J and I were recently watching a Dave Chapelle standup comedy thing, and one of the things he talked about was the difference between how white and black people view the police. His example was that white friends of his have no problem walking up to a policeman and actually talking to them, asking for directions or whatever, and how he's always amazed that they're not afraid and don't get hauled in for assaulting an officer or something (except much funnier than that).

Something that struck me though was that J and I have had almost identical conversations, except I'm not black, just poor. If I see a police officer walking down the street, I'll cross the street to stay away from them. J has called the police about noise, which I would never do. I have called them about actively dangerous stuff, like when the posters on the telephone poles in our neighborhood were lit on fire during a dry spell, but even then I freak the heck out, because what if they think I set it? Why would someone just call the police? One of the few times I well and truly flipped out on J was when he (briefly) considered applying for a police job. I don't even think I could be friends with one, because I would just be too afraid, because what if there's some law I don't know about?

And I do the same type of thing in other situations with people in positions of power. This makes J crazy, actually, because I hate calling our rental company, financial aid, tech support, whatever.

This past weekend, when talking about the Dave Chapelle routine, I realized what the essential difference is. If you've grown up in a comparitively priveledged way, your assumption is the that the job of people with power is to give you things--fix your clanking garbage disposal, sort through your financial aid, get the kids lighting firecrackers at 3am to cut it out. But if you've never had much of a safety net to begin with, it seems like those same people's jobs is to take things away from you--claim an old garbage disposal broke due to negligence and charge 500$ for it, to take away your student loans, to hassle you for God-only-knows-what-reason.

It's probably not *just* a class thing, but it did strike me as consistent with a lot of other class-related stuff I've thought about. Hmm.

A thing I've noticed:

I'm sitting on the bus, in the airport, out in public somewhere, doing something string-related. Many people have no idea what I'm doing, and some are interested and ask about it. Which is cool.

But some people, for whatever reason, can't just ask a fully open-ended question like "What are you doing?" or "How does that work?" Instead, they ask, "Is that ___?"

____ is always, ALWAYS crochet.

I'm never, EVER crocheting.

Why is this? What is it that these people that know nothing about craft stuff think they can identify crochet?

Today I was spinning and someone asked me if it was crochet. I chatted with him a little bit, and then got to thinking about all the times I've seen or heard of spinning--in Walt Disney movies, in fairy tales, in books of the Girls On The Frontier genre, in The Mists of Avalon. It wasn't very long ago that references to spinning would be no different than references to eating food or wearing warm clothing when it's cold; almost too quotidien to attract any notice at all.

Yet in only a couple of generations it's become something that no one can even recognize. Makes one wonder at how much technology we've lost, and what normal everyday thing will seem backwards and strange in a few generations.

I currently am undergoing a terrible case of Spinning Wheel Lust. I've been spending far too much time this weekend cross-referencing reviews, writing up lists of things to consider, looking at ads in Spin Off, etc., etc. I'm pretty sure I know what wheel I'm going to buy, but I'm being sensible enough to wait until J has a full-time job because I don't want to ruin our run of breaking even or better, even though we've just had a couple of small financial windfalls come up at once and the wheels are so pretty and OH GOD THE MATERIALISM IS EATING MY SOUL I WANT A WHEEL SO BAD.

ahem.

I've signed up for a bunch of free spinning catalogs in the last few days, which I might regret next month when I've forgotten about a wheel and then am buried under a pile of shiny paper when I open my mailbox. But knowing that things with my name on them are in the mail eases the pain, and is the cheapest alternative.

The strange thing is that I've been spinning for almost a year and had no particular interest in a wheel until about a week ago. Then suddenly, kablooey.
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All this ranky greed reminded me of a couple of months ago when I talked about my stash. So I counted things up to see how I was doing.

Here is what my stash looked like 3 months ago, if you're keeping score. Not included in those pictures is a big box of acrylic I'm just going to give away when we move, the yarn that was in my knitting bag for projects actively in progress, and my spinning supplies, but I'll mention them anyways.

Ebayed:
1)Two balls of sock yarn that I bought, then didn't like the dye job of. No point in working with materials I don't like.

Used a few yards of:
1)Five balls of Dale Baby Ull for headbands. They were so much fun to make that I'll certainly make more. The five balls are in different but coordinating colors, so they're good for color experiments.

