A good, busy weekend.

Capoeira: On Saturday, I did a capoeira demo with my group. The game I played was only all right, but playing in front of 100 people makes me conservative. It's more fun as a player when I'm right out there on the edge of my abilities--I might fall on my rear, and that happens plenty, but sometimes I pull some trick that feels fantastic. J's parents are coming into town next weekend, and we're looking forward to playing for them. Should be fun.

The only downside to the demo is that my gourd fell off onto the sidewalk and cracked. (reference pic.) The string holding the gourd on was somewhat frayed, and snapped as I picked it up to start playing. It was a long but clean single crack, so on Saturday night I tried putting it back together with wood glue. I was skeptical about how it'd sound after that, since the crack was so long, but it seems to have worked pretty well. On Sunday afternoon I gave it a good testing, sitting next to the river and practicing a bunch of songs. The boaters seemed to enjoy it, though the ducks didn't appreciate it so much.

Work: Read some papers, skimmed a ton more. I'm getting very bitchy at papers that are lame. I had a dream about an experiment to do, and it's not a terrible idea. May try it later.

Fiber stuff:There's some cranberry-colored fiber I've been spindle-spinning into laceweight for well over a year now, off and on. I'm finally on the last little handful of it; I'm really looking forward to knitting it up now that I can determine the final yardage. It'll probably be somewhere between a wide scarf and a narrow stole; something rectangular and lacy.

I also just plied up aabout 400 yards of the Shetland I'm working on for a sweater. I *think* I technically have enough now to do the sweater, but I'll probably do a few more bobbins so that I don't have to use the yarn that doesn't match the majority. I still have plenty of fiber, so I'm not worried about that part, I'll just use the extra in a hat, or something.

None of these plans are coming to anything right now, though. I'm not doing any large-scale projects right now, just because I don't want the responsibility. The spinning's a bit different, because I only really think of it on a bobbin-by-bobbin time scale. If I sit down and do it, I can spin a bobbin in a few hours, so that's a small project.

Urban wildlife that I saw this weekend: rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, robins, a cardinal, sparrows, finch-like birds (a red one and a bright yellow one), ducks (eating all the mulberries), some kind of hawk (getting attacked in the air by much smaller birds), crows, a possible blackbird or two, a probable muskrat, some little fish, lots of bugs.

To the woman who screams for her cat for 10 minutes, 5 times a day: You want her home all the time? Make her an indoor cat. She'll live a longer, healthier life, and you won't annoy the 50-100 people that can hear you even with the windows closed.

Things happening lately:

--Found a paper in my field from 1914. My ultra-modern, super-hot, catchphrase-laden field.

They don't even have a camera to show what they're talking about, it's all drawings. Totally awesome. I had to get the journal from the Rare Books Collection.

--Finished spinning up that green yarn I was working on, I'm now using it to knit slippers that will get felted. I forgot how fast it is to knit felted slippers--I'm already up to the heel on slipper #2. Not much of a pattern, I'm afraid, I basically just knit huge toe-up socks with an I-cord bind off.

The yarn came out all right. It's two plies of teal green Corriedale, one ply that's a whole mix of things--some dyed green fiber, some of the same fiber undyed, a tiny bit of aqua Merino I had laying around. The quality of the spinning is pretty good, especially considering I pretty much banged it out without doing any sampling, but I don't really like the barberpoling in the sections with white fiber. I LOVE the sections with the handdyed fiber, though, which is a similar color to the teal that comprised the other two plies.

I'll have to keep all that in mind in the future, when I want to stretch out a nice lot of handpainted roving. It was also a reminder that I *still* don't like heavy barberpoling effects, and maybe I should stop trying to use fiber just because I have it. I've come close to ripping out the slippers a couple of times, but I don't think the effect will be as gacky, once I felt them.

-Used to be, as I was calming my brain down to fall asleep, I'd mentally revisit places where I spent a lot of time in childhood--my school, my grandparents' houses, the yard behind my dad's old house. It was calming, to go through and see how many tiny details I could remember.

