HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*breath*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!

*wipes tears, laughs some more* This is so embarrassing.

I'm really bad at knitting garter stitch.

Garter stitch, for the non-knitters, is typically the very, very first thing a new knitter ends up doing. This is because one performs the exact same motions, no matter if you're working on the right or wrong side of a piece.

Something about the way I hold my needles, though, means I have a heck of a time knitting into a stitch that would be purled if I was doing stockinette. If I don't go slowly and pay attention I end up knitting into the row below occasionally, which makes a big mess quickly.

My usual sneaks involve purling every row instead, which I have no problem with, and to avoid garter stitch lace, because if there's anything more obnoxious than knitting purls, it's knitting 3 purls together.

Which means, of course, that I found a garter-stitch lace piece that is so perfect and unique that I haven't found anything remotely similar. (And believe me, I tried swatching it in stockinette, or playing with the charts to make it all-purl garter stitch lace. That dog won't bark.)

To make this work, I'm playing a bit as I do the first few rows, to figure out how to prevent myself from screaming and shredding the lovely yarn. Working the stitches really close to the tips is helping, as is keeping my needles at a sharper angle--they usually form about a 150 degree angle, and to do the knit garter stich in a remotely consistent way, I'm decreasing that to less than 90. It's not natural, but I hope it'll eventually morph into something that is. I've got some contract knitting for the first time--a friend of mine totally fell in love with the Seuss hat in the last entry, but her 7 year old is going through a Strict Gender Rules phase and won't wear pink, so I'll be doing a similar one in blue, with a pompom instead of a flower on the top. A big pompom might look even sillier, like he just had an idea that exploded.

It shouldn't take long, but I'll enjoy it. Her son is funny, and deserves a joyful and silly hat. I don't know that I'd ever do something larger than a 5-10 hour project for pay, though, unless I needed to make a living at it. Kind of ironic since I'm willing to spend a ton of time on gifts for my family or a pile of maybe-a-cute-coldheaded-child-will-wander-by-or-maybe-I'll-ger-tired-of-looking-at-them-and-send-them-to-charity hats. I suppose I'd rather keep my hobby a hobby. (I insisted she didn't need to pay, incidentally--we work together and she's done me a lot of favors--but she insisted more strongly.) It's a time-of-year thing. The weather lately has been perfect for either running around outside or snuggling under a blanket of half finished sweater--the best kind of crisp fall day, every day.

Little time is left for thinking things through well enough to write them sensically.

Fall is a time for doing things, fitting in the last couple of things you'd meant to do during the summer before it gets too cold (J and I rode our bikes through the Arboretum through a flock of wild turkeys two weeks ago. This weekend we'll go see the Cultural Stereotype Dioramas, which is so wierd with its "Look! The French guy is eating BREAD!" that I love every second I'm not spending getting startled by 50 year old taxidermied cats.)

Years of starting school in September gives fall a beginning-of-the-year feel even though I'm not Jewish, and as such I tend to make more of the type of promises people usually make on January 1st, so I'm busier than usual trying to keep up with my own high standards.

I've been spending a little time working from home every evening, unless I work late. It makes me feel virtuous even if I should have been doing it all along.

I've also been getting my container plants ready for winter. The pepper plants I started fairly late from seed came *this* close to producing, but the fingernail-sized fruit fell off after a few days indoors to protect them from frost. The cukes have all been pulled, but I've been collecting seeds from the morning glories as the berries dry out so I can plant more next year.

And it's time to split my aloe plant again; if you live nearby and want a baby off of the most prolific aloe plant I've ever seen, leave a comment with your email and I'll get in touch soon. There's a dozen babies, most of them good sized, and I've literally run out of even casual acquaintances I can give them to. (The babies are prolific, too, which means the people I gave shoots to are now trying to give me back the grandchildren or even great-grandchildren of my plant.)

Yes, I've been knitting too. What a silly question.


Probably for the Dulaan project. I've lost all interest in socks, so I've been making hats on the bus, using up odds and ends. There's a third hat, but I need to rip most of it out because I messed around too much with the rate of decreases. I'll show that one once it's had its medicine.

Hat on the left is from a book called Hats On that I got from the library. I've been fighting against buying it for awhile, but after giving it a serious lookthrough, I've decided I should get it at some point. There are too many clever and well-thought-out designs not to.

