I haven't been this excited about politics, well, ever.  the first time I heard about Barack was almost three and a half years ago, when he spoke at the DNC in 2004.  my mom said she had heard him speak and was inspired by his message of hope and change, and she encouraged me to read his speech.  now that he's running for president, she's forwarding racist emails, propagating rumors about his faith and poking fun at his name.  is this not the same man who, in that very speech that she encouraged me to read, said of his parents, "They would give me an African name, “Barack,” or blessing, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success"?


the next time I heard about Barack was about 5 months later, at the mister's house in Illinois.  Barack was their state senator, recently elected to the US senate.  the mister's family was excited about, and inspired by, him.  and so was I.


when he announced his candidacy, there were plenty of naysayers.  he's too young.  too inexperienced.  too "black" to get the white vote and too "white" to get the black vote.  but, one vote at a time, he's proving them wrong.  people are ready for change.  I'm ready for change.  are you?

so for those who may not know, on december 20th, the mister asked me to marry him!  I had been waiting and hoping for it for a long time, but the way he did it was pretty amazing. 

since we were each spending christmas with our own families (don't ask), we decided to do presents a little early.  we went to dinner at this new restaurant downtown called nada (site plays music, so turn off your speakers, if you need to).  it's owned by the boca group (more music), so you know it's good.  they sat us near the bar, with lots of people walking past constantly, so I figured he wasn't going to ask then.  so I just relaxed and enjoyed dinner-- it was pretty delicious.  we got a guacamole appetizer, margaritas, and cazuelas for dinner (he got chicken, I got pork).  yum. 

when we got home, he plugged in the tree, turned off most of the lights, and even asked if I wanted to put on some christmas music, which he never wants to listen to!  so then we sat down to open our gifts.  and he got me a sheep!  the first package I opened contained a letter from the farm telling me about my sheep, as well as several cards with her picture on them.  It also said she had included some samples of my sheep's fleece.  so when I felt the other (squishy) package, I knew exactly what was inside.  I opened it and found a sample of cleaned and carded wool, as well as a bag of raw wool.  and nestled in between them was a little pouch with a ring in it.  the ring belonged to the mister's great-great-aunt, who never had any children and willed it to her favorite niece, the mister's grandma. 

now we get to the thing that spurred this post:  check out this picture.  those are the last four people who have had possession of my ring.  grandma a. gave it to the mister's dad.  he gave it to the mister, who gave it to me.  how cool is that?

okay, I'm moving all my notes on my tangled yoke cardigan over here to clean up the project page a bit.  (sorry to non ravelers who can't click the link/ non-knitters who don't care.)

okay, since i didn't include any before, here are some pics if you or anyone you know is interested in one of the kitties.  i'd say one or both of them, because they really do seem to get along sometimes, but i'm pretty sure girlcat is causing all this crazy peeing in gerber, even though they're both fixed (and up to date on their shots!).


aaaaand i need to get a life and stop taking so many pictures of my cats.  because contrary to what you may be thinking, i did not take any of these pictures tonight to advertise for the kitties.  they were all already on my computer.  i lose.

does anyone want a cat?  i have two to give away. 

gerber has always been a bit of a crazy, but i figured he'd calm down as he got older and if i got him a friend.  boy was i friggin' wrong.  he just peed in my favorite (suede!!) shoes.  both of them.  that's deliberate, friends.  i just can't do it anymore.  i've tried and tried, and i love having him around when he's good, but the good isn't outweighing the bad anymore.  it's a bad relationship.  so if anyone wants him, he's an adorable orange tabby with no tail who eats paper, pees and poops wherever he wants, and loves to claw curtains.  he'd make a great outdoor cat.  and to be fair, i think the pooping and peeing everywhere is just because he doesn't like having honey girl around.

i'd keep honey girl, but the reason i got her in the first place was to keep gerber company.  plus, she still has a bit of diarrhea and i can't afford a sick cat.  plus, i'm kind of sick of always smelling like cats.  anyway, she's a sweet, beautiful medium-hair tuxedo.

so, anyway.  two cats.  plus a carrier, litter box, toys, food and water bowls, most of an 18 lb bag of science diet, a homemade cat bed and a makeshift cat climber.  you can have any or all of it.  i'll give it a few weeks (or as long as i can stand it) and then i'm cutting the ties.  it's a bad relationship and it's gotten unhealthy for me to try to maintain it.

i'm off to try to figure out if i'll ever be able to wear those shoes again.

