Knit a little, read a little, watch a little

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Odds and Sods

Another day of being queen bitch on the Knittyboard. Several more "Your avatar is too big" pms, and one about someone selling stuff on the board. It's been up for a while, but it only now crystallized that that is what she was doing (it was in the Jordana Paige thread.) Grr.

Some finished objects. Miracle of miracles, I finished Dad's sweater off late Thursday night. He's been wearing it to shovel the driveway.




That's a thumbnail of me in the sweater late Thursday. Note the length - if I don't raise my arms above my shoulders, I could wear it as a mini! On Dad, it falls nicely below the enormo-paunch. I will try to get a better picture of the sweater - maybe tomorrow if the light cooperates.

Since I finished the sweater with 5 1/2 balls of yarn left, I knit a scarf with some of the excess. The original plan was to knit a scarfy version of Cozy. The Silkroad Aran didn't like that plan - it was to sticky to knit well. So I checked my stitch dictionary for something lacy. Nothing sent me. I rifled through some other stuff - tried using Alice Starmore's Aberlady (Aberlady is the texture version of the stitch pattern shown in the picture). Not enough definition for it to work. Out came the Clapotis pattern. Much better, although much narrower than the original:

Took maybe 2 1/2 balls of yarn. I spit-spliced the ends - gross, but oh-so-effective. Wish I had thought of it while knitting the sweater (way too many ends for my taste!)

I also got new yarn last week, but just now bothered to get the pictures downloaded from the camera:



I love the blue, but the green was unexpectedly grayish. It is more of a charcoaly-green than the forest I was expecting. I still like it, it just wasn't what I expected.

Watched a lot of TV on DVD this week - several disks of Roswell - Season 2 (love the Christmas Nazi!), an episode of Popular (unlike most TV shows on DVD, Popular gets watched one episode at a time (as opposed to Roswell, which I watch by the disk, not the episode)). I CANNOT WAIT to get my Wonderfalls DVD in February. I've been lucky enough to be able to watch it up here (thank you, Vision TV) and it boggles my mind that it was yanked off the air. OK, it doesn't really, because networks don't always know quality programming when they see it. There's only three episodes left, and I can't wait to find out what happens next. (Actually I can - this week's episode is on the tape in my VCR, but I wait until Tuesday night to watch it.)

In addition, I finally watched the end of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital - yuck. The phrase "sucks like an Electrolux" (gleaned from the author's note of some fairly early King novel) comes to mind. A good part of that comes from the fact that I've seen Riget, the Danish original by Lars von Trier. FAR superior, and out on video if you can track it down. It has a sequel that isn't out on DVD or video, which is a pity because I'd really like to see it. The ending of the first series was an extremely dramatic cliffhanger, which left much unexplained (a "How the hell did that come out of there?" kinda thing.)

A brief word on hockey. This season is toast. There is a distinct possibility that the NHL in its current incarnation is toast as well. Both management and labor have forgotten that there is a third party - the fans. Both sides have done a wonderful job of alienating the fans. Speaking for myself, I'm existing quite well without the NHL. Admittedly, I have practice from 5 years in Portland, Oregon - not a hotbed of good NHL coverage (but a good CHL team.) Frankly, watching hockey games would be difficult to wedge back into my active TV schedule. I'm either watching TV or watching a DVD. I think there are solutions that seem to be ignored - elimination of "hard" arbitration in favor of "soft" arbitration (I think the terms are right - the texts are in the garage). Currently, when a player is taken to salary arbitration, the player and the owner submit their offers. The arbitrator chooses one - either the player's offer or the owner's offer. By "soft" arbitration, I mean that both sides submit their offers, and the arbitrator can choose one of those offers, or what the arbitrator deems to be the fair value, which would fall between the two extremes. It requires well-informed arbitrators, and the offers will be the absolute extremes, but I think allowing the arbitrator to pick a figure in the middle would prevent some of the inflation currently seen. There are others, but it's getting late.

One last thing:




You Are From Mars



You're energetic, athletic, and totally hyperactive.
You love playing sports and being in the middle of all of the action.
You're independent, courageous, and brave. Unafraid to do things your way.
Mars can be reckless, quick tempered, and a little too spontaneous.
So think before you act - and resist your natural urges to dominate others.