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NanoPants Dance
4/29/05
I'm out of town until late next week. No parties.

In the meantime, continue to amuse yourself with this. (link via comments section in The Knitting Curmudgeon. Also, my personal stamp of approval is on all the sites in my links section. So go to it!

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4/28/05
The poster's just about done--I finished it at lunchtime and sent it to my boss to look over and send back corrections. It's good, I think. I hope the clinicians understand me when I talk.

So since lunchtime I've been doing some very mild puttering with font size, finding an extra reference or two, laughing at lazy cats, that sort of thing.

Also, I wrote up the first of what will probably be an occasional series of knitting tutorials, which isn't fully linked up yet but'll be there soon. Fixing Mistakes, Part 1: Lace.

And with that, to Florida. I'll be back later next week.

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4/27/05


Our garden at time 0, 10 days ago, planted with seeds from peppers, morning glories, daisies, pansies, and some accidental birdseed I've since weeded out. 10 day old gardening pictures means I'm way behind, I know--the morning glories came up after only 3 days, the daisy seeds are germanating all over the place, the lavender from last year that was near-death all winter suddenly has new sprigs, and since this picture I've started some peas. No peppers have sprouted yet, though the package said it can take up to 3 weeks, so I hope they'll behave this time around. If not, I'll buy seedlings. I'm not too proud.

The things in the picture that are already green? On the far left, that's the Aloe That Ate Manhattan, in a brand new pot. I got tired of seeing it in the green flowerbox. Next to that is J's blackberry cane, an experiment I was very skeptical about at first, when he bought this sad little brown twig. But it already has flower buds and will probably whoop all my veggies because J effortlessly whoops me at EVERYTHING. The small brownish-green thing at the right is the lavender, which I bought last year and seems to like its new pot very much.
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I tried to arrange these so the squirrel would be holding a peanut or acorn so I could call them the Squirrel Nut Slippers, but the acorn was lumpy and it's hard enough to tell that they're squirrels anyway without confusing the matter.

These got knit in two days, then were felted and sent to my mom with a get well care package of books, a CD, and a video. I used my usual slipper pattern, which is the same as my usual sock pattern with a nod to changing gauge and the way felting shrinks more in length than width. The duplicate-stitched squirrel is in a wonderful Scandanavian sweater booklet from 1946 I got from a friend of my mom's. I've been planning to make some kind of knitwear for my mom's dog that would incorporate the squirrels for a while. I hope Feebs doesn't mind that mom got them first (mom's doing well, by the way, those of you who are playing at home).
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That shawl/tablecloth I was trying to avoid, which resists all attempts at photography. The whole thing's taken from A Gathering Of Lace, but I'm mixing patterns. I realized that once the center medallion's done, it'll be perfect travel and conference knitting because it's easy, will take forever, and is on wooden needles so the TSA people won't hassle me. Once I realized this, not starting it wasn't possible.

It's bus knitting right now, but it's strange because it rapidly puts me in a meditative place that isn't real conducive to remembering my stop is coming up. I may just have to work out a knit mandala now. Only I won't undo it all at the end. East Meets West, I suppose.

I noticed that after Knitty put up a lace pattern specifically designed for people new to lace, the livejournal knitting community suddenly lit up with fear of the scary holes. And because it's painfully easy to get me into Lecturing Teacher Mode, I took a bunch of pictures of myself fixing lace mistakes on this the other night, and I'll put up a tutorial sometime soonish. At least a week, though. Need to finish getting ready for the conference.

Anyone know anything fun to do in Fort Lauderdale? I didn't think so.

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4/22/05
A theory: The last 3 songs of the first half of White Album can, taken together, refute that whole silly "John's the rocker/ Paul's the crooner" thing.

For those of you playing at home, the three songs are "Why don't we do it in the road", which rocks and is naughty and is sung by Paul, "I Will", which is just the sweetest fluffiest tune, again sung by Paul, and really hilarious back-to-back with "Why don't we do it in the road?": "No one will be watching us, why don't we do it in the road?" vs. "I will wait a lonely lifetime, but I'll always feel the same." The last song is "Julia", which if I'm really listening to it, will always make me cry, and is sung by John.

(I brought my CDs into work today because the data analysis I'm doing is very boring and repetitive, so I may as well sing harmony as I do it.)

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4/21/05
Anne talked today about the poor songwriting that went into the state song of New Mexico, where she grew up. This led me on a google wander to find out about other state songs, which leads to a ghastly array of tunes chosen only because they have the name of the state in the title. A tale of dance-floor betrayal? Or how about some minstrelsy? It's all here.

Connecticut, which has the misfortune of being a state with a hard-to-rhyme name, many syllables, and a thorough lack of romance, decided to go with "Yankee Doodle", as insipid and silly a song as it's possible to write. How many more Connecticut schoolchildren need to be kept up at night tortured with the question "Why would a Doodle name a hat after pasta?" Although, at the moment I can forgive my home state all transgressions. The first state to legalize gay civil unions without the courts forcing them to is a nice place to be from at the moment.

