Weddings. Weddings everywhere.

Everyone I know is getting married right now. There are... um... 10 marriages involving people I'm close to that have happened within the last few months, or are happening within the *next* few months. And I think I forgot a couple*. The details of weddings are sort of boring to me, but I love the excitement that goes into all those details, because only crazy, stupid love could make someone care about flower colors and matching invitations. Dresses and suits are being tailored right this minute, wedding website bandwidth is being sapped, people are coming up to me, grabbing at my sleeve, and crying "Why didn't you TELL me that I said I was getting married that it meant I was ACTUALLY GETTING MARRIED!!!"

And I'm thrilled for them all. I certainly don't think one needs a life partner for anything except wheelbarrow races, but it's nice to see simply lovely humans find each other.

If only all these lovely humans were held as equal under the law. They're not. Some of the marriages will be holy in the couple's eyes, the eyes of the witnesses, and (*I* think) the eyes of God, but some states won't let them care for children or even protect them from outright discrimination. Why would they, if they're participating in the discrimination?

Today I was walking through the State Capitol building and ran into my clergyguy**, wearing his clerical collar and a gay pride flag. So far as I know, there wasn't an official protest today (all the relevant info is in the last two paragraphs of that article, by the way), but he was spending the day in the capitol, being visible and available to talk. This sort of approach is exactly why I love my church, and I wanted more than anything to stay, to make his lonely depressing day into a group calling for justice, but, you know. Life. As it was I didn't get home until almost 8 tonight, but I spent most of my workday in a dual state--half explaining equipment and calculating molarities, half in the Capitol, where I'd left my heart.
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My feelings change depending on my mood. On bad days, I feel like the world is going backwards--who in their right minds would pass legeslation that take away my rights***? On good days, the non-legally binding marriages happening all around me tell me that love, compassion, all the stuff that makes us human, is stronger than any bureaucracy.
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Tonight, I opened up my mailbox and found an odd-shaped envelope. Guess what? My cousin is getting married. I'm thrilled. Love wins.

*Not even taking into account late-breaking news!
**I always, always have to mentally erase the word "priest" lest J sprain his eye-muscles from rolling them too hard. Doesn't mean I know the right word. Pastor? Clergyman? Surely if I've gotten it wrong he'll help me out in the comments section.
***Like the right to bear arms and have control over the contents of my uterus, this is not a right I plan on using anytime soon; nevertheless, I like it very much where it is and would not like it to go away, thanks.

Not a swatch, I swear. It was hard to get the whole thing in the picture without it looking like a big messy blob.

It always takes me a few inches of knitting before I can remotely picture what the completed thing will look like. This sweater isn't quite there yet, but I like it so far.

Good stuff:

-The phenyl rings are working well and keep me amused. I like that I was able to make them widen and narrow to fit into the larger pattern.
-My fabric is pretty even, and I discovered that one or two good tugs was enough to smooth out the occasional puckered bit.
-I feel pretty good about my color choices.
-My spit splicing technique has vastly improved. I'm hiding the lumpy bits in the center steek.

Bad stuff:

-I'm a little worried that my gauge is too loose. I consciously tightened up some last night which I'm hoping will help, but I'm pretending that I don't need to measure it. Hopefully I'll get over that tonight, and rip if the situation is dire.
-My wrist has been bothering me. Sometimes it just hurts for no reason (or for a reason I forgot), but I'm a little concerned that the two-handed Fair Isle is the problem, because knitting Continental has bothered me before. I'm amending my technique by trying to only move my left hand and arm when I'm using the left-side yarn, which sort of works despite me being the least ambidextrous person in the world. If it keeps up I may need to slow down.

Neither here nor there:

-I think it's funny that Rebekkah's ribbing for the same sweater is almost an exact photographic negative of mine. It'll be neat to see the same motifs worked in really different colorways. My usual Sunday two-hour capoeira class (usually one hour of workout, one hour of music) turned into an all-day thing because there was a visiting mestre and contramestre (that's a level below mestre) in town.

3 hours of workout.

2.5 hour roda.

