if you want to sing out sing out

A,

I imagined myself chewing the grass today--figuratively speaking--but found myself unable to. My figurative grass is more like hay I think; it's dry and stiff. My saliva cannot penetrate. And then I spit it out, unable to chew.

On an unrelated topic, my stomach is shrinking. I feel mildly as though my dependence on food is diminishing. I also feel like I'm not responsible enough to make my own food yet.

Homecoming, how happy. It has such a nice ring. I never went to the parade, did you go this year? Did you know that when you have children and they join a sports team that you are expected to go to every game? I find this insurmountable. That is most likely why I don't have children yet.

This is my beautiful male rabbit, whom I continue to refer to as a "she" because I'm already used to the pronoun and find it difficult to change. Which leads me to think about the hypothetical circumstance that someday someone I know will have a sex change and I will forever be using the wrong pronoun in reference to him or her.

This is Hazel-Rah in his torpedo position. I guess you can't see the shape very well from this angle, but it reminds me of a torpedo. When he's all floppy and lazy and lying on the floor you could pet him, fold over his ears, cup your hands over his eyes, or move his body like a mop on the floor, and he wouldn't budge. Only don't try to pick him up, because then he'll run away.



This is Hazel on the skateboard. He won't go very far, because James removed the wheels.


And Hazel with some spinach on her. Him. Whatever.

I went to the fridge to get some happy food and came back with creamed corn. Is it wrong that that seemed the happiest thing in our kitchen?

I went to a seminar yesterday. It was a student in her last year of grad school. She wasn't a very good speaker and I was kind of tuning her out, but I liked her, because in the end of her presentation, she showed pictures of all the people that she wanted to thank. Only she had photo-shopped the pictures so that her faculty adviser was a gremlin and some other member of her group was Indiana Jones and etc. for at least 10 people. I thought it added a pleasant amount of accessibility to her project. But then the faculty grilled her with questions and I came away with a sense of hopelessness.

When the possibility of moving to Las Vegas was still up for grabs, I looked into the university there and found that it was only a couple of blocks away from the strip. Somehow that calmed me and made me feel as though I could handle the level of chemistry at that school. I find the big picture far more overwhelming than the hypothetical 2x2 on my hypothetical desk.

I still need to get a desk. Is it wrong to go shopping for artwork before practical needs have been fulfilled? I went into this second-hand store, only it was a good one, and they had all of this shiny jewelry and I got a pair of earrings in the shape of whisks. Whisk whisk whisk whisk whisk!! And they had lovely shiny loopy costume jewelry that made me think of you. I would have bought you earrings, but they were clip-ons. There were llama cuff-links there.

Oh wait, this is a knitting blog . . . I feel like I don't have any friends . . . or any interesting knitting news. Didn't you knit your washcloth in cotton?

I need to buy buttons.

K

ps. I think I inhaled a fair amount of carcinogens today. Lab=sparklers. Lab=incoherent Karen.

Homecoming

K,

It was lonely without you, dear, but I went to homecoming this past weekend, and it was a lovely time. Weird when you feel out of place, though. I feel old. Pretty much no knitting got done this weekend. I think I put in a few rows on a finger. Yup. A finger of a glove got maybe 3 rows done. That's how much not-knitting I did.

I did go to a dance, and showcased my ability to dance to rap, latin, soul, general retro, jazz, whatever. It helps when you have an amazing partner.

We also discovered some...swords? Something...and we dueled to the death for awhile. Until we decided that dueling to the death was silly, since we both wanted each other to live.

I was told my face was a bit proud. Obviously this is only because I am the most amazing bamboo sword (?) fighter ever, and it comes through in these pictures.


I won't duel you, Karen, unless you train for at least 12 years first. Just in case I forget to restrain myself.

Love,
A

Cotton

K,

While I don't entirely apologize for the craziness of yesterday's post (was it yesterday? two days ago? everything blends...) I did forewarn you. Let me explain.

I am tired. I am very, very tired. My insides feel like they are vibrating, I am so tired. I don't know why, I even looked through some books, and they don't talk about guts vibrating. Let's ignore that. My brain is ceasing to work, however. And thus, my latest post? That was actually ruminations on the difficulties of dissection. Very abstract ruminations, because I didn't want to gross people out. Because, Karen, my dear, you really don't stomach those things well. So there you are. Eventually all medical students become crazy. Once we're bad enough, they call us interns. Then you begin the process of becoming uncrazified, eventually resulting in becoming a full-fledged doctor! Some people take longer than others, such as cardiologists, or pediatric cardiothoracic surgeons. Actually, the surgeons never really lose it. And then they kind of get arrogant, because their patients are mostly asleep and, while awake, daren't damage the ego of someone who is about to rummage inside them. I digress.

I knit a cotton preemie cap for the preemie project, which collects baby caps for all the teeny tiny babes in the hospital, of which we have a high amount, comparatively with a regular hospital. This made me realize something:

1) Preemie knitting goes even faster than baby knitting
2) I hate knitting with cotton. So painful. My right wrist was shot all yesterday. I could barely write. My wrists just can't take that harsh of a fiber! So right now I'm working on a cashmere lining for the gloves I'm knitting. I really, really like cashmere to knit with. It has about zero elasticity, but really, who cares. It is so soft and lovable, you just want to hug it and knit with it all day. Cashmere doesn't hurt your wrists. Cashmere and cotton shouldn't even both start with "C," they are so not in the same category. I'm going to start thinking "Kashmir" when I think of it now, because we all know that "K" is so much better than "C."

