Today, and pretty much every time I cook meat, I am happy about those 3-pound tubs of peeled fresh garlic at Costo. I love garlic, and pre-peeled individual cloves are so convenient.

Yum!

Yeah, so, the Jonathan Coulton show last Friday was pretty great. I'm not doing a real report but I don't think I need to since (for those of you who care) this show was filmed for a DVD which will bring the full delightful experience to the masses. (Um, in a few months.) Mostly I just want to pass on the link to this excellent video from the evening, in which he, along with illustrious guest stars including Leo Laporte, plays his song "Still Alive" Rock Band-style. (Spoiler alert: they fail. But just barely.)

Really an amazing show. This was my first time seeing him play (and my first time at the Great American Music Hall which is a lovely venue) and it was well worth the trip. I'm not a super-hardcore fan so I think there were a number of things I didn't "get," and I don't do audience participation (of which there was a small but significant amount), but I had a great time (thanks especially to my BFF who invited me along [and got me in for free]).

Also, there was delicious cake after the show was over. Yellow and chocolate! Would that every concert ended that way.

So, yeah, a long weekend with too little sleep, then four days of work and now I've got a moderate cold and despite the doses of DayQuil and albuterol (that's to ease the coughing) I'm feeling pretty shitty. But I've got work tomorrow and I hate letting a show recap get to its one-week anniversary, so I'm gonna give this a try. I'm thinking the happy memories will distract me from my ills. ( Golden Gate...Divisadero...Turk...Fillmore! )

It was really an excellent weekend, not just for the shows but for seeing old friends and meeting new ones! Maybe next time I'll get to go out East instead. In the meantime, I have memories and pictures. k1cup, hope you had a good trip home!

I really wanted to get this recap done earlier, before all the memories trickled out of my brain, but, you know, there's that job I have to go to now, and the fact that I'm getting old and tired, so now it's four days later and I don't know how this is going to turn out. Probably short, and summary. ( But I've thought that before and it didn't turn out that way, so let's just plunge into it, shall we? )

Now that I'm done being a killjoy, you can take a look at the pictures and setlist. Fillmore recap coming up! (Maybe tomorrow? Depends on how late I stay out with k1cup. :P )

I think this one is going to be shorter than usual, partly because it's so very much after the fact, and partly because the show itself was so short. ( But let's see how it goes. )

Wow, that report was really short. That's got to be a record of some kind. And here are the photos and stuff. Can't wait until September!

Yeah, I've been pretty negligent with the updating, but there really hasn't been anything happening. I've just been going to work and sitting around and stuff. But Thursday was wallacecat's and my anniversary, so I skipped work and we went out and got sushi and then went over to Myopic Books. After a bit, while wallacecat browsed around the bookstore, I strolled over to Nina. I'm not really supposed to buy any more yarn, but as a special anniversary treat I was permitted to pick up a couple skeins of Alpaca Silk (in amethyst), which I have already cast on for a pair of rather indulgent socks.

Speaking of which, I finally have pictures of the xtreme socks I kept talking about last summer. I actually only finished them in December—I started them in June and by September had just about 3-4 inches left to do on the second sock; then school started and what with teaching my two classes and the extra hours I took on (to buy the beloved and totally worth it MacBook) I didn't get much knitting done. But I picked them back up over the winter break and finished the last bit off in a couple days; now, a month or so later, I have ( 7 photos and the usual commentary. ) They were fun, too, so now that those are done, I'm thinking I might want to take the lovely 140g yarn left over from that baby set and try another of this kind of thing—perhaps Eunny Jang's Bayerische sock pattern adapted to a knee-high? I probably wouldn't get it finished before the weather got too warm to wear them, though. Hee.

Wow, I have been seriously delinquent on show reports lately. I don't know if it's even worth talking about the Doughty show now, almost two weeks later...( but hell, I'll give it a try. This won't be very long. )

Oh yeah, 3 blurryish photos and they're also oddly pink. And again, setlist and a pretty lo-fi mp3 of the new Luminous Girl song.

Common Rotation tomorrow, OK Go and the Decemberists in a couple weeks! I've got to get back into my concert recapping habits...

I never figured I'd ever feel it necessary to write a letter to the editor, but the Trib finally drove me over the edge when I saw the sub-headline for this story. I mean, I've grudgingly come to accept the fact that the Trib's copyeditors don't know the difference between "it's" and "its," but come on—"bain" isn't even a word in English! If one hadn't already immediately realized that the word ought to be "bane," one might charitably speculate that the author was trying to make a clever food-related pun on the French word "bain" (as in "bain-marie"); but even if that were the case, the phrase would still make no sense. So I fired off an angry (e-)letter. Not that I think it will make any difference in the Trib's miserable editing, but I couldn't let that sit.

Anyway, I'm waiting around for students to show up, and then when I'm done here wallacecat and I are going for one last late lunch at the soon-to-be-defunct Zephyr. It is truly the passing of an age.

Well, today is the birthday of Dan Miller, so happy birthday Mr Miller!

Today is also the one-week anniversary of when I hurt my knee, so happy anniversary knee injury! I blame Sufjan. Anyway it's still hurting rather a lot when I go up or down stairs, so I finally made an appointment to go to the Student Care Center on Thursday. I'm pretty sure it's runner's knee (a complete misnomer in my case since I avoid running as much as possible) so I don't think it's going to require any radical treatment, but it could take several weeks or even months until it's back to normal. And I have to say, if it's gonna be weeks and weeks before I can go up and down stairs again without pain, then the rest of this year is gonna be pretty fucking shitty.

Also! We've been having this problem with tiles falling off the bathroom wall so the repair guy came over to fix it. He spent all this morning ripping the walls out and rebuilding them. Then over the next couple of days I guess he's going to put the tiles back on. In the meantime we can't use the shower (although we can take baths). Sigh. Yeah, it's been a rough time.

I think I need a brownie with ice cream on it now.

I always forget that all the non-dining-hall food places are closed the week before classes start. I guess it's to train the first-years to eat at their house tables and not find food independently? All I know is, that means I had no lunch today. Boo-hoo!

Anyway, it's back to school on Monday so I guess that means less time for me to knit. Ha! not really, but I've managed to finish quite a few items while I've had lots of idle time during the summer. My insane socks are still coming along, but the second one is going pretty slowly—it's not that I've lost interest in finishing the pair (the pattern is too elaborate to get boring, exactly), but since I've already completed one, the other one is less...exciting, I guess, since I already know what it's going to look like and how to make it. So while that one is malingering I've already begun and finished several other projects, including that baby set, another pair of socks, 1 2/3 of a third pair of socks, and ( this fair isle bag, with 10! pictures and extensive commentary. ) I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I'm less wary of doing fair isle now, but still. I'd never wear a fair isle sweater, so I doubt I'll have call to do much more of it in the future. But it's nice to know I can do it if I want to.