kmkat and her kneedles

Bits and pieces.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Smokey's cousin G concerning her son and DIL in Chicago:

[Son] and [daughter-in-law] had a baby girl this morning, however, Son delivered the baby at their house!  DIL started having labor pains about 3 a.m. and called the doctor about 5:30, and the doctor told her she still had several hours yet, but DIL was having intense labor pains and was waiting for Son to get 2-year-old Daughter ready.  So then she went into the bathroom and started screaming at Son and Son had to leave 2-yo Daughter in the highchair, and the baby's head was coming out.  So Son called 911 and they walked him through delivering the baby.  What was scary for him was getting her to breathe, but she did and he tied off the cord, then the paramedics got there and they let him cut the cord since he did all the work. No name yet, they are both in shock still.  She is 7 pounds 8 ounces (smaller then 2-yo daughter, she was 8 pounds 11 ounces), but she is nursing and DIL and the little girl are doing great.  Son said he remembered in the Navy not to panic or things could get worse, so he decided, well, I guess I am going to deliver a baby this morning!  He did great and so did DIL.  I'll send the name later and some pictures.           - Cousin G.

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Maggie, #2 son's gf, was looking through my copy of Custom Knits by Wendy Bernard. She noted model after model dressed in a hand-knit sweater and underpants and nothing else, except for the one model who appeared to be wearing the obligatory hand-knit sweater and a strategically placed cereal bowl. "Put some pants on!" she kept telling the models. She even called #2 son into the room to look at one particularly egregious fashion disaster -- I believe it involved a tank top, hand-knit skirt, patterned tights, and patterned shoes. "Ewwwww," was their consensus.

And that is my review of THAT book.

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If you have a natural Christmas tree, remember to water it:

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I would like to point out that on this, the last weekend of Good Old 2008, I finally updated my 2008 FO folder (link in the sidebar). That felt so darned good that I updated my Ravelry projects page. And if I ever take the frickin' fotos, I will update my stash page, too. Warning: don't hold your breath.

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I got another interesting couple of e-mails. Here is what they both looked like, except that the addressee -- which is not my e-mail address, btw -- was slightly different:

I immediately checked my PayPal account and was not surprised to see no such charge. I most assuredly did NOT click on the "Dispute Transaction" link near the bottom of the e-mail. If nothing else about the e-mail screams "Scam!" at you, at least look at the *math* in the middle. Sheesh.

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I have had a tab open in Firefox all day long for Webs, debating about whether to order the Silky Wool for the Baby Cables & Big Ones, too (really stupid name for that pattern) sweater. I finally decided on a good neutral color (50) and the total $ turned out to be far less than I had previously estimated. (What was I thinking? Why did it take me so long to figure out their "discounts"?) But I had resolved not to buy any yarn this year, and I need to finish the kimono sweater OTN. The Lavold yarn is in my cart. Update: the yarn is ordered; frugality and common sense be damned.

BTW, did you know that when you are on a pattern page in Ravelry like the one I linked to, you can click on the "Yarns" tab at the top -- not the "Yarns" tab at the very top, instead the "Yarns" tab between "Details" and "nnn projects" -- and see all the different yarns that people have used for that particular pattern? Sweet feature!

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This blog, Clusterfuck Nation by James Kunstler, is an interesting -- albeit depressing -- read. There is definitely a good deal of truth in what he says. I question his precise timing, but not his underlying thesis, which is that our present mode of life is unsustainable and will end sooner rather than later.

From today's (extremely long) post:

There are two realities "out there" now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let's call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a "consumer" economy to resume in "growth" mode. This view includes the idea that technology will rescue us from our fossil fuel predicament -- through "innovation," through the discovery of new techno rescue remedy fuels, and via "drill, baby, drill" policy. This view assumes an orderly transition through the current "rough patch" into a vibrant re-energized era of "green" Happy Motoring and resumed Blue Light Special shopping.
      The minority reality (let's call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the "consumer" era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we've come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.
      My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.
      ...The dialectic between the two realities can't be sorted out between the stupid and the bright, or even the altruistic and the selfish. The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won't care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.

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Guess who has been having fun with TypePad's variety of fonts and colors today?

Merry merry!

For those poor souls -- Cookie, Stacy, Carrie K., Abigail, Carrie, and anyone else who lives in the land of the warmth and the sun and the palm -- here are some snowy white Christmas-style images just for you.

Those sparkles? Some are on the snow, some are in the air -- tiny ice crystals floating on the breeze.

In the words of another blogger, merry whatever you've got!

Answers, and the ultimate analysis of *that* song.

Answers to some questions about my MacGyver experience in the *elevator*, asked by commenters and non-blog-reading friends and relatives to whom I e-mailed the link:

• The whole experience lasted 30-45 minutes, no more than an hour.
• Yes, I take my knitting everywhere I go. Clearly, that question came from a non-knitter.
  
• No, I never burst into tears during the experience. MacGyver never cried, and neither did I :-)
• On Sunday #2 son investigated and found what had caused the failure. I had tripped a circuit breaker by stopping and starting the *elevator* too quickly. It is once again as functional as it has ever been.

