Comments!

I love comments! They give me some freakin' idea what to write about. I made a little list. You guys are in trouble, now. (For those of you coming late to the party, I've got a hand problem with nerve damage that's been giving me fits, and unfortunately the only real treatment for nerve damage is large doses of 'downers' - to use the street drug term - and I'm on two doses a day of a fairly strong tranquilizer. It's supposed to be three doses. Don't tell my doctor. Anyway, it messes with my ability to remember things, and think, and get jokes, and do much of anything but sleep.) My mother made lists. Lists and lists and lists of lists. Wherever she's at in the afterlife, she's laughing at me, right now. So I'm gonna follow the list and it's gonna be random, but I'll remember everything. Maybe.

Let's all hope Blogger lets me post photos.


The big deal this morning is, I officially entered the State Fair. The Blue Shimmer and a hunk of lace are due on October 4. (I am spazzing already, or would be if my nervous system were capable of it.) There was no scarf category, probably in an effort to keep every new knitter who cranked out a strip of garter stitch from entering. There WAS a scarf AND hat category, but no freaking way am I knitting a hat out of Doucer et Soie. So that idea's scrapped. I didn't really need another thing on deadline anyway. Especially since this is the current state of the lace I'm entering:

That crochet cotton in the little balls? Size 70. Essentially sewing thread. And the needles are 0000. (Yes, of course I own a 0000 circular. Don't you?) I took a photo of one of the little thread-balls so you could have some scale:

Of course the fucker's blurry. I've no idea where the stuff came from. Probably Woolworth's on State Street in Alliance, Ohio. (I haven't lived in Ohio since 1990.) I've been stashing crochet cotton for decades. I have sworn not to buy any more until I work through the two-foot-wide box of it I've got, but they're making some really funky new colors.

And while we're at the state fair project discussion thingie, here's what I've got on the Blue Shimmer.
I'm still not wild about the beige/brown/greyish tan background, but it is an improvement on that big swathe of chocolate brown slap across the middle of the gauge swatch:

And it's not quite as bad as this. So I guess I'll keep going. There are several mistakes in there, but they're consistent - for example, I was supposed to do one round with brown, knitting the brown stitches and purling the blue. I knit everything, all the way around. I'm calling it A Unique Design Element. I was starting to freak about getting this done, but then realized I started it a little less than a week ago, so... I might yet pull this off. (Whose idiotic idea was it to knit this thing on ones and twos, again? I think I was posessed by aliens.)

Other news is mostly updates.

I got a load of the damage to the Suburban last night when the husbeast came home: some scratches and a cracked turn signal lens. (I think the bulb inside is still intact and even works. Just the lens is cracked.) I understand there's nothing left of the Taurus he hit - it had to be towed away. Weirdly, it was an almost exact repeat of the accident that caused all my hand problems: He was going straight on a major road, minding his own business, and some idiot pulled out in front of him, making a left turn across traffic, and pow. But this time, no one was hurt.

Baby, the corpse flower over at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, has been pollenated (Was it good for you, baby?) and is dying back... I suspect that'll be as interesting as the blooming was. At least from six, eight states away, watching it on a web cam. I'm glad I'm not there to smell it. (Have I mentioned I was a botany student when I dropped out of college to have the baby, and plan to go back and finish? This won't be the last of your unwanted plant news.)

I went book shopping last night, and there seemed to be a common theme:
We've got a new book outlet nearby, and I love those places for buying huge, monolithic, full-color-printed books for six bucks each.

I wanna knit a sweater that looks like an old-fashioned map (preferably with dragons and krakens in the oceans) and I wanna knit one covered in alchemical symbols for the Anti-Craft, and I wanna do a couple dozen with edgings taken from the pottery decorations of different cultures, and something in lapis blue based on the city walls at Ur, and I've already started doing charts of the tile work of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and then we get into the actual CLOTHES people wore through history...

And our last bit of news. Someone doing a google search wound up HERE after entering a search for knitting patterns for, and I quote, 'gonad warmers'.

I snarfed tea out my nose on that one. I knew we shouldn't have discussed Freud and knitting. TRISH! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT! ahahahaha