A note to the truly insane number of people who've come here looking for "nanopants" in the past 24 hours: please refer here.

A note to Madison people: there are several trees filled with particularly nice mulberries on Willy street at the moment. There's a tree right next to the welcome to the neighborhood sign that I've been pulling handfuls off of. (There's also a tree in my backyard, but the branches are 30 feet in the air. I can only look at the fallen ones and sigh.)

A note to band nerds: I saw a bumper sticker this morning that said "I'm as horny as John Philip Sousa". I wish I'd seen it in high school.

A note to eaters of obscure vegetables: What do you do with a kohlrabi? I got two tomato-sized ones in my CSA box this week, and have since been singing, to the tune of "What do you do with a drunken sailor":
What do you do with a ko-ohlrabi?
What do you do with a ko-ohlrabi?
What do you do with a ko-ohlrabi?
Early in the morning?

Your ideas need not be for early in the morning. 400,000 of The Gay + Lots of Librarians = the most fun public transit rides EVER.

At least, I hope. If the chemical I ordered comes in today or tomorrow, I can go (I was told it'd take a week, it's been 8 days). If it comes on Friday, I'll need to stick around. Grant deadlines wait for no one, even if they're looking forward to seeing plumed drag queens.

Speaking of work, it's going well. Really well. 180 bazillion percent turnaround well.

I'll say it this way: one of my self-imposed rules is not saying bad stuff about work. And when, in the last almost-four years, have I talked about work? Well, then.

My other work rule? As obvious as the first one to me, but maybe not so much the non-science crowd. Anyhoo, it's this: nothing proprietary, nothing that could get published, unless it's been published already. Since I don't have any publications yet, that's pretty straightforward. My lab's pretty open, but I suspect that putting unpublished data online would be cause for ejection by cannon. The picture up above? A very pretty cell. I'm pleased with the staining, and I'm excited things are going well, so I want to share. But it's doing something slightly wonky, so it's not getting published, and if someone could figure out my work from that, then hell, they DESERVE to scoop me. Proof of nerdiness:

There's a way that I feel when I'm having a really stimulating science conversation that requires romantic language.

Time slows down. I feel like we're the only ones in the room. I get daydreamy for a few hours after, thinking about ways of doing particular experiments, or how to prove or disprove someone's interesting questions. I want to email them the next day to thank them for giving me some time with their lovely brain. If it's someone a few steps ahead of me, career-wise, I see where they live, and if it's in the northeast I imagine doing a postdoc for them, having access to their genius all the time.

I had a really great poster session last night, just a "please give us money you nice people" thing, but with some very smart folks that asked just the right things. Add to this some lovely data I got this week, and I'm falling in love with science all over again. Is there any way of politely telling a young woman wearing a short short flouncy skirt (like this, but even shorter) that she's flashing crotch with every step? This Wired article about nanotech and Eddie Bauer's goofy "nanopants" led a bunch of people to end up here over the weekend after googling for "nanopants".

Sorry, people. A: Nanopants are pretty crappy nanotech, and people who are protesting nanotech could find a lot more important things to get worked up about than droplets of Teflon. B: This site has nothing to do with Eddie Bauer's silly technology. It's just that I do some low-level nanotech work. Also, to my ear the title sounds like "No Pants Dance", which makes me laugh.

Oh, don't be a pervert like that. The phrase "No Pants Dance" makes me think of a pantsless child J and I saw at the park on one of the first warm days of the season, hopping around the gazebo, his hands waving around in a universal gesture of springtime joy. We live in the hippie neighborhood, so seeing an occasional tiny tuchus run by isn't so unusual, but he so perfectly expressed my own joy in the early sprouts and walking around with open coats that he'll always be somewhere in my mind, dancing and laughing. I was reading the last couple of pages of one of the Harry Potters last night, in an attempt to not die before the new one comes out, and the music from the very end of one of the movies was wandering in and out of my head. Except, when I started paying attention to it again, it had morphed into the music that comes at the very end of Star Wars. Cognitive dissonance.

Darn John Williams and his predictably arranged hummable themes! Oprah's groupies are reading Faulkner.

Excuse me, my brains are going to explode now.