Now being actively used in a project:
1)Lorna's Laces sock yarn, to match its mate.
2)Dark green WoolEase, for a vest (swatching counts if it's extensive enough that the swatch is the size of a baby vest already, I say.)
3)Gray and green wool for an entrelac hat experiment (technically cast on and ripped out, I need to think about this some more. But it's in the yarn bag.)

Used up entirely:

1) A hat's worth of gray wool.
2) All the yarn that wasn't shown due to it being "in progress", save the vertical patterned Fair Isle which is too hot to work on right now (there will be pictures of these finished things soon, as soon as they get to their intended recipients or I get up the gumption to put on a wool sweater in June).
3) A big pile of acrylic for the fishie blanket.
4)About 6 ounces of roving.

Purchases:
1)A sweater's worth of cotton for a sweater for J. The next major project once I knit the vest described above.
2)Some fantastic alpaca roving.

Overall progress: Slowly but surely. The purchases I made have been reasonable. The cotton is for a sweater to replace a storebought one that's falling apart, and I have some plans for the roving.

90% of the crafty stash now easily fits in the tub. Fitting all my extra fabric and roving in it before we move was my main stash reduction goal. At this rate it won't be a problem.

I've planned for or used up some yarn that had no specific plan. Because I have it all sitting there on my Flickr page, it's easy to remind myself of when I have a flash of brilliance, and prevents me from buying something that I already have.

I haven't had a ton of free time lately, so I haven't finished as much as I did within the same time frame last year. But I've used more than I've bought, and got rid of what doesn't give me pleasure to look at or use. Even though the change is small, I feel less weighed down by my craft-related posessions and more curious about their potential.

Pretty successful so far.

I am so, so pleased with myself.



What is it?


A spindle bag. I bring my spinning on the bus with me sometimes, and I've found it's a lot harder to keep spinning stuff together compared to knitting. Because roving is loose fluffy stuff, it just falls apart in a loaded backpack, wisps of fluff getting into everything, and messing up the roving, which makes it hard to spin.

My temporary solution was to use a long plastic bag (like the kind newspapers get delivered in), which was about the right size. The fiber and spindle stayed put, but the lump of undrafted roving that was usually at the bottom of the bag sometimes got caught in the spindle hook, which, again, left a chunk of tangled roving I didn't want to use. I've worried about the state of the spindle hook, too, on my more delicate spindles, and anyhow, plastic bags aren't cute and fun.

So I came up with my perfect spindle bag, which has a place on top for a spindle, and another space on the bottom to store enough roving to keep me busy for an hour or so (which is about as much as I can use in a day anyhow). I figure so long as there's roving on the bottom it will act like a pillow for the hook.

I'm all right at sewing--I have a sewing machine that I can use all the bells and whistles on, and I can make very basic clothing, pillows, curtains, that sort of thing. I'd like to get better at it, though; there's a sewing store close to me that gives lessons and I'm thinking of going there. And I did learn a lot just on this little bag. The pocket at the bottom took me a while to logic my way through, and then once I figured it out I sewed the bottom part the wrong way out and cursed a lot as I ripped the seam.



You can see the seam here that separates the spindle space from the roving space.



My first buttonholes. One is handsewn, one is done by machine. After making them I realized it'd be better to sew them first and cut after, especially because I was cutting through a couple of layers of cloth and it ended up being sort of messy. A good lesson, though.

I love pleasant surprises when I'm doing this sort of thing. Don't those buttons sort of make a face?

How about now?

It seems to be singing the praises of delicious wool. Because of this, I'm calling it the Spindle Snake.

When I wrote recently about how every popular blogger has had a book out recently, I wondered to myself if my annoyance was a signal that knitting has jumped the shark.

This weekend I went to a few used book stores and found many copies of new knitting books, including Stitch 'N' Bitch. There were also some classics, a bit older, but the sort of thing a new knitter would have snapped out of a great-aunt's attic (I passed on "Knitting Without Tears" and a few gansey books, but I picked up a pre-Dover edition of Barbara Walker's first stitch treasury).

I love going to used book stores, and I always poke through the craft section. There are hardly ever ANY knitting books. Now all of a sudden the balance seems to have shifted, and I had a dozen or so quality books to choose from.

So. Knitting is dead. I decree it. It's time to keep pet geckos, or something.

Just give me your leftover yarn and books first.
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Okay, that stuff I just said is sort of ironic because on Friday I had a lovely knitting community feeling at The Sow's Ear, where I chatted with a bunch of people, found out a few people are reading the site (*waves*), met a blogger, recommended good beginner books to friends, bought fantabulous alpaca roving, and talked about all sorts of yarny things.