Ow.

I'm frankly surprised I can walk today, considering I cried in the shower last night because I was just that exhausted.

There's also this thing that was bothering me yesterday, which I can't really explain well, but of course I'll write for 10 pages trying to describe it anyways.

So, it takes an incredible amount of work to be at the top of one's discipline, if it's science or martial arts or becoming a famous actress or whatever. And I wonder, what was that person thinking when they were at a very low level? Because I think that affects the way they respond to the low level people once they *are* well known within that community.

For some people, doing really well is something they mostly do for themselves, by asking the question "How good can I be?" And if that person has the ability to be really, really good, it doesn't really change the way they respond to people whose best is not as good, whether due to lack of training or ability.

On the other hand, lots of people move up the ranks by looking at their equals and then figuring out ways to beat them. And in this mindset there's an element of superiority that comes in that colors interactions with anyone who isn't better in that discipline. I noticed when J was doing tae kwon do that the belt system often gave people an excuse to treat their "lessers" as unequals, which is one of the reasons I'm really glad our capoeira school doesn't have any kind of belt system. But that approach can still be present even if everyone isn't color-coded.

What does this have to do with anything? I had one really fun game in the roda with someone in my class who's way better than me, and who managed to look good without making me look bad. The whole game just got set up in a way that allowed both of us to laugh a lot, and he went slowly enough that I actually had a chance to learn something, and left feeling like I'd done my best. On the other hand, one of the guests seemed really into making everyone else look bad at the roda. And I don't know, maybe he's just so used to playing with a different caliber of player so that it's hard to even deal with a newbie, but he seemed really into embarrassing anyone who got into the roda with him, and it made the whole game less fun.

Anyways, it's just something for me to think about in situations where I'm the fairly knowledgable one. Things I forget I do until I do them:

I can't just write a normal grocery list (J does this too, but I did it when I lived on my own). I like putting silly rhymes in there, so I write down things like "stoatmeal" for "oatmeal". It makes me smile at the grocery store.

On synthesis days in the lab, I spend a lot of time working with thiol-modified compounds. Thiols are the things that make skunk spray what it is, and they add piquancy to the smell of burning tires and rotting eggs. It is almost unbelievable, the tiny amount of some of these chemicals that can knock you over--in one case, I put the teeniest tiniest drop of pure thiol into about a shotglass-worth of innocuous stuff. Even after removing this really dilute solution from its container and rinsing that container a few times, changing gloves, and picking up that container for a moment, the residue left on my gloves is STILL enough to knock me back. Even doing everything in the fume hood, things can get pretty bad.

So of course I sing a song to them. To the tune of "Tiny Bubbles".

"Stinky thiols, Do your job, Make me happy, Fa, lala, lala."

(Anyone who knows me is not surprised. I sing a lot, but I consider words to be an afterthought because I can't figure them out half the time anyways, so I substitute my own.) SFC Knitalong:
Finally after all my gabbling, a swatch:

I was simultaneously swatching for size, color, and pattern, so that's why things look a little strange here and there. One nice thing about colorwork is that changing the pattern doesn't change the gauge, really, so I could try a bunch of different things and just check my gauge when I was done. I'd mentioned previously that I was probably going to change the vertical peerie, and you can see those experiments here.

From left to right:

-A simple braid--a fairly common FI motif, but usually horizontal. I like braids and ropes in colorwork, but it didn't look quite as nice arranged vertically.
-A scrollwork thingy that was in a different sweater in the book. I played with making it the mirror image of itself back and forth as I went. I like this motif a lot, actually, although it doesn't really go with the fairly geometrical main motif. Into the "ideas for later" pile it goes.
-A sort of DNA helix. There was a very short bit of this in another sweater from the book, so I just extrapolated it to be a continuous pattern. I really wanted to like this one, but stranded knitting hates vertical lines, and there are those two stitches in the middle that just switch back and forth, and things got a little puckery there. Side note: I assumed I had the twists-per-base pair way off, but it's not too bad--apparently the average is 10.6 per one 360 degree rotation when unstrained, so 6 per half-twist isn't so insane.
-A diagram of a polyphenylene, which is an electrically conductive polymer. This is what I'll be using as the vertical peerie. It's got some angularity to complement the main motif, I can fit two of these into every 25-row big motif, I was able to make the width work with my stitch count, it's pretty obvious what it is to people who have studied chemistry, and in terms of dork-factor, it's most in line with my training, and least likely to get me in trouble arguing about, say, the number of base pairs per twist. I'm particularly pleased with how the little double bonds in the phenyl rings came out, and how easy it is to switch their locations as I go up the chain.
-My initials, which look sort of garbled because they run into the edge. This will be located where the side seam would be on a flat-knit piece. I like personalizing the stuff I know I'll be proud of.