For a while, I've been thinking about spinning, instead--no neps, no stopping to move the yarn to a different hook, just different colors, fat, thin, whatever came to mind.

But even *more* recently, my half-asleep brain has enjoyed packing bentos.

J and I have been joking around lately, about whose Japanese culture obsession is more serious--his love of anime, or my love of bento.

We're nerds. You know that.

Anyhow, I got overly enthusiastic with the cooking a few nights ago, and thought this was a bento worthy of being shared.



Clockwise from upper left:

-Potato/spinach croquettes with a little container of ketchup
-Five-spice tofu (made with a kind of tofu I'd never seen before, with a dark brown "rind")
-five-spice bok choy
-fresh summer squash
-fresh snap peas and a container of pickled ginger and soy sauce
-onigiri with furikake
-grape tomatoes cut like flowers

My sister-in-law got us some little clear plastic containers for Christmas last year (less than 3 ounces each, with a note saying "Love from the TSA"). Turns out the pill bottles are water-tight, and work great to put sauces in. It's not very cute, but whatever, it's my bento, not a schoolgirl's.
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Onigiri-making directions. These are my new favorite things--I've made them a few times lately. They're pretty easy to make once the rice has cooled down a bit, they look neat, and they're an excuse for me to eat gallons of pickled ginger. I always worry that as I'm making them they'll stick to the plate I set them down on, so first I put down the flaky stuff you see on them (sometimes, I use sesame seeds). Since it'd get put on anyway, so it's a system I like.
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The five spice stir fry was partly adapted from a recipe in one of my cookbooks. It came out fine, though I'm not sure how I feel about five-spice powder as a general thing; I'm not a huge anise fan.

Five Spice Stir-Fry

Ingredients:

For the sauce:
1.5 tsp five spice powder
1 tsp powdered ginger (I threw in some pickled, too)
1 garlic clove, minced
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon honey
1 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tsp hot sauce, or to taste


Rest of it:
a little oil to saute
1 bunch of bok choy (2 might've been better)
8 ounces firm tofu, sliced somewhat thin
This would be good with other green veggies too--beet greens, asparagus, snow peas, etc.

Heat the pan pretty high with a bit of oil, and add the tofu. Heat the tofu up without moving it around too much, so it browns.

While that's going, mix all the sauce ingredients together.

When the tofu's browned, move it to one side of the pan and add in the greens. Let them get a little brown too, but not cooked to death, either. Take the pan off the heat, mix in the sauce.
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For the croquettes, I looked at a couple of recipes online (they're a really common bento item, for some reason). They were all pretty straightforward, although none included a binding agent in the filling--just potatoes and sometimes some other vegetables, or flavoring. I tried this for the first batch, but they were just a mess; when I tried to flip them over they landed on their sides and got completely deformed. Maybe my potatoes were too wet, but half an egg helped the problem 100% and barely changed the texture of the final product.

Ingredients:

2 medium-sized potatoes
1/2 a box of frozen spinach (5 ounces, maybe?), thawed
1 or 2 eggs
about 1/3 cup of breadcrumbs
a bit of salt and pepper to taste
oil for frying


Peel and dice the potatoes, boil until soft, drain off the water, and mash them.

Mix in the spinach, salt, and pepper, and an egg if you want to try it that way.

Make small patties with the potato mixture, and coat with 1)Breadcrumbs or flour, 2)Egg, 3)Breadcrumbs, in that order. Cook them on medium heat with a good amount of oil (1-2 tablespoons per batch), flipping them over as they brown.

In one of those can't-remember-how-I-got-there types of Internet wanderings, I ended up at this Slate article about how messed up wedding and engagement ring culture is. I've always taken a nearly-absurd pleasure in telling people the price of our inexpensive silver rings as they're showing off a multi-carat diamond. Elemental carbon has never really interested me, and the human misery that envelops the diamond industry just isn't something I want to support.

