I want Malabrigo!

Sometimes I am very spoiled.

It usually stems from the desire to knit something and to knit that something right at the moment the whim strikes me.

I want, more than anything in the world, to knit something (anything, really) with the new Malabrigo yarn at the Shuttle Shop in Warsaw.

As a rule, I don't buy yarn when I have no plan for it. I must have a pattern or at least an idea of a pattern before I buy sweater yarn. I must have sock patterns in my Queue on Ravelry before I will allow myself to buy sock yarn (okay, that is just a lie. I pretend that's what I do). Today, when I dropped by the Shuttle Shop, I saw the Malabrigo yarn for the first time, felt it, and decided I must have some.

However, I have no idea of what to use it for. So I resisted temptation. I looked at the pretty yellow and reminded myself it would be idiotic to buy it, as I look hideous in yellow, like Emily Dickenson right before she dropped dead. At least, what I imagine she must have looked like before death. And we're talking the real photo of her, not the one her sister retouched to make her prettier. In short, I look pale, sickly, and with the dark circles under my eyes and my dark brown hair longer than it has ever been before, I do look like I have slid out of my own casket before leaving the house. Trust me, fans of Stephanie Meyer, if people really looked like the vampires she describes, they would look like me and that ain't pretty. You can see the blood vessels right through my pasty skin, and that makes me look tinged with blue. Not good. Not even a little.

Tan, you ask? My skin doesn't tan. It turns yellow. Which, when combined with the blue tinge, makes my coloring vary from yellow to sick green. Mmmm. That's bringin' sexy back. I long to fly to England every summer, to be with my own kind. In England, I wasn't the palest person at the beach. That feels good.

But I digress. The fact was, the yarn I wanted had no purpose, so I left it on the shelf instead of letting it sit in the yarn bowl (where pretty unknit yarn lives to liven up my room).

The store is supposed to have Malabrigo sock yarn, at a time that remains unspecified and at the whim of the UPS or Fed-Ex guy. I want that yarn. I have decided that is the yarn for me. I have a billion sock pattern queued. Fine, a little less than that, but a lot. And I must knit them with the Malabrigo, in a pretty semi-solid that will work for the Digitessa, because I think I have my problem with that figured out, finally.

So it must come, and it must come soon. I cannot live another week without it. I need it, like drug addicts need their crack. I must have that sock yarn, wound into a little ball of happiness and waiting for me to cast on.

I'm a little obsessive.

I will now distract you from my oddities with this:





It is a hat I knit for our recent cold spell.





See, now doesn't that just make you forget all the freakish things I just said? The kind of things that make you want to call a judge and get me declared non compis mentis so you can have me committed against my will? I hope so. Although, the idea of sitting around in a sunny dayroom, knitting with wooden needles while supervised so I don't harm myself or others sounds kind of nice.

I Got Nothing

Yep...

Huh.

I made a goal a month or so ago to write a blog every day, and take the weekends off. Last weekend, I was so filled with ideas that I wrote on Saturday and Sunday too. So today I will share a series of unconnected events that have thus far failed to mesh into a cohesive idea or narrative format.

Today, Mom took Darcy for a walk, got dizzy, and blacked out several times on her way back home. She abandoned her jacket in a tree by the creek because it was too heavy, and thought about leaving her shoes as well. Now, she's fine. What do you call that?

Dad spent the evening playing his whistle in his room. The phone rang, and though he was feet from it, he failed to answer it. This may be because he is deaf. DEAF! (I shouted that last one so he could hear me.) I walked into Paul's room, which hasn't has any overhead light since the bulbs burnt out over a year ago. Mom wouldn't change them, because Paul can reach the bulbs from the bed, and she has to drag in a step ladder and drag it back out. Turns out Dad is a lot like Paul, because when HIS call was over, he left the phone on the floor behind a chair in the dark so others would have to struggle repeatedly for each call. Thanks.

I went to the grocery store today with a list. Then I called to see if we needed hot dog buns. After that, Dad called me back to edit the list, and I ended up walking around the Walmart grocery section three or four times, switching the kind of chips I was buying to the kind he likes, and adding in some relish, because "he didn't have enough." Curse his name. Then I drove home, and he ate his hot dogs like a duck, swallowing them in three bites without chewing. Real attractive.

