Good weekend

Is it Monday already? How did that happen? The weekends go so fast sometimes, and those two precious days of not having to wake up at yeurgh-o'clock just aren't quite enough. We did do a lot, and a lot of fun things, this weekend though, so I can't complain.

Saturday, we got up early to go to Older Daughter's soccer game. They lost, but not badly, given that they were playing one man down (no, the other team didn't pull a player from the field), with no substitutes. I've been thinking a lot lately about teams, and kids not showing up for things like practices and games, and the reasons why that happens. I know that sometimes, something comes up -- a family trip, or an emergency, or being sick, or one time when two games get scheduled at the same time -- and that's just the way life is. But I also know (from talking to their parents) that for some of these kids, the reason that they regularly are late to games, or miss them completely, or don't come to practice, is because they're involved in so many other activities that the overlap means that they simply are not able to make it to every practice or game that their activities involve. Let me state that more simply: they are so over-committed that they inherently cannot, under any circumstances, meet all of the obligations associated with those commitments.

Now, it would be easy to say that hey, they're kids, and these are just sports (or music, or whatever), and come on, lighten up. And to a large degree that's true. But I've been thinking about what I see my college students doing, and about how often my fellow faculty members and I complain that our students are regularly late, don't come to class, miss meetings with us, fail to complete assignments, etc. Between the classes that they're taking, and work, and clubs, and teams, and family and and and, it is physically and temporally impossible for them to be able to do all of the things that they say they will do. And so they skip important classes, miss tests, don't do homework (and I can only imagine that they're doing similar things in other areas of their lives), and then are completely and utterly floored when they're told that no, special accomodations will not be made for them because they didn't meet their obligations. Or, they state baldly that they know they can't do everything, and so doing things half-assed is what they've chosen to do instead. And we wonder where they get the idea that it is OK to say they'll do more than they can, and then expect it not to matter.

I guess one interpretation could be that this teaches kids to judge what is most important at any given moment in a busy life. And that is truly an important life skill. But I also think that it is an important life skill to adequately judge what one can actually do. It also seems important to realize that letting other people count on you when you know that you're not going to be able to do the job you say you'll do is generally a bad idea. I'm not sure that this one has easy answers, but it's something I've been hashing through in my head, and you all get to share, heh.

After soccer, and our usual visit to the farmer's market, we had a quick lunch and headed out to Balboa Park to the Museum of Natural History to see the Body Worlds exhibit. We all thought it was truly amazing (this is definitely a ymmv sort of thing); the exhibit was well-arranged, and the explanatory placards included just the right amount of information. I'm pretty sure that the comparison between a healthy lung and a smoker's lung put the girls off smoking forever (and made me glad that, of all the unhealthy things I've done in my life, I somehow escaped that one!). The plastinate that included a spinal fusion like the one that I had was particularly fascinating one to me, in a sort of shuddery kind of way. Human bodies are amazing in their complexity, and this particular exhibit really conveys that viscerally (literally, haha). All in all, though, it was well worth the visit, and we were all happy we went. We also popped over to the zoo to see the new elephant exhibit, but it hadn't opened yet. Alas. So we visited the polar bears and the tree kangaroos instead, and declared ourselves satisfied. (Although I remain convinced that they put those poor kangaroos up in those trees; no way did they get up there on their own.)

After a fabulously yummy dinner at Saffron (thanks for the recommendation Kim and Anne!), we headed home, happy; we even had time for me to read a chapter from Fellowship of the Ring before bedtime.

Yesterday was a quieter day. I stayed home and admired all the flowers in the yard.
And did laundry.
Nope, no pictures of laundry. No pictures of the knitting I did, either, but I did work on the linen shell. I read, and finished an excellent book that I highly recommend: Fieldwork. Talk about a fascinating read. The author gets right into the minds of anthropologists and missionaries, and does it as if he, himself, were doing fieldwork; he does an amazing job of representing their lives, as they themselves see them, all without actually saying that he's trying to be an anthropologist himself. Extremely well-done. A friend loaned it to me, but I may have to own this one myself. I ate it up in record time, and there are parts that were well worth savoring more slowly. Luckily, books, unlike meals, can be re-experienced, and don't cause indigestion.

