Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me!

We listen to WNYC a NPR affiliate in the New York area.  WNYC has really great programming and provides actual information in an interesting way.  One of the things about radio stations like 1010WINS is that they're obnoxious and they don't actually give you any information about anything, instead they just read these ridiculous headlines in a dramatic fashion.  We like WNYC so much that, like the New York Times (another of the few remaining decent sources of news), it is something that we actually make an effort to support.

Anyway one of the many things we like to listen to on WNYC is their weekend programming including their radio quiz show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."  It's hilarious and you actually do manage to learn much more about what is going on in the news than 1010WINS.

Since we are on the WNYC mailing list we got the announcement that Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me was going on the road.  We were very excited.  The show is usually recorded in Chicago, so there wasn't much of a chance that we'd be able to see it live ordinarily.  It took a group effort, but we managed to get six tickets so Todd, Sofia, my mom, Clint, Rena and I all went to see the NYC taping.

Carl Kasel and Peter Sagal host the show and the panel for each show changes and is made up of a pool of comedians, writers, and other famous personalities.  At our show the panel was made up of Paula Poundstone, Mo Rocca, and Adam Felber.  They were great and I was particularly excited see Paula Poundstone, because she's hilarious. We had a great time.  We laughed so much that our faces hurt by the end of the night.  What is only one hour of on air time takes over two hours to tape mostly due to excessive applause, laughter and ad-libbing by the panel.

Baby sweater

Todd asked me to make a sweater for his high school friend's baby daughter.  In the past I've made lots of baby booties, but Todd wanted me to make something a little more than that.  After some research I settled on the autumn leaves cardigan by Nikki Van De Car using the DK swish yarn by KnitPicks.  The yarn was a lovely purple heather color felt very soft.

The little cardigan knit up pretty quickly so I made a hat to match and then I made booties too.

I had sort of a hard time getting the buttons right.  My mother-in-law kindly provided me with buttons, but in a moment of absent mindedness I miscounted the number of buttons I needed and ended up being one short.  I had to go back to the drawing board and ended up going to a button store where I found perfect little purple buttons.

Lacking an actual baby to model this on I tried it out on my bear.

When everything was folded up it made quite a cute little package.

I hope it didn't get abused by the USPS too much and that it made it in one piece.

Believe - The Eddie Izzard Story

I don't know how we didn't know about this earlier, but Eddie Izzard has a movie!  It's a small indie film and as soon as we learned about it we texted our fellow Eddiephile, Marsden, and made a date to see it.  Despite careful planning Marsden accidently went to the wrong theater and I forgot that parking in NYC is awful and Todd got out of work late.  Fortunately it all worked out!  We all met up just in the nick of time.  Todd and Marsden held seats while I fought with the muni-meter and crossed my fingers that the car didn't get ticketed and towed.

I have to say that since I *LOVE* Eddie Izzard I've always wanted to know more about him and we've made a special effort to see any shows he's done in our area.  (Our area being defined so far as a radius around New York as far as Philadelphia and Montreal.)  Seriously, I could listen to him read the back of a cereal box.  Better yet, I could watch him read the back of a cereal box.  All of Eddie Izzard's material is even better if you can actually see him perform, because his pantomime  is brilliant and his facial expressions add an extra level of hilarity—especially when he's made up.

So, back to Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story.  The film attempts to tell the story of Eddie's life and career, including interviews with Eddie, his family, friends, colleagues, and other people from various phases of his life.  We learned a lot about his childhood and his motivations to become a comedian.  Eddie's father has always supported him, but his mother's death when he was 7 really affected him.  It did not influence his taste in clothes and makeup, but it seems like his desire to have the adoration of a crowd was sort of a substitute for his mother's presence.  And he was very driven to achieve success, plodding through nearly a decade of failure before he give even mild critical acclaim. 

I don't know how someone can get up night after night and perform to apathetic crowds.  I guess you have to live for the high when you really connect with your audience.  Although I myself get serious stage fright even when I have to give a presentation at work, I have heard that there is something intoxicating about being up on stage and having everyone cheering and screaming your name.  As of now I wouldn't know.

