Author: afthead

Old knitting dog learns new trick

On By aftheadIn Knitting, Uncategorized2 Comments

I have a few skills I’d say I’ve mastered.  Knitting is one of them.  I’m no Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, but who is?  There’s a difference between a knitting master and a jedi-knit-knight.  I’m a master because there isn’t much that intimidates me.  Sure, I have to remind myself how to read lace charts, and I refuse to deal with 80 bobbins of yarn to create intarsia, and I’m always watching videos of different cast on techniques, but the things I don’t know how to do are just things I’ll try someday and when I do I’ll turn out a passable product.  I know how to fix mistakes, I know when to just turn a knitted item back to a ball of yarn.  I can throw and pick and strand and design.  I know how to knit.  It really doesn’t surprise me anymore.

Well, today a miracle happened.  One of my favorite blogs is SouleMama.  I feel like SouleMama is bizarro me.  She has five kids, homeschools them and lives on a farm.  I have one kid who has been in “school” since 13 weeks and I live in a city.  Her life intrigues me, because I can see myself in it.  If somehow we had been switched at birth I can imagine living in a homestead filled with children all wearing the clothes I made them with my own hands tending our flock of sheep.  (I’d homeschool them so that their friends wouldn’t laugh at my inept seamstress skills.)

On Monday Amanda, the author of SouleMama, posted about their family activities during the rainy weekend, and she included a picture of this crazy knitting project with yarn on double pointed needles and fluff hanging out of it.  No explanation, just a pictures, but I was intrigued.  I commented on her post guessing that she was creating roving lined mittens.  Well today her post was all about the thrummed mittens she’d created.  I took a deep breath.  In thirteen years of knitting I have never heard of thrumming.  This was something new.  I tore through her post.  I started searching Ravelry and Etsy.  Thrumming is a thing.  It is an amazing technique where every few stitches instead of stitching your yarn you knit in some fluffy roving.   It makes garments that are soft and fuzzy on the inside and super warm.  I love that thrumming incorporates color and texture into projects in new ways.  I was giddy.  I sent the post and patterns I found to knitting friends and tried to get them all on the thrumming bandwagon.

Where to start?  Well, I stopped at the local yarn shop on my way home, bought a hunk of roving for $6 and then came home and bought a slipper pattern that I adore: Cadeautje by Ysolda Teague.  The roving I bought is an odd mustardy green roving so I can’t make the cool rainbow slippers featured on the pattern yet, but I dug deep into my stash and found some really ancient chunky alpaca wool blend that meets the designers suggestion for yarn and looks pretty darn cool with the roving.

Let me lay this out to you.  For a $6 roving investment and a $5 pattern investment I am going to embark on a new stashbusting project to create wool/alpaca fluffy lined slippers.  Can you imagine anything more dreamy on your foot?   Then I can move onto mittens, funky earflap hats, and glasses cases.  It’s a miracle!  I am so excited.  Now, off to read a couple of thrumming technique blogs before I cast on.

Finally, I’ve gotta be honest here, thrumming?!?!  Can you imagine a cooler word for a new knitting technique?  Thrum, thrum, thrum.  Eeek!

Management Monday

On By aftheadIn Management Monday, Uncategorized6 Comments

I’ve been throwing around the idea of starting a regular blog post about my 9-5 job.  I manage a team of web developers, analysts, database administrators, designers, web strategists, and QA personnel.  Everyone’s asleep now, right?  Everyone has moved to the next blog already.  Dear God, please don’t tell me she is going to bore us about management.

Wait though.  In real life, I care deeply about the twelve people I spend 8 hours a day with.  I get bureaucracy out of their way so they can do amazing work.  I search for opportunities to make sure that they have the absolute coolest projects to work on.  When their personal lives fall apart I make sure they have meaningful work with whatever bandwidth they can give, and I remind everyone to be kind to each other, because we are all human beings.  I’ve called my team one by one on a weekend when our coworker passed away, because who sends that in an e-mail?  I help them learn and capitalize on their strengths and find them partners to shore up their weaknesses.  I inform everyone that “we all do shit work” but no one on my team does all the shit work.  I have spent 8 years trying to create a team who cares about their work, each other and delights our clients.  Rumor has it I’m not bad at my job.

