As anyone who is paying attention has noticed, I tend to think about craft projects with attention to ridiculous levels of mathematical detail. A sloppy seam doesn't bother me, but a pattern repeat that doesn't quite fit? Watch out!

So here's what I've been focusing on recently: striping in triangular shawls.

Let's say you want to knit a triangle shape to put over your shoulders. Any isosceles will do but I'm going to assume a right triangle for ease of computation later:



You can actually knit this in several ways: start from the bottom point and increase, or knit the thing from side-to-side by starting from one of the other corners. You could even cast on half of the top width, do some clever things with short rows, and end up casting off the other half of the top at the end. But the vast majority of patterns of this type have you start or end along the entire bottom edge, and then, end or start with just a few stitches at the back of the neck. Here are a few examples of this type of construction (the first is a long-edge-up, the other three are a center-neck-down). If you're working from the center neck down, there are increases along the center and on each side, and when you add in some patterning, you end up with a neat symmetry along the spine of the shawl, like so:

Except, you know. Looking nice, and not like I spent less than two minutes with MS Paint.

Now, let's say that you have several balls of yarn--all the same size but in different colors. Or, let's say you have one of those fancy yarns that changes color every X number of yards. The rows at the outer edge of the shawl are going to be much longer than the rows at the center top of the shawl. So if you use up each ball of yarn before going on to the next, or if your yarn changes color every 10 yards and you have no control over it, you'll end up with something that looks like this:



A big chunky not-even-stripelike-thing in the center, and ever-thinnening stripes down towards the edges.

I HATE this look. Sometimes it doesn't bother me so much, like when the project is just a cozy stashbuster, but for something that is supposed to be a source of pride, no. Just no. Especially when I'm spinning for a project and thus have complete control over the final yarn, it just seems terrifically lazy.

I've got some very pretty hand-dyed fiber that I'd like to make into a triangular shawl. Can I split it up in a way that eliminates, or at least minimizes, this stripey effect?

You bet I can. Next time: some actual math.

So step 1 of the Organize My Dang Knitting Already Plan turned out to involve going through my knitting bags and realizing that the reason things weren't getting done was because it was a rat's nest. A lot of that has to do with our aborted house-moving in April, where lots of things got thrown into boxes, and then put back in roughly but not exactly the same order. So my very good intentions of restarting the lace kneesocks didn't work out because I couldn't find my pattern notes. Things like that.

In the process of sorting, I found some silk singles, completely spun but not yet plied. Even though it's not even something I remembered to put on the list, I finished it:

Lovely, lovely stuff. 2-ply, one ounce, about 215 yards. Maybe a doily? I haven't done one of those in a while.

Then I found a half-full spindle with some gorgeous alpaca/wool/silk blend on it (the final destiny of this fiber is as singles, so I wasn't even trading one set of singles for another!) Finished off that spindle-full, so that I could put the fiber and spindle bag away neatly. Then I found yet ANOTHER small pile of singles to be plied for my spinning guild, which I dispatched quickly.

When I finally got all the yarn, fiber, and fabric where it was supposed to be and stopped finding half-done projects, the end result was a craft space that is no longer any kind of disaster area. All spindles empty. One half-full bobbin on the wheel. All knitting needles in a place I can actually find them quickly. Phew.

And then, well. And then I went to Susan's open house on Saturday and came home with ridiculous amounts of yarn and fiber. The haul includes some sock fiber that is positively screaming about the injustice of not being made into another pair of kneesocks right this instant. There's a skein of dyed-by-me fingering weight yarn that isn't thrilling me--I'm too picky to enjoy surprises, which is what a first-time-dyeing experiment is guaranteed to be. (This is why I don't join yarn or fiber clubs.) Lastly, I got some yarn for the test-knitting project I mentioned in the previous entry, which is currently still at the swatching stage.

Steps forward and back, and all that. At least it's organized and prioritized.

