Kat with a K

UFO Challenge Clarification

Okay, a few people have asked whether you need to post your UFO progress here each month. You can, but you don't have to. If you have your own blog, you're encouraged to post your UFO there each month. (Just make sure you say that it's for the challenge.) If you don't have your own blog, you can comment or e-mail me.

Wednesday Randomosity

1. Hey look! A Tardis USB Hub!

2. Thanks for all the compliments on the Deweykitten. It's interesting that you all say how big he is, because it's harder to notice when I see him every day.

3. Today is the deadline to sign up for the UFO Challege. But remember - if you sign up today, you have to work on/post about your January project today. Please only sign up/comment once. I don't have time to go through and approve all the comments every three minutes, but that does not mean your comment didn't go through.

4. My semester started last night. Cataloging! Whee! It's nice to be back.

5. Everyone should read this article by Michael Pollan about food and nutritionism. Very interesting.

6. I have two book reviews and an FO post that should be coming up soon. When I have time. Right.

Caught up. I think.

I think I have finally caught up with all of the submissions as of now. So look at the sidebar, and if your name is missing or your URL is wrong or whatever, let me know. Whew.

Also, if you need help with the ring code or anything, let me know that too. I realized I hadn't said much about it, assuming you'd all joined rings before and knew the drill, but that isn't necessarily true.

By popular demand...

Dewey's fans have been clamoring for pictures, so here are a few from our Buffy-watching this afternoon...

Hrmph.

I feel like I've asked this before. But. If you were my copy of Mason Dixon Knitting, where would you be? Because I am in the mood to knit bibs, and I cannot. Find. It. ARGH.

No more Reading Challenges

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently (which you may have figured, since I certainly haven't been posting), and I've realized, with the help of some friends, that one of the reasons why I feel so tired and and run down all the time is because I schedule and plan and make lists for everything, including my so-called "free" time. As a result, I never actually have any downtime. The semester starts next week, and I'm already feeling stressed, so something has to go. So I'm pulling out of the various reading challenges I've signed up for. I'll keep the lists, since I really do want to read all those books. Just not right now. They all sounded very appealing on the day(s) I came up with the lists, but too much of the time, they're not what fits my reading mood, and so they just feel like homework. The especially frustrating thing is that recently, I've been just wanting to read read read - just not those books. (I've been wanting British police procedurals, contemporary literary fiction, and Latin American poetry, in fact.)

And yes, this theoretically means I'll have time to post more and keep up better with the UFO challenge administation stuff.

UFO Resurrection Challenge Ring!

By popular demand: click here to join the UFO Challenge ring! I don't have the time/energy right now to maintain a group blog - you may have noticed that I'm having trouble finding the time/energy to do anything with this blog - but I can manage to keep up a ring. Come join!

Page 123 Meme

Tagged by The Barefoot Cobbler...

The Page 123 Meme
1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, look down to the 5th sentence.
3. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog.
4. Include the title and the author's name.
5. Tag 3 People.

(Fifth sentence or fifth line? I guess I'll go with sentence...)

"'Let them watch if they want to.'
'But it startled mother badly the other night. I think I'll just ask them not to, if I can catch them.'"

The book is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. And I have no idea what is going on in the above, as I am currently on page 83. Hmm.

Tagging: Newness of Life (although I feel like she's already done it...), Zuzu's Perch, and Stumbling Over Chaos.

Kitten pictures! (Not to distract you from lack of content or anything...)

Hello! Sheesh, a girl and a kitten ignore the Internet for a weekend, and five billion e-mails come in! Coming soon: updated list of UFO challenge participants, links to some UFO challenge finishes, and my first finished object of 2007! (Which also happens to be my January UFO!) To tide you over, want to see what Dewey and I did while we were ignoring you this weekend?

Yesterday we made tomato sauce...

And then we watched lots and lots of Buffy...

(It got a little scary.)

Wednesday Randoms!

1. It's actually seasonably cold out! Thank God.

2. I'm a little behind on the UFO challenge sign-ups, so if you don't see your name there yet, don't worry. I'll catch up tonight.

3. The back of Arwen is thisclose to being done. Tonight, I'm determined to finish it and start one of the fronts. Wheee.