Has anyone else noticed how Valentine's Day has degraded from the meaningless greeting-card holiday it once was and become solely about sex? Television talk shows are almost exclusively featuring people talking about sex, how they have it, with who, with what, and why they hate the people they used to have it with. The infamous fourth hour of the Today Show with Hoda and Kathie Lee (shudder) is enough to make me go deaf on a good day, but today, it almost made me go blind. They featured a pair of underwear designed to have two occupants. The box this garment came in had a picture of its intended use. Yep. Thanks for that. Then, to make matters worse, Kathie Lee (that harpy, spawned of Regis' evil) took them out of their containment and announced that they had been previously worn. She then exposed the inner crotch of the panties to the camera and repeated her assertion, accusing a member of the crew of having done so. There are reasons every day that the two of them should be loaded onto a rocket by NASA scientists and blasted into the sun, but NASA doesn't take my phone calls anymore.

I had to rip out the gusset of my Digitessa practice sock because I think I have the issue I had with the first attempt figured out. I think a bit of clarification could have been left out of the pattern...leading to my stupid mistake. Mistakes. My stupid, repetitive mistakes.

And there you go. My day. Wow.

This is fantastic!

I was reading Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's Twitter posts (this is the Yarn Harlot for all you non-knitting Muggles) and I saw that she mentioned a certain web page.

It was this one: What is Stephen Harper Reading. Now, if you are not Canadian or choose not to concern yourself with the politics of surrounding countries (that's a mistake, Mexico's chaotic drug war is crossing our border and has already caused at least one kidnapping within our country, not to mention what happens to people in Mexico, which is much worse). Canada's Prime Minister, although maybe not for much longer, is Stephen Harper.

The page I linked to is managed by an author who sends Mr. Harper a book every two weeks. The books are selected for their ability to impart a sense of peace on the reader, with the hope that reading them will bring him stillness. For good reason, if you know anything about Mr. Harper and his positions (especially regarding the arts, which got my favorite knitting celebrity in a tither).

The reading list alone is amazing, I recommend most of the books on it (the ones I don't I haven't read--yet).

Yann Martel started the web page, selecting each book and writing a note and an inscription before sending them off to the Prime Minister. In case you don't know, Martel wrote The Life of Pi--which one the Booker Prize (That is a big deal). I will let him explain his motivation; I hope you all read it.

The point of this post; though, is not to congratulate Yann Martel for the awesome reading list, nor to point a finger at any political figure beyond the borders of the USA--we have had our own massive problems of late in that department.

My point is to ask: "Why didn't someone try that with President George W. Bush?"

So I typed the question, "What is George W. Bush Reading" into Google.

I found many references to an interview Karl Rove gave, describing the former president's reading habits. However, I didn't find any projects like Martel's.

I wondered why. President Bush was mocked, deservedly, for his demeanor. Quotes taken from his speeches were made into "Bushisms" and published, repeatedly. He was called uninformed, uneducated. And that was just by me. Then it hit me. There were several good reasons no one tried to give him a reading list. He is married to a (former) librarian. Laura Bush could have given him any number of good books. Alternately, Cheney would have tried to ban any controversial/against message books that crossed the desk of the president. I presume. And he already had one. At least in 2006.

No matter what Bush read or didn't read during his time in the White House, he stayed the same man. Meaning either his book list wasn't one that led to self-improvement, or his books confirmed his core belief system.

When we read, no matter what our book choices are, we ought to keep an open mind, approach each novel with the goal of hearing the author's message and learning what we can from it. This was why I read the Twilight series even though I wanted to tear my eyes out through all four novels. I learned how to write a good hook from those novels. I also learned that, if you want to read Wuthering Heights, you should just read it. Don't buy a series of novels that are disguised as a different story but actually are, simply, longer versions of Wuthering Heights. With more vampires. And werewolves.

I'm sorry no one thought to provide our former president with good, insightful books. Even if nothing he read changed him or showed him the value of the arts in our country, it would have been a nice way to reach out to someone so many flaming liberal artists (that would be me, again) disagreed with so passionately.

