You Thought You Knew Me? You Were Probably Right...

I got this from Specs.

1. Flip to page 18, paragraph 4 in the book closest to you right now, what does it say?

”And yet…and yet…Harry went restlessly back to the bed and sat down on it, running a finger over his scar again. It wasn’t the pain that bothered him; Harry was no stranger to pain and injury. He had lost all the bones from his right arm once and had them painfully regrown in a night.”

2. If you stretch out your left arm - as far as possible, what are you touching?

Hubbster’s book: Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia.

3. What’s the last program you watched on tv?

The Daily Show and CSI, on my dad’s TiVo when we were visiting him over Columbus Day weekend. I had no idea what TiVo was, but I’m very impressed…

4. Without looking, guess what time it is.

8:00 pm. Crap, it’s 8:26. Typical. I’m always losing time.

5. Except the computer, what can you hear right now?

An episode of Sopranos, season 5, on DVD. Things look bad for Adriana.

6. When was the last time you were outside and what did you do?

Hubbster and I met my cousin and her friend for lunch at the Popover Café, and then we walked through Central Park for a couple hours. It was a beautiful day. I hadn’t seen this cousin in five or six years, even though we were really close as kids. This was the first time she met my husband.

7. What are you wearing?

Flannel jammies from Victoria Secret, which my mom gave me for xmas a few years ago. They’re blue, with a pattern of little white down feathers all over them, as if I just got in the way of an exploding duvet.

8. Did you dream last night? If you did, what about?

This is SO embarrassing, but I dreamed that I found a few untouched skeins of the one of the yarns I’d decided to give away to Goodwill (which in the dream was already gone, instead of sitting by the door waiting to be gone), and…I was regretting giving it away, because these extra skeins would have given me enough for a sweater. I wouldn’t actually want a sweater out of this yarn, though – the regret was all in the dream only. There were many other unrelated episodes to this dream, but the yarn-related one is all that I remember now.

9. When was the last time you laughed?

About 30 seconds ago, because of something on Sopranos.

10. What's on the walls, in the room you're in right now?

Quite a bit, as it’s our living/dining room and the kitchen and entryway are also visible from where I’m sitting. Most of the wall space is covered by bookshelves, but there’s also a copy of an old engraving of Geneva that Hubbster got when he worked there one summer, the cuckoo clock his dad gave us (the real thing), and a framed photograph of the New York skyline taken by Hubbster’s friend from his old apartment when he was at NYU. It’s got a huge stormy sky filling half the frame and throwing strange light on the skyscrapers. This is not nearly as strange and creepy, however, as the other photograph, in the hallway, taken by the same friend from Hubbster’s old apartment in Brooklyn, showing the twin towers before Sept. 11, but with such strange lighting that the towers…look like ghosts. They took the picture because they thought it looked neat, that’s all. It was hanging on the wall the day Hubbster saw the towers fall, and came home to Brooklyn to find charred bits of office paper on his front stoop.

11. Have you seen anything strange lately?

Apparently we saw lots of really strange people while out and about with my cousin the other day, but Hubbster and I mostly took the strangeness for granted until my cousin or her friend pointed it out. Weirdos, performance artists, etc. Just the usual Central Park stuff.

12. What do you think about this meme?

A little different from the usual – I like the random aspect of it.

13. What's the last film you saw?

The Departed, while we were visiting my dad in NH. We don’t see movies here generally (at $10.50 a pop, no matinees!), though we’re strongly tempted to check out Borat.

14. If you became a multimillionaire, what would you do with the money?

Pay off all our educational loans. Buy a decent house somewhere pleasant, in a blue state or Canada. Get one of the several accountants in my family to tell me how to invest enough of the money in smart enough ways to ensure a decent retirement for me and Hubbster, and for our parents. If possible, invest enough to live off the interest, though “multimillionaire” status doesn’t necessarily mean as much as it used to – depends on how “multi” we’re talking! Establish an educational fellowship, or if possible, several. Donate to my top-ten list of charities. With whatever’s left, buy up my wishlist from Amazon and KnitPicks. I’d probably still want to teach and write, but it’d be nice if the pressure to make ends meet were taken off…I think I’d actually work better, and be more driven, in that case. I’m odd that way.

15. Tell us something about yourself that most people don't know.

I almost never spoke in school, unless directly called on by a teacher, for much of middle and high school. It just wasn’t worth it. I was a total blabber-mouth at home though, and continue to be when I’m with people I’m comfortable with.

16. If you could change ONE THING in this world, without regarding politics or bad guilt - what would it be?

”Bad guilt”? Huh? If you don't watch out, I'm going to take back those nice things I said about this meme.

If I could change one thing by magic that I think would make the biggest overall difference, I would make the general population of the whole world value education, critical thinking, and teachers as highly as they ought to.

19. What do you want your children's names to be, girl/boy?

Names have to be pronounceable and not silly in both English and Russian. I’d prefer for there to be family associations at least on one side, if not both mine and Hubbster’s. ‘Anna’ is perfect – the name of one of my favorite great-grandmothers, and the grandmother of Hubbster’s who practically raised him. We also really like ‘Marina,’ after my grandmother, Mary, and Hubbster’s mother, Galina. Boy names are harder. The ones we like in English don’t have good Russian equivalents and vice versa. Right now, Alexander and Alexei top the list. Every other person I know seems to be named Alexander, which is the only mark against that one, but Alexei is often difficult for English-speaking mouths to deal with, and it’s even worse for the Russian diminutive of that name, Alyosha.

17. Do you like dancing?

NO. And NO – it’s NOT that I’m just shy, but secretly wishing to be dragged into it. NO. I just DON’T LIKE IT and that’s okay. Have we got that straight? I love to talk with my friends, I love to watch other people dance, I like to listen to music and to just watch people. But I do not in any way get any pleasure from dancing, and it’s not because of self-consciousness or fear. I don’t have a good ear or sense of rhythm, and this means not just that I’m a bad dancer, but that it’s NOT ENJOYABLE. It’s like asking someone incredulously why they don’t love to wander around a room in random circles - because that’s what dancing feels like to me. It’s boring and I’d really much rather be talking to someone – anyone. Why can’t most people who live to dance get this into their heads?? I’ve never tried to force anyone to read or knit or drink tea against their will. I wouldn’t dream of it. But more people than I can count have tried to manhandle me into dancing when I have clearly and politely, with no hesitation, shyness or self-consciousness, said that I’d rather be doing just about anything else. What’s UP with that???

