Recently in Miscellaneous Category
In Chicago, the official Independence Day fireworks always happen the night of July 3rd, and the general populace (and surrounding suburbs) are left to put on their own shows on July 4th. Even though the sun is still out and it's 4 PM, this incredibly beautiful afternoon is being punctuated by the noise of firecrackers and M80s. By the time it gets dark, I know that it will sound like a war zone outside my house. The air will be filled with smoke from pyrotechnics. The cats will flee to the basement and John and I will perch on our upstairs balcony watching the displays of our neighbors, some of which try to rival some of the larger suburban shows.
This is something I had no idea about until I moved to Chicago. In fact, even when I lived in Hyde Park, the neighborhood was relatively quiet. But where I live now, in roughly the center of the residential part of the city, the 4th of July makes you wonder about all those laws banning the sale of fireworks in Illinois.
At one point I would have been irritated by it. Annoyed with people who seem to think that their desire to celebrate outweighs the public need for safety and quiet. But after my 7th year in our house, I've come to see it as part of the fabric of the year. People blowing off steam and trying to create some explosive beauty in their back yards.
I've been spending the day, or rather Z's afternoon nap, doing some things that are good for my soul. I finished a small spinning project and spun up and plied some lovely silk -- just 30 grams, but since I got about 160 yards, I think it will make a nice small summer scarf. And I got my blog archives working correctly again. It had been causing me a lot of mental distress that these weren't functioning correctly. So now I have achieved some measure of independence from the frustration of having a partially functional blog. There's still a lot more to do on the blog, but at least now I am making progress in the right direction.
My other little project has been to identify the ongoing craft projects I have going on right now.
They are:
- My Diagonal Squares quilt, in which all the blocks are complete, but have not been assembled into a quilt top.
- My Blooming 9 Patch quilt, which I have gotten about halfway through sewing the strips together.
- A doll-sized version of the Children's Delight quilt that I created for my god-daughter. I have the top pieced together, but I want to try quilting and binding it myself.
- And a quilt project I haven't talked about yet, Modern Thinking. This is a project I started this month as part of a color theory in quilting course that I took at Quiltology with Amy Walsh of Blue Underground Studios. The color theme is "Fire and Ice". I don't even have all my fabric cut out for this one yet.
- The Zebra Striper baby dress for Ms. Z. I am in the long endless yellow knitting trip that is the skirt of the dress. The advent of warm weather killed my enthusiasm for this project.
- A pair of toe-up socks that I haven't blogged about yet that takes nice advantage of striping sock yarn. I'm about 1/3 of the way up the leg of the second sock, so these socks will make an appearance here soon, I hope.
- My Kushu Kushu scarf that uses that Habu Textiles stainless steel yarn. I like this project but the fine yarn and big needles with dullish points don't make for fast knitting so it's been sidelined for a little while.
- John's Stained Glass Scarf which is not quite to the halfway mark now. I made a lot of progress on this thing when I was home full time with Zosia (it was my nursing project). The double knitting is neat but takes so darn long.
- And my Three-Ply Targhee Log Cabin Blanket. I've decided to use some log cabin squares in this project and just some squares of garter stitch on the diagonal. This project sits in my living room waiting for some love. Something it's unlikely to get any time soon since it's a thick wool blanket and it's getting warm here in Chicago.
- My Rogue cardigan. Now that I am post baby and on my way to getting my post-baby body back into shape, this project may get some air time as it gets closer to the fall.
- My Moorit CVM spinning project. There's still a whack of a lot of that big ol' ball of moorit CVM to spin up. I'm going to try to load up my iPhone with podcasts and get cracking on this. I did a little test spinning to see if I would have any problems matching my previous singles and it still looks pretty good. I still have this dream of spinning the wool and designing a sweater to use it with!
Happy 4th of July to everyone here in the US and elsewhere that's celebrating the day. To everyone else, I wish you a great weekend!
I'm learning lots about MT that I didn't know before, but don't feel like I'm getting much closer to an installation that makes me happy.
