Pre-holiday rambling

First, a couple sock in progress photos:



(Golly day, that's dark. I took it without flash and it looked okay on my at-home monitor, but here on my work monitor, it's really dark. Oh well). This is the toe of the first toe-up sock (Veronik Avery's "Traditional Toe-Up Socks."). It's done on size 0s so it grows slowly, but the size 0s work well with the finer-gauge Claudia Handpaints yarn (color: Strawberry Latte, also sold as Berry Latte...)

Not much to say about these so far; it's going to be just plain stockinette until I get to the heel turn.



And this is the first Alpenglow sock. A clever design element: the "clock" pattern moves diagonally along the foot. (Well, actually, the true "clock" pattern, which is the same, ends on the side of the leg, but this is a branch of it that keeps going). I like the almost bas-relief look of the twisted stitches, but you really do need to use a light solid or semi-solid for them to show up well.

***

One of the people on the Completely Pointless and Arbitrary Group was talking about having a "DAMMIT" cake - she was going to see if a bakery would do it for her. Essentially, it is this: when you've had a bad week, make or get your favorite cake. Write "DAMMIT" on top of it in icing. Put a candle on it for every person or think that ticked you off. Light the candles, blow out, eat cake.

I admit, I kind of like this idea. The Disney cookbook I had as a child had a recipe for "Unbirthday" cake in it (because you have 1 birthday a year, but 364 unbirthdays - 365 in a leap year), that makes me think of it.

Not sure if I have the energy to bake a cake tonight, though. (And anyway, I'm still trying to reduce, so cake might not be the best thing to have in the house).

I probably won't do the candles, though, because it would mean another trip out to the Mart of Wal and I've done my penance there for the week.

Yesterday, though - well, it gave me several candles for the cake:

1. A "mandatory" meeting that, to put it briefly, happened because someone somewhere did the expedient thing for themselves rather than doing it the right way, and apparently the entire campus is now a bit afoul of ADA, and so all faculty must attend a meeting where we are told how to do the thing the right way. So if we do it the "expedient" way and get in trouble, it's our own fault and not the university's.

The thing is exclusively for online classes that do online testing.
I do not teach online. If I have my way, I never will teach online. I certainly am not teaching online this fall.
At the very end of the meeting, the moderator noted that "Well, you'll be using this for online teaching in the fall, but we're upgrading the software in January, so you won't have to do it this way any more."

I am too polite to facepalm in public so I didn't. But I was facepalming on the inside - I spent two hours in a meeting that not only does not pertain to me currently, but which contained information that will be obsolete long before I would ever actually use it. But that's the nature of how bureaucracies work, and I'm trying not to be too irritated.

2. I came home and found my neighbors to the south were having a new heat pump/ac unit installed. And that the company doing it had parked their truck, their trailer, and dumped all the sheet metal (for upgrading the ductwork, I suppose) in my drive. I couldn't put my car away. I parked in the street but wasn't happy - people drive like maniacs on my street sometimes (I had my mailbox knocked off its post once....) and I was fearful of being sideswiped or worse.

I would not have minded nearly so much had my neighbors come by or called me a day or so before and said, "We're having some work done on that side of our house, would it be okay if the guys parked in your drive?" so I would have at least expected it.

When I went out back to water the tomatoes, I tried to avoid the bits of sheet metal but STILL caught my foot on one and now have a cut on one toe (I was wearing dress sandals).

Finally, I gave up and decided to go to the aforementioned Mart of Wal and get more milk (so I wouldn't have to on the weekend) and see if maybe any new vegetables I didn't know about had been invented, or something.

3. The Mart of Wal was SLAMMED with people. More crowded than I've seen it in a long time. I thought a Tuesday afternoon would be safe, even a Tuesday before a long weekend. I was wrong. Apparently for most people the long weekend started today.

Also, people were walking the crowded aisles, heads down, texting. I saw two near-collisions of people. I just...the rudeness and sense of being in a "bubble" some people have just gobsmacks me.

I managed to get my food and pay and scram, and when I got home, the a/c guys were gone. (The headman of the company was checking out the installation). I figured I wanted to check my drive for scraps of sharp sheet metal before I drove in, but I didn't want to be "obvious" about it (the company is the one I use and I know the head guy a little bit). So I pulled part up into the drive, put my food away, and checked after he had left. I found one small piece but probably not of tire-puncturing sharpness....


4. Also, I referenced "looking for any new vegetables that have been invented." I'm hitting one of the periodic walls on my vegetable-intensive diet - I'm sick of red cabbage, sick of steamed cauliflower, sick of raw spinach (and I don't like it cooked).  I'm even getting a little tired of the fresh-tomato dishes, though it will be a few more days before the next round of tomatoes ripens.I just want something different.Or not to eat lots of vegetables all the time. I don't know. (It doesn't help that my digestion is rebelling a little bit on all the vegetables at the moment...) So, I don't know. I get home early enough today that I could do another big baked potato as my main dish. (Potatoes still count as vegetables, don't they? I know some people who swear that sweet corn "doesn't count" as a vegetable - not sure what it counts as (grain? fruit?) but it's not "nutritionally pure" enough in some people's books, apparently. Or maybe they think it tastes too pleasant to be an official vegetable, I don't know.)