My love affair with the Kindle continues
In bed right about at midnight, not as early as I would have liked. Also, I didn't touch any of my projects requiring mending -- largely because I got home to find the house empty (since Mom was off taking care of Grandma and making a grocery run) and decided it was a splendid opportunity to do some knitting-while-reading. Or possibly reading-while-knitting, since I've been noticing a severe backlog of unread fic and so much of it I've loaded to the Kindle -- just haven't gotten around to reading it yet, and since I've been reading so much profic over the last few weeks... Well, I could take a break and shift gears to fanfic for a while, but given the deliberate effort I'm making to read this particular series in order for once (instead of a book here and a book there, months or years apart and having forgotten who the hell half the characters are), I figured might as well plow through and just spend as much time reading as possible.
So, I pulled out my Ginkgo Shawl (since I'd done so much work on the Pond Kneesock during my lunch and the receptionist's absence) and put some rows on it and discovered I'm much closer to the leafy border than I'd realized. I think the pattern includes advice for increasing the size, and I suspect I'll go for that -- using worsted-weight yarn instead of laceweight or fingering has already done a lot to enlarge it, but I'm not going to the effort of making a warm shawl without it being large enough to really wrap around myself like the Seraphim Shawl. Running out of yarn isn't an issue, since I'm going to be ordering some more from KnitPicks (quite possibly in the next week or two) anyway -- the color having been out of stock for a while has been a contributing factor to me having been ignoring the project so much in the last few months, since I was afraid of getting really enthusiastic about it and using up the last of the yarn and having to sit around and wait for more and feel cranky about not being able to work on it. So. The pattern tells me to just make sure I have "an odd multiple of 15 stitches + 2" and that for example the next size up means beginning the lace chart on row 107 (instead of the 77 the main pattern calls for). Good, good -- I'll keep going till 107 and see if that looks like enough shawl.
You know, I still have not entirely ruled out making the leaf lace in a different shade of green. Wait, yes I just did, because there's not another shade of green in Wool of the Andes that looks good with the "Aurora Heather" I'm already using. If I'd been planning a two-color shawl from the beginning, I'd probably have gone with "Avocado" paired with either "Grass" or "Everglade Heather," but I fell in love with "Aurora Heather" when I got some in a kit and that's the shade I wanted for my big leafy shawl. It's not shown to best advantage on the KnitPicks site -- my own Ginkgo Shawl photo gives a better impression of its actual shade. And I don't want to use a gold or a brown or even a white with the "Aurora Heather," because the leafy part is the area that really should be green -- doing the stockinette in another color and the leaves in green would have been fine, but it's too late now. (No, I'm not just going to put in a band of another color in what's left of the stockinette section, or even a stripe of another color and then a different shade of green for the leaves. That's too busy for the effect I was thinking about.)
So, anyway. Not quite as much sleep as I'd have liked, but an excellently cold morning. Made it harder to get out of bed, but at least today I'm wearing my Berge Sweater with the new Berge Stockings for the first time ever. And yes, they look good together (even better if I were wearing black cargo pants instead of khaki ones, but I only have one black pair left and I wore them earlier in the week). I even got to wear my flip-top mittens on the drive to work. It's not a bad morning -- although running very late and them coming in to learn that the printer is dead and we're getting a new postage-metering machine that we'll need to be trained on (and which I won't be using till next July, having just finished my month in the mail duty rotation, and hence will have completely forgotten the details on by the time I have to do it again)... Well, it didn't help.
Spotted on my Yahoo! page:
TV's Stephen Colbert Stars in NASA Video for Space Fans -- "'We're here, we do cool things,' Lou said in a statement. 'But, while general public has good will toward the agency, it doesn't have a full grasp of the things we do. For a lot of people, NASA was the shuttle and when the shuttle went away ... and for a research center, it's even tougher getting the message out.' They picked the right target in Colbert, a long-time supporter of NASA. 'I've always been a huge fan of space,' Colbert says in the video. 'I love looking up at the stars and wondering what distant planets are out there to be discovered, and can we frack them for methane?'"
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
The Census Bureau Counts Fathers as ‘Child Care’ -- "It’s not baby-sitting when Daddy does it. Who wouldn’t agree with that? The U.S. Census Bureau, apparently. When both parents are present in the household, the Census Bureau assumes for the purposes of its 'Who’s Minding the Kids?' report, that the mother is the 'designated parent.' And when the designated parent is working or at school, the bureau would like to know who’s providing child care. If the answer is Daddy, as it was 26 percent of the time when these numbers were last released, in 2005, and 32 percent of the time in 2010, the Census Bureau calls that 'care.' But if Mom is caring for a child while Dad’s at work, that’s not a 'child care arrangement,' but something else. Parenting, presumably."