J didn't propose with a ring, but soon after we got engaged we did buy and exchange rings. (Then, exchanged them again a month later after needing to return them--J told me one size larger than his finger was, and bought a ring one size larger than what I'd said to him, because he was "worried they'd be too tight".) And those are our wedding rings, too. And while they're inexpensive, I think they're lovely; we get occasional comments from people who like that it isn't just the usual plain band.

So it's not the ring itself I have a problem with--the symbolism is nice, and I think of ours as having the added symbolism of the intertwining of our lives, along with the lives of our friends and family. I don't even mind the implied symbolism of "hey, I'm spoken for, so don't bug me"--so long as that cuts both ways, of course. Which is the trick of engagement rings, supposedly the exclusive purview of women. People are supposed to BEHAVE once they're wearing any ring of commitment--that's part of the reason they're there, so everyone around them knows their status. Which means that with a more traditional couple, the woman's expected to behave for about a year longer than the man. Ultimately, it's pretty perverse.
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Talking about committed relationships reminds me of something I was thinking about recently. I was thinking about the gay rights movement, and how I could respond to otherwise nice people that still can't get any farther in their thinking than not being vehemently anti-gay. (You know: "I don't mind Those People, so long as they keep their hairdressing and their Streisand singing behind closed doors and away from my kids.") How does the existence of homosexuality* actively improve the lives of straight people?

And it's corny, but what I've come up with is: love.

Love is a funny thing. We do all these things in its name, foolish, dangerous, world-changing things. And yet, it *could* be argued that it's all a perversion of biology, that the whole system of adrenaline rushes and feeling head-over-heels is just put in place so that we'll all hump and replicate. It explains our (societal "our", here) love of youth, our enjoyment of watching people that are vital and healthy, our mating dances, the emphasis on our baby-making and baby-feeding parts.

Cheapens the whole love thing quite a bit, that does. *I* don't want the nearly 9 years I've been with J to be a great evolutionary joke. A Darwinian ploy to make me forget about birth control feels wrong right down to my bones, and yet, it *would* feel that way if it were true, wouldn't it?

But! If everything under the umbrella of "love" was just a series of chemical reactions designed to turn me into a mother, why would homosexuality exist? Gay couples can parent as effectively as straight couples, but artificial insemination and adoption weren't too useful back when we were getting chased across the savannah by elephants. Homosexuality just doesn't make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

Which is why I think it's so wonderful. Gay love proves the validity of straight love. It shows that companionship, romance, attraction, all that stuff, actually comes from *us* and not from some signalling cascade set off by the probable immune system of a theoretical future offspring.

It gives me a stronger faith in love as a real, true force in the world.

*Not homosexuals, homosexuality. There's a great big pile of ways gay people have improved my life, the lives of my friends and family, and the lives of everyone in society. What I was thinking about was, what if homosexuality didn't exist in the first place? What do we lose then?

I finished these several months ago but forgot about them until I was getting the Dulaan Project box together:

Three very basic hats, all from the rapidly shrinking box of worsted weight Red Heart acrylic. I think the final tally for the Dulaan box was 3 sweaters and 5 hats. Stress knitting for the win!

They're all based on the same formula as I have in my Basic Hat Pattern. I cast on about 80 stitches for all of them. The two round-topped ones were decreased identically, but on the plain green one, I did a few inches of I-cord. I was originally thinking of putting a tassel or pompom on the end but I liked it plain.

The gnome-like hat started off like the others, but I spaced the decrease rows more widely, decreasing once every 7 rows instead of every other row. I did a bit of I-cord on the top of that one too, although it blends in more with the rest of the hat because the rate of decrease was so slow. It looked a little odd stuffed on my head, but I think on a kid-sized head it'll be cute. If I did one like this again, I might do the decreases once every 10 rows to ensure that the hat flopped down; once every 5 if I wanted it to stick straight up. At 7, it couldn't quite decide.

