Yarn! And Books!

Oh my goodness yes, yesterday was a good day.

For one thing: I forget how nice it is to have a conversation with someone that (a) lasts more than five minutes and (b) does not revolve around work, or the various types of volunteer work things I do. (My everyday conversations tend to be very functional, or they tend to largely be interrupted - there's not much time to chat in the "donut fellowship" at church, for example).

I met up with Laura around 11 at the knit shop. And we shopped. And it was excellent.

As usual, I decided to be the Little Pig because I live so far from any sources of super good yarn:



Yarn for two toys, a shawl, and (probably) fingerless mitts.

The pink and green are for a pair of Loopers from Mochimochiland Patterns. I have already tentatively named them Kip and Muffy (unless I can find a preppy-male name I like better). Because, see, they're pink and green? Classic 80s preppy colors?

I don't know; I find that amusing. Maybe no one else does. Maybe you have to have my personality and have had gone to a don't-call-us-prep-call-us-independent-high-school. (I never really fit in with the preppies but I do think the whole culture influenced my mindset a wee little bit in some ways).

The rust-colored yarn is for Zeke the Alpaca, another excellent Dangercrafts pattern. I wanted a yarn that specifically contained alpaca for it. (Yes, I know. But I'm also the person who made tiny eggs out of Sculpey for her dollhouse and put tiny yellow yolks inside them, even though no one would ever see the insides, just because. Because I would know it was there and it would please me.) It's one of the Auraucania yarns and I admit it was pretty pricey for a TOY, but part of the fun of making toys is having excellent yarns to make them with. (And there will likely be enough left over for a hat. I think I'm going to do some stash busting and knit a bunch of hats this winter, and then send them off to one of the many groups that can use them.)

(I need to get back to making more toys. Making toys makes me happy).

The green - which isn't coming out true color in the photo, it's more of a peridot green - is for the Oscilliscope shawl in the new Knitscene. I knew I wanted to get some of this yarn for SOMETHING when I saw it, it has a lovely shiny quality to it (it is called Lustra). It's a wool/Tencel blend; it's the tencel that makes it shiny. I think it will be excellent for that shawl.

And the one little ball of the multi yarn is an Auraucania Aysen. I just liked it. I think it will become a pair of fingerless mitts for me. I think there's a pattern for a worsted-weight yarn in one of the Clara Parkes books.

And then we went on to lunch. Thanks to the suggestion of an excellent short cut from Sue (or maybe it was Frances. I can't remember which of the yarn shop ladies is which), we managed to avoid allllll the construction on loop 281 (and I will remember that shortcut for the future, as it's a much faster way to get between Barron's and Stitches N Stuff, which are my two main destinations in Longview).

And we had an excellent lunch. (I've never had a bad meal at Barron's.) And we split a piece of cake. And as I said: it was wonderful to have a conversation that DIDN'T revolve around work for a change. We talked about a lot of things, including some about our own work, but as we both do different things (she is a CPA), talking about work is more interesting and less of an echo chamber.

And then after lunch, we shopped around a bit in Barron's. I bought some books there, a couple books came later (after we had split up) from the Books a Million (which is so much larger and so much nicer than the one near me):



I found an inexpensive copy of The Time Machine (I know, I know: you can read it for free online. But I don't want to!). And the other two books from Barron's were total serendipity finds: "Operation Mincemeat" (love the title), which is about an attempt by the British to fake out the Nazis in World War II. I find the Britain-in-WWII history stuff interesting so I decided I wanted to read it. (Also, the title grabbed me). And then the diary of a Farmer's Wife from 1796-1797 ("Anne Hughes: Her Boke"). I picked it up off a table while Laura was looking around, read a few passages, and decided I wanted to buy and read it. It looks fascinating - it has bits on the problems of sheep-thieves, and recipes (well, in very much an outline form), and discussion of village festivals, stuff like that. The kind of stuff I love reading about - how people lived. And yes, it is from a genuine diary that the woman kept back then.