Hat on the right I made up as I went along, starting with my Basic Hat Pattern and 90 stitches. Except for the rolled brim, I did the whole thing while at a mini-conference on Saturday. The doodle on the top isn't a proper pompom but a few uncut, secured loops I made with the yarn end. The overall effect--the fluorescent colors, the slight bowing out of the upper part of the hat due to my tighter Fair Isle gauge, the curvy flower on top--is positively Seussian. It's been sitting on my tv for a few days, keeping me cheerful.

I should write the pattern up, minimal as it is. There should be more goofy flowery hats in the world.

Oooh! Oooh! The Fair Isle part should be little flowers! Now I really have to write it up, as soon as I knit another one. The weekend before last, I got a copy of Knitting in the Old Way at a nearby yarn store. At 40$ it was super pricey, but as I know now, my brain was being addled by a virus that would have me fevery and full of snot by the end of the day, so I failed to notice just how much I was spending.

Halfway through reading it, I already know it's worth every penny.

The approach to the patterns is EXACTLY the way I like to think about things. The shaping, construction, and any unusual techniques are carefully and clearly described, but the sometimes cumbersome details of gauge and shaping are left as an exercise to the reader. There's no handholding, but nothing useful is left out.

And a good discussion of set in sleeve shaping! I always wanted to know more about how and why that sine-wave-looking sleeve cap worked.

Anyways, yeah. Worth the forty bucks. I'm likely to refer to it not only when I'm working up a sweater from scratch, but if I'm trying to make sense of a poorly-written pattern.

Also, by sitting with one leg out on the floor for about 20 minutes, I was able to logic my way through a twisty kick I was having a hard time figuring out with everyone looking at me in capoeira class. It's not complicated, it's just *twisty*.

Now I just need a tape of the music when I practice so I can get better at doing it in time. I freshened up the design on the front page a bit. No more lentil soup! I can barely photograph regular things and make them look clear and good, I don't know what I was thinking trying to do food photography.

I've been doing a lot of work-writing recently, but the first draft is now off my desk and I can get back to doing real work. Um, like writing here. (shh.)

J and I have gone to capoeira a few more times, and are enjoying it a lot. I'm better at singing, he's better at kicking, so we both have something to look forward to not stinking at.

So here's the way capoeira works if there's enough people (10 is probably a good number). You sit around in a circle and play music in 4/4 time that's heavy on the two-THREE-four, while two people dance/fight in the center of the circle. When they're done, they trade off with a musician, and then that person plays in the center with whoever their opponent picked.

All the instruments provide is the rhythm (the berimbau plays two notes, but it's mostly rhythm too). And everything except the berimbau just goes two-THREE-four. So that part is pretty easy. At the same time, there's constant call-and-response singing, between one and four bars each, which probably wouldn't be too bad except it's in Portuguese. I catch onto the tunes pretty quick anyhow.

J and I could only remember a couple of words apiece of the song we learned this week, but fortunately we remembered different words, and together we re-remembered the whole thing. It's too bad it's in Portuguese, since just about no outsider watching would have any idea what we're singing about, but it makes me laugh. The chorus that's sung together says "I can't wash my clothes becuase I have no soap." The soloist gets more specific, "No, no soap at all", "My brother Irmano doesn't have any soap either", "My clothes are still dirty" etc.

Singing a cheerful song about dirty clothes in Portuguese makes me smile. I think I'm going to choose that song to sing a lot. In the Naming of Who Will Play People You Know in a Movie game, a sea change has occurred.

Seth Green's long-time stronghold the role of J is slipping every time I watch an episode of Firefly, and he's losing to the nonspellable Alan Tudyk, the guy that plays Wash.

I love the character of Wash as much as it's possible to love a character that is almost exactly one's husband on his best days. I just finished watching all the episodes of Firefly yesterday, and it's a heck of a lot of fun. Go find it.

(No, I don't know who should play me. Actresses that make it far enough to have any name recognition are too cute and normal.)

Still speechless, and suddenly full of words.

But none of that matters, because I have the best t-shirt in the whole world:

I mirror-imaged the mirror image for your reading convenience.

I don't care if the picture does makes me look crosseyed (an affect from not looking into the camera reflection), it *doesn't* make me look like a middle-aged overweight Hispanic dude, making it comparitively accurate.

Dear Ironic Deity:

When I said "sometimes it's okay to be quiet", I didn't mean that the silence needed to be enforced by laryngitis.

Coughingly yours,
T