From Boing Boing comes word of the BBC demanding that a knitter remove Doctor Who-inspired patterns from the web. Patterns that were made available for free, mind you. Sheesh. I had better go grab all of the Scarf patterns now, while they’re still available…
Was chatting with my best friend earlier tonight — his 7th anniversary is today, don’t ask me why he was online — and he reminded me that he has been dating his now-wife for 17 years. Which is also the amount of time that I’ve known him. That’s really amazing to me. While his wedding feels like it just happened yesterday, I’m having a hard time believing that I’ve known him for 17 years now. 17 years! I feel a little like Jeremy Piven’s character in Grosse Pointe Blank, but…17 years!
Otherwise, all is quiet on the homefront. I have a Committee Meeting on Wednesday, where they will all hopefully say, “Yep, sounds good. You should be done by _______,” with the blank being either end of summer or mid-fall sometime. I’m getting nervous, as usual, because I never feel like I have enough data to present, but that’s the way it goes. I spent all afternoon playing with radioactivity and will have data on four Southern probes and two LMPCR probes by Wednesday morning. I’m hoping that the radioactivity will bring me a super power or two, but I’m not optimistic.
Today’s picture is the washcloth I’m making for Emma. I’m making it in the Swedish Block pattern, which is something like a basketweave, but not quite. I’m rather pleased with how it is turning out. It even looks like the picture in the book (a little)!
Yesterday something kind of cool happened to me. As you may recall, I asked for suggestions for what to do with my single skein of Tilli Thomas P&S yarn. I got a cryptic response from one of my cool new knitter friends who suggested “YO K2Tog” and I knew what she meant! Well, I basically knew what she meant. I know how to translate that jargon and look up how to do those stitches. Heh. I did a little Googling and found this scarf that I think I’m going to try and make for Emma. Pretty, right? If it’s too hard (or I don’t like how it looks) I can always tear it up and try something else. Not literally tear it up, of course…the yarn is far too expensive for that.
To learn: yo, k2tog, seed stitch.
I finally hung up the poster we bought at the Spring Arts Festival. We bought a cheapie poster frame, but I think it looks pretty nice. I can’t do anything about the reflection from the flash, though, sadly.
Nothing else terribly exciting to report today. The Saturn overheated on my way in to work after therapy and it was all I could do to get it home before it asploded. I put some fresh coolant in and am crossing my fingers that it will be better tomorrow. We’ll see.
I also finished up my first dish cloth piece. I kind of borked the binding off at first, so it looks a little funky, but I don’t care. If it were perfect, how could I get better? I’m looking through my copy of Barbara Walker’s Treasury for the next pattern to learn.
6. Almost a week!
As I mentioned yesterday, we went to a Yarn Tasting last night which was totally awesome. It was at Hanks, of course, the coolest yarn shop in all of Gainesville (if not the southeast). There were about a dozen groovy knittas, and we were very honored to be among the chosen few. We each got a couple of mini-skeins of lovely silk yarn from Tilli Thomas, a pretty awesome-sounding company. I chose the white and red yarns in that picture above, but Emma was the big winner. She came away with Rock Star Mermaid, the multicolored ball in the middle of the picture. Very cool.
So the only minor, minor complaint that I have was that the red dye runs a bit. Look at my needles in that picture…see how red the points are, compared to the ends? It was all over my hands, too…I didn’t want to touch the white yarn, for fear of it getting stained. QQ more, eh?
We also bought a little more of the yarn. I bought a nice blue skein of the Pure and Simple (like the red) and Emma bought a skein of jade Plie (like the purple). I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet, but I’ll figure out something. Any suggestions?
Just got back from a yarn tasting at our favorite local yarn store. Totally awesome. Thanks again, you guys, for inviting us! Pictures and linkage to come tomorrow. Now: dinner and sleep.
4.
Dear Brain,
Why are you so easily distracted? I intentionally left Lappy at home so we couldn’t play internet and get some work done. But you, you devious lump of gray matter between my ears, you figured out that there was *another* computer here in the lab which can internet. And facebook. And blog.
I even brought you our current knitting project, so we could pretend to be productive, while waiting for the Southern probe to label. And yes, you did humor me for a while and let me knit for half an hour, but then we were back on internet before I even knew what was happening. But know I know your trick, Brain. I’m wise to you. “Let’s just check our email,” indeed.
A.