(Sorry if I've been unduly grumpy)

18. George Bush?

Willfully stupid, coke-snorting, pathologically lying frat boy with a daddy complex who is allowing the evil cabal that flatters and rules him to destroy the world for no better reason than their pure, unadulterated greed, and when they follow Goebel’s Textbook on Authoritarianism (“the best way to fool the people is with a really big lie”), refering to all this theft, murder, torture, and bigotry as “Christian,” “fiscally responsible,” and “tough on terror,” many people -- most of them employed in the media -- are too scared of getting even more screwed than they already are to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes. I could go on. For hours. I could go on for as long as it takes to get these people out of office and, preferably, behind bars.

20. Would you ever consider living abroad?

I’ve lived abroad for a year at a time on three separate occasions, now. I will certainly do so again for at least that long several times more. I would be very excited about the idea of a much longer stay in many, many parts of the world.

21. What do you want God to tell you, when you come to heaven?

I wouldn’t say that I want this, but here’s the picture that leapt to my mind: “Gotcha! I really am a feeble personification of human fears that lives on a fluffy cloud, as opposed to that abstraction of the combined natural forces of the universe which is far greater than any pitiful human imagination. Aren’t you glad that I’m a girl, at least? And don’t worry – we’ve got plenty of yarn here. Duh – that’s why we call it heaven.”

22. Who should do this meme?

Everybody who’s read this far.

And I’ve been doing some quizzes. Putting them together probably gives a pretty solid all-around sense of who I am, actually. I’m skipping the stupid and illiterate ones, of course.

(And yes – I’ve been saving these up for a while. I didn’t do them all just now in a gigantic, epic bout of procrastination. I just do them every once in a while and stick the code in a file, and I realized I had a whole bunch built up. They gotta go somewhere, folks, and in the meantime I have neither made progress on any knitted item nor gotten around to addressing anything else on my blog to-do list. So there you go.)

Which NICOLE KIDMAN Character Are You?

"Satine" in MOULIN ROUGE!You're not just a star in your own mind, you're the real deal. Beautiful, talented, and gorgeous. But life is short: stop worrying about money and fame. Above all things, life for love.
Take this quiz!








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(Yup. That's the character I'd pick. Except there's no correlation with that whole prostitute thing.)

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

(This one seems to be particularly accurate – it’s almost spooky.)

You paid attention during 91% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

(Again, accurate right down to the point that I sure as hell didn’t actually learn any of this IN high school. No, they were too busy entertaining us with football and pep rallies.)

You are 60% English.

Getting there. You may wish to pay attention to the world around you.

"And did those feet
In ancient times,
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
In England's pleasant pastures seen?"

Well, no, but it's a cracking good tune.

How English are you?
Create a Quiz

(I always wanted to be English. Seems like I’m getting there. )

Your Language Arts Grade: 100%

Way to go! You know not to trust the MS Grammar Check and you know "no" from "know." Now, go forth and spread the good word (or at least, the proper use of apostrophes).

Are You Gooder at Grammar?
Make a Quiz

(This one was much easier than that other one.)

Congratulations. You are 30% dork.

So you're aware what a computer is. That's a start, but for true dork-dom, we're really looking for someone with more social dysfunctions and technical know-how.

The dork/nerd quiz
Quizzes for MySpace

(I expected more. Clearly, there are many kinds of dork, and not all of them were encompassed by this quiz.)

You Are 35% Strange!

You are a bit strange, though still more normal than strange. You definitely have some quirks, don't get me wrong. But you aren't exactly freaking out old ladies on the street. It's okay though, you've got a healthy mixture of strangeness and normality.

How Strange Are You?
Quizzes for MySpace

(I’m a little disappointed not to have scored higher on this one, too.)

Which Star Wars Character Are You? Your Result: Yoda You are a passive green creature with a speech impediment. You always try to find a peaceful resolution to your problems, but also aren't afraid to kick some ass if you need to.
Jar Jar Binks
Luke SkyWalker
Princess Leia
Han Solo
Darth Vader
Boba Fett
Jabba the Hutt
Which Star Wars Character Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

(Whatever. I don't get this one, but then it's been awhile since I last saw Star Wars.)

You are 0% STUPID!

Ok, so you're pretty intelligent. Granted, you have some stupidity but everyone's entitled. And you certainly have the ability to keep it in check when you need to. Good job!

How Stupid Are You???
Make a Quiz

(That’s a relief.)

Squib You scored 16% Slytherin, 20% Ravenclaw, 44% Gryffindor, and 36% Hufflepuff!

Are you sure that you belong at Hogwarts? You show no defined personal characteristics and therefore no house preference. Perhaps you should seriously consider a lucrative career in dentistry or tax preparation -- or allow the Sorting Hat to redetermine your place at a later date.

Link: The Sorting Hat Test written by leeannslytherin on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

(*Sniff* I’m nothing but a bloody squib!! I was shooting for Ravenclaw, dammit!)

What NYC yarn store are you?

You are School Products!
You are a treasure seeker. You will sort through piles and piles of poorly labeled yarn to find the perfect coned cashmere from Kashmir. And when you find it, you will design a fantastic lacy shawl.
Take this quiz!








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(That one was a no-brainer…)


And now, my three favorite new quizzes:

You are 42% Russian!

It may be that you've been in emigration for too long. Time to watch some old Victory Day parades on video and remember your roots.

How Russian Are You?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

What kind of graduate student are you? Your Result: Typical. Your talent and passion will get you through and it'll all pay off eventually, but for now...well, there's a reason everybody says grad school is the worst time of your life. Hang in there.
The precocious expert.
The closeted professional.
The poseur.
What kind of graduate student are you? Make Your Own Quiz

The Importance of Exercise

Hi guys. Sorry I pulled the disappearing act. Nothing has gone terribly wrong; it was just a particularly busy and stressful time for a while there. The diss chapter is at a critical stage and making me completely crazy. I think this is part of “progress,” but it’s still sometimes hard to tell the difference between “progress” and “pointless hell” just at this particular juncture.

