Friday morning random

* The first leg of the LEGO man has been completed and attached, the second leg has been begun. It's eye-opening to see how difficult it can be to render a very specific (and very boxy) 3-dimensional shape using knitting. All kinds of crazy techniques to make the legs shaped right. Lots and lots of picking up of stitches, which I openly admit is one of my less favorite parts of knitting.

* I might have finished the second leg except I spent part of the evening, shall we say, indisposed. Either I ate something my digestion didn't like or I got a little stomach virus. (I had been having minor troubles since Tuesday, chalked it up to perimenopause*, but then it got bad last night). I think maybe it was some kind of virus because a dose of Pepto shut things down about 1/2 hour after taking it.

Pepto is one of those things I keep on hand, even if it means pitching part of a bottle after it's expired and getting a new one. Because when you need it, you NEED it, and you don't want to have to drive to the pharmacy, or worse (if it's after 6 or so) the Wal-Mart, for it.

(*My mother tells me this is not unexpected in my family)

* I'm still gonna toss out the remaining serving of onion soup and look very closely at the ingredients on that low-sodium beef broth I bought; it's possible some flavoring or additive in there did me in. (There are a couple brands of canned chicken products that used to make me sick, and I think it was one of the flavorings they added)

* I do think I'm going to make myself a LEGO man at some point off of this pattern. And I think I'm going to do the cape from the expansion pack, but instead of doing it in black, I'm going to do it in a bright color, because then the figure can be LEGOMAN! Saving playtime from being boring since 1978!

(The modern-style LEGO minifigure was - so the Internet tells me - introduced then. I remember there being sort of proto-versions of them, but without arms and moving legs, in some of the sets my brother and I had as children)

I'm also wondering if there's some way to work up a wig - like a wig with pigtails - from the hat pattern, so you could make a figure that was clearly a LEGO woman. (Or a LEGO girl, if we're talking pigtails. Or, ooh, a LEGO Abby Sciuto. Yes, that amuses me....a LEGO version of Abby, with a black pigtail wig, and black legs and maybe a hot pink torso with a skull applique on it....)

*The weather still looks iffy. They are now saying "Widespread winter precipitation" for Monday. Well, if it's sleet or non-sticking snow I will be okay (I only have one large bridge to cross - over the Red River). But if it's freezing rain, I may have to call Amtrak and eat the cost of whatever cancelling a ticket at the last minute is. I hope it doesn't come to that, for lots of reasons. (No, I can't leave any earlier. And anyway, Sunday evening looks worse than Monday afternoon). My big hope is that by 1:30 or 2 pm when I need to leave, the temperatures will be enough above freezing that things will be okay, and that as I go south, things will get better. (I don't worry once I'm on the train. It takes a LOT of bad weather to stop Amtrak. Like multiple feet of snow...)

* There are car ads now parodying the craziness of Black Friday. (Though still, pushing for people to go in and buy a new car.) I don't do Black Friday. Not because of any real anti-consumerist sentiment or anything, but because I hate what people can become when they see something that is (a) a good deal and (b) implied to be scarce. I have no desire to get elbowed and pushed, let alone trampled....I can't think of anything I would want to give anyone that would be worth that. (I hope the people working retail on that day get double overtime or something, just for dealing with the difficult people.)

I don't know. My parents asked me for a list of what I wanted for Christmas and it was hard to come up with stuff. I listed a few books, and a couple of kitchen gadgets, but sometimes it's hard when you're an adult, you're in a position to be able to afford most of what you need, and you don't have anything you have a huge burning desire for. (And also, some of the things I might like - a new laptop, a digital SLR camera - are more expensive than what I'd want to ask for.)

Most of the stuff I really, really deeply want is not "stuff" - I'd love to have more free time to do what I want. I'd love to be able to slough off a few of the responsibilities I've accreted of late. I'd love to see the church I belong to grow. I'd love to see some miracle happen and a cure for cancer - all cancers - found (and be affordable). I'd love to have more energy when I got home in the evening. I'd love for my allergies to be less than what they are. I'd love to have a year with no awful natural disasters or things like school shootings.  I'd love to have a better grocery option right in town than the small family-run place or the monolithic wal-mart. I'd love to have a bigger group of friends right here who were similar to me in age and situation (nearly everyone my age is mid-raising-children, and I get that that takes precedence, and sometimes plans have to be changed because of kid stuff, but still, it's hard)

* Comment of the week, from someone on ITFF: "dear student, "Cracked.com" does not count as a scholarly source." Oh my goodness. What? Someone thinks that site counts as a scholarly source, or else they thought their prof wouldn't know it wasn't or check it?

I may have 99 problems with how students cite stuff, but having someone cite Cracked.com is not one of them, thank goodness.