kmkat and her kneedles

Delicate woolen organs.

Sent to me by #2 son. I trained him right.

Monday morning stumbling.

Stumbling Upon, that is. StumbleUpon is my new favorite time-waster. I limit myself to stumbling onto only a few websites per day, lest I waste more time than usual too much time.

Here is today's best find: Oooms.

Need a flash drive?

Before you rush over there to buy one, be warned that a 512MB one costs €70. Even if the dollar weren't in the toilet that would be a lot of money for a flash drive.

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Fans of Office Space might find this one amusing:

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These are just weird.

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Looking for a present for that aggravating relative or coworker? Look no further...

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Thus endeth our shopping session for today. Go forth and consume stumble!

Duh.

 

And I thought I was so smart.

Wool warrior.

That's what this shirt says : Wool Warrior / A good day to dye.

In Klingon.

Available here. (Scroll down to the "Future languages" choice.) Thanks to knitnzu for the link.

It's business time.

Thanks to eurolush for the link.

So what am I, chopped liver?

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

I suppose the upside is less risk of identity theft.

* * * * *

Tornadoes and severe weather in MN and WI today, but not right here. I took a nap in the afternoon  (yay! naps!) and woke enough to hear rain and maybe some wind, but went back to sleep. The power went off for about half an hour at about 6 pm. And that was that.

#2 son called at about 6:30 to tell me he was fine. Apparently there were tornado warnings for the Eau Claire area, where he and his girlfriend are visiting her mother for the weekend. I was grateful for his thoughtfulness, although I had no idea he was in peril.

Smokey called shortly after from work to tell me about the tornado that touched down in Hugo, a far-flung northern suburb of St. Paul; a 2-year-old boy was killed, his older brother was critically injured, and 20 people were unaccounted for. Yikes.

#1 son is in Chillicothe, Illinois for an outdoor rock festival that he is attending with a very good friend from college whose family lives there. Chillicothe is in northwestern Illinois, which may be in the path of the storms. But I am NOT a worrier, so I am NOT worrying about him. He is driving his friend back to law school in St. Louis tomorrow so I won't see him again until Tuesday.

So I am doing what all good knitters do when their families abandon them.

• Give thanks to the Knitting Goddesses.
• Have a beer.
• Knit while listening to an audio book.
• Knit while watching a DVD.
• Knit while meditating on my good fortune.
• Eat chocolate without sharing.
• Read knitting blogs.
• Finish the current pair of socks on OTN.
• Think about what to cast on next.
• Do NOT make dinner.
• Compare stash yarn to patterns; ponder same.
• Wind yarn into a delightful center-pull ball (Brooks Farm Acero, mmmmmm!)(The second link is to Ravelry; the color I have is the same as the second skein on the left, the one in mimknits' stash)(I have two skeins of that color and one of a similar color that has some deep blue in it; all acquired from Norma when she destashed at New Year's)(I am now all a-quiver to cast for something from this gorgeous stuff, never mind the 3 or 4 other projects currently OTN.)

I think I may need some input on a project I am contemplating. Pictures and words tomorrow. If I get out of bed soon enough :-)

Ready to start your Tuesday with a smile?

First up, some Cute Overload. You will find some interspecies snorgling -- kitties, puppies, bunnies. Cuteness abounding.

* * * * *

Next.

Last week our senior dog, Bear, had surgery to remove a tumor on her right hind leg. I was worried about her; she is something like 13 years old and the vet said they would do the surgery under general anesthesia. I dreamed about it the night before, and in my dream she died.

Happily, I have never had any semblance of foreknowledge nor ESP nor any of that woo-woo stuff. She came through the surgery with flying colors and continues to do fine. Amazingly, she seems to be walking better, trotting up and down the stairs much more easily than before. The incision looks great, even though we were woefully negligent in applying triple antibiotic ointment to it. Giving her the oral antibiotics 2x/day? Forget it; we are lame.

But we noticed that she was licking the incision on her first day home, and we were worried she might try to chew out the stitches. So we did what the vet recommended: we put shorts on her. Backwards, to allow for the plumy tail.

Needless to say, she didn't wear them long. I found them discarded under her table in my office, where she spends much of her nap time.

But she was one stylish -- albeit silly -- dog for a short while.

I is for icefishing.

Not.

 

Admit it, I had ya goin' there for a second, didn't I?

But while we are on the subject of ice, how about this?

As that picture loaded I expected the captions to mention the ice auger sticking out of the kitty's right ear. But, no, apparently the frozn harbls were funnier.

