Howdy Stranger

If you've come here looking for comics, and are surprised by all the knitting content, or if you've come here looking for knitting, and are surprised by the comics content, don't worry! You're in the right place.

If you're just here because you miss me, then Hi! I miss you too!

I'll be at the Portland Zine Symposium tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday with my comics. Limited edition hand printed, colored, and bound copies of Faster than Ever, the last printing of Life with the Underdog #1, and a new mini of 6 strips will be available, along with the rest of my oevre. I'm going to look out for you, ok?

Don't worry, even if you can't make it, we'll talk soon.

Hugs,

Nina

Because I Still Knit

I am so behind on this blogging thing. But first! Have you seen my cats recently??



I promise, they're usually a lot happier to see me than they were right then.

Anyway. I made a scarf!



I got some absolutely gorgeous buttery soft Soul Wool through an international swap (Thanks Chana!) and ripped off the pattern from a scarf that one of my coworkers made that I liked a lot. Cast on 120 sts on size 15 needles, and knit until the yarn was gone, using the leftover scraps for fringe. I wore it most days last month and it made me happy.

Also, my lips are badly chapped in that picture because I spent the night before drinking "Gimlets," which in my mind means gin and ice and more lemon juice than my tissues and teeth were designed to handle. The more "gimlets" you drink, the less you taste the lemon juice (and the gin), and the stronger they inevitably get. Strong enough that I have a dim recollection of this



being the funniest thing I've seen this year. I can explain.

But I'll spare you the embarrassment. Rest assured, it is really, truly, salt and nothing more.

I also finished the sleeves to my most recent sweater. The stripy ones that I was knitting two at once?



And then, while I had so much time on my hands from not blogging, I finished the rest of it.



Cakes and I couldn't decide if the color variations were more obvious in direct



or indirect sunlight. Will you please settle this one for us? Regardless, it's one of my favorite knits (though the most recent knits always seem to be my favorites) and I've started two more sweaters already, but they're for work, so I'm undecided how much I'll share them here.

Still loving my job. I had my 3-month review and despite missing the meeting (yes I suck) they seem to love me back and want to keep me on. I would feel lucky even if it was a lame job, the fact that it is a cool job leaves me all the more in awe of how my recent risk-taking has paid off.

And, can I tell you a secret? (I know YOU'LL keep my secret, internet!) I've been working on comics again, little by little, and I went to Portland's own Stumptown Comics Fest last week, which was nerve racking and then totally inspiring. I'll give you all a more detailed play by play of the fest if there's interest. On my part.

I don't have any to show you yet but I'm picking up speed and I'm very excited about the prospect of finishing a new issue of Life With the Underdog by the summer. Fuck, I'm excited about the prospect of finishing anything that's not a sweater!

Hugs!

Exploration and Stuff

Can I just take a minute to express my gratitude to the English language for the word "stuff"? It's vague but unlike "nothing much" or "whatever" still suggests something concrete. As in:

"Hey Nina, what have you been working on instead of your blog?"

"Oh, stuff."

See? Stuff! Not nothing, but stuff! Love it.

Cakes and I had another anniversary. I could try to remember which one it was but that would require effort and I have too much, um, stuff going on to muster that for such an insignificant tidbit. Not that an anniversary is insignificant, but at this point, I've shared enough of my past with him to feel that he is a part of my life even in relation to what I went through prior to meeting him. So, it feels artificial and weird to stress the boundary between my pre-Cakes and post-Cakes life. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that my life is now pan-Cakes.



Which is not to say that an anniversary is no longer going to be an occasion for induglent celebration. We took an investigatory jaunt through bits of Washington and Oregon, hoping to see some pretty and make some summer camping plans. I consider myself pretty well-traveled, but had still never been to the Northwest before we first visited Portland, and, well, there's a lot of Northwest outside of Portland. Like, right outside. We saw deer



The first of many. Need a better look? My limited photo-editing skills will provide you with a grainy closeup!



Yum, grainy! Grainy deer doesn't sound all that yum, actually.

