Hey folks!

Sorry for the lack of updates these past few days. A number of things have conspired against my efforts to blog, and that may continue to be the case for a little while, but with luck, not. In any case, here I am, now.

I’m going to leave in a few hours to go westward for a couple of days. I should return here Friday afternoon. My grandmother, a loyal tychoish.com reader, has a knee injury and needs some able bodied assistance and company, and I’m the family member that can get away the easiest. It’ll also be good for me to have a little time to gel away from St. Louis. I’ll have writing time, the chance to sleep in a room with windows (to further regulate the sleep cycle,) and it’ll be good to spend some time there.

In other fronts:

  • I finishesd the first novella thing in James Tiptree’s “The Starry Rift.” It was nice. I can’t decide if the fact that their technology was based almost entirely on “cassette tapes” is a product of the novel/novella cycle being written in the Early/Mid Eighties, or the fact that these stories are set a long time before the “present” day relative to Brightness Falls from the Air and the framing story and she just wanted it to seem “old”
  • I have 33 more rounds/rows to knit on the turkish tile sweater. The final 9 rows are short rows, for the shoulder shaping. Four rows before that, the back neck shaping begins which will remove about 40 stitches from active play (to set the back of the neck lower than the top of the shoulder edge.)
  • I started a sock with cheap wool (good thing, that) using Elizabeth’s “Sheepsfold” cable/pattern. It’s quite fun and it’s the first sock, I’ve actually knit that has any sort of pattern on it. Pretty damn nifty, if I do say so myself.
  • I’m trying to figure out what my plans are/were for knitting camp this year. My roommate (waves! I’ll write back very soon) wrote me and I’m trying to figure out what I want to do. I want to go this year, I think I’ll have letters from graduate schools before I have to commit to camp, which will be good. I want to go, I will probably go, but I’d like there to be more certainty in my life before I say “yes, and I’ll go to x camp.”
  • I feel like I’ve made a breakthrough with the TealArt design. One of my big projects for t his week is working on getting the site to work the way I want it and then launch it. Then I’ll be in deep battle mode to get content polished and put up. I also need to figure out how to get paypal set up so I can have an appropriate tip jar and checkout system so that I can collect money for the knitting patterns I’m planning on putting together, and as a sidebar for the fiction projects. It’s hard not to think about the business of next-wave art/creativity/content. I’m not sure that anything will come of it, but I know that it’s worthwhile to try--particularly given the nature of the redesign and the basic idea that it’s hard to get something if you’re not asking for it…

Ok, that’s enough for now. There might be more tonight, but probably not. I do have a couple more sweaters to talk about, so this week won’t be completely boring for you :)

Onward and Upward!