Filly just wrote a post containing a full list of all her WIPs, and it got right under my skin, because arrrgggh, I have so many partly-done projects (and two-three more "need to do soon" projects) that it's making me crazy. I think I need to pick a week sometime this summer where I skip out on all evening activities including computer time (which is such a waste of brain cells, really), get the couch all comfy, get some DVDs and books on tape, and just knit and spin all week. It's not like that would be any kind of hardship--oh, no! I'm going to spend lots of time doing a thing I totally enjoy! And then at the end, hopefully, I'd have made a lot of progress and be able to cast on for something new. :) It'd be interesting to see how much I got done!

Let's see, what's in progress right now?

1) The main project is this very nice sweater, which is not at all like anything I normally wear except that I love it to pieces. I'm making modifications galore--different stitch pattern, a bit of shaping so that the back is lower, fingering weight hemp instead of sportweight alpaca and according changes in numbers. This was what I worked on in Japan, because most of it is just straight up and down easy lace pattern. I didn't get a whole lot done on the trip because looking out the window of the trains was much more entertaining, but at this point I've knit from one front all the way to mid-back, and have just started working on the second front piece. The fronts are considerably longer than your typical cardigan, so I'm more than half done, certainly. This is perfectly good bus knitting, so I'm content with the slow steady progress it's making.

2)Lacy Cables Knee Socks, with handspun superwash/bamboo blend:

These are a fair ways along, though I need to figure out if I messed up the increases along the calf. I was working on these before the Japan trip but didn't want to bring them with. I'm following the pattern pretty closely with some slight gauge modifications, so there's not much thinking to do If I do a WIP-a-palooza, these will probably be worked on first.

3)Snowflake Mittens: I am 200% in love with the yarn, and still figuring out the pattern. I was working on these a lot last fall and just faded because the picture in my head wasn't lining up with the fabric after ripping 2-3 times. These would go fast if only I could figure out what I was doing.

4) Socks Of Fail: Birch Leaf socks from A Gathering of Lace. Technically a finished object, except that one sock has 12 repeats of the leaf pattern, and fits beautifully, while the other has 11 repeats of the leaf pattern and doesn't. Sounds easy, except that ripping back to the appropriate spot involves knitting most of the sock again. Tossed aside in frustration long before I even defended. I love the socks though so I should really just suck it up already. This would be another good one for targeted WIP-icide.

5) Long-term shawl design: Thinking about this one makes me grumpy because it's such a huge project and I'll never ever finish it. I think it's time to move it out of the knitting bag into the "put on hold indefinitely" box.

And then the ones that I haven't even started yet but feel the need to finish anyways:

6) Fishy Hat Redux: I want to post the pattern for this guy. I want to reknit it as it's been a while since I made it. I have someone who is willing to trade the hat for pictures of their child wearing the hat (so that I have better pictures to go with the pattern). I just need to knit the darned thing (and also email them back about the pictures). Shouldn't take too long once I get started; I took good notes and the pattern is mostly written/charted.

7) More shawls: I have two in-progress spinning projects with half-planned shawls connected to them. I'm less up-in-arms about spinning in progress, but it'd still be nice to make some progress on these.

8) Test Knitting Project: The pattern's not even written yet, but I've agreed to knit it by September and it's a fairly big project, so it'll get bumped up in priority soon. The advantage to going WIP-hunting sooner is that I could finish my own projects and have a nice empty knitting bag.

9) Sweater Swatch: Oh man, this thing is so great where it is that I should just bind it off, then hang it on the wall to dream about knitting it this winter. There's so little involved that I could probably finish it tonight, but it is still sitting on the needles.

Nine projects in the pile. This is ridiculous for someone who prefers to have less than three going. So, that's it, then. Sometime very soon, I'm going to go offline for a week and spend the whole time WIP-hunting, including lunch breaks. I could probably get 3 or 4 of these finished during that time. Possibly short updates on progress will be involved.

It is likely that you will find the following to be a very Important and Informative website.

Who Pooped?

(Note: Embedded sounds make this NSFW until you TURN OFF YOUR SPEAKERS. On the other hand, it's perfectly safe for young children unless they're not supposed to giggle.

There are lots of things I want to say about the trip, but it's still pretty disorganized in my head--pretty much every single moment of every single day involved dealing with things outside my experience, how do you condense that down? I bought a journal our first day there and I have pages and pages of doodles and repetition and streams of consciousness. I feel like it needs to digest a bit more.

