Long time no smoke signal

Hey there all!

I know it's been awhile since I posted, (okay a week) but I have been a busy bee.

Lambtown and a weekend without rugrats

This past weekend was Lambtown see the sidebar for the link to the event. I had done what I always do wherein I comb through the lists of classes looking for the ones that I would like to take....I do this repeatedly, mostly because I would not want to miss anything that is interesting.

Then I forget to sign up. Well not really forget, more like I get weighed down in whether I will find someone to watch the kids....(someone thought it would not be good for me to leave the children in the car for 5 hours in summer heat and passed a law of all things making it a felony.) and whether I really want to spend the money on the class, whether the class is worth the money, and whether I will be bored silly. Then there is my natural inclination to participate heavily in the class, which some folks think is bad, and so it all adds up to one thing.

I did not sign up for the classses after all, and instead used the time without the kids to just loaf on the couch. Well some of the time anyway. Some of the time was used to photograph the yarn for the store (did you know that my digital camera comes with a flower and superflower setting that are great for photos of yarn??), some of it was used to sew some of the backlog of fabric accruing in my sewing room.

I went to Lambtown with Janet from knitting, and we made the rounds of the whole fair before going into the fiber fair to make the rounds there. We also had lunch there....Janet had a chicken and mushroom crepe, I had lamb ribs which were by all reports both excellent. The fiber fair was larger than normal, and we made the rounds there as well. Janet bought some yarn, and I got a little mixed bag of fiber in greens for spinning up, as well as almost a pound of cormo roving for Morgsarah from Knitty chat as part of a local fiber swap that we decided to do. (people pick partners, and then swap fiber from local fiber sources in natural colors). The final thing that I got was a pair of Clover's new lighted knitting needles, which are apparently do new that they are not shown on the Web at all....totally on a whim...

So actually it shaped up into a rather pleasant weekend.

Home Leave for the Family

Monday morning my sister in law flew in from Rome, with her two girls and her rather ill husband for 2 weeks on home leave from the UN and the plant diversity preservation firm that he works for. The nieces are blossoming, especially the older who is 13, 5 foot ten inches tall, slender and lovely. Can I just say that I hate her for winning the gene pool crap shoot? But she has redeemed herself by learning to knit. Her grandmother has been teaching her, but I have seen some of the knitting that GRandma does.....okay, entire cardigans done on like size 1 or 2 needles, in basketweave where each repeat is like 4-5 stitches....and I am thinking that Niecey needs some big ass needles and some fluffy yarns to get her well and goodly hooked. So we are planning a clandestine trip to the yarn store, and if she makes it to our house, she may get to comb through my yarn stash for goodies. Either way, I plan to comb through too and pull out any novelty yarns or ball ends for her to play with. And the huge clovers that I have are so for her.

Tuesday I worked remotely from MIL's home so that I could visit with them, which was really nice and worked out well for the editing of the documents that I needed to work on.

Dinner at ChezPanisse

We met the family at Chez Panisse last night, which is a 5star restaurant in Berkeley, for dinner. There was 10 of us, including DH and I, his sisters and there partners, the aforementioned nieces, and DSIL's husbands youngest daughter from the previous marriage and her beau. DH and I sat with the beau who works for a solar company.....very interesting conversation...

But you want to hear about the food of course. I have copied the menu in from here for you to droll over, since they change it daily.

CHEZ PANISSE CAFÉ DINNER MENU

Wednesday, August 2, 2006

Fixed Menu $26.00
Garden lettuce salad
Tomato and onion panade with green beans and okra
Boysenberry sherbet with candied orange peel and biscotti

Little Gem lettuce with Caesar dressing, $9.00
Heirloom and cherry tomato salad with aïoli, $10.00
Local king salmon with cucumber, chervil, and capers, $11.00
Eggplant, roasted pepper, and cipollini salad, $10.00
Pizzetta with tomato sauce, scallions, and sheep's milk ricotta, $12.00
Baked Sonoma goat cheese with garden lettuces, $9.50
Garden lettuce salad, $7.00
Summer squash minestrone and basil, $7.00

Spaghetti alla puttanesca: pasta with tomato, anchovy, olive, and hot pepper, $16.00
California white sea bass with summer shell beans and tomato vinaigrette, $26.00
Bollito misto: Magruder Ranch grass-fed brisket and shoulder with tomato, romano bean and horseradish, $28.00
Grilled Sonoma County duck breast with corn, squash, and rocket salad, $22.00
Tomato and onion panade with green beans and okra, $18.00
Pizza with greens and pancetta, $17.00

Side orders: a plate of olives, anchovies, Parmesan, or Tuscan olive oil, $3.50 each