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Ya know that maudlin song everyone loves to hate, Christmas Shoes? I had never heard it until a few minutes ago, when Cursing Mama sent me an audio link so I could listen. Gee, thanks, kiddo!

But I am benevolent. I am gracious. I am unbelievably generous and forgiving. I shall share with you an analysis of that song. Would that I could claim to have written this, but no, honesty compels me to reveal its true author: Joshilyn Jackson, of Faster Than Kudzu.

Ms. Jackson writes:

The Big Weep

Please do not judge me harshly. I am a woman of a certain age, and prone to sniffling at southern bell commercials and velvet paintings of big-eyed children with a single tears hovering on their lower eyelids, and, conversely, inexplicable rages and, on particularly bad days, stress murders. By which I mean, sometimes, people reallyreallyreally get on my last raggedy nerve and bounce – for example PEOPLE WHO LITTER when I can SEE a trashcan less than 30 steps away AND THEY SEE IT TOO -- and then I kill them.

Oh. Not really. But I see it play out in my mind’s eye, perfectly, how I will pick the litterer up in my mighty hands and crumplecrumplecrumple them and throw their destroyed remains IN THE CAN instead of down in the grass while saying, “AND DATS TAHHHKIN OUT DA TRAAAASH!” with lots of German accent and ZERO inflection, as if I were Arnold Swarzenegger, circa 1989. So, yes, weeping at schmaltz and killing the inconsiderate. I LOVE being 40. No, really. SO MUCH.

BUT WE ARE NOT JUDGING HERE. This is important to remember, o best beloveds, as I am going to share the deep ugly secret hidden in my ugly guts.

For three years now, I have burst into tears whenever Christmas Shoes came on the radio.

I am HIDEOUSLY shamed, shamed beyond all mortal ken, to admit that such a pernicious and wily perpetration of manipulative SAP AND TWADDLE could WORK on me and make me squirt with the weepies.

Do you know this song? It is a nightmare. I only heard it ONCE when it first came out, and I wept until I was close to puking and every since the opening bars undo me and I have to flee the song WAILING like the Sabine women. In the song, it’s Christmas Eve, some guy is in line at a shoe store, and this KID ahead of him is buying some shoes. For his mother. So she will look PRETTY WHEN SHE MEETS JESUS AS SHE IS DYING HERE ON CHRISTMAS EVE.

And if this is not enough, the kid doesn’t have enough money. He and the clerk sort through all his crumpled ones and change and there is NOT ENOUGH for the Christmas shoes. Also it is snowing, I am sure, and somewhere a sad kitten expires of hypothermia pressed against cold, dead side of the starved and frozen The Little Match Girl, but NO WORRIES, because the singer ponies up for the shoes, and then, just when you think it cannot get worse, the singer shuts up, and this WARBLEY LITTLE FLEET OF BIG EYED-SOUNDING ORPHANS sings the final chorus while the music goes all TINKLEY with SAD SAD bells.

BY the way, strictly to make myself feel better, I will tell you that professional cynic and red head Amy-Go BAWLS LIKE A LOST SEAL PUP whenever she hears the opening bars. SO. I am not alone in this awful madness. Whoever wrote that song, whoever perpetrated the singing of it, down to every child in the chorus, when at last they slip their mortal coils (or I get them for littering) they are ALL going directly to HELL, and they have earned it. OH, and last year I found out some heinous creature made a MOVIE out of it, and HE is going to the special hell. That is all.

It’s a manipulative awful song that plays SHAMELESSLY on every twinging heartstring it can find. AND YET, every Christmas, it starts to come on, and I find myself flailing into immediate bawlage, driving blind, desperately whanging my fist at the radio to change the station. YARG.

Until THIS year. Friends, I have defeated Christmas Shoes.

Here’s how: I actually listened to it. For the second time. I listened to it, and the Spock part of my brain, the lizardy piece that lives just under the occipital bone and takes care of fight or flight and my autonomic functions said, “WHOA, Nelly. This song makes no SENSE.”

I sniffled a little, and then started actually PAYING ATTENTION.

It’s Christmas Eve, and this kid with the dying mom is IN A SHOE STORE. His FATHER has sent him. Um, no. Who says, “Hey, kid, your mom is about to kick it, take a fast run over to Pay Less?” No one. And then the crumpled bills and all?

My Spock brain, listening to this poor sap concluding that the Lord sent the future motherless boy to remind him Christmas is about... shoes and hope, or something? No. NONONO. My reptile brain said, Dude, it’s a SCAM. There is no MOTHER. There is no DYING. There is some Fagin-esque teenage brother in an alley waiting to see what the kid’s TAKE is going to be so they can go to the pawnshop and get money for the ARCADE. Next the kid will go to WOLF and not have enough for the camera his mother needs so she can get a photo of heaven’s golden roads. Then they will head off Best Buy so the kid can warble, “Sir I want to buy this 42 inch flat screen, for my mother, please…”

It is SO CLEARLY a scam. Anyone who has ever been approached by the guy who needs 3 bucks for the train to get to the interview for the job he needs to be able to support his 4 starving babies that he was on his way to catch when robbers took his wallet and he will miss the interview OH HALPS HALPS…yeah. I have met that guy a hundred times, and he NEVER agrees to walk to the subway or Marta with me and let me buy him a ride. He just wants the cash. For meth. SO, I buy him a sandwich and tell him to get help, but I do not BUY HIS DRUGS FOR HIM.

