Something I'm gonna do this year, that's new and different.

I just recently discovered that it is possible to "embargo" posts - that is, to write them at an earlier time to be posted later.

So, just as I have lights on a timer when I leave my house for an extended period, the lights on this blog will be "left on" during the 3 weeks or so I am gone. There will not be a post every single day...but there will be periodic posts. Obviously they will have to be something written in advance (expect a heavy Christmas and New-Year's theme), but there will be occasional posts.

Lynn, if you're reading this, I can't post comments on your blog. And I can't even see it in Firefox from my home connection. I don't know if you changed something in the config, or if it's just Wordpress being an idiot.

Two additional things:

Adding BigAlice to my blogroll. I've been reading her for a little while (clicked through from Mimoknits) and I find some of her insights interesting and funny.

I also have to talk about a book I'm reading. It's called Everyday Life in Roman and Anglo-Saxon Times.. It's another book about Roman Britain. (The Amazon link shows the same edition I have in the photo; the book is by C.H.B Quennell and Marjorie Quennell, who I presume was C.H.B.'s wife.)

The book is really absorbing. It's actually a history of Romain BRITAIN (perhaps not obvious from the title) written for British schoolchildren. (I'm not sure what age - as I'll note later - but I'm guessing it's maybe 10-14 year olds).

They go through tremendous detail of the everyday life stuff - what the baths were like, what commerce was like, how the Roman soldiers were almost as much surveyors and builders as they were an occupying force.

The book (which is actually a compilation of two books) is fairly old; the edition I have was published in the 60s, but looking at the copyright page, I see they were originally published in the 20s. (Which makes me wonder a bit at writing and how it's changed and does it perhaps not say something very good about the history education an American who was a child of the 70s and 80s learning a lot and being quite absorbed by a book written for Edwardian British 10-year-olds?)

What I like particularly about the book is its tone. I guess the best word to describe it is "avuncular," in the best sense of the word. It's kind of like a learned older relative is sitting down to tea with you and entertaining you with stories about what they've studied over the years. (There is sort of a "dear Reader" tone to the book, which I know some people hate, but I love, because it feels cozy and personal to me).

The drawings are also excellent - for example, there are ones of the various classes of soldiers and the types of armor they wore, and everything is labeled and described in the text.

It's been the book I turn to - even though I AM reading "Pickwick Papers" and have just started "Gaudy Night" - before I go to bed these past few days. Partly, I think, because it's written at a level my tired brain likes, and partly because - and this is one of the things I like about non fiction - there's no DRAMA. You don't feel worried for particular characters, there's nothing bad happening. And also, I find I have a hard time remembering characters in books (like "Pickwick") where there are all these little subsidiary characters who kind of blip on and off the stage, but who come back later and and you find yourself going, "wait - was he the vicar or the publican?"

Another thing I have to say - after reading the Quennell book and the other one I read last year on Roman Britain - if I ever have the chance to get to the UK, and there's time at all to do it, I really want to go up and see Hadrian's Wall. Just to be able to say I've seen it, I've been there.

A couple minor sidebar changes - two blogs that went out of "business" (Little Birds and Creating Textiles) have been replaced by two other blogs I read pretty much regularly (and will probably read more regularly now that they're just a click away for me).

Yarnstorm in particular has had a lot of interesting commentary the past few days - about "small pleasantnesses" and stitching as a way of getting yourself some peace and quiet in a hectic situation (She refers to women who were homemakers in the '30s but I see how the concept could apply to ANYONE, male or female, homemaker or slovenly housekeeper).

And Kucki (Karin) comments here fairly regularly. And I tend to like to 'reward' my regular commenters (those who have blogs, at least) with a link (for what that's worth considering that probably only something like 12 people read my blog, but whatever.)

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.

*****

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.

Oh, haha!

I wasn't able to log in..got a really bad really ugly error message.

A little searching about revealed this "magic" fix:

The REAL Blogger status.