In the meantime, I have been writing about the trip in tiny increments, on J's Flickr stream as he adds new pictures. (Note: A lot of those pictures are mine too, but he's got the Pro account so we're putting them all up over there. At some point we'll get more organized about noting who took what.) We've been home for over a week and he's only on day 5 of the trip, but, well. We took a lot of pictures. I've been getting bits and pieces of what I want to say out over there, plus, there's lots of cool pictures of Tokyo, and the first few cool pictures of Kyoto. So if you're interested in a somewhat piecemeal but chronological retelling, Try over there.

Back! Many pictures and much talking soon. But first, a short scene: How Jet Lag Seems To Work In This Household.

Time: Day after a 11-time-zone flight

T: Hey, I'm not sure I buy into this whole jet lag thing. I've woken up after 9 hours of sleep feeling normal and rested. I could easily imagine [insert moderately ambitious day-after-trip project here, like going to work or navigating across town for dinner].
J: Yeah, I feel great too. Let's still take it easy, though. How about we chill out at our home base for a little while, and then [insert less-ambitious project, like going outside, period].
T: Sure, sounds reasonable. Maybe I'll take a nap*.
J: Sounds good. Let's go an hour from now.
T and J, in unison: *yawn* *yawn* *yawTHUNK*
6 hours later
T and J: Well that was a nice half hour nap! Wait, why's it all dark outside?
fin


*Napping while not exhausted on a day off is not unusual behavior on my part. I consider napping to be one of my hobbies.

Phase #2 in Month-O-Crazy: heading off to Japan. To fill the void, enjoy my stockpile of internet amusements.

This image of Neil Armstrong just after getting back from the first moonwalk brings tears to my eyes, and makes me feel like humanity has to be doing *something* right.

Traceurs at my alma mater. I love how the background people totally ignore them.

"Modern Samurai" video With a pretty bad translation, though it's good enough to get the idea. I like the bean the best.

Tiny, awesome DDR player. Cheers me up for some reason.

The Accent Archive (English section) Lots of English speakers saying the same short paragraph. Useful for inspring or easing homesickness (or other location-sickness).

Sita Sings The Blues, an absolutely amazing movie that J, Shira, Ari, and I saw over the weekend. The description makes it sound dry and unamazing, so just skip that, go to the "watch it" section and check out the first 5-10 minutes. Chances are excellent that you'll want to see the rest. I'm going to watch it again tonight, myself.

This was a response to a comment on the previous entry, which got long enough to deserve its own entry.

Our normal book arrangement, by section.
Non-shared:

J's* fiction
J's non-fiction
My fiction
My non-fiction
My um.. autobiographical non-fiction? (not quite that, but it's a well-defined category in my own head which is all that matters. Personal essays, largely, also nonfiction where I learn as much about the author as a particular topic.)
My unread books.

Shared:

Manga
Reference (puzzle books end up here, because I often need to look something up when working a crossword)
Filled-up blank journals (J writes real things in his, mine mostly contain knitting charts and spinning specifications)
Cookbooks
Craft reference
Harry Potter
Oversized books (some reference, some photo albums, some yearbooks, some art books)
Magazines, arranged by title.

That seems like a lot of books when I write it out, but several of those share a single shelf.

I think J has some sub-organization in his sections; I can recognize one as "funny soothing stuff when I can't get to sleep", and another as "Sci Fi that makes me nostalgic", but the rest are even more Borges-ian and even I don't understand the workings of his mind well enough to deduce them.

I usually arrange my sections by size. So, I'm usually a visually-based arranger to begin with. Arranging by color wasn't much of a stretch, except that on this occasion I used all J's books for my purposes.

*We freely steal from each other's libraries, the person who buys the book is usually the one who ends up with the book on their shelf.

So I just had this ridiculously stressful couple of weeks which ended up leading to having an apartment full of stuff boxed up ready to move, with no new apartment to move it into.

This made me feel better, even though I might need to rebox them again soon:



I don't know if we'll keep these like this permanently. J joined me in admiring it on Friday night, but I can also hear his Librarian Brain whirring in confusion. Bruce Lee's Fighting Method sitting between Harry Potter and my organic chemistry modeling kit? Wrong.

