Sweater Update

A,
We finished Tucson's half marathon yesterday! My time was only seconds over two hours, and if I hadn't needed to stop midway for a bathroom break, I would have actually been under the two hour mark. James and I both finished at about the same time, which was waaay faster than I thought we would do. I think a combination of race-day excitement plus the fact that it was 95% downhill led to a fast race. The downhill bit led to some soreness too. As soon as the race was over and I slowed to a walk, I realized I was unable to walk properly. Right now I'm feeling a bit like an invalid (a fierce invalid), and James is making me breakfast, so I thought I would blog.

Remember the sweater that I am making? I am so excited about it. I totally scratched the original pattern and am coming up with something completely different. I was sitting in class the other day and the girl in front of me had a sweater on that was short-sleeved, v-necked, and had a horizontal lace panel across the back shoulders. I decided I loved the way the sweater looked, but I am making a few changes. Mostly, my ideas will make the sweater less complicated to construct, but I am still planning to keep the idea of a lace portion on the back of the sweater. We'll see how it goes. I'm not there yet, but almost. Here is the sweater so far:


I'm working on a few ideas for the lace part. This is one of the ideas. Unfortunately, the picture is very shadow-y, so you can't see the lace as well as I would have liked.


I haven't worked on much else knitting-wise since I last posted. But I'll keep you updated. I am looking forward to Christmas!

K

PS. What have you been working on lately? How is your owl sweater? I would love to see some of your recent knitting creations. They are always beautiful.

PPS. Merry Christmas!

Black Friday

A,
I tried black Friday shopping for the first time today. I took about two steps into Walmart and then turned around and left. I forgot I don't like holiday shoppers.

The mall, however, was empty. I was surprised by this, but after some consideration, I surmised that our town's entire population must be at Walmart today, leaving the mall essentially free from shoppers. I bought a pair of shoes.

I don't usually shop at our mall, because it has very few stores in it that you would recognize, and mostly it's full of poor-fitting teenage fashions. The last time I was at the mall, I was trying to find a pair of jeans. I think I stopped at every single store that sold jeans (we have a small mall), and ended up leaving empty-handed. It occurred to me later that every pair of jeans I tried on were not really jeans. They were stretch jeans, which in my opinion are not really jeans at all.

One store I stopped at today was full of wild sweaters with fascinating shapes and cables. I spent some time looking at them and wondering about their construction. What interested me about this store is that it was full of synthetic, plastick-y fabrics (which, whatever. That's fine, I have worn plenty of acrylic sweaters). But the weird thing was that it was also selling one lone cashmere sweater along with everything else.

Is this a testament to the recent availability of cheap cashmere? Or maybe. Maybe the average person wouldn't recognize that most other materials in this store were cheaply-produced. Mostly, I just like the juxtaposition of cashmere surrounded by synthetic.

PS. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and are enjoying the leftovers.

PPS. The BEST place to shop on the day after Thanksgiving is the grocery store. No crowds. Best time to shop ever.

PPPS. I had to rip back my sweater already. Waaay too many increases in the pattern. If I had continued, it would have swallowed me whole.

K

must . . . finish run . . . so I can knit

A,
Everything still hurts. Even my toes. Which, apparently, is a motivation to keep knitting.

I think I told you that James and I are training to run a half marathon this December. I'm a newbie at running, and I'm sure I'm still slow, but we're working on adding the miles rather than the speed. Generally I've been running in the mornings and James has been running in the evenings, but this weekend, I decided to wait for him to come home from work for us to run together. Which meant that we were running nine miles at noon, with the sun at its zenith. Now, we may be having the same lows as Iowa right now, but our highs are in the 70s. Which isn't even that hot! So I don't know what happened, but the sun was beating on us, we didn't have water, and our run--which should have lasted 90 minutes--took over two hours.

We stopped at three places to try to find water. The first place we stopped was a church, and although I couldn't find a drinking fountain inside, we let Dutch drink out of the decorative fountain at the foot of three metal crosses. I finally found water for us by sneaking into a hotel and looting cups from their breakfast nook.

Finally, with water in us, we completed the run. I swear to you today, I will only run when it is cooler than forty degrees outside. Well, maybe some exceptions to that, but never never again when the sun is so high in the sky.

