Farewell AssenVassen, Hello Lacey, and Other Things to Celebrate

I know I haven’t posted in a while, and honestly the PhD is the one to blame. Ever since the semester started, I haven’t had a moment’s pause. Stupid PhD. I’ve had to squirrel away knitting time between term paper paragraphs as reward, and five minutes here and there before bedtime. This insanity should abate soon and I’m looking forward to a fairly free summer of knitting and napping, and blogging, and barbeques, and dissertation proposal writing, and master’s thesis publishing, and…well, I’m sure I can come up with tons of things that will try to get in between me and knitting but will surely fail.

What’s with the title you so astutely ask…It’s not a famous Filipino saying if that’s what you’re guessing. Let me begin from the beginning. My immediate family (before marriage) was comprised of six people—2 parents and four chirrens as we were called. All us chirrens at one point or another owned a Honda Civic hatchback or shared one, or inherited one from the others. Patrick had a red Civic, I had a silver one, Nina and Mark shared a gold one until Mark got his own red one (he’s on his third now). Anyway…so Nina got a gold Honda Civic hatchback, it was a 1990 and in great shape. She decided to get her nused car some vanity plates. I think at some point in time, maybe during the junior-senior powder puff football event she (my sister) was tagged with the nickname Asian Invasion—a force to be reckoned with (which she is, but that’s another story). Sticking to the catchy name, Nina decided to announce to all motorists that she is indeed an Asian Invasion. As we are all aware, license plates have a limited number of space, so how to put the essence of Asian Invasion in 7 letters? ASNVASN. It was supposed to say Asian Invasion but it really translated as AssenVassen, whatever that means.

So the AssenVassen continued its life through High School then graduated to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg for its undergrad, and I eventually inherited it as my mobile unit for graduate school. I kept AssenVassen for a good two years at least and about three weeks ago her clutch gave out. The average price to replace a clutch is roughly $200.00. AssenVassen was worth less than $200.00, how did I come to this? Well going further back in time to Thanksgiving of last year, AssenVassen was mangled in a hit and run event as it calmly sat parked in front of a friends home. Intent on getting my investment’s worth in auto insurance I contacted my agent and I was informed that since AssenVassen was worth less than the damage of the crushed front left panel, they would treat the situation thusly…

Insurance company would buy the AssenVassen from me for $250.00. So they would pay me $250.00.
After said purchase they would sell AssenVassen back to me for $1.00, so I’d be left with $249.00
After this transaction, if anything ever happened to the AssenVassen damage wise, nothing would be covered (unless of course AssenVassen ran over someone then their medical bills would be paid for)

So seeing the idiocy of this whole situation of having to sell my car and buy it back and whatever, and that I paid more in insurance than the worth of my car, I bit the bullet, refused to replace the clutch and decided although premature in my life plan, I went ahead and bought a newer used car.

Therefore…I would like for you all to meet Lacey, dubbed as such by Ana because of my new vanity plates YOK2TOG. The plates are cryptic enough for muggles to get confused over, but simple enough for a knitter who has dabbled in pattern knitting to recognize and smile. Yes I am a knitting nerd. Yes, I know…go ahead…bring it on.

It’s nice to finally have a car that runs, that has air conditioning, that has more than one speaker, that hasn’t been lived in by a mouse with a penchant for ketchup packets in the glove box, and that doesn’t shake when it’s driven. The AssenVassen has served my family well, but it is now the dawning of the Lacey knitting mobile.



The semester is coming to a close and there are a few things to celebrate and possibly more to come.

Emily has finished 1 of the 2 socks required for a pair of monkey socks!

Ana has finished 1 out of the 2 socks required for a pair of glittery socks. The sock yarn she used was very sparkly, but oddly enough there's a weird dark line that showed up on one area of the sock but not on the rest. Strange.

I finished my last presentation for the semester last night and I think I am well on my way to the end of this round of classes! Yay!

Now I have can look forward to a trip to NY with Mr. Rich to see Go Home Robot play at the Creek and the Cave bar in Queens on Friday 4/27, there's going to be some yarn hunting in Brooklyn with Ana, a lot of food eating with my brother Pat, and Rich will be attending the Bent Festival.