Probably the last you'll hear from me for a few weeks, as I go celebrate the holidays with family. When I come back, many gift pictures! (Shh, they're all already uploaded and everything. Don't tell.)

Here's a picture of socks I keep forgetting to post:



The gray is some Regia I picked up on sale, the blue/green is some of the Elann-brand sock yarn. Done on size 0's, mostly on the bus. One night I worked on them at my knitting group and realized that I can't knit on size 0 dp's for more than half an hour without my hands falling to bits because of my Insane Double Pointed Needle Death Grip(tm), and so this really is the perfect bus knitting project for me. I finally wove in the ends on these this morning, though I'd finished them around Thanksgiving. I get lazy with finishing sometimes, but I like to do it if I'm in the right mood, namely, the "Okay, I really want to wear this now" mood.

Christmas knitting done! Just a bit of blocking now.

Here's a cute picture from when I was 3 or 4 that my cousin sent to me:


I can still get my hair curly like that with a little bit of effort. And my barettes are still usually a bit windswept.

Proof of my freakish body proportions (look away if you don't need to know my bidness):

I was making measurements for the Juliet Pullover a few nights ago to distract me from my lack of yarn in the mail (it finally got here last night, whoopie!). And I thought I'd check to see what my bra size should be, rather than just what I buy in the store, because this is the kind of thing I wonder about before I go to sleep.

So I looked it up.

40 A.

40 A! Boys may not know this, but I don't think this size even EXISTS. And it's all ribcage! I just have big lungs, I swear! I blame playing bass clarinet during my formative years. Also, I really do have boobs, they're just dwarfed by the MONSTROUS BEER BARREL I CALL MY STERNUM.

I don't know where my body came from. Everyone else in my family is normally proportioned.

I cast on for the last of the gifts I'll be making this morning. Another 3 days and the self-imposed gag order will be lifted. I hope the recipients like them. It's been nice to change gears to things that go fast (I've been averaging an item every 3 days), but it's about time to get back to my square-inch-per-hour meditative pace.

Today I was going to show off pictures of a gift that's already been opened and the yarn pron that is Elann's Baby Silk, but the baby silk still hasn't arrived (I'm starting to get the shakes, help!), and though I swear I took a picture of the gift, the electrons containing it in my digital camera seem to have boiled off when I wasn't looking.

Ah well. The gift was a scarf that used the Clapotis pattern from Knitty. I used Lion Brand Microspun in a tan color that I got off a recent yarn swap in my knitting group. I cut the pattern down considerably since I only had one skein, but it *just* made it--I had about 6 inches left to weave in, and the scarf was wide and long enough to be fashionable, if not super warm. The knitted fabric the Microspun makes is really neat, almost suede-like, but man that stuff splits like a gymnast.

Though I can't show the yarn yet--I'm playing with my 2-inch samples just to distract me from this fact--I can show what I'm going to make from the bulk of it: the Juliet Pullover from this past summer's Interweave Knits, which happens to be the perfect gauge and shape I was looking for to compliment it. The ribbons are out--things with empire or pseudo empire waists make me look like I'm expecting. And I might do a different lace edging. But I've done 90% of the number crunching and I'm ready to do gauge swatches the SECOND it shows up. I'll be bringing this with me to the in-law's for the holidays. I'd bring the lace, but it's a bit beyond the point of portability, and I become decidedly antisocial when I work on it.

Are there unresolved stories from your childhood that have gotten stuck in your head as an adult?

I don't mean that in the depressing Dr. Phil and Oprah way--THAT stuff drives me up a wall in no time. I mean little plot holes that never got filled properly. The punchline to a joke where you missed the lead-up (why would being afraid not be funny?). Or a family tradition that never quite made sense. That sort of thing. As an undergrad, I recall a particularly frustrating PChem problem in which the theoretical answer the prof gave bore no semblance to reality--it involved boiling water and an ice cube. I'm not even going to get into it it's so dumb. But a year or two back, while working at the Synchrotron, I figured out exactly what was wrong with the prof's assumptions and emailed all my friends that had taken that class, all of whom gave a shout of frustrated relief in response.

So, I have another one that I'll call on your collected wisdom for.

When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my science teacher gave us an unusual piece of homework, due a few days later: put a Saltine in your mouth and leave it there for a long time. Something was supposed to change, and we were to tell her what.

20-someodd kids came in on Monday and said the same thing:

"It got wet, then it got mushy, then it got watery, then it got even more watery, then it was so watery it was gross and I spit it out."

This wasn't the right answer. She told us to go back and try again. The trick was that we hadn't done it for long enough.

I swear I sucked on that lump of cracker for an hour without noticing anything but how gross it is to leave a cracker in your mouth for an hour.

When we went back again with the same answer, she threw up her hands in frustration, shrugged, and handed out a ditto about the small intestine.

And wouldn't tell us what it was supposed to do, only that we hadn't done it properly.

Google, my best friend, is unhelpful on the topic. Using my grownup brain, I suspect that enzymes in your saliva should break the starches into sugars, and the cracker was supposed to taste sweet, but this never happened for me (I tried it in college one time when I had a roomate with a Saltine supply).

So: Anyone have any clue? Did my teacher make this "experiment" up to keep us quiet for a few minutes? Have you ever heard of this? Seems like I had all the cool kid experiment books and I never saw anything close to it.
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Side story: I was going to mention my 6th grade teacher by last name only, then decided to google the name (it's Greek, unusual enough for me to check). Her name and current job came up 3rd after genealogy sites, and that was without any first name because I couldn't remember it until I saw it. The rest of the page is taken by either her or her daughter, who was a few years ahead of me in school. Which puts me into a unique situation--should I mention her name, which would very likely lead here here eventually, which might mean I'd get an answer? Or would that be too weird? That's a bit too metacognitive for me.