I get the same gauge as the book sweater (30 stitches/4 inches) with size 3US needles, and I'll do the courrigated rib on size 2US. This means I don't have to buy any more needles. Phew.

While watching the Olympics last night, I futzed and futzed with the numbers, rearranging the motifs, adding and removing spaces between them until I got something I liked that was about 300 stitches around (not including the steek stitches). Now that that's settled, I'll be happily casting on, starting the ribbing, and throwing in an ungodly number of stitch markers this week. I've been spinning a fair amount lately.

These are just sample skeins, a few yards apiece, because I like trying things. From left to right, merino roving I got at WEBS when I visited a friend in Northampton over the holidays; a 3-ply composed of a white, brown, and blue strand; a 2-ply with a brown and blue strand, and my attempt at a single-ply, using the blue.

Lessons learned:

-I can't spin thick. I have a 3-ounce starter spindle (which is really heavy as spindles go, and heavy spindles tend to make thick yarn) and if I concentrate like crazy I can maintain a worsted weight 2-ply thickness. Most of the time, things are looking on the sport/fingering end of the scale. Not necessarily a bad thing, but as I'd like to use the yarn I'm spinning now with some Cascade 220 I already own, it's sort of a pain.

-I am, however, getting better at controlling what I'm making. I've been working on keeping my fingers out of the drafting zone, while maintaining the same yarn thickness. Up to this point, I was having a rough time doing that without the yarn thinning out to thread. As a result, my yarn is getting much more even, going faster, with less swearing.

-I love merino. Soooo soft. I've heard it's harder to spin with, because it's so silky and fine and the length of the fibers is pretty short, but I either have a fabulous sample or it suits me better than the other fibers I've worked with. The tendency for dramatic structural collapse is greater (I pull and pull and nothing happens, and all of a sudden the whole thing falls apart), but I'm being more careful with my fiber prep and that's helping.

-I got a gift certificate to a fiber place for Christmas, and bought some pretty reddish roving and another spindle. It's really pretty, it spins nice, but I don't like the hook at all. It had some burrs on the end I needed to sand off because it kept snagging the yarn, and it's made of fairly thin metal that seems to bend when I look at it funny (it looks like the metal from thin paper clips, actually). I'm really concerned it's going to break off before I spin any reasonable amount on it. If/when it does, I'll probably get a more sturdy hook at the hardware store and hope that I can screw it in without breaking the whole kit and caboodle. It's strange to me that the spindle I paid half the price for seems to be made of higher-quality materials. Sweaters from Camp Knitalong Day:

A sort of short entry today, at least, compared to my incredibly wordy entries so far.

So, these are the colors I'm using. I'm mid-swatch, I should have it done over the weekend. I haven't done much colorwork, but I take some pride in having very even stitches in my lace or cabled projects, so it's humbling when I can't count how many rows I've worked because half the stitches have disappeared due to tight floats.

The float situation is slowly improving, though, by my trying one thing for 2 or 3 rows, looking carefully to see how it works, then switching to something else for another few rows. Here's what seems to work best:

-Foreground color in the left hand, background in the right. I usually knit righty, and have a tendency to pull the yarn too much as I would on a piece of plain stockinette, and at the same time I can't for the life of me crank down my Continental tension. I'd rather have the foreground stitches stick out.

