Arts and Crafts

Another aspect of my summer involves getting around to using some of the craft kits currently stored in my closet. What I’m currently working on was actually in a box under my desk, but minor details here. So after taking a years-long break, I’m attempting to complete my first cross stitch project since elementary school. After a few weeks, I can say that I should have stuck to friendship bracelets, because at least you can’t stab yourself with a friendship bracelet. (The ones I’m talking about are made completely with thread. The sharpest object involved is the scissors used to cut the thread, and if you want, you can even use safety scissors.)

Thus far, after approximately thirty-five hours of work, I have filled most of a 4” by 4” canvas, stabbed myself a couple dozen times with the most definitely not blunted needle, scratched my knee, cut three knots out of the thread, left two knots in the canvas, and untangled knots at a rate of one per every five or so minutes. Isn't summer fun?

I honestly don’t remember fighting with knots this much the last time I did cross stitching. My options are to blame my memory or the kit I’m using. I blame the kit. For whatever reason, the entire thing appears to be made of plastic/synthetic fibers. If this is 21st century cross stitching, maybe in another fifty years they’ll be using fiber optic cables that can be programmed to be any color you want when you finish . . . oh, wait. That defeats the actual purpose of cross stitch.

I don’t know if it’s the plastic thread or just that I appear to be working with single strands of thread, but something is causing a ridiculous number of knots. Beyond the mechanics of and my inability to do cross stitch, the rest of the kit is driving me up the wall as well.

First off, when you get the kit, there’s a nice picture of two kids building a sand castle on the beach. When you look more closely at the pattern you’re supposed to follow, you realize it’s a similar picture, but it is very clearly of two kids building a sand mound on the beach. It appears that the “finished product” picture given is a scaled down version of a larger, more detailed cross stitch pattern. Misrepresentation of the facts instance 1.

Once you get past the cover picture, you look at the pattern more closely and realize all the instructions are in Chinese. I don’t read Chinese. Fortunately I've done cross stitch before, so I didn't need the instructions. It would, however, have been nice to be able to understand the color code so I would know which threads to use. Except the threads didn't have any color numbering system, and I got them in two giant bundles.

Moving on: a little ways into the project, I decided to separate the threads by color to make it easier for me whenever I needed a particular color. This was when I discovered that the “light green” was basically a slight variant on the light yellow that would have benefited from a healthy helping of green dye. I would have benefited from some spectrophotometric analysis.

Of course, in the pattern, the light green actually looks like light green, not yellow thread with a case of mildew. Which leads me to misrepresentation of the facts instance 2. On the cover picture, the girls’ hair is a nice shade of light brown. In the pattern, it’s not light brown, but it is a reasonable shade of light yellow. The actual thread is bright yellow, bordering on neon. I've seen about as many six year olds with neon yellow hair building sandcastles sand heaps on the beach as people wearing shiny gold six inch heels to go wading.

So I briefly considered writing a letter/email of complaint to the company, but then I realized that they’d probably just send me one of each of their kits for me to make. (There are nine of them, all nicely displayed on the back side of the pattern.) And wouldn't that just make my summer?

Road Tripping: Boston

Unlike Maryland from Ithaca, Boston actually is a day trip from where I live. A few weeks ago, I rode in with my parents and some of their friends to see a little of the city. If you've never driven in Boston, you’re missing out. You may be thinking, “I've driven in New York City, and that’s so much bigger.” Well, in New York City, you can actually drive both ways on a majority of streets. There’s also really no such thing as a seven way junction, in which your turning options are right, sort of right, really right, straight, kind of left, and do not enter. And then there’s rush hour, which is was a breeze back in 1657 when three horses reached an intersection at the same time.

Fortunately, I wasn't driving. We started the day at the Public Garden and the Boston Common, then followed the Freedom Trail over to the Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

View of the Boston skyline from the Common

On our way back to where we had parked, we stopped by the Shaw Memorial opposite from the State House. We had studied this memorial in my writing seminar during spring semester. Given the opportunity to see it in real life, we went a little out of our way to hunt it down. The location is kind of weird in my opinion, because instead of facing the Common, it faces the road, which makes it hard to get a good look at it since if you step too far back, you’re fighting with pedestrians for the sidewalk, and if you step further back than that, you’re in the road.

Still, it was interesting to get to see it for myself. Some things I noticed: The angels near the top of the memorial weren't that prominent (either that or I was being blinded by the sun), Shaw was definitely at the forefront of the scene, and it was more 3D than I expected. We read about how the sculptor went back and forth about how he was going to design the memorial before deciding on a high relief, which it turns out means almost 3D or something like that. I know, I've got the terminology down solid. I should be an art major.

Shaw Memorial

There’s also a back to the memorial that I hadn't known about until I saw it for myself. It basically memorializes the officers who took on leadership of the regiment and the soldiers who fought. It also mentions how they went for a year and a half without pay because they were going to get less than white soldiers, so I guess the movie Glory at least got some things right. And so concluded my real life history and English lesson (and this blog post).

Blog Silence

. . . Also known as being unemployed and home for the summer so little to nothing happens unless you count field trips to Stop & Shop, which my blog readers mother probably doesn't need to read about because she was right there with me when we spotted that great deal on strawberries. When I’m not chasing down sale-price pasta sauce and day-old garlic bread, I've been at home reading, sleeping, eating, ant catching. You know, the usual summer activities.

What I haven’t been doing: keeping on top of emails (like I do that normally . . . only happens if it’s from the guy of my dreams work related or urgent), multivariable calculus, quantum physics, anything vaguely academic. I have, however, learned all about the 2006 Everest season (thanks to Nick Heil’s Dark Summit and Lincoln Hall’s Dead Lucky) and watched a lot of Jeopardy!. You can never know too much almost useless trivia. As proof that hands (and bodies?) on learning really does work, there was a clue about a phalanx (a Greek military formation) that I knew because my seventh grade social studies teacher had the class form a phalanx, complete with pencil spears and folder shields, and march down the hall. And then there was the time we learned about Roman bathhouses. . . .

