So many things to talk about. So little time to write them into an understandable form.
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Just for a moment, ignore that this video is about a sports person, or that it's on Jimmy Kimmel, or that it features a guy from Star Trek.

Just watch, and laugh.

The video reminded me that laughing at people full of hate is pretty effective--if you argue with them, tell them you hate them, then they feel free to keep the cycle going. But no one likes feeling foolish, and like they're part of a joke they don't know the punchline for.

Another thing that struck me is that George Takei only came out publically within the last year or so. When I hear about people that were in the closet for ages and ages, I always mourn a little for the energy they spent hiding--what could they have produced, if they hadn't spent so much time and worry trying to pass? Seeing this makes me wonder how many other hilarious moments of his we'd missed before now. But it also makes me look forward to what else he's got up his smooth, chocolatey sleeve.
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Speaking of humor, here is some nerd humor: xkcd, a heavy-on-the-engineering-and-math-humor webcomic. Also, Jonathan Coulton, who sings songs about zombie memos, Christmas cards from post-apocalypic futures, the Mandlebrot set, and a truly glorious version of Baby Got Back (plus, he apparently grew up one town over from one of the towns I grew up in). They're improving the little interstices of time I have.
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Here's all the handspun I was talking about recently:
The skein farthest to the left is the one I spun first, and didn't like. The more I look at it, though, the less lumpy it seems. I'll still avoid it in the sweater, if I can.

There's about 730 yards here, total. The yarn is sportweight, the second through fourth skeins are a pretty consistent 14 wpi (the first one is more variable, but mostly thinner). I think I'm more than a third of the way there, even if I'm discounting the ugly skein.

Oh, and the different-colored ties on every skein are actually part of my labeling system--I write down the yardage and wpi of every skein, and note what the skein is tied with. That way, if there's one I don't want to use, I don't have to take the wpi of all of them to figure out which one was a bit thinner. Plus, I can plan on using the smaller skeins in places where I know I won't need a whole skein, like if I run out of yarn at the top of a sleeve. Also, it makes me feel a bit organized, at least.

I don't have a real good sense of how much of the wool I've spun up, weightwise, though if I really wanted to I could bring what I have spun into the lab to weigh it. I suspect I'll have plenty, though--there's two pounds of fiber, I'm spinning it reasonably finely, and I'm not planning on knitting anything too baggy.

I've got some general ideas for what I want to do with it, but nothing set in stone yet. I was poking through Madam's knitting book collection recently and came upon Viking Patterns For Knitting, which has contains a lot of parts of things I've wanted to try lately--beautifully complex, asymmetric cables. Just fantastic. So I bought it, and also The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns.

Between these two books, I'm pretty sure I can rule the world.

And here are the kid sweaters I've been talking about lately. That sleeveless one isn't done yet, obviously, but it was at a photographable stage, so why not. I'm thinking of doing a hat next, for some minimal variety.
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When one is having a rough day, it's made much worse when the bad things happening are A)entirely avoidable, and B) entirely your fault. It was snowing like crazy over the weekend--the buses even stopped running. Forgot my lab keys over the weekend, and needed to slog through the snow and take the bus all the way back home. Wouldn't have even bothered coming back--wouldn't have bothered going through the 16 inches of snow in mid-fall in the first place--if I didn't have some time-critical things going. Thanks to my own stupidity I ended up working until about 9 on Sunday night.

It looks like they went well, though. There's some super-exciting preliminary data, and I just came up with a way of addressing a question I just *know* reviewers are going to hound on.

It's exciting, starting to see the answers to things I've been wondering about for 5 years. I've seen a few descriptions of spinning on a wheel where they say you shouldn't need to pull on the yarn at all with the non-fiber-holding hand; you just get the tension knob properly set, and the fiber-holding hand controls the drafting. Until recently, I hadn't quite believed this, mostly because I couldn't do it. Either the fiber would sit there doing nothing, the yarn getting overspun and kinked up, or I'd try to force the thing to go by holding the fiber too far back and it the whole thing would wisp apart.

