Thursday morning stuff

* Well, the toughest lab (in terms of logistics for me) this semester is now over. No one got hurt, so I guess there's that. (One semester - this was not my lab - but a student in another lab refused/forgot to wear safety glasses, a pipette shattered, and the student wound up with a piece of glass in their eye. So I always get twitchy about labs where we use glassware or chemicals, and I tend to nag people about safety glasses).

* I still boggle at how some students can achieve Junior status in a science major and still be able to confuse a beaker with a graduated cylinder. I don't know if it's sheer sloppiness (not reading the directions or listening to my verbal directions at the start of lab), or compartmentalization of knowledge ("Welp, I'm done with Chemistry forever. Time to forget all that stuff"), or if they just genuinely never had to know. I can understand it in my intro bio students, some of whom have never had a lab science before, but someone who has presumably had the intro-bio sequence, plus intro chemistry, plus Cellular and Molecular....

* Maybe this is how I was a strange student; I always liked it when something in one class linked up to something I had learned somewhere else, it was like, "Oh, I already *know* part of this."

* Though I also know I have a freakish memory and maybe I need to expect less in terms of memory from other people. I don't know, though, you would think remembering the identifications of basic lab glassware would stick with a person.

* In crafting news (as much as I get done these days, she says bitterly), I'm still working on the tail for Queen Chrysalis. This pattern takes a looooooooooong time. If I had known how long it would take me to crochet all those dumb little holes I might not have been so eager to do it.

I will say that the amigurumi is as large as a small dog - in its unfinished state, it is standing next to my big chair and the head comes up almost to the armrest. Also, it does stand up on its own - I find that when I make amigurumi of acrylic yarn and stuff them properly, they do stand up on their own without any kind of stabilizer needed (lots of patterns tell you to wrap dowels with stuffing and insert them into the legs or neck, stuff like that. Generally I don't have to do that.)

* I guess the referendum vote for whether Scotland breaks from the UK is going on now. I have to admit, this is a position I don't take a strong stand on - I can see interesting things and bad things resulting from either outcome. And it's something that's not all that likely to affect me (at least directly), so it's something I can kind of sit back and watch. I hope everything goes okay, though I suspect that if a country exists where this kind of vote can happen peacefully, it's someplace like Scotland. (And no, I'm not exactly looking for commenters to give me strong reasons why I should feel one way or the other on this. It's actually nice to have an issue where I can go, "You know, I see benefits and drawbacks of both sides so I'm not going to come down strongly for one.")

* That said, if Texas were to try something like that, I'd be agin' it. For very personal reasons: I wouldn't want to have to show a freaking passport to go to the JoAnn Fabrics. (Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but considering that nearly all my 'good' shopping is in Texas, and the next city of any real size that has decent shopping is much, much farther away than Sherman is....)

* Also in Texas: This weekend is the Blackland Prairie Arts and Fiber Festival. At this point, I plan on going. But it's possible I might not; there's enough unsureness about if and when the remnants of Odile are going to dump on us and if it's raining cats and dogs Saturday morning.....well, nope. I don't like driving in heavy rain and I'm sure that even though most of the event is indoors, it just won't be as fun in heavy rain. (And I've had a few near-misses of late on 75 - people cutting me off, people tailgating me when I then had to slow down or nearly brake for something, and I don't relish driving in Saturday morning traffic in heavy rain). I hope the traffic on 75 isn't getting progressively worse (more like the near-Dallas traffic) but I fear it is. There also seem to be more people who are forgetting to "drive friendly."

I don't really have any plans to get anything; there is nothing I need in the way of yarn save for the time and motivation to knit up what I already have. Already I'm thinking that I will be "providing" for the bulk of my yarn in my will. (What to do with it? I don't, at the moment, know anyone else who's a committed knitter who is a lot younger than I am. I suppose what I could do was see if there was an arts center or something like a halfway house that had a knitting-therapy program and leave it there. Though who knows? By the time I wind up checking out of the hotel of life, maybe I'll already have found some way to give it away. My grandma gave away a lot of her things while she was still living because she said she wanted to know for sure that the person she wanted to have it got it, and I think she also wanted to have the feeling that the person was getting to enjoy the thing. )