I feel so 5 years ago… I just finally got an iSight camera from Betsy who’s moving to Italy to start an Art Monastery. She no longer needed it since her fancy new laptop already has a camera built in.

I’ve never had the occasion to video chat, nor do I have the inclination to be LonelyKnitter34 and turn this into a vlog. But time will tell. You may see me sitting here bleary-eyed, not quite looking at the camera in dim overhead lighting soon enough.

Just in case, I opened up a hizKNITS AIM account, should you ever see me online. Grab a window, have a sit and type at me for a spell.

With the crazy storms hitting Northern California, I left work early on Friday, for fear of getting stuck in Berkeley if the Bay Bridge was closed. Instead of pulling out the laptop and writing the reviews that are already overdue, I ran to the store to buy fixin’s for pea soup.

I always intend to make soups and stews, but never get around to it. During my trip to my parents’ house over the holidays, I hopped into the kitchen with my mom and made a bucket of pea soup and a tub of vegetarian chili. Cooking with her was the highlight of my time with them. (A close second was devouring EZ’s Knitting Without Tears—who wants to make a hybrid sweater with a shirt yoke?)

And what better to go with warm bowls of love? Fresh-baked bread! Because the pea soup was going to be ready that night, I couldn’t rely on the tried and true no-knead loaves. So, I tried my hand at baking my own pita bread. (Pictured are the leftovers on Saturday, with the two no-knead loaves I mixed up to sit that night.)

Now, I’m all for process and the meditative quality of kneading, but rolling out individual circles takes forever, when you’re used to barely touching your dough. Also, by baking them in the oven, instead of a on a griddle, they puffed up tremendously. More like whole wheat turnovers filled with air than warm, soft blankets. Still, ’twas delicious.

This morning we cut into the loaf on the right, made with steel-cut oats. I found a bunch of recipes for no-knead variations at Breadtopia.com. Much denser and moister than plain, old boules. It will taste great tonight with the chili tonight. The kidney beans are already soaking.

Thank you, Mom, for being my inspiration in the kitchen. I wish we had more time to cook (and knit) together. You don’t look a day out of Girl Scouts! (more gorgeous photos of her from the ’60s, scanned into my flickr account, along with some embarrassingly blond baby pictures of me)

And, a (belated) happy birthday here on the blog! (Yes, I called her yesterday, day-of her birthday!)

If any of y’all want to send her a greetings: momannh [at] aol [dot] com.

Here’s our daily bread, freshly baked for the new year. It’s hissing, moaning and cracking on the stove, cooling as I type this.

Perhaps not daily, I’ll do my best to share a little of my breads and other foibles more frequently, hopefully taking pictures all the while.

I’m not a big resolution guy, but I hope 2008 contains many more loaves like this, lots of other handmade things, and sharing them with people I love.

Let’s make it a great one, kids!

What is that compels us to collect evidence of past experience? Do we not trust our our feeble memories? Time robs us of yesterday, while firmly shoving us toward tomorrow.

Being here at my parents’ home in PA, a house I’ve never lived in and only visited a handful of times over the past five years, takes me far away from my West Coast present. Rifling through mildewy boxes of my childhood momentos allows flickers of forgotten time: that Clowns for Christ weekend, those high school SAT and AP test scores, the notes from my fifth grade girlfriend and myriad Boy Scout badges and patches.

I’m surrounded by everything they’ve collected in their years together. The stuff that survived the 10 moves I made with them during my first 18 years has now been joined with new relics of three other moves. What’s going to survive this next one, as they prepare to go to western New York next week?

Watching my dad sort through tons (literally) of magazines and books—theology and religion, magic, writing, origami, role-playing games, science fiction and fantasy, storytelling, cycling—shows me how defined he is by his pursuit of knowledge, or at least the acquisition thereof. Seeing my mom wade through recipes, both handwritten and torn-out from magazines, underlined her connection to people and places across time through food. Some are tried and true (with stains to prove it), and others just symbols of hope for a future sidedish, culinary adventure or inspiration for another idea.

For my crap, it’s all being thrown away, even the seven years of art school drawings and paintings. At least the student loans are paid off. What good would these objects serve me now? Back in San Francisco, they’d just sit in storage, never to be seen until a move or a cleaning purge. Their demise is inevitable.

