Whew!

Everyone,

Well, man oh man, it's been a lot of work to get here, but here we are!

The shop is opening Monday, Dec 1. Brax and I are really, really excited about it! Here is what it looks like right now:


Yes, we've still got a lot of work to do. But trust me, tagging yarn and putting it on shelves is like a trip to the Fireworks, Candy, and Puppydog Store after months of dealing with the bank, painting, installing flooring, figuring out tax procedures, and getting UPS to actually give us our packages.

Here is the deal with the shop, except with even more information this time:

WonderKnit!
3165 N. High St
Columbus, OH
43202

Opening day is Monday, December 1! Hours: 11AM-7PM every day except Tuesday. We're closed Tuesday.

Mr. Cabbage is being Mr. Rad and putting together our website for us, but it's not done yet. It's www.wonderknit.com .

Please Be Our Friend!
You can be our friend on MySpace (www.myspace.com/wonderknit)!
And you can be our friend on Ravelry (http://www.ravelry.com/people/WonderKnitter)!

There's even a Ravelry group waiting for anyone who wants to be a WonderKnitter.

The Credits
We had a Women's Studies professor in college that used to always talk about the "myth of independence," meaning that people in America always think they can do things on their own, when in reality no one does anything on their own. Here are the credits:

Grandma for the collateral
Mom for everything
Dad for the handymen
Ali for the truck
Topher, Juan, Josh, Matt, and Ali for the free labor
Brandon for the computer and the website
Erin for the designs
Cabbage for the enthusiasm and promotion
Karida for custom yarn and teaching me to self promote
Goodies and families for believing we could do it

Wine Lips
I will keep posting on this blog because I love this blog, but we can try and keep the shop stuff separate, ok? Like, maybe if something really cool is going on at the shop, I'll link to it or something, but this is not going to be the WonderKnit blog. I blog because I like to write, and I want this blog to keep being a place where I can come write.

Brax and I started this blog when we were both in the middle of our own crappy journeys. The last two years, we have blogged and blogged about how we wished we were living in the same city, close to our families and old friends, and doing something creative and fulfilling with our time. Now things have come full circle, and we're both back where we started. It's all very "What-I-was-looking-for-was-in-my-own-backyard" etc, like in Wizard of Oz. It is cheezy, but it is part of what we learned. And of course, now that we're here there is a whole set of new challenges for us. But I have to say, challenges are easier to face from out these new windows.

I guess now that we're in this new place, this new old place, the blog has to change. We don't need to correspond, cause we see each other every day. We don't need to bitch about our jobs, because we made our own jobs, and they are what we make them. (We might bitch about our on-the-side serving jobs occasionally, I guess. But other than the occasional jerky customer, serving is a good gig.) We are busier and more engaged with our lives, so we will probably post less. I don't know! We will take it one day at a time, and see where we end up.

The point is, WonderKnit stuff will be taken care of elsewhere, Wine Lips will keep being a place where we come and complain and talk about yarn and recover from our hangovers, and we hope you'll keep thinking we're funny.

See you Monday!

Love,
Bruce

Jeans. Again. Sigh.

Hey Brax,
Right now I think you're gettin' ready to head to Monday night karaoke. Not me, not tonight. I need to rest and stuff. Also I really can't afford to have one of those dirty Pabst Blue Ribbon hangovers tomorrow, since we need to bustass on the shop.

My mom told my Aunt Jean about our blog and she read it (hi, Aunt Jean!), and then she e mailed me to tell me not to flush Puff's down the toilet because it will mess up the plumbing. I know, man, I was desperate! Anyway, Aunt Jean, as soon as I posted that blog about the kleenex, Brax came over and dropped off a roll each of paper towels and TP, so I'm good.

Tonight I went shopping for jeans. The whole thing pretty much got my goat.