Neither did the lovely meal that ended the weekend: homemade fish tacos and strawberry-rhubarb crumble. Mmm...

Hookey redux and a sweater

It seems to be the week for fun adventures. On Tuesday, Rick and I played hookey together and went out for lunch and then to see Star Trek. We've never done that before -- bagged on work to go to the movies -- so there was a delightful feeling of getting away with something. Which we weren't, really, given how hard we've both been working lately; Rick's put in several very late nights (early mornings really; working until 2:30 am is just wrong), so it's not like he hadn't put in his hours for the week already. We both had fun at the movies, too; if you like great big space battles in which the good guys always win (except for those poor red shirts, but hey, if you put on a red shirt in Star Trek, you gotta know what's coming), then this is a good one.

And then yesterday, I got to go see Anne and Kim and Beckie! Whoo-hoo! Anne and Beckie (Beckie, do you have a blog I can link to? I forgot to ask...) came in from Ohio this week and are staying with Kim, so we met in Encinitas at Common Threads; such a fabulous yarn store, and just far enough away that I don't pop in all that often. I was very good and walked away with only one skein of yarn (I haven't taken any pictures of that yet, so I'll do a big picture post of new yarn acquisitions in a day or so), although I was terribly tempted by a skein of gorgeous burnt-orange Malabrigo sock yarn. Or the purple. Or maybe the bluey-greeny-grey skein. So much beautiful yarn, so little time...

Alas, I completely forgot my camera, if you can believe. I was so busy trying to be sure that I had my knitting, and that I'd done everything that needed to be done before I abandoned house and work and family for the day, that I forgot it. Anne posted a whole mess o' pics, though, so you can check those out. We went to lunch at Q'ero, a Peruvian restaurant that is absolutely fabulous, and where I ate probably more than I should have, but boy, every bite was delicious. And then we headed off to Chuao to have gelato (mmm....gelato...) and knit for a while. And we talked and laughed and talked. It was a perfect day.

And the best bit was, I'd managed to finish Ondule in time to wear it to show off to Anne. It took a late night (not too late; I was done by midnight-thirty or so -- why does finishing always take so much longer than it seems like it will?) to finish it up, but I'm so glad that I did. I made Rick take some pictures last night; the color is a bit ruddy, but it was getting on towards sunset when we took the pictures, which isn't always the best light.
This sweater was so much fun to knit. Once I got the hang of the pattern, it was completely intuitive, and I was able to read while knitting, which is why it moved so quickly. (I've spent the last couple of days reading textbooks on ethnography while knitting; getting work and knitting done at the same time is a good thing.) As you all know, I generally don't knit sweaters in pieces, but this one was so easy to do, and the pieces came together so nicely (and there are no separate button bands to knit, which made me happy), that it was well worth the piece knitting; I'd recommend this one in particular for anyone who's been thinking about knitting a pieced sweater but hasn't wanted to take the plunge.
I probably could have (should have?) knit it one size smaller; I have this terrible tendency to think that I'm even bigger than I am when it comes to knitting (and yet, somehow, to always be surprised at how big I look in pictures, which suggests that some part of me thinks that I'm smaller than I am; how many of me are there in my brain?) and to choose a larger size than I should. I think it's also because I don't trust my gauge swatches, and I figure that I can always wear a larger sweater (in fact, given that I prefer comfortable, loose clothes, I'm more likely to), but I can't and won't wear one that's too small. I need someone to be there when I go through patterns circling all the numbers for the size I choose, so they can go back through and circle the numbers for one size smaller when I'm not looking.
I love, love, love the corrugated rib in the peplum. Love it. And these buttons make me so happy. I got them in Santa Fe, when we serendipitously found a yarn store, Tutto, while looking for somewhere to eat dinner, and I wandered in and saw them and had to have them. I hadn't even seen the yarn yet when I bought them, but I think that they go together well. And the yarn. Have I mentioned how much I love this yarn? This is Briar Rose's Grandma's Blessing, an absolutely gorgeous superwash merino that is so soft and squishy. It's a delight to knit with, and the results are fabulous. I'm already trying to figure out what I can knit with it next. Maybe I need some more to knit something in the blue/green family? Maybe I should be good and wait until after Sock Summit (this is not some kind of major self-discipline on my part, btw; I'll be at the Briar Rose/Knitspot booth the whole weekend and it seems only fair that I should score some yarn for myself while I'm there, no? After all, I'm saving up my yarn budget for just that).