I've read through this post again and have to say, it could have been planned better. Usually I try to end with a bit of a conclusion. But there isn't one, in this case. Just a recommendation: Read a good book, once and a while. Put down the magazines and read a good book. There is a table in every large bookstore marked "noteworthy paperbacks." Just grab something that looks interesting and give it a try. You might not like what you read but try to keep an open mind. Look at how the writer composes his sentences. Look at descriptions, imagery. Try to picture each character in your mind. Examine their similarities and differences to other characters, and how they grow through the book. And as you turn the last pages, think about the why behind the novel. What was the reason the author sat down to write the story he/she wrote.

Then, when someone talks about slashing library budgets, taking books out of school libraries, or cutting funding for the arts, ask yourself if your favorite book could have been written without those grants. Ask if you would be the same if you hadn't been able to go to a library as a child. Ask what would happen to you, how your life would change, if you couldn't afford to buy books. Ask if the world we live in would be improved, really improved, if the arts were abandoned the way so many politicians advocate in times of economic turmoil.

Oh well, thanks for listening.

An Unorthodox Knit Night

When Rachael told me about the group of knitters that meets at our local coffee shop on Tuesdays, I was thrilled (even more thrilled to find out Rachael followed my blog...). So when Tuesday rolled around, I set the VCR to tape Fringe, because I am an obsessive fan, and left the house.

I didn't know what it would be like. I freak out a little when meeting new people, and I had almost talked myself out of going in the first place. But I talked to Rachael on Ravelry and she said she would try to make it, so I decided it would be worth dealing with the nerves.

I arrived early-ish. So I bought a hot chocolate, since I love their hot chocolate at KenapocoMocha, and I sat down with my knitting.

I had brought a new project that was knit two, purl two ribbing so that I could enjoy myself or freak out and not destroy a project I really care about, like my practice Digitessa sock. The practice Digitessa is something I started when I discovered I wouldn't have enough yarn for a full pair and thought that I would use up the remaining chunk of nasty sock yarn I had left over from an unfortunate purchase back when I knew nothing about sock knitting. It is truly nasty, although a pretty color, and it feels like woolen sandpaper.

The new project was the Swirling Gauntlets (you can see them here on Ravelry). They are a relatively simple knit I think might make my life a bit easier by keeping my hands from cramping up as I knit when they get too cold. My house gets chilly sometimes.

So I sat down and started my ribbing, then 7:15 came along and I thought, no one else is coming. I didn't care, I love the coffee shop, and I love having Internet that goes fast enough for me to upgrade Windows Vista and actually enjoy Ravelry instead of wrestling with it to get a pattern.

I resolved to learn Portuguese, and then I looked up and saw Rachael! I met Rachael at MC, and we bonded over a love of Sci-Fi and knitting; a few years ago we went here together (that's us, right there!) and on other knitting pilgrimages since, because that's how we knitters roll. Yeah. I used rap lingo. I can do that.

We rehashed many of our knitting projects since we had last met, she showed me her February Lady sweater, and we stayed until the shop closed.

And since I saw Rachael, I remembered that I had failed to do something rather important during the months that I was without a digital camera altogether. I forgot to share pictures of one of Rachael's designs.

So, this morning, I broke out the tri-pod, learned to set the timer on my camera, and posed for some pictures.

Here are her Coralline Socks:




I used Koigu KPPPM in their PG02132 colorway, which is a variegated orange with some purple and green. I thought it looked like coral my brother had seen on his Bahamas trip, when he went to look at sea snails for fun and profit. Well. Not so much profit. He counted conch for a class at MC.

In case you were wondering where my pasty, pale, naked white legs are, don't worry. There right there, underneath the dark knee socks I put on to accent the Coralline socks. I know you miss seeing the ethereal glow of my Anglo-Saxon skin, but what can I do? A girl has to show off lace patterns sometimes.




I love the socks, I love the pattern. So here they are, even if the pictures had to wait until I got a new digital camera for Christmas.




Oh, you were wondering why I ended up needing a new camera? (Try to ignore my bum up there.)

My camera had it's battery bricked when I went to Spain and fried it on different voltage when my converter died. At first it held a charge for a few hours at a time, then only about three minutes. I tried to get a new lithium battery, but the exact size and shape and voltage was no longer available through the camera company. So the camera was worthless, and still is in its drawer, collecting dust.

Dad then took the other digital camera to a mountain in Guatemala, then to Colorado, then to the Church of the Brethren's annual conference, then to a series of other places I have forgotten because he never told me where he was going in the first place. Other people who go to our church would say, "hey, is your dad coming home from Place X soon?" And I would stare at them, thinking, "wow, my dad went to Place X? I thought he was just working extra late!"