(The other books were purchased at the Books a Million. The Charlie Chan one was one I was looking for; I saw the author interviewed on Book TV a couple weeks ago and found the interview so engaging that I wanted to read the book. And as I said, I think, before: I hadn't known that Charlie Chan was based on a real person, who apparently had an even more interesting (and far less stereotyped!) life. (I have read a few of the Charlie Chan mysteries. They are fun mysteries if you can get past the sort-of-cringey "Wise and Inscrutable Chinaman" stereotyped stuff. I guess I managed by imagining that Chan was playing an act - that he didn't really talk like that but he was playing into people's stereotype of him, so he could get more information by seeming less than he was. Kind of like Miss Marple being the sweet old lady knitting over in the corner...

The other book is called "The River Where America Began" and is about the James River, and now that I look at the title again, I'm really hoping I don't have another copy - purchased earlier and stashed on my bookshelf somewhere.)

And I found the Interweave Crochet accessories special article. Lots of scarves, a few things I might want to make, and besides, I just like having stuff like this to look at.)

After the lunch and shopping at Barron's, it was closing in on 3 pm, so we went back to the yarn shop (Laura had left her car there - I knew the way to Barron's so I drove). I decided to go back in to use the restroom, and also looked again at something I had looked at and tentatively decided against, because it was spending still more money.

But then I weakened.



It may be a slightly tired joke, seeing how many times I've used it, but I do like big skeins and I cannot lie. These are three more skeins of that Stylecraft yarn - the one I'm using for Potter. These will be for the Polperro jacket in Country Weekend Knitting. (Yes, Charles: probably my 2011 sweater!). The pattern calls for 2200 yards. Two skeins would have been about 1980 yards; which might have been enough, but I didn't want to risk it. The leftovers, I can either turn into hats and scarves for charity knitting, or, if I don't break into the skein and if I get back to the shop at a time when they are still selling the yarn, I might be able to return it. (Or I might be able to knit a vest out of the remaining skein.)

I decided to buy the yarn after all, because:

a. This yarn is by-and-large more reasonably priced than other yarns I could use (excepting some of the KnitPicks yarns, or a very lucky find on Elann).

b. I really like knitting with this yarn, and Stitches N Stuff is the only place I've seen it for sale

c. The pale purple color is pretty much the color I was envisioning knitting the jacket in. (In the book, it is grey, but I wanted something more lively, seeing as it's a heavier sweater to be worn on really cold days).

d. I really, really want to knit the Polperro Jacket sometime. I like the historical-pattern nature of the stitch pattern, and I wear cardigan sweaters all the time in the winter, because some rooms on campus are cold and some rooms are overheated, and it's good to have a garment that's easily taken off and put on as needed.

Well, a couple good things did happen yesterday (other than my clever fix of a knitting mess-up).

First of all, as I was heading home from school (I wasn't getting anything done, it was loud, and I had exams to grade) I decided to run by the local glass company. This is a long-term business, it's been here for like 50 years.

I planned on just asking the guy if he could do it, and maybe have him measure to cut the mirror (I guess I was assuming cutting mirror took a long time). Instead, he looked at the mirror, and said, "If you have about 30 minutes right now, I can do it now."

It didn't even take that. He cut a new piece of mirror, pulled out the broken pieces of the old one, glued it in, taped a couple of narrow blocks of styrofoam over the edges, and told me to leave the tape-and-styrofoam on for 24 hours.

It cost $15, which I'm guessing is about 10% of what I would have paid at the dealership.

So: broken car mirror, go to a glass company.

(The bad news is it looked like maybe they were going out of business, there was a For Sale sign up in front of the building. Or maybe they rent the building and the owner was just selling, or they were moving. I should have asked. But I get shy about stuff like that sometimes)

But, on the other side, I've partially fulfilled my 3-50 commitment for the month.

