One Crazy Fiber Lady

Where to begin?  Been a couple of days, hmm, where did I leave off? I was pretty busy at work last week and with the early "mama wakeup" was crashing pretty early as well. I finished the "had to" things on office task list and am now cruising along on the remainder.  Do need to do my self evaluation/yearly review by the end but I’ve learned the trick to that thing a couple of years ago.

Anyway, Marina and I went off to Purl on Thursday.  She wanted to get started knitting socks and while she had beginner yarn at home really wanted to get some good yarn for the next pair.  What’s better than Koigu right?   I had to check the sale basket where huge skeins of Woolpak sat discounted 40%.  Sadly, I couldn’t find two skeins that coordinated in the same gauge and left without.  Believe me, I tried very hard.  Marina picked up two though for seperate projects, as well as a couple of skeins of koigu.  Me?  Well I flipped through the Folk Mittens book on the shelf and found a pair that I wanted to make.  I ordered the book in the Interweave Hurt book sale and am awaiting its arrival.  I picked up a couple of skeins of Cascade 220 in colors that match my winter coat for some serious coordinating bliss.  Yes my winter jacket really is that color combination.  It’s a wonderfully warm Land’s End parka with umpteen pockets.  It also is a petite and fits beautifully.  No, those colors wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it was the only one left in the store in my size.  No, the pink isn’t the accent color.  Sigh. 

Anyway, like Rosemary, I can’t seem to leave a store without picking up more sock yarn.  So naturally I had to pick up more this trip too.  I needed more brown sock yarn and it was nice of Koigu to put together this lovely blend for me.  Will match the nice chocolate colored sweater I happened to be wearing for the trip perfectly.  Now to finish some of the wips in progress and I can maybe make myself some brown socks.

Two new electronic devices entered my life on Friday, which prevented me from getting much done on the "softer side" of Risa   First, I have a laptop from the office.  I initially got it back during the summer of 2003 when I was pregnant with the twins.  We fear, correctly, that I would wind up on bed rest.  I had planned to carry on working but figured that a laptop would allow me to code from the couch.  My boss agreed and the helpdesk gave me an old Toshiba Portege 7200 basic bare bones computer which really required a base station but was good enough to connect to the office with and remote into my desktop there.  Little did we expect my bed rest to be in the hospital, where I lay for 8.5 weeks.  I’ve used the old Toshiba at home since, but last week it started to "chunk" and kvetch periodically and a scan indicated that the hard drive was failing.  I chatted in passing with someone from the helpdesk about it.  She suggested I bring it in and once she found out how old it was, told me she could upgrade me slightly without having to get director approval.  Sweet.  So I schlepped it in on Friday.  After lunch, I got a call from her, my new laptop was ready.  Slight upgrade?  I owe her some handknitted goodness for the massive upgrade I got.  While its nowhere near the cool goodness of Deb’s recent laptop experiences, this is worlds better than any laptop I’ve ever had!  She handed me a "new" Toshiba Tecra 9100 with all sorts of goodies, include built in wireless!  Life is good.  Needless to say, I had to spend some time Friday getting to know the new girl and tweaking her.  Had to make some changes to my wireless network at home to get her to talk to the router, but all is functioning normally now.

The other new addition was a purchase.  I’ve had Palm pilots for years, even had one of the original "personal" models.  The last was a Sony Clie SJ20.  An efficient little baby, but getting up there in years and asking to be replaced.  I’ve gone back and forth between upgrading to another PalmOS based unit or moving over to the PocketPC world.  The microsoft developer in me really liked the idea of the Windows based unit that I could actually write my own applications for (and believe me there is a dirth of WM Knitting apps out there).  Still, I was leaning towards getting a Palm T|X until Kevin pointed out this little news item:  Treo 700w brings Palm to Windows.  Huh?  A Palm running Windows?  Can’t just be this one model they are doing this with.  Hell if Palm is moving to Windows, maybe I should too.  Purchased online Thursday, arrived at the front door on Friday, I’m now the owner of a HP iPAQ rx1955. This little bad girl has Wifi built right in and had no issues connecting to my little wireless network at home.  In a blink, I was online, accessing my gmail account and answering emails.  Nifty.  I’ve also added a new ebook to her so if I get bored knitting on the train (or I can’t get a seat which does happen periodically) I can read.  What am I reading?  Something from the Gutenberg project?  Nope.  Stephen King’s newest book:  Cell.  So now with two new tech toys in the house, you can understand why my craft time was minimal at best.  Ignore of course the two short people who are still kinda demanding of my time too

I did do some knitting though.  I started the second of the Claudia Handpaint socks.  I’m trying something new though.  Deb posted last week about the Turkish cast on and provided a link to an online tutorial.  Always on the prowl for something to make the cool socks even cooler, I had to give it a try.  Saturday night, I spent about 20 minutes knitting, but by the end of that time had the toe done using this technique.  I’ve done the figure 8, but my this one is easier by far.  You don’t need to use the two circs indicated in the tutorial.  The magic loop is perfect for this method too.  The color representation in this picture is a bit closer to the "real" colors though I can’t say as I see all that pink that my camera picked up. 

I also swatched for my Olympic vest last night.  I’m getting the requisite stitch/row on a size 2 needle.  Oy.  Fair Isle Vest, with never before done steeks, on a US2, in 16 days.  Someone reserve a room for me in a rubber room because I’m definitely going to need it. 

The next FLAK installment has been out now for two weeks, with the newest one out any moment, I finally got down to business and picked up the stitches for the back.  I sat down to do the match after swatching for the vest last night.  Much to my surprise, because of my tiny frame, I need NO filler stitch on this sweater.  The back is ALL cables and the 2 purl stitches between cables.  Should be interesting.  At least it won’t get boring to knit and not such a bad thing as I have a tendency to royally futz up Moss Stitch. I didn’t get very far before it was time to call it a night, but I do hope to make some progress on it tonight.

Lastly, I spotted this view while peeking into the living room from the kitchen door the other night.  I couldn’t have asked for more from this little kitten.

Craft on.