Year: 2007

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

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I tried to find a place to block Icarus (completely soak the shawl and pin it out so that the pattern opens up), but I have no large, flat areas in the house. A large bed is ideal, but both candidates are in frequent use.

I’m also just nervous placing something in the house that shouldn’t be touched for a few days. That is pretty much an impossibility in our house. There is a lot of destruction that goes on in this house, I’m lucky that most of my knitting needles aren’t lost or bent out of shape.

I did faithfully swatch Picovoli. It’s the first fitted garment I’m making for myself, so I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t too far off the published gauge. I knit myself a little square and then put it in the washer and dryer, something I would do to a cotton sweater.

Boy, did the fabric tighten up! And I’m pretty close to gauge! I got 22.5 stitches/4 inches and the published gauge is 22 stitches/4 inches. I’m not too worried about being off on the stitch gauge because the sweater is knit with negative ease (snug) so I’m hoping it won’t matter too much. I didn’t do the row gauge because I’m just lazy about it and because I can try on the sweater as I knit it and modify it from there.

I always have trouble at the very beginning of a project. This time was no different. After 2 rows, I determined that the stitches were indeed twisted even though I double-checked before I joined the ends. Crap-o-la!

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Scientific name: Podocarpus polystachyus
Common name: Sea Teak
Location: Singapore

We spent a stuffy, sweltering morning running around the Japanese School’s gym. It was Sports Day at Edda’s school. On the way to the event, Edda was enjoying the weekend, smiling in the car, in a good mood even as we walked down the driveway of the unfamiliar building. As soon as she spied the staff and realized that school stuff was going to happen, she burst into tears. She wanted to be at home watching Blue’s Clues.

So as soon as the Olympic torch was lit, Edda was out like a light. Twice she woke up looked around and saw that she was still in the middle of an un-air-conditioned room without a TV and promptly fell back asleep.

Vince had fun too. He loves his medal. Look at the big trophies on the table in the photo. Vince totally thought he was going to be able to take one of ’em home.

Yellow team victory! (I know, they are all wearing blue shirts, but really, they were the yellow team.)

(A side note: Jeremy is ill. From my data, it take about a week for this particular virus to transmit from one person to another.)

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I knit Pomatomus while I was sitting in the audience of Sports Day. Of course, I’m intensely interested in Vince and Edda doing their thing and I’m also interested in the kids who are in Edda’s class, but I hardly recognize some of the older kids, so I turned to knitting while they played hockey.

I also knit a swatch for Picovoli, a cotton sweater designed by one of my favorite knit bloggers, Grumperina. She happens to be a grad student in neurobiology at Harvard. Pretty cool.

Since the infamous camera drop, my camera has struggled with low light macro focusing. The little red light that it uses to focus has been knocked out of alignment, so it doesn’t shine on the center of the frame. So it tries and tries and usually fails.

Apparently, I still don’t know how to use this white balance, because the sweater isn’t going to be orange. It’s a more coral-ly color.

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Scientific name: Mussaenda erythrophylla
Location: Singapore

Yes. I am a closet American Idol fan. I found this moment to be a bit funny, but you have to know a little about the show’s format. Basically, every week, contestants pick whatever song they want to sing. Right now the guys sing on Tuesdays and the girls sing on Wednesdays. America votes after the shows (they are all live) and then on Thursdays, four people with the lowest # of votes get booted – 2 guys, 2 girls. And when people get booted, they sing the same song that they did that week – which allows for some humor. 🙂 So this is Leslie Hunt singing after she’s been told that she’s been booted off. The pay off is at the end…

What makes it even funnier, the person that got boot of just 10 minutes earlier, in the same show, sang the exact same song – “Feeling Good”. Apparently America really don’t care for jazz. 🙂