ProseKnitic – of Words und Wolle

I unearthed a couple more UFOs. The problem with stripey type yarns is that it takes a lot of effort to make the sides identical. These aren’t.

Next Step:

Twinings Shawl

Two balls of Opal and more than a couple of hours – one more UFO completed (well, not blocked) 50″ x 14.” Knit on a 4.00 Kollage square needle.

And this is what is left -

which is not bad considering that it is a 16 row pattern which can only be stopped at row 8 and 16.

And my WIP/UFO pile has decreased by three.

Left on the needles – my Faery Ring, Pagode, Katherine, Stillwater, Textured Sleeveless Pullover, and an ancient Norwegian Roses Vest. Since I want to join Jo and Dicksie in knitting Knitting Lavold’s Brage  starting 15 Sept I plan on having at least two completed (Faery Ring and the Sleeveless Pullover) if not three to decrease my guilt.

Podcasts

Catching up on Wait, Wait …. don’t tell me!

Most of the time, you hear me complain about journeys; this time it went rather smoothly.

The Mole came out of his cave to give me a hug goodbye, it was a nice walk to the train station. Arriving early enough, I caught the S2 promptly and an earlier ICE at Mannheim. There was  a seat on the train just waiting for me and a stop at the USO netted me a book to read on the train. Only three of the 20 books I had dropped off last time were still on the shelf. Unfortunately, few people, if any, seem to bother to go to Bookcrossing and make journal entries.

Security said nothing about all my knitting needles, extra cables or computer equipment in my carry-on at either the airport location or the second screening for the UK flights. The flight was fine, not full. The long term parking Custom Service issued me a new ticket when I could not find mine (pre-paying parking at Heathrow is the only way to go) and there were no traffic jams on the way home.

Ms Soprano had cleaned up the kitchen, including the dishes and recycling before leaving (she flew back to the US last Friday) and even left me a comment so I knew where to find one of the slithering tape measures. The Avatars show up in my dashboard, but not, apparently, where you can see them complete with new hair cut and color.

Women’s Textured Vest

This is the Fall KAL for one of the Ravelry Vest groups – Cascade’s Greenland Sleeveless Textured Pullover which is even available as a free download linked from the above page.

The actual color is dark orange. It is not for me – which should not be a surprise. The yarn is Smart from Sandnes, the needles are 4.00 and I am past the split for the front and back. Suddenly deciding that it would be smarter to knit both the front and back at the same time, I added on the second ball and will move on to three tomorrow so that both fronts are the same as well.

Audio

Finished Back on Blossom Street and moved on to Press Enter by John Varley (cheep download a number of weeks back from iTunes).

Can you think of a more lovely way to spend an afternoon?

There is Geollyn who braved the stares from other men walking by. There is Lia, Erica of the wonderful shawl, Julie (who you would never believe has been knitting for only three weeks), Donna (from Adelaide), Veronika (Bensheim -> Wales really soon now), Diana (who was kind enough to take a whole lot of yarn off my hands for charity knitting), and Cornelia – working on a mystery shawl. Of course, I could well have missed someone, and the names are not in the order of seating….

Café Maximo is a lovely place to sit outside in sun for most of the afternoon. What started as a 1400-1600 meet-up once a month last year or the year before is evolving into a weekly meet-up of whomever can make it, lasting how long people can stay.

I managed to pass along a good size bag and a half of yarn odds and ends to new homes, much of it headed to charity knitting, completed 10 cm more on the vest, devoured both nachos and some good Käseküchen, and managed to get home while it was still light.

at all: not what so ever about what we might do with the Siebenschläafer. We have had the little beasties in the wall and between the attic floor and our ceiling for several years now.

They are moderately destructive, but don’t really have a fondness for wires. They have, on occasion tried to chew their way out of the built in cabinets. It is also known that they have an unerring ability to find their way back from getting trapped and moved (record so far is about 10km when crossing a major river is not involved). From my point of view, humane means that I survive the enterprise, not them.

