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Deadline knitting and NaBloPoMo make terrible bedfellows.

Crunched for time, so here are some interesting things I came across today while killing time at my desk.

This might be the most charming block in NYC

Cat Heaven?  I just want to know why I didn’t visit here when I was in Japan

Charles Schultz would have turned 90 today.  We still miss him.

Why I am getting a Costco membership

And on that last link, here is a quote that, to me, sums up so much of what it wrong with our business culture today:

But not everyone is happy with Costco’s business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco’s customers but to its workers as well. … One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco “it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.”

Perhaps I am hopelessly naive, but shouldn’t it be better to be a customer or an employee of a company than a shareholder?  Altruism and love-your-neighbor hippiedom aside, why has the idea that building a strong company with loyal, repeat customers as how you create actual value for your shareholders completely disappeared?

Of course, the end of the article’s focus on Mr. Sinegal’s focus on cutting expense and demanding rock-bottom prices on his goods raises interesting questions of what THAT mindset is doing to workers further downstream, but I’m also not kidding myself that every other retailer is doing the same thing AND not passing any of the benefit of that onto their employees, so perhaps this is simply the lesser of two poor practices.

Have you found anything interesting in your forays around the internets lately?

Deadline knitting and NaBloPoMo make terrible bedfellows.

Crunched for time, so here are some interesting things I came across today while killing time at my desk.

This might be the most charming block in NYC

Cat Heaven?  I just want to know why I didn’t visit here when I was in Japan

Charles Schultz would have turned 90 today.  We still miss him.

Why I am getting a Costco membership

And on that last link, here is a quote that, to me, sums up so much of what it wrong with our business culture today:

But not everyone is happy with Costco’s business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco’s customers but to its workers as well. … One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco “it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.”

Perhaps I am hopelessly naive, but shouldn’t it be better to be a customer or an employee of a company than a shareholder?  Altruism and love-your-neighbor hippiedom aside, why has the idea that building a strong company with loyal, repeat customers as how you create actual value for your shareholders completely disappeared?

Of course, the end of the article’s focus on Mr. Sinegal’s focus on cutting expense and demanding rock-bottom prices on his goods raises interesting questions of what THAT mindset is doing to workers further downstream, but I’m also not kidding myself that every other retailer is doing the same thing AND not passing any of the benefit of that onto their employees, so perhaps this is simply the lesser of two poor practices.

Have you found anything interesting in your forays around the internets lately?

Early Thanksgiving means that it feels like the Christmas season has descended far earlier than usual, and I keep forgetting that we have a whole week before it’s even December.

Today was the Christmas parade in Quincy, and so it feels properly like Christmas to me now that I’ve seen Santa ride by on his firetruck.   Instead of hanging out on the steps of our church and watching the parade with church folks, this year we spent it with the family of one of H’s classmates.  That was an amazingly huge crowd of folks.  I was completely overwhelmed, but she had a blast hanging out with the cousins.

As I was driving home the other night, I was admiring the lights that some of our neighbors already had up.  I never used to like lights;  my parents were anti-lights when I was a kid, and as with so many other things, I decided I didn’t like them either mostly as a defense mechanism for being bummed that we didn’t put them up.  When I got older, I went through a phase where I thought white lights could be lovely, if they were done “right”, but colored lights were tacky.  Now, I love them all – delicate white lights twinkling like stars, icicle strings hanging from eaves, bright multi-colored lights in their riot of blues and greens and reds.   While the whit lights are beautiful, the colored lights seem like the embodiment of joy in the season, and I love them for that.

We haven’t put up our lights yet, I think that will be a project for next weekend, and I can’t wait to see our house joining our neighborhood in dressing up for the holiday.

How do you decorate for the holidays?

Too heads-down busy with my deadline knitting to write much tonight, but I have to share this cat story before I forget.

This evening, I was sitting on my couch knitting.  I went and got a snack from the kitchen, just some cheese and crackers, and settled back into my spot.  As soon as I sat down, Mango materialized in front of me, staring intently at the cheese, clearly begging for some.  She edged closer and closer to the plate and I was watching her, because she is entirely untrustworthy when it comes to people food.

Just as she got within striking distance, I heard a rustling behind my head and turned to find Martini sitting right next to my head on the arm of the couch, equally intent on plate.  Realizing I was distracted, Mango lunged for the plate and very nearly succeeded in making off with my snack.  I yelled, which made them both skitter off to glare at me from under the table.  How dare I deny them delicious goat cheese?  Can’t I see that they are STARVING?

All I could think about was the scene in Jurassic Park where Sam Neill’s character describes how the velociraptors hunted in packs, and how I can’t believe I was nearly just outsmarted by a pair of cats.

After yesterday’s travels, all I wanted to do today was hunker don at home, chill out and work on my deadline knitting project.  I did end up going out this evening, but just for a quiet get together with a friend and her daughter.

Unsurprising to anyone who knows me, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Black Friday nonsense out there in the world.  I could sit here and tell you who this is some principled moral stand protesting our consumerism society, but if it is, it’s the easiest stand I’ll ever make.  Somehow, the concept of a boycott seems to imply a sacrifice, that you are refusing to do something that you would normally participate in and enjoy – and there is nothing about overcrowded malls or waiting out in the cold to buy a discounted TV that sounds like anything I would ever enjoy.  So, while I do object on principle to stores opening at 4 AM or midnight or even on Thanksgiving itself (Buzzfeed had the best explanation of why you should skip Black Friday I’ve seen on their site today), I’d not be out there even if I thought it was the best idea ever.