it finally got nice for good here, and i opened the window in the bathroom after my shower yesterday.  now my bathroom smells and sounds like the outside.  i miss it.  i'm not sure how i'm going to make it through the summer, trapped inside that concrete prison, working with the same four people.  how will i survive without windows?  or shorts?  or 100 new faces full of anticipation and nerves and excitement every week?  or rain on a canvas roof?

i need a change of scenery.  i need to feel the grass between my toes.  i need to eat my dinner with a kitchenaid dough hook.  i even need to be woken up obscenely early by those damn crows in lumberjack.

i hate that molly will never truly be ours again.  at least it doesn't feel that way, and not any time in the near future, that's for sure.  i hate that council could take that away from us, and make at least a part of each one of us not want to go back.  i hate that the backdrop to so many of my favorite childhood memories is forever tainted by a few bigoted, petty, small-minded people.  and i hate that there's a part of me that hates that place now, no matter how much the rest of me loves it.

i need to go back.  or i need to get a new job and a new life somewhere far away where molly doesn't exist.  and failing either of those options, i'm afraid i'm going to have some sticky summer nights ahead of me.  because the thought of opening my windows and letting the smell of the outside into my house makes me want to cry.

it's supposed to rain tomorrow night.  somebody find me a tent.

k is out sick today, and creepy dave is out of town all week at some conference in d.c. so i'm going out of my mind bored today. i could cut a spinal cord. or clean. or work on compiling all the lab's ApoE data from the past three years like keith has asked me to do. but i just don't feel like it. and he's hundreds of miles away, so he can't make me! ha! don't get me wrong, i did work today. i just did it so efficiently that what should have taken me half of a day only took about an hour and a half. i can stretch 4 hours of work into looking like 8, but it's damn near impossible to accomplish the same feat with only 1.5 hours of actual work... so i'll update instead. here's a fun trick, which works especially well if you're using a mac with a dock that's set to automatically hide if you're not hovering over it-- keep a spreadsheet open on your desktop at all times, so that if someone comes in, you can quickly minimize your internet window (completely hidden from view if you have said mac) and look like you're working on data entry. this is just one of the many cunning techniques we use to avoid doing any real work. use it wisely, young grasshoppers.

in other news, did anyone catch snl this week? i only stayed up for the first half, but that kid from even stevens was pretty funny. although it seemed like practically the whole show (at least what i saw), was all him, andy samburg, and that other guy. there was the sketch where they tried to buy beer, the "sofa king" sketch (which was sofa king funny, mostly because they were all sofa king strange), and the one where they all shot each other (which, you may or may not have noticed, featured "hide and seek" by immi). i guess there was some other stuff, too-- the prince show and the dakotah fanning show were the only other sketches i caught. plus avril lavigne looking like an idiot. don't get me wrong, i like avril (shut up, she writes a damn good pop song), but girlfriend is a totally lame song, and she has these totally lame motions that go along with it. she just stood there behind the mic stand, no guitar, occasionally holding her hand up to her ear when the lyrics talked about hearing something, or pointing to the audience when singing the word "you." it was bad. ooh, and her backup singers were doing the same motions, which made it even worse!

i finished all the pieces of my sweater this weekend and i started to seam it, but it just looks so terrible-- i'll post pics when i get home, but it's seriously fugly. the only thing i like about it is the sleeves, but they look so bad on the sweater. i'll probably rip the whole thing minus the sleeves, and then redesign the rest of it to suit them, but i can't even look at it right now. i've been so frustrated with my knitting lately, i just don't want to think about it. i had to rip the potw shrug, i'm probably going to start over on the potw stole using bigger needles (although, as i learned the hard way, it's probably smarter to just keep the old one as a giant swatch or something, rather than ripping it), then this sweater went all to hell...i need something completely fresh to knit. or i just need to bite the bullet and cast on again for the potw shrug if i'm hoping to get it done in time for the knitting challenge. it was going along fairly quickly. maybe...

and i can't forget about thursday night tv-- i was so mad because i was out with lizz (happy hour at friday's!) and then we went back to my house and we were just talking. i turned on abc at about 9:50, just to catch the preview for the new grey's and, lo and behold, there was denny! i figured i'd be fine since it was just supposed to be a clip show, but i didn't know denny would be hosting it! and then later that night, lizz told me michelle had been voted off survivor! boo to network stations giving out misinformation! but at least they re-aired grey's friday at 8, so i caught that. and then i read the recap of the survivor episode online. that sucks for michelle, because she played the game so well, and she just got a total crap hand dealt to her the way they split them up. although (and maybe it's because i didn't watch the episode, but) i don't get why dreamz (what a stupid name!) didn't vote for stacy-- he hated her. oh well. at least now i can go back to watching ugly betty. get pumped for all-new thursday night tv!!