I swore I would never be a manager.  I scoffed at my managers in my early twenties.  I rolled my eyes as they slinked out of the office at 6:00 or 5:00 or (gasp) 4:30 when my day was easily going to last until 9:00 or 10:00.  I railed that they were never with us when we worked Saturday and Sunday.  Early in my career I was a technology consultant where my worth was literally determined by the number of hours I put in: I got paid for overtime and we billed by the hour.  I made money and my company made money when I worked constantly.  My claim to fame is that I worked a 116 hour week once.  Yes, I collapsed getting out of bed one morning and was stuck on my Sioux Falls hotel room carpet for an hour until my legs decided to work, but I went to work that day, dammit and didn’t mention my collapse to anyone.  I barely remember the managers who told me I “exceeded expectations” and that my areas for improvement were “to clone myself,” to “do a better job coloring my spreadsheets,” and to “stop rolling my eyes in meetings.”  Want to bet I rolled my eyes at that comment?  I was a workaholic who turned out reams of code and could optimize any process you handed me, making four hour reports run in 4 seconds.  People put up with me and I did what I needed to do with little support from above.

In hindsight, the managers in that job weren’t set up to succeed.  They were expected to work the arduous hours I did, but they were 5 years older.  They had young families, but couldn’t be honest that they needed to slip out to go to their kid’s doctor’s appointments or school play.  That was career death.  No one was willing or able to stand up to the consulting machine and say “We are all humans here, can we be kind to each other?”  The company was set up for retirement at 40 and the only way you achieve that is by working all the hours most people work by the time they are 65 in 15 less years.  You could have a personal life at 41, except you really can’t live that way.  Eventually I left when I started realizing that I wanted a life outside work too.

Two jobs later I was told that a first level management job was going to be posted and that no one else was going to apply, and no one else did.  I found myself in charge of a team and I stumbled through two life changes simultaneously:  learning how to be a manager, letting go of measuring my worth via my own personal accomplishments, and learning how to be a mother, letting go of measuring my worth via my own personal accomplishments.  All the while, the voice in the back of my head kept taunting me with that line from the monster.com Superbowl commercial, “I want to claw my way up to middle management.”  Was this what I really wanted in my life?  (Oh man, I just watched that commercial again.  It is so gut-punching.)

Like most people, I have no good answer to the “what do I want with my life” question.  I don’t have the wisdom or the perspective to say if I’m in the ideal job for me.  I am happy I made the transition to the manager role and am really proud of what our team has become.  I enjoy being involved in the decision making process, the business development process, and the people development.  I feel like a fraud, because I don’t have an MBA.  Everything I’ve learned has been through books, trial and error, and instinct.  I long for personal accomplishment still, but often when I try I just become a logjam in all my other roles.  All that said, I feel like I have some stuff worth sharing:

  1. How do you decide if a job is right for you?
  2. Should you work in the public or private sector?
  3. How do you find work life balance?
  4. How do you help your manager give you a more constructive performance review?
  5. What tools are out there to learn your strengths and what do you do about your weaknesses?
  6. Oh crap, I’m a new manager, what do I do?
  7. Competition or collaboration?
  8. When do I know it’s time to leave my job?

So I’ll spend a few months trying this topic out and see if there is any interest.

 

The insight from today’s post?  We are all human.  Try to be kind to each other.

There is a tiny girl

On By aftheadIn stories14 Comments

There is a tiny girl.  Her story is not my story, but her parents.  Her parents are my friends and like most children of my friends she got a hat when she entered this world.  A hat with a poof as big as her head.