I really liked my old camera. It was a Nikon Coolpix, and it must have been one of the first digital ones. The lens would flip around to face you if you wanted it to, so I could pose for pictures with it on a tri-pod and know where my mark should be.

This one is good too, it is a Canon Powershot A1000IS. It is much fancier than the old camera. The old camera had less than half as many mega pixels than this one does. And this has an image stabilizer, which does away with my need for a tri-pod in the first place.

I have Shaky Hand Syndrome. Self-diagnosed. My doctor (actually several of them) calls it a tremor. I like my name for it better. It makes me sound less like a geriatric patient.

Anyway, getting the new camera has awarded me with the novel opportunity of travelling with a camera again, allowing me to take many, many pictures of corpses in North Manchester (I saw it yesterday shoved into a garbage bag as if that made it better, having a bloody torso in a garbage bag than out in the open. It just makes it look like a cover-up.), the joy of knitting, and my daily life. Not to mention fancy socks.

What is wrong with me anyway?

I noticed it last week.

In my family, passed down from my Polish-American grandfather, come the gnarly fingers. It has cursed my mother as well as my grandpa, and it appears prior to arthritis that is, from their reports, quite painful. I have always hoped that the gnarly finger gene passed me by. I have slender fingers. They are rather nice, if unmanicured, and I would like them to stay that way.

I am slightly obsessive, and I think--know--my friends will tell you (or my family at least) that I am actually more than slightly obsessive. Okay, I am very obsessive. An obsessive knitter who keeps all her stitch markers in the same place, must use the same size, shape, and color stitch markers for the same project, and if there aren't enough little purple holders, I will forgo them entirely and just keep track in my head. No matter if that means I have to rip rows back more than the average knitter with their mis-matched markers. I also need to put groceries on the belt neatly, arranged by what is cold and what is room temperature, then by size and shape. That is so that I know that the right things go in the right bags, and I can keep track of them. This is why I do self-check out. I get stared at less.

This freakish turn of my personality became evident yet again when, while knitting, I looked down and noticed a little swelling above the distal joint of my middle finger (no, it did not come from obscene hand gestures). I lean my right needle against this portion of my finger as I knit. And, because I am a tight knitter, with, what Elizabeth Zimmerman would say, a lot of tension, I have created my own deformity. I am a freak, with gnarly finger(s) in the making.

My solution, because knitting is so imperative and the way I knit cannot be changed (I have tried) has been to apply a band-aid over the offending part of my finger, with the hope that I will protect my bone from damage. I did this when writing caused a similar bump years ago, and the bump went away.

Or did it?

I began to wonder days ago, if this is the same bump. This was confirmed through this week, as I noticed how often that part of the finger is used through my day. I use it to balance my fork. I use it to hold my pencil or pen. I use it far too often. That assertion was again confirmed with my discovery of a corresponding callus above the bump (lump? Can finger deformities kill a person?).

And then I discovered the true cause of my problems.

The circular knitting needle.

I have begun, with the need to knit La Digitessa, Spina Di Pesce, and the Firestarter, to use metal knitting needles for the first time in my life. Metal doesn't give, at all. Not even a little bit.

We all know from my constant complaints (at least on this side of the blog) that I bend double pointed needles when I knit with them. I snap size ones after a few months of constant use. My size twos develop a curve. I looked at my size sevens the other day and saw that they too have a curve. I never use them. How is that possible?

Wood can curve. Stainless steel? Not so much.

I determined this morning that only by setting aside my circular ways and getting off the Addi for good can I cure my freakish problem, which is bound to repel men and cause me to die old and alone, covered in wool fragments and cat hair.

So, I tried to knit on La Digitessa with wooden double points.

And it doesn't work.

There is a reason it was written for circular needles. That is what works. Mom let me know that her size one or two wooden Addis had the cable snap off where the metal clamped it to the wood. The metal creates a narrower portion of the needle, and on a tiny wimpy sized needle, it can cause problems for knitters who are abusive. If my mother is an abusive and tight knitter, tight enough to damage needles, than I am a violent, brutal, cruel knitter. I would break those needles faster than my Brittany size ones and I snapped two of those in 24 hours.

So this blog entry is my way of kissing my pretty hands goodbye. I am giving them up for something I love more than them. I give them up for knitting.

