Archive for the ‘Lifestyle’ Category

Twisted. Kinked. Matted. Torturous. Snarled. Chaotic.

I could go on.

The sock blank is a truly wondrous thing; its swift changes of color heed not the worrisome siren call of the Fraternal Twin Sock Syndrome, creating a thing of beauty that is, in fact, paralleled by the other thing of beauty right next to it. And knitting two socks at the same time, toe-up, is equally awesome (in the original sense of the word, “something fantastic that inspires awe,” rather than in the Bill-And-Ted’s-Excellent-Adventure sense of the word, “something random that makes Keanu Reeves say, ‘Whoa!’”). The two things together?

Apparently, two rights make a wrong. A very big one.

Things were humming along swimmingly until I hit the heel turn and started to use yarn from one strand at a different rate than yarn from the other. I’m halfway through the heel turn on one sock and have had to slip stitches across to the other heel to work on it just to bring the second, long, unwieldy, difficult, wearisome, obstreperous strand into the world of seemly, appropriate yarn behavior.

As usual, life and art imitate each other, so the week, too, has been twisted, torturous, snarled, chaotic, wearisome and obstreperous. As a reminder that my wounded knitting and wounded week will eventually work themselves out, however, I have full use of my faculties. And my thesaurus.

I spend most of my days–all but a very few a year–on a gerbil wheel, walking the same 20-block route to and from the markers that divide day from night, work from home, classroom duties from research duties.

Friday’s trip took me off of the gerbil wheel and on an almost overwhelmingly sentimental trip to one of the biggest landmarks in a geek’s life: Frys. There were, admittedly, a few non-geek things thrown in for good measure, including a very satisfying trip to an Ann Taylor store that resulted in one of the most coveted shopping experiences a well-endowed woman can have (a good-quality perfectly fitted white button-down shirt in the right size, on sale for less than $20). Still, the indisputable stars of the day were the fumes of computery goodness in that most precious of geek meccas.

On those rare instances when I do set foot off of the gerbil wheel, it’s always a little strange, a little limiting, to come back to it, especially when a trip to Frys feels just a little bit like a homecoming. It’s times like this when I appreciate more than ever one of the projects I undertook at the beginning of the year: a pictorial of change to remind me that my gerbil wheel is as much a thing of beauty as the unchanging haven of silicon that is Frys.

These three photos are all from October of this year, taken from my living-room window, spaced evenly 2 weeks apart. It’s amazing how much can change in the space of a month.

Equally amazing is the lack of knitting that has gone on in the last week, but that is a post best saved for tomorrow.

Or, potentially, both, which is even better!

The pesto is colorful, and it’s in single-serving ice-cube format. How cute!

The knitting has come down to socks, socks, socks and more socks.

The socks are even more colorful! They’re very pretty and one of them is even the product of my own hand-dye.

I’m probably going to rip back the hand-dyed version, though, because I want to put together another pattern with the forked heel in several different sizes. The issue at hand is how to do the ribbing so that the sock pattern itself is a worthwhile contribution to any sock knitter’s repertoire, rather than merely a vehicle for the forked heel. Chemgrrl suggested a column of 3×1 interspersed with 3 columns of 1×1. What do you think?

What she said.

Your heart might grow too. I’m off to go install a plug in for charity.

Dyeing day has come and gone, and the fact that I am sitting here typing means the extra ‘e’ in the main verb is a key part of the excitement.

which looks like this now:

and, with nothing but walnuty goodness and boiling water, brought these into the knitting world:

was (and still is) extremely pleasant as well as eminently talented.

The only thing that went wrong? Mmmmmm. Pepto-Bismol. I will have to rectify this. It was supposed to be an icy pink, but even limiting the dye called for in a “pale” color to less than 1/8 of a teaspoon, coupled with a mere 5 minutes in tepid water, turned off-white wool/silk into, well, a color that is very nearly unwearable unless you’re 3 and wearing a tiara and a tutu. While I won’t have the cherry-blossom pink yarn I wanted for a modified cardigan version of the Hanami Stole, I have learned a lesson about icy just-barely-not-white-anymore colors that I will not soon forget, and I likewise had a weekend I won’t soon forget.

The weather was perfect; the company was fantastic; the slowly darkening walnuts smelled of cookies, leaving trails of steam wherever the dye pot went. There were picturesque falling leaves cascading in waves of yellow and orange around our heads (along with slightly harder walnuts falling from trees overhead), and dappled sunlight wafting in rays across the newly dyed yarny goodness as it dried outdoors in the warm afternoon air. In such surroundings, the Pepto-Bismol yarn–and the walnuts falling perilously, percussively, and concussively, close to the deck–were absolute necessities. I’m convinced that it’s these tiny little imperfections which elevate a day from simply great to unsurpassingly, beautifully, uncompromisingly real, and real is oh-so-much better than perfect….