IMG_4544_medium2
She got sick in her second fall and after days and weeks and months of horrible tests the worst imaginable diagnosis came back, but that is their story, not mine.
It’s winter now and my hands have longed to help my friends.  We bought them meals, but I wanted to do something personal, so I cast on a hat.  A bigger hat with a tiny pom pom.    A hat with a brim, because it is cold this January and my friends are so cool.  Their daughter needs a hat to keep her warm this winter.  Her parents need a hat that tells them their friend still thinks about them and cares.  I hope it isn’t too big, because the tiny girl may not have time to grow into things, and that is the tragedy.  There is a tiny girl, and soon she will have a new hat knit with love and sorrow and friendship for her, her family, for all they have endured and all they have yet to endure.

How do I make it work?!?

On By aftheadIn Tickles my afthead1 Comment

 The instructions on the back of my new clock are confusing.  Do I need a C battery, or not?  Perhaps I need two AA batteries, which are included?  Perhaps some other alternative energy source is provided-solar panels or fusion-but when that runs out I’ll need a C battery, which is not included.  What if I’m not in the USA, the only country where this statement is applicable, is the battery included or is there a different power requirement altogether?  What would happen if my husband took this on a business trip to the UK?  Would he get additional clarification?

My friends, the answer, if required, is not included.

The S-words

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized8 Comments

There are two words in the English language that when directed at me start my blood boiling, set my teeth on edge and make me want to claw the speaker’s eyes out. Also lots of other cliches, idioms, proverbs and phrases of anger and annoyance. They are:

should

selfish

I have to admit, that my biggest character flaw is that I hate being told what to do. My family will attest that this trait can make me hard to get along with. Sometimes there are things I should do. For example, I just had gum surgery. I should floss more; I should use my Waterpik; I should use my sonic toothbrush; and I should be gentle when I brush. I really should do those things, and I’m making a concerted effort to be better about the hours of oral hygine necessary to accomplish the four shoulds. That said, all of these tasks are palatable because I’m the one saying should.

My husband and I have an annual fight, which we’ve avoided in 2016 for the first time in 20 years. (He finally wised up to the fact that he can control if this fight occurs or not.) Normally a few weeks before New Years he starts making suggestions for OUR resolutions.

“We should pick a room every week and focus on organizing and really cleaning that room.”

“We should plan meals every week.”

“You should figure out something to do to make yourself happy.”

Let me do a quick translation of the above innocuous statements.

“You have too much crap and I can’t organized it without you, so would you mind getting rid of some of this useless stuff so I don’t have to look at it? You are a bad person.”

“I’m tired of the meals you make and you do a bad job grocery shopping. You waste food and our family eats like crap. No wonder you need to lose a few pounds. You are a bad person.”

“Why are you such a grouch? I’m sick of living with a miserable wench. Will you do something about your attitude? You are a bad person.”

See, even writing these I can sense how ridiculous they are, but I can’t help it. The word “should” gets uttered in my direction, even softened by a “we” instead of a “you,” and I go crazy. I can take constructive criticism and people can tell me what to do. I’m old enough now that I can listen, process and appreciate helpful direction, once I have a chance to take a deep breath, squelch my innate aggravation, remind myself that I know I’m not perfect and the person in front of me is trying to be helpful. (Thankfully I’ve had the same manager for years now and we are used to each other’s idiosyncrasies, so performance review time isn’t so bad.) However, all that goes out the window when a “should” is included.  Should is a code word for “there is something wrong with you and I’m finally going to break the bad news to you, but I’m not willing to be part of the solution: you are the problem.”  I despise should.  Yay to a 2016 New Year with no Afthead-shoulds.

Now let’s talk about the other pet-peeve: selfish.  Selfish is a code word for “you live your life differently than I want you to, so I label you as a human being – selfish.”  Thankfully selfish is not a word thrown around as lightly as should, but I can recite for you every single time someone has thrown that arrow in my direction.  Each time, I was not being selfish, but I was making a choice that the other person didn’t agree with.  I wasn’t having children yet.  I was taking advantage of opportunities presented when others didn’t.  I was capitalizing on an opportunity I created.  Sure, I make selfish choices all the time.  I choose to do what is best for me, my family, or my situation instead of optimizing life for someone else.  However, I’m deep enough into this parenting thing to know that you don’t label a person by their actions.  You don’t call someone selfish because they make a choice that appears selfish to you.  Selfishly, I waited until I was 33 to have my daughter, because that was what I needed to do for my family.  Selfishly, I’ll make the most of an opportunity presented if I am the best person to do the job.  I am not a selfish though, and I’ll appreciate you not calling me that.

