jinx

 Ok, apparently my last post was some sort of jinx for the Sox, so no more praising and making up ridiculous names for the players.  Instead, I will lament over my lack of progress of anything knittish.  I have so many things I want to knit, but I dont want to leave Lisa’s so called scarf on the needles for fear I will never finish.  Tonight, though, I have to clean my house, since our boozing it up all weekend prevented us from tidying up, and the booziness subsequesntly caused us some major laziness.  So I cant restart the knitting tonight.  Although tomorrow night I wanted to start ‘The Kite Runner’ that my good friend was kind enough to loan me.  And I cant knit and read at the same time and I am definitely not a fan of books on tape, so stuck at an impasse once again.  Anyhoo, just wanted to post something, so it looks like you get nonsensical ramblings.  Lucky you.

the sneaky sox

 Amazingly, I stayed up for the Red Sox come from behind win last night.  This team is just on fire.  Pedroia and Ellsbury were magic.  Ellsbury, with homers in the first and the sixth and a textbook bunt in the eighth made me a Jacobeliever.  Get it?  Get it?!  No?  Okay.  Anyway, as Jeff lay snoring next to me, the Sox won their sixth consecutive game with five or more runs.  Yikes, looks like another astonishing season ahead for the Red Sox.

 (On a side note: my sister is supposed to get us tickets to the game.  As of last night’s standings, I wouldn’t mind going to a Baltimore game at all.  Hint, hint, Emily.)

knitting? *crickets*

 I have not knit a stitch in over two weeks.  The last knitting I did was on the flight to Detroit before all of our mishaps occurred.  I dont have the patience to finish Lisa’s so-called scarf, for some reason (don’t worry Lisa, I’ll get back to it eventually!  Good thing spring is here and scarves are not a necessity now).  I think I need a new project, and what I have in mind is definitely not a hum drum scarf.  Drum roll, please…

 It is a new pattern from a company called skif.  The sweater can be worn like this or upside down!  How cool is that?!  I know, I know.  I have all those projects in my blogroll that I want to start.  Well, I dont have the cash to buy any yarn these days, so all of these projects will have to lay on the wayside until a few of the five weddings I have this summer have passed.  Sad, isnt it?

wma winner

 Jeff’s band, cleartheway (you can find them online at myspace.com/cleartheway) won Best Rock Act Wednesday night at the third annual Worcester Music Awards.  This was the second year they were nominated (last year for Best Up and Comers).  cleartheway were nominated for four awards this year, Best Pop Act, Best Live Act, Best CD and walked away with Best Rock act.  Quite an accomplishment, I’d say.  Lets give the boys a hip-hip-hooray to congratulate them.

Good job, boys!  Keep up the ROCK!

travelicious

 My absense from the blog lately is directly due to the fact that Jeff and I were trying to surprise his sister for her birthday by flying out to her new home in Kentucky and since she is a loyal (?) reader of this here blog, I didnt want to ruin the surprise by ranting of the hellish nightmare that elapsed between the planning of this trip and the actual execution of the travel plans.

 To begin, we decided in Feb that a trip out there for her birthday would be awesome and started making plans and searching for flights.  Since I am such a cheapskate, we decided to go with an airline I had never heard of that had tickets for $80 each way.  Bargain.  We booked through Skybus airlines and awaited our departure date.  Jeff’s parents decided to make the trek out here as well and we all booked our tickets together on his mom’s credit card.  Fast forward to the day before his parents were to fly out and we find out that Skybus has gone under.  Folded, the day prior to flying with no advance warning, no honoring of already booked flights, nothing.  So we scrambled to find his parents new flights and find ourselves new flights.  Not sure if anyone has ever tried to book last minute travel whilst pinching pennies, but it is near impossible.  Luckily, there are a half dozen airports within two hours of Jeff’s sister’s place and we had a few options to choose from, nowhere near as cheap as Skybus, but we didnt want to ruin the surprise, so we shelled out a few mor bucks to make the trip.  No biggie.

 Jeff’s parents make it out there fine and we get set to leave MA the next weekend.  We chose to fly out of Manchester, NH since the flights were early, early AM and late late night and to ask anyone to drop us off or pick us up at those ungodly times would have been insensitive and the parking in Manchester is cheap, so we opted to drive and park ourselves.  The Manchester airport has zero kiosks with food, and we were running late and had no time to stop, so I was starving for the first flight.  We landed in Detroit at 8.30 and stopped at McDonalds to grab some food so that I would not rip Jeff’s head off.  Our connecting flight to Indianapolis was at 9:12, so, stupidly, we did not rush to the gate.  We missed the 9:12 flight to Indy.  The ticket agent at the gate was so unhelpful, did not offer to book us on a different flight, I had to ask her what our options were.  We got to fly standby, which, if no one has ever done, is the most delightful experience.  You get treated like a second class citizen, like you are disregarded and made to feel less than.  It was amazing.  The next flight out would be at 12:30, so we read our books and met some nice guy from Indy who was trying to start up a company that sold shoes out of vending machines.  We did not get to board the 12:30 flight.  At this point, I just realized that this trip was doomed from the start and went to the toilet to break down.  The surprise would be ruined for sure.  We head to the next gate for a flight that was to depart at 2:00.  That flight gets delayed until 4:00.  I ask the ticket agent what our chances are of getting to board this flight. She says that all the flights are overbooked and we practically have no chance of leaving Detroit.  Somehow, the gods were smiling on us and afforded us a nice ticket agent named Donna, who booked us a flight into Cincinnati (ten minutes from Jeff’s sister’s house).  The crappy part about this is that Jeff’s brother-in-law, whom we had been in cahoots with the entire time, was in Indy ( at a real classy strip joint) waiting for our flight, since we had been delayed so many times, and now would have to drive the two hours back to Cincinnati.  He was pretty easy going about it.  I surely would not have been, so I thank him for that.  I guess the upside of this experience is to know that if me and Jeff could make it through travel trouble without killing each other, I guess we can make it through anything.

 We get to the house and she is totally surprised.  They have a nice house, ginormous for the price by MA standards, in a nice neighborhood.  KY is nothing like I expected.  I guess I expected something very backward, hillbilly–people chewing on straw and wearing overalls?  But it was modern and decent.  Everything is new, the houses, the shopping plazas.  It seems like everything had been built within the last five years.  The nightlife is crazy and, although I would never associate Buffalo wings with Kentucky, they seem to specialize in them.  Fantastic wings.

 She was sad to see us go, I could tell.  And the flight back was just a lot of travelling.  Two hours from KY to Indiana by car, a pit stop in Ohio, layover in Atlanta (four hours, did I mention), fly into Manchester and drive home to MA.  Six states in one day, not too shabby for not-so-seasoned travellers.

 Needless to say, I am exhausted today.  Just worn out.  I will certainly sleep like a baby tonight.

holy neglect!

 Oh, my poor blog.  I have neglected you for so long. 

 My new job has been going fantastic, so there is nothing to report on that front.  Jeff got some great news from his company.  He went in for his seasonal negotiation and got a $10,000 a year raise.  So he is all proud of himself as he should be.  After getting the shaft for the past two years at his old job, he is finally getting a deserved pay raise and a boost in the ego.

 I have not been knitting.  Like, at all.  None.  I feel kinda bad, but I just lost the drive for a bit.  I am sure I will pick back up eventually.  But summer tends not to lean itself toward scarves and sweaters and fuzzy things of the like, so the knitting goes by the wayside in lieu of more outdoorsy/warm weather activities (read: not knitting).  So I guess you can expect the frequency of posts to dwindle over the spring and summer months, but I wont leave for good.  And, yes, that is a threat.