We have tried trapping, poison and blocking every single last place where they could possibly manage to sneak in.

No luck. They may be tiny, but seem to be mighty.

on the road

The Mole got up this morning and came along to the testing day of ATLS. All moulaged, he served as one of the mock patients for the hands on portion of the test, talked to several of the docs and seemed to have a good time.

After several stops and hunting around, we managed to replace his old MacBookPro. With an operating system that refused to upgrade, 80G hard drive and continual freezing, I wanted him able to return to school on the 9th with the ability to handle anything his last year of A levels tosses at him.

and home

30 years of marriage, about 18 months of again running two households and the DH seems to have forgotten every thing about toilet seats.

What is it with guys? OTOH, I am not doing the cleaning…..

They’re back. Busy little creatures running up and down in our house walls. Activity increasing as the sun goes down, they dance in the ceiling, cavort in the walls, damage wires and otherwise keep me awake at night.

Knitting is much better -

started yesterday and messed up this morning with me crossing some of the cables in the wrong direction. The two affected rows (why do I never find the error immediately?) have been ripped and  I am over half way done with the repair row using a tiny circular as my cable needle. I do know how to cable without a needle, it is a good suggestion for when none seems to be found, but I find that my gauge is more consistent when I use one.

which reminds me – it isn’t often that I find someone who both reads as much as I and seems to have similar reactions to books. I find Melinda’s book reviews well written and extremely useful.

Books

I started the new J A Jance before I left home, finished #3 of the Lt Leary series in audio on the plane to Germany, started Mean Streets - anthology yesterday and am behind on most of my podcast list.

Having read a post by Mary Scott Huff that she wrote last winter, I was able to maintain my cool when transitioning from ribbing to the pattern portion of a vest. A cabled vest, and me on a plane without a cable needle.

One of the smaller size KP harmony end that was just swapped off the cable worked as a substitute and I even still had both loose needles at the end of the flight.

Now, the previous evening I had dug change out of the bed (€, $, Sterling and a couple of Florints), tracked down needles hiding under the bed, collected yarn from a bin upstairs, and rescued pouches of stitch markers from two suitcases. Remaining on the must find list – after I had located one of the must be dozens of needle size gauges that I own – was a tape measure.

I think they are alive; capable of slithering off on their bellies to secret themselves in dark warm places. I buy tape measures frequently, but never seem to be able to locate a single one.

Unless, of course, I am have just returned from acquiring a tape measure. It is at that point that I will find a tangled nest of them in a knitting bag that I could swear was empty just hours prior.

I suppose I could solve the problem if I went through the whole house (which house? UK? DE? ) and collected all my knitting stuff into one location and spent the required time to sort things out. Stocked project bags with the required tools and placed all the extra in my nice wooded Lebküchen box.

Oh, wait. I did that once, right before I moved so that everything was organized. That was Jan 2008. I wasn’t two weeks on the ground in the UK and didn’t have a tape measure in sight.

Two of them that I located last night were still in their original packaging. I have not a clue what one was doing in the kitchen service manual drawer or why the other was hanging out with candles in the dining room. But certainly, they did not fight me when I placed them in my project bag.

I did make a significant mistake: I unpackaged them. Tonight I find that both had vanished, slithering out of sight sometime in the last 24 hours when I was not looking. I hope they are having a good time, perhaps exploring a Lufthansa flight back and forth over the Channel.

A married couple in their early 60′s was celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary in a quiet, romantic little restaurant.

Suddenly, a tiny yet beautiful fairy appeared on their table. She said, ‘For being such an exemplary married couple and for being loving to each other for all this time, I will grant you each a wish.’

The wife answered, ‘Oh, I want to travel around the world with my darling husband.’ The fairy waved her magic wand and – poof! – two tickets for the Queen Mary II appeared in her hands.

