Suspended Animation. Or at least Suspended knitting.
9:41 pm, 1 September 2008
A sleeve is done. The Suspension Cardi has a completed sleeve! And, to be completely honest about the knitting, there is more than one sleeve. Perhaps a sleeve and a third. Ish.
I’m not entirely sure if that’s an indication of time actually dedicated to knitting, or just time not dedicated to other things. For my own peace of mind, I’d like to think it’s the former; for the health of my ongoing projects, it should probably be the latter. On the other hand, knitting karma seems to work best when there’s actual dedication. To with, the Secret Summer Sock Project Of Great Import is being test knit (test knitted?), just as The Sleeve Of Doom that has stymied me since April reached past the one-third mark. Coincidence? I think not!
Still, I’m not sure if pictorial proof of dedicated knitting time is appropriate, given the gravitas (and workload) of orientation week. Sleeve, or discussion group planning? (We all know the answer to that, don’t we?)
A Sock Is Born!
10:35 am, 23 August 2008
The wrath of the computer gods
7:21 pm, 14 August 2008
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!
All those little hops on the landing….
8:30 pm, 10 August 2008
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.
These are a few of my favorite things….
9:56 pm, 9 August 2008
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.
And now for a word from our sponsor!
11:37 am, 5 August 2008
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)
- 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).
- 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.
- Let the mix sit for two weeks, shaking the bottle occasionally to redistribute the zest for maximum extraction of goodness.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Home is…wait where is home supposed to be again?
1:27 pm, 26 July 2008
It’s been a while since I felt the kind of displacement that comes from spending a few weeks on someone else’s floor and hunting down guest Internet connections in a city that’s theoretically home. In what I’m finding is a fairly regular alignment of the stages of various things in different parts of my life, the BrewFest vacation, my computer projects, my knitting projects and my academic projects are all simultaneously in conjunction, contributing equally to this odd feeling of disjointedness. It’s both encouraging and a little unsettling, since displacement comes from change and change is usually a varying combination of fun and scary.
For a long time when I went back to Portland, I slept in the house that had been home since before I was a self-supporting life-form. The last several years, of course, the sleeping quarters were my own and when I flew somewhere, coming home really was exactly that. This trip came at the transition point, where the new city wasn’t quite home in the real sense of the word but the old city didn’t have quite the familiarity it once had. Even though the old haunts are still there and the things newly discovered just before our departure a year ago are still making their imprints on the psyches of the people who walk by everyday, the simple act of scanning for an open public wi-fi network brings with it a certain amount of other-worldliness.
As much as we all long for excitement and the thrill of the undiscovered, there is something to be said for predictability. I just never figured that Bloomington would be the latter and Portland the former…. My knitting group has a lot do to with that.
The knitting itself, however…. I’m working on a new sock design, which is unusual for me. I knit a lot of socks and I futz with sock designs all the time, but I rarely think about designing socks for publication, much less designing a cables-and-lace pattern from scratch. Still, a new heel turn method (yes, more teasers) deserves a completely new pattern. And this is what it looks like right now:
With help from my knitting group (Thanks, Huan-Hua and Nicole!), I have a substantial part of the charting done on an exciting and very knittable sock pattern. In a desperate effort to get the damn thing done quickly, I’ve set it up as my Ravelympics project.
Out of the desperate effort to get a sock pattern done also comes a desperate need to redesign my pattern stylesheet, and that’s where the current computer project comes in: a complete reinstall. Again.
Thanks to Adobe’s shoddy programming and inability to mandate the use of case-sensitive code, I’ve had to reinstall my OS for the second time in six weeks. Fool me once, etc., etc., etc.
In any case, the reinstall prompted a rethinking of my computer set up, and boy, has it changed. Unfamiliar computer surroundings apparently translate to real-world unease. Weird. Though I do have to admit, as I was transitioning my Time Machine backups from one hard drive to a bigger external hard drive, that I was perversely disappointed by the fact that my old backups were only 50K short of 2 million trashed files. Two million! (Ah ah aaah! Maybe I should change my nickname to The Count?)
Of course, before the knitting starts, and before the sock design really gets underway, we have the academic projects to tackle. I use the royal we because first-person discussion is much harder here. I have a total of four paragraphs in 8,000 words that are dragging down an otherwise fantastic project, and once I solve the problems in those four paragraphs, my life will take on a very different shape. These are the key paragraphs; they define the framework of a Big Project, set out the methodology for what I want to do for the next few years, and I can’t fix them because I can’t quite justify the building of mental research walls yet. I don’t want to have a focus because I like futzing with a wide variety of things, but I can’t move on to the next stage of Big Project until I focus on this one and just get it the hell done.
On the other hand, the socks are coming along nicely.
Une bière avec les tricoteurs? Mais oui!
8:54 pm, 25 July 2008
The Oregon Brewers Festival is usually unpredictable, owing to the flammable combination of copious amounts of beer, an even greater assortment of people and the heat of an Oregon summer afternoon.
This year, BrewFest exceeded even my expectations–which are admittedly high–thanks to the sprightly combination of knitters and the open vibes inspired by Portland’s friendly atmosphere. (Or the beer. I’m not sure which.)