In addition, I’ve been having these mysterious aches and pains for a few months, which suddenly started to get worse, so I had to go through a round of tests and doctors and worry. I thought from the beginning that it was some kind of pulled muscle or pinched nerve, probably getting continually aggravated by sitting in front of computers day in and day out in uncomfortable chairs, and that’s what, after a lot of scary tests, it seems to be. Or at any rate, every diagnosis that’s really scary has been eliminated, thank goodness, so the doctors have now decided to let me go away and suffer with no further intervention on their part. I’m told, though, by people that know, that the whole vast array of psychosomatic illnesses that accompany dissertation-writing will disappear as if by magic on the day I defend the thing. I’m very much looking forward to that. In the meantime, I’m going to try to get more exercise and rotate amongst my various uncomfortable chairs when I work.

I’ve also been on an interesting emotional journey relating to our recent national elections. This isn’t the place for detail, and others have blogged so articulately on exactly the things I’ve been feeling, but the curious may enjoying following this link to a glimpse into the tiny, crazy world I come from, and how it’s – maybe – finally – changing.

So I had all this time where I felt awful physically, was very worried, was completely paralyzed about my chapter (all of this is pretty much over now, by the way)…I just felt incapable of doing anything active, like blogging, or writing, or thinking, and for much of the time wasn’t even up to reading other people’s blogs, or listening to podcasts or knitting anything remotely challenging. I started re-reading Harry Potter for approximately the 7th time. I puttered, and I lived through another 3-day migraine marathon. And, of course, I found a way to treat myself with some yarn therapy, which played a big part in making me feel better.



I organized my stash. I pulled it ALL out of its closet, spread it all over the living room, wallowed in all its loveliness, rediscovered forgotten treasures, and put it away again in much better order than it had been. I also sorted out two big shopping bags full of yarn to give away to Goodwill. Everything that had more than 20% acrylic in it, everything I know I’ll never knit with, is going to be gone. I’ve divided what remains into lace yarns, sock yarns, felting yarns, potential sweater yarns (which was a surprisingly small pile – I have really been making a dent!), and a separate pile of miscellaneous one-skein treasures.



Then I made a sock. I’m just about to graft the toe of the first one. I’m using one of the gorgeous sock yarns I got from Cookie’s contest - it somehow reminds me of peacock feathers. The colors are mostly dark blue, chocolate brown, and olive, but there’s also a bright peacock blue that never fails to delight me every time it turns up. I had to manipulate these photos a lot to get them even close because I took them at night with a flash, but Cookie’s original picture of the yarn is very accurate.



I’m making these top-down, using the Harlot’s recipe. It’s the first time I’ve ever used US #0 needles, and I’m really enjoying it (though you might want to ask me again when I’m on the second sock). It’s perfect for the state of mind I’m in – lots of mindless knitting with very impressive results, and just enough excitement to keeping my mind on the knitting instead of my worries. I was going to just make the Widdershins pattern, adjusting the size up for Hubbster, but then I actually read the designer’s instructions for sizing up. I thought I knew as much math as I would ever need for knitting. But no. Everything she writes there relating to her heel sizing formula is total Greek to me. Luckily, one of my heroes has graciously agreed to write up how he did it, which will be extremely helpful since I want the same number of stitches he had. While I was contemplating all this and waiting to hear the details of how David did it, it occurred to me that it might be helpful to have even the faintest clue how the regular, top-down heel flap sock is made. I’ve never done it before – the closest I’ve ever come was fuzzy feet, and that was a very long time ago, before I’d ever made any other kind of sock, so I don’t remember a thing. The Harlot’s recipe is (of course) fantastic, and I’ve had a lot of fun watching how this works. I know most people are much more familiar and at ease with the heel-flap sock, but compared to the Gibson-Roberts short-row method, which I learned first, it seems so much less intuitive that what you’re doing will actually make a foot shape, right up until the very end. I had a lot of fun with that. And I made an eye of partridge flap, which was also highly entertaining, as I’d never done that stitch pattern before. I love the way the yarn striped – it never really pooled, but formed subtle stripes in slightly different formations on each part of the sock. I did the leg and top of the foot in a modified rib copied from Thuja. Both Hubbster and I love the look of it – very masculine, somehow – and I love that it’s much faster than regular ribbing. Every other row is plain stockinette, and even the rows with purls don’t have that many of them.

There are a million things I wanted to reply to (and that’s not counting the now huge catch-up list of unread posts I have waiting for me in bloglines) and stuff to add to the sidebar, etc, but one thing at a time.

My Knitting Bag

This is random, but I've been wanting to show it off to you all for a long time, and since I don't have anything else to blog about today, I will.





This is my prized knitting bag. For a long time, it was buried in my closet because it held a UFO (one of the ones that got frogged in August). One of the benefits of frogging that UFO was that I got to re-discover my favorite knitting bag all over again, now disassociated from the frustrating sweater-that-looked-mauled-by-a-cat.

If you look closely, you can see that this bag was made for me in 1979. My mom sewed it, cleverly doubling or tripling the thinner printed cotton fabrics to match the weight of the denim. Then, she embroidered my name on it, and "Montana '79" because she made this - and a matching one for my brother out of tan corduroy and green cotton prints - to hold the stashes of crayons, paper, Uno cards and other odds and ends we were given to get us through the long train ride from Michigan to our aunt & uncle's house in Missoula, Montana, and back again. I was four at the time, and one of my clearest early memories is the overwhelming surprise and delight I felt when I opened up that bag for the first time. My parents were really young and still finishing school, not to mention they were hippies and it was the 70s, so we did not get elaborate presents for birthdays or christmas. A scratchy sweater, a board game, and some small stocking stuffers was more like it in those very early years. So, here we were in mid-summer, no special occasion, and I got a bag full of all my favoritest things in the world. I didn't happen to know that crayons, paper, and card games were really cheap - to me, they were highly coveted and endlessly entertaining items, and I couldn't really imagine what anyone would want with anything else. I think this feeling is part of why the bag was very, very special to me from the start, even more so than for my brother, who was a little older and less easily thrilled out of his gourd by something like a 48-piece set of crayolas (after all, I had only had the baby-size 8-piece set before this).