first, i'm so glad that lj news post was an april fools joke.  i mean, i figured it was, but i wouldn't have been surprised if lj was going all crazy to try to keep up with myspace, or whatever.  anyway, like i said, i'm glad it was a joke.

also, i'm giving up on new music wednesdays.  partly because i can't ever remember to do it, partly because i don't think anyone actually reads this anyway (save for maybe four people), and partly because, honestly, i don't really have any more new music.  i had a bunch all saved up at the beginning, but now?  well, not so much.  especially since i don't have bittorrent anymore...

what else?  oh, i am the smartest woman alive!  i went to the library today and got the first five harry potter books on cd, and i'm copying them all onto my computer so i can listen to them while i knit in preparation for the new book and movie!  yay for old hp and new hp!!!  and yay for the guy who reads the books-- i hope it's the same guy doing all of them, because he does an awesome dumbledore and an awesome hagrid, if you can believe it.  (although boo for the fact that it's probably about 50 or more cds-- just counted.  65, in fact!  this will definitely take a while, and i'm not sure how many of them will fit on my ipod at a time, as the first two discs of the first book are already 131 MB.  although i guess i could just sit in the living room and knit and listen on my computer.)

as far as knitting goes, i'm almost done with my sweater-- i've gotten to the bind-off for the neck, so all have to do are the front shoulders, the sleeves, and the dreaded seaming...  should have it done by the end of the weekend.  then i've got to start over on the potw shrug and stoles, as i want to finish as many of them as possible in time for the april/may knitting challenge.  i think they'll fit the "summer knits" theme perfectly!  then it's on to graduation gifts for the little sister, fun stuff for me for the beach, a mystery gift... the list just keeps growing.  i need to stop looking at new knitting patterns and yarns, because i always find way too many things to make and beautiful yarns to buy and look at...speaking of which, i made a promise to the mister at the beginning of february that i wouldn't buy any more yarn for the rest of the year unless it was for a specific project that would be a gift.  well i've already broken that promise more times that i can count, but i'm making it again now.  and i mean it.  for the rest of 2007, i'm not buying any more yarn.  not even cheap sweaters to unravel for yarn.  not unless i have a specific gift in mind.  and then i'm going to put it in a separate place, labeled for that project.  only needles and patterns for the rest of the year.  there.  now it's in writing.  hold me to it.

not much else to report.  going shopping and dinnering with halolizzrat tonight-- vs, bb&b, who knows where else.  yay for shopping!

okay, off to knit to the sounds of harry potter!

i watched a LOT of tv tonight.  but at least i was knitting while i was doing it, so i still managed to feel productive-- great how that works, isn't it?  idol sucked tonight.  i have no idea why i even watched it.  i think it's because of hennifer lopez.  yes, that's right, i confess.  i am oddly drawn to her.  i can't stand most of her music (seriously, we get that you're from the bronx, give it up), her husband (not to be confused with enrique iglesias.  or the mister, for that matter) creeps me out, and so far she's only showed mediocre acting talent in movies with really crappy scripts (and plots).  but i like her, and i can't help it.  even if i can't explain it.  well i liked her on idol, anyway. 

but that's not the point.  the point is that idol sucked.  even melinda sucked, and jordin wasn't that good.  plus, she told all of america that she was born in '89.  that is just far too young.  i can't even think about it.  it's a sad day on idol when sanjaya gets the best praise from simon, and i'm pretty sure simon wasn't even kidding about it this week.

house was pretty good, too, although i wasn't buying the coincidental symptoms of the woman at the hospital and the guy on the plane-- house doesn't believe in coincidences.

ooh, and then after house, i watched svu, which is a total guilty pleasure.  another inexplicable attraction. 

i've just spent at least 6 hours (VERY conservative estimate) over the past few nights, staying up way past my bedtime trying to untangle the knots in a ball of yarn from that blasted shrug i frogged.  my fingers are red and sore, my back hurts from hunching over my yarn, and i'm TIRED.  i finally got done tonight, looked at the now double-stranded yarn cake, and didn't like the way it looked, for some reason.  so i was frustrated.  but i tucked it into my knitting bag and went to brush my teeth, and i decided i would give the yarn a chance, and that it probably just looked funny because i was only used to seeing it single-stranded in a ball.  and then i walked out of the bathroom and there was my happy little yarn cake, strewn all over the kitchen floor.  the happy little yarn cake that had destroyed my fingers and my back and my will to live for the past three days.  i hate my cats.