I thought maybe I would get some work done this weekend, but I was so sore that I didn't want to move ever again. So I forgot about research and started a sweater instead. In my opinion, knitting is almost always a better use of time than school work. So that's what I did.




PS. I finished the shrug with your yarn. Actually, I think I told you that, didn't I? Anyway, I'll post a picture once I have James around during the day time.

PPS. It was good seeing you. Have a happy Thanksgiving.

K

don't stop

Hi K,

You know, I really love knitpicks needles, but the cabley ones just keep on breaking on me. Those dang cables slip out of the tips right in the middle of a row, and all your stitches come out, and you're left with wanting to knit and nothing to knit with. Very sad. And, as of recent, they only make double pointed needles in sizes US 4+ in 8 inches long. Which is too long for double pointed needles, if you ask me.

I'm going to try to show you something. When I was in Vermont, this last summer, I had dyed some Cascade 109 before I left, because I had this sudden urge to knit a pair of chunky cabled mittens that are all the rage on Ravelry right now called Bella's mittens. Here's the back story as much as I understand it on these mittens.

There's this blood disease called porphyria cutanea tarda, where if the patients go out in the sun, their skin gets horrible blisters. Their blood also destructs, or hemolyses, so they need blood replacement. *These people spawned a race called the vampires, which even though the diseased people they sprang from probably didn't live forever, they did. The vampires were all really really good looking and hot. One day somebody named Bella fell in love with one of the Vampires. She was apparently able to change into a lamb at will, which is why she had these mittens, because she could produce her own wool for the yarn. She liked to eat apples with the mittens on but I don't recommend this because that might get the mittens sticky.

Anyhow, I arrived** and I started knitting these mittens. Now, let me tell you, there is a reason so many people have knitted these mittens: it's somewhat addicting.


Now, you might be able to tell from this picture that I've knit, ahem, three pairs of these. Almost. I'm on the last pair. So I finished the first pair, and then I took a field trip out to Kaleidoscope Yarns in Essex Junction, which is really a lovely shop. Such nice Malabrigo Chunky, which I though would be really good for knitting maybe another scarf and a pair of these mittens. So, I knit the second blue pair that's squished in the middle, and fiddled with the pattern a bit.

Wow. I. Love. Malabrigo Chunky. It's such smooth, lovely knitting. Very, very nice. I decided I couldn't end our relationship there. So I ganked two of the lime skeins of yarn from the previously to-be scarf and started another pair of mittens.

Until that is, I arrived at the O'Hare International Airport. I learned a few things going through O'Hare that day. If you wear a nice dress, security will complement you and let you through easier. If you're planning on waiting it out with knitting, bring extra yarn. If you wear a nice dress, store a hairbrush, some toothpaste, and a change of clothes in your carry on for when your flight gets canceled.

Because I ran out of yarn right at the tips of the mittens, I stalled. I couldn't go any further, even when I got home. And now the mittens are right there, where you see them.

Almost done.

Sob. So close.

Love,
A

*This is called sarcasm, by the way.

**Not in the same place as Bella the vampire-loving lamb/woman but in Vermont. Unless she was in Vermont.

insectophobia

A,
The giant house spiders are back. Giant as in, I saw a small tarantula this summer the size of one of these spiders. Plus, black widows to boot. We found a black widow spider outside of our front door, and then a second one the following night. The next day I saw a piece of styrofoam that looked like it could be a giant egg sack, and I sprayed it to death with spider-killing spray. I think I'm getting hyper-sensitive about the spiders.

Remember this bug? Insects can be scary when they're in places they don't belong. Like houses. Or cars.


I hope Iowa is scary-insect free for you.

K

practice makes glove-perfect

A,
Aren't these so much fun?

Sometimes the perfect pair of gloves takes multiple trials and errors to get it just right. This project had its origins over a year ago. Last last May, my aunt-in-law sent me a knitting book for my birthday on Latvian Mittens. I read it, and contemplated, and over the summer I ordered some yarn for what I thought would be the perfect project. Only, the colors that I saw when I opened my package were not exactly as I had interpreted them online; so much so that I abandoned all hope of using the yarn (at least on the intended project). Which just goes to show you that there's no substitute for seeing true colors in true person.