-Very consciously knitting the first stitch from a run of background color more loosely than I think I should. Stems from the problem described above. I keep thinking things are going to be WAY too big and sloppy, but it hasn't happened yet.

-If I have a more than 2-stitch stretch of background color, knitting it at my usual tension. It feels sort of strange to alternate knitting loosely and normally, but the fabric is much more even than when I knit loosely the whole time.

I think it will take me a while to gain some muscle memory with this switchy tension thing. Until then, knitting this project will be slow going. I'm not too worried about that, though. I love the colorway I picked out, so I'll enjoy seeing how it all come together. I'll just be sitting over here with my brain exploding from cuteness. Don't mind me.

(link via Mason-Dixon Knitting.)

Note to self: Block things on towels that are a different color than the thing being blocked, or else be patient and take pictures later.

Pattern is Egeblad, available in several places online. The version I worked from didn't have a picture up top, and I'd printed it out a year or so ago, so of course I'd totally forgotten what it looked like. I wouldn't have printed it out if I didn't like it, though, so I worked blindly from the prose directions, enjoying each pattern change as a surprise when I got to it. It was a good pattern, pretty straightforward, start to finish took about 3 weeks of not-too-intense work.

I knit the whole thing using the Magic Loop technique on the long size 0 circulars I used on the Mediterranean shawl. I like Magic Loop for starting small-diameter lace because there's fewer opportunities to mess up a yarnover at the beginning of a repeat, and because it's pretty obvious where the beginning of a round is without having markers sliding around. I also have less of a problem with laddering.

I used white laceweight Tencel that I bought on sale at a nearby yarn shop over the summer. Only 1 dollar! A steal. Tencel is nice stuff--it's pretty and shiny and gets sort of clear when it's wet. I'd definitely use it again.

The only thing left: figure out what to do with it. This is the second doily I've knit, and the second time I've knit one with no clear idea of what it's for. For now it's fine sitting on the dining room table. Whoops, forgot to post this one:

One of the lace scarves I made for Christmas. This one was for my aunt. I used Elann.com's alpaca/lace blend (again, aren't you glad I only have enough left for one scarf?), knit on size 7 needles. A non-garter stitch feather and fan variation. It came out nice.

One thing I tried with this scarf that didn't work occured while blocking. In another lace project, I ran some cotton thread through all the edges and gave it a pull, which kept everything nicely even, and meant I needed to use fewer pins while blocking. Thinking the same principle would work for a rectangle, I tried the same method for the scarf. However, I couldn't put the cotton thread under enough tension to make the long skinny rectangle stay square--it ended up as a sort of bowtie shape. Turned out it didn't need a heavy blocking; smoothing it out on the carpet and tugging everything into place by hand was more than enough. But it's a good future lesson, that the string trick only works with squareish shapes. Those of us who are scientifically-minded are no less inclined to moments of contemplation than the average person, it's just that our approach is often more, erm, scientific.

We do things, like, say, graph the qualities of male companions over time and extrapolate them to prove the niggling feeling that there's been a downward trend in their quality.

It's about the best thing ever. Go take a look.

There's another detail I'd like to point out, which is that the first thing I thought after I stopped laughing was "ooh, nice graphing software. I gotta stop using Excel, it really is starting to get in the way of the quality of my work."

Nerds recognize each other. I don't think I mentioned it, but I had a cold, turned bronchitis, turned sounds-like-a-frog, turned not-infectious-but-I-can't-stop-coughing illness for most of January. It's only in the last week that laying down at night doesn't make me feel like I'm going underwater.

I also got a set of magnetic poetry inspired by headlines from The Onion for Christmas. Added to our already-impressive collection, it's opened up whole new vistas of crude and amusing phrases.

At a moment when I was well and truly sick of this cold, I wrote a headline:

Which reads: "T coughs up portions of goddamn universe--diagnosed with horrible drowning inflatables, vows to "Blrrrgh"."

It made me feel a little better, to pretend I was on the cover of USA Today, with a larynx full of gunk and a doctor with an unspecific diagnosis.

It also felt good to curse out the gunk.