Thanks for your patience.
In fact, after I found out we were having a girl, but before Ms. Z was born, I insisted that I didn't want to do that whole "pink is for girls, blue is for boys" thing. When people asked me what colors I liked, I suggested yellow, green, purple and my personal favorite color, blue. And, lucky for me, most of the clothing that we were gifted with came in a rainbow of colors. Sure, there was some pink in there, but there was enough variety that I didn't mind the pink too much -- and having diversity in her wardrobe was much more important to me than anything else.
Initially I went quite "neutral" for her nursery as well. Her furniture is in light wood and white, the walls are a soft purple, her carpet is grey. Nothing that screamed out girl to me. We did go the pink route for some of her bedding, and registered for a really lovely dark pink and white motif crib set from Nurseryworks. But with a variety of different colored toys and mobiles the pink wasn't overwhelming, and I thought it was a nice balance.
I think what started to get me when it came to wanting people to recognize that Z was a girl was when people would ask me "Is it a boy or a girl?" On one hand, the pronoun "it" is just the neutral pronoun. On the other hand, people are never referred to as "it" except in a perjorative way. So not only did it feel like my baby was losing an important part of her identity, but she was being made into a thing or some kind of pet. And gender really is an important part of identity. If only because without gender we become "it"s.
I could completely understand this reaction from people without children. Heck, I'm sure that I've been guilty of it more than once in my life and I don't chase after people and harass them about their word choices. But once I had Z, it really sunk in for me that babies were little people with their own personalities and identities. And as I struggled with figuring out why it bugged me when people asked me what "it" was, I tried to find ways to make sure I wasn't doing the same thing. So when we met another baby, I started asking questions like "How old is your baby?" or "Does your baby enjoy the swings?" because the parent or caretaker would usually say something like "He's 6 months old" or "She's getting to like them now that she can sit up." So when I didn't know whether the baby was a boy or a girl, I was able to get my gender information in a way that preserved my own need to recognize that the baby was a person and not a thing.
So that was when the pink started to creep in. First it was her foot wear: pink Robeez shoes for when we went out for walks, then subtle things in her wardrobe: tops with pink flowers, bottoms with pink designs or more feminine motifs. She has a few solid pink things, but mostly what I've tried to do is buy clothing that gives off cues. I love bright colors (I think that is why I enjoy quilting so much) and want Z to enjoy color, too, but I also want people to recognize that Z is a girl. Sometimes being a girl comes with a lot of baggage, but my overall experience so far is that it's a pretty cool thing, too.
Does that mean that I subscribe to all the gender-role stereotyping stuff? No, not at all. I grew up thinking that most of the time the boys got the coolest toys: building blocks, erector sets, Legos and miniature firetrucks with real hoses that could squirt water and computers. I have a plan to make sure that Z gets exposed to all sorts of different kinds of toys and games and I'm going to work hard to make sure that she understands that no matter who she is or what she wants to be, her parents will support her. That means if she wants to be an engineer (a strong possibility given her genetic stock) we'll try to encourage that. If she wants to be a girly girl, I'll try hard to not make her think that there's anything wrong with that either.
Not too long ago, I was listening to a podcast or reading something online (I honestly can't remember) about "taking back the pink" -- it spent a lot of time discussing how one simple color came to be symbolic of such a strong set of stereotypes and how both women -- and some men -- had gotten tired of this and were embracing pink in their lives just because they liked it and it made them happy. And I was remembering that article when I bought the yarn for Z. I just thought it was a lovely color and would make this sweet sophisticaed strawberry ice cream confection of a sweater, and it would give me the chance to indulge in a sweet and girly little project. (In fact, if the yarn hadn't been so darned expensive ($14/skein) I would have bought it for myself.). So I guess that yarn is a little bit stereotype and a little bit my attempt to get beyond my own color biases and just enjoy working with a happy color. Kind of nice when you get a "twofer" like that.
