Knitting Hate

• I hate all of my knitting projects: the sweater is in the black-hole portion of the body, and I still am not absolutely sure how I’m going to make the shoulder work.
• I have a second sock that is turning out to be very much not the same size as the first sock, despite using the same needles/etc as the last sock.
• Resuming the pattern on my color-work sock has not gone as efficiently as I had initially hoped. And there might be tinking back, and I still don’t know how to pick up the pattern in the right way.

Other Things

• Teh Tiereds (The tiredness) hits at like 10pm these days.
• My LaTeX mojo was having some problems earlier: quite annoying.
• I’m updating my iTunes for the first time in weeks and possibly months. I’m currently downloading 125 podcasts… Egad folks.
• I’ve started spinning again, and I very much want my own wheel again. I’m in the process of consolidating my flock, and if I can sell one or two of these wheels I can get a new one. I can hardly wait. (This is connected to the last part because spinning and podcasts go together in my mind.)
• GRE on monday eek.
• Other graduate school things. eek squared.
• My computer has been (likely due to downloading and the GRE prep software) kind of lagging. I want a new Mac Book hard core now. Interestingly I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to upgrade to Leopard. Mostly I think because I don’t want to disturb the tenuous balance that keeps my system running.
• My battery life has fallen off significantly in the past few months, and I think it’s time to get a new one. I think that even if I get a new computer someone in this house will use Zoe I (I’ve already decided that the new computer will be called Zoe II), so it’s not a very bad investment, unless of course, she goes up into flames at some point. I better go back up things.

Cheers!

Last night I finished another sleeve. Turns out I had to revise the sleeve a little bit, and the sweater looks like crap at the moment, but I trust that a little bit (or a lot of blocking) will do it good. This means that in the great sleeve-off of 2007, I only have two more sleeves to knit. This sweater is one that hasn’t made it onto ravelry or the blog, but it’s coming. I swear. The yarn is Patons classic merino/wool, and though I had a bit of a honeymoon with this yarn over the last 15 months or so, I think I’ve recovered. It’s good yarn but it’s a little pill-ey, and I think for a basic worsted weight yarn I’d prefer something with a little firmer twist.

I have a knitting lesson today. It’s my hope that as this store gets established, I can spend more time teaching and less time selling yarn. Though it’s great to work in the store, and I do like it, I don’t respond to fashions very well, and if left to my own devices--as I’ve spoken earlier--knit with the same two kinds of yarn for years without getting bored. Anyway, my lesson, I’m teaching this cool young woman how to knit, and I’m going to do it my way (though I borrowed heavily from Joyce Willams' method described in Latvian Dreams which I think is becoming the store standard.) Basically, we’re teaching casting on last and purling almost immediately, so that people know how to get stocking stitch before garter stitch. With hope this will mean that people will have a framework to learn casting on when they get around to it, and they’ll be able to avoid aversions to purling as well. I’m looking forward to it.

More to come!

I’m sorry there wasn’t a proper tychoish post last night. I had a bunch of life stuff to write that I put in a friends locked LJ post, so I could write full names out and mostly because in many ways it was a message to friends, who are on my friends list. I’ll try and summarize and provide something a little more interesting for your perusal. Also, because I didn’t post yesterday, I feel like I’m all sorts of behind.

• I had a good conversation with a potential professor at a school that I really really want to go to next year. Though it’s always a crap shoot because of funding and departmental politics, I think my chances are better now.
• Having this conversation has sparked a lot of my own processes. I’ve been stuck in a lot of my projects for many weeks, and between that and having less free time (and therefore being less likely to waste it), and that’s good. I’ve been really tightly wound, but I think I’m doing better with this.
• I figured out a friend’s secret last night. It makes me happy. There’s a segment of the conversation about logical families (I’m stealing this from Armisted Maupin, but I’m not sure he’s the creator; logical familes being the familes we build rather than the biological familes we’re born to) Anyway, I really want to blog that has nothing (really) to do with the secret, but I don’t know if I can write about it without giving the secret away, so I have to figure out how to write it.
• The yarn store working is going well, and I might have pictures somewhere, but I haven’t found them yet. Your patience means a lot to us in this matter.
• I’ve been knitting a sleeve, the second sleeve of a sweater, most of this week. It’s red. Very red. I’m going to run out of yarn. So if anyone has a few yards of Patons Classic Wool/Merino in a very very red color, I’d love you forever, but I suspect that I’m just going to have to buy a full ball. Sigh. I’m very close and this is frustrating. It’s unfortunately a yarn that we don’t cary at the shop, so I have to trck out to g-d knows where to find it. So close, it’s frustrating.

I’ll be in touch. Thanks for reading.

Asus Claims Apple Tablet Is Real:

Can Apple turn the Tablet PC into a success when previous attempts have failed? The short answer is ‘yes’. Any company that can make a mobile phone with no buttons, no picture messaging, slow Web access and no video capture into the most desirable phone on the planet can easily make tablets popular.'"

(from Slashdot.)