If I had time, I’d take a picture of every item and write a little bit about where and when it was aquired, a memory blog of sorts. Better yet, I could start by capturing everything that comes into my life right now, so I wouldn’t have to look back and think and wonder what I’m forgetting.

But that would be a fruitless and endless practice. One that would get in the way of they real day-to-day of living. Besides, I’ve never organized any of my photos and I’ll be darned if I start scrapbooking now. I’d focus on the what’s happening of right now, of the bread I baked for dinner and the pea soup I made with my mom.

There’s so much of my own past that I want to hold onto, even seek out and find those long-lost friends. And to do that means a little less time at work and more time creating new memories with people I love. (A New Year’s resolution, perhaps?)

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the rare gem the pops onto my radar screen, like this clipping from the Uniontown, PA paper’s article on the changing lives of minister’s wives. I may no longer have that towheaded mop-top or that killer bike race tanktop, but I know that once I did, and it made me smile.

This is how my weekend ended. In the gaze of a sweet little puppy, while having dinner at Lisa’s house. This little bambino who looks like bambi is a fourth of Janie Sparkles’ size and twice as eager to snuggle. (and, yes, that’s a cameraphone picture!)

It was the perfect end to a super-duper busy weekend, between swim practice, hanging out with Mike (where this happened… more on that later), a swim team holiday party, cooking a bunch of cabbage and kale, a drive-by pop-in to Sabrina of KnitKnit’s book signing put on by Sile of Knit One One fame.

I can tell it’s the holidays, as almost every night there’s a party or a concert or a project to do. If only my day job would let up and allow me to get my social on… or at least return to knitting.

Pardon my blog nap.

Work’s been exhausting lately, so nothing much left over to devote to writing or knitting. It may be this way through the end of the year…

However, I wanted to say a great big “thank you” to Vickie Howell for the mention on her podcast, CRL: Craft | Rock | Love.

I’ll write more when I wake up from my long winter nap.

For the lack of posting, you’d think I had forgotten how to write at all. ‘Tis not the case. It was a productive blog silence, as I attempted my fourth NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.

Sadly, at about 18K words in, I pulled the plug last week. It’s further than I’ve ever gotten, so that makes me happy. But with trying to launch a site at work, two nights at the office past 11pm and a trip to the outlaw in-laws (outlaws only because my relationship isn’t legally recognized) in Eugene for the upcoming Tofurkey day, it wasn’t going to happen without a lot of pain. And I want to do NaNo in a spirit of fun and joy. There’s enough hurt in the world without scooping some more on myself.

That said, my newfound free time means a return to knitting, a chance to clean out some email inboxes, a truckload of Ravelry friend adds and hopefully more opportunities to be social. I’m back in the pool, too. As soon as that darn redesign launches, it will be a full return to normalcy.

It’s October 15, 2007.

Blog about the environment. Do something for the earth.

Can you take one less car trip today? Ride your bike for a short trip instead of driving? Sorry for being redundant (yes, I mentioned it Friday!).

At 2milechallenge.com you can plug in your address and get a Google map that shows you what’s within 2 miles of your home. And the map opens with my office address (if you ever wondered where in Berkeley I work).

Feel free to share on your blog.

So, last night, I experienced the cutting edge… at an ATM machine.

I had to deposit some checks and, lo, and behold, there was a new-fangled ATM at my local Bank o’ America. It didn’t require envelopes, in fact, there were none. No, this new machinery takes the frustrating task of licking envelopes that sit out in public AND the challenge of addition has been abolished! Instead, it just sucks in each check as-is, I verify it, then it asks for another!

From what I read in their press releases, if I had had cash, these new “deposit image” ATMs can take a stack of up to 40 bills at once and count them for you. If only I carried that many Washington’s! As you can see, they then print digital images of the deposited checks on the receipt itself.

Does your bank have this? I head heard of Wells Fargo doing it, but until I used it, I didn’t get its magic! Is it me, or is this totally Jetsons?

Proof that I am indeed alive. Had breakfast with Sean and Mr. Man this morning, followed by a hipster latte. It was nice to roll around on city streets in the morning.

Work has been such that I haven’t felt like writing, nor running, nor knitting. Luckily, I’m off to knit this afternoon and I’ll post pictures to prove it.