- Chicago has gone from a very cold spring (the coldest May on record for over 100 years) to a blast of August and is now finally settling into some reasonable weather. Probably my favorite temperature range is 70 to 75 degrees farenheit with mild breezes. The fact that it is relatively rare in Chicago except in late spring and early fall makes it all that much more enjoyable when it arrives.
- My incredibly resilient father has taken on his third major surgical procedure in less than a year and just had his hip replaced. He called me after surgery yesterday. He is very excited to have it done and to be back on the road to much better mobility. I'm feeling inspired by his willingness to take on the scariness that is major orthopedic surgery so soon after some other major medical events because he wants to be proactive about ensuring his own quality of life. Sometimes it is easy to let our fears prevent us from opening a door and going someplace better. One of the things he can do as "therapy" is use his spinning wheel. You've got to love rehabilitation that involves spinning. Dad was asking me about whether he should make a two ply yarn or a three ply. Is there anything more fun than sharing a fiber hobby with your dad? I love you, Dad. Heal up soon and heal up better than before!
- Ms. Z is now going to bed between 8 and 9 PM almost every night. I am still adjusting to this change. You would think I would have thrown myself full force into knitting and spinning, and I have started a new pair of socks for myself. But mostly I am just using my free time to do not very much at all except read and watch some mindlessly entertaining TV (Deadliest Catch on Discovery... I am trying to convince myself that it is helping me to understand some of what is really involved in bringing seafood from the ocean to the grocery store, but I really just think that the cinematography of the boats in the Bering Sea is very cool in HD).
- You know, I'm just not feeling a 4th entry here... probably because I have a big #5...
MS is an autoimmune disease where in the immune system attacks the nervous system. This inappropriate immune behavior leads to many symptoms but often includes pain and fatigue and a degradation of neurological function including paralysis and loss of vision. Different people have different progressions, but the end result is that most victims of this disease must work through both pain and the knowledge that at times they are going to be fighting for control of their own bodies.
Medical research is expensive, and I know many of you must be thinking, "How can my $10 make a difference?". In and of itself, one ten dollar bill can only do so much, but together, they can do some amazing things. Last year Claudia raised almost $40,000 for her ride. That kind of money can help to support a graduate student's stipend for two years, or can cover most of the cost of a post-doctoral researcher's salary for one year. It can buy almost half of a lower throughput sequencing machine. It could cover the cost of developing a genetically modified mouse that could be used to study MS or could maintain a small "clean" mouse colony for a year or more to help study the progression of disease and possible interventions. It could make it possible for 20 researchers to travel to a conference where they can share the results of their research and maybe help to catalyze the next big advance in the science and understanding of the disease. I saw the value of this money first hand when I was in the laboratory and people received grants and fellowships from the MS Society and organizations like it. There are so many ways that this money gets put to good use!
I think so many people think that only big government research grants can make a difference when it comes to tackling big disease issues, but the truth is that smaller communities of people really can make a difference with contributions to efficiently run organizations like the MS Society.
This year, I definitely was the beneficiary of some good karma when I went to Boston. I plan to make a contribution to Claudia's fundraising efforts for the MS Society in honor of her dedication to doing a good thing to help others and with thoughts of the people who did a good thing to help me in mind. If you have the resources to consider contributing to this cause, I hope you'll get on board and help work towards fighting a disease that affects so many of our fellow travelers.
MT4 is not bad, it's just a significant shift structurally and I did some dumb, blind things without thinking when I installed it. I have been kicking myself for deciding to upgrade when what I had was working fine. The lure of shiny new features is just too much to resist sometimes. Some days I am just my own worst enemy when it comes to wanting to play with new toys. In the end, I ended up "starting fresh" by creating a brand new blog and importing all of the stuff from the old blog into the new one. And there are still a ton of issues that I still have to resolve. Sigh. But at least you can read it and I can post to it, which is an improvement. The look and feel of my blog is now just one of Movable Types standard on board styles... I miss my old template already. But hopefully I'll be able to resurrect things as time goes on. In the meantime, it's nice just to have a blog that actually functions.