(Have you heard of this? It's kind of a grassroots thing. The idea is, each month, you spend a total of $50 (at a minimum) spread over three locally-owned businesses. As I have a quilt shop in town, and the place I like to buy cards and gifts for people is run by one of my AAUW colleagues, it's usually not too hard. The idea is, I guess, you're supporting local businesses and the $50 thing was based on a calculation that if a certain critical mass of people - not necessarily everyone in a town - did it, it would keep downtowns and locally-owned businesses alive. And I think restaurants count too.).

I also spent part of it at the locally-run grocery. I had not shopped there much, because when they first re-opened, it seemed like they didn't carry any of the brands I normally use. But maybe they've been taking patron requests, because I see they now have Daisy brand products (my favorite sour cream). And they went up GREATLY in my estimation when I found they had the Saco powdered buttermilk - nowhere else in town has it, and I don't think I've even seen it in shops in Sherman. The powdered buttermilk is a boon to have if you like to bake, and sometimes do things that require buttermilk, but don't want to have to run out and get it and then either struggle to use it up (I drink it sometimes but it's not my favorite beverage ever) or have it go bad.

(I had stopped in to buy whipped cream for the AAUW cake).

I also made a fruit sauce. I kinda-sorta followed a Mark Bittman recipe, with a couple modifications. Here are the pithy instructions:

1 cup water
1 cup sugar
~4 T butter (you can use less, it's partly to make the sauce glossy)
1, 12-ounce bag frozen UNSUGARED strawberries
1, 12-ounce bag frozen UNSUGARED raspberries (These are the fruit where the whole fruit/slices are frozen "loose" and are in a bag - they are not in a syrup)

about 1 to 1 1/2 T cornstarch, mixed with water.

You mix the water and sugar and bring them to a boil over medium high heat, then melt the butter in it (turn the heat down to medium). When it has mixed and thickened a little, you dump in the fruit. Bring it back to a boil, cook and stir for maybe 5 minutes (turn the heat down after it boils). Then slowly add the cornstarch-water slurry and cook over medium to low heat until it gets thick and glossy.

It's simple and pretty good. You can keep cooking it down more to make it thicker, but remember it will set up a bit more after it cools.

(I also was reminded of my childhood, when I got in trouble for using up my mom's cornstarch. You can make a non-Newtonian fluid out of cornstarch and water, and it's tons of fun to play with. Actually, it's probably fairly cheap as toys go, I think her main annoyance was that I used it up and didn't tell her.

Also, one of my favorite Mythbusters "Taking it to the extreme" myths involved this - after the unsuccessful ninja walk-on-water, Jamie made a giant vat of the cornstarch-water mixture for Adam to run across. It was pretty impressive and looked like a lot of fun - as long as he would run across it, it would support him, but when he stopped and stood at the end, he sank into it like quicksand. ("Oh, this feels SO wrong" was his comment, as I remember).

And one last good thing - when I bent over to brush the (dry) cornstarch I had dropped on my pants leg, my nose was down near my knee, and looking at my leg from that perspective I thought, "wait, my thigh looks smaller than it used to." So I pulled out the measuring tape and, even though I was wearing slacks, measured over them. Yup, an inch and a half smaller than the last time I measured (like a year ago), and I'm definitely in that "magic category" of women who are allegedly protected from heart disease because they have larger-than-sticks but well-muscled thighs. (I will hasten to say that I'm happier about the allegedly-protected-from-heart-disease thing than the reduction; and anyway, my thighs are still bigger than what Madison Avenue or Hollywood would consider "acceptable." But hey, if I'm less likely to keel over of an exploded heart at a young age, I'll take it.)

Tomorrow



Tomorrow



Tomorrow

It is my day off! It is my day to go to Longview and spend time around yarn and books and nice soap and gourmet supplies and all manner of things that make life GOOD. It is my day to go out somewhere nice for lunch, to get a big cup of real hot chocolate or chai tea with my lunch, to get dessert if I want it. It is a day when I am only responsible to ME. It is a day when people who have problems I "need" to fix will not be able to reach me and pull me away from what I want to be doing.



