A Curious Statistical Anomaly

I don’t get to knit much except during those times when there’s not much else to do that requires my hands — so I knit when the PC locks up (which lately is a lot and knitting keeps me from trying to get it to work by pressing keys, thus making it worse) or when watching TV or DVDs, when we have company and just sitting and talking.  But somehow, to my surprise I managed to finish a few things that have been hanging around.  You know how it is — a bedroom project, a living room project, an office project, and one that fits in the purse for travel.

First, I finally finished these socks made with Red Heart’s Heart & Sole with Aloe yarn. As usual with self-stripping yarn they’re fraternal socks. The colors aren’t quite right but they’re a beautiful orange, burnt red, purple, brown, yellowish that reminds me of desert sunsets. They’re just my basic sock pattern only with a broken rib pattern on the leg section. Only since I really don’t like doing purl, the purl band only shows on the inside and the outside has some interesting bumps and texture that I really liked.

Next, I blogged about knitting the Baby Fan Mitts of a Paton’s Silk Bamboo yarn in a previous post. The pattern is a free Ravelry download designed by Morgan Wolf that you can find here. The pattern is very clear and the mitts are beautiful and dressy without being too fussy.

I had plenty of the yarn left over so I decided to make a matching cowl to go with the mitts. I used a pattern from one of Barbara Walkers’ books and started knitting. It took a few tries to get what I wanted but here it is drying. (Don’t let the color fool you — this is the same yarn as the Baby Fan Mitts and in the same color — for some reason I just couldn’t get the same color in the pictures. Actual color is a very pretty blue-teal — closer to the mitts photo than the cowl one.

I think it came out pretty good and I’m pleased with it. I’ll try to get a picture with me wearing it at some point. I’ve been thinking of writing the pattern up and posting it but don’t know if there would be much interest. Would there? Should I?

But because now I didn’t have anything but sweaters on the needles, I needed to start another pair of socks. These are a beautiful green/gold/red/yellowy tweed using Paton’s Kroy Socks yarn.

I haven’t yet decided what to do with them. So, I’m making a plain foot and will do something with the leg portion when I get there. I’m debating making these as a Christmas gift for someone so I’ll have to see how the foot looks before deciding how to do the leg. Right now I’m thinking a plain 2×2 knit purl ribbing or some other simple ribbing pattern.

I’m rather pleased with myself at doing so much over the past two months. But then the fibro has been pretty bad and knitting is something I can do even if I can’t really think straight as long as it’s just plain knit and socks are mostly that. Luckily when you’ve been knitting for years even using double pointed needles to do socks is second nature.

I signed up for the Rockin’ Sock Club by Blue Moon Fibers this year. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and I finally managed to hit the enrollment period with the money to do it (just got paid for a freelance gig). I’m really looking forward to getting the first shipment of yarn and patterns. If I can keep up with the socks from the club I should manage to keep my feet warm next winter and hopefully a couple of the pattern will make great gifts for those who keep asking me for socks for those family members who keep hinting for socks.

Today my laptop decided to take the day off.  I didn’t know that’s what it had in mind.  I was working along thinking I’d do a few more things and then take a short break and up pops a low battery warning.  Now, I’ve got the ‘ol laptop plugged into the UPS which is plugged into the house circuit so no worries.  I keep on working.

I enter a stack of books into the database and between books this low battery warning keeps popping up.  So, I stop and check all the connections and everything is plugged in solid.  Sometimes you see my feet and those dangling cords sort of have their own battle.  But all is as it should be.  Keep on working.

Up pops a notice that the laptop is going into some sort of mode to help me conserve power.  What the?  I check the cords again.  Everything is fine.  This time I’m on my hands and knees under the desk checking the entire length of each cord — from laptop to the power brick and the  brick to the UPS.  Yup all the cords in and plugged in solid not wobbly.  I even checked to make sure the UPS was plugged in but knew it was because the printer and the lamp was working fine.