But the one that takes the cake is the Jersey state song, with what is possibly the least poetic title ever devised: "I'm From New Jersey". The song itself doesn't read so terribly, although Hoboken's heart-stealing powers are disputable. It's just the title's frankness that gives me pause. No "Fair New Jersey", not "Hail! New Jersey!" or "I love New Jersey".

Not even going into town with the featherless hat Not Yet Known as Macaroni, done while riding on a pony.

It's an altogether more practical lot that lives in the Garden State, I think.


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4/20/05
Best town name occasionally mentioned on the local news: Pardeeville.

(I'm going to a conference the week after next, and working my tuchus off to crunch all the data I've created before I go. Things'll be lightish for a bit, though I do have pictures in the digicam that will come up here soon.)


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4/18/05
Growing up as I did in a house where both me and my mom (and her mom and HER mom) had a variety of intestinal problems, we'd talk about them, and laugh at our misbehaving colons.

Which leads to my loving a good funny poop story.

(Warning: the above link leads to a funny poop story, that talks a lot about poop. Poop, poop, poop.)

J just can't handle any of this talk. I was reading that story, collapsing on the desk with tears of laughter, and he read over my shoulder for about 10 seconds before running away in horror.

In all other situations we have nearly identical senses of humor. I suppose we can't have everything.

(Don't worry--no poop tomorrow. Only eye-pleasing pictures.)


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4/14/05
We have tickets to see David Sedaris this weekend. I'm wicked excited.

I wonder what it's like to be a rockstar to NPR-listening types. Women in glasses and tasteful shoes asking you to sign their bodies, guys in tweedy jackets shouting "whoo"! What a fun yet off-kilter life to lead.


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4/12/05
Words and phrases that sound dirty, but aren't.


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4/11/05
If Da Vinci couldn't draw, lived in the modern day, and watched Invader Zim, he might have doodled something that looked a little like this:



I'm still working on the Mediterranean Shawl. The edging's a little over half done, which is a ton of progress in terms of knitting hours, but doesn't look like much of anything because the whole thing's squished up on the needle.

But I'm in the home stretch on it. I'm on the last major motif. It might be done by June. And then I'll be done with blindingly small lace! Whoohoo!

Of course, to celebrate, I've started planning another shawl, from the same book as the Mediterranean with small adjustments. But this one would be able to do double-duty as a fancy tablecloth, and it would be on larger needles so it'd go faster, and 3/4 of it would be mindless knitting, and it would use up all my leftover laceweight yarn.

Rationalize much, T?

J's started to worry a little. He sees the red shawl I made sitting in the closet, the gray shawl that's taken 8 months so far, and the doodling notes and gauge calculations for the ramping-up obsession, and asks gently if all that work is worth it for something I hardly wear. And he's right. It's probably not. I wear my hats and sweaters and socks all the time, but the shawl only comes out when I'm in the mood to overdress.

Fortunately, I'm able to do non-subsistence knitting. I don't need to face the choice of pretty knitting or freezing. I can keep myself warm, or make a robot, or make something uselessly pretty, or work through a technical challenge. Or do all of those at once. Or none.

I'm going to be out of town a lot next month. I think a mindless circular lace shawl will be the perfect thing to bring along.


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4/8/05
(Backstory: In 1998, J and I worked on Star Island, a tiny island off the coast of New Hampshire that spends 3/4 of the year run exclusively by seagulls, and the other 1/4 catering to mostly Unitarian religious retreats. Honestly, I don't really know what the conferees get up to, I only ever knew what they ate, because I was on the waitstaff. People who work there are known as Pelicans, a cutesy term that covers over unpaid overtime and three or four days off over an entire summer, and one of about a million Stepford Wives-ish injokes you need to learn to get your job done. Sorry, is my bitterness showing? Anyhow, for some reason lots of people think this is the best place EVER. Yankee magazine did an article on it a while back calling being a Pel "the best summer job in New England".)

I was thoroughly dissapointed to find that there's not a single Google hit for the search string "Star Island Sucks". So here's one, just in case someone's looking.

There's a mailing list for Pelicans that I ended up on one point. Most of the time it's completely dead, but some recent shakeups in management have led to some discussions about how to improve the Pel/management relations.

Thing is, I'm reading a bunch of people's responses, talking about how there's no better job , and the friends they made with last a lifetime, blah blah blah, and I'm having a hard time believing that I spent a summer on the same unhygenic slavedriving guano-spattered rock as these people. We live on such different planets that I can't even form a coherent response for them. So I'm going to do some vitriol-spewing. Fear not--on Monday there will be a funny Gir picture for you to enjoy.