Right now I'm trying to look on the bright side and see this as an opportunity to learn something new and to clean up a bunch of old cruft that had accumulated in my template. I'm hoping that once I get to start playing with some of the new widgets and toys in MT4 that I will be happier about the whole situation. I do have to say that I like the image preview functions much better...
However, the moral of this story is most definitely the old engineer's adage: if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Yes, I know I am having problems with the comments... they want you to be authorized to log comment... even I am not authorized at this point, so don't take it personally... more MT4 issues.
Dear Blog Friends,
I always think that I am going to be able to do everything I want to do, no matter what new things I take on. So I had the same attitude about having a baby. Certainly after I "got used to" having a baby around, I would regain my equilibrium for balancing home and work and crafting and then I'd have everything back in order again. But at this point, I still haven't reached that equilibrium point. And, as a result, I spend a lot of time bouncing between things, and not really being happy with what is going on with any of them. So even though I don't like what I am seeing, it has become clear to me that something has to give. John and Z are non-negotiables, work, unfortunately, falls into that category as well.
Crafting and regular blogging, in part because they go hand in hand, are the easiest things to set aside for the time being while I work on getting the two most important things in balance. Blogging is creating additional issues for me at the moment because I made the mistake of trying to upgrade to Movable Type 4 and I have run into some server-side problems that probably aren't a big deal but which I just don't have time to troubleshoot easily right now. But the process of upgrading also resulted in changes to my database that make it difficult to use my old MT3 installation as well. And time I spend messing around with blogging software is time I don't spend with Z or on other things that I need to get done.
I will continue to pop in here periodically with a baby picture I especially like or a project that I manage to complete, but posting will be irregular until at least December and perhaps until after the holiday season. Hopefully by then I will have things in better order and can start adding a few more fun things to the collection of stuff I am trying to balance.
Peace to you all.
Theresa
The last two days have seen a little knitting, but a lot of general lack of motivation. I'm not sure whether to chalk this up to being 34 weeks pregnant or just to the weather, but clearly it doesn't lead to that much that is bloggable. So instead of rambling too much, I thought I'd just share a picture I took a little while ago that makes me happy and is one of the elements of my baby's nursery -- though not quite in the right color scheme.
One of the only things I regret about being in the city and having a lot of shade in the lot our house sits on is that I can't really grow a butterfly garden. Perhaps Z and I will just have to do that at my parents house. I like the idea of my baby's life being filled with butterflies.
I'm considering myself to be a lucky knitter these days. About a week ago I received my invitation to participate in Ravelry. I found out about Ravelry a while ago when Cara first talked about it on her blog. I am always ever so curious about knitting community projects -- especially ones that people have nice things to say about -- that look to involve organizational tools for knitting. So I trundled on over there and put my name on the waiting list to get to try it out and be part of their widening beta test.
Last week I got my invitation to come and join the party (before I go any farther, you should all know that they are letting people in in the order that they put their name on the list, and they are letting people in as fast as they think the system can tolerate new people -- there's no favoritism going on here). I clicked the link, got signed up and have had a real blast playing around in the Ravelry sandbox. As a knitter and a sometimes coder/webmonkey, this is one of those things that I wish I had thought of myself. It's well thought out, easy to use, and fun. Fun to the point of kind of being addictive -- I just can't seem to stop myself from plugging in my projects, stash, needles and books from my knitting library. And when I take a break from that, it's fun to go trolling through looking for friends, seeking out interesting new patterns, and seeing what other yarns people have been making some of my old favorite patterns in. Heck. I even opened up a Flickr account so that I can use the photo importing feature.
Want to see what else is being put together for Ravelry? Just click here -- Jessica and her husband Casey, have put together a screen shot tour that describes it all (what it is and what it isn't) better than I can.