Tilly had fun getting in on the picture-taking action last night. It's hard to get her to leave me alone long enough to get a picture without a jumping dog in it.
So there you have it. Ondule is finished (yes, I'm wearing it right now, why do you ask?), and I'm going to try to get a few more things off the needles in the next week or so. I have the second Rogue Rose sock to finish, and the seasilk scarf I started, and my Louet linen shell. Meanwhile, I can start plotting the next new project...

Playing hookey

That's what the rest of Sunday felt like. We packed up the car, dog and all, and headed off to the beach. The goal was to go up to San Onofre, where there's a part of the beach that allows dogs (and can I just say, as an aside, that one of the biggest disappointments about moving to Southern California was the utter lack of dog beaches? The closest one to me is in Del Mar -- about 20 miles south -- and it's only about 100 yards of beach, not somewhere that you can actually go for a walk while your dog happily plays. Up north, dog beaches weren't much closer, but they were worth driving for). It's the same part of the beach that allows naked people (I live in a strange world, which is part of its charm), but live and let live, I always say.

However, when we hit the freeway, it was clear that there was no way we were going to make it that far north. The drive is usually about 45 minutes, at freeway speed; we were going less than half that, and there was no sign that the traffic was abating. It was just as bad on the other side, so apparently everyone at Point A was heading for Point B just as fast as the Point Bers were driving to Point A. We got off the road and turned around. But our lunches were packed, and I wanted salt water, so we decided to take a shot on a small stretch of beach that we'd heard about where a blind eye is mostly turned to the presence of dogs (I'm not going to say where, lest I call the attention of less blind eyes), and I'm so glad we did. It was absolutely beautiful, and sandy, unlike the beach at San Onofre, which is mostly big round cobbly rocks.

It was a lovely overcast day, and we explored and wandered.
You can see why this beach is little-patrolled; it's mostly covered in water, even when the tide is going out.
The girls played their favorite game of gathering up very wet sand
and carrying it onto the beach to make dribble castles.
We saw a Bob's Big Boy.
(Do you think he's confused there in that yard?)

I admired the line between sea and sky.
And I got to drive home barefoot with sand between my toes.
I think everyone was glad in the end that the traffic was so bad.

Plus ca change...

...plus c'est la meme chose.

I had to laugh today when I opened my mother's day presents, and one of them was this:
Now, I'm not laughing at the gift, which I love. I'm laughing because this will be the first new radio/alarm clock I've gotten since college; Rick's also dates to his first year in college, and when you line them all up:
Behold: the twenty-five year evolution of the Sony Dream Machine. Plus ca change indeed.

I also got this lovely toy, which I've been wanting.
It's The Knit Kit -- how cool is this? It's got everything: a row counter, tape measure, thread cutter, crochet hook, scissors, and stitch markers and needle point thingamajigs (what do you call those again?).
How cool is that? It's a little bigger than palm-sized, and just perfect for throwing into a bag before leaving the house, it'll fit in any bag I have, and be so easy to transfer. Love it.

I worked hard yesterday so I could earn my day off today. We had an early soccer game, after which we went to the farmer's market. Then Rick went off to get the rest of the shopping done while I vacuumed and started laundry. Dinner last night was a celebration of spring: snapper sauteed with onions and peppers and pickled lemons and cilantro and cumin, served with corn tortillas and salad, followed by strawberry shortcake. Mmm....