So the the movie chronologically follows Eddie's life and performances, including his struggles in his early twenties to really get his style and material to a place where an audience could stay with him for a whole show. His style was a little scattered and spastic and audiences didn't know what to make of him and couldn't follow him at first.  Eventually, of course, he finds his rhythm and becomes and overnight success.  But Believe is actually sort of dark.  It focuses on the tough parts of his life, even through his later successful years.  It seems that Eddie did have a tough time, not just because it took time to make his material flow, but because being a transvestite makes the hoops you need to jump through multiply.
But through the worst of it there were some highs, and it ends on an up beat.  Eddie started a club of his own called Raging Bull (I really, *really* want one of their shirts).  Then while he was there he got scouted for an AIDS benefit and at that benefit he did a piece about being raised by wolves that got rave reviews and put Eddie on the global stage.  From there Eddie put together his longer shows and became more and more successful.  But there is always a wrinkle in the plans - after Eddie got two awards for Dress to Kill he became the target of some jerks on the British TV show Watchdog for alleged fraud.  They even filed a suit against him.  There was a misunderstanding with a theater where they put the words "all new" on the poster for his show.  The allegation was that much of his material was similar to his old show.  Eddie explained that his shows were always cyclic, the beginning of one show had lots of the materials from the end of the last show, and by the end of the show the materials were completely different.  But like most of his fans I could watch him do the same show every day and not be upset.  However, some critical idiots got carried away and gave Eddie tons of shit for doing things that way.
I think I've probably exhausted this subject for now.  More after his new show in January...(SO EXCITED!!!)

The NYC Yarn Crawl

Check out my haul!

This past weekend I participated in the 2009 NYC Yarn Crawl.  I forget how I found out about this, but I found out about the yarn crawl right before it started.  Right away I started trying to figure out how to hit every store.  I also tried to figure out who I could convince to come with me and I came to the sad conclusion that although I have knitting friends I don't have a whole lot of knitting friends in NYC.  Todd is usually a pretty good sport about my knitting habit especially since I made him the sweater and matching socks but I decided that I'd have this adventure on my own.

As it turned out I managed to hit seven stores.  Not too shabby.

1. Starting on Friday night I headed down to the east village to Downtown Yarns.  I convinced Todd to let me sneak in a store on a work day by driving to work and then promising him that we could have dinner nearby.  I had forgotten that I really like this little yarn store.  The people are very friendly and they have a good selection of interesting stuff.  Plus there is this very sweet golden retriever that can often be found asleep blending in with the skeins of wool.  I asked the women at the store what fun new stuff they'd gotten in and that turned out to be a really good idea.  This store also has a great display in their front window of knitted leaves.

Saturday was the main event and I decided that it would make the most sense to try to got to a group of stores that were sort of close together.  After close scrutinization of the map and list of participating stores I decided that I could get to the most stores by focusing on the west side of Manhattan.

2. In the morning afternoon I (finally) headed into Manhattan and started near the PATH station with  School Products (1201 Broadway, 3rd Floor).  I learned that they're the oldest yarn store in NYC and that they have a fantastic selection of hand-dyed cashmere.  I wandered around touching all the yarn and could have stayed there longer.

3. Nearby I stopped at Habu Textiles (135 West 29th Street).  This was a weird little shop with little baskets of tiny skeins of yarn on the floor.  It was interesting to see the unusual products that they sell, but I'm not sure I'd have stopped there if I'd known.

4. In the interest of saving time I hopped on the train to Knitty City (208 West 79th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway).  I'd walked by this store before, but had never actually been in it.  It is a nice store with some fun but expensive silk and cashmere novelty yarns.  Unfortunately it was jam packed.  I did managed to squeeze my way to the back of the store where I found some very nice ladies who had come into NYC together for the crawl and the sale yarns.

5. My next stop was the The Yarn Company (2274 Broadway near 82nd Street).  I'd been to this store once a while back with Nikki.  The people who run it are really nice and I was tempted by their fun displays to buy some tasty sock yarn and almost tempted to buy a cashmere scarf kit.

6. After a quick stop at a bodega to get a fruit salad I hiked the rest of the way up to Yarntopia (974 Amsterdam Avenue rear 108th Street).  I have mixed feelings about this store, but they have a nice selection of sock yarn and they were running an interesting deal on overstocked cashmere yarn: 30% off if you buy the rest of the stock.  This deal became less interesting when I realized that each ball was $50.

7. I got in a bonus store on Sunday when Jess' train got delayed.  I persuaded Todd to stop at Purl Soho (137 Sullivan Street) on the way to Penn Station.  I'm glad that I got to squeeze in Purl Soho because the people in the store are really nice and they make very good use of a tiny space.