Your help is requested.

Plz to voot fer mah fren Kthrn, hoo mad thiz. She sez,"And if you recognize a Quantum Weather Butterfly, well, so did I, and that's why I put that caption on it."

Her entry was on page 6 when I voted (10:49 am CDT, Wednesday, 4/30/08) but will undoubtedly have drifted backward by this time.

Thank you for your support.

H is for hijinks.

Lest you think we accountants do nothing but crunch numbers and whine about it, let me show you a few candid shots I took this year.

What's going on here?

Every night about 8:30 it becomes problematic to walk anywhere on the outer perimeter hallway because of Jim's and Chris's nightly putting contest.

Too much snow on the ground in March to play outdoors, but our carpet is green. That's close enough for these two. They putt all the way around the office, then up and down the center hall. Every night. 8:30. If they ever start practicing their chip shots I'm outta here.

One Sunday afternoon they lured Pat into their game.

Knowing the first two, I suspect the newcomer got fleeced. They are killers, those two.

Actually, we are all competitive, albeit in some unexpected ways.

Get ready...

Get set...

Go!

The fingers fly. The youngsters use Excel on their computers with the 10-key attachment...

while a couple  of the experienced hands rely on their faithful ol' 10-keys.

I hate entering numbers with decimal points. Who cares about the pennies? They just slow me down. Unbeknownst to the youngsters, though, we old folks know that we can set our ten-key to insert the decimal point without that extra keystroke. In the words of the poet: Old age and treachery beat youth and skill every time.

Youth and advanced technology prevailed here, though. That's the winner (of a $50 gift card!) in the white sweater and ponytail.

Meanwhile, the nightly drama of the putting contest continues. Er...

WTF? Where are they?

And Bill takes it home. Baby needs gets new shoes.

* * * * *

Today is my last day and I am floating a couple inches above the floor. I love what I do, and I love being done.

* * * * *

If anyone is counting, yeah, I skipped G. I'll try to catch up later. TTFN, folks!

Accounting is like knitting, only different.

I've been thinking about what I do at work in terms of something La Harlot said the other night, and I thought I'd share it with you. Just in case you have always wondered exactly what it is that I do.

Preparing 1040s is not terribly difficult. They are remarkably similar -- W-2 wages, some interest, some dividends, some stock sales, a few K-1s (reporting their share of the income and expenses from a partnership), maybe a pension or some stock options, deduct some real estate taxes and mortgage interest and contributions, add up how much they have already paid in withholding and/or quarterly estimate payments, and wham!bam!thankyoumam! it's done. Of course, those are the easy-peasey ones; entrepeneurs tend to have much more complicated returns. Expatriates' and really rich people's returns have their own quirks, as do those of the children of the latter.

I have done my share of all of those this year (except the expatriates; we have a whole department that does nothing but those), plus the odd trust return and a handful of gift tax returns. My big headache, though, has been the returns for thirty-plus investment partnerships. The money manager sends us a massive Excel spreadsheet for each partnership with all the information for that partnership and its partners, anywhere from twenty to over three hundred partners per partnership. We import that data into our tax software, tie up a few loose ends, and it's done.

Except of course it isn't quite that easy. The spreadsheet doesn't add across and down because of rounding errors, which we have to find and adjust. The spreadsheet is not in the correct format to import so we have to manipulate it. Some of the columns have to be combined, some have to be split, some have to be created, yada yada. And then, just to make it more fun, every so often we run across something that doesn't make sense, we ask the client about it, and they end up giving us a whole new set of spreadsheets. Rinse and repeat. How many times can they screw it up? Every time, apparently.

Okay, here's the knitting analogy. (You were waiting for that, right? Right.)

It's like knitting a huge lace stole from a series of charts. Cast on 320 stitches, follow the first chart, then the second, and so forth. Except that the charts are written in Tagalog and you have to translate them into English before you can begin. (Yeah, I know that the big advantage of a chart is that it is NOT language dependent; work with here, 'kay?) You get them translated and start knitting. Along the way you discover that whoever wrote the chart was not exactly paying attention, and there are a number of random errors, which you have to catch and correct before you can proceed. If you miss one, you will find it a few [hundred] rows later and have to frog back to correct it, so you pay very close attention, so close that your brow furrows and your shoulders hunch and your lower back feels like the roots of a pot-bound cactus.

But you persevere and knit all the way to the end of the first chart... whereupon you are told that that was the wrong chart and you have to start over.