I've been feeling a little down on my knitting group lately because a few regulars that I'm close to have moved or are coming much less frequently, and I just felt like I was putting a lot of stuff in and not getting anything back--I'm in charge of the email list, and some nights I feel like everyone else is allowed to hang out and socialize but I keep getting pulled away to troubleshoot things that are just "sit there and think about them for 5 minutes" types of things, no matter your level of experience. So it was really, really nice to get some compliments, have some genuine give-and-take, to actually be told something that was new to me (I read new things online all the time, but it's nice to have that in person sometimes too.)

It's too bad it's so far out or I would go there more often, just to hang out and have a snack.

I'm giving enough thought to this new sock pattern that I know I'm in trouble. It'll be a while before I do anything with it, but it's in heavy rotation on the List Of Things I Think About When I'm Not Thinking About Anything.

But look! A steek has been cut!



This is sort of an old picture--the sweater's looked just like this since we got back from our trip. I've been slowly working on reinforcing the steeks with a closely spaced hand sewn backstitch, but I also have another sweater I'm weaving in ends on, but there's a finite amount of "interested in hand-sewing" time I have in a day.

Cutting the neck steek wasn't too traumatic even though it was my first real one. For one, I believe in the steek. I made a practice one a few years ago with some slippery acrylic, pulled the thing to death, and saw that I'd have to go in with a pointy object and intentionally unravel threads to go farther than a stitch or two into the steek itself. Also, I started with the smallest, least integral steek. No weight hangs from the neck steek compared to, say, a sleeve, so it didn't seem too dangerous.

I'm planning on tacking the steek down eventually. There are some pretty good pictures at the back of Alice Starmore's Fisherman's Sweaters that I'm basing all my steek techniques on this time around. That's not something that needs to be done right away, though, so I'll probably leave it until after this run of needlewielding.

I also need to figure out exactly what I'll be doing with the sleeves. I mentioned before that the pattern along the sides carries up and around down to the wrist. On the top of the sleeve, I'm pretty sure I want another column of Norwegian Stars. But in between? I'm dithering between doing something very similar to the rest of the sweater and just cutting into the pattern as I decrease down to the wrist, or having a small, allover pattern as can be seen in this picture of Crichton made by another person in the Sweaters From Camp knitalong. I think I have to take some measurements and figure out exactly how wide this in-between spot will be--if it's pretty wide, I'll at least include polymer chains flanking the stars. If its less than 20 or so stitches, though, some unobstrusive allover pattern might work.

This is how knitting stupidity happens. (in a different form than last week's stupidity).

So a few days ago someone shares a picture of gorgeous, very finely knit knee-high stockings they made for themselves, in the middle of an online conversation about sock knitting.

I don't really enjoy knitting socks. And yet... wow. Those are BEAUTIFUL. And I'd have something to wear with skirts.

So now I must go through my stash and figure out if there's a way I can manage to make something like these.

Some concerns:

-I'd like them to be firmly knitted around the foot (so they wear better and feel nicer), but I'd like something lighter and lacier around the leg (to show off the lace, and to not be too hot).

-I DON'T want them to be too silly. If I want silly, I have rainbow-striped individually-toed socks that end just below my knee already. So, all one color, more or less. Or slight varigation that goes well with lace.

My thought at the moment is that I could knit the foot in a traditional sock yarn and do the rest in something finer, with colors that go together. That way I could do the whole thing on 0's or 1's and get the alternately dense/lacy effect I'd like.

To maximize the use of stashed yarns, I could either 1) get some laceweight yarn that matches the solid-color sock yarn I already have and deal with hand-washing the socks every time I wear them, or 2) Cobbling this small amount of gray sock yarn with some gray reinforcement thread I got ages ago from elann.com that's been sitting in the "to donate" bag. The latter appeals for its use of stuff I already have and its increased likelihood of being totally machine-washable, but suspect I won't have enough and Elann ran out of that color some time ago.

While the overall project appeals to me, maybe I should start by asking this question: If I've been consciously buying more "adult in the workforce" clothing, and wearing it at least once a week at work, are above-the-knee socks going to totally ruin that? Right now I mostly wear nice ankle socks, and the more I think about this the more I wonder if knee socks are a step up or down from that.