Rick Santorum accuses Obama of being intolerant of hateful bigots -- "Of course, the Obama administration hasn't actually said anything about the recent ruling on Proposition 8. But no matter-poor Rick Santorum is feeling awfully oppressed by the president's intolerance of Santorum's intolerance. Why, it's getting so a proud bigot like Santorum can't even express his hatred openly without imagining that the president doesn't agree with him! Poor guy."
The Phantom Menace: Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fear-Mongering about Iran's Nuclear Program -- "Facts rarely get in the way of American and Israeli fear-mongering and jingoism, especially when it comes to anti-Iran propaganda. For nearly thirty years now, U.S. and Zionist politicians and analysts, along with some of their European allies, have warned that Iranian nuclear weapons capability is just around the corner and that such a possibility would not only be catastrophic for Israel with its 400 nuclear warheads and state-of-the-art killing power supplied by U.S. taxpayers, but that it would also endanger regional dictatorships, Europe, and even the United States. If these warnings are to be believed, Iran is only a few years away from unveiling a nuclear bomb...and has been for the past three decades." I didn't actually read this article -- I started out, and then it turned out to be pretty much a listing of incidents in which various agencies kept claiming Iran was on the verge of achieving nuclear capabilities -- I started skimming, looking for it to wrap up the examples and get to the conclusions, but I didn't see any. Just -- endless claims that Iran is just a few years away from wreaking nuclear havok, on and on for the past several decades.
Koch Brothers, Allies Pledge $100 Million At Private Meeting To Beat Obama -- "At a private three-day retreat in California last weekend, conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch and about 250 to 300 other individuals pledged approximately $100 million to defeat President Obama in the 2012 elections."
And the day improved after getting off to a rocky start -- the printer was working again after some more fiddling, and the postage-machine demonstration was fully as boring as I expected, but similar enough to the old one that I should be able to figure it out in July when I need to. The receptionist was late enough getting back from lunch to give me time for some more reading-while knitting (after my having already fitted a smidgen of that into the end of my own lunch hour), and before I pulled out the sock and the Kindle I had finished printing up both the policies I'd brought to the front desk with me, allowing me to drop two accounts onto my supervisor's desk. This afternoon has been about Tumblr catchup and a bit of noodling around whittling away at "tomorrow's work." (And then my computer randomly restarted itself. Dammit. At least I was able to pick up where I'd left off on everything.)
Fuck this, I'm at a stopping point and everyone else has gone home. I don't have any time to make up right now, might as well head home and see how much more reading-while-knitting I can get in before Mom gets home and turns on the TV.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
So, I pulled out my Ginkgo Shawl (since I'd done so much work on the Pond Kneesock during my lunch and the receptionist's absence) and put some rows on it and discovered I'm much closer to the leafy border than I'd realized. I think the pattern includes advice for increasing the size, and I suspect I'll go for that -- using worsted-weight yarn instead of laceweight or fingering has already done a lot to enlarge it, but I'm not going to the effort of making a warm shawl without it being large enough to really wrap around myself like the Seraphim Shawl. Running out of yarn isn't an issue, since I'm going to be ordering some more from KnitPicks (quite possibly in the next week or two) anyway -- the color having been out of stock for a while has been a contributing factor to me having been ignoring the project so much in the last few months, since I was afraid of getting really enthusiastic about it and using up the last of the yarn and having to sit around and wait for more and feel cranky about not being able to work on it. So. The pattern tells me to just make sure I have "an odd multiple of 15 stitches + 2" and that for example the next size up means beginning the lace chart on row 107 (instead of the 77 the main pattern calls for). Good, good -- I'll keep going till 107 and see if that looks like enough shawl.
You know, I still have not entirely ruled out making the leaf lace in a different shade of green. Wait, yes I just did, because there's not another shade of green in Wool of the Andes that looks good with the "Aurora Heather" I'm already using. If I'd been planning a two-color shawl from the beginning, I'd probably have gone with "Avocado" paired with either "Grass" or "Everglade Heather," but I fell in love with "Aurora Heather" when I got some in a kit and that's the shade I wanted for my big leafy shawl. It's not shown to best advantage on the KnitPicks site -- my own Ginkgo Shawl photo gives a better impression of its actual shade. And I don't want to use a gold or a brown or even a white with the "Aurora Heather," because the leafy part is the area that really should be green -- doing the stockinette in another color and the leaves in green would have been fine, but it's too late now. (No, I'm not just going to put in a band of another color in what's left of the stockinette section, or even a stripe of another color and then a different shade of green for the leaves. That's too busy for the effect I was thinking about.)
