Yes, it's very true that mac and cheese would not work for some vegetarians - it wouldn't work for vegans, and it certainly wouldn't work for the lactose intolerant, and there are people from some cultures who simply find cheese disgusting.

And there are other problems - one of my uncles has been a vegetarian all his adult life, and he blames his heavy consumption of cheese as a protein source for his now-high cholesterol and also for the fact that he had to have his gallbladder removed about fifteen years ago.

If we ever host a large conference at my school, I'm definitely going to make an effort to have a vegan option available - something with tofu, or a good bean dish, or those portobello mushrooms, or something. I'm a meat eater but I can be happy with vegetarian or vegan food if it's prepared with the same care that "meat eater's food" is by the food services. Too often the vegetarian option is either gluey pasta or some kind of partially-cooked not-well-seasoned vegetable dish served over Uncle Ben's Converted Rice.

(And actually, given the prevalence of celiac disease - something I've read about recently - having a meat-free, AND gluten-free option is probably a good idea. I knew someone with celiac disease when I was growing up and it was very tiresome for her to travel because she usually had to take a "stash" of gluten-free food with her.)

Anyway. On to some pictures.

First off: I finished the Jaywalker socks:


I'm pretty happy with them. I did knit the pattern (mistakenly but it was a good mistake) on size 2 rather than size 1 needles. The pattern is rather tight and not very stretchy and I know others have commented that the socks came out a bit small on them.

I especially liked the yarn - Lisa Souza Dyeworks "Sock!" in a color she calls "Petroglyph." I had a fair amount of the yarn left over (it's a big skein) so I think I'll use the rest for a pair of kidsized socks for the Community Knitting Box.

I also got around to knitting one of the "Nauties," from the pattern by Beth. (Note that she now has a trilobite pattern up on her blog - scroll down to the entry for July 29. So the Nauties have "prey" if you're into that kind of thing.)

His name is Sheldon.


"Yes, yes. We all know that Sheldon is a funny name."

I knit him using leftovers of Araucania Nature Wool (the shell; it's scraps of the blue and red left from my Fibonacci sweater) and I used cream Wool-ease for the head and tentacles.

It's a fun pattern to knit; you do a lot of things you don't normally do in knitting. I can also see now how one could make a spiral-shaped cushion using a similar technique - but just keep on knitting and stuffing and coiling until it's big enough or you're sick of it.

I have another picture to add - not something I knitted or sewed myself. But, a couple of weeks ago, Michelle was talking about how, although she was a productive and lawabiding member of society, she was never very good at acting her age.

That's true of me, too.

When I was at the meetings, I walked by the campus bookstore one day. And I saw something I wanted to buy, as a souvenir of the meetings.

It wasn't a sweatshirt or a t-shirt.

It wasn't a notebook with the campus' name on it.

No, it was this:



The mascot of the campus I was at is the "Antelope" (they are more colloquially known as the 'Lopers). So they sell stuffed toy pronghorns* there. And I wanted one. So I bought it.

And then I spent twenty minutes sitting through a not-very-interesting talk given by someone with an impenetrable accent, thinking not about the topic of the talk, but about what I might name the pronghorn. (As I said: not good at acting my age.)

I tried various geographic combinations but didn't like any of them. (The best candidate was Casper, that being the name of a largish city in Wyoming, one of the places where these critters are found).

I finally hit on something that pleased me and that seemed to work.

His name is Frank.

I have to explain that - it's kind of an obscure biologist/old movie buff pun. You see, the genus name of pronghorns is Antilocapra (which, I believe, translates roughly to "Antelope-goat." They have similar grazing behavior, in fact, to goats, and some of the locals in areas where they live refer to them as "goats" or "speed goats")

So his full name is Frank Antilocapra.

Maybe I'm the only one who finds that amusing. But I do find it amusing. So Frank he is.

(*I feel duty bound as a biologist to inform you that pronghorns are, in fact, not true antelopes. They are a monospecific genus and, in fact, a monospecific family. They are the only surviving member of their family. They are in the same order - Artiodactyla - as the deer and other "ungulates." But they are not true antelopes, old songs about Home on the Range and Nebraska colleges notwithstanding.)

I think tomorrow is going to be the start of my Big Office Clean. I think I'm going to take (and post) "before" and "after" shots, just so you can all see the true horror that my office has become. (It's not ENTIRELY my fault; we are required by law to keep copies of student papers for a certain number of years in case grades are contested - so I have an entire file cabinet just full of old grading. And also, the person with whom I share a research lab snagged all of the good storage space in the lab while I was out of town - and, as a result, I store nearly all my stuff in my office while the majority of his books are stored in the lab.) But I can still make things better, mainly by sending lots and lots and lots of old paper to the recycling center. I've decided that if I've not touched it (or at least looked for it) in a year, I probably don't need it.