I've been feeling bogged-down by a bunch of unfinished projects recently. One literally just needed a bit of finishing, but there were decisions to make with respect to the finishing, and even bringing it around to my knitting group for advice didn't get me going (after talking to them, I had SIX good ideas instead of three). The second was stalled for no particularly good reason, just out of sight I suppose. I realized on Friday that I could easily knock them both out this weekend, and wouldn't it be great to have them both cleared away, making room for something new and fun?

It would.

And as of dinner time tonight, I finished them both. One is drying on the floor. That counts to me, as the only remaining work is keeping the cat away from what she considers to be a very delicious sheepy smell.

Exhibit A:


Huntington Castle Pullover, from the Fall 2004 issue of Interweave Knits. The navy blue is Cascade 220, a commercial yarn, and the other colors are my handspun. I talked a bit about spinning for this back in September, and have been working on it in odd moments since. It's not a difficult knit; the trickiest part involved keeping the colorwork even as the floats are somewhat long and all in the same place (which for me often leads to them showing through on the front side). The only real modification I made was to add the inkle-woven band around the front, and to add a few rounds of crochet underneath so that I had something to attach the band to.

I'm really really happy with this sweater. It's a perfect weekend thing. I actually wore it yesterday before I sewed the band to it, so I know that it fits just right, though it was a little naked without the hood adornment.

Here's an in-progress picture of the woven band, for visual reference:


Exhibit B:

This one was actually a stashbusting exercise. Remember the Fair Isle? I had a LOT of yarn left over from that, because the yarn only came in nice big 4-ounce skeins. I probably could have knit a vest in a similar color scheme, but frankly the idea of more colorwork in those colors gave me the willies. So I decided on some nice, soothing lace instead.

The shape is adapted from a recently-published pattern in the spring issue of Spin Off last year. I added the lace in myself; The colors all sitting together reminded me of a rainy day, so I decided on a lace pattern that started with tiny drops and got bigger until there were big fat drops along the bottom of the shawl would be neat (and I picked the picot edge because I thought it looked a bit like drops dangling from the edge of the shawl). I'm pretty happy with how it came out. Except for the white, I just knit each color until I ran out of it, so now all I have left of Fair Isle sweater yarn is a bit of white and the green, which didn't really go with what I was trying to do here. Quick, effective stashbusting.

Obtained from the library this afternoon, in one fell swoop:
Surface Chemistry
Physical Chemistry of Surfaces
Adsorption by Powders and Porous Solids
Fundamentals of Surface and Thin Film Analysis

For some reason, I can't stop looking at the stack on my desk and thinking "It's a cookbook!"

Trying to figure out what to do with that little thought-fart. I'm sure it could go somewhere amusing.

(What I was doing before I was trying to figure out how to cook using those books was put together a curriculum. I'm familiar with a good percentage of what's in the books already; I'm more paying attention to the way the material is structured because I'm finding myself jumping around too much in my initial notes.)

A. calls me and asks me to look at a piece of equipment that is giving her unreliable data. I'm 85% sure of the problem, but I go downstairs anyway because it's hard to diagnose over the phone. I sit down, watch the zigzagging live readout of data, and trace my finger around on the cover of the detector.

"Thought so. Put your finger here. Feel that fluttery vibration? The polarizer is flicking back and forth between two positions. It happens once in a while--I think there's a minor bug somewhere in the program. Restarting everything will only take about 3 minutes and should take care of it."

We shut off the instrument and the computer, and when we restart, the live readout is smooth, and the cover of the detector is still. Time for data.
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I run a tutorial to get people set up culturing cells for experiments. We make up media, thaw the frozen-back cells, clean the area we'll be working in. The last thing we do before putting our hands in the hood is to spray our gloves with 70% ethanol. The alcohol is chilly, even through gloves.

We add the cells and media to a flask, and open the incubator to put the cells inside. Researchers new to biology often comment on the smell of the incubators--a smell my nose once interpreted as both natural and chemical, food and soil and synthesized antibiotics. It's the way it's supposed to smell, so my brain now idly notes the smell as being "good" while taking care of all the higher-level tasks of explanation. The smell of media gone bad is impossible to ignore in such a way. I once came upon some media that had gone off, and the other person in the lab and I spent an amusing 10 minutes coming up with ways to describe the smell as we located the source (uncleaned vacuum aspirator trap) and proceeded to bleach the crap out of the thing.

"This... this is bad."

"It's like week-old sushi."

"It's like week-old sushi, which was eaten by a cow, who died of food poisoning and was in turn left in the sun for a week."

"It's like matzo ball soup made by the worst bubbie EVER."

"It's like molds have gained sentience and are fighting back."
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B. is getting an error on another piece of equipment. There are two detectors on this instrument, both under vacuum, behind a thick steel cover. Unseeable, untouchable. I realize that a previous user has changed the detector settings because of the sound of the wrong detector sliding into place. Detector B moves with a lower-frequency whirr.
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There is a sensual* aspect to working in the sciences that I think gets ignored too often. Nowadays people often think of science as something that is entirely accomplished by people staring at computer screens--something a powerful brain can do without any corporeal assistance. And while there are fields where that is the case, in most areas of the sciences, using all of the senses it's safe to use will give you a more complete picture of what's going on. ("Safe to use?" There are many older reference books that, when describing the physical properties of chemicals, include taste. Many of those chemicals are now known carcinogens or teratogens. What we lose as an identification tool, we gain in lifespan.)

I think viewing science as a thing that requires people to sit back and think and not explore, physically, from every angle, is a part of what makes science seem unappealing to so many people. The expectation for many is that all the answers are in a book, and that scientists sit around with their giant brains, reading all the time, and figuring stuff out that regular folks never could. This makes science at once seem totally boring and totally inaccessible, so why wouldn't the public's understanding and interest in basic science slide down, as it does?

In a way, experiencing science in this way, engaging my senses to understand everything as thoroughly as possible, is a bit of a return to childhood. Adults aren't supposed to sniff anything unless it's food, look at the underside of anything unless there's a price sticker there, or touch anything unless it's in the way of what they need to do. It's *fun*, to be able to identify a problem by knowing the usual voices of the instruments in the lab, and I think that's something that would appeal to more people than the usual view of scientists.

What do you enjoy about what you do?

*That's "sensual" as in "of the senses", not sensual in a sexual way, though at the same time it can be pleasant.