So, I have this day job, you see. One that takes up lots of my time and prevents me from knitting. One that takes up the majority of day and lots of my mental energy. But it also funds my knitting lifestyle and there are plenty o’ perks there. And, I love the peeps.

Today, I launched a refresh (don’t say redesign) of our corporate site. We’ve been actively working on this for over a year and a half. And there were about six months before that of research and RFP’s and trying to figure out what we want.

It’s now live. Go look at it (if you know where I work). Let me know if there are any bugs, but in the meantime, I want to sleep.

And knit, if I remember how.

Thank you to Dan for this laugh this morning.

You go, McCain! Makes me respect Romney ever so slightly.

Dan, of course, would be another one of the guys I’d hope to meet at the Men’s Spring Knitting Retreat in May.

Now, back to writing my self-evaluation for work. If only I could write, “Work eats into my knitting time.” But I don’t think that that would go over too well.

… or is it, Back to Zero?

I spent last night going through my Bloglines. Over 1000 entries of blogs I’ve meant to read, sitting there, collecting pixelated dust. Via scanning and reading and clicking and even a few comments left, I’m all cleaned out. We’ll see how long it takes for them to pile up again. I haven’t even touched MWK or Ravelry…

While going through everything, I saw Queer Joe’s mention of an impromptu men’s knitting retreat in upstate NY this Spring.

Am I the last to know, Mike? This is what happens when you don’t keep up with your online life!

Reading about Easton Mountain, where it will take place, I recognized a high school friend as one of the residents there and another friend is on the board that runs the place!

I don’t think I have a choice. I’ve got the vacation time. Any one else thinking about it? I’d love to meet you fellas who live on the other side of the country.

With the crazy storms hitting Northern California, I left work early on Friday, for fear of getting stuck in Berkeley if the Bay Bridge was closed. Instead of pulling out the laptop and writing the reviews that are already overdue, I ran to the store to buy fixin’s for pea soup.

I always intend to make soups and stews, but never get around to it. During my trip to my parents’ house over the holidays, I hopped into the kitchen with my mom and made a bucket of pea soup and a tub of vegetarian chili. Cooking with her was the highlight of my time with them. (A close second was devouring EZ’s Knitting Without Tears—who wants to make a hybrid sweater with a shirt yoke?)

And what better to go with warm bowls of love? Fresh-baked bread! Because the pea soup was going to be ready that night, I couldn’t rely on the tried and true no-knead loaves. So, I tried my hand at baking my own pita bread. (Pictured are the leftovers on Saturday, with the two no-knead loaves I mixed up to sit that night.)

Now, I’m all for process and the meditative quality of kneading, but rolling out individual circles takes forever, when you’re used to barely touching your dough. Also, by baking them in the oven, instead of a on a griddle, they puffed up tremendously. More like whole wheat turnovers filled with air than warm, soft blankets. Still, ’twas delicious.

This morning we cut into the loaf on the right, made with steel-cut oats. I found a bunch of recipes for no-knead variations at Breadtopia.com. Much denser and moister than plain, old boules. It will taste great tonight with the chili tonight. The kidney beans are already soaking.

Thank you, Mom, for being my inspiration in the kitchen. I wish we had more time to cook (and knit) together. You don’t look a day out of Girl Scouts! (more gorgeous photos of her from the ’60s, scanned into my flickr account, along with some embarrassingly blond baby pictures of me)

And, a (belated) happy birthday here on the blog! (Yes, I called her yesterday, day-of her birthday!)

If any of y’all want to send her a greetings: momannh [at] aol [dot] com.

Here’s our daily bread, freshly baked for the new year. It’s hissing, moaning and cracking on the stove, cooling as I type this.

Perhaps not daily, I’ll do my best to share a little of my breads and other foibles more frequently, hopefully taking pictures all the while.

I’m not a big resolution guy, but I hope 2008 contains many more loaves like this, lots of other handmade things, and sharing them with people I love.

Let’s make it a great one, kids!

What is that compels us to collect evidence of past experience? Do we not trust our our feeble memories? Time robs us of yesterday, while firmly shoving us toward tomorrow.

