Goodbye 2006

Hello 2007

two weeks since a post. getting further behind in capturing my quotidian life resulted in blog paralysis. In an effort to jump-start my blog mojo, here goes. In no particular order, my so called life:

I finished a Dulaan hat. Does it look too pointy? like a yurt? (unintentional.) It does look better on a head than here and it is warm. Lamb's Pride worsted (doubled) and Bulky. US8 circular and DPNs. 88 stitches. many inches of k1p1 ribbing, then a purl row then the usual every other row decreases in stockinette.








I chose my own christmas presents: A sewing machine and a new iron. A decent basic sewing machine with one key accessory suggested by Jessica --- a floating presser foot for sewing zippers in knitwear. Not that I have actually sewn a zipper on knitwear yet.

But I might soon. Cambridge Jacket is nearing completion. The pieces have been seamed, except for the sleeves. Why? Because there's too much fabric under the armpit. I seamed one and it looked terrible. I'm mulling over solutions that don't require me to knit new sleeves. I think I can seam it up tighter and neater, then machine stitch and trim the extra bulk out of the inside. Makes me not a knitting purist perhaps but so it goes. Will let you know if I succeed.






My new iron is a Rowenta. As Zach says, it's not just an iron, but an Iron Experience. So much fun I voluntarily ironed Franz's shirts and when I ran out I pressed my jeans and Zach's pajamas.

When I tried to iron in the kitchen the wondrous steam kept setting off the smoke detector.

But ironing downstairs in the family room became more entertaining because...

I surprised The Nerd with a wii. An Ironing Experience is even better when you can watch your husband and son bowl and golf. More fun perhaps while I still held the high score in bowling of 183. When husband finally figured out how to wii-bowl and scored 241, well, I cheered and I didn't.

My first (with the new machine) sewing FO was a pair of pants for Franz. Click on the nerdly link in above paragraph for photo. These have been a UFO for about 10 years. An old neighbor wore casual colorful pants while puttering around his yard. Franz desired such a pair. I started making matching pants for Franz and Zach. What happened? hellifIknow. They sat unfinished in my box of fabric. The garage sale sewing machine I was using stopped working. Fixable -- but not by me -- it was given away courtesy of craigslist. I did not finish the matching pair for Zach as they are sized for a three year old. Zach is relieved as he declared the green paisley fabric a crime against fashion.

In the let's get organized department, I spent a productive day (while the guys went skiing) organizing paperwork. Included recycling and shredding much paper. Our taxes in 1998 and 1999 were very complicated; the supporting paperwork was several inches thick. Keeping the quarter-inch thick copies of the actual returns, I shredded the rest. Statute of limitations and all that, right? I tend to be a packrat. To keep things in control, I try to picture a 60 year old Zach trying to plow through everything before settling our estate. So, I ask myself: Is this really something he will find interesting to discover then?

I felted a gauge swatch for the Tartan Jacket into a DPN organizer. Got the idea from a Berocco pattern found on The Worsted Witch blog. Of course my real-life organizer doesn't look as pretty, but it works. The only possible negative side effect was that Franz could see just how many DPNs I've accumulated in just over a year of knitting. So it goes.


I tested a recipe for Cook's Illustrated for a Rustic Plum Tart. Or, as the email from the magazine called it: A Plumb Cake. What's in a name. It was yummy and I will make it again.

I rendered some lard. Jamie and Mitch surprised me with a gift of leaf lard. Jamie and I had been talking about this hard-to-find, hip pie crust ingredient at Thanksgiving. She found it at the Madison Market from a local coolandgroovy farm. It was easier and less smelly to render than some accounts warned. Haven't made a pie crust with it yet, but will soon.

I made granola. Zach is allergic to soy products. Well, actually all legumes which pretty much changed our mostly vegetarian ways, but especially soy. This means I have to read labels carefully and cook most foods from scratch --- soy protein is added to just about everything these days. Think that's a good or even a benign thing? Think again. Granolas without soybeans are few and far between. The only one without soy that we like is a blueberry granola from the PCC. However, it has flax. Lots of flax. All that flax does not make my digestion very happy. So we attempted to create our own. Of course I planned on writing down the recipe I improvised but... Let's see if I can remember. Thick-cut oats, bulk organic rice-crispy-like granuals, sunflower seeds, brown sugar, honey, canola and a pinch of salt. tossed together and toasted at 400 degrees for 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes. Cooled, then tossed with freeze dried blueberries and some soy-free protein powder. It's pretty good. goes really well with yogurt.

I'm still mulling over opening an etsy shop to unload offer up my handpainted yarns. Erika just made some nice socks with some. But there's so much nice yarn already in etsy stores...

And I've been mulling over the Six Weird Things About Myself meme. Almost have it narrowed down to six. Maybe next week.

Happy New Year!

I'm wrong

but not unhappy.

I predicted our power would be out til next Tuesday, Monday if we were lucky. But Friday afternoon and w00t! power! Only 15 hours of a chilly house and melting ice cream.

Seattle and environs got the windstorm as predicted last night. Power went out at midnight, I heard the smoke detectors beep as they changed from electric to battery mode, but otherwise it was no big deal. Morning was kinda chilly, but I have a gas cooktop and thus was able to boil water for drip coffee.

Franz is in CA on a business trip, so I slept downstairs away from the noise of the wind. Thus, I missed hearing this fall across the street. My neighbor's spruce used to be about 50 feet tall. Now it's about 20 feet. Anybody want a 30 foot christmas tree? The top did fall between the two houses, so probably little or no damage to L's house. Her bedroom is right at the corner of the house where it fell, so she didn't get any sleep last night. It severed next door neighbor Nancy's phone and internet connections though. Bummer, but it could have been worse.

yes, this tree is being supported by the power lines.

