Better

The food processor quandary has been solved.  When I had looked everywhere within a three-hour drive of home and had not found the quiet processor, I took a step back and thought about it.  My old processor was a Hamilton Beach machine, a brand that is still made and that I'd seen during my hunt.  So the Emperor and I went back out and found a nice, smaller model of that brand and brought it home.  It's the perfect size, and it's much quieter.  For Thanksgiving, I processed up two batches of whole-wheat pie crust dough (and froze three crusts' worth) and shredded lots of zucchini for zucchini bread and baked it.  I've even found a space in the cupboard for the machine, which is perhaps the biggest miracle of all.

On the job front, I've passed my first year tenure review with flying colors.  Yes, at my school they review you every year.  I'm glad -- it takes some of the mystery and the anxiety out of the process if you have to do it five times before it really counts.

Our department is having a pot luck lunch this coming week, and I can't decide what to bring.  I could just bring some random food and not worry about it, which would be just fine.  Up until yesterday, I had been waiting to see what everybody else planned to bring and trying to fit in with the existing offerings.  Then I looked through my tea magazines for recipe ideas ... and now I think I'll bring some kind of finger sandwich, to make it easy to eat.  The catch is that one of my colleagues is a vegetarian, and another must eat gluten-free.  I'm thinking I can find a nice gluten-free bread and top it with some kind of carrot and goat cheese schmear.  Or, maybe my old standard carrot-ginger-cream cheese schmear.  Or I could make a green schmear, and cut them in the shape of little trees.  Or...  see my dilemma?    Oh!  I could do two of the above, and make one of them gluten-free.

As for knitting, I'm still in startitis mode, but too busy to do much of anything about it.  I had started a Pretty Thing with some leftover Pediboo from another project, but about halfway through, it met with an Unfortunate Accident.  I had left it on a table next to our chairs, and it somehow found its way underneath one of them while we were vacuuming the floor.  That's not the Unfortunate Accident.  The Emperor picked it up and tried to dust off the hair and dust that was stuck to it.  That's not the Unfortunate Accident, either.  That occurred when I, the impatient, thought it would be a good thing to use the vacuum cleaner to suck the dust and hair off.  I ended up not only sucking a whole section off the needles, but sucking the stitches right down to the cast-on row, in the twinkle of an eye.  So I frogged it completely and decided to grab a different yarn out of the stash, this time a skein of Trekking XXL Pro Natura, which is 25% bamboo.  As I've been knitting this pattern with this yarn, I have noticed that while the colors are pretty, it's not as soft knitted as it is in the skein.  Now, because I've gone and looked up the yarn to show you, I find that the bamboo in it is unprocessed -- the fibers are harder so the socks last longer.  So now I'm thinking I might end up frogging it again, because I'm not sure I want to have unprocessed bamboo around my bare neck, no matter how pretty the thing is.

Tell you what I ought to do -- get out that beautiful bison I spun in 2006, ply it against itself, and use that to knit up a Pretty Thing.  That would be soft, and it would be a good use of a rare fiber that I don't have very much of.  That's what I ought to do.