wabisabi

FO: another sock

So, finally, another one:

Usual pattern out of my head, usual 2.0mm needles (dpns), Opal yarn from the stash.  This actually came out of a grab bag from the Tutto factory store.  I think it was 15 Euros for a whole whack of odd balls of Opal, and although some are smaller, I've already had two of the balls that were large enough to make two pairs of socks, this one included.  I love the pale blue, it reminds me of robin's eggs.

So that makes four on the sock-o-meter, and if I'm going to make it to thirteen before the end of the year, there had better be some serious sock knitting to come.  Alas, I've got too many other more interesting things on the go right now.

Speaking of which, sometime soon I'll get around to writing some notes on the Strawberry Charlotte, which was grand, if I do say so myself:

roll up

In the comments, Ted wondered if there were a link for the Mystery Stole 3 project.

Why, yes, yes there is-- on Melanie's Pink Lemon Twist blog.  Melanie, BTW, is the designer and organizer of the project, and there's a link to the yahoogroup for the MS3 on that post I've linked to.  Sign-ups end July 6th.  All the information for the project comes through the yahoogroup -- the files are posted there, and you can ask for help from the group.

I've just printed off the first Clue (and had my first surprise, because it wasn't quite what I was expecting, which I consider one of the main benefits of such an exercise), and I've got to get to the bead store to get some beads.  I can't do that until later today, alas.  I tried the bead store here in town, but they seem to be closing (insert weeping and gnashing of teeth), so I'm going to drop off the birthday charlotte at my sister's later and then pop down to the beadstore there to see if I can't find something appropriate to match my green Italian stash wool.

book early, book often

So, are you really thinking about coming to FibreFest North?

If you are, then you really need to think about calling the Waterview Resort and booking your room.  Now. The reason for this is that the resort also books rooms for people not attending FibreFest, and they need to know they're going to have the weekend booked by Someone.  "Someone" might turn out not to be a knitter.  "Someone" might book just ahead of you.  "Someone" might book the last room.

Besides, you really want to come, right?  You really want to make the first FibreFest North a great event by coming to knit, to share, to learn, to relax?

Now, I've just come home from Podcasters Across Borders -- okay, that was more of a conference, with organized sessions for learning, but it was also an opportunity to meet some folks I normally only know through their podcasts or the occasional email.  I came away energized, full of plans, excited.

I suspect FibreFest North is going to be like this, too.  More relaxed, more informal, but with the same sense of community and sharing and learning.  When I was a kid, we used to spend our summer vacation on Georgian Bay, and it's a really lovely area.  I'm hoping there'll be a marshmallow roast in this somewhere...

Plus!  Statue of Wiarton Willie!  Giant groundhog statue!

(For those who don't know, Wiarton Willie is the Canadian version of Punxatawney Phil..)

So, don't wait!  Call! Join in the fun!

Just do it now, okay?

P.S.  For those wondering if they should bring their spousal or pseudo-spousal unit -- by all means, do.  There are opportunities to do other things besides knitting (see the Waterview Resort site for more ideas).  The Other is coming, and he's rather nice, if I do say so myself.  Well, nice in an Engineer Gearhead Geek kind of way, but nice, you know? 

So go!  Book!

so just how is your day going?

Let me tell you about my afternoon.

I decided to drive out to one of the local farm stores -- pulled in the parking, and it was busy.  It's that time of year, local produce is finally here, and this farm produces some things themselves, and brings in stuff they don't produce from other local (or reasonably local -- the cherries that have just appeared come from the Niagara Region, not *too* far away) producers.

I walked in.  There was a sign up -- the debit machine was down. Sorry.

Sigh.  All that fabulous fresh stuff, and I had to leave, as I had five bucks in my wallet.  Not to mention the fact that I was planning on picking some things out for dinner tonight.  Not to mention the fact that I NEEDED strawberries in order to make the strawberry charlotte I'm planning for my mother's birthday dinner tomorrow.

