I'm so happy I was able to fix what was messing up the blog in IE. (And thanks to TChem for the tip-off: that the blog DIDN'T work in IE. I assumed that if it worked in Firefox, it would work in all browsers. I guess that's not true.)

I think I'm done altering the template for a while.

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And thank you all for the birthday wishes. It was a good day (and the weekend was good.) Now all that needs to happen is for the present my parents ordered me to arrive. (And, ahem, my brother and sister in law AT LEAST bother to send me a card. But whatever.)

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I think I've posted this before, but if you teach basic bio (including genetics and DNA/RNA) a really good site is DNA Interactive. There's an interesting timeline on there that has short animations of some of the experiments (like the Hershey and Chase "blender experiment" - featuring bacteriophages. And of course the Watson and Crick studies.) I like to show some of the experiments to my general biology classes because they are both interesting (it's more fun to see an animation of the phage injecting its DNA than it is for me to draw it on the board and wave my hands around and say "now this is what is happening") and because it shows a pretty good outline of how the experimentation worked. (And in the Beadle and Tatum experiment, they talk about how it took nearly 300 tries to get the mutant they wanted. One of the things I dislike about how a lot of textbooks present experiments is that they make them look very obvious and easy and they leave out the fact that the people involved may have labored for six or eight months - or more - on false starts before they got something workable).

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I knit a bit more on the hood last night. Again, this seems to take longer than it should. But I'm nearly to the decreases. After the hood's done, the next step is to pick up 158 stitches (yes, I know the exact number for my size) along the left band and knit the button band. And then on the other side I have the "fun" of trying to figure out how to best space the buttonholes.

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I also sketched up an Oscar the Isopod. Yes, I'm going to make this. I found some fawn colored felt (for his underside) and some grey (for his body-plates and head). I don't have the right color chenille stems, though (I am going to make an armature of chenille stems and also use those for his many legs). I think what I'm going to do is construct the basic body shape over the armature using the fawn felt, and then cut the individual "armor" plates and sew them over that basic shape.

And his head will be last. The face I've drawn for him has him with a little moustache and a little surprised-looking mouth. I don't know why but that amuses me.

I think Oscar is a classical-music fancier.

I just have to get some cream or fawn colored chenille stems and I can start putting it together.