The new chart, instead of being written in Tagalog, in which you are now a bit of an expert, is written in Xhosa with footnotes in Urdu, and besides, now you are behind schedule and thus have to work even faster/harder/smarter to catch up. Knit, knit, knit, from 8:30am until 10pm, with a couple breaks for coffee and quick meals and to run to the printer and the bathroom and maybe to whip out a 1040-- , er, a scarf, or two; go home, come back tomorrow, and do it again. Endlessly. Because the charts and stoles, they just keep a-comin'.

Meanwhile, there are literally hundreds of other knitters waiting for you to finish these stoles. Unlike a real knitted piece, when finished your stole will be magically broken apart into hundreds of tiny pieces that will then become parts of other knitters' stoles. They cannot knit their stoles until yours is done and blocked and dried and checked for dropped stitches and missed yarn-overs. All those other knitters are trying to be polite and not bother you, but you can feel the pressure of their impatience. Once in while one will ask, "How's it going? Are you getting close?" and you bite off their tiny head because you Just. Can't. Help. It.

And that's why I may not be blogging much for awhile. The jailers tell me there is no internet access in the cells reserved for homicide suspects, and besides, it's really hard to type when wearing a straight jacket...

Chuckles and smiles for your entertainment.

 

Seen at the boat landing on Big Butternut Lake on election day, perhaps because it was recently hauled off the lake after being used as an ice-fishing house all winter. No comment.

* * * * *

I managed to capture this photo one morning on the way to work. Notice the advertisement on the back of the black van, then notice the kind of van it is. You may need to click to embiggen so you can read it clearly.

 

Huh?

* * * * *

The following are not chuckles, but rather things to make you smile: sweaters observed at Yellow Dog Knits in Eau Claire when I was there for Franklin's 1,000 Knitters photo shoot.

Luscious cables (I love cables. Must knit cables)...

 

and fantastic (intarsia?) stripes (I love stripes. Must knit tweedy stripes.):

  :

Random Wednesday.

F is also for famous, which is how I am feeling right now. Check out my picture, right next to Dale-Harriet's, over at Franklin's post about his Yellow Dog photo shoot.

* * * * *

We got some snow yesterday. This is around the corner and up the block from my house.

 

It was several inches of heavy, wet snow that made all the trees and bushes very pretty.

Some people are just too darned conscientious for their own good. These folks had already shoveled their sidewalk by 8 a.m. Don't they know it's gonna melt almost immediately? Or at least by June?

 

Across the street, Linus was looking a little... bedraggled.

 

Downtown, we have people to take care of these things. Wouldn't want anyone to get their Ferragamos wet.

  

Don't you love how I take pictures through the windshield? While driving. Not to worry; I didn't hit anything. Yet.

* * * * *

Observed at the office:

 

* * * * *

Last week I bought some daffodils from the the Cancer Society to brighten up my cube.

 

Knowing how fast they open, I thought it would be fun to photograph them every hour and make a blog post about it.

 

 

Hmm. It's a slow game.

 

Not a lot happening.

 

Okay, I guess they are opening. A little.

 

Ya wanna see the high-tech tripod I devised so I'd always get the same angle on the shot?

 

Upside-down glass on top of a pile of notepads, camera on top of the glass. Yeah, I know. I'm a genius.

 

Jumping ahead...

   

   

Did you notice how I put the digital clock in there now, so you can tell that an hour has elapsed? Genius, I tell you.

   

   

Yeah, I was getting bored, too. They seemed to be going pretty much directly from barely open to... dead.

 

* * * * *

Matthew's joke. (You have to imagine him saying these things)

 

"So, what's happenin'? Where's the action tonight?"

(scuffle, scuffle, whisper, whisper)

 

"Police! You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say..." etc.

We don't see this much.

Pictured below is the footwear worn by the stylish companion of Miriam from the Netherlands, one of the contestants in the World's Fastest Knitting Competition that I blogged about on Sunday. It is difficult to tell because of the angle of the shot, but that shoe was about 18" long, all of the excess length in that extreme pointed toe.

We don't often see shoes like this in Minneapolis. In fact, we seldom see much beyond parkas and scarves and snowboots. It's good to know that fashion is alive and well elsewhere.

Eye candy Friday.

 

Thanks to Cursing Mama for the quote. And some unknown artist for the picture*.

* Scanned from a book of cat art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

En Esch has something to say.