PS: Dear Focus, as I know you’re reading this with Brain, let’s get it in gear, eh? You know we’ve got that meeting with Dr. Flanegan Wednesday, and I think that all three of us (you, me, and Brain) can agree that we’d like to have something useful to present to him then. So chop chop! And hop to! And some other obscure, unused motivational phrase from thirty years ago!
Gosh, how has it been a week since I’ve written? The time, she does fly by. Current mood: pretty good; could certainly be worse. Current music: the hum of my box fan (stupid A/C).
Life has been pretty hectic this past couple of weeks. I finally got over that nasty virus on Tuesday, so I’ve been trying to put a bunch of hours in at the lab since then. I’m moving a little more slowly than I might like but I feel like I’m making deliberate, forward progress.
I can’t remember if I blogged it or not, but I finally got some radioactivity in at the end of the previous week, so I got to do some Southern experiments this past week. At this point it looks like either my probes or my membranes are shitty. I labeled a probe of mine and a probe from our former postdoc (who graciously took time away from his work to supervise me and make sure I wasn’t doing anything obviously stupid), then hybed my probe to a test strip that I made and the postdoc’s probe to a membrane he provided. Mine came back all black and nasty and smeared, but his was lovely, a single, clear line well above the background noise. After seeing that, I decided to throw out all of my probes and re-create them from the original PCR. I could spend a month trying to reisolate a single clone from each of the probes (and be sure that it’s right), or I can take a week and generate them fresh. Progress.
Ah, work. Enough work typing. I’ve been doing a few things to keep my sane outside of work. Sleeping, mostly, but not exclusively. While looking for some old test scores in my office closet, I came across a bunch of pictures of me that came from my Grandma Henderson. I was at work late one night and borrowed the scanner between experiments, then posted a bunch of them on Facebook. That link should work, even if you’re not a member. There are a couple of particularly cute ones, including one of me all bundled up in a snowsuit from about 1978, and one of me in front of the Golden Gate Bridge from about 1983. Hee! I plan to keep expanding the album as I find more pictures and get them scanned.
I’m still knitting, too. I’ve moved on to the Next Project, which I think I’ve written about before. At least I think I’ve written about the concept behind the Next Project. I’ve ordered a “stitch dictionary” and am going to make a bunch of little dishtowels (or whatever, but about that size) and learn as many stitch patterns as I can. Well, maybe not learn, but practice and get used to manipulating the yarn and the needles with the clubs that I call hands.
The colors are pretty good, right? And I think they’ll all work together with each other. The yarn is thin enough that the cool ladies at our favorite yarn store — who must think I’m nuts…I made this quick, quick stop earlier to look at a couple of the 4″ square pieces that they have hanging on the walls and are very similar to the dishcloth project, and must have spent all of 90 seconds in the store because I had to get the groceries home — suggested using two at a time so I tried to pick colors that would look nice paired. Clearly the two blues look decent together and the two pinks, but I think that either of the pinks will be decent with either of the blues. We’ll see. Worst case I hate it, and I don’t do that one any more. 
I’m also still playing WoW, of course. The weekly adventures are over on Wara’s blog, but in summary I’m still having a lot of fun. I left my old guild which had become too raid-focused for my tastes, and have found another guild that is pretty fun so far. A friend of mine is an officer and I’m looking forward to getting to play with her a little bit (if she ever come back online…hint, hint). They’re pretty cool and casual and mature, which is basically all I want. I don’t need to be (or have time for) doing the real hard-core endgame raids right now, and that’s not their focus at the moment. Maybe eventually, but not right now, and that works well for me.
Enough for now. Time to go wake up the wife so she can take a shower and get to work, the poor kid. My hero. Seriously.
I spent almost the entire weekend in bed sick, so I have little of interest to share. So why am I posting? ‘Cause it’s my blog and I’ll post if I want to! Heh.
Actually, I do have some fun news to report. I was feeling better on Sunday afternoon, so I went over to our favorite local yarn store and Sharon helped me finish my scarf! Woo! She showed me how to sew the remaining lengths of yarn back into the scarf, so it doesn’t have those dangly bits any more. Hurray! Emma says she doesn’t block her scarves, so I’m declaring this one done. I updated its progress over on tha Rav and am ready to move on to the next project!
Well, after I get some more sleep, ’cause I’m still pretty tired. I made it to work but am not expecting to get much done beyond that. Type to you later, my friends.
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.
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