On the other hand, there's the occasional serendipity. Christine Jorgenson, David Sedaris, and Shakespeare are neighbors in this arrangement, and that seems to have the makings of a delightful any-3-people-living-or-dead dinner party. And First Love Sisters and Real Boys are separated by Chicago and Italy.

Here's what I learned as I played with this:

White and black do not go, even if the text is huge, bold, and brightly colored. They need to live somewhere else.

I set the tan/off white books on their own at first, but they the yellow and orange looked incomplete without them.

To me, the exact chromal order didn't seem quite as important as having several sub-groupings by shading. A few relatively light or dark books looked more intentional together than dispersed.

There are disproportionately few purple books in our (veryvery) random sampling. But there's lots of blue books to make up for it. An RO/YG/BIV arrangment seems to very roughly split things into thirds, with the brownish books being split between the O and the Y.

I thought that this might come out really ugly since we don't have quite enough books to avoid a pixellation effect, and because, y'know, we buy books to read not because of the color of the covers. But I love how it looks. I'm thinking that when we reorganize the books (either by reboxing these and moving or by staying here and getting the rest of the books out), that I'll try to do it with the whole collection, over several bookshelves. Except the oversized books. And possibly the cookbooks.

It pleases me, overall. If I had enough books to do so I'd probably set it up so that the X axis was sorted by color and the Y axis was sorted by brightness. That way the black and white spines would have a clearer place.

Or, I'd just have one really long bookshelf going around the whole apartment at about eye-level.

I've been feeling bogged-down by a bunch of unfinished projects recently. One literally just needed a bit of finishing, but there were decisions to make with respect to the finishing, and even bringing it around to my knitting group for advice didn't get me going (after talking to them, I had SIX good ideas instead of three). The second was stalled for no particularly good reason, just out of sight I suppose. I realized on Friday that I could easily knock them both out this weekend, and wouldn't it be great to have them both cleared away, making room for something new and fun?

It would.

And as of dinner time tonight, I finished them both. One is drying on the floor. That counts to me, as the only remaining work is keeping the cat away from what she considers to be a very delicious sheepy smell.

Exhibit A:


Huntington Castle Pullover, from the Fall 2004 issue of Interweave Knits. The navy blue is Cascade 220, a commercial yarn, and the other colors are my handspun. I talked a bit about spinning for this back in September, and have been working on it in odd moments since. It's not a difficult knit; the trickiest part involved keeping the colorwork even as the floats are somewhat long and all in the same place (which for me often leads to them showing through on the front side). The only real modification I made was to add the inkle-woven band around the front, and to add a few rounds of crochet underneath so that I had something to attach the band to.

I'm really really happy with this sweater. It's a perfect weekend thing. I actually wore it yesterday before I sewed the band to it, so I know that it fits just right, though it was a little naked without the hood adornment.

Here's an in-progress picture of the woven band, for visual reference:


Exhibit B:

This one was actually a stashbusting exercise. Remember the Fair Isle? I had a LOT of yarn left over from that, because the yarn only came in nice big 4-ounce skeins. I probably could have knit a vest in a similar color scheme, but frankly the idea of more colorwork in those colors gave me the willies. So I decided on some nice, soothing lace instead.

The shape is adapted from a recently-published pattern in the spring issue of Spin Off last year. I added the lace in myself; The colors all sitting together reminded me of a rainy day, so I decided on a lace pattern that started with tiny drops and got bigger until there were big fat drops along the bottom of the shawl would be neat (and I picked the picot edge because I thought it looked a bit like drops dangling from the edge of the shawl). I'm pretty happy with how it came out. Except for the white, I just knit each color until I ran out of it, so now all I have left of Fair Isle sweater yarn is a bit of white and the green, which didn't really go with what I was trying to do here. Quick, effective stashbusting.

Obtained from the library this afternoon, in one fell swoop:
Surface Chemistry
Physical Chemistry of Surfaces
Adsorption by Powders and Porous Solids
Fundamentals of Surface and Thin Film Analysis

For some reason, I can't stop looking at the stack on my desk and thinking "It's a cookbook!"

