I don’t have much to offer today, except for some wonderful, awful, beautiful machine-knitted sweaters:
German design company produces 3-D sweater.
Yep.
On the way back to work from running errands, I was delighted to be behind a fellow who was blowing bubbles out the window of his gigantic pickup truck. Had I not just fixed the keyguard on my phone (the purpose of the erranding), I would’ve snapped a photo. However, you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Science is so awesome.
I heart it. This is also incredibly creepy, in an inanimate blob sort of way.
Rather, an old one, revisited, which is more an art than a craft, being paintings on canvas.
At any rate, my long-missing painting muse (I have not seen it since September of 2004) has returned, and I have a couple of freshly-primed canvases sitting in my den, waiting for more exciting paint. I have Ideas. Hopefully there will be documentation soon, too.
Did no knitting last night, although I’d intended to. Instead, I cleaned up some in anticipation of a house guest, ate dinner, and then watched Namastey London again (which although sappy and dumb, never fails to make me weepy) while priming said canvases. They were paintings I did in college that I really really hate now, so it saved me from both ugly wallcoverings and spending money on more canvases, which ultimately saves me some space (canvases really do take up a lot of it, except when you hang them up). Gross fact: weevils do not change the flavor of lentils, especially if you are not picky, go to the trouble of picking them all out, and are both ravenously hungry and lazy. Which I was. And now you know a whole lot more about me and my proclivities than you ever wanted to know.
I’ll leave you to think on that for a bit.
Well, it’s fueled by stuff like this:
The Migration of Anatomically Modern Humans
See? 195,000 years. Which gets us as far as maybe, oh, somewhere on the other side of the galaxy from where we are, since the center of the Milky Way is approximately 25,000 light years from us. The closest planet that is a possibly Earth-like planet is about 20.5 light-years away , so I feel a little better about the search for life out there in the universe, but I’m still navel-gazing.
Oh, you are such a Monday.
But I have a working laptop, so that’s good. The new hard drive is in, and I only appear to have lost all my fonts (this is a bigger deal than it sounds) and bookmarks from my web browser. Whew.
Had Jennie over to stay this weekend, and then sent her home again on Sunday. We had some lovely adventures, involving pedicures, sushi buffets, a diversity concert and a really weird late-night Chinese restaurant (which we found after cold-calling several from the listing on Jennie’s GPS). Thanks, lady, for telling us it was behind the Chick-fil-A. We seriously never would have found it (no, really – there was no sign).
The result of all this is that I now have nicely manicured toenails, some extra weight on my person (woo all-you-can-eat sushi) and a renewed determination to learn Kathak. I have been thinking about it pretty much constantly. I even went so far as to find some instructional clips on YouTube, which I attempted to follow along with but actually don’t remember all that well. The ChickenGoddess says she knows of a few schools in the area that teach it to grown-ups. I will continue to attempt to learn from the YouTube clips in the meantime. Lea and Yul, who did not do Kathak but did perform at another point in the program, did a lovely job.
I also made it to the heel portion of the second Rivendell sock before the ChickenGoddess came over to watch Jhoom Barabar Jhoom. I got no knitting done during that, which was really for the best, because I still can’t read subtitles and do complicated knitting all at once yet.
But I will someday.
Which is what I got done last night.
So.
I came home Wednesday and the husband said, “Your computer won’t turn on.” Well, crap. I tried it and lo and behold, he was right (not that I doubted him at all). Matt tried it out at work, and declared the hard drive to be dead.
I am not upset about this. No, really. Two months ago I bought a 500 GB external hard drive, and had the foresight to back up the entire contents of the laptop (minus one Blood Ties episode that came to me broken from iTunes, but it was the crappy one about the changeling babies, so I’m okay with that). In the past two months, I’ve saved all my side projects to it, along with my photos, so really there’s not much on the computer that’s not someplace else, except for my bookmarks, which I will perhaps be able to retrieve. I hope.
