Quantum Tea

I finally caved and got a Facebook account. Found a few people I know, a herd of people from church found me, looking for a few friends from school and university. A lot of the people I knew are only on Friends Reunited, I hadn't been there in ages but they've lifted some of the restrictions and it's free to message people now. It seemed like a daft business model to charge for that in the first place.

And I only signed up with Facebook because Hubby wanted points for the Petrolhead game!

Everyone reads Dilbert and Garfield. My favourite alternative comics are:

User Friendly
Tales of from the trenches of Columbia Internet. Also features a Dust Puppy, the Elder God Cthulu, and the battle between geeks and marketing.

xkcd
"A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." These are a few good samples: Google maps, Holy Ghost, Boomerang, and Cautionary.

It's been a while since I did one of these. September and March in 2007 were the last. Similar to phoeknits weekly thing but a lot less frequent:

Knitting
Eris is back in the lunchtime knitting slot, which is pretty much the only time I knit. I have one, maybe two, Christmas projects planned which will be started soon so they don't stress me out. Neither will be difficult or overly time consuming and I already have the yarn and patterns. Once all those are complete, I found my next shawl to knit, Sivia Harding's Waves in the Square. Fingering weight yarn, shaped to fit over the shoulders, not pointy, it's perfect. Also has an interesting beaded picot hem.

Spinning
I'm in trouble here. I have one bobbin with less than an ounce of Polwarth on, one bobbin with a similar amount of Cormo, and some pretty Gale's Art black BFL in Cherry Blossom arrived this week. I only have three bobbins and I need one free to navajo ply the Polwarth or Cormo, so I can't start anything else on the wheel unless I make a microskein and clear one bobbin. There's still grey alpaca on the Tudor Rose spindle, which is wonderful to spin.

Reading
Re-reading "Undestanding the Borderline mother" and "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince". Going to start adding re-reads to my Currently reading page.

Writing
Urban fairy story #2 is 2750 words and growing, the big confrontation is coming up. Monthly meetings with the post-NaNo group are a great impetus to get something written. Anything written. Hubby helped me come up with a good villain for my NaNoWriMo novel this year but it's going to need serious plot work to make a time travel story work, especially one told with a lot of flashbacks. Starting to get excited about NaNo.

Listening to:
Enigma - MCMXC AD (1990 in Roman numerals. Primary school had us use Roman numerals for everything for a week and long multiplication took forever. But I did learn the numbers.)
Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc
Loreena McKennitt - The Mummer's Dance
Fatboy Slim - Praise you

Watching
Witchblade the TV series. Season one was far better than season 2, but it's still a shame it got canned. Season 1 has several cityscape shots that show the Twin Towers in New York.

Yarn: Mama Blue Simple BFL in Beekeeper.
Pattern: My own. 12st easy toe from Knitty, panels of Diamond Rib from Sensational Knitted Socks, Sherman heel, rolled top.
Needles: US0 40in Addi circular, with US1 dpns for cast off.
Duration: 11th July to 11th August 2008.

These socks suffered several mishaps and false starts. The 8st easy toe was too pointy, a 16 st version was too wide. On sock #2 the heel was ripped out twice due to mishaps, and a glitch in the lace pattern required ripping just after the heel. But I love the semi-solid yarn colour and Diamond Rib makes a good accent panel. Used the cast off from my Seraphim shawl for the rolled top to make sure it would stretch enough, and it does. They look good, feel warm, and at nearly 10st/in, they should be fairly hard wearing.

They feel soft and warm, thinner than regular knitted socks because of the smaller needle and thin yarn. There is a good chunk of yarn leftover from the 418 yards in the skein. It was a little splitty, which caused me a couple of problems but I would forgive a lot for this colour and feel. Mama Blue has many other beautiful semi-solid colours, but her yarn store is picked clean within an hour of new stuff being posted so it's hard to get hold of. I would love to try her Sea Merino yarn, which is a blend of merino and seacell fibre (derived from seaweed).

Now, back to Eris...

My beloved husband wears a hat, a baseball cap that has seen better days. He loves that hat, and it gets comments because of the Linux penguin, Tux, on the front. I got it for him from ThinkGeek at least three years ago and I've been bugging him to find a new one.

Hubby is a creature of some consistency, to the point that when he pitched six old pairs of jeans, they all had identical holes in the left knee and right back pocket. When something wears out, he gets an exact replacement for it. Thus, the solution to the hat problem.

I got an identical hat and hid it. When he came home that night, I stole the old hat and swapped it for the new, saying nothing, which was very hard. When we headed out to watch a movie, Hubby got to the stair post, picked up the hat (which was much lighter in colour than the old one), and said "You newed my hat!" Technically, the only thing I took away was the dirt, everything else is the same...