As an aside -- this is now the fourth place I've been in my quest to bring together the required materials for the charlotte.  Now, I don't know if you've ever made charlotte, but it's essentially really easy (or at least I'm hoping it will be, as I'm flying by the seat of my recipe-less pants here).  There's a cake base, with a cream centre.  The cream is stabilized by gelatin, which you put in a fruit puree.  So you get a nice, mousse-y, fruity, creamy cake-type thing.

Okay.  Cream?  Easy.  Gelatin?  The same.

Instead of baking a sponge cake (since it's been miserably hot here), I decided to use savoyardi biscuits -- soft-ish cakey cookie type things, like a ladyfinger only a little crispier on the outside.  I'm planning to stand them up in a ring around the outside of the charlotte, and put some in the base, too.

So at the first store, they only have these Giant Savoyardi Biscuits, Gulliver-like in their proportions.  Savoyardi Biscuits a Brobdingnagian would love to have for tea.

And they had no strawberries.

Next store?  I find the appropriately sized Savoyardi Biscuits, but no strawberries.

Today at the farm store?  Lovely, luscious strawberries.  Debit machine down.

At which point I made my fifth stop in my quest for charlotte materials (and second stop in the quest for tonight's dinner), the local supermarket on the way back from the farm store.  They had almost local strawberries, not quite as luscious as those I'd reluctantly left behind, but all right.  They'll do in a puree.

I scrambled around for dinner fixings.

I managed to tune out the child throwing the Mother of All Tantrums because his mother wouldn't BUY HIM THE TOY HE WANTED.

I couldn't find the button for "cucumbers" on the self-check out.  I went through all the produce, before finally giving up and pressing the button to ask for help.  The nice cashier came over and went through all the produce buttons before finally finding out what the code for cucumbers was.

I left the supermarket, came home, and now I just want to lie down somewhere until it all passes.  Oh, well, and get the charlotte started.

It'll be a great birthday dessert if it works.  Stay tuned.  I may rival the tot for the Mother of All Tantrums if it doesn't.

roll up for the mystery tour

So, one of the things I've been doing lately is trying to challenge myself to try out some things I've never done before, or have been hesitant about doing.

The first?  The Mystery Stole knit-along.  I've done the swatch:

The yarn is something I bought in Italy.  I had a note with more information about it at one point, but that seems to have disappeared, but it's wool, I remember that much.  It came from the back of a little shop in Turin where, the day I went anyway, it was packed with Italian knitters scrambling to get the good deals.

This was a good deal.  And at the time (seven years ago now -- ack!), I actually liked the colour, which is a teal green.  I'm less enamoured of it now, which is why it's been aging gracelessly in the stash.

But I'm still determined to work heavily from my stash for the next while, so when I decided to sign up for the Mystery Stole project, I figured I should use some of this for it.  Yes, I know, the Highly Suggested Colours were white/cream or black (or variations on those shades), but what I have is green, so green it is. 

This is actually Mach II of the swatch -- the first one was knit on a slightly smaller needle, and it just felt too tight to me.  I trusted my instinct and just ripped it out rather than finishing it, and I like this second one better.  The yarn is slightly finer than the Zephyr suggested, but that's okay.  The point is to try something different and see what happens.

The other thing I did was sign up for Facebook.  I'd been resisting this, I think mainly because I had these visions of being found by someone I went to highschool with, and I have absolutely no desire to revisit the past.  But someone challenged me to just try it out, and leave if I wasn't happy, so I got thinking, well, what have I got to lose.

The final push came, though, when Amy set up a Facebook group for a Yarn Roundtable for Knitty.  I'm not sure if I can make it out, but I really would like to, and I figured the only way to find out more would be to take the plunge, sign up for Facebook, and join the group.

I've joined a couple of other groups as well, fan club groups for a couple of favourite podcasts.  It's too early to judge, but some of the functions remind me a little of yahoogroups, so I'll see how it goes.

Fingers crossed that there are no blasts from the past.

i'm in...

...are you?

