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Our long, national nightmare is over. I am once again gainfully employed.

It's freelance, and part time, but has the potential to become more and it's enough money to live and pay bills and cease being a deadbeat, so that's good enough for me. I am going in Mon-Wed next week and then they're closed until early January. It'll have a much better work/life balance, as in, this work should not prevent me from having a life like the Horror Show did. I don't get to work with K-dub, ryan and Chris anymore, but it's at the same place that the Professl works. He is the King Kong of job hookups, all you need is to drop his name and people offer you jobs.

happy birthday, dad!

I put up this same picture a few years ago but I can't get enough of it. The saucy look, the tie, the bling on his hand, the slick car in the background, Pam Grier over there on the right. I am meeting Pops and all the various siblings uptown for lunch and some giant tree viewing.

In local tree news, this morning Chris made homemade hot chocolate, put on the Yo La Tengo Christmas album and we decorated ours.

christmas tree, dressed
Originally uploaded by sassydotnet.

Yes, it's colder in Buffalo and Green Bay and Nome. But it's supposed to be cold there.

I had a Job Interview today so I was out and about in the frosty air for most of the afternoon. I really have to get myself a fancy adult professional lady winter coat for things like this. I love my bright red, muppety coat (30th birthday present from Ankabuki!), but the muppet coat plus 6 or so crosstown blocks of wind chill makes me look not unlike a giant, puffy tomato. Not a look that screams "hire me!" My fashion issues aside, I think things went well. The people I met with would be cool to sit near for 35 to 40 hours a week. I can walk there. Also, I got to have hot chocolate. Sold!

Afterwards I went to Astor Wines armed with D's list of recommendations for the winos on my Christmas list. I got one out of three things I needed then, for something completely different, on to National Wholesale Liquidators for cheap CENSOREDs to complete another few gifts. I think I'm gonna make it, even if I end up knitting one last hat in the car on the way to the parents.

Tonight is boring (unlike the last 5 scintillating scandalfests) but all the news is imminent. I swear, tomorrow night - monkey boys, teen pregnancy, celebrity gossip, free beer!

Internet, I'm a mean, high strung, awful, high maintenance girlfriend. Also it's hard being a stay-at-home not-mom, a house(not)wife. December is the cruelest month for jobhunters and I still have 2 or 3 companies stringing me along, unable to commit but not willing to give me closure either. Chris goes off every morning to the Hateful Place of Hateful People full of sadness, while I sit on the couch in PJs, a sweater, a cozy blanket, a laptop, WLNY TV 55. I don't deserve it. Then some nights he has drinks with the nonHatefuls, to escape the hate. He deserves it. And then I go and get sad and demanding for no good reason.

But because he is so strangely wonderful, he understands. And he comes home with this:

Now we have the tree, tomorrow we will decorate it (tonight he's in Philly at the Villanova game). We have a box full of ornaments and Bing Crosby CDs and 5 cookie sheets waiting to be filled up with ginger snaps, spritz cookies and miles of almond buttercrunch. If I could ask for one thing more, it would be the job I'm interviewing for tomorrow.

Guess what I suck at? Embroidery. How can embroidering a simple stick figure drawing be harder than knitting? I may have to rethink a couple of gifts, it may end up being hats for everyone after all. *

I gave the first hat I made (which is actually not the one in friday's pictures, that was the first hat made with Crazy Aunt Purl's roll brim pattern/formula) to M for her birthday Friday night and she liked it! For real! And wore it on her actual head and it actually looked cute. We went to Yama for sushi and ordered enough to get The Boat.

There's more from the weekend but I'm in a bad mood now so, later.

*I'm taking pictures of all the things I'm making, but won't be able to put them up til after the giftees receive them, since nearly all of them are sneaky readers.

Cheating today with pictures because I'm busy. Going out for sushi for M's birthday in an hour. Then tomorrow morning (at 9:30 am) going to Mario Badescu for a facial courtesy of last year's gift certificate from ChrisMom. Nothing like getting things in under the wire. Both ChrisSis and I got the gift certificates and neither of us made it to the salon so last week CMom made all three of us an appointment. I've never had one. Will my face get peeled off? Will it go all tomatoey? Tune in next week.

Crazy Aunt Purl is 40 kinds of fantastic. She taught me math, useful math! Take that Miss Goudreau (was that her name? canteloupe, help me out here). I am on my way to an entire closet full of simple knitted hats now that I have finished one and learned how small is too small for an adult human head. Without further ado, here is Hat Patient Zero:

wee hat on Chris's favorite chair. it's hard to tell but it's a sort of periwinkle, greyish blue with a raspberry pinkish stripe

wee hat on wee kicky

wee hat on giant dork

See you next week.

I am making gift progress almost in spite of myself. I have grown much in these past few years. I remember to stop, look, count what I've got and pronounce the people with 3 gifts finished, done, move on! Thirtysomething: the Age of Reason. It's nice. So mom, done; sister, done; father, not done, but decided. Now on to Chris's family which is a swirling cornucopia of ideas, many of which involve crafts I've never done before but (perhaps over-optimistically?) feel I will figure out just fine. If not, I will just crank out 3 more knit hats and smile pretty.

