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A recent discovery:
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
Hilarious stuff. I saw a great potential entry at Lowe’s but had no camera handy.

12 – Later Crusades
13 – Life of the Castle
14 – Life of the Village and Town

09 – The Growth of Feudalism
10 – The Deeds of the Northmen
11 – The First Crusade

A few days ago while we were sick and just hanging around home, Henry and I tidied up the Sitting Room (which is more of a craft/sewing room), made a pattern for a new messenger bag for him, dug up cloth out of the scrap boxes, and made his bag. It’s blue corduroy with a striped interior. It’s got two deep regular pockets inside, plus a fancy zipper pocket with an inset zipper — never tried that before! Henry had the idea to put the Triforce on the front flap, and luckily we had enough yellow scraps to make a good one. Photos!

Interior view:

Fancy zipper pocket:

I’ve just finished the first mini-monkey sock. Thought I’d better jot down some notes while I still remember what I did, so the second sock will match (more or less).

48-st toe (12 st each needle), then 7 reps mini-monkey pattern. Inc. every other round for gussets to 24 st. on each heel needle (72 st total at this point). Heel flap is 12×12 (6 edge chains)

When heel is done, four more reps of pattern, then 5 rounds plain, picot row, then one round plain, then dec to 40 st and work 3 or four rows, turn sock inside out and attach loops to inside of hem.

Photos soon.

After a year and a half we’ve finally finished our Ulysses audio book — and just in time for Bloomsday!

http://librivox.org/ulysses-by-james-joyce/

As the catalog page notes, we bent the rules on this one — editing was not required; recording in pubs was encouraged. You’ll hear lots and lots of bloopers and background noise. A few of the sections were read as dramatic works with sound effects and everything. Hooray Team Librivox!

Well, I’m still sick, Henry’s still sick. We were planning to go the The Fair today, but that’s off — luckily it runs till July 4, so there will be plenty of other opportunities to go.

So, let’s see, what did we do… Henry watched some cartoons, I ran errands, we played some WoW, we tidied up the Sitting Room, and we planned out a new messenger bag for him. Made the basic pattern already and dug through my stash for appropriate fabric — he chose a medium-blue corduroy for the exterior, and red-and-white striped stuff for the lining.

Watched Episode 9 of Rome tonight with Dan! What an AWESOME show. Every episode is gripping and over far too soon. The only thing we don’t like is the title sequence, which is dull compared to the title sequence for The Tudors :) Other than that, it’s perfect — well-written, characters we care about, fine acting, amazing sets and costuming. I suppose there are plenty of wild historical inaccuracies, but oh well, we’re learning a lot about ancient Rome anyway, and it sends us to wikipedia to look things up and compare reality with TV.

Another photo of Henry at the Rockola concert:

He was singing and playing guitar on “The End” (Abbey Road).

Still sick, but feeling better. I felt well enough today to run some errands, teach my piano students, and do some desperately-needed housework. Moved the long Ikea sofa from the teaching room into the sitting room (i.e. craft/hobby room) so Henry has a nice place to lounge after “bedtime” while he’s waiting to get sleepy. Also vacuumed & dusted, etc. Henry has started to feel sick again, poor boy.

Working the Widdershins heel on my Mini-Monkey socks, but I started too soon and had to rip back, so no photo yet.

Season finale of The Tudors tonight. Poor Cardinal Woolsey. We can’t WAIT until there are new episodes!

I have skinny feet. Not short, just really REALLY skinny. Also, I knit relatively loosely. Also, I hate baggy socks. Also, I don’t like to knit with needles smaller than US 0 (2.0mm). Add these facts together and you will see that I have problems following other people’s sock patterns.

I usually get about 8st/inch with fingering yarn on my 2.0mm needles, which is a typical sock gauge — but my I need my socks to be an inch or two smaller around than the pattern size. Therefore, I must re-write every pattern. This is not a problem with a pattern that has a small repeat, say, a 6, 8, or 10 stitch repeat. I just figure out how many repeats I need to leave out, and go from there. But there are a lot of cute socks with larger repeats — Cookie’s “Monkey”, for instance. It’s got four repeats of a 16-st lace pattern, so 64 stitches around — far too big for me.

So last night I scaled down and re-charted the lace pattern to be a 12-st repeat, made a 48-st toe, and tried out my scaled-down pattern. So far it’s looking REALLY good, and it should fit properly. Not all lace patterns can be successfully scaled down, but Monkey can!

Photo of original chart vs. scaled-down version:

And the toe of the first sock:

Here’s something you should know about:
http://recaptcha.net/

A captcha that not only stops spammers, but also helps to digitize books correctly! It’s a win-win combination!

