Well, I’m officially a professional writer. I got my check from the KnitLit folks in today’s mail. I’m still undecided as to whether I should buy a new video game, go on a tea-buying frenzy at Teavana this weekend, or buy stuff off of my Amazon wishlist.
And since I’m impatient I now have two copies of the book. I should look up one of my old English teachers to send it as a random present.
Before work today I convinced Allyson to drive by the local Borders so that I could pick up this:
This is the first time that I’ve ever bought a book at the bookstore because I wrote something in it. I feel very content and accomplished. It feels odd to know that something I wrote is in bookstores all across the continent. If you’d like to see for yourself, the book is KnitLit the Third: We Spin More Yarns, and I’m on page 229. Most bookstores seem to be putting it in the crafts section.
My weight chart looks horrid this week. I knew this was coming of course for the reasons I outlined last week, but it has been further amplified by my complete lack of exercising. You see, after my run of atonement, I had a funny feeling in my left foot just in front of the ankle. It didn’t hurt really. I just felt a weird shifting or pulling when I took a step without my running shoes on. I’m sure it didn’t help matters that I walked around all day on Monday with my boots on. In any event, I made an amateur medical decision to avoid aggravating any injury I may have incurred.
And then the food. When my best mates come to visit, we tend to eat a lot more frequently than I otherwise am wont to do. On a typical weight loss day, I only eat one actual meal in a day with little micro-snacks thrown in as necessary. When Jason and Richard are in town, there’s a two-meal minimum in place with strong encouragement to eat steak, ribs, and chicken wings. In terms of my food selections, I did pretty well, opting for chicken and veggies where possible, but the whole extra meal had no choice but to take its revenge on my trend line the next morning at weigh-in. I take a lot of consolation in the fact that I’m still losing weight for the week overall.
-0.16 kg/week with an average daily calorie shortfall of -202 kcal.
Probably the biggest news to come out of the weekend was that Jason(1) and his wife will soon have a new little Consolo in the world to rear and play video games with. I knew that they were…ummm…working on it, but before I didn’t have a deadline for my baby blanket knitting project. Now I know that it must be done before the spring.
Remember those socks I originally started making whilst Florida was being savagely attacked by a herd of hurricanes last year? Remember that sock I almost finished while up in Massachusetts? Well, I finally got around to seaming the toe and weaving in the loose ends this morning before work.
Next step: Figure out whether to knock out Jen’s socks next or launch right into the Consolo baby blanket.
My poor wife has been in dire straits today. She has spent nearly all of the day in an horizontal position on our couch. You may have read that she fell down a set of stairs. Well, she knocked her knee pretty hard. When she got up this morning and walked to our little home office, she nearly fainted from the pain of it all. In an effort to be a good husband, I drove to our local grocery store, picked up a twenty-pound bag of ice, bought some donut holes (to expedite healing, you understand), drove back home, and broke up the ice into several individual ice packs, so that my bride could keep her leg from swelling quite so much.
While I was separating out the ice (which I assure you is a Herculean task when the ice has refrozen as a singular solid block of frozen water), a gentleman from the apartment complex popped in to make sure that nothing in our apartment was leaking since the folks under us had a steady stream of water dripping in. He didn’t find anything and eventually took off. I waited a respectable amount of time to ensure he wasn’t coming back and then opted to go take a bath. After I had gotten settled in with my copy of Fever Pitch and a nice steaming tub of hot water, Allyson came in and told me that the apartment guy was back. I toweled off and dressed even though I hadn’t had an opportunity to shave or wash my hair. The fellow eventually said that he would be back in after lunch. I took the initiative to make a delightful lunch of seared tuna steaks with a sautéed mushroom and sour cream sauce, which I promptly plated and served, to a very stiff, groaning, and cold wife. I don’t consider it immodest to declare that my lunch was the best thing I’ve eaten in a matter of weeks.
I did manage to finish up my camera sock before work. I vastly prefer this new version for several reasons. Firstly, I never liked the purl regions of the thin orange stripes of the first version. Secondly, the camera had a nasty tendency to slide out of its cover when I flipped up my messenger bag to grab something from the inside pock. This new version is longer, allowing for the ribbing to do its designated puckering work at the top. I haven’t had any more problems with the camera slipping out. Thirdly, the stitches are so perfectly even throughout the whole sock. It’s like I knitted Plato’s ideal iPod/camera sock. Because I’m a good knitter, I promptly started working to finish the only other project I have on the needles right now (the companion alpaca sock that I was working on during my Massachusetts excursion). Unlike other knitters in the house, I am not a fiber whore who flits about the house from one project the other in a series of tawdry, brief, and passionate affairs.
I’m sure this will shock any knitters in my audience, but you’d be surprised at how many people regard you strangely when you pull off your shoe, remove your sock, put the sock you were just knitting onto your foot, pull out a digital camera, and take a picture of the half-completed sock in the middle of a library. Strange but true.
The patrons of Smathers Library were greeted by just such a display earlier this week when I was knitting on the companion alpaca sock:
It amazes me a bit to think that absolutely none of that sock existed beyond the component skein of baby alpaca yarn just a little over a week ago. Even more entertaining to me is the fact that both socks are tied to events in my life. I knit the first alpaca socks back during the hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004, and I knit the bulk of this sock during my excursion to and through Massachusetts.
I’ve had to own up recently to the fact that I’m a born sock knitter. I enjoy making socks far more than I enjoy any other type of knitting project—which is saying an awful lot because I truly enjoy knitting almost anything.
The camera sock is done.
In the end, I opted to do a three needle bind off to seam the bottom, and I’m really pleased with the results. I had never done a three needle bind off before, but the Internet made it a rather painless experience.