I want to introduce you to someone I met in my genetics class today!


This is Godfrey Harold Hardy, one of the founders of the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium concept/equation. Apparently he played Cricket with Reinald Punnett (of the square variety) who told him about the problem of population genetics, and Hardy figured it out! They showed this pic in class today, and the girl with a good sense of humour and I both burst out laughing. Because look at him. My first thought was, "He looks like he's about to attack the camera-man with those hands. And that face!" My next thought was, "Oh, my gosh! NO! He wants to knit! He's got his hands ready to go, and nobody ever taught him, and this was his cry for help." Look at how depressed he seems. It's because he's not knitting, Karen.

We could have helped Hardy. I feel sad that he is dead 60 years and that he never learned. It's really a shame. So many people's lives could be improved by knitting.

Biochem test tomorrow. Wish me luck!

A

Forewarned: Crazy talk

I am a coconut inside my gut. The centipede hung out on the beach while the sun set, and he drank tequila, ruminating on whether Pascal really was right, about religion being all a game of roulette and chance. Dried coconut fell out of my fingertips. When will the coconut stop? How much is there? Why does it all fall into the bucket and where does it then go? Together with the other coconut, or stay on it's own, or does it just disappear. Because maybe coconut can do that. Though it doesn't seem so.

Figuratively, of course.

Act III

K,

Sadness. The merino is one that I am frustrated with sometimes. It does not like to take cool colored dyes...the warm colors of the browns have thence left only reds, yellows, and oranges. Now, at a standstill orange, though swimming in blue dye, I am left with only one option. Well, two options.

1) Love the orange. Be the orange. Think how much you like to eat oranges.
2) Saturate that puppy with black so hard it will think that it's Halloween and it got left behind during Trick-or-treating.

I'm going for two. Sometime. Sometimes when it's not 2 in the morning. Besides, absolutely no one here uses the stove but me. Except Erin sometimes. Hopefully she was not planning on making Lasagna tomorrow.

A

Orange you glad it's only $4 yarn?

K,
Now that I have added khaki (with a hint of green) camel, and golden brown it has turned orange. It seems to have a like for only the warmer members of the color wheel. Therefore, I have now added blue. This was only supposed to take like an hour. Or less. Preferably less. Other people can't help but get brown. They get brown accidentally and don't want it. Why can't I be like those people at this moment? Perhaps I'm going through the rainbow. Yellow is next. Then green. Actually, I have added blue, so we might not be so far off if we guess green.

A

Another Running Blog Entry

K!

I am dying yarn, yet it is not turning out well at the moment. You see, when I added all the dark brown dye, attempting to get brown, I did not.

It turned cherry red.

Cherry as in the top of your Dr. Pepper bottle cherry. While this is not a nasty color at all, it is not brown. Which was the goal.

Luckily, I realized that

1) I had too much yarn and too little water in the pot for it to dye evenly and
2) It was red

before it got too terrible, and I threw out the red freakish dye water and threw in a bit of khaki and golden brown to change it up. Because maybe that will work? I may need more khaki in order to counteract the red. You know, green + red = brown. Maybe. Maybe that will work.

Oh the stress of life.

I came to some major realizations in my life.


This sweater, which I don't even think I told you about, but which I have been obsessed with, has to go. It is scratchy. Far too scritchy scratchy. 60% Alpaca 40% merino, but sure doesn't feel like it. It almost feels synthetic nasty. That's what I get for randomly buying offline when I haven't felt it before. The place is yarntreehouse on ebay, and this sure doesn't feel like the blend it is stated to be.

I put down this sweater awhile, pondering what I would do (I had taken these pictures earlier documenting where it was driving me crazy with it's messed up gauge) and then I realized. The 78% merino 22% nylon blend! Surely it would dye nicely for me and be the sweater I want!

We'll see if I can fix it. However, I don't hold too much hope. In the meanwhile, I've still been busy.

Blue cashmere, ripped from a Goodwill Sweater, and not nearly as shiny as it looks. Actually, it is the opposite of shiny. It is dull and soft. The yarn not in a ball (I had to wash it) shall be the lining for a pair of gloves, possibly one at the bottom at this post.


Once very purple Linda Allard and Ellen Tracy sweater, 70% wool, 30% silk.
One shinier than it looks teal 2XL Men's Peruvian Connection Sweater, 80% Baby Alpaca, 20% Silk.
Ripped!
I must say, these are two of the most (probably) expensive sweaters I've ever ripped. $4 for me, but much more for someone else out there. The purple is gorgeous. Probably the highest quality of yarn I've really ever worked with. It doesn't feel like wool when it's in the sweater, it's so soft. I can't believe I actually felt that it was when I was going through the racks and checked the tag. But it is immensely high quality, and was a dream to rip. The teal was not a dream to rip. It is what we call exactly the opposite of a dream to rip. But let's forget about that. Like in the Hip Hop Kids, "Well, you need to get past that, because they got ripped, and that's all they is."

And maybe you know what this is now?

Sorry the pics are a bit blurry, hard to take them indoors. And it is a'raining outside, so that was not happening.

Man, I need to speed up my Exit Scrategy! I'm going to dance it out of this post!

A