Lordy, it’s hot here, 94 degrees Fahrenheit (34.4 Celsius for you people who live in other lands). And it was the same all weekend. We did the “close all windows and doors in the morning to try to keep the house cool” trick, which works pretty well except for a few hours in the afternoons when indoors and outdoors are equally bad. But then in the evening we open everything up again and it’s more bearable.
So, yeah, we didn’t do much all weekend except hide in the house and try to stay cool. Started some Horde characters with our guild, watched a lot of Arrested Development, ate nice cool salads.
At least with weather like this, it is ever so pleasant to take a before-bed walk in the warm, breezy night!
Orthodontist for Henry this morning. They installed metal bands around his top back teeth. Next week he’ll get headgear to attach to those metal bands, to pull in his overbite. Plus braces. Poor boy. And then I took him to the beach for some surfing and boogie-boarding, but really, it was almost too hot to be pleasant, since I have to wear layer after layer of sun-protection clothing. When he was done in the water, we rode the Giant Dipper Rollercoaster for a treat! Whooooo that was fun! My favorite kind of coaster — old, wooden, rattly, and thrilling! I wish it wasn’t $6/ride though. Gosh. We’d ride it every time we went to the beach if it was $2. Oh well.
Ok, well, I’ve put off the housework long enough. Oh, one more thing — I went looking for a free peasant blouse pattern and bumped into a blog full of fun sewing tutorials: http://indietutes.blogspot.com/. Lots of fantastic clothing tutorials there, mostly intended for little kids but easy enough, if you have any sewing experience at all, to modify for grownups! I love the peasant blouse, the wrap-pants, and the corset dress. With some bust darts, that red-plaid flat-fronted corset top would make a dandy summer dress!
Just discovered the Australian comedy band, Tripod. FotC they’re not, but they do have some rather funny songs!
True Geek Love:
(This part’s got a multi-player section, honey
Maybe you could operate a turret with me, would you like that, baby?
Games give you hand-eye coordination and spacial intelligence together with map reading skills, oh sugar)
On Thursdays, Henry has classes at his charter school from 9-3:30. I drop him off in the morning (it’s a 45-minute drive) and his dad picks him up in the afternoon, then they hang out for a while together, and then his dad drops him off here in the early evening. When he got home, Henry was just bubbling over with happiness while telling me about his day. In science class, they measured the volume, mass, and density of oranges and discovered that they float when unpeeled and sink when peeled. In art they worked on a secret Mothers’ Day project, and in English they started working on a class newspaper. Henry gets to interview his art teacher next week, and he’s all excited about that. Then, he helped with the K-2 art class, and then did a lot of improve in the Advanced Acting class. Sounds like he had a really fabulous day!
I didn’t sleep at all last night so I felt pretty crummy all day. After getting the house in order, I discovered a site where you can watch TV shows and movies online. I tried Charlie Bartlett, which wasn’t very good (I really can’t imagine why it gets such high ratings on imdb), but then I switched to Curb Your Enthusiasm and finished up Season Six while knitting a piece of lace that I hope to enter into the fair, if I get it done in time.
Let’s see… Kirsten loves her birthday Print o’ the Wave lace stole, yay! Now I’m dying to knit more lace. Taking commissions ;-)
Speaking of which, I’m now working on a hat that my mom commissioned for a friend. I based it on brooklyntweed’s Red Light Special hat pattern, but charted out a different design and am using different colors. Coming along nicely. Yarn is knitpicks’ Telemark, needles size 2.
I’ve been watching amazing old BBC documentaries while I knit. Yesterday I watched the first four episodes of James Burke’s “The Day the Universe Changed” which is, as you would expect, utterly fascinating. From wikipedia:
The series’ primary focus is on the effect of advances in science and technology on western philosophy. The title comes from the philosophical idea that the universe essentially only exists as you perceive it; therefore, if you change your perception of the universe, you have changed the universe itself.
