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Thanks go to Jessa for the heads-up that even the New England Journal of Medicine's readers find Harry Potter to be dangerous to our health.
My most recent project, post-baby-madness, is a v-neck tank top in Zen, based on this design in Rowan's Cotton Tape Collection. 
I didn't count on ribbon yarn being such a b*tch to knit with--I keep poking my needle into the yarn, not through the stitch, and ripping back was an absolute nightmare when, on a weird decrease row, I somehow dropped a stitch.
At any rate, I managed to rescue most of my work with a little help from the ultimate godsend, the Vogue Knitting Quick Reference. Much as I adore the great big hardcover version, which has a place of honor on my knitting shelf, its spiral-bound condensed version fits in my knitting case and has saved me countless times. Hurrah for Vogue!
to knit! Or so I've been telling everyone who e-mails me about the Kelly Girls, my Chicago knitting circle. Maybe it's a bit ambitious to tell someone I can teach them in an hour, but it's true that they are picking it up fast.
I found an absolutely gorgeous scarf pattern online which I think is just what I want to do with my pile of charcoal Cash Iroha that I picked up in Oak Park last year, at Tangled Web's winter sale. Yummy. I've swatched till my hands nearly fell off, but couldn't come up with a pattern to show off it's luxuriousness. This might just do.
Has anyone tried this crossword software for the Palm OS? Or the NY Times premium crossword puzzles subscription?
I've just purchased a Tungsten E, to which I am utterly devoted. It's a bit small for gaming, but I thought it would be nice to do puzzles on the train sometimes. Any advice?
Thanks to the Shifted Librarian and many others for this fab t-shirt link. My personal fave.
If I see one more librarian t-shirt with a pile of books and a cat on it, I will SCREAM.
I picked up Neil Gaiman's new Sandman: Endless Nights collection over the weekend. I almost don't want to start it, because I know it will distract me from everything else in my life until I'm done reading it. Plus, once I finish it, I'll never be able to read it for the first time again.
This is probably the same reason I'm hesitating before buying Neal Stephenson's latest novel. Safety first: if I don't own it, I can't stay up till dawn reading it!
Lately, Fresh Air has been chock full of absolutely hilarious controversy. Check out Bill O'Reilly's insane refusal to answer any serious questions, and Grover Norquist's comparisons of unfair tax practices to the Holocaust. Terry really liked that one.
Two interesting transit topics came up this week.
Today I rode my bike around the city, about ten miles in all, putting up flyers for the Kelly Girls. Then I collapsed in dead exhaustion. I think I'm out of shape, and I'm more grateful than ever that Chicago is basically flat flat flat. Also, the bike lane on Damen is excellent! I had forgotten all about it since I moved south.
On Eight Forty-Eight the other day, there was a big discussion of the potential CTA fare hike, and its implications. There was this guy from Northwestern's Infrastructure Technology Institute who insisted that fares shouldn't be subsidized, or at least shouldn't be kept artificially low, because that doesn't do anyone (including "poor people") any favors. He felt that it would be better to charge more for transit, and that people who ride farther should pay more (as on the DC Metro and other systems).
This really made me see red. After all, basically he's talking about penalizing lower-income riders, people who can't afford to pay much more for transit, or who can't afford to live in the expensive neighborhoods in which they work. They ride from far away, and Schulz's suggestion that charging them more for these longer rides would give them an incentive to live nearer their jobs is a ridiculous argument.
Now that the academic year is in full swing, I'm getting the kintting itch again, and I think a lot of other people are, too. This should be a good time of year to start having knitting circle meetings again.
The Kelly Girls are a knitting group I started around the time my very close group of girlfriends stopped knitting together regularly. We were looking to open things up and meet other crafty people, and it worked pretty well for a while, but the summer created quite a lull in attendance.
I've been printing up fun flyers for the group on my shiny new color printer, in the hopes of attracting some new (and some prior) members for the group. Now I just have to bike around town and put them up!
Last night I tried to knit up a gauge swatch out of some gorgeous blue Zen I bought an age ago, and ended up spending three hours untangling the skein in front of Law and Order: SVU.
Note to self: next time, recruit someone else to hold the yarn while I wind.
It doesn't knit up pretty in rib, just in stockinette, so I'm thinking of modifying a Rowan shell pattern I found last year. Something like this.
Now that I have this crazy new job as a chemistry librarian, despite a complete ignorance of chemistry, I'm taking a general chem class. This is mainly to get up to speed, so I can be a more useful resource for my department. However, right now I'm swimming in molarity and stoichiometric equivalencies.
I'm fairly certain I could calculate the molarity of the solution in my brain right now. Gah.
Recently my boyfriend's sister had a baby, and I was in an absolute frenzy for several months before, knitting like a maniac. At least in terms of speed and intensity. I mean, I wasn't attacking people on the bus with my needles or anything.
So here are the fruits of said labor, along with the fruit of the aforementioned Mama's labor.
One of my favorite used book stores, which I fear to go to because I tend to drop $50 or more per trip, is Myopic Books in Chicago. They recently moved to a new storefront, which used to be the home of the excellent Earwax Cafe. Earwax moved across the street, into very nice digs, and has incredibly cool new booths painted in gorgeous colors and patterns. Also, dragons hanging from the ceiling. Niiiice.
My new obsession is Netflix, and my new Netflix obsession is the X-Files. I never really watched it when it was on TV, but now that it's over I feel like I'll be able to get closure if I get hooked on it (which I have).
I'm very big on closure.
So here's the part where I actually get to see if my blog is working. I've been futzing endlessly with my images, which finally make me happy, but I can't figure out my stylesheet worth a damn. So I'm going to see if adding entries makes it display properly. Here goes ....
Sleepy bunny booties
Bear-suit for baby
Thomas with his new bear