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It used to be that I didn’t really care about the Oscars.  I love movies, but the whole awards thing?  Could not have cared less about who went home with the silly statues.  When my dear friend Carrie moved to Boston and invited me to her Oscars party, I went because the party sounded fun.

That was more than 10 years ago, and since then, I’ve gotten just a little more into the whole thing.   There were years I participated in the mad Oscars “Death Race”, trying to see as many of the nominees as possible – leading to some poor decisions, like going, alone, to see The Hours while struggling with my own rocky transition to motherhood (not something I would recommend) to sitting through the entirety of Gangs of New York (also not something I would recommend, although my companions seemed to enjoy it, I think?).  I learned from that year, and now I give myself a pass for the movies I really think I’ll hate (so, no, I didn’t see No Country for Old Men, nor did I see There Will Be Blood).  It’s also led me to seek out movies that I have deeply loved, but might never have made the time to go see without the pull of the Oscars to draw me in.  Last year’s Biutiful stayed with me for days and days, I loved it so much and I would never have seen it if I weren’t trying to see all the Oscar movies.

But my favorite, favorite part of Oscar season is going to see the Shorts programs.  They put together the nominees for Animated, Live Action and Documentaries into three programs, so you can see them all in one place, and I love them.

When we first started going, they played a single night, at one theater in all of Boston, and it felt like an awesome secret – something neat and fun that almost nobody else did or even knew about.  Now, they’re more popular and more widely available (you can even download them from iTunes, if you want to), but it still feels like this oddball thing to go do, and I would be incredibly sad to miss it.

This year’s crop of movies was only disappointing in that there were not any really wacky entries – you know, those movies that just make you stare at the screen, not quite believing what you’re seeing (there’s almost always at least one or two of those), but I really enjoyed them all, especially the animated ones.  A Morning Stroll, with its take on a random city dweller’s encounter with a chicken;  Dimanche, crudely drawn (and the weirdest of the bunch) with a child’s eye view of a small town Sunday;  La Luna,  a lovely fable about how the moon changes its phases and about finding your place in the order of things, Wild Life, a visually gorgeous story of a British emigre to the Canadian frontier and how unsuited he was to the life on the prairie and The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, which was beautiful and whimsical, depicting how much richer the world of books makes our lives.

As always, the documentaries were sad and traumatic – it’s saying something that the one about the American civil rights movement was the most uplifting one of the bunch – and they didn’t have the one I really wanted to see about the starlet turned nun.

The live action shorts were a good mix of funny, poignant and downright heartbreaking.  I loved was Time Freak, mostly because I think that’s exactly what I’d do if I had a time machine, obsessively try to fix every little stupid thing I did, over and over and over.  Raju just broke my heart in about twelve different ways.

I won’t even begin to make a prediction about which one will win – I’m never right, whether I try to guess based on what I think the Academy wants to reward or based on which one I liked the most.  I can never even manage to pick a favorite, never mind the winner.

If you want to see more, you can see trailers and find showings here.

If you just read the blog, you might come to the conclusion that I rarely knit, since I so rarely post projects up here.

Lately, though, I’ve been working on a lot of gift or otherwise secret knitting, so I’ve had nothing I could really post up!

It’s all finished now, and except for two pieces that need to be gifted, I can finally blog about them.  Hooray for that!

First up is a test knitting project that I did this fall for Juniper Moon Farm, for their Spring / Summer collection.

My piece was Finch’s Wings, done in Findley Dappled, color Summerfield.

Photo copyright Joel Eagle, used with permission

There are not words for how much I loved this pattern and, even more so, this yarn.

To be honest, when it first appeared on my doorstep, I was underwhelmed.  Purple and orange and green?  For a detailed lace pattern?  I was convinced that calling the resulting project a dog’s breakfast would be insulting to the dog.  But, since I didn’t get to pick, and I wasn’t going to be that test knitter, whining that I didn’t like what I had been assigned, I settled in to work.  Even in the raw, untested state,  was charmed by the pattern.  The lace pattern looked intimidating, but it was one of those that once you moved through a repeat or two in your swatch is made sense and was easy to read in your knitting, so you couldn’t really lose your place.

Photo copyright Joel Eagle, used with permission

And the yarn was such a wonderful surprise.  The colors were so much more subtle than I expected and they didn’t complete with one another.  More than that, every time I pulled the next length from the ball I found something new that I hadn’t noticed as the colors blended into one another.  Even as I was nearing the end of the sweater, I had conversations in my head as I knit – “Wait, there’s brown here.  I don’t remember there being any brown before, and it’s a pretty shade, too.  Cool.”  I was completely in love with it by the time I was finished, and I cannot wait to pick some up to work with, now that it’s in stores.

I found the test knitting process to be a whole blast in itself as well – working with the designer to iron out wrinkles, making suggestions on how it might be improved, getting to peek inside the design process and then having gorgeous pictures of my finished work.  All of it, even the frenzy of mad knitting to hit deadline, was something I would love to do again.

You can see more of the Findley Dappled patterns on the Juniper Moon blog here, and more about the whole Spring collection here.  They are definitely worth checking out.

It’s the first week of January, and that means registration for Squam opened today.  I was at the Post Office ten minutes after they opened, handing over my envelope.