There are really only two things about this camera sock that bother me:
1. I just can’t stand the way thin stripes look on ribbing. The purl bumps are just wrong-looking. Any sane person would have acknowledged this fact about themselves before adding two thin orange stripes, but I’ve never made any claims about my sanity.
2. Most of the weaving in of ends went just fine, but I realized about five minutes ago in looking at my work that I mistakenly took two of the black threads in the wrong direction, leading to a couple of small gaps on one of the sides. The fact that it’s on a side means that no one other than me or an extremely anal knitter(1) will ever notice it, but I assure you that it will gnaw at my soul.
On the upside, it’s functionally beautiful. The camera fits in that perfect way that can only come with a hand-knit custom job, and I no longer have any reservations about putting my camera into the outer pocket of my messenger bag.
In short, I win.
Things seem to be coming together a bit this week in ways both exciting and extraordinarily banal. On the work front, I have more meetings in my little compressed three-day pre-vacation week than I normally have in two normal weeks. My belief is that the universe is punishing me for going on my first vacation in a matter of years. Thankfully, I’m also learning a lot of new stuff about the way in which my office makes our applications, so the meetings aren’t a total wash. The only good meetings are ones in which I learn something new.
My weight loss is deliciously back on track this week. Once I got over the 120 kg hump, things started requiring a lot less dieting effort. Even with eating out for most of my meals, I’m again losing over a kilo per week. In fact, my chart looks something like this:
-1.06 kg/week with a daily calorie shortfall of -1363 kcal.
If you’d like a more interesting (and visual) way to keep track of my weight loss, watch this weight loss photo set over on my Flicker account. I’ll be taking a picture of myself once per week in that same Arsenal training shirt so I can see some sort of identifiable difference in my appearance. I have pictures from when I weighed nearly 140 kg (300 lb, for my American friends) and some when I was around 95, but I wasn’t really able to wear the same clothes anymore, rending any comparison difficult. By wearing the same shirt (that started out way too tight), I’ll be able to track my progress more effectively.
Preparations for our trip are going well. Allyson and I sort of tag-teamed the laundry last night and again this morning, so we should have all the clean clothes necessary for our trip to Boston and its surrounding areas. I need to figure out what sorts of fun diversions I’m going to take with me. Right now I’m banking on several magazines, The Zen Teachings of Jesus, and my Nintendo DS to keep me entertained between tourist destinations.
Finally, the camera sock is coming along nicely. It’s a sweet looking black with two orange micro-stripes near the bottom. I’m nearly done with the knitting portion, which means that tonight will be spent seaming and then weaving in all those loose ends in what I hope will be an artful manner. I might be short on sleep again tonight because I think it would behoove me to finish this project up tonight.
I’m not sure what to make of this, but…
I found this at the Gainesville Bed Bath and Beyond. In fact, it’s all over the walls for some reason.
I’m currently working on (on rather posting a ChangeLog instead of working on) a little sock for my new digital camera so that it can be all safe in secure in my little messenger bag. For reasons I’m not exactly sure of, I’m convinced that I need to get this done before Allyson and I leave for Boston on Thursday. I know that it’s very possible because really we’re only taking about maybe 8 cm of ribbing and some seaming, but I’m not sure why I’m convinced that this is a hard-deadlined goal for the week. Maybe it’s like a little knitting test to see how committed to the project I actually am.
I went into work about an hour late today to make up for extra time I put in the night before, and I spent that extra hour in the midst of a knitting frenzy. About five minutes before I was supposed to be at work, I finished Stephen’s Slytherin hat:
I still need to weave in the ends, but it feels wonderful to be done with this project. The only tricky part in the pattern came on the second decrease round, where you’ll do a K2G but not K1P1 after that. Your last six stitches for that row actually look like:
K2G K2G P2G
which makes sense if you truly grok the pattern, but it’s not explicitly stated that way.
Now I’ve just got to buy more yarn and psyche myself up for the accompany scarf which is nothing but a little over a meter of stockinette knitted in the round. I might take a brief break though to knit myself a hat just like this one but in Wolves colors.
I would just like to add that my cat is convinced that I’m an asshole because his food dish has been empty for hours, and I have yet to drop everything and solve his “problem”.
I’ve become convinced that something about the act of knitting distorts a knitter’s sense of the passing time. Perhaps we knitters truly are masters of the no-self, Zen masters who bend both yarn and the concept of time around us through intimate acquaintance with wu wei and an attention to detail that would make a savant blush. Of course, it could also just be that we’re entirely too optimistic to give ourselves a realistic time estimate for our projects. I would certainly make this a criticism specific to me, but I’ve noticed amongst the knit bloggers (Yarn Harlot as just one example(1)) that this is an all-too-common problem amongst those of us who turn loops into garments.
In my GTD project list, I put down “Knit a Slytherin hat for Stephen”. Keep in mind that I’ve already started a hat, hated it, threw out my progress, and started over once already. That’s about four or five hours already into a hat that wasn’t even finished yet. Nonetheless, when I put down a time estimate for this task, I only paused for a moment before putting down an estimate of four hours, and this esimate made sense to me at the time. I’m currently about six hours of work into the hat, and I’m not even to the decrease rounds yet. In fact, I have about eight more centimeters to go before I start decreasing.
I must say that I’m really digging this hat design though. I might like it enough to make it in Wolves colors for myself—especially if I could find some 100% worsted-weight wool in pure black somewhere soon(2).
In other news, today is a victorious day because I got my spare power supply for my Powerbook over the weekend and took it on into work. When I left the house today, I just unplugged my laptop from its cables and put it into the bag without having to reach down beside my desk to unhook the damn cables. Going to work is now less of an ordeal, and that’s sort of a life goal of mine.
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