Per Mary's Request

The Gingerbread Man

This is the gingerbread man that my mother made for my christmas tree. This one has a "lemon icing" trim and the other one has "vanilla icing" trim. Which means she just used different colors of yarn. :)









The Tree


Here is the decorated tree - as best as you can see. It's a lot of fun with the lights and ornaments. And we had a wonderful party and everyone came and brought the ornaments. It was a VERY full house. :)

Definitions....

Ok - it's lesson time. :)

For those who don't know - most good Yiddish terms are frequently defined in story form, because that conveys the meaning best.

For example. You've all heard the Laverne and Shirley theme song where they sing "Schlamiel, schlamazel, etc etc Incorporated!"

Well - a Schlamiel, he's a clutz. So he's the guy at the dinner who spills the soup. The Schlamazel though, he's harder to define, so the best definition is, he's the guy at the dinner upon whom the soup spills. See?

B'Shairt... (my personal favorite - though my husband calls it B'Sh*t :) ) is Fated. Meant to be. You go shopping and you find this wonderful pair of shoes that you love, but can't afford them. A few weeks later you go back, and not only are the shoes still there, but they only have one pair left, in your size, in your color, AND they are on sale! see? meant to be.

So the definition of chutzpah is basically, Balls. Nerve. Like Oh my god I can't believe they did that! The story goes, that a boy kills his parents. When he is brought to trial, he throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan. That's Chutzpah.

Well folks - we have a NEW definition of Chutzpah. We thought it might be the lady who called my Aunt M from florida to say, that my grandmother promised her one of the Lladro statues from her collection, and that she knows Grandma didn't put it in the will, but she did SAY it and she wants that statue. No... we have an even better one. (one that my friend suggests is deserving of the Golden Fist award. :) )

My Aunt R... you all remember her right? She's the crazy one! She always has dinner with my Aunt M on Friday nights for Shabbos. Well my Aunt M had just had a personal medical procedure done (NOT pleasant, but yes she is JUST fine folks) and was not feeling well. Certainly not up to company. So she actually surprisingly said NO to Aunt R. Told her that she could NOT come over for dinner. They were just going to have leftovers anyway, nothing special.

So a Little while later, Aunt R calls back to say she has been invited for dinner over at Mouse's house for Shabbos. So Aunt M is very happy, "see, she can land right on her feet and still have company etc." Well, apparently Aunt R wasn't invited, she invited herself.

To make it worse, she didn't tell Mouse that she was inviting herself. So she shows up at Mouse's house, and it's a little dark. She rings and rings, and FINALLY someone answers the door. Apparently they weren't having dinner. They were all sick and in bed. So she goes into the house, and... here is the definition of chutzpah... you ready?


Not only did she invite herself to someone's house, without telling them she was doing so mind you, not only did she get them out of sick bed to let her in, but she got them out of sick bed and got them to actually COOK french toast for her to have for Shabbos dinner since she was already there!

Now that my friends, that is TRULY an impressive feat.

Anyone want some Snow Blades?

So the verdict from the doctor is - no more skiing. No more ice skating. No more rollerskating. (sigh) I probably won't pay attention to ALL Of it, but I'm going to give up the skiing at this point.
Oh well - so I'll see if I can sell them for a reasonable amount of money. My ice skates were getting too small for me anyways and i haven't seen them in about 3 years so I'm not going to worry about them for now.

They took a NICE big chunk of miniscus. Unfortunately they weren't able to save it, though they tried. They did the whole repair and then at the end of the surgery the whole thing just fell apart and they had to remove the tear as opposed to fix it. So I will have to continue to baby the knee or I will be likely to get an arthritic knee that much earlier in my life. As a friend of mine says, it's a catch 22. You are overweight so they want you to excercise but you are very limited in the exercise you can do C'est la vie.

Not that much else going on here. Working on some knitting projects and I finished up 5 bunnies over the weekend and shipped most of them out. There some ALIT sukastar stuff going on but it's convoluted and confusing and I'm not sure I've got the details straight enough to write about them yet - so I'll have to hold off for now. I promise some soon.

Laters!

Post - OP

Well here i am. Post op. :) Knee surgery done and over with. YAY!!! i can actually straighten my leg again which is a lovely thing.

So the doctors went in, and they TRIED to fix the miniscus. Unfortunately, every time they tacked it together and then moved my knee, it just came right apart again. So they ended up just doing the trim which the doctor was happier with anyway. This way I don't really need to go through the whole ACL reconstruction which was not something i was really looking forward too.

So i've been walking around today without my crutches. Not too bad- though right now i'm in bed so I can have my leg up for a while. Working from home for the next week at least and then i'll be back in the office next week most likely. Which is good since the boss' are coming for a visit. :)

i've been doing some knitting. Got the most AWESOME! knitting needles i've ever used. They are Denise needles. They are a circular needle kit, that is just great. For $50 you get sizes 5-15, plus various lengths of needles, end caps, and connectors to make longer needles. You can order sizes 17 and 19 to add to your kit, and also longer cables if you need it. (and yes i already have a pair of 17 and 19's and a 30" cable on their way to my house.) Mom started using them, and has currently adopted my size 15's, and will return them in 2 weeks at my party. At which point i'm sure she will have already purchased a set of the needles for herself. :) They are really nifty. IT's great to have everything organized into one kit, and no worries about whether or not you have the right size needles. Just get it from the kit. If you are using that set for a project, well just take off the needles and put end caps on the cable to hold your work on until you are ready to go back to it. You can even put a different size needle on each side of the cable, so you can knit for different textures. :) I really liked some of the other needles, like the Addi turbos. Which means i probably would have loved the quickpick needles too (which are also a kit like the denise) but the problem is, what makes them SOOO nice and quick? They have a nickel coating. I'm allergic to nickle, so the palm of my hand would break out while i was knitting. (sigh) But the denise ones are plastic and work so very nicely. :) here is a picture of the "chain link" pattern i stumbled upon by mistake.


I'm knitting with size 10.5's with a cotton worsted weight yarn that's coming out really nicely. I also got some really cool alpaca yarn that i was playing with but am not sure what i really want to do with it yet. Trying to make some ornaments as well for our new Chrismachanukwanzika foliage... :)

our party is actually a decorate our first foliage party - so hopefully we'll get a lot of fun ornaments for the holiday season - many of which will hopefully be non breakable so the doggie tails don't knock them all off. :) I guess the fragile ones will go on top.

There isn't a whole lot else going on - i've sewn together 5 bunnies. I did them in a 5.5 hour marathon last night. That included putting on fusible interfacing to make the seams more sturdy and putting cotton batting in the ears to give them a little more "body" :) So they are sewn. Now I need to spend another 4 or 5 hours, stuffing them, sewing up their back seams by hand and then embroidering faces on them. The temptation to draw faces with a sharpie is high, but the samples they all saw were embroidered so I guess it's only fair that i embroider. One of them is the bunny to go with the blanket i'm making for my new Niece in law. :) She was born the tuesday before thanksgiving. Course we didn't find out until that saturday night. M called his brother to see how things were going and P answered "well, not too bad considering. But that's to be expected." M asked what, and P goes "Mom didn't tell you?" apparently he figured their mom would call us, where as M's mom figured that she didn't want to spoil P's news. So we found out a few days later. Oh well.

and that's my story - the gimp is now signing out.... :)