This weekend has been an unusual mix of sloth-like torpor and comfortably productive activity. Perhaps the latter was made possible by the former.

I went to bed on Friday night at 9 pm, and I would characterize the next 24 hours as one long nap interrupted by brief, and very unwelcome, periods of wakefulness. I nearly finished a sleeve Saturday night, went back to bed, and woke up refreshed.

So refreshed, in fact that, after prepping the 5 books I need to read in the next few days for electronic reading, I got all ambitious and decided to put together a bookshelf that’s been taunting me for the last few months. (Gimme a break, the taunting was very quiet. The bookshelf doesn’t have vocal chords. Or lungs.)

I understand now why I put it off. The thing is taller than me. And wider than it is tall. And heavier than…. Um, than someone who is 20 pounds lighter than me…. And it was a bitch to put together. I had to get angry and kick it at one point to get it square so I could drill the brackets into place.

But I won! I beat the inanimate object, and I beat it on my terms, one-on-one, without having to resort to following the directions*** that suggested a bookshelf of this size should not be assembled by one person.

Next up: putting stuff into the bookshelf. I might need another nap….

*Apologies to Dylan Thomas. And Shakespeare. And probably the cast of Dead Poets Society.**
**Or perhaps I’m thinking of the wrong Robin Williams movie, and he quotes that line in Good Will Hunting. Screw it, not important enough to look up.
***Directions are for people who like their limbs intact and unbruised. Sissies….

It’s not my hard drive. It’s not my RAM. It’s the logic board…. Oops.

So no blog posting of any significant value. (This post courtesy of my iPod Touch.)

The socks continue apace, so hopefully by the time the computer returns from the land of misfit computer parts, I’ll have photos!

Why is it that we only emphasize the very end of something? As evidenced by the photo at right, it’s really the process that’s the fun part. Look, socks!!!!! Of my very own cables-and-lace design!

Stuck landings in gymnastics are just about as important as stuck landings in real life. It’s usually what you do during the bulk of the routine/class/business meeting/knitting project/friendship/day that really counts, not how quickly you walked out the door when the day finally ended. In real life, we comport ourselves as though every moment counts, and gymnasts do the same thing, because tiny steps on the landing only add up to ten percent of the overall deductions in an average gymnastics routine.

We talked about extension and amplitude yesterday. Today, it’s form and execution. Elfi Schlegel compliments gymnasts who have great form and execution all the time–Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson, along with the Chinese team, got most of those compliments today–but she doesn’t really explain what “great form” really means and how gymnasts “execute” moves well.

There are only a few body shapes the human body can make under duress: straight/slightly arched, bent at the hips, and bent at the hips and knees. Gymnastics “form” is just a measurement of what shape the gymnast made compared to the shape specified by the code of points for a particular skill; good or bad execution expresses the degree to which they deviated from that body shape.

Straight-body moves like handstands require the legs, arms and hips to be lined up and stretched into a near-straight line, with the insides of the ankles touching (rather than crossed). Bent-hipped body positions can be done with the legs/ankles together (piked) or the legs separated (split or straddled), but the knees cannot be bent and the hip-bend must be at least 90 degrees; if your bent-hip position is a split position, that means at least a 180-degree split. Tucked positions require at least a 90-degree bend in both the hip joint and the knee joint, and the ankles again should be together but not crossed.

Deviate from the specified form for a skill and execution deductions kick in. Each 10 or 15 degrees of deviation in an execution deduction–the difference depends on which apparatus–has a set deduction. There’s one deduction for missing 10 degrees in your 180-degree split and another for missing 20 degrees in your 180 degree split; deductions for each 10-degree bend at the hips in a layout position; even deductions for not having your hips bent enough in a pike. If your arms were bent in a handstand on bars, there’s a deduction for that, and it too is specified to the very degree. Flexed feet, crossed feet, head position, and too much arch in a straight-body position are also incorporated into execution deductions.

It takes time to train your eyes to see all of the different angles of deduction, time to see all of the body parts at the same time, but it doesn’t take much to appreciate it when you see a skill done right. At least not when you understand how amplitude, extension, form and execution all come together.

It’s always nice to see a stuck landing, but it’s the confluence of great execution, high amplitude and precise extension–and not the endings–that make a routine world-class. It’s not the end of the day that makes a job worthwhile, or a goodbye that cements a friendship.

It’s the middle part, and as any gymnast will tell you, the landing of one routine just means it’s time to prep for the next apparatus, the next routine This week, Huan-Hua (on the left, with Katie) moved on to the next routine, and even if endings don’t count for everything, they should still be celebrated with a good application of beer.