I've also done a little cooking baking experimentation in the kitchen. When a batch of bananas started turning brown black, we first made some banana chocolate chip muffins, which I have to say were better than the blueberry muffins I made from a mix a few days later. There was also one last black banana that I ended up throwing in the blender with some strawberries, vanilla yogurt, and a couple ice cubes. Note: don’t forget to peel the banana and take the leaves off the strawberries . . . these instructions were actually in a recipe I was looking up online. Because normally I eat banana peels. The ones that are still yellow with just a few brown spots are my favorites.

My latest foray into the kitchen resulted in corn dog muffins, which I originally saw on some blog somewhere and came about because of a surplus of hot dogs.  We made a batch of cornbread batter, spooned it into a mini muffin pan, and shoved placed a hacked up piece of hot dog into each muffin. Here’s how they turned out:

Personally, I like these even though I don’t like the idea of actual corn dogs. Five points for the internet. Next up: baklava, maybe? Hey, stop laughing. It didn't look that hard when the woman on the website did it. . . . So if I’m not posting it’s probably because I’m busy coupon cutting reading about obscure topics in books from my library’s nonfiction section and/or spilling sugar on the kitchen floor.

Short Stories

Blue Suede Shoes:
Sometime soon after arriving at Cornell, I wore a hole through the bottom of my right sandal . . . only my right sandal. I got a new pair a little while ago. The sandals are grey and green and made of rubber and various synthetic materials. So they’re not blue, not suede, and they’re not even shoes. I was going for parallelism. . . . I should just stick to engineering. Anyway, while sandal shopping, I would go over to the women’s section and look for the “casual” section. I’m just going to say that the last time I saw someone casually wear gold sparkly 6-inch heels to the beach was – let me think – never? I am aware that I’m on the let’s-go-walk-through-a-mud-puddle end of casual, not the cocktail-party-in-a-lounge side, but I wasn't aware that you didn't actually have to be able to walk in sandals anymore. Maybe it’s just me. I mean, I did almost mange to trip off a stage during a band concert once. Wearing flats.

Spam and Eggs (actually, just spam):
What’s almost as amusing as receiving audition notices for all-male a cappella groups is when Cornell mail goes to spam. Case in point: sometime around one of three days of spring in Ithaca, for the second time, Cornell sent me an email about Big Red Shipping and Storage. (They’re a company managed by Cornell students that will store the contents of your dorm room for the summer if you can’t or don’t want to take them home with you.) The email went straight to spam. Both times.

Best Day Ever:
After my last final of my freshman year, I had an entire afternoon with absolutely nothing to do for the first time in weeks. A friend and I went to get lunch, walked back to north campus, and then decided to walk back to west campus to go bouldering at Noyes. It was just as tiring as I remembered, but I got farther on the Spiderman route and did a couple other easy routes. We had the bouldering wall to ourselves, so we got to climb continuously and get super tired. At that point, we took a quick detour by the library to check out A. D. White’s library (also known as the Harry Potter library), then camped out on the arts quad. It was an absolutely perfect day, the kind of day Cornell puts on their admissions brochures. And it’s gotten me to thinking, what would be my best day ever? How exactly do you combine hiking, clarinets, and math and science without psychedelic drugs and/or a time turner? I guess I’d settle for a good long hike up some mountains in the middle of nowhere. Acadia National Park would be good. Acadia is currently my favorite vacation destination and the answer to 11-down in a crossword puzzle I was doing recently.

Milestones

Once Cornell started thawing out, I started trying to go running a little more often. Since I also had a membership and free shoe rental for the climbing wall, I've been more active in the past few months than I have been since . . . oh, eighth grade or so. I might have had more to do with high school sports, but the soccer team cut me, so that was the end of that.

I like running on dirt more than concrete, so I've done all my running at Cornell around the lake so far. Plus, this way I don’t have to cross any roads and no one has to wonder if I’m going to pass out from the exertion. With that as an indicator of my physical fitness, it was actually an accomplishment for me to run two miles without stopping. Since coming home for the summer, I've started trying to add a little mileage, however, the two large hills on my route have something to say about me not walking.

I also finally got a new bike after the back brake on the bike I was riding broke, making it super fun unsafe to ride down the aforementioned large hills. The old bike (which wasn't technically mine) was pink. My new bike is pink and white. The only way it could get any better is if I added pink glittery streamers to the handlebars. (Note: if anyone actually attaches pink glittery streamers to my bike, I will reattach them semi-permanently to the head of the perpetrator and/or the nearest victim. . . . Kidding . . . mostly.)

Anyway, I've been trying to bike for longer distances as well, but again with the **** hills. Insert word of your choice for the asterisks. Personally, I like steep. Actually, it’s more like conditionally steep. Walking up the hill? No problem. Biking up? I hope you didn't need to feel your legs for awhile. I’m hoping to spend the summer going a little further for a little longer. If it doesn't keep raining, I may see if I can hit 100 miles running and biking . . . combined, not each . . . I’m not that crazy. I know some people can run more than that in a week. At this point, I’m not one of them.

On the climbing front, before I left Cornell for the summer, I finally managed to traverse over half the wall without stopping/falling off. Next step: traverse the wall using only natural holds. Once I get some chalk. Yes, it is possible to climb without chalk. No, it isn't always ideal, especially when you go from having your fingers in a hold to plummeting to the ground in approximately 0.001 seconds.

In the meantime, I guess it’s time to hit the roads.