Tasting

This is a non knitting post--too busy lately with the semester wrapping up coupled with holiday prep stuff. This post is strictly wedding related...we had our tasting last night and it was fun! I wish it would be feasible to get married around this time of year, the Inn was decorated so nicely for the holidays! I took some pics that I'll post later but they are slightly blurry because I couldn't use a flash. We took a look one more time at each of our rooms that we'll be using to refresh our memory; luckily our cocktail hour room is actually bigger than we remembered. We were starting to worry about how all of the guests, the servers and then the musicians would crowd into that room. I took some pics of the rooms too so hopefully that will help when we start to think about decorations.

Now onto the tasting, I was honestly expecting more of the same harried, disorganized service that we've had in the past since being handed off to our wedding coordinator. We were pleasantly surprised last night that others working at the Inn were aware that we were there for our tasting and everyone was very nice and excited for us (or they put on a good show anyway). They seated us in the main dining room which we hadn't been in before and they actually brought us everything that we had requested (although I forgot to print out the email I sent to Liz to truly verify this). We started with a variety of appetizers, of which we picked 4. Mom, if you read this I'll tell you the details. Then we tried a soup and a salad, 2 entrees (funny story, we had each taken a bite of the chicken dish right before I knocked over my water, which knocked over my wine and completed flooded our plate, the chicken was nearly floating), and then finally they had prepared two 6-inch cakes for us to sample.

The waiter was very nice, we were re-introduced to Arthur (Mom, you met him too) who I think will work our event. It was so much better and more organized than I imagined that I'm going to send Liz a thank you email today because I was very impressed.

Mom, next time we talk I'll fill you on the details

Knit Along Progress and Long Weekend Goings On

S and I are in the middle of a knit along. We're making these Herringbone Mittens. We started them Friday night from the confines of a quaint little coffee shop in Harvard Square on Friday night. This will be news to S, but I have actually restarted the mittens once since then. I thought it was odd that what the author calls the main color is not what's used for the ribbing of the cuff. I wanted navy blue there and it was green, so I'm now calling green the main color and navy blue is the contrasting color. The chart is uber difficult to follow but I've finally found a good way to keep track of where I am.

Of course, I'm also working on my sweater, Morgan's sweater, and the blanket at the same time.

This is the first post since Thanksgiving so I guess I should share a little about that. We successfully timed the entire dinner perfectly. The turkey was oddly dry in parts and very moist in other parts. We wonder if it's because it was free range...who knows. I attempted to make my own dinner rolls but they turned out more like biscuits. I think I have to work on my kneading techniques. They were good nonetheless. In addition, we had cornbread stuffing and a gouda mashed potato casserole. The last two were so so...I'm not sure we would make those again. For dessert, I made a pumpkin cake with caramel cream cheese frosting but I can't really taste the caramel which is a bummer because that was a pain in the butt to make. That was the first thing I've tried making from Food and Wine....hmmm..

Last night we went to the holiday tree lighting in Cambridge.
It was nice, 1/20 of the crowd that goes downtown for the Boston tree lighting. It seemed somewhat poorly organized though, they had a gospel choir singing. Well, that's what they were billed as but it was three guys I think. You would think they would be singing Christmas carols but it was mostly gospel songs with a smattering of Christmas songs thrown in. On the plus side, they were serving apple cider and hot chocolate...it was chilly!

Afterwards, we went to Crate and Barrel to buy our Christmas cards and see if they had anything we would want if we started a registry. We found two different kinds of silverware that we liked but that was about it. We're not even entirely sure we're going to register...it seems silly when your guest list is only 30 long.

This morning we tried Harvest for brunch. It had really nice ambience. The food was good, I'm just not sure it was worth $33 for brunch but I would try it for dinner. They had a nice courtyard which their dining room encompassed and they had a lit Christmas tree outside; the inside was very festive too. My biggest complaint was that there were 6 vents that went between pumping freezing cold air and nice cozy air in about five minute increments and we were right in it's pathway.

The rest of the day was spent painting, studying, and knitting....ugh, back to work tomorrow after four days off. Cruel!!!!

Weekend Winterland

This weekend M and I went to the future in laws for a pre Thanksgiving celebration since we are staying home this year. Neither party felt like traveling and we wanted to try to do a Thanksgiving dinner ourselves. His mother told us to wear our boots and my fashion sense almost won out, but I'm glad I let function win. They had at least six inches of snow and it was actually snowing on our way up. Here are some shots from their land:






It's hard to tell from this picture, but this is an old milkhouse that is next to their garage from when their land used to be part of a farm.




































In addition to the Thanksgiving excitement, as mentioned in a previous post, there is also yarn excitement!

THis is the yarn that will be used for M's sweater. I'm using another Zimmerman pattern...can't remember what it's called. Also, Knitting for Him is en route from the library so perhaps I can get future ideas from that. YOu can't really see the color since I shot this without a flash and in poor light, but it's a light blue grey, the color is 'tide pool'.





I also started my cabled yoke sweater. This part is the cabled yoke part which will sit right below my shoulders and go the full circumference of the sweater. I'm about halfway down with this piece.

New Yarn Extravaganza!

I got my shipment of yarn from WEBS yesterday along with a new dining room rug. More about the rug later.