Trying to figure out what to do with that little thought-fart. I'm sure it could go somewhere amusing.

(What I was doing before I was trying to figure out how to cook using those books was put together a curriculum. I'm familiar with a good percentage of what's in the books already; I'm more paying attention to the way the material is structured because I'm finding myself jumping around too much in my initial notes.)

A. calls me and asks me to look at a piece of equipment that is giving her unreliable data. I'm 85% sure of the problem, but I go downstairs anyway because it's hard to diagnose over the phone. I sit down, watch the zigzagging live readout of data, and trace my finger around on the cover of the detector.

"Thought so. Put your finger here. Feel that fluttery vibration? The polarizer is flicking back and forth between two positions. It happens once in a while--I think there's a minor bug somewhere in the program. Restarting everything will only take about 3 minutes and should take care of it."

We shut off the instrument and the computer, and when we restart, the live readout is smooth, and the cover of the detector is still. Time for data.
*******************
I run a tutorial to get people set up culturing cells for experiments. We make up media, thaw the frozen-back cells, clean the area we'll be working in. The last thing we do before putting our hands in the hood is to spray our gloves with 70% ethanol. The alcohol is chilly, even through gloves.

We add the cells and media to a flask, and open the incubator to put the cells inside. Researchers new to biology often comment on the smell of the incubators--a smell my nose once interpreted as both natural and chemical, food and soil and synthesized antibiotics. It's the way it's supposed to smell, so my brain now idly notes the smell as being "good" while taking care of all the higher-level tasks of explanation. The smell of media gone bad is impossible to ignore in such a way. I once came upon some media that had gone off, and the other person in the lab and I spent an amusing 10 minutes coming up with ways to describe the smell as we located the source (uncleaned vacuum aspirator trap) and proceeded to bleach the crap out of the thing.

"This... this is bad."

"It's like week-old sushi."

"It's like week-old sushi, which was eaten by a cow, who died of food poisoning and was in turn left in the sun for a week."

"It's like matzo ball soup made by the worst bubbie EVER."

"It's like molds have gained sentience and are fighting back."
*******************
B. is getting an error on another piece of equipment. There are two detectors on this instrument, both under vacuum, behind a thick steel cover. Unseeable, untouchable. I realize that a previous user has changed the detector settings because of the sound of the wrong detector sliding into place. Detector B moves with a lower-frequency whirr.
*******************
There is a sensual* aspect to working in the sciences that I think gets ignored too often. Nowadays people often think of science as something that is entirely accomplished by people staring at computer screens--something a powerful brain can do without any corporeal assistance. And while there are fields where that is the case, in most areas of the sciences, using all of the senses it's safe to use will give you a more complete picture of what's going on. ("Safe to use?" There are many older reference books that, when describing the physical properties of chemicals, include taste. Many of those chemicals are now known carcinogens or teratogens. What we lose as an identification tool, we gain in lifespan.)

I think viewing science as a thing that requires people to sit back and think and not explore, physically, from every angle, is a part of what makes science seem unappealing to so many people. The expectation for many is that all the answers are in a book, and that scientists sit around with their giant brains, reading all the time, and figuring stuff out that regular folks never could. This makes science at once seem totally boring and totally inaccessible, so why wouldn't the public's understanding and interest in basic science slide down, as it does?

In a way, experiencing science in this way, engaging my senses to understand everything as thoroughly as possible, is a bit of a return to childhood. Adults aren't supposed to sniff anything unless it's food, look at the underside of anything unless there's a price sticker there, or touch anything unless it's in the way of what they need to do. It's *fun*, to be able to identify a problem by knowing the usual voices of the instruments in the lab, and I think that's something that would appeal to more people than the usual view of scientists.

What do you enjoy about what you do?

*That's "sensual" as in "of the senses", not sensual in a sexual way, though at the same time it can be pleasant.

Things I Wished I'd Thought To Say Theater:

Phone rings, I answer it.

Long, long pause, then "Miss [J's last name]?"

"Sorry, that's 4 fails in two words. Goodbye."