i give up.

sorry i've been so lame.  i meant to actually do a good post this week, but i had a knitting nightmare.  i put the potw stole on hold for a bit because mom says she wants a shrug instead.  so i decided to make a potw shrug.  but i did about 11 lace repeats before i decided it was just too narrow to ever work, so i frogged the entire thing.  which would have been fine because it had only taken me a few hours a night for two or three nights and it was easy and actually fairly mindless, doing it with the bigger needles.  the nightmare happened when i tried to wind what i had frogged into a center-pull ball, and i ended up with a big tangled mess.  i think i've spent about 4 hours last night and tonight trying to untangle it.  i'm about to give up, but i just hate wasting yarn!  i'll post pics of the sadness later.  anyway, music....

katie melua!  piece by piece!

this is a pretty solid album, kind of bluesy, slow in some parts, but with really good lyrics and a lot of emotion.  nine million bicycles is such a sweet love song.  i love this: "there are six billion people in the world/ more or less/ and it makes me feel quite small/ but you're the one i love the most of all."  and spider's web is kind of a social commentary about how everything we do affects all kinds of other people (hence the title).  if i was going to skip one track, it'd be blue shoes.  personally.  okay, i'm too tired to write anything else.  check her out.

obvious pick/ first single: nine million bicycles
my pick: halfway up the hindukush-- what can i say, i just like it.

p.s. it is SNOWING outside!!  crazy!

so i went to the lys yesterday to buy a circular and possibly yarn for two sweaters (one for me and one for the mister).  i want to make the puff-sleeve cardigan from fitted knits for me, but my copy of the book hasn't come yet, so i wasn't sure how much to buy.  and also, i'm rubbish at picking out colors-- i can agonize for hours when faced with a wall of cascade 220.  so i didn't get yarn for me.  as for the mister's sweater, i was still holding out on finding some bulky superwash for a reasonable price, but i just don't think that's going to happen.  so no yarn from the lys for that project, either.  (fyi,  i considered knitpicks bare superwash held double, but it still would have ended up costing me $60.  i also (briefly) considered a mostly-acrylic blend, for the washability of it all.  in the end, i decided on the knitpicks bare bulky.  hopefully it's not too itchy.  and i guess i'll be hand-washing it for the rest of my life.)  also, do you know how hard it is to find long circulars in tiny sizes?  the answer is very.  so i ended up ordering that off of knitpicks, too.  after wandering around the store for about an hour and poking various balls of yarn, i accidentally bought some malabrigo.  god, that yarn is gorgeous.  i had picked it up and put it down about eight times while i was there, and i finally decided i had to have it.  it's probably the most beautiful yarn i've ever owned, and it's definitely the most expensive (i recycle cheap sweaters when i want cashmere).  i was working on the potw stole this morning, and the sun kept popping out from behind the clouds, splashing huge patches of sunlight all over my living room.  and i could hear the malabrigo calling to me from inside my plastic tub, smashed up against yarns not worthy to even look at malabrigo, much less touch it.  so we had a little photo shoot, the malabrigo and i:




(incidentally, those foot pictures from the last post have made me realize how badly i need a good digital camera, and i'm really sad that i took back the one my parents got me for christmas.  it was on super-sale, and i traded it in for an ipod (which are never on sale!), because the mister was giving me his old camera.  and i only ended up with about $30 leftover after i bought the nano.  don't get me wrong, i love my ipod, but i could buy it today for the same price.  i'll have to wait until next christmas (or black friday, at least) to get a comparable camera at a comparable price.  the picture from that post were taken with (from top to bottom ) , the mister's old camera (which is now mine), my cell phone, my mom's old camera, my mom's old camera, the mister's brand-spanking new camera, mister's new camera, and the rest with mister's old camera.  don't those 5th and 6th pictures look sweet, if not graphically disturbing?)

and, lastly, a progress pic on the potw.  i got nervous that it wasn't going to be big enough, so i blocked what i have so far.   i'm still thinking it's going to end up pretty narrow, but at least i can always make it as long as i want.

try to ignore the crappy lighting and the red towel on which it is blocking.  i really should block on my white towels when i'm planning on taking pictures, but those are my shower towels!

it is time, friends. time for me to share the epic saga of my freaky foot fix, in commemoration of the 3-month anniversary of my surgery, which was last wednesday (better late than never, eh?).