Needless to say, the trip flew by, and the bag became my "travel bag," going with us on every trip. And, dutifully, Mom embroided the location and year for each subsequent journey. The one that really cracks me up now is "Nashville '85," because I insisted that she embroider "101st Airborne" under it -- the name of a theme restaurant we went to on that trip, that my brother and I had loved beyond all things.

Around that time, in the mid-80s, my mom made two more bags for my cousins, with whom I was very close. Times had changed, and so their bags were made with two squares on each side of teal corduroy and two squares of printed cotton in teals, lavenders, blues and pinks. I was SO jealous of their pretty-colored bags for a while there, and thought mine looked old-fashioned. It stayed in the closet for most of my middle-school years. We all have these lapses of poor judgement, after all.

Later, when I went abroad as a high school exchange student, I packed that bag with me on purpose so that we could add an impressive "Norway '91-'92" to it. Of course, by the time I got back everyone was busier, and my Mom had (to be honest) never been all that big on embroidery anyway. I was the crafty person in this family, and I was old enough to embroider it myself. I liked this idea, and loved inheriting Mom's embroidery floss collection, but somehow...I just didn't get around to it for a while. Mom had stopped partway through the word "Norway" and so eventually, on a vacation home from college, I decided I must at least finish the word. This is when I learned that method matters in embroidery, and it's not as easy as it looks to do it neatly:



The 'wa' was done by Mom, the 'y' by me. As if you couldn't tell.

So to this day I still haven't done any more than that, even though technically I've taken the bag to Chicago for college, and on two separate trips to Russia, and another to Budapest, since that time.

Somewhere along the line, it has become my knitting-at-home bag instead of a travel bag (it's not exactly a convenient style for my kind of traveling these days). Now that I've frogged that pesky UFO, I'm keeping my currently favored at-home project, the Fair Isle sweater, in it.

So - is there a story behind your favorite knitting bag??

Today's blog entry brought to you by the tangy fruit taste of nostalgia.

One last item for today - if you haven't already listened to last week's Cast-On, do. I signed up on Wikipedia before I'd even finished downloading the episode.

Too tired and scatter-brained to say anything else coherent. Been loving all your comments. I think there were things I wanted to respond to, but don't remember what they were at the moment. I think I'm getting a cold. I feel like my head's full of...well, snot.

Handspun

Krista was entirely right about handspun. I get it now. It's dangerously fun to knit with.



Hubbster said this sock feels like "cream" on his foot. Given the extreme affection he feels for anything made out of cream, this is strong praise indeed. I used plain (commercial-spun) brown alpaca for the bottoms so I could make the handpun stretch to two full-size socks, and also because I couldn't stand the idea of that handsun touching the floor. The alpaca matches astonishingly well, and is easily replaced (I have loads more leftovers from that particular sweater). I also like the idea that the part of the sock that's on the floor has the excessive warmth of alpaca, while the rest is the more reasonable wool. The gorgeous way the handspun shifts from more brown here to more white there was really fun to watch as I knitted it up, and the texture is delicious.



The second one is just waiting for a finished sole.

Meanwhile, it occured to me that the burgundy handspun from Krista would be perfect for my first foray into the Red Scarf Project. I really like the idea behind this charity, and it's one of the ones where I really do see how my knitting something can help as much as cash or some other more practical or direct effort. And I LOVE that the student who receives this scarf will be getting not only my handknitting, but it will be knitted from yarn spun by Krista, and a wheel given to her by someone else still. I'll definitely attach a little card to the scarf explaining its generation.



Here's the start of it. To make it long enough and to ensure that it wouldn't be ruined if accidentally thrown into a washing machine, I added a second ball of Katia "bufalo" yarn, which is a machine-washable nylon ribbon yarn that has the texture of suede. The colors are a wonderful match and the play of textures has me fascinated enough to even be enjoying the garter stitch! I'm going to knit this piece until it's square, then turn it, log-cabin style, to knit from one side for most of the length of the scarf, then turn again at the end to make another square attached at the same 90 degree angle on the other end of the scarf. I got that idea from another scarf shown on the Red Scarf Project blog, though I'm doing mine slightly differently.

My plan is to make this, and hopefully more red scarves, my subway-knitting project from now until January, when it's time to send off the scarves. I have temporarily stopped reading on the subway because I don't dare get into a good book (will make working on diss very hard) and can't concentrate on work-related books. So it'll be great to have a constant, on-going, easy travel project.

Those of you who looked closely at the above picture will have noted a small tragedy I suffered lately. One of my favorite plastic straight needles broke. I loved using these purple needles with red tops for warshcloth knitting (it really made that PnC sing!), so I'm very sad now. :-( Although it's just as well to switch to circs for all future subway scarf knitting, since the cramping I incurred as a result of crushing my elbows to my side to keep the straight needles from hitting people was more than a little annoying. The tip that snapped off the needle rolled away to the far end of the car and is thus lost forever. *sniffle*.

In other news, I finished the second slipper for my MIL (I consider them finished even though they're not felted, because I'm going to felt them there, in Georgia, over xmas). There's no pic because it looks just like the first one (which is a good thing of course). Will start the pair for my FIL soon. Will not be tempted away by handspun. Will wait to be tempted away by handspun until the second pair of slippers is done, at least. Thank goodness both in-laws have relatively small feet. Anyway - the patterns. Most of you are familiar with the felted clogs(scroll down) by Bev Galeskas, available in a one-off pattern from Fiber Trends. The slippers I'm making for the in-laws are also by Bev Galeskas and are basically put together on the same principles as the clogs, but are shaped slightly differently. The patterns are in her book; I'm making the ballet slippers for my MIL, and the moccasins for my FIL. I'd made ballet slippers before for my grandma (but forgot to photograph them, along with the first pair of clogs I made), and they came out great. I haven't tried the moccasin-style slippers yet, but the look seemed just right for my FIL (that picture I linked to above makes them look rather awful, but I couldn't find a better picture, much less one from the actual book, where they look very pretty indeed). Also, since I plan to make still more clogs one of these days for myself and Hubbster, I just had to do something a little different with these. I use Paton's Classic Wool, as I've been doing for almost all my felting, because it's easy for me to get and I'm now very familiar with how it felts. I'm going to make mine and Hubbster's clogs out of wacky-striped leftovers, because I have TONS leftover. The yarn requirements for the Galeskas patterns are very generously calculated in my experience. Which is also a very good thing - I covet leftovers.