Well, I finally got it to work. I'm not sure what did it, exactly, because I suddenly noticed I was doing it the night before last, with just a little guidance from what I think of as the fiber-pulling hand, but no longer. I think using carded fiber helped, as did having already spun nearly 3 bobbins. Once I had the hang of it, I realized I could draft way, way faster. With the highest ratio on my wheel, spinning singles for a sportweight 2-ply I was in a comfortable easy rhythm.

Elapsed time from buying the Joy to feeling like I'm outgrowing it: 6 months. I won't be buying a new wheel anytime soon, though; for now, treadling faster and/or enjoying a slow easy rhythm will have to do.

I'm getting more and more pleased with this Shetland. I mentioned some of the trouble I was having with the singles, and I was disappointed with the first skein. So disappointed, that I pulled the remainder of the iffy singles off the bobbin and stuck them in a box. Perhaps I'll want something more nobbly later.

The second skein, I could see the resemblance to the stuff I'd worked up on the spindle, which is lovely and knitted up to a wonderful fabric that's squishy while holding textured stitches. I finished spinning the third skein last night, and it's even better than the second *before* taking a bath. I'm getting a fairly consistent 14 wpi, 200-plus-a bit yards per bobbin. Good stuff. Pictures soon.

Now I'm starting to think a bit about the pattern, what I'll be able to do with these not-so-great skeins. They might be good at the edges, they're more in the 16 wpi range, though with more thick-and-thin spots. Or maybe if I have enough yarn I can just avoid the first skein entirely, use it to make a hat or something. A little urban-planning type experiment:

The next time you drive to a mall, or even a Walmart/Target/large grocery store type place, park across the street from where you want to go, and try to walk there.

How easy is it? Do you have to dodge cars? Hop a fence? Cut across feeling-like-you're-trespassing medians?

I mostly take the bus places, and sometimes when I'm cutting across a parking lot, I get a distinct feeling of unwantedness. There are no sidewalks around the parking lot. There are no pedestrian crossings, even in areas where people walking through might have just parked on the outer edge of the lot. Often, you get the sense that this is just a car-culture thing; the people constructing the lots assume that everyone gets there by car, so don't think to make areas pedestrian-friendly, particularly this time of year when some of the handier access points are blocked by snow. Other times, it seems as if things are deliberately constructed to prevent someone from walking in there.

Here in Madison, the West Transfer Point--a spot where over 200 buses stop per day (pdf)--is within a couple of blocks of three separate strip malls. You need to cross the street once or twice to access all of them. This would be fine, except the stoplights are on the far end of the block, so a ped is likely to cross 6 lanes of just-got-off-the-highway traffic by one of the non-traffic-lighted pedestrian crossings. Local drivers are disinclined to slow down.

Only one section of the street has a sidewalk, and in order to enter any of them from off the property, you need to choose whether you're going to A: Hop a fence, B: worm your way between shrubs, or C: walk along the car entrance ramp, which, because it's a main thoroughfare, is SUPER dangerous, with cars moving fast and not looking for walkers.

How many thousands of people go through that transfer point every day? I'll bet that most of them have money they'd be willing to spend--there's a grocery store, an arty movie theater, a comic book shop, a used book store, several craft stores, a dollar store, and a few fast food places right there, and I've spent money at all of them. With so many buses going through, and considering that from there you can get to almost everywhere else in town, it would certainly be convenient to get a transfer, pick up a few things, and catch the next bus a half hour later.

And yet the people who designed all three of these structures have actively set things up in a way that prevents pedestrians from safely doing business with them.

Perhaps the assumption is that everyone who rides the bus *has* to, that they're all too poor to drive. But that's simply not true. For example, the U gives out bus passes to students and people who work on campus. Parking on campus is very expensive and a hassle, so plenty of professional people who work on or near campus take the bus, which picks up and drops off within a block of where they need to be. The buses are packed before 9am, and full of students and people going to work. All these people have disposable income, and if they're anything like me, often pick up food or run errands on their way home.

So why not? Why not remove a dozen cinder blocks, and pave that little space, so pedestrians have a way in? Why not paint two white lines nearby, so someone walking has a spot they feel they can legally cross? Why not put in a curb and sidewalk that runs along the entrance ramp?