The 2008 cycle of Olympic gymnastics has begun, and it started on a high note, both as a couch potato and as a spectator (the two activities having subtly different emphases).

In couch-potato terms, I finished one of my 2 big summer writing projects and printed out a draft of the other to read for sentences that are too long (always my last step). I also came out on top in my epic struggle against the cables-and-lace pattern that I’m hoping will accompany the first official sock pattern with my new heel turn (a very small, very incomplete sample at right, just to make you salivate a bit). Pretty damn impressive for a 24-hour period of time, but it’s really just a bunch of projects that have been percolating all coming to a close at nearly the same time.

In gymnastics spectator terms, I finally got to see one of Alexander Artemev’s pommel horse routines without having to scream to no one in particular about how horrifying it is that he fell. Artemev–and to be fair, quite a few of his competitors–has what we call “extension” and “amplitude” in the gymnastics world, words which the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad NBC Commentating Trio toss around but never really define.

You can try out both extension and amplitude for yourself at home: think of the difference between reaching out with a straight arm to grab a pen and reaching out with a straight arm for a wall that’s several inches away and has a million-dollar bill taped to it (but without ever moving your shoulders). That difference in tension and the length of your arm is the difference between “straight” and “fully extended.”

Now imagine how high you’d jump if you were just asked to jump over that pen, and how much higher you’d jump if the million-dollar bill were hanging 3 feet above the tips of your fully extended fingers…. That’s amplitude, which can also refer to how far away from the equipment you can push your body–maintaining full extension, of course–even if you still happen to be physically touching the equipment.

If you just watch gymnastics every 4 years, the inexpressible difference between “Meh….” and “My god!” will–given the same difficulty level–probably come down to an athlete with OK extension and amplitude vs an athlete with full extension and amplitude. Artemev’s pommel horse routine–when he hits it–has both. The Chinese men are unbeatable because they have both on all 6 events.

Not only am I’m excited to see how this home-court advantage will work for a very deserving Chinese men’s team, I get to be excited about gymnastics and my knitting at the same time! Favorite things, indeed.

Tomorrow, more about how to make gymnastics scoring make sense, a rundown on the women’s prelims, and actual photos of actual socks made of actual yarn.

There is no knitting. There is no writing. Not that both aren’t being done, just not documented pictorially. There has, however, been crafting. The crafting itself was undertaken weeks ago, but the fruits of the crafting have only recently come to, um… To fruition.

Behold, Lime-cello! There’s limoncello and grapefruit-cello where that came from too. Because I goofed and didn’t share the process with my sister when I was in PDX, I’m sharing it here for posterity’s sake.

Citrus-cello in 10 steps or less (two of which include taste-testing)

1. Buy the highest-proof everclear you can find, and split the bottle in half into two carefully-sterilized 750 ml bottles with cork or plastic stoppers, not screw-on caps (vodka or scotch bottles run through the dishwasher work nicely for this purpose).
2. Add a little more than a cup of citrus zest to each bottle (somewhere around 7 large limes or lemons, or three large grapefruit). For the best flavor, find citrus with extremely colorful peels; the color equates to lovely citrusy flavor. Because I use two bottles for extraction, it’s easy to do two different flavors of citrus-cello with a single bottle of everclear.
3. Let the mix sit for two weeks, shaking the bottle occasionally to redistribute the zest for maximum extraction of goodness.
4. From here on out, treat each bottle separately if you’ve done two different flavors. Strain the citrus extraction into a good glass pitcher with metric measuring marks, and toss the now-crunchy mostly-white zest. Note how much everclear/citrus mixture you’ve got.
5. Grab two new 750 ml bottles, or re-sterilize the two you used during the extraction process. Pour the strained everclear/citrus into one of these bottles.
6. Mix up some simple syrup: 2 parts sugar to one part filtered water, heat until combined, usually just after boiling. (I actually do this in the microwave. Carefully.) Refrigerate until cool.
7. Test your sugar preferences. In a shot glass, measure 1 part everclear/citrus mixture and 1 part simple syrup. Put it in the freezer and let it chill. Taste. If it’s too sweet, add filtered water until you have a citrus-cello you can happily drink, keeping track of the approximate proportions of added water. If it’s not sweet enough, add more simple syrup.
8. Using your personal preferences as a guide, pour the right amount of simple syrup into the bottle already containing your citrus/everclear mixture. Shake to combine.
9. Place in the freezer, and enjoy when chilled.

Because your final product will be somewhere in the 90-proof arena, your citrus-cello probably won’t turn into slush when it’s frozen but will instead remain a lovely syrupy consistency perfect for drizzling over vanilla gelato.