Actually, is it just me who feels this way about yarn leftovers? I wonder. Somehow, a whole package of yarn that's enough for a project can inspire some mixed feelings in me. Sure, I'm totally excited about the project(s) I might make out of it, and it's beautiful, and I love having enough. But, I also feel a wee bit guilty about each set of yarn that's enough for a whole project, but which is just sitting there instead of becoming a project. It seems to be calling to me, and more than a little disappointed in me for neglecting it. Leftovers, on the other hand, are what they are. They're content. Just as beautiful as the yarn was in a whole bag, the lone ball or ball and a half sits quietly, without expectations, taking up little space. Yet...its potential is infinite. Where a bag of yarn can really only become a sweater, and where two hanks of 190-yd sock yarn must be made into socks, not defiled by sneaking parts out of it for other purposes, a stray partial ball of sweater or sock yarn can become a part of any kind of knitted object whatsoever. The tiniest bits of yarn can be stranded or plied together, tied into a magic-ball, or possibly needle-felted. Made into pom-poms. Trim. Random bands of color on otherwise dull garments. I feel completely free to turn leftovers into anything I want, no matter how frivolous, silly, or unlikely to turn out well. There are no potential bad consequences, because this yarn was waste to begin with. It's like making something out of nothing.

Not that I actually do much of this. Most of my leftovers are still sitting in the closet, or, in the case of the really small leftovers, in my cool big triangle-shaped clear glass jar. Somehow, it makes me feel secure and warm and happy, knowing they're there, waiting to be turned into...anything.

Back to regularly scheduled programming for the day: work. Work, work, work. Yes, siree.

Joy in a Box: Yarn Porn

People, you’re not going to believe how good today is.

No, it’s not that I had a minor breakthrough with my chapter last night, although I did.

It’s not that after the breakthrough, I finally started the slippers for the in-laws’ xmas presents and finished the first one before going to bed.



It’s not that Hubbster bought the most yummy raspberry chai tea that we’ve been enjoying all day today.

It’s not that my advisor emailed me about that screwed-up funding situation that I mentioned before, to say that they’ve found a solution (not an ideal one, but at least we’ll be able to make the rent this spring).

It’s certainly not the weather:



No.

The thing that’s way better than you can possibly believe is what the mailman brought to my door today:



Krista from Pigeon Roof Knits sent me handspun, as a random act of kindness. Krista tells me that she got her spinning wheel this way, and so she’s passing on the love by sending me some of her gorgeous handspun. I was excited beyond words when she offered this, but seeing what actually came in the box left me literally stuttering and more than a little shaky from the sheer, amazing joy of it. I'm sure you guys can understand.

Naturally, since it’s raining like the dickens out there I can’t get good pictures. The colors actually came out a little better in the picture above, taken with a flash, than the macro ones below, which I manipulated to make as close as possible to the real thing. The real colors are actually somewhere in between.



This one is all lovely natural earthtones, which Hubbster has claimed as his own. Socks, I think?



This incredible piece of woolen lusciousness is calling my name. Nay, it is crooning to be made into delectable sockie-wockies for my very own self. Maybe this yarn will be the inspiration required to make me finally try socks with a cable or lace pattern? Any suggestions? On the other hand, Aline (new knitter from across the hall) says it’s way too beautiful to put on one’s feet. Perhaps a lacy scarf/stole??



Given the nature of this gift, I want to make the other three yarns into gifts for other people. This one is mohair-bamboo, and the picture doesn’t remotely capture its breathtaking color and shine. I think it would be lovely for Fair Isle trim on a hat or in a sweater, with something very plain for the background, to show off the color and texture?





I really like the idea of putting these two together, or maybe the teal with the luscious purple-mauve-lavender-rose-etc one above? The burgundy one is really a rich burgundy, not at all captured in the photo. The teal and tan is more accurate, although the tan is really more brownish than it looks here. Ideas?

Krista, you made my day, you rock my world, you will bring me untold hours of continued joy as I knit with all these lovely yarns -

Smorgasbord

Another smorgasbord of random bits today.
(if I number them, it makes it seem organized rather than rambling, right?)

1. It's been a long time since I posted a progress shot of the Fair Isle:



Note how I used foreshortening to make it look like much more progress than it actually is. The good news is, I absolutely can't tell where I switched to the slightly smaller needles.

2. Aija changed my life yesterday. I saw her post on weaving in ends as you go, and to my surprise found that it was a technique I hadn't seen before. Her pictures and explanations were so gloriously clear that I felt like I got the concept just from reading it. Later on, in the evening, I tried it out on the Fair Isle. And even though I was complicating things somewhat by trying it with more than one color in the same row and knitting Continental-style (Aija's demo in English-style), it was actually totally easy. I just held the end being woven in between my left thumb and ring finger, while arranging the left-hand working yarn as usual over and around the other three fingers of my left hand. My right hand was busy enough knitting the other color English-style, which is still new to me. I wove the end in behind whichever color I was knitting for every other stitch anyway. Worked fine! It's totally invisible from the right side, and totally unobstrusive from the wrong side, too!!



