I sense a knit-along coming on...

NPR did this story the other day, about Bolivian president Evo Morales' favorite sweater, which he, apparently, wears at every photo-op he can. It's supposed to be a symbol of his affiliation with the common people of Bolivia - at least, that's how it's interpreted by some observers (some people just think he has no fashion sense).

Here's a closer look.

Knowing there is a good bit of crossover between NPR geeks and knit geeks, I await with bated breath the news of an Evo Morales sweater KAL.

did it again

It happened again. Yesterday was such a beautiful day - cold, but clear and bright and sunny. When I came home from school in the late afternoon and went into our kitchen, I noticed a strange yellow light filling our back room. What on earth was that bizarre light, I wondered. If you remember this post from a couple weeks ago, you will know what it was.

Yes, once again, I was spooked by sunlight. It had actually been so long since we had a nice, sunny day that I had forgotten how that back room lights up in the afternoon as the sun sets.

The other interesting event of yesterday was what my DH received in the mail: his diploma! He is officially a masters-degreed nerdy boy now. He is so nerdy, he's going to get the thing framed - unlike, say, me, who affixed my bachelor's degree to the fridge in my mom's house with Powerpuff Girls magnets (it is now in the cupboard in our dining room, along with our marriage certificate). I'm not even sure where my high school diploma is, and I worked way harder to get that thing than I did to get my college degree.

Well. I'm off to get my hair done in a few minutes - pictures tonight, if it turns out well!

my baby is home! oh, and my husband is back, too

Yay! I am once again posting from my beloved li'l laptop, which is warming my lap like it were a kitten or something. It's so cold in this damn apartment, I'd be sitting here shivering if it weren't for my precious, precious baby. My DH delivered it back to me, apparently safe and sound (knock on wood). And he delivered himself back to me safe and sound, too, which is wonderful - tho' with no good news on the job front. Time for me to start planning for another year here in Syracuse, I guess.

Today was such a long day, and the semester still hasn't gotten into full swing yet. Plus, I haven't gotten a really good night's sleep in over a week. At least Tuesdays are my days to sleep in - my first class isn't until 11 a.m., which is loverly. But then I've got those two classes back to back which both test my stamina - physics because it is so, so boring and the teacher talks in a Polish-accented monotone, and Japanese because I spend the whole class straining to hear anything anyone else in the room says during the entire class. But then I'm done for the day! Except for anime at 7 p.m. - but that gives me tons of free time on Tuesday afternoons, which I'll need to catch up on the ludicrous amont of homework assignments I've got. Seriously, you know it's going to be a rough semester when organic chem is shaping up to be the class for which I have the least amount of work.

Crap. Once again my plans to post something of substance are thwarted by extreme exhaustion. Welcome to the spring semester. It's going to be like this until May.

happy birthday, Jilly-Bean!

It's Bean's birthday today! She's... still younger than I am! Whooo!

As mentioned elsewhere, a bunch of us went out for dinner at Pastabilities last night to celebrate. I would love to post some pictures for you, but alas, the DH is not back with my laptop, yet, and I am too lazy to hook my camera up to his machine. It's a pity, too, because we all got some fabulous ambience-capturing pictures, and it's a shame to let them go unblogged.

The cool thing about dinner, besides the good food and lively companionship, was Andrea & Ted's kid Toby. I knew Toby was a good kid, but he was stunningly well-behaved all throughout the meal (especially considering he's like, not even 3 yet). I really hate kids, in general, but if they all behaved like Toby did last night, I'd have to rethink my curmudgeonly anti-child stance. I believe kids' behavior is determined, in large part, by parenting, so kudos to Andrea & Ted!

We did go to Elegant Needles beforehand, and I did buy yarn... for Bean, not for myself. I didn't lapse on the stash-busting (tho' I was so, so sorely tempted). I just bought some tiny 4" and 5" dpns for sock knitting which I have been wanting for a while - a set of 3.0mm aluminum Skacel's, and a set of 2.25mm/US1 Brittany birch needles. I've heard tell of breakage problems with the tiny Brittany's - I will, of course, let you all (all 5 of you reading this) know how I fare with them.

Man, I had more I wanted to post about, but... I'm just too tired. It's amazing how having to get up so early on weekends when I work really takes so much out of me. I am so old and feeble. Anyway, happy birthday (again!) to Bean - here's to many more!

crap in my lap

Uhm, not that kind of crap. Crap like, I just spent the past 3 hours on the couch, frogging the leg of the socks I knit for the DH a while back. 3 hours, people. I'm sure the more experienced knitters among you already knew this, but when you're ripping out ribbing starting from the cast-on edge, it takes for-freaking-ever. I only had like, an inch-and-a-half of ribbing to rip, too (the rest of the leg was in stockinette - which the DH said felt too loose around his ankle, hence the ripping). I ripped down to just above the heel, picked up the stitches, and now I am going to knit back up to the top in k2-p2 rib.

3 hours. And that was just for one sock. I think I discovered a couple little tricks that might make the second one go faster. Of course, once I got past the ribbing, the rest of the leg took about 30 seconds to frog. Hooray for stockinette!

In other news, we haven't even had a full week of school yet, and I am sick of it already. Physics class is so chock-full of busywork, I'm not sure when I will find the time to actually finish it all, and we have to use these degrading clicker-things to answer questions during the (really boring and crowded) lectures. My organic chem professor thinks he is so way cool and funny, when really he is just obsequious* and weird (not that there's anything wrong with being weird - it's the obsequiousness that gets me). Japanese is kicking my ass - so much new vocab! All at once! And the labs haven't even started yet. Ugh. I may only be taking 13 credits, but you sure wouldn't know it from my workload.

Well, back to sock-frogging. What a depressing way to spend a Friday night.

*This is not really the word I want here, but it's close, and I can't seem to come up with anything better at the moment. The connotation I want is "trying to hard to be cool, but really just being kind of patronizing and annoying." Help me out here, people.

