Spring Break, Wooh!

So spring break is over now. Nothing terribly exciting to report, except that my Mom & Aunt came to visit. We took the dogs to the beach and watched for whales (yucky weather, saw none) and drove around. I found some yarn in Bandon for a very pretty skirt at a really cheap price too, go me! I volunteered for Whale Watching Spoken Here on Wednesday and Saturday as well, skunked on Wed (clouds so you couldn't see more than 1/2 mi off shore and sideways rain in heavy winds- thank goodness that was an indoor site!) and saw just a few on Saturday (the rain kindly waited until after we left to set in). Oh yeah, Saturday night we also participated in Earth Hour, not using any electricity for an hour. We played cards in front of the fire, and I knitted.

I finished my vest recently and wore it to school friday before spring break (I worked every day that week, it was pretty nice). It's a bit small- I guess I sized it down too well, but not TOO small. It works well over a T shirt.


Then this week I started and finished an Owls sweater! That was fun, it was such a quick knit, and it's very cute and fits great. It used a lot less yarn than I thought too, so it ended up costing like $20! Yay for making my own clothes!

We worked a lot in the garden the past few days, pulling out old stuff and weeds and planting early seeds for this spring. It actually was frosty this morning, but apparently not cold enough to kill the sprouts, thank goodness. We got a whole bunch of good soil out of the compost bin and made up some organic fertilizer, so I hope we'll have good production this year.

Today I went out to lunch with Steph and her friend Crystal (whom I met at the Diego's Umbrella show) and then we took the dogs to the beach and hung out drinking beer in the sun. I wore my new sweater. All in all, a pretty excellent day. Some fun things are planned for the next few weeks too, I'm excited!

Drama

I was at the HS again today (that makes 3 days this week, and 4.5 for next week!), subbing for the teacher who last year put me in a bad situation and made me feel like crap, giving me the worst sub experience thus far; but I'm glad I was there today. Today was... interesting.

It was "green week," odd since Earth Day is in April, and the students got both a pep assembly and an hour-long lunch today. But that's not why it was odd. Apparently Friday night, a female student called the police and reported being raped by a fellow student. She was 14, he, 18. He is currently sitting in jail awaiting the trial on Monday, and she was escorted to school this afternoon by police to pick up her things. I didn't hear anything about it at all the other 2 days I was subbing, so it seems the situation at school came to a head today.

As in any criminal case, it's not cut and dried exactly what happened, and this being high school, there were endless rumors floating around- "He was a virgin! She was making out with another girl/ was drunk on the bus home yesterday! He would never do that! She's a liar, she was laughing about the situation!" etc. His friends decided to show their support by wearing t-shirts bearing slogans such as "I support [boy], bring him home!" They all say he was the nicest guy, he would never do something like that, etc. Obviously he was a popular, well-respected guy at school, and people honestly believed he was a good person. But that doesn't mean he didn't do it. Everyone thought Ted Bundy was nice and charming too, and the BTKer's family would never have dreamed he could perform such heinous acts.

Unfortunately, it's all too easy to get caught up in the hype and forget what's really important, to take the words of someone too emotionally involved at face value (I've been guilty of that too, when my friend found out her husband had been sleeping with their 12 year old foster daughter, believing her say the girl seduced him, when that DOES NOT MATTER and was almost certainly wrong anyway). Everyone forgets that it's wrong to talk about a crime scene being investigated, and it's false to assume you know what happened just because you know one person involved. Even if he didn't force her, it would still be statutory rape (though people are also saying she lied about her age, which makes things complicated). What's important is that either way, someone's life was ruined Friday night. Blaming the victim doesn't make it any more OK, even if she is an attention-grabber type.

The students were very upset with the way the administration handled things, particularly that people with "we support [boy]" shirts were told to take them off or go home. Obviously students at school don't have the same rights at school as an adult on the street, but there have been cases similar to this in the past (students wearing unmarked purple armbands to protest something) proving that it is stifling their free speech. Where do you draw the line between allowing people to show support for someone they believe to be wrongly accused, and creating a potentially hostile environment for a girl who was brave enough to report a rape? Apparently one of her own friends tried to beat her up yesterday, so there is certainly some proof to the "hostile environment" theory.

It doesn't matter if she's a "bad girl, a slut, a liar," whatever; or if he's a "good, wholesome, popular, nice guy." Something happened, and only they 2 know exactly what and how, and the rest of the school needs to let the court decide the truth. I understand their frustration, but it's just a horrible, sad situation no matter what happens, and becoming overwrought and getting yourself suspended won't make things any better. There are times to stand up and protest and say "this is wrong, we won't take it!" but a case like this is not one of them.

