Science Monkey

Emma and I had a lot of fun knitting this weekend. She is taking a sock knitting class at our favorite local yarn shop, and seeing her working diligently on her homework inspired me to get back at my scarf.

I finished my first skein of yarn but had a small problem. Although I had used half of my yarn, I didn’t have half of a scarf. I didn’t even really have a third of a scarf. Hmm…what to do? Head to Hanks, of course!

My original intent was to just buy one or two more skeins of the same yarn that I was using. It’s this nice, semi-chunky yarn that has great texture to it. The yarn was spun with alternating stress (technique? pressure? however the hell you spin yarn) so there are regions where it’s wide and regions where it’s narrow. Emma made a scarf for her dad with it and the end effect is really cool. The scarf looks like she used a really complicated knitting pattern when she actually just used the knit stitch and hit a nice resonance with the yarn.

Fortunately, as it turned out, they were out of the same blue color. What to do? They had the same yarn in a couple of different colors — a lilac and a deeper purple — so Emma suggested that I do four big stripes of color. The more I thought about it, the more I loved this idea. I bought one each of the lilac and purple and am really excited to see how the scarf is going to turn out. I mean, I was pleased that I was doing it before, but now I’m even happier.

I went a little nuts last night and kept grinding away, so by the time I stopped I had the second skein entirely knit into the scarf. I fastened the next yarn and called it a night.

It was really fun, you know? I sat for a little while on the couch last night and just marveled at my scarf. Well, perhaps marveled is a strong word, but felt very pleased with myself. I made that. And it really doesn’t look bad at all.

I’m starting to turn my thoughts now to What Comes Next. The monkey is coming, of course, but I want it to be perfect when I make it. Or at least 98% perfect. My problem is that we live in Florida, a climate ill-suited to the male knittr. I could make more scarves, of course, or a sweater. Eventually I want to make a Norwegian sweater, but that’s not exactly Project Two material. And at least one pair of knucks, naturally (I’m leaning towards “Hold fast”). But it’s far too warm here most of the time to wear scarves and sweaters and gloves and knit hats. I have a couple of friends who are pregnant, so baby blankets would be nice gifts. Emma suggested hand towels, which seemed like a really silly idea until Lorena pointed out that I could use them to learn stitches. She suggested I get a “stitch dictionary” and work my way through it, practicing each stitch one at a time until I had it down cold, making little blocks of a towel (or multiple towels) as I go. Not a bad idea, eh?

N.B.: For those of you on Ravelry, I’ve finally gotten my account up and running, so I’m hip with the fly kids. I joined the Hanks group, naturally, and played around a little. It looks like a really nice resource.

I went out to try and watch the eclipse last night, but it was too overcast to see much from the house. I took a few pictures anyway, to experiment with shutter settings, etc. This was my favorite. I really like how the light reflecting off of the moving clouds creates a shimmery halo around the partial eclipse. It reminds me of pictures of the Northern Lights, which I have yet to see in person.

Emma and I spent some time Sunday morning refreshing our fish tank. We have a 29-high in our living room which has been largely neglected over the past few months, causing it to be covered in algae. Sunday morning we cleaned the glass, siphoned out as much of the crud as we could from the gravel, replaced much of the water, and bought some new fish.

We bought a whole mess of “tropical community” fish which should play together nicely. Although the quality of the above picture isn’t great (clearly my cellphone camera needs better lighting than what we have in the house), you can see some of the new lovelies. We got a few different kinds of mollies (the ones with the oversized bellies, red swordtails and white lyretails), tuxedo guppies, red platys, a half dozen zebra danios, and about six neon tetras. And two black snails. And some live plants. And…

I’m really happy that we did this. I spent about an hour on Sunday afternoon sitting in the recliner, just watching the fish swim around. It was wonderfully peaceful and relaxing.

How do you like my new socks? Pretty sweet, eh?

Now I get to annoy all of my friends by obsessively taking pictures of them! Woo-hoo! Until then, here’s Keegan…

Guess what came in the mail today! Go on, guess. Exactly! My new Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comic and my membership in teh Pip Fan Club. I am Foundling #474. And…I now know The Secret. The Secret has rocked my world to its very core. Tomorrow will be the beginning of a new era and I think I like the way it is going so far.