I hate shopping. Nothing makes you feel worse about yourself than shopping. First I tried on about 700 pairs of jeans in the Junior's department. See, I was told I should check Juniors, because they have odd numbered sizes, and I've been having a lot of trouble with the even numbers. I used to be an 8. Then I was a 10. 8. 10. 8. 10. NEITHER!!!!! Now I'm kind of a 9. I do not understand these fluctuations. My lifestyle is pretty steady. My theory is that my weight is affected by stress.

I don't even have a scale, you guys. My target weight is NOT BUYING JEANS.

So anyway, I was shopping for jeans and I was in Juniors, and whenever I'm in that department I'm A) afraid of knocking over a skinny teenager with my ass and B) sort of afraid the popular girls will make fun of me. So I tried on all these pants and found two that were ok, but man, they sure are making jeans ride low. Is this what the young girls are wearing?

So I headed over to the women's department and found these jeans that fit me perfectly except they were mom jeans. They came up to my neck and ballooned out around my thighs. I kind of wanted to shoot those jeans with a gun. If only I'd had a gun in my handbag.

In the end I bought two pairs of jeans, from the Junior's department, one a size 9 and one a size 11 (Why? How? Hate pants.) but I'm not really in love with them and I may take them back.

After the jeans I headed to the bra department and I do not even want to talk to you about it.

nataliedee.com

All I know is that I meandered around the bra department for a really long time trying to find the Playtex Thank Goodness It Fits Bra, which has half sizes. Everywhere I looked, all I could see were all these signs that said "full figured." I know that it is hard for girls with big 'uns. I want y'all to be able to find nice bras. I like that there are lots of "full figured" bras, clearly labeled. I just want equal treatment! I want to see the giant sign that says TITLESS. Then I could just waltz in and grab my little half-sizer and get the hell out.

Here's the problem, though, when you finally find the Titless bras, they're all padded to oblivion. Padded to full figured. Que? I just want a holster for my girls, you guys. I don't want a whole microfiber fake girls setup.

It was just really stressful. And the moral of the story is, I hate shopping when I need something. Shopping is only fun when you are bored and have some extra money and decide to pop in to see what's on sale. Shopping for something is pretty much the worst.

Ok, I am going to go watch Charlie Brown Christmas now.

Luv,
Bruce

crappy crap

Things that are hard today include:

Being out of toilet paper and paper towels, reappropriating Kleenex for these purposes.
Being out of vegetables.
The light keeps changing in my office as the sun travels across the sky and this makes it difficult to take photographs of knitted things.
Turns out my washer doesn't do "hot" loads. I don't know why I imagined it would.
I made a really involved budget spreadsheet for the shop and then Excel crashed and lost it.
I seem to be really tired.
I overslept.
Accomplishing things is hard!
Ummm.....I have a bunch of crap to do. That's the main thing. It is stressing me out.
I should probably stop listing all the things that are bugging me and instead actually do some stuff...you know, finish things.
My bathroom cabinet is really messy and there is all kinds of crap just crammed in there. Any time I take something out, it causes a chain reaction resulting in stuff falling out of the cabinet. This happened earlier today. I got out my hair dryer and it caused an eyeshadow to fall out and break and now there is fine, sparkley orange powder all over the floor, which paper towels would be just ideal for.
Sister really wants to sit on my laptop, and I feel like I am rejecting her love because I keep putting her on the floor.

OK. OK. Stopping. Working. Right.
-Bruce

"TAILS" from serving, ha ha ha!

Duuuudes!

Sorry about the blogging hiatus. I have no excuse.

So, I've been up to all sorts of stuff. As you know, Bruce and I are opening a store! We are SO excited about it, and are looking forward to having our own grown up business to run ourselves! (by "run" I mean "sit around in and knit all day," of course)

In the meantime, I've been waiting tables for money. I sort of hate my job, because no one comes into my restaurant. I usually end up wasting about 25% of my tips on the parking meter, if you know what I mean. But that doesn't mean it hasn't provided plenty of entertainment and good stories!