Thursday, already??

Ye gods. I knew this day was coming, but it just hit me that it's here, and I'm still totally unprepared.

My dear husband, Johnny, is leaving for San Antonio this afternoon!! He's going to the ALA Midwinter Meeting, as I mentioned before, and he'll be back on Monday... which means that I will not get a proper meal between now and then. People - I cannot cook for myself. If I want to eat something warm, that leaves me with four choices: spaghetti hoops, ramen, instant oatmeal, and takeout. And I have to work this weekend, too! Maybe Bean and Mr. Bean will let me spend Saturday night with them, so I won't have to drive all the way home and sit around an empty house all night.

More than the food thing, tho', I was just reminded - I told my DH he could borrow my laptop for this trip. *gasp!*

Five whole days without my laptop?? What the hell am I going to do with myself???

Ok, so I'll have his computer which I can use. But it doesn't have all my files and bookmarks and stuff on it. It doesn't have all my pictures and iTunes songs and downloaded knitting patterns... And then there's the things I dare not even let myself contemplate - what if my precioussss gets stolen or broken?? If I hadn't completely forgotten that I promised him he could borrow it, I could have been backing up all my files over the past few days. As it is now, I don't have time - I'll barely have time to sync my iPod and PDA before my baby is wrenched from my tender, loving arms.

O, woe and gnashing of teeth! O, sorrow and distress! O, melodrama!!!

Eh, okay, so it's not that big of a deal. I feel dumb for not remembering to back up my files, tho'. And, while I will relish the chance to sit around the house playing Tori Amos CDs and watching Secretary (which the DH refuses to watch, for some reason), I will be lonely (and freezing cold when I go to bed). At least I do have to work this weekend, so I won't have too much time to mope. Oh, and a note to any potential stalkers out there - it's not like I am going to be home alone, our downstairs neighbors will still be there. So don't even think about trying to pull something.

fashion for idiots

The biggest problem with fashion right now (besides its eternal problems of espousing styles that no one save for skinny 14-year-old girls looks good in and promoting sickening conformity and twisted ideals of beauty) is that they're trying really, really hard this season to foist upon us the worst item of clothing ever. I mean, of course, the gaucho pant:



(If you should take momentary leave of your senses and wish to buy any of these hideous vestments, I nicked these pictures from Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters.)

If these aren't the ugliest things the fashion industry has ever tried to get us to wear, I'm not sure what would be. Not only are they awful from a practical design perspective (they're not casual enough to replace shorts, but they're not formal enough to replace a skirt or proper pants in the workplace - they're being released as a fall/winter item, but they expose far too much skin to be sensible in cold weather), it's literally impossible for anyone, anywhere, of any age, ethnicity, or body type to avoid looking ridiculous in them. You could have the most amazing legs on the planet, but in those monstrosities, no one would ever know. The style is unattractive enough on skinny girls, but, as with most of the wretched crap the fashion industry churns out, it's extra-unflattering on anyone larger than a size 2:



I cannot fathom how anyone could think these ludicrous garments are a good idea, and I continue to be amazed at how many of the dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks bimbos sorority girls on the SU campus are actually willing to put these things on their bodies and go out in public.

Clearly, though, fashion people are not always the brightest among us. Take, for instance, the item description of a short wrap top in the Alloy catalogue I received today: "Item CA3F7115 Cropped Surplus" (p. 57 - emphasis mine). Too bad they meant "surplice." Further proof that spellcheck can't help you if you're stupid.

a minor accomplishment

So. It looks like I've actually managed to do it. The 16 posts in 16 days thing, I mean. Actually, I managed to do 17. Ok, some of them were short and lame, like quiz results. But still. For someone who managed to not post for the entire month of August, roughly a post a day is pretty good.

Ugh. I'm so tired, but because school starts in the morning, I know I won't be able to fall asleep, so I'll just be lying there for hours, bored and anxious, desperate to fall asleep because I'm so tired, and because if I don't, I'll have a crap first day of classes, but knowing that if I fall too soundly asleep, I'll still have a crap first day of classes because I'll wake up late and not have time to pack my bag and shower and get dressed and I will miss the bus. I'm so unprepared for school to be starting up again already. Just one more week of vacation, and I'll be ready! Just one more week! *sigh*

Ugh. Fucking school.

G'night, y'all.

an obscure reference

As you might have noticed, I changed my profile pic. This one looks even less like me, but ardent fans of John Singer Sargent will understand why I chose it.

While I'm on the subject of obscure things, here are three somewhat esoteric songs I've had pop into my head recently, leading me to google them:

• "Don Gato" (traditional - it's a kids' song, we sang it in music class in elementary school, and I loved it. I had forgotten most of the words, tho'. Thank goodness for the internet.)


• "This is Ponderous" by 2NU (this one was a moderate radio hit when I was in like, 7th grade. I'm still looking for a clean copy of it - the original album is out of print, and I'm not interested in the re-recorded version they just did, at least not until I've got a copy of the original. You can stream it from their website, tho', which is good enough for now.)


• "The MTA" by The Kingston Trio (thanks to the bizarre musical tastes of my mother, I learned to love the KT at a very young age. It's good to know they're still out there playing music, even if none of the original members are still in the group. I hardcore need to rip some KT into iTunes.)

ritual de lo scriptual; and a progress report

You may not have known this about me, since I am not in the deep throes of fevered obsession anymore and therefore do not talk about this incessantly, but I am a pen snob. More specifically, I am a fountain pen snob. I own, like, 60 of them (don't gasp, most of them cost about $4 a piece - I only have a few really pricey ones). I fell in love with the damn things in 9th and 10th grades, and I have been preaching the f-pen gospel ever since. One of the small pleasures I take in life is, at the beginning of a semester, choosing which fountain pens to use and filling them with ink. It's a semi-annual ritual I really missed when I wasn't in school anymore and had no reason to keep my pens inked up.

