A productive day.

Even if my head IS full of snot.

Got all the dye projects done for the impending Knitty article... now I just have to write the thing. Here's a teaser:

Incidentally, I don't suggest dyeing anything when you've got a bad head cold; I had blue and yellow dye on my hands today, blew my nose, and for a second, I thought my brain was rotting out. (Sure feels like it.)


While in the midst of all the color and chaos, I wandered through the house to get a soda, and noticed THIS in the bedroom:

Somehow I don't think I can blame Sekhmet for that one. (It is officially summer here; the husbeast has taken the doors and windows out of the Jeep.)


My latest brainwave for my mother-in-law's Christmas present is one of these Herbert Niebling doilies, knit with larger needles and black silk/alpaca and some beads, as a shawl/wrap. Yes. Another idea to kick around. I tell myself I've got to make a decision on this, but with the way I keep pushing back the Christmas knitting projects to knit doilies, scarves, sweaters, and the odd nuclear reactor, how urgent is it, really? (If I wind up knitting a 300 round doily in three weeks, the husbeast will gladly buy a plane ticket so one of you can come here and smack me in the head and yell "YOU DUMBASS.")

Really should get to that swatching. Really.

I've got all this block-print stuff laying here to play with, though.

Aieeeee.

All this week, over on her blog, Alwen has been discussing this lace knitter/designer named Herbert Niebling. I made the mistake of e-mailing her and asking her about it. She promptly e-mailed back a slew of links, including his works on Ravelry. There's a site with patterns available, and... and...

I'm on round eleven. Of a hundred and twenty.

Maybe I can give out doilies for Christmas.

The husbeast can put his on his desk at work.

Sekhmet, you fucker.

Last night, I awoke at four AM. I was laying on my right side, and Sekhmet was sitting directly in my line of sight, right next to my head. Eyes bright, ears perked, whiskers on red alert. I suspect she had patted my face to wake me up. I stared at her for a moment, and shut my eyes again.

So she smacked me in the cheek.

Then I threw her off the bed.

(I would like to add, the cat's got all her claws and could have ripped my face off if she'd wanted. Near as I can tell, this is playing, to judge from the look on her face.)



Anyway, I'm tinkering with the blog, which should be pretty obvious. Knitting half a dozen gauge swatches, I hope. (I'm afraid it'll wind up being a dozen.) Am cooking up my new semi-zen project (lots of stockinette, but with some funky decreasing in certain obvious places); I'm dyeing pre-spun yarn for part of it, and spinning some self-striping yarn for the rest. Should keep me busy a while. Plus I'm dyeing silk and wool for this Knitty article. Yay?

Go, Penguins!

(Shut up, Ang. Redwings suck.)

Finis.

Finished Zen 2 last night (a ten-day sweater, new record). Darned in all the ends, washed it, blocked it, went to bed. While it was wet, Sekhmet wadded it into a ball and slept on it, so this morning it looks like, well, like a cat wadded into a ball and slept on it. So I'm gonna wait on the photo. The yarn didn't relax as much as I'd hoped, so I'm still not sure it'll fit me, but I'm thinking it'll fit the Goober for a year or two the way she's growing, and that's just fine. Who knows, maybe I'll lose more weight (I am finally down ten pounds) and it will fit me by next winter.

And maybe purple piggies will fly on stealth-bomber wings.

This is the start of Memorial Day weekend for those of us in the US. Monday is a federal holiday, and the long weekend is treated as the official start of summer. Mother nature has started things off with a bang in the form of a massive thunderstorm this afternoon. You know, since that rant of mine on the environment, we seem to be having an awful lot of close lightning strikes. I tell myself it's just that I'm noticing now, but DAMN, I hate hearing that zap.

My plan for the weekend involves dyeing some silk and some wool, writing a Knitty article about it (I'm calling it "Dye Another Day"). I'd like to re-code this blog, with a different template, and I wanna fool around with this lino-cut printmaking idea I've had, and making my own logo sort of thing. Had a bit of a brainwave last night, sort of Japanese iconography meets Meg Swansen. Here's hoping it works.

