For some reason I've only wanted to write listlike blog entries lately. And here's some more of that.

I like the idea of the "read 50 books in a year" challenge. A few years in a row now I've considered it, but realized I'd feel guilty whether I didn't accomplish the goal (because reading should be fun) or if I did (because I should have spent some of that time reading journal articles instead.) Since I started thinking it was a good idea in.. *checks notebook* '05, I have, however, made a point of writing down the books I've read, with a paragraph or two about what I thought of them. This works pretty well, because I have a tendency to read books without any analysis, as a purely passive observer. It's made me better at noting things I like, and helps during those occasional "I have nothing to read" slumps, when I can look through and remember particular authors or themes that I enjoyed.

Over the last 3 years, I've read 53, 41, and 41 books, respectively*, and I'm in the mood to make the thing a bit more public. So occasionally I'll review some books here, which I've done before anyhow, but now that it's an official thing I might get around to doing it semi-regularly. Making it to 50 shouldn't be too much of a struggle except that the first two months of the year were pretty much a wash. We'll see if I make it.

Commentary on the ones I feel like commentarying:

1) Me Talk Pretty One Day: A reread.

2) The Tiger In the Well: Third in a mystery series written by Phillip Pullman (who wrote the His Dark Materials Trilogy). After reading the first two, I got to seeing a bit too much of the machinery in this one.

3) Misconceptions: I read some Naomi Wolf as an undergrad and liked the particular style of righteous anger she inspired in me. This was no different, though I'll have to read it again sometime when I haven't just defended my thesis.

4) Genshiken Vol. 1, and Japan Ai: Japan Ai is adorable and I recommend it if you need something light and pretty to look at. Genshiken is great if you know the references for the manga/anime jokes, and mildly charming if you hung out with geeks growing up. I only know enough of otaku culture to recognize the jokes in a general way, but I liked it more than when I saw it the first time around as an anime.

5) The Code of the Woosters: The characters in the books read quite a bit different than they do in the BBC adaptation. I don't like the book Jeeves and Wooster half as much, as people. But maybe I just really like Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. Tough call.

6) The Ode Less Travelled: What was I saying about Stephen Fry? Oh, yeah.

7) When they Severed Earth from Sky: A very cool book, a bit hard to explain. Basically it's a discussion of how myths might've evolved from discussions of actual phenomenon. "That mountain over there, it looked like a giant with firey-red hair was hurling boulders into the air, so stay away from the mountain" turns into "Once upon a time there was a giant with red hair, and he threw boulders down the mountain to keep someone away. Stay away from the mountain." It's a small step, really, when you don't have written words to build up scientific knowledge. The writers go back and forth between describing common myths, and determining likely physical causes for these myths. It's cooler than it sounds. If you like books where the twist at the end changes everything, read this book. A lifetime of mythology will get all swirly.

The last chapter's about dragons, and it's so awesome that I don't even want to give the trick away. It feels like a trick--I have no idea if their theories are full of it, but I was totally convinced while I was reading.

8)Jezebel: The story about the famous whore, with some visits to the actual sites and far too little archaeological data. Reading this after #7 was a bit mind bending; I kept thinking Jezebel was going to turn out to be a tidal wave or something. It was all right, and neat to know some of the background behind certain changes in translation and such, but there was a bit too much of the author in it for a non-fiction book.

9) Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm: This book joins "James and the Giant Peach", "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", and "A Wrinkle In Time" as a children's classic I missed in childhood, but read as an adult. If anyone in my family had read it, I'm quite sure they would have pressed it on me, what with my pre-existing love of the Little House On the Prairie series, and what with Rebecca having a dark complexion and being too much of a wiseass for her own good. There were some parts that were considerably more shrewdly witty than I was expecting. The little bit about her spinster aunt having a heart that had only ever been used for circulation of the blood was pretty good.

On the other hand, the combination of an adult point of view and a *modern* point of view gave some really awful twists to things. One of the main characters is an adult man, and every time his name comes up in a new group of people, they say something along the lines of "Oh, too bad he doesn't have a wife, though he doesn't seem interested in marrying. He sure loves spending time with children, though!" Always those two bits of information. Loves kids, lifelong bachelor.

Nowadays, a 30 year old man known for not having ladyfriends but spending lots of time alone with children is not going to have children to spend time with for long. Especially when he starts sending expensive jewelry to 10 year old girls. It took me most of the book to realize that he was actually *supposed* to be a Good Guy. Every time he got Rebecca alone I cringed, waiting for something horrific to happen, in spite of knowing it's supposed to be a book for children! That's a rather drastic cultural shift, along with it being acceptable for someone to say they don't want a girl to have a career because they want to marry her instead. The frequent icks killed the enjoyability.