J and I are going here for my birthday.

He made the mistake of sending me the link.

I made the mistake of looking at the menu.

I might just fall down and die from joy halfway through the meal. Or take off my clothes and roll around in the dessert. I promise nothing.
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Yes, I am actually alive, just heavy into assembly-line knitting, and not paying attention to much else. Though I had a very successful food-weekend, in which I figured out A: the secret to making my crepes more like my grandfather's (apparently when he says "play around with it until the consistency is right", he means "add more milk"), and B: How to make vegetarian gravy that's not lumpy.

Vegetarian Gravy

Ingredients:

About 1/4 of an onion (or a very small onion)
A fair blob of oil or butter
4-5 mushrooms, sliced thinly
1/2 tsp. sage
1/4 tsp pepper
a shake of garlic powder
a couple of shakes of tumeric
scant 1/4 cup flour
1/2 cup plus a splash of milk (soy milk would probably be fine)
1/2 cup plus a splash of broth or water with boullion

Heat the onions in oil until they're clear and melty. Add the mushrooms and cook until everything's browned a bit. Add the spices (leave the tumeric off if you want it to be whitish instead of yellowish).

Meanwhile, whisk the cold milk together with the flour until there are only a few tiny lumps. Take the veggies off heat, and pour the milk in, then the broth. Keep stirring until it's as thick as you want it. Num. Good on un-meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

The squirrels in our yard are always good for a laugh.

A little while back, I expressed a wish to see a pumpkin with a tail sticking out of it. Yesterday someone put a good-sized whole pumpkin out back against a tree. A squirrel immediately laid claim, chewing away a perfect fat-squirrel-sized hole, then digging out the seeds, burying them in the yard, and coming back for more. Once in awhile he'd sit on top of it, resting, surveying his nut-filled kingdom. Then he'd get back to work, reaching so far into the pumpkin that we could only see his tail and one hind foot.

We wanted to take a picture, but it was dusk when we noticed his industry, and the tree is a ways away from our front door, so it'd be hard to see. I peeked into the pumpkin this morning and found that he'd nearly scraped it clean.

Dear people involved in the live geurrilla improv performance whatever-you-were-calling-it piece on State St. last night:

At first I was amused, but now I can't get "The Ants Go Marching Two By Two" out of my head. Gr.

An academic research talk frightened me for the first time yesterday.

"Directed Evolution of Viruses". Remember that phrase. It'll be the thing that kills us off unless we start living on other planets first. I'm absolutely unshakably convinced of that.

Does everyone else know this and I just was out sick that news week? I keep up enough with biotech literature that big ideas don't usually bonk me over the head like this.

Anyhow, the Bio 101 refresher course: A virus is basically a little protein-coated lump of DNA (or RNA, yes I know, but I'm trying to keep on topic here). The DNA mostly says "make more things just like me!", which your cells do until they explode, and all that stuff that used to be on the inside of a cell is suddenly NOT which is what informs your white blood cells that there's a problem. Your white blood cells find something on that virus' protein coating that makes it different from useful surfaces like those of your red blood cells or sinus cavity and then go about destroying whatever looks like that virus and inflaming spots in your body in the meantime. The next time that virus shows up, the white blood cells are ready for it and the fight is won much more quickly.

The reason we get sick more than once in our lives from viruses like influenza is that the protein coating changes slightly over time due to slight mutations when your cells are churning out all those viruses. If it changes enough, the white blood cells don't notice the intruder and things go a bit more slowly. You get sick with the flu again.

Now, there are two bits of research that scare me:
1: We can tack DNA onto the end of these viruses already. A lot of times we add in DNA that simply says "start glowing in the dark", as a way of making sure it's working.(Again, the process of GFP labelling is a little more complicated, but I'm trying to make a point here.) There are plenty of people using this for honorable purposes, trying to add in DNA that tells the cell to die if it's cancerous, or stay alive and extend new links to its neighbors if it's the neuron of a patient with Alzheimer's.

Less honorable people could just as readily inform your neurons to engage in mass suicide, or the lining of your veins to clump rather than lie flat. As far as I know, the good stuff hasn't gotten FDA approval yet but that doesn't mean it's not getting heavy play right now. Scientists are a few years from reliably telling cells ANY of these things from within, but only a few, I think. We CAN tell them to do a lot of things.

2: We can mess with a virus' protein coating at a much more rapid rate than happens with chance alone. This is the directed evolution--the thing the guy talked about yesterday I hadn't heard before. You make mutations happen at a faster rate, then screen out whatever hasn't changed the way you want it to. Brave New World aside, it won't work on the size scale of a person, because it takes too long to raise a few billion babies, waiting for the one with the polka-dot hair. But a virus has a lot less complexity, and a much faster reproduction rate.

The guys I saw yesterday can take a virus that 90% of us have been infected with and maintain immunity to, mess with it, then pack our cells full of the stuff without any immune response whatsoever.

Read that again: we can change viruses more rapidly than the flu does to itself and make it do exactly what we want it to do.

We can pack that virus with information that tells a cell to A: Replicate virus, and B: Do whatever the heck else we want it to do.

This is what people are working on.

This is what bad guys WANT us to work on.

Again, this isn't happening tomorrow, but it is happening. It's enough to stick me in a hideyhole. A well-sealed hideyhole with nanoporous filters.

Update: I was just just chitchatting with my boss and asked him what he thought of the talk. Apparently, I WAS sleeping on the day this was big news, but it is scary powerful sciencing nonetheless.