Well. Again, it's been quite a while, hasn't it. I should just accept my bad-blogger status and be done with it.
Anyway. My Supercomputing demo did not crash, nor did any of my planes; therefore, I count it a success. Other than that it was pretty unremarkable, except for being my first trip to Florida and first in-person sighting of palm trees. And the mid-70's-and-sunny weather was certainly a nice change from Indiana in mid-November. I packed my drop spindle and some gorgeous combed top in my luggage and did quite a bit of spinning in the hotel room in the evenings; apparently spending all day thinking and talking about all this esoteric, bleeding-edge high-tech stuff made me want to do something very, very simple and very, very old in my spare time. I finished spinning and plying that batch in December and gave it to my Hatrack Gift Exchange recipient, though it just about made me cry to ship it off. 250 yards of the most
beautiful stuff I've ever spun. But then Greg got me three huge, gorgeous batts of Corriedale from
Grafton Fibers for Christmas, so now I can make more! Yay!
I haven't been doing much spinning though. I did manage to get the
Christmas sweaters done in time--early, even! I cast off the last stitch on the last one on the evening of the 21st. I also made some
fingerless gloves for Jess and a Mobius basket for Beth. What I didn't get done in time was the socks for Laura and Scott's birthday; I'm only just now turning the heel on Laura's second one. My hands went carpal right around Christmas Day while I was frantically trying to finish them, but sadly the deciding factor in postponing them was not the crippling pain but rather the fact that I'd run out of coffee. Ah well, they got gift cards on their birthdays and they'll have socks in another week or two.
I had stupendously bad luck knitting for Scott this year. I spent months on his sweater (I believe I've mentioned before that he's 6'5" and long-waisted), and just as I was nearly done with the second sleeve I discovered that both sleeves had errors and I had to rip them both back to the shoulder. After ripping back and before restarting I took a break to make myself
these to vent my frustration. Hey, just cause yarn is soft and fuzzy and crafty doesn't mean I can't use it to express my hostility. So anyway, I did the sleeves over and finally finished his sweater, but it came out a little wonky--the neckline was way too stretchy and it only comes up to crewneck height, even though it's supposed to be a mock-turtleneck. Still wearable though. And then, after I'd thought his socks were finished and I'd started on Laura's, I finally let go of my denial that my gauge was off. I really really wanted to believe that it was just the ribbing pattern pulling in and they would still stretch enough to fit, but I finally went back and re-measured, and sure enough, I'd been getting 8 stitches to the inch the whole time, instead of the 7 I thought I was, making them about two inches too small around. So I had to rip out the finished pair and redo them from scratch. At least he only has size 11 feet, smaller than you might expect for someone so tall, but that still threw my carefully-crafted schedule into chaos and destroyed all hope of having all the gifts done in time.
Laura's sweater also came out a little wonky. I don't know if I made a mistake in blocking or what, but it was supposed to have 3/4 sleeves, and I carefully multiplied all the row counts in the sleeve pattern by .75, but as you can see in the picture they come right down to her wrists. Weird. Good thing I didn't do the full-length sleeves or they'd be down around her knees. It's also kind of baggy in the body because the pattern didn't have any waist shaping in it, and because I was using Rowan Kidsilk Haze (which 1) is incredibly expensive and 2) can't be frogged) I was too scared to do any major modifications to it. But it's a wraparound style, so that helps correct the shapelessness a bit.
But Mom's and Dad's came out perfect, dammit! And I DID get them done on time!
I had a good Christmas all around, despite the achy hands (the very first gift I opened was a set of carpal tunnel therapy gloves from Scott--I put them on immediately and kept them on the rest of the night, and they really do help). I even had a bit of serendipity at the Knightridge Solstice party, where I ran into my friend Aaron from high school, who I hadn't seen for about 10 or 12 years. He and I were really tight with another guy, Quinn, who moved to Berkeley after college but was going to be in Bloomington over Christmas. We really wanted to get all three of us together, but the scheduling didn't work out for that, so I ended up just having lunch with each of them individually. Quinn is poly too now, which does not surprise me at all; Aaron is curious about it and says he wants to try it, but I'm not sure whether that's a genuine desire for polyamory or just a wish to recapture the excitement of youth. None of my business anyway. It was awesome to see Quinn again, despite the guy-I-want-to-sleep-with-who-doesn't-want-to-sleep-with-me factor still being in play...my coping skills in that area have improved not at all in the intervening 12 years, I'm sorry to say. We fooled around very slightly back in the day, but he was dating someone else then and neither of us had ever heard of poly, so we never really did anything, and this time around I didn't really get any interested vibe from him. It was still great to see him though; apparently he comes back to visit once or twice a year, so maybe we can do lunch again sometime. And I should definitely see Aaron more often; he lives just up in Greenwood. As much time as he says he spends down in Bloomington, I'm surprised it took us so long to run into each other.
Let's see, what else...New Year's Eve consisted of drunken dancing with the assorted freaks & geeks I'm proud to call my friends; that was a lot of fun. Going back to work after vacation wasn't so fun; I'm really getting restless there but I still have no clue what I'd rather be doing. I've been added to the team for the LEAD project to help with testing (and documentation, but mostly testing), but it's an immensely complex and poorly-documented system and I'm having trouble getting my bearings enough to be of any help. I'm not even a systems programmer, dammit, a fact which Beth seems to have forgotten. Also she said a few weeks ago that if I don't step up and make a serious effort and contribution over the next month or two, she'll have trouble justifying extending my contract past May, so now I find myself suddenly fighting to keep a job I don't particularly like or want. The irony is not lost on me. Oh, I guess that's another thing that happened, she asked me to stay on and work for her at the data and search/high-performance distributed computing center that she and Dennis are starting in the fall. She said she likes working with me and even offered a slight raise if I'd stay (only to the mid-40s at most, post-docs are only making in the 50s here so that's the best I'll ever do with my measly bachelor's degree); I suspect that most of what she likes is that I'm too docile to complain about how hard she is to work for. Sigh. I'd already pretty well decided that I can't afford to move in May or June like I was originally planning. I guess I could maybe just barely do it if I had to, but it's a risky thing at this point; I've saved some but I don't think it would be nearly enough. But then it's not like I've done a lot of research on what it would cost, or even made any effort to find a job in another city. So I guess on some level I don't really want to leave.
I'm seeing a new therapist, this one is at the student health center. It's way more convenient to work, and this guy is really good. Unfortunately what it means for him to be really good is that he pushes on all the places I hate having pushed on, and I'm usually a wreck for the rest of the day after a session, and sometimes even the day after that. It's difficult, but I try to think of it as being like shiatsu massage on a muscle that's completely seized up--certainly more painful in the short term than avoiding it would be, but it needs to happen if I want the full use of my body back.
Guess I'd better schlep myself in to work; it's a class day today so I have less time to get stuff done. I completely flunked stats last semester, but there are no consequences for failing whatsoever--I don't need the credits for anything, and due to a recent HR policy change I don't even have to pay back the fee courtesy. It's very liberating. I'm taking topology this semester, and so far it's fun--the first day we learned to play tic-tac-toe on the surface of a Klein bottle, that rocked :) Since I'm already obsessed with turning one-dimensional strings into three-dimensional objects, I figured that class looked like a good bet.
Off with me now.