A quick word on the sulfur allergy - it isn't a true allergy, in that I doubt my immune system is involved. I just call it that, out of habit, because otherwise doctors ignore me, give me weird drugs, and I wind up in the emergency room (yes, it has happened). Sulfur compounds of all types that I know of give me vertigo and nausea. It varies, from mild nausea lasting two or three days after a heaping dose of guacamole full of raw garlic, to being unable to stand, walk, or drink water without vomiting, after a couple doses of sulfanomide antibiotics. For a long time I thought it was me, but I did some research and realized a lot of other drugs I had bad reactions to - Vioxx comes to mind - have sulfur compounds in them. So... whatever it is, it isn't an allergy, but I think it's a legit reaction to nearly all forms of sulfur. A friend of mine is a chemist and has told me to buy some granulated sulfur for some learning experiments; I haven't had the nerve to do it.

So there you go, far more than you ever wanted to know about things that make me puke.

Gonna be an interesting weekend. I can tell.

A compendium of weirdness.

Because I'm at a loss for a topic, I'm going to follow Alwen's idea, and give a list of things I've been researching and reading about lately. Brace yourselves. It's a freaky list. (Big shock.)



The most interesting thing (maybe) is the Lizard Man of Lee County. Evidently, South Carolina has its own variation on the Big Foot legend; this time it's a seven foot tall lizard thingie that lives in the swamp. I was hoping for a long tradition, but the legend only goes back to 1988, which is kinda disappointing. The Jersey Devil goes back to the 1700s, after all. Anyway, a seven foot lizard with glowing red eyes makes me wonder exactly what kinds of mushrooms are growing in those swamps. At least I know what to throw at the husbeast tonight, when he gets home, to freak him out. We're in a swamp. By golly, I think I see a seven foot lizard out there RIGHT NOW! AAAAAAH!



Another thing I've been looking into is how glow-in-the-dark pigments 'work'. I can't get into gory details though... for some reason they seem reluctant to get into atomic structure in articles. But it all puts me in mind of an old Bloom County cartoon, where Oliver (the boy genius) builds a nuclear warhead for Science Fair. When the teacher asks where he got the fissionable material, he says he scraped the glow-in-the-dark paint off several thousand old watch faces. (In fact, that's a running joke around here, building a nuke with silly ingredients like that, since the husbeast is trained to work on nuclear power plants.)



And then there's leeks. Yeah, like the food. The blame for this one I lay squarely at the feet of Alton Brown; his Good Eats episode on leeks was on last night. (Incidentally, there's a great selection of quickie how-to videos by him, available here.) He was doing freaky leek facts through history, and being me, I started wondering where/when they'd been domesticated. So a quick pop over to Food Timeline ensued. (I should know better, because I can't hit that site and spend LESS than half an hour reading things I never knew about all kinds of foods I've never eaten, while going "oh, cool".) Onions (to which leeks are related) were eaten back to the stone age, but it's thought they were domesticated somewhere in the middle east/central Asia around 3500 BCE. They became popular in Europe particularly, and according to what I've read, vegetables in Europe during the middle ages were pretty much cabbage, onions, and beans. That's it. Yum. (Which puts me in mind of that joke, "British cuisine has three vegetables, and two of them are cabbage.") I also find, in my cruising of the 'net, that some research group is trying to genetically 'fingerprint' garlic, so they can trace it's evolution and migration. My first thought on that is WHY, but hell, it beats research on nuclear warheads, right? Maybe? Can we develop some new antibiotics yet?

Ahem. Where was I? Right. Leeks. They seem to be native to the Mediterranean area, and have been domesticated for about three thousand years. They're popular in Europe, but haven't spread in fame like regular onions have. The reason for my curiosity is, I'm allergic to sulfur, which means I am allergic to the 'hot' taste causing chemicals in the onion family - they're all based on sulfur compounds. (And the reason cutting onions bothers your eyes is, those compounds turn to sulfuric acid when they hit the moisture in your eyes.) So years ago, unable to consume big portions of onions and garlic, I began fooling around with using leeks instead. And I found that not only was I able to eat them, but they were yummy! These days I use leeks in place of onions in almost everything. And when a recipe requires mirepoix (carrots, onions, and celery), I just use carrots and leeks - the taste of the leek is sort of like celery and onion together, and I can get away with it.

