2014 Recap

So I realize that we're almost 2 weeks in to January, but I'm finally getting my life, my jobs (school started on Monday!), and my house organized enough that I can spend a minute reminiscing about 2014.  I did a ton of traveling (which I need to keep doing!), I continued to rework my curriculum at my job, and I tried some things that I generally wouldn't have otherwise!  While I didn't complete all my goals, the ones I did complete I was really happy about!
My mantra for 2014 was Be Silly, Be Honest, Be Kind, an Emerson quote that I'm particularly fond of.  While there were times that following that was difficult, I feel like I did a pretty good job overall of staying positive, having fun, and attempting to keep kindness in my everyday interactions.

Successful goals-
- Running a Half-Marathon

Success!  This one was big.  I'm not a runner.  Repeat:  NOT a runner.  I ran Grandma's Half-Marathon, got a time of 2:32:27, and learned that while I'm not cut out for long-distance running, I have a very high pain tolerance threshold.  As a climber, I feel like that's important. :)
- Finish 4 Knitting Projects for Myself
Another success!  First and foremost, I finished a pair of socks for myself at the end of January in 2014.

I knit my first hat and mittens set for myself- my first matching set in like 8 years of knitting!  Unfortunately, the hat fell victim a couple of months later to Maeby's tummy, but for awhile I had my very own set of hand-made goodies!

I also finished an entire sweater in the span of the 3 weeks I was overseas on my Europe vacation.  Woowoo!  This only shows that when I actually put my mind and efforts towards a big project, it's not that difficult to complete.
- Read 40 books
I officially read 34, but that's not counting the thousands of pages of student papers I read throughout the year.  I feel like that more than makes up for the books I didn't get to.
Favorite books of the year include:
"A Dance with Dragons" by George R.R. Martin (when is the next book out??!!)
"The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance" by Laurie Garrett (I don't know why I'm so fascinated with nasty diseases lately...)
"Faithful Place" by Tana French (need to check out more books by her...)
The Southern Reach Trilogy, including "Annihilation" and "Authority" by Jeff Vandermeer (I'm reading the third and last book in this new series right now)
Obviously there are more that I enjoyed, but those are the highlights.
- Finishing "The Dude Sweater" during the Olympics

I love and hate this knit so much.  Great conversation piece, huge and awkward to knit.  Also fairly ugly.  Working well for S's new man-cave in the basement, since it's chilly down there.

Non-successful goals-
- Finished my Dad's Dale of Norway
It's the the docket for this year.  I. WILL. PREVAIL.
- Create a Personal Website
Pshh.  Nope.
- Work on German
I did a little bit, but not nearly enough for it to count.
- Learn Photo Software for Editing Photos
I mean, I learned how to do it on my phone.  Does that count?
- Climb 5.12 on Sport and 5.11 on Trad
Started to toe that line, but not last year.  This year is the year!
- Reach the 200 Hexipoof mark on the Honey Quilt
Nope.  I kind of forgot about this project in like mid-February...
- Break Procrastination Habit
This was mostly to do with grading, and while I got better, I still have a ways to go.

Uff-da!  Well, besides the hard and fast goals, it was a great year.

I went on a climbing trip to Mt Rushmore with one of my besties in Spring.

I got to do an all-ladies climbing trip to the Red River Gorge, which has become a yearly MEA-break tradition in October.

I met Ben, an honorary nephew and a pretty sweet little dude.

I got to visit Denmark for the first time and see one of my best friends while she lives there.

I joined my family for a fantastic two weeks in Italy.

I went on a chilly but fun weekend trip to the BWCAW with my guy for his Bday.

I got my diving certification and went on my first dive in Lake Superior- a night dive!
Come to think of it, 2014 was pretty sweet.
It may be difficult to top... :)

Wedding and Unpacking and Constructing- Oh, My!

Over the weekend, I was honored to be the Maid of Honor (oh, puns!) in my friend Celeste's wedding!

Celeste is one of my best friends from Graduate School, and she decided to stay in northern MN after we graduated.  Lucky for both of us- I get to see her all the time now!

The wedding was gorgeous, and the party was fantastic despite the slightly-chilly temps that rocked outside.  During the ceremony (held in a greenhouse), we could hear the wind whistling around the glass as it frosted over.  Very dramatic and cool!

(Eric, the groom, totally photobombing us while we tried to take a serious photo)

(Scott was my dapper and all-around awesome bearded date!)
It was fantastic fun all around- probably one of the more low-key and all-around fun weddings I've been to in a long time!  Less than a day after they got hitched, Celeste and her husband are off on their honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, and it's probably a good thing...

It's gotten a little chilly up here in Duluth.  Sadly, that picture doesn't depict the -40's that the windchill gets down to... burr!  Luckily, that's given me plenty of time indoors to do a ton of unpacking, organizing, purging (which I realize is what you're supposed to do before you move... oops), reorganizing, and all around making a mess of the new house as I try to figure out where everything will go.