Anyway, I just filled up my pens for the coming semester tonight. So far, that's the only prep I've done, tho'. I'm still kind of in denial about the fact that school starts tomorrow.

Here are the pretties I am using to start this term:

From left to right, that's my green fine-point Waterman with violet Pelikan ink in it; my Waterman Hemisphere (I think that was the name) with dark pink Pelikan ink; my new Retro 51 Tornado (which I got for Christmas from Bean - yay!) with apricot Pelikan ink; my pink Tombo with green Waterman ink; a Sheaffer Reacktor (seriously, who names these things?? That is the lamest product name ever) with lilac Pelikan ink; my Sheaffer Jellies pen with some really old brown Sheaffer ink I am trying to use up; and my new orange Lamy Safari with turquoise Lamy ink.

Oh, what the heck, since I already have the camera hooked up - how about some knitting progress pics?

Here's how I'm doing on my first of the Brainylady cable socks:

I've started the toe - I should be done with this by tomorrow and casting on for sock #2, with any luck.

Here's Adler's Wallaby:

I need to freakin' hurry up with this, or he will have outgrown it before I can even give it to him. I'm almost to the armpits. I'm worried that I won't be able to figure out the pattern there, because I read ahead a bit and it didn't make a bit of sense to me on the first read-through... but often patterns don't make sense until I'm in the thick of them, so... I must forge ahead with great speed! I've only managed about 7 rows on this in like, 3 months. Ack!

Here's how the Linux illusion scarf is coming along:

From straight on, it just looks like stripes...

...but viewed from an angle, a picture is beginning to emerge! Neat, huh? I tell ya, tho', if I ever do one of these again, I'm choosing a much narrower pattern. This is taking forever, with 60 stitches per row. And I'm thinking, now that I am like, 100 rows into this, that I should be doing it on 5's instead of 6's. I figured with worsted weight yarn, 6's would be ideal. But now that I'm a ways into it, I can see how an even tighter gauge would be better. The thing wouldn't be quite so wide on 5's, either. If I actually make it past all 284 rows of the Tux chart, I'm thinking I will just forgo the Linux chart on the other side and just finish the scarf out in garter stitch, or else I will never finish it. At least garter stitch I can do while I'm doing something else, like reading or watching telly.

And here's Johnny's Dr. Who scarf:

I haven't touched this thing since before the end of last semester (and oy! I should be weaving those ends in as I go! I know I should, but I've been lazy). It was my take-along project for last semester, so I always had it with me in my bag - but since I've been home all the time, I haven't picked it up, probably because it was too far away from where I was sitting. I am so profoundly lazy. I'll definitely pick it back up once school starts again. Anything to procrastinate instead of doing homework.

And that's it. There are so many projects I totally want to dig into, because I've got the yarn and needles and pattern all lined up, and I've got a mission to bust all that stash (and also, apparently, a mission to link to the stash post in every subsequent post - I guess I've found a hall-of-fame entry, there). But. I need to get Adler's Wallaby off my needles, at least, before I start anything else.

I *knew* it!

be sorted @ nimbo.net

And on a side note, has anyone else been having massive problems with Blogger lately? I've been trying to post this one tiny thing since like, 4pm. Sheesh.

late, as usual

Casting about online tonight (tho' I really should have been asleep long ago - school starting the day after tomorrow, what? Whacked-out sleep schedule, huh?), I found a couple -along's that I would have liked to have joined, had I only known about them, oh, three weeks ago.

#1: The Stash-along from Knitter in Progress. I'm thinking I'm just going to pretend I'm in this one, and play along, anyway, because I'd already declared a mini-moratorium on yarn-buying after flashing my gigantic stash. I'm hoping to go longer than three months, tho'. Or rather, I'm hoping to measure my progress in FOs as opposed to months. I'm not allowed to buy any more yarn until I can fit all the yarn I've got into the bins I have (I bought another bin on clearance at Jo-ann's the other day, and I still have overflow yarn. It's obscene). Like I said, I've got projects in mind for most of that stash - I will post a partial list soon.

#2: The ABC-along from How the West Was Spun (more details here and here). Basically, you take a picture of something every two weeks and post about its significance to you on your blog. Each fortnight's object should begin with a subsequent letter of the alphabet. For example, sometime between January 1 and 14, post a picture you've taken of something that begins with an A (aardvarks, for instance) and explain what it means to you. From January 15-28, post a picture of something that starts with B, and so on. Not that I would have time to do this every fortnight for a year, but I absolutely love the idea. Someday. Someday!

am, too.

So when I went to join the Upstate NY Knitters webring started by my knitbud Susan, I checked on the other couple webrings I joined, the Say No to the Poncho webring and the Mini Knits webring (for knitters with Mini Coopers). I was a tad dismayed to discover that, on the Mini Knits ring, I'm no longer listed under "member sites" - rather, I've been moved into a section called "other sites of interest."

You know how, on cartoons, when a character is just about to cry and their eyes get really big and start to fill up with tears, and their lower lip sticks out in a quivering pout? Like this:

Yeah, that was me when I saw that I wasn't counted as an "active member" of the ring anymore.

So what gives? Do I not talk about knitting enough? I try, but man, I knit so slowly that most of the time there's not much to talk about. I keep my projects sidebar (over there on the right) up to date. Ok, I mention projects in my recently completed projects section that aren't knitting things, but hey, knitting is far from the only crafty thing I like to do. But I'd say that, at least based on my shameful, shameful stash, I definitely qualify as a knitblogger.

Or is it that I don't talk about Lucy often enough? I did that one gigantic post about her back when I started the blog. Just like with knitting, there is just not that much to say about her on a daily basis. She is my cute little red car, and I love her to death. She just hit 40,000 miles on Thursday, on our way home from the outlet mall at Waterloo. Her theme for this winter has been her passenger side door handle freezing, so you can only open that door from the inside. That's probably not a good sign, especially since she is almost three and a half years old now, and no longer under warranty. (I am just waiting for that day - you know, when it's snowing and I am late to class and freaking out, and both her doors have frozen shut and no matter what I try, I can't get in.) I still need to get all her dents and dings straightened out (someday, when I have a lot of spare money lying around - donations gladly accepted), and she needs a good scrubbing, but even despite all that, she is beautiful and I love her.

