Another Clapotis on the Needles

I'm on the foot of another pair of socks, and I've given up and started another Clapotis. I have yarn that doesn't want to be anything else. It's quite irritating, actually. I'll swatch a yarn or knit something with it and not quite have the right amount of yarn and I'll throw up my hands and realize that the yarn just wants to be a Clapotis. Good grief. What did yarn do with itself before the Clapotis?

In other news, sometimes you juts gotta say HUH???? Case in point. If I say the name AOL to you, do you not immediately wonder how many "install AOL now with this free CD!" offers you received in the mail over the years? You do know that the software AOL uses includes an embedded version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer software, right? So, I wonder, is it just slightly possible that AOL might have been able to avoid this? Perhaps they could've shipped their own browser? Maybe?

And finally, the article I'm about to link to is not funny. But I dare you to read this headline and not snicker. I do hope everybody's ok.

This May Be a Bit Heavy

I generally avoid saying anything on this blog about politics or religion. I would argue that both topics are difficult to do well, which is why there is so much spittle in the public conversation surrounding both.

But occasionally I get fooled into thinking perhaps, if I could invite a few people into my world, I might find that there are more people like myself than I realize.

Warning: If you get what I'm getting at, you will always be able to find an uncomfortable place in yourself after this. This looks like a religious question, but it's also about the famous "Human Condition" and the relationship between the self and the other. I'm not proud of the number of years it took me to figure this out for myself nor of the fact that I still catch myself behaving exactly the opposite of what I believe is right.

What is the difference between Righteousness and Self-Righteousness?

(Edited 1/1/08. Video had been removed, so I removed the link to it, since it was really ugly and cutting into my sidebar.)

Whine, Whine, Whine

What a bizarre week. And it's not even over yet.

First, a very nice co-worker gave me a magnetized pad of paper. She put it on my laptop, which decided to forget how to boot immediately after.

I was able to switch my hard drives into another laptop chassis and I'm doing fine now. I was very fortunate that the magnet didn't affect my hard drive. One of our care managers accidentally erased his hard drive with a pacemaker testing device earlier this year. "Operating System Not Found" is not an error message I have reported to me very often. I was very happy that it didn't happen to me.

But the funniest/most irritating thing that happened all week was my cookies got stolen. I brought them in to share at our annual buffet, and the leftovers, which were about half the cookies I brought, left the building with a member of our cleaning crew.

I made more cookies tonight. Tomorrow I'll save half of them for a cookie swap and let everyone else enjoy them.

Still, I'm having trouble making up my mind, am I angry or have I just received a really big compliment? Those cookies were not the only food left in the kitchen. They weren't even the only cookies there.

Actually, I can't help laughing a bit. They were oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I wonder if he'll eat too many at once. Prevent colon cancer - steal these cookies!

Really great news - I got a Barnes and Noble gift certificate from my Secret Santa. It turns out you can use a gift certificate to pay for anything on the B&N site - including used books for sale from third-parties. That was why I wanted a gift certificate - I can get more books for my buck if I buy used, but nobody's comfortable giving used books. So this was perfect. Happy me!

Knitting news is sparse. I owe this blog a picture of a pair of finished socks; I figured out that I was sewing up my sweater in the wrong order; and I'm in the middle of yet another pair of socks.

'till next time....

I Suppose I Should Admit I'm Alive

Actually, I'm alive and doing quite ok. I just have no pictures and my knitting has become very back-burner.

I just read Hamlet for class. Now perhaps I'll understand my ex-husband's beloved movie, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I find myself compelled to find out.

Then there's the desire to read more of the author I just heard a reading from last night, Miguel Piñero.

I don't think I mentioned that I found the rest of the sweater that I blocked. The story is that I had started a skirt a couple of years ago, and decided, at the point when I attempted to give it a waistband, that it was both too bulky and too revealing. In short, it was a bologna-casing and greatly enhanced curves I didn't realize I had. I ripped it and knit the yarn into a sweater, blocked half the pieces, put them in a safe place and blocked the rest of the pieces. I was then stuck, because I had mis-placed the first half of the sweater. But I've found the pieces and I've got both side-seams and one shoulder-seam done.

Now I have to go do secret-santa and potluck shopping. We expect to be snowed in tomorrow. Maybe I'll take some pictures and brag about my Tofutsies socks then. After five false starts, the socks came out beautifully. I haven't had so much trouble with a pair of socks since my first pair. Non-wool socks are less forgiving of gauge approximations.