Bonus Tuesday post: from today's e-mails

Frozen Grand Central

The Victim: Passersby and staff at Grand Central Station in New York City.

The Pranksters: The folks at

Improv Everywhere who brought you the shirtless shopping extravaganza at Abercrombie & Fitch not long ago organized their best mass prank yet. They gathered over 200 people and asked them to freeze in place on cue. We are impressed at how professional all of the pranksters acted -- no one moved or laughed.

If It Happened to Us: We'd think that they were filming an episode of Heroes.

A public service announcement.

Want to see [parts of] the commercials that will air during the Super Bowl tomorrow? Check this out. Some are the entire commercial, some just a teaser. Fun, nevertheless.

(I don't do ASL, my bad, so anyone who wants to interpret this for me, feel free.)

ETA: lime-dragon has kindly interpreted: "Basically, Amy is excited about PepsiCo working with Enable and Deaf people and making a commercial that features a joke well-known in the Deaf community. Oh, I see she added a transcript; you can read it on the youTube page for the video. : )"

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the Council For Better Knitting During Football Games.

Catching up, vol. 4: Kinnearing* at the Art Institute.

Let's look at knitting. Not my knitting, though. Remember how cold it was in Chicago? Do you know what that meant? Lots of knitwear on parade. Let's take a look, shall we?

There was a plethora of scarves, many of which were inexplicably blurry. I love "plethora." Thank you for letting me use it today.

 

Apparently not everyone got the memo about the fun fur.

A sweet hat, very possibly handknit:

 

Sweaters, lots of sweaters.

There was this traditional Norwegian cardigan. (These things are ubiquitous in provincial Minneapolis in January, so it was mildly surprising to see one in sophisticated downtown Chi-Town.)

 

A little lot of intarsia, thankfully not hand-knit:

 

The classic cable-knit sweater, either machine made or hand-knit:

 

I sent this dude really, really strong Put-it-on! vibes, but all for naught. He was determined just to carry his gorgeous, hand-knit gansey-ish sweater in dark slate blue worsted-weight wool. Somebody loves him very, very much. Or he is rich enough to buy his own hand-knit sweaters. Either way, he's a lucky guy.

This was my prize knitwear find that day. You can't see it because she has her black coat wrapped around her waist, but this sweater was tunic length, and had those wild sort-of-diagonal intarsia stripes all the way down. I took lots and lots of photos of her, but apparently my Kinnearing skills blow. This is the best of a bad lot.

 

This patchwork-y number had the potential to knock Ms. Diagonal Intarsia out of first place, but for some reason it just didn't speak to me like DI did. Second place for you, Missy.

 

I don't know exactly what this Anglo Saxon Mona Lisa is doing, but I am sure it is fiber-related.

Tatting? Weaving? Um... shuttlecocks?

* Kinnearing**, sort of.  I held the camera at normal position, but surreptitiously. Kind of like the way your kids try to look innocent when they have chocolate up one ear and down the other. Yeah, that kind of surreptitious.

** "Kinnear" is in www.urbandictionary.com. Is that cool or what?

* * * * *

The Art Institute allows photography but bans flash, hence all the blurry photos. I don't seem to be able to hold a camera still enough to save my soul. I don't remember a flash ban at MoMA when I was there last May. Maybe that's why those photos all seemed to turn out better.

Borders says, It's the unofficial anthem of sweaters.

Quoting from the above e-mail I got today from Borders Books (emphasis mine):

Ingrid Michaelson is on a roll. Following her unlikely discovery on the Internet, four of her songs have been featured on Grey's Anatomy, and her catchy tune "The Way I Am" became the unofficial anthem for sweaters thanks to the popular Old Navy commercial.

Here is the music video from YouTube:

And here is another video of the song recorded at a Borders somewhere. Click on "The Way I Am", about a third of the way down the list of songs in the center of the page.

Now, I realize I am just a knitter and you are just a knitter and all the hundreds of thousands of us out there are just knitters, but which God/dess decided that a... chain of bookstores? got to decide what became the unofficial anthem of sweaters. Nothing against Ms. Michaelson's song -- it's very nice, catchy, pretty, engaging, yada yada -- but, c'mon now, something as important as The National [Unofficial] Anthem For Sweaters should be chosen by those who know and love The Country Of Sweaters. And who knows it and loves it more than we do, the people who labor over every single k1p1 and each k2tog and all those millions of stockinette stitches in between?

Maybe we need to contact Ms. Michaelson and demand a recount.

[/tongue from cheek]