Okay, weird but not critical but I’m thinking I’ll start a backup just in case.  Close all the programs and start the backup.  Grab a book to read while it’s running and I get a Skype just as I get a message from the laptop telling me it’s shutting down soon.  Send word I’m going to be offline and hit send.  Black screen and a beep.

Try to turn it back on.  Dead. Nothing.  Nada. Okay.  What’s there to do but make tea and grab a book and pretend it’s my break.  I tried several times throughout the day to push the power button hoping it would some up.  Nothing.  Finally, Hyperion gets home from work and I tell him about the problem and ask if we should buy a new brick — last time this happened it was a bad power brick.  He says maybe I missed something and he follows the cords all fine and dandy and then pulls out the cords to pull them out in the light to see that they look fine and not broken or scuffed, plugs them back in and powers up.

Everything is fine.  My laptop sits here with this smug look of satisfaction.  I think it just wanted a day off.  I don’t know why it couldn’t just send me a memo requesting the day off.  I think it might be developing sentience and if not that it’s at least developing an attitude.

Today has been a real challenge. Most of last week I kept having lower back pain on top of the usual fibromyalgia issues. It was constant pain with, now and then, a bad twinge. Finally, today I just couldn’t take it anymore and took a muscle relaxer.

I figured I’d been thinking it was kidneys and drinking water like crazy but it still hurt and every bend and lift was…let’s just say not fun. So, the muscle relaxer. It helped. So, I’m guessing it was the muscles in my lower back all the time and while I was trying to take it easy lifting anything I was probably just making it worse ignoring it. I’m a bit floaty but the pain is now in that “over there” place. You know — you’re in pain and you know it but it’s like one step to the side of you so while it’s here, it’s over there and ignorable.

Meanwhile, we’ve got all the ornaments off the tree and packed. We’ve managed to get all the branches smooched together. Next we need to take it apart and wrap it up for storage. That’s the sticky point with my back as it is. Guess that waits a bit until either I feel better or Hyperion tackles it on his own.

I really hate it when the spoon just get all used up while I still have a full TO DO list and lots of day left over. Meanwhile, I’m doing mindless knitting on my sock — the stocking knit bit in the foot so I’ve got 3 more inches before I have to think about the heel.

I really need many more spoons in my life. So much time so little energy and so few hours not in pain. Okay, I’m whinging again but darn it sometimes you just have to get it out so you can move on.

Okay, this has nothing to do with muscle pain, but a lot to do with mental anguish. Gayle and I watched two sci-fi movies today. Supernova and The Black Hole. Neither are the “classic” by that name, but newer and if anything, worse. Worse because you’d think after all this time movies could actually afford to have a science adviser that could tell them they’re making complete idiots of themselves. Actually, maybe they do have advisers. Just because you have one doesn’t mean you have to listen to them. And in these cases, they most certainly didn’t. Let’s take a second to hit the highlights on the lack of any conformity to high school level physics knowledge.

First in Supernova we have our sun about to go supernova. Okay, we can stop right there. Our sun would need to be about half again its current mass at the very least, so the very premise is already impossible. But wait, there’s more. Why is it going supernova? Because a planetoid crashed into it. Never mind the fact that you could dump the rest of the solar system (which, including ALL the planets, is less than 0.2% of the mass of the sun) into it without causing much more than a ripple. But no, this single planetoid has “punched a hole” in the sun and caused it to become unstable. The instability causes Coronal Mass Ejections which, for some unexplained reason, seem to be aimed at the Earth time and time again. But wait, there’s more. Despite the fact that CME’s are huge energetic clouds of gas larger than the Earth itself, in the movie, they arrive as swarms of little fireballs that rain down and blow up individual buildings. UGH! And the solution to the problem of the impending supernova requires a suspension of disbelieve far above the capacity of this viewer. In most ways, the biggest problems with this movie revolve around the fact that the writers were incapable of understanding anything about the scope of what they were trying to meddle with.  The sun is just too big to fiddle with, and CMEs are just to big and diffuse to cause any problems on less than a hemispheric scale.