Damn. Now I wanna make cock-a-leekie soup.



Anyway. I'm now going to go knit while brooding over a Knitty article I can't write until an order of silk and wool gets here. (It is due tomorrow.) Since I am almost pain free for the first time in weeks, I may babble again later. On the history of handkerchiefs, or cartoons, or, I don't know, Chinese ceramics. Or maybe I'll build a draw loom on the back porch. You never know around here.

Not a bad day.

Which is odd, 'cause everyone in the house is sick, and we spent most of the day like this:

Even the cat has a runny nose.

I think the real cause for my semi-good mood is this:

I'd been talking to a friend of mine about unloading some art supplies I'll never use on her... she insisted on making me something in return. I mentioned I could use a small cup-shaped something to hold little knitting snippets. That's hand-formed Fimo clay on the outside, with glass beads. Sooooo pretty. It came in the mail today, kind of unexpected, and was a VERY nice surprise. (My friend is, sadly, blogless, or I'd hook you up. When she gets her web site going, I'll let you know.)

To keep myself entertained, I've been knitting away. Almost done with Zen 2.

The swatch relaxed when I washed it (I'm keeping track of these things now, after telling Bells it wasn't worth the bother) so I've got high hopes that this thing might actually fit. So exciting.

Otherwise, I've been cruising Ravelry like a fiend, plotting Christmas presents. STILL haven't made up my mind about what I'm knitting for my mother-in-law. Newgrange is still distantly possible but now I'm off on a tangent about cables.

Oh. And the Goober quote for the day: "I love spitting!"

Good times.

A heaping dose of stupid.

Yes. I've been back to the pharmacy. (For those just tuning in, I deal with a military medical facility that inclues a pharmacy run by, to quote my doctor, "Drug Nazis".)

I saw the doc this morning about some stuff. Nothing terribly exciting. Adjusting dosages, refills, sinus problems, blah blah. So off I go to the pharmacy to pick up my medication. (I am leaving out the part where the Goob threw a screaming fit in the middle of the waiting room.) Okay. Now. As a chronic pain patient, I take or have taken a lot of different medications. Some of them have a very high resale value on the street (tranquilizers in particular are very popular; I've taken them for my nerve damage). So I've always been aware of the safety issue; keeping track of my purse at all times (if there are medications in it), not pulling out big bottles of pills in public, etc. While it is not a common occurrence, there have been muggings here in the US involving people walking out of pharmacies getting their drugs stolen. Again, I'm not totally paranoid, particularly not on a military base, but you know. Be aware. Don't be an idiot.

Don't be an idiot.

I go to pick up my medication, and what do the PHARMACY PEOPLE put the drugs in? The people who should know better? A BRIGHT RED BAG WITH A PHARMACY STICKER ON IT. I might as well put on a shirt that says "Attention addicts: fun drugs here. Help yourself, just hit me in the head first."

I hope to hell these aren't the same people handling the nuclear warheads.

Still slow.

I've spent the weekend hanging out, knitting, and reading. It's been glorious.

Started the second sleeve of Zen 2. I'm hoping to get it done by tomorrow and the whole shebang joined up. Watching the colors come and go is way more entertaining than I'd expected; I'll have to try it again some time.

I'm also getting back to that dark green wool I had a while ago. Remember?

It'll get turned into a hat and scarf for a Christmas present.

The husbeast asks I put up a better photo of his work; apparently the last picture I posted was a before photo:

His welding rig is a "Fender Mender", the name of which just cracks me the fuck up. Sounds like the name of a garlic peeler. Or something. Not a big he-man welder. Anyway, anyway. There's his after photo. All nice and fixed.

The one big blot of ugh on my weekend was yesterday. We had to go to a child's birthday party at the Inner Ring of Hell. (Also known as Chuck E Cheese.) If I were to sit down and make a list of all the things that make my nervous system go funky, you would wind up with a description of Chuck E Cheese. Flashing lights, loud noises, screaming children, hordes of people. Yup. The Goob, of course, loved every minute of it.


We agreed that the cake was pretty good.