(The living room is pretending to be organized.  What's that?  Why, yes, there isn't a couch.  We're definitely using bouldering pads instead for now...)
One of my big YAHOO moments between wedding help last weekend was putting together the bedframe we got from Ikea to replace our old and broken one.

Constructed.  ALL.  BY.  MYSELF!
I had only a couple of minor mistakes where I had to learn to slow down when reading the directions, but overall it looks and works great!  It's quite nice to be sleeping on a frame again instead of a mattress on the floor, reiterating the importance of owning real furniture.  Scott and I are doing a trip to the cities this weekend for one more big Ikea run.  On the top of that list- a couch!
Besides finishing unpacking, spring semester is already creeping up.  Classes start next Monday, and with Faculty days on both Thursday and Friday, I've been scrambling to get my syllabus and lesson plans ready to go before two days of meetings.
One of the good things about those meeting days?  Lots of knitting time. I have a couple of projects in mind to work on.
And apparently I need to knit myself some handmade socks.  :)
Those have officially been added to the "Things I need to Knit for Myself" list for 2015...
Speaking of lists, hopefully I'll get my official "15 in 2015" list up in the next day or two when we officially get internet at my house.
Yep- still without.
Crossing my fingers for Friday.
Until then, stay warm out there folks.  It's a tad chilly...

Moving is a Pain

Christmas was really nice this year.  I was grading and entering grades right up until the 24th of December, and then Scott and I shot north to finally unwind for a couple of days in northern MN.

It was great- cold but gorgeous, lots of good times, laughs, awesome people, great food...
and at least one 12K cross-country ski trek!  I'm firmly committed to getting in to this sport. :)
We came back on Saturday, went almost straight to the UHaul store, and spent the entire weekend schlepping all our crap to our brand-new place!  I'm more than a little excited- we're still renting, but we're renting from awesome people, and we're renting an entire house!  No more apartments or duplexes for us!
The last few days I've been getting all the last bits moved and spending hours cleaning the heck out of the old apartment.

Literally hours of cleaning, scrubbing, sweeping, steam cleaning, and doing all I can to make sure that we get our full deposit back, which we successfully did!  We did our final loads last night around 6 pm, and were so tired that we watched a couple episodes of Fargo, clinked our toast around 9, and were in bed and zonked by 10:30.  A bit lame for New Year's Eve, but after the days we had, it was welcome relief to get a full night's sleep and just relax a little.

Today we finally had time together to begin to unpack the place and put it to rights.  I built our new bedframe from Ikea, and I'm already making a shopping list for when I make a trip down there next week.
This weekend is my friend Celeste's wedding, and hopefully I'll have internet hooked up at our new place early next week (hopefully!).  I apologize for the lack of posts lately, but no internet makes it difficult. :)
I'll do my 2014 recap and 2015 hopes in the next couple of posts- I'm really excited for the year to come, in so many ways!!!
Happy New Year, everyone!

Featured!

Holy buckets, everyone!
One of my favorite knitting blogs, Knitted Bliss, decided to feature my Classy Fornicating Deer Vest on her weekly feature "Modification Monday"!  I was incredibly flattered when she sent me an email concerning a possible feature.  The blog post about it went live yesterday.
You can find it here!
I'm pretty excited that she picked that vest, and if anything, it's inspired me to branch out a little more in my knitting! :)
Tomorrow, I'm off to the north for a fun-filled Christmas with Scott's family, and hopefully fixing the Onward Shawl.
Yeah... I haven't looked at that yet.
It's still a little raw.
Just to make me feel better, here's one of the outtakes from our Christmas photo shoot.  Maeby looked a little too upset for us to use it for the actual photo.  Therefore, it's good for me to use when I'm upset at her.

Happy Holidays, everyone. :)

Just when you think it's safe...

I finished the Onward Shawl yesterday while watching my students frantically typed their finals.
I was really excited- it was gorgeous, not too crazy-huge, and I eliminated doing the extra repeat because I finished the cast-off with a nice comfortable tiny ball of yarn left, saving my extra skein for a future gift.  It couldn't have worked out better, timing-wise and yarn-wise.  It was beautiful.  It's still 7 days before Christmas.  I planned on blocking it today and getting it in the mail tomorrow, to arrive under the tree by early next week.
It was too good to be true.
I came home and happily displayed the shawl in all its glory to Scott.  He complimented the pattern, said it was really cool but not too fussy, and stated that the recipient would probably really like it.
I folded it carefully, put it on the dining room table, and we went in the kitchen to make dinner.
It only took about ten minutes.
She apparently had been lurking nearby.

I think she was waiting for the opportunity to get back at me for the (only slightly) humiliating photos I took of her for our Christmas card.
She was waiting for the perfect moment.  Plotting, planning, and being patient in a way that only a cat with limitless time can.

%@#$!!!!  Rotten little furball with no respect #%!@$#!@%@$^@$^@#$#%&*^#^$%!!!!
She is the WORST!!

