I made myself a hat the other day.

I love it.

Find it here.

The class of 1853, University of Rochester found here

Today I began work on my thesis project involving the University of Rochester class yearbooks (which date back to 1858) and today I started the task of flipping through every single one of them. In about 4 hours I made it through 1858-1877, not bad progress.

Here are a few things I read that seemed kind of interesting/funny.

From the section "Other Universities" in the 1869 class yearbook:

"Three thousand duels were fought by students in the German Universities last year, and 'twasn't a very good year for duels, either. Nobody hurt."

and in the 1859 yearbook, in the section "Another Year" I found this gem:

"During this year, the subject of Women's Rights has received an unusual degree of attention from our Faculty. The sad result, it is almost sickening to relate. The last citadel of bachelordom has been stormed and taken, and its hitherto unconquerable defenders have been carried off captive. The Greek has become a slave to a woman, and the FOWLER has been snared in its own net; so that celibacy has no longer a learned advocate among us."

an opportunity for me to teach the world

Exhibit A: I got horribly sick from these oysters, on the plane home from Seattle...during landing

In the past month or so I've come to realize that some of the dumbest shit happens to me. Not interesting stuff but mainly really boring and mostly irritating things that is either common knowledge to other people or strange things that no one else seems to understand...until they happen to me.

What the hell am I talking about? Here's an example: one thing I learned after moving to America was that post-dated cheques don't exist in this country. How did I find this out? My landlord deposited my January rent cheque (post-dated January 15th) on December 30th and when it bounced he refused to pay the $30 insufficient funds charge from my bank. Apparently you can date a cheque for February 38th, 2240 and if you sign it, it's legal tender in America.

Exciting, right?

Last night I sent a friend of mine an e-mail about another stupid thing that I am in the process of figuring out and she reiterated my feelings of "why the hell does this shit always happen to me?!" with her line "... your bedding story totally cracked me up. sorry about laughing, but damn that is funny. I feel like that is an only you kinda thing."

So, in the spirit of this kind of junk happening to me repeatedly with no end in sight I have decided to start posting about this kind of crap so perhaps someone can gain from my mistakes/misfortunes.

Sigh.

The lovely and talented Zoë Jaremus photographed myself and my roomate last fall. Here we are standing under a willow tree hoping there are no ticks in that pile of leave (there was not). See more of Zoë's work here.

Scarf

I made this scarf for a friend in two days! It's pretty nice but I have plans to make one for myself using a different pattern so we shall see how it compares. I told her I'd mail it to her next week but it might get "lost" in the mail and just end up in my dresser drawer....

I'm feeling a little homesick as I slowly come to terms with the fact that I'm stuck in Rochester for at least the next 4 months. No big deal, just missing a few things from home. This morning has been full of yoga, coffee, empanadas and the farmer's market. This afternoon will consist of more coffee, TMS searches, crochet work and watching Hulu.


[heard] "Autumn Almanac" by The Kinks

[watched] the last three seasons of Peep Show, hilarity.

[read] A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Beautiful, sad, funny, a little self indulgent but a solid 8/10.

[started] a cowl scarf for zoe.

[finished] a cowl scarf for zoe.

[drank] trying to drink enough water everyday, this is hard to do when coffee and beer are abundant

[ate] a cheesy, delicious and most likely bad-for-me empanada at the market this morning

[planned] the baking of a parsnip spice cake for tomorrow's Fibre Rat.

[acquired] US #17, 32 inch circular bamboo knitting needles.

[fancied] a ton of shit at the mall yesterday (sad but true). Anthropologie is crack for women.

Alright, back in Rochester where it seems to snow all the time. We've got at least a foot and a half of snow in the last 2 days, maybe more. To be honest, I'm miserable here but I'm attempting to ward away my melancholy with knitting/crochet projects, cooking, baking, watching TV on Hulu (the best thing about America) and working on some sort of thesis.

For Christmas I received the bon appétit Desserts cookbook and I have some serious plans to bake a parsnip spice cake, make some puddings and whip up a loaf of cinnamon buns. I've also got about 3 knitting projects on the go right now which should definitely eat up some time.

And now for a tasty anecdote. The other day I visited my local Wegman's grocery store (which is always a nightmare, the aisles are super tiny and it seems like there are always too many people wandering about) where I decided to pick up a good ol' six-pack of Brooklyn Lager. At the cash the 60-something year old cashier was having trouble with my Ontario driver's license so asked her manager to take a look. My license card is expired but it has a government sticker on it declaring it as a legit ID card. I've also renewed my license and had my receipt and renew forms on me. Still, the 13 year-old manager didn't like/didn't understand what was going on so he refused to sell me beer. Seriously, I had to be twice this kid's age so I tried to explain it to him but he still didn't get it so I asked to speak to his manager hoping I would talk to someone more my age. Not so, some girl showed up a few minutes later who had to be at most 20 and she continued to deny me my beer. My bitter resentment towards this place deepens. But, at least I don't work in a grocery store, right?

pardon me

I'm returning to Rochester on Monday and really don't feel like doing anything until then. It's only quarter after 10 in the morning but today kind of already feels like a write off. I'm going to go do some reading, drink some tea and think about what I will post here later.

I get to go home tomorrow for a month over winter break. First, there are papers to get done and this is the music I'm going on right about now.

I need to finish more books

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (all)

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (all)

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


bold = read
italics = started but never finished

knobs and such

I am all about colour wheels these days. I saw these little drawer knobs at Anthropologie a couple of weeks ago and if I had any need for some knobs I would have bought up the lot of them. I guess I would also have to have a few dollars in my pockets as they are not cheap.

Hairdid

This happened awhile ago, I forgot to share.

19th Century hipsters, as promised. Recto and verso of a stereocard made by a NYC photographer in the late 1800s. I had to have it.

image from Magic Pony website

Sometimes I wake up in the morning with the most random thought on my mind. This morning it was "those poppy pins made by Julie Moon". After a little poking around online I found her poppy earrings in the Magic Pony Shop along with some other great finds.

Trillium pin by Julie Moon

Colour Wheel Necklace by Yellow Owl Workshop

Air & Water pendant by Yellow Owl Workshop

1920s Cigarette Pendant Necklaces by Erica Weiner


Terrarium Necklace by Erica Weiner


Infinity ring by Erica Weiner


Herkimer Diamond ring by Erica Weiner


Imagined Memory Locket Necklace by Erica Weiner


Lucky 1892 Altered Penny Necklace by Erica Weiner

Mnemosyne Necklace by Erica Weiner

Antique Enamel Mourning Locket by Erica Weiner

If you know anything about me, you know that I enjoy gin. Recently, I have come to terms with that fact that I will not be going on our class trip to France this year. So, instead of spending the $5000+ to fly across the ocean (which is totally worth it, I know) I will put some of my money towards a collection of gin and other liquors I fancy. I started it off this evening with the purchase of Bluecoat American Dry Gin, a tickle too patriotic for my tastes but hopefully this stuff tastes delicious. Other things I have my eye on include:

Root Organic Liquor
Snap Organic Liquor
Red Lillet
Pimms
Aviation Gin
Blackwoods Small Batch Gin
Bols Genever Gin
Cadenhead Old Raj Gin
Crop Famer's Organic Gin
Death's Door Gin
Right Swedish Gin