In every way, the time I spent on Star was the least professional work experience I've ever had. Most people I worked with worked hungover most days, a pretty incredible number considering there was 6 miles of ocean between us and the nearest liquor store. The average work day was about 10 hours (3 hours at breakfast, 3 for lunch, 4 for dinner), 14 hours on Saturdays. You'd get 6 total days off for the entire summer if you worked for 10 weeks. The pay was about minimum wage--assuming 40 hour work weeks.

There were one or two substitute workers for the entire island, somewhere between 75 and 100 people. This meant that when half the island got the runs from, um, something, like the fact that all the dishes were washed with cistern water we were explicitly told was unfit for human consumption, I fed people in between hourly trips to the bathroom, which in any other restaurant would be enough to either get me fired or get the restaurant reported to the Health Department. And then I got dehydrated and fainted because we didn't have enough potable water at the time.

I was one of a small handful of people who were on the island for the first time. The first timers were there to work, and were professional if not friendly. The lifers--the kids who'd been coming for a week every summer as a tourist since childhood--were consistently treated better, with better lodging, more offers of rehiring, and more promotion opportunities. Those were also the kids most likely to treat the job like vacation, leaving at the height of a shift to go smoke on the loading dock, dropping food on the gritty floor and putting it back on a platter, not bothering to even pretend to do whatever the manager (another college-aged kid, another lifer) was telling them to do.

And the traditions! Oh, where would we be without the traditions! There are all kinds of hilarious scripts to be followed every week, such as singing wake-up music on early Saturday mornings, performing like trained monkeys at a talent show for the conferees, or being shoved off a pier into North Atlantic water when you can't swim. The same script gets played every week, beginning late Saturday afternoon as a new conference arrives and ending early the next Saturday, and rewinding AGAIN the beginning of every summer. Every day I calculated the maximum number of hours I could sleep, to get away from the weight of this cheerful repetition, the long hours, and the 3 weeks of diarrhea.

I didn't deal with the situation too well. My response entailed not hiding my revulsion of the people I worked with and telling people when they were doing things wrong, since I was nearly the only member of the waitstaff with any food service experience.

I did start seeing J that summer. That's something. But he could tell you I spent most of our time together encouraging him to come take a nap with me. And the island is a very pretty place, so long as you don't get on a seagull's bad side. But, man. I wish I knew what crack the rest of that mailing list's smoking. They want to know how to make the Pels happy? My response is: they shouldn't BE happy. It's not a vacation. It's a JOB. The people that got drunk every night and lost count of makeout partners at the orgy had a FABULOUS summer. But they didn't earn their pathetic pay.


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4/7/05

A hat in the same color as my climbing mitts, so I can match if I want to. The pattern is here. It's been there for awhile, but I wrote it out from memory (I'd made a different version for one of my stepbrothers for Christmas) and found that the decreases were kind of ugly, so I rewrote the last couple of rows.

I have enough yarn left in those colors to do some kind of scarf, but I'll have to percolate it for awhile. Maybe when it gets too warm to work on anything big.


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4/6/05
I like climbing. I like it a lot. I keep trying to write about it, but it's hard to describe it without explaining a whole lot of terminology, and explaining every reach of my arm just sucks out all the love. Describing knitting's easier, somehow. Probably because it comes down to looking at pretty pictures.

To people who haven't climbed or only tried it once or twice, it looks like a sport for the terminally muscular. There was a small cluster of college-aged guys there last night, big guys, lacrosse-player looking, showing off how many chinups they could do. But they couldn't climb worth a damn. I kept hearing them complaining that you must have to be REALLY huge to do certain moves--a bunch of which I can do, and I still can't manage a single pull up. (If they'd been saying this in a dejected way, or not swearing every other word, I might've shown them that the move was much easier if their feet were oriented differently, but it was more fun to rapidly swing up to the top in their presence and walk away. Maybe getting showed up by the nerd'll have some effect.)

Climbing involves a lot more thinking than you'd see at first. The dependence of footholds on a well-located center of gravity, the anisotropic surety of a lopsided crimp, or making sure you'll still have enough muscle strength to make that last difficult move are all learned behaviors. There's this amazing, slightly built woman I see from time to time that makes every move look as natural and composed as a solo violinist. She's got such a great feel for foot placement that she always manages to find the path of least resistance. I always climb better after watching her warm up on a route that's *just* within my reach.

And speaking of routes that are just within my reach, there's a bouldering problem a friendly engineering acquaintance put up a few weeks back that I think about as I fall asleep sometimes. I don't think I've ever put so much thought into a climb. Every move is barely within my technical and strength abilities, so when I approach it, I know I need to be perfectly warmed up and completely in the moment, because a quarter-inch change in foot placement and I'm in barn door territory. Last week I was able to touch the bottom of the last handhold. This week I was able to get two half-knuckles in, but wasn't remotely solid. On another climb, I would probably shrug my shoulders and say "Good enough", but at this point, a technicality just isn't good enough. It's a ridiculously Vygotskian problem for me, so perfectly suited to what I can just barely do that I can't stop trying it until it's done.


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4/1/05
Water's been found on Mars!


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