Skip to main content

Surprising Ways of Showing Up

Somehow, I got into crocheting a while back. I even got to put my skills to use for my new nephew, since I figured he could use a one-up mushroom beanie. All in all, I'm pretty happy about this turn of events. I get to make people hand-made gifts, and that goes over pretty well. I've also found that it's a half-way decent way to relax and unwind in the evenings. If I've had a rough day at work, I can spend some time thinking about a crochet hook instead. So, yeah, it's been a good thing.

That said, it's showed up in other parts of my life, sometimes in surprising ways. For starters, my brother made fun of me. I forget exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect of me being an old lady. I can't say that I was entirely surprised, since I figured someone was bound to poke fun eventually. It just so happened to be him, in this case. Also, it was all in fun, so we both laughed about it.

The other thing that came up, however, was at work. Some enterprising souls started a blog of sorts, sort of like Humans of New York. If you've never seen it before, it's one guy's attempt to humanize the nameless faces in the New York crowd. I don't know how he does it, but he takes pictures and gets people to tell him their life stories. Some of those stories are really interesting, and it's a reminder that everyone has some quirk, some experience, some story, or some wisdom to share. It's a lot of fun to follow, and people at work decided to try something similar to help us all get to know each other better. And they asked me to be in it.

Well, okay. I don't mind talking, and it's for an interesting enough cause. So, I agreed to do this, and they asked me to mention some interests. I threw out a lot of the usuals: sports, software development, comic books, running. Oh, and something to the effect of,"these days, apparently I crochet." Well, that got the person's attention, and she immediately jumped on that. So, we ended up talking about crocheting. They even took my picture with some of my work spread out over a table. Let me tell you, I never expected that to happen back during that snowy winter in Colorado (when I first learned how to crochet).

The other fun bit has been tied to the on-going octopus joke. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, my friend likes to poke fun of me about a rumor from high school. I apparently learned to say "octopus" before any other word, and she needles me about it. So, I got her kid a book about octopuses (octopi?), and laughed my head off when he liked it. She, however, kept it running by getting me a birthday card with an octopus on it. Well, then. She had a second kid, which presented a great opportunity for a rebuttal:
You can only see 4 of the 8 tentacles, but trust me, they're there
I laughed the whole time I was making it, too. This crocheting thing is apparently quite useful as a means of cracking jokes.

So, teasing or not, I think I'm going to have to keep doing this crocheting thing. Who knows how else it'll show up? However it does, I strongly suspect that it'll be amusing as all heck.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Scratch 2

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inside and Outside

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I invested in a sewing machine during the pandemic. It was the most basic model we could find, but it was good enough for what we needed: to make a few masks. And now, over a year later, I still think that it was a good investment. Interestingly, even with restrictions being lifted a bit, we still find that we need masks. Some stores still require them, and neither of us wants to be in a position where we needed a mask and didn't have one. So, we still have to wear and wash them. And even though we've never run out of clean masks to wear, we did notice that we were close a couple of times. So, I recently broke out the sewing machine to make a few more masks. When we initially invested in supplies, we bought a pack of fabric squares. We figured we weren't going to need super high quality, and having a bunch of squares would give us options in case one of us screwed up (read: me). That also gave us the ability to add a little v...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...
Post a Comment
Read more