So I don't know what's up with the Mini Knits webring and my site, but whatever. I am not going to write to anybody and complain, because, I dunno, I guess I have more important things to worry about. And I'm lazy. And I'm a doormat who usually can't be bothered to pipe up, even when I feel like I've been "roughly used." Eh, it's not that big a deal. I'm more puzzled by it than annoyed, really.

wtf?

At first, I couldn't get Blogger to post at all - and then when the post finally went through, it got posted twice??

Sheez. Stupid computers.

it says "baka gaijin"

(click on the little dots above for the link)

I heard about that site (hanzismatter.com) on NPR last night - it's like the equivalent of Engrish.com for Asian characters. Mostly, it's people who have gotten tattoos of mis-written or poorly-worded phrases in hanzi or kanji. I'm flabbergasted. Like the owner of the site says, why would you get a tattoo in a language you don't understand? Or if you do get the tattoo, why wouldn't you first verify it with someone who actually knows the language? It's a tattoo, fer chrissake. It's permanent! At least most of the mistakes on Engrish.com are on t-shirts or signs, not branded forever into someone's skin.

Sheesh.

So, inspired by that site, I went a-googling and found a bunch of neat links for information on characters.

• .gif files of many common Chinese characters, searchable by English definition, from about.com. They give the simplified characters, tho', which are standard in mainland China, but which I don't really like very much because most of them are ugly (more on this in a sec).


• the 3000 most common characters, in order of frequency. This guy also has knitting charts for some characters!


• Chinese surnames and links to resources for researching your genealogy in China (which I would totally love to do someday).


• a searchable online Chinese dictionary - way bitchin', especially how they deconstruct the characters (like giving an etymology for the words). Also, they show both the traditional and simplified characters, so bonus points for them.


• the ugly boy tattoo story, as linked from hanzismatter.com. On the one hand, this is kind of sad... but on the other hand, it still makes me giggle (I am so going to hell for that. Hee.). I particularly enjoy the sidebar to the article, featuring key phrases to avoid if getting character tattoos.


• Unihan, the universal code for displaying characters online.


• shirts from jlist.com - if you want shirts with "wacky" phrases on them written (correctly) in Japanese. I want the reverse version of the "Beware of Perverts" shirt (size XL, if you're feeling generous), tho' the "Death from Overwork" shirt (size M) and the "Expel the Foreign Barbarians" hoodie (size M) are pretty funny, too. Actually, there's a ton of great stuff in the jlist.com store. I've been meaning to drop a chunk of change there for ages.

So if you're wondering, here's what my Chinese name looks like (character images snatched from zhongwen.com):
This is my mom's surname. The simplified version is in parentheses. See why I don't like the simplified characters? They don't make the damnedest bit of sense, half the time. How did they get that square & cross thing from the character on the left? The simplified version is just ugly. And anyway, no one would use the simplified character to write their name.
This is the name my grandparents (mom's 'rents) gave me. They picked it to sort of sound like my English name, but not be an exact phonetic translation (the standard version of which, "ee lee za bai," just sounds ugly to me). It means "beautiful coral" ("li" from "mei li," meaning "beautiful," and "shan" from "shan hu," meaning "coral"). "Li" is a fairly common character (in fact, while I was doing that semester in Singapore, I noticed they used that "li" as part of the translation for "Ally McBeal" in the Chinese subtitles for that show on Singaporean TV), and while I'm no fan of the simplified version of it, I will admit that that one is a whole heck of a lot easier to write than the traditional version. "Shan" is pretty obscure, however, and I remember one long exchange between my mom and a Chinese calligraphy artist where she was trying to explain which character it actually was so he could do a painting (writing? script? what is the noun I want, here?) of my name.

If I were ever to get a character tattoo, it might be my name (in part so I could always remember how to write it - which makes me sound like a retard, but that "li" is really tough to write, dammit). If not that, then I'd have my mom and her siblings and my friend Julia (and maybe even Julia's parents) all proof my phrasing and characters first. And I'd watch the tattoo artist like a hawk to make sure he or she did not screw the thing up. I mean, really.

catch-up catch-all

That last post was kind of a bummer, huh? Local tragedies like that just make me so sad - especially when they are so, so preventable. I am trying not to dwell on it, tho', because... I only have 5 more days of freedom left until school starts again!!! I have to enjoy this time while I have it, because soon it will be time for me to return to that dark place of despair and woe. Plus, I'm behind on posts!

So. Here's a bunch of things I've been thinking about lately.

I got my grades last Friday (I could've gotten them online much sooner, but I really was not in any hurry to find out how badly I did). Not quite as bad as I was expecting, given the fact that I know I bombed the organic chem final. I got:

• A- in Genetics & Cell Biology I


• B+ in Japanese I


• A in Ethics & Value Theory


• C+ in Organic Chemistry I


• A in Organic Chemistry Lab

I'm posting these gory details because, ok, here's what gets me: the classes in which I feel like I really did well and learned a lot (Japanese & Genetics), I didn't get A's, and for stupid reasons (I bombed the first test in Bio because I missed the bus and didn't get a chance to look over my notes beforehand; and I kind of didn't turn in a large chunk of the homework for Japanese). I did get A's in Philosophy and Organic Lab, and I totally didn't deserve them at all (I got the A in Ethics because my Hottie Philosophy TA™ is, apparently, a big pushover - I did none of the reading and only a half-assed job on the three papers; and I have no idea how I got the A in Chem Lab - that class was the bane of my existence, I did really crappily on most of the labs, and I also bombed that final). I don't even think I deserved the C+ I got in Organic, because I learned nothing in that class. I bombed every test except for the first one (which was largely review from General Chem), and if roughly half the class still did worse than I did? That's pathetic. I should've failed that class, based on how much of the material I actually grasped and understood (let alone how much I was able to demonstrate on tests that I understood). It just bugs me that my own measure of self-progress didn't square at all with my actual grades. I guess I shouldn't complain, because on the whole I did better than I thought I deserved to. That doesn't make me feel any better, tho'.