To illustrate this idea, James Burke tells the various stories of important scientific discoveries and technological advances and how they fundamentally altered how western civilization perceives the world. The series runs in roughly chronological order, from around the beginning of the Middle Ages to the present.
Youtube user “jamesburkefan” has posted all the videos and made playlists for each episode so you can watch them easily. Obviously, if you like the series (and who wouldn’t?) you should consider purchasing it! Just kidding, the DVD set costs $750. Yeah, that makes sense. We wouldn’t want this spectacular series to be, you know, affordable.
Last night Dan and I watched Zodiac, a based-on-reality film about a serial killer, well, really it’s more about the men who try to track him down. Nearly three hours long and no flaws. Snappy yet believable dialogue. Beautiful pacing, directing, writing, acting, sets, costumes… you’d swear you were plunked down in the early 70s. No stupid contrived tacked-on car chases or romance. Dear Hollywood, that’s the way movies are supposed to be. Please make more. (Warning: there are a few on-screen murders. I put my head under a pillow and Dan turned down the volume and told me when it was safe to look).
1. Breakfast, chores, etc.
2. paid bills
3. Left at 10:30 so we could get up to San Marcos in time for our meeting at Henry’s school at 11:30
4. Stopped at the surf store to get a surfboard carrying thing for the top of the car – $30!
5. Got up to school, had our quick meeting (just handing in samples so the government knows Henry learned something
heheh)
6. Picked up beginner surfboard, lent to us by awesome homeschooling family
7. back to school, dropped Henry off for classes
8. bank
9. got bloodwork done at lab (nice gentle short tattooed Stephen was there, yay! He knows how to draw blood completely painlessly, it’s amazing)
10. mailbox place
11. picked up a couple things at Trader Joe’s
12. Pharmacy
13. back to get Henry after classes
14. drove home down freeway with surfboard making horrid vibrating sounds on top of car, nerve-wracking!
15. dealt with giant pile of junk mail
16. called in change of address to MacWorld, nice cust. service lady gave us two free months
17. Helped Henry install GuildEventManager add-on
18. read backlog of email, watched The Office with Henry
19. Henry to Kung Fu
20. made dinner
21. Picked Henry back up
22. wrote this boring blog entry
and now I think my baked potatoes are done so I will eat them with approx. one stick of butter on each, yum
I’m very fond of A Room with a View, so I was excited to find out that PBS was showing a new version (2007) tonight. I watched for a while, but was terribly disappointed, though I promise I had an open mind and I was ready to be pleased! First, it started off in 1922, with Lucy, obviously George-less, revisiting the Pension Bertolini, and remembering the story in flashbacks. Um, what? The first thing that popped into my mind was that, for some reason, they decided to kill George in The Great War. Maybe there’s some other reason, but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. The characters were All Wrong. Mister Emerson and George were coarse. Mister Emerson was positively creepy; and George, strolling around the hallways of the Bertolini dressed only in a towel — I think not! Lucy was much bolder than she should have been. Charlotte was not manipulative enough. Cecil not stuck-up enough (though I turned it off in his first scene, so maybe he became more like himself later). The directing was clunky and obvious. The lovely delicacy of the novel was gone. Anthony Davies wrote the screenplay, so it should have been better!
One thing I did like — the costuming. It looked 1910-ish (very Betsy and the Great World). Lucy had the most beautiful linen suit on when she was “In Santa Croce With No Baedeker”, so elegant and simple. I wanted to rip it off her and steal it.
So, I gave up and put on the real version (1985) Helena Bonham-Carter, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliot, Judi Dench, Daniel Day-Lewis, Simon Callow, and, of course, Julian Sands — not coarse at all, a perfect George :)
I finished the Print o’ the Wave Stole! (Note: As written, Chart B for the edging contains an error. The second-to-last stitch of rows 9, 11, 13 and 15 should be marked as a k2tog.) I knit 34 repeats of the main motif in one long panel, instead of grafting two 17-rep pieces together down the back.
