Have a wonderful, cookie-filled holiday season! Posting will be even more sporadic than usual over the next week or so.

(The cookies? I had way, way too much energy last weekend. My labmates were happy.) Well, it was a lovely birthday. Nice Indian dinner, nice time at a yarn shop with some friends, lots of emails. Interestingly, while I was eating my cereal yesterday morning and watching the dopey Today show, they mentioned that some sociologists are now defining adolescence as lasting until someone turns 26 (Googling isn't turning this number up, however, so I'm not sure which orifice they pulled it out of). So now I'm an adult by any standard, I guess, even though the day I graduated from college was pretty much the day I started living without any material dependence on my parents.

My birthday splurge was some black and yellow self-striping yarn. Bee feet! I was briefly planning on doing a pattern that would make the stripes zig-zag, but upon further thought, I realized that I'd rather have buzzing feet than ones that sighed "Good grief". Twenty-six years ago, Hartford Hospital had its all-time high number of babies born there in a week.

And twenty-six years ago, I was the fattest out of that all-time high number of babies born.

Twenty six years later, I'm old enough to have pleasant but numerically uninteresting birthdays. But that's all right. It's been a lovely day nonetheless. I finished the Felted Oven Mitts pattern. Hopefully I'll remember soon to actually connect it with the rest of the pattern section.

I looked around to see if there were any other patterns out there for an oven mitt, and I only saw one, done from the cuff up. So I feel like I've contributed something interesting to the knitting world.

I was worried they wouldn't work well, but I used them for the Great Cookie Baking of 2005 this weekend and it was way better than potholders, which slide around on me and burn my fingers half the time. I'm wearing my alpaca/silk sweater for the first time today. It came out so nice. The only problem is that I'm going to be using some strong acids in the lab today, so I'm going to have to either be very careful or freeze in the tank top I've got on underneath. I had to get to work early today, and so I didn't think through my wardrobe selections carefully. I've got brand new wool pants on too.

Pictures soon. I keep forgetting on the weekend, and at this time of year I'm mostly not home when there's natural light during the week.
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Crazy Science: why methanol makes people go blind. (one of an occasional series, which I should really consolidate at some point.)

This is why you should've taken organic chemistry.

So, when your body digests and metabolizes alcohols-- and not just the "fun" alcohols, mind: sugars have a lot of alcohol groups hanging off them and the same thing happens--the alcohol (an -OH group sticking off of a carbon) gets reduced to a ketone (a double bond between a carbon and oxygen).

Totally boring, right? What the hell does that even mean?

If you're digesting some of the fun alcohol, aka ethanol, nee HO-CH2-CH3. It gets turned into acetaldehyde, which is an irritant and liver-ruiner in large quantities, but which is pretty common in the atmosphere. It smells kind of nice, actually, like most ketones. If you're drinking your regular wine with dinner, the acetaldehyde that gets produced is processed like any other thing you put in your body.

But let's say, instead of your regular wine with dinner, you drank some absinthe. One of the components of absinthe is wormwood, and distilling spirits from wood can produce methanol, aka HO-CH3. This was that thing I breathed some of yesterday and felt silly for a while. The only thing missing is that one little carbon, but it makes a world of difference when you consume it and your body processes it and converts it to... formaldehyde. You know, the stuff that preserves organs for dissection. Organ preservation basically turns all the cells into a solid lump of polymer, and this is somewhat inconvenient if you're still trying to use them. The optic nerve is particularly sensitive to formaldehyde, and so a little nip of methanol here and there will degrade it pretty rapidly. Woohoo! Methanol fumes! They're all fun and games until someone goes blind.

(Fear not, gentle readers. I'll be all right in about 20 minutes.)

Also, knit blog readers: Do you remember a recent (within the last 1-3 months) rant somewhere about how rude and dismissive the phrase "not your grandma's knitting" is to previous generations of women who worked with their hands? I woke up this morning with a perfectly-formed essay on the topic, but about half the time this sort of thing happens to me, it means I read it somewhere else. If it does exist, I assume it exists in a well-read corner of Blogland, thus the question. Googling that phrase brought up so many obnoxious fluff articles that I about punched my screen, but not the deconstruction I was looking for.

Here's the progress on the cross-stitch so far, post-ripping out a big messed up part. There's still a few parts that are slightly off, but I know where the problems are and I've worked around them up to some slightly inconspicuous areas, where I can get everything back to normal without things being way lopsided.

Then I got kind of bored with it and started making some hats. I narrowly avoided finishing an entire small hat while J watched one of the Star Wars movies. I sat on the couch facing the tv and listened to what was going on, but registered my protest against George Lucas sucking by working a fairly complex multicolored pattern and not looking at the screen at all.

[Why don't I like George Lucas? I always fall asleep when I watch his movies, it's like he films them on tryptophan. I've noticed they're very... episodic, in that nothing happening on-screen seems to make an emotional impact on the characters. There's no buildup--at one point, Harrison Ford is shrinkwrapped for easy shipping, another time, he's playing with a huge monkey, or stepping into what looks like a big chasm but is actually a well-disguised bridge, or fighting those big white two-legged tank things. I can picture him doing all those things, but I don't know WHY, because before I figure it out he's off chilling with Billy Dee Williams. Basically, his movies make me feel slow and stupid because I never understand what's going on, so I fall asleep, so I REALLY don't know what's going on.]