My local spinning guild has a Roc Day celebration every year, and this year in the middle of demonstrating stuff and talking to folks, I bought a blend of superwash wool, bamboo, and nylon to make socks with. Usually one 4-ounce ball is enough for a pair, but I wanted knee socks, so I bought two so that I'd have plenty.

I started spinning up the first ball that same day--4 ounces, 300 yards, *just* fit onto a single bobbin. I don't usually end up with such nice round numbers or such cooperative fiber, but I just smiled to myself about the nice combo and started working on my sock.

I finished knitting the first sock and while I cast on for the second with the remainder of the first ball of yarn, I got to work spinning the remainder of the fiber.

And what do you think I ended up with? 4 ounces, 300 yards, *just* fit onto a single bobbin.

Apparently I am a robot.



Pretty, yes? For a robot, at least.

Because of our pending trip to Japan, I've been trying to pick up a little traveler's Japanese, so I can hopefully not offend every single person I meet with my gangly Western-ness (only most of them). I've been listening to Pimsleur language lessons on tape. They're very useful for this sort of thing, overall--I know "please", "thank you", "how much does that cost?", "do you speak English?" and "where is [name of place]?", which was about 85% of what I needed on my one other overseas trip. I'm going to be almost completely illiterate (I know the characters for "man" and "woman" so I don't walk into the wrong bathroom), but hopefully my constant embarrassment will get me through. I'm enjoying listening to the tapes, and liking the way it's helping me pick up bits and pieces from anime.

The thing about these tapes, though, is that they give me a somewhat odd sense of what the average traveler is doing over there in the land of the rising sun. Along with "What time is it?" and "I want to eat sushi" I have also learned to say "Is your husband here? No? Then, would you like to have drinks at my place?"

Is this really a common enough situation that I should be learning it before the word for "bathroom"?

We gave the cat a prophylactic de-wormer last night--it's this goo that you put on between the shoulder blades so they can't lick it off (ha! says the cat. I will stretch and stretch until I can get that awful tasting fur on my tongue, and then I will RUN AWAY FROM THE AWFUL FLAVOR).

My sense is that it's a dose of Drain-o for their systems--not especially nice, but nicer than worms burrowing into your eyeballs. Punky was obviously feeling off all evening, because she was hardly being obnoxious at all. Reminds me a bit of how she was when we first got her, which brought home just how sick a kitty we had at the beginning, though we didn't realize it at the time.

There's a bus I regularly catch that is regularly empty save the bus driver, a few stragglers like me, and two young female Mormon missionaries. (They must be on the clock, because they're wearing their nametags). The usual bus driver is either Mormon or a very nice man, because he chats with them familiarly each evening.

"I think what you girls are doing is just fantastic," he says, as he opens the doors at the top of the hill.

It twisted my brain up for a few minutes, trying to imagine a worldview where telling people they're going to hell is *right*. I decided that there's something to be said for wanting to share something you feel strongly about and love, even if it's not my thing at all. And I've heard some stuff from religious friends about how religions with a witnessing component have seen some huge jumps in participation in the last 10-20 years, particularly in developing nations.

So maybe going door to door and being a pleasant face that represents a particular worldview is a useful thing. Maybe all those little pamphlets that show up in the laundry room at my house are actually doing something, on a worldwide scale.

I guess my real question is, why am I NOT proselytizing for the thing that is central to my life?

*noknoknok*

Hi, my name is TJ, and I'd like to tell you about Science.

*Briefest waiting-for-doorslam pause*

Living in what seems to be a chaotic world can be very distressing. But there are constants in the world which you can rely on. 300 million meters per second. 1.6x10^-19 Coulombs. 8.3 Joules per Kelvin per mol.

The goal of science is to help you make meaning of your world, with the information you already have. Joining the world of science makes the world seem both more organized and richer--since devoting my life to it, I find that I can see the commonalities between things so much more clearly. When looking at the natural world, I can imagine the common ancestors of all living things, and appreciate the evolutionary symphony taking place in my very own back yard. I understand that my ability to see that natural world is due to nuclear fusion happening 150 million kilometers from my eyes, to atomic-scale interactions between photons and the molecules on the surfaces I'm looking at, to those photons interacting with specialized molecules within my own body, to the release and interpretation of electrical signals. Again, a beautiful, coordinated symphony on every scale.