Christmas Shoes is the same thing, and if the fellow in line had ANY sense, he would grab that kid by the scruff, drag him out, round up the mastermind teenage brother, take his cell phone, flip through for the inevitable entry that says MOM N DAD, and CALL THEIR TOTALLY ALIVE NOT DYING AND WELL SHOD PARENTS to come PADDLE THE BUTT of con-the-younger and ground con-the-elder for the natural born rest of his LIFE.

Well played, Christmas Shoes, well played. But this year? I win.

Thank you for writing that, Ms. J. You have done us all a great service.

Eye candy Friday II, the Free Tibet edition.

"None of us are free until ALL of us are free."

Beverly at PoMoGolightly is having a Free Tibet contest on the occasion of the opening of the 2008 Olympics. Remember the Mikhail Bakunin quote above; remind yourself of it as you watch the Games.

PippiKneeSocks created the beautiful yarn pictured above and will give it to the winner of PoMoGollightly's contest. She based the colorway on Tibetan prayer flags. 

Ankles and Angie.

Although I am about as far from a fashionista as it is possible for a human to be -- I mean, I buy most of my clothes at Wal-Mart and Fleet Farm, with an occasional foray to Tarzhay -- I have The Sartorialist in my Bloglines because I like to know what I am missing. And occasionally when I gaze at the Beautiful[ly Dressed] People he photographs I find myself saying, Huh?

Like these two, featured on different days, the first in Milan, the second in Paris. What exactly is going on with their ankles?

Clearly, this is a fashion trend that has not yet made its appearance in rural Wisconsin.

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One of the unexpected joys of blogging is meeting other bloggers. (Yeah, there are actual real people behind those blogs you read.) Today I met up with Angie of Purling Oaks, who was in my corner of Wisconsin on business.

The little town of Cumberland is a very pretty 30 - 40 minute drive from my house. We tried to meet here:

but they had the bad manners to close at 5, which was when we planned to meet. Instead we found a sports bar with a sort-of lake view, ordered beers, and pulled out our knitting. That's what Wisconsinites do -- order a beer and [fill in the blank].

Our waitress obliged us by snapping a photo. Angie is the pretty blonde; I am the gray-haired laugher.

In case you were wondering, Angie is a delightful person and I immediately felt like I had known her for years. We talked knitting and blogs and bloggers and jobs  and remodeling and cats and plurking* and college. Turns out we both started our college careers in the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota, she in industrial engineering and me in math. No wonder we are both knitters ;-)

* Angie's cell phone had Internet access so she showed me how it works, and now I am plurking myself. Just what we all need -- another time sink...

Word cloud.

Generated by Snapshirts* from my blog. I think it must only look at recent posts because "matthew" does not appear. Since he moved to Minneapolis I have not wrote about him as often as I did last year. I guess I am doing a creditable job in knitblogging, since the words knitting, knit, yarn, lace, sock, and socks are all in larger type.

* Click on the "custom" icon and ignore the $18 price tag. It does not apply unless you are going to have your cloud printed onto one of their items of merchandise.

Oops.

Judging from yesterday's comments, I may have worried some of you bloggers, made you all anxious about whether your blogs met my impossibly high standards. Apparently my tongue was not shoved far enough into my cheek.

I delight in you all and will read your blogs whether you put up those navigation things and a preview post button and even if you have eighty zillion totally undecipherable CAPTCHAs. I may not comment in the latter case, but that is my loss, not yours.

My brain was not functioning quite at full power yesterday, so I forgot to link to Erika and Chris as I had intended. There, fixed.

Also, today as I was perusing blogs I remembered something. If you have one of these puppies that shows all the dates that you posted?

   

You are good to go. My thanks.

Anyway, thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, and a million blessings on Cathy-Cate, who commented three (3!) times, plus worried herself silly about how to put those navigation things on her Wordpress blog. She figured it out! Thank you, C-C! I shall give thanks every time I read your blog :-) I think I am obligated to send you some chocolate now, right? Right.

Once again, thank you for listening to my little rant. I shall endeavor to be more agreeable and less, um, forthright for the immediate future.

Or at least until the medication wears off.

A wee rant about blog hosts.

I've been reading blogs long enough to have developed my own habits and my own set of pet peeves. In the furtherance of my "It''s all about me, all the time" effort, I am willing to share my gripes with you here. I am generous that way. You can thank me later.

TypePad:

I use TypePad. Amy uses TypePad. Norma uses TypePad. Vicki and Trudy and eurolush use TypePad. Whenever I click onto a blog and discover that the host is TypePad, I do a little happy dance in my chair. Until, that is, I decide that I simply must share something with the blogger, and so I comment. But if the blogger has turned on "Always require CAPTCHA" I weep with despair.