*I do count these things funny. For some knitting books and manga, I count two or three books read together over a few nights as "one book", or occasionally I count a quick-moving series like the first few books of the "Spiderwick Chronicles" that way. I'm complicated.

Argh, baby sweater plan failure. I hate when a project that looks good in your head goes downhill the second you start trying to make it a reality. It just takes all the wind out of my sails. Something that fails right at the end, I can rip back a ways, or tear the whole thing apart, but I have the momentum of knowing it started all right to sustain me. When you're looking at a project you were excited about that has no redeeming quality--a gauge swatch that is totally off, and ugly, and the stitch pattern makes one of your favorite yarns suddenly feels terrible--it just sucks all the fun away. I just would have liked to take something out of my plan besides "that was bad in every way", but I suppose it happens sometimes.

Mmm, delicious Easter sushi. My husband is awesome.
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Various projects going right now:

-This sweater

has a long and sordid history of not being finished. I started it a bit over two *years* ago. I got the whole body done before summer hit, at which point it got too warm to sit around with a pile of yarn on my lap.

Winter last year, I got one sleeve done, before experiment-finishing stress took over and I could hardly string two words together much less keep track of the dance of stitch counting, yarn-switching, and decreases required to knit the second sleeve.

Now is the perfect time to get back to it again. It's been taking up a bunch of room in my yarn box, and I don't like having more than one complex project sitting around at a time. Complex projects have been building up in my head over the last two years and are ready for the world, so this bad boy has got to go.

I always forget what an enjoyable knit this is. I love playing with the colors, the charts make sense, and colorwork means that every row has something new to see, and progress is obvious. I'm just to the end of the first repeat (of five), and since the sleeves in this sweater are worked by picking up stitches around the shoulder and working down to the wrist, each repeat goes a bit faster than the one before. I'm hoping to finish this up before the weather gets too warm to work on it again. It'd be nice to be able to wear it this season, but I'll settle for completion.

-Baby stuff: My stepbrother and his wife are going to become parents early this summer, and my stepmom and I will ensure that this is kid will never get cold (she's a crocheter, and when she emailed me to tell me the news she said she already had a blanket started). I've got a clever little toy started, and I ordered a copy of the Baby Surprise Jacket pattern. I've got a fun idea for the colorway of the jacket (inspiration here), and I'm really curious to see how it comes out.

-Designing: I've been slowly but surely working on the pattern for the Crowned Heads scarf. If I'm awesome I'll finish typing it up and have it out to my reader-helpers this week. I showed the scarf to the knitting group here last week and they really liked it, so that was a nice real-world kick in the pants.

I have a few other patterns I've been thinking about writing up and selling. There's this:

And this:

And this:

And somewhere in there I want to post this one here for free, as I mentioned recently:



(better pictures ma?)

I'm just loving having plans right now; it's so nice to come home and not feel the weight of school on my shoulders. I'm still doing a bit of my job outside of the 9-5 timeframe (and finishing up some papers on my Madison work that I want to submit), but it feels like I'm doing extra rather than barely keeping my head above water. The thing about grad student-hood is that there's a sense that you should be thinking about school as much as possible--24 hours per day 7 days per week is an A+, but anything below that means you're not standing up to expectations. Constantly feeling like I wasn't working enough was really hard on me, so moving away from that is so freeing. That stuff I just listed? If I never do it, I won't be letting anyone down, I won't lose financial aid or wreck a chance at a satisfying career. Isn't that wonderful?

Things I didn't notice weren't in Madison until I left it:

Ears popping, not just on planes. (The location of Ithaca's downtown is easy to remember, geographically--it's *down*.)

Non-white middle class people.

Snow falling hard enough to seriously affect visibility, without sticking at all.

Judaism. (Well, that did exist in Madison, but it was less visible. Wegman's has a whole huge seasonal Passover section.)

Country people, hipsters, and professionals in the same bar, non-ironically.

Microclimates. It's a 15 minute bus ride from campus to my house, and it's frequently raining or snowing in one place but not the other. Low clouds mean that the hills are *in* the clouds, while downtown is merely cloudy.
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When J and I went to visit his grandmother a few weekends ago, we drove up along the lake and went through Seneca Falls and Geneva on our way to the freeway. Somewhere between those two towns was a neighborhood called "Canalside". There was a Canalside mechanic's shop, a hair dresser's, and some sort of antique/collectible shop.

The collectible shop had a bunch of driftwood-ey branches around the base of the sign. One is propped up at an angle that obscures the "C" on the sign until a car gets within, oh, 10 yards or so of driving by.

If you, like us, happen to be taking this route, I guarantee that you and your car-partner will be first shocked into silence, then into relieved laughter, all thanks to the shop that is NOT called "Analside Gifts".