The other night, I was closing the restaurant, which meant I showed up and immediately cut the other server because it was so slow. Gradually, I accumulated 3 tables over the next hour and a half, one of which was starting to get a little drunk off of those alcoholic coffee drinks we serve. Anyway, I was bringing out an irish coffee to one of them, and the words "can I get you anything else right now?" had barely left my lips when I saw something fall from the drop ceiling, barely miss hitting a girl on the face, and land on the floor.
The girl looked down and gasped, "oh my god! oh my god!" Still standing at the table, I couldn't even begin to imagine what had happened, until I saw a MOUSE scurry away from the table, round a corner, and disappear into the dining room.
For real. A BABY MOUSE almost landed on my table. I immediately apologized, and rushed off to inform the manager, a bartender who had been promoted to "bartender/manager" about 3 weeks ago. He likes to listen to Radiohead on his IPOD while he's working, thus making an already-depressing job that much more unbearable. When I told him about the mouse I had witnessed taking a dive into the dining room, he stammered and kept asking me if I was "sure." I gave up trying to get him to actually "manage" the situation, and went over to my table again to apologize profusely on behalf of the restaurant, promising that I would do anything within my power to resolve the situation.
Thankfully, my table was super cool about it all. Even though everyone else in the restaurant asked for their check about 30 seconds after the word "mouse" was first uttered, they stayed, eventually CATCHING the mouse and humanely setting it free outside. This valient effort earned them a free bucket of beer on top of their already-comped check, and they left me a really nice tip.

In conclusion, I would like to add that while the GM of the restaurant showed up, she did very little to help the situation, save from comping my table's bill. When I told her about the mouse, she ran around the dining room looking for it, crowing about how it must be "sad" and "miss its family," and loudly providing our guests with the insight that "we share the earth with all its animals, after all." When she caught me rolling my eyes at her gauche behavior, she said, "ha ha, Karen is so scared of the little mouse!" No, she and I just have wildly differing views on sanitation . I told her she was lucky the health inspector wasn't there, hoping that she would grasp the severity of the situation (or at least the need to bring in an exterminator), but she ignored me.

I hate having more managerial experience and skill than my boss.
Anyway, I'm sorry for the long lapse, and I hope to share many more Serving Horror Stories with you all soon!
Love,
Brax

List of Excellence

Hey dudes! Here's some stuff!

1) Our friend Katie graduated! I'm SO proud of her. She's amazing. She just figured out what she wanted and went for it and did it. That is so great, and I know she's going to be a big giant success. A Chef Success. Chefcess.

Here is the picture I took of her actually accepting her diploma.


She's the short one...see, I was so busy jumping up and down that I put my camera on manual focus. I'm pretty much awesome.

Here she is at her graduation party, with an apple and her cute mom. If you think I'm proud, you should see this lady. These parents were about to burst. Chef KT! You win!

2) The morning after KT's graduation party I woke up with a bunch of bruises on my legs and I have no clue how I got them. I probably got them in some really awesome way. Also I remember walking, in a tizzy, up to a friend of mine, holding my handbag up by a broken strap and exclaiming "My handbag broke!! What! What a crappy handbag!!! Can you believe that!" And he took it from me and handed it back fixed saying, "It wasn't broken, Libby. It snaps on and off." Well la di dah. Obviously I am ready to be a big mature business owner.

3) Lucy watches television when there is an animal on the teevee. Only animals. Even when the sound is off! How does she know? What do they look like to her? How? What?


4) The shop is coming along all fastlike. Brax and I are working really hard on it and we should have it open real soon. We'll tell you a date as soon as we know for sure. Sorry about the lack of precision on this--we just want to be able to open the doors the very minute we're ready.

5) Amazing potato cheddar soup!

a buncha potatoes
1 carrot
1 stalk celery
water
SALT
1 stick of butter
a couple cups grated cheddar

This recipe goes like most of my soup recipes. Katie is probably going to read this and be like, "Bruce, you're doing it wrong," since she is a big chef now and all. But this is how I do it, and I think it's delicious!