The husband thought for a moment: ‘Well, this is all very romantic, but an opportunity like this will never come again. I’m sorry my love, but my wish is to have a wife 30 years younger than me.’

The wife, and the fairy were deeply disappointed, but a wish is a wish. So the fairy waved her magic wand and poof!…

The husband became 92 years old.

The moral of this story: Men who are ungrateful morons should remember fairies are female….

– - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - –
Packing is such not fun. Flight tomorrow for Germany.

Don’t ever stop knitting in the middle of a row of lace. Unless that row happens to be the one with the life line – you just might be in for a world of pain. I looked at that UFO which has been sitting on the needles for several months now. I could not tell where I was in the pattern – the number of stitches in the row gave me a couple of possibilites.

The end result was that I decided to do this -

It was such fun that I decided to be honest about the following -

into

and this

back into a

All of this means I really need to decide about

and

Thanks so much for the interest, condolences, and comments on the house. We have backed off for the moment on house hunting.

Better we should keep the money in the bank, investments and current property.

Meanwhile – Ms Soprano has been entertaining herself

Rather than give in to temptation, I pulled out one of my stagnant projects. The first sleeve is now finished.

Since garter stitch is great video watching knitting, I kept on going and completed almost two repeats of the pattern on the second sleeve.

Why was I watching video’s?

The Croughton Library has the new Dr Who series on the shelf……

Neither the DH or I are sure if we are disappointed or relieved. We both loved the house and, believe it or not, had already had a two year rental contract offer.

But someone outbid us for the house. By a lot (well, I consider $100,000 at lot) which put him well over asking price and cash at that. Must really need that particular house. I shudder to think what it is going to do for house pricing in the area.

On a better note -

my drive to work this morning was delayed. After five minutes of watching them wander back and forth in the road I finally got out and snapped the picture. Since that had no effect I swallowed my pride and went after the trio of pirates yelling and waving my arms.

They finally conceded me the right of way.

This has been one of the roughest time zone wipe outs for me yet.

I don’t think it was the long flight, broken by a plane change in Minneapolis (long enough to buy another thermos mug from Caribou Coffee and not much else), or waiting for our ride at Heathrow Terminal 4.

Never mind that the plane was full and I hardly slept or that I haven’t slept regularly since getting home. Managed to make a dental trip for Ms Soprano on Tues without running off the road (close but made it) and got to work although I am not sure that I really accomplished much of anything.

It must be the house.

You see, one of the things we were doing in San Francisco was house pricing. Not intending to buy, mind you, just looking. Unfortunately we found what just might be the perfect house for DH. I like the house alot, even though it is in the East Bay and want to be in the city.

It is just that house prices are so horrible in California. Our first three houses (ok, Minnesota but still) were well under 6 six figures. DC was more expensive, enough so that I was willing to freak out on a house costing double what our last house had cost. We sold our last stateside house in 1997 (ouch, 11 years ago) and have owned in Heidelberg since 2001.

The good thing is that this house is less expensive than the house we now have (currency changes and inflation have worked in our favor) but still. It means that if our offer is accepted we won’t have a lot of cash for the next year or so and will have to find a one year tenant so as to avoid any unpleasantness at removing a renter.

I will know tomorrow. Meanwhile, knitting has given way to mindless computer games in an effort to zone out and not panic.

She arrived while I was on vacation. I could call her Victoria, or come up with a better name. Weighing in at slightly more than 3kg, she is lighter than my laptop…..

Dandelion Wine – A book by Ray Bradbury, a beverage, and a Canadian Group from many years ago that has a wonderful album titled Circles in the Grain (music sample here).

I am originally from the Midwest, crop circles mean one thing. Flying over large areas of the US – it means something else.

showing that there is life and future after passing over the majesty of the Rockies

and on into the sunset

toward my current home.

There is a lovely small yarn store on Solarno in Berkeley called Stash. Carries all sorts of essentials, like Cascade and Harrisville. The people are wonderfully friendly and the sit and knit area is really comfortable.