She not only ate the tip of the end of the shawl, she nommed on the end of it as well, displayed in the pic above (comparing it to the good, non-nommed side).  She wasn't content with just destroying one part of it- she had to show her dominance over all knitted goods by eating two very different parts of the shawl.
Even now, as I type this, she's lazily chilling in the kitten bed, acting as if it never happened.
Just. the. worst.
She's lucky I don't put out a Craigslist ad for her right now.
::sigh::
Guess I'll rip back the last two sections and reknit them.  I suppose it could have been worse.  This also gives me a chance to add another repeat on to the shawl if I wanted to make it bigger.  Not that I wanted to in the first place.
::grumblegrumblegrowl::
Stupid cat.

Finals Week

I'm halfway done with my finals push.

I've drank about a pot of coffee a day, graded enough 8-page papers to make me go mildly cross-eyed, and I just collected even more final papers to go through over the next couple of days.  Tomorrow will be my last day with this semester's students- two 2-hour exams, where I'll be alternating between walking around to make sure students aren't cheating and working on the Onward shawl.  It's probably the first long-term knitting time I've had since Thanksgiving.
In the craziness of grading and finishing the semester, I have managed to have a little bit of fun!
I went to the bridal shower for Celeste, one of my best friends from Grad School.  She's going to become a Mrs. in a little over two weeks, so it was time to celebrate!

I'm throwing her Bachelorette party on Friday evening, and I'm excited for a little more time to hang out.  She works at another one of the colleges in the area, so between our schedules, it's hard to find time to hang out.
We also had the Christmas program for my dance studio last Sunday!

I had all of my tap dancers up on stage for a rousing number of the "Shim Sham Shimmy", my yearly tradition.  I have to admit, I'm a big fan of getting a giant group of like 40 tap dancers up on stage all dancing together.  It looks (and sounds!) pretty cool. :)
Oh, and this fell off my truck:
while I was driving.

It's a chunk of the exhaust system.
...yeah.
Besides that, Scott and I are also trying to work on this:

Moving day is approaching.
No wonder my knitting has been on standstill for a bit.
Good thing I can update soon on some of that... :)

Back from a Break!

After posting about the Deer Vest, I decided to take a little hiatus from the internet.  Between the end of the semester nearing (and grading ramping up), choreographing in the days and teaching dance several nights a week, and an upcoming move (which I'll get into in a moment), I needed to just take a break.  I hope you all understand. :)
Even now, I'm completely ignoring the pile of papers to grade that I should have handed back to my students last week.  The only reason I get a pass is because it was just conference week, and the students were stressed out enough about meeting with me to pitch their last paper that every last one of them conveniently forgot that I have yet to hand these back.

End-of-semester time is just as bad for teachers as it is for students, especially when it's the holiday season.  This semester seems especially difficult- I've had a surprisingly high number of frantic students that need extra credit, want to make up tests and papers, and are questioning their grade online vs. their "real" grade.

I really do love being a teacher, but from Thanksgiving onward, it's a 10-hours-a-day 7-day-a-week job between grading, planning, students, and more grading.  This week is our last full week of classes, then the amazing fun of finals week begins!  I'm hoping that this year, there will be no tears or students swearing under their breath during the test.
Besides school being crazy, to make this year extra fun, Scott and I took the leap and decided to change our address before January first.
Yep, we're moving across town and into a real house!
We're not buying (yet), mainly because my teacher salary can't afford it and Scott's probably heading back for a Master's degree in the fall, but also because buying a house feels a little more permanent.  We still talk about the possibility of taking a full year off from jobs (after saving like crazy) to live out of a van and travel from climbing place to climbing place.

(Photo courtesy of Gear Junkie of a converted van- the climber home of choice!)
Both of us still want to do it while we're kid-free and young, and that would be the kind of trip that we would never regret taking.  I know of a lot of people that say, "some day" when it comes to ideas like this, but I would love to just take the plunge and DO IT.  Luckily, I'm with a fairly like-minded guy!  :)
Back to the moving- while I finish up finals, I have to help pack up our household and move it across town.  Our new landlord is marrying one of my best friends, so we're slowly moving our stuff over there in the next couple of weeks.  Right before Christmas (and after all the grading), we'll probably do the last few things in the "big day" move, so when we come back from spending Christmas with Scott's family, we'll have the new place ready to go!
Hopefully. :)
The knitting has mildly been at a standstill, but hopefully I'll get progress updates on here.  I'm hoping also to post a list (yes, like everyone else) of What to Get Your Climbing/Outdoor Friend for your Holiday of Choice, as well as our incredibly awesome Christmas card.  Yes, the cats are involved.  Yes, they're going to be dressed up.  Yes, I do expect them to murder me in my sleep some day from all the abuse I've put them through.

Maeby loves that she got to wear her Christmas sweater from last year!
Hahaha... aaaah too much fun. :)