What's next? Finnigan's Wake? I was fussing over the stash-reduction shawl last week, trying to figure out how big it will end up. Since it was hard to measure scrunched up on one circular, I transferred stitches to a bunch of smaller-diameter circulars to have a looksee:



I like the single column of holes radiating out better than the feather-and-fan lace in the original. (The actual pattern looks like this). And the pattern is so easy and comforting and FAST compared to the Mediterranean shawl, though production might slow now that it's warming up here. A neat word etymology I learned this weekend from a book I'm reading about archaeology in Crete: the word "barbarian" came from Greeks who met some foreigners whose incomprehensible language sounded like "barbarbar". I finished more than just the shawl this weekend:


Blinding, blinding socks. I started them in the winter, when I was working on two gray projects in gray cold weather and gray gray gray. So I made these, filled with secret messages to amuse myself.

Yes, really.

Turns out it's impossible to photograph because of the varigation, but I put my full name in capital letters on the lower ankle portion of one sock, and made a sort of pictograph of my name (which very roughly translates to "Sacred Vegetable Pickers", if you're curious) on the other. The upper half of the sock leg is plain ribbing, so when worn normally the ribbing will be folded down over the entertaining bits, making for a decoder-ring level of secrecy.

Partway through these meaning-packed socks, I read this really excellent essay on the "me too!" culture that seems to surround online knitting. Why SHOULDN'T we all be making things that can be used by no one else?

To which I ironically say Amen, as wrong as it feels to vocally align oneself with someone else's personal manifesto of uniqueness. In any case, these socks are a good example. From my knitting peeves to the way I usually wear through storebought socks, these socks were designed for me. They even have my name in them!

We don't get much in the way of bespoke materials anymore, do we? This was something I also thought of when reading Women's Work, which discusses the evolution of textiles from the earliest fragments archaeologists have found to almost-present-day. At the time when owning more than you could carry was pointless and maybe dangerous, everyone knew how to do everything they needed, and personalization was the result--a tool carved more deeply on one side to accommodate a lopsided grip, a shorter toga/sari/kilt (all originally made as one long piece of fabric draped artfully) with a longer warp fringe done because you ran out of thread, a string skirt made with beautiful stones found on a memorably windy day.

I know, I know: globalization isn't exactly a new topic at this point, but all the same: what do you own that was made just for you? First things first:

This happened 3 years and one day ago.

Also? Our parents have done more for us to celebrate the occasion than we've done, unless you count the extreme joke mileage we've gotten out of this being our leather anniversary. We don't usually go through a whole big whoopidy-do-da over romantic occasions--usually dinner out at a new restaurant suffices. 'Cause really, what's the point? I get to spend every day with a beautiful man with a wicked sense of comic timing that talks with passion about things I don't understand, and who likes to go for walks and grow green things and meow at passing cats. For some reason, he likes spending time with me, too.

Every day is a celebration.
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I started this shawl at the end of August last year. I didn't pick it up at all through the month of December because I was making piles of slippers, but the rest of the time it was my primary project. So, a lot of knitting time went into it.

Good stuff: Whatever hangups I still had about picking up stitches evaporated after picking up over 1500 stitches for the border--the same way getting shots used to scare me until I needed to get a bunch of shots because I'd played with a pony that went rabid. I used to have a really difficult time making edges look nice, but I have a system now, and you can see from the pic above that it worked pretty well.

I love the yarn, Jaggerspun Zephyr. I'm using up the leftovers for a different (much easier and faster) shawl now, and the next time I decide to do a lace project, it'll be my top choice. Very even, super soft, blocks beautifully.

The price per time unit of entertainment? Less than 50 cents an hour. I like lace because it's cheap.

Bad stuff: The gauge listed with the pattern only talked about the body of the garment, done on 2's. I was fairly close and didn't worry about it. But the border, which was done on 0's, came out quite tightly--I needed to block the heck out of the shawl so the edge wouldn't squinch up the body and curl things up. I'm still not sure it'll stay blocked. If I do something of this size and complexity again, I'll be sure to swatch a bit of the edging, to make sure everything lines up.

Frankly, I'm sick of looking at the thing. I'm hoping that letting it sit in a closet for a few weeks will help. I'm sure it's nice--I see no mistakes, and after 9 months of work, that's saying something--but I can't stand the sight of it. But I'm sure my worldview will settle soon enough, and then I'll wear it lots.
She's done.

More importantly, and nearly as long in the making, a big grant I've been assisting with is being printed RIGHT NOW. So I'll talk more about the shawl tomorrow, when this monster has begun its trip to the NSF.