So, less than a month until my birthday-

Do you all have your presents picked out and your travel plans arranged? Kidding, of course. It's weird that I'll be 30 in less than a month though. I know I'll at least have fun on my birthday, because Eli & Jack are driving down, and we are going to visit R in NorCal for the last day of his week-long training there. Then we'll be back here, I hope hanging out with other people who come visit, but at the very least enjoying ourselves immensely. Hm, I just have to make sure that if we go camping that night I can set up my tent sufficiently far enough away from the snoring....

Anyway, R is gone yet again this week, at a fire training in Redmond. He is enjoying spending his per diem on the abundance of restaurants there. I wish we had better restaurants here, or at least more variety (not that we ever go out). It's pretty much all your typical American-style food, including loads of Gringo-tastic mexican places, and a few totally old-school inauthentic Chinese food places. At least Porta is damn good Italian, and you can get good pub-grub at a few places. Apparently there is a Thai restaurant at the new concert place downtown, and there's also been an Indian restaurant sign up for months now with the place never open. 2 of the Oriental restaurants in town sell sushi, but at one a guy I know has gotten food poisoning twice, so that's not so hot. But tomorrow I'm going to the other one with a couple friends (well, at least Gloria, we'll see if anyone else shows up, it was kind of last-minute).

I'm kind of obsessed with food lately (well, more than usual) because I've been trying a detoxifying diet this week- no alcohol, caffeine, dairy, gluten, meat, or eggs, so that basically reduces me to fruit, veg, legumes, and nuts. It has me craving empty carbs and sugar like crazy, even the yummy coconut rice pudding I made isn't working. And honestly, I can't see that it's helped my stomach any, which is frustrating. Stupid stomach, just be normal!

As for knitting, I haven't gotten much done lately (sucked away by my first love- books), but I just got my Christmas present from V in the mail (call it a half-Christmas & birthday present!), the book "Custom Knits" which has some good patterns, but more importantly, teaches you the details of how to make a pattern that works for YOU and looks the way you want it too, hooray! I need to finish up my sexy vesty, I'm just in the middle of the back now and need to break into my third ball of yarn, unfortunately. Hm, I just looked at my projects page on ravelry, and learned that out of 50+ things I've worked on, only 1/5 of them were for me! I clearly need to be more selfish. ;)

Smarch marches on

March is supposed to come in like a lion, right? Well this year it certainly is, but sort of like a lion reintroduced to a game preserve to control the gazelle population. Sure we're getting loads of rain (and some wind) but we needed it!

We made the most of a stormy weekend at home by doing things around the house. We made bagels and blondies, whole-wheat cinnamon raisin bread and winter squash risotto. Everything was really delicious, even though the bread didn't rise much in the breadmaker, so it was really dense. R brewed and made a pizza peel to use for baking homemade pizzas and bread. By the way- if you haven't tried the "Artisan bread in 5 min a day" recipe, you should, it's really great and just about the easiest homemade bread conceivable. Just leave the dough in the fridge until you want some bread/pizza/whatever. We even use it to make buns for sausages.

Luckily, Saturday afternoon was nice enough that we could take the dogs for a walk on the marsh trail. It's about half a mile round trip from our house, and the trail itself is probably just over a mile, but it was fun, and the dogs were certainly glad to get some good exercise.

I worked Friday and Monday (Dr. Seuss' birthday!), but now I have nothing lined up until my 4-day stretch just before spring break. Oh well, things tend to come up last-minute fairly often. I haven't gotten much knitting done, I don't feel. Lace patterns just don't motivate me because they are so slow, and I can't do other things while knitting them (like watch movies or read, which I can do while knitting plain stockinette or knitting or anything else I don't have to think about too much).

And finally, we attempted to buy tickets for Hawaii a few times over the past few days. The cheapest are on Priceline, which is an awful site. You go through all the steps over and over again: searching, selecting flights, putting in your info, picking seats, typing credit card numbers, only to get to a page at the end saying "sorry, we can't sell you those tickets at that price right now!" Then if you go back to the main search, sometimes the price has gone up $50, sometimes nothing is different at all, but you still Can. Not. Purchase. Argh! Also, I still have no idea where we'll stay the extra 3 nights we're there, we found one place, but then the nights changed slightly. Sigh.