DESSERTArtisan cheese selection: Fromage de Meaux, Twig Farm Tomme, and Sally Jackson Sheep, $12.00
Bittersweet chocolate pavé with Cognac cream, $8.50*
Golden Sweet apricot tart with vanilla ice cream, $9.50
Boysenberry sherbet with summer berries, $8.00
Affogato: warm espresso over vanilla ice cream with biscotti, $7.50
Noyau ice cream with nectarines, $8.00
A bowl of Middleton Gardens raspberries and Raye Byrne mulberries, $7.50

We all began with a loverly red wine that took us right through dinner. Each person had a salad, mine was baked goat cheese with rocket and some other lettuces....it was lovely and the goat cheese had a touch of sour that was nice. The second course was a variety. Mine was duck breast with corn and more rocket, the breast was done to perfection, with the skin still on and crispy with a hint of salt that was just to my taste. DH had the brisket which mealted in the mouth. Nieceys had the tomato panade-think lasagna with bread instead of noodles....very gooey and they enjoyed it. I am not sure what everyone else had, until we got to dessert.

Dessert at our table of 10 consisted of 6 bittersweet chocolate paves which is a flourless chocolate cake, suitably drizzled with chocolate and other delightful things. There were then 2 more apricot tarts, including my own, which were also lovely.

Getting Ready for business

The website for Ceallach Dyes is also taking up quite a bit of time....but is almost done....I have some finishing touches to make and the SIL and her BF will be helping with some polish, and then I should be publishing it soon. So look for that....there will of course be announcements here and in various other locations.

Other stuff that I just need to vent on a little bit

Do you ever find yourself on kind of a negative vibe? I am finding myself there right now. I am spending a lot of time complaining aobut things, or maybe it's that I am really irritable and so things are getting on my nerves more, I don't know what it is. What I do know is that I feel like a complete bee-hotch, and it seems out of my control.

Perfect example: the cube at work is really cold....in fact I started to measure the temp and at my cube, it was 72 degrees. There were days that I had on two sweaters and a shawl and sat at my desk shivering. Hardly an atmosphere conducive to prodcutivity. Lest the reader think that I am crazy, my neighbors were also saying it was too cold, as were passerby. So I call to get it taken care of. A month goes by, while I am on vacation, and no one comes to look at it. I call again, explain about the previous ticket which this person cannot find, and open a new ticket. They tell me 4-8 hours and someone will be by. 2 days later still no one. I call again. Nothing.

I called 5 times on this, each time getting more ticked about it, because I should not have to call so many times. Finally, after the last call, the engineer calls me and explains that they had had bigger problems, one of the chillers has been down and needed to be replaced. Now I am understanding on things like this, but at no point did someone say to me, they have big problems and your ticket may take a while. He also for the first time says no problem shoudl be able to pick it, yadda yadda---again the first time. That same day they came and put a portable temp tracking device in my cube. Next day Mr.HVAC comes by and finds out that someone had turned the two closest thermostats down to 68 degrees, which is why it was so cold at my desk. So turns out I was not crazy, I should have been complaining and it's a good thing that I did.

While this is going on, my neighbors are basically ignoring my efforts, which quite frankly are also on their behalf. No support, no encouragement. Nuttin'. At one point, one of them said to my face that I was being a bee-hotch (same one who is my 'friend' that won't even look me in the eye right now....not sure what bug is in her bonnet, but if she ain't got the guts to come out with it, I will not be responsible and quite frankly she is being rude.)

Meanwhile, every morning this week, I have to be on the phone an hour before my normal start time for project meetings, and I can barely get up in time. I am exhausted from these meetings, it's not like I can just go to bed earlier because I would just lay there til my normal bed time. So instead it's just wearing me down and I have started having PVCs again.

So yesterday, we are driving around looking for parking at the restaurant and I am getting more and more steamed, because all the parking is 1 hour in an area with restaurants (which usually take a minimum of 1 hour) or permit parking. DH keeps talking about dropping me at the restaurant, which I hate for some reason, and then parking in a garage 2 miles away, and I am just getting more and more agitated.

DH and I also had a fight recently because my hairbrush was missing after the hskpr was in, and he kind of glanced around and put no effort when I had asked him to have a look, while complaining that it was mine and I should find it, when I had already spent 30 minutes looking for it.....Turns out it was in his bathroom drawer, which I am sure I checked. It's a little thing, but it escalated into this big blowout, and then I realized I had not had breakfast at 10 am, and he was trying to get me out the door directly following my last meeting when I had not had a shower, and he called me a name that I hate, so no wonder it became a big blowout. And DH does not know how to fight or makeup, and he wanted to hug me and I just wanted him and the kids to leave forever because I am not handling anything at all lately with grace, confidence and style, but where other people get to have bad days, for some reason I don't get the same kind of slack.

I am going to go crawl under a rock now.