In other pictureless knitting news, I'm working the neck on a striped raglan sweater that's been on the needles since Christmas, I'm almost up to the heel on the second of a pair of socks that I promised the intended recipient MONTHS ago, and I'm mentally playing with some ideas for the Woolease seen here. I think my idea would come out nicely enough to sell, but I worry that it will be too similar to some vest patterns I've seen in Knitty and Interweave, even though I really don't *like* those vests, which are less graceful than what I'm going for.

Oh, well. We'll see. I really like my cable idea in theory, maybe I could put it on something else.

A little thought experiment: What's the smallest part of someone's face you could see and still recognize the image as that person?

I've been thinking about this because one of the labs I work in works with vision, and put up a little "Identify the person in the lab by their eye" poster, with extreme closeups. And it's interesting to me, because for some of them, my brain just fills in the rest of the person's features, and it's instantly obvious. But for others, I can spend a few minutes analyzing the makeup/lack of, eyelash color, etc., and still can't figure out who it could be. Twenty minutes later I'll walk by and realize who it is without trying to narrow it down.

It's not a problem that responds well to logic.

I've been trying to figure out what it is about the "recognizable" eyes that separates them from the "unrecognizable" ones. The people I know best have generally been the easiest, which makes sense. The few that include a bit of eyebrow are easier. People who wear makeup are easier than those without, though there are few enough makeup wearers that that might be a case of narrowing it down rather than one of recognition.

I'm sure there's a psychological paper in there somewhere; fortunately, I'm not a psychiatrist so I can enjoy just thinking about it.

And it's been fun to argue with people, especially when they don't recognize their own eye (I didn't, at first, until I realized I have the darkest eyes of the Caucasians in the lab. It was the only case where the logic helped).

I am, as usual, incredibly late to the party, but I've been thinking about this article, and the document the article refers to, for the couple of weeks since my blog reading circle went crazy with the "government is telling me what to do with my body" heebies.

While I understand the heebies, the CDC recommendations aren't particularly scary, despite the phrasing of the Washington Post article. It boils down to: "Kids are more likely to be healthy if their moms are healthy before they get pregnant." Which is hard for me to argue with.

I'll get to the specific CDC recommendations in a minute, but first, some personal stuff. This article was actually pretty well-timed for me. While I'm not *planning* on getting pregnant anytime soon (and not yet specifically planning to at all), my feelings about pregnancy and parenthood have recently shifted away from utter blinding horror and towards "I'm not sure what I'd do if a surprise showed up."

Most people wouldn't think of this as great personal change, but I do, and before I saw this article I was thinking of discussing some stuff with my doctor the next time I have a checkup. Because if my first instinct is no longer "I'd abort the thing the day I found out," then I *should* talk to my doctor about some of the concerns I have about babymaking. That doesn't mean I live in a fundamentalist Christian world where I'm a baby factory that submits to her husband, it means I care about factors of my health that weren't factors last year.

Here are the actual CDC recommendations in bold, with my commentary unbolded in between.

Recommendation 1. Individual Responsibility Across the Lifespan. Each woman, man, and couple should be encouraged to have a reproductive life plan.

Wait, did you catch that? *Everyone* should think about their capacity for babymaking, once that capacity exists, and should probably have a conversation with their partner and doctor about those choices. Seems reasonable.

Recommendation 2. Consumer Awareness. Increase public awareness of the importance of preconception health behaviors and preconception care services by using information and tools appropriate across various ages; literacy, including health literacy; and cultural/linguistic contexts.

I've never liked the phrase "health care consumer"--it makes sick people sound like they ENJOY being sick--but I'll overlook that bit because most of what it's saying is that people should know that there are things you should do before you become pregnant or impregnate (like women taking folic acid), if you want to have a healthy child. It's as reasonable as telling people about risk factors associated with drinking or doing drugs.

Recommendation 3. Preventive Visits. As a part of primary care visits, provide risk assessment and educational and health promotion counseling to all women of childbearing age to reduce reproductive risks and improve pregnancy outcomes.

"Are you planning on having children soon?"

I've been asked this since I was in grad school as part of my regular checkup. I *should* have been asked since I was 15, before I was even *kissing* boys, because I had the capacity to make babies and the doctor didn't know what my social life was like. And all the guys I know should have been asked this same question, from about the same age (J isn't here to corroborate, but my guess is that doctors don't ask men those types of questions. Any male readers that can affirm or deny?)