I find their email-hiding service to be especially useful:
http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/

We plan to install the phpbb registration plugin on the LibriVox forums asap. Maybe it’ll be easier for regular people to cope with than the captcha we have now, plus it’s just so suitable for our project!

Getting lots of nice LibriVox-related email lately!

From a fellow in Finland:

Thanks once more about the librivox, it is a amazing system and I have really enjoyed listening the books. MP3 books give totally new possibilities. And at the same it is also back to the basics or original story telling way like it was before the radio or TV

From a lady working in Qatar:

… I listen to the librivox stories at night when I’m trying to go to sleep. Night is when it’s worst — I lie there wishing I was home — and it’s nice to have something to get my mind off of it. I finished your “Secret Garden” a few days ago and I’m working through “A Little Princess.” Something about this place is making me want to regress to my childhood.

From a gentleman, aged 55:

I absolutely love Librivox and I can’t thank you all enough. I would like to download your books onto CDs so that I can play them on my CD player while I work.

From a lady:

This is such a great cause, I’ve had a stroke recently and cannot hold a book to read it, I can however, listen to audio CD’s.

From a father:

Thank you for your LibriVox recordings. My family has had many good hours of listening. We especially enjoyed your reading of ‘The Secret Garden’, but also have listened to ‘Swiss Family Robinson’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

I’ve always been a reader — but find listening proves helpful in getting through some books (like Moby Dick).

From a mother:

We live in Singapore, and wanted to let you know how much we have enjoyed… continue to enjoy…your recordings.

Our 6 year old, Jackie (Jackson) has listened to Our Island Story and some of the Baum books on Librivox.org, and, in fact, after a hard morning at outside play and Primary 1 (first grade) he loves to sit down on the floor, construct something (out of cardboard, leggos, etc) and listen to you read a story

From a lady:

I don’t know you but i listen a lot to the audio books you read. I live in
the netherlands. So i’am not very good in Englisch. But i listen every day
on the way to my work to story’s. So my english improved every day a little.
And i find it a lovely way to start a day. I like the little princes and i
just listen to the secret garden.

Thanks, everyone :)

(if i’ve quoted you and you’d prefer not to make your words public, let me know and I’ll take them down)

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I whipped up another pair of socks from the rest of the Marra. Four-round stripes, the misocrafty short-row heel, and, as an experiment, 8 stitches added evenly in one round before the heel and then taken away after:

I think they’re very cute with my Crocs:

And last night I started my Wavy Triangles Scarf while we were watching Rome:

I charted the pattern first:

It made me really happy to start working on this scarf because it reminded me of going with Christine to the Yarn store in Montreal! I skipped the fancy tubular cast-on because I tried it out and it’s icky, it stretches out but doesn’t stretch back which is bad thing for a scarf if you don’t want splayed ends.

Just woke up, gotta write this down before I forget, though I know there’s nothing worse than hearing about other people’s dreams.

We were in Canada, helping Hugh and Christine move. I went out to a little store, and there was a grizzled old man there, maybe 65-70. Somehow I found out that he was ApeLad (drawer of hoboes, monkeys, lolcats, etc. His work shows up on boingboing all the time). We talked for a while, and I got all giddy and excited because I had met ApeLad, and I ran back to the house to tell Hugh, because I knew he’d want to meet ApeLad, too. Hugh was out but Christine was ironing sheets, so I helped. There was an aquarium in the kitchen, and a miniature lynx was diving in and trying to eat the fish.

So random! Why on earth did I dream about ApeLad? I’ve never given him a thought before. Now I see that he’s on twitter… I wonder if I should friend him. I find it creepy when unknown people friend me… but he can always block me if it weirds him out.

What makes google so cool? Here’s a new service they’re working on:
http://labs.google.com/goog411/

I just used it to get the number of my local GameStop. It worked like a charm. The googlebot operator was helpful, polite, and spoke perfect English. He understood my request, and was willing to connect me to any one of 11 GameStop stores. As it turned out, the very first one was the nearest, and he connected me right away. For free. Chew on that, Phone Company!

Get your own Daemon at http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/!

Feeling a bit better this morning. Still sick, but definitely a bit better. Rockola posted a few photos from the Sgt. Pepper show! Here’s Henry playing keyboard in Penny Lane:

And here he is cueing the audience in Sgt. Pepper:

Yes, that’s a librivox t-shirt he’s wearing :)

it’s tuesday evening. i’ve been sick since the middle of sunday night. bob and chloe came over on sunday afternoon, which was great fun. introduced them to curb your enthusiasm. then sore throat struck in the middle of the night. sore throat is gone now, replaced by stuffy head, congested chest, general misery. bah.

Three more chapters for you:
06 – The Rise of the Franks
07 – Franks and Mohammedans
08 – Charlemagne

Bob Dylan is responsible for all the hit songs of the past 35 years. This video proves it!