I'm thinking, in addition to looking for yarn for either Potter or the fake-Cowichan sweater from the newest Knitscene, I'm going to contemplate yarn for some more fingerless mitts. Because it occurs to me, just like you can have many colors of socks to match your clothes, it would be nice to have more than a pair or two of fingerless mitts...again, to match clothes. The chilly season is coming on and it will be nice to have them for when my office is cold. Or when the classrooms are cold. Or at home, for when I read in bed with the heat turned down. And how much more fun to have ones that match what I'm wearing.

And fingerless mitts are really fast and FUN to knit. They're one of those things that look far trickier than they actually are to do, which makes them fun.

So, I'm going to keep an open mind: I have a nice pattern or two for worsted-weight yarn, but there are also lots of lovely ones for fingering-weight as well.

And for that matter, one of the Ravelry groups I'm in is talking about a January swap, so I might get some yarn with the thought of either doing mitts for me or mitts for a swap-partner.

Oh, and I want another set of size 1 sock needles. And a short #3 circular for when I get to the sleeves on Thermal. And look to see if they have the other Norah Gaughan books that Berroco did. And and and. I am bouncing around with anticipation. It's almost like Christmas!

(Oh! And I need to write down how much yarn that felted Fortune Cookie bag in the new Interweave Crochet takes...I'm thinking about doing one as a Christmas gift for my AAUW gift exchange. And maybe doing one for my sister in law, if the AAUW one turns out well).

And thanks to all the various publishers who hired me to fact-check/proofread/evaluate textbook chapters this fall, the trip will be quite nicely funded.

(And yes. I called Stitches N Stuff just to be sure. They're open tomorrow. I think I have that small-town mindset - being used to times when stores sometimes unpredictably close - and I didn't want to get down there and be Horribly Disappointed. Because if I got there and they were not open, I WOULD cry. And it would be an ugly cry.)

This is for everyone who is sad, who is distressed, who is having a hard time.

I know it's been used a lot in ads and such, but it still makes me feel a whole lot better whenever I listen to it. It calms me down when I'm upset about something, makes me more hopeful about the world and people in it, and makes my shoulders drop back into their normal position when they've gotten squinched somewhere up around my ears.



Enjoy. And feel better.

I'll be back in a week.

I am one step closer to my dream of playing the piano. The Music Academy here in town called me up today - they had several openings available for students wanting lessons.

So starting next week, 3 pm Tuesdays, I will be learning to play the piano.

I am SUPER excited about this. The teacher is pretty highly recommended and when I spoke with her earlier, she mentioned two things that are definitely a win in my book: first, she wants people to learn to play the kind of music THEY like - so I will probably be working on mainly "little" classical pieces, with perhaps some jazz or gospel thrown in for variety (The truth is, I like MOST music, with the exception of some of the 20th century atonal stuff, and most current pop/country pop/alternapop/"urban" pop). Second, she is very into teaching music theory along with technique - and one thing you know about me, if you have read the blog for a while, is that I am fascinated by the "how things work" or the "why are they this way" as well as the "how do I do it?"

For the first few weeks, I will need to "borrow" a piano (either down at church or maybe someone in the Music department on campus will let me sign up for a practice time there) until mine arrives. But that's good - I like the idea of having my feet a little wet by the time the real piano arrives, so I can sit down and transfer the little bit of knowledge I've already gained to it.

Actually, some good things did wind up happening today, which salvaged the day:

1. I got all the student papers graded, plus wrote the second exam I need to have written for next week. Meaning I am free to enjoy my Thursday AND Friday.

2. My beloved "Old Factory" skin for Firefox has been updated for the newest version of Firefox. So, goodbye "Pimpzilla," welcome back the steampunky goodness of Old Factory.

3. My quilts are done! I may be able to get them on Friday. (I have to call her back; she said she was having wonky hours this week.). If not Friday, certainly next Tuesday afternoon, now that I've written all my tests ahead - I will actually have an easier week NEXT week as well as being able to enjoy my break in good conscience.

