I've been picking away at various things but they're mostly big, long-term things. So I probably won't have pictures to show for a while.

I'm slowly adding edging to Hiawatha. I find I can't work on this too long - more than an hour at a time - without kind of getting burned out on it. It's sort of repetitive but it's not the kind of repetitive that you can't look at - so I can't read or even really watch television while working on it.

I'm sewing more of the "96! I have to sew 96 triangles together!" for the current quilt. Some of the fabric I've ordered recently also showed up - a few of the Funky Monkey prints (a sock-monkey based design; not sure what I'm going to do with it but I like it) and some more of the Kaffe Fasset prints. These were ordered from Hancock's of Paducah. I ordered them partly to fill out an order (make it worth ordering) that I was ordering a 12" pillow form it. (I finally found one. It's one of the icky kind with the waffle weave outer cover - think of the kind of fabric on the pillows they give out on the train, or used to hand out on airplanes and you've got it). But beggers can't be choosers, and it was the only place I'd ordered from before (and therefore, trusted) that had the forms.

So sometime I'll make Squarey, even if he has to be filled with an icky form. (Yes, I know, I could make my own but I'm lazy that way.

Also, one big complaint about Hancock's site: they don't tell you that something's back-ordered until you've put it in your cart. (Well, okay, at least they do tell you). But it's frustrating when you're ordering through a dialup connection, and you have to wait for the pictures to load, and wait for the page to load....also they don't have a "go back to where you were before" button; their "continue shopping" takes you back to the front page, which is annoying.

I suppose I'll start getting Hancock's hugacious (and easier to browse than their website) print catalogs again, which would be good.

I'm also knitting more on the Hourglass pullover. Funny how simple sweaters seem to get more progress on them than, say, the long-stalled Samus. (I'm still on repeat 7 of 9 for the bottom band). I guess it's because I can read and knit with this one - I read most of this month's "American Scientist" while knitting on it.

(I wish all scientific publications were like "American Scientist." It's nice to have color pictures and color figures and a nice big typefont - instead of that "hey, let's go down to a font of 8 for the materials and methods section!" And the articles are written in such a way that I can mostly understand the computing-science articles, or the topology articles, or the genetics articles. Not so in the "real" journals, where reading even a little bit out of your discipline can be headache producing. And "American Scientist" has a few cartoons in it - I really think the "serious" journals would be livened up by a few Sidney Harris or other science-humorist bits. Of course, that would probably cause them to jack the subscriptions up another several hundred dollars per year....

Hmmm....American Scientist costs, IIRC, $55 a year. And it's glossy and pretty and has cartoons. (It does also have advertising - which leads to some inadvertent humor, for example, a letter-to-the-editor talking about how leopard geckos don't have sticky gecko-feet but most other geckos do, and on the next page, there being an ad for Geico, with their little spokesgecko sitting at his computer. I wonder if he has sticky feet). And the "serious" journals I read cost hundreds of dollars PLUS require you to sign over copyright to them for articles you've written PLUS charge high fees to profs wanting to reprint articles for classes to read PLUS often charge page charges...but they don't have advertising (some of them used to - old, old issues of Ecology I've looked at used to have ads for scientific-supply companies inside the back cover. And it makes me wonder. It doesn't seem right that the truly readable and interesting "journal" is fairly cheap, but the "prestigious" journals are dry and often hard to read and expensive and there's a truly Byzantine process involved in getting a paper accepted and published.... I don't know. It just seems that often in life what should be straightforward isn't.