It’s still a long time and a lot of waiting from January to June, but once you know for sure you’re registered, the going becomes more real, and for me it feels like  something small I can take out of your pocket and pet when I need a reminder that there are good things coming up.

If all goes as requested, I am taking a photo class and knitwear design class.  Those both fit snugly into the path I am trying to build for myself.  We’ll see when my registration gets there if it is meant to be.

As always, I am looking forward to my time in the woods.  This year will be different – although the friends I have gone with many time are still going to, I’ve chosen to share a cabin with other friends, ones that I met there in years past.  Although I love my friends to pieces, I am finding the thought of changing things up to be profoundly exciting, like I am shedding a protective shell that had grown a little too confining, and stretching out to embrace a new experience.  I am a little afraid that I will have hurt my friends’ feelings with this choice, and hopeful that they will recognize that it has less to do with them and more to do with me, and wanting to grow into something new.

Far more than simply rooming with new people, I am taking an even bigger leap with my Squam experience this year.  For the first time, Elizabeth is taking the Squam experience to foreign shores (Can it still BE Squam if it’s not AT Squam?  I guess we’ll find out!).  In October, Squam takes a vacation to Italy, and I am going there too!

All by myself.  And I’ve spent all day moving back and forth between being wildly excited and completely freaked out at the thought of going to a workshop all on my own.  This is all the funnier if you know that I’ve spent the past three years convincing people that it would be just fine for them to do the very same thing and join us in the woods of New Hampshire without knowing a soul in the camp.  Yet, when it is time for me to do it myself, I am a giant ball of anxiety.

But Italy has been at the very top of my travel list for years.  It’s been there for so long that it was starting to intimidate me – that only the “perfect” vacation would be right, that if I couldn’t go for long enough or visit the right places or stay in the right kind of hotel, that I just wouldn’t go because it wouldn’t be everything I’ve hoped and dreamed.  How damn crazy is that?  So, despite having a million reason that it might not end up working out, I added Italy into my registration envelope last night and popped it off in the mail this morning, before I had a chance to have second thoughts and use my fear as an excuse to keep myself small.

And it is going to be awesome.

This week, today is my Friday.  Gotta burn up the vacation time and spend some time with Miss Hannah, since today was the last day of school and now she’s off for nearly two weeks.

Tomorrow, the final push to Christmas prep starts, and I’m over here trying hard not to think to hard about all the things I have to accomplish between now and Sunday (hint:  It’s a LOT.)

Tonight, though, Hannah and I will be heading into Boston to have a lovely fancy dinner and see the Rockette’s holiday extravaganza.  I can’t think of a more fun way to kick off the final approach to Christmas!

Last summer, I had a crazy plant grow in my morning glory bed near my back door.  I let it grow because I was both lazy and curious to see what it was and what it would.  I still don’t know what it was, but it grew to be huge – taller and wider than me.

Since it got cold and everything has turned brown and dead,  every time I walk by that bed, I have thought to myself how bad it looked and how I really should have cut it down and cleared out the bed to get ready for next spring.  I haven’t, of course (see above, re: lazy) but it’s been bugging me.

Yesterday morning when I came downstairs in the cold hours before the sun had been able to warm anything, I looked out the window and realized that the tangled brown mess was full of birds.  Little black juncos and brown sparrows all chattering to each other and feasting on the seeds the plant mess was still holding in its dried branches.

Just like that, something ugly, messy and annoying was transformed into something wonderful and entertaining.  It made me smile all day long.

As much as I might be inclined to whine about how stressed or tired I am,  I can’t forget that I have so much more to be grateful for than not.

As I’ve been hearing so many people angst about family drama on the holidays, I think the thing I am most, most thankful for is my family.  We’re not perfect, but I really genuinely enjoy my family, despite our differences and am immensely grateful that I still have them and that I get to spend time with them often.  I really only have my mother in law on Wiley’s side, but she is great too.

It’s easy to forget how lucky I am  in the day to day, but it is a lucky, lucky thing.

Earlier this week, I came across this story, and immediately fell in love with the idea of this sandwich.  Given how much of a steak lover Wiley is, I knew he would want me to make them for him.

He’s off tomorrow to go help my Dad with trailwork on the piece of the Appalachian Trail that he is responsible for maintaining.  After the terrible snowstorm in CT Halloween weekend, they are expecting a lot of hard work cutting up fallen trees and clearing brush.  It’s going to be a long, hard day – just the kind f day that justifies a sandwich made with two entire steaks and a whole loaf of bread.  Plus, it’s his birthday, and everyone deserves treats on their birthday, right?

So, tonight I set about making sandwiches for the trail crew.  Wiley couldn’t find a big loaf of bread, so he got three little ones instead, which meant we had wee little steaks to go inside them instead of big huge ones.

Of course, I forgot to snap pictures until I was already moving along, so we’ll start in the middle.

Hollowed out bread loaves:

Steaks just starting to sizzle:

Mushrooms, cooked and ready:

Steaks, nearly ready:

Sandwiches under construction:

Pretty packages, tied up in string:

My house is full of smoke from cooking the steaks, and the kitchen smells fantastic.  The sandwiches are sitting under my heaviest cutting board and cast iron dutch oven slowly compressing, waiting for Wiley to pack them up in the morning.  I hope they are half as delicious as they smelled – if they are, those men will be eating well tomorrow afternoon.