At the KenapocoMocha

Paul needed help with his class schedule for the spring, and I used the opportunity to swing by the coffee shop to write today. The KenapocoMocha is a relatively new addition to North Manchester, which means that it is less than twenty years old, and in this case much less, because it wasn't even open when I was a student at MC.

It's a neat place, and not just because it's run by the former campus pastor and his wife (they are fun people). They feature a different artist as eye candy every time I come in, with the whole Victorian interior dripping with watercolors, weavings, and sketches.

Here is some art:

My hot chocolate in the midst of its creation. Yum.

This was one of those pictures that just seems to happen. I was initially trying to get a shot of the front counter, and the barista walked around the corner just as I took a picture, ending up right there, pouring steamed milk like she'd been there all along. I am fond of this picture.

Here is a bit more:




I love super-tall old Victorian windows. I can just picture standing in front of one and staring across the city, watching for someone. I was born in the wrong era. Or maybe I've just read The Woman in White one too many times and am just on permanent lookout for Count Fosco and his creepy white mice. Probably the latter.

Mom is fixing Paul's schedule, since she is the master of scheduling. No one else could better ensure that he will graduate when he ought. Not the dean, not his advisor, not even divine intervention could better write that last semester's schedule for Paul.

Because Jen will use this as an opportunity to laugh at Poor Paulie, I will speak again in his defense: He has all the classes he needs and wants only some interesting electives. He could take boring classes or even the ones he has set already, all he wants is to see if he can fit in something more entertaining, and I won't help him anymore because he's depressing when he works on things like this. I told him he was on his own last spring, when he shot down every idea I had then got mopey, forcing me to hang up my phone and put it on silent and resulting in his needing help now. Kind of like some of your relationships.

There. I have done my sisterly duty of defending my little brother.

I spent last night working on the little hearts until my fingers cramped up. Now I have three fronts and backs ready for sewing into three 3D hearts, and I looked at them this morning and thought: these are going to be ugly as sin.

I'm going to sew one up and stuff it, then if it is nasty, I will frog the lot and give up. I thought they were cute on Ravelry. But if they are going to look like kidneys, not hearts, I give. No one wants a Valentine's Day Kidney.

That's the nastiest organ, too. Look inside one sometime, I have, and eww. I know we need them to live, but I was creeped out for a week afterward just thinking that I had two kidneys inside me.

Just another weird moment in Laura's life, chronicled for all to see. Enjoy. Pull up a chair, I have a million stories just like it.

Saturday night in the city

Oh, wait.

Indiana doesn't have cities.

I went to Jennifer's apartment Saturday night, because that's what I do when there's nothing else for us to do on the weekend, which means that's what we do every weekend.

She mentioned that if she could decide what I did for a living, it would be this. Writing semi-amusing blogs or columns that I dispersed to various people in exchange for tons of money, enough to let me go to Europe whenever I wanted.

What Jennifer fails to realize is that she is the only person reading this blog, most days. Certainly she is the only person I know who reads it on a regular basis, and definitely the only person who talks about it with me later.

That makes me wonder...why do I write these when I could just call Jennifer and tell her what I have to say?

And the answer to that question is this: I am funnier on paper (or computer screen).

So, if you're reading this and not my friend Jennifer, welcome to the blog. If you're reading this and are Jennifer, thank you for giving my writing purpose. If not for you, I may as well be sitting in my kitchen melting plastic in the microwave instead of writing these blogs every day.

But it is for you others that I write this post. It seems to me that other people, City Folk, might not realize how boring a night in the country can be for a twenty-something pair of single girls. So I will enlighten you.

8:00 p.m. Laura arrives in "town" after having called ahead to the Chinese place in town, pre-ordering her food in advance of arriving in town by pressing a button on her cell phone, because she has the restaurant on speed-dial. Birdie, the owner of the restaurant, doesn't take Laura's name because she recognizes Laura's voice on the phone and because there are never multiple identical to-go orders at any given time.

8:05-8:10 p.m. Laura pays for her food and makes small talk with Birdie.

8:11 p.m. Laura arrives at Jennifer's apartment, peels off multiple layers of winter wear (mostly hand-knits) and puts her food on a plate. Jennifer has already eaten. Both sit down to watch an early episode of The Andy Griffith Show. They ponder which episode it is, then accurately predict the story-line even though neither had seen the episode before. Then they wait to see how right they are.

