30 Days of Music Day 9

A Song that You Can Dance To

No No Keshagesh by Buffy Sainte Marie.  It’s got a really important message and a really infectious beat.

Knitting and Crochet Blog Week Day 3 – One Great Knitter (and then some) | knitcroblo3

I have never been someone who could just choose one of anything.  My favourite colour is blue…no, red…is black a colour?…  I love Grey’s Anatomy, but Chuck is awesome, and I’m so excited for True Blood’s next season.

So choosing one important knitter is impossible to me.

Elizabeth Zimmermann must receive credit where credit is due; her brain is one I should dearly love to have been able to pick.  But I’m sure there are thousands of us extolling her virtues, as there should be.

The Baby Surprise Jacket I made for my godson.

Jared Flood should follow EZ since he is an EZ aficionado.  He has a very clean, crisp aesthetic and I love his love for texture in patterns and yarns.  But I mostly love him for his phenomenal photography; I aspire towards that.

The Turn a Square I made for my buddy Jay.

Ysolda Teague has this amazing ability to waiver between elegant, feminine patterns and delightfully cute ones; I have learned a lot from her (especially from her video on how to do a tubular ribbed cast-on), and the title for her collections of patterns, Whimsical Little Knits is ridiculously appropriate.

The Veyla and the Ishbel I haven’t told Ravelry about yet…

Cookie A is the designer whose patterns I have knit the most.  I am definitely a sock knitter and she’s the reason why.

The Kai-Mei socks I’ve already worn through.

Adrian Bizilia is the first knit blogger I read and her influence in my knitting and spinning has already been covered in the last two posts.

I can’t find the hat that I knit of an EZ pattern out of yarn I spun from wool I purchased from Hello Yarn.

Kristen Kapur is someone I regularly turn to for knitting goodness.

The Sikkim I made for my friend Raura.

Hansi Singh (Ravelry link, since her etsy shop is gone) is the designer who almost made my brain explode when I tried to knit her snail.  I never finished the body of the poor dude because the yarn I had for it was too big and the body ended up HUGE…one day I’ll finish it.

The aforementioned Garden Snail.

And finally, I have two friends who keep me inspired regulary, neither of whom have blogs that I’m aware of.  Raura and Hannbanann; both somehow find time to knit while going to school full time, and both create such beautiful things!

2 Awesome Things That are Completely Unrelated

1. The wind storm yesterday.  Knocked two large limbs from one of the trees outside my building and neither landed on the cars beside the tree.

2. Fabric made from spider silk!  Thanks to my friend Kitty Black who shared this in Ravelry.

2 Things

1. If you’re a local and you love CJSR, it’s their annual FunDrive.  If you’re not a local, you can stream it online and come to love it and maybe you’ll want to donate too!  My favourite show these days is English Breakfast on Thursday mornings.

I took this photo and saved it to flickr, hence no name on it.  But it’s mine; if you want a copy, be sure to site me for it.  Thanks.

2. It’s Jim Henson’s Birthday!  Happy birthday Jim!  He would have been 73 today.

Music Glut

I took a mini-vacation and attended the Edmonton Folk Festival from Wednesday night to last night and it was fantastic!  My highlights were Hanggai (Mongolian music from China), Alex Cuba (he said there is a rich culture of pick-up lines in Cuba, and one of his songs was titled, “Baby, if You Were a Cook I’d Eat Everything Off my Plate”), Pine Leaf Boys, Jill Barber (I still love her music, now I love her fashion sense), and The Idan Raichel Project (sorry, it’s a MySpace page).

Of course, I knitted while I was there:

Herringbone Scarf

Herringbone Scarf and Bela Fleck

Kai-Mei by Cookie A. (dirty toes courtesy of dancing barefoot to wicked tunes of The Idan Raichel Project)

Apparently Time Means Nothing To Me

So, I was wrong in my previous post; I’ve been fond of Mother Mother since January 2007, right before Touch Up came out in February 2007, and I didn’t see them last summer at the Velvet Underground, I saw them in the summer of 2007. That’s the thing with my memory, it all blurs into one.

My apologies.

And I Watch it Try Befriending Embers*

Mother Mother were in town last night and I got to see them!  They opened for Our Lady Peace at EdFest (but I didn’t stick around for OLP).

My friend thought it wasn’t their best show, having seen them play at better and more intimate venues, but I reasoned that it’s difficult to play such an event where 90% of the crowd is just waiting for the headliners.  Besides, I highly enjoyed it and danced my tailbone off (as best I could considering how many people were in my bubble); maybe my friend was just dismayed by the inattentive crowd (though there were many of us fans dotting the audience).

Then, I got to get their autographs (Ack!).

And a pic of them.

Sigh.  They’re still the prettiest band ever, and now I’ve discovered that they’re nice too, which is great; so often I’ve met or run into someone of notoriety whom I’ve adored and upon meeting them my infatuation was tarnished, but not with these guys and gals!

Edit:  I realised that I consistently only pay attention to the prettiness of this band on my blog, and don’t actually discuss why I love their music, and the truth of the matter is, I loved the band before I saw them live last summer.  So here it is: the vocalists sing with fantastic harmonies, the drummer has that rare skill of drumming in tempo and throwing in out of tempo beats (as I’ve noticed in Tool, so he is godlike now too), the bassist is great at the bass but also plays the saxophone (and apparently the clarinet), the female vocalists also accompany with keyboards, and the lead singer plays a wicked guitar.  And then there are the clever lyrics and fantastic writing of which I cannot even begin to acclaim because I can’t organise my thoughts on the greatness, and the eclectic styles within the albums; you get some fairly modern-pop sounds that suddenly merge into ’30s jazz…my goodness I can’t explain the joy.  I first heard of them in January or February 2008 when “Train of Thought” played on the CBC Radio 3 podcast and knew I had to buy their Touch Up album when it came out.  And now with O My Heart, they’re just knocking me out. 

Also, last night, they played some new stuff, as they did last summer when I saw them at the now defunct Velvet Underground (that space changes names almost as often as I change my underwear…I do speak with hyperbole), and I have to give them kudos for working so dang hard!  This is not an idle band, and I love them.

*Lyric from title track  “O My Heart” by Mother Mother

Guess Where I’ll Be in September

9.

Have I mentioned before that I love Timur Bekmambetov?

‘Sup?

It’s been awhile…I have no real reason.  Well, maybe I do; I haven’t finished any projects lately so I haven’t had a lot to share.

To tie you over, here are some of my favourite pictures I’ve taken lately.

I went fishing with my dad on the day before his birthday, and we found a new-to-us lake called Phyllis Lake.  It’s a campsite and lake and we had one of our most successful fishing trips ever!  I even caught (and released) well more than five fish including rainbow trouts, perch and suckers (yucky suckers).  But my favourite part was watching the birds.

Lazy bald eagle.  One of the other fishermen said that the eagles were lazy as they would wait for the osprey to catch a fish and then they’d go after the osprey and steal it from them!  And then I saw it happen!  Dirty bugger.

Industrious osprey.  They were very busy catching meals for themselves and others.

Last night when I came home from work I saw a much-pierced young man on a bicycle doing something on a Telus box in front of my parking lot with a wicked grin.  I’m not sure if he was the artist or just taking a picture but when I saw what it was he was so devilishly admiring I had to get a picture (the signature was added on to the photo, it’s not on the box, I’m too straight laced to make graffiti).  If you’ve been reading this blog (and it’s preceding blogs) for awhile, you’d know that I admire graffiti (with the exception of simple tagging; I like colour or well stylized stuff), and this little stenciled piece was a delight to me.

And if you’re interested in personal stuff, I’m here to let you know I’m trying to lose weight.  This past year has been tough on me for reasons unknown and I gained about 15 lbs.  If you pay attention to BMI stuff, I’ve stepped over my proper BMI line and headed into obesity, which is such an alarming word.  Anyway, I’m really interested in losing my muffin top; but not so much my bust.  And maybe my thunder thighs, but you know, whatever.  So I’ve been working with Spark People, and if my neurotic scale can be trusted, I’ve lost 5 lbs in the last two weeks by monitoring my diet and exercising a lot more than I typically do.

According to my often lying scale, I’m currently at the weight I was in high school.  This is where I rant about BMI and all of that.  I weigh what I weighed in high school, but I am about 2″ thicker in the waist (and probably elsewhere).  BMI doesn’t seem to take into account that muscle weighs more than fat.  Being a farm kid, I was curvy but built (you don’t want to know what I was lifting to make me so buff), but now that I’m a costumer, that muscle has degraded.  So really, I’m trying to be more musculer and toned.  Anyway, that’s my rant.

How’s life in your world?

Beast

10 years ago, I was listening to the local “hard rock” radio station constantly.  It was playing in my office and in my car.  I didn’t like female vocalists, and the angrier the better.

If you had told me that within five years I would stop listening to that station I would have laughed.  But I did.  I couldn’t stand the repetitive nature of the playlists, and I grew weary of the completely sensless banter that spewed forth every five minutes after a song or two.

So I moved my dial to the furthest left on the dial where the local university radio station lived.

And if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have heard of nor appreciated the female vocalist that fronts a hip hop group like Beast.  Here’s their MySpace link.  Her voice is like a cool glass of chocolate milk or plush velvet; deep and rich.  I can’t tell you how much I adore her vocals, and the mix is fantastic.  If you’re not intrigued by my little paragraph of praise, just let me tell you that the female vocalist was a vocalist on Les Triplettes de Belleville.  Enough said.