kmkat and her kneedles

Waiting.

Waiting is hard.

Time passes so slowly when one is waiting.

It helps if you have a friend or two to keep you company.

Even then, impatience can cause one to attempt to hurry things along.

So we wait.

And eventually...

something happens.

Mr. Goldfinch has found the new feeder! He helps himself,

and, being the generous and caring bird that he is, tells a friend.

We are still waiting for these two to invite the rest of their friends and relations.

I have had up to eleven goldfinches at one time on my original feeder. But when that one bit the dust -- those hungry little birds pecked the holes so much that after fifteen years the openings were big enough for the thistle seed to fall out -- I got another. It was very pretty, with a copper top and matching bands around the holes to protect them. But it proved to have a very poor design, indeed. It had a seam on each side of the clear plastic tube; in a short time the seams split open just enough for the seed to get wet and nasty. The poor finches would land on it, sniff, then turn around and give me a dirty look through the window. After an embarrassingly long time I got the message.

Now everyone is happy.

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Knitting continues on the Summer Chevron sweater. I worked on it all last weekend and every spare minute since then. You may remember that it is knit top down in the round, starting with a cast-on at the neck and increasing from there. Increasing 8 stitches every other round quickly leads to a lot of stitches. There are upwards of 450 stitches on the needle now, and visible progress is slow. So far it seems to fit, but the real test won't come for another 6-8". Which would make it twice as long as it is right now, so it will be awhile...

Let's talk... shoes.

#2 son and girlfriend were here last weekend. They told me that high-top Reeboks are back in style. Happily I still have two pairs left from the early 1990s. These are my favorites (the other pair is black),

#2 bought GF a 6-month anniversary present. She likes pink:

However, the Grnd Priz For Kool Shooz goes to #2 for these that he found at a thrift store:

Here's lookin' atcha, kid!

Wool warrior.

That's what this shirt says : Wool Warrior / A good day to dye.

In Klingon.

Available here. (Scroll down to the "Future languages" choice.) Thanks to knitnzu for the link.

Needle matters. Or, needles matter.

I am swatching for the Summer Raglan. Yarn is Madil Eden, 100% bamboo, worsted weight. Started out with my favorite needles, a Knit Picks Options circ using Harmony tips, US#6.

Even ignoring that random purl stitch at upper left that wandered into the stockinette, the result was... unsatisfactory. This yarn is too slippery to do well on slippery needles, and waaayyyyy too splitty for the KP sharp points. I had lots of little extra loopies where I hadn't caught the entire strand of yarn, which is a loosely plied thing of about 20 cobwebby strands.

Moving on, I tried a Denise Interchangeable, US#5. The Denise needles are plastic and have rather blunt tips, which worked perfectly with that splitty yarn.

Much better. No splits at all.

The problem is that the Denise cables suck big time. Every single cable in the set has started to separate between the cable and the cable end. Knitting with them requires fighting the stitches over that little irregularity all the damned time. No way I was gonna set myself up for that frustration.

I could have gone online and bought another cable, but there was a pretty good chance that by the time I was well into the sweater it would have begun to separate, too. So I went needle shopping online, looking for blunt points. An Addi Natura or even an Addi Turbo seemed possible solutions, but the shipping time for either meant I would have to wait, and I wanted to Cast. On. Right. Now. Sometimes living 50 miles from the nearest [full-service] LYS is a pain.

I searched through an assortment of needles I got on eBay last year and came up with a pair of Bryspun US#6 straights. The points, while not blunt, were at least less pointed than the KPs.

Hey, that looks good! (Ignore that loose strand at the edge of the garter stitch edge. Garter stitch turned out to be hard to do with this yarn, but there is no garter stitch in the sweater, so I felt safe ignoring that little problem.)

Yep, definitely good enough.

But the sweater is knit in the round so the straights wouldn't work. I searched a little further in the needle stash and found a Susan Bates 32" US#4 circ.