Let’s turn to Google for a definition, shall we?

selfish
adjective
(of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure

I can give several examples of my not-selfish qualities: I coach my daughter’s soccer team, I foster kittens, I contribute to charity, I parent, and I manage a team of fabulous people.  Sure, I have self-serving reasons I do all of these things, but none of them is chiefly concerned with my “personal profit or pleasure.”  My profit or my pleasure is an aspect of each of those activities, but it is not the major reason I do them.  However, I accept that some people may not see it that way, and they are welcome to question my motivations, but they are not welcome to call me names.

Words do matter, and many people have hot button words, which unfortunately, you usually don’t realize until you’ve uttered them and felt the over-the-top response crash over you.  Now at least mine are out there in the blogosphere for anyone to read, so when you say “Johanna, you should be less selfish” you’ll understand when my head explodes.  Boom!

New Years Peas

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized3 Comments

As long as I can remember, I have been forced encouraged to eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s day.  My dad is from Texas and this is a tradition he brings to the family.  Not normally the superstitious one, we have a hard time avoiding eating our annual good luck peas.  Even now when I have my own family and my own household, I get the text or call asking if I’ve had my black-eyed peas.

As a child, I remember the peas tasting exactly like dirt.  Sometime the dirt bits were boiled with ham to make them ham-flavored dirt.  Sometimes they were just plain old boiled dirt.  More than once I ate the dirt like it was a pill: no chewing, just swallowing.

Then my dad discovered the black-eyed pea dip.  This year my recipe looked like this:

2 cans of black eyed peas

1/2 onion chopped coarsely

1 can of Rotel tomatoes

1 package of Women’s Bean Project Green Chili Salsa Mix seasoning*

Juice of half a lime

1 Tbsp of water if the dip seems dry

Put everything together in a bowl the morning of New Years Eve.  Let the flavors mingle during the day.  The dip will be tasty by the evening and even tastier by the next day’s celebrations.

Now it’s not the most appetizing looking dip, but trust me, if you have to eat dirt bits, this is the way to do it.  The dirt flavor is hardly noticeable with all the spices and it’s so easy to put together. To be fair, the dip is also helped by the fact that legumes are trendy now, as opposed to when I was a kid.   Our good luck dip was enjoyed at both our New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day parties.  No one had to be coerced to try it…well, except the kids.  None of the kids ate the dirt dip.  Don’t tell my dad….

Happy New Year!

 

*The Woman’s Bean Project is one of my favorite local charities, and they ship all over the United States.  Their mission, according to their website, is “to change women’s lives by providing stepping stones to self-sufficiency through social enterprise.  They train impoverished women how to succeed in the workplace”.  Their food is delicious and every purchase helps a woman move toward a sustainable career.  They have helped 800 women move into personal responsibility.  I recommend the salsa dips, the cornbread, and the split pea soup.  Yum!  You can also order their products on Amazon and Overstock.com, or check their website for local retailers in your area.

Knitting Knew Year

On By aftheadIn Knitting, Uncategorized11 Comments

Oh my blogging friends, I have missed you.  Since December 10th I’ve had gum surgery, had an allergic reaction to my antibiotics, got canker sores at each of the 17 sites I had stitches in my mouth and pulled off the annual miracle we call Christmas.  I have so much to tell you!  There are posts floating around my head about friends, Christmas, books, gum surgery, anniversaries and work.  And so many blogs to read!  I am terribly behind!  So to ease my way out of my no-blogging streak, I’ll start with the knitting I accomplished over the last few weeks.