The programmers at TypePad must really, really have a thing about spammers because when this option is set, they require the commenter to fight their way through multiple CAPTCHAs before the comment is accepted. At first I thought it was just me -- maybe I was utterly incapable of typing the displayed letters and digits. Eventually I learned that TypePad always does the multiple CAPTCHA thing. This is extremely frustrating, for this commenter, anyway. I used to have my own blog set this way, but when I discovered what it pain it was on other blogs, I turned it off. I haven't had any spammers in nearly two years ::knock on wood:: Check your TypePad blog to see your settings (Weblogs | (click on the title of your blog) | Configure | Feedback) and consider turning off the CAPTCHA requirement. Thank you for your cooperation.

If you want a little protection from spammers after turning off the required CAPTCHAs, there is another option on that page that you might want to try: you can turn off commenting on your posts after a set period of time -- one month, a year, something in between. Seems to me that should help. I recently got a snotty comment on one of my first posts (September, 2006) so I turned off comments on posts older than six months. Try it; you'll like it. Maybe. Whatevs.

Blogger:

The reason I do the happy dance in my chair at TypePad blogs is because right up there at the top of every post are navigation links:

Maybe that doesn't matter to you. Maybe you read everyone's posts in your Bloglines or FeedBurner or whatever aggregator you use. Maybe you don't care whether you read every single post from a blogger. For myself, I always click on the first unread post in a particular blogger's feed in my Bloglines so that I read it in the blogger's chosen setting. Seeing the layout and appearance of the blog helps me recognize which particular blogger I am reading. (Yeah, lame, I know, but I gotta work with the brain I've got. Visual memory and all.) And once I read that post I want to read the next one without having to go back to Bloglines to get the link. TypePad makes that easy (see above). Blogger has finally made it easier, too.

or this:

So, please, if you use Blogger, go take a look at your blog and see if you have this at the bottom of your post. If you don't, fix it. Thank you.

I have never had any trouble with Blogger's CAPTCHAs for some reason.

Don't know why, don't care. It just makes me happy, and anything that makes me happy has to be a good thing, right? Right.

Oh, and while we are talking Blogger, there is another thing you should check in your settings. Do your commenters have to have a Google/Blogger account to comment on your post?  If this is what your comment page looks like:

you are making it very difficult, if not impossible, for many people to comment. I happen to have both a Google account and a Blogger account, but that does not necessarily mean I can comment. Don't know why, just know it doesn't always work. Makes me unhappy. Boo hoo.

If you wonder why you should bother, your might want to read the first part of this exchange on another blog I subscribe to. This is how wars get started. You don't want to be the cause of KnitWars2008, now do you?

WordPress:

WordPress is versatile and robust blogging software. It does not, however, automatically give that previous post/next post link thing that I like so well. I know it is possible -- both Chris:

and Erika (I think):

have it on their blogs. So, WordPress users, make a Kat™ happy. Check your settings and find that navigation thing. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your check chocolate is in the mail.

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Thus endeth my diatribe on blog software and hosting. Discuss among yourselves. After you have checked your own blog.

In which I drop the pencil and go see La Harlot.

I knew that The Yarnery was bringing Stephanie Pearl-McPhee to St. Paul on her current book tour, but I had completely forgotten about it, even as I was reading La Harlot's blog posts this week about the tour and her appearances in Charlotte and Lexington and New York. When her visit to our neighboring city to the east was announced back in January or so, I took one look at the date -- April 10, five days before Tax Day -- and knew there was no way I could contemplate going. So I forgot all about it.

Until I read Cursing Mama's blog post yesterday. And then read Jeanne's comment that she was planning to go, even though she didn't have a ticket -- she was counting on the weather to prevent some folks from showing up. (In case you don't have an RSS feed on Twin Cities weather, we are currently under a winter storm warning, with accumulations of s**w of up to 12" possible/likely. Sheesh. It's April. Anyway.)

I read all that at about 2:30 pm. At 4 pm I thought about it again. At 5 pm I surveyed my desk and decided I had about two hours of work left, which wasn't critical and could wait until Friday morning. So I left work. At 5 pm.

Wait, let me repeat that: I left work at 5 pm.

I have not left work that early since... ever. Even if I were done at 5, which I never am, I  wouldn't leave then because I would end up sitting in traffic.

So I got my car and drove out of the ramp.

 

My plan to zoom over to St. Paul hit a couple glitches right away. Sorry, no photo of the ambulance that almost t-boned me. Oops.

 

The line of cars to get onto I-94 heading to St. Paul, above, was 4 or 5 blocks long, without even considering the lineup on the quarter-mile-long entrance ramp. Hmmmm.

I didn't live in the city of Minneapolis for 32 years without learning a thing or three about getting from Point A to Point B (even if Point B is in St Paul), so I plotted myself a course that did not involve the freeway and headed out.

Will she make it by 6, when the doors open?

There was still some significant traffic to deal with on the Franklin Avenue bridge.

From my vantage on on my bridge I could see the I-94 bridge, where the traffic wasn't moving very well. It's the left to right traffic, below, that is heading towards La Harlot; it wasn't as bad as the right to left traffic, but it wasn't good, either.

Once I got across the river, though, it was clear sailing, er, driving. Long ago I lived near downtown St. Paul for part of one year and biked to the University of Minnesota every day for summer school classes. I got to know the East River Road very well. That knowledge served me well last night.

Almost there...