After figuring out the list of Dones and Not-Dones, I made a new list of what I needed to get off my ass and do today to keep this oh so tenuous momentum going. And not just in the gift making realm. I've been really good at keeping on top of shit while unemployed these past 3 months. All bills are still paid on time, I conscientiously return all library books on time and I try to keep clutter and filth at bay since I live with someone else now, someone else who goes to work every day unlike myself. It's working out. I have some credit card debt where previously I had none and I should be going to the gym every day with all this free time but I'm not perfect, just better. Apparently, at the ripe old age of not quite 34, I needed a sabbatical. I really needed this time off to just not be burnt out anymore. I mean, if that job I was up for right when I quit had worked out I would have taken it and would have been fine. But having the incredible luck and good fortune to be able to ride out these months not working at all has made it so I actually want to start working again. I'm ready for offices and commutes and desks and insurance and watercooler chat and all that completely inane crap that we all put up with to have a roof and food and (relative) peace of mind. I have an interview next week, first one since October. Fingers crossed for me, please?

But back to the gifts. Number one on today's list of shit to get done was another stop at the yarn store. It's nice to put the addictive personality to good use when possible. I was supposed to resist the temptation of more pretty yarn for random scarves and just get some 100% wool for felting a small gift but of course I caved. The rationale is that it will be good for last minute easy hats if and when my other crafty projects meet tragic ends, if for instance, embroidery turns out to be like Advanced German or rocketry.

As I waited for La Vida Bandanna to wind 40 silmarillion skeins of yarn into balls on the magical yarn baller, my eyes drifted to his companions. One was a young woman gathering yarn and looking through some books and another woman dressed all in white with a soft but incredibly familiar voice. Oh. Hello there, Rosie Perez. She had a cane and a limp. She asked a lot of questions about things in the pattern book she was flipping through. As she left, Bandanna wished her hip a speedy recovery. Yo, Rosie, let me tell you a story about knitting. The left hand and the right hand. The left hand is hate. The right hand is love.

I have completed one hat and one scarf! Both have some obvious flaws and look a little like someone with a hook for a hand created them, but they're for people who already love me so I should be OK. Pictures forthcoming.

OK so The Triangle. Sucked equilaterally. As mentioned before, I have pretty low standards. I've watched Judging Amy twice a day every day for a month now. But this was 10 pounds of crap in a five pound sack. The rogue Australian? Check. The feisty know-it-all? Check? Sam Neill playing brothers, one regular, one mustachioed? Check and mate. And it didn't even make any sense! Not just your garden variety "movie physics" nonsense, actual nonsense. Characters who answer questions like "What do we do next?" with "Aha! I just figured it out. Winston, it was his brother, Winston!" And what was with the squirrely dude playing Smithers to Sam Neill's Mr. Burns? It was just a coincidence he skulked and lurked and glared his way through every scene? Where was the inevitable discovery that they were all just pawns in his creepy reindeer game?

Tomorrow I have exciting plans to leave the apartment so maybe I'll have more than warmed over made for TV movie commentary after that. Good night and good luck.

It was one of those days that feels successful and productive but in reality can pretty much be summed up as: I left the house today. A bunch of money was spent but only half of what I needed got purchased. I was supposed to buy another ball of yarn for one of the gifts, research then buy an iron and pick out something for dinner. I only got as far as the yarn store.

But! It was a more than satisfactory trip full of hot knitting action. I ended up doing a hour long one-on-one lesson on How to Knit a Hat which was really cool and convinced me I could make like 5 hats a day it was so easy - all my Christmas gifts solved! Until about 5 minutes ago that is, when I had to put down my work in frustration, completely stymied by the last 3 rows of my maiden hat. I'll have to go in tomorrow and beg for help. So close!

Later tonight, part two of The Triangle. Part one was...less than. But 1) mystery, 2) everything else is repeats this week and 3) Eric Stoltz. Also, I have no standards, really.

Speaking of TV*, I swear, the overt desperation and sad patheticness of daytime TV commercials is the prime reason behind my desire for a new job. I don't want to be a debt consolidating, metabolife gulping, pyramid scheming licensed TV repair tech insured by Geico. Please keep your fingers crossed about the job Essl called me about today.

*But there is one daytime commercial question I need answered. There is this George Foreman commercial in heavy rotation on all the non-premium cable channels for his new grill, the G5 "Grilleration" with 5 interchangeable plates. The commercial has 5 Georges each showing off one of the plates. There's the grill, the griddle, the waffler, the sandwich press and what sounds like "a bacon oven". I've seen the thing enough to catch that the George with the bacon oven actually has a pizza on the plate. Is he saying "baking oven"? That's just...weird.

I don't really want to write anything new and push my beach picture off the front page. But I've made a pact to update to update every day during the holidays (starting today I guess) so I have to get back into the groove.

I am doing poverty-induced handmade gifts this Christmas, but I think it's going to be better than the diamonds and Jaguars I usually hand out. Seriously though, every year it's a race of inconspicuous consumption where I spend hundreds of dollars and get crap people could probably do without. Not that anyone really needs the scarves I'm knitting or towels I'm embroidering, but they're more likely to think of me when bundling up or drying a dish if I make the gifts myself. Or whatever, that's my hope anyway.

It makes me just that much more of a hipster douchebag though, as I realized last night. While riding the train to Brooklyn I opened my messenger bag, moved aside my library book (Michael Chabon, The Final Solution) and pulled out my knitting. After adjusting the volume on my iPod, I spent the ride working on my scarf which was easy to do because I was wearing fingerless gloves. Shoot me.