So then I decided, I can't fail too miserably in my color choices if I pick just two colors to work with. I happened to have enough yarn lying around in blue and white fingering and so I cast on for some lovely Latvian mittens. I'm still pleased about the color choice (lovely shade of blue), but not so pleased about the mittens-in-progress. Or should I say, mittens-that-will-never-be. Simply put, they're far too small. And I'm not pleased with this thumb gusset either. But most disheartening, is the fact that the pattern repeat ends far too soon, forcing the mitten to either be stumpy short or strangely patterned. Or, more likely, never finished. At the end of this, I'm not particularly interested in salvaging the project. It's just too tiresome. As you can see, I've already slipped the needles off to start up another project; I just didn't have the heart to unravel it all yet. If I knit a project out of this book (which I will, eventually--I just need some time to heal), it will be a different pattern, different color scheme, different yarn. The book is great, I just didn't seem to be able to plan well enough to pull it off.

Now, after all that, I still wanted a success, so I kept a tiny piece of hope alive, and lo and behold, some kind knitting individual came along, wrote up a free pattern, and even posted requirements for the exact yarn that was to be used. Although I don't think these are Latvian, it's still a similar concept, and it has taught me quite a bit about color selection simply from working the pattern. Amazing. Finally, a success story.

And even better, I found a way to make knitting gloves enjoyable. I turned the fingerless mittens into gloves, and it was all possible due to these itsy bitsy double pointeds that don't drive me crazy with their absurd length.

And thus, more than a year after my scheming began, I have finished two gloves. Two lovely, colorful, warm gloves. I think my aunt-in-law will enjoy these. And even if she protested that the other ones were just fine and that anything I made her would be just fine, I know in her heart, she was secretly hoping that I would knit her these very gloves.

Tell Archimedes hello from me!
K

truthfully

A,
Arizona's medical school is starting classes this week, which seems absurdly early compared to the rest of the university. I still have three full weeks to soak in the sun and take some time for myself. As well as contemplate the new course that I will be teaching. LaKeisha and I have a new TA position in which we will be leading a supplemental instruction course for minority students in general chemistry. It's refreshing because it's new, and it's exciting because we are being given almost free reign to develop our own course. We'll be following the content covered in the lecture, but our supplemental instruction will include additional practice and training as to how to best learn general chemistry.

As I have been contemplating this new course, I ran across a book that I read while in high school. It had a couple of chapters devoted to the scientific process and scientific explanations. I found most intriguing the following passage:

“If a scientific theory makes successful predictions, and if it does not conflict with other well-established theories, and if it makes no false predictions, then, whatever its shortcomings, it is true.” (pg 77)

I find this passage infinitely fascinating. What is truth, really? What is a scientific truth? There are models we use in chemistry that help us to understand and predict the nature of atomic particles. If these models are useful, is that sufficient grounds to necessitate them being ‘truthful’ as well? I don’t actually know what to think about this, but it’s been tumbling around in my mind. Can truth be subjective? Must it be always absolute?

A few months ago I participated in a retreat focusing on evolution (due the occasion of it being Darwin’s 200^th birthday). In fact, I found that I learned more biology during this weekend event than I have ever remembered learning in previous years (which may not be something to brag about, but it was a very interesting weekend). Having a limited understanding of evolution prior to this, I was surprised to find that the idea is really quite reasonable and easy to comprehend. Yet for some reason, it is framed in staunch controversy between “religious” and “scientific” minds so that one might be led to believe that there is no middle ground.

But if the scientific theory of evolution is able to produce accurate predictions concurrent with our observations of the natural world, is it not worth learning and utilizing? Does that lend it “truthfulness?” Some may have philosophic differences that make it difficult to reconcile evolution and religion. But if it is useful in the context of science, why not give it a try?

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to say that a person “believes” in evolution or that they “believe” in science. Rather, we should use science as a tool to make discoveries, predictions, and engineer new technology. So what is “truth” and what bearing does it have on science? Is there an a priori truth? How do we know what we know?

I certainly don’t know what the "answer" is, but I would love to start a conversation, possibly in this new course. I love to listen to and participate in heated, rational debates. Those are my favorite. And whenever possible, why not tie it into something as exciting as science?

Take care,

K