Next up is The Black Hole, in which an “accident” with a particle collider causes a black hole to form in St. Louis. Obviously based of the nonsensical ravings against the Large Hadron Collider, this movie quickly goes from the absurd to the disparagingly laughable. Quick lecture in two points. First: The energies produced by the Large Hadron Collider are of a lesser order of magnitude  then the energetic collisions taking place every second in our upper atmosphere between air molecules and cosmic rays. If those collisions haven’t created a black hole in the last few billion years, the LHC isn’t going to be any worry. Second: Assuming a black hole was formed, it would be a microscopic black hole which would flash out of existence in a few microseconds due to Hawking Radiation. Despite what you may have learned about black holes, they do actually emit energy due to quantum mechanical effects at the event horizon. And the smallerl the hole, the faster they evaporate.

So in the movie, we have an impossible event, creating something that wouldn’t actually be of any danger at all.  Furthermore, any black hole that did form, would be subject to gravity like anything else. And since gravity is a universally attractive force, the black hole would fall into the earth (the larger gravity field) and make its way to the core in no time at all before being snuffed by the aforesaid laws of physics. But that would make a short and pointless movie. So instead we get a full scale black hole, hovering over the ground, and eating St. Louis. Interestingly enough, the black hole appears to think (like Khan in Star Trek 2) in two dimensions. Instead of gobbling everything up all around it, it swirls like water going to down the kitchen sink, slowly expanding outwards, but letting helicopters fly over it with impunity. Now we get the part that REALLY doesn’t make any sense. If we ignore physics (and boy do we ever), there’s not much one can do to stop a black hole that’s on the rampage. So we get the addition of an alien entity that uses the black hole as a transit system from planet to planet, and feeds it by sucking in electricity. And “all” we have to do to save the Earth is kick the alien back through the black hole and all will be well again. Gayle and I yelled the solution at the TV about 15 minutes in when the alien first started moving around. Pity it took until 15 minutes from the end for the protagonist to think of it as well.

Okay, that’s enough ranting for now. But be warned, there are two more movies in the collection, and as soon as my craw can take it, we’ll dive into those stinkers as well. When? You’ll be the second to know.

Woke up to find the house surrounded in fog.  At first I didn’t notice because the rain was pattering on the sky light and it was rather dark.  Once I got up and looked out there was fog, the thin grey blanket type over, around, and cloaking everything.  It made for the kind of grey, lazy day where you just spend your time catching up on all the little chores you’ve been meaning to do.

Picked up the kitchen and cleaned the counters and stove top.  Then started on the big job.  Taking down the Christmas tree.  Wish we could leave it alone since my back has been quirky for days now.  But, it’s not the decorating statement I want to make.  The hold up was having to replace the ornament boxes which we’ve had for years and were more tape than box now.  So, lots of shopping and checking in stores as we did errands over the last couple of weeks and found a couple of reasonable substitutes.  It seems that ornament boxes have become tiny little things that won’t hold ornaments — go figure.  So, today we took all the ornaments off the tree and got them packed up.  We started going branch by branch to pull the branches towards the center: you know when you separate and fluff them when you put the tree up that you just have to squeeze them all down again.  Got about 1/6th of it done.   Hopefully, tomorrow we’ll finish that bit of it and get the tree apart, wrapped, and stored.  Then it’s clean the living room and rearrange the furniture and the plants.

Meanwhile, I’m almost done with a sock … maybe another 1/2 inch and bind off. Then start the second one.  I joined the Rocking Sock Club and I’m really looking forward to the first package.  I’ve never joined a sock club before but heard a lot about this one.  I  just never remembered about it during the signup period.

I’ve found the black yarn for the bear’s face so hope to get that done tomorrow or at the very least over the next week. I’ve been finishing things lately and that’s a good thing.  Got the cowl done.  Just need to sew in the ends and block.  Should have pictures up for that soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading in all the in between times to get my commitments for reviews done this month.  Trying to catch up and arrange some interviews before it gets too late, too.