Man, I was trying to keep this post fairly lighthearted, and I just made myself start crying from frustration, just thinking about having to go back to school again. Ugh. I hate school so much. But, unfortunately, I didn't do badly enough last semester to justify giving up and trying something else. God dammit.

Ugh, moving on. Monday night the DH and I went suit-shopping for him. He finished up his internship in December, so he is now officially a masters-degreed smarty-pants. He's going job-interviewing soon, so he needs suits. Let me put this in a bit of perspective for you: when I first laid eyes on my husband, back in 1997, he had a bleached-blond mohawk and was wearing a Godflesh t-shirt. He didn't own any dressy clothes until this past year. He wore a drugstore shirt, cargo pants, and Chuck Taylors to our wedding (we were married by Elvis, after all). I still have only seen him wearing a tie about three times, ever. Seeing him in a suit is just... bizarre. But not in a bad way. He cleans up good. :) Suits, however, in case you were not aware, are ex-pen-sive. He better get a damn job soon, because we are rapidly becoming flat-ass broke. He is going to the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Antonio in a couple weeks. He has never been to Texas before. I told him that, if he gets a chance to drive up to Austin, he has to go to Chuy's and have the key lime pie. Other than that, there's not much I can tell him - Texas is not somewhere you can really explain to someone who's never been there. You've just sort of gotta go there and see it for yourself.

Speaking of traveling, Mr. Bean and Bean have bandied about the idea of going to London and Paris this May. Mr. Bean has never been off this continent, so he is particularly eager to go. The DH and I definitely want to go, too, but here are the chief problems: we are broker than broke; the DH wants to quit his current job, which he hates, before he is sure he has found something else, so we may end up even more broke before May; should the DH find a job somewhere other than Syracuse, we will need to be doing our moving during that month, because that is when our lease is up. Oh, and did I mention we're broke? I'm fine with us being really broke for a while if Johnny wants to quit his job. He comes home from work so pissed off most of the time, I'd rather he quit and we be broke than having to put up with how frustrated he is now. Plus, if he quits his job, he'll have more time to look for a better one. And if he can't find anything fairly quickly, he's said he's willing to take a shit job for a while just to tide us over. But if it comes to that, maybe international travel is not within our means for this year. And if he does find a job at the ALA conference, it probably won't be in Syracuse, so we will have to start planning to move somewhere else. And moves cost money. Even if he gets a job somewhere that'll give him a cost-of-relocation bonus, I'll have to stay here until the end of the school year, so there may be a few months where we'll have to pay two rents - which is even more expense. As much as I would love to go to Europe in May... as much as I miss traveling... I have serious, serious doubts about whether or not we'll be able to swing it. But even if we can't go, Bean & Mr. Bean are going to have a blast.

Hmm, there's more, but this is becoming the longest post ever, so I think I'll take a break, for now.

a brush with someone else's death

In my last post, I mentioned seeing a pretty bad accident on my way home from Bean's place on Saturday night/Sunday morning. I heard yesterday on the news just how bad the accident was. Turns out some drunk kid left the bars at Armory Square and was driving his SUV the wrong way up 81 (north in the southbound lanes). He crashed head-on into another guy's car and killed him. Here is the Post-Standard's coverage and follow-up. According to the article in the paper, the wreck happened at 2:30 a.m., meaning I was right about driving by it just after the cops got there. I thought it had been a minivan involved instead of an SUV, because it was sitting so low to the ground when I drove by. The Pontiac was just crumpled. A few minutes earlier, and it could've been Lucy sitting there crumpled on the side of the road - it could've been me eulogized in yesterday's papers. That's kinda... terrifying.

The drunk driver kid had been drinking in Armory Square - what I want to know is, how did the bars there let him leave so piss-drunk and get into his car? I know, it's not their job to babysit all their patrons - but you'd think someone would have noticed and stopped him from driving off. If he was drunk enough to end up driving the wrong way on a divided highway... I just don't understand how something like this happens.

The name of the kid who was killed was Billy Leaf. My heart goes out to the Leaf family. I can't imagine how awful this must be for them.

Always have Designated Drivers, kids! And if you're getting hammered at a bar alone, you're not leaving until you're good and sober (or you're getting home in a taxi).

a belated epiphany

Ugh, now I remember why it is I don't do those spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment crazy road trip things anymore. I actually forgot I had to be at work at 7 this morning until it was almost midnight, and we were still in Watertown. Oops. How late did I get home? Let's just say that, well, on my way home from Casa du Bean (after we'd made our way home from Erin's, a journey on which we saw 7 snowplows headed in other directions but none going our way when we really could have used one), I passed a pretty bad accident on I-81 right by the mall. I passed it fairly soon after it happened, because it looked like the police had just gotten there, and there was still glass and debris all across the road, and about a minute later, I saw the ambulance headed toward the scene. That was at around 2:45 a.m. I passed by the wreck again on my way to work, and they hadn't even finished clearing the site yet. Yeah, I got about 3 hours' sleep. It was a pretty rough day at work. I'm so exhausted right now.

I have to say, tho', it's been a long time since I laughed as much as I did with Bean and Erin last night. I spend so much time by myself these days, I literally forget how much fun it can be hanging out with other people sometimes. Yay, girlfriends! (And yay for the Gristmill Restaurant in Parish, for being open 24 hours a day, so I didn't end up accidentally wetting Bean's car seat. I tell ya, we mocked the place when we gassed up there on the way up to W-town, but it was our savior on the way back down.)