This seemed like something that a lot of people were having a problem with, in my reading around. Why should doctors be asking? Because it's a HEALTH CARE ISSUE. My doctor asks me if anyone in my family has had a major health care crisis since the last time I saw her, when I'm graduating, how I feel about living so far from family. She's making conversation, but she's also figuring out what my health care situation is like--does she need to talk to me about dealing with stress? Are there genetic factors we should be considering? Is it likely that she's going to be seeing a lot more of me? All that stuff is less relevant than my fertility, frankly, but it's still critical to my health.

Recommendation 4. Interventions for Identified Risks. Increase the proportion of women who receive interventions as follow-up to preconception risk screening, focusing on high priority interventions (i.e., those with evidence of effectiveness and greatest potential impact).

"Are you planning on having a baby within the next year?"
"Probably."
"Then we need to have an extra talk about your poorly-controlled diabetes."

It doesn't mean she'll listen, but it does mean that she'll be fully informed about the impact her choices will have on a gleam in her boyfriend's eye.

Recommendation 5. Interconception Care. Use the interconception period to provide additional intensive interventions to women who have had a previous pregnancy that ended in an adverse outcome (i.e., infant death, fetal loss, birth defects, low birthweight, or preterm birth).

This one makes me sad, but it is reasonable, again, if someone is planning on having another baby.

Recommendation 6. Prepregnancy Checkup. Offer, as a component of maternity care, one prepregnancy visit for couples and persons planning pregnancy.

This recommendation is pretty much what I just said I'd be doing the next time I go to the doctor's, so I can't fault it.

Recommendation 7. Health Insurance Coverage for Women with Low Incomes. Increase public and private health insurance coverage for women with low incomes to improve access to preventive women's health and preconception and interconception care.

This one makes me mad--not at the CDC, but the nonexistent health care system in this country. Get people without it some fucking health care already!

When J worked for a health-care advocacy group a few years ago, one thing they were trying to get was prenatal care for illegal immigrants, partly based on the theory that the whole family would get government health care as soon as the child was born in the States (and therefore became an American citizen), and partly based on the idea that it would be cheaper to do a prenatal checkup than it would be to take care of a premature, underweight infant with breathing problems that could have been in much better shape if the doc had put the mom on bed rest for 2 weeks.

It'd be nice if we could get the same thing for everyone.

Recommendation 8. Public Health Programs and Strategies. Integrate components of preconception health into existing local public health and related programs, including emphasis on interconception interventions for women with previous adverse outcomes.

The people at greatest risk of having children with major and expensive health problems are the ones least able to take care of them--poor women who get their health care from Medicare or Medicaid. They're also the ones least likely to be reading the Washington Post in the morning and setting up their yearly checkup before writing a few pages for their thesis. Of course they need to hear about this stuff too! Criminey.

Recommendation 9. Research. Increase the evidence base and promote the use of the evidence to improve preconception health.

I can't comment on this--I'm too busy writing up a grant for the NIH that will measure the effect of me wearing a bright orange t-shirt reading "THINK ABOUT TEH BAYBEEZ" and running around Victoria's Secret the day before Valentine's Day.

(Sorry, I'm tired of being serious, I just did a lot of reading about how the government wants to make me into an incubator, this is the second-to-last recommendation, and it took me way too long to write this. *deep breath* Back to normal now.)

Seriously, there's nothing wrong with this one because the CDC memo starts with a lit search that seems pretty scanty. To make the data worthwhile they'll probably need to tell all this stuff to a bunch of women that have ZERO interest in getting pregnant, but that's medical research.

Recommendation 10. Monitoring Improvements. Maximize public health surveillance and related research mechanisms to monitor preconception health.

This reads to me as "Oh yeah, and give us a big wad of money too." This and #9 are by far the least specific, but the CDC has written this nice long document, of course they're going to put in a little ad for themselves. I understand how these things go.
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So, I'm not especially horrified that the government wants men and women to remember that they have the capacity to make babies whether they want to or not. And that's also a FAR cry from "New federal guidelines ask all females capable of conceiving a baby to treat themselves -- and to be treated by the health care system -- as pre-pregnant, regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant anytime soon," which is how the Washington Post puts it. The only time the word "prepregnancy" comes up in the CDC document is in referring to a time when someone is PLANNING on getting pregnant in the near future. Nowhere does it say that even nuns should be in a heightened state of alert. It says "be healthy, talk to your doctor before you get pregnant" to non-doctors and "ask people what they think of parenthood" to doctors. Pretty sensible advice.

Only really really smart knitters can make one long cuff of a sweater in 3x3 ribbing, and proceed to knit 3/4 of the second cuff in 2x2 ribbing, without noticing.