And then there was a big box of Indian imports that I was to sort through as payment for working a steampunk festival, which necessitated me picking up the husband from work, and then I sat in the bell tower for a couple of hours, and spun up a bit more of the logwood roving, before realizing that I need to wind what I’ve got off onto a toilet tube, and so then I worked some more on the Rivendell socks, and ended up a few rows shy of Chart 2 (which is the cable part). So I guess I got a lot done, but it was a lot of little stuff and doesn’t feel like much. I think that if I’m diligent, I can get to the heel of the sock before the end of Sunday (but that remains to be seen).
This weekend, though – this weekend will see me hopefully getting more knitting accomplished, and seeing Lea and Yul perform in Gwinnett, and hanging out a lot with Jennie, who is staying at my house for a couple of days so I don’t get lonely.
And since Social Life in Medieval Rajasthan just landed on my desk, I’ll be reading a lot of that. Sounds pretty awesome.
And I’m wearing my Pardon My Hindi t-shirt, because it is also awesome.
2. I have a general problem with the way most people treat celebrities. This is not to say that I don’t clam up and turn into a blithering idiot in the presence of a famous-type person (hello – hiding behing my drink at the Beverly Wilshire because Christopher Walken was there waiting for a cab), but my issue is more with the fact that people assume an unnecessary and impolite familiarity with celebrities. And then, as I was Twittering and following Nathan Fillion and Eddie Izzard, I found myself putting them into new categories in my head, which are places generally reserved for people I’ve met and interacted with on a regular basis. The navel-gazing part of this is the question of whether or not Twitter and other online casual social outlets are further changing our perceptions of people we’ve never met before. Having the sordid details of someone’s supposed affair plastered across the pages of US Weekly is one thing, but the minutia of someone’s day-to-day activities is another.
I don’t respond to the tweets of people I don’t know. I know that some people do this, and that’s fine and dandy, but I feel very strange doing that. Is it acceptable to do so? Is it like commenting on someone’s blog anonymously? How many tweets would someone who is relatively visibly, publicly, have to sort through on any given day? If Wil Wheaton takes a photo of Batter Blaster and then tweets it, and I’ve tried it, is it acceptable to tell him that it is delicious?
This is really frustrating me, as you can tell. I also have perhaps put unnecessary thought into figuring it out. But I’m pretty sure that social networking has removed some barriers between people, but at the same time created some nebulous places in interpersonal relations with people we’ve not met in real life.
Thanks for listening.
(Resume normal fiber-blogging tomorrow.)
So here’s my latest round of navel-gazing, which is deeper than usual (for reasons undiscovered by me):
1. I have been thinking a lot lately about life on other planets. That is, whether or not it’s useful to us to discover it exists. Okay, so on a “spiritual” level (for lack of a better term), sure it’s useful. It helps us to know we’re not alone in the universe. It possibly also helps us to know that maybe somebody has gone through similar experiences as we have, as a species.
However, how practical is this knowledge? What I’m basing all this debate on is this – the speed of light. Ultimately, light, though very fast, travels at finite speeds. An object that is one million light years away is still one million light years away. Therefore, were there to be a civilization on a planet, we’d be seeing one million years into that planet’s past. For example, a civilization one million light years away that’s just receiving light from our planet, would see our history before human beings ever existed, provided they could see Earth in such detail (who knows? maybe they’ve figured that out). And then if we saw evidence of a civilization on a planet one million light years away, who’s to say that it’s still there, or that the planet even exists any more? I mentioned this to my husband, who mentioned faster-than-light travel, which brought on an additional discussion of relativity and its limitations given our current knowledge of the laws of physics, and I’m still left thinking about the what ifs.
Apparently this is something that SETI researchers struggle with on a regular basis.
(More to follow tomorrow, with Part 2.)
I have accomplished much by spinning, plying, and washing my first handspun. It is lovely.
However, this bit of accomplishment is dwarfed by the sheer amount of roving I have left over (which compared to some is not a lot, but is overwhelming for me).
I will demonstrate.