I was so bad, tho' - I bought that yarn just so I'd have something to knit, but I ended up spending most of the night usurping Erin's computer (Georging, blogging, and just random surfing), so I didn't even get past casting on and knitting one row last night! That was probably for the best, however, as I used my down-time at work today to study the whole illusion-knitting concept and to deconstruct the chart by writing out the first part of the pattern line-by-line. And I get it now! It's neat! I want to try making my own illusion charts to knit! The skull pattern I worked up like, a year and a half ago (no, wait, more like two years ago now) would translate to illusion knitting very well, I think. It's not as wide as the Linux scarf, which, at 60 stitches wide, is sort of... well, a pain in the butt. It's going to take forever to finish, even if I skip the other half (the non-penguin part) of the illusion design. It's addictive, watching the picture emerge row by row; but it goes soooooo..... sloooowly...... Even more so because the Caron Simply Soft is so slippery on the (borrowed) aluminum needles I'm using - I am so afraid I'm going to drop a stitch or split the yarn (which I've done a lot so far), I have to slow my knitting down a bit. And since I knit at a snail's pace to begin with... It's like the Dr. Who scarf, another WIP it will take me ages to finish. That one's also 60 freaking stitches wide (tho' in lighter weight yarn on smaller needles). But I can knit on the Dr. Who scarf in the dark, if need be. The Linux scarf really requires a lot of my attention while I'm knitting (since, y'know, there's a chart to follow and all). I'm chipping away at it, tho'. I even... - whoa, I had a train of thought, there, but it just left the station without my mind on board. I nearly just fell asleep sitting upright. I think that's my cue to go to bed.

I had more bloggy stuff I wanted to cover today, but I guess it'll have to wait. Alas!

"holy f-ing stash!"

Greetings from Watertown, dear readers (all two of you who are not in the room with me as I type). This morning, Bean called me at work, asking if I wanted to go over to her place (roughly a mile from my place of employment) and knit after I got out. I said okay, even tho' I had not placed any knitting into my bag that morning on my usual mad dash for the door (I actually thought "Oh, I'm just going to work and back - I shouldn't bother bringing any knitting, because I won't have a chance to work on it at all" - stupid, stupid, stupid!).

Once I got to Casa du Bean, I was told "We're going to Watertown! To knit!" (Watertown, for those of you not versed in Central New York geography, is about 45 minutes north of our fair city.)

Our knitbud Erin recently moved to Watertown, and she and Bean wanted to get together. Only thing is, there's nothing between here and there. So, Bean decreed we were going to Watertown, since Erin has always had to drive from afar (first from Tully, fifteen minutes to the south of Syracuse, and now the frozen wilds of W-town) to knit with us. This time, we would bring the knitting to her.

It'd been a while since I did any crazy spur-of-the-moment road-tripping, so I acquiesced. But before we could head north, I needed to make a quick stop at Michael's to get some yarn to knit! And my choice for spur-of-the-moment new knitting project was... (drumroll, please) the Linux illusion scarf! I'm not even that big into Linux... I've actually never used Linux except like, once on the DH's computer when he had that partition on his hard drive that booted to Linux... like, four years ago. But I love the damn penguin! And I want to figure out this illusion knitting thing. I almost get it... if I take a pattern apart and do it once, I'll have a handle on the whole technique, and that'll be yet another weapon I can add to my arsenal of eeeevil (like the fru-eet of the dev-ill).

I know I said I don't do the whole New Year's Resolution thing, but I have decided I'm going to try not to buy any more yarn this year until I've done a whole lot of stash-busting (and you will see why I've made this decision in just a minute). Buying more yarn just so I can knit tonight kind of goes against that effort, but at least the yarn I chose (Caron's Simply Soft, in black and grey) is *cheap*, so I don't feel too bad.

So. Why do I need so desperately to stash-bust that I've declared a moratorium on yarn-purchasing right on the eve of Elegant Needles' biannual massive yarn sale? Here's why. I present to you... my shameful, shameful stash:


(bin #1)


(bin #2)


(bin #3)


(bin #4 - scraps and sock yarns)


(bin #5 - pricey yarn! Well, some of it, anyway)


(overflow - I don't even have a bin for this yet)

I took these pics during a recent yarn-stash-database update. So now you know. Now you know where all the Gedifra Fashion Trend yarn in the greater Syracuse metro area went, once it was discontinued and put on clearance. Now you know why my DH is thisclose to kicking me out of the house. Why his demeanor fills with apprehension every time I come home from shopping and say "Guess what I bought!" I haven't gotten to the point of hiding yarn... yet. I'm trying really hard not to let it get that far.

In my defense, I didn't pay full price for the vast majority of that yarn. If I didn't get it on sale, I bought it ball by ball with 40%-off coupons. No, I'm not kidding. I have a deep internal well of patience.

But. I really need to cut down. So. If you look closely at that last pic, you'll see 15 balls of light gray Fantasy Yarns Alpaka (from A.C. Moore) there in the front. I gave those to Bean for X-mess. Most of the rest of all that, I already have patterns in mind for it. I probably won't live long enough to knit my way through that shameful, shameful stash. I have a lot of knitting to do. So, uhm, I better go get started (and besides, I've usurped Erin's computer for long enough!). (The title of this post, btw, is what Bean said when I started uploading these pictures to post.)

Here's to a knit-ful 2006.

in case you were wondering...

I am: Kurt Vonnegut For years, this unique creator of absurd and haunting tales denied that he had anything to do with science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

Yeah, I really need to read some of his stuff sometime.

not burnt, but spooked

Yipes, I'm still behind on posts! So here is a quickie to get me closer to caught-up.

I had an experience a few days ago which I've found to be quite typical of wintertime in our fair city.

It was about midday, and I was sitting on the couch, minding my own business, when I noticed a strange, golden light outside my windows. It looked really odd, especially when compared with the usual matte gray-ness one sees when glancing out of windows between November and April around these parts. This weird light got so bright that I was actually able to turn off the lamp beside the couch, which I had had to turn on because (save for about one hour around daybreak) it's always so dark in our north-facing living room. At first, I couldn't figure out what on earth the strange light was or where it was coming from. Just what the heck was going on out there?? It took me a minute before I realized it was sunlight.

