First, the finished. I cannot resist a fat-bellied gnome, and this one from sewingseed is particularly glorious. I happen to have a great deal of natural colored linen fabric that I trimmed from the bottom of some IKEA drapes; I believe I cut about 18" off the bottom of each panel which left far more fabric than I felt comfortable throwing away! I used a small piece of this fabric to stitch the gnome on. Once it was done I gave it a quick wash and press and turned it into a wee fat-bellied gnome sachet:

I stuffed it with some lavender that I've kept stored in an air-tight container; I harvested and dried it the first summer we lived here, when we discovered that I'm horribly allergic to it. Very short bursts of exposure don't bother me too much so I threw the buds inside, sewed it closed and tucked it straight into the mail. The sewing was super quick and easy, but the stitching took me about 6 hours because I might just be the slowest stitcher ever.

My work in-progress is for my husband. We're both big fans of Doctor Who so when I came across this Pixel People lineup of all 11 Doctors by weelittlestitches I knew that it was something that he had to have for his very own. I'm a little bit further along than this image:

I've since stitched the 8th doctor in too, so I have 7 doctors left before I can wash, press and frame it. My one regret is that two of the doctors have a fair bit of un-outlined white and I chose white 14-count aida cloth to stitch it on so I might have to figure out how to help those doctors stand out from the background a little bit better.

A note about some great service I received getting set up to start these projects. I bought most of my initial supplies at Mindy's Needlepoint here in Eugene where I was treated with great respect despite my lack of knowledge about what I was buying. I was given a recommendation about what needle size was correct for what I was doing and got some great help in finding all of my floss colors. Two thumbs up.

Now I have this crazy idea to knit an interrobang, but I think it might be better suited to colorwork than to a softie.

I bought my husband this Ice Invaders ice cube tray for his Christmas stocking. I'm trying to come up with some ridiculously nerdy cocktail to go with them. I feel like perhaps it needs to be bright green.

Using my spreadsheet I calculated the number of stitches in the first repeat. Before I began knitting this repeat I weighed my ball of yarn, finding that I had 33 grams left. I knit the repeat and weighed again. 20 grams. The number of stitches in the remaining repeat and the bind off was approximately 135% larger than the first repeat. 135% of 13 grams is 18 grams, so the math told me that I'd have enough yarn to finish the shawl the way I wanted. Because I am cautious, I inserted a lifeline in my knitting and forged ahead. And wouldn't you know it? I ended up with 2 grams left over, a whopping 7 yards of yarn. It's like magic when the math works out like that, only you know, with proof and reasoning to back it up.

Next to an out-of-focus quarter for scale. I don't normally like to cut it so close with my yarn remainders but I love using up all of my yarn. It's so gratifying.

I think she and I need to have a talk about who the macbook really belongs to. Clearly she disagrees with my assessment that it is mine.

A bus, with a boat on top. Photo taken last May at the Willamette Valley MusicFest. Fun Fact: I did the design for the MusicFest site (coded by someone else). I'm not sure how much it may change for WVMF 2009, but as of the time of publishing, it is my design.

The procedure is slightly awkward because you have to point your eye perpendicular to your face and mush into the machine (there's a nice pad on the machine though!) It takes just a minute or so and the images are ready immediately, no waiting! How does it work?

The instrument uses coherent red-green illumination, enabling it to image pathology throughout the layers of the retina, from the sensory retina and nerve fiber layer, through the RPE and down to the choroid. The ultra-widefield image can be separated to present the distinct retinal sub-structures and the individual red and green laser images can be displayed in grayscale separation for enhanced contrast.

Lasers! Lasers are awesome! And these lasers showed that my retinas and lenses look good, as well as my optic nerves and all so I have no signs of glaucoma or cataracts. I do need stronger vision correction and will be getting new glasses as soon as the lenses come in. I guess I have a very high curve to a prescription that is normally pretty flat and they couldn't cut them in-house. I'm looking forward to having sharper distance vision, that's for sure!

Knit to 9 stitches per inch on very pointy size zero crystal palace bamboo double pointed needles, these socks started with a figure 8 cast on. In that cast on, you cast on a smaller number of stitches and increase to create a toe pocket. In this case, that number? 40. Total number of stitches in a single round once I finished the toe increases? 88. To give me an unstretched size of 9.75, 90% of my husband's foot circumference. Once the toe was done I knit a little further with pagoda (the orange) to get a toe that looked right before I switched to the seaweed (green yarn). And then I just kept knitting for, well, a while.

Right now I'm stalled a bit, I haven't been knitting much. I've reached the point where I need to be thinking about the heel. Because my husband also has big ankles, the afterthought heel I was originally going to use would make it difficult to make sure the sock will fit up and over his heel. My current thought is to put the sock on waste yarn, knit a heel (using the same figure 8 technique I'm using for the toe) and graft it on, then go back to knitting as scheduled, up the leg. I just need to get around to picking it back up. Stay tuned for the further adventures of the giant man-socks.

And now, apropos of nothing, I give you the pig butchering guide:

Mmmm, pig.

Number 1: Without Garfield
Number 2: Live, full color, filmed in front of a blue screen, with bonus music videos.

I've never been one to spend too much time playing video games. I'm generally not that good at them, with the exception of games that benefit from many buttons being mashed all at once (Soul Caliber, I'm looking at you). That said, we purchased a Wii in December of 2006 and since that I've found a lot more games that I'm decent at. I can stomp all over TheBoy when it comes to playing Mario Kart on the virtual console, much to his consternation.

One of the benefits of being at the LAN party last weekend (more on that soon, I came down with a massive case of exhaustion coupled with a large amount of fluid in the ears) was that I got to watch people playing things. Rock Band, for instance, breeds an awful lot of tone deaf singers, singing loudly. Guitar Hero looked complicated beyond belief, but also really really fun. Unfortunately, I didn't get any time to play myself and Sunday found me whining to TheBoy that I really wanted to play it. His solution? Let's go buy it. And we did. And after a few frustrating starts (boy, I cannot wait until they make the left-handed guitar for the Wii, so I don't have a whammy bar in my palm all the time) I managed to beat the game on easy by the end of the evening on Monday.

Since I beat this version, I've started back at the beginning in medium level. It's more challenging to add in that fourth note, plus more chords. Great fun though, I highly recommend it.