I had already been spit-felting the ends whenever possible, since as you can see this sweater has a LOT of color-changes. But every time you go from a two-color row to one of the bands of plain one-color knitting in a different color, I spit-felted one of the old colors to the new one, and let the other drop. Then I started a new, second color when the time came. Of course, I realized once I started focusing on the whole concept of ends last night that I could just as well spit-felt the "second old color" to the "second new color" and let it carry past those two tiny rows of plain stockinette in another color, and I wouldn't have any ends to weave in at all. But now that I've figured out the Aija method, it's too much fun not to do it! Chalk it up to good practice...I get sick of spit-felting anyway. (Has anyone else noticed that spit and wool don't smell very good mixed together? I find spit works much better for this purpose than water or soapy water, but the smell.)

3. Yesterday, Specs commented (and apparently blogless Hyunjee seconded):

I know *exactly* what you mean about the guilt. I think grad students always feel guilty about something. We're not reading enough, sleeping too much, not spending time with friends/significant others, not putting enough time into lesson plans, not speaking enough in class, etc.

One of the reasons I like knitting is because it gives me something to show for my "free time." Sure, I could have spent those thirty minutes scribbling notes for teaching tomorrow, but hey! I've got this neat short row heel to show for those 30 minutes instead!

Everyone needs a hobby to take them out of their job (or in our case, the entire rest of our lives), and I'm glad that mine is one that also makes beautiful things for people I love.

That really says it all. In three, neat lines. Why did it take me pages and pages to not quite say that?? Story of my life...

4. Cookie said: "If I tried to write as much as you, it wouldn't make any sense whatsoever and would change topic every 2-3 sentences. " Wait, that is how I write...oh. You know, I think my blog reads rather better than my current chapter draft. Frightening, isn't it? (PS: the way to get around this is to number each topic. Then it looks like you planned it that way. The problem is that my constantly changing topics have a tendency to get hopelessly entangled with one another...)

5. Bad news about Riga balzam. After all that talk, I completely caved in and went slightly out of my way today to stop by this wonderful little wine store with a terrific selection of imports (on W. 181st just before the corner of Cabrini, for those in the neighborhood). I had found Riga balzam there once before when I was desperate enough to buy it at $25 for the large bottle (listen, you can get it for a lot less in Ivanovo, okay). I couldn't find it on the shelf in its usual place today, but they're remodeling, so I asked the manager. Turns out they can't get it any more. A French company bought out Riga balzam and a really good Armenian cognac I also like, and they're not putting it back on the market until they've aged their entire stock 4-5 more years. This means, of course, that it will likely taste even better when it does come back...and cost several times as much, too. However, for those of you who live in or near cities with Russian or other Eastern European neighborhoods, I would think you'd still be able to find other kinds of balzam and, for that matter, Georgian and Armenian cognacs (which are often very good). Ask the oldest man who works in the store which one to buy. It's always the oldest man who knows best. Rule of thumb in a Russian store: if you want honest advice on what to buy, never ask anyone under 30, and be careful with any women under 65. And don't believe anyone who tells you something is "fresh today." If it doesn't look really fresh, it ain't. Anyway.

6. No, graduate school has not driven me into alcoholism. Yet.

7. Everybody go look at Hege's gorgeous Norwegian sweater in its natural habitat of fall foliage. Yum.

8. Okay, the cashmere/silk lace scarf could also look really, really good if I had made it really long (and narrower). That's okay - I like my cravat, too. But now I also need a long, thin one...>:->

Juggling Skeins

(Yak/Merino scarf from ages ago, finally modeled now that the weather is cooperating. Nice match with the coat, yes?)

[NB: There is much text and little knitting in the rest of this post. Feel free to skim or skip]

Hyunjee commented on yesterday's post:

OK, I'm coming out of lurkdom to ask how on earth you balance dissertation writing with knitting, blogging, being married, having friends, teaching, etc etc. I've read your very thoughtful pieces on the Mason-Dixon craze and on price fixing in the yarn industry, and now you are writing Blogger tutorials... and you have chapter % bars in your sidebar!? That move?! Maybe you should write a long post telling us underachieving diss writers how to keep all these balls up in the air, because it's pretty damn impressive. OK, back to writing... :)

(And Carrie seconded the query.)

My first reaction was laugh hysterically because I really do spend every waking second and most sleeping ones in a state of total panic about how many important things I'm not doing at any given moment (even when I'm working, I'm thinking about all the diss-related tasks I haven't done yet).

So what the @$^%$^@ am I doing wasting any time on a blog at all?? I have asked myself this question. And I have, indeed, been asked by others. My answer is that it's either this, or go completely raving mad. I'm only one untwisted strand of cobweb-weight yarn from madness as it is. After trying to find something to keep me sane for a long time, this blog is really doing it better than anything else. Just knitting alone didn't entirely cut it - dissertation-writing is so anti-social already, and my knitting was pretty anti-social, too, and I just needed to force myself into some human interaction.

What about my ("real"-life) friends, you ask?

I'm actually terrified to even tell some of my friends that I have this blog, because I'm scared they'll hate me for doing this instead of calling or visiting them. Not that I don't ever call my friends anymore, but I am WAY behind on all the things I want to be doing both to be a good friend and to enjoy being with my friends for my own sake.

But here's the thing. I've already got all kinds of guilt and self-pity and guilt and more guilt associated with my friends right now, so I'm mostly doing what little I can manage and hoping life will improve in this respect once this !#$%!#$% graduate program is over. And hoping they'll let me make it up to them. Hand-knit socks for EVERYBODY!!!!

The beauty about this blog, by contrast to the real-life friend situation, is that I have these lovely online friends (this means you) - almost none of whom I've even met, but people who read my blog, and/or whose blogs I read - who are there when I need them (via Bloglines =] ), but who won't kill me or even be particularly hurt if I just disappear without a word sometimes (not permanently). This is about the only kind of friendship I can handle right now.

Of course, I'd love nothing more than to talk for hours and hours with all my friends on a regular basis like I used to, but these days the very thought of calling up a friend or going out for coffee actually gives me stress headaches. I know that once I get somewhere so good, I won't be able to stop myself from having lovely long chats and...before I know it, whole days pass and no work gets done and I'm back to questioning why on earth I'm bothering with this dissertation.