But, I’ve seen a lot of things in the past few weeks that have made me re-think how I’ll be doing my Christmas shopping this year.  The past few years, I’ve gotten lazy and done most of my shopping on Amazon; they make it so easy, it’s hard to resist.  This year, I want to spend more of my dollars in and around my own community, but not at the mall (god, I hate the mall, even when it’s deserted).  I’m going to start tomorrow at my LYS and favorite bookstore, and plan to do the rest of my shopping that way too.   It’ll be less convenient than having everything magically appear at my office door with the UPS man, but hopefully worth it, keeping the businesses I love going strong.  Now, if only my actual town where I live could get some businesses I want to support.

My dad, carving our turkey

Happy Thanksgiving from our house to yours!

Hope you had a day as full of love and laughter as I did.

It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and we’re getting ready for our travels tomorrow.

Like always, we’ll be up at dawn, to get through the gauntlet known as the Mass Pike before the traffic gets impossible and to arrive at my parent’s house early enough that Wiley and Hannah can go watch the road race through town (this will be its 76th year!).  While they’re off doing that, Mom and I will finish up any work that needs doing in the kitchen.

Like always, there will be turkey and meat stuffing and mashed potatoes and turnips (*shudder*) and both kinds of cranberry sauce, and if we’re really lucky, my Uncle Ronn will have bought homemade bread.

Like always, my family will be loud and opinionated (although we all know better than to bring up the election), and we will laugh more than we argue.  My Uncle Dave will be irreverent, my mother will be grumpy, my brother will be sarcastic and my cousin will be brash, in all the best ways of the word.  My dad will preside over all of it, satisfied that this, the coming together of his family, is exactly what it is all about.

And it will be exactly perfectly right.  I can’t wait.

It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and we’re getting ready for our travels tomorrow.

Like always, we’ll be up at dawn, to get through the gauntlet known as the Mass Pike before the traffic gets impossible and to arrive at my parent’s house early enough that Wiley and Hannah can go watch the road race through town (this will be its 76th year!).  While they’re off doing that, Mom and I will finish up any work that needs doing in the kitchen.

Like always, there will be turkey and meat stuffing and mashed potatoes and turnips (*shudder*) and both kinds of cranberry sauce, and if we’re really lucky, my Uncle Ronn will have bought homemade bread.

Like always, my family will be loud and opinionated (although we all know better than to bring up the election), and we will laugh more than we argue.  My Uncle Dave will be irreverent, my mother will be grumpy, my brother will be sarcastic and my cousin will be brash, in all the best ways of the word.  My dad will preside over all of it, satisfied that this, the coming together of his family, is exactly what it is all about.

And it will be exactly perfectly right.  I can’t wait.

Ten things for which I am thankful this year:

1. My family. They are wacky and insane and sometime make me nuts (especially the mister and the kidlet), but they are never boring AND they continue to put up with me.

2. My friends. I am blessed with both a group of very close friends that I love and a wider circle of people I love to spend time with.

3. My friend Roy continues to hang on in the hospital. We will start to get a better idea this week what his long term prognosis looks like, and his doctors are still cautiously optimistic.

4. Freedom from want. We may not have everything we could possibly want, but we damn sure have everything we need, and a whole lot of the things we want. There’s far, far too many people out there who can’t say that.

5. My cats. Even when they make me want to stake them out in the yard to be coyote canapés.

6. Co-workers with a sense of humor, especially the ones who appreciate my sarcastic gallows humor self at my best (worst?).

7. Curiosity. I hope I never tire of wanting to learn and figure stuff out, and that I am lucky enough to remain surrounded by other people who are continually seeking.

8. Books. My house, it could collapse from the weight of all the books we have crammed on every horizontal surface. I love the feeling of diving into a new book.

9. Knitting. It is slow and useful and keeps my hamster brain occupied. It has brought wonderful people into my life and gives me a way to create beauty every day.

10. Cooking. Just like knitting, it is a hobby that lets me be creative and fill a essential need. It makes me happy and is its own reward.

What are you thankful for this year?

Today is my mister’s 40th birthday. We celebrated with a little seafood dinner and then a trip to the Apple store where he got to indulge his little gadget loving heart with a new toy, which he is happily setting up right now. He’s very cute when he has new toys, and I am very happy I got to buy him one.

Me? I am battling a wicked, wicked case of startitis. My deadline project is looming large, and I realized today that my deadline is WAY closer than I think it is, which means I really should be working on it.

And after that, I have two sweaters to finish, two hats to repair, two more hats promised to other short people in my life, a sweater promised to Ms Hannah and christmas presents to finish start.

But (isn’t there always a but?), yesterday I took a wicked fun color theory class with Ann Weaver. As our project to explore our experimentation with color, we started on an Albers Cowl. I had, until yesterday, mostly avoided the pull of log cabin square projects, but this thing has completely sucked me in. It’s so charming and cunning and I am having SO MUCH FUN plotting out my colors, and now it is the only thing I want to work on.

This is going to be bad news.

My first center square, in Dragonfly Fibers Djinn Sock in “Blood Orange”. The white for the next stripe is Jill Draper Makes Stuff Splendor Sock in “Vanilla Bean” and it is simply LUSCIOUS.