Ted (aka Knitterguy) has decided to organize a fibre retreat for the end of September -- FibreFest North he's calling it, and it sounds like the perfect opportunity to spend a weekend involved in relaxation and informal learning.  The Other and I have decided that this is going to be our vacation this year -- we can't afford to take time other than on a weekend, and this sounds like something we can afford to splurge a little on.  Rumour has it that the Waterview Resort works hard to make the experience there a great one, and I, for one, am looking forward to an opportunity to just chill out for a weekend and spend some time with some good people.

Okay, okay, I'm just geeky enough that I'm also really excited about stopping to see the statue of Wiarton Willie on the way there.

So go, read about the event, sign up, come, have fun.  See a giant groundhog, even.  Life is sweet, eh?

Mind the gapless

So, I decided to plug in my iPod Nano this morning and take off stuff I was done with and transfer some podcasts I'd grabbed (thanks to the hotel's fast internet).  All of a sudden, everything was grinding to a halt, which, thanks to The Other's tutelage, I now understand as a sign that Something Is Going On in the Background that is Making the Computer Generally Unhappy. 

Except, no matter what I did, I couldn't transfer my pocasts to the Nano, and even had a really hard time getting the Nano ejected so I could close iTunes and start over.

However, I happened to notice a message in the window at the top:  Determining Gapless Playback Information.  So I got everything shut down, and went out to do some searching on the 'net.

I found some useful info on this blog, which I tried, and which worked just long enough for me to transfer my podcasts.  At which point, it started all over again, much like happened to some of the commenters on the blog post.

It has never done this before.  I have no idea why it's trying to do this now, but I think, though I'm quite pleased that I tried to solve the problem myself, that it is now Officially Beyond Me, and I shall have to wait for The Other to come home to figure out if there's something else we can do to Stop The Gapless Madness.

In other news, there was apparently something making the rounds at PAB this weekend, and I didn't think too much about it until last night.  I'd had kind of a funny headache and didn't feel quite one hundred percent earlier in the day, but I had assumed it was because I was absolutely exhausted from the weekend.  But no.  I've come down with it, too, and although I feel better this morning than I did last night, I still feel rather crap-tastic.  So more on PAB when I can do it justice.

PAB2007: Saturday Report

Did you ever have one of those moments in life when you realize that you just may be at a turning point?  That's how I've felt the last two days, attending PAB 2007.

I will confess that there's a part of me that feels a little bit like a fraud, like I don't belong here with all of these incredibly smart, talented, creative, generous people.  They are involved in a wired world in a way that is almost completely beyond my comprehension.  I don't Twitter.  I don't do Facebook (frankly, it creeps me out a little). 

But let me state what an absolute pleasure it has been to meet, firstly, some of the folks whose podcasts I listen to on a regular basis.  They are even nicer in person than they seemed on their 'casts or in emails, something I didn't think could be possible.  It was interesting to note that almost none of them corresponded to any idea of how I thought they looked, of the image I'd created of them listening to their voices.  I had some idea of what to expect when I met Bruce Murray (whose photo is on his show page), and I had some inkling of what Sage Tyrtle of Quirky Nomads would be like.  But everyone else -- nope.  Either they were taller or thinner than I'd expected, or younger (or occasionally older) than I'd imagined. 

I mention this only because it's fascinating to me, the conceptions we form about others and their appearance based only on their voices.  There's probably some profound sociological theory to be expounded on there, but it's beyond me.

But I've had a blast talking to people about my podcast, and other ideas I have, and getting feedback and ideas of how to go about achieving what I'd like to in the future.  And I've been blown away by the talent and generosity of the folks who presented at PAB, who weren't paid to do this, but shared their expertise and knowledge and ideas with us all.

I hope to talk more about the sessions that particularly inspired me, but I think I'll wait for that until the recordings are put up on the Canadian Podcast Buffet show site.  But what I'm coming away with this weekend, in addition to ideas and inspiration and much food for thought, is this overwhelming and overarching sense of community.  There are folks here with whom, on some levels, I have very little in common -- yet we are finding common ground by sharing our experiences of what is, in my mind, a very powerful form of storytelling -- the podcast.  I've met some folks whose podcasts I'd heard of, but hadn't had a chance to download yet, and went right back to the hotel room and fired up the computer (the joys of fast internet!) and subscribed right then and there.   There were folks whose podcasts I wasn't familiar with, and I went looking for them, too. 