Don't get me wrong, I still see my friends, and luckily they're very patient, understanding, and many of them are also in very similar stages with their own study and work, but at the moment that whole area of my life feels partly stressful, and often all-or-nothing. The blog is the opposite - I really have no expectations or consequences attached to it, but there's also lots of fun, and laughter, and shared interests and human interaction with really great people whom I respect and admire.

As for Hubbster...I'm very lucky there. He's also a grad student in the same field, so even though he's also stressed-out and swamped in work, we're physically in the same space almost all the time, we understand perfectly what the other is doing, why it's stressful, but also why it's still important and worth doing, and we can often make things easier on the other person. I am a few years ahead in the same program, so I've already taken the courses, the exams, and done the teaching that he's doing now (and yes, I give him my notes!). And he's a native speaker of Russian...([whisper:] I'm so lucky here I hate to admit it in case other dissertators want to kill me)...so I have NO translation issues. I do most of the busy work of it myself, but when I'm stumped, I don't have to waste hours with my pile of 17 Russian dictionaries (I really do own 17, I counted) - I just ask Hubbster. And he can do Russian-language online searches in the blink of an eye, while I spend 15 minutes hunting for the !%$%@#$ soft sign on the cyrillic keyboard...Since he even works in the same field, I can take an article or book that would, in the old days, have sucked up several long, painful hours of my time before I determined that it didn't even have what I was looking for (partly because most Russian academics are not nearly as orderly or predictable in argument structure...when they have an argument...as Western-trained historians) - now I can just hand it to Hubbster and say, "what do you think?" He'll happily skim the whole thing in 10 minutes (it's probably on his orals list anyway), tell me the one tidbit that's interesting, and tell me the rest is Marxist-Leninist babble that can safely be ignored. Talk about 'squeee....'!

I'm also lucky with Hubbster in the sense that when he needs attention, instead of sulking and feel ill-used (as I would do), he...sings. Makes funny noises of all kinds. Dances across the living room. And, if really necessary (like, when I'm listening to Cast-On while immersed in a bit of tricky shaping) - he'll actually come right up to me and jump up and down (or start loudly admiring the knitting in ways that hilariously make no sense). Unlike my sulking routine, his methods are so adorable that I inevitably end up giving him exactly the positive attention he craves without even having to think about it or try. He's a winner.

Beyond that...well, you should meet me, and see the way I talk. 90 mph. Although I can be very quiet and shy with people I don't know or when otherwise out of my element, most people who happen to come across me mid-stream with no previous warning just sort of stare and blink. I type and write the same way. So...even though I'm insanely slow about research, poorly organized, and DESPISE reading anything that I "have" to read and will go to insane, irrational measures to read something frivilously unrelated instead....I still usually manage to make up the lost time by typing, writing, and revising at warp speed (this is of course all predicated on the fact that I really do think about the subject of my writing while knitting, while staring into space, and while sleeping - often waking up with a revelation of some kind...there's no way this would be effective if I really blocked out work when I'm not obviously working).

I do have to revise everything I write for the diss a minimum of 20 times (no exaggeration for once) before it's even presentable, because of the typos, the un-thought-out bloopers, the deeply (nested (sentence (structure))) (for which I'm famous in certain circles), but I actually really like this process, so once I get that far I don't procrastinate much at all and if no one stopped me would often work round the clock . During the period leading up to that, though, I must have breaks where I think about something totally different or I just can't take the agony. So, lately, the blog serves really well for that. I'm on the computer anyway, so I just pop over and read my bloglines, or write a post, and usually by the time I've done that I've restored my mood and energy a bit, and I'm feeling guilty enough to go work again.

How would my friends feel if I called them in the middle of the day with no warning, asked them to be funny for 10 minutes, then hung up on them when I felt ready to work again???

Though it's REALLY bad when something I read on someone's blog is so exciting that I run over to my knitting book shelf and/or stash and start playing. It doesn't happen often, and I try to clamp down on the impulse, because it can be disastrous.

Hubbster would point out that when he's seized by one of these needing-a-break spells, he usually does something like the dishes, or making dinner, or sweeping the floor. To which I retort: who's keeping this family in hand-knitted socks, again? Okay, that's not entirely fair and I DO do my share of housework, but I tend to save it up until it's overwhelming, then do it all at once. Hubbster, too, is not blameless - he sneaks peaks at tank modeling sites while he's "working" - I've seen him!

Anyway, as you may have noticed, I type up my posts really fast and they are, therefore, often full of typos and spelling errors (not to mention rambling in nature...I try to put in lots of photos to distract you from the ramblingness). They don't often have many of those other pesky common writing mistakes, but that's from years of grading student papers - the usual kinds of mistakes leap out at me like giant, screaming, neon hammers that hit me on the head and make me feel all prissy and school-marmish.

Often, when I hit a brick wall in writing the diss (note the violent imagery that keeps popping up when writing or the diss is mentioned?), a little aimless blathering about knitting can be just the ticket to get the fingers moving again over the ol' keyboard (hmm, warm, wooly imagery...pictures of alpacas with big, brown eyes...yarn porn...just the words are soothing, aren't they?)

Of course, if I were teaching right now this blog wouldn't be here.

Last year, when I was teaching, I only vaguely knew there was such a thing as a knitting blog universe, and was reading only the Harlot (whose career I've been following since the old days of the e-mail KnitList, before she started blogging). I wasn't even knitting very much, and certainly not anything remotely complicated. Teaching has a tendency to take over my life and leave no energy left for anything else. In my experience, it's much easier (than writing and research) to know what you have to do, and there's just no way to procrastinate however much you might want to, but doing all of it takes everything you've got. I only barely got started on the writing in that whole last school year, whereas I think I can finish the diss completely in this school year, because I'm not teaching. Writing alone is exhausting creatively and intellectually, but it feels more to me like trying to force lots of abundant energies - including good stuff but also the adrenaline produced by stress, for example - into channels that will be productive, rather than letting them take over and result in spontaneous combustion. Sometimes this requires running some of the energy into alternative streams, just to keep it from exploding.