Yes, you know it's winter in Syracuse when you actually get spooked by the sight of the sun.

just call me gimpy

As those of you who have seen me in person since Christmas know, I tried snowboarding on Christmas day. And, naturally, I injured myself, because an extremely out-of-shape 27-year-old has no business trying anything that could in any way be construed as an "extreme sport." About halfway through my first run down the baby hill, I wrenched my left ankle. Luckily, my mom is a doctor, so when I limped back to our time-share room, she took a look at it and ruled it no more serious than a sprain. So I iced it, kept it elevated when I slept, and once I got home, I made Bean wrap it up in an Ace bandage (the perks of knowing a nursing student! Heheheh).

Even besides my ankle, I was pretty banged up. Here is what my knees looked like just after my half-run down the slope:

My upper arms and my abs were sore for several days afterward, too. If I ever do that again, I'll try strength-training my upper body and abs for like, a month beforehand - and I'll wear knee pads and a butt pad. Actually, I think I would really like snowboarding if it weren't so downhill, or if the downhill slope weren't so steep. Cross-country snowboarding? Well, maybe not. But maybe on a less-steep bunny hill.

So Christmas was 11 days ago now, and my ankle still hurts, though it definitely has gotten better. How long do sprains usually take to heal? It was swollen for days, but once the swelling went down, I took the Ace bandage off and tried to go to work for a day without it on. By the end of the day, my leg felt like it was on fire. Ouch! Learned my lesson there. I didn't think I spent that much time on my feet at work, but apparently I do. With my luck, I will probably be all better just in time for school to start, and then I will slip on some ice rushing to class and injure myself in a new and different (though no less inconvenient) way. I'd still be willing to try skiing, tho', because I've heard it's a lot easier than snowboarding. Maybe in February sometime.

16 posts in 16 days

Alright. I'm not one to make New Year's resolutions. But I did want to try to do this one thing: every day until school starts on the 17th, I will make at least one post per day. I have a ton of stuff I've been meaning to blather about, but while school's on, it's just impossible. While I've got the time off, I mean to make the most of it, blog-wise. So, a post a day, at the least. If you look closely, you will see that I've already screwed this up, as I didn't make a post yesterday - but I'm cutting myself some slack there, because I left home at 6:45 a.m. yesterday and didn't get home until after midnight. Since I made two posts on the 1st, I'm calling it even (this is my game, I make the rules - which, thanks to this Yarn Harlot post, is one of my new favorite sayings. Hee.).

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of knitting... what the heck happened to The Knitting Connection's website? I used to have a link to it down there in the Syracuse Links section, but I just tried to click it to check their store hours for the week, and it gave me a "server not found" error. Did they just give up on the site and let it lapse? I think that's what happened with the site for The Village Yarn Shop/pe (aka "the snooty local yarn store"), because when I googled it, I found a few references to their website on other sites, but not their site itself (another "server not found" error). Ditto for Elegant Needles. What is with LYS's giving up on their internet presences? Is this just a mirror of the tech bust, with stores thinking a website could bring them profit with minimal work, only to find it was more trouble/expense than it was worth? Or do places just not see the point? Because, for someone like me, who absolutely hates to interact with people using a telephone, a website is a fantastic place to get simple questions answered (like, "how late are you open today?" or "are you open tomorrow?" or "which days will you be closed for the holidays?" or "where are you located?") without having to actually "reach out and touch someone," as it were. Increasingly, I feel like places that don't have websites don't really exist, in some way - as if they didn't have a phone line or weren't in the phone book.

I can understand how, for a truly local YS like The Knitting Connection, a website in not really worth it, as it provides roughly the same benefit as a Yellow Pages ad while requiring more cash and time to keep up. But, OK, remember that super-bulky purple yarn I bought for a mere $5/ball at Rhinebeck? It was made by a place called Hudson Valley Sheep and Wool Co. Don't bother looking for their website - it used to be at www.hvsheepandwool.com, but it's not there anymore. And that kills me! I would love to know more about the place - What kind of fiber animals do they have? How big is their herd? Do they do all their own wool processing, or do they work with an outside mill? Do they have needle size or pattern suggestions for this gigantic yarn I bought? Do they have a store, or do they just sell at fiber shows? If they have a store, when are they open? How do I get there? - but I can't really find out anything online. Sure, I found a phone number I could call, but... I haaaaaate the phone. Plus, alright, it's an 800-number, but I don't have a land line, so if I were to call during "normal business hours," it still wouldn't be totally free for me. And I'm sure I'd have to call during "normal business hours" if I actually wanted to talk to a human being. Whereas if they just had a website, I could get all my questions answered (if it were a halfway decent site, anyway) at 2 in the morning while sitting on my couch in the dark in my pj's, without making a sound louder than a click.

If you're going to try to be more than just a local YS (which, I would argue, any vendor at a fiber festival is trying to do), you've got to have a web presence. It doesn't have to be flashy, and it doesn't have to be updated that often. Take the NorthWind Yarns site. They cover all the pertinent info (hours, directions, etc.), and they give plenty of things to click on, but they don't really say all that much on any of their pages. They give a rough summary of what they carry, but don't get bogged down trying to post details like exactly what they have in stock at the moment. Their site is pretty, but not tricked out with bells and whistles. It probably took a bit to set up, but now that it's up, it's probably very low-maintenance. And it sure enticed me to want to go to their store and spend money. Actually, more than that - it enabled me to go to their store without having to call ahead (because, as noted - haaaaaate the phone).