And Science has a place for you to make meaningful, long-term contributions to our community. Scientists are not just rehashing old facts, but always seeking more information about our world and sharing that information with fellow Scientists. Perhaps you'd like to come to one of our weekly seminars. You don't need to participate if you're not comfortable--just enjoy a cookie and some coffee or tea, and listen to what we have to say.

I'll just leave this copy of Nature for you to look at on your own time. Hawking be with you!

This is why the Internet exists. (via Shira and Ari)

It's silly, yes, but it's also an interesting exercise in compare-and-contrast. Mostly what the video does is make me want to find every cross-cultural example of young men showing off to music, in groups. It seems to be something so very nearly universal among humans, to find out what the limits of our bodies are, to show our friends those findings, and to hoot in appreciation. It always makes me so happy to see it.

My inner 12-year-old boy decrees that the Word Of The Day today is: coxsackievirus.

A useful point to anyone with as much common sense as me, or less: When working in a bio lab, don't follow the thought "Well, THAT looks odd" with "I wonder what it smells like?"

I'm smart enough not to do this in a chem lab, where sniffing mystery items can give me cancer. But I'm not smart enough to do this in a bio lab, where sniffing mystery things is not going to give me cancer, but is going to make me want to yarf.

However, the intellectual result, aside from the wanting to yarf, was useful enough to make me understand why old school chemists still hate fume hoods. The eyes alone can be somewhat limiting, particularly when combined with a lack of experience. Sure I have a nice microscope, but that just got me a nice picture of the nasties, without much more understanding of what I was seeing (hey, I'm an engineer, I never got much chance to look at contaminated cells before.) What were those clumps? They'd gotten larger since yesterday, so I knew it was cellular, but that doesn't narrow it down much. The nose is filled with some very useful chemical receptors and a lifetime of experience. One sniff screamed "poo", and reminded me of the obvious: there's people in that same lab culturing e.coli. Duh. The experience would have been just as instructive if the contamination had been yeast, though that wouldn't have prevented me from trying the trick again. I *like* the smell of rising bread.

Life with Punk:

We got a cat in early December. As you can see, we are total suckers, and at this point exist merely to provide cozy laying-down spots and snacks.

It's an indication of just how much she is our furbaby, that my first inclination when I thought of writing about her is that, wait, when she grows up I don't want her to read this and get embarrassed, and I don't want the other cats at school to make fun of her.

I wasn't thinking this in a fully conscious way, and then realized: duh. I mean, we'll be home-cat-schooling her anyhow. :p

But she was one of the things that helped to temporarily kill blogging for me. I didn't want this to be All Cat All The Time, even just temporarily. Daily cat pics can be had elsewhere. I'm mostly getting all the geekiness out in one big lump.

When we first brought her home, we just got whatever cat food seemed appropriate, and figured we'd go with that for the time being until we'd actually done some research. She seems happy--nay, obsessed--with her meals, and the food we got happens to conform to the vet-recommended standards. But it's meat, and after being a vegetarian for over 12 years it feels a little odd to have a big wodge of beef and chicken goo in the fridge. The one ethical decision we *had* made in the pet food aisle the night before we got her was no fish; there's no reason to decimate an already-ailing part of the ecosystem for our new friend, cute as she is.

Our friends Ari and Shira have three cats that are all vegan, though, and are the sort of handy friends who can provide instant reference books upon request. So right now I'm reading and figuring out how to at least reduce the amount of meat in her diet. She does seem to love the stuff, as is her instinct, and to regard any non-meaty things I offer her with frank disdain, no matter how much she cries for them as I make dinner. We're still working towards that.

Little dude had a rough time for the first probably-2-ish years of her life; she showed up at the SPCA with 3 kinds of worms and a mostly-dead litter of kittens (I heard in one place that one survived, and that none did elsewhere). But she'd made a friend with someone who'd pulled for her to get expensive treatments and not be put down--someone who wrote "Best kitty ever!" on all her initial checkup forms.

