Month: March 2007

You know that feel you get when you look at old photographs, or flip through your high school yearbook? It’s not even old things, a joke you shared with a friend over dinner Thursday night where you laughed so hard the whole restaurant looked at you strangely.

It gives me the warm fuzzies and I can help but smile.

Thanks to everyone out there in my life. You make it special. Really, you all do. Thanks.

Of course, I doubly like the video, cause it involves bikes. 🙂

I can not believe that Vince is 5 today! We partied all day long!

Now the kids are asleep and we are packing, packing, packing for our trip to Taiwan tomorrow. (At least the washer got fixed! Woo hoo! Didn’t think that was going to happen…)

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Scientific name: Spathodea campanulata
Common name: African tulip tree
Location: Singapore

Hope you are having a wonderful 5ht birthday party! woo hoo!

It’s funny. Every month we have a meeting for NGDA, which is a grant from The Library of Congress for their NDIPP project. NGDA is the project that paying for my salary, incidentally.

Well I walk into our meeting, and out of 8 people, I’m the only guy sitting there. A guy colleague did walk in about 15 minutes late, but I thought it was amusing. It’s pretty rare in the engineering world, tho I suppose half the people there were librarians, to be fair.

The washer died and we are leaving on a jet plane on Saturday morning! What am I going to do? We are rapidly running out of underwear. I knew that something was fishy with the washer on Tuesday, but I didn’t investigate until today. We are going to tour a foreign country with no clean underwear. Argh!

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Scientific name: Carphalea kirondron
Common name: King’s Mantle
Location: Singapore

As I wait for Vince
I look at my reflection
Was the toilet flushed?

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Picovoli is a raglan sweater and knit in one piece from the collar to the waistband.

You can see the raglan sleeve forming here with increases on either side of the stitch marker. Where my little finger pokes out from under the fabric is where the opening for my head is. The collar is curling around itself (not unexpectedly), so I wonder how it will flatten out in the end.

I was awake way past my normal bedtime and I inadvertently put increases around the stitch marker which indicates the back center of the neckline. Whoops! I took out the increases, but it left stretched out stitches. I’m not ripping back for this, instead I think I’m going to try and even it out with the rest of the row using a crochet hook. I hope it isn’t too much slack to hide.

As I was discovering that knitting (and surfing about knitting) does not really put me to sleep, I found a knot in my ball of yarn. I decided then that I needed to go to bed.

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Scientific name: Thumbergia erecta
Common name: King’s Mantle
Location: Singapore

From Frank’s blog, except for me.

Likes

– My friends – Some amazing folks – intellectually, spiritually, emotionally
– My sense of humor
– Capable of rational thought
– My sense of style/fashion (for a guy)
– I can live on a budget

Dislikes

– Stubborn. Thanks Dad! 😛
– I think I am right all the time. And I am.
– Lazy – I do enough to get by.
– Weird/Bad thoughts run thru my head. I’m glad nobody can read it.
– I secretly want to feel superior to others.

1. Two sets of earthquake tremors were felt in Singapore today. Strangely, I felt neither.

2. Mysterious things are happening at Edda’s school. Students and teachers seem to be leaving at an alarming rate. I’m not sure what the problem is, I just know that it’s getting lonelier on the 3rd floor.

3. Jeremy went on an office team-building hike with his colleagues this afternoon. I guess it’s suppose to help one to feel like part of a team. Rah! Rah! Oddly enough, Vince went with them. Amazingly, he didn’t complain as he climbed up the steep hill. Sometimes I wish I could send Vince to work with Jeremy. He could empty them of all their office supplies in 30 minutes.

4. Remarkably at 8:30pm, Jeremy, Edda, Vince and Ruby are all asleep.

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Scientific name: Syzygium polyanthum
Common name: Salam
Location: Singapore

Vince wanted to go to IKEA today to play in the ball room. Edda is so unpredictable in public places, I hate to go out alone with the two of them. And going right after school (Vince’s suggestion) meant that I would have to get them lunch and through Edda’s nap time at IKEA. Sometime I’m all up for the challenge, but today I didn’t want to go for absolutely no reason (also that ball room is a germ incubator), but at 11 am, Jeremy reminded me that we needed wrapping paper so I gave myself a pep talk and hauled the two kids over to the big blue building. I also promised myself that I would get to eat this as a little reward:

I have no idea what it’s called, but it is $1 and it is delicious. As Rachael Ray says, Yum-O!

Look what Vince made in school!

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Lynae asked (a few posts ago) if the linen I used for Icarus was nice to knit with. She was the generous soul who gave me four (!) cones of the beautiful red fiber to make the shawl way back in August. I had never worked with plant fibers before this project, my limited knitting experiences have been in wool (one green sweater) and superwash wool (for socks). Generally I wear much more linen than wool, even when I live where it snows, so I have an affinity for this material.

When I started, the linen felt stiffer and more paper-like than I was used to with wool. The thickness was much more variable, some places it was almost bulbous and other places, it was as thin as a hair. Amazingly, even though the linen got very thin in places, the fiber never broke or snapped even though at times I put the fiber through some extra tough pulling. I did some research on linen and, of course, it’s a very tough fiber, even stronger when wet.

What I loved most about this linen was the color. I love red, but it has to be a true, deep red. Not too orange and not too plum. And the color of Icarus is PERFECT! I can’t wait to block it and see the luster of the fiber really come to life.

I have a super secret plan of how to block this baby, but I can’t reveal it yet!

Now on to Picovoli (yarn received as a gift, again from the generous Lynae)

I ripped out the my previous false start and redid it this time correctly. There is a little twisting of the yarn as I proceed, I’m not sure if this is going to matter in the final product. I suspect this has always happened with my projects and this is the first time I noticed it.

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Scientific name: Daedaleopsis Confragosa
Common name: Blushing Bracket
Location: Singapore