4. I was able to get a flu shot. And it wasn't so bad. One of the home health care businesses here in town was running a drive-through shot clinic (< YakovSmirnov > What a country! < /YakovSmirnov >). I had seen it advertised, forgot about it, then saw the sign as I was driving to the credit union. So I decided on the spur of the moment to go in and do it. Which was good, because it didn't give me time to build up a big pile of anxiety re: the needle. Also, I think having the shot done while I sit in the car (again I reiterate: what a country!) was actually better for me, psychologically - I was sitting IN MY OWN CAR and not in some sterile, hospital-antiseptic-smelling white room. So I was less apprehensive. And in 14 days, give or take a few, I'll be protected against whatever crud makes the rounds this winter.

5. And I see that the newest Owly book (which I ordered a month or so ago) came in the mail, along with an issue of Real Simple. So I can relax this evening and have some fun things to look at.

This post is dedicated to my two favorite simple machine based tools ever.

(Well, they are both based on the wheel-and-axle principle, at least. And they also both have a screw in the clamp that holds them onto the tabletop or whatever, but the screw isn't such an integral part of the mechanism.)

The umbrella swift:



And the ball winder:



There is something simple and pleasing about winding off skeins of yarn using these tools. The pleasure I feel is kind of similar to the pleasure of using other simple, time-honored tools - tools I know my great-grandmother (or even great-great grandmother) would recognize.

The swift I have makes a soft rackety-rack sound as it turns. The ballwinder makes pleasing "cakes" of yarn - the strands overlap in a complex pattern that reminds me a bit of the phyllotaxis seen in sunflower seed heads.

There's also the pleasure of expectation while doing it - winding off yarn is a preparatory step to knitting. (Sometimes, it's the most pleasant preparatory step - next, you have to make your swatch and find the right needle size and maybe figure out the pattern stitch or read through the pattern to make sure it all makes sense). But winding yarn is simple and pleasing and elemental and next to actually knitting, probably the most pleasant part of the process. It carries with it the happy expectation of starting a new project.

You can make do without them - there's the time-honored tradition of getting your "beau" (or later, your husband, or, I suppose, a particularly calm and compliant child) to agree to be manacled with wool for the length of time it takes to wind off a ball. Or, absent a beau, you can drape it around your own knees (and if you are athletic, stick your feet up in the air as you wind...there's a picture in Tracy Ullman's knitting book of her doing just that. I'm afraid my hamstrings would seize.) Or you can drape the hank over a (loosened) lampshade and wind from there.

And a ballwinder isn't totally necessary - in fact, for several years, I had a swift but no ballwinder. The only problems with handwinding balls of yarn (unless you have a nostepinne), is that you have to be very careful not to wind too tightly (which I tended to do), because it puts stress on the yarn (in fact, some "experts" advised to only wind balls right before you were ready to knit with them). The other problem is that I find the balled-up yarn goes rolling across the floor, and winds up in inaccessible places, and (if you're like me and would rather knit than sweep) picks up dust birds as well.

(There are also electrical ball winders but I have to admit I prefer the little hand-cranked one I have - too many gears and motors on things and there are more things that can go wrong. And I understand how the hand-cranked ball winder works, whereas some of the workings of even a simple motor are more mysterious. And the electric ones are, well, electric, and they SOUND electric. Instead of the little soft clatter, there is a mechanical whir, which I find less pleasing).

I like my little ball winder for those reasons - the nice, compact, pleasing-to-the-eye cakes of yarn. The fact that the "cake" stays put when you're knitting from it. (You can either do it as a center-pull, or knit from the outside. I tend to do center-pull with some yarns, and knit-from-the-outside on those that are grabbier and would give what one knitter calls "yarn barf" - where you get a big clump of yarn coming out of the middle all together). I also like that I can tuck the tag or band into the middle of the cake and keep the information with the yarn if I want to.

When I first got back into knitting, I didn't own either. It's a lot harder working with hanked yarn if you don't have a swift...I had one unhappy misadventure with a ball of Koigu that I tried to wind off by "pooling" on the floor, and then walking around and around as I wound the ball...it wound up in a big mess and I had to take hours untangling it. The swift is such a better way of doing it.