We saw spectacular mountains



These were somewhere around Mount Ranier, which is surrounded by a National Park which we thought we might be able to drive through. Wait, that's not completely honest. I thought we'd be able to drive through. Cakes thought the roads might be closed due to snow. Can you guess which one of us grew up close to real mountains?



You probably guessed right.

The next day, we were east of the Cascades and the weather was much more welcoming. We saw Lake Billy Chinook, so thoughtfully named:



Though the sun might have contributed to my last month of malaise over lack of such in Portland. I know, I WAS WARNED. By EVERYONE. You can say it. Go ahead!

Lake Billy knows nothing of your judging me.



Lake Billy is very secluded at this time of year, and pretty far from the nearest town, so I was relieved to learn that it has a nearby fire department!



Ha! Pancakes!

The Good Good, Part II

(I learned today that Short Circuit was also filmed in Astoria. This could have escaped my notice because I was always partial to Short Circuit 2, which employed that time-honored movie sequel device of transposing the original movie to New York City.)

Subheading C: Good Knits

I think I once claimed that I don't like to knit socks. With my capacity for self-knowledge increasing with age, I now realize that when I make a dumbass statement like that, I should be prepared to recant it almost immediately.



I started these on the plane back from Hungary and they were my carry-around knitting project since then. I find it utterly enchanting that something I carried around solely to keep my hands busy in waiting rooms and meetings turned into socks.

I take it back. I like to knit socks.

I always feel like I'm learning from my knitting, and I don't mean that I'm learning new knitting maneuvers. (Though, I am.) What I'm learning about is how creative pursuits grow and sustain themselves over time. How to have a healthy relationship with my interests that allows them to grow instead of stifling them. Without even meaning for it to happen, I got deeply involved in this knitting thing, learned a ton of cool techniques, made a ton of cool stuff, and now more than ever, I'm bursting with ideas and confidence for even more challenging projects. My interest in it has only deepened, not waned, and I think that some credit for that is due to the attitude with which I approach knitting. (Some is due to knitting just being that damn cool, but you knew that, right?) So, I've been trying to learn my lessons from it well and I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can apply them to my other creative goals. I do have other goals, you know!

One lesson I learned last week:

I almost never, ever rip out my knitting. I prefer to fudge away mistakes as much as possible. We've all done it, right? You make a mistake in the increases for a sleeve and think, "I'll just write that down and make THE SAME mistake when I knit the other sleeve. They'll still match." Sometimes this works, but usually I get a finished product that I'm not perfectly happy with. Or, maybe I'm loathe to rip out because I don't like the project enough in the first place to spend extra time knitting on it. Point is, I don't rip out.

But..I started my latest sweater project with a lot of excitement, and partway through the body (which is knit in one piece and that was a LOT of knitting) realized that I didn't like where it was going. I'm really into the one-row stripes right now. My plan was to knit this sweater, striping between the gray yarn and the dark one, which has subtle color changes throughout the ball, and to intersperse them randomly with stripes of the bright colors. Like a spectrometer, kind of. But by this point, I realized that I hated it, that the bright colors were obscuring the more subtle color changes, and that the dark colors in turn were muddying the bright ones. I put it down on the nightstand and thought, maybe it will look better in pictures.



It most certainly did NOT.

So, I did something I never do. (Well, after leaving it on the nightstand for a few days, trying to figure out a way to fix it that didn't involve un-knitting anything) I ripped it out and knit it again. And it went much faster the second time, probably because I actually liked it.



I'm working on the sleeves now, and knitting them two-at-a-time, which is one of those cool techniques that I understood IN THEORY and yet had never tried.



I figure that this way, if I make a mistake on one of them, it'll be very easy to duplicate on the other one. (Let's wait and see how THAT one comes back to haunt me.)

And finally,

Subheading D: Good Housekeeping

It took one month of determination, one month of whining about being tired from work, and finally the intrusion of a piano into our living room (thus depriving me of the ability to maintain said living room as my interim office space), but I did it:



The studio, I mean, MY studio



Is finished. I mean, unpacked.



