Oh man. Girl Scout cookies have arrived! All day today at work I found myself daydreaming about coming home to my box of Tagalongs. They are truly the perfect cookie. (Sorry Samoas, I still love you but the lack of peanut butter makes you not quite perfect.) Unlike everyone else on the planet, I don’t care so much for Thin Mints.
It’s springy and warm out at last and a new chapter of Anne is recorded and released and I’ve had my fix of Tagalongs so all is well in the world.
I started some socks with my Mountain Colors yarn and was well past the heel when I realized it was way too big so I ripped the whole thing out and started over, this time with a fun little mock cable rib pattern. Now I’m about to where I was when I ripped out:
Fits perfectly and there is something so satisfying about working with thin yarn and tiny needles!
Then the Malabrigo. This will be a raglan sweater, pattern derived from The Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns by Ann Budd, which I highly recommend. It’s like a recipe book crossed with a choose your own adventure book. Recipe in that you choose your style of sweater and gauge and then follow the instructions. Choose your own adventure in that you can choose the edgings, neckline, collar, waist shaping, etc. As far as I can tell, it’s turning out pretty well so far but the colorway of green and yellow has an interesting effect, take a look:
Does it remind you of anything? Yup, camouflage. But that’s okay, it will be my gorgeous, elegant camouflage sweater. Do you like the pretty Picot edging?
I do. I practiced it first on my Ocean Hat.
My Ocean Hat was really a tool to teach myself some new tricks like a picot edging, fair isle knitting, and a fun corkscrew hat topper. I used the Rowan All Seasons cotton yarn plus some leftover from the Sara Hat and some yellow cotton I got from the bargain bin at my yarn store. I used a pattern of interlocking swirls I got from The Knitting Stitch Bible by Maria Parry-Jones, another book I love so far. The pattern and the pastels made me think of waves, hence the Ocean Hat:
It’s a bit overwhelming to look at I think but it’s fun and I learned some new tricks making it so that’s what counts!
So I’m still working on the Yellowstone socks and the Camo Sweater. I also just got some truly lucious Alpaca yarn to make some gloves that I plan to start soon. Here’s a closer look at the Ocean Hat:
So, the past week I’ve been driving myself nuts working on a “Mini Project” for my Flash class. We were given a JPG file of the school mascot and instructed to include a variety of animation elements we have learned so far in the class. I submitted my project at 11:30 pm last night, 15 minutes before the deadline. Check it out and admire at your leisure. 
In other news my Meniere’s had continued to be problematic and then last week my ear started to feel funny. As in I could tell something was wrong with the opening in my ear drum. The reason why I have an opening in my ear drum is related to a device called the Meniett which I’ll let you investigate on your own if you choose. In any case, I’ve had tubes, I’ve had problems with tubes, they’ve been in and out and the last time my doctor (who is wonderful by the way) ended up having to take the tube out, he was sure that the opening would stay open. But last week on Wednesday night my ear felt funny and Thursday I woke up and was pretty much sure it was closed. Yesterday I saw the doctor and sure enough, it sealed itself back up again. Rather than have outpatient surgery to put in a fancy T-shaped tube as we’ve done the last two times, we opted for a “temporary” tube done right then and there in the office as we did with the first tube. My doctor’s theory was that since the T-tubes haven’t lasted any longer than the temporary ones, might as well git ‘er done so to speak. Well, it wasn’t fun but at least it is done and I can use my Meniett again starting tonight.
Of course I then had one heck of an earache and didn’t sleep well last night so I had to miss work today. It was nice though to sleep in and get caught up on some miscellaneous stuff. The most recent poetry collection at LibriVox filled up and just as I was about to start cataloging, I read a post from Chris, one of our brilliant programmers, that he had implemented a feature I requested that allows people cataloging collections to input a variety of fields at one time. For instance, in a collection of 20 poems, I previously had to enter manually the title, author, and source for each one into a special area called the compilation table. This makes the title and author of individual poems searchable by the catalog. And the source is important to document Public Domain status. I keep track of all this stuff on a spreadsheet and then, by my calculations, would copy and paste from Excel to Firefox 60 times. Yup, 60. And that’s just for the compilation data, similar stuff has to be copied and pasted other places for regular cataloging. Well, Chris made us a brilliant feature that allows us to copy and paste from excel and enter every single bit of compilation data in one go. It made my day. It makes cataloging poetry so much more pleasant! So, if you’ll excuse me, I have a collection to finish cataloging.
Knitting pictures coming later…
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