I think I also like them because they are "good" tools. They do their job well. There is nothing jury-rigged (and yes, I maintain that "jury rigged" is the right term and not "jerry rigged," which sounds like a WWI-era insult) about them - they do their job right, they do what you expect them to do. There are few things that can go wrong with them and most of those things can be easily fixed. Yes, they are single-use tools (I know some people who refuse to have single-purpose tools in their kitchens...) but I tend to feel I'd rather have a tool that does one job really well than a tool that does five jobs poorly.

So I'm very happy to have both the swift and the ball winder. Winding off yarn feels like kind of an autumnal activity, like something you do in preparation for the long winter ahead. I've been winding the skeins of Araucania into cakes in preparation for starting the Cobblestone Pullover. Even though I probably have at least a week's knitting left on the SitCom Chic I'm working on, I felt like winding yarn this afternoon.

Yay!

xkcd does its own, slightly twisted, take on the Discovery Channel "boom-de-yah-dah" ad.

More stuff I love/stuff that makes me happy. (This is a continuation of the earlier list.

21. This news story. It's so silly and yet it makes me feel cheerful to think about it. All those little rubber ducks bobbing around, and scientists using them as a way to map ocean currents.

22. The fact that the internet is almost like those house-dreams I have - where I find a room I never knew of before, and it's full of all kinds of neat stuff - I've noticed that looking up embroidery stuff, there's ALL KINDS of neat stuff out there, you just have to search around a little.

23. The various different comics I read, especially collected in book form - Little Dee, and Nemu-Nemu, and Owly, and some of the older ones like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side and the really early Peanuts strips...

24. Dollhouses. I used to have one when I was a kid, and I still like the idea of a miniature house with tiny stuff. (I made a lot of the stuff in my dollhouse). I also love the more "artistic" or "fancy" renditions, especially Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle. (Unfortunately, I've never seen it "in person" - only photographs in books. It's amazing and I'm sure it's even better in person.)

25. Mystery novels, especially series mysteries, where you can revisit the familiar characters from time to time. There is something I find satisfying about mysteries; I am not sure what it is - I usually don't "try" to solve it before the detective does, and in some cases I'm reading it more for the characters or setting than the plot.

26. That I will never, ever have to be 13 again.

27. Having unusual butterflies visit the plants in my garden. I have an abelia bush in my front yard, and most summers I get a bunch of sphinx moths or hummingbird moths visiting it, and it's really fun to watch them.

28. The fact that if I realize I like a particular television show, and it's already near the end of its run, I can "catch up" with the earlier years I didn't see by either buying or renting the dvd. I think having season's worth of shows available on dvd is a nice idea.

29. Farmer's markets - real ones, where the people who actually grew/raised/produced the stuff are there selling it and you can talk to them and get tips on preparing the vegetables and stuff.

30. Being able to go somewhere (like McKinney) and park my car and spend most of the day walking between different boutiques and craft shops and antique stores. Much more fun than the mall.

31. Slow cookers. They're a brilliant invention - put the food in it first thing in the morning, turn it on, leave it, and by the time you come home from work, dinner's ready.

32. Walking down an empty (or nearly-empty) beach and being able to pick up smooth stones and bits of beach glass.

33. The music of J.S. Bach. I know some people have referred to it as "mathematical" (and therefore, I suppose, "Cold") but I find that actually most of my favorite pieces of his (a lot of the cello works, a lot of the "little pieces" for solo piano) seem to combine the best of "logic" and "feeling" - or you might say, the best of the left and right brains. Or perhaps, the best of the intellect and of the soul. It seems to me that Bach so fervently believed in an underlying order to the universe - that there were universal rules and laws - that he seemed to put that in his music, that he's reflecting his ideas about God and perfection and completeness in his pieces.

34. But I also love some of the late 19th-early 20th century British "popular classical" music - Ralph Vaughn Williams, Edward Elgar, the "wind band" stuff.