I'm not even getting into what happens in these spots if you have a bike; that's another day's rant. I always notice when birdsong comes back. Although it'll probably get colder again, it's the thing that convinces me that winter really is a temporary thing, that the world will be green again eventually.

This morning, I heard a bird I very specifically associate with waking up at my grandmother's house in the summer--it would wake me up and annoy me. I'm not sure what bird makes the call, however; I just haven't looked up at the right moment. It's that one that sounds like a child playing on a squeaky swing. It made waiting for the bus a more cheerful thing. I'm doing a silly Bollywood night with some friends tomorrow night--I've invited them to my house, we're going to watch Amar Akbar Anthony*, and eat chili and cornbread and ricotta cheesecake and laugh with the movie.

Last night I was struck with a sudden feeling of, oh, I don't know, inverse-homesickness, in that I was homesick for places and people I've never met, at least in real life.

I just thought you all should know that I miss you, somehow, and if transporter technology existed you'd all be here tomorrow night, trying to figure out what a man dressed as Abe Lincoln stepping out of a giant wheeled egg labeled "Happy Easter" symbolizes to the Indian subcontinent.

Talking about research.

Eating a sauce made from raspberries I picked on a friend's farm in September and froze, so I could have raspberries in February.


*Which I highly recommend if you, like me, have always thought you'd like Bollywood movies but don't know where to start. It's 10 rainbow-soaked, showtune-playing varieties of delight. A general observation:

For a lot of my friends, last year seemed to be a year of stagnation at best (although all the exceptions to this very vague rule got married last year, so who knows). Things just weren't clicking.

This year seems to be a year of a lot of people getting sick of stagnation at best, actively looking for something better, and hey guess what? Better stuff exists! There just seems to be a lot of agency coming from everywhere. It's lovely to see things happening, for everyone, all the time.
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A Belated Valentine's observation:

Say you want to convince your sweetie that your love is pure and everlasting. You might want to give them something made of gold, which is nonreactive under all but the most extreme situations.

But maybe gold is too malleable. Maybe you want to say your love is unyielding to all the pressures of life. Then, a diamond, with its high tensile strength (though my handy materials science textbook suggests that Kevlar might say this 2.5 times better, if she works for NIST). I've never been impressed by diamonds, though--I just look at them and can't help thinking that I contain more carbon than they do, and in more interesting configurations. Which is a bit odd, because normally I have a soft spot for large single crystals of things.

But I digress. Maybe diamonds don't impress you either. What if you want to tell your sweetie that your feelings are so strong they just might explode with the slightest provocation?

Clearly, then, you need some cesium.

I think I've shared that link before, but I was thinking about it in the lab just now when I realized how much gold I have sitting in my lab drawers. Not ingots or anything, you understand--all very thin layers, barely enough to electroplate something interesting if I wanted to (I want to. I've considered saving all the used bits).

Jeremy did something very lovely for me yesterday and today, and drove me way to the outskirts of town to get some lab stuff coated in a thin layer of gold. I was considering the irony: a man drives his wife to a building. She enters, and a few minutes later, happily leaves, laden with a package that contains shiny yellow layers of gold.

Then she brings the package into the lab, does things to its contents, and throws the gold away.

What would a good symbolic love gift be for you?
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Yet another observation, the last one, I think:

I'm always wanting to combine my lab work with my crafty stuff. In the book Mauve, they say how to synthesize mauve if you've got a handy laboratory. Since I do, I'm always sorely tempted. How cool would it be to synthesize some mauve, dye some fiber, and spin it, and knit it? Fun, I say. Things that strike one as strange only with the greater informational volume one has in adulthood; Music In Childhood Edition:

In 7th or 8th grade, all the songs we sang at my Catholic school's music concert were from Fiddler on the Roof.

At another music concert around the same time, I soloed the first part of "Surrey with a Fringe on Top". In some ways, that's weirder than the first one, because we *did* have boys who could have sung the part. Or, if they were all balking and an Oklahoma song typically sung by a man was required, why not one that doesn't involve dating? Last April, I did an entry about my stash, and I've been updating things occasionally. Here's the most recent one.

I bought some yarn over the weekend for the first time in ages, which got me thinking it's time for an update. Not as detailed as previously, but some thoughts on my fight with craphoarding.