Let's compare needle points:

From the left, Knit Picks Options US#4, the Susan Bates #4, and a Knit Picks Harmony #5. Although the Harmony point looks similar to the Susan Bates in the photo, believe me, it is much more pointed.

The Susan Bates was perfect.

That swatch has been through the washer and dryer on the hand- washables cycle, so the gauge is ready to be measured. At the top you can see the complex calculations (ha!) needed to rejigger the cast on, which originally called for 112 stitches at 14 st/4". Sometimes my gauge measured at 21-1/2 st/4" and sometimes at 22 st/4", as in the photo. I went with the looser gauge in my calcs because the pattern says the garment is drapey and if one is between sizes one should go with the smaller size, plus I think the bamboo yarn is probably drapier and will stretch more than the Rowan Summer Tweed called for. I think that since the sweater is knit from the neck down, I can finagle the size.

We shall see.

Stumbled upon.

[Selected] Quotes from Albert Einstein

• "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
• "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
• "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
• "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
• "The only real valuable thing is intuition."
• "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
• "I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
• "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
• "Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
• "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
• "Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
• "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
• "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
• "Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
• "Technological progress is like an ax in the hands of a pathological criminal."
• "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
• "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
• "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
• "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
• "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
• "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
• "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
• "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.  If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
• "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."
• "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."
• "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
• "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this?  And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
• "It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
• "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)

Copyright: Kevin Harris 1995 (may be freely distributed with this acknowledgement)

Eye candy Friday.

Get ready...

Get set...

GO!

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Can I get an "Awwww..."

Random Wednesday.

"I tell my sons, 'When you bring a girl home, I don't care about her family background. I don't care what colour she is, or what she wants to be... just don't bring me a girl who peers warily at her plate and says, "What's in this?".' "

  -- from passage des perles.blogspot

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One of the duties of being a mother of a kid who lives faraway is the packing/repacking and shipping of stuff.

 

This duty also includes removing any hazmat from the shipment.

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My newest wallpaper, featuring a hanging basket from my deck.

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"You might very well think that. I could not possibly comment."

  -- from House of Cards / To Play the King / The Final Cut.

Awhile back I included that quote in a blog post and it got me to remembering the source, this BBC miniseries. A quick trip to the library's online catalog and the 3-CD set was on its way to my house. I watched it last week whilst recuperating from that little bout of food poisoning.

It was every bit as good as I remembered. Ian Richardson plays the most deliciously scheming, malevolent, downright evil politician one can imagine in 20th century politics. Hitler could have taken lessons from this guy. I recommend it highly to anyone looking for something to watch this summer while the TV plays reruns and other assorted crappe.

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This business of quoting from stuff I have watched or read can have unanticipated consequences. When I said, Winter is coming, I of course had to go check my reference to be sure I had the title right. Lo and behold, I find that book 5 of the series comes out in September! Can I get a w00t?!

I am speaking of the epic The Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. It is a fantasy series, but unlike many books of that genre, these have engaging, fully-developed characters. The series is great. I listened to the audio books of #1 through #4 a couple-three years ago and was completely captivated. After browsing the plotlines again at Amazon I find I need to refresh my memory before I listen/read #5. Whee! My summer listening has just been decided!

* * * * *

After knitting six pairs of woolly socks since the end of tax season, I think I am ready to move on. I still have 1-1/2 socks to finish before I can truthfully say I knit six full pairs, but still. When those little details are cleaned up I am on to other game. Summer has finally arrived here in the Great North, complete with 80° temps, humidity, and swarms of mosquitoes so thick in the evening that it is problematic to open one's mouth to inhale. The onset of those all-too-brief weeks of balmy weather has inspired me to attempt my worsted-weight bamboo version of the Summer Raglan from More Big Girl Knits.

Wish me luck.

Knitting for the future.

