I am utterly thrilled to have received a Smart Bitch Title for my entry in their Duncan’s Big Misunderstanding Contest (entry #6).
(Don’t worry; I won’t let it go to my head.)
29 December 2006
23 December 2006
Kiri Shawl Done!
The past couple weeks have basically been Kiri all the time, with an occasional interlude for my son’s sweater. But Kiri’s done! and blocked!
At this point, I expect to finish my son’s sweater, one of the Mill Hill ornaments, and possibly another small project by the end of the year.
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21 December 2006
Recent Reading: Decorating, Damar, and Dashing Adventure
Alexandra Stoddard, Feeling at Home. I definitely like Stoddard’s work best when it’s focusing on decorating and how to do it well, and this is one of those books.
Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown. Nth reread for the Damarian books. Still wonderful.
Celeste Bradley, The Pretender. This was recommended on Mrs. Giggles’s site as a Regency romance that actually has a decent heroine, and that was correct. Agatha has come to London incognito, pretending to be married, in order to search for her missing brother James and avoid the nasty neighbor’s son. While she makes some mistakes, she actually does have a brain, and she uses it. Simon, who runs a spy network, is also trying to find James. They meet; they fall in love; various obstacles ensue. This was a great light read; the characters are fun, there’s a lot of humor, and while the resolution feels rather unlikely, it’s enjoyable nonetheless.
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20 December 2006
One Single Sentence
Kim Allen tagged me to answer answer Richard Feynman’s “one-sentence challenge”: If all knowledge about your field were about to expire, what one sentence would you want to pass on to the future? (Feynman said about physics, “Everything is made of atoms.”)
My field is publishing, and my specific job centers on data wrangling. So my one-sentence advice to the future would be, “Make it easy to change a single letter.”
That covers classic moveable type, of course. It also covers electronic work — if you don’t have native files, or they’re in a format you can no longer read, it’s no longer easy to change that one-letter typo on page 47. And if it’s hard to change a single letter, it’ll also be hard to change a sentence, reformat the text to fit a different page size, etc.
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19 December 2006
Yuletide Done.
Note to self: Volunteering to write a pinch hit story for Yuletide Treasure is a helpful act to the fic community and good practice for forcing your brain to spit out 1K+ words in a week. However, it is not conducive to sleeping. Sleep is also good, as is having brains to accomplish paid work.
Anyway, my original Yuletide story and my pinch hit are done, and I’ll talk more about them in January when authors are revealed. I’m very pleased with how I did on my original assignment; I think I had a good idea on the pinch hit, but the execution left a bit to be desired. Still, I hope the recipient will still find it an interesting story.
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10 December 2006
A Small Social History Note
Having looked at a slew of census pages, I’ve noticed one major change between the pre-1930 censuses and the 1930 census:
In the censuses before 1930, the enumerator was almost always a man.
In the vast majority of the 1930 censuses I’ve looked at, the enumerator was a woman.
I wonder why the change. Side effect of the Great Depression? Men with jobs couldn’t afford to leave them? Families needed all the extra money they could get, so wives started doing the job? Someone decided that women would be more familiar with their neighbors than men would be, so women would make better enumerators?
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2 December 2006
Still Knitting
I focused on three projects while I was at camp. My son’s sweater is coming along; I’ve finished the sleeve increases and now just have to knit until I reach final length. I made the heel gap on both socks and am now well into the ribbing; I’ll go back soon and do the heels. And I knit a pattern repeat on Kiri, which is getting large enough that a pattern repeat takes forever. (And it looks like I’m going to have to make at least one extra repeat. Whine.)
I’ve also gotten another couple inches on the bobbin lace. It’s still going to be scraggly-looking, but that’s okay; by time I’m done, I’ll probably be ready to make another one that can actually go to a person. (I’m thinking an orange or gold version of this pattern might be cool; the inner part looks like a mandala of stylized chicken feet, which makes me think of the Brave Combo version of “Chicken Dance”…..)
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1 December 2006
Texas Camp 2006
I spent Thanksgiving weekend at TIFD’s annual camp again, and I think I’m finally recovered. It was a fun weekend, with great food and great dancing. This year’s teachers were Lee Otterholt, general Balkan, and Richard Powers, vintage couple dances. I heartily recommend both.
Unlike a lot of teachers who focus on one particular country, Otterholt taught dances from several countries and peoples around the Balkans — Greek, Albanian, Rom, Assyrian. Mavromata, Paraliakos, and Syrtos Pyleas were fairly simple dances; Cobankat, Kotitsa, Opa Cuba (non-Kotansky version), and Bracno Oro were a tad more complicated, and Kotchari and Krivatvorena were fast-paced and demanding. (Krivatvorena is a dance, I discovered, that one genuinely can do better with a small quantity of alcohol in the bloodstream; the individual segments are all ones my feet know how to do, and as long as my brain shuts up my feet can get on with it.)
I’m overall not crazy about couple dancing. True, I greatly enjoy dancing with my boyfriend, and I don’t mind dancing with someone I know or doing a mixer with strangers. But it’s one of those activities whose coefficient of static friction is pretty darn high; it’s very easy for me to decide “no, I don’t feel like trying this”. And indeed, after getting one really awful partner (awful = criticizing me for starting on the foot the teacher’s telling women to start on and generally acting like he’s the teacher, not the guy in the center of the room), I decided to sit out the rest of the classes.
But I’m glad I at least stayed in the hall and watched, because Powers is a hoot. “Some people have fun with tango; others make fun of tango. Both are valid styles.” He’s an excellent teacher of social dancing, giving lots of good tips and all along keeping an attitude that this is meant to be fun, and that there is no One True Way to do a social dance. I did dance the two quadrilles he taught on the first day, and actually liked them enough to suggest that they be taught at the Monday night dance group. And I’d like to try the cross-step waltz with my boyfriend or some other partner that I trust to make it fun.
Overall, definitely a worthwhile weekend.
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