I also got lots and lots of knitting done.
That's a back, two fronts, and most of a sleeve. With luck, that sleeve'll get finished today, but we'll see. It's an absolutely gorgeous spring day, and my daughters and Rick are calling for a walk, which seems like just exactly the way to spend my mother's day with the girls who make being a mother such a joy, and the husband who keeps me sane while doing it.

(P.S. Happy mother's day, mama -- I love you!)

A piece!

I have produced blog fodder, in the form of the back of a sweater. Go, me. I actually finished this on Tuesday night, but I've been busy since then, so this is the first chance I've gotten to pin the back out and see how it looks. Meanwhile, though, I cast on for the left front side, and am almost to the armhole bind off, so that's going very quickly.
I only lightly steam blocked it to relax it a bit before pinning it out. Once I have the whole thing put together, I'll steam block it a bit more rigorously. (You can see I'm using those lovely blocking boards; they make life so much easier!) I took it out to the front patio to get some fresh air. I think that the colors are showing up truer here than in my earlier pictures.
I adore the colors of this yarn. Chris truly outdid herself, truly; I think she must be a mind-reader, since I don't think I was very clear about what I was looking for, but she nailed it on the head anyway. And these subtle color shifts work so beautifully with Anne's pattern; look at the corrugation above the waist, it's so much fun to watch the pattern emerging as I knit. Mmm...
It's so tempting to just sit down and plug away at this instead of doing anything else, because I'm dying to wear it. Thank goodness the weather has warmed up a little these last couple of days, or I don't think I could resist.
The Douglas irises love the new warmth. So does Tilly.
I rather wish it weren't so gorgeous, as I'm trapped inside working on a paper. The good news is that I (finally!) feel like I'm getting to a break-through point, that place where I have some kind of story arc going, and I can start putting data and analyses and references in the places where they belong. Until I have that order set in my mind, everything feels like a jumbled mess, but now that it's there, I think I can start getting somewhere (because 20 pages of single-spaced notes just doesn't feel like anything somehow, until it has a sense of order).

On a completely different note, my knitting research project is going to get underway imminently; I'll have a lot more to say about it very soon. I have a small grant to pay for things like an online survey site subscription, my new Marantz digital recorder has arrived in the mail (dudes, this thing is so full of features it's scary; I don't come with this many features), and I have my Institutional Review Board's approval to work with Human Subjects (that would be you all). It's time to get this show on the road.

Weekends are for...

Running around like a chicken with its head cut off, apparently.

Because that's what we did this weekend. Which means that not a lot of knitting got done, although I am almost done with the back of Ondule; but pictures of the back of a sweater on the needles just look like pictures of the back of a sweater on the needles, and 10 inches of progress doesn't necessarily make for interesting photography -- at least, not in my hands.

However, some of the rest of the weekend certainly was good for pictures. Saturday was soccer and Older Daughter's school's open house. She played in the orchestra there (but all of my pictures are either videos, or have someone else's kid in them), and volunteered at her teacher's science booth showing off the solar cookers they made for a project recently, before we headed out to her soccer game where her team won. I should mention that this winning thing makes a really pleasant change from last fall, when her team played the entire first half of the season with no subs whatsoever, and often even one player down. What constantly amazed me about the whole experience was that the coaches of opposing teams didn't also play one girl down (remember, this is a rec league; if it was competitive, I'd expect no different, but we're -- supposedly -- all in this for the fun of it, right?), even when they were, oh, say, 8-0. Maybe it's just me, but that does seem weird. Older Daughter's coach this spring is exactly the kind of coach I wish we'd been playing against last fall; when we were one man up on Saturday, he took a kid off the field so we'd match the other team, because why not? It's rec soccer, and none of our parental egos are bound up in whether our kid's team beat the other kids' team's butt, right? (heh) The best bit is that when we're really ahead, the coach plays the kids in positions that aren't their usual spots, which gives them a chance to try out something new, and the other team a chance to maybe score a goal. They're all going to be much better players for the experience, I think, with a stronger understanding of how a team works together to cover the field. (I should mention that this is a co-ed team, which is also quite a learning experience for both the boys and the girls, who are remarkably evenly matched on the field.)

