squares and circles

Squares first. I turned 25 this Saturday, and hence am officially a square (though some might argue that I’ve been one for a good long while!). And that square you see up above is one of the delicious brownies we made to celebrate. We used the American Heart Association Cookbook recipe, which is the one I grew up eating (heart problems run on one side of my family, so it only made sense!), and is also my favorite. It’s very basic, simple…no boxed mix and no chocolate chunks or anything like that, just good old dutch process cocoa and some other “real food” ingredients. Normally we would have made the traditional Space Shuttle Cake, but it being a weekend, we couldn’t have just brought it into the office to share it with my colleagues (most of whom were out of town at the conference I’d hoped to be at, anyway), and a space-shuttle shaped cake is a rather hard thing to keep hidden away from the cats if we keep it here at home. So, brownies it was. And I quite enjoyed them.

These are the other squares in my life right now. The little knitting/crochet/crafting group of us in my department has a tradition of knitting squares to create baby blankets anytime someone we know has a baby, so I’ve been doing my share. I’ve started my own tradition of knitting a square with the cabled pattern from Demi on it, since I have it memorized and really enjoyed knitting it.

So, what then of these circles I reference in the title of this post? Well, y’all remember how I got rather obsessed with circular yoke-style sweaters awhile back, right? And how I joking referred to the existence of a secret society of fellow yoke-loving folks bent on world domination (or something to that effect)? Well, it exists now. I broke down and created a flickr group a couple of days ago. So, if you are interested, please join! I have no idea, by the way, what I’m doing administering a flickr group, but hopefully it won’t turn into a disaster. I realized after the fact that I’d screwed up and made it an invite-only group instead of a regular public group, but please just ask, I’ll be happy to take care of you. And on that note, a question: should I make a Ravelry group, too? It sort of seems to me like Ravelry is actually the better place for chatting about patterns and such (what with the easy “magic linking” and all that).

I’ve got another physical therapy appointment today, and will get to hear about the results of my MRI. My back is still a mess, but I’m feeling optimistic about things anyway. Other than this back thing (which is admittedly still sort of a big deal and definitely a setback), I’ve been feeling quite a bit better recently. More energy, and more at peace with the fact that fine, I have chronic health problems and have to be more careful than other people about pretty much everything (and probably will never run another marathon again in my life), but that’s not the end of the world. I’m eager to get to work on some of the academic projects I had to abandon as well as some new ones, but I promise I won’t push too hard this time around, since that only seems to make me sick again!

Oh, and I can finally reveal who the recipient of the baby booties was! Glad they got there!

Oh, and also, Lolly just posted a great interview with one of my favorite designers ever, Norah Gaughan. Go read it!