Right now it is early summer. The birds are singing, the sun is warm, the breeze is soft. Swimmers frolic in the lake. Fisherpersons cast their lines and hope.

But it will not always be so. One day darkness will fall, a heavy chill will descend, and snow will blanket the land. Winter is coming.*

In preparation I am knitting myself a dandy pair of heavy boot socks. Remember this yarn?

It is in the process of becoming a pair of these:

 

Yeah, that's three photos of my left foot wearing the same sock. Work with me here.

I am in love with the way the two yarns stranded together make such a nifty marled, ragg sock look.

The oatmeal color of the Lana Grossa Megaboot Stretch works perfectly with the greens and turquoises of the tweedy Online yarn. I held the Lana Grossa next to another colorway of tweedy Online yarn, one that is less green and more blue; the two did not do a thing for each other. But these two seem to have just enough yellow in common to be happy together.

When we were camping on the North Shore a couple weeks ago I felt like I should dress in a flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. And maybe sing, "She's a lumberjack and she's okay / She sleeps all night and she works all day." Maybe these socks are my first step in that direction.

While we are admiring these colors, let us take notice of how these same colors may occur in nature:

I missed a photo op earlier this afternoon of a parade of several adult Canada geese and at least a dozen nearly-grown goslings. These five babies (I had to blow up the photo to 100% to count them; you will just have to trust me on the number) are much, much younger. They are also possible loon lunch. This is the first year since 1991, our first summer here, that we have had both loons AND Canada geese on the lake. The loons always chase away the geese and claim this teeny tiny ocean for their own. Good luck, Mama and Daddy Goose! Take care of those babies! (Although the world does not perhaps really need any more Canada geese.)

* Extra points for anyone who can identify the book[s] from which this comes.

John McCain, high energy prices, and the Enron loophole.

Thanks to Cursing Mama for the link.

Ta da!

I am healed! Woke up this morning with normal temp and feeling fine. Good health is highly underrated when we have it, and longed for when we don't. Thank you all for your generous and thoughtful wishes and your funny comments -- you are The Best!

So. Enough with the food poisoning. Moving on.

* * * * *

I got a new camera!

I wrote about my previous camera, a Fuji FineFix S5100, when my sweetie bought it for me in November 2006, and I have loved almost everything about it. It took great pictures, it didn't eat batteries, it had an awesome 10x optical zoom, it had a ton of features -- included macro -- that I gradually learned to use, and it looked cool. (That last thing was not terribly important to me, but Smokey liked it.) It had two faults,  however: it was about 6 months too old to have image stabilization, which I found would have been extremely helpful in low light conditions, and it made my purse or tote bag v-e-r-y heavy.

This little baby has solved those problems.

It is a Canon PowerShot A720 IS. I haven't had the chance to play with it much, having spent the two days since it arrived sick in bed, but I will. It is the camera that Claudia talked about buying a few months ago; I figured that a camera chosen by someone who, 1, already had a digital SLR and was looking for a good small camera to throw in her purse/backpack/knitting; B, did the amount of research she did; and iii, was as smart as she is, would be a good one. It has only a 6x optical zoom, but I figured that limitation would be made up by the increased number of megapixels (the Fuji was only a 4MP). The final factor was when Consumer Reports picked it as a Best Buy in the latest issue.

You want to know what else was cool about buying this camera? It cost me almost zilch. Paid for the camera with a gift certificate I got at work last winter. Bought a 4GB memory card out of my own pocket, ~$15. The vendor that sold me the camera sent me a $20 coupon, so I bought another memory card and paid only the shipping. Heh. Such a deal.

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While searching for my post about the Fuji I came upon this, which upon rereading I find to be one of my more thoughtful posts. And so, in the interest of bolstering my ever-expanding ego, I present you a link here.

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I planned to give you some knitting photos, but having missed two days this week means I am dreadfully behind in everything else in my life, so I will close this post. Once again, thank you for all your good wishes. It meant a lot to me.