On Sunday, we headed for the local Renaissance Faire to meet some friends. The girls got dressed up and had a blast. They even got picked to go on stage during the two performances of A Fool and his Family. Older Daughter was picked for the first performance (Jack and the Beanstalk); she was The Cow.
(The cow hat is a dead giveaway.)

Younger Daughter got to be the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella.
You can see she's working pretty hard at Wickedness there.

To Younger Daughter's great joy, there was a man there with a (subspecies of, but don't ask me which) peregrine falcon, her all-time, very favorite in the whole world bird.
And they got to pet the Friesian horses; I can't tell you how absolutely stunning these horses are. Their manes are soft and silky and long, and the stallion (the one in this picture) stood 17 and a half hands high.
And they were even received by Queen Elizabeth I herself.
Older Daughter worried quite a bit about whether or not they should bring their newly-acquired (small wooden) swords with them. She eventually decided that it would be inappropriate to enter into the royal presence armed. It was just as well. The both said that the queen seemed "strict".
Heh.

Next time, I promise some pictures of Ondule, whether I feel like there's anything new to show for it or not. With luck, though, I'll finish the back tonight or tomorrow, and then I can block it so we can all see just how gorgeous this yarn really is.

Tap tap...

Is this thing working?

Right after the last round with technology (the score is now something like Technology: 357; me: 0), I got a call from one of our IITS guys, telling me that it's almost time for my biennial refresh. The one where I get a new computer. I'm betting this sounds like good news (and I felt a bit better about it after I convinced him that no, I did not want to go from my 15-inch MacBook Pro to a 13-inch MacBook, thankyouverymuch), but we all remember what happened during a simple system upgrade don't we? Can you imagine what's going to happen when they try to move everything to a whole new computer?

Chaos. Mayhem. Madness.

I'm trying not to think about it. I work for the state, after all. It could be years before anything comes to pass.

Meanwhile, spring has sprung.
Younger Daughter really likes picking flowers for us. Unfortunately, this occasionally leads to the total and complete decimation of whole beds of flowers, so we've had to point her in the direction of things like these lovely self-seeding and well-spread nasturtium (although shouldn't the plural be "nasturtia"?).

I think I can get the pictures of knitting that I wanted to show you last time to upload. Let's see.
That's the shell I'm working on -- essentially a complete reversal of the Slinky Ribs pattern, done in Louet linen. At the moment, though, it's been put on another needle and set aside so that I can work on this instead (how is it that I only have one size-three circular needle? how?).
That is the back of Anne's Ondule cardigan (imagine an accent over that e); I've knit up through the peplum and am almost done increasing again after the waist shaping. Then it's a straight shot to the armscye. And can I just tell you how much I am loving this yarn? This is Briar Rose Grandma's Blessing, and it's so soft and squishy it's a crime. Honestly, I keep making Rick squeeze it when I'm knitting in the evenings; he agrees that it's pretty decadent. Unfortunately, that means I'm torn between wanting to knit slowly so that the experience will last, and wanting to knit quickly so I can wear it. Life is so confusing sometimes.

I've also momentarily set aside the SeaSilk scarf. Not because it's not gorgeous and fun to knit (because it is; this yarn feels almost like suede -- it is, to borrow a word that Ellen used to so perfectly describe Maplewing, unctuous), but because I'm having an issue.
Aren't those colors beautiful? I'm using the Trinity stitch from Victorian Lace Today, which I think is beautifully textured and works really well with the color changes in this yarn; it looks rich and jewel-like. But that's not the problem.
The problem is that, for some reason, I'm doing something very wrong with the faggotting between the edging and the body. It's not doing what it's supposed to, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. So I'll fiddle with it until I get it right, and then rip this out and start over. But that will probably wait while I work on Ondule. This thing is addictive...
I think I'm going to need to pace myself.