Stuff and Things and Whatnot

Here’s a chart with sock lengths for different shoe sizes:
Sock Size Chart

* PITA, of course, standing for, “Pain in the Ass.”

Last night, after having worked until 9:00, I was sitting on the couch, trying to relax and wind down enough to go to bed, and I picked up the Branching Out scarf I’ve been working on/screwing up lately. [A word of advice: Don't use mohair for your first lace project!] I had messed up the preceeding pattern repeat, but after much frustrating ripping back, I was back at Row 1 again, and I was certain that I’d have smooth sailing as I continued to knit away in front of the TV. Somehow, and perhaps not surprisingly to anyone who has tried to work on lace while watching TV, I missed a couple of yarnovers in the first row, and didn’t realize it until I was at the end of the third row and didn’t have enough stitches there to finish. More frustrating ripping back — those mohair fibers get all entangled just looking at each other, don’t they? — I was ready to start Row 1 again. I had made my way across the first four stitches when my husband’s cat, Belfry, decided to walk across my lap.

Belfry and I have a love/hate relationship. He can be very sweet and snuggly, but he is more often an annoyance to me. He’s a fat (16+ lbs.) black and white shorthair with autism and eczema. He can’t read a person’s mood the way Mike’s other cat, Basil, can, so he always begins an interaction with the same grating meow and assumption that you are in love with him and want to lavish your attention on him. He likes to rub up against you, and because he sheds both black and white hairs profusely, it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing: you’ll always have his hair showing wherever he does it. His self-image must be that of himself as a young, lithe thing, because when he can’t jump up onto something (the back of the couch, for example) due to his excessive girth, he walks across you as though it had no impact on your bladder, chest, knitting, etc.

So, Belfry walks across my lap and gets his toe tangled up in the yarn running from the ball to the scarf. He gets freaked out, and tries to jump away from it, but can’t. He gets more freaked out when I try to disentangle him, and succeeds in pulling live stitches off my needle, yanking several yards out of the ball, and generally pissing me off. Seething, I finish off the row before getting ready to head upstairs (some relaxation, huh?), and then I notice the kicker. Apparently, when Belfry freaks out, he loses control of his bowels — I know this because I’ve lifted him suddenly off the bed when I’ve been folding my laundry on my clean sheets (to avoid the cat hair, of course), only to find the sheets aren’t so clean anymore. And apparently, having a strand of mohair around one’s back paw with human people yelling and grabbing at one’s legs is enough to freak one out. I had to clean cat poop off the couch before I could turn in.

PITA, indeed.

So I’m going to be getting my last huge long training walk in before the big Breast Cancer 3-Day next month, and if you want to come along for any piece or part of it, here’s the route.

Going through my typical morning routine, I just checked in at Bloglines. After hearing Grumperina’s complaints about their not catching her updates (and they apparently haven’t caught her most recent), I subscribed to my own feed a few days ago, and I was very pleased to see that my post from yesterday recorded as new. Imagine my utter and complete surprise to find another subscription to my feed! Welcome!

I can only imagine that you found your way here by searching for some knitting-type something, so by way of explanation, this did not start out to be a knitting blog. It started out to be a place to record all of the things I have a tendancy to write down on little slips of paper to remember for later and then either lose before I can use them or throw them away after some weeks because I can’t remember what they were for. Thus, there are lots of random categories over there on the right. It’s become pretty knit-heavy because I’ve been pretty knit-obsessed of late. If you’re a visitor or subscriber, I hope you’re getting what you came for.

I finished the sweater for my friends, Steve and Jessica, who are expecting next month:

I think it turned out pretty well, although you can’t tell from this picture that the green is much more grassy than sagey. I had a little difficulty with the instructions when it came to the hood — you knit the hood onto the front of the sweater and then attach the bottom of it to the back neck, but the hood is about twice as wide at the bottom as the space in which to attach it, and there’s no direction for how to make it work. I checked and rechecked the pattern to make sure I hadn’t just made it too big, and then decided to ease/gather as I joined the two pieces.

I also finished a hat on Sunday for my sister’s best friend from high school, Kristin Schumard, who found out just a couple of weeks ago that she has breast cancer. If she’s 30, she just had a birthday. I used the random skein of Noro Silk Garden I picked up at Mass. Ave. Knit Shop in Indianapolis a couple months ago and winged it. Sorry no picture: I wanted to get it off to her ASAP as a pick-me-up. It makes the Breast Cancer 3-Day that we’re walking next month that much more important.

Next on the list is choosing sweaters for the niece and nephews. We’re celebrating Christmas in October, when the grandparents are up north from Florida, so I only have a couple of months. No problem, right?

I got my order from Knitpicks yesterday and wasted no time getting to work.

Instead of knitting an actual gauge swatch, I went ahead and cast on for the number of stitches needed — it’s a baby sweater, after all — and figured if I wasn’t getting gauge, it wouldn’t be a big deal to tink it and try again. Unfortunately, I’m not getting gauge, and my #9s are attached to another project at the moment. I’ll have to free them, I suppose.

I had to try some other yarn, too, so here’s Alpaca Cloud in Iris. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it yet.

And, in the better late than never department, the socks (my first pair!) I finished, like, two months ago for my husband.

This blows my mind. Absolutely. So all that cool 37signals stuff from the last post? It’s primarily developed using Ruby on Rails, which basically automates a whole lot of the nitty-gritty programming of any database-driven web-based application. Just looking at the whole scaffolding thing in the Make a Todo list in Rails tutorial made me jump up and down in my chair a little.

I found some nifty new organizational tools (woo-hoo!) today through a Salon article about a company called 37signals. Their flagship product is and project management tool called Basecamp, but they have a webspace product called Backpack, and a list utility called Ta-da List, all of which look abundantly useful.

Basecamp Login

Backpack Login

Ta-da List Login

Someone on the Disney Deads website sent around this very awesome link today to a Google map add-on that allows you to point and click through a route and calculate mileage. Here’s our regular route.

I’ve made this twice now, loosely adapted from the “Strawberry Cheesecake Pie” recipe in Lauren Chattman’s Icebox Pies (Harvard Common Press, 2002).

Basic Graham Cracker Crust:
11 graham crackers, crushed in the food processor to yield 1 1/3 cups
5 tbsp. butter, melted
1 tbsp. sugar
1/8 tsp. salt
— Mix dry ingredients, and toss with butter. Press firmly into 8″ pie pan. Bake at 350° for 6-8 minutes.

Filling:
2 tbsp. cold water
2 tsp. unflavored gelatin
8 oz. cream cheese
3/4 c. heavy cream
1 pint berries
2/3 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
— Sprinkle gelatin over cold water and allow to absorb. Mix cream cheese, cream, berries, sugar and vanilla in a food processor until smooth. Melt gelatin in a small bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. With the food processor running, pour gelatin down feed tube and blend thoroughly. Pour filling into cool pie crust and refrigerate overnight, or at least 6 hours.

Note: I also tried this with blueberries, and they need quite a bit less sugar (as little as 1/4 c.?), as well as some additional acidity — lemon zest wasn’t enough on its own. I tried substituting half and half for the heavy cream, which worked just fine since I also added a little more gelatin to the mix.