I look forward to this device, but I think the point is pretty funny.

Meanwhile, Zoe, my trusty Tiger-running Powerbook G4, continues to perform admirably, though the top plate on the lower left hand corner continues to rattle worrisomely. The current plan is to wait until WWDC and see what things are looking like then. I’ve toyed with the idea of buying/building a beige boxed ubuntu “server,” but who knows, things work great the way they are, so I’m in no particular hurry. For the record, I got Zoe (nee Mona Ramsey) in May of 2005.

So I’ve been incredibly angsty about the whole graduate school application process this time around, no real surprise. Ironically, I was pretty confident about my chances last time, and here I am now. I’m doing better about this. First, I took another practice GRE and got solid, but not stellar scores, scores that would be good enough for my purposes. That is, they wouldn’t preclude acceptance anywhere, and would probably fall safely within the “typical” range.

Secondly, and more importantly, a professor that I’m interested in studying with--where I had previously expected to be this year--has asked to have a telephone discussion tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. This is a good thing, I think I tend to do well in person/on the phone, and even though there was a snafu last year, if this could come through in a real way… Good things folks. Good things.

I’m moving forward on a lot of the things that I’ve been dragging my feet on for a while, and while I’m still worried, I’m feeling better. God knows why.

Also I’m reading an utterly crappy book on aging and sexuality. It’s written by a journalist, which accounts for the poor methodology and virtually unvarying sentence structure. Although she does talk about aging “gay men and lesbians,” I think she doesn’t understand enough about ahem youthful queer sexuality to be able to approach queer sex as we age. Also, there’s more unironic quoting of Andrew Sullivan (sorry no linking for the bastard) than I can really stomach.

Anyway, normal day at the yarn store, I hope you all have a good day!

So I don’t in reality watch all that much television, but I do enjoy knitting and watching TV, particularly whilst sitting in front of the computer. So I’m compiling a list of shows that I enjoy to knit by. Don’t expect anything ground breaking, sometimes predictable shows are good for knitting.

1. Law and Order (All of ‘em)
2. Battlestar Galactica
3. Shark
4. Bones
5. NCIS
6. Stargate Atlantis
7. Boston Legal
8. House
9. Criminal Minds
10. How I Met Your Mother
11. 30 Rock
12. Jericho
13. Numb3rs
14. Eureka
15. Dexter.

So mostly procedurals, a little bit of science fiction, with a dash of comedy and drama… Lets note that I don’t watch all these shows every week, nor do I watch these shows with commercials, which makes it better.

Lets make this a meme, and I tag all of you! If you watch TV and knit, what shows do you watch. The only rule is that they all must currently be in production… Link or track-back your post in the comments.

I’ve been talking about my taste in yarn at the store, in relation to the sweaters that I’ve made and what I’m working on now, and through intention or happenstance I’ve discovered that I’ve been working with a constrained palette for some time, and as I’m thinking about the projects that I’m working on now and what I plan to be working on in the future, I’ve caught myself thinking about this kind of creative exercise in a slightly broader context.

Knitting with smaller selection of yarns does something really cool for me as a knitter. It means I can think less about some of the trivial things: how many stitches do I need, or how will this look when I block it, are questions that I don’t have to ask, because I’m used to the yarn a lot. Furthermore, I think with more experience I can and do get better at designing and working with the yarns, and I know that my core of yarns is quality stuff that will hold up for me long term.

And there’s always the adage that scarcity produces creativity, and I’m willing to buy that. In a lot of ways science fiction presents some interesting constraints. In my current project, most of the story occurs on outposts and long range space ships, where there are limited resources and populations. It’s not the same as constraining your word choice, or something on that level, but it does mean that problems that you and I might solve by running away and relocating have to be dealt with in another way (I’m mostly think of public health disasters here, but it works in other situations as well.) I’m not sure that this is best example, but it’s a start.

I imagine that there are other kinds of creative constraints that we place on ourselves. I imagine some people write long hand for this reason (even if they’re crazy!) and indeed choosing to write a story from a particular POV could be one of these constraints.

I put on a sweater that I designed a few years ago, and finally finished last year, with the Louet Merino (Gems/Opal) Sport Weight.

It’s a great sweater to wear. It’s warm, it’s soft, it fits great. When I made it, I was expecting that the darker color would be prominent, I frankly don’t know what I was on at all. I’m going to blame it on the fact that my roommate had gotten a puppy and I was taking 24 credit hours that semester. The fact that it fits so well is frankly amazing, given all that.

The center pattern is “rams horn,” from a Meg Swansen book, the next pattern is a medallion pattern from the Traditional Fair Isle Knitting book, the next two patterns are from the Traditional Scandinavian Knitting book, and finally, the edge pattern is from the perrie pattern for Meg Swansen’s Fair Isle cardigan. I still don’t know exactly what I was thinking.

The store I’m working at carries this yarn, and I’m thinking that I might have to knit something with it. So much for all that talk about creative constraints, I think I’m going to be slipping.