4. Remember that license plate thing I was doing? I hadn't mentioned it recently because I'd been stuck for a few months with just a few left to see. Well, yesterday I saw Montana! Wheee!

5. I don't know what I did to my back/neck/shoulder/something, but OWW.

6. Please tell me I'm not the only one practically counting the hours until the new Grey's Anatomy tomorrow night. (Well, I know I'm not the only one, Christine, but...) So excited. The teasers are killing me. (29 hours.)

Review: Archangel by Sharon Shinn

1. Archangel by Sharon Shinn
Genre: sci fi/fantasy/romance
Rating: 4.3

I read this book for my sci fi/fantasy book club this month. In general, I thought it was really very good. It has a fantasy-type setting, but the plot follows many of the conventions of the traditional romance novel. It also deals with interesting issues of faith, theology, and duty. The characters were interesting and multi-dimensional, and the plot kept me turning pages. I will definitely be looking for more by this author.

I did have one major issue with this book, however. The synopsis at the beginning of the book gave information that was never stated within the actual text. It was hinted at a few times, and I kept expecting the climax of the novel to include the discovery of this information. But... it didn't, and I was left confused. Was this information that the reader was supposed to have, but not the characters? Was it something that would be revealed in a later book? What the heck was going on? Even though I loved the book, this is still nagging at me.

Sunday stitching update!

Hey, remember those? Yeah. I hadn't been cross stitching much because it seemed like a bad idea with a bitty kitten around, but I've been missing it, so I started up again. Just being very, very careful.

As I've mentioned, I'm using a system in which I work on one project for 10 hours and then rotate to another. So this week I finished my first ten hours on the Teacup Quilt:

And then I got a few stitches into my new project, Teresa Wentzler's Noah's Ark Samper. Sorry for the poor quality of the photo. I'm not used to taking WIP pictures in daylight!

Kitten at play

By popular demand, here's a series of pictures from last night:

Look, I've actually been knitting!

There's even photographic proof! I've been mostly working on Arwen, and it's coming along nicely, although it's not that thrilling to look at at the moment:

I pulled out the aforementioned baby blanket, although I haven't actually resumed work on it yet. See, I told you it was almost done:

And this will be something secret. Actually, I'm not sure if it's secret - must check whether it's okay to blog about.

I have kitten pictures too, but I think I'll save those for tomorrow.

The UFO Resurrection Challenge has officially begun!

The list of participants should be in the sidebar by the time you read this. If I've left you off the list, let me know. We also have a wonderful button, made by Kat of Kat Knits:

A few things I wanted to mention:

1. There's still time to sign up! Deadline is January 31.

2. Please try to post each month about the item that you're working on or frogging.

3. You don't have to finish the item within the month. You just have to honestly add it back into your rotation of active projects. For example, I might get out a barely-started lace shawl in February, work on it along with one or two other things for a few months, and not finish it until May. That's fine - as long as you're actively working on it, it's no longer a UFO.

Any other questions? Let me know.

What will everyone be working on first? I have an almost-done green cotton baby blanket, and at least five friends expecting babies in the spring, so I think I know what I'll be working on...

Happy New Year!

In case anyone wondered, the 24-hour emergency animal clinic is not, in fact, the most cheerful place to ring in the New Year. This afternoon, Dewey started throwing up periodically for no apparently reason. The first two times, I thought "Okay, he's a cat, it happens." After the third time, I started to get worried, so I called the clinic to get their advice. They told me to take his food away for a few hours, but to bring him in if he did it again. He did. So off we went at 9:45 tonight. After a brief wait, during which I called my parents to play the "Hey, guess which ER we're in now, Mom?" game, $200 of tests and exams concluded that Dewey appears to be in perfect health. But really, it was worth every penny to get the scary stuff ruled out. He got an anti-nausea shot, and has been okay since, so... we'll see. No food until tomorrow. And now we have a CD of nifty pictures of Dewey's insides!

So anyway, we got home around 11:45, and I just managed to turn on Dick Clark, change back into my pajamas (I'd put on jeans to go to the clinic), and make some adult hot chocolate before midnight. My throat still hurts too much for champagne or really any alcoholic beverage that isn't based in warm milk. So I managed to see the ball drop, and Robot Dick Clark try to speak. Depressing, really. Ah well.

Happy 2007!