To sum up:
I went to Minneapolis.
I bought a lot of stretch velvet at SR Harris.
only even prettier than that.
I bought 6 skeins of Serendipity Tweed
to make this sweater
LT bought a ton of Lopi.
Some of it will be a sweater for me.
Also, I went to Annie's and had fries
There was also sleeping, and I finished the Olympics hat for my mom (needs blocking and tassels) on the flight back
Then yesterday, I failed my "Resist Shiny Object" roll
That, my friends, is a Samsung Moment, an Android phone with a keyboard. It makes me happy. It makes me very very happy. It keeps generating usability posts in my head, which I have no time to write, partially because I am genuinely busy, and partially because the Shiny Phone is hypnotizing me at every available moment. People, it is from the future! And also the past!
Take for instance, last night, when I thought, "huh, I wonder what this Amazon MP3 icon does". And then it went to Amazon. And Amazon had available for download a long-lost, much loved tape of my from high school: The Majesty of the Blues, by Wynton Marsalis, which has this track: Premature Autopsies. That track is ... it's about being indominatable, and persistent, and amazing, and it's all accented by the music perfectly. I fell asleep listening last night. And today when I was looking it up, I learned that it was written by Stanley Crouch and delivered by Rev. Jeremiad Wright, Jr., which made it all that much more amazing that a 16-yo white girl living in a logging town happened across it, because that was sure as hell not the world I was inhabiting. I think it's because someone gave to my sister the classical trumpet player, because, you know, trumpets are all the same, right? And there are so many awesome lines, but the one I needed when I was sixteen was:
Now if a dragon thinks it is grand enough, that dragon will try to make you believe that what you need to carry you through the inevitable turmoil that visits human life is beyond your grasp.
And then it amazes me yet further to imagine the man who recorded those lines, back in 1989, was also preaching to a young man, a man who is now president.
It is the truth of a desire for a refined and impassioned portrait of the presence and the power and the possibilities of the human spirit.
....
And now this will sound like a comedown, but there is an app from a site called OurGroceries.com which somehow mystically connects all sorts of smart phones to the same shopping list, out there in the cloud, so that I can write from the bus that we need oatmeal and my partner can check his phone before he leaves the grocery store, and it's TRANSPARENT.
And my sister can text me and tell me that my nephew believes that Baz engages in single combat with lobsters. And I can take pictures of the sunset and scan barcodes for price comparison and find myself on a map. I can look up restaurants and directions, and I can email far-flung friends. I can find constellations and amuse a 4-year old. I can call people. I can listen to music. It's so much bigger on the inside than the outside. I have joked for a couple years about having the internet in one's pants, but it's true. The future is so big.