   

Yes, I made it in plenty of time. Best of all, I ran into Cursing Mama, who had an extra ticket because her friend who had planned to go had decided that weather was too bad to drive *all the way from Hudson.* Thanks, Keri, for not coming! Thanks, O Profane Mother, for the ticket!

I had a sock OTN in my purse -- emergency knitting, the words of La Harlot. But it is destined for someone else and I didn't have her foot measurements with me so I just tried it on myself and decided it was time to start the short-row heel. Of which I have not done one for about 2 years, and it never worked very well when I did it, and I didn't have any instructions with me, so I just  winged it. If it ain't right, I'll frog it; but at least I had something to do while I waited.

Do I have lots of photos of La Harlot and all the knitters and the gorgeous knitwear that I saw? No, because I forgot my camera in the car. (Duh.)You'll have to check out others' blogs to see it all. But I was there, clapping and singing "Oh , Canada" right with them.

And laughing along with The Yarnery Family Singers ("Argyles and fair isles and warm woolen mittens...", to the tune of "My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music; "Steph-aaaaaaah-nnnie, Steph-aaaaaaahh-nnnie..." to the tune of "Eidelweiss", ditto). Here are some videos courtesy of Shelley Kang that I found on YouTube:

Stephanie P-M confessed to having brought the nasty weather with her. This was the scene this morning:

   

But all is well. I saw La Harlot.

Contests: to get and to give.

Thanks to the ever-vigilant Chris, I saw last week that Purling Dervish was having a contest. Off I went to enter, and lo-and-behold, a few days later I got a congratulatory e-mail from Stacy, the Dervish herself. I won! W00t!

Tonight I was heating myself a little dinner in the microwave tucked into the corner of our department -- there is a very nice break room downstairs with tables and banquettes and vending machines and lots of microwaves and a toaster and a toaster oven, but I use my eating time to commune with y'all, so I tend to eat at my desk -- and while my dinner heated (Kashi Chicken Florentine and a bowl of cream of chicken Florentine; sensing a theme here?) I checked the nearby file drawer to see if I had any mail. Wowzers, there was a package for me!

It was soft and squishy -- whatever could it be? Well, I kind of knew because Stacy had said when she posted the contest what the prize would be. Work with me here, 'kay? (The suspense builds.)

Whatever it is, the inner wrappings coordinate well with an individual tax file. Good thing I wasn't working on a partnership return; those files are blue. Or a gift tax return -- those are bright yellow. Horrors! (Suspense builds.)

Could it be.. yarn? (Suspense reaches unbearable level.)

Why, yes! It could be!

And this is not just any yarn. This is Malabrigo 100% merino laceweight. Two (2!) 50-gram skeins. That's 940 yards, folks. Enough to do some serious lace damage.

Now, I am not a lace knitter. I have attempted a few easy lace patterns in the past with less than stellar results. All attempts were frogged after a couple inches. But some say that the key to success in learning something new is to do it with a yarn or fiber that you love.

If so, look out lace -- here I come!

* * * * *

In the interval since I wrote the above, Things Have Progressed. Nora is hosting a shawl KAL. She blogged about it for several days, agonized over her choices, solicited input from her readers as to what shawl she should knit. In the process of reading about it Thursday night I got snagged, er, hooked. The Icarus pattern has been googled, purchased, downloaded, printed, and currently resides in my knitting bag. Icarus is mostly stockinette, with regular columns of k2togs and yos; the *real* lace doesn't come until the end, when I will be ready for it. I hope.

My swift and ballwinder are at the house in Wisconsin, so I sent one skein of the Malabrigo with #2 son, who is going there this weekend with his girlfriend (also a knitter, can he pick 'em or what?) Their assignment is to wind the laceweight into a ball, firm but not too tight, don't wind too fast or the ball will fly off the ball winder, be careful a strand doesn't slip off the winding platform and get tangled in the gears. Can they do it (the winding)? Can I do it (the lace)? Stay tuned.

* * * * *

I had a contest here myself a couple weeks ago. Remember this picture? Now it has a caption.

"I have six stitch markers, the fifth dpn, and the remote. You gotta problem with that?"

Congratulations to Sheepish Annie! Chris and I each picked our own several favorites, then I chose the winner from the overlap.

I know that Annie is a lace knitter, but guess what? That Malabrigo is all mine. Sheepie, you are getting something else (bwahahaha). I already know what the non-fiber, non-chocolate bit will be.

Thanks to everyone who sent funny captions. To be brutally honest, I had an ulterior motive in staging this particular contest: I wanted to entice people to send me things that would make me smile or chuckle or gigglesnort or laugh out loud during this, a rather stressful time of year for me. Last year I just came out and begged. This year I was sneakier.

* * * * *

Now, for your amusement I give you my winning entry in Purling Dervish's contest. First the set-up:

I know, you’re all here for the contest portion of this post. Recently, the possibility of not returning to my current position due to the floppy paw has been brought up. Something about being in front of a computer for 9 hours a day not being conducive to having full use of my arm. I was asked “Have you thought about what job you would do if you couldn’t go back to what you were doing?”

::: blink, blink ::::

::: deafening silence :::::

I hadn’t even considered that. Not on my radar at all. My thoughts were: Doctor fix. Do PT. All better! Return to my job. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Apparently not.