Soooo... I didn't intend this to become a pro-internet rant. But I really just don't get how a business owner wouldn't want to take advantage of every possible media outlet to get information about their business to potential customers. I mean, I want to go yarn shopping when I travel to a new place, and I'd google for yarn stores near my destination when planning a trip, but I don't have a phone book for, say, Peoria to check out before I go. And there can be a happy medium for business owners, where a website could be way more useful than that hypothetical Yellow Pages ad, but almost as low expense. More yarn store owners just need to find that internet zen state, so I can do more yarn shopping with less actual human contact.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to head over to The Knitting Connection (I broke down and called them) and scope their selection of size 9 dpns.

some knitting content, for a change

So it's really a bitch when you're doing cabled socks and you get to what you think is a cable round, only to realize you miscounted and you should have cabled about 2 rounds ago. Then you have to tink back 2 whole rounds because you don't trust yourself to pick up both the knit and the purl stitches properly should you try to simply slip the needles out and rip back the 2 rounds.

It's also a bitch when you're thinking about starting the second sock of the pair and you realize you don't remember if, for the first sock, you did the same cast on specified in the pattern (long tail) or if you did the cast on you usually do for socks (the Old Norwegian, as specified in the Priscilla's Dream Socks pattern from Interweave Knits, which has become my Ur text for sock construction - Erin, I cannot thank you enough for passing that pattern on to me). I think I'm going to go with the Old Norwegian, and if it looks weird, I'll rip it out and start over. Why, oh why didn't I write down which cast on I used?? I made other notes on my printout of the pattern... why in god's name didn't I note that one crucial thing??

Ohh, the humanity!

grossest. post. ever.

That is a warning to the squeamish among you - you may wish to skip this post, 'cause I've got a story to tell about what happened at work today (possibly my crappiest day on the job to date), and it ain't pretty. In fact, it's really icky, so if you have a low tolerance for gore, you may leave now. I promise less-icky posts in the near future.

For the stout-hearted among you, here is my tale of flesh and woe:

As I've mentioned before, I work in a medical laboratory. You know it's going to be a bad day at work when, as you arrive at 7 in the morning, uncaffeinated and bleary-eyed, the night-shift guy greets you by saying, "I've got a mess for you, little lady." But really, nothing can prepare one for being presented with a whole, gangrenous, severed human toe in a specimen cup.

Besides being very, very disgusting, the toe presented several procedural problems. I work in the microbiology department. We're not supposed to get whole severed body parts. Those get put in formalin and go to pathology. If we get flesh for a culture, it should be a relatively small piece of tissue, because we need to grind it up before we can set it up on the agar plates. And the test should be ordered as a tissue culture, so the techs know what sort of specimen we had (or at the very least as an OR culture, as the toe came from the operating room), but it was ordered as a wound culture instead (specimens for wound cultures generally come on swabs stored in preservative medium). So not only did I have to wrangle an inappropriate specimen, I had to fix the orders in the comptuer, as well (which is the part of my job where I have the least experience, so it takes me far longer than it should, and I usually need to get someone to help me muddle through).

And man, when I say wrangle... I had to get some tissue out of the toe to grind up. We have these kits we use when we need to cut stuff up - they have sterile tweezers and scissors and forcep-things, and they used to have scalpels in them. But of course, today, when I really could have used a scalpel, we just happened to be out of the scalpel-containing kits. So I basically had to hold the toe with the tweezers and hack at it with the scissors as best I could (and I kid you not - just as I sat down to start hacking, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" came on the radio. Hee.). We couldn't use the foul outer skin of the toe - we needed the inner bits. It would have been so much easier with a scalpel. I don't know what was wrong with the toe that it had to be removed, but it looked really awful. Honestly, I have to handle all manner of bodily fluids and secretions in my job, so I'm not that easily grossed out. But this was far and away the grossest thing I've encountered to date. Even the seasoned medical techs were disturbed (tho' not too disturbed to make some sick jokes). It looked like, y'know when you overcook sausage and it gets all dark and swollen and blistered? Like that. It was listed on the requisition form as "third toe," but it was so swollen it was the size of a big toe. And then on the other end, the bone was still sticking out, all bloody and raw. There was a whole joint still in there, too, which brought another level of difficulty to the tissue extraction. I only managed to get a tiny bit of usable stuff. And then there was the grinding, which is always arduous.

Add to that another specimen in the same batch with a mis-ordered test, meaning more time lost messing around on the computer... I wasn't even finished processing the first drop when the second one showed up, and on a normal Saturday, I've got time to do the first drop, read all the inter-office e-mail that has piled up in my inbox since my last shift two weeks ago, and start in on callback before the second drop arrives.

That pretty much set the tone for the whole day. Callback is a morning thing, but I didn't even get to it until after lunch. I nearly slid off the road in the fresh snow rushing to make a yellow light so I could get back to work within my ridiculously short lunch half-hour. I found out today that, despite what I'd thought for months, I am not supposed to work tomorrow (New Year's Day), but Monday instead. Why? Because there's this crack-headed scheme where, if there's a holiday on Sunday, Sunday becomes Monday and Monday becomes the holiday. Apparently this is long-standing company policy. Would've been nice if someone had let me know before I'd planned my weekend around working Saturday and Sunday. At least, allegedly, I will still get holiday pay even though I'm not working on the actual holiday (but rather, on the fake holiday). I got to work almost on time this morning (which is a big deal for my chronically-late self), but it was so busy and stuff kept coming up all day, I ended up leaving over an hour late. Ri-diculous. The only saving grace was that the radio played tons of great songs (probably a post-Christmas-music backlash - thank goodness). I guess Lite 105.9 is a better station that I thought it was. But overall - just a crap day. A crap end to a crap year. Good riddance, 2005. Not that I expect 2006 to be any better.

Anywho. We just spent the evening drinking the hefeweizen and framboise lambic I picked up on the way home, and watching DVDs, which we haven't done in a long time (for the record, pre-minuit: Chinatown and an episode of Black Adder; post-minuit: two episodes from the first season of Chappelle's Show). And now I guess it's time to go pass out. Bonne Année, everybody.

P.S. - was it just us, or was it kind of creepy having Dick Clark on ABC this year?