here ends the edited version.  was it too gory?  if so, i apologize.

it is time, friends. time for me to share the epic saga of my freaky foot fix, in commemoration of the 3-month anniversary of my surgery, which was last wednesday (better late than never, eh?).  this post will contain graphic post-op pics of my foot.  i'll repost the saga without the pics (and maybe without some of the gory details) for any who may wish to read of my woes without feeling the urge to puke.


okay, i think that officially was the World's Longest Entry.  if you made it through, congrats!  and even if you just skimmed it for the gore, that's still quite a bit of looking.  i'll get this up and then repost minus the pics. 

okay, so i didn't update. whatever. i'm a terrible blogger. but you probably already knew that. i did, anyway.

courtney and i went to kenwood after i got off from work today, and then we went back to her house and cooked dinner and then watched a WHOLE LOT of tv. survivor (wherein michelle falls off the platform whilst yelling at her blindfold teammate), and then the office marathon that was on today that courtney taped. good times. only i didn't get any work done on the shawl. oh well. there's always tomorrow.

goodnight.

sorry about the lack of new music. last night was kind of crazy. i'm at work but i'll try to post when i get home!

okay, i'm at work and i so shouldn't be posting (not that i have other work to do, but whatever) but i just wanted to share the good news i found out today. i have a job! i mean, obviously, i have a job, but i just found out that if our spending continues like it has been recently, we'll have enough to stay through august of '08! and the mister graduates in june of '08, so that means i should definitely be able to stay in cincinnati until he graduates. i was so worried that the money was only going to carry us through the end of this year or so, and then i'd have to find a new job until the mister graduates. possibly longer, i guess, if we stay here. but there really isn't anywhere here for him to work. so now he can finish school and i can keep working in cincinnati, and then we can get married and move somewhere fabulous!

or we could get engaged first. how about that?

boys are dumb. but maybe now that i actually have some sort of job security, he'll propose? maybe??

i have all these things i keep meaning to put in my journal, but then i never get around to updating.  and by the time i do, i have so many more things that i want to say, that i don't want to write the World's Longest Entry.  but i will anyway!

the mister and i headed to pickerington on friday, but not before some excitement here in cincinnati.  we had planned on both driving up, since his parents didn't want him to leave his car in scary clifton for 3 months, so we were caravaning (if you can call two cars a caravan).  we were trying to leave early afternoonish, but as soon as we got on the road, i knew something wasn't right.  i pulled over, and i had a flat tire.  with a screw in it.  ick.  so we started to change it.  and it started to rain.  really, really hard.  it was awful.  when we (he) finally got the spare on, we drove back home, he ran inside and cleaned up, and then we finally got on the road around 5:15.  needless to say, we did not make it home in time for dinner before north's musical.

pajama game.  man, was it awful.  it was written in the '50s and set i think in the '20s, so it was all sorts of really bad humor.  and it the story moved sooooo slowly.  thank goodness for female leads, though.  she was one of the only good things about that show.  it's so strange to go back 5 years later and see how much has changed and how much hasn't.  first, there were SO many townies.  so many!  good townie= matt guirreri, who is the new assistant band director and conducted the orchestra for the show.  he is way better than he who made pickerington band kids hate band.  bad townie= heidi.  man, when is that frightening, frightening woman going to leave?  i think there needs to be an assassination.  there were plenty of other townies, too, but we must keep moving along.  the sets were good but, as with most musicals, there are just so many of them that none of them are all that impressive, and they all require quite a bit of imagination on the part of the audience.  not like when scott built an entire two-story house on stage, complete with working water pump.  what else?  well, there were some pretty risque scenes.  like a musical number called "steam heat" in which the dancing girls (we'll come back to that later....) dance around all sexy-like in nothing but leotards, tights, and tap shoes, to a song about needing a man's heat to keep warm.  interesting.  and the middle school kids saw this show because, apparently, the fall show (lend me a tenor) was too risque.  peg is still doing the costumes.  it's odd because in the very first scene with the full cast, you can pick people out by their outfits.  chorus members are just wearing mismatched tops and skirts/pants, dancing girls (grumble, grumble) had on super-bright, full skirts, and the lead had on a dress.  but not just any dress.  a dark green, almost teal, belted dress.  sound familiar??  and the dancing.... well there were lots of dance breaks in the show, and i found it odd that they didn't cut more (or any?) of them out, or at least shorten them, considering the majority of the cast-members.  as for those that could dance, well.... at least there weren't any scenes in this show in which the dancing girls pretended to sing while the chorus girls stood in the wings and sang all the parts for said dancing girls.  but most of them didn't even mouth the lyrics!  i mean, i know they're trained not to when they're dancing in, say, dance competitions, but when you're on stage pretending to be a pajama folder in a pajama factory and everyone else in the factory is singing about how life sucks, you should be singing too, dammit!  and there were so many scenes in which the dancing girls did some absolutely stupid, ridiculously easy dance, and then left.  hello, why can't the other girls have a second in the spotlight, too?  and when i say stupid and easy, i mean they lined up and all put their arms out in different directions like the arms of a clock (think the opening credits of that one season of the cosby show), then made a circle around a guy while he was the arms of the clock and they were the numbers.  seriously, heidi?!?!  the best part of the show was the end, not only because it was over, but because all the dancing girls had to sit on the steps, and the rest of the pajama factory workers did a little simple dance.  although, now that i think about it, they probably just figured they were too good to dance with the peons.