Gumshoe Review published it’s first original short story this month.  We’ve already chosen the story for February.  We hope to have a new story featured each month.  This is a new venture for us and we’re still working out how to streamline the system: reading the submissions, ranking them, going over our favorites, notifying the authors whether we’re interested or not.  We’re getting better but still need to get a system that’s easy for us to deal with and make swift decisions for the sake of the authors.

Nevertheless, I still feel even though I got a lot done today that I’m still running in place rather than moving forward.

I saw this quote today:

“The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.” – Marcel Pagnol

Well, I got thinking that really this is very close to the saying: You’re as happy as you make up your mind to be. Which is a paraphrase of a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

Anyway, both of them got me thinking about how our attitudes effect us and those around us. Thinking about how,  when I have a bad night and don’t sleep and I start my day grumpy, it tends to stay that way. However, if I somehow see something or meet someone that makes me smile, the day makes a change from that point on. There was a meme going about a while ago that said that you should smile at someone and make them happy for the rest of the day. People complained that that was just to simplistic.

Thinking back on the holiday season, and often during it, I notice that people are nicer to each other during this time of the year. They smile more and are far more courteous that normally when they’re wrapped up in their lives and their problems. So, I’m thinking I’m going to try harder this year to be happy and make those around me happy too.

I challenge each of you to be nice to one person a day during this coming year. That means giving someone a genuine, “Hello”. Or, just letting someone cut in front of you on the road or in a store line — with a smile and “that’s okay”. Take the time to notice the world and the people around you and appreciate the sunshine, the rain, the wind (which right now is howling outside my window), and the sunsets.

To get you in the mood to try this “be happy” attitude, here’s Bobby McFerrin’s YouTube video, Don’t Worry, Be Happy. I can’t embed that one so go and watch it, but here’s Bob Marley, with the same song:

Try to start every day, happy to be.

Bear Update:
When last we left the little bear in a previous post, it was rather scary looking. Parts scattered all over the place. I’d managed to make a back, front, two arms, and two legs. However, I couldn’t find my buttons for joints or my needle. So, things got put away.

Finally, I managed to dig out the buttons and find a workable needle. I needed buttons big enough that a child can’t swallow them even though the buttons that make up the joints are inside the bear and a child can’t get to them without a severe desire to dismember said bear — shivery scary thought. The intended bear recipient is rapidly growing since she was born in Feb and I’m totally behind.

What’s needed now is the face– eyes, nose, mouth. Those are embroidered on so there are no pieces for a child to pull off and choke on. I just need some time — a good movie should do it. As soon as I find the thick velvety cord I use for this. It’s in the house somewhere.

Baby Fan Mitts:
I’d seen Patons Silk Bamboo yarn at A.C. Moore and fell in love with the sapphire color. It felt so soft and silky but I couldn’t think of any reason to get it — I just didn’t have a project in mind or planned.

Then as these things tend to happen, I was reading the Rainey Sisters blog and saw the Baby Fan Mitts. Perfect. One skein of the yarn would make the mitts (which is true if you don’t waste any in a long tail when you cast on the stitches. Of course by the time I picked up the yarn, I couldn’t remember how much I needed so I got four skeins.

The mitts came out beautifully and fit and feel great. Much closer fit making them a bit dressier than some others I have. But as I was making them for me and after making two cowls for the moms for Christmas. I got to thinking that a nice matching cowl would then make a nice dressy set. So, out came all the stitch dictionaries and I found a cable-fan that I thought would look like a close match but would also be warm and pretty. Here’s the bit I’ve got done after a bit of experimenting and changing the pattern a bit.

I think it’s going to come out just like I want. I made it a bit loose so that if I decide it will work I can make it longer to pull up over my head to cover my ears if it’s really, really cold (like it has been the last week or so).

Anyway, tomorrow is major last minute house cleaning. Pick my son up at the airport. Buy the Turkey and catch up on his life. Just what he wants: the mother interrogation. Naw, we’ll all have fun. We’re planning to go see the new Sherlock Holmes film. I may or may not be able to post for a while. So, everyone have a great holiday if I don’t get a post or two in.