Sort of an "underground" Blogger fix page. So I cleared my Blogger cookie (heh...clearing ones cookies sounds like a euphemism for making #2...) and now it works.

Anyway. What I was thinking about was that I think Wilbur, my tardigrade, needs a friend. An Isopod friend. When I get a bit of time I think I'm going to make a little grey isopod, about Wilbur's size. Tentative name is Oscar. Oscar the Isopod. I like it.

I MAY have fixed it. There was still one tiny bit of the word-cloud (a css feed) still stuck on the template; I think that was what was screwing things up.

If you use Internet Explorer and you can read my blog now (I can when I look it up in Explorer), please drop me an e-mail or a comment.

Whew. I thought it was the flickr badge and I was preparing to take that down when I saw the little lone .css tag.

(I'm not that good with HTML...)

Well, I don't know if anyone will be able to see this...

several people e-mailed me saying they were just getting the "sidebars," no blog. Ugh. I'm guessing it's a Blogger glitch - maybe a shortlived one, I hope, because I can see the blog this morning and when I reloaded it was still there. So I don't know.

Charlotte, Nancy, Karin - drop me an e-mail if you can see this, please.

I don't know if the problem is related to the removal of the "word cloud" that I did - to speed loading - or not.

If it is a continuing problem, maybe I need to bite the bullet and do the "template upgrade," which means copying and migrating all my links and such. (Ugh.)

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It was a pretty good evening (and thank you for the birthday wishes.

I decided that since it was Longfellow's birthday, it was an auspicious evening to work on the Song of Hiawatha stole:



The red stitch marker (the leftmost one) is where I started knitting last night. I think I'm going to do that more - put in a stitch marker where I started - so I can actually see that, yes, I am getting something done on the bigger projects.

I removed the "word cloud" - it seemed to make the blog-loading hang up badly - and it really hasn't been that informative, recently. We'll see if this speeds up the load-time.

okay, I went to the flickr forums.

apparently EVERYONE is having this problem.

but I will warn Devorah and others who may have kids who read this site: you may not want to look at the photos until I say things seem to be fixed. Some of the photos that are subbing are nasssssty and I wouldn't want more innocent eyes to see them.

I'm really ticked off by this. I hope it's just a random glitch and not someone vandalizing what WAS a good photo sharing system. Grr.

Just a few random things:

First off, if you choose to comment anonymously (not logging in/not having blogger account), would you be willing to sign your comments? I mean, I don't need a full name and address but a first name or nickname would be nice. You don't have to if you have your reasons, but...I like to see a name attached to things.
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I finished the Eiffel Tower dishtowel this afternoon. While trying to find something on television that didn't deal with Anna Nicole Smith.

I don't know...I realize that the networks are totally playing into the public blood-lust on this - when someone dies, especially someone whose life has mostly been a big trainwreck, it's all over the place.

Mostly, she made me sad. Sad that someone felt she had to present that brainless bimbette image (or maybe that was actually what she was, I don't know). Sad that she seemed to be allowed to interview and present when she was on medications (prescribed or otherwise). Sad that she didn't seem to have anyone in her life who would say, "You know...you really should think before you do X." She seemed to be someone who didn't totally get the concept of "consequences."

I suppose part of the frisson is that she was just over a year older than I am. How different people's lives are. I don't think I'm going to spend quite so much time feeling bad that I've not managed to find a mate or that I seem to be labouring in obscurity a lot of the time. Because I know I'd hate being famous. And it seems there are an awful lot of famous-for-being-famous people right now whose lives are either big messes, or who have died young. (I will say it again: I think when people become famous really fast really young - like before 25 - it screws up their heads most of the time. Your personality really isn't completely formed, I think, before 25 (before 30 even, maybe) and I think the kind of influences that come with fame and wealth and that kind of attention are not always salubrious, particularly in cases where the individual involved doesn't have someone close to them who cares for their welfare more than they care for the money the person is making.)

