Yesterday was one of those days at work that always seemed like I was going one step forward and two steps back. The net result: by the time I went home I felt exhausted and like I hadn't accomplished anything. Not a very satisfying combination. Hopefully today will be better. I have a couple of little coding projects that I can work on and probably complete. Writing a good piece of code is almost as satisfying as completing a knitting project -- code isn't as tangible, but the recipient is usually pretty happy to get it!

A lot of people don't see it the way I do, but I find coding to be a wonderful, therapeutic process: you solve a problem and then you send your solution out into the world to be enjoyed by other people Good code, like good patterns, gets adopted by a lot of people. But I can be happy just creating a little tool to help one of our scientists get at our data better. And I should get to put together a couple of those little pieces today. Writing code for me today is also a form of avoidance. We have a big grant proposal that I am supposed to be working on...

Last night on the knitting front, I spent some time blocking my sweater. It actually felt pretty good, stretching it out, watching it come out exactly the way the pattern said it was supposed to size-wise. I don't have the nifty blocking board that I ordered from KnitPicks yet, so I improvised with one of our futon couches and some plastic trashbags and a spray bottle from some body splash. Talk about being an urban yuppy knitter! It felt very strange to spray down my work, but now that it is dry, everything feels so soft and looks so smooth. I will probably leave it tacked down until I get the time to sew up the raglan sleeves and put on the collar. Next adventure: learning how to do mattress stitch!

One thing that may not have already become clear about me is that I am a PDA junkie. And not just any PDA, I will only use Palm devices -- yes, I've tried PocketPC devices and I just don't like them. They don't feel natural and I keep expecting them to be full-blown Windows, which they are not. Anyway, it never really occurred to me to use my Palm (its not a true Palm, its a Samsung I-300 Palm Phone -- last year's techie Christmas present from John -- this link is to the newest incarnation of my phone) for anything related to knitting. It does hold my Knitting Needle database, but that't about it. Then I discovered this little program:

CountAble 1.1

This little program made it very easy for me to keep track of row increases and cable decreases and everything else as I worked on my sweater. Much better than conventional row counters -- I can keep a lot of information going at once, there are no little pegs to lose, and my cat does not try to run off with them! It's a simple little program (the kind I could probably write for myself if I just put my mind to it), but very handy, and definitely worth the $6 given how many row counters I have been found by my cats and then never heard from again. Even better, it is customizable so that if you have a bunch of different repeating patterns in your aran sweater, you can keep track of them all -- and you can keep track of mutiple projects.

Started my Fuzzy Feet last night after I got the sweater into blocking mode. I discovered that I knit too tightly for felting (this was also true of the "Unflappable Handbag" project on my WIP list) and I had to move up to size 11 needles (good thing I already had the 16" circ and the DPs I needed!). Having never really done a sock before, I foud the heel turning process to be pretty cool. And I am pretty pleased with the way the Kureyon is striping. I think I may end up making a pair of these for John. He's not so sure about the striping, but he's very annoyed that the temperature dropped again last night and he can't stand to have cold feet! Actually, he sort of surprised me last night by wanting to go in and see my sweater blocking. I think he likes seeing how my projects progress -- in the same way I like to see the new improvements that he has made to his home theatre.