#1: Headband and fingerless gloves for mom

A few weeks before Christmas mom asked me if I could knit her a headband.  I have a knitting pattern I love for headbands.  I’ve made at least four of them, and they come together in no time.  The pattern is just interesting enough to keep me engaged and it comes together in a flash.

Normally, I’m not a fan of lace or cables in variegated yarn, but there were very important reasons I used this yarn for this project: it was in my stash, it is pretty, and it isn’t itchy.  Both my mom and my daughter have a severe dislike for wool and find things itchy that I think are soft and smooth.  As a knitter, that’s a bummer, but when someone asks you to make one of your favorite knitted projects, you do what you can with what you have on hand and that meant variegated alpaca.  (Especially because I couldn’t drive to the local yarn shop while taking heavy duty painkillers.  However, I could manage to follow lace and cable charts.  Go figure.)

This is my favorite of these headbands I’ve made.  I used a smaller needle (10) and it’s much nicer in a tighter knit: it isn’t so loosy goosey on your head, it’s warmer, and it isn’t as wide across the head as my other ones.  I stitched on an antique button and voila!  Christmas gift finished…. except… there was a decent amount of yarn left.  So, I started hunting on Ravelry for patterns that didn’t need much yarn and could be knit on a size 10 needle.  When I came across these owl fingerless gloves I knew I had my winner.  My mom has given me patterns with these cabled owls on them before, and mentioned her knitting friends making them.  These subliminal hints meant she would love them.  I couldn’t resist!  I was nervous though, because the pattern called for 100 yds of chunky yarn, my skein only had 110 yards to begin with, and I’d already knit a headband.  Feeling braved and doped up, I cast on my first mitt.  I shortened the cuff a bit, and in the end had about three yards of yarn to spare.  Plenty!  I had to go to the craft store on Christmas Eve Eve for the button eyes, and stitched them on just in time.  I’m thrilled with the pattern and the results.  The mitts are soft, pretty, and practical.  My mom loved the set.

#2: Mittens for the kiddo

Feeling inspired after Christmas, and with my mouth still in agony, I picked up my sweater I’ve been working on for a few years and started to work on it.  I cast on the neckline and got that finished, but I’m worried it’s too short and a bit wonky.  Ugh.  Hoping blocking would fix my problem, I started to finish up the sleeves until I was waylaid by a little voice and some big blue eyes saying, “Mommy, would you make me some gloves?”  Well, knowing that my daughter never asks for knitted objects and often turns her nose up at sweaters made out of yarn softer than butter, I seized the opportunity.  However, I don’t love anyone enough to make gloves – all those fingers to get the right size and all those joins, gak – but she was okay with mittens, but with tops.  “Not like Nanna’s mittens.”  Back to the yarn closet, and this time we found two skeins of yarn that met her color and “not itchy” requirements.

One Monday night football game and the one with the thin striped was done.  She tried it on and loved it.  Then I asked, “Do you want them the same, or mismatched?”  I was telepathically sending her “mismatched” vibes, because second mittens are so boring.  My powers must be strong, because she was thrilled with the idea of coordinated mittens.  One day of college bowl games today and the second one was done.


Her nine year old friend dubbed them “Totally cool” this evening so I know they will be worn the rest of the winter.  They could use some blocking, but given how much they’ve already been on her hands they may end up staying a little irregular.  I’d rather have them loved than perfect.

Pay no attention to my messy house in the background.  Did I not mention gum surgery and Christmas?  (Ha ha, just kidding you.  My house is always messy.)

Happy Knew Year!

Wishing you the little things

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized3 Comments

On the eve of Christmas Eve I thank you all for reading my ramblings, and hope you all have a joyful Christmas, if you celebrate, and a couple of awesome days if you don’t.  (Okay, have awesome days even if you do celebrate Christmas.)

Remember to pause and enjoy the little things.  Me?  I stopped to appreciate  4737-4745 on the longest ever hopscotch this morning.  If only I’d had more time, I would have hopped them all.