As one should do when one’s entertainment is only made possible thanks to those in the service industry, one must also give credit where credit is due. OBF always has cheerful, knowledgeable staff working the pitchers, and this year was no exception. They even got a standing ovation from the crowd of beer connoisseurs!
In addition to ogling the sock-tastic projects conspicuously and proudly displayed by fellow Ravelers triners and lavandarknits, we also spotted the elusive Blogger (image rotated for her own protection) hard at work on her July Skif-A-Long project. A brave choice, I might add, given the fact that the many-stranded goodness required by a Skif project also means a penchant for tangling the likes of which one might only see when…. Well, when The Blogger tries to brush her hair in the morning….
Standouts included Dragon’s Milk (sweet, malty goodness), Coffee Bender (what coffee would taste like if it were alcoholic), the new heel-turn technique I worked on, a dark head-turner called Quilter’s Irish Death, and a lovely Foggy Goggle belgian that you either loved or hated. I even managed to document the heel-turn technique in one of the pages of the low-tech BrewFest blog we’ve taken to keeping as a group.
More on that later….
Drink more
10:00 pm, 22 July 2008
The last 10 rows of Icarus are slow going, partly because of the repetitive stitch pattern, partly because of the length of the rows and partly because I keep working on it while I taste beer.
BrewFest has been amazing so far. If you’re going, Dragon’s Milk is a definite must-try as is the Scurvy Coffee Bender.
I have mitgated the drinking by using a new iPhone 2.0 app, FileMagnet, to read Icarus’ lovely charts. I may never get over the novelty of having a lace chart in full color displayed in my iPod Touch screen. Photos later.
Law and Order: Ninja Knitter Crime-Fighting Unit
2:31 pm, 17 July 2008
I hadn’t realized until last night just how pervasive the knitter’s mindset is. In the interest of preventing any undue stress, the story you’re about to read does end well, with no bodily injury or serious mental damage inflicted on anyone. (Given the outcome, I might even suggest that we were more amused by our little adventure than frightened.)
My sister, The Blogger Formerly Known as T-Bone and I went to Conference Room C (also known as Rogue Ales Public House) for drinks last night, where we responsibly purchased mugs and tokens in advance for the Oregon Brewer’s Festival. Shortly after our purchase, we had a chance meeting with yet another Former Knitting Store Employee (bringing the total up to 4 former or current employees of said fantastic LYS), whereupon we decided to go get some food and catch up.
That’s when our evening took an odd, unexpected turn. One of Portland’s many denizens of the streets–most of whom are really quite harmless–snatched the bag containing said mugs out of The Blogger’s hands and threw it at her because she refused to give him a quarter. All hell broke loose, and in the ensuing 911 phone call, I was asked to describe the attacker.
“Well, he’s 5′11″ with bright blond short hair and darker mutton chops. Light tan baseball cap, khaki pants. Um…” (Brief pause while I collect my thoughts because Former Employee #4 has engaged physically with the attacker in order to keep him from hitting The Blogger. Or perhaps to keep The Blogger from hitting him, I’m not sure.) “Gray hoodie sweater, light blue bandana tied around his neck.” (Another brief pause while I wrack my brain for more distinguishing features.) “The hoodie has raglan sleeves!”
The hoodie had raglan sleeves.
One of my friends had just been attacked by a violent panhandler, another was holding said panhandler at arm’s length trying not to get punched in the face, my sister’s phone battery died in the middle of her 911 call, and as this was all going on, I was describing to a bemused 911 operator the sleeve styling of the attacker’s hoodie. Clearly, I cannot be trusted in difficult situations (though it should be noted that my sister’s 911 call did not actually include a description of the attacker, so perhaps we should both not be allowed in public).
All’s well that ends well, as the saying goes. Our OBF beer mugs caught the brunt of it (see photo below), and when we went back to Rogue to fall on the mercy of their OBF-mug-dispensing staff, The Blogger animatedly chatted to the staff about how she’d have kicked that guy’s ass if she’d gotten the chance. The bartender and our lovely waitress sprang into action and got us two replacement mugs lickety-split, and my sister and The Blogger will now have proof of the attack to take to court without having to drink their BrewFest tasters from the palms of their hands. (P.S. Thanks, awesome Rogue Public House staff!)
We also proselytized about OBF to the only non-Former-Knitting-Store-employee witness to the whole event, a really nice guy who moved to Portland a week ago and didn’t realize he was moving to beer nirvana.
The moral of the story is three-fold:
- Make sure The Blogger and Former Employee #4 are on your side in a fight.
- Ignore the kinds of knitting observations you’d normally make about a person when you’re on the phone with 911.
- Be responsible and follow through on your court date when the police ask you to press charges so they can keep Scary Attacking Guy and people like him from attacking other people too.
The poor police officer who took our statements wasn’t overly optimistic about the chances of keeping Scary Attacking Guy in jail for long, because many people who say they’ll show up in court just never do. When the people who have just been accosted feel sorry for the police officer who’s taking statements, that just means the system needs a little more support from its citizens.