Being here at my parents’ home in PA, a house I’ve never lived in and only visited a handful of times over the past five years, takes me far away from my West Coast present. Rifling through mildewy boxes of my childhood momentos allows flickers of forgotten time: that Clowns for Christ weekend, those high school SAT and AP test scores, the notes from my fifth grade girlfriend and myriad Boy Scout badges and patches.

I’m surrounded by everything they’ve collected in their years together. The stuff that survived the 10 moves I made with them during my first 18 years has now been joined with new relics of three other moves. What’s going to survive this next one, as they prepare to go to western New York next week?

Watching my dad sort through tons (literally) of magazines and books—theology and religion, magic, writing, origami, role-playing games, science fiction and fantasy, storytelling, cycling—shows me how defined he is by his pursuit of knowledge, or at least the acquisition thereof. Seeing my mom wade through recipes, both handwritten and torn-out from magazines, underlined her connection to people and places across time through food. Some are tried and true (with stains to prove it), and others just symbols of hope for a future sidedish, culinary adventure or inspiration for another idea.

For my crap, it’s all being thrown away, even the seven years of art school drawings and paintings. At least the student loans are paid off. What good would these objects serve me now? Back in San Francisco, they’d just sit in storage, never to be seen until a move or a cleaning purge. Their demise is inevitable.

If I had time, I’d take a picture of every item and write a little bit about where and when it was aquired, a memory blog of sorts. Better yet, I could start by capturing everything that comes into my life right now, so I wouldn’t have to look back and think and wonder what I’m forgetting.

But that would be a fruitless and endless practice. One that would get in the way of they real day-to-day of living. Besides, I’ve never organized any of my photos and I’ll be darned if I start scrapbooking now. I’d focus on the what’s happening of right now, of the bread I baked for dinner and the pea soup I made with my mom.

There’s so much of my own past that I want to hold onto, even seek out and find those long-lost friends. And to do that means a little less time at work and more time creating new memories with people I love. (A New Year’s resolution, perhaps?)

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the rare gem the pops onto my radar screen, like this clipping from the Uniontown, PA paper’s article on the changing lives of minister’s wives. I may no longer have that towheaded mop-top or that killer bike race tanktop, but I know that once I did, and it made me smile.

It’s the day after, and I haven’t been too good about spreading the holiday cheer here. Just a lot of dog photos.

The past few weeks have seen three pairs of Ysolda’s garter stitch mitts, inspired by this photo by Christina. Two got away without photos, as did one of the two Noro K1P1 striped scarves I’ve spat out since Thanksgiving, as inspired by Jared. (However, mine alternated a solid with the Noro, as I worked through yarn already owned.) Perhaps a picture will appear here after I charge the battery to the lovely camera I received, thanks to the man (his photo above, my assisting and animal handling).

I hope you and yours have had a lovely December, whether you celebrated yesterday, earlier in the month or on the solstice. I’m headed to Pennsylvania tonight to help my parents pack up their house for the next four days. If anyone’s going to be in the vicinity of Bedford or Harrisburg, that’s where you’ll find me.

Just pray that there’s no bad weather to prevent my 12/31 flight home, via DC.

This is how my weekend ended. In the gaze of a sweet little puppy, while having dinner at Lisa’s house. This little bambino who looks like bambi is a fourth of Janie Sparkles’ size and twice as eager to snuggle. (and, yes, that’s a cameraphone picture!)

It was the perfect end to a super-duper busy weekend, between swim practice, hanging out with Mike (where this happened… more on that later), a swim team holiday party, cooking a bunch of cabbage and kale, a drive-by pop-in to Sabrina of KnitKnit’s book signing put on by Sile of Knit One One fame.

I can tell it’s the holidays, as almost every night there’s a party or a concert or a project to do. If only my day job would let up and allow me to get my social on… or at least return to knitting.

Pardon my blog nap.

Work’s been exhausting lately, so nothing much left over to devote to writing or knitting. It may be this way through the end of the year…

However, I wanted to say a great big “thank you” to Vickie Howell for the mention on her podcast, CRL: Craft | Rock | Love.

I’ll write more when I wake up from my long winter nap.

Be cool for just $10. Or make your friends cool. Or, as my mom suggested, make your friends’ kids really, really cool.

Threadless is having a sale.