I know it’s not Friday. I wish. That means: *thank goodness it’s finished
The first communion cardi that had taken over my life is done.
Well, it doesn’t have buttons yet but whatever. It doesn’t get them until tomorrow. My part is done.
I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. Next time I agree to make something on a deadline, remind me that I cannot manipulate the space-time continuum in my favor.
Pictures tomorrow after I get a good night’s sleep and regain my sense of humor.
I love my trusty water bottle. It goes with me every day and has been to more foreign countries than most people I know. It’s indestructible, dishwasher-able with a mouth wide enough that it actually gets clean, and a fun color. It saves countless disposable bottles from ending up in landfills. However, it must go.
It’s one of the kind of plastic that’s made with the chemical Bisphenol-A (BPA), which is apparently rather bad for you. This was announced months ago, but I wasn’t terribly concerned until Nalgene announced the other day that they would stop selling them. If they’re willing to forgo an entire highly profitable product line, that says something. It also says something that the US was one of the last places you could actually buy BPA plastic bottles, but I don’t want to think about what that means.
Nalgene will be selling BPA-free bottles soon. I will get one of those. But I will miss my water bottle.
If some part of knitting needles or yarn turns out to be cancer-causing, I’m giving up.
Lately, I’ve been spending all of my knitting time (which hasn’t been much) on the Cassie cardigan. This is the first time I’ve designed a sweater completely from scratch. It has picot hems with a lace pattern whose name escapes me at the moment.
After several false starts with really funky proportions gleaned from other patterns in similar sizes (the length specified for this chest size in the Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns gave me a sweater appropriate for a baby, for instance), so far so good. Though I did spend an embarrassing amount of time last night trying to get the lace pattern to work with the decreases for the neck.
While puzzling this out last night, as usual, I was listening to my ipod while knitting. (Random fact: my ipod’s name is Ralphie, named after the kid in A Christmas Story; it was a Christmas gift, and that’s my absolute favorite Christmas movie.) I usually listen to podcasts (my favorites: Cast On, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, and This American Life). When I run out of those, I put the music on shuffle. Theoretically, this means that it randomly chooses tracks from my music and plays them in some random order. I’ve always thought that it seemed to have an indordinate fondness for certain artists, but this week it’s becoming glaring obvious that it, indeed, does.
The catch is that the artists aren’t the same every time. Each time I put it on shuffle, it seems to pick one group or two or three to favor. The anointed ones change every time (though there are a couple that show up far more than the others). What I end up with is this artist or group of artists being played far more frequently than they should be, based on their proportion of my overall music.
Yesterday, for instance, I made it through 50 songs. Of these, a quarter were from the Barenaked Ladies and the Nutcracker. Last week, out of 40 songs, one quarter were from Peter Gabriel, the Police, and U2. Every single time I put it on shuffle, it plays at least one song from Peter Gabriel, U2, the Police, Blink-182, and the Beatles (yes, I’ve been keeping track; no, I don’t care that you think I’m a dork). To put this in perspective, out of all of the 489 songs currently on my ipod, all of the tracks from all these artists combined only make up 19%. It doesn’t so much like Dave Matthews, the Postal Service, Weezer, Third Eye Blind, J Ralph, and REM, which also comprise the same overall proportion of my music collection.
It also seems to despise all newer music. (Lest you think all my music is old.) And, strangely, it almost never plays the songs I have actually purchased. Is this a ploy to make me buy more?
It is possible to game the software and tell it to favor a song/artist/album and make it play it more frequently than it otherwise would. I have done no such thing. I think my ipod has an agenda. I’m just not sure what it is.
There will be actual knitting content one day soon, I promise. There just hasn’t been that much exciting knitting going on since I got back. In fact, I can summarize it all here:
Don’t worry, you’ll see much, much more of the last one. I should mention that it has to be done by the beginning of May for said little girl’s first communion. At least it’s small.
In the meantime, here’s something far more interesting. It’s what I consider one of the more random things available for purchase in your friendly neighborhood Tesco (grocery store) in the UK: man tissues.
Okay, I guess they’re technically kleenex for men, but I think man tissues sounds better. As far as I can tell, they only differ from regular kleenex in that they’re huge (at least twice as big as normal kleenex), thicker, and come in a manly black box. This is in direct contrast to the trend of, oh, everything else being smaller in the UK than the US. Kimberly-Clark pretty much sums that up on the back, though I’m not sure what the “sorted” thing is about. They sorted out all of the huge tissues considered man-appropriate? They sorted out all the people who don’t have space for the massive box on their small tables?
Remember the old Secret deodorant commercials where men who used it turned into women? W joked that would happen to me if I used his man tissues. But, seeing as those were my only option in his apartment, I decided to tempt fate and tried them.
I’m happy to report that I’m still a girl.
Now, what I want to know is why there are no kleenex for women. Is that because all other kleenex are for women by default? I mean, the floral theme on the boxes never gave that away, but I think if men get their own tissues, we should, too.
The man tissue box also shows one of my favorite things about commerce in the a country with royalty: the royal warrant. It’s that white seal on the right side of the picture above. It’s basically a way for the company to advertise that somebody in the royal family uses their products. Kind of like a royal seal of approval. Sometimes you see them on shop signs, sometimes in ads, and always on the products.
The warrant itself is very specific. It specifies exactly which royal personage uses the product, and which product specifically that they use. This cracks me up.
This one is for the Queen, who, I’m guessing, is the big catch in the royal warrant arena. However, it’s rather hard to conceive of the Queen using disposable tissues. My favorite one in W’s apartment is his dish soap. It’s for a brand called Fairy, and that one is for the Queen, too. The warrant requires that the royalty in question actually uses the product. Somehow I don’t think she actually does the dish washing. I’m guessing that it being used in Buckingham Palace is probably enough.