So the contest… give me an answer. What job could I do? or What job would you do? Don’t worry about education or talent requirements. No answer is too silly or too serious. It just can’t be sitting in front of and using a computer all day.

To get you all started, the first two that came to my mind are:

1. phone sex operator
2. pastor

No, I do not have issues, why do you ask?

Here’s a review:

• Post your answer to the question “What job could I do?” or “What job would you do?” .
• Let me know if you only knit or if you knit and spin. (I kept typing sit and spin)
• Random number generator will pick three lucky winners.
• I may even throw in a special prize if you make me pee my pants .

I guess her pants landed in the laundry that night because I won the Big PIMPing Prize. And here it is, the pee-pimpin' comment that won the Malabrigo:

Theoretical physicist*
Ethicist
Economist
Philosopher

The common factor among these, of course, is that those people don’t really DO anything. They read a lot, they think a lot more, and then they talk. Endlessly. The floppy paw thing? No problemo, dude.

My personal choice would be Empress of the Universe. But I would hire others to make all the decisions I didn’t want to be bothered with and to enforce my decisions on the important stuff: what sodas to have in the vending machine, what the chef should make for dinner tonight, what to knit next. You know, the important stuff.

* I have been listening to a biography of Albert Einstein, the theoretical physicist to end all theoretical physicists. (He specialized in thought experiments.) And I've always been fascinated by non-Newtonian physics, although I will freely admit I don't really grok it. See the quotation visible in the first photo, above.

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.

F is for...

Franklin.

On Saturday I went to Yellow Dog Knits in Eau Claire.

It is a sweet little yarn shop, full of fibery fun and wonderful staff. It is where I met La Harlot back in 2006. I think there is a plaque somewhere.

Saturday I met another famous knit blogger. And photographer.

He was as delightful in person as he is on his blog -- personable and easy to chat with. Of course, once a person has knitting in her hand, how could she be nervous, even in the presence of the great and famous?

There were about 65 knitters who came to be photographed, but Dixie of Yellow Dog had organized the whole thing so well there was no waiting.

Dixie's son Nick was there.

Isn't he cute? Wanna see a close-up?

She has trained him right. What a guy.

Oh, did you notice Franklin's earring?

I say again, what a guy.

* * * * *

Thanks for all the sympathy and encouragement after my whining yesterday about working so many hours. Today the pace slowed a bit. I can never see that coming -- I feel like whatever is happened right now will continue to happen... forever. Now, though, I think I may survive. Maybe even get a full night's sleep a few times this week. Whew.

Random Wednesday a la Norma.

 

No, you are not in the wrong place. I'm channeling Norma.

A few days ago Last week Norma did the bestest post, wherein in she quoted a sentence from each of the many blogs she reads. Since I am a shameless thief I am brain dead imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I am gonna copy her.

Here goes:

1. “Oh, by the way…” he said, walking back to the front step. “You wanna get married?”
2. In other breaking news, liquid water was spotted in the wild yesterday.
3. I'm doing this twice a day during this trip to keep my resistance up and fight any emerging bugs that might be sticking to the windshield of my Prius.
4. Although I agree that sad mutant babies deserve mittens just as much as regular babies, I was aiming for a regular mitten. 
5. I really have no feelings for Colin Firth.
6. For those of you keeping track of my parking/snow removal saga this season, you can add another tally mark in the Oh, I Just Give Up column.
7. “I hope your class is also covering the more important KSL, Mom, because the big kitty and I are getting plenty tired of having to communicate with you via these photo captions!” 
8. If she has to pee at all, that's a different story. 
9. In the end, I decided that the only thing I really collect is...yarn.
10. I really thought that mattress stitch would change my life.
11. And heel gussets to make one weak in the knees?

Some of these are from blogs you probably already read. Perhaps one or two of them will introduce you to someone new. They are all over a week old. In any case, this was a fun post to put together.

Even though TypePad ate the first draft. Apparently they read my praise of their service in a comment somewhere and decided it was time for the universe to exact its revenge.

Catching up, vol. 5: knitting party at Amy's.

Way back in January Amy had a party for Twin Cities knitters and knitbloggers. I finally put together a post about it.

Sadly for me, I was late getting to the party. Although there was lots of yummy food and drink sitting about, the knitters had finished in the eating arena and had moved to the knitting arena by the time I got there. So I joined them and skipped most of the food, much to my eternal chagrin (although anyone who has seen me knows that I am in no danger of starving to death). I know it was all delicious, Amy, as I fully expected it to be, having drooled over your Friday Food posts for months.



Here is Amy handing out prizes to everyone. Prizes that included Deb's hand-dyed yarn, mmmmm...

From the left, above, we have Connie, Christy (the name of whose blog escapes me at the moment; Christy, sing out in the comments if you are there), and Deb. I think that is Marge whose face is hidden by the prize bag Amy is waving about. At the extreme right you can see a tiny bit of the lovely purple Shetland Triangle worn by Miss T. She insisted that day that her face not be included in any pictures, and I thought I had obliged her when snapping photos. But when I was gathering the photos for this post I found that her lovely face had mysteriously appeared. So I cropped it out. Your secret identity is safe with me, m'dear :)


On the other side of the room are more knitters -- blogless (I think) Deepa, Anne, and Heidi on the couch; Renee, in the red sweater, has a knitting and movie review blog that is a lot of fun. Be sure to check it out.