35. Imagination. Being able to read a book and picture the places and characters in it.

36. Peonies. I don't have any growing in my yard (I don't have quite the right spot and I'm not sure they'd do well in my climate) but I love them - they're so big and cheerful and blowsy.

37. Rain, especially when it's been a while since we had rain. I like the way the air smells when it's raining. I like the change that rain brings.

38. Garden gnomes. Again, it's something that's a little silly, a little needless - but they make me happy. (I have a tiny gnome in my garden).

39. Going into a big craft store. All that possibility. All those things to look at and consider.

40. The hardwood floors in my house. It cost a lot to get them refinished but it was completely worth it.

Well, I've decided to let myself have that "fluster." I have a good coupon for Books-a-Million and I saw an interview on Sunday Morning this morning with Ken Follett - normally I wouldn't think of reading him, but he wrote a book (actually, quite a while ago) on a 12th century or so cathedral. And I LOVE historical fiction. And I am fascinated by the Middle Ages. And it sounds like a good book, based on how widely-read it's been. (And he's written a continuation that incorporates the Plague and its effects). So I'm going to go looking for that, and any of the new magazines I don't subscribe to.

I generally don't shop on Sunday - trying to make a feeble attempt at keeping the Sabbath and all that - but once in a while I allow myself an exception.

(I also have a good JoAnn's coupon; might try there first for one of the magazines I'm looking for, or might use it to stock up on thread).

The fact that the thought of going out and doing something makes me want to Snoopy dance means I'm over the funk of Friday and yesterday. (I tend to react strongly and violently to things but get over them fairly fast).

And I finished Bloom.

And I finished the Neapolitan socks!

And I pulled out and re-started the Miranda socks, and now feel motivated to finish them. ("Start-over" rules! I may crank through many stalled projects this month).

Pictures will come tomorrow. I'm very happy with how Bloom blocked up; the yarn lost a lot of its scratchiness when treated with wool-wash.

****

Oh, and TChem: I kind of figured that was the case. In my experience, insects tend to be ATTRACTED to electromagnetic waves, not repelled. I used to have a halogen lamp that had, I guess, a step-down voltage transformer in the plug. I came home one day and found about 10,000 ants clustered around the plug - they found their way into the house and were attracted to it. ("We welcome our new Electric Overlord"?)

Oh well. I guess I'll keep periodically spraying with clove oil (the only thing that seems to work but that doesn't make me cough or twitch) and just stomping the odd "waterbug" that finds its way in.

Because it is unprofessional for me to scream and whoop and wave my hands around while I run up and down the halls, I'll do a version of it here:

I FOUND THE MISSING FILES!

I FOUND THE MISSING FILES!

What they were, was an NMS analysis of data. Now, unless you're in a very particular branch of plant ecology, that will probably not mean that much. NMS is a complex analysis procedure where you get kind of a unique situation each time you run it (so it's not 100% valid to do a "reconstruction" and pull stuff from there).

But when my co-author (and this is why he is my co-author, and in calmer retrospection, I don't think he's trying to spike the paper; he had no way of knowing the stuff he was asking for was not right at my fingertips) ran the analysis he COPIED the results to a CD that he gave me - and I promptly forgot about until I was looking through some other CDs of stuff. And I found it. And I saw the cryptic label he had written on it. And I thought - wait, did he tell me he was copying the thing to a CD in addition to giving me the print out?

And yup, there it is. So one of the big major sticking points of this project is not a sticking point any more. (And maybe I dumped the printout all those months ago because I knew I had the CD.)

Moral of the story: do a big complex analysis - save it as a textfile somewhere. Preferably on a CD or thumb drive so when the Computer Gurus change out the computer, your file doesn't go with it.

And I really truly don't believe horoscopes - and in fact, if you ask some people of faith about them they actually say horoscopes are kind of heretical - but the one for me in the paper last night did say something like "Stick with a difficult project and it will become much easier." I kind of laughed cynically at the time.