who had to struggle in school like I did. Someone who possibly was told "You need to write with this hand, not that one" like I was. :( You right-handers have it easy! Now why I heart bloglines. I am really, really bad at keeping up with blogs that I haven't subscribed to via bloglines. Some of you may have noticed that I haven't commented in forever well that's cos I can't keep up with all the ones I read, until today!!!!!!!!! I wish I had thought of this sooner. Guess that's what happens when you've got time on your hands. So I went through and did a search of all the blogs I like reading that I don't already have on bloglines to see if I could add them on bloglines and thankfully, everyone's got a feed!!!!!!! I was making up for lost time too. Who knew that literally everyone has a feed there. I sure didn't. The things you learn....

Left-handers 'think' more quickly

taken from BBC News!! Left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport, say Australian researchers. Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows. The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli. Experts said left-handers tended to use both sides of the brain more easily. Study leader Dr Nick Cherbuin from the Australian National University measured transfer time between the two sides of the brain by measuring reaction times to white dots flashed to the left and right of a fixed cross. This seems to go with evidence that left-handers use both sides of the brain for language Dr Steve Williams He then compared this with how good participants were at carrying out a task to spot matching letters in the left and right visual fields, which would require them to use both sides of the brain at the same time. Tests in 80 right-handed volunteers showed there was a strong correlation between how quickly information was transferred across the left and right hemispheres and how quickly people spotted matching letters. But when the tests were repeated in 20 left-handed volunteers, the researchers found that the more left handed people were the better they were at processing information across the two sides of the brain. Extreme left-handed individuals were 43milliseconds faster at spotting matching letters across the right and left visual fields than right-handed people. More efficient Dr Cherbuin, research fellow at the University concluded: "These findings confirm our prediction of increasing efficiency of hemispheric interactions with increasing left-handedness." But he added that it wasn't a clear-cut pattern as there were subtle differences between strongly and mildly left-handed or right-handed individuals. Dr Cherbuin explained that people tended to use both hemispheres for tasks which are very fast or very hard and which require interpretation of a lot of information, such as computer games or driving in heavy traffic or playing sport. Chartered psychologist, Dr Steve Williams said left-handed people tended to be better at using both sides of the brain. "It's certainly very interesting. It's always been said that left-handers are different from right-handers in that they are less consistent with their left-handedness. "This seems to go with evidence that left-handers use both sides of the brain for language - that they are more bicerebral. They get faster at it because they're having to use both sides of the brain more." "In football, being able to shoot with either foot is a huge asset (each foot like each hand is under opposite-side control) and I've heard that left-handers tend to have better backhands in tennis," he added.

where to start..

I don't even know where to begin!! It feels like it's been forever since I have posted. I've just been preoccupied with life stuff. As you all know, I subbed yesterday @ the school in the Palisades and those 2nd graders are monsters! I don't know if it was having a sub or what but they were unreal! This class definitely knows how privileged they are and apparently flaunt it. The teacher I worked with yesterday was telling me how they'll even try to bargain with them (the teachers) to get out of stuff. The kids will say, "If I give you this...will you give me that?" She said the class is insane naturally. She and the lead teacher don't know what to do and have just accepted the fact that this is how their class is. They call out, sing out, and seem to lack both discipline and respect. The teacher was talking over them! I actually felt more like a teacher in this classroom though because she gave me stuff to do! I also had to help make sure they were on task (because she couldn't do it alone!) They were so distracted!! I don't even know how many times I had to ask some of them to stop talking and listen to their teacher! Ugh. There are 16 kids in the class and I'd say at least 5 of them were out and out brats. They can't even follow simple directions like raise your hand when you want to speak, or please stop singing or even please do not play around with these because I am going to want them back when we're done with the activity. They can't even sit still for very long!! Talk about pure torture. I had to be with them from 12:45pm until 2pm. Their lucky teacher got time away from them. I'm hoping to not hear from the school for a while. I need a break. If they call again for the 2nd grade class, I might have to think twice about it. Carole, do you do middle school or high school? I couldn't imagine having to deal with 193 children a day! I finished two objects and a pic of one of them is posted here. I plan to cast on for @ least three different projects today. I hope I can do it. I need to get started on the dishcloth fun cloth. I wanted to wait until there were at least 20 rows posted though so I wouldn't get too anxious!I also need to cast on for the 5-hour baby sweater. I really like it in the variegated so I went out and tried to find some nice variegated baby yarn but there wasn't much of a selection. I picked up some lion brand stuff-can't remember the name of it but I liked the colors. I'll try to post pics of whatever I've accomplished tomorrow! I also need to cast on for this super cute penguin hat I saw in a mini-mag I picked up @ the grocery store. :) I'm going to wait until I get to the face part and then worry about enlarging the chart! Now I do have some pics to post but they're not of knitting. I thought they'd be fun though. My sister had a Christmas party to attend this past Saturday evening and had no idea how to do her hair. She knew how she pictured it to look but didn't know how to make it look the way she wanted. So in comes my fiance. I figured he'd know how to show her how to use a curling iron because she's not very curling iron savvy and here are some pics of them playing beauty shop. I was online reading blogs last Friday night!This was the 'practice run' but she ended up not having time @ all to do her hair because she had to leave right from work to get to her friend's and that was the night of the UCLA/USC game. So she had traffic with a capital T. She did enjoy it though and he did too!

chilly monday morning

So I'm a bad substitute teacher. I have been called (counting today!) three times by the private school in the Palisades and I've said no twice already. The first time, because the day after we were leaving for Thanksgiving and I wanted to pack and just rest. The second time, I started training with the Kelter Center (last Monday) and this morning they called. My fiance picked up, saw that it was an "Out of Area" number and he hung up. lol. Great. I knew it was the school because they are the only ones who'll call me at so early. The first two times were around 7. Today he called after 8. They needed me today-I have my paper to finish for tonight, reading to do, and I still need to go by the school where I interviewed the director to pick up a pamphlet! They also need me tomorrow though. Hm. So I will be going in tomorrow and I'll be helping out in the 2nd grade class. Today I would've been in the 1st grade. I'm so bummed. Oh well. I'm sure there will be other opportunities. In regards to knitting, I've been working on a secret project. I've frogged it at least three times but I'm now at the point where the pattern is coming easy. I started a swatch for my sister's cabled scarf but I'm having issues and just might have to post on KR for some guidance. I'm trying to combine two different cable stitches into one panel and it's not coming out right. I've only done a couple of rows but something is not right. I'm not sure how many stitches I need to decrease when combining different cables. I have a center cable that is enclosed by two other cable stitches. I'll work on it some more Wednesday. I was perusing windansea's blog the other day when I saw her super cute 5 hour baby sweater! I really liked her version so I went out to pick up some yarn to make one for my niece. I found a pattern that is bigger too. :) I have yet to cast on but am ready to! I have yet to start on any of the dishcloths for my kal's so don't anyone tell me what they are unless I ask you to!! I may start the monthly dishcloth kal today so I don't just have one project going on. Okay, off to start the rest of my homework day! Happy Monday! ETA: It's only 11:30 (PST) and I've finished and printed up my two papers due. All I have left is to read tonight's chapter (which is short!) and pick up that pamphlet and all my homework is done. Yahoo!!!!!! I can knit soon! :) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ P.S. I noticed that mostly everyone who has taken the Stress test that I got from AR are more stressed than I am but that's because I don't have children of my own! So when I do start having children, someone will have to remind me to take this test again so I can see how quickly times have changed and so I can remember my not-so stressed out life that I used to have! lol.