Most of the rest of the group:

I think that's Guinifer at the bottom with her glasses on top of her head. Shame on me, I didn't get the names (or I have forgotten them, even worse) of the others, even though I chatted with several of them.

The best part of the party, though, was finally getting to meet my new BFF Deb.

Thanks, Amy! Same time next year?

* * * * *

In other catching up news, last Friday night Deb and I (and her daughter Kathryn-who-spells-her-name-like-me) had dinner with Cathy-Cate and The Gothlet, who were in the Twin Cities for the Knit-Out and some family get-togethers. I never expected that knitblogging would so dramatically increase my social life :)

10 blogs that make my day.

Sophanne over at Becky Knits Two named me as one of the bloggers who makes her day, so I am here to pass on the favor.

Ten of the bloggers who make MY day (chosen at random from the many-more-than-ten that I read daily):

1. Sheepish Annie
2. Franklin of The Panopticon
3. Norma
4. Dale-Harriet of Cats, Sticks, and Books
5. Cursing Mama (I used to know her first name but it fell out of my brain)
6. Deb of Wound Too Tight
7. Chris of Stumbling Over Chaos
8. Erika of Redshirt Knitting
9. Lisa of Knitnzu
10. Ryan of Mossy Cottage Knits

Thanks to everyone who makes me smile, weep, nod, grimace, and hoot. Y'all make my day!

Pay it forward. With a twist.

  

I was just over at Norma's and read about her Pay It Forward thing. You can go read about there; to quote her most excellent summary:

I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment on my blog requesting to join this PIF exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be yet and you may not receive it tomorrow or next week, but you will receive it within 365 days. That is my promise. The only thing you have to do in return is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog.

My personal twist is that the winner may, if s/he so desires, designate that I knit something for their favorite charity/cause instead of for them personally. The actual objet d' knit will be of my own choosing after due consideration of each recipient's preferences with respect to color, fiber, care, etc.

So…go for it!

* * * * *

Is it really December tomorrow? I guess that means I did the NaBloPoMo with only one missed day, and I didn't have real Internet access that day. So I am patting myself on the back and saying, See, Kath, you really can talk that much.

Whether I actually had anything worthwhile to say is a question for another day...

Thanks, Deb!

Awhile back I won Deb's happy hour contest. Forgetful as I am, my winning slipped my mind until she apologized a few weeks ago about not sending my prize(s) yet. No problem, Deb!

Then she posted this on Monday. Go read it; it will make you laugh. I'll wait.

Okay, back now? Here is what arrived in yesterday's mail (as I was opening the box I kept thinking about how I really should take photos of the unopened box, the partially opened box, yada, yada, but since I am all about the non-delay of gratification you will have to use your imagination to fill in the intermediate steps):

Well, well, well; clearly this is not the kitty that the menagerie at Chez Kat were hoping for. Hannibal and En Esch were planning to teach that new kitty how to dash out the door when Kat lets the dogs out; Lucy was wondering if this kitty knew about the "no claws" rules when batting at her nose. All does not appear to be lost, however. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

We have a kit for making felted flowers:

Those funny-looking pins at stage right are the glass-tipped stamens for the flowers. Somebody used their creative imagination to design this kit.

A keychain sock blocker, plus instructions and yarn (STR, yay!)  to make a tiny sock for it (crayons added by me for, um, color):

Was there yarn in the prize? Yes, there was yarn in the prize -- dyed by Deb's own hand during one of her [in]famous Saturday dyeing sessions with Chris and Jeanne. I'm a big fan of jewel tone colors, so I was thrilled with what she sent.

There was yummy Henry's Attic Treadsoft (100% merino superwash) for a pair of socks:

and gorgeous Henry's Attic Pony laceweight (100% fine merino), perhaps for a scarf:

Tragically, my camera refused to capture the true colors of the sock yarn. The darker bits, which look teal-gray in the photo, are actually much brighter, some of them bright teal. I love the look of contrasting heels and toes on my socks, so I'm thinking I will search out some suitable teal yarn for those parts. I was able to tweak the colors in the second  photo so they are fairly accurate. Yum. Do I detect Chris's [purple] influence in this one?

But it's not all about the yarn. It's really all about the love...

Thanks, Deb! (And doesn't she have the coolest handwriting on the planet?)

* * * * *

Knitting of the kimono sweater was interrupted yesterday by the opening of an eBay package that arrived while I was at the tax conference earlier in the week. Four skeins of Noro Silk Garden, 2 each of 244 and 251, for yet another Noro scarf Christmas gift:

Say it with me now: Mmmmm!

First you have to break some eggs.

My photo experiments posted last Friday record the beginning and ending of a frogging project.  Last year I offered to knit Andrew's girlfriend a sweater. We decided on this one from Knitty:

After much e-mailing back and forth and visiting of yarn shops and discussion about color and softness on the skin, I bought yarn and started knitting. Swatched, washed same. Gauge = happy. Knit the back. Sent it to her to check on the sizing. Received request for additional length. Time passed. They broke up. Sadness. Indecision. Should I still knit the sweater for her? Um... no. The project stalled, never to be completed, while I pondered what to do with the yarn.

