Well, I was going to have pictures, but there's something wrong with the disk and I can't load the pictures off of it. (Or maybe there's something wrong with the floppy drive; Dell floppy drives are notorious for chewing up disks or refusing to read them).

Maybe later. The problem healed itself before.

At any rate: I swatched for the Central Park Hoodie last night. I got gauge, but I also learned that if I do put buttons on it, they will have to be fairly light buttons, as the fabric is going to be very soft and drapey and heavier buttons (glass or metal) would probably pull on the button band and make it stretch.

Other than that, it looks good. I'm still really delighted with the color.

I also pulled out the long-stalled Samus - I don't think I've touched it in six or eight months - and added a few more rows to the band. I've decided to try and finish the band on it, so I can pick up stitches - because then, I'll have another stockinette-stitch portion of a sweater to knit on while I read.

****

You know how when you go out somewhere, and come back home, you notice cooking odors or the smell of flowers you have in the house or something? Well, I walked in the door yesterday and realized my house smells like Vicks Vapo-rub now. Eugh. Oh well. It does seem to have helped with the cold symptoms.

****
I almost resigned from a committee I'm on yesterday, because one of the things that makes me the most enraged happened.

We had been trying for several months last year to make some proposals to improve things. Well, a group of people in town - most who never came to the committee meetings when we asked for input - basically hired a lawyer to tell us that we couldn't even make our suggestions to the city council. Well, yesterday, someone showed up - now, granted, this is a person who does come more or less regularly, but he very well might have been part of the "blocker" group - to complain that the committee "never did anything" and that there was this one very specific instance of something we had been trying to fix (and had been blocked from fixing) and why couldn't we tackle it?

And I almost stood up and said to the man, "Unless you are proposing that we all walk over there en masse right now and do what you are saying needs to be done, there is no point in discussing. I will remind you that six months' worth of our time last year was spent trying to solve this problem, and our work ended up in the toilet."

But I didn't. But it totally drives me up the wall how city government works - people sit around and gripe, gripe, gripe. Someone comes up with a plan to fix what is being griped about. But then the gripers come up with 100s of reasons why it can't or shouldn't be done. And then they gripe later on that nothing is done.

The other thing: We were planning a couple of Saturday activities. The couple of city employees that were there (now, granted, they are overworked and are doing the job that three people would do in another city, for about 3/4 the pay that one employee would get) complained that it was on Saturday. "But we don't get PAID if we come on Saturday" was the complaint. Again, I very nearly said, "We are asking for it to be scheduled on Saturday so that those of us who are doing this on a volunteer basis, and cannot take time when we are "on the clock" at our regular jobs to go do volunteer work, can come out and help," but I didn't.

Again, that just eats at me - when I hear people complaining "But I'm going to be doing this thing off the clock!" when everyone else in the room is in the very meeting "off the clock" and what they are going to be doing on those Saturdays is on top of the work they already do.

One thing I've learned? It's largely the unpaid unthanked volunteer work that makes the world go 'round. So it irritates me to see people try to game the system so that they're not doing the work as a volunteer, but that everyone else has to play schedule-hockey to try and get time off work to do volunteer stuff. That's not right.

I dunno. I realize it's different outside of fields like academia and medicine and running your own business, but there are a lot of us in those three fields and we work many, many hours "off the clock." So it's frustrating and irritating to be told, "No, we have to schedule this at 10 am on a Tuesday so I can be paid to be present." Because if you do that, I won't be present - because I have my paying job I HAVE to be present at.