Tonight we watched the Muppet Christmas Carol. I love that film and the music. Believe it or not, it’s closer to the original story than many of the serious versions (of which I own about 6). We read the book (A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens) a few years back and were surprised to find that some of the lines in the Muppet version that we thought was just Muppet humor was actual Dicken’s humor.

Anyway, found this Muppet version of the Ringing of the Bells, which is one of my favorite holiday songs, and well, words just can’t quite explain this one, so just enjoy this bit of Muppet holiday humor —

Today was another day of snow shoveling to clear our driveway. The road part of our driveway got plowed by someone early this morning. So, we’ve only got to do our 5-700 feet to allow the delivery trucks (FedEx and UPS) to get here. So, tomorrow will be even more shoveling…and more…and more. Maybe I should play this video a few more times to get my spirits up.

It started snowing last night.  We made it home from a WSFA meeting.  Of course the usual 45 minute ride took slightly over 2 hours and had its moments of sliding and slipping but nothing too bad.  We did meet a nice woman who couldn’t get her car up the hill because she didn’t have front wheel drive.  She warned us of the abandoned car at the crest.  We made it up with no problem and finally got home.  Slow and steady seems to help even non-turtles get where they’re going.

But, that experience last night on the way home was what fed our unbelievably silly actions today.  Pride goeth before a  fall and while we didn’t fall — well we did slip and slide and have lots of other adventurous stuff happen.  You see … we’d sold some books on Amazon and we thought we could mail them out on time if we did it today.  The snow didn’t look that deep.  Really, it didn’t– maybe a foot.

Well, dressed and packed and in the car, we started out.  We’d agreed if when we got to the real road and it was not looking good we’d turn around and come back. Those of you who have been reading for a while know our mailbox is about a quarter mile from the house and that’s where the real road is — the road that is our address. So off we started on our adventure.

We got about 1/2 way to the road when disaster struck. We hit ice beneath the snow and slide and fish-tailed and other fine movements of driving adrenaline surges. That stopped our slow and steady pace and we just never got it back. Hyperion walked back to the house for the garden shovel (we intended to buy two shovels while we were out, the one from last year had mysteriously vanished) and some gravel. He came back with the garden shovel and the stiff plastic broom and a bucket of gravel. He shoveled. I swept. We cleared out a large area around the car and under it.

Seems the snow was deeper here — maybe 15 inches and it was dragging on the undercarriage of the car. You can probably guess the rest. An hour and a half later we’ve shoveled a good percentage of the road/driveway maybe 30-40 feet (if added all together) and we haven’t really gotten enough stability and movement to turn around. I’m really dragging. We’re both soaked. So, we headed home — walking. Luckily only about 1/6th of a mile. In snow which is by now 18 inches deep. Even walking in our tire tracks didn’t make it much easier.

To shorten the story. We peel out of the wet clothes changed and got into dry things. Took a short break with hot chocolate and lots of hind-sight evaluations, head-shaking, sage but too late advice to each other, and the knowledge that we still had a car sitting out there in the driveway and not quite far enough over to let a snowplow (which we devotedly hope to engage tomorrow) to get by.

After several rousing games of rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock– I got to stay home and do the wash and get supper started and Hyperion went out with shovel and a heavy heart to see about moving the car either into the tire tracks and home or far enough off to the side for the wished-for snowplow (if it can be made to appear) to get by. He didn’t have much time, we were losing the light and it was still snowing.

He managed to move it over. Get home and once again dry off and dress warm. We made Shepherd’s Pie — can’t think of a better comfort food item for today. It’s still snowing and is expected to all night tonight. [Photos taken this evening.]

Tomorrow is another day. Maybe. More humbly, we’ll be able to retrieve the car. Find some real shovels and put this all behind us. Can’t believe we were this clueless. It must be the scent of Christmas just fogged our brains.