An FO. Reverse Bloom Washcloth from Weekend Knitting and Interweave Knits Winter 2003, wrapping a bar of Blessed Juno soap. I don't think I will knit this pattern again. It's not that special and requires 10 ends woven in. If I do make it again, I'll make it smaller, only 19 stitches per petal. And I will do the decreases differently, 5 regular double decreases from each petal join might look better than the ones in the pattern. But I'll most likely try the fancy washcloth in Mason Dixon Knits instead.

gift on a thrift

Gift buttons on a thrift aran.

Someday the perfect yarn and the perfect pattern will call out to these beautiful dyed mother-of-pearl buttons. Until then, I think they'll do just fine here.

The rest of the felted aran sweater will become...? A pillow? A purse? a blanket? time will tell.

Thanks, Nancy, for the buttons specially chosen for me.

Thanks, Katie B, for the sweater. A well-made if non-descript pattern, slightly felted and donated charity. Rescued and further felted, it will live on.

Thursday

No pictures because I am at the library. Out of the house! no more ice! woot!

After two days of school closures, today is a late start day --- allowing time for all the ice to turn to slush before getting the kiddies to school. This plays havoc with Zach's school schedule. Instead of having his three classes back to back from 8:15 to 10:55, he has two classes in the AM, 10:00 to 10:55 and his third class meets 12:30 to 1:00. So I walked with him to school and am hanging out at the library nearby. He'll meet me here and we will go have lunch somewhere. I was thinking Subway but just discovered that Top Pot sells sandwiches.

the eyes have it.

Time for new glasses. Two years ago I got my first pair of progressives. Ouch, expensive without insurance, but there you go. Gotta see. I chose a stylish pair also, something bold and unusual that shook up the husband and child. Nowadays I see similar glasses all over the place. Well that's not a reason for new specs, but my inability to see close-up was. Plus we now have vision insurance, double woot. Sure enough, my prescription changed and newer, more styling frames ordered. Unsettling though, the doctor noticed a spot on my right retina. Looks like an inflammation. He spent a long time examining it with the strong lights and magnifiers, double checked my health report, and concluded that I had no known reason to have a spot on my retina. Two weeks of telephone tag between opthamologist and retinologist, I was told that the spot is very likely nothing, I don't need to see the retinologist right away. I did schedule a follow-up with the opthamologist in a couple weeks to see if there's any change.

a costly mistake.

but not mine! While waiting for the news about the retina, I got the call my new glasses were ready. yay. So I went in to pick them up, a little nervous about having buyer's remorse on the newer styling frames. After all, I couldn't see very well when I tried them on. Imagine my surprise then when they pulled out a pair almost identical to my old glasses. Uh oh, did I do that? Good golly, if I wanted the same frames, why not put new lenses in my current frames? Turned out I did not mistakenly choose those frames. Their bad. So sorry. Will make new pair. In the meantime I get to wear the new wrong ones. They'll get to return the frames for credit, but I suppose they'll have to eat the cost of making the lenses.

geeky homeschooling excitement.

I was thinking about one of my favorite TV shows from the '80s --- hadn't thought about it in years, but being in the library made me think about trying to find it. The library does have one copy on VHS of some (but not all) of the episodes, but the creators have the videos available free over the internet. Woot! Zach and I will now be watching The Mechanical Universe from the Annenberg Foundation. (no link because I can't figure out how to do that on this machine, but is easy to google.) And there's more. I'll probably check out their series on Economics, Statistics and other topics too. would be nicer if we could lounge in the family room and view on the TV, but free and convenient watching over the computer doesn't sound that bad.

Why I am knot participating

Seriously, does anyone really think this is going to give anyone any valid information? Enough to warrant a paper? A peer-reviewed paper? With like meaningful statistics and everything?

"Most memes, I'd wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are—to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett's rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium—"skyhooked" into prominence by high-traffic blogs. "

Don't you just love the social science jargon?

he wants us to disseminate this totally artificial "meme" so he can say something about organic ones? As I just said a couple days ago. Memes are not equivalent to blogging writing prompts that the blogger chooses to use or ignore. The concept of meme comes from the notion of ideas as entities that spread like viruses. Who really has the ability to choose whether or not to become infected with a virus? What makes the whole notion of meme interesting is the lack of meta-knowledge of its spreading. Blog prompts that someone chooses to participate in or are not really memes, but more like fashion trends.

Also, the researcher wistfully regrets not tracking two "memes" in which he participated (or started? not sure.) Why didn't he? Because the very nature of the viral spreading of ideas is that you do not know in advance which ones will spread and which won't.

I read a lot of blogs, too many perhaps. Mostly knitting blogs but not exclusively. And get this, I never heard of those two memes. That supports my position that the spread of this artificial one has no useful information to say about real viral spread of ideas.

Ironically enough, the path upon which I heard of this artificial meme was through someone who profuses a strong dislike to the canned writing prompts that the knit blogging community calls memes. While not immune to actual memes (imo) she has been mostly immune to these artificial ones. And yet she is participating in this one. But get this: she did not follow the rules and actually talk about the project on her blog, she just links to it vaguely. An actual carrier? (But a carrier who chooses to be one, so that's a limitation in the analogy.) That's sorta interesting. But this just proves the artificiality of this "meme" since in real life she would have been the last person to have participated in any such blog writing prompt. So in real life, I possibly never would have heard about this "meme." So for the sake of science, I choose to not participate. No technorati pinging from me.

so... am I participating or not?

Where is Eugene Miya when you need him?