Yarn: Knitpicks’ “Shadow” in “Lost Lake” (dark green, with just a hint of blue and brown). I bought three 50-gram skeins, but only needed 12 grams of the third skein.
This was my first fine lace project. It was fun and easy, and I got it done much faster than I thought I would — less than a month start to finish. Both lace patterns were relatively easy to memorize, so of course the knitting sped up when I no longer had to refer to the chart all the time.
I wish you could feel the finished stole. It is so soft and fine and light and floaty, yet very warm. It’s a very beautiful thing.
Photos! Because there are so many, I’ll make them small. Click to embiggen.
And now, backwards in time a bit, here it is blocking yesterday. It dried fast in this insanely hot weather:
And here’s what it looked like as I was rounding the final corner with the edging:
Happy birthday, Kirsten :) I’ll pop it in the mail soon!
It was hot today — 94 degrees Fahrenheit (34.4 Celsius) at the hottest part of the day. That’s unusually hot even for summer, and it’s only April. Wacky! We kept the windows closed all morning because the house was cooler than outdoors, but when the temperatures equalized and the house started to feel stuffy, we opened up every door and window and ran the fan to move the air around.
I did the usual housework and chores, and then I knitted for the rest of the day — finished the edging around the stole and blocked it, woohoo! Pictures tomorrow. For entertainment I listened to my Pandora.com stations for hours, also in the morning we watched Friday’s Battlestar Galactica (not enough cylon battles in that episode).
Oh, and I started watching David Attenborough’s wonderful natural history documentary series, Life on Earth. Lovely stuff. It was originally aired in 1979, and I think we might have watched it then… it all looks and sounds kind of familiar. Good luck finding it on Region 1 DVD… you might try mininova.org ;-)
I’ve been working on the edging like crazy. Here’s what one short end of The Stole looks like, pinned roughly out to shape:
As of tonight, I have only about 15 reps to go!
Also — last night The Office was on. Hooray!!!! I believe that was Michael’s finest “That’s what she said!” ever. Ahhhhh so wonderful to have new Office.
Fixed many breakfasts this morning, then the boys and I got to the Apple store at 9am. Nice Apple guy came out to my car and carried the iMac in for me. The Apple store doesn’t open for business until ten, though they start doing repairs, classes, and private lessons (!) at 9. It was really strange to be in an almost-empty Apple store. Usually it’s wall-to-wall people. A nice Genius took the iMac into the back to open it up, decided it was the power supply, and replaced it then and there! Go Apple! They actually had a power supply for a 3-yr-old iMac in stock. My Applecare was still good so I didn’t have to pay a thing. A nice Apple guy even carried the iMac back out to my car for me. Apple, your customer service rocks. My iMac is good as new now :)
Then home and chores. The boys wanted to ride their bikes to the park, but it was cold, so they rode bikes and I drove so I could sit in the car and knit once we got there. It’s only a few blocks away, and they don’t have to cross any busy streets. Then we went home and I fed them again, then we drove up to San Marcos for Henry’s 12:30-3:30 classes. Fargo and I went to the library for a while, and then sat in the common room at Henry’s school. While we were at the library, Fargo noticed that they had a manga drawing class from 3:30 to 4:30 (free, run by a famous manga artist whose name I can’t remember) so after Henry’s classes were over we raced back there and they had a great time at the drawing class!
Then we got home about 5:15, and they played and I made dinner, then over to Henry’s Kung Fu class at 6:30. Then home again, and I made more dinner and collapsed on the couch, set up some WoW auctions, knitted some more edging onto The Stole (I’m nearly halfway around the perimeter!), and watched an episode of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Michelangelo. Bernini. Ahhhhhhh, so civilized! here’s Bernini’s David for you to admire:
Picked up Henry at 8, fed him again (the boy is an eating machine), and he and Fargo and I watched The Trouble with Tribbles. Fargo is not a big Star Trek fan. Yet. We aim to change that :)
Tomorrow we only have orthodontist in the morning and Henry’s private Kung Fu lesson in the afternoon, so I hope we can do some nothing for a while…
