MarQ1

Today was the last day at work for my old boss, the best boss I’ve ever had. Staff reduction. Not pleased. Not many bosses would allow one to go into his office and vent for a half an hour.

I did, after much effort, finally finish the scarf as a going-away present.

He liked the scarf, but it, once again, was too, too long. Scarves grow when I wash them. After this, my hands feel arthritic—and they may well be, what with all those “through-the-back-loop” stitches. It’s not my best pattern. It curls at the edges, it will never truly lie flat, and the color repeat came to just under three panels per ball of yarn.

The balls, however, may have been short and I’m a tad annoyed with Debbie Bliss cashmerino aran®. The one ball I weighed was 8% underweight, 46g instead of the 50g marked. It is possible I would not have had to even buy that ball if the first had been full weight. But that’s speculation. What was almost as annoying was the odd undertwisted bits in the yarn where some fuzz lump made it into the strand and the the yarn momentarily became bulky instead of aran. Still I like the yarn. I’d just like to receive the full 50g mentioned on the label.

One more complaint. The maker of some cheapo yarn I bought last year—one of those highly scorned brands—clearly and helpfully marks both the inside end and the outside end of its skeins. It would be really nice if Debbie Bliss® did this as well so I wouldn’t have to fish half the innards of the ball out to find the end. I had the same issue with Rowan cotton chenille and it looked like some mauve brain exploded on my worktable.

Really I’m just p—ssed I lost my boss. The new boss is fine, but it’s not the same.

No, I did not finish it on time. Instead, since Wednesday evening, I’ve been suffering through one of the worst colds I’ve ever had. I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say I slept 18 hours on Thursday, reached 103.7° F (39.8° C) at some point Thursday night, ache all over, and am currently sitting upright for more than an hour a stretch for the first time since Wednesday evening.

At some point on Wednesday, I decided a plague-infested scarf wouldn’t be much of a gift and put it aside.

I have until Friday morning to turn this into a full-size scarf:

It’s supposed to be a gift. I doubt that I will make my deadline. The ten-inch needle is in there for scale.

All of the right-side purls, but two, are through the back loop and and all of the wrong-side knits are too. I wanted something that was patterned, but was still bearable on the reverse and the turned stitches clean up the ribs and give the wrong-side interest.

The part that gave me the most grief—and forced a huge amount of frogging—was deciding on the increase. I knit and frogged at least a foot. I couldn’t find an increase that looked even between a purl and a knit and a knit and a purl. I always ended up with one increase of a pair looser than the other, whether YO, reverse YO, M1 or various combinations of knitting or purling front & back. I finally gave up and modified my pattern to place all increases after knit stitches. I used M1’s, btw.

I took this shot a few days ago, probably to illustrate the shoddy construction technique used in building this place.

I don’t remember why I was standing on the kitchen counter-top in the first place.

Went bowling with the folks from work. Work outing. Didn’t do too badly: 127 for the first game. We won’t go into the second game, which was after the beer kicked in.

The test of time will take place tomorrow morning, when I try to pull myself out of bed. Bowling once every five years doesn’t give the body the necessary memory.

As work outings go this wasn’t bad. My first game was better than those of two guys twenty years younger than I.

I spent most of the weekend reading up on CSS compliance and separating content from presentation and fiddling with the site. And my sub-site that’s a work under wraps. It will combine knitting, HTML, PHP and a MySQL database. More later.

The more I read, the more I think MSIE s—cks. I keep seeing, This is a cool, efficient way to do this in just CSS, but IE doesn’t support it, but here’s a javascript work-around. I don’t want to do javascript work-arounds.

I did get a bit of knitting done during the Oscars, but, again, the hat is black and just won’t photograph.

J. suggested Saturday that I braise something for dinner Sunday. I’m not a fan of braised meats, except brisket, but I thought that if I made it myself I could make it palatable. I made a chuck pot roast, braised in beer, onions and mushrooms, finished off with potatoes, parsnips, carrots and more onions and mushrooms. J. loved it. It looked perfect. The gravy came out perfect. The vegetables were perfectly done, but not mushy. It smelled like a good pot roast. I still didn’t like it. There was nothing wrong with it, I just didn’t like it. Not the meat, the mushrooms, the carrots or the parsnips. The potatoes and onions were okay and I can go either way on the gravy. I’m not a gravy guy.

It’s a good thing J. likes it: he has a lot of leftovers to finish off.

I suspect that that had I made it into a giant curry, I would have been just fine with it.

I just looked at this site for the first time with Microsoft^® Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac^®, specifically 5.2.3 (5815.1). What manure! And I don’t mean my design.
The content follows the sidebar instead of being displayed next to it. The list bullets aren’t correctly displayed. It can’t display the one-half character (½) correctly. There’s no border around images used as links (Safari doesn’t show those either). I assume that that indicates that CSS 1.0 compliance is practically nil.

Are any of you using IE for Mac? Do you see what I’m seeing?
I’m sure I can code around it, but I’d recommend switching browsers.

Does anyone using IE on Windows have the same issue? If so, which version? I can’t check it myself.

I spent the day yesterday either flat on my back or on a pillow on my stomach with an icepack on my coccyx. I strained my lower back while shaving. Better today.
It’s astounding how few things there are to do while flat on your back or while balancing an icepack on your posterior. Read. Sleep. Knit something small really close to your face. Mainly read and flip over every twenty minutes.
Two things I’ve discovered: we have no good lighting at floor level and radiant floor heating would be really nice.
I’ve started a new hat, It’s black, again, so don’t hold out for pictures.
And my butt’s no smaller.