Also, the reason I came up with a way to avoid Blogger as much as possible (see post below) is that when I first started this blog and went through trying to upload images directly a few times, I had a moment when I thought, "either there's a better way to do this, or this blog dies tomorrow." So I thought of a better way, and now that technical side of blogging doesn't really take up any time, either. I have organized bookmarks for all the image hosting and counter sites, and my passwords are remembered by the computer...it's so easy these days to coordinate this stuff. Why can't my diss be this well-organized??

(Note to Carrie: it's usually much better in the evening than the middle of the day. Maybe that's why you've had better luck? The image uploader is much slower than any I've ever seen anywhere else [even years ago], and it often breaks down altogether around midday / early afternoon. And the connection to Blogger required to post or access files is often very flighty around the same time. I have a high-speed cable connection that never shows any trouble with any other sites at this same time. One would also hope that BloggerBeta is better. Spider says she doesn't have much trouble in uploading small images, anyway.)

As for the moving progress bars...well, you may have noticed that knitting bars move much faster than the diss bar?? I knit a little bit almost every night before bed, for sanity purposes, and I also knit whenever I'm on the phone, waiting for the computer to do something, traveling, walking, or talking to people. That's not really very much of my day (except for the part about waiting for the computer to do something), but it adds up. And, about once a week or so - more often when deadlines are far away, not at all once they start looming - I can put on some podcasts and a movie or some Sopranos, and just knit, knit, knit most of a day away. Sizzle got finished so fast because of a once-a-year, paid-for-by-parents weekend holiday that included long hours in the car and on the train, and a following weekend when I was sick and couldn't really sit in front of the computer. Now that my current chapter is revving up again, knitting progress has slowed back down to a dull buzz in the background, and my posts - you may have noticed - are both less frequent, and less interesting.

It also makes all the difference in the world to New Yorkers like ourselves not to go out. We pretty much stopped doing that because (a) we're on a very tight budget this year (b) we're on a tight time budget too, and we're homebodies who can only really relax at home by ourselves, so time "out" is tiring too, though in a different way, and (c) we're sick of being fleeced - movies and restaurants in New York have gotten to cost so many times more than their actual value that we just gave up. Not worth it. We'd love it if we could afford Carnegie Hall and Barge Music more often (read: at all, since Hubbster is no longer a lawyer), and there are certainly a few restaurants that I consider "worth it" (Caffe Dante, anyone?), but most of the places one tries out with friends or on special occasions turn out to be...if not disappointing, then certainly not worth a week's income.

Also, I love writing, and I love analyzing things. Mason-Dixon, the yarn market...19th-century Russian cultural history...whatever. It's just the way I think. I think this way about EVERYTHING. It just spills out of me wherever I go and whatever I do, so those long analytical-type posts really took nothing out of me. I can do that in MUCH less time than it takes me to, say, look up fussy details about a pattern, its designer and yarn and needles and explain clearly whatever weird half-assed modifications I made...that's why you hardly ever see that stuff on my blog. :-) And yes, speaking on behalf of the people who know me well...it's kind of freaky. You can't ask me about the simplest thing without getting a three-part argument with citations (ask my parents). Luckily, most of my friends are also academics, or at least academically-minded, and respond in kind.

I seem to be posting a lot about HTML, but only because no one else seems to be posting much in a quick-n-dirty way for bloggers who don't want to deal with technical crap, so it feels like a useful thing to do. I am new to blogging and have limited tolerance for technical crap myself, so I understand, but on the other hand, I have a very soft spot for HTML. I learned it back in the day when it was ten times simpler, and also when there was no such thing as software that did it all for you. We're talking circa 1994. Two of my best friends and I, in college, started a "'net'zine" (we coined the word independently at exactly the same time that a million other people coined the same term). Bits and pieces of it are actually still online,* though the images that once made it great are all in deep storage (can't be bothered to find, sort, and upload them). It was fun to do, got up to a whopping 1,000 or more subscribers, and succeeded admirably at fulfulling our goal of being "the dumb thing we did in college." When I first saw the first issue of knitty.com, way back when, it reminded me enormously of the tone and style of our old 'zine, except that knitty...actually had content. Huh. I knew we had forgotten something. Anyway. The one thing I can say for it now is that we spotted Bust and how cool it is way early (scroll down to the section labeled "Testimonial Diner," if you are so inclined), and I'm still a little nostalgic about those days sometimes. Hence the HTML-related posts.

You see how I can just ramble on, and on, and on? Effortless, I tell you.

But my life is actually completely crazy, and I'm a mess of psychosomatic illnesses because of the stress involved in the whole dissertation thing and my generally bad coping skills. It's only Hubbster, my closest friends, and knitting/blogging that get me through the day.

Most of all, I really miss fresh air and real, slow-cooked meals (you see why I'm so addicted to The Purloined Letter??). These days, we mostly eat out-of-the-freezer stuff from Trader Joe's, or anything likewise quick that isn't full of chemicals (note that we do not own a microwave), and we tend to eat it in front of the computer, or a book, or a draft print-out....

Er, anyway. There I went again. Thanks, Hyunjee, and Carrie, for coming out of lurk mode!

Note to all lurkers: remember to say hi once in a while! I like lurking, too, but I like comments even more!! Ura! Ura! Ura for comments!!

Anyway.

Nishanna, whom I met at the Harlot talk in Brooklyn, has issued a really interesting challenge to the knit-blogger community. I think it relates closely to an idea in the Harlot's latest post. I consider this post my response. The rest of you - go at it. I can't wait to read what you think.

Random picture (POSTED DIRECTLY FROM FLICKR!!! Thanks, guys!!!! [but why do they make it so labyrinthine?? PhotoBucket is so much better about that...]):



* Note that following this link, and the one on the sidebar to my Cast-On essay, will together give you my full name(s). Not that I mean to hide it or any other identifying factoids from any of you, but I'd really prefer for my full, google-able name in all its parts not to be associated with this blog, because when I'm on the job market, I'll get googled by hiring committees who probably aren't as informed as you all are about the therapeutic qualities of knitting, and will just conclude that I'm not "driven" enough to be hired. So please pretend you don't know my whole name or institutional affiliation. This gives the whole blog thing a fun cloak-n-dagger feel, doesn't it?