Another tip if you want to make a long pointy hat is to start the decreases a little sooner than you would on a regular hat. An explanation of this complexity requires the high-powered graphics of MS Paint:

Let's say you knit a plain tube that was as long as the height from your ears to the top of your head (this is about what I acutally do, by the way). Then you knit the usual top.

Not only are the decreases such as to make a nearly-flat top, but the fabric gets pulled in a little bit, as demonstrated by removing the corners from the dark blue rectangle. If the stick figure pulled the hat down in the back to cover their nonexistent neck, it'd fit perfectly.

If, however, you started with that same plain tube and added a top with slower decreases,

No only is the top of the hat way far away from the head, but you also don't get that slight tucked-in effect at the top of the plain-knit section. This hat would go to the stick-figure's chin before getting a snug fit.

If, however, you knit a shorter plain bit before getting into the decreases,

There's a vast improvement. The top is still far away, but the head actually fits snugly in the right spot, without the hat falling over the person's eyes.

You can look at the actual pictures of the hats and see that the decreases for the pointy hat started much earlier than for the other two. I designed them for people with smaller heads than I have, but they all fit me equally, just a bit snugly.

I hadn't thought of it before, but the pointy hat was somewhat of a practice run for the fish hat. The gauge is way different, but the average rate of decrease was comparable, and the setup was the same. I'd been particularly pleased with the way the rate of decreases worked out with the fish hat, but until I looked at this picture I'd just considered it to be a lucky moment. Hadn't even remembered that I did the same thing a few weeks before. In a way, all the luck I needed was right there in my head.

I think this kind of thing is what an experienced knitter has that a relative newbie doesn't. I have a fair number of patterns roughed out in my head, because I've knit 3 or 4 similar things before and the similarities have become apparent. I know the tricks, because I made mistakes back when I didn't know the tricks. Even if I don't go back to my physical notes *looking* for similarities, bits and pieces get picked up along the way. Now the muscle memory's there to the point where my entire memory of knitting these hats consists of deciding how wide to make the stripes.

Rest In Peace, Mr. Wizard.

He was definitely one of my major pro-science influences, growing up. I watched him every morning while eating breakfast.

I think the last time I saw the show was the night after my prom. My friend Ben and I came back to my house at about 5am after hanging out at a friend's house all night, flipped on the TV, and watched Mr. Wizard on the couch, under a comforter, still in our prom clothes. I remember that we talked for a little while about which episodes we remembered, and how nerdy it was to be watching at that particular moment, until we fell asleep.

I always appreciated his low-key, household-item-heavy approach. As a kid, I felt like a lot of other shows were trying to fool me into learning. And it didn't work--I'd remember the wacky guy, but not that he was singing about relativity, or whatever. But I learned stuff from Mr. Wizard--about how our muscles work, about how gases can be poured, about how strong gravity and air pressure are, and about how good science is done. He had the right idea--science is inherently interesting if you know what questions to ask.

His child-actor assistants annoyed me, though.

So thanks, Don, for giving me a mental picture of a scientist that I could identify with.

Been doing a lot of spinning lately. Well, more spinning than anything else non-work related, at least, which is still not a ton. Most of it's been on the spindles; there's not a good space for the wheel in our room, and we've been hanging out more in there than the living room lately in order to watch various shows on YouTube in my uncopious free time.

Something that I'm noticing is that I've found my, for lack of a better term, "creative voice" in spinning much sooner than I have in any of the other crafts I play around with. Not that I'm an expert by any means, but I feel much more open with my spinning, and that the results are obviously *mine* and not anyone else's.

This is something that's gotten to me during other times of my life. When I played music, or wrote a story, or even when I knit something, I enjoy it, but I never feel like I have that distinctive creative voice that other people talk about. I just end up with a thing that could have been done by anyone else. I feel the same way about my work. I hope that I do a good job, but another conscientious person could end up with the same results. I'm just... regular, I guess.