There isn't a yarn store near us in Bayonne and the yarn meet up in our town is held at a coffee shop so I don't really have a circle of local knitters or a local yarn store, but I'd like to have one - it is on the list of requirements for our new town.  I like the idea of having a LYS.  On the one hand I want to be able to find good yarns at a good unrealistically cheap price.  On the other hand I'd like to have a place to meet other knitters and hang out with people who are as obsessed interested in knitting as I am.  Actual stores offer the opportunity to talk about yarn, get advice about patterns and to actually see and touch the yarns.  Unfortunately it is often cheaper to buy yarn online, but I appreciate the efforts of the organizers of the yarn crawl and the participation of the yarn stores so I did buy at least a little something from each store.  In an effort not to just go crazy I set out with a list of yarn for patterns I actually wanted to make, but I didn't actually find many of those yarns in the wild on the crawl.

The haul: At the top is the shopping tote provided by the yarn crawl organizers - one of the store owners said that it was wishful thinking, but by the end of the weekend I'd more than filled one.  In the second row is a pair of skeins of sock wool, a skein of Noro Daria Multi and The Yarn Girls' Guide to Knits for All Seasons (the book written by the owners) from The Yarn Co.; a black spangled novelty yarn and a lovely gray lace yarn from the sale bin at Knitty City.  On the right hand side with the Vogue knitting magazine are two different kinds of silk yarn I want to try to make the flowered scarf on the cover of the magazine with from Yarntopia.  In the next row is the very cool tote bag from Purl Soho; some gorgeous hand dyed cashmere from School Products; a skein of Misty Alpaca's Chunky to finally finish a pair of slippers; and some superwash wool also from the sale bin at Knitty City.  At the bottom is a new Jared Flood pattern book, some Road to China yarn to make the Beaumont Beanie and a couple of balls of Rowan Lima.

I really appreciated the stores that stayed open late for this event.  In the evening on Saturday Todd managed to wait until 7pm before he called to find out how things were going.  I think he was relieved to hear that I was done, but truth be told, if there had been some stores open even later I would have kept going.  Say for example if the Brooklyn stores had stayed open late I would have hiked all the way there to visit them.  Sadly I didn't win an of the raffles.  I almost thing it would be better to have more smaller raffle items so that more people could win.

Dog grooming

After a muddy adventure in the rain we decided to put our brand new grooming table to the test.

I may have mentioned in the Pyrapalooza post that we learn new things each year. NEPR does a wonderful job of not only placing Pyrs in good homes, but they also provide ongoing support to help you to be a better Pyr owner. As a perfect example, this year there was a grooming lecture and workshop that they ran on Sunday. It was the perfect close to the event since most of us had happy, tired, and dirty dogs to take home after a weekend of romping in the rain. It continues to amaze me that such gentle fluffy white dogs can turn in to such muddy, dirty, wet, matted specimens. But, for the record, Pyrs are often happiest while they are getting into such a state.

Back to what we learned at the grooming lecture: lots! We signed Buddy up for personal grooming with Nicole in addition to the lecture so Todd and I got to comapre notes.  While Nicole worked miracles on the snarles in Buddy's pantallons she explained many grooming tips.  First she recommended getting a grooming table.  That way the dog is gently, but firmly held in place and they're up high so you can get to the dog all over.  This simple step can be overlooked, but anyone who has had to chase a dog around with scissors and a brush to remove a mat will be pleasantly surprised to find that using a table makes grooming less stressful for everyone involved.  Plus the table puts you and the dog at eye level which makes alot of the aspects of grooming less threatening for the dog.  In terms of the mechanics of grooming, we learned that much can be achieved with just detangler and cornstarch.  I watched in amazement as a matt that previously would have had to be hacked off was deftly removed.  We also learned about some tools that make grooming much easier.  Once you have the cornstarch and detangler applied a matt razor and a coarse toothed comb do magic to remove loose fur and matts. 
After Pyrapalooza we ran out and ordered a table and new grooming tools and after a very muddy walk we used them to great success.  We really can't deny that Pyrs shed and require significant grooming, but after the lecture and Nicole's help, I think that it will be much easier for us to keep Buddy and Dakota looking their best without having to spend a ton at the groomers.