The REALLY smart ones. Like me.



Spinning (especially plying) is a good warm-weather activity, especially when my two main projects are mostly-completed sweaters in the round, which require me to basically wear a blanket whenever I work on them.

The bottom three skeins are the remainder of the blue wool I used to knit this hat. I might use some of it to add to that hat, actually; it's a little short because I had less than a yard left of what I'd spun up to that point when I finished it. It wouldn't be too tricky to pick up stitches along the bottom and add an inch. And the rest of it? I don't know. It's very similar to the Blackberry Ridge fingering weight yarn I'm using for the Fair Isle cardigan (no surprise there; the roving is from their mill). I might do some colorwork with it and the leftover yarn from the sweater. I think that'd turn out nice.

The top skein is laceweight merino that I'm SO proud of. It's been sort of frustrating spinning so fine. The yarn breaks a lot, and reattaching the fiber is more difficult than with the other rovings I've worked with so far. But I'm so happy with the end result. There were a few different colors in the roving, which gives the final yarn a nice heathery depth. It's something I would LOVE if I found it in a yarn store, but gracefully-colored merino laceweight is an exceptionally rare creature.

There's about 130 yards here, about 20 wraps per inch. I have four ounces of roving and it doesn't look like I've made any dent in it so far. Once I'm done spinning it up I'll probably knit a lacy scarf and/or stole from it, depending on the final yardage. I'm also considering plying some of the singles with some white merino I have, since four ounces of lacweight isn't SO much. I could use the white-and-red plied yarn in a knitted-on border.

Like, two years ago (I don't feel like digging through the archives for it) I started writing up a "how to design silly little things like Girs and Brain Slugs" tutorial. I put a paragraph or two up, then ignored it, making it the first of a nonexistent series.

But in the last week, I 1: Finished and officially posted the brain slug pattern in the patterns section of the site, 2: Saw a couple of online requests for various toys, 3: Noticed that the Gir pattern was getting a lot of linkage from various places, and 4: Read a nice little description of various methods of putting toys together.

Knitting little toys is so much fun, but people get intimidated by all the little pieces. Especially when the toy doesn't really look like anything until it gets seamed together, which can be very scary for someone without a lot of sewing experience who doesn't realize that NOTHING looks like what it is when it first gets cut out.

So I finally wrote the tutorial and put it up on the LJ Knitting Community. It's got a pretty good response so far, so if you're interested in making crazy knitted shapes you might enjoy reading it.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the things knitting does well, and the things knitting *doesn't* do well. And the more I think about it, the more amazed I am that someone would write a knitting pattern which essentially overlaid a fabric pattern and told you to sew it together, unless they're very consciously imitating old-fashioned sewn fabric toys and *telling the knitter that*. Because what's special about handknitting? It boils down to personalization of fabric, stretchiness, and seamlessness of construction. Handknit socks are superfantastic--I can't imagine the days of stiff seamed fabric around your feet. Other wonderful knitted things include extra-squishy stuffed animals, leg warmers, hats, things for people you care about (so you can personalize them), and flights of fancy like brainslugs, DNA scarves, and sweaters with polymer chains running down the sleeves. Why interupt the flow of all that joyous energy?

Today is our fruit anniversary. We don't make a big deal of the occasion--we both happened to want mp3 players at the same time, so we both bought what we wanted and counted that as having bought each other a present. We'll go have a nice dinner tomorrow night. Like I said last year, every day is a celebration.

This year has been my "wise elder statesman" year of marriage, because so many people I know are having weddings right now and have been doing things like coming up to me and saying "Why didn't you tell me that people would freak out about napkin colors? Why didn't you tell me that *I* would freak out about napkin colors?!?", which is about the time I pull them aside and make them breathe for 5 minutes, reassure them that contrary to popular opinion, the wedding isn't as fun as marriage, so not to worry. It's like adults telling you that high school will be the best years of your life, when you're an unpopular and pimple-laden junior. It just ain't so.

As someone who was totally freaked out by the idea of marriage for a long time, this is pretty rich, but I've been married for *4 whole years*. This allows me to be a matronly blowhard once in a while.

But this post isn't about me being a matronly blowhard. Or maybe it's about me being a matronly blowhard, and having chosen a lovely enough person who can deal with that for four years and still be happy.

I still like his little quirks. I still watch him sleep. He can still surprise me. I'm still amazed that he actually likes me.

Happy anniversary, baby.