Ravelry is a very cool tool and a blast to play with. I really hope that Jessica and Casey are successful getting this thing going and ramping it up. If you do go on over and put your name in to be invited, please remember that it's still in beta (i.e. still not entirely ready for prime time as far as the developers are concerned) and please BE PATIENT and charitable in your thoughts if you have to wait. This is a two person show, folks -- and I think both of those people have full time jobs that don't involve developing a cool website for the knitting community -- and it's being put together as a free resource. It's clear that Jessica and Casey want to make this something that every knitter can participate in and enjoy, but that they also want to release something that can handle a lot of people and that provides a good use experience. That process takes time.
And cool, well built things like Ravelry are very much worth waiting for!
While some folks were off enjoying Maryland Sheep and Wool, I was at home helping to direct some of the house organizational changes that need to happen before the baby arrives. Given that my fiber room is becoming the nursery, that room has to get emptied out before nursery building can begin. That means moving most of my craft stuff to other locations and creating a better crafting space in my office area -- which I chose because it's well lit and close to my main computer area. We decided to start with creating the new workspace first, since it would allow me to move a number of things from my old space in an orderly fashion.
My parents were coming to visit this weekend, and my dad, handy guy that he is, helped John with the process of making it happen quickly and smoothly. I did almost nothing -- but I do have some photographic evidence of the transformation.
This was my corner of the office before the process started. The bookcases are mostly empty because the first part of the process involved moving a bunch of my books downstairs into some new bookcases we bought for our guest room. Yes, I know, I have a lot of clutter. Part of this re-organization process is also for me to start reducing some of that. John and I are both world champion pack rats when we want to be.
With the help of my Mom, Dad and John, all the remaining stuff got moved out of the bookcases. The big bookcase got moved into my bedroom (where I am creating a small reading nook (probably there will be pictures of this later) and the bookcase on the right moved to the other side of the room (John's half of the office) where it will be used to help organize some computer stuff.
The new workspace needed to include shelving up to the ceiling. John and my Dad decided on using a system that involves hanging the vertical brace pieces down from a horizontal support. The cool thing about this is that you don't need to drill holes in the wall for anything but the horizontal support.
Once that horizontal support is in place, it's a simple matter to hang the vertical supports, put in the shelf braces and place the shelves. All this stuff came from the Home Depot. The shelves are nice because all Dad and John had to do was trim them down to the size they liked. They are melamine shelves with an oaky looking color to match my desk and the trim on the workspace top.
My Dad, who built the workspace top, decided that the best way to create a flexible workspace for me was to create a top that "floated" and didn't have any supports that would get in the way of me putting a chair under the top at any location. These oak pieces were attached to the wall to provide some additional strength for the cantilevers he was using to help support the top. The opening is just to provide access to the electrical socket and cable and phone connections.
My Dad built the worktop at home with some melamine he had and trimmed out the front edge with an oak edge to give it a nice decorative touch. It's 30" deep so that I have a workspace that can be a nice place to sew, but can also support doing a little cutting, paper art, pattern design, or whatever other thing I can think of to do there. John installed the lights over the desk to help give me a fully lit workspace. The lights are standard fluorescent assemblies with OTT lights in them so I'll have natural daylight colors. It's hard to see, but my dad drilled two holes into the back of the top so that electrical cords for the lights and my sewing machine could run down underneath (Treese doesn't like a lot of exposed cables, my husband tells my dad -- clearly he knows me well). Those holes have those nice plastic inserts that you find in office desks for cabling to help keep things neat and to prevent jagged edges from snagging anything.
Here's the finished space, complete with my sewing machine installed in its new home. To further polish the area, John bought cord covering conduit to cover the cords from the light fixtures and mounted a powerstrip underneath the top to support the lights and the sewing machine and whatever else I want to plug in there. Et Voila! I now have 80" of new workspace, a collection of lovely shelves to move books and craft components onto (those boxes on the shelves are something that I found at Joann for scrapbooking, but which work awfully nicely for storing fabric and quilt blocks). It's a perfect dedicated living space for my sewing machine with a reasonable workspace to support my sewing projects. And having a dedicated crafting area should help me keep my computer/office oriented workspace tidier and just generally give me a nicer work area.