It took me a while to remember the last time I bought yarn for myself. I think it was for the Fair Isle sweater I've still got in progress, and I bought that about this time last year. So I suppose by Wendy's standards, I *already* did my "No Yarn For A Year" challenge, although I wouldn't consider it like that, because I bought a lot of stuff over the last year--a wheel, several pounds of fiber, yarn for gifts. I'm not even sure what I have takes up less space than before, because fiber is fluffy and full of air, and there's a whole new container I have to store things.

My stash IS better organized and more centrally located, however. There's the knitting bag (containing stuff in progress and sometimes yarn for very-near-future projects), there's the yarn tub (with some works-in-progress that have stalled and all the other yarn), there's the fiber/fabric tub (that has some things on top because they don't fit right now). There's sometimes a small bag of fiber-in-progress sitting next to the wheel. But that's it. Even the sewing box has a home.

The part of my stash that's been reduced the most was a gigantor box of tag-sale acrylic. I've done a few baby blankets and am using it right now in the sweater-o-thon. I'd said a while back that I would give what's left before I move, and that's still the plan--I'm running out of ideas for the remaining skeins.

Although I haven't bought much yarn lately, my yarn bin is just as full. How can this be?

I've spun a lot of yarn lately. Most of it isn't ready to knit because I haven't spun the whole project's worth. I'm still mostly enjoying the process although I'm starting to spin more with specific projects in mind.

I'll probably update this again, and with pictures, when it's been a year since the first set, in early April. There's a lot more fiber, so I'll probably include that, and I'd like to be aware of how much fabric I have, so I'll probably include that too.

What I'd like to do before then:

Finish the acrylic--or at least, finish it enough that the remainder fits in the yarn bin.

Give away some fabric. Why do I have all this calico?

Be able to fit all the fiber into some container.

Get handspun higher up on the to-be-knit queue.

I should probably put my sewing machine away--it's not in the way, but I use it so little that I'm starting to become aware of the real estate it takes up (J, I'm thinking of putting the laptop there so I don't feel like I'm taking the computer away from you when I'm working).

All the above is really part of the same general, long-term goal: Be able to justify everything I own. "I like it" is enough, "It gives me good memories" is enough. Things that don't manage even this minimal criteria, why let them weigh me down, when someone else might love them?

Oh, that stash addition, what was it? A few balls of bright red Lacey Lamb from Lakeside, a yarn I've been looking at for a while. It's very, very soft, and very, very thin. It claims to be machine washable but I probably won't test that. I don't know what I'll be doing with it yet, but I bought enough for a rather large shawl, so my options are open. I have lots of design ideas that I'll work on... er... someday. Lovely stuff. I'm usually not much of one for doing the same pattern more than once. Even with things like socks, which I generally make very plain versions of, I'm always approaching them a little differently, trying toes and heels, combining leftovers, playing around with self-striping.

But I'm really enjoying the repetitiveness of the kid sweater pattern right now. I sewed the first one together, and now feel pretty confident that it will fit a small human, though I am going to compare some of the measurements to published patterns. The knitting is done on the second, and, once again, I cast on for the next as soon as I'd finished.

For a while now, all the knitting I've had has been fairly complex stuff--gifts for others where I was writing the pattern as I went, my Fair Isle sweater, lace. Usually interesting knitting is what I find compelling, but lately I've just wanted a moment of peace and quiet. No complicated patterns, no frequent thinking (doing something about once per inch is okay). No changing needles, even. All these sweaters are fitting a need. A lot of work-writing seems to lead to a lot of non-work-writing. Not sure why that is.

Anyways, I've been thinking a bit about capoeira lately, and why I like it.

One of the things I realized is that it's one of the few situations where I give myself permission to be a flailing dope.

When I was rock climbing regularly, I'd do the same move over, and over, and over, and it'd be satisfying to get it right, but just as often I'd wear a hole in my hand and do the thing more poorly over the course of the evening. I kept trying to get good enough were I felt like I could at least contribute something to the conversations of the climbing friends I have, but they started a ways ahead of me and went more often, so I'd see myself lagging farther and farther behind.