Article Practical in Oakland has lace yarns, choices and choices. It also has more pretties. Not the basics. I think the two store inadvertently complement each other well.

I will not talk of spending hours in Bead stores nor Jo-Anns Fabrics with an old army friend.

Other than that, I am at my same two knitting projects, Ms Maus is not feeling well, the suitcases are packed and I am for bed.

Floor to Ceiling and now filling two walls,

each plaque lists the name, rank and date of death of an OIF/OEF casualty. Top to bottom moving right across the wall, day after day, column after colum the dead are recorded, remembered.

Not just the Marines, but Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard.

The walls were full as of months ago and I am not sure where the Association will expend next. The dead are still marching, adding up the sorrow of our country. One can only pray for decreasing numbers and an end to the rapid accumulation of sorrow.

Ms Maus, it seems, likes butterflies.

I am worried about the sugar content.

In any case, I will not show you the results of the Bead Store raid. Nor the wanderings through other parts of town.

I will just leave you with the impression that no one was lacking in food, toys or books.

Right on Sutter Street in downtown San Francisco has the most marvelous library. Complete with shelves of books, high arched windows, display cases, old globes, and the most comfortable chairs in which to sit and knit.

Cell phones are not allowed. It was so nice to get away from the technology for a while.

Concourse A simply is not that bad.

I am keeping a positive spin on my emotions. Since we paid to log in from Ms Sopranos computer, I still haven’t uploaded everything from Anticipation (tomorrow – I promise).

Meanwhile – NWA and Detroit

The long story – the weather was not as good as it could have been leaving Montreal.

The flight path given to the pilot was about 20% longer than expected. Received, of course, after we had pulled back from the gate. Because it is Canada and fuel is more
expensive, he did not have enough fuel on board to make the flight.

End result is that we had to taxi back to the gate and refuel which accomplished a 90 minute delay in departure. Arriving in Detroit 5 minutes after our connecting flight was scheduled to leave, we high tailed it over to the gate.

Empty. Completely empty. we walked a bit farther then headed back toward the center.

This time spot a woman standing at the gate; she had just locked the plane door so could not admit us to the flight. The very full flight. The one on which our three seats were the only vacant places in the plane.

When we had blasted past the gate, she had been down the jetway tagging plane side check ins.

It is now past noon, there are no connecting flights available and the next two direct flights are full. Rebooked to Delta, or perhaps it is NWA, I can’t tell and don’t care.

We might standby, but have guaranteed seats on the 1935 flight, first class seats. It is cattle car for any of the other options, most of which would involve several plane changes. The girls have voted to wander the airport and fly first class.

go figure.

Better to arrive late than to be stranded in (pick one)
1) Memphis
2) Atlanta
3) MPLS
4) ????

Sunday night is the traditional Hugo Awards night.

This year I really thought about it, then didn’t go. Yesterday and today I spent running various Kaffee Klatsches in rooms just about as far from the sign up table as it was possible to get. In rooms where there was no coffee. Facing crowds of people who kept giving me this blank look when I asked if they were signed up.

I am not stupid, I was sitting there yesterday, I know that I told them when and how to sign up. Sheesh! I am sure that it would occur to most people that many authors are popular. Popular enough that lots want to sit down and chat. That is why we run sign-ups and only let the first 10 on the list into the room.

Anyway, being the door dragon lets me see a lot of different authors without being in the way. I do not presume personal relationships with authors because I read their works or have met them before.

If you have not heard of Pat Cadigan (a Cyberpunk original), she is a lovely person. I had a whole long list of others that I was going to reference, but just run out of energy. Much better to have the note up than not.

One must maintain a sense of humor.

May I put in a plug for Neil Gaiman? Not only is he a fantastic writer but he is a sterling human being. The official Guest of Honor for this convention, he signed on long ago. He credits his minder (and she is wonderful) but it takes a mensch to faultlessly make all panels, signings, and presentations even when exhausted. He even took time one evening to have sushi with the teens. (yes, Ms Maus was there and thrilled). Believe me when I note that several of the well less important authors refuse to have anything to do with those under age.

