Mersydotes

Yesterday at work, there was this whole "photocopier thing", and I was so upset when I got home that I had to make an egg basket.  I just had to.  It was very cathartic.  And now we have a basket for our eggs!  Yay! Very lovely, no?  Kind of like crochet origami.  It was awfully fun to make, and fold, and figure out the geometry.  Plus, it gets to live in the fridge.  Now our lives are complete- I've crocheted everything in the house, even the fridge. Yay! ~Mersydotes

Just north of the city is a magical land filled with hamlets and hollows and boroughs.  The kind of East Coast you think of when you here tales of Pilgrims and whalers.  In fact, before we moved out here, I honestly had no concept of what New York City would look like.  The night I flew in to join Mr. Mersy, I burst into tears as we flew over the Statue of Liberty and the immense expanse of what I now know to be the nighttime star-scape of Manhattan and Brooklyn spread out below us.  I had no frame of reference to imagine anything so vastly populated. But the wee towns, I can well imagine, and this past weekend Mr. Mersy and I drove around to see what life looked like in Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown.  We want to move there tout de suite! It was cruelly cold (wind chills of 20 below), and the towns were silent, hibernating under the grey skies and wind sweeping in off the Hudson.  When life re-emerges in March, I imagine it wi...

Way back when, when I was but a wee thing in grad school, I had a conversation analysis course with a professor who ran off to Kenya and had all sorts of adventures before getting her PhD under the guru of all sociolinguistic gurus at UCLA.  If that wasn't cool enough, one of my classmates was an Italian woman who was not only brilliant, but who wore heart-achingly chic outfits completely handmade from natural linen and felted wool.  I, on the other hand, wore jeans and showed up late to class every day because I was too busy smooching Mr. Mersy.  It was a great semester.   It was very probably the best class I ever took, and when I saw this Italian crochet video tutorial (click here ), it took me back to afternoons spent painstakingly analyzing phone conversations from the 70s. Although I'm not a big fan of felted wool, I do love rough, "unfinished" wool, and I happened to have a few skeins of Noro laying around, just waiting for the perfect pr...

Snow came today and covered everything in marshmallow fluff.  It caused all sorts of chaos in the street when a mischievously parked delivery van caused an entire busload of people to be evacuated in the middle of the street.  I felt horrible for the bus driver who had to stand in the snow calling for a tow truck while cars honked and snow swirled.   I hope everything worked out ok for the driver and everyone stayed nice and warm. ~Mersydotes

It's nearly bedtime, Penny has been out one final time, and my toes are roasting atop the space heater- but I just had to pop into the blog for a moment and record the miracle that happened today.  Are you ready: I actually made good fried rice here at home.........I know!  Crazy! I tweaked it so that it would be gluten-free with tamari rather than soy sauce, and added some garlic pepper paste for a bit of a kick.  It has nutty sesame oil, fresh ginger, garlic, rice wine, and basil.  We made ours veggie-ful and added some tofu puffs cooked with gluten-free teriyaki sauce on the side.  Never ever ever did I think that we could make tasty fried rice here at home, but this recipe (click here ) proved me wrong.  I got a good vibe (and a massive craving) when I read through it.  Instead of the packaged rice the recipe recommends, I just cooked regular rice with half the water and no lid. Honestly, we might have this every night for the next dec...

Some days are frigid and clear, others bone-chillingly damp.  The ice has frozen so solid out in the streets that it took three big dudes from Queens, a wrench, a shovel, and lots of burning rubber to free my little car from its parking space last week.  I owe them a huge thank you, because I made it to work in plenty of time, and I learned that if you want help from strangers in NYC, you just have to offer them your parking space. Usually, I would contrast that opening paragraph with a mention of how warm and snuggly it's been inside our little apartment, but unfortunately that would be a downright lie.  The super has gone awol, leaving us with very little heat.  Despite our attempts to track him down, he is remaining elusive, and we are shivering.  The radiators almost never come on any more, and we sleep with the doors closed and our wee space heater running full-blast all night.  Goodness knows what our electricity bill is going to lo...

All those little hexagonal droplets of color from last week joined together into a most delicious puddle on our bathroom floor: I can't help but image each hexagon as a colored drop dripping from the faucet, all over our tiles.  Can you imagine anything more exciting that seeing a puddle of crochet begin to spread?  Wading about, ankle-deep in yarny color?  Splashing along with your toes?  Experimenting with the new kaleidoscope camera on my phone I took some photos of our new rug, and I imagine that if yarn were water and color were air, it would look something like this:   Splash about for a bit in all these puddles, and fight the winter doldrums away! Lots of love, ~Mersydotes  

Sometimes it gets cold here in the city.  The wind comes off the ocean and bites you while you hurry to shelter in the metro tunnels.  You're grateful for the warm air you'd usually avoid breathing at all costs.  All around you is a sea of grey and black coats, and faces you'll never recognize.   The nights have a yellow-tinged, street-lamp glow to them that seems even colder.  In Illinois, the moon would shine so brightly when it was full that I'd have trouble sleeping until I pretended its light was a blanket I could wrap around me.  Here, I lay awake at night, trying to pretend the streetlamp outside is really moonshine seeping through our blinds.  Usually, it doesn't work, but every so often, I can pretend. Sometimes there's no hot water in our apartment; sometimes the pipes just hiss and gurgle, and there's no water at all.   And sometimes the super turns off the radiators for reasons know only to him.  But I'...