Then all the joints in my hands started aching the second I got up on a wall, and I just gave up on it. I was tired of falling off the lowest-ranked routes at the gym, and of feeling all at once like these routes I couldn't do were so boring. An awful combination.

But I enjoy listening to their stories, so I do that, now.

It's not that capoeira is easy. I have this thing where I usually get teary when there's something I don't understand or can't do, because I get so frustrated, and I regularly hit that point early on with some complicated choreography.

You want to know how much I'm not designed for synchronized movement? I need to look at my hands to tell left from right. (The fingers and thumb of the left hand form an L; I learned that in first grade.) This is unhelpful when you're mid-headstand.

But after one insane 4-hour class where I didn't have the strength to do a bunch of unfamiliar moves, my body was too shaky after a while to even do the moves I knew, and I got lectured about how anyone starting capoeira needed to be serious, to do it for life, I just broke, and decided to do the opposite, because what the hell, I was paying for lessons.

So I let myself be silly, I let myself make mistakes, I let myself not understand how something works. That doesn't mean I'm disrespectful, I just dont worry about stinking. If I can't do it exactly right, so what? I'll just be a happy person with crummy form. (note: so long as it's not something that's dangerous to do to my body--there have been a few bad habits I've worked really hard on, because doing a particular thing the wrong way for years would have destroyed my hands.)

Interestingly, I think my game is better for the not caring, because there's a lot of space to be goofy in capoeira, especially in angola. The games are played slowly, there's lots of play-acting and trickery--someone gets you, and you can choose to act faux-shocked and limp around for a moment or two before starting up again (or to get your opponent's guard down to do something funny). It's not usually the sort of thing where there's an obvious winner--it's a conversation.

Having a bad day is built right into a lot of the songs in capoeira--songs about being both big and small in the roda, about back and forth, songs saying "play with me carefully" which has the double meaning of "I'm a tender old man, play carefully", and "I'm a *wily* old man, play carefully."

Cai, cai bananeira,
bananeira caiu

If, like the song says, a big banana tree can fall, why should I worry when I do it? I'll never have sufficient body awareness to be really impressive looking in the roda. But I can have the most fun. It's so cold today that most public schools in the area are closed.

I've never even heard of such a thing.

Also, by the time I got on the bus my glasses had a significant* layer of ice on them, just from my breath freezing to them. Those pictures of male Arctic explorers with frosty beards make more sense.

I tried that trick in the Little House books that always stuck in my head--spitting and having it freeze before it hits the ground--but either it didn't work or it just didn't break into a million exciting pieces. It was too cold to have the presence of mind to check.

Small comfort: recent temperatures, while colder than it's been during my entire time in Wisconsin, are still 10-15 degrees above record lows.

*"significant"="thick enough that when I wiped at it with my glove it came away in a single sheet". Some spinning I haven't shared:

That brighter stuff on the left is the silk top I got at Blackberry Ridge a few months ago. 130 yards, 22 wpi. I'd say it's a third of the two ounces I bought. I've been allowing it to be a bit more thick and thin and slubby than I normally care for--firstly, because my definition of spinning this "thick and thin" really isn't and I'm trying to train myself to be calmer about spinning, secondly, because I think the randomness of the color will be emphasized by the yarn itself having more texture.

In thinking about what to do with this yarn, I did a small swatch around the holidays:

On the bottom, the silk plied with itself. On the top, plied with off-white silk from the stash. On the left, just the off-white silk plied with itself, because I wanted to see if it would work as an edging. Knit on a size 2US needle.

As you might have guessed from seeing the skein above, I decided not to ply with the whitish silk. The contrast was greater than I thought it'd be, and the texture of the pattern was completely lost. Meanwhile, I couldn't stop looking at the bottom part of the swatch. It positively glows.

The white edging? Probably not, but I'll have to see how much yarn I have before I completely discount the idea.

The rest of the skeins you can see in that top picture are spun from Ashland Bay merino top. I've shown some of this in progress before, and these are all the skeins I have right now. Just shy of 600 yards all together and about 30 wpi. I think that's about half of the 4 ounce ball of top I started with.