Only a couple of things remain to be done... we are installing some "tchotzke shelves" to the left of the main shelves so that some of the small trinkets from my book case can be displayed there, and I will have some cool magnet it boards under the bottom shelf so that I can keep track of the notes I like to make for myself. Next weekend I will be treating myself to a trip to the Container Store to look for storage boxes for the top shelf to hold less used supplies, and I will likely add some additional storage (on wheels) under the desk top to hold supplies I need to have close at hand.
To say I am psyched by the potential of this new space is an understatement. It's beautiful emptiness is already inspiring me to discard things that aren't necessary and to think about how to create an organized, functional space. John and my Dad brought this whole thing together exactly as I had planned it in my head -- while my mom and I attended a bridal shower and treated ourselves to a nice trip to Quiltology. I feel lucky to have such great guys around to help make my life better.
And now the mass book and craft moving process can begin...
Today's post kind of snuck up on me. I think it's a pretty big milestone for me. It's my 1000th blog post. Ten to the power of three. A cool grand. My own millenium.
I've never really celebrated any of my "blogoversaries", in truth, this is because I don't really know when to mark the beginning. My very first post was on August 24, 2002, inspired by Julie who had told me about these interesting new knitting blogs. I've always liked the idea of having a journal, but I wasn't sure what to do with a journal that got published in a public place. Like most people's first post there's not much useful in it. I had just set up my Blogger account, and that first post was mostly one of those Testing.... testing... 1...2...3... things. I didn't make another post until the beginning of October, when I finally decided that I was going to talk about both bioinformatics and knitting. Needless to say, the bioinformatics didn't stick around very long, though, of course, my blog name "The Keyboard Biologist" which is completely derivative of my corporate life, stayed in place. I guess it was my way of saying "look out! crafty scientist in the house!"
But reaching 1000 posts, no matter when I started the process, is something easily defined. 1000 posts in 4.5 years -- it surprises even me to think that I've come up with over two hundred posts a year since I started blogging. I "went daily" sometime in 2003 after being inspired by bloggers like Wendy and Bonne Marie. I loved how every morning with my coffee I could open up their webpages and find something new to start the day with. Posting daily was a real jolt to my own creativity and inspired me to do and try new things. This blog started as mostly knitting with the occasional paper craft. Since then I've tried spinning, dyeing, sewing, braiding, tatting, crochet, quilting and even a little bit of rubber stamping, not to mention playing around with HTML and digital photography and some pattern publication. I've knit more socks than I ever imagined were possible, I have a veritable wardrobe of handknit sweaters and tops, and I can't almost even believe that I am about to embark on an unspun fiber to sweater kind of project. In 2002 I would have identified myself as a "geek girl", now I think of myself as a "crafty girl" -- even though I'm probably getting too perilously close to 40 to really be in the girl category much at all.
What's a little funny about the whole thing is that when I started, I was almost always convinced that I would get bored and give it up or just simply run out of things to say. Even though I love to write and love to journal, I figured that there could only possibly be a finite amount I could say about knitting or other crafting projects, and that people would just get bored with hearing my voice. Instead, 1000 posts later, I find myself wondering how I could ever stop doing it. I love going out on my balcony to take pictures of my latest project. I love talking about some "new to me" discovery that fascinated me for an afternoon. I love connecting with people from all over the world who talk to me through comments and email. I love learning from other people who inhabit the community. I love blogging -- it just makes me happy to see my words on electronic paper, to read the comments I get. To know that I might be someone that other people share their morning coffee with. I don't know if I'll always be daily or I'll always be talking about crafts, but I suspect that I will always be blogging.
From my desk to yours, a round a virtual lattes from the Keyboard Biologist to all of you who stop by my little corner of the internet every now and again. Thank you to everyone who has made this a worthwhile and lasting experience. I'm looking forward to seeing where the next 1000 posts take me.