Frankly, I don't think I'll have enough hours in the day for all this inspiration, but I'm so grateful it's out there and being shared.

people gotta move

Now, for once, the Vatican comes out with something that makes sense to me:  the "Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road", touted as a kind of ten commandments  of driving.

I don't want to write too much about this, as I think it's actually more of a perfect topic for the household gear head, but I have to say that I really love this idea.  Think about it -- the Vatican wants to deal with road rage.  I'm all for someone, anyone, dealing with road rage.

I will point out, though, that I'm already a practitioner of some of the guidelines outlined in the document.  I frequently, for example, pray in the car.

Okay, it's usually along the lines of "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and all the saints and angels, preserve me and save me from being creamed by one of these crazy nutbar drivers, wouldja?"

Sign of the cross optional.

(As a complete aside, when I entered "Pontifical Council for Migrants and Itinerant People" in google, it asked me, perchance, if I didn't really want "Pontifical Council for Migrants and Ignorant People".)

(If you're curious, you may read the whole document here.  I will say that, though I've read enough Vatican documents to last me at least two lifetimes, I do think I'd like to take some time to think this one over a little more carefully.  Hopefully The Other will, too, I'm honestly curious to know what his take on it will be.   It'll have to wait, though, as there are other, more pressing items at hand.)

it never rains, but...

There's a problem in my kitchen.

(I will not panic.  I will not panic.)

We noticed during the last big thunderstorm that we had a wee bit of flooding on the counter, and figured it was the siding needing some new caulking, and that the rain normally isn't that heavy nor does it usually beat up against that side of the house.

We had another big thunderstorm roll through today, at which point I found not only a puddle of water on the countertop, but also in the cupboard just above.

And now that I've had a really good think about it, I realize that the patching inside the cupboard is probably not where the previous owners removed old cupboards to put the current set in. No, it would seem to have been some kind of patching job probably related to the tendency for the flood to appear during a thunderstorm.  On top of it, the patches seem to be growing mould, and all of this would normally throw me into extreme panic mode, but I've been trying very hard to adopt a postive approach to things lately, based on the reasoning that negative thoughts attract negative results, and positive thoughts positive ones.

(Everything will be all right.  The Universe will provide.  Dammit.)

In other news, I've discovered that one of my very favourite podcasters, Bruce Murray, has started a new one, The Running Shoe  Well, not exactly.  It's called a "talkcast", as the idea is to do it live every Thursday evening, invite folks to call in and participate, and just generally be immediately interactive.

But the talkcasts are recorded, and made available for download just like any other podcast.  The sound is a little funky, because of the technological limits of such an endeavor (I assume, anyway) -- it's a bit more like late-night call-in AM radio sound, for those of us old enough to remember that.

I find it highly amusing that I've discovered this just at the moment when I'm trying to decide whether to remove "run the Paris marathon" from my list of things to do in my life.  I'm not sure my body is up to running to the end of the street, never mind a marathon.  The irony is that I used to be a runner -- dedicated, any weather, 10K races, the whole schmatta.  I gave it up when I started injuring my hip every time I ran, and when my knees started bothering me.

I can't help wondering, though, if I'm just finding excuses.  I don't know.  Running is a lifestyle, and I'm not sure if that's me at this point in my life.  I kind of like staying inside the Y and using a piece of equipment, and I know what Bruce would say:  "You don't run races on the treadmill."  (Or, in my case, the cross-trainer...) 

But it's funny that just as I'm thinking about whether I should take the plunge again and try it out, that the Universe hands me my very own personal coach via the internet.  Somehow it seems like a bit of a sign.

Now, if the Universe would just hand me the perfect contractor to fix the leak in my kitchen, life would be perfect, you know?

(Well, close.)