So, anyway. Not quite as much sleep as I'd have liked, but an excellently cold morning. Made it harder to get out of bed, but at least today I'm wearing my Berge Sweater with the new Berge Stockings for the first time ever. And yes, they look good together (even better if I were wearing black cargo pants instead of khaki ones, but I only have one black pair left and I wore them earlier in the week). I even got to wear my flip-top mittens on the drive to work. It's not a bad morning -- although running very late and them coming in to learn that the printer is dead and we're getting a new postage-metering machine that we'll need to be trained on (and which I won't be using till next July, having just finished my month in the mail duty rotation, and hence will have completely forgotten the details on by the time I have to do it again)... Well, it didn't help.
Spotted on my Yahoo! page:
TV's Stephen Colbert Stars in NASA Video for Space Fans -- "'We're here, we do cool things,' Lou said in a statement. 'But, while general public has good will toward the agency, it doesn't have a full grasp of the things we do. For a lot of people, NASA was the shuttle and when the shuttle went away ... and for a research center, it's even tougher getting the message out.' They picked the right target in Colbert, a long-time supporter of NASA. 'I've always been a huge fan of space,' Colbert says in the video. 'I love looking up at the stars and wondering what distant planets are out there to be discovered, and can we frack them for methane?'"
Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
The Census Bureau Counts Fathers as ‘Child Care’ -- "It’s not baby-sitting when Daddy does it. Who wouldn’t agree with that? The U.S. Census Bureau, apparently. When both parents are present in the household, the Census Bureau assumes for the purposes of its 'Who’s Minding the Kids?' report, that the mother is the 'designated parent.' And when the designated parent is working or at school, the bureau would like to know who’s providing child care. If the answer is Daddy, as it was 26 percent of the time when these numbers were last released, in 2005, and 32 percent of the time in 2010, the Census Bureau calls that 'care.' But if Mom is caring for a child while Dad’s at work, that’s not a 'child care arrangement,' but something else. Parenting, presumably."
Rick Santorum accuses Obama of being intolerant of hateful bigots -- "Of course, the Obama administration hasn't actually said anything about the recent ruling on Proposition 8. But no matter-poor Rick Santorum is feeling awfully oppressed by the president's intolerance of Santorum's intolerance. Why, it's getting so a proud bigot like Santorum can't even express his hatred openly without imagining that the president doesn't agree with him! Poor guy."
The Phantom Menace: Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fear-Mongering about Iran's Nuclear Program -- "Facts rarely get in the way of American and Israeli fear-mongering and jingoism, especially when it comes to anti-Iran propaganda. For nearly thirty years now, U.S. and Zionist politicians and analysts, along with some of their European allies, have warned that Iranian nuclear weapons capability is just around the corner and that such a possibility would not only be catastrophic for Israel with its 400 nuclear warheads and state-of-the-art killing power supplied by U.S. taxpayers, but that it would also endanger regional dictatorships, Europe, and even the United States. If these warnings are to be believed, Iran is only a few years away from unveiling a nuclear bomb...and has been for the past three decades." I didn't actually read this article -- I started out, and then it turned out to be pretty much a listing of incidents in which various agencies kept claiming Iran was on the verge of achieving nuclear capabilities -- I started skimming, looking for it to wrap up the examples and get to the conclusions, but I didn't see any. Just -- endless claims that Iran is just a few years away from wreaking nuclear havok, on and on for the past several decades.
Koch Brothers, Allies Pledge $100 Million At Private Meeting To Beat Obama -- "At a private three-day retreat in California last weekend, conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch and about 250 to 300 other individuals pledged approximately $100 million to defeat President Obama in the 2012 elections."
And the day improved after getting off to a rocky start -- the printer was working again after some more fiddling, and the postage-machine demonstration was fully as boring as I expected, but similar enough to the old one that I should be able to figure it out in July when I need to. The receptionist was late enough getting back from lunch to give me time for some more reading-while knitting (after my having already fitted a smidgen of that into the end of my own lunch hour), and before I pulled out the sock and the Kindle I had finished printing up both the policies I'd brought to the front desk with me, allowing me to drop two accounts onto my supervisor's desk. This afternoon has been about Tumblr catchup and a bit of noodling around whittling away at "tomorrow's work." (And then my computer randomly restarted itself. Dammit. At least I was able to pick up where I'd left off on everything.)
Fuck this, I'm at a stopping point and everyone else has gone home. I don't have any time to make up right now, might as well head home and see how much more reading-while-knitting I can get in before Mom gets home and turns on the TV.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.