8:18 p.m. Laura finishes eating her Chinese food, using chopsticks, despite the fact that the order of food covers the extra-large dinner plate completely and is still piled pretty high. She comments to Jennifer that she should not have eaten that much and that she shouldn't eat anything else during the evening, repeatedly.

8:19 p.m. Laura washes her dish. While she does so, the identity of the mysterious stranger in the episode of Andy Griffith is revealed. Jennifer, sitting in the room in front of the television, fails to notice this. She then asks Laura as Laura re-enters the room. Laura tells Jennifer she did not hear. Both are disappointed.

8:25 p.m. The two finish the episode of classic television, then turn to their laptops. Laura finishes uploading pictures and posting them to her blog. Then she publishes it (Note: the blog says it was published at five, but that is by another time zone. After all the changes we've had in Indiana over the past few years, I really have no idea what time zone I live in, so I never changed it from the default).

8:35 p.m. Jennifer puts in a disc from the first season of Sex in the City, which is the closest to a happenin' social life either one of us will ever get. She then mutes the television a few minutes in so that we can listen to Hugh Jackman sing. Jennifer is clearly disappointed to find that he is a tenor, and is vocal on the subject.

8:47 p.m. Jennifer finds a picture of Hugh Jackman for her desktop background. She was inspired to do so by Laura's desktop background which is of a sweater Laura wants to knit from Criminal Minds. Laura took a screenshot of the sweater in order to have it as a background, and she tells Jennifer this as she tries to pretend it isn't pathetic to have a sweater as a desktop background and not a hot guy. Although the guy wearing the sweater was a model before he became an actor, and is rather attractive. So Laura supposed that it wouldn't be pathetic to have it as a desktop background if she didn't mention repeatedly that the picture is there because of the sweater and not the guy. Even though that is the truth.

9:30 p.m. After watching multiple episodes of Sex in the City, Laura decides that, because Culvers will close in approximately a half-hour, it is imperative that the two young women leave the apartment in order to purchase custard.

9:42 p.m. Jennifer and Laura buy custard, and Jennifer buys broccoli cheese soup, because broccoli cheese soup goes so well with mint chocolate explosion custard. Laura comments on this. Then the two begin to laugh hysterically while discussing the semi-attractive guy who works in the electronics department at Walmart, who Jennifer smiled at a few days earlier only to find later that she had something black stuck in-between her front teeth. It was certainly there during the smile, she surmised. The two then laugh hysterically at Laura's mother discovering porn at Dicks.com, and again at Laura's grandparent's house.

9:50 p.m.-11:00 p.m. The two consume their food, Laura repeats her assertion that she should eat nothing else that day. This time she actually doesn't. They also watch many, many episodes of Sex in the City. They ponder what year the show began, and presume that it must have been in the 90's. Laura then decides she must go home.

11:05-11:15 p.m. Laura goes to Walmart, although not to seek out the semi-attractive electronics salesman. She buys dish soap and feminine hygiene products. Then she leaves, although not without being hit on by several teenage boys. This happens every time Laura enters a Walmart alone after dark, and she always finds it humiliating.

11:16 p.m. Laura begins the drive home, hoping to wash off the shame of being hit on by the obviously stoned teenage boys by turning on the radio and cranking up the volume. However, the horrible music from the eighties only reminds Laura how much older she is than the obviously stoned and visually impaired teenage or pre-teen boys, who shouldn't have been let into a Walmart after dark or let loose from their parents in order to hit on poor unsuspecting young women driven out to Walmart only because she is allergic to the only dish soap in her house, meaning she could wash no dishes.

11:46 p.m. Laura arrives home. She talks to her mother and shows her the pictures of the bloody torso in North Manchester.



Then she condoles with her mother about the porn incident. Both express regret that the nice meat market they like in Elkhart is no longer in the same location, so Laura's mother could not purchase the apple sausages they wanted.

12:17 a.m. Laura goes to sleep, after watching a M.A.S.H. episode. She reflects that they don't make TV like that anymore, not noticing until the next day at 9:48 p.m. that she sounds like she was old enough to have watched the show when it first came out.


So you see Jennifer, when you imply that you won't mind me telling the world about your life, I take you literally. And now it is too late to stop me.