It also hit me, driving home from my office this morning: for years, I've sort of mourned the fact that I'm not pretty, that I'm kind of fat, that I don't have the kind of face or body that really inspires attention from guys. But, you know? I guess that having that carries its own set of problems. And maybe it would be worse to be what society views as drop-dead gorgeous than to be kind of plain.

I guess at times I still hold onto the childhood idea (and yes, it is from my childhood; one of my early career goals was to be a "movie star." Fortunately that died somewhere around age 7) that people who are rich and famous somehow have it easier than the rest of us, that they don't have the same anxieties or screwed-upness. But intellectually I know that's not true, even if some days when the water distiller isn't working and someone in one of my classes calls me and says, "I missed class today, did we do anything?" and I have class until five and then a meeting from seven p.m. until God knows when, and it's so easy to think, "If I had somehow managed to be born with the genetic-freak body of a supermodel, I could be on a jet to Milan surrounded with yes-men and handlers instead of this."

So I don't know. To sort of paraphrase Tolstoy: all screwed up people are screwed up in their own way.

It also makes me think a bit of "Richard Cory" - the old Edward Arlington Robinson poem, where all the "poor" people of the town look at Cory and envy him, and think how easy life is for him, and one night Cory goes home and puts a bullet through his brain.

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I'm cutting more bits for the Tumbler quilt. I've decided now that I'm going to cut some of each of the fabrics, and then sew for a while, and then cut more. It gets kind of wearing to cut and cut and cut. And I'm not nuts about running a rotary cutter AROUND a template; there are awkward angles that hurt my wrist and also make it harder to cut accurately. (I know, they sell little turntables to help with this, but the little turntables I've seen are even too little for the fat quarters I'm working with.)
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I'm looking at the stitch-pattern books again, thinking about designing more socks.

I do think I'm going to do the Bacteriophage socks, in Fair Isle (I played around with plotting out/imagining different methods of portraying the things and Fair Isle seems to suit best). I'm thinking of the little row of 'phages up under the ribbed cuff, and then maybe a phage worked onto the heel, and then just a little row of 2 by 2 checks of the two colors in the socks, right before the toe decreases.

I charted out a little 'phage on some graph paper. I can make it 6 stitches wide and still have it be identifiable (to me at least) of what it is. Even the little "prongs" are there that it uses to attach to the E. coli. I think I'm going to do a little line of stitches in the color (or maybe even a third color) in the center of the phage to represent the DNA in it. (Maybe: red phage, blue socks, green DNA?)

I have sportweight yarn in all the colors I'd want except the green. I THINK I have sockweight yarn - at least scraps - in the colors I'd want.

Heh...if I really wanted to get fancy, I could do the 'phage on the heel attaching to an E. coli. (but that would be even more involved and would probably require some small-scale intarsia.)

I do want to finish at least one of the pairs of socks-in-progress (I have the Miranda socks, and the pink Opals, and now the Feather and Fan) before I start anything new.

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I do have a fourth pair of socks - a long time gone, I started the "Seasons of Door County" socks I got at Blackberry Ridge. But. They are too tight. I used a size 4 needle as suggested but did not swatch. I can't really get the first sock on over my heel without major stretching, which I think would wear out the sock too fast. What I need to do is gut up, rip out the very-nearly-finished sock and start over on size 5s (and not knit so tightly this time! One of the "issues" I have with Fair Isle is that I knit way too tightly on it and always need to remember to go up a needle size from what I think it should be.)

or if I were a very generous soul, I'd finish them and give them to someone with smaller/thinner feet than I. (But I'm not that generous.)

I made one tiny change - because New Blogger seems to be making people log-in before they can comment. I've decided to at least temporarily allow anonymous comments; this will probably do away with the problems that non-blogger people have in commenting.

Word verification should still be on though.

I'll have to discontinue this if I start getting lots of comment spam (probably unlikely with word verification) or if I get lots of anonymous "drive-by" mean, obscene, or wildly off-topic comments. (This is MY party, so I get to decide what goes. If you're a regular commenter, the off-topic thing really does not apply to you. What I'm talking about is people who come in, drop off a URL, and leave.)