Sickness & PRIZE!

Welcome to my flu...cuz just as my HS Physics teacher, Dr. Todd, once cryptically noted that "it's always your very own personal rainbow;" it really is always your very own personal bout of influenza. When it hits me hard, I'm always reminded that people DIED of this thing less than a hundred years ago! Happily I am so Airborned/Zicamed/Echineciad-out (I really miss Wellness Formula) that I'm only just slightly suffering. I was able to make Shepherd's Pie last night for my boys (the two-overgrown kids I live with who are up and outta here at 7:30AM to try to hit the snow before the tourists), but I was so dizzy (I'm trying to ignore the inner-ear infection looming at the edge of my being) eating was a chore and I fell asleep on the couch immediately afterward.

Enough about suffering! Not like I can skip work or anything.

PRIZE!

So I entered a contest. If you remember from WAAAAY back I LOVE to enter contests. My favorite contest entry (and win(!)) to date was the Santa Cruz Good Times' Shakespeare Santa Cruz contest. Basically every week the local rag would have embedded Shakespearean text somewhere in their articles. Your job, should you choose to accept it, was to discover the line and then say what play, act, scene, line, etc. it came from. If correct, your name would be entered into a drawing and you would get a chance to win two tickets to a showing of whichever play (one of three) that the Shakespeare SC troupe were performing. Soooo...with nothing better to do, and really, not expecting to find anything, I read the paper. Low and behold, when reading the movie review for "Conspiracy Theory" (yes, this was years and years and years ago and I still remember it like yesterday---I'm lame, I know it) I was told that the Mel Gibson character was only mad "when the wind was north by northwest, but when the wind was southerly he knew a hawk..." from a whatever, handsaw???---I don't know the line exactly anymore, it's been YEARS since I read the play, and my collection of Ole Willie's works is in storage at my mom's house. But oh yeah, HAMLET! So I entered, and I won! And I got to see Richard III! I was a Literature Major, I'm sorry, this kind of stuff gets me excited on many levels. Yeah, add "dork" to my lame-ocity.

Soooo, where was tangent girl? Ah yes, when last we left her she was telling about a contest. Well, Birdsong had a contest. The only requirement was to, um comment on her blog. Could even the wiliest and most non-contest-entering of you resist that? And, um, I won.
So what'd I win? (Cuz try as I might, my little cybershot is not the best at low-light/winter/indoor/closeup pictures, if any at all.) Vogue Knitting PILLOWS book, enough yarn to make Ruched Velvet Pillow, and even an incentive, THE BACK of the pillow, all done!

So, will I expand my horizons beyond hats and scarves to try this pattern out? Quien Sabe. But the yarn is so RED and I've never done anything this complicated with two needles...I actually have crocheted a number of pillow slips in my time. We'll just have to see. But thank you thank you thank you Birdsong.

My head is telling me it's time for some painkillers and maybe a decongestant or three (better living through chemistry), so I'll have to leave this post at that.

Happy Flu Season!