It wasn't suitable for charity sweaters -- too expensive, too soft/unlikely to survive hard wear, plus the machine washability, something I specifically looked for for this sweater, would not be useful in Mongolia or Afghanistan.

I had combined two strands of the worsted-weight Gems with one strand of Socks That Rock in the color Carbon Dating to achieve the gauge and tweedy nature of the yarn called for in the original pattern. I was extremely pleased with the result; too bad it wasn't gonna happen now.

I pondered incorporating the STR into my own sweater but eventually decided against it. This yummy stuff is now on the needles for a Baby Surprise Jacket for a coworker's possibly-yet-to-be-conceived baby.

But there wasn't enough of the Gems for a sweater for me. What to do, what to do?

Then another blogger, either Juno or Cara, destashed this lovely stuff:

Exactly the same yarn in a gorgeous garnet that -- to my eye at least -- would go very well with the heathery grape Louet Gems I had. Sold!

Now the problem was the pattern. Eventually I decided I wanted a big ol' wrap-myself-up-in-it kind of sweater to envelope me when the winter winds blow and the house is chilly. At first I assumed I would use a basic pattern from Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns; specifically a shawl-collared cardigan.

[digression] I'd like to insert a plug for this book, plus her other similar title, A Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, which has, in addition to a basic sweater, patterns for basic gloves, mittens, hats, and scarves and multiple sizes and gauges. These books are to a knitter what an encyclopedia and thesaurus are to a writer. [/digression]

I pondered how best to combine the colors and decided that the lower half of the body and sleeves would be garnet and the upper half grape and that there would be some possibly Fibonacci-type stripes at the transition.

So it was settled: all that remained was to determine proper size and stitch count, wind the skeins into balls, and cast on. As soon as I had finished the fund raising knitting for the library that I had committed to over the summer and early fall, this sweater would be the next thing on my needles. And then there was the Red Scarf Project. That took some time, too.

In the interim I toyed with instead using Norah Gaughan's tilted duster pattern from the latest IK but eventually decided that its construction, clever though it was, might be difficult to adjust for proper sizing and flattering fit for my ::cough::ample curves::cough::  I also wasn't quite sure how it would work in two colors.

Somewhere in the interim I saw and immediately ordered this book.

What? you say. Kimono are nothing but rectangles sewn together. Where is the knitting joy in that? But my favorite kind of knitting is the mindless kind. Miles of ribbing? Bring it on!  Pattern stitches? Boo, hiss. Oceans of stockinette? Sheer bliss.   

But the real appeal is deeper than that. I found in college that I had a deep love of Japanese art. Prints, graphics, whatever, their utter simplicity and elegance spoke to my soul in unexplainable ways. They just felt... right.

Hiroshige and Hokusai in particular were a delight to my eye.

This love of Japan expanded for a while into everything Japanese, but after we hosted a Japanese foreign exchange student for five months in 1988 I found that I had some serious problems with certain aspects of Japanese culture. My professor for various Chinese and Japanese art history classes had summed up Japanese art as "profoundly superficial," which is wonderful in a visual medium but as a value system? It sucked rocks. Perhaps it was just our student; who can be more superficial than a teenage girl?

But the visual appeal has remained strong these 20 or 30 years. Even though the garments in this book had apparently little in common with the beloved Japanese prints of my college years, they shared that same elegance and economy of form. And they would be simplicity itself to fit.

A couple pieces in the book appealed particularly:

   

The author also included a 2-page section just for me.

I'm on my way!

* * * * *

NaBloPoMo = National Blog Posting Month.

I'm on my way on that, too!

CAP @ MoA.

Barnes & Noble, Mall of America, October 25, 3:30 pm:

Barnes & Noble, Mall of America, October 25, 6:00 pm:

Barnes & Noble, Mall of America, October 25, 6:55 pm:

The above photo in no way shows the actual number of people present for the reading/signing. There were people standing shoulder to shoulder out of camera range at the left, sitting knee to knee on the floor, hovering around outside the cafe and craning their necks to see the author. Nobody sat in the space directly in front of the author's table, though. We are from Minnesota! That might be too forward!

Here we see the public relations manager of the store, quickly scanning the book before CAP arrived, trying to figure out why so friggin' many people showed up so early to see the author of... a knitting book?

 (The comment heard most often as new arrivals walked into the cafe and saw the meager number of chairs: "They're doing it again.")

Barnes & Noble, Mall of America, October 25, 7:02 pm:

Laurie Perry is the cutest thing on two legs. And the funniest. We clapped, we hooted, we laughed, we cheered, we clapped some more. We all fell in love with her.

I had brought a library copy of her book, which she graciously signed:

(I bought a copy for myself, too :-) )

* * * * *

I met up with Dale-Harriet (of WI) and her Beautiful Daughter for the signing. She and I had never met and had only discovered each other's blogs within the last week, but it was quickly apparent to both of us that we had been separated at birth. Especially when she saw the wallet photo of my husband and exclaimed, "He looks just like my husband!" Just a  couple of old hippies, each married to a Scandinavian-type guy with a full beard.