 
I’ll be back with a vengance on the 26th!  We have so much to talk about.  Gum surgery, traveling stories, knitted objects, and more. I think there may even be a year-of-Afthead celebration to occur.  

Enjoy the little things!

Afthead Hannukah 

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I’ve finally recovered enough from my gum surgery to post again.  Thank goodness, because I almost missed blogging about Hannukah!  

Mr. Afthead and our daughter lit the candles before leaving to watch the University of Denver hockey game tonight.  (I wasn’t invited because I’ve yet to stay awake past 9:00 since Thursday’s surgery). We don’t do any presents for Hannukah, so the tradition is just about lighting the candles.  Mr. Afthead’s father is Jewish, so we aren’t:  Judaism is passed on through the mother’s side.  Our celebration is cultural and not religious.  As someone who didn’t grow up with this celebration, I have grown to love the moments of quiet calm for eight nights during this busy season.  

It’s also a touch point every year to measure how much my daughter has grown: this year she can light the candles from the middle candle, the shamash, and recite the prayer herself, in Hebrew.  By next year she may be able to even light the shamash herself.  

Happy Hannukah to any of you who celebrate and happy holidays to everyone from the Afthead family!

Why am I so angry?

On By aftheadIn Uncategorized12 Comments

I have two big fears in life: broken glass and dentists.  If you were at my house for dinner and shattered your glass to bits on my floor, I’d likely tell you it was no problem and move everyone out of the way so I could sweep up the shards of glass like a normal person.  When you left, I’d start my obsessive routine, vigilantly seeking out every foot-embedding tiny invisible knife.  I’d sweep, and vacuum, and mop and vacuum again.  Even with all that, I’d find a lone sliver somewhere in the coming days while I walked through my house in shoes, because I know those evil glass bits are lurking.  My glass fear is one that I can hide from all but my closest relations.

My dentist fear is a whole different level of fear.   I have fainted dead away twice in my life: both at dentist offices.  I have been known to sit in my car and put my head down after an appointment so I don’t faint on the drive home.  I have had 7 crowns, 2 root canals, more fillings than I have teeth and my wisdom teeth out.  The fear that proceeded all of those pales to my current fear:  gum surgery.

It’s a simple surgery.  It’s a graft on one tooth.  I’ll be fine.  I know this in my logical brain.  My emotional brain?  Well, when I went to visit the nice gum doctor and he pulled out his notebook of gum surgery before and after pictures I did not faint and I did not vomit, which I was proud of.  However, when the nice man finished with his horror show of gum pictures and asked me if I had any questions I looked at him, took a deep breath, and burst out crying.  He looked at me like I had leprosy.

See, the dentist fear isn’t controllable.  It makes me faint and cry in public.  This appointment, the one where I learned I was having gum surgery, it was a month ago.  A month I have been dreading the surgery.  A month I’ve been having nightmares about what is going to happen.  A month of seeing his folder of surgical details looking at me.   A month of planning logistics.  My favorite, is that I have to have someone drive me because of my “pre-medication” and the instructions say in bold, “Do not take a taxi while taking your pre-medication.”  This little tidbit might be the only thing keeping me sane.  Is a bus okay?  What about Uber?  A train?  I mean, I can’t drive and in bold cannot take a taxi, but no other forms of transportation are discussed.

So, why am I grouchy?  Because I deal with this kind of irrational fear for a week or two, but after a month  my edges are raw.  I can’t take in any more.  Anything can send me into a tailspin: my daughter asking for an iPad from Santa, my husband lecturing me on her lack of after school activities, deciding if we should order Christmas cards, and holiday family budget discussions.  All of those have sent me into a tailspin.  I have explained my craziness to my husband, but somehow he is incapable of turning off normal topics of conversation this week.  He can’t stop himself from asking, on a lunch date, if I really need him home on Friday, because he’s really busy at work right now.

Last night?  I dreamed I bled out and my family came home to find me dead because I was left alone after gum surgery.  Lordy.  I need to get this procedure over with so I don’t lose my mind.  I’m dreading Thursday, but it can’t come soon enough for the Aftheads.