In contrast, the Master of Ceremonies – Julie Czerneda – managed to cancel on everything except for her performance at the Masquerade. I am afraid I missed the name of the gentleman who provided the French half of the announcement for which I am truly sorry. He was lovely and extremely funny.

If you want photos from the Masquerade – this is the link to the low resolution version and has some great pictures.

AKA Ravelers Unite

and of course, I misplaced the list of who was present. Functioning on little to no sleep.

But see, I really do leave the registration desk every once in a while.

The day went by like a blur. Spent almost the whole thing working registration. This is just the short break before the parties.

What parties? Those that start somewhere after 2100 and end by dawn at any World Con. I like the arches and had not even take the camera with me today.

The convention center is a multicolor riot of color just a few blocks from our hotel.

Registration, where I spent most of the day along with the two girls hit periods of quiet. Final numbers for the Con should be around 5,000 with most expected to check in tomorrow and Friday.

As it turned out, the reg system was the same as we used at LACON, so the girls went right to work.

with the two of them probably helping more people than most of the other stations combined. Could also be their smiles and the fact that they are not old…..

Other than the Reno 2011 bid party, there wasn’t much of anything scheduled for this evening. I just headed back to the hotel, knit for a short while and went to sleep early feeling rather righteous from having spent 40 minutes on the treadmill this morning.

Audio

Lt Leary series – David Drake – Book 3. Valor’s Trial – Tany Huff….

home -> airport. Turns out KLM uses Terminal 4 which I would not have known had our cab driver not insisted on dropping us off in the correct place. Terminal is under construction – enough said right there….

Heathrow -> Schipol. Schipol -> Montréal. Coach bus to nearby hotel. Hike down the street.

Tired (my body just knew it was 2300…)

But I like the look of Stillwater -

even if I am not doing it in one of the original color schemes with three bijillion ends to weave in.

After spending the last two hours hunting for an envelop I was about ready to slit my wrists. Said envelop had a number of 10L sterling notes in it. Money that I planned on using in the morning to pay the cab driver. With three of us needing to get to the airport at the height of train commuter traffic, it seemed more sensible to get a nice comfortable ride to Heathrow.

Of course, as part of my attempt to be frugal we have a bit of an interesting route. Taking KLM, we change planes at Schipol en route to Montréal. Which takes me right back to packing, insanity and needing to find my money to avoid the otherwise inevitable trip to a cash point.

There was at least something positive to come out of my panic. The clothes cupboard is now meticulously sorted and organized. I have pulled out a variety of garments to pack and have only handknit socks to chose. It made me feel good, but didn’t do anything for the economics of the situation.

Giving up, I slumped onto the corner of my bed.

Crackle?

Lifting up a corner of the large comforter than has been draped across the bed since DH left, I noted the edge of some paper. Envelop as a matter of fact. Money, UK money as a matter of fact. I have no memory of dropping it on the bed the last time I need to get some cash. In fact, I have the distinct memory of holding it in my right hand, pushing some shirts out of the way with my left and burying it under the winter sweaters. The memory is almost tactile in its clearness.

Losing my mind or getting confused? Probably no matter, the girls think I am ancient anyway.

I decided to just set Katherine aside for the moment. I don’t have the energy to frog, and I want to have the graphs redone for a cardigan before I do. But frog will happen unless one of the girls claims it as it is not making me happy. Appreciate all the suggestions and support. The reds will be a good contrast. Right now I have only 75 gm. Excuse to go shopping.

Ms Maus has been spending the weekend vegging out on downloaded TV shows. She is my Bones addict.

I spent the day loading MP3 audio books into iTunes to transfer to my iPod. I wanted a lot of choice for the upcoming trip. Nothing like deciding you don’t like a story but not having any alternative.