Somehow, spinning is something else again. Even though I'm only working with fibers that other people have prepared, I feel like I'm getting towards having a recognizable style--one that *I* recognize, at the very least. And that's a new thing.

So, what's in that style? It seems to be a lot of barber-poled yarns that don't say "hey lookie me! I'm a barberpole yarn!" There's this hat, which went from 3, to 2, to 1 plies of a 3-ply yarn being the darker grey fiber. There's this:

Which is a 3-ply of two dark brown wools: one ply of one, one ply of the other, and one ply alternating between one and the other every few yards. 11-12 wpi, 80 yards, about 1.5 ounces. I *adore* this yarn. It's wonderfully sheepy.

And then there's the yarn I'm working on right now:

Partly spindle-spun, partly done on the wheel, as you can see.

I expect it will be the loudest of the three, but is still keeping with the theme. The current plan is to do 2 plies of the plain teal Corriedale, and one ply of roving from Four Crows Farm. That third ply will mostly be the multicolored wool shown here, but a bit of white, because I have some left over from another project and thought it'd be nice to mix it in with wool from the same flock. And a bit of turquoise merino I had laying around because it wasn't enough to do anything with, and was a similar color.

Eventually the green and brown are going to go together for some felted slippers. For that reason, I'm not being too strict about the grist of the yarn. I just don't need that stress right now. I'm also not washing the yarns beforehand. I read someone at one point who thought that felting the yarns a bit in the finishing would decrease their likelihood of felting in the finished project, and since I *want* the finished project to felt I figured I'd try it this way and see if it makes a difference. I might give the knitted-but-unfelted slippers a soak before throwing them in with the laundry, though, because so far my experience with spinning has shown me that even processed fiber is positively filthy and usually still has some dye left in it.

The entry below, and a conversation with a friend about the entry below and related issues, got me thinking about the number of times that I got surprised about the details of developmental stuff, growing up. Not that I really think that *this* is the place to talk about it, but it does seem like there should be a place online somewhere, where everyone gets to honestly, anonymously answer the question: "What important thing didn't you know before [fill in the blank] happened?"

Maybe I'll make a place like that. Y'know, when I have a life.

I think that what happens a lot of time is that the strict medical definitions get used, a non-personal approach gets taken. On one hand, this enables everyone to be more comfortable, talking about very personal stuff like a math problem. I mean, I'm doing that right now, aren't I?

But on the other hand, while the information may be technically correct, you lose all the fine detail of what things actually look like and feel like, what's normal and abnormal, what's always awkward, and what just takes a little practice.

When I was in my highschool health class, they had a little box you could put questions in. But who's going to walk up in front of everyone and put in the lonely question that obviously belongs to them? And I know a lot of the stuff that surprised me, I wouldn't have *thought* to ask beforehand. To take a not-too-private example, who knew that shaving your legs with a soapy hand clutching the razor would cause you to slip and cut yourself? I learned, quick, but that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking of.

Anyways, just something running around in my head.

Warning: The following link may cause shrieks of recognition for females who came of age in the 70's and 80's (and into the 90's if you went to a Catholic school).

Growing Up And Liking It.

(It's the one with the three pen pals that write back and forth about their periods. Remember it? Maybe the smiling flowers on the cover will jog your memory. N.B.: they did change some of the info over the years--I don't recall anything about belts or safety pins.)

For males who came of age around this time, you should know that some of us got all our information from this book. If this doesn't horrify you, it should. Without getting into too much detail, it didn't prepare me for the variety of symptoms which all fall well within the definition of "normal".

There was a movie we saw at the same time we got the booklets, with the following plot-frame: a bunch of teenaged, redheaded actresses tell an 11-year old she won't be able to play Little Orphan Annie if she gets any taller. Then they talk about how great Kotex is (or whatever brand paid for the movie).

An excellent message. "Enjoy your success while you still can, because it will be all over when you gain the ability to concieve". I think it was the first time that I realized that there's a point at which growing up, becoming a big girl, stops being a good thing.