I got all of the yarn for M's sweater, some yarn for a hat for me, and the yarn for my knit along project with Sue which apparently everyone else in the universe is also doing. No one's original anymore, eh...what are you going to do.

Anyway, I have finished the socks as much as I can, I'm going to run out of yarn at the toe...so I've kind of just left it sitting this week while working a little bit on the blanket. I also started my Paton cabled yoke sweater (which I can't find a picture of). I finally made some sense of the pattern...at least the first part so I'm starting on that. It's different than the other sweater I made because it's by no means seamless. The first thing you start with is the cabled yoke, each part is worked seperately and then either joined or sewn together...not my strong suit. Hopefully it works out and good thing I didn't spend a lot on the yarn for this...it could be a travesty folks.

Now, more about this rug. Ok, we bought this rug for our dining room and we are both a little disappointed. What you can't see in the picture is that what looks to be a slight varigation in color is almost camouflage-like on the real thing. When you click on larger image, it still doesn't get you close enough to see that. We both agreed that if we could have seen this in the store we probably wouldn't have bought it. But it's nice finally having a rug in there...but I have mixed feelings about it for sure.

I'll post pics of the yarn at the end of the weekend....

Knit Pics

Here are the updated pics....

So this is the infamous My So Called Scarf . This picture shows the color more accurately, the next picture shows the detail a little bit more.
























These are my socks from the left over yarn from E's ear flap hat











This is the lap blanket...I'm only on the second of eight skeins...long way to go











This one shows the detail of the pattern a little better

So there you have it!

Jewelry and Clink.

Another non Knitting post...I plan to upload pics tomorrow S, didn't have time today.

Today we went to talk to a jeweler about how to combine the two heirloom rings we have. After spending about an hour plus with the salesperson, we came up with a basic design...it's basically like this but the diamond from my Mom's ring will be in a bezel (I have no idea if that's how you spell since I have not heard the word before today). It's basically a round cup that holds that diamond instead of being held in by prongs and it will only be elevated slightly from the band.

Here's a similar style I found on the net: http://www.bluenile.com/product_details.asp?oid=5231&page=1&show_all_pages=1&col=1&row=12&pos=34&set_shape

The smaller diamond's on the side will be much smaller than the ring from the link. They are from M' great grandmother's ring and taper in size. There will be four smaller stones on each side of the diamond in the middle.

The initial issues with designing it was the Mom's diamond was about twice the size of M's great grandmother's diamond and using two diamonds was problematic. They couldn't find a aesthetically pleasing way to use both diamonds which I expected. Then I decided to use Mom's but it's a fairly large diamond for the band widths I was looking at and could not be completely embedded in a diamond without the bad being really thick and wide which I didn't want. They were trying to sell us one additional stone so that we could have the one large stone, two medium sized stones and then the baby diamonds tapering around the band but we weren't interested in purchasing another stone, we wanted to use what we had.

Finally we came to the conclusion that a 'channel' setting would be what I'm looking for. The baby diamonds would be embedded in the band and then the band would stick out a little bit past the edges of the diamond.

She wrote everythign down for us and told us it would take three weeks to do. M's bands were pricier than we were thinking it would be, so we're going to check out another place before we decide.

Here are some pics from our walk to the jeweler on a great crisp fall day in Boston:

After the jewelry store, we tried out the new restaurant at the Liberty Hotel called Clink. The atmosphere in the hotel lobby itself was very cool (for those who don't know the hotel used to be the Charles Street Jail and they've kept up with the jail theme in the restaurant and still have some of the original structural work). The lobby was very modern with giant murals and exposed brick. They had a bar in the lounge area with various seating areas, it seemed like people were able to order food at those tables also. The food was probably 7/10 but the presentation was really nice and they were pretty attentive. They are kind of big on the tapas idea but no one really explained the menu to us, there are several dishes that didn't have prices and were meant for sharing (I only know because I looked up the menu before we left).

Overall, I would say go for drinks and get appetizers in the lobby/lounge area (they also have a bar and lounge area called Alibi that we didn't go into), don't bother with the Clink. itself.

It was a nice day...great brisk weather and good company :)

2010...The Future Is Upon Us

I met with my academic advisor yesterday...the good news is that I have an anticipated graduation date and the bad news is that it's 5/10 as in May of 2010...holy crap that's a long time away.

Luckily, in Spring I have managed to avoid going to class for six hours on Monday night. I will be taking one online course and one classroom one (kind of sucks because it starts at 7pm instead of 4pm, but at least I can drive and get home in 20 minutes instead of an hour). I have one more class I can take in summer to speed things along but that's the only one left that I can take in between semesters.

My first clinical will be in Spring 2009 and the last year is pretty much all clinicals which will be a challenge with work. We'll just have to wing it and see what happens.

Somebody's Sleeping On the Job!

So I'm reading my pharmacology book and stumble across this exact phrasing in the text on page 354 of the Sedative-Hypnotics chapter:

"Antagonists are typified by the synthetic benzodiazepine derivative flumaenil, which blocks the actions of benzodiazepines, eszopiclone, zaleplon, and zolpidem but does not antagonize the actions ofhttp://www.theonion.com/content/node/52073 barbiturates, ethanol..."

Can you believe that?? The title of the article (to save you the time) is 'Resume Font Offends Employer'. Luckily, I'm not too much of a complainer and can look past the fact that the article uses the word 'shit'