anyway, that's enough ranting about some stupid high school musical.  saturday, i sent the mister off the california with a completed pair of socks.  i miss him so much already, not necessarily because it's been that long since i last saw him, but because i know it's going to be a long time before i see him again.  it's so strange knowing that (at least in the near future), he's not going to walk through the door of the apartment or call and ask if we need anything else while he's picking up milk.  i have no idea what to do with my evenings or what to cook for one person.  it kind of sucks.  a lot.

to occupy my mind, i've started knitting eunny jang's print o' the wave stole.   it is incredibly time-consuming and takes so much concentration.  hopefully both of those will change as i get to know the lace pattern.  i've finished 3.5 lace repeats of the suggested 34, which means i'm a bit more than 10% done with the center panel.  or a bit less, if i decide to do the two panels and graft them together, as i'm sure grafting will take a bit of time to get it to the proper stretchiness.  i'll post a progress pic soon, maybe tonight or tomorrow if i get a bit more done.

oh, and i went to the doctor this morning.  the gaping wound in the side of my foot hasn't really done anything in about 2 weeks, so he prescribed this stuff called regranex.  apparently it contains a platelet-derived growth factor which is normally used to heal diabetic ulcers.  hopefully it'll work.  i'll post the full saga of my surgery and recovery soon, but if i do it now, this really will be the World's Longest Entry.  so i'll stop.

cuttin' right to the chase, this week...

imogen heap!  speak for yourself!

sure, she wears some of the strangest outfits known to man, but her music is amazing.  she's another one of those artists in the "electronic" category (like kate havnevik) of whom you should not be scared.  and if her music sounds familiar to you, it's because she is from frou frou!  the sound is very familiar but, i think, the songs are even better.  many of them have been used in episodes of the o.c.  she was nominated for a best new artist grammy this year, which is when she wore the "creature from the black lagoon" outfit that krissy talked about at work, that we looked up, after which i looked her up at home and fell in love with her music.  okay, i really don't have much more to say.  the whole album is so good.  so go listen!

obvious pick:  i honestly don't know!  so many of her songs have been used in various things and released as singles.
my pick: probably hide and seek.  or headlock.  or the walk.  or....

i played hooky from work (again) this afternoon and went out to lunch with the mister and his parents at camp washington chili.  oh man, is it tasty.  i don't think i'll ever go back to skyline!  we got a table right away, ordered drinks, got our drinks and ordered food, and within a few minutes, out came four plates, heaped with spaghetti, meat, and cheese.  the spaghetti was thicker than any i've ever had with cincy chili, and really added a lot to the dish.  the chili was perfectly spiced and not runny at all, like skyline's (and we didn't even order them dry).  and the cheese!  there was so much of it!  and i know there are plenty of skyline devotees out there who say their's is the best cheese, but camp washington's is at least as good, if not better.  i got a 4-way with onions (which i'm pretty sure skyline doesn't even offer), mister got a 5-way, FMIL got a 4-way with beans, and FFIL (FDIL?) got a 3-way.  so tasty, almost as convenient as skyline, and the fastest i've ever seen a plate of food come out of a kitchen, despite the fact that every table in the place was full.  i give it a solid A- (it would get an A or A+ but, i must admit, skyline's oyster crackers are way better).

in other news, i missed grey's last night!  we were out at a wine tasting until after 9, and then we got back here and mister's parents hung out for a while, and then it was after 10.  and we're going out tonight, so i won't even get to see the re-run of it at 8 tonight.  boo!!  does anyone want to find it online for me?  lizz?  i don't have bittorrent anymore!  also, am i going to see you this week?