This stuff, it's wonderful. I don't mind spinning the silk because I love the colors, but it takes some concentration, while I find the merino quite easy to spin on the bus without paying much attention (it does however require more attention than I have at the moment, thus, the parade of easy kid sweaters). It's all spindle spun so it goes slow, but it's an enjoyable long-term project. I'm considering buying 4 more ounces of it, which would give me enough yarn for quite a large shawl. I'm not sure exactly what I'd do with it, but I have a few design ideas floating about.

On the opposite end of the spectrum:

These are from the two pounds of wool I got at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool festival.

The fleece of Mitzi (which was turned into the singles on the right) is working very well. I found it very easy to spin it to the thickness I wanted (sportweight as a 2-ply), filled up two bobbins without a hitch.

The yarn on the right, which came from Fontyne, is trickier. It still has a good amount of grease in it and is a bit sticky. Oddly, this made me spin it *thinner* than I wanted; I had a really hard time spinning it thicker than laceweight without it getting really just slubby and bad. When I used a lower ratio and cranked up the tension, all that happened is that the single broke. Repeatedly. It took me about half a bobbin before I was able to get the hang of it on the wheel, which mostly consisted of me being too annoyed to care about slubs everywere.

Particularly frustrating was that I didn't have any trouble at all spinning the sample I was comparing the yarn to, which I spun on a spindle. Maybe some of the roving is of a different quality? I don't even know.

I think for now I'm going to wind the way-too-thin half into a ball of singles, which I may use later for something where a finer yarn is okay, and I'll just try spinning more of it to get the hang of it. Meanwhile, I'm annoyed at having wasted that much wool just trying to get something that's not awful. I'm already kind of nervous about having enough wool to knit a sweater, this sort of thing doesn't help. Brainless knitting continues apace. The green sweater is all done but for the finishing, a second one in light purple sportweight acrylic is quite a ways along. There's a patterned sock that has gained a bit one night that I was up for some thing more complex, but precious little of even that.

I usually like creative challenges, but there's something to be said for comforting, productive motion you don't even need to look at. I had a very intense day on Thursday--all good, but very heavy on the "be at my sharpest and best", for many hours in a row and for several different purposes. I ended up hanging out with J and his D&D group for an hour or so, being completely passive, knitting the second sweater. Braindead knitting is *fast* knitting, too; I could probably knit a whole sweater in this non-pattern in a day, certainly a weekend. A good thing to keep in mind if I ever need a quick gift.

And a stack of kid's sweaters, on a bad day, will make me feel like at least I can do something right.

Brainless sweater patter, continued (beginning is here.

Sleeves:
These are worked from the top down. I knit two at once, flat, but if sewing pieces magnifies your aggrivation, pick up stitches around the arm hole.

Cast on (or pick up, see above note) about 45 stitches. Decrease one stitch on each side about once per inch until you have 31 stitches and about 7 inches of fabric. Knit 1.5 inches of ribbing, or knit another inch plain before doing the 'purl bumps and bobble' edging described previously (only be sure to do it in reverse because this is the bottom of the sleeve).

Bind off loosely, leaving a long tail to seam up the sleeves.

One last finishing trick I've been doing: worried that the neck of a kid's sweater will be too tight? Try and stick your own head through. Kids' heads are not much smaller than adults, so if it fits, it won't be too loose, though it can be tighter than you'd prefer on your own sweater. This works anywhere beyond about toddler age. Thermometer free temperature determination, Part Two:

If it's cold enough that you didn't even notice that your boogers are freezing, it's below 0 degrees F.

This has been thermometer free temperature determination, Part Two. This weekend will provide ample opportunities to research Part Three, "Ten Below", but then again the researcher might just sit in her house all weekend and be thankful for modern heating. Thank you for watching.

Thermometer free temperature determination, Part Two:

If it's cold enough that you didn't even notice that your boogers are freezing, it's below 0 degrees F.

This has been thermometer free temperature determination, Part Two. This weekend will provide ample opportunities to research Part Three, "Ten Below", but then again the researcher might just sit in her house all weekend and be thankful for modern heating. Thank you for watching.

Thermometer free temperature determination:

If your boogers are freezing, it's below 10 degrees F.

This has been thermometer free temperature determination. Thank you for watching.