I feel much more at home now.

In other news, Cakes found a rainbow for me!



Yum.

The Good Good, Part 1

Sometimes, I just don't feel like paying attention to my blog. Between working (still love it, very unusual for me but why look a gift job in the spilled milk, is what I always say) and the home life and Pickles in town for 2 weeks, it sometimes feels like I'm not getting anything done. So I'll ignore the blog because I keep promising to feed it awesome stuff I made, and I'm afraid if I try to blog without awesome stuff for it, it might bite off my hand or something. And where does this sort of behavior lead me?

To days like today, when I realize that I'm backed up 2 pages of photostream with pictures of stuff I made that I haven't fed the blog yet. And you, dear, patient readers, get one longass stream of awesome, organized by categorical subheadings. But first, some disappointment.

Subheading A: Disappointment!



Cakes and I went to Astoria weekend before last, which is where The Goonies was filmed. I don't even need to link that do I? For any of you not familiar with the Goonies (that is, had already moved on to plot- and dialogue- having cinema by 1980-something), it's a movie about young boys who have an adventure with a severely developmentally disabled man, some pirate booty, and two females whose sole purpose, plot-wise, is to get kissed during the celebration scene that always follows the climax of an adventure movie. Wait, I'm lying, I think Martha Plimpton also has to play a piano made out of dead pirates bones. Oh, and I'm lying again: the "pretty" one (not Martha Plimpton, unjustly) also has to get kissed by her boyfriend's little brother who is masqueriading as her boyfriend because it's dark and HAHA she is stupid. Am I alone in this appraisal? Is the Goonies a boy thing? Or do I just have a cold heart made of stone?

But I digress.

We crossed the Columbia River into Washington state, via a rather amazing bridge.



First it's tall; then it's short! How I can fail to be entertained by the Goonies, yet be utterly amused FOR 10 WHOLE DAYS (maybe longer) by a bridge that is both tall and short is a dilemma I will leave to my biographers to resolve. But I do wonder sometimes.

We tried to go somewhere called Cape Disappointment, but we're not sure if the incredibly long (and cool) jetty we walked out on was it, and I forgot my camera in the car, so I can't very well ask y'all to fact-check for me. I'm either disappointed or pleased by this, depending on which option has greater comedic juxtaposition potential against the name "Cape Disappointment." You decide!

Subheading B: Good Eats!

The parade of scrumptiously toothsome (see? blog readers make great thesauri(?)) Italian meals continues:



Eggplant parmigiana, before



And after. The after picture is blurry becuase my hands were shaking with anticipation of sweet sweet parmigiana.

This dish required an utterly terrifying amount of olive oil, just so you know. I'm...ashamed to reveal how much. Also scared that the people I served it to will find out and exact some sort of horrible revenge. Eggplant parmigiana: delicious, but deadly!

Moving on. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I had a brilliant stroke of amazing genius a few weeks ago that finally came to fruition on Friday. It was like, one of those moments when all the pieces magically come together to reveal a wonderful, lofty purpose that is far, far greater than the sum of its parts. See for yourself:



I make really good chicken soup (but those of us who were with me last Passover should already know this) and I now have a crockpot (yay marriage) which means I can make really good chicken soup WHILE I AM AT WORK.



I also make amazing pie crust. You might not know this about me, so I will introduce this concept as clearly and concisely as I know how: If there is one recipe I will take to my grave and never share with a single soul, it is my pie crust. That's how good it is. AND! I now have a food processor (you guessed it...marriage!) which means I can make pie crust after a long day of work without crying bitter cranky tears of frustration. Well, LESS tears.

So...you know where I'm going with this, right? Chicken soup pie? Or, as the norms say, Chicken POT pie? But that isn't all.

We got a muffin tin. (yes, marriage.)

I like to eat with my hands. (That one I had before the marriage, thank you very much)

Oh wow.

Signed,



Sealed,



Delivered!



SMALL PIES.



That fork is purely for show.

DINNERPIE!



It's so great to relive the excitement. Great, but exhausting. Further subheadings tomorrow.