This is starting to get silly.

That'd be 5 finished objects in the last month and a half, thank you very much. But it'll probably be the last one for a while, because the only project semifinished project left is a ways from being done. Well, I did just do a good job of hemming up some pants, but I don't consider my short-leggedness to be especially blogworthy.

I started these socks the day we moved to Ithaca. We had an empty house, and I only had odd bits of yarns that no mental gymnastics could turn into an actual project. The one unread book I had was boring. This gave me a perfectly reasonable excuse to go to my new local yarn shop and buy yarn despite the overgenerous amount I already have. But like the reasonable person I am, I avoided the huge piles of Schaefer (a local yarn producer!), and instead got some fairly plain sock yarn, with the thought that doing some interesting stitch patterning would keep my brain occupied and take more time while I was waiting for the movers.

Except that all my knitting books were on a truck....somewhere (3 days later, we found out they were still in Chicago). I can start a toe-up sock without a pattern, but this yarn really needed some texture. So, as I knit the toe of the sock, I thought about what I could do with patterning. Any patterning on the sole of a sock hurts my feet, so I decided on a simple panel up on the top. I doodled around with a few different cables before I came up with this one. Unlike the more traditional Aran-style braids, the individual strands here don't move all the way from the left to right side; each intertwines with one neighbor, then heads in the other direction. The behavior of the individual moving strands reminded me of a chain link fence.

When I got to the leg portion, I thought a bit about how I wanted to do the back. I didn't want to add more cables in; I continued to think of the patterning as a fence, and chain link fences don't just separate in mid-air. Instead, I added the ribbing in slowly, which you can see on the sideways foot above. I was thinking of a picket fence going into the distance. I'm not sure that worked, but I like the diagonal line of ribbing anyways.

A few weekends ago we spent many hours sitting at J's baube's bedside with his family, and I pretty much knit the entire foot of the second sock in the car on the way to Buffalo or at the nursing home. It's nice to have something to do when you don't even want to go to the bathroom "just in case", and it lent a bit of normalcy to my world at that moment.

I finished the socks yesterday. They're the same size as each other (which is my usual sock problem), but they're both the teensiest bit baggy. I'm hoping that a run through the wash will help tighten them up, but they're pretty comfortable even if that doesn't happen. They took me just over a month to knit, but it feels considerably longer, since more happened in the last month than in the last several years all put together.

I'll be posting this pattern here for free soon, because it's been a while since I've done that. I'm still working on the Crowned Heads scarf pattern, though, so it may be a bit.

The FO's just keep on coming:

(I got the giggles mid-picture. It always happens when you're me.)

A sweater I started working on... when? early July, apparently. Yikes. 95% of it was knit within a month of my buying the yarn, but it sat in my knitting bag, half-basted together with two different sleeve caps, until about a week ago. Then I finished it in two nights.

The hardest part was choosing a sleeve cap. I used methods I roughly lifted from two separate places to design the sleeve caps; one was short and wide, the other taller and narrower (each I would describe as "more like the way I just described them than a usual sleeve cap", for what it's worth). Interestingly, I now know from ripping one out and redoing it that each used almost exactly the same amount of yarn, and so both covered nearly the same area in spite of their very different shape. When I first basted the sweater together, I tried to get some pictures to make you all decide, but it just wasn't working.

What was the difference? Well, although it wasn't photographable, they did look different to me, which again, is interesting since they each covered the same number of square inches of arm. Each seemed to fit well; there was no particular bunching or tightness on either. I finally decided that the wider sleeve cap looked slightly less "formal", in a way I can't define. It just had a slouchier way about it, in spite of the similar overall fit.

If this sweater was intended for lounging, I would have chosen the wider sleeve cap. But I wanted it for work, so I went with the narrower one. The next time I'm doing any sleeve cap, either following a pattern, or striking out on my own, I'll probably keep this in mind and adjust accordingly. I'm sure this stuff is in seamstressing books, somewhere, but I just pick it up where I can. (Anyone know of a good seamstressing book? I'm tired of unfitting buttondown shirts.)

I am sooo happy with how this sweater turned out, though. The sleeves are the teensiest touch of a bit too long for the lab, but it's super clean, professional-looking but not too stuffy, and the short-rowed v-neck makes me feel more clever than my Ph.D. does.

I mean, just compare it to the my initial doodle:

That's it!

I'll probably post the pattern at some point, but as a one-shot, one-size-only- fits-my-broad-shoulders thing. I got into a fair amount of detail about the design process along the way, so go look at the July and August archives for some ideas, if you're interested.

A reason for a few days of quietness.

I'll be back this weekend.