The Ithaca SPCA is really beautifully set up. The cats live in groups of 2-4 in little glassed-in cubicles, that have blankets and chairs and baskets and toys. It gives you a good chance to interact with the cats on their own terms, to get some sense of what they'd be like in a house. Punky was so, so mellow; I messed with the cats I liked a little to make sure they didn't swat the second you touched a paw, and she rolled over to get me to stop bothering her, but was otherwise unfazed.

Part of that was because she was still recovering. She's plenty goofy now, and knows exactly what those pointy things sticking out of her paw are good for (particularly 10 minutes before my alarm goes off in the morning, because she can't stand the excitement of it almost being Time For Deliciousness).

For the most part, though, she's very fun to have around. We made a good choice in family member. She's pretty clearly One Of Us already.


Doing some transferring of materials between the -80C (-112F) freezer and the liquid nitrogen storage tank (77 Kelvin, -321F), I hum "She's as Cold as Ice" to myself. I only realize what I'm humming after the lid's back on the tank.

Stupid Journey, with their scientifically appropriate songs worming their way into my subconscious.

At dinner, J was telling me that the people primarily responsible for putting melamine in Chinese formula had been sentenced to death. I generally have a huge issue with the death penalty, because the people in the US who are sentenced to death are typically irretrevably mentally ill, and I feel some sympathy for the awfulness of their brain chemistry or the messed-up life that led them to do terrible things.

But I have a very, very difficult time working up the same level of sympathy for people who, out of pure and entirely logical greed, choose to add the goddamned precursor of Formica to infant formula in order to game the system to think it was packed full of nutrition. There's a bunch more levels of understanding there, a lot more intelligence and wherewithal which could have been used to help the world. A person who takes those abilities and uses them to sicken a third of a million people in exchange for some money makes it really hard for me to recognize and welcome their inherent worth and dignity.

I watched I'm Not There over the weekend while plying yarn that will become kneesocks. Maybe it would make more literal sense to me if I knew tons about Bob Dylan to begin with, but as it was I just enjoyed the dreamlike sense of one person inspiring so many different interpretations.

It reminded me very distinctly of something that Jon-Jon once wrote about--about how something can be true without being factual, and his attempts to write truthful things while occasionally avoiding facts or changing them wholesale. Watching a person be a 9-year old black boy, a washed-up Christian preacher, an androgynous mumbler, and Billy The Kid, all at once, gave me a stronger sense of what he was saying than I'd felt before.

Sometimes, you need to make something up in order to tell the truth.

And it got me thinking about this space. Part of my quietness lately has had to do with getting too bogged down in the listing of facts at the expense of truth, I think. The blog was turning more and more into "I made this. It is this color. I ate cereal for breakfast. It is cold outside." And all those facts seemed to be adding up to a smaller and smaller percentage of all the rest of my life. Except that in this real life, right now, the Really Big Things and the Teensy Little Details are so mixed up in each other that to even start posting is daunting. After planning the future in generalities for so long (when I finish my degree, when we're settled in with jobs, when we have a bit of money in the bank) J and I are suddenly presented with many, many specifics--interest rates and radon levels and floor refinishing and square footage and counteroffers, and at exactly the same time, and precisely because of all these little details, we're choosing whether or not to lock into some of the biggest long-term decisions that people make. This is the supposedly the gratification I've been delaying my whole life, and now that I'm here I find that the "gratification" is even scarier than all the stuff that came before.

So life is complicated, and it feels wrong to be so casual as to blog about it.

This space has been turning more and more into some kind of catalog, sterile and factual. That sterility was repelling me, so I chose to stop until I had actual things I wanted to say. What I seem to be saying now is that I don't know what I want to say, and that was a really long meta-post to say nothing, which I know gets tiresome way fast. But I'm thinking about what I can write here that expresses more truth. I have no idea what will happen to the facts in the process.

If this sounds tiresome, I still have plenty of knitting bits cooking on Ravelry, where, as everywhere online, I'm TChemGrrl. If not, join me for the ride.

All of my famous pretend boyfriends in one place, with documentation

When I saw this I lost all ability to form words and just flapped at J.

(sfw, just not sf my sanity.)