In case you’ve forgotten, this is my first handspun (shameless bid for attention):
It’s roughly 89 yards, and is not bad for a first effort. However, this is not all. Now that this is done, I have 8 more ounces of logwood and iron dyed mystery wool
(some spun up from the first bag; I’m on to the second now)
11 ounces of some mystery brown wool that the husband chose at the state fair last summer (it is scratchy and full of dirt and is an acceptable challenge, but I’m glad I won’t be wearing the finished product)
15 ounces of some lovely white targhee cross which is a lot but very soft and will possibly become fingerling, and will also be dyed after spinning
Plus the olive green and neon colors from this past weekend, some purple logwood and alum dyed roving from S&W, a whole mess (like, another 16 ounces) of BFL pencil roving I bought on Etsy, the reindeer-colored roving gifted to me by the Chickengoddess following this past Christmas party, and roughly 8 ounces of some purply stuff I bought when visiting Baobh for the Pants Pants Revolution party.
Which adds up to 58 ounces of fiber yet to spin, ply, and wash. I still have no plans for what I’m going to do with most of it, except for the scratchy brown stuff, a portion of which will become fingerless gloves for the husband. I had originally intended them to be bulky, but am using a very light spindle, so the yarn will ultimately be quite fine, rendering a fine but scratchy finished item. He didn’t specify gauge, so I’m cool with that.
My stash is really starting to overwhelm me. I have run out of room in my six yarn drawers, but refuse to make more (even though I’ve got Knitch gift cards hanging around, for eventual use; I will make space in what I’ve got).
It makes me feel better to know that Baobh has a bump (like, more than 10 pounds) of BFL in her fiber room at this very moment. I had to restrain myself from unwinding it and rolling in it like Scrooge McDuck and his pool of coins.
Sort of like this, but with wool:
So. I did much fiber stuff this weekend, although I had planned to do more. Yesterday was blissfully unproductive. I sort of sat around all day in my pajamas, and got nothing real accomplished.
But Saturday? Saturday was quite productive.
First, I got a new cell phone. My old one had started to lose its buttons. The new one is without iPhone-ness, but somehow I feel cooler for having a cheapo phone (it was free, and I can still take pictures with it). I did lose all my fancy-schmancy ringtones, but that’s not an insurmountable obstacle. Luckily they were all songs I own, so I can cobble together reasonable facsimiles.
Afterward was some erranding (I think we got comics? Maybe?), including a vain attempt to locate a replacement pair of the flip-flops I lost one of during the printing weekend (btw – Reef doesn’t make the Costa Rica style any more, so I will either have to locate the missing shoe or pony up for a pair of Rainbows; I really hope I can find the other shoe), and a stop at the ChickenGoddess‘s house to carpool with her and her husband to Claudia‘s for a birthday party.
Which was awesome. I made progress on my Rivendell sock:
Actually, that’s the second one. Woohoo!
And I ate myself into discomfort. There were three desserts! And I couldn’t be rude and try just one. I even tried the strawberry-rhubarb-lingonberry pie (which was delicious)! And everyone seemed to be having a lovely time:
This was mid-eating. I have others, but they are un-flattering (in that certain folks look a little demented, through no fault of their own but through all fault of camera operator error).
The best part was when Jane dragged in a bucket of yarn to be rid of, and there was a yarn frenzy and I came away with:
A silk-alpaca-mohair blend from the Brown Sheep company,
A man-sized sweater’s worth of Donegal Tweed (thanks, Stuart!),
A pound of olive green roving, and
~4oz of “Culture Club” colorway roving, courtesy ESC.
I don’t know about the birthday folks, but I made out okay.
The cats agree.
And then, full and sloshy, we went to see Harry Potter, which was fantastic (no, really – it was far better than the last couple of films).
Meanwhile, the husband had gone out to Tucker and retrieved a Turkish rug that was being given away:
It’s huge, lovely, and covered in dog. I do not mean merely dog hair. No, it is also scented of dog, and has some dog-looking stains. However, it is salvageable and with some extra care and attention should be quite lovely soon.
It is hunting-themed:
Not to bad, huh? It’s badly faded in spots, and there are a couple of holes, but it’s pretty decent for free. I hear Oxiclean will do a good job on it.
knitters = angry mob 