Being from a country without a monarchy, this, of course, fascinates me. I insist on dragging W to palaces (which, incidentally, all look the same). I read/watch all of the little tidbits the royal family tosses out to appease the public. I wonder why Prince Philip is not a King. (Can anybody explain this to me?? It can’t be that there can only be one monarch. Past Kings have had Queens. I haven’t yet gotten a good answer to this question.) Still, must we know where they buy everything?
People in the UK generally seem quite a bit more polite than we are in the US. Stiff upper lip and all that. Even the road signs seem more restrained. The yield signs, for instance, implore you to “Give Way.” It seems like they’re inviting you to do it. Our signs, on the other hand, seem like much more of a command: You! Yield! Wait on the other cars!
Our signs are also more often ignored. Let me tell you, readjusting to the homicidal drivers in the DC area was probably the hardest part about settling back in this week. Drivers in Europe may go must faster or hang out on the other side of the road, but they’re far less likely to kill you. I was gone for a full month and never saw an accident in Germany or Scotland. I’ve seen two this week. But I digress.
People in Scotland are even nicer about telling you to stay off their property:
Hmm, the American version not only would not use either the words “polite” or “please,” it would probably also involve allusions to firearms and/or dangerous pets.
Despite including both a “please” and “thank you,” this one from a student’s apartment in St. Andrews is a little more forceful:
Probably an American.
Thanks for the welcomes back. I highly recommend everyone taking a month off every once in a while. It’s quite nice, though the return to normal life brings all that relaxation to a crashing halt.
While still in Scotland, I sent off my HSS3 package to my pal in Finland. And that turned out to be quite a good decision. Along with being far cheaper to send than it would have been from the US, it got there in 3 days. It sometimes takes longer for mail to from me at home to my parents in Oklahoma.
The socks reportedly fit.
I had enough yarn left over that I also made some toddler socks for friends in Scotland.
I did these completely without anything measurements, so I had no idea if they would fit the toddler in question (they did) or even what size they really are. I figured if they were too big that they’d fit him one of these days.
I like the yarn’s color repeat (variegated versus striping) better in the smaller socks. The adult socks are 80 sts around, the toddler ones are 64. (Yes, 64 sts for big baby/toddler socks. And they weren’t way too big for the baby in question! My gauge was tiny.)
The skein was big enough that I also managed to get two mini socks out of it.
I tried for two matching ones, but I ran out of yarn. I remade the smaller ones several times in an attempt to use up absolutely all of the yarn. I lie. Actually, I did it several times in different sizes because I had no more yarn and W was working on a paper. Ever wondered what you’d do when bored and stranded with no more yarn? I now know that I would make and tear apart the same little sock over and over. But, in the end, I ended up using every bit of yarn possible without resorting to a really distorted sock.
Here is what remained of the skein in the end.
I finally caved and headed to the yarn store down the street from W’s apartment only to find out that it’s only open Thurs-Sat. And it wasn’t Thurs-Sat and I would no longer be in St. Andrews last week when those days finally rolled around. So there was no yarn acquisition on this trip.
At the moment, however, I’m on etsy debating buying sock blockers. I know they’re totally unnecessary, but I want some. Do you use them? In the process, I just found someone who sells a yarn sampler of 5 mini skeins. Very cute, though you couldn’t actually make anything out of any them, except for more mini socks. I should stop on etsy now. Hmm, to buy the sock blockers or not?
Alas, my month-long escape from reality is over and I’m back in the US after the most convoluted return trip that included 4 airports in 4 different time zones in 3 countries with 3 different currencies.
For reasons I totally don’t understand, I even ended up behind a police barricade in the Frankfurt airport. There I was, innocently eating a sandwich on a bench outside a restaurant. A swarm of German police came down the escalator and commandeered a couple luggage carts. They then proceeded to tie the “police line – do not cross” tape to them and stretch it across the room right beside where I was sitting with me and the other diners behind it. They said lots of things in German while doing this that I presume contained some clue about the reasons behind it, but I, of course, didn’t understand a word. None of the officers made any effort to make us move, so we just sat there. I didn’t think messing with the German police was the wisest of ideas.
After a while, people started walking under the police line to get to the restaurant. Then another barricade went up at the other end of the room. Then they took it all down and went away. And I still had no idea for the reasons behind that whole episode.
Now I’m home and trying to wrap my jet-lagged brain around cables so I can finish CPH. Don’t worry, there are still many posts about Scotland to come. But first I must dig through the mail.
A collection of humorous signs I’ve encountered in Scotland.
At least they’re honest.
I don’t want to be anywhere near those driving toddlers.
Is it just me, or doesn’t it look like she’s pushing him out into the street?
And the best one, from a restaurant bathroom in Edinburgh:
Yes, I went back to the table and got my camera and went back into the bathroom just so I could get a picture of this. The best part is the warning at the bottom:
I don’t even want to think about what exactly they don’t want you to be doing while driving. I suspect it has nothing to do with the whisky flavor.
We really overuse the word “quaint” around here with regard to our surroundings in Scotland. W declared a moratorium on the word the other day. Here’s a taste of why.
My favorite street in St. Andrews. The ruins of the castle are at the end of the road, with the North Sea behind.
In Culross, in the East Neuk part of Fife.
On the Lade Braes Walk in St. Andrews.
Random fishing village street scenes.
I have a thing for roof scenes, in case you haven’t noticed.
A pretty path right on the water.
This gives you a taste of how windy and cold it’s been in St. Andrews.
Being right on the North Sea does have its drawbacks.
For a brief while yesterday it was sunny and not windy or snowing or even raining. It was even warm enough that I took off my gloves and scarf. But not my coat. That would just be silly.
It was glorious. It was a good day to be a flower.