Put all the chopped up veg in the soup pot and put in just enough water to cover it. Add salt to taste. For me this is a bunch of salt. Let it boil for maybe 30 minutes. Then take out a few cups of the soup and put it in the blender and puree it. Put it back in the pot. OK. Then make a roux. (A roux is when you take some of the hot broth and put it in a bowl with a couple tablespoons of flour and make a smooth paste out of it.) Put the roux in the broth. Stir it on in! Stir in the butter. Then add in the cheese, a little at a time. Sprinkle, stir, sprinkle, stir, until it's all incorporated. Delicious! Really, really healthy low fat food. Perfect for vegans.

That's all for now!
Bruce

WonderKnit!!!!

Well, I'm going to go ahead and make the big announcement:

Brax and I are opening a yarn shop. YEAH!

What you need to know:

It's called WonderKnit
It's located at 3165 N. High street in Columbus.
Our hours will be 11 AM to 7 PM Wednesday-Monday. Closed Tuesday.
Theoretical Opening Day: Late November, 2008!

We had hoped to open up in September or October at the latest, but then the banks crashed and the world ended and we couldn't get a loan. After months of speculation and doubt and frustration, it's finally happening, and we'll be opening in the next 2 weeks. Wow.

We've got it painted up all pretty in there, and put down flooring, and everything is shiny and pretty, and the yarn is rolling in. We want it to be the friendliest, coolest yarn store, where everyone feels welcome to hang out and knit. Once things are more settled down we'll probably do some sort of rad opening party, with special guest Karida.

Everyone get excited, everyone come buy some yarn and help a blogger out.

We couldn't have done any of this without my mom, my dad, and especially my loan-cosignin' grandma, so I am feeling pretty lucky at this moment.

So that is the Big News, the Big Secret Project we alluded to a couple of times. Exact opening day will be confirmed here and elsewhere. Hope we'll see you in the shop soon!
Bruce

O-H-

We are so Important here! This is the only time ever that we get to feel important. This state is nuts.

Here is my favorite part of this article:

Diane McDonald, an occupational therapist, is voting for McCain even though she thinks Obama is "articulate, intelligent, unwavering."

"So why don't you vote for him?" Hawkins said.

"Because it doesn't mean I believe in his politics," McDonald said. "A lot of women have gotten in trouble because of men like that."

Coast to coast, LA to Chicago, western male
Across the north and south, to Key Largo, love for sale

Face to face, each classic case
We shadow box and double cross
Yet need the chase

A license to love, insurance to hold
Melts all your memories and change into gold
His eyes are like angels but his heart is cold

No need to ask
He's a smooth operator

Don't trust a smooooth operator, ladies! He'll take your Flower and skip town, and America will be left wandering around like Delta Dawn in her bedroom slippers with a faded rose pinned to her dress, waiting, always waiting, for that Smooth Dark Stranger to return.

In Franklin County the Obama people are out in much greater force than the McCain people. Franklin county is one of the only counties Kerry won. WE TOLD YOU SO, OHIO.

In Butler County, where my parents live, the McCain people and the local GOP are hammering pretty hard. The other day when we were there there were two different anti Obama robocalls in a row. It seems like a waste of money to me, since Butler County is where all the crazy maniacs live--McCain is going to win Butler no matter what. I guess they're trying to energize their voters--not about McCain, but against Obama. Even so, there is much greater support for Obama than I've ever seen for a democrat in Butler County. The man knows how to reach people, I tell ya what.

This reminds me of a story: in 2004 the Butler County GOP people sent out such a constant stream of big glossy swiftboat crap that my enraged father taped a big note to the mailbox that said, "Dear Mail Carrier, please do not deliver ANY ITEMS from GEORGE BUSH or the REPUBLICAN PARTY to this address. Thank you."

The mail lady wrote a note back that said she had to deliver whatever was addressed to him and fitted with appropriate postage. Poor Steve.

Man, all this talk about Butler County has me craving a Richard's Pizza! Mmmmmmmmmmm, Richard's Pizza.......

Go vote, everyone!
Bruce

Exoskeleton

I'm sitting here at 2 AM with a glass of wine listening to the Dixie Chicks on repeat. It doesn't sound like a recipe for awesome, does it? Well, shit, I don't wanna talk about it, let's talk about something else.

1) Tinker, tinker. I've been tinkering around with this Manos I mentioned in my previous post. My So Called Scarf? I know I said I was anti. I lied, it's a really nice pattern.

2) On Thursday afternoon Brax and I arrived at my house, still smacking our wine lips from an evening at my parents' house. (We practiced some new songs with my mom, for our Andrews Sisters band. Those of you who find yourselves on the Thanksgiving drunk dial list get ready, we've got some excellent selections for you this year. Remember, let voice mail get it.) Also, woods-walking, naturally:


Anyway, we arrived at my house, and in the door was a big fat envelope, and in the envelope was:


The proof! The proof, the proof! The book proof, which Karida and I must look over very closely, and make any changes we want, because this is the last call for changes on the drunk knitting book. It has pictures in it and everything. There is even a picture of me and Karida in it, and we don't look stupid either. They put make up on us and stuff, so we look pretty stylish. Karida called me up and we dorked out over it for a while.

3) No Good Nick recently posted about the Book It! program from the 80's. Do you all remember this? You got pizza for reading books. PFFFFFFFFFFFT. I WOULD BE SO FREAKING FAT IF THIS WERE STILL TRUE.

My house, like Nick's, was always full of books, and my mom let me read whatever I wanted. The only book I remember my mom telling me not to read was Little Birds by Anias Nin, which I, of course, read the very second she left the room. I definitely read things that were over my head (I read the Catcher in the Rye when I was 11, and Possessing the Secret of Joy when I was 13. These were over my head.). It didn't do me any harm, and I'm a firm believer of letting kids read whatever they want.

I still read like a madwoman. When I went to Monticello last year I was all twitchy because I wanted to read Thomas Jefferson's books, which were, of course, behind glass. The tour guide was like, "Well, here's his books! That guy sure liked to read. Now if you'll all follow me into the bedroom..." So I didn't really even get to look at them very much. Dang, I like books.

This is why I can't get behind Kindle.

Things Kindle can't do
-have a book smell
-have old notations written in it
-sit on a shelf and tell you about the person who owns it
-be a time capsule (I stick things in books and joyfully rediscover them years later)
-have "Fannie Roberts on her Birthday, from Aunt Bev, March 12, 1946." written on the inside cover.
-get dog-eared and well loved.

Nick made a list of books he's read in the last 3 months, and I don't have that kind of time, but I figure I'll follow his lead. Here's a smattering of stuff I've read recently.

Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte Yeah, yeah. I'll never get sick of it. Over and over and over and over, I will read Wuthering Heights. I'll read it a million times and never totally get it, and I'll notice something new every time. I love this book.

The City of Dreaming Books Walter Moess This book was pretty freaking weird. The imagery was pretty brilliant, though, and I appreciate the creativity of a fellow bibliophile. The illustrations are completely charming.

The Mists of Avalon Marion Zimmer Bradley is vast and beautiful and cobwebby. Reminds one of one's feminist roots. Reminds one to deconstruct the framework of mythology, love, power, religion.

The Twilight Saga (Stephanie Meyer) Questionable in so many (many. many.) ways, and yet I read the entire series in 2 weeks. Reminds one that sometimes a story is a story and maybe you should stop thinking about it so much and just focus on wanting to bone the vampire.

Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka) Maybe Kafka is over my head? Exoskeleton.

The Portable Dorothy Parker I cannot stop with this book. I carry it around with me like I'm 16 and it's my goth girl journal. I love Dorothy Parker so much. If I could go back in time, I'd go straight to the Algonquin Round Table for a highball wearing a low-waisted dress and a fox fur scarf. Dottie and I would get drunk and be snarky to everyone and then we'd go out and act bad in high society. I'd explain that she should stop trying to kill herself because I'm from the future and know that she'll never actually manage it. It would be rad!

That was fun! Maybe I'll blog about books more.

Later,
Bruce