a fieldwork morning

I decided today was as good a day as any to grab the June samples for the ongoing soil invertebrate study. I started at 7:30, but wow, I am not used to the heat and humidity we have. Towards the end I was getting dizzy every time I stood up from stooping over to sample, which is a bad sign. (I feel some better now after drinking a bunch of water and taking a shower).

It could just be fluctuating blood pressure. My doctor once found that my blood pressure is pretty different if I'm lying down vs. standing up, and I'm one of those people who sometimes has to get up carefully from a seated or lying position because I do get the brief moment of hypotension.

It could also just have been that my evaporative cooling system kind of failed - it was very humid out in the field, I was wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt over my t-shirt, and even gloves (the sampler gives me blisters otherwise, and I need a long-sleeved shirt because so many plants make me hive up).

I'm going to have to be careful the rest of this summer though. I hope this is just a brief hot spell and we're not going to be in the mid-90s or above with high humidity solidly from now until September.

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And another finished project. Well, you've kind of seen these before, but here is the completed pair of Elegant Socks. This is a Nancy Bush pattern, it was in Patternworks some years back, and also in the 2010 "Knitting Traditions" compilation issue.

I used Classic Elite's "Alpaca Sox." I forget the color name or code because I lost the ball band, but I think this was a yarn I ordered from Simply Sock Yarn.



I wound up using size 0 needles for these - partly because they were (IIRC) 72-stitch socks, which tend to be a bit large on me if I use the more-typical-for-socks-I-knit size 1 needles, and also, I figured the alpaca yarn was maybe a bit more delicate than wool - and if you knit things to a tighter gauge, they tend to make a more resilient fabric.

I'm using the 0 needles yet again - I started the "Tea Time" socks from that socks-around-